by Cam Rogers
Beth looked around. “Looks like it’s just us, though.”
“Yes,” Will said. “My thoughts on that are undecided.”
“Will,” she said, hugging herself. “I need to get out of this cold. And … there are some things you need to know. That’s just how it is.”
“Wait,” he said. “Just … wait. What do I call you? And, please, no real names. I don’t want to know anything about you.”
Beth remembered Will’s video message from the swimming pool. The vast universe felt suddenly like a small, tightly-arranged room with everything in its place. They had always been in their place.
“September,” she said, feeling very far from home. “Call me September.”
Sunday, 28 February 1999. 9:49 P.M. Riverport, Massachusetts. Forty-six minutes later.
The kitchen table was an oasis of light. Beth’s mug was empty; William had no interest in his tea. She was silent as he processed all that she had told him.
He hadn’t looked at her for twenty minutes, eyes scanning left and right, processing.
Eventually she broke the quiet by asking if he understood what had to be done.
“You will not find his body,” Will said. “The man you pursued here.”
“I know.”
The index and middle fingers of Will’s hands wiggled nervously. Processing. “All the events of the future world of which you are a citizen will come to pass. In a sense they have already happened, and cannot be avoided or undone. You must understand that, September.”
“Dr. Joyce, you know all you need to know: a machine based on your design damages the M-J field. We need to repair the field. Can you design something that we can use, in my time, to repair it?”
“It will take ten years.”
“2009. Perfect. I’ll jump ahead ten years, meet you and…”
Will was shaking his head. “It took five years for the Promenade to accumulate enough of a chronon charge for one journey, and your arrival depleted most of that.”
Beth put her mug down, carefully. “You haven’t perfected chronon aggregation.”
“I’ve barely begun. Most of my funds went into the creation of the machine’s core.”
She felt panic rise. She didn’t like it. She barely recognized it.
She took the fear and compartmentalized it. Moved on.
“Tell me how we’re going to fix the fracture in the M-J field.”
“It will be a broad-spectrum solution—a carpet bombing—but it’s the best I can do with the resources available. It will be my life’s work. It’s also a long shot.”
“When can you start?”
He still hadn’t looked at her, his eyes still ranging over nothing in particular. “I started twenty minutes ago.”
Wednesday, 24 May 2000. 6:11 P.M. Fifteen months, twenty-five days after time core activation.
Point of view tilts sharply up, then down, then centers. Camera appears to be positioned on a writing desk. Location appears to be an attic—mostly empty.
William Joyce enters frame, sits, adjusts his glasses.
“I was averaging ten entries per three-hour videotape, resulting in a collection of over sixty cassettes. It became apparent to me after a … passionate … entreaty from my visitor that this posed a significant security risk. As you can tell from the empty bookshelves behind me that collection has now been sanitized. I will be restricting myself to a single videotape for the purposes of ordering my thoughts henceforth.” He gathers his thoughts. “I…”
Joyce reaches off-camera, retrieves a mug, drinks from it, winces.
“I ran the numbers again today. My initial ten-year projection holds firm, but the cost has not—as expected. I … have had to take the extraordinary measure of…” His voice fails, momentarily. “Without funds the Countermeasure I am creating cannot be completed. It follows, then, that if I fail in this task the universe itself will…” He becomes angry at himself. “Today I extinguished my parents, with the stroke of a pen, by taking what money they had set aside for my younger brother and funneling it toward my work. I took their final gift to Jack, the boy who is all that remains of my family … to correct my mistake.” He hit himself, in the chest, hard. “William Joyce! William Joyce … killed … everyone.” William’s formerly guileless expression has flushed, teeth locked. “I am the terrible thing at the end of the world. The figure poets and mystics foretold. And it is not great. It is not proud. It is not mighty.” He howls and then claps his hand over his mouth—as if afraid of being discovered. He listens, hears nothing, resumes in a lowered voice—trembling. “Buffoon. Simpleton. Idiot. I did not stride toward Armageddon, I stepped in it—like shit in the street. How does a person survive this kind of self-knowledge? I killed the universe. I killed … everything. It is destroying me … and I can tell no one. No one.”
He drains the mug. “I will require materials similar to those I used in the initial construction of the time core—and then some. I am tempted to neutralize the core I have but the sick truth of it is I need a working model for reference and observations. At present I believe I can refine my work on the chronon aggregator, allowing for the devising of a kind of … it’s a stupid term but ‘chronon bomb.’ ‘Bomb’ in the sense of an intense, localized hypersaturation of chronon energy calibrated to trigger particle propagation at a rate faster than I would expect an M-J fracture to foster dissipation. However, more research needs to be done in a range of areas—I can’t just make the fucking thing go boom. Propagation is one thing, but the damage to the field is another. If the device doesn’t attend to the problem at the very heart of the disaster—then causality will be left to bleed out once more. At best.”
He reaches for his mug, finds it empty, sets it down. Looks off camera. “She remains in the woods, in the shelter she built for herself. Residing in the town isn’t possible as she has no paperwork and can’t very well take a job. She’s let her appearance go, looking very little like the woman who stepped off the Promenade last year, and she avoids Jack like he’s contagious. And his little friend Paul. If I’m honest I fear we’re both losing our minds.”
Wednesday, 16 August 2000. 7:00 P.M. Riverport, Massachusetts. Seventeen months, seventeen days after time core activation.
She had to wait until spring before starting work on the shelter. Before then she had slept in the barn. Staying in the house was not an option. Things were complicated enough as it was without letting young Jack see her before he was due to actually meet her as Zed in ten years’ time. The first time she caught a glimpse of him from the barn, two feet shorter and seventeen years younger, was like vertigo. And anyway, Will wanted to limit contact with her for fear of learning more about the future than he needed. That was fine by her. So she got some bedding and set it up in the control room in the barn. The ground was freezing, but it was a small room, easy to warm with a space heater.
So she had killed time, watched actual music videos on MTV, and managed to avoid the final reactions to Clinton being acquitted, all while being quietly grateful that she wouldn’t have to witness and live through everything that was coming after in New York the following year. She had always known she would be here, and had always imagined the experience to be … cute? Fun? Instead, interacting with so many things that she knew to be dead—the news, the culture, a CRT TV, dial phones, newspapers, the music, the lingo—left her feeling ghostly.
Her time here had ended long ago. She didn’t belong.
Both she and Will agreed that once a potential future was witnessed that future then became inevitable. With that in mind she supposed they could have spoken candidly about everything that would occur between now and 2016 … but they didn’t. It made Will exceedingly nervous and it made her homesick as hell.
Friday, 18 August 2000. 7:10 P.M. The Joyce farm.
Irene Rose had been with the company for almost ten years. Working under Randall Gibson had been some of the most fun she had ever known. He was the one who gave her the handle “IR.” As in Irene
Rose. As in infrared. As in she was very good at murder-in-the-dark.
Gibson, IR, Donny, and the other muscle were the closest thing any of them had to a family. That fit Monarch’s selection criteria for their particular role. A couple years ago, Gibson had told Irene Monarch had been trawling her background for eighteen months before she’d even heard the name “Martin Hatch.” This was when Monarch had been half the size it was in the present day. She’d been running combat operations through Iraq and Afghanistan for years when the call came in.
No family, flexible morality, battlefield experience, top third percentile success rate, psych profile configured for uncommon resilience—that was the starting criteria. What it boiled down to, really, and everyone in the family knew it, was that Hatch wanted highly skilled, mentally reinforced, intelligent, and self-aware sociopaths who were perfectly loyal to a paycheck if not a person. Loyal without fault.
Monarch had her pulled back Stateside, then kept her waiting six months. She took a job in Vegas, analyzing poststrike drone footage of funerals in Afghanistan. A big burial turnout meant the target had a lot of support, so IR spent hours and days going over hi-res RPA footage and matching attendees against available intelligence. Before she clocked out each day she filed recommendations for future targets. She hated the job. She was a doer, not a giver.
IR had trouble breathing the same air as civilians, with their dumb concerns and cartoonish ideas of masculinity. She had no idea what Gibson got out of being married to one.
She had been one week away from heading back to the Middle East when Martin Hatch had called her in personally, and flown her first class to Massachusetts.
The non-disclosure agreements surrounding her employment with Monarch had been dense, with the ink-and-paper termination clause being standard and the verbal one being quite literal.
She was cool with that. They all were.
A bunch of people just like her had been recruited, run through the program. Standard boot camp, double the pay. Pretty much nobody flaked out. The academic stuff weeded out about 30 percent. The stress tests zipped up another 50. The remaining 20 percent, herself included, had been black-bagged and shipped off to someplace anonymous. The usual shell game of trucks and planes and trucks and planes until they took the hood off and she was in the cell she’d occupy for the next six months, in between being groomed for Monarch’s fledgling Lifeboat program. That had been her first experience with laboratory-induced stutters and her rescue rig.
They started small, and brief: one cubicle, sterile, stuttered for a minute. Before long it was larger rooms, more complex environments, airborne detritus. Then came rescue scenarios, liberating frozen subjects and the like. Then came live fire, understanding how far a projectile travels and using the suit’s capabilities to best advantage against a hostile, chronon-active target.
Then came, one day, mankind’s first encounter with a Shifter—and it all went to shit. They were going to be in a sealed-and-stuttered environment for fifteen relative minutes. The environment would be in flux, posing a threat to life and limb.
The Shifter had phased in. The eager students calmly identified what they assumed was a new challenge—some engaged, others intended to evade en route to the exit zone. The blackly flickering thing had just stood there, immobile, taking a ton of punishment. IR remembered rounds pinging off it, squirreling away through space and freezing, before, finally, it activated. No, not activated: reacted. It came to life with such shocking ferocity she realized it hadn’t been patient, or biding its time: it was pain. The thing had been immobilized by the sudden, shocking agony of its arrival. It identified the operatives in the room as the sources of that pain, and it turned on them like a living thing no longer capable of reasonable thought.
It blitzed them. A combine harvester had a better grasp of foreplay. It put them down like a burning man tries to put himself out: frantically, furiously, blindly, desperately. In seconds a dozen operatives—men and women IR had come to know by name—were standing around, positioned like performance art, weapons half-lost from grips, spent shells glittering the air like rain, all of them dead before any blood could escape them.
It had been really interesting.
IR hadn’t moved from her starting position. Typically, she waited to see how the pattern of the room was going to play out before committing herself. It had paid off. Everyone else had died, she stayed put, the thing seemed to appreciate that. It stood there for minutes and minutes. So did IR—as still as she could. Finally, the thing was just gone.
Then the stutter broke and all her little friends hit the floor and started gushing blood. Ninety percent of the graduating class washed out in less than a second, leaving just her and everyone else in Gibson’s squad. The longest serving and the best. A-grade. Hatch’s favorites.
Paul Serene didn’t like Shifters. That was a well-known secret. He really didn’t like them. Tough man, but there were gaps in his armor, that’s for sure. Didn’t feel to her like he was meant for the life. But he was a big deal, a secret that had to be kept, and she liked that she and Gibson’s crew were in on that. Their little secret. She got to see the world, got presented with fun and complex tasks, and she usually got to kill someone at the end of it. She, Gibson, their family, were a big part of Monarch’s success: the strategic elimination of obstacles on the way to 2016. Paul Serene had some kind of foresight, told them who would be a problem and when … knew how things would Tetris out if a block here and there were removed. She and her crew removed those blocks. It was a great way to make a living.
And now here she was: time traveling.
IR let the airlock smooch and hiss, watched it open. She popped her head out and back, then committed to a slow pan of the barn down the barrel of her assault carbine. Clear, but the two rooms at the back were question marks.
She advanced down the ramp, carbine pressed to her shoulder, cleared both rooms: one crappy control room and the other storage for tech stuff. She let the carbine hang and turned up her left wrist. The Velcroed gauntlet had a clear window on the underside. In that window was a printed portrait of a ten-year-old kid. Jack Joyce. Target of the evening. Her orders were to kill the kid and no one else: especially not William Joyce, and especially not any other child in the house.
IR could do that. She was down with games.
She’d been given the rundown on how to operate one of these machines. Entering the control booth at the back of the barn she checked the date on the clock: Wednesday, August 16, 2000. 7:12 P.M. Neat. Weird. She unclipped one vest pouch, unwrapped a small piece of gum with one hand and her teeth, popped it in her mouth, and then reshouldered the carbine, chewing.
House.
Nice night outside. Nice and warm. About to get ugly.
Strawberry bubblegum.
Gravel drive. She progressed heel-toe, foot over foot, nice and quiet, scanning windows and doors. Got to the steps. Tested each one with her boot. Stepped over the creaky ones.
Front door unlocked. Big property like this, nice little town, traditional values. She couldn’t respect that. Nudged it open, crept on in.
Big room. Nine-to-three she clocked dining room, stairs, sofa, fireplace, kitchen entrance. Clear.
Dossier cited second floor as being where she’d find the kid’s bedroom. Stairs. Carefully as she goes.
Floorboard creaked. Spins to kitchen entrance—someone there. Finger almost hits the sweet spot and then she remembers: just the kid.
“Identify yourself.”
Female. Knife in hand. Big one.
“What’s up, IR.”
Recognition. “Wilder.” Guessing it was cool to smoke this one, but what about leaving blood all over the house? Probably not cool. Training said leave no tracks. “Outside.” Easier to conceal.
“I already fucked up one of your squad in this living room,” Beth Wilder said. “That tastefully eggshell loveseat is what saved Gibson’s life.”
“Won’t say it again.”
“H
ow many more are coming? Randall? Voss? All of them?”
Safety clicked off.
Beth sighed, understanding. “All of them. Fuck’s sake, Irene, didn’t they teach you anything about the immutability of collapsed waveforms?”
Wilder took a step for the door, complying. A nervous lick of the lips, a half glance to the stairs behind.
IR’s instincts said: target. She glanced.
There was no one on the stairs. The new information, all of a sudden, was that she couldn’t breathe. Or feel her arms. Or legs. She watched the room tilt upward and rush to smash her in the face.
The flat blade of the carving knife caught moonlight just below her chin. Wilder’s bare feet padded over to her, careful to stay out of the dark lake spreading across the boards.
One disappointed sigh. “Goddamn it, Irene. I wanted more time.”
IR spat her gum onto the wet floorboards.
And that was that.
Thursday, 17 August 2000. 3:23 P.M. Riverport, Massachusetts—Northside.
Starr Donovan walked home from school, same as every day. She didn’t much want to be there, but getting solid grades was one of the things that made her mother happy. That was pretty important these days.
She had her earphones on, the Discman looping that one Chumbawamba song. It was one of those songs that made her happy. That was pretty important as well. It got her to and from school, made sure there was a smile on her face when she walked in. She learned early that this was important as well. People reacted differently depending on what she did with her face, and how she felt seemed to affect that.
Starr’s family had lived in Riverport for two years by this time. Her folks had said Dad was moving where the work was. But almost as soon as they moved to Riverport the work dried up, the docks closed, and now Dad was away as much as he had been when they lived in Phoenix. It was cool though; if he’d been home all the time it would have felt weird.
Their home was a little two-bedroom place from the fifties, on a corner block. High wooden fence, big back garden. She had her bus pass and house key on a loop around her neck. Fishing it out she let herself in, dropped her bag by the door, closed it behind her. She fished the Discman out of her jacket pocket …