by Cam Rogers
“This is a time machine,” Jack said.
Jack’s clone took back his keys. “I’ll be needing those.”
“Into the airlock, Jack. That’s how this happens.”
Jack’s clone’s head was on a swivel, taking them both in. “Intense. Hey Paul, what would have happened if I didn’t do what I did? Y’know … screw with you. The parroting thing.”
“To answer your question,” Paul said to the clone, “it’s not possible. You would always have said and done what you have just said and done. You’re here as a direct result of what has gone before. Now get off the ramp. You’re staying. Jack, you’re going.”
“Going? Going where?” The real Jack this time.
“I’m sending you two minutes into the past, so that we can have this conversation.”
The machine waited, thrumming heavily. “And what if this plays out like the end of Evil Dead 2?”
“You’re not going to the fucking Middle Ages. You need this machine to step out of, and that wasn’t functioning until we turned it on four minutes ago. That’s as far back as this machine will take you—to the moment it was first activated. Now move. I’ve been waiting three years to try this thing.”
Jack walked cautiously up the gangway, eyeing the distortion waves emanating from the machine’s housing. “If I get lymphoma I swear to God…”
“It’s not radioactive; it’s chronon-active. Completely revolutionary and entirely clean. As far as we can tell.”
“Swell.” Jack stepped over the lip, into the airlock, looked around inside. No controls, no handles. “Hey, if something goes wrong, how do I reopen this thing?”
“You don’t,” Paul said. “Once the charge builds up within the Promenade it needs to be expended before the internal atmosphere is vented. Failure to do so could cause … big problems.” Hydraulics engaged, hefting the door away from the housing and sliding it toward the seal. “Just walk counterclockwise around the core. One full rotation will complete the journey.”
“Fine. But when I get out of here I want a full—” The door pressed into place, then locked off with a rubbery smooching sound. A blast of cool air filled the room. Jack’s ears popped. Wiggling a finger in one ear, opening and closing his jaw, he peered through the viewplate.
Outside, Paul was waving him to the left. The other Jack smiled and waved beside Paul.
The airlock had two internal doors. On cue the left door disengaged. Jack stepped into the Promenade, the airlock sealing behind him. The interior of the circular corridor was made of some kind of nonconductive white ceramic, featureless, blood-warm beneath his fingers and floored with waffle-tread black rubber.
The thrum of the core sounded louder inside the corridor, the womb of some furious monster. The thrum transmuted to a sudden whine, the floor kicked, Jack said, “Fuck,” and …
Silence.
The regular, adrenal pound of the core was gone, though it couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from where he stood. The airlock was so perfectly soundless Jack could have believed it was floating in space. Blood pulsed in his eardrums, his breath rasping like it was piped through earphones.
“Jack?”
He took a step forward, peering around the eternal corner. “Hello?” No response. He started walking.
No other sound was forthcoming. The trip around the core felt a lot like walking on a treadmill, like the corridor was moving around him rather than he moving through it. Then the exit door appeared.
Jack hit the red release button, the seal cracked, the hatch slid aside, and he stepped into the airlock from which he had departed a minute ago. Peering through the viewplate he saw the gangway, the time lab, Paul, and his double. His past self.
The airlock hissed open. Jack steadied himself against the lip of the seal, suddenly light-headed. Internal atmosphere vented and he stepped outside, giddy. He knew this scene. He knew what the Jack before him was feeling. He hadn’t noticed how utterly dumbstruck Paul had looked the first time around.
“Hey me,” Jack said to his clone. “It’s you.” Then shook his head. Too weird, like vertigo in his own skull, like waking up from a dream inside a dream to realize he was still dreaming. “Damn.”
The clone at the bottom of the ramp took off his goggles, peering at Jack with an expression that resembled hostility.
Jack put his hands up. “Hey, it’s cool. This all works out. And Paul, you still owe me a fucking explanation.”
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 4:17 A.M. Riverport, Massachusetts. Quantum Physics Building.
Jack’s past self reentered the machine and peered anxiously from the airlock as the hatch closed. He and Paul waved him off. There was a powerful snap, the distortion effect around the corridor pulsed outward, vanished, and the machine returned to its usual low hum.
“Jack.” Paul smiled alarmingly. “With this device, this machine that you’re looking at right now, we can put an end to … suffering. Disease. Catastrophe. We can … we can go back in time before … imagine if this machine had existed on September 10, 2001. Imagine how different our world would be today if we could go back with enough time to stop those flights. Imagine being able to develop a cure for a terrible disease in the future, and then bring it into the past. Just think.”
Jack looked at the machine. “If in the future you know that this works, like you said, wouldn’t you come back to this moment, right now, and tell yourself that?”
Paul’s mouth opened uncertainly. He glanced at the machine. “I … I don’t know. I…” He laughed it off and made a final adjustment. “Okay, my turn. The destination date’s been set for two minutes from now. All you have to do, once I’m inside, is hit the Go button. Got it?”
“Paul, security is about to walk in here and find me alone with eleven billion dollars’ worth of bleeding-edge whateverthefuck. They will not buy that I was looking for the cafeteria.”
“Two minutes, Jack. The door’s locked. You’ll be fine.” Paul moved up the gangway, pivoted, thrust both arms into the air, and hooted.
“Woo,” Jack responded and opened the airlock, realizing four cameras were filming him in commission of a federal offense.
Paul stepped inside. “Okay, lock me in.”
Jack tapped a key; the airlock sucked itself shut.
A green alert flashed: the elevator had just opened on the other side of the lab’s security door.
“Paul, make this quick. We don’t have—”
The security door beeped, and hissed open.
“Long.”
Paul’s face fell. “Oh no.”
A forlorn figure stood at the top of the stairs, thin and haunted inside a beaten old coat, looking at Jack and Paul like a child betrayed. “What…?” said William Joyce. “What have you done?”
Will clattered down the stairs. “What have you done?” He hadn’t run a comb through his hair in days; shirt and pants were a calendar of use.
“What’s happening, Will?”
His brother rounded on Jack, his thin-fingered grip pinching into Jack’s shoulders, gaze flicking over factors and dependencies only he could see. “You have to help me. We have to shut this down. We have to shut this down, Jack!” He abandoned Jack, faced the machine. “The core is live, but if we disconnect the Promenade it’s useless for transport.…”
Paul’s voice crackled over the quad-system. “Jack! Stop him! If he damages the network anything could happen!”
“Shears!” Will screamed. “Cut the power to the Promenade at the trunk!”
Jack grabbed his brother before he could run off. Will wrenched himself free. As he did something heavy fell from his pocket and thudded on the deck. A 9mm automatic. Will tutted exasperatedly and picked it up. “Their calculations are wrong, Jack.”
“What is that?”
Will disregarded the gun, annoyed, but didn’t pocket it. “Jack, you’re not listening. The Meyer-Joyce field is being rendered unstable. It will fracture entirely if—”
Will was never any go
od with his hands. This could end badly a number of different ways. “Will. I need you to look at me. Can I please have the gun?”
A wild sweep of his arm distanced Will from his brother. “Don’t patronize me, Jack.”
“You’re not thinking straight.”
“This device has been sabotaged. It will—”
“Listen—”
“Time! Is going! To end! If you won’t work with me, then you must get out of my way.”
Jack refused to engage with the madness, an old tactic. “Or what, Will?” Jack moved carefully toward his brother. “You’ll shoot me?”
Will raised the gun and fired into the ceiling, a needle in the ear that killed all sound, and then the shot was reverberating from a dozen surfaces. Will shoved his brother aside, knocking Jack to the rubberized floor.
Through his hands and chest, pressed against the rubber, Jack felt the floor suddenly thump from somewhere deep in its guts.
“No. No no no no no!” Will hammered the controls, the machine’s innards shifting from that low signature hum to something different, more alarming. It wasn’t the charge building up. This was something else. Something more uneven, distressed, broken. Escalating. Jack scrambled to his feet.
Paul’s face was framed by the airlock’s small viewplate as smoke filled the internal cavity. “Jack! You have to stop him! Jack!” The Promenade vibrations doubled their rpm, the distortion-shimmer shifting out of synch with itself—becoming something more serrated and angry. Paul looked terrified through the clouding glass. Jack was at the hatch, failing to find any kind of manual override. “We can’t,” Paul said, coughing, the smoke so thick he was little more than a shadow. “Even if you could open this thing the environment in here is chronon-charged. It needs to be discharged in a controlled fashion—which means I take a stroll down the Promenade. It’s cool. But you have to hit that Go button.” Paul’s hand stabbed the glass, pointing at the control bank where Will stood.
The machine shrieked; a ceramic panel popped free, splanging to the mesh maintenance floor.
“Will! Hit the button!”
Will was too preoccupied to listen. “Bringing the core online: wrong thing. Charging the Promenade: wrong thing. Using…” Will’s eyes ran over one of the screens, panicked. “You used it? You’ve used the Promenade? Oh God oh God.”
“Will!”
No response.
“Paul. Hang tight. I’ll—”
Air pressure shifted. Jack felt himself being pressed bodily into the muscle of a giant heart for one monstrous, elongated beat and …
Boom.
Jack was lifted off his feet, hit the deck.
Twenty-seven tons of metal tortured by torsion screamed like a living thing.
Jack scrambled off the gangway and sprinted for the controls. Maintenance grills tumbled fifty feet from the ceiling, bouncing off walkways, cracking glass. Without slowing, Jack shouldered Will to the floor, grabbed the corner of the panel, and slammed the Go button.
The distortion field amplified, leaped outward, broke the air. Every socket in every panel and recess vomited sparks and flamed up. White enamel tiles were painted in upward tongues of char. The machine’s whine dropped. Jack gasped with relief.
Then it began cycling up again, harder and harder, faster and faster.
He couldn’t see Paul anymore: the interior of the airlock had filled completely with black haze. Abandoning the controls, Jack cleared the distance to the hatch in seconds, slammed into it, pounded against the glass, and screamed, “Paul! Go! Go!” He had no idea if his friend was even conscious inside that armored sarcophagus.
Will shouted Jack’s name, was back on his feet, bracing himself against the control panel. “We’re too late! Get away from the machine! Get…!”
The core threw off three-foot sparks in colors Jack had never seen before.
The Promenade buckled inward. Jack’s atoms yanked toward the core, for a second. And then the opposite, times ten.
The blast wave punched through Jack, flowing through his cells like water around stones, and into the room. Lights erupted, glass exploded, panels fried, monitors crazed, and everything …
… stopped.
Silence. Like he had known inside the Promenade. Perfect, utter silence.
Lowering his hand from his face, Jack opened his eyes and looked around. Everything was silent because nothing moved. Nothing. Not the shattering glass, not the flying sparks, not the billowing and rising black smoke. Nothing. Not even his brother.
Every last thing had paused, mid-action. Frozen. Perfectly paused, immobile; people, objects, smoke, and sparks locked in time and space—a snapshot of a moment. He reached out, touched a floating shard of glass, felt it resist, watched it budge but remain suspended in space.
Jack was moving, but not a single other thing was.
Will was still behind the control console, hands thrown up to shield him from the console that had erupted in sparks and flame, his face contorted like a badly-timed snapshot. Jack reached out, fingers stretching toward his brother’s frozen expression. “Will?”
An alert—bright green—caught his attention from one intact monitor. It read, in no uncertain terms: DESTINATION DATE: ERROR.
If the destination date was an error, then where—when—had Paul gone?
God pressed Play.
Metal crashed into metal as the control panel blew up. Will shrieked and toppled backward as glass shotgunned from the observation deck’s frame. Smoke rolled out from the machine in a terrible wave as emergency lights kicked in blood-red and, instantly, the room filled with nine soldiers in hard-chested tactical gear.
They didn’t have helmets, they had masks for faces, and those faces leered yellow, circular, smiling.
Green lasers sliced the smog, attached to black rifles that swept the room like terrible eyestalks. Behind each one a black-eyed idiot grin.
The white lettering on their black chests read PEACE.
Oh good, Jack thought. None of this is real.
Will was on his feet. “Jack. Someone is still in the machine.”
“Targets!”
“‘Targets?’”
Every green beam flew home to one of two focus points: Jack or Will. A lethal wall of cartoon smiles.
Jack and Will should have died. They didn’t.
One of the men lowered his weapon: barrel-chested, ’roided, confident. Ex-marine bikers, African heterodox Christian militiamen, Israeli mujahideen … Jack had seen enough veteran mercs over the last few years to recognize one on sight. Had to be the leader.
“Gentlemen!” He pointed at Will, voice muffled behind the yellow mask. “You I know.” Then at Jack. “You I don’t.”
He grabbed at his mask and snapped it off over his head—the yellow disk attached to the front of something like a tactical hockey mask. “This is fuckin’ stupid, I can’t breathe.” He was in his forties, close-cropped dark hair, laughing eyes.
“Boss.” One of them shifted uncomfortably. “Orders are: masks on.”
“Voss, dictate to me again and I’ll put on clown makeup and fuck your kids. Donny, cuff the egghead. The rest of you, delete the rando.”
Blank-eyed smiles swung beams from Will to Jack’s chest.
The floor kicked. The core flared. Blast wave.
Everything paused. Everything, and everyone, freeze-framed in an instant.
This crew had flooded through the door, down both sets of mesh stairs, every assault gun pointed at Jack and Will, beams frozen, expressions frozen, shouts trapped in throats. Eight men and one woman.
The Promenade had shed almost all of its plating, half-skeletonized by everything it had endured, its torment tearing it apart from within.
Will was resigned, eyes on the console, heedless of the two targeting lasers still floating over his shoulder blades. Jack reached out, took Will by the arm. The folds of Will’s shirt were hard as rock—locked in a submoment. His brother did not move.
“Will,” Jack said.
“We have to go.”
Nothing.
His grip tightened. “Will!”
Something palpable transferred from Jack, through his hand, to his brother. Will’s profile flared—suddenly shrouded in that familiar distortion field—and Will kicked off talking: “If he uses the machine it…!” Will stopped, realizing things had changed. “Jack. I was too late.”
“Will … we need…”
“We’re existing within a topological defect in the Meyer-Joyce field. Time, causality … all have ceased to function.” Shockingly, Jack realized, his brother was about to cry. “The M-J field has been fractured, Jack. Wounded. Zero state. Complete, all-encompassing … stasis.”
“Will—”
“I was warned.” Will was gone again. “I knew it. We knew it. I warned Paul, but he wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t listen. This could have been avoided, but now…”
“This happened once before. I don’t think it’s permanent. When this ends those men in the funny masks are going to come to, kill me and kidnap you.” Then: “Why do they want to kidnap you?”
Will didn’t hear. “Not the end,” he said, nodding. “Just a stutter.” Nodding more vociferously. “All right. Let’s go. We have to go.”
Everything fluttered uncertainly: juddering in and out, sucked back in, paused.
Jack grabbed his brother. “Run.”
A torrent of gunfire annihilated the console, tore through the spaces where the brothers had stood, punched through all of that expensive white ceramic. The smoke-wall finished its rollout, flooding across shooters and targets alike, spot fires erupting and hissing amid the haze.
“Lost visual!” someone shouted.
“Under here!” Will shouted. “Beneath the machine. Maintenance recess.”
“Pair off,” their leader drawled. “Secure the scientist, then get the bodies to the library.”
Visibility was down to five feet. Jack kept his hand on Will’s shoulder, making their way through the pall. Will was leading them down the side of the gangway, while Jack kept his eyes on the probing green lasers.
“Something’s real wrong here, Will.”
“Is there no beginning to your insight?”
“These wide-bodies are career players. Why they’re dressed for street theater I have no fuckin’ idea but you can bet there’s a reason. It’s the opposite of camouflage. They want to be seen.”