by Cam Rogers
She’d only ever heard stories about the powers Paul Serene was meant to have. If Jack’s fumbling around was a comparison, this may not end well for her.
She reminded herself: you can’t die. Not yet. By the same rule Paul couldn’t either. So where did this leave them?
Somewhere beyond the walls, Shifters howled.
Paul’s limbs locked, his breathing caught in his thin chest.
“Why do they make that sound?” she asked.
“We hurt them.…” He choked on the words, swallowed. “Causality … potential … possibility … it all fountains off living people. It’s excruciating to Shifters.”
“That’s why they don’t bother the people frozen outside.”
“It’s why they kill,” Paul snapped. “To take you from being anything to being a thing.” His eyes settled on the machine. “Is this why they wouldn’t let me stay in the Tower?”
So that part of his story was true?
Paul’s eyes fell on the machine. “Am I supposed to go through that? Does it work?”
She felt the weight of it at her back, like a threat. “Paul. You have to be brave enough for an entire world here, man.”
He wasn’t listening, walking closer, halfway to her now. “What does that mean?”
“You know what happens if you leave here.” Paul wasn’t listening. He moved closer still, eagerly, his eyes tracing from the machine to the generator, back to the laptop. “Paul, back up.”
“Fundamentally, it’s almost identical to our model.”
Shifter shrieks shotgunned through her every cell. Beth and Paul shocked away from the direction of the sound, the front door, the world outside.
He spun on her, eyes bracketing nothing but animal violence. “Get out of my way.”
Six months learning to speed-draw paid off in that moment, side-drawing from inside her jacket and locking him square … but only for a moment. Paul vanished, her fingers wrenched, and the weapon swept away. She cried out in pain, clutching her hand.
He was at the laptop, her gun next to the keyboard. The dates were already changed.
She rushed him from behind, pointlessly. He was gone before she even got close.
As her world vanished in a blast of pain and light her inner ear lost all sense of vertical and horizontal. A bed of cold stone crashed into her spine, and the only sensible thing that penetrated her undoing was something someone had told her a long time ago in Arizona: “It’s the hits you don’t see coming that get you.”
She was bone and pain, a small mess of connections and associations that didn’t fit together. Something pneumatic engaged, and she heard something vent with a deep hiss. She blood-felt the discordant rage of Shifters, skipping and phasing toward them from the outside world, homing in faster as their excruciation escalated.
Paul was talking to her, panicked, moving about. He stepped over her legs to get to the laptop. “… this’ll never happen. You’ll be someone else. I’ll be someone else. I’ll never, never…”
The shattering cries of Shifters had become deafening.
“Paul…” She almost drowned on his name. Rolling sideways was like having her head stepped on. She cough-cleared her mouth of blood, watched sprayed droplets catch on suspended dust particles. Her voice was a croak. “Change is impossible—”
“It’s a time machine, you idiot! I helped build this thing!” He was white with fear.
“No…” Her hands pressed to the stone floor, trying to keep her gorge down. “You didn’t.”
He was moving again, backing for the entry ramp.
“I know the science. If we made this happen we can … I can unmake this.”
She wasn’t having this conversation again. Her hand slapped down onto the benchtop, grasped for the gun. It wasn’t there.
Paul had it. He pointed it at her. His voice was fragile. “Please don’t.” He had never hurt anyone before. He had never hit a woman. Now he had a gun pointed at one. She could see Paul was collapsing from the inside, knowing already what he was becoming.
He wasn’t looking at her, though.
Roiling humanoid non-shapes, barely coherent, stood at the far end of the basement. Snapping. Jigging. Agonized.
The gun wavered in Paul’s hand. “Please … don’t let them get me.”
She laughed. It hurt. “You can’t go back, Paul. You can’t change things.” She pointed to the laptop. “Because you haven’t primed the machine.”
Onscreen an amber text box requested: ACTIVATE?
Shifters rounded in their direction, caught sight of their infinite potentials, their fountaining causality. Their hatred and madness hit them like a physical thing.
Metal screeched as the corridor’s locking mechanism cycled. The airlock seal cracked, the lock auto-spinning as atmosphere vented and external hydraulics levered the door aside.
With a cry of relief Paul spun for his escape.
Waiting inside was the biggest Shifter either of them had ever seen: broad across distorted shoulders, its thrashing head snaking three ways through space. One distorted flashing shadow of a paw grabbed the lip of the airlock, levering itself forward as its second hand reached out, into the room, for Paul’s face.
The center of that hand shone with light.
Backing away Paul let it all go and screamed—because it was going to be the last thing he would ever do.
The Shifters rushed forward, half their frames missing as they flick-vaulted through space, over workbenches.
Beth hit ACTIVATE.
The chronon distortion wave kicked off the Promenade, hit the Shifters, and for a moment—as when Paul had saved Beth from them a few hours ago—they vanished.
It was all Paul needed. He was gone, in a blink, through the airlock. Beth swore and vaulted after him. She barreled up the two-step ladder and into the airlock as the distortion wave subsided and the Shifters phased back in. The big Shifter, Shining Palm, half out the airlock door, had time to roar once before Beth was through the right-hand door behind it. It locked behind her and …
Silence.
As fast as she could she ran—not to 2010, but toward the date Paul had set.
She ran to 1999.
18
Sunday, 28 February 1999. 8:53 P.M. Riverport, Massachusetts.
William Joyce, twenty years old, finished his celebratory cocoa, rinsed the ceramic Riverport Raptors mug, and returned it to the cupboard above the sink. The house was dark, silent. He had taken Jack, his younger brother, over to the house of the Serene family. He’d be staying for the night.
Tonight solitude was imperative. Tonight Will would undertake a journey of great risk. One he had worked toward since he was a boy of fifteen. Utilizing grant money, academic connections, and a falsified passport he had secured through—of all places—a local biker bar, William Joyce had financed the construction of a device that learned men and women many years his senior had laughed off as ridiculous, impossible.
Screw those guys.
William zipped his jumpsuit to the neck, ensured his canvas utility belt was securely fastened. Clipped to it was everything a chrononaut might possibly need: penlight, cell phone, a roll of elastic tubing, alligator clips, pens, waterproof notebook, a digital multilanguage translator he had bought from a magazine, a canvas pouch containing aspirin and iodine and antimalaria medication. Around his neck were binoculars and a Brownie camera. Beneath the jumpsuit was a secondhand bulletproof vest.
The pack on the kitchen table contained a change of clothes, a bottle of water, three cans of spiced ham, seven novels, an edition of that day’s New York Times, and an untested chronon storage device—painstakingly charged over a period of years that he was fairly sure had been adequately shielded.
A note rested on the kitchen table beneath a thin vase. It read:
Dear Reader,
If you have found this letter, then I am gone. Grieve not for me, but make proper use of the gift I have left mankind. In the old barn, sitting stately outside the c
asement of this very kitchen, is a time machine.
Yes! You read that correctly! A time machine!
I bequeath now to the government of the United States, who are best equipped to plumb the secrets and discoveries I have made, catalogued extensively in the notes I have left behind, the right to license my work for the betterment of mankind. I leave the negotiations to Mrs. Serene of 94 Chestnut Avenue, who has more experience in these things than I.
As to my brother, Jack, I bequeath to him all the proceeds and royalties from all goods and services based upon my research, discoveries, inventions, and intellectual property. Additionally, this shall cover all costs of his being cared for by the Serene family of 94 Chestnut Avenue, as they continue to foster and care for him up until the age of 21.
All I ask is that great care be taken with the Chronon Core™ for as long as it remains active and connected to my beautiful Promenade™. I may yet—someday—return.
Look for me in the year 2019.
Ad futura, ad astra.
—Dr. William Joyce (qual. pending)
William read the note one more time, nodded with satisfaction, hoisted his travel pack, and marched for the barn—stopping only for one last backward glance. How he wished his parents had lived to see this moment.
He opened the front door and, hunching against the icy winter air, closed that chapter of his life with the thunk of a lock.
An inch and a half of snow had fallen the night before, and several inches that month. William was pleased that he had invested his few remaining dollars in the sturdy utility boots he had found at the thrift store on River Street. They kept the moisture out well, the snow crunching satisfyingly beneath their worn tread. Warm light fell in subtly fanning lines from between the boards of the barn across the garden: amber illumination sparkling white, glowing moonlight blue. With shaking hands, he unclipped his key rings and snapped loose the three padlocked chains from the flimsy barn door. Gravity snaked them eagerly through their iron loops, sending them clinking heavily into the freshly packed snow.
Stepping into his barn laboratory he pulled the door closed behind him. It was only a few degrees warmer inside, made so by the grumbling generator and the ambient temperature of his beautiful Promenade and its stout, multifaceted heart.
William surveyed his kingdom, nodding as he found each essential piece as it should be. The generator: jouncing and thrumming. The chronon capacitor: running a little hot, but the charge at 100 percent. The departure station, created from a dozen PCs running in tandem, the date prominently onscreen in satisfyingly retro font: November 1, 2019. The systems monitoring station: online, all gauges reading nominal. That would change once his creation was brought to life. Which left the core.
The core was offline. Utilizing a 10,000-terahertz laser, small quantities of multiple isotopes, a small reaction chamber within a nuclear research lab at a South American university, a homemade carbon launcher, and a supercomputer, William had fabricated within a magnetically sealed geometric sphere one stable and relatively safe microscopic black hole.
That’s what was resting at the center of the machine, within that sphere, waiting to be brought online.
No time like the present.
He crossed to systems monitoring. A socket rested at the center of every facet of the core’s geometric casing. Resting half-inserted into each socket was a fat eight-inch connector. Running from each connector was a wide-gauge length of cabling, connecting directly to one segment of the Promenade.
Triple-checking all settings and conditions, William deemed all things to be optimal. Five years, great risk, and all of his grant money and professional earnings had gone toward this: his moment of truth.
“Make it so.”
He clicked a single key. Masses of black cabling jumping once as electromagnets charged and plugs slammed into sockets. Will’s eyes flicked from the core, down to the diagnostics screen, and back to the core.
A bass thump kicked pleasingly through his ribs as a single distortion wave pulsed off the Promenade. Electricity plugs sparked and burned out. Lightbulbs exploded, dropping the barn into freezing half-light. The generator screamed and black smoke poured from all the wrong places. Will’s eyes scanned information feverishly as it poured down the line, filling pulsing onscreen gauges, numerals skittering as they extended.
The Promenade lit up from within, a solid bar of white light blasting thickly from the airlock, through winter air grown pungent with diesel fumes and burning insulation. Diagnostics informed him that the Promenade had flooded itself, momentarily, with chronon particles. That wasn’t meant to happen. Not yet. He hadn’t yet primed the Promenade for departure.
AIRLOCK: DISENGAGING.
Deadbolts thunked back within the Promenade’s housing. Chronon levels were now at normal levels within. Hydraulics engaged. Atmosphere vented.
William forgot the diagnostics. He stepped away from the bench to stand before the airlock.
The hatch levered aside, and someone appeared inside the Promenade’s airlock, lurching into sight from the left. A visitor?
The translator! He fumbled on his utility belt. He may need the translator.…
“Wel-welcome, traveler,” William said, stammering. “Damn it. I am—”
What the stranger had to say needed no translation. From the ramp of the airlock the figure raised one arm and shot William in the head.
* * *
Paul popped into existence the second Beth stepped out of the corridor, into the airlock. She caught him leaning heavily on the door, pointing the gun he had stolen from her at whatever was outside the machine.
She didn’t stop to think but barreled right into the little fucker, snapping one elbow into the side of his head. Paul’s skull rebounded off the heavy iron door frame. The bounceback pitched him slack-bodied down the exit ramp.
It’s the hits you don’t see coming that get you.
She swept up the sidearm as it hit the ground and came up level with Paul’s head.
Paul’s face was a mess of tears as he rose weakly up off his knees. “No.” He put his hands up. “Please.” Backed away, half-naked, stumbling. “No. No no…”
Oh fucking hell. She gritted her teeth. Steadied her arm. “Shut up.”
“Please. Please … please … no … no.”
It was freezing but Beth felt nothing but sick. “Stop saying that. Shut up.” Their frantic breaths misted in clouds before them. She advanced, he backed away—off the ramp, onto a dirt floor.
She recognized this place. They were in the Joyce barn; the same barn in which she’d have her altercation with Gibson seventeen years from now.
There was a body on the floor, dressed like a cut-price Ghostbuster. It was Jack’s brother, Will.
Paul chose that moment to turn and run.
“Stop!”
She fired. The round caught him above the hip, splashed right through him, impact turning him around. He was looking at her as he stumbled backward to one knee, tears streaking his quivering face. Staring down at himself in disbelief, seeing what had been done to him, he screamed in a ruined voice wet with despair. Even then he was still trying to get to his feet, still trying to get away.
Paul looked back up at her, as Beth shut her eyes and fired again.
It took him through the shoulder, wrenching him around and down again. He coughed, scrambled weakly, trying to buy a few inches closer to an escape from this nightmare.
“Don’t,” Beth said, trying to see clearly.
She shuddered, trading a little piece of herself to aim at the back of Paul’s head.
Then, just like that, he was gone—the barn door smashing wide open in his wake and all the cold in the world rushing in.
Shock.
He was gone. Paul Serene was out there, in the world. Loose.
“Fuck!”
She flew to the door, liking her chances of being able to find him quick in the snow. The tracks were there all right, stretching all the way to the woods. Pa
ul had covered hundreds of feet in no time. In this weather, wearing nothing but jeans, she wanted to believe he wouldn’t make it.
She needed confirmation. She needed a body.
The one on the floor behind her groaned. Will was alive.
Paul was out there, but Will was in here—wounded.
She couldn’t give chase, so she just screamed at the trees. Her own rage echoed back twice. Seconds later she was at Will’s side, telling him to remain still. Will’s response was to shout something incomprehensible and utterly fail to follow instructions.
“Calm down!”
Will froze. She could see the livid tear across the left side of his skull, the flowered bruise, the free-flowing blood.
“I didn’t do this to you. That was—”
“Chut!” Will barked. “Nothing!”
“What?”
“Don’t! Just…!” He panted, eyes ranging back and forth across nothing in particular. “Have I been shot?”
“Yes.”
Will fainted.
If she was honest with herself she was tempted to leave him there. The adrenaline was draining and a freezing cold was working its way to her bones. He had a canteen clipped to an overloaded belt. She unscrewed it, poured ice water across her fingers, and flicked it at his face. Will snapped to, barking.
“Agh! Agh!”
“You were grazed, that’s all. But you need to get to a hospital.”
“Stop,” he snapped, totally confused. “Talking.” Then: “Don’t tell me any—”
“Don’t tell you anything about the future, got it, I saw the same movie. Can you stand?”
That took the wind out of his sails, and Beth felt a little bad about it. She imagined he might have been preparing that speech for years. He righted himself, got to his feet. “I should have expected this. Why didn’t I expect this?”
“Getting shot?”
Will looked pale, like he might throw up. “Please stop saying that. It’s very … just, please stop saying that.” He took a couple of steadying breaths. “Visitors. I should have expected it once I activated the core. It stands to reason that future users would want to go back as far as they could.”