Timecaster: Supersymmetry

by Konrath, J. A.

  “She’s trading bread sticks for sex! I hate Windows 35!”

  For the umpteenth time, Talon 2 and I both had the same idea, albeit with opposite hands. We each reached down and slapped the shit out of McGlade.

  “Weapons,” he said, his cheeks blossoming red. “You need weapons.”

  All four of us nodded.

  He made a face. “I don’t have any weapons anymore. I sold all my contraband to buy that pizza-snarfing robowhore.”

  Perfect. I checked my DT. A hundred minutes before this earth was destroyed. I couldn’t face Alter-Talon without a weapon. And if Dark Alter-Talon sought out his evil counterpart like Talon 2 sought me out, then they’d know we were coming and were no doubt preparing for it.

  “Your husband,” I asked Alter-Vicki. “Does he have access to weapons?”

  She nodded, looking as grim as I’d ever seen her. “He’s got a stockpile. He told me about it once.”

  “Do you know where it is?”

  “No. He didn’t go into any details.”

  I rubbed my face. The situation was getting pretty grim.

  “If you need weapons, why don’t you ask your grandfather?” Harry asked.

  Talon 2 and I each did a double-take and said, “Huh?” It was getting pretty old, doing that all the time.

  “Your grandfather. If anyone has some guns hidden away, it’s that old kook.”

  “My grandparents died years ago, Harry.”

  He shook his head. “No. Just your grandmother did. Last I heard, your grandpa is still around.”

  I accessed the CPD tracking database and punched in my grandpa’s name, trying to track his ID chip.

  McGlade pushed my DT away. “No chip. He’s a dissy, Talon. Went off the grid back when firearms were outlawed. Said no one was taking away his guns.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “In the woods, outside of Rockford’s dissytown. About ten minutes from here.”

  “Take us,” I said.

  He shrugged. “Can over, unconscious.

  os peace officerG’t. I’ve got a packed schedule. Today is shower day. Then I’ve got to go to work.” He lowered his voice and cupped a hand around his mouth. “I just got a job delivering pizzas.”

  “Harry, if we don’t get our hands on some weapons and get back to Schaumburg in the next seventy minutes, this world is going to be destroyed.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “No shit?”

  Alter-Vicki touched his arm. “We’re telling the truth.”

  “Fuck work, then.” He called over our shoulder. “You hear that, you sex-withholding bitch? The world is ending! No more spending my hard-earned credits on Italian food you can’t even digest!”

  “I’m ordering a pizza!” she yelled back.

  “I hate you!” Then McGlade clapped his hands and rubbed his palms together, grinning wide. “Okay. Let’s roll.”

  • • •

  Though McGlade was short on contraband, he had a garage full of biofuel scooters in various stages of disrepair. We managed to find five that worked, and McGlade took us down some side streets, which led to trails, which led to what seemed like a directionless drive through the woods. This was territory appropriated by the government to dissys.

  Each big community in the USAC had an area set aside for the disenfranchised. If you wanted to be part of society like a good utopeon, you paid taxes. Since tangible currency was a thing of the past, everyone’s bank account was directly connected to their ID chip. Those who didn’t want that way of life had no way to survive in the utopias—begging was impossible—so they formed dissy communities. Dissys didn’t pay taxes, and didn’t have any of the benefits of society that came with paying taxes. Being off the grid was akin to living in the early twentieth century. Some didn’t even have electricity or running water.

  Because this area was protected land, it hadn’t been harvested in ages. Seeing these huge oak and maple trees made me think of my youth, before the nation switched completely to biofuel and foliage tax was just a dream in the mind’s eye of some politico. While I wouldn’t want to give up creature comforts and societal

  rules, Grandpa sure picked a beautiful area to live in.

  The memories I had of my grandparents were pleasant ones. They often babysat when my parents went out. Grandpa taught me to fish, and hunt. Grandma taught me some basic tae kwon do. I remember them smiling a lot. I also remember their inner strength, the same kind my own parents had. Grandma was a Chicago cop, back when they used to be called police officers. I never knew much about Grandpa’s past, but from what I understood he was a badass in his day.

  I missed them.

  The thought that I would see Grandpa again, after all this time, was tantalizing. I buzzed with that same sense of excitement I used to get when I went to visit them at age ten.ering pizzas.”

  ed to , Sata-san.G

  But it wouldn’t really be my grandfather. It was Alter-Talon’s grandfather. Which meant we might not be

  welcome at all. Alter-Talon seemed very good at mucking up his relationships.

  McGlade came to a stop at a barbed wire fence. He reached down into the saddlebag on his scooter and removed a pair of wire cutters.

  “I got this.”

  “Harry,” I said. “I think that’s—”

  My words were interrupted by a loud CRACK! accompanied by a blue spark when McGlade touched the wire with his tool. It threw him off his bike and into a fluffy-looking brown bush.

  “—electrified,” I finished.

  McGlade sat up, a halo of smoke around his head. Pieces of the fluffy brown plant clung to his body. I’d never seen anything like it before.

  “Is the plant attacking him?” Talon 2 asked.

  “They’re burrs,” Sata said. “Seeds of the cocklebur plant. Entirely covered with tiny hooks so they stick to fur, hair, and clothing. It’s how the seeds travel long distances. They hitch a ride.”

  McGlade got to his feet. The burrs stuck to his shirt and pants by the hundreds. He must have been ten pounds heavier.

  “WTF?” He plucked at the burrs on his pants. “These things don’t come off.”

  “They’re the inspiration for Velcro,” Sata explained.

  “Shit. Do I have any in my hair?”

  He had so many in his hair it looked like he was sporting an afro.

  “A few,” I said.

  “How do I get them out?” McGlade whined.

  He tugged at the clump in his hair and yelped. I picked up the wire cutters, carefully avoiding the burrs, and then dug into McGlade’s saddlebag until I found some rubber-lined gloves. As I snipped the remaining wires of the fence, Harry’s complaints got more and more frantic. When I glanced at him again, I noticed he was bare-chested, burrs stuck to the hair on his back and stomach. His shirt was also balled up around his head, making him look like a lollipop.

  “I can’t get my shirt off!” It sounded like he was crying.

  Alter-Vicki and Talon 2 gave it a go, trying to yank it off Harry’s head. There was screaming, and some ripping sounds, but if anything the shirt seemed to stick to his face even tighter.

  “You’re pulling off my eyebrows!”

  “You shouldn’t have tried to take your shirt off,” Talon 2 said.

  “You think?!”

  The muffled screams gave way to mu over, unconscious.

  os peace officerGffled crying. “I can’t breathe in here! I hate burrs!”

  Sata took the cutters from me and went to work on McGlade. He didn’t cut the shirt away. He just made some eye holes and a mouth hole.

  Harry now looked like a pale, flabby scarecrow.

  “There,” Sata said. “That should do until we find some scissors.”

  “This won’t do at all! I hate this!”

  There was the sound of a twig snapping, just beyond the fence.

  “Harry, be quiet.” I peered into the woods. “I heard something.”
>
  “You heard clumps of my hair being torn out!”

  Another crackling sound. I planted my feet and squared my shoulders.

  “Snappy doodle fuck! How did I get burrs down my pants?!”

  I felt that tingle, like I was being watched. The canopy was thick, and my eyes couldn’t penetrate the darkness.

  “There are burrs stuck to jimbo and the twins!”

  “Harry, STF up!”

  “I don’t care if the world is ending! I shouldn’t have come along! I should have stayed home and died with sex doll pizza tramp!”

  I tapped my eyelid, my All Vision Contact Lens going to night vision, and immediately saw a man, expertly camouflaged in a ghillie suit, standing right in front of me.

  Before I could raise my fists his hand shot out, thrusting an old-fashioned revolver under my chin.

  Chapter 6

  T-minus 98 minutes

  “Wicked,” Dark Alter-Talon said. They were in Alter-Talon’s armory. “Do you have two of these like I do? Or like I did, before my earth disintegrated?”

  Alter-Talon nodded. “Yeah, I’ve got two.”

  “We’re going to be invincible.”

  “That’s the plan.”

  They did a wet high five, making a sound like two raw steaks being slapped together. Each felt pain. Neither one cared.

  They’d harvest their new hands in less than two hours.

  Chapter 7

  T-minus 93 minutes

  “Grandpa?”

  But it couldn’t be him. Ev digital tablett glancesped at the same time.

  en though his face was smeared with brown and green greasepaint, and he was wearing a mesh camouflage suit that had colored strings, sticks, and leaves woven into the fabric, I could still see this was a younger man. My Grandfather would be in his nineties. This guy was maybe half of that.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Talon?”

  That voice.

  Unmistakable.

  It had to be…

  Grandpa.

  Hearing it again, after all these years, made me choke up. I couldn’t get a word out.

  “Mr. Troutt, my name is Michio Sata. I was your grandson’s superior in the timecasting program at the Chicago Peace Department. This is not the Talon Avalon you know. He, and I, are from an alternate dimension.”

  The man narrowed his eyes. “Sure you are.”

  “You sound exactly like my grandpa,” Talon 2 said. “But you’re still young.”

  “Anti-aging pills. Just because I’m disenfranchised doesn’t mean I can’t barter. You from another dimension too?”

  “Same dimension. Sata-san invented a device that illuminates dark matter. I’m dark matter to you, you’re dark matter to me. Normally we can’t see each—”

  Grandpa pulled back the hammer on his revolver, shutting Talon 2 up.

  “Why are you on my property?”

  “Mr. Troutt, sir? I’m Harry McGlade.” McGlade raised his hand up and waved, even though he wasn’t facing the right way. “I used to be friends with your grandson years ago, before he became a raging dick. Remember I met you at—”

  “I remember you,” Grandpa interrupted. “Christ, do I ever.”

  “We need your help, Mr. Troutt,” Sata continued. “Some very bad men are going to destroy this world in less than an hour, unless we stop them.”

  I cleared the knot out of my throat. “We need weapons, Grandpa.”

  “Don’t call me Grandpa, Talon. I know what you did to Boise. You turned out to be a real bad egg.”

  Talon 2 and I both said, “That wasn’t me.”

  Grandpa shoved me back, keeping the gun on me. “All of you, get off my property. Now.”

  I took a deep breath, tried to keep the fear, the desperation, the emotion, all in check.

  “Gran… Mr. Troutt. I don’t know you. My grandparents died when I was a kid. But I know the exact same things can sometimes happen in alternate dimensions, so maybe they happened here like they happened on my earth. I remember the week of my ninth birthday, you and Grandma too much woman for that.”

  “m get new stuff.”

  pveryone came over, we all went up to Wisconsin to your place, and I hooked that huge Northern Pike on a Lucky 13 lure.”

  I closed my eyes, let the memory come back to me.

  “It was too big for me to pull in, and I begged you to help me. But you told me I could do it. Kept urging me on. You stood by me the whole time I was battling that fish.”

  “I have the same memory,” Talon 2 said. “You were holding the net. Telling me when to reel in, when to let out line. Must have played that fish for twenty minutes. My muscles were shaking. I was sweating so hard. I wanted you to take the pole because I was sure I’d lose it. You told me—”

  “You told me it was my fish, not yours,” I said. I could practically smell the lake, sense the rocking of the boat under my feet. “You said it would be okay if the fish got away. The important thing was to see the battle to the end.”

  Talon 2 smiled. “When I landed that sucker, you let out a yell that could be heard all the way to Canada.”

  “One of the proudest days of my life,” I said.

  Grandpa stared at me, hard.

  “Mine too,” he said.

  He was silent for a long ten seconds. Then he spoke again.

  “Come with me.”

  Alter-Vicki took Harry’s hand, and Grandpa led us through some dense woods to a partial clearing. There was a well-tended vegetable garden and a wire coop for chickens. I heard a snort and followed the sound, seeing some pigs in a pen adjacent to the log cabin in the center of the property. A creek flowed ten meters beyond that, an old hydroelectric waterwheel spinning fast. There were several windmills on aluminum poles, stretching up above the canopy, and a bank of solar panels on the cabin’s roof.

  I also noticed something odd on the other side of the cabin. A patch of daisies. They were in a rectangular formation, obviously maintained, completely incongruous to the surroundings. I was about to ask about it when I saw the tombstone.

  JACK

  I MISS YOU

  EVERY DAY

  Grandpa held the door for us, and we trudged inside, McGlade walking straight into the door jamb and falling onto his ass.

  “Someone help me!” he whined.

  Harry sure whined a lot.

  Alter-Vicki and Sata got Harry upright and we all piled into the kitchen. The cabin was sparsely furnished. The main room consisted of a wooden rocking chair, a fireplace with an old chainsaw hanging over it, and a bookcase filled with paper books, an antique radio occupying part of one shelf. There were some pictures on the walls. One of my grandmother. One of me, Grandma, and Mom. The windows all had metal shutters.

  In the kitchen was a woodburning stove, a refrigerator, a wash basin that had been converted into a sink, some cabinets and drawers. And above the sink, hanging on the wall…ering pizzas.”

  ed to ?” Sata asked.G

  A mounted Northern Pike.

  “Is that…?” I pointed.

  “Twelve pounds, seven ounces. Yep, it’s yours. But not literally. From what I understand about parallel universes, there could be an infinite number of those pikes caught on an infinite number of earths.” He jerked a thumb at Harry. “What happened to this moron? Crawled into a cocklebur bush?”

  “Fell in,” Talon 2 said.

  “They’re sticky,” Harry moaned.

  “I knew you grandfather,” Grandpa told him. “He was an idiot, too.”

  He motioned for Alter-Vicki to sit Harry down at the only chair in the kitchen, and then he rummaged through a drawer and found a knife, handing it to her handle first.

  “So you understand the multiverse theory, Mr. Troutt?” Sata asked.

  “I’m a hermit, not an idiot. I’ve done a lot of reading on the subject. And don’t call me Mr. Troutt. Or Grandpa,” he said, looking pointedly at me and Talon 2. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for that. Call me Phin.”

&
nbsp; “Thanks for helping us, Phin,” I said.

  “I haven’t agreed to yet.”

  He stripped off the ghillie suit, stripping down to jeans and a white tee shirt. They looked to be real cotton. After hanging the camo gear on a wall hook he used a towel to wipe the greasepaint from his face. Sans makeup, Phin didn’t appear to be more than fifteen years older than I was.

  “We don’t have anti-aging pills on my earth,” Talon 2 said.

  I nodded. “Mine neither.”

  “Officially, neither do we. The government doesn’t want anyone to know about them. Fears overpopulation. But I know a guy. Now someone give me the Reader’s Digest version of what’s going on.”

  “The what?”

  He sighed. “The abridged version.”

  Sata gave a quick explanation, and Phin surprised me by being able to follow along. But I suppose living to ninety you learn a few things. While Sata talked, I wandered over the bookcase and noticed it was crammed with science titles. He also had an antique digital tablet, a Kindle Fire. Amazingly, it could still power up. It was full of ebooks about astrophysics, quantum mechanics, the TOE, and even a few about the TEV and timecasting technology.

  “So not only will this earth be destroyed,” Talon 2 said, “But Alter-Talon is going to kill my wife. Well, his wife.”

  I came back into the kitchen. “I love my wife more than anything, Phin. I can’t let her die. Please help us.”

  Phin’s mouth formed a thin, tight line flamethrowerELoet. “I’ve got guns. A lot of them. But I want something in return.”

  “There’s not a lot of time—”

  Phin cut me off. “Time is something I’ve had way too much of, Talon. I also love my wife more than anything. When Jacqueline—your grandmother—when she died, I didn’t want to go on. But I forced myself to. I forced myself to live as long as I could. I always held out hope, with technology advancing as quickly as it has, that I might see Jack again someday.”

  Sata nodded. “I understand. You want to find her.”

  Phin set his jaw. “If there are infinite earths, there is one almost identical to this one, except on that earth I died and Jack lived.”