Quantum Break

by Cam Rogers

  “Knock it off!” he yelled, uselessly, having gone sheet white. “Fuck. I’m sorry. Fuck. Are you … you were…”

  She looked him in the eye, pissed off, jammed the barrel to her temple, and pulled.

  Click.

  When she took it away there was a circular brand where the muzzle had kissed her. Then she threw it away. “I can’t die,” she said, yanking the plugs out of her ears. “I can’t die because when I was eight years old I met my older self. I can’t die because I haven’t done that yet, I haven’t gone back and met my younger self, you understand? I’ve always done whatever I’ve wanted, knowing that at worst I’m looking at a hospital stay. Parkour, martial arts, hang gliding, skydiving, bungee jumping, hitchhiking, roof surfing, hanging out with pirates and reprobates, staying up too late, not looking before I cross the street, everything that just went down at your old house … free pass. Makes me a very, very good operative. Nobody gets to kill me, nobody gets to take me down. The laws of causality won’t permit it.” She pointed back toward the swimming hall. “I go through that machine? Meet myself? I’m done. All bets are off. After that I could develop an allergy to fabric softener and drop dead. Choke on a fucking kiwi.” The adrenaline was washing out of her, bumming her out. She leaned heavily against the brickwork. “You wanted to know how I pulled off that magic trick on Bannerman’s Overlook? It has something to do with that. Same reason I’m not dead on the ground right now with Nick’s gun in my hand.” She stared at the reeds, tossed the plugs into them along with all the other trash.

  Jack had taken his out, was staring at her. “You could have just fucking said so.”

  “It wouldn’t have sunk in. You’ll come to rely on me being capable, but what if I go through that machine, meet myself, and from then on I’m second-guessing every move I make? You need to step up. No matter what it costs. If we fail, everything dies.”

  “And not meeting your younger self isn’t an option. Right.”

  “Right. If I don’t then I’m not here, we’re not talking, and nobody is trying to stop Monarch. If my older self doesn’t spirit my younger self away to a string of West Coast and South American training camps I don’t become me and there’s nobody here to save the day. But it’s not just me. You need to do the right thing, even if that means abandoning your brother, killing your friend, anything at all that means we succeed. Be prepared to do things you never thought you’d have to, because the alternative is so much worse.”

  “Paul said something similar.”

  “We’re both right, but he’s going about it the wrong way. That’s all I know.” She’d said her piece. Done. “So the mission is this: we go back, we find the Countermeasure, find out what it does, and then—most likely—we get it back here. That done, we fix the Fracture and save the world.”

  “Beth.”

  “Yes, Jack.”

  “We don’t know what the Countermeasure is, or even what it looks like.”

  “No. But we know who had it last, and where. The rest we improvise.”

  Saturday, 8 October 2016. 4:37 P.M. Riverport Swimming Hall.

  Nick patched up the coffee maker, found a few plastic cups in the cafe overlooking the pool, and made a passable espresso with what was left of his pods. The three of them sat on camp chairs in the pool, next to Will’s workstations. The sunlight through the filthy vertical skylights was blazing amber as it approached sunset.

  “What do you remember about 2010?” Beth asked.

  Nick shrugged. “Best of times, worst of times. Played center position on the ice and everyone knew my name. My face was on coffee mugs. I had my college ride, and then I blew it. You?”

  Jack shrugged, sipped his coffee. “Spent the first six months getting sick of my brother, the last six months looking for her.” He jerked a thumb at Beth.

  “What about you, Beth?”

  “First six months hanging out with this guy, last six months in a compound in Arizona. Ran a lot.”

  “What kind of compound? Like—”

  “Just a bunch of guys waiting for the end of the world. Ex-special forces. Thought they’d seen the writing on the wall and made a few decisions. I was just there to learn.”

  “Guns and stuff?”

  “Mainly cognitive, mental, and physical. Resolve. Teamwork. Judgment and adaptability. Discipline. Stress control. Multitasking.” She finished her coffee, surveyed Will’s battered old machine.

  “So you’re really doing this,” Nick said.

  Beth stood. Jack took her by the arm. “If we do this we’re only going back six years. That’s more than fifteen years after you met yourself. You don’t need to come along. Stay here. If I don’t come back—”

  “I’ve made my peace. Don’t psych me out now, Jack, okay? Let’s do this.”

  Her eyes were sharp and her voice certain. Jack let it go, but he didn’t like it.

  Jack went to refamiliarize himself with the instrumentation—Will’s device being far more primitive than Monarch’s. Beth didn’t follow. She walked up the ramp.

  “Paul said something similar.” That’s what Jack had said to Beth earlier. She stood at the machine’s airlock, palm against the hand-riveted metal frame. Paul had entered Monarch’s machine and been reborn as something altogether different. Beth was on the same path. Both of them were attempting to save the world, in their own way; both of them thought they were right; both of them knew the past couldn’t be changed, were dedicated to their cause and, she knew, both of them would be reshaped by traveling through these machines.

  The machine shouldn’t have smelled like anything more than age and industrial grease, but not so. It had a scent of its own, the lingering, meaty heaviness of …

  “Death.”

  She stepped inside the airlock, a heavy, ten-foot square iron chamber reminiscent of something submersible. It was clear just how heavily Monarch had based their design on Will’s work—it was functionally identical: clockwise for future travel, counter-clockwise for past. Unlike the Monarch machine, this corridor was rigid, not self-assembling, and midnight dark in both directions. The stink grew more intense as she stood in the chamber.

  She exited.

  “I think something might have died in there,” she called out, hoping for an obvious answer.

  Jack was moving from console to console. “Will wasted a lot of money on that security system if a raccoon can get in here. It’s just old. All right Nick, can you get us some juice?”

  Jack’s reasoning didn’t make her feel any better. She glanced back into that darkened airlock, interior details half-formed in the shadows. Beth suppressed a chill.

  Nick redirected power from the gennie. There was a deep thunk and the airlock interior illuminated under the power of an old-school filament bulb, which promptly popped. The corridor trembled as behind the scenes the contraption’s innards shifted and the core came online. Beth took a few careful steps backward down the ramp.

  The vibration joined forces with a secondary instability, their crashing and separating rhythms beginning to shake components loose from the Promenade. A distortion wave struggled into existence around the corridor-ring but was failing to become substantial.

  The shaking and thrashing built in strength as systems beneath the machine began to emit desperate, high-pitched alarms. This wasn’t working.

  “Goddamn it, no. Nick! Reset the power!” Wheeling away from the destination console, Jack moved to reboot the core when Beth got in his way.

  “No.”

  “What do you mean ‘no’? I’m trying again.”

  “The hell you are. Clearly something is wrong with this thing, and none of us have any idea what it is. If you damage it, we’re boned.”

  “We can’t stop trying. Will’s notes are all over this place. Maybe we can—”

  “We’d have as much luck trying to repair the Large Hadron Collider.” She sighed. “And I’ve seen your brother’s handwriting. We need an expert. Fortunately, I know where to get one. Dr. Sofia Ama
ral. Head of Monarch’s Chronon Research Division and one of the handful of authorities on your brother’s research worldwide. One of the few who risked their careers to give Will any credibility at all. She’s a believer, and she built the Monarch machine. Well, she and Dr. Kim.”

  “Which means she works in the Tower.”

  “Works there, lives there, almost never leaves there. She’s one of their highest value assets.”

  “What about this Dr. Kim?”

  “Dead,” Beth said. “Car accident. So they say. Sofia is pretty much it. Every tech-head under her is working in compartmentalized divisions on a need-to-know.”

  “What about the people working with Paul at the university?”

  “There were a few people who had an operational understanding that we might have been able to exploit.”

  “‘Were’?”

  “I kept tabs on them in case they became useful, but three weeks ago they vanished. One from the university and three from the chronon division. Which leaves Sofia, and probably Paul, and it’s not like you can invite Paul over for beers.”

  “No,” Jack agreed. “But he did invite me to the gala.”

  “When? Before you tried to explode him to death?”

  “Even then he seemed pretty certain he wanted me to come up and check the place out.”

  “That’s as good as giving yourself up. If it’s just me I can—”

  “Guys,” Nick interjected. “Listen, how about we relax tonight, okay? Wait until everyone’s good and hungover tomorrow morning, then we just pick her up when she ducks out for a post-bender hamburger. Yeah?”

  Beth shook her head. “If I was Paul in this situation, what with the university and Jack on the loose and knowing Jack as well as I do? I’d keep her under lock and key, trot her out for tonight’s performance, and then make her vanish till I needed her again. If we don’t grab her tonight we may not get another chance.” This was going to be a hard sell. “My cover is still good. The only person who ID’d me at the farm was Gibson, and he was in the house when it blew. I can get inside Monarch Tower, get close to Sofia, and get her out.”

  “You don’t have any kind of powers.”

  “I can’t die. How’s that for power?”

  Nick blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Sure,” Jack retorted, “but you can be detained. You can still fail. You can’t get her out of there alone.”

  “Her offices are on the top level. Just off the top level is a helipad.”

  “You can fly?”

  “I was told I’d need it. Seriously, Jack, me alone is our best chance.”

  He put his hands up, walked away. “Fine. Whatever, Zed. You’re the boss.”

  Nick and Beth sat in awkward, simmering silence as Jack climbed out of the pool and left the building. The slam of the security door echoed through every chamber in the place.

  “He still wants to save his brother,” she said. “Thought he could pass on some message in 2010 that might save Will’s life in 2016. He’s frustrated, but he’ll be okay. Science isn’t his thing, really.”

  Nick nodded. “Yeah, that’s gotta be hard for a guy.” Twiddled his fingers. “So,” Nick said. “You’re Zed, huh?”

  14

  Saturday, 8 October 2016. 7:58 P.M. Floor 49, Monarch Tower. Paul Serene’s Quarters.

  The glass wall afforded Paul an angel’s view of Riverport. The town was nothing special, but neither had Alamogordo been before Oppenheimer, or Sarajevo before Gavrilo Princip, or, for that matter, Bethlehem if he wanted to be grandiose.

  On official blueprints his rooms were listed as office space. When Paul had reason to leave the building he came and went via private helicopter, his existence a company secret.

  Paul had never wanted for anything material. Wise investments had furnished his parents with a pleasant home and their son with the freedom to pursue a life of his choosing. The world had always been open to Paul. But it was Riverport, Massachusetts—not the universities of Europe or the Machiavellian war zones of world finance—that had shaped him. This town, of all the places on Earth, had been his crucible. Riverport had birthed him, raised him, changed him. Compressed and bound by fate, it had all happened here.

  Urban camouflage fatigues lay pressed and ready, draped across the chair beside him; props to lend authenticity to the press release he was soon to be filming. He had the chair commissioned, carved from a single piece of a Fitzroya cupressoides taken from the Chilean rain forest. The tree had been over thirty-six hundred years old when Paul had it felled and turned into something he might sit upon. It was older than the Americas, than Christianity, older even than mathematics.

  It was Paul’s favorite chair.

  Time would end. But, perhaps, by using every part of his wealth, talent, determination, and intellect, he might liberate humanity’s fate from the end he had written for it.

  “You’re doing it again.”

  If he had died today there would be no one to undo what was coming. He had risked it all to save Jack, for friendship. He could not be so irresponsible again.

  “Paul.”

  Sofia had entered, dressed for the evening in something tight, floor-length, and Italian. Tablet in hand, mind forever on the project.

  “I’m sorry, what?”

  “Grinding your teeth,” Sofia said.

  Paul felt something stir in the waters of his body, a pulse of nausea behind his eyes. He braced.

  “I could hear them popping in the hallway. You’ll need a dentist more than you need me if you don’t learn to relaaaaaaaaaaa…”

  Sofia slowed and froze as time hesitated, foreshadowing an incoming stutter. They were becoming more frequent now, that was undeniable. Paul kept his composure, waited for the elongated moment to play out, and snap.

  “… aaaaax. The ground-floor atrium looks beautiful, and the demonstration space is perfect. Now, there was something you wanted to show me?”

  “You are about to woo the world with the wonder of chronon technology, and all of our efforts are about to conjoin. Lifeboat has a fighting chance. You’re here with me. That’s all I need.” She had noticed nothing. That brief stutter was more severe than the last instance. A sizeable one was due.

  “Nervous?” he asked.

  “Not at all.” She moved closer to him. “Once the world sees with their own eyes what we have achieved, how foolish our critics will seem. The reputations of Doctors Joyce and Kim will be restored, the value of Monarch stock will ascend toward Heaven, and I will finally have you to myself. Even if we have to live in the shadows for the rest of our days.”

  The timing was right. God had nodded his head.

  He reached inside his jacket and withdrew a slender sheaf of fire-damaged paper. “But if you could find the time to give an opinion on this, I’d be grateful.”

  She gave him a curious look, lay her tablet on his ancient chair and took the filthy collection of papers with both hands. Her eyes grew wide. “The Regulator.”

  “Take your time,” he said. “They’re only partial, but perhaps you…”

  “Dr. Kim’s notes. Are there more?”

  He wanted to tell her: Kim was a fraud. William Joyce created the Regulator. But that would be a mistake. If she knew that then she would question other truths, and force herself to analyze William’s fractured reasonings and paranoid convictions … and he needed her focused; on tonight, and on the research. If anyone could learn something new about the device at the heart of the Tower, it was Sofia. There was no one else.

  She fixed him with an expression of such need. “Paul, are there more papers like these?”

  He shook his head. “William Joyce stole them during his time with us. Kept them at his house. Those were all I could save.”

  She seemed to forget him almost immediately, returning to the printouts and diagrams. “I … I will need some time.” Then she surprised him by grasping his hand, fixing him again. “I love you. Do you accept that?”

  He laid his hand atop he
rs. “I do.”

  His heart hurt for her, for his Sofia.

  She didn’t know, couldn’t know, that once the endgame began, she would never see him again.

  Saturday, 8 October 2016. 7:58 P.M. Riverport Swimming Hall.

  The acoustics in the swimming hall were fantastic.

  “Beth! You need to see this!”

  Nick was in the dry pool, in one of the castor chairs. The portable TV was on. She came in from a back room, sleeves rolled up. She’d been running maintenance on her gear while she had a moment.

  As Beth climbed down the three-step ladder and dropped to the bottom near the deep end, Nick turned up the volume.

  “… details again: The state’s most wanted man, Jack Joyce, was apprehended here, on the sidewalk outside Sullivan’s Deli, about a half hour ago. According to witnesses Joyce, age twenty-eight, approached a uniformed patrolman, hands raised. What happened next remains unclear. Shots were fired, and evidence at the scene suggests Joyce was wounded. However we’re told he was soon after wrestled to the ground and handcuffed. WSRP-TV understands he was taken to Riverport Police Department where…”

  “Turn it off.”

  Nick clicked the remote.

  “I thought he was upstairs.”

  “He was! He said he was gonna catch a few hours’ sleep. I don’t get it.”

  “The cops’ll hand him over to Monarch. The idiot thinks once he’s inside the building he’ll be able to bust out and save the day.”

  “Too many of them?” Nick asked.

  “That and he’s not that good, is completely unprepared, has no security clearance, no clue what Sofia Amaral looks like, and no idea what the layout of the building is.”

  “Ah.”

  Beth checked her watch. A few hours until the gala kicked off. Guests would be arriving soon.

  “Plus they’ve got the means to suppress chronon levels, which will almost certainly impact his ability to recover from whatever horrible shit they’re about to do to him. You need to drive me to Monarch Tower. Right now.”

  Saturday, 8 October 2016. 8:10 P.M. Floor 49, Monarch Tower. Paul Serene’s Quarters.