by Cam Rogers
Will stepped on shattered glass and four beams slashed toward them. Jack threw himself on top of Will as a three-round burst sang past his neck, hot.
“Under the ramp! They’re under the ramp!”
Jack dropped down into the maintenance ring. Will scrambled, Jack followed, his booted feet disappearing over the side as a pair of questing lasers slashed through the space they had just occupied.
Jack hit the grill floor on his left shoulder. The smoke was thinner beneath the machine, the curving recess tight with the machine’s core suspended directly above them. Voices above called out their location: Jack and Will had given no one the slip.
The squad leader, the one with the southern drawl, was giving orders. “Irene, radio Actual, have ’em get their bird in the air in five. Voss, Rodriguez, get the roof off this room. The rest of you secure this floor.”
A voice overhead barked: “Sir, two targets are—”
“Beneath that contraption, I know. Well? Go on. Go get ’em. Hey fellas?”
“Is he talking to us?” Will whispered.
Jack motioned him to be quiet. Listened.
He heard something. Listened again. A second time: ping.
“Come on out.”
Two canisters rolled over the lip of the recess, clattered to the grill, trailing orange. Gas.
Jack scooped up the first, but it was in his eyes and throat before he made contact. Tossed the first one up, blind. A hand popped over the side, holding a Glock. The shooter waved it around, blasting off shots. When it was over Jack was curled fetal, choking, hands pressed to his eyes as the cloud from the second canister swept around the curve.
“Boys?”
Hands on his arm, pulling hard. Jack let himself uncurl and rise.
“He’s reloading,” Jack rasped, and he slammed Will into the wall as thirteen blind rounds spanged and whined into tens of millions of dollars’ worth of technology.
The shooter started coughing. “Ah, fuck, that stuff’s got a kick, don’t it?”
“Boss? We’re meant to capture Dr. Joyce alive.”
“I know, I know, was just havin’ fun. They’re fine. Go get ’em.”
Will’s face filled Jack’s vision: he was wearing the protective goggles Jack had discarded. “This way!” His voice was pretty hoarse, though.
Boots hit metal as two grunts dropped into the recess, impact reverberating, lasers on, slashing upward. One trooper headed left around the ring, the other right. Pincer.
Will had popped open a decent-sized hatch—no crab-crawling through vents for them—dragging Jack behind.
“Is it dark in here?” Jack’s nose and throat were on fire. He couldn’t even open his eyes, overflowing with caustic tears faster than he could wipe them away. “It seems really dark in here.”
“The Techs mostly use headlamps down here. We’re inside the machine. The actual machine. The entire building is given over to maintaining and running the core and Promenade, making time travel as safe and accurate as possible.”
Jack hacked and spat. The walls were bolted metal, occasional tangles of cables, hot technology, still running. It was fifty degrees warmer in here than in the lab. “I thought small was the new big.”
“The Large Hadron Collider has a circumference of seventeen miles,” Will replied. “A lifetime of study and sacrifice has allowed me to harness the laws of time and causality within a space no larger than the apartment building from Seinfeld. So I, and the greatest minds to have ever lived, would appreciate you keeping your observations to yourself.”
Despite the dire circumstances, it was good to hear Will back in form. Jack coughed repeatedly; all he could taste was salt and snot and acid.
“Time travel’s one thing; what’s harder to believe is that you know what Seinfeld is.”
“You haven’t changed at all. Can you fathom how serious these events are?”
“Will,” Jack said, gasping. “Levity is a strategy adopted by many to deal with crisis.”
“You’re always like this.”
“You’re always a crisis.”
“That’s simply untrue.”
As if in rebuttal green lasers snapped on over Jack’s shoulders. Will shoved him to the ground as two silhouettes snapped off a series of probing three-round bursts. Gun-cracks reverberated down the narrow throat of the corridor.
“I never shot at you,” Will said, face-to-face. “I needed your attention.”
“We have to get out of this tunnel.”
Tactical lights snapped on atop the troopers’ assault weapons. They were coming in. Jack reached up, yanked the pistol from the back of Will’s pants, rolled, and squeezed. Nothing happened.
“What was that?” The troopers crouched.
Jack flicked off the safety and squeezed again.
His wrist took the kicks, shots going everywhere. Silhouetted and vulnerable against the light from the entrance, the troopers scrambled back into the maintenance loop. Will grabbed Jack by the collar and hauled him upright. By the time the troopers hosed down the tunnel, Will and Jack had crashed around a left-hand turn.
Jack pressed Will against the warm wall and dragged him down into a kneeling position. Pistol braced, he aimed at the corner as best he could, and waited.
The guards didn’t pursue. “I need an eyewash station,” Jack croaked. “Or a cafeteria.”
“Cafe—?”
“Milk, Will. Something alkaline. For the eyes.” He stood up, tried to bring the tunnel into focus. It was like staring into hot light.
“Follow me.” Will moved off, then stopped. “‘It happened once before,’” he muttered.
Jack blew a nose full of something offensive onto the floor. “Will, we gotta go.”
“Back there, you said, ‘It happened once before.’ The stutter. How could you know that? If time had stopped and restarted, it would have appeared to you as it did to me: seamless. Unless—”
“The world froze, but I didn’t. Then I grabbed you and—”
Will’s eyes were scanning again, not seeing Jack. “Your proximity to the pulse altered your relationship to the chronon field. My reanimation must … there must have been chronon-transference from you to me. Meaning a non-affected person can act as a kind of causality battery, of sorts. Chargeable, yes, by someone who is a causality source, even in a state in which causality has ceased to self-generate.”
“Will! What’s…?”
“Time go bad! Get it? Causality, the flow of time, of cause and effect, is a lake. The lake contains an ecosystem. We live in that ecosystem. The lake itself is held in place by a dam. That dam is now leaking, thanks to you and Paul activating that machine. Now the cracks are going to widen, and then—”
“The dam breaks.”
“No more causality—stasis. A forever now. An eternally frozen present moment. Monarch knew this was going to happen. Banked on it, I think. The machine was calibrated incorrectly. Monarch blocked my case against activation at each step, refused my evidence. They wanted this to happen, Jack.”
“Why? If the world goes down, it takes all of us, Monarch included.”
“I have a contact inside the company. Horatio. A nice enough person. Boutique muffins, outrageous moustache, you know the type.…”
“Will.”
“He tells me Monarch’s been incubating something, an initiative directly related to the work at the university time lab. Project Lifeboat. Very few know about it. Nobody except the CEO Martin Hatch, a handful of experts inside the company, an unnamed contractor, a single lobbyist in D.C., and a lone recruiter in Europe.”
Then it clicked. “Those guys in the masks are Monarch.”
“Monarch doesn’t need to steal the machine, Jack: they own it.”
“I told you something was off about this.” Jack took Will’s arm. Tried to look him in the eye, but it was so dark in there he may have been staring at Will’s navel for all he knew. “Where’s your car?”
“In the parking lot, of course.”
“And the parking lot is where?” Just like old times.
“Three hundred feet from the rear of this building.”
“All right, let’s—”
A pattern of high-frequency noise penetrated the tunnel, from outside the building. It started as a series of three triple-claps, and then became applause.
Panic cut back into Will’s voice. “Is that gunfire? From outside?”
Jack moved past Will, feeling his way along the wall.
“Are they shooting on campus?” Will’s voice was rising. “Who are they shooting at?”
“It’s an announcement. They want people to know this is going down.”
Will was breathing harder than Jack, about to hyperventilate. Jack ran his free hand over the 9mm, made sure the safety was off. “Three hundred feet to the parking lot, right?”
“Yes.”
In Jack’s current condition a flailing or unconscious Will would have been more than he could handle. A lifetime with his brother had provided a number of ways to get Will’s shit under control.
“Hey Will, what’s the capital of Nebraska?” Feeling along walls of warm steel. A light ahead.
“Lincoln.”
“Hey Will, what’s the temperature on Mercury?” Okay, that was definitely a door in front of him.
“That’s not my field. I know what you’re doing. Around five hundred degrees Fahrenheit as an average.” Will’s breathing was calming down.
“Hey Will, what’s a big word for someone who uses too many big words?”
“Sesquipedalianist.” He didn’t even have to take a breath in the middle of that one.
The corridor ended. “Hey Will, where’s this door lead?”
“That’d be the server room on the fifth floor,” Will said, taking a deep breath. “We’re below the time lab. The corridor beyond that has an elevator approximately a hundred and fifty feet to the right. That will take us to the ground floor.”
The elevator was dangerous. If anyone was watching the bays they’d notice the elevator moving. The doors could open and they could walk out into a half-dozen guns. But with Jack half-blind and unable to make out anything farther than thirty feet away would the stairs be any safer?
“Will, I’m gonna need you to keep your eyes open. Tell me everything you see. Quietly.”
They stepped out of the tunnel into a cold, dark room humming with quiet purpose.
“No one’s here,” Will whispered. It was just them and sequential racks of fat vertical servers: midnight-blue twilight speckled with thousands of yellow and green LEDs. There was only one door, manual, domestic looking, and opened from their side.
“Hey, Will?”
“Yes, Jack.”
“When Paul went through, I caught a look at the readout. It said ‘destination error.’ What does that mean?”
Will thought about it. “Oh, dear.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“Because Paul did not appear prior to his own departure he must have traveled forward. I would assume the error indicates he traveled to a point where a date becomes redundant. It’s likely Paul sent himself far enough ahead to witness the inevitable collapse of the Meyer-Joyce field.”
“The end of time?”
“When Paul emerges from the machine he will be stepping into a moment that is infinitely self-dividing. He will freeze, and there will be no coming back from that. I’m afraid he’s gone, Jack. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe … maybe I can use the machine and get him.”
“Let’s get out of here alive first. If Paul is at the end of time, he won’t be going anywhere.”
Jack listened at the door, couldn’t hear anything, and Will risked opening it, gently. The sounds of war outside, still muffled, grew louder.
“I don’t see anything,” Will said.
The corridor was dark, lit by illuminated exit signs and a light coming through a wall window at the far end of the corridor.
“What is that?” Jack said.
“A glass wall that overlooks the campus. Ordinarily it’s quite lovely.” The applause from outside had become sporadic. “But I’m not sure I want to take a look, just now.”
“Can … could I go forward and pull him back in? Like I did with you? Would that work?”
“You’re talking hypotheticals.”
Low frequencies from the outside didn’t make it through the glass outer shell and brick walls. Higher frequencies fared better: Pops. Screams.
If Paul really was dead, it didn’t feel real. He had to get Will to safety before it did begin to feel real, and he fell apart. “Anyone…” Breathe. “Anyone likely to be working late on this floor?”
“No.”
“Okay. Let’s go. Quietly.”
One step at a time, gun in one hand and the other on Will’s shoulder, they moved toward the light at the end of the hall. Jack coughed up something watery and acrid for the thirtieth time, unable to contain it.
“Hey,” he rasped. “What’s that?” He pointed toward a dark, man-sized prism against the wall with one illuminated face.
“Vending machine,” Will said.
Jack spluttered again. “Does it…” Coughed. “Does it sell…?”
“No!”
There was no explanation for what happened next: Will threw himself backward into Jack, Jack stumbled, and then shots rang out from the end of the hall. The shooter ducked behind the corner as Jack and Will sheltered behind the machine.
Jack’s heart sank. The vending machine wasn’t going to stop bullets. “Will. Slide down. Get small. When I—”
The shooter popped back, squeezed off four shots. Three went wide, punching through a corkboard, blowing out clouds of particulates. One hit the machine, knocked a hole in the Perspex, exploded three cans of soda, and exited two feet above Will’s head. Jack responded by whipping out and firing blind, three shots. The shooter responded and Jack slammed back against the wall, air pressure pulsing with each passing slug. Jack’s best guess was that his pistol had maybe four rounds left. Maybe.
“Hey!” he shouted. “Is there some other way we can do this?”
The shooter opened up; Jack got low and fired twice. The shooting stopped—nothing but the ringing in his ears.
“Did…,” Will said. “Did you?”
“Hey,” Jack called out. He got to his feet, iron sights trained on what he was pretty sure was the right place: just to the left of the open doorway to the elevator bay. “Hey, man. Are you okay?”
The shooter popped out, fired. Reflexively Jack shielded his face and fired twice before his pistol clicked out.
They were both done.
The shooter stood there, a silhouette a little darker than the shadow in which he stood. The shooter’s gun hit the floor. Eyeshine blinked off, then on, and he toppled back against the wall. Gravity did the rest.
“Hey,” Jack said, moving toward the man. The shooter slid down to a sitting position, despondent, like someone getting bad news. “Hey, brother. Are you…?” It was dark, and he was half-blind, but the truth of the situation was clear.
Will said, “Oh dear.”
“Will,” Jack asked, “why isn’t he wearing black like the others? Where’s his mask?”
Will’s voice was reluctant, deeply sad. “Oh Jack … I’m afraid you’ve crossed a most unfortunate Rubicon.”
The shooter was wearing a buttoned beige shirt. Jack could make that out. There was an insignia on the short sleeve.
“Wait here,” his brother said. Jack heard something tumble heavily to the bottom of the vending machine. A seal crackled as it was broken, and he felt Will’s hand rest on his forehead. “Water. Open your eyes.” Will gently tilted his brother’s head back. Coolness was palmed onto his burning face. “Does it hurt?”
Jack didn’t say anything.
His vision improved. Details were clearer, edges sharper. The dead man came into focus. Jack let out a breath.
Quietly: “He was shooting at us, Jack.”
/> “He was just confused,” Jack stated. “Hiding, probably.” The badge on the man’s sleeve belonged to Monarch Protective Services. Not Monarch Security. Not a soldier. Just a rent-a-cop. Just a guy with an Xbox and a crappy car and a half-eaten pizza in the fridge. “I saw him outside. He knew me. From school.” If Jack hadn’t divorced himself from Will and Riverport six years ago he would have needed a job as badly as this guy, and he would have been wearing the same uniform.
5
Jack removed the man’s gun and two spare magazines from his belt. He stood, walked through the open doorway, past the elevators, and looked out the wall window. Will followed.
The geodesic undulations of the Quantum Physics Building’s laminated glass shell, lit from within, illuminated the surrounding grounds. Jack could see masked “Peace” troops down the length of Founders’ Walk. At the end of the path: the ramshackle outline of the protest camp. There, too, idiot-faced men, working, searching, carrying away limp forms in teams of two. Occasionally, single gunshots.
“What the fuck is going on?” He turned to his brother, his face an accusation. “Paul told me Monarch Innovations was funding the research. Why attack the building? The protestors? Where are the cops? The media?”
Will struggled to find words. The elevator beat him to it.
Ding.
Smiley-faced troopers flowed into the hallway with practiced precision—implacable, unfeeling—the first three dropping to one knee so the three behind them could also take aim.
PEACE.
This is what it felt like for Jack, meeting his death. Colors were richer, smells stronger, time slowed, each moment a meal. Some clown had posted a Far Side cartoon to the corkboard; the spalling around one hole in the vending machine shone like chrome. A moment returned from ten years ago, now clear as day: he had bought a beer for the man he killed.
Ten years. The Tavern. Jack had finished a late shift delivering pizza. He had met Paul at the end of the bar, a spot that smelled equally of hoppy microbrew and acrid wafts from the nearby men’s room. He and Paul had a few, and this guy had appeared and let them in on a secret: the Tavern was named for the owner’s love of Dungeons & Dragons. Jack had bought a round. They’d burned maybe a half hour and another round, and went their separate ways.