Quantum Break

by Cam Rogers

  Beth calmed him, distracted him, decided they needed to eat. Paul showed her how he had been surviving: canned goods, a propane cooker, bottled water, stored in the staff kitchenette upstairs.

  She had about forty minutes left in her rescue rig. After that she’d be as stiff as every other poor bastard.

  Out from under the floor Paul had noticed her wounded leg immediately. With all the care of a small boy tending a fallen bird he had cut away a portion of her fatigues, enough to expose the wound, and tended it as best he could with antiseptic, fresh gauze, and a tight binding.

  She told him she had gashed herself running from the Shifters.

  “You have to be more careful here,” he told her. “When everyday things don’t yield, they become dangerous. You could slash yourself on a falling leaf, you hit it right.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “You tie a pretty competent bandage.”

  “Boy Scout,” he said, closing the kit.

  Paul’s kitchenette was spartan: steel benchtops, small microwave (useless, no power), fridge (redundant, food lasts forever), one table, and four chairs. He chatted as he heated a pan on a propane camp stove, cracked eggs, mixed flour, chocolate, and maple syrup. And cinnamon.

  Paul told her his story, about the university shooting, going through the machine and expecting to emerge back into the Riverport University time lab. Instead he found the airlock packed with passengers: men in Monarch armor. They had been nervous, Paul’s sudden presence in the machine with them unexpected. One had almost shot him but the soldier in charge said (and this was confusing), “Don’t shoot, it’s him.” Then the main airlock had opened.

  From outside the machine someone had said “Welcome.” The Monarch troopers were asked to come forward and relinquish their weapons. There had been some back-and-forth, but the troopers eventually exited, hands open.

  Then someone had called Paul by name, asked him to come out of the machine.

  Terrified, Paul had stepped off the Promenade, into the airlock, and surveyed what awaited.

  Outside the airlock was a glossy-floored expanse of polished black ceramic, the ceiling vast above. A glassed-in observation deck looked down upon him from one side. Swaddled figures stood motionless there, faces obscured behind safety goggles. He saw the Monarch soldiers being led away by a group of men and women wrapped head to toe in protective layers of dark material, weapons held loosely in hand. Paul didn’t know what had happened to the soldiers after that. He never saw them again.

  At the foot of the steel ramp people in sand-colored floor-length robes waited for him, attended by personnel in black military-style uniforms.

  Behind them the far wall of the lab was gone, torn away and with it part of the glossy black floor. Riverport was laid out through a flickering violet energy haze. Smack in the middle of the view was the university. The sky above it was a thick mass of black cloud punched through with pale eddies, bolts of terrible energy leaping from earth to sky. There was flame and there was smoke—none of it moving—with great gouges slashed perpendicular to Main Street.

  “Come out,” the tallest figure had coaxed, gently. “You’re expected.”

  “Wait,” Beth held up a hand. “How did they know you were arriving?”

  Paul was getting frustrated with what he was cooking, sighing, watching it fall to bits atop the plastic spatula. The gas cooker froze every now and then and Paul had to make contact with it for a half second to reanimate it. “The people in the Tower, they’re always working, up there.”

  Project Lifeboat. Had to be.

  “Sometimes they come out in BearCats, hauling trailers. Sometimes monsters come for them, and they do what I do: drop chronon charges and run.”

  They did it, then. Lifeboat happened. The world ended, and Hatch got what he wanted.

  “They’ve even got planes,” he said. “I’ve seen them taking off from the airport. Why go anywhere? The entire world is like this, right?”

  “I really don’t know, Paul. I … woke up,” she lied. “Someone put this gadget on me, told me how to use it, then left me to it. Told me to come here and look for a chronon supply before the charge runs out.”

  She watched as he reached for a plate and moved it to the stove. He scraped the mess onto it.

  “Are they … good people, do you think? In the Tower?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, sullenly. “They gave me supplies, led me from the Tower, and that was that. Sounds like you got the same treatment. Maybe it’s an experiment.”

  “Thank you,” she said as he handed her a plate. It smelled like something a kid would make for breakfast. If she was going to eat she had to make it quick—before the charge dissipated. Taking bits and pieces between her fingers she transferred it to her mouth. Lumpy, sweet, dry, and powdery … but who knew where her next meal was coming from? She noticed him watching her hands—specifically her thimbled fingers. “The people up there wear these?” She waggled her digits.

  “Only when they go outside. I’ve seen you around, haven’t I?”

  Beth swallowed. “This is good.”

  “I’ve seen you around.”

  “Gotta get out sometime,” she said, hoping that’d be the last of it.

  “You know who I am.”

  Her bones flashed glass-cold. “Sure,” she said, dutifully taking another mouthful, buying a few moments to think. “You’re Paul.”

  “I’m not wearing a rig,” he said. “You weren’t surprised by that at all.” The cooker’s blue flames became rigid, Paul forgetting his own meal. “Why are you here?”

  She swallowed, the clumped lump sticking in her throat. “I figured that was normal for some people.”

  Paul had nothing to say. He just looked at her, working her out.

  She couldn’t tell what he was thinking, but if he was half as skilled as the Paul Serene she knew in 2016 he could kill her here and now. All she could taste was chocolate and cinnamon and …

  She knew who he would become. The things he would done. She had to shoot him. Right here, right now, with the taste of that child’s meal in her mouth.

  “I’ll help you,” he said. “I have plenty of chronon batteries. I don’t need a rig so we can make them last a long time. The chronon umbrella only fits one, but we can sleep in shifts. You’ll be okay.”

  Ah … shit.

  * * *

  He had shown her how to tap the current-model chronon containers to recharge her rig, and then they had retreated beneath the flooring. Shifters were howling in the city, but it was distant. Paul was right: it was safer here on campus. She figured the concentration of chronon energy—stored as it was—may have been enough to keep them away.

  He wanted to double-check the dressing on her leg, but she had insisted it was fine. She had told Paul she’d take first watch, and to get some sleep.

  Paul had crawled on to his little mat, pulled his sleeping bag over him like a blanket, and curled up fetal. “I’m sorry I was suspicious,” he said. “There hasn’t been anyone else. Not for…” He stopped talking when his voice cracked.

  “It’s okay.” She gave his hand a reassuring little shake. “It’s—”

  Paul’s fingers clasped her hand and he looked right at her. “Would you … would you just hold my hand till I fall asleep?”

  God, she needed to backpedal. She was off mission. She was way, way off mission. “Sure,” she said, knowing there was a special room in Hell for her, for what she was about to do. “Sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”

  Paul nodded, buried his head into his bunched-up jacket, his hand vise-tight on hers, and shuddered, grateful to no longer be alone.

  A room, just for her.

  * * *

  Paul had a gym bag he used to store cans of beans, sachets of meal replacement powder, and bags of old T-shirts. The chronon canister fit neatly into it. She left it by the dome’s main door, then went back into the chronon accumulator lab and climbed through the open floor panel. Paul was still asleep, fing
ers curling and uncurling in his sleeping bag blanket.

  She couldn’t kill him. She couldn’t. Beth remembered the look of terror and betrayal on that girl’s face as she had woken up to the end of the world. The terrible sadness that had flooded her face as she died.

  Beth had done that. She didn’t have it in her to kill another innocent.

  So she did what she could do. She kneeled beside him and, deeply ashamed of herself, turned off the chronon umbrella. The light faded from inside the tiny hidey-hole. And in no time at all Paul’s breathing stopped. It was just Beth now, kneeling in the twilight.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. “I promise we’ll do everything we can to fix this.”

  She got up, bending beneath the low ceiling, wiping her hand on the legs of her fatigues. Hoisting herself aboveground, she double-pumped her fingers and moved the floor panel into place—sealing Paul Serene into his sad little refuge for the rest of lightless, self-dividing eternity.

  She snatched the bag from beside the dome’s doorway and got out of there, the canister feeling heavier than it should.

  * * *

  It took a relative hour to get from the campus to the gutted building that housed Will’s machine. Exhaustion weighed her down by the time she got there. She hadn’t slept since before the university shooting and her leg still wasn’t taking weight as well as it used to.

  She took a direct route to Will’s machine, an almost straight line between campus and Monarch Tower. Company vehicles, hardware, and troops were thick on the main streets, making for the Tower at speed as causality fell to pieces around them. A BearCat had swerved, two wheels lifted off the ground. A Monarch operative hung out the side, carbine loosing a final spray before the vehicle surely flipped. Beth noticed the damage to the vehicle’s antiballistic surfacing—deep tears, ripping whole panels free in places. The killing blow had ripped along the passenger section, killed the gunner, and took out the vehicle’s chronon rig. They’d been running from Shifters.

  A Juggernaut was caught in a pose of alarm and distress, most of the front plating torn from the protective suit, the shoulder-mounted micromissile pod hanging by a single joint. The pilot had been killed halfway through jettisoning himself out the back of the rig, like a skeleton stepping backward out of its own skin.

  A four-way intersection was where two thick conical sprays of destroyed vehicles and dead people had plowed into each other, disintegrated at high impact, got airborne, and sprayed killing debris in two fat directions simultaneously.

  Causality had fallen into a disagreement with itself here. The flow of traffic both ways had stuttered, machine-gunning twin rivers of vehicles into each other at speeds that should have been impossible. It was as if hours of traffic from two directions had fed into each other in an instant. Cars, shrapnel, and bodies hung in a wide spherical radius centered on the intersection, debris so heavy that the site was like an imperfect, damaged dome of steel studded with contorted bodies.

  Car frames reduced to ugly blasts of metal, human bodies ruined and unidentifiable. In those last moments every rule had gone out the window.

  This would have been happening the world over.

  With all her heart Beth hoped her parents hadn’t lived to see it.

  * * *

  She released the front door and entered. “Get to July fourth, grab the Countermeasure, and split.” She slung the bag across her shoulder and climbed down into the excavated basement, doing her best to compartmentalize everything she had seen at the intersection—next to the compartment set aside for what she had just done to Paul. “See you there, Jack. Don’t stand me up.”

  Not Monarch Paul, Jack’s friend Paul. The kid who couldn’t operate solo at parties; the kid she and Jack had relied on to keep an eye out for the cops when they were up to no good, much as Paul had hated it; the kid who had sat through a couple of episodes of Team Outland one night, defending the character of the show’s dork-genius.

  The place gave her the screaming heebies. Not just the basement but the whole tomb-like silent world. She had to get the fuck gone, as a matter of priority.

  Cricking her neck, she began piecing together what had to happen next.

  The corridor needed a conventional charge as well as a chronon load. The core would also be brought online electrically. Whoever had relocated Will’s machine down here had provided a generator, and it seemed to be in good shape. All she needed was for the chronon charge in each critical component to hold long enough in this chronon-free world for her to run the fastest lap of her life.

  She double-pumped her hand and reanimated the clear-screened laptop. The charge she imparted lasted long enough for her to lock in her destination date: 4 July 2010. She unzipped the bag and hauled out the canister. It was a standard Monarch capacitor design, sealed and insulated. The socket design was unfamiliar; she hoped it was standard to 2021. If Monarch tech and Will’s kit-bashed jalopy weren’t compatible she was going to have to make a run at the Tower for another way out of this time zone. Fuck that.

  She just wanted out of this grave to someplace where she could breathe life for a few more years. This place was too final, too sad, too … meaningless. Too nothing. She had never realized how much she depended on ambient sounds and smells and surprises to know she was alive. Voices. The way snow didn’t crunch under her feet, the way streets didn’t smell like carbon monoxide cut through with the occasional sharp line of perfume or aftershave, the silence … were killing her by degrees. It was claustrophobia by way of agoraphobia. It was like falling off a cliff, flailing and helpless. Surely it must be what astronauts felt in deep space. To be the only living thing in a void is to be both dead and forgotten, but alive enough to know it.

  A blade of paper she had adhered to the canister’s shell by some latent static charge, slid to the benchtop: a printed screen cap. Wikipedia. The subject was Paul Serene.

  She skimmed the article. It was all there. Everything she needed to know between then and now. A thought occurred and she opened the gym bag. The bottom of the bag was floored with a nest of similar clippings. She gripped the printout, read it all from start to finish in a rush.

  Humanity knew it had been killed by Paul Serene. The narrative was simple: on the morning of October 8, 2016, he had sabotaged and activated a device—a time machine—that Monarch Solutions had decommissioned for ethical reasons. Twenty-four hours later, Paul Serene issued his one and only communique to the world, detailing what he had done and why: the M-J field had been dealt a fatal blow. The universe had a few years of life left. In that time the chronon levels would drop, causality would become increasingly schizophrenic, and then—finally—time would cease to flow altogether.

  In the days after Martin Hatch had come forward with a proposal: Project Lifeboat. He spelled it out very plainly: the end of time was inevitable, but humanity could survive it if Lifeboat was operational. Humanity’s best and brightest could work beyond the end of time to engineer a solution.

  Paul Serene was known and remembered as a monster: the man who had erased the universe.

  Martin Hatch was known as the man who may have saved it.

  The frozen world outside was waiting for him to succeed.

  The Paul Serene asleep on campus now had known this. Saving her, making pancakes, holding her hand … he had known all this.

  “Shit.” Dropping some charge, she reefed out a fat coil of textured cabling from the tray beneath the workbench. “Shit shit shit.” It ended in what looked like a compatible plug: multipronged with a threaded safety collar. It took a little force but eventually the connector snapped into the battery and she screwed the collar down tight. He had known.

  Transferring a c-charge to the laptop she dumped half her rig’s power into the machine, releasing it from stasis. She checked the ladder, listened. Nothing.

  A few keystrokes and the power gauge on the canister lit violet, the laptop registering a steady flow of c-particles from the canis
ter to the corridor.

  “One point two one gigawatts,” she muttered to herself, wandering over to the generator. “One point two one gigawatts … Here we go.” She double-pumped her fingers, pressed her palm to the flat casing of the diesel generator parked on bricks by the wall. “First you get sentimental over Gibson’s kid, now you do this.” Quickly she pulled off an access panel, hoped for the best, and kicked it off. “You’re too soft for this, Starr. I should have chosen someone else.” The generator sparked to life with a furious complaint, shuddering violently. Closing the hatch muffled the sound quite well.

  She moved back to the laptop and tried not think about having just buried someone alive at the end of the world. “One point…” Oh God. “… twenty-one gigawatts…”

  She had a choice.

  “You’re weak, Starr.” Her voice resonated briefly, died suddenly, in stasis. “Go back.”

  Events can’t be changed. We’re slaves to cause and effect. Paul Serene lives. Paul Serene founds Monarch. Paul Serene causes the Fracture. You’re weak. You’re weak. You’ve fucked up. “I’ve got to kill him.” But you can’t kill him. “I’ve got to kill him.” It’s not possible.

  “You told me your name was Beth.”

  In the reflection of the laptop’s screen she saw him: at the foot of the ladder, daylit.

  She wasn’t afraid. She was ashamed. “Paul.”

  She double-pumped her fingers, brought the terminal online, remembered she’d already done that.

  “You know who I am,” he said.

  “I know you’re a good person, and a sweet kid.” Locked it in. “And I know that you’d never want to hurt anyone.”

  You’re the reason I am who I am. My whole life was authored by yours.

  He was bare chested, in his worn-out jeans, standing at the foot of the ladder … a look of utter betrayal on his face.

  “You weren’t asleep,” she said.

  “Martin Hatch told me our machine was the only one. No previous working prototypes.” He took a few hesitant barefoot steps toward her, through the dust-mote tunnel she had carved out of the basement air. “You were going to kill me?”