by Barry Lyga
“It’s only been a few days for us.” Oliver put an arm around her. She shook it off.
“No time for that,” she said, clenching her fists and tilting her jaw up. “Sounds like we’ve got a serious Big Bad to deal with.”
In clipped, economical phrasing, she explained how she and the others had ended up in the thirty-first century.
“That burst of energy you experienced must have been our enemy reaching back to crack open the moon in the antiverse,” Barry mused. “From the temporal zone, you can access most of the Multiverse, so it would be the easiest way to cross the vibrational barrier.”
“Let’s conference in an expert!” Winn exclaimed, and before anyone could stop him, once again there was a hologram of Rond Vidar standing among them.
“Winn!” Rond shouted. “I’m in the middle of very delicate—”
“Forgive us, Mr. Vidar,” Barry said quickly, “but we’re out of our depth here. And we think you may be able to help save, well, everything. Including your century.”
Rond sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Of course. Of course. I’m sorry. I’ve just been trying to figure out a certain problem for weeks now. I haven’t been sleeping much, and the Kathoonian stimshots are wearing off. Catch me up.”
Between Superman, Barry, and Sara—with Winn occasionally chiming in—they managed to bring Vidar up to speed.
“It sounds as though you collided with the Iron Curtain of Time,” Vidar said. The high-resolution hologram did an all-too-effective job of conveying his shock. “That’s precisely what I’ve been spending so many sleepless nights trying to puzzle out. You’re very lucky to have survived the experience.”
Iron Curtain? Barry mused. He knew that in the mid-twentieth century, there’d been an “Iron Curtain” that stretched between the borders of those countries controlled by the Soviet Union and those of the free West. There was no literal curtain made of iron—it was just a political metaphor to describe the way the Communist Soviets contained information and emigration from their side of the border, restricting the flow of news and people from East to West. This Iron Curtain of Time sounded like a similar metaphor.
“The Iron Curtain of Time?” Oliver’s voice was skeptical. “That’s not a thing. That can’t be a thing.”
Vidar shrugged noncommittally. “Technically, you’re right, Green Lantern.”
“Green Arrow.”
“Right. Sorry. I get my history confused. In any event, the Iron Curtain of Time is not, in a very real sense, a thing. It has no physical, corporeal characteristics. It is a temporal barrier athwart the time stream itself. We believe it to be constructed by a being from far in the future, a being called the Time Trapper.”
“You can’t build a wall across Time,” Barry protested. “It’s not just impossible—it’s nonsensical.”
“And he did not,” Vidar agreed. “The Iron Curtain is just a convenient metaphor to explain that now it is impossible to travel past the year 3102. What we refer to as an Iron Curtain is in reality a series of interlocking tachyonic breakwaters, a subatomic bombardment of superluminal particles that travel back and forth in time so quickly and precisely that they prevent passage.”
“I understood that it’s a metaphor,” Oliver admitted, “and not much else.”
“This Iron Curtain thing makes no sense,” Sara complained. “The Legends have been to the End of Time before. There’s nothing there except a place called Vanishing Point, where the old Time Masters had their headquarters.” She paused. “They’re not, uh, an issue any longer.”
“Vanishing Point is at the End of Time, where your specific universe collapses under its own weight and coldness,” Vidar told her. “Your foe—our foe—is at the End of All Time. Where every universe has its terminus.”
Barry felt a chill. Not merely the end of the world, or the end of the universe. Not even just the End of Time, as J’Onn had seen. It was the end of every universe.
That was where their foe lived. And they had no way to get there.
“Rond,” Superman said, “you’ve been studying the Iron Curtain, right?”
“Yes. As soon as it appeared on our scanners at the Time Institute, my colleague Circadia Senius and I immediately sent probes to analyze it. None of them came back. We’ve had to make do with remote viewing.”
“The Curtain blockades the year 3102 and beyond. In theory,” Superman said, “could we travel to the year 3101 . . .”
“And just wait!” Oliver snapped his fingers. “The Curtain stops time travelers, but it won’t stop people just living, right?”
Rond shrugged. For the first time, the hologram fuzzed ever so slightly. “We considered this. Once you passed the point at which the Curtain exists, you’d still need to time-travel to the End of All Time. But the enemy is capable of moving the Curtain at will, it seems. He would just reerect the barrier elsewhen, and you’d be right back where you started.” He pursed his lips, pondering. “Quite literally. And eventually, the enemy’s strikes throughout the timeline and Multiverse will corrode the barriers between eras and universes. The crossover effect will reduce the Multiverse to a single moment of entropy, destroying it entirely.”
Oliver threw his hands in the air.
“Great news,” Barry muttered.
“I refuse to believe that we can’t find a way to fight this enemy,” Superman said. “I’ve yet to encounter the foe who doesn’t have a weakness.”
“Do we think this guy can reach through the Curtain from his side?” Sara speculated. “Can that help us somehow? Can we lure him out?”
“He’s using Reverse-Flash to power some sort of machinery on the other side of the Curtain,” Barry said. “With all of that vibrational energy at his disposal, he doesn’t need to come through the Curtain. He can just reach back and do things like release Anti-Matter Man from his prison and have him do his dirty work.”
“Vibrational energy . . .” Winn mused. “Rond, you said the Iron Curtain was . . . Hey, Computo, play it back.”
The words floated from the air, a dead-on replication of Rond’s previous statement: “What we refer to as an Iron Curtain is in reality a series of interlocking tachyonic breakwaters, a subatomic bombardment of superluminal particles that travel back and forth in time so quickly and precisely that they prevent passage.”
“Clear as mud,” Sara pronounced.
“No, no, wait!” Winn said excitedly. He used his tablet to project some graphs and images into the air. Despite himself, Barry found his curiosity piqued and meandered over to watch.
“The breakwaters are actually moving at varying vibrational rates. That’s how they can block time travelers in the first place.”
“Time travel is all about vibrations,” Superman murmured.
Barry knew this was true. The Cosmic Treadmill had allowed him to sync up his vibrations with the sixty-fourth century. Then, when he’d relaxed those vibrations, he returned to his home time.
“Reverse-Flash’s vibrational energy powers the machinery that reaches back through time,” he said slowly, beginning to perceive the edges of an idea. “If we can generate enough vibrational energy . . . we could possibly penetrate the Curtain.”
“You weren’t able to break through,” Ray pointed out. “So that machine must be amplifying Reverse-Flash’s vibrations. We’d need . . .” He surrendered. The numbers, the concepts, they were too massive, too enormous and broad even to contemplate.
“Are there any members of the Legion with vibration powers?” Barry asked. “Or who could amplify my own?”
Winn tapped his chin as he thought.
And thought.
And thought.
And—
“Any day now,” Oliver said testily.
“Sorry!” Winn yelped. “Look, there’s a lot of Legionnaires, OK? It takes a minute.”
“There’s no one,” Superman said. “As I said—I used to be a member, when I was younger. I know the team well. No Legionnaire can amplify your powers
or produce the necessary vibrations on their own. It’s up to us.”
“You’d need more than a thousand Flashes,” Winn said very unhelpfully, “with a whole mess of vibrational energy . . .”
And then Green Arrow started laughing.
Bemused, Superman looked over at the Emerald Archer. “Would you share with the rest of us?” he asked. “We could all use a good laugh right about now.”
Oliver Queen wiped his eyes and gazed around the room at the geniuses and superheroes staring at him as though he’d lost his mind. “Sorry. It’s just funny because . . . I’ve figured it out.”
Flash’s jaw dropped. The hologram of Rond Vidar inclined its head skeptically.
“No, seriously,” Oliver promised. “I’ve got it all worked out. I know how to get through the Iron Curtain of Time.”
15
The time courier opened a path into the S.T.A.R. Labs Cortex. Barry stepped through with Oliver and Superman, right into Iris’s waiting arms.
“Hey!” he said in surprise. “You were standing in the right place!”
They hugged and he gave her a long kiss.
“Did you get there? To the End of Time?” Iris’s eyes shined with hope.
“No,” he told her. “But don’t worry. We have a plan.” His eyes flicked to Oliver. “Sort of.”
“And we brought friends,” Oliver said, gesturing to the portal opened by the Time Courier.
White Canary and Heat Wave stepped through into the twenty-first century. The Atom followed them in a new, sleek version of his costume. “Hey, everyone!” he said. “Check it out! They put me together with some Imskian tailors in the thirty-first century and redesigned my costume. Cool, right?” He struck a weight-lifting pose.
Mick Rory smacked him on the back of his head, then inhaled deeply. “Ah, car exhaust, beef jerky, and old plastic. It’s good to be home.”
“We do have a plan,” Barry promised. “Thanks to Oliver. We need to talk to James Jesse.”
Iris recoiled. “The Trickster?”
Oliver grinned at her. “No. The other one. The one from Earth 27.”
“We need vibrational energy to break through a barrier in time,” Barry told her. “I can’t generate enough, and Wally’s still somewhere in the sixties.” They had no idea where Wally had chosen to take his vacation from the Legends, so they couldn’t just go get him, unfortunately.
“So we’re going to use the speedsters from Earth 27,” Ray interjected. He laughed out loud, surprising Iris, Mr. Terrific, Caitlin, and Felicity. But Superman only smiled in response, and Oliver and Sara both cracked modest grins.
Mick pawed through a bag of fries someone had left on a counter.
“We’re going to build a gigantic treadmill,” Barry said, “and put ten thousand speedsters on it and have them run us through the Iron Curtain of Time!”
16
The energy cage around him was translucent enough that Cisco could see through it. Surrounding him was a flat, dead plain, pockmarked here and there by crumbling boulders and shallow pits. Above, the sky was speckled with hard black circles surrounded by dim halos of light. They were dead stars, Cisco realized, throwing off the last vestiges of their heat and light as their nuclear fuel waned, the atoms at their cores finally fusing to cold, dead iron.
“Like you, I can perceive the other reality. I was born when Flashpoint was reversed. The ripple effect of the time stream’s damage warped the very fabric of space-time, pushed along on a wave until it crashed on the shores of the very End of Time itself.”
Cisco thought it made sense—he tried to imagine the time stream as a heavy length of rope anchored at the End of Time. When TV Barry caused and then reversed Flashpoint, it was as though he’d given the rope a jerk. That jerk had rippled along the rope until it hit the wall. With nowhere left to go, all of that energy had had to do something.
“So, when a mommy time paradox meets a daddy wall of entropy, they kiss and make a little . . . whatever the heck you are?” Cisco asked.
“I am the Time Trapper. For I have taken your timeline and trapped it within another reality altogether. Your timeline should have merely been an aftereffect of a decision not made, of Barry Allen’s potential to not disrupt history. But by creating me, he made it possible for your reality to be so much more. I captured it, trapped it, and exploited its existence, spinning what should have been a single timeline into an entire Multiverse of its own, a near-identical twin of the other Multiverse. And thus was born . . . the Megaverse!”
Fuming, Cisco said, “So, in other words, the TV Barry Allen screwed up, messed with history, then re-messed with history, and we’re the ones who get punished for it? Not cool.”
He’d heard enough. He had the power to escape from this cell, and now that he had gathered some crucial intelligence on his foe, he was going to use that power.
Furrowing his brow, Cisco focused on the space just beyond the energy field. All around him—through him—the vibrational frequencies of the universe sang in unison. He plucked at the strings of reality and a breach opened before him—
And then the breach closed on its own, and he heard himself say, “So, in other words, the TV Barry Allen screwed up, messed with history, then re-messed with history, and we’re the ones who get punished for it? Not cool.”
He decided to breach out of the prison. Focusing, he opened a breach—
And it closed by itself. To his astonishment he was speaking again. “. . . messed with history, then re-messed with history, and we’re the ones who get punished for it? Not cool.”
What was happening to him? Somehow he was reliving the same few seconds over and over again. Opening the breach, watching it close, jumping back a few seconds to do it all over again.
“I have been waiting for you to exploit your powers,” the Time Trapper said, standing motionless. “Now that you have done so, I am able to manipulate your personal temporality. Your vibrational frequency was closed to me until you projected it into the fabric of the universe. Now it is mine to control. And so I have trapped you in the same fifteen seconds, where you will use your breaching abilities over and over again, allowing me to tap into that power and use it to enhance my speedster-driven machinery. Due to your ability to perceive alternate timelines, I suspect you are able to experience and recall these fifteen seconds each time.” For the first time, the Time Trapper moved, raising one purple-cloaked arm to gesture non-committally with his right hand. “I surmise that this will drive you irretrievably insane in short order.”
Cisco yearned to protest, to scream, to holler. But he had no control over his body or anything tangible at all. He was cut loose from time, tethered to himself, but helpless, able only to observe as the universe in his very specific area rewound itself.
He could say nothing to the Time Trapper. Nothing save, “So, in other words, the TV Barry Allen screwed up, messed with history, then re-messed with history, and we’re the ones who get punished for it? Not cool.”
And then open a breach.
And watch it close.
And then do it again.
And again.
And again.
17
Joe paced impatiently as Bert Larvan—the brother of the Bug-Eyed Bandit—perched on a stool in the Bunker and peered through a microscope at the bee Joe had recovered from the bodega. Dinah, Dig, and Rene had not been sanguine about allowing a civilian (and one related to a super villain, to boot) into the Green Arrow’s hidden lair, but Joe had prevailed. They needed someone to examine the bee and reverse-engineer its signal ASAP, and with all the usual geniuses out of town, Bert Larvan was their best bet.
“The swarm is 20 percent bigger, according to this thing,” Wild Dog said, gesturing somewhat laconically at one of the computer displays. “How big’s it gotta get before we get serious and call in the people with powers?”
Dinah snorted in offense. But Joe took Rene’s point. Dinah’s Canary Cry was a great power, sure, but basically useless against a swa
rm of bees located thousands of feet straight up. They needed a Flash or a Vibe or an Atom or someone who could get up into the air and deactivate the swarm.
None of those folks were available to them. They had Bert Larvan.
“Anything, Bert?” Joe asked, ending his pacing right behind Larvan. “Anything at all?”
“Detective West,” Bert said testily, not even bothering to look up from the microscope, “you can have me do this job properly or you can have me do it not at all. Which do you prefer?”
Grinding his teeth together, Joe stepped away a few paces. Holding his tongue was not his forte, but Larvan was doing them—and the world—a big favor. He’d put aside his animosity toward the police in order to figure out how to help stop the swarm and capture Ambush Bug. That bought him a little consideration for his . . . prickly personality.
“I say we find one of those jetpack things,” Wild Dog said nonchalantly, “and fly up there with a flamethrower and BWOOOOOSHHHH!” He mimed spraying fire indiscriminately in a wide arc.
“Great idea,” Dig deadpanned. “I’ll get right on it.”
“Hundreds of thousands of melted, flaming, sizzling little bees dropping out of the sky,” Dinah added. “That’s not a problem.”
Rene shrugged. “I don’t see anyone else coming up with anything.”
Bert Larvan cleared his throat loudly and significantly. The message was clear: Everyone shut up. I’m working.
Joe huddled the four of them together at Rene’s seat near the console. “Look,” he said, his voice low, “we’ve got Bert and that’s about all we can count on right now.”
Rene chuckled mirthlessly. “You really think we can count on him? He hates the cops for arresting his sister.”
“If there’s one thing that drives him,” Joe pointed out, “it’s that love for his sister. He can’t stand that Ambush Bug is using her bees for his own purposes. If nothing else, we can trust Bert to help stop the Bug.”
Rene shrugged.