by Cam Rogers
“April 3rd, 2003, yes, sir.”
The smile. Hatch just let that hang for a moment. Gibson reflexively swallowed.
“You’ve done things for this company that you will never be allowed to speak of. You are in possession of privileged information at the highest level. You understand the terror we face, and you are one of the very few who know of this company’s relationship with our Consultant. All these things you have earned. Your success rate is almost flawless, and you have a most peculiar gift for inspiring loyalty in those under your command. Of one hundred and twelve candidates for the Chronon-1 program, nine made it, and you were at the top of that list. You possess a unique psychology, Mr. Gibson, and a level of moral flexibility I find astounding. But I wonder, do you possess a holographic imagination?” Still the smile. “Are you able to construct a three-dimensional image of a future formed by actions you may choose to take in the present?”
“Sir, I—”
“It’s one of the things that separates us from animals. The ability to delay gratification now for a likely greater reward later. The ability, for example, to choose to not pursue a grudge match against a total stranger, but instead follow orders and strive to keep alive a man critical to the ongoing survival of our species. But I interrupted you. Finish your thought.”
“Sir.” Gibson didn’t like this. He had never imagined that one day Mr. Hatch might look at him like that. Now he was imagining all kinds of things. Like who he might be at the end of this interview, and suddenly he couldn’t get one thought to connect to the next. Like a fucking chump. “With respect, Mr. Hatch, I was assigned to oversee Guardian squad’s sweep-and-clear. I left Donny—”
“No mind on Earth grasped chronon theory so well as Dr. William Joyce.” Hatch moved to the front of his desk. “You were tasked by me, explicitly, with keeping him alive. With keeping him out of the hands of our Consultant.”
“Paul Serene, I understand, but—”
“That,” Hatch emphasized, “is an excellent example of what I am talking about. Do you understand why we refer to Mr. Serene as ‘our Consultant’? Paul Serene’s primary role is to play the villain of our upcoming drama. In time Monarch’s role will be to play the rescuing hero. Therefore Paul Serene being tied to Monarch will destroy our credibility with the governments of the world.”
Hatch took a measured step toward Gibson.
“That unquestioning trust is the pillar most essential to the success of Project Lifeboat. Unheard-of technology must be delivered within a very short time frame. Technology requires development. That development will require unlimited funding, manpower, and intergovernmental cooperation, and it will have to happen very, very quickly. Time is quite literally running out, Mr. Gibson. Dr. Joyce’s expertise would have bought us time. But now … now he is dead.”
“Holographic. Right. I got it.”
“I’m removing you from command of Chronon-1, Mr. Gibson. Henceforth you will be taking your orders from Donny.”
“Sir—”
“This close to the end there’s no room for second chances. You are in receipt of the last chance I will give you. Were you about to throw it in my face?”
Gibson said nothing.
Hatch turned to face Riverport, screwed in an earpiece, and got back to work.
Life escorted Randall Gibson to the door, and closed it.
* * *
Paul Serene was a man who lived in the space between moments, known to very few. In his too-long-seeming lifetime he had learned many truths. He had built a diverse, multinational corporation in secret, from hiding, using skills and gifts unique to himself. He had met many extraordinary people, many of them terrible to know.
That’s how it had been for seventeen long years, from the moment he first stepped into the time machine until now.
All for this critical moment. For Project Lifeboat.
Chronon particles are critical to the functioning of causality. No particles, no causality. No causality, no flow of events—and what is time but a linear flow of events?
The activation of the Monarch-built time machine at Riverport University fractured the Meyer-Joyce field: the field of chronon energy essential to the functioning of causality. Eventually that fracture would cause chronon levels to drop disastrously low, the field would collapse, and time would end.
The universe would become locked in a single moment, dividing infinitely.
Because of him. Because of what he did.
For seventeen years Paul Serene had lived with this knowledge: Paul Serene had killed the universe.
He had but one chance to make amends for his great evil.
Project Lifeboat would enable areas of the Earth to be shielded from the collapse of the M-J field. It would enable operatives to move freely about the planet in their quest to repair the field, to reseed chronon levels and thereby restart the flow of time and causality—freeing humanity from its coma.
Then there was the issue of the Shifters: violent, non-Euclidean monstrosities indigenous to causality-free environments. Every single laboratory encounter with one had resulted in violent fatalities. Paul knew well enough what they were capable of. At the age of twenty-eight he had spent what seemed an eternity hiding from them, bunkered down beneath floor panels, waiting for death at the end of time.
The technology—and the defensive capabilities required to protect the last and best of humanity from the Shifters—would require development. Only five years remained. Development within that time frame was not possible without focus and assistance on a planetary scale.
It required nothing less than humanity coming together, united by a desire to survive.
That would require some doing.
The threat would need to be seen as formidable, the solution as clear and simple and singular.
All this spun through Paul Serene’s head as he fought for consciousness.
Many great people do not fear death or pain, but there is not a person alive who does not dread aloneness without hope or end.
One night terror differed from another. But however it began Paul was always choking on the acrid fumes of burning insulation and superheated long-chain polymers: the atmosphere that had filled that failing airlock.
This thick mix coated his tongue, mucus membranes flavored themselves toxic, the drug-taste dripping down the back of his throat as he retched and fought for breath.
A knocking sound always accompanied the initial suffocation: a dull pounding against a wall Paul could never find, and Jack’s voice calling his name from very far away.
Paul always panicked. He would run for the voice but never found a way out of the smoke and back to the real world. He always knew what would happen next, and always wished that the smoke would kill him first.
Paul knew what it was to be buried alive in a moment without end, to feel his psyche crushed like a shell of spun sugar. He knew the killing fear all humans are susceptible to, and yet his fear of the monstrous thing that knew his name, that had stalked him across time, dwarfed even that.
It was here now. He could hear it, in the smoke. Often there would be years between encounters, but each time they met the thing got closer. It howled from within Paul’s head.
Infinite potential futures split and bloomed before him; endless corridors spraying in infinite directions. He chose one and fled down it as easily as a frightened child runs to their parents’ bedroom.
The campus. The burned library. Jack had Paul’s gun, the dull-chrome .45 Paul had picked up years before, a gift from the widow of a Russian warlord, one of Paul’s zealots.
In this future Paul had no seizure. In this future he flicked the pistol from Jack’s grip, sent it spinning into darkness. Jack’s eyes widened with terror—a fear that had nothing to do with Paul.
The monstrosity was there, as always. The thing with the killing light in its palm. It strode from the flames of the library’s ruin.
Panic rising, Paul focused on Jack as a means of escape, saw a hundred futu
res split off the man, chose one, and dived. The scene split, clone images separating, and then the present coalesced.
There was no escape. In this future Jack was gone, and Paul found the thing waiting, as always. It howled. Nothing living sounded like that. Nothing. It was a howl from within the head, not without.
Bestial, fractal, glittering, and hideous it swung for his face.
The palm of its killing paw shone like a star.
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 5:50 A.M. Riverport, Massachusetts. Monarch Tower.
Paul woke, gasping, the straps of the breather biting into his face.
“Paul.”
The smoke was gone. He sat upright, in a narrow, steel-framed bed, rubber straps straining as he pulled the mask from his face.
Her hands were on his shoulders. The sharp taste of the chronon-rich formulation filled his mouth, lungs, body, settling the seizure. His cells felt intact and reliable. He was alive.
He knew this bright room. Her laboratory. He was home.
“Paul.” Sofia: kind, worried eyes and gentle-faced.
He relaxed; the panicked animal inside him receded.
They weren’t alone. Martin Hatch was there, patient hands clasped at his waist, dark-suited and unforthcoming, saying nothing before it served a purpose. Martin had been with Paul from the beginning. It was with this man, in this town, that the idea of Monarch had been formulated.
Martin was the face and CEO of Monarch Solutions, the umbrella company and global force that allowed Paul to quickly and easily assemble the technology and talent to do what the survival of the species required. A company rapidly built by capitalizing on Paul’s powers and knowledge of the future.
Martin received Paul’s glance, and returned an acknowledging nod of the head. You’re fine, the movement said. We have been here before. I am with you.
Paul breathed out, the strap snapping free. “Jack. Where is he?”
“When Talon squad located you, you were alone,” Hatch said, that voice as strong as the cornerstone of any parliament. “A citywide be-on-the-lookout has been issued for Mr. Joyce.”
“Regular police can’t—”
“I know. I’ve put Chronon-1 on it.”
“Paul,” Sofia interjected. “The debrief can wait. How are you feeling?”
“How long was I gone?”
“Not long. Less than an hour this time.”
These episodes were becoming more frequent. He examined his left hand, luminescence beneath the sleeve of his tunic. Sitting up and removing his shirt and gloves he examined the spread of the sickness Sofia was racing to understand, an illness that put Paul beyond the help of physical medicine. Six years ago the flesh of his left arm had been transformed, fractal and flickering—the first and most powerful sign of the spreading metamorphosis. Since then it had spread past his elbow, reaching for his vitals. Sofia told him of the inroads it was making, beneath the surface of his skin, fingers of bright corruption reaching upward to touch the underside of his brain.
He was shuddering. Thoughts of that thing were still in his head, its massive and distorted frame flickering between states. The hideous head-scream. The desire to make Paul one of them. To take away the mind he had jealously safeguarded for so long.
To claim him with the light of that shining palm.
The seizure he experienced at the library, while fighting Jack, was the illness’s latest attempt to wrest control of Paul, once and for all. Paul’s mind remained his own, for now, but the infection had claimed another inch of his arm.
“I don’t have long.” Saying it felt like an admission of death. “The visions, my reconnoitering of possible futures, they’re narrowing.”
Sofia took his hand, the sick one, without concern. “I’ve made good progress toward a cure. We will keep administering these treatments to keep the symptoms in check.”
“The time frame of your visions has been growing shorter,” Hatch said. “At a concerning rate.”
“I’ve never been present in any vision beyond October tenth, 2016. We knew this would come.”
Sofia’s face grew dark; throwing an accusing look at Hatch. “I won’t listen to this.”
Paul had to stay alive long enough to see the world saved. If he died with Lifeboat’s future uncertain then the world died with him.
Sofia’s touch was the one real, selfish comfort he permitted himself in seventeen years, but only because it served a higher purpose. She healed, better than anyone was able to.
She healed, but she could not cure.
Paul swung his legs off the gurney. There was a chamber at the far side of this small lab. It resembled a glass cube, hairy with connections to banks of monitoring equipment, boxed in by a four-point stutter generation field. Inside the stutter contained within that glass box was one of the creatures Sofia had classified, in non-formal nomenclature, as Shifters. It was a being similar to the Shining Palm, but smaller in size.
The stutter chamber was powered by chronon energy flowing directly from the Regulator, the source of near-limitless energy at the heart of Monarch Tower. The Regulator was the very core of Project Lifeboat, housed in a sealed chamber adjacent to Paul’s quarters on the forty-ninth floor.
What a boon to humanity the Regulator could be, if only they could understand how it worked. He cursed William for his pride, and turned his attention to the creature in the chamber.
At one time, not long ago, the thrashing thing in the glass box had been known as Dr. Kim.
Thing. Singular. Not strictly accurate.
Kim’s role had been to unlock the Regulator’s secrets, to better harness its potential for Project Lifeboat, and the overeager fool had gone too far. One mistake, a slip of the hand, and he had ceased to be Kim at all—transformed by the complex interaction of gravity, probability, and causality occurring within the heart of the Regulator.
Sofia had been told the device was the creation of Kim himself, a story the little man had been more than happy to play along with. But it was far from the truth.
Because of his error, Dr. Kim now existed in a state of quantum superposition. Moment to moment his form settled upon one configuration then manifested as another. The eye could not rest, detail could not be grasped.
The Kim-Shifter was a being of pure rage, thrashing against boundaries it could never escape.
Shifters manifested only within chronon-free areas—spaces in which probability and causality had ceased to function. Place a probability generator—such as a human—within their habitat and Shifters became incredibly violent. Sofia hypothesized that a Shifter’s natural state was placid, but exposure to potential was agonizing, driving them to destroy the source of pain.
Dr. Kim had been human. Paul himself was being colonized by a condition similar to Dr. Kim’s. Therefore, Sofia concluded, Shifters had once been human.
Examining Kim’s state of superposition she believed he now existed not as a Dr. Kim, but as all possible Dr. Kims.
The Shifter in the chamber was form and reality at war with themselves.
This, she concluded, meant that Shifters were beings that existed outside and across all times, living in the spaces between moments, four-dimensionally. The Kim-Shifter existed. The Kim-Shifter would exist. The Kim-Shifter had always existed—even before the moment Dr. Kim became a Shifter.
The thing had long ago given up attempting to attack its cage. Now it existed in a state of perpetual, thrashing frenzy, a dozen versions of itself half-perceptible from moment to moment. Paul had come to think of its layered, multitudinous shrieks as the sound of utter hatred.
“Martin,” Sofia said. “Cover that, please.” She nodded to Paul and his clear distress.
“He has been like that from the moment he transformed,” Hatch said, pulling a black cloth about the chamber. “Where does he get the energy?”
The cloth did nothing to keep the hate-sound from Paul’s mind.
“He chose his fate,” Paul said, more to comfort himself than anything else.
/>
“One of him did,” Sofia replied. “The multitude he has become did not, and I suspect they hate him for it.”
Sofia went back to finishing her ministrations. “It is not a fitting fate for a man who may have saved all of humanity. The Regulator was his gift to us. Without it you have no way of sidestepping the end of all things. Lifeboat would be nothing.”
Paul was just as important to the Project as the Regulator, and Kim knew it. That’s why the man had locked himself inside the stutter chamber before the transformation had taken full hold: to provide a fully infected patient ready to be studied, and to help find a cure for Paul’s condition.
Sofia may not have found a cure, but the treatments she had developed through studying the Kim-Shifter had bought Paul enough time to lay the groundwork for Project Lifeboat.
Paul crossed the room. One wall was entirely glass, looking down upon a glass-roofed farm of laboratories, each one staffed by men and women at the peak of their field. Many of them, in that moment, would be working to find ways to save Paul.
Pointless, but he couldn’t tell Sofia that.
He need only survive a day or two more, that was all that mattered, then the process required to make Lifeboat a reality would succeed.
The flesh of his arm ached.
“I can’t become like them,” he said, as much to himself as anyone. “That kind of madness. Trapped between moments. Forever.”
“Paul,” she said. “That is not your fate.”
“I’ll kill myself first.”
“That is not what I meant.”
“They want me with them, Sofia. When they howl, it’s a pull like nothing I’ve ever felt. When I dream of them it’s like coming home.”
“You make it sound like something you want.”
“What if, as this sickness spreads, my mind becomes infirm? In a moment of weakness, I could surrender humanity’s every future.” Paul took her hand in his. “I need just a few more days. Give me that.”
“I do not tend corpses,” she said. “You will live. But, I will do as you ask. For the next few days.” She laid one hand against his face. “In that time don’t be stupid.”