“But it’s not even my birthday,” Bledsoe said. He glanced at the landscape surrounding them. “Or is it? I don’t even know where or when we really are.”
“It is your relative present,” said Command One without ever breaking eye contact. “What you see around us is a historic view of the Egyptian monuments from roughly three thousand years prior.”
“Like a movie?”
“No, it is a stream from that time-space.”
Bledsoe tried to wrap his head around that and decided it wasn’t the most pressing issue.
“Why is there a gun here?”
Command One took a deep breath, as if steeling himself against whatever would come next.
“I am going to show you something,” said Command One with an oddly muted, restrained tone. “Try to remain seated.”
Bledsoe looked from the man’s face to his hands. Command One made no move. His ebony eyes remained fixed on Bledsoe.
On the walls about them, the scenery changed. The light changed slightly, darkening further as the moon faded from a half to a thin crescent in a different part of the sky. Gradually, the horizon across half of the room morphed from an empty, flat desert into the silvery jumble of an urban landscape littered with a never-ending jumble of two- and three-story buildings, all seemingly constructed from squat, long boxes with rows of black squares for windows.
“Cairo?” asked Bledsoe. “When is this?”
“2209.”
“Really? Looks the same as now.”
“Not for long,” replied Command One in a near-whisper.
At first, Bledsoe thought he’d seen a bird in the sky. A blotch crossed over the moon. As the spot approached, it grew wider, swallowing more and more stars. Bledsoe noticed a pale red tinge around its edges. Fire? He realized he’d something like this before — footage of the space shuttles when they would reenter the atmosphere. The craft zipping through the air, heating particles as it passed, resulting in a shield of glowing plasma streaming around and behind the craft.
Bledsoe’s first thought was that he was witnessing some footage of an alien ship landing, a far-future sequel to the Roswell crash. This didn’t feel like a ship, though. It was only a growing ball of fire surrounding an impenetrable blackness that reminded Bledsoe of Command One’s eyes. The fire stream behind the approaching object lengthened. Its size doubled, then doubled again.
And then, in what felt like the span of a heartbeat, the fiery mass struck the earth.
Or did it? Bledsoe couldn’t be sure. The mass exploded in a purple-rimmed wave of absolute black that swept over Cairo, swallowing everything before it. The darkness struck the ground and bounced back into the sky as it continued to expand laterally. The effect was similar to near-ground nuclear blasts, which cast off a half dome–shaped fireball above a wider, circular Mach front. Bledsoe knew the characteristics well. He should. He had helped to build the initial weapons that had made such blasts.
“A Q-bomb,” said Command One quietly. “Built on the principle of quantum entanglement and the destructive field that results when those entanglement bonds are collapsed on a massive scale.”
Bledsoe’s chest burned, and a distant part of his mind realized that he’d stopped breathing. The field of darkness spanned from one horizon to the other, and when its blast front reached the plain on which the Sphinx and their vantage now stood, it took all of Bledsoe’s self-control not to fall from his chair and curl into a ball on the floor. The blackness swept over them in a spray of debris, purple flashes, and deep, rumbling wind that sounded as if a hole had been blown straight through to hell and unleashed its eternity of torment.
Bledsoe took the shallowest of breaths, then another. The world around him had gone completely black. Bledsoe couldn’t even make out the table immediately before his face.
“It took four days for us to repopulate the area with enough sensor motes to provide a visual stream,” said Command One.
Gradually, a sickly, blood-red light crept up from the eastern horizon. Command One must have the feed on fast-forward, because in a matter of seconds, dust-choked light swept over the sky, and the sun rose over the landscape, a dim orb of crimson that could only illuminate the world into twilight.
Cairo was gone. In its place sprawled a blackened sea. It looked as if the world had been burnt, then soaked in fuel and burnt again until nothing stood. The Nile River ran gray and turgid with sludge. Turning about, Bledsoe saw that the Sphinx’s head had been blown off, as had the top of the Great Pyramid. One of the smaller pyramids behind it had collapsed into a pile of rubble. The third remained intact, but everything lay covered in a thick layer of black grime that Bledsoe assumed was the charred desert itself blown across the visible world.
“What happened?” Bledsoe asked, his voice coarse and broken.
“The North African Alliance refused to cooperate with your demands for submission.”
At first, Bledsoe didn’t understand. “What?”
“Cairo, Tripoli, Casablanca, and New Carthage. Four bombs. The estimated loss of human life within the first month was roughly seventy-eight million.”
“I — I don’t…” The room spun around Bledsoe. His head seemed detached from his body. His heart raced. “I only wanted the U.S. and the Soviets…” He trailed off then tried again. “I did this? Why?”
“You ordered it. That is the way of owning the world. Not everyone wants to cooperate.”
If that was supposed to be a joke, Bledsoe didn’t find it funny in the slightest.
Without knowing how it got there, he looked down and found the Walther in his hand, pointing at Command One.
“You’re lying!”
“Mr. Bledsoe,” said Command One with the same unshakable evenness. “Have you forgotten?”
He unwove his fingers and spread his hands apart across the tablecloth. The space between them glowed and took shape.
The fabric thickened and dimpled, shifting with luminous colors and patterns far more vibrant than the dark wasteland about them. After a moment, Bledsoe recognized himself in the three-dimensional fabric. He was sitting on the hospital bed alongside Claude, who stared at him with fading consciousness. This would have been just after Bledsoe had tranquilized him. Bledsoe could hear the scene play in his mind.
Relishing their reunion and his own victory, past Bledsoe explained his intention to take over the Russian government and thereby make America a stronger nation. Bed-ridden Claude was belligerent and skeptical to the end. As his friend’s consciousness faded away and his eyes closed, the Bledsoe sitting at the restaurant table and watching the recent event play out felt a piece of his heart splinter off and dissolve.
The tabletop scene changed as the fabric wriggled and stretched between Command One’s fingers. Claude’s retirement home room morphed into what was likely a hotel room decorated in glass and steel. Bledsoe sat before a desktop fashioned of green glass within which danced a multitude of charts, images, and text windows. His face had aged. A dark beard covered his cheeks save for one raw, pink patch down his right jaw, which reflected the light as if wet and glistening. He wore a thick, gray woolen coat with shoulders damp from rain or snow. The real Bledsoe observing this show had barely aged two years in the last twenty. The Bledsoe before him was haggard and old. Dark circles clung beneath his eyes, and his skin seemed like weathered, sagging leather.
Behind him, broad windows exposed roiling storm clouds and a concrete cityscape. Against this, the dynamic reds and greens of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square stood out like a beacon. From somewhere beyond the field of view, a gravel-voiced, Russian-accented man asked Bledsoe for a final decision.
Bledsoe looked up at the speaker, his expression full of spite and venom. He nodded slowly and said, “Launch the Q-bombs.”
“You do not remain continuous throughout the timeline,” said Command One. He brought his hands together, extinguishing the video stream beneath them. “You leave gaps of decades between arrivals, sometim
es posing as your own offspring or clone. But I am not lying. You ordered this strike. And others.”
Bledsoe pushed away from the table, gun wavering from Command One to the table and back again. His thoughts ran together in an incoherent rat’s nest. Every time he stared into Command One’s placid gaze, his anger increased. His mind felt like that incoming bomb, a sphere of blackness rimmed by fire and terrible emptiness.
“This can’t be the only way. I’m sure that seeing this now…here with you…I’ll know. I’ll remember.”
Command One shook his head. “I have files of four times you have launched those bombs from four different timestreams. In three of them, the event follows this discussion.”
“Then I’m sure I have a damned good reason for doing it!” Bledsoe yelled.
He fired the gun into the carpet by Command One’s feet. The man blinked and gave only the barest of flinches, as if he had known the shot was coming.
“You do,” said Command One. He lowered his head slightly, leaning forward over his hands. “The question remains, though: What happens if you don’t do it?”
Bledsoe shook his head, unsure if he had heard all of the words. “What do you mean?”
“Do you have it within you to not kill? We know that you have the capacity to extend the world’s longevity as far as we’ve been able to see. But we don’t know if you can extend it even further if you are able to overcome your propensity for violence and domination. This is why we want Winston Chase at your side.”
***
Bledsoe felt as if Command One had just slapped him in the face. Was he insinuating that the boy — Claude’s loudmouthed brat — might somehow be necessary to make Bledsoe a better person?
For that matter, what about the fact that he’d gone through this charade at least four times before? He really was little more than a pawn to them, a tool to be shoved around a board and manipulated.
He was nobody’s tool. Ever.
“You want to kill me,” Command One said. “That is why I gave you the gun.”
It was true. Bledsoe could feel the pressure he had on the trigger. The snub-nosed handgun wavered no more than five feet from Command One’s chest. He couldn’t miss.
“You wanna die?” Bledsoe rasped. “I’m happy to oblige.”
“I don’t want to die, but that is not important.”
He stood and took two steps toward Bledsoe, closing the distance between them. Rather than let the man stand over him, Bledsoe also stood, frantic gaze meeting Command One’s impossibly calm stare. Bledsoe kept the gun pointed squarely at his chest.
“What matters,” Command One continued, “is whether you can master your instincts. This is quite possibly the branching of the timestream.” He slipped forward until the gunmetal pressed against his suit jacket. “Can you control yourself? And what will happen if you can?”
He was provoking Bledsoe. He had some sort of crazy death wish. Bledsoe knew Command One wanted him to pull the trigger, and he didn’t know why, but he almost didn’t care. The man had no regard for Bledsoe’s independence.
“If you can spare me, then you can spare Winston.”
The gun fired and recoiled sharply in his hand.
Bledsoe had not willed it. His first thought was that perhaps Command One or the Omega Mesh or someone in this insane asylum had taken control of the gun or Bledsoe’s hand. Perhaps they had taken the decision away from him and were doing this as a trick to make him doubt himself, feel remorse, break down. It was just the sort of tactic you would use on a psychological torture victim.
Command One fumbled backward. His hand reached for the back of his chair as his mouth hung open and blood welled through his shirt and down his belly. His expression shifted from pain to disappointment. That was how Bledsoe knew the shooting hadn’t been orchestrated. It had been Bledsoe’s choice, after all.
Accepting that, Bledsoe understood his own action.
“Spare Winston? I don’t think so.”
Command One’s hand fell from the chairback, and his body collapsed sideways. He thudded against the floor, legs visible from behind the table.
Bledsoe’s breath came in ragged waves as the dust-obscured sun shone through the devastation he would someday make, bathing the world in the glow of blood.
That would show them. He was no one’s lab rat.
“What is your plan now?” asked Command One.
Bledsoe started. The body had not moved, and the voice came from the restaurant doorway.
Command One entered, dressed in an identical suit, expression as dispassionate as before, with no sign of having been harmed. Bledsoe peeked around the table, confirming that there was still one very dead Command One on the floor.
“Clone,” said Command One. “Perhaps you should know that my name is Janek-3. He was Janek-8. There are five others currently. Collectively, we are Command One.”
Bledsoe had the feeling that everything he learned about this place was only the tip of the iceberg, but that tip just kept getting bigger.
He dropped the Walther on the floor and took a long, shuddering breath. “Of course you are.”
“We have been synchronized from birth so that the experiences and memories of one become shared by all. It allows us to assume another’s place seamlessly in situations…” He gestured toward the corpse of his — brother? Twin? “…such as this.”
“Has it ever occurred to you or your all-seeing Omega Mesh,” Bledsoe growled, “that I might be so angry exactly because you people keep trying to manipulate me?”
“Yes,” said the new Command One as he stepped over his clone and took the chair to Bledsoe’s left. “That theory has been tested and disproved.”
“You people stuck me on that island for seven years, running endless tests, for nothing.”
“It was expedient to isolate you until the appropriate time. That purpose was quite necessary.”
Bledsoe walked away from the table and to the nearest wall. Even up close, he would have sworn that he was looking through a window. The resolution of the imagery was astounding. Only the fact that they hadn’t been annihilated in the blast told him that they weren’t actually at the location. He ran a hand across the wall, expecting smooth glass but instead finding the surface to be gritty as course sandpaper.
“Am I still a prisoner stuck in some experiment of yours?” he asked.
“You are no more a prisoner than anyone else,” observed Command One. “You are free to end this life at any time and initiate a timestream reset.”
“And then do it all over again.”
“The details change to varying degrees each time, and with them, the actions of the primaries. Yes, you can call it an experiment. Only the final result matters.”
“Until you run out of time to keep doing the experiment.”
Command One gave a small shrug.
“Where are we?”
“Still in Area X.”
“In my present? Show me.”
Bledsoe needed to get grounded. He felt utterly adrift and craved a frame of reference to which he could tie himself.
Command One raised a hand, and the obliterated Egyptian landscape faded into complete blackness, which in turn dissipated like mist, leaving behind a view into a cavernous stone world.
Bledsoe walked along the wall, and now he did have a dim recollection of this space. It was the central chasm that ran through the center of Area X, but whereas before most of the structure had been roughly cut from the desert’s stone body and strung with miles of wiring, this place only retained that structure’s barest bones. All the orange-layered walls were polished and lined with channels of embedded, sinuous lines of white lighting. At least six balconies descended into the depths. Every one of them was filled with people in uniforms of every color. About half of them were bald. Many showed skin of the colors Bledsoe recognized from the world’s usual races, but some were gray like Bernie. This new Area X was a blur of activity, filled with the ocean-like drone of countless v
oices.
“What is all this?” he asked. “Area X? But…how? And this is now?”
“It is. We employ various phasing technologies so that the facility can serve different needs under various contexts. Also, we can opt to filter it from outside view when expedient.”
Bledsoe recalled trying to probe within the place and being unable to. Command One had come outside to message him for that exact reason.
He turned to tell Command One that this was yet another example of how his actions were only those of an animal in a maze, but his words failed when he saw the tabletop before the man shifting with motion. A swarm of black shapes buzzed above the white linen surface, rising, falling, twisting in lazy loops through the air. On the table before Command One, a circular shape started to take form. At first, Bledsoe didn’t understand what he was seeing, but the jarring drone of bees was unmistakable, and, as he drew closer, Bledsoe saw the tiny, honey-filled hexagons that formed the structure’s building blocks. Before long, Bledsoe saw that the black bees were building an ascending spiral, like the graceful perfection of a nautilus shell applied to a hive.
Command One casually reached up and grasped one bee between his thumb and index finger. Bledsoe heard the small body crunch.
“You see how the others carry on,” he said. “The individual is unimportant. What matters is the hive, the group. It is a thing of absolute beauty, a reflection of the natural order.”
Bledsoe wanted to ask if those were real bees or some sort of projection. The fact that he couldn’t tell was disturbing in its own right. However, since none of the bees appeared interested in Command One, and none were veering close to Bledsoe, he allowed himself to decide they were a projection. No doubt, Management or the Omega Mesh knew he had a fear of bees and this lesson was designed specifically to grab his attention in a certain way. He wanted to put his fist through the hive but couldn’t bring himself to test his assumption.
Winston Chase and the Omega Mesh Page 22