Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time

by Penn, James Wilson

  “For sure,” Julie agreed, looking at the sky.

  Tim looked up, too. The sky looked pretty convincing. You’d almost have thought you were really outside. In actuality, they were still on the inside of the underground hideout where Hopkins’ great uncle Paul lived, only now they were in what the locals apparently referred to as the Exercise Room.

  As they were building the place, the members of the resistance knew that they would be down in the bunker for months, maybe years. And being cooped up underground that long was definitely going to have psychological downsides that might end up doing more damage to the members of the resistance than the one world government ever would. So instead of requiring the residents to pace back and forth in their apartment rooms for exercise, the architects, who from what Tim gathered were in no way hurting for financial or technological resources, decided to build a small artificial world inside their underground fortress.

  The Exercise Room spanned half a mile in diameter. The ceiling was a dome reaching a hundred feet high, programmed to be a sunny blue with white clouds during the day. Starry skies with a moon that reflected the natural lunar phases filled the night. A lake, about a hundred yards across, took up a small portion of the enclosure. It was hot inside, since the engineers were simulating summer today, so there were several people swimming and splashing around. Others walked or ran about. Some played with the dogs who called this little chunk of indoor grass home. Members of the resistance of all ages came in and out of the Exercise Room periodically throughout the day, from the school-aged children of resistance members who took their recess here to the older residents who came around to get a break from their work.

  No one was surprised to see the four teens from the 21st century there that day either. The teens were frequent visitors to the Exercise Room in the past three days. It had become their favorite spot to go and get out of the apartment ever since they had been taken there on their second day here to learn how to ride horses.

  Most of the historical figures who they would be impersonating knew how to ride horses, after all, and besides, it was one of the fastest ways to get around in the era they would be visiting. So it made sense to Tim that Hopkins wanted them to learn how to ride, but he was surprised that there were horses for them to train with. Apparently a couple of the higher ranking members of the resistance had owned horses that they just couldn’t bear to leave aboveground. Usually, they were kept in a pasture and stables in a different part of the compound, but for the last few days, they had made an appearance with their teenage riders in the Exercise Room, as their skills as riders had improved.

  “I’m starting to wonder if things will ever get back to normal. I mean, if we went back now, wouldn’t we have already missed over a week?” Billy asked.

  Tim had been brooding over this question off and on for the past several days. “I think so, but, what choice do we have? If we go back now, we’d also still be fugitives accused of treason, right?”

  “Plus, we’ve got to beat the Emperors. Have you already forgotten what they’re going to do to the world if they have their way?” Rose asked. The faint hum of a futuristic lawnmower had just started up, and Tim could now smell freshly cut grass. Apparently, the lawn was real.

  “Listen, I wasn’t saying we should do anything different. I’m just saying that what we are doing is ridiculous,” Billy said, throwing his hands up.

  “Right,” Julie said slowly, nodding. “Speaking of ridiculous: Have you guys memorized your bios yet?”

  The four were silent, like students in a class trying to decide if they should reveal whether or not they had done last night’s homework.

  Billy spoke first. “I’ve almost got everything in mine.”

  “Geez, Billy, yours is like two pages!” Julie protested. “Mine’s seven!”

  “Relax, July,” Rose said, using her nickname for her best friend. “Timothy’s got more like twenty.”

  “You know, you can just call me Tim. In fact, why don’t you just start calling me Russell Sage? You’ll need to soon enough anyway.”

  “And what, you’d call me Joanna Curtis?” Rose asked with a laugh.

  “Well, my point is, we’ll start having to do that soon, at least if we meet each other in public,” Tim reiterated.

  “Well, I guess if you came over to the Curtis house, I would have to address you as Mr. Sage, if I was getting you a glass of water or something. I think you could get away with referring to me as ‘that girl over there.’ Nobody’s going to expect a congressman to know the name of a 15 year-old girl, even if she’s the daughter of a Supreme Court Justice,” Rose said.

  “You’ve got the worst job of all, I think,” Julie said sympathetically. “You’re the only one who’s going to have to live in a house where someone else is telling you what to do. I don’t envy you.”

  “Ah well,” said Rose. “I’ve sometimes wondered what it would be like to have a brother or a sister. Now I’ll have three of them.”

  Billy shook his head. “Do you even remember all of their names yet?”

  “Of course!” Rose said. “That was one of the first things I learned. Way more important than all the political stuff in my information. After all, a 15 year-old girl can be expected to forget stuff like that. But her siblings’ names, never! They’re-”

  Billy cut her off. “Whoa! Don’t tell me, you’re going to make me forget my stuff!”

  Julie laughed. “Seriously, what hard stuff could you have to memorize? You’re just an innkeeper.”

  “Well, geesh,” Billy huffed. “You’re just the widow of a merchant.”

  “I didn’t mean to say that mine’s more important, I just meant--”

  “It’s not a competition!” Rose said. “Anyway, Tim still wins. And he’s the one who’s really going to be seeing important stuff. Hearing what the other congressmen are saying, trying to figure out whether they’re on par with what they would normally have said, so that we know if their minds are being messed with. He’s going to have to have half a history textbook stored in his mind to make this work.”

  Hopkins had given Tim notes to study on the different people he would meet in Congress. He was even able to tell Tim how the congressmen voted in the original timeline, so he could figure out who was showing signs of brainwashing. This had been tricky, given that history textbooks or references in the current timeline would not have this information, since the vote went differently.

  But Hopkins had known that the Emperors would be planning another alternate timeline. He had taken the opportunity, in the brief amount of time when the timeline was set back to normal, after the teens had fixed it by dismantling the bomb back in 1916, to gather information about how history was supposed to go.

  The fact that there was a window of time there at all confused the teens at first, because there was no time differential for them in their time. But Hopkins had explained that since he was from the same time as Dr. Russell and the other Emperors, he would not see changes until the Emperors jumped back in time to make them and spent enough time there to complete them. In contrast, for the teens, they were already events in the past as soon as they materialized. Tim had to admit that he was still a bit unclear on the specifics, but he decided to leave the science of it to Hopkins and just try to remember the history as well as he could.

  Hopkins had put all the information on a data card that he was able to take with him in his pocket when he time-jumped and could access anytime he was near a power source like they had in the 24th century. This was all useful, though it had given Tim a lot of stuff to memorize.

  Hopkins had also been able to go back in time to the year after the target year to meet all the people they’d be impersonating, see what they looked like, take covert pictures, and record their voices, so that they would know everything they needed to about how to make them convincing on a physical level. The harder part would be blending into society and knowing everything that their characters were supposed to know.

  “Ye
ah, lucky he’s already a walking history textbook,” Julie said, quickly flashing a grin at Tim. Tim smiled back tentatively. He still wasn’t sure what to think about his friendship, or relationship, or whatever it was, with Julie after his abortive attempt to broach the subject nearly a week ago now.

  “But Hopkins has been keeping us so busy it’s no wonder we’re still going to have to do some cramming tonight. Can you believe that we’re going to be going back tomorrow? I feel like it’s so different this time, knowing so far in advance what’s going to happen to us and everything,” Tim said.

  “Yeah, last time it was more of a get-in get-out thing. Just a few days. This time, it could be weeks depending on how long it takes us to figure out who all is being controlled,” Billy said.

  Julie picked up a blade of grass next to her leg and started fiddling with it. “I still don’t quite believe I’m going to be living in 1854 by this time tomorrow. But then, I’m not sure I’m totally over the fact that I’m living in the 23rd century right now, so making another change shouldn’t really matter much, should it?”

  “I think it’ll really sink in for me when I can look in the mirror and see a person from the 19th century looking back at me,” Rose said. “It’s almost creepy!”

  “Oh, it’s definitely creepy,” Julie countered. “But I hope I’ll get over it once it’s happened.” She shook her body in a way that suggested trying to shake something dirty off. To judge from her facial expression afterwards, she hadn’t quite succeeded.

  Tim slipped his cell-phone out of his pocket to check the time. Their phones had run out of battery days ago, but Paul had fooled around with some electronic supplies he apparently had lying around and was able to connect them to a power source. The phone’s clock function was the only thing that worked on it this far underground, but he didn’t have a watch to check.

  “Speaking of which, you think we ought to get heading over there now?” he asked.

  Julie took a deep breath.“ Yeah, I guess so. He said we can reverse it right away when we finish up back there, right?”

  “Right,” said Tim, as they got up and started walking back out of the indoor park and into the hallway of the underground complex.

  “Hallway E’s going to be this way. I think that’s where he told us to go,” Rose said.

  “Yup. E 233, I remember,” Julie said. “I wish we could have had you be the blonde girl and I’d be brunette,” she added, to Rose. “I don’t know how I’m going to get used to that.”

  “Wow, nope… You definitely can’t complain about having to change your hair color. Have you seen my guy’s beard?” Tim asked.

  “Oh, come on. Haven’t you always wanted to have a nice bushy beard?” Julie asked with a wink.

  “No, I can honestly say that that desire has never crossed my mind,” said Tim.

  “Well, I’m still nervous,” Julie announced. Her body shook again, warding off some unseen force.

  “You’d better not do that once we’re done in there,” Billy said. Julie looked at him, confused. “You might shake the disguise off.”

  Julie frowned. “I’ll probably wish that was true.”

  Soon, they were at room E233. The door opened automatically as the four teens entered.

  The room looked like a dentist’s office with several extra chairs. It made Tim nervous, even though he’d never been particularly scared of the dentist’s office. He saw Julie give another one of those creeped-out full-body shakes.

  He remembered that she’d told him earlier that year, back in their high school cafeteria, about how much she hated the dentist’s office. Apparently, that was an aversion that was still true for this Julie, despite coming from a different timeline.

  Hopkins wasn’t there yet, but Paul was lounging on a bench integrated into the wall of the room. He smiled and waved at the four of them as they entered. Billy and Julie were pleased to see him, which made sense. They seemed to get along better with the younger, less formal, Paul than they did with Hopkins.

  “What’re you doing here?” Billy asked.

  “Well, my nephew suggested that you guys might be nervous. I get the feeling he might be right, so we figured I could go over the specifics of how we’re going to disguise you one more time,” he said.

  Tim wasn’t sure that understanding the process would make it any less creepy, but Billy and Julie at least seemed ready to listen. Tim shrugged and followed his friends to a bench on the wall adjacent to the one where Paul sat.

  After giving them a moment to sit down, Paul continued. “So, back in the 2100s, people got tired of having to go through extra steps to make themselves look how they wanted to. People had been putting on makeup, using anti-aging cream, acne medication, and even plastic surgery for centuries, all trying to control how they looked. People used the same kind of stuff in your time, only less effective.”

  “Right,” Julie chimed in. “Like sometimes when I put on anti-acne medicine and break out more.”

  “Sure,” Paul agreed with a smile. “Just like that. Only over time, technology to alter appearance got more and more advanced. Back in your time, only professionals like plastic surgeons could alter your personal appearance to the extent we’re doing for you guys. But, as technology progressed, it kept getting cheaper until you could do it from the privacy of your own home.”

  “Plastic surgery from your own home? I don’t get it. Who’s holding the scalpel?” Rose asked.

  “That’s the point. No one. One of the big breakthroughs was people starting to use nanobots to do all the work. Manufacturing synthetic tissue where it was needed, removing tissue and imperfections where they were no longer desired,” Paul explained.

  Billy frowned and said, “Wait… nanobots? I think I’ve heard of them before, but…”

  “Ah, right. I keep forgetting how much is after your time,” Paul said with a wave of his hand. “Just really tiny robots. Basically invisible. These days, there are all different types of nanobots, but the ones used for this sort of thing are about the size of a human cell.”

  “And they can perform plastic surgery?” asked Tim, both flabbergasted and creeped out.

  “Yeah,” said Paul. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  “Have you ever had it done to you?” Julie asked.

  “Nothing major,” Paul said with a laugh. “Everybody uses it to combat acne when they’re in their teens. Nothing like a couple hundred nanobots to wipe out an outbreak. Of course, those are kind of low-tech compared to the model you’ll be using. They can do all the standard stuff like changing your hair and eye color, even shading your skin tone, but these are more advanced. These can get to your vocal cords so you sound like they people you’re mimicking, and they can muscle their way in through the skin cells and get to the bone, because your face’s bone-structure will have to be changed. Only slightly of course.”

  “Wait! These things are going to be taking away my bones?” Rose asked, alarmed. “How is that something that can just be changed back afterwards?”

  “Well, we’d use artificial tissue again afterwards to put everything back to normal. You’re really not going to be able to tell much of a difference. It’s not that big of a deal. I haven’t even gotten to how they’ll change your body,” said Paul, pausing as he got another anxious look from Rose. “Which again, is not a big deal. My nephew picked people who were the same height as you all, or at least close enough that no one will ever notice. So it’s just a question of adding some fat to some places, sometimes taking it away from others…”

  He trailed off because it was at that moment that Hopkins walked in. As soon as he saw the generally appalled facial expressions from the teens, he raised his eyebrows at Paul. “I had them talk to you because I thought you could make them feel better about having their appearances changed.”

  Paul was about to answer his relative when Rose beat him to it, “He said he’s going to take away my bones!” she accused hysterically. Tim fought to stifle a laugh.

  He
’d had some moments of high anxiety over the last few days. All the teens had.

  Hopkins gave his great-uncle another look. “No one is going to take away your bones. They will only be altered a bit.”

  “My point is,” Rose said, not calming down, “that I’m always going to have weird bones that aren’t all mine in my face, even when you change things back. ‘Cause you can’t put any of my bone back in there, it’s just ‘artificial tissue’ or whatever.”

  “Right, but you’re not going to be able to tell the difference,” Hopkins said. “Besides, once I reprogram all the Domini Temporis, everything will turn back to normal, including your face.”

  “Yeah… but Rose’s face will never be normal,” Julie joked.

  Rose glared at Julie. “What, so you’re just okay with this?”

  “As okay as I am with any of this. We’re traveling through time to save the future, so if we’ve got to change our faces to do it, well… whatever,” said Julie. She looked around to Tim and Billy to see if they’d back her up.

  Tim shrugged. “You guys know I’m in. I just want to go back to 1854. I’ll let nanobots make me look like anything they want if it means I get to travel back in time again.”

  Rose sighed. Tim knew she liked history just about as much as he did. “Okay, I hear you. But it’s still just super weird, right?”

  Billy said, “I’m still going to be tall, so if there’s a few artificial bones in my face or something, my height’s my only physical characteristic I’ve ever really cared about.”

  “Boys...” said Julie, with an eyeroll.” “But seriously, Rose, you’re in, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m in.” Rose paused, then said, “But let’s get to it before I change my mind. How about we knock me out and get started?”

  Hopkins smiled, but raised his eyebrows at Rose. “What do you mean? There is no need to put you under anesthetic for this procedure. The nanobots will administer localized anesthesia as they go, but you will be awake throughout the entire process. It should only take about forty-five minutes.”