by Cam Rogers
“Steve said it was cool. We’ve been in there all day.”
“Get the f— ’scuse me, ma’am.” More civil. “Get back inside. And put your jacket back on.”
“But—”
“Before I report you.”
Nick sighed, saluted, and stepped over the rope.
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 8:53 P.M. Outside Monarch Tower.
It was about to get ugly for Davis and his partner when Gibson’s squad came out of the security door behind them. Donny shouldered Davis out of the way as Chronon-1 pulled up before the scarred, fucked-up wreck of their former senior operative.
“Boss?”
Gibson’s left eye was swollen and fused shut. Hair had been seared away in patches. He was missing a tooth. His skin and fatigues were black with impacted soot, ash, and blood, slashed along the arms and knees. Keeping the weight off his left leg gave him the posture of something that had crawled out of a crater.
“Hey, Donny. You want to get these nun fuckers away from me?”
“Sure, boss.”
Davis and his partner backed off, herded away by bloodless glances from Voss and Irene.
“Seen Beth Wilder around?”
“The washout? Her unit’s doing internal for sure. Why?”
“Get me inside.”
“Sure thing. Voss, scramble a medic.”
“Fuck that. Get me inside. Davis, you say nothing. Donny: let’s go.”
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 9:00 P.M. Monarch Tower. Atrium.
The two-story videoboard faded out from images of foreign lands, laboratories, workers, children, and innovations, cross-faded to the company logo, the word MONARCH fading in peacefully atop it.
Martin Hatch took the stage. The crowd applauded.
“Invited guests, thank you for being with us here this evening. You all know me. I’m Martin Hatch, CEO of Monarch Solutions. I know a few of you have noticed the four strange-looking objects arrayed about us.”
Hatch pointed to the four stutter-field pylons delineating the western third of the atrium, bracketing the audience. Chrome and hazard-striped, each had a small chronon battery affixed to its base. Each one was manned by a chronon technician.
“I overheard my good friend Harold Ashworth, CEO of Exxa, wonder to his lovely wife if perhaps Monarch’s big announcement would be that we are branching out into the production of avant-garde furniture.”
The crowd laughed.
“No, Howard, we are not.”
A few chuckles.
“For tonight’s demonstration to truly impress I request that you all ensure you are within the yellow border marked out on the floor for you.”
* * *
Beth double-checked her notebook, filled with dates and times and scraps of future information. Beth’s future self had written in that notebook that the Monarch gala was about to get hit with a stutter.
The elevator came to a stop. Getting off at thirty-five she turned on her rescue rig. Her skin tingled, sharp, and subsided.
Monarch Tower was a hell of an operation. Within five years it’d be a fully functioning arcology: a city within a building within Riverport. Entirely self-sufficient: apartments, a small school, gardens, water, recycling—the lot. The perfect place to hide out come the end of time.
Assuming Project Lifeboat was on its feet by then. Still only in the blueprint phase Horatio hadn’t been able to fathom how they’d get chronon efficiency to the required levels in time. Despite the size of the company, Monarch didn’t have the capital, resources, or personnel to pull it off within five years. Lifeboat didn’t just want to shield the Tower; it required operatives that could survive for months in the wild. The energy reserves required to do that were monstrous. Unthinkable.
Her ear mic patched her into Monarch comms. A couple of people in her unit were already on duty, lower down, updating over Monarch frequencies. Questions were asked about the fate of Jack Joyce. Through this Beth knew exactly where they were keeping him.
Beth carded herself through the first security door and into the warren of corridors on thirty-five. She accepted that her progress would be tracked, questions would be asked, but it didn’t matter. By the time tonight was over Monarch would know she had given notice. Abducting their key scientist would make that pretty clear. She would find Jack, free him, and incorporate him into the plan. Assuming the idiot was still breathing.
She rounded the corner, was heading for the room where Jack was being held when the first pre-stutter hit. It was unexpected but she seized the opportunity, broke into a run, double-pumped her left hand to get the chronon-flow going, got between the two frozen guards at the end of the hall, and used her live left hand to swing the time-locked door open.
She skidded to a halt, stopping in time to avoid crossing into the stutter field which would have nullified her rescue rig and rendered her immobile.
Jack was in his chair, frozen.
Beth closed the door behind her. The stutter broke.
“What’d you say?” one guard said.
“I didn’t say anything,” replied the other.
Jack was reanimated. Beth held a finger to her lips. Quietly as she could she deactivated the stutter pylons.
“Hey,” he whispered.
She unfolded her knife, snipped the zip ties holding him to the chair, looked him in the eye, and explained in detail how she intended to hammer his balls flat on a stump.
* * *
The lights dimmed by half and Hatch waited as the music swelled. The videoboard lit up with an on-message color-and-movement mélange: orchestral segueing to dubstep as family-values imagery cut to forest-fringed highways, gear-shifting vehicles, rapelling troopers. Sweat, strain, sharp eyes, and bared teeth, all coming to an explosive halt on the Monarch logo.
In exchange for six figures a Mayfair agency had provided forty-five seconds of idiocy.
Hatch waited respectfully as the applause faded.
“Friends,” he said. “Let’s talk about death.”
The videoboard behind him flared white: a scene in a hospital ward. A mourning family gathers at the bedside of a fading grandmother.
“No matter your demographic,” Hatch said. “The number one killer is time.”
The scene cross-faded to a desert battlefield, a lieutenant calling for backup, and a pall of orange dust providing fantastic depth of field.
“At Monarch Solutions we have elected to remove time from death’s equation.”
Back in the hospital now. The lieutenant lay on a gurney. Recognizing the pylons that surround the fallen lieutenant’s bed, the crowd aahed, intrigued.
“Imagine if we could pause time for the terminally ill. Imagine a mortally wounded soldier, or a gravely ill loved one, suspended perfectly for as long as is needed, at the flick of a switch.”
Hatch snapped his fingers, and a gently luminous canopy enveloped the bedridden lieutenant onscreen.
“Chronon-stasis technology keeps the patient safe within a moment that will continue to self-divide for as long as a medical technician deems it necessary. The person’s condition will never deteriorate, and they will never age. If need be they can remain in that localized zero state for years, even decades, until a cure for their condition, or a donor organ, is found or can be grown.”
The crowd applauded.
“But there are so many more applications.”
Spotlights sprang to life, swept to darkened corners at the back of the stage. Exclamations from the audience as two Juggernauts cycled to life, stood erect, and strode to the front of the stage—laser targeters panning across the assembled crowd.
In the wings, Sofia Amaral tapped her foot and checked her watch. Her cue was coming up, but her mind was elsewhere. She couldn’t stop thinking about the notes Paul had salvaged from the Joyce house: Dr. Kim’s plans for the Regulator.
How had Joyce purloined those documents? Joyce and Kim had been colleagues at one point, years ago, that much she knew. William Joyce must have acquired t
he documents during his time as a consultant on Project Promenade, and then studied Kim’s designs in secret. What scraps that remained were littered with parenthetical notes and observations. Had Joyce been an early collaborator on the Regulator project? Had he felt sidelined? Had there been bad blood between the two?
No matter now. Her crucial finding was this: it was now clear that the device was not intended to function as a power source, but had been designed to release its massive charge in one focused burst. But why? Why had Kim built such a device? And why his charade of attempting to plumb the device’s secrets, as though its creation had been little more than a quirk of fate?
She shook her head. She hadn’t been trusted with the details. There was more going on and clearly it had been deemed above her security level. The man she loved had been keeping her ignorant; her expertise and professionalism had not been trusted. That hurt her, deeply.
This had driven her to reassess her own calculations, and try as she might she still could find no error of process, calculation, or reasoning. The end of time was approaching. It was going to hit, and far sooner than Paul believed. She had to speak to him. He may not have trusted her with the true nature of the Regulator project or her role in it, but Sofia’s pride demanded that Paul hear her on this. The life of the universe itself was at stake.
* * *
“Handing yourself in was a dick move, Jack.”
Jack kept his voice low. “I got arrested so you wouldn’t have to risk yourself.” He stood, rubbing his wrists.
“You can worry once I go back and meet my younger self. Until then I’m protected by a chain of causality connected to a collapsed waveform. Take this.” She handed him her gun.
“What about you?”
“I’ll grab one when the next ministutter rolls in. I need you to tell me when you sense one about to hit. We use those to leapfrog from concealment to concealment until we get to the ground floor. Once the main stutter lands, we take Sofia, get to the roof, steal Paul’s helicopter. With luck we can be back at the pool before the stutter breaks.”
“I overheard Paul saying he was watching the gala from upstairs. Security’s supertight up there.”
“Okay, fine. I’ve got Nick outside on standby. We can book it out the western exit, take our chances on the road.”
* * *
The screen behind Hatch shifted to a collage of ten faces: the ten students killed early that morning at Riverport University. Standing at the back, watching, Nick recognized two people he had tried to save: a man and a woman, gunned down on Founders’ Walk as they ran for his cab.
They faded out as Martin Hatch, the man who had ordered them killed, concluded his homily.
Nick kept his fists jammed in the pockets of his borrowed suit, sweating.
“Friends, here is where I think chronon technology shows its worth. Take a scene like the one that terrorized this town this morning, then bracket the location with four high-strength zero-state pylons. Everyone within that bracket freezes. Time stops.”
Hatch stood aside, swept an arm toward a person standing at the back of the stage.
“Our chronon Technician.” A jumpsuited Monarch employee stepped forward. Running the zip down her front she revealed the lightweight chrome-and-wire frame that followed the lines of her torso and limbs. “Our lightweight model, built for the basics. Operative Wilson here is wearing a ‘rescue rig.’ This enables her to move freely in a zero state and to release items and people from that state at will. Next…”
A larger figure strode in from stage left, carrying an assault rifle. In profile he was a man in modern white armor fitted with a black gas mask. On his back was a broad dome, studded with what looked like soda-can-sized fuses. Each of the fuses glowed with a pulsing amber heat. The figure pivoted and walked downstage, into the light.
“Our Striker. Fully mobile within a zero state, he is armored for combat operations. As an added extra he is also able to manipulate his relationship to his personal Meyer-Joyce envelope, folding deeper into the stutter, briefly inhabiting a smaller subdividing moment within a larger one—but with no loss of mobility. What this means,” Hatch said, “is that within a zero state the Striker has the capacity for superspeed, crossing short distances in quick bursts. Useful for rapid response and flanking maneuvers.”
Hatch spread his arms and two spots found the oversized, seemingly headless, blank-surfaced exoskeletons stationed at either end of the stage.
“And finally, our large friends: the Juggernauts.”
The crowd went nuts. They couldn’t get enough of the big guys.
“Gentlemen, if you’d be kind enough.” Hatch made circling motions with both hands.
The Juggernauts rotated in an ungainly fashion, displaying their open backs. There was a clack and a soft whine as the two pilots released from their harnesses and stepped free.
“We’ve left off the back half of the Juggernauts’ signature clamshell design to give you a better look at how these fellows work on the inside.”
* * *
The stuff they were showing off was pure eye candy. Nick wanted to see more of the show, especially all the detail on the Juggernaut prototypes, but he couldn’t. He had to find Beth, and a nearby elevator pinged open. As its passengers exited Nick stepped inside.
An infoscreen opened up on one glass wall. “Welcome, visitor. How can I help you?”
“Uh…”
Nick realized he had no idea where to go, and also that most of the building was locked off without a security pass.
Out of nowhere a rush of bodies and hardware filled the elevator carriage: big dudes and one serious-looking woman in Monarch fatigues, all packing sidearms.
“Floor thirty-five,” one of them said.
Someone swiped a card and hit the button.
The last one in was Randall Gibson.
Nick’s spine snapped rigid. He didn’t move, pretending to be deeply interested in the wall map.
“Nobody touches her,” Gibson said, low. “We find her, we do her, we report it.”
Busted, messed-up Gibson. He filled the elevator with the thick smell of old sweat and smoke. One of his eyes was actually fused shut.
Any one of these people could kill Nick as easy as turning off a TV. The elevator began to rise. Nick watched the atrium fall away beneath him.
“How’d you make it, boss? I heard—”
“Triangle of life,” Gibson muttered. “I hit the dirt alongside a couch. Beams and shit hit the couch, left me a tight shelter next to it. Debris hit the shelter, left me in a pocket.” He coughed. Sounded wet. “I’m good.”
“Rigs on,” one of them said. “Stutters.”
Thirty seconds later the elevator shushed to a stop on thirty-five, pulling level with its glass-walled neighbor—as two people filed into it.
Nick looked through the glass walls that separated the two elevators and instantly recognized the two people inside the one opposite.
Jack and Beth.
“Boss!”
Beth’s head snapped toward them, recognized Gibson’s squad—then clocked Nick.
Nick shook his head tightly, terrified. Do not acknowledge me in this elevator full of killers.
Nick’s elevator emptied in a heartbeat as the doors to Beth and Jack’s hissed shut. She glared at him, mouthed What the fuck?
And then they descended.
“Senior Operative Gibson, sir!” Two Monarch regulars came to a halt before the squad. “Sir, Jack Joyce … he’s…”
Nick stepped out of the elevator just as Gibson’s squad rushed back in to pursue Jack and Beth. The elevator chimed shut and departed.
The two Monarch guards, looking as though their careers were flashing before their eyes, disappeared through the security door they’d appeared from, barking into ear mics.
“Right,” Nick mumbled, trapped. “Now what?”
* * *
Martin Hatch accepted the applause. “Now, friends, if you would be kind enough to stay wit
hin the yellow zone we would like to conclude with a practical demonstration of this world-changing technology. We’ll need all of you to space out evenly, and marks have been provided.”
People shuffled, each choosing a mark for themselves, taking position.
Hatch got a thumbs-up from the four chronon techs.
“Three. Two. One.” Hatch snapped his fingers.
The techs activated the pylons, the chronon levels within that sectioned-off piece of the M-J field dropped, and the entire crowd froze.
The operatives onstage got into new positions. The pylons shut off, the crowd reanimated, exclaimed as the operatives “teleported” before them, and burst into applause.
Hatch snapped his fingers. The crowd froze. The operatives rearranged. The pylons shut off. The crowd came to life. Their laughter and applause turned to an ecstatic roar.
Repeat.
Disbelief. Delirium. Dollar signs.
From the audience’s perspective each time Hatch clicked his fingers everything changed in a moment.
Hatch’s smile was wide, but there was no joy in his eyes.
He clicked again.
* * *
Paul, in his quarters on the forty-ninth floor, sipped a small glass of champagne, dressed for operations in underarmor and urban camouflage.
Martin’s demonstration was playing out on a closed-circuit feed displayed on a laptop. It all seemed to be going well.
Then the call came in over a Monarch secure channel: Jack was loose.
Paul immediately switched the feed to elevator cams—and there was Jack in the company of a Monarch employee, headed for the ground floor. For Martin’s demonstration.
Sofia. She was down there with Martin, waiting to give her presentation.
The elevator identified the employee accompanying Jack as Beth Wilder. Paul called up her file. Her face looked back at him, and he felt, viscerally, a lost part of his own story click into place. “I know you. Beth.”
He tapped the desk, contacted the on-duty security chief. The voice on the end of the phone demanded identification.
Paul Serene had effectively founded Monarch, and yet he’d be stopped at reception if he walked in unaccompanied.