Quantum Break

by Cam Rogers

  Prone and gasping, he fired bursts at the first two, six rounds suspended on a trajectory for their targets’ helmeted heads.

  The round had blown a hole the size of a golf ball just below Jack’s ribs. Manifesting a handful of stutter bubbles, and flying after Irene, had expended almost everything he had. He felt the cells of his body thirstily draw in every scrap of chronon energy they could get, shock and instinct repurposing and localizing it to the wound. His body was pulling itself back together, but it was going to take time.

  Upstairs Nick threw himself out the cafeteria window as Irene closed in from behind. He hit the tiles hard, yelped, and hobbled to his feet, limping hard.

  * * *

  Irene pulled her sidearm as the time machine shrieked and flashed.

  “Voss is clear! Irene, get down here! Chaffey, Reeves, Dominguez, you’re up! Go go go!”

  She didn’t hesitate. This was everything they had trained for. She hopped down, bounced neatly off the roof of the generator prefab, just as Chaffey’s crew went through. Crossing the distance to the machine’s ramp in no time flat she sprinted—straight to the airlock, no hesitation.

  Gibson closed it down, gave her a new date, and sent her through.

  * * *

  Nick limped to Jack—his hockey injury now kicking his ass. That fall hadn’t treated him kindly. He found Jack on his back in a pool of blood, a bloodied hole shot through his side and pale as a sheet. “Jack … Jesus man don’t be dead.”

  “I’m … okay. Irene went through didn’t she?”

  “The machine? Yeah. I think they all did.”

  “Fuck.” Jack got to his feet.

  Gibson changed the date again. Four different dates meant anyone who came after C-1 had no chance of stopping them, or knowing when they would emerge from the machine.

  The airlock door opened. Gibson keyed the machine to activate. The airlock door hissed, preparing to lever itself shut.

  He quickly changed the onscreen date but did not commit it—just covering his tracks, making sure nobody could pick when he had gone to—then leaped the console, pounded up the ramp, and slid inside the airlock just before it sealed.

  Atmosphere vented, internals pressurized, the airlock and Promenade flooding with chronon particles.

  Mission accomplished. Ha-ha fuck you.

  The door to the past opened, and Gibson was history.

  So.

  Jack felt the fight go out of him.

  That was that then.

  Nick leaped backward as Jack turned and emptied a full magazine into the stutter bubble behind him.

  Nick looked away as the stutter bubble collapsed and freed rounds tossed the Monarch Security squad like dolls.

  “Okay,” Jack said. “Let’s go.”

  He ran to the controls, kneeled, examined Sofia. The hit was to her left arm. She was cold, and her breathing was shallow, but she was alive.

  He glanced at Nick. “Can you get her to a hospital?”

  Nick nodded toward the television. It had been running on silent the whole time, tuned to coverage of the Riverport situation. It was clearly getting worse. It wasn’t just the attack on Monarch Tower; things were beginning to go wrong across the city. The Riverport power grid was fluctuating, brownouts traveling across neighborhoods.

  “The Riverport Emergency Facebook group has a conversation going at the moment. People are seeing ghosts, reporting lost time. Not a lot, but a few. Checked it on my way over here.”

  “Sofia said the end was coming soon.” Jack got to his feet and tried to make sense of what Gibson had done. He didn’t know where to begin. The date field was blank. Sofia wasn’t going to be able to help with this. There was only one date that he knew for certain would get him somewhere he needed to be: the date he tried to send Beth to. The date she would head for, if she could.

  Jack set the controls for July 4, 2010. The day of Bannerman’s Overlook. The day Will’s Countermeasure went missing.

  “I’m going to catch up to Beth. It doesn’t matter if the city’s losing its mind, Sofia needs a doctor.”

  “I’ll get her there.”

  “See you soon.”

  Jack slapped the button, activating the machine. He ran up the ramp and swung into the airlock. Earlier Beth had noticed an odor to the machine. She wasn’t wrong. He smelled it now. It was the odor of rot and decay.

  The airlock smooched shut. Chronon particles flooded the chamber. The door to the past opened, and Jack ran.

  16

  The hatch between airlock and the bulb-lit Promenade hissed and smooched shut behind her, the homemade corridor curving away ahead. In that moment some higher power hit Stop on the player. Abruptly, cruelly, every sound and movement ceased. Stillness. The follicles on her arms and scalp puckered closed. This world was separate and apart from the one she had just left.

  Her wounded leg ached, powerfully.

  Ninety-eight percent of chronon trainees washed out once they hit their first laboratory stutter. Finding themselves isolated in a death-calm reality, a world in which they had no agency whatsoever, flipped most trainees out. They couldn’t open doors, move objects, eat or drink anything. They couldn’t be heard. Monarch psychologists concluded this triggered base-level lizard-brain fears of entrapment, inflaming terrors of suffocation, dying alone, being forgotten, and nullification of self.

  Twenty percent of candidates who washed out in the stutter training phase left the company, followed by institutional stays at Monarch’s expense.

  Something about it disassembled people on a code level.

  Something about being in that tight curving corridor, the air thick with the hot nasal tang of superheated metal and the world gone voiceless, she understood why so many couldn’t handle it. It was as close as Beth had come to being buried alive.

  She marched forward, fast, cleaned out her thoughts with improvised ritual: handgun, loaded. Hair, tied and out of the way. Figured she must have been halfway around the loop. It was getting harder to breathe. She tried not to think about the possibility of the door not being open at the other end. Cricked her neck, rolled her shoulders. Three quarters. Breathe, Zed. Ashleigh. Starr. Wilder. Whatever. Breathe.

  The exit hatch, dead ahead. Punched the release plate.

  Fuck. Come ON.

  She felt the charge bleed from the air. The Promenade deactivated, causality kicked back in.

  The Promenade transformed completely.

  Lighting flicked from warm to cold, amber to white. The sterile chill of environmentally friendly fluorescents, half of which didn’t work, replaced the warm filament bulbs.

  As the floor beneath her feet snapped from waffle-treaded insulation to cheap and heavy iron grillwork she almost lost her balance.

  Will’s pentagonal corridor was gone. She was now in a four-sided corridor, the construction of which made Will’s look like a masterwork of thoughtful craftsmanship.

  Will’s Promenade was gone, Beth laying at the doorstep of what could have been the entrance to a moonbase’s methadone clinic.

  Get it together, Wilder. This is just the load screen.

  Beth leaned against the new wall. Her leg didn’t want to take the weight, but she made it. Ignored the pain, put it in a room, locked the door.

  She glanced at the overheads. That type of fluorescent hadn’t existed when Will made the machine. The machine had grown older.

  Gun held in a double-handed grip, Beth peered into the airlock.

  Whatever this is, she told herself, it doesn’t end here. Whatever this is it can’t possibly hurt you. She still had an appointment to keep with herself.

  Get out, reconnoiter, set a new destination, bug out. Simple plan’s a good plan.

  The airlock had also changed. It could have been an old-school diving bell. Beth stepped inside, stiff-legged, the sound of the rusted grating a short squeal underfoot. The exit hatch was as heavy and submarinal as the rest of the machine’s new construction. There was a single circular viewplate bolt
ed into the exit hatch. Through its grimy cataract she could tell the machine had moved. It was now in a very wide, open space. There were … arches? Just outside. Beyond them: light. Was the machine in some kind of pit?

  A four-spoked iron wheel was affixed to the center of the hatch. Leaning against the hatch was a crowbar. Holstering her pistol, she wedged the bar into the wheel, got leverage on it, and pushed downward. Two attempts and it gave. Beth cycled the wheel, released the hatch, and swung it wide.

  Thank fuck.

  The air outside was little better than the stale, static atmosphere inside the machine, but she disembarked gratefully. Wherever she was, whenever she was, this place was almost certainly a basement. She descended a short stepladder onto a floor of reclaimed brick. The roof was wood-reinforced plaster. The basement was divided by a plaster wall, itself broken into three brick-reinforced archways.

  Beth thumbed the light on her phone and looked back at the machine: it was a different beast now. Cruder, crappier, like a weekend survivalist’s attempt at creating a submersible bunker. The only familiar thing about it was the core—that was Will’s—wired into an odd new housing.

  By the stepladder was a wooden workbench, scored from decades of use. Its undershelf housed the cabling and innards of what Beth recognized as some kind of chronon battery—but it was markedly different from the models Monarch was iterating upon. Fundamentals were all in place though: plus-sized chronon aggregator, some kind of capacitor, shitloads of insulation and cabling. One strand of the tech-spaghetti led up to a rubberized mat on which rested a thin plate of glass. The glass was illuminated with diagnostics—a viewscreen. The diagnostics told her the machine had a chronon charge of zero.

  Her way home had gone out of business.

  If she didn’t find a source of chronon energy someplace, the mission was a bust. Beyond the basement arches a curtain of blue-white light dropped straight down from a smashed-out ceiling. Cautiously she moved toward the light, noting banks of old freezers left and right, and wooden shelves stacked one atop the other, pressed to the sides of the pit. It was freezing in here. A wheeled scissor lift stood against the left wall. Construction lighting—halogen lamps on thin telescoping yellow stands—were arranged in four corners, dead-eyed. Looking up it was clear what had happened. The ragged lip of the pit was about twelve feet up, accessible by a metal ladder or the lift. Up there she could see what remained of what had once been a kitchen. Someone had knocked out the floor, without grace or care. They had also knocked out at least one of the kitchen walls. Someone had gotten a hold of William’s time machine core, had chosen this place to set up operations, and used this house as a cover—a shell over their subterranean base of operations.

  All this she could deal with. What bothered her was her hearing. The sound down here had a strange quality to it, super-crisp. Her footsteps, an experimental cough, all began and ended very sharply. No resonance.

  The atmosphere was thick with dust; she felt it against her face as she moved. Resisting.

  She stopped by the ladder and gazed at the light that fell down from the upstairs world. She reached up, sweeping her hand gently through the day-lit particles suspended there. The motion of her hand carved a track, the motes moving aside obligingly, but nothing swirled to fill the space her hand cleared.

  Stasis.

  She shone her phone-light back the way she had come. Her passage from the machine to the ladder had carved a tunnel in the dusty air. She wiped a hand across her face. It came back thick with dust.

  Holstering her weapon and pocketing the phone, she climbed the stepladder up to the surface.

  Hands gripped to a floor paved in cracked red-and-white tiling, she emerged into what could have been either construction or destruction. The wall between kitchen and living area was gone; the jagged remnants of the wall-that-was remained at ceiling level, trailing scraps of flower print paper from the fifties. Seven or eight tables were stacked atop each other and pushed to the walls. A few were kept as surfaces on which to array tools and supplies. This had been a home converted to a sandwich shop. Chalkboards remained nailed to one wall, offering basic food and soup at steep prices. Four bucks for a glass of water.

  There was a pile of mail gathered inside the front door. Beth walked through the clutter, shielding her mouth from the dust, and scrutinized the luridly enveloped junk letter at the top of the pile. The date stamp was enough to flush her heart with cold water. 2021.

  She knew what this was, when she was.

  A stutter was a hiccup, a moment temporarily self-dividing. Eventually it ends and time continues. As such the odds of her emerging directly into a specific split second that had been affected by a stutter were statistically impossible. The only way the machine could have delivered her into the heart of a frozen moment is if the machine’s destination parameters had been thrown forward so far into the future that there was nowhere—no when—farther to go.

  She reached for the faux-brass door handle, stopped, caught by the sight of her rig-thimbled fingers, the wires tracking up her sleeve.

  Beth rapidly squeezed her right hand together twice, felt her fingertips tingle. Quickly she touched the door, freed it from the stutter, opened it, and double-squeezed again to kill the flow. She was going to need to conserve all the energy she could.

  The street was the same as the sandwich shop, which was the same as the basement: uniform temperature, no resonance to sound. Muted colors, as though life had bled from the world.

  Beth knew immediately where she was. The treelined street led straight to Riverport University campus several blocks away.

  The library was gone. A forest of twenty-foot-tall crystal prisms stood in its place—a memorial, she supposed. The dome of the Quantum Physics Building was still there. No doubt repaired and refurbished after Gibson had gotten through with it.

  The skyline wasn’t so different. A few more skyscrapers, a few more apartment complexes. She turned and looked the other way. There it was.

  Monarch Tower. Still the biggest bastard on the block five years into the future, but not unscathed. Something had taken a swing at that misshapen obelisk, and snapped a bite out of its top third. Black glass and reinforced concrete had been swept away, the rectilinear honeycomb of its innards now open to the air. The familiar distortion-flicker of a chronon field enveloped the top of the building.

  Someone was alive up there, and keeping the lights on.

  It had been a brisk winter’s day when everything had stopped for the final time.

  Riverport. The world. The planets in their rotations. Galaxies, even.

  Every last thing in Creation’s inventory accounted for, and stopped.

  2021 was when it happened. All her efforts would come to nothing. The Countermeasure would not work.

  She sniffed, ran the heel of her palm across one eye, and checked the charge on the buckle of her rescue rig. She had three hours before she became one with the universe.

  17

  The man’s legs were tense, angled, frozen in a position of struggle. He had stepped off the hood of his car, which he had parked next to the tree for this purpose. The noose about his neck was electrical cable. If Beth looked at the tree from one angle it was burning. If she looked at it from another it was dead, the branches caked with ice. From another … there was no tree, the man and noose hanging from nothing at all.

  Not everywhere was as torn between timelines as this tree; almost everywhere, thankfully, was consistent. The upsetting product of conflicting realities coming to a bizarre settlement, yes, but blessedly concrete.

  The man had failed to kill himself in time. The terror in his eyes told Beth he had known that.

  Paul had said time would end in five years, and he had been right. The evidence bore that out: the changes to Riverport, headlines, dates on phones. Despite the evidence of their eyes and Sofia’s calculations, the rising chaos of 2016 hadn’t stopped the world.

  How?

  Her rig had two hours left in
it. She had been wandering for an hour. Walking, and trying to piece together how her universe had died. The best place for answers was probably Monarch Tower, but she had no interest in spending her final moments anywhere near that place. If things ended with her never having to see that deconstructed butterfly logo again that’d be just fine, thanks. Instead her feet had taken her around the familiar, through parks and down side streets, taking the scenic route toward the university.

  Almost every block had men and women bearing tracts and alarmist sandwich boards: SELF-ANNIHILATION LEADS TO THE FIRES OF DAMNATION!

  Riverport was a jumbled toy box, the panicked mingling with the sanguine; men and women walked hand in hand past parents and children rigid in the act of fleeing from something that no longer existed in this settled-upon waveform. On the sidewalk outside the park Beth almost tripped over the head and arms of a man protruding from the sidewalk—his reality betraying him to some facet of another reality—one in which the sidewalk was a hole in the ground, probably—delivering the grim fate of materializing inside earth and concrete.

  There was a pattern to the evangelists: they were all preaching the same platform. Not Jesus, not redemption, but “suicide is sin.” Every single one of them, from ecstatic to miserable, railed at the world: meet the fate God had intended for them. Do not rob the Lord by meting out death at your own hand.

  She scanned what she could from the static, windblown, and weeks-old pages of Metro in parks and bus shelters. She spent an iota of her rescue rig’s energy to release a fairly intact issue from where it had been tucked beneath the wipers of a parked electric car. Garbage was everywhere, the papers were out-of-date, windows were smashed. Everything pointed to a society where people just stopped going to work—including cops.

  The dateline on the papers read January 12, 2021—and those papers didn’t seem fresh. Newspaper distribution would have broken down days or weeks earlier. Birthrates were way down, attendances at religious services way up … even as the number of self-proclaimed faithful in developed nations had plunged. There was a recession, China was capitalizing on that, and it looked like many First World police forces were now so heavily militarized they were indistinguishable from the actual military. Beth noticed American cops wore the Monarch logo somewhere on their uniform. All of which was by the by. The paper she held was stained and stiff and fading. Things would have gotten a lot worse since it had been printed.