“The state of computing advances rapidly in the years to come. However, this is not important in the current context.”
Command One gave a slight flick of his hand, and a new vision crowded into Bledsoe’s mind. From his perspective, he sat before a control console unlike any he had seen before. Its brushed steel surfaces gleamed beneath ghostly images hovering in midair — ranks of numbers and graphs, motion pictures, and more — hovering impossibly within arm’s reach. However, the arms on the console before him were not Bledsoe’s. They bore the gray skin and long fingers Bledsoe recognized from the alien in Area X’s dungeon. And even this wonder paled beside the view visible beyond the console. It was the edge of the Earth, a sweeping blue-and-white gemstone beyond which stretched the black infinity of space. It was unlike anything Bledsoe had ever seen or dreamed before, and it stole the breath from his body.
With another tiny wave of Command One’s hand, the vision vanished from Bledsoe’s imagination.
As the wonder faded and Bledsoe tried to blink away his confusion, an endless series of questions began to crowd into his mind. One took priority over all others.
“What do you want?”
Command One straightened and took a deep breath, carefully weighing his next words. He clasped his hands behind his back and said, “I only want to help you, for reasons that will become clear later. And I will tell you one thing only on the condition that you hold it in absolute secrecy.”
Aware that this could be some sort of trick, Bledsoe nevertheless felt himself getting back onto solid, familiar ground. “I’m great with secrets.”
Command One nodded absently, as if Bledsoe’s comment were a foregone conclusion. “Several weeks from now, this research facility will be destroyed from within. If you interfere in this event in any way, every ambition you have for leadership and achievement will be lost. The base and everything in it must be destroyed.”
“That’s treason,” hissed Bledsoe.
Command One licked his lips and said with utter seriousness, “It is essential in order for you to emerge as the one man capable of saving the future. You have QVs now. You must escape this time and use what you have to create a world of your choosing.”
Normally, foreign governments recruited traitors with money. This Command One character wasn’t saying a word about cash, but he was definitely talking Bledsoe’s language.
“I’m listening,” Bledsoe said quietly.
“You want to quit radiation work in Animal Research,” the man continued. “Don’t. You will need this knowledge in the years to come.”
Bledsoe’s eyes narrowed with doubt. “And how does logging animal feeding get me to saving the future?”
“I cannot give you much more information. Only know that there will be a holiday when most of the base workers will be absent. The few who remain will clear out in response to an alarm. That is when the people you love will turn their backs on you and escape with the Alpha Machine.”
Bledsoe knew he could only mean two people. The embers of his anger fanned into flames.
“If you interfere at all, in any way,” said Command One, “you will lose everything. But in the moment when they attempt to leave, you must go with them. If you are patient and obey, you will have the Alpha Machine and control mankind’s future.”
The long game, then. Command One was offering him power, but it would take time to develop. Patience wasn’t Bledsoe’s strongest trait, but he thought he could manage some restraint. It was for a good cause. He already knew what and whom he wanted his future to hold.
19
The Reset Risk
Winston materialized in a dazzle of white-and-blue lightning that left his retinas dancing with dark splotches. He squinted his eyes, trying to clear his vision, then hunched forward as a sudden wave of nausea swept through his body. For a moment, he thought he was going to throw up then and there, right at the feet of whomever was standing near him. His head throbbed, and he took an involuntary step back.
Time-travel sickness.
His father had warned him. Apparently, Winston had taken enough hops in a short enough time that the wear was catching up.
The nausea passed as quickly as it had appeared. The spike driving up from his spine into his brain retracted, and Winston could finally make out details around him. Someone had a hand on his shoulder. There were vertical bars before him — Bernie’s cage. And there was Bernie’s thin body, only a few feet away. The alien reached through the bars, steadying Winston.
“Cool,” groaned Winston. “That should be in the manual.”
He searched around the holding room and quickly found his nausea receding behind his rising indignation.
“Where are my parents, Bernie? I said to have them here in—”
Winston clung to the cage for stability. “Again with the reset. What are you talking about?”
The color patterns in Bernie’s irises shifted deeper into green.
Winston put a hand to the side of his head and groaned. “And now I’m feeling worse. OK…what’s the Omega Mesh?”
Winston slumped against the cage. He had hoped there was a way to bring his parents forward. After all, there was no living Claude or Amanda after the plane explosion. What if there was a way to jump them past all that pain and loss and start over?
Of course, Winston knew he was being impulsive and not thinking clearly. If he brought them forward from right now, all of their existence and his own childhood preceding 2013 would be radically altered. Winston had a feeling that going so far off the Omega Mesh’s script would result in yet another reset. There appeared to only be one game plan, and they wanted him stuck running it.
added Bernie.
Winston backed away from the cage. His stomach had settled enough to let him think, but he still felt unable to make any sense of what was happening.
“So…” He paced, trying to make pieces fit together, and pointed at Bernie. “Right before I jumped, you said that Bledsoe was at the middle of all this. Please explain.”
Bernie bowed his head, sending waves of white hair cascading down his shoulder. He pondered the question, then arrived at some resolution.
“Ugh!” Winston couldn’t hide his frustration at these non-answers. “Why does this Omega Mesh love Bledsoe so much? His sparkling, one-in-a-billion serial-killer personality?”
“Yeah, I got that much. What’s his purpose?”
Bernie only offered the slightest hesitation before answering.
Winston shook his head. The alien might as well have said that he’d tell Winston when he was older.
“All right, so what’s my purpose?”
“What?!” Winston confronted Bernie through the cage bars. “Aw, no. Hell no. There is no way, no how, that I am—”
Winston pushed away from the cage bars in frustration. “This sucks! I don’t believe it. How does this thing know it’s the only way, huh?”
Winston thrust his face back toward the cage so that it rested only inches from Bernie. He resisted the urge to stare at Bernie’s eyes, which wasn’t that hard given his current fury level.
“I…don’t…care,” he hissed. “And of course I’m trying, because you’re not telling me anything. So, let’s keep this simple. Just answer yes or no, OK? If I take you back to 2013, will you help me save my mom and my friends?”
“Yes or no, Bernie?!”
Winston stomped his heel into the floor and swore loudly. The expletive seemed particularly bad in the holding room’s empty, echoing silence. He forced himself to take a deep breath.
“Why wouldn’t it let you?”
Right. The word “prohibition” flashed back into Winston’s mind. This duality thing was a rule, not a law…and rules were made to be broken.
“Then we need to ask the Omega Mesh to make an exception.”
Bernie shook his head. The ridges that served as his eyebrows rose, and Winston thought he detected a tremor in the alien’s hands.
“But possible,” Winston insisted.
His mind continued to churn, struggling to come up with options. Nothing sounded better than his original idea. He gave Bernie a sly glance.
“I asked for an order of QVs to go, and you didn’t shoot me down. You didn’t give me any of this ‘if you do, it’s a reset’ business. That tells me you already know it could work.”
Bernie’s lips trembled slightly, and his irises continued to shift in tight, multifarious patterns.
“Oh, come on, Bernie!” Winston smacked a cage bar for emphasis. “I’m not a statistics idiot. Given everything you’ve told me, out of twenty-eight iterations, I’ve tried this approach, what? Five times? Ten tops. It’s not like we’ve exhausted every option.”
Bernie’s voice in Winston’s mind was barely perceptible.
“So, it can be done! What’s it gonna take? Let’s make a deal and get out of here.”
The holding room’s reinforced door slid open. Too late, Winston realized his mistake in letting the Alpha Machine fall still. He had been so absorbed with Bernie that he had neglected to maintain an avenue for a defensive retreat. Shade would have been appalled.
Winston raised Little e, unsure if he had enough time to charge the device for an attack.
Bernie placed his hand over Winston’s.
Amanda walked into the doorway. She wore striped gray, high-waisted pants and a white blouse with puffy shoulders. Even though this must be her usual work wear, Winston couldn’t get over how much better she looked than as the plain the waitress he’d grown up with. Just as she made eye contact with Winston and he was about to call out a greeting, the words died on Winston’s lips.
All around him, the room and everything in it took on a gritty appearance, as if the particles that comprised the matter were straining to fly apart and only barely being restrained. At some points, he could see through the shelves and carts along the walls. He spotted traces of dark interior within the stone floor. The light from the overhead lamps at first seemed like streams of infinitesimally small specks, then, when he tried to look at them again, like oscillating waves of energy. He lost all sense of connection to his body, which appeared to remain motionless. Gravity felt impossibly distant. The overall effect was entirely disorienting.
At least Winston had the benefit of growing up with sci-fi movies that depicted such bizarre states. In an abstract way, this was reminiscent of the background reality of the Matrix or even some choice Doctor Who effects. He had a frame of reference that said reality might not always look like reality. His young parents had no such benefit. He couldn’t imagine his young mother trying to cope with this.
Winston considered speaking a reply, but the idea of trying to force words along the tedious path from mind to lungs to vocal cords and through the various contortions of his tongue…
he gushed.
Winston felt Bernie smile reassuringly, which was a very strange mental interpretation, because the alien’s face didn’t move at all.
As Winston watched, golden light poured around Amanda, seeming to bend about her like flowing water around a stone. She moved with utter slowness. One hand brushed across her pants, and Winston watched the ripple of its impact form a wave in the fabric. Her eyebrows crept upward at a glacial pace as she remained in that moment of first recognition, and her lips ever so slowly started to separate, preparing to speak at some distant time. Winston hoped he could remember how she looked in this instant — bright-eyed, intense, and purposeful — for the rest of his life.
An edge of sternness seeped into Bernie’s tone.
The idea that Bledsoe might play a part in stopping global annihilation rather than causing it seemed far-fetched.
Winston felt an electric shoc
k of embarrassment. And to think he’d been worried about cameras in his room.
That thought led to another realization as he studied his mother.
Well, that was encouraging. That meant even if all Winston’s actions weren’t new, at least he was on the outer edge of being predictable. For some reason, the Omega Mesh, and thus Bernie with it, wanted him to play things safe and not do anything different. That just didn’t make sense.
The thought of repeatedly going through the past week of his life, with all its insanity and loss, made Winston’s mind reel. How could that possibly be?
Winston forced himself to ask the next question, although he feared the answer, knowing that it ultimately ended with him being here right now in a different iteration.
Winston Chase and the Omega Mesh Page 14