The Beautiful Land

by Alan Averill

  Yates takes a moment to stare at the men in front of him as they lean forward in their chairs. He can feel them sizing him up, watching him for any sign of weakness or hesitation. Doubts, any doubts, would be bad right now. If they delayed the transfer, someone might discover his true plan—and that would be a very unfortunate thing.

  “No, gentlemen,” answers Yates. “Ten o’clock is perfectly acceptable. Gather together at this time, open a bottle of champagne, and celebrate your ascendancy into immortality.”

  The board leans back as the tension in the room melts away. They want to believe him, these men; they want to think they will be kings in a brave new world. Daniel motions for Yates to approach the table, then leans his sizeable gut over it and proffers his hand. Charles plasters a false smile on his face and pumps the massive paw a few times, then works his way down the line like a minister at the end of a sermon, shaking hands, exchanging words, telling the men that all will be well. It’s long and tiring work, mostly because he has to resist the urge to break into maniacal laughter. Pride has made these men soft, and greed has made them sloppy. Four years ago, they never would have put so much responsibility in the hands of a scientist they did not trust. But the reality of the Machine changed everything, and with ultimate power at their fingertips, they decided it was worth the risk.

  The meeting continues with mindless speculation about the grandeur of their new world, but Yates does not linger. Excusing himself under the pretense of preparation, he returns to the elevator, inserts a keycard, and rides it as far down as it will go—farther down, even, than the Machine itself. When the lift finally grinds to a halt, it spits Yates out onto a hidden floor that he had constructed in secret. He takes a sip of lukewarm coffee as he strolls down a long, dark hallway. At the far end, he stops at an imposing metal door and begins to disengage a complicated system of locks. A soft gurgling sound emits from somewhere behind the door, as well as an unpleasant stench. This continues to amaze Yates—even with the best air-filtration system he can build, the smell still manages to escape.

  When the door finally swings open, he steps into a large white room. To his left is a supercomputer of his own design, one far more advanced than anything else currently in operation. Thick bundles of wires spill out from this machine and over to a massive storage tank. The gurgling sound comes from a system of hoses at the back of the tank. Pure, clean water flows in, but the stuff that emerges is blackened and foul.

  Yates has spared no expense in the construction of the tank; it is, without a doubt, the most secure prison that the world has ever seen. The walls are nearly three feet thick and composed of titanium interlaced with lonsdaleite—a material even harder than diamond. Surrounding the tank is an electrified grid that could power a small city, as well as vents than can fill the room with deadly cyanide gas. And just in case something does happen to climb out of the tank with revenge on its mind, the entire floor is wired with nearly a thousand pounds of explosives.

  He sits down at the desk and flips on a video monitor. This is connected to a small camera inside the tank, providing Yates a view of the thing that lurks inside. He longs to get closer to the creature, to examine it with his own hands, but such a wish is folly. Inside the tank is the most amazing and most dangerous thing that has ever existed. It is a creature beyond even death. It is the antilife.

  The image on the screen is blackness, and for a moment it appears that the camera has stopped working. Then something shifts slightly, creating a dark blur against the brackish water of the tank. For a long time there is only this blurry darkness, but then it shifts again to reveal a bit of pale, translucent skin. One huge black eye rolls around to the camera and stares into it, watching. It understands what is happening. It knows that Yates is there. But then again, it has always known this.

  The pipes gurgle again as a thick, black fluid begin to run though them. This ooze moves through a series of smaller and smaller pipes before finally dripping out into a small glass beaker on Yates’s desk. He watches it crawl down the side of the glass with a handkerchief over his mouth; the stench of the stuff is beyond overpowering. After a few minutes, the flow slows to a trickle before stopping altogether. A couple ounces of sludge lie in the bottom of the beaker, and as Yates picks it up and looks inside, he wonders if he might be making the most terrible mistake of his—or any—life.

  “Nothing is accomplished without risk,” he murmurs to himself as he swirls the liquid. “There can be no progress without fear. This is the only way. Others will come. Other men. Other Machines…. This is the only way.”

  He raises the beaker to his lips and drinks. Foul blackness trickles from the side of his mouth, but he continues to force it down. When he is finished, he falls to the ground and waits for the convulsions to pass. They are worse than ever this time, a thought that brings him a small glimmer of joy. His calculations were correct. When the change happens, he will be ready.

  Hours tick by. The thing in the tank stirs, occasionally slamming itself against the sides. Finally, Charles Yates manages to pull himself off the ground and back to his chair. His hands are trembling, and his legs are weak, but he is alive. And more than that, he is prepared.

  “Men can keep their money and their power,” whispers Yates to himself as a small trickle of black seeps from the corner of his eye. “But I lay claim to the Beautiful Land.”

  chapter nine

  There are three pancakes left. Samira managed to finish off two plates, while Tak bulldozed through a shocking six and a half all by himself. Minutes ago, the waitress came by to pick up the empties, refill the water, and wipe down the table—doing, Samira thinks, a really half-assed job of it—and now all that remains is a single white plate with three cold flapjacks in a little pile. Samira can’t imagine trying to eat them. She can’t even imagine expending the effort it would take to lift her fork and drag the plate over.

  She and Tak have been eating in silence for the last thirty minutes. Tak’s statement that he fucked everything up completely shattered his good mood, and Samira decided to wait it out instead of asking questions. She feels this to be a pretty remarkable display of restraint because when it comes to questions, there are hundreds of them flying around her head.

  What do you mean “they’re bringing it here”? Why did you make me eat all these pancakes? What’s happening six hours from now? Why am I going to die? Who did you work for? What’s in the briefcase? Why do you need me? Is this really happening? And I mean really, because it all sounds impossible if you ask me.

  But rather than bother her friend, she waited, and now he finally seems to be coming out of his minidepression. Smiling at her from across the table—the same dopey grin that made her high-school life bearable—he runs a hand across his face and exhales loudly. “I guess I should finish talking, huh?” he says.

  “Guess so,” she responds.

  “Okay,” he begins, leaning back in the booth. “You should understand this about the Axon Corporation—it’s pretty small. Just a dozen guys, all of whom are incredibly rich and powerful. They handle the funding, talk to government officials, make bribes, stuff like that. All the science, all the technical stuff, is handled by a dude named Charles Yates. He’s a physicist, he’s nearly eighty years old, and he’s fucking brilliant. He’s the one who built the Machine in the first place, and he’s the one who realized that time travel isn’t a one-way street—that if you could send someone to a random timeline, you could also bring a random timeline here and use it to overwrite our own.”

  “Is that why you’re scared?” asks Samira. “Because you think he’s going to overwrite the world in six hours?”

  “Yeah. It is. Although now we’re down to five.” Tak checks his watch and opens his eyes wide. “Shit. Four. I better hurry this up. So in the new timeline, the Axon Corporation functions as a one-world government. They have all the money, all the armies, all of it—and these twelve dudes are in charge.”

  “Hold on,” says Samira, holding a hand t
o her forehead. “I don’t…This is so weird, Tak. So this is about to happen? You’re saying that four hours from now, everyone’s going to wake up, and the US government is going to be gone? That we’ll all be slaves for some huge corporation?”

  “Basically, yeah.”

  “I don’t get how that would work. I mean, people would revolt. They wouldn’t just throw up their hands, and say, ‘Oh well, I guess I’m a slave now!’”

  Tak shakes his head. “When you overwrite a timeline, you change everything. It’s like all the previous stuff never existed. People aren’t going to remember they used to live in a different world.”

  “That might be nice,” says Samira. “There’s a lot of my life I’d like to forget.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s too bad, because you’re going to remember everything.”

  “Why?”

  “Because when Yates turns on the Machine, we’re not going to be here. You and I are going to a random timeline until all of this is over.”

  Samira reaches down to crack her knuckles, then realizes they are covered in gauze. Her head begins to ache. As her breathing quickens, she suddenly locks onto a dirty smudge on the window. Grabbing a napkin and dipping it in water, she reaches over and begins scrubbing with short, quick strokes.

  “Uh, Sam?” says Tak slowly. “What are you doing?”

  “We can’t use the Machine, Tak,” she says, ignoring his question. “You said it’s in Australia. We can’t get there in four hours. And besides…”

  She trails off, her attention now completely gripped by the window. As Tak watches in silence, she scrubs with mad abandon until the napkin dissolves into a tangled mass of thin wet strands that leave the window dirtier than before. Frustrated, Samira grabs a fork off the table and shoves it underneath her bandage. She rips through the first three layers, then quickly unravels it from her hand until she has a makeshift rag. Carefully turning the bloody sections inside out, she folds the bandage into a square, dips it in the pitcher of water, and attacks the window with renewed fury.

  Tak slowly reaches across the table and touches her on the shoulder. She shrugs his hand away and keeps scrubbing, causing the scabs on her knuckles to burst open and begin leaking red. Upon seeing this, Tak grabs her shoulder again and shakes it.

  “Sam…. Sam! Sam, stop it!

  “No! No, I have to—”

  “Sam, knock it off. Stop it! Stop it now!”

  He reaches over and yanks the bandage from her hand. She screams and tries to grab it back, but he grips her wrists and refuses to let go. She looks at him, panting, eyes wide, and waits for her breathing to slow. Then she wrestles free and collapses as far back into the bench as she can go, cradling her wounded hand in the folds of her dress. The waitress briefly emerges from the back to see what the commotion is, then decides better about interfering and disappears again.

  “Sorry,” whispers Samira. “I didn’t…I didn’t mean to…I’m sorry. Keep going.”

  “Sam, what the hell just—”

  “I’m fine!…Fine. Just keep talking. I’ll be okay. You finish your story, then maybe I’ll tell you mine.”

  Tak doesn’t seem to care for this arrangement, but, rather than push the point, he leans to his side and taps the top of the briefcase. “This is a portable Machine. Yates invented it. It doesn’t work quite the same way—you can only use it to visit timelines you know about, not find new ones—but it’ll be good enough. We’ll use it to leave the solid timeline, then come back once the change is complete.”

  “What if I don’t want to go?” whispers Samira.

  “I know it’s scary,” he begins, “but I promise, it’s gonna be—”

  “No!” She screams the word, the loudest sound she’s made in months. “No, Tak. Look, I think you’re crazy, and I’m not convinced any of this is really going to happen. But if it does? I mean, if you’re right, and it does? Then I think that’s okay.”

  “Sam, wait. Wait, you don’t—”

  “I hate it here,” she says. She can feel tears yet again, hot and angry, but rather than being ashamed, she welcomes them. “I hate it. I can’t talk to people, I can’t sleep, I can’t…I can’t do anything anymore.”

  Tak’s mouth is hanging open—this was clearly not a reaction that he had planned on. And really, thinks Samira as she reaches for a napkin to wrap around her bleeding hand, how could he? How could he know what it’s like? He’s been messing around with time in Australia while I’ve watched soldiers shoot families at military checkpoints.

  “I have dreams,” she continues. “Every time I go to sleep, which isn’t often anymore, I have these terrible dreams. There’s one where I’m lying on the ground and a tree starts growing out of my mouth, and it kind of…It splits the sides of my mouth open and my face just rips off. I have that one a lot.

  “And then there’s one where these little kids are chasing me around the streets of some desert town, and I think…I mean, when the dream starts, it’s like we’re playing tag or something, but when they get closer I see the kids are actually made of worms. Just these little worms that are wiggling around, and when they catch me, they hold me down and the worms fall off their faces and crawl into me. They leave these perfect little round holes all over my body.”

  Samira can’t look up. She knows that Tak is staring at her, but she doesn’t want to meet his gaze. She hasn’t told anyone about the extent of her issues—not Dr. Carrington, not her fellow GIs, not anyone—and now they’re flooding out of her in a rush she feels incapable of stopping.

  “I can’t get clean anymore. I see dirt, and I go crazy. I see a smudge on a window, and it starts to hurt unless I wipe it off. Noises keep me awake. Anything but a constant, steady noise prevents me from even thinking about sleep, then I get tired, then I get angry, and all the pain comes back all at once. I’m broken, Tak, and it’s way, way worse than you know. So if we’re going to go to a new timeline where I won’t remember my old life, then I’m seriously gonna be okay with that.”

  Tak leans over for her hand, but this time she refuses to give it. Instead, she sniffles and wipes her nose on her arm. “Sorry”—she chuckles—“that’s kinda gross.”

  “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “Sam, I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “But listen. You have to come with me.”

  “Tak, I don’t think you—”

  “You have to.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’re not in the other timeline.”

  “Because…” she begins. “Wait, what do you mean?”

  “You’re dead,” he says in a trembling voice. “All right? In the other timeline? The one that’s coming here? You’re dead. You got blown up by a roadside bomb, and you’ve been dead for two years. And when the Machine cycles up, it’s gonna overwrite whatever isn’t supposed to be here, and that means you’re gonna die.”

  “I don’t care,” Samira says, unsure if she believes the words or not. She folds her legs under her, pops off a shoe, and starts cracking her toes with her good hand. Once she finishes a pass, she finally manages to look at her friend, only to find him staring back with sunken, haunted eyes.

  “You hate this life, Samira?” says Tak. “So do I. You’ve done things you wish you could take back? So have I. Working for these men, using the Machine like some kind of fucked-up science project, helping them…”

  Samira starts to speak, but Tak waves her off. “You want to know the worst part about the Machine? When it finds a random timeline, it creates a kind of door we use to move from one reality to the other. But the doors are inherently unstable, and for the first year or so, we weren’t able to keep them open. Every time I came back from a timeline, the door would close, and we could never go back. But then Yates figured out a way to store the doors, to hold them open so we could revisit random timelines whenever we wanted. And you know how he does it? He does it with people, Sam. Fucking people. So if you go into that building in Australia
, there’s this room the size of a football field filled with people. They’re all on stretchers, and they’re fed through tubes, and they just lie there in a coma so we can use their brains to hold the doorways open. Hundreds of people, Sam. They kidnapped and imprisoned hundreds of people, and I knew about it, and I just…”

  Tak balls his hand into a fist and raises it over his head, as if he wants to slam it into the table. Instead, he just waves it angrily in the air a couple of times before dropping it to his side in a gesture of surrender. “I kept going,” he concludes. “I put it out of my mind, and I kept going.”

  This is almost too much for Samira to take in, so rather than think about it, she lets her mind go blank as Tak picks up a fork and balances it on a single extended finger. “Why are you here?” she finally manages to say. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “I can’t stop what’s coming,” he says, as the fork slips off and clatters to the table, “but I think I can make it right.”

  “How?”

  “There’s a woman named Judith Halford who works with Yates. Before this whole thing started, she made a secret copy of the solid timeline—a fail-safe in case something went wrong. If I can find the fail-safe and get it to the Machine, I think I can undo all of this.”

  Samira lowers her hand, picks up a napkin, and begins to tear it into small pieces. She’s never felt more overwhelmed in her life. She doesn’t know whether to embrace Tak and tell him everything is going to be okay or bolt from her seat and run screaming into the night.

  “I need you,” he continues. “I need you with me. I’ve probably caused hundreds of people to die and I don’t…I can’t be responsible for you. I just can’t. So come with me. Help me. Right now, we’re two people who’ve done some terrible things, but this is our chance to make it right.”

  She lets his words hang, then slowly stands and walks out of the diner without a sound. The cold night air hits her in a rush, but she doesn’t mind. Pulling her dress tightly around her, she walks past rows of idled semitrucks until she reaches the edge of the highway. Across the road, tall pine trees with snow on their branches sway in the breeze. She listens for the sound of an approaching car, that satisfying, predictable roar, but finds only the random chatter of a cold Nebraska night.