by Cam Rogers
Paul addressed the guy with the gym bag, now gratefully relaxing against the hood of Beth’s car parked between the buildings some fifty feet away. “Well done. You’re safe now. Is that it, in the bag?”
The man was nodding, loose-jointed with relief. “Yes sir, yes it is. Thank you.”
Past the security team, closer to Will’s workshop, Jack got to his feet. The scene filled itself in: the security team covering him. Beyond them Paul, with Beth’s carbine. Beyond Paul, Beth laid out flat, clutching her head. Past her, leaning against the car, the tech. At the tech’s feet, the gym bag containing the Countermeasure.
Paul gestured to the waiting vehicle. “All right, technician. Get yourself to—”
Like a living thing the gym bag at the technician’s feet leaped off the ground—the bag disintegrating instantly—and all the light in Heaven spilled out.
The self-replenishing source within the battered Countermeasure hosed out a density of chronon particles orders of magnitude greater than the environmental baseline. The technician—engulfed by a roiling, expanding distortion field—was rapidly reinvented by a flickering, shifting phage that swept from his center of mass toward his extremities, and raced upward toward his mind.
Eyes open, terrified and ignorant, he felt all that he was being replaced a thousand times over.
Paul shouldered Beth’s carbine and shot the doomed tech through the head.
The tech’s sickness vanished upon death, and he slid to the concrete fully human.
Silhouetted against the crazed, strobing light, Paul let the weapon slip from slack fingers. Caught within the Countermeasure’s ongoing blast, the left side of Paul’s body was already changing. His hand was reskinned by the same iridescent transformation that had claimed the doomed technician. Both terrified and entranced, Paul saw his flesh alternate between versions of itself, the shining facets of the sickness like shifting windows on to alternate versions of his own flesh, nothing constant, always changing, always different. The change crept toward his shoulder, inch by slow inch, accelerating as Paul’s cells absorbed more and more of what the Countermeasure threw out.
The roar of approaching trucks came to them from blocks away, echoing off the closely packed buildings: Monarch backup, responding to the emergency.
Jack was on his feet. Beth too. The light was blinding.
Beth received the worst of the blast. She had been caught between the tech and Paul, much closer to the epicenter, twenty feet from the Countermeasure. She faced Jack, her head a silhouette against that killing light, one transformed eye shining like a dying star. Her teeth, clenched against pain, were backlit.
The backup squads arrived as the warehouses and Beth’s car met alternate versions of themselves: fading in, falling apart, building up, redesigning, self-defacing, flashing clean. The first security team stood unmoving, trembling, hypnotized by the vision.
The slowly expanding radius of oversaturation showed catalogs of could-have-been. The sections of the warehouses caught in the blast were raw brick, then pristine white, then tagged with gang symbols, then gone entirely, then overgrown and abandoned. One second they were made of corrugated iron, the next they were a parking lot, followed by an outdoor café. The car changed models and colors. Sometimes it wasn’t a car, other times it was a Bronco, or gone, or riddled with bullets, or a motorcycle, or a solar-powered three-wheeled covered trike the likes of which Jack had never seen. The ground itself changed, rioting and fighting with versions of itself: concrete, blacktop, overgrown, lawn, mud …
Brakes were hit as the driver of the first backup truck spotted the anomaly, the three-truck convoy skidding to a halt outside the oversaturation’s radius. Armed men disgorged from the vehicles without order. Nobody advanced. No one wanted to get close. None of them understood what they were seeing.
Beth saw Jack. He was running to her. She brought both her hands up, intersected. T for Time-Out. Think Before You Act.
There was nothing he could do.
“Go.” Her throat, the interior of her mouth, luminesced, flickered, snapped.
Then she turned and walked toward the mad light.
“Beth!”
She didn’t look back. Her rescue rig sparked and crazed as it shielded her against the madness. Connections shorted out, sparked, burst into flame at elbow and shoulder. But it was enough to keep her going, to get her closer to the Countermeasure before the change took her completely.
Discordant energy arced and flailed from vehicles and brickwork. Men stumbled backward, scrambling like scalded cats from flickering arms of violent energy that leaped and bounced from one surface to another.
The space between the warehouses had become a storm; a force Beth had to push against, and through. It cost her to do it, as every cell in her body was forcefully introduced to its countless others. Her brain revolted. She understood in moments what it was like to be a thousand people all at once. A thousand simultaneous versions of herself. She saw infinite lives running parallel to each other; infinite futures in this life branching away from that moment. She held herself together, in this life, to finish what she had come here to do—to retrieve the Countermeasure, intact. She had given too much, lived too long, to be swept away by a torrent of potential and chaos before she had sung her final note.
She crouched before that fount of mad energy, and plunged her flickering, shifting hands—hands she didn’t recognize—into the roiling light.
The Countermeasure was in there, a thrashing, discordant sun. It plunged tendrils into her body and mind, showing her infinite possibilities, distracting her from the most important of all tasks, unmaking her capacity to be singular, introducing her to flavors of agony few people had ever known. Her rescue rig shorted out completely. Her hair caught fire, a corona around her head.
Sliding and fumbling across the surface of the Countermeasure, she was able to locate the damaged access panel. Using hands that were in the process of ceaseless reinvention, faster than she could process the changes, and with what remained of her strength and control, she forced the tiny hatch back into place, hoping against hope it would be enough.
It was.
The blinding glare vanished as Beth toppled to her side, the hot, heavy weight of the Countermeasure clutched to her chest.
“Beth…” Jack vaulted forward. The nearest security specialist fired his Taser. Jack tensed, and dropped like a side of beef.
Beth lay on her back, blue morning sky broken and wrong-colored in her new, changed, starlight eye. So many versions of her wanted to be known inside that singular body. So many lives. An infinity of other nows and heres; lives where she and Jack had walked away from this. Where this had never happened.
Men gathered, carefully, nervously, at the corners of her vision. She saw the surviving technician reach down to take the Countermeasure from her, eyes full of fear and misery.
She heard Paul howl. He staggered into view above her, all messed up, his arm and the side of his body a flashing, fractal mess. “What have you done to me?”
An aftershock pulsed. The world reinvented shockingly as something else, something alien, for just a moment. Returned to normal.
The technician took her prize and ran toward a waiting security team. The Countermeasure was gone, and with it any hope of repairing the M-J field.
One of the security team ventured to speak. “Sir, we should get you to a doctor immediately.”
Paul ignored him, fell to his knees, got in her face, screamed again, “What have you done to me?”
Beth smiled, her teeth backlit, her left eye going nova. “Oh buddy,” she said, with many, many soft voices. “I have not yet begun to fuck with you.” She unzipped her jacket, with a strange ping-snap sound, showing Paul what she carried beneath: five one-pound bars of C-4 wrapped in Gorilla Tape, attached by nine inches of rubberized fuse to an M60 igniter. “This is just the load screen.”
The fuse popped and hissed, throwing smoke in Paul’s eyes.
So many fu
tures ran to meet Beth, so many possibilities revealed themselves to her starlight eye. So many Jacks.
Jack ordered misfiring limbs to action, hauled himself off the ground. One of the security grunts had Tasered him in front of their vehicle, and Beth was too far away to reach. His heart died the moment he realized he had failed her again.
Paul leaped back, folded into a moment, and fled. His men were less fortunate.
One future in particular shone brightest, clearest.
Beth whipped her head to look at Jack, one last time. “Hey, Trouble? Trust the villain.”
The first rule of a good disappearance: leave nothing behind.
“Beth!”
Supernova.
The C-4 kicked off. The three men gathered about her had no chance. The corners of both warehouses blew inward, top levels collapsing into lower. Beth’s car bucked upward, the hood blown off, tires blown out, a ton of brickwork sloughing down onto it from both sides. Every window for a block blew out. The soldiers milling about thirty feet away went blind, deaf, and were blown off their feet. The technician, running for the third unit, tumbled to the ground, clutching the Countermeasure—then got up and kept running. Debris rained down for two blocks. Somewhere in the docklands a car alarm started wailing. The air was choked with atomized dust and brickwork.
Jack lowered his arm from his face, his ears ringing. Beth was gone. The men who had gathered around her were gone. The second unit were laid out: two of them clutching their heads and screaming, eyes destroyed, eardrums burst. The remaining three were motionless. The third unit had fled for the cover of their vehicles, sheltering behind their window-smashed truck.
Clouds of dark orange haze rolled across the scene, obscuring and revealing. Here men screamed, then they were gone. There bricks tumbled from the smashed face of a warehouse … and were taken away.
No sound, save the ringing in Jack’s ears.
A dust-curtain breathed aside and there stood Paul Serene, some fifty feet away, his arm a shifting, sliding, starlight mess, his face fixed in a caught-red-handed little-boy expression of “what have I done?”
The clouds froze. Jack and Paul looked at each other—fate affording them privacy in this final moment. Jack raised his handgun, took his time centering the sights on Paul’s head. Paul didn’t move, didn’t fight it. Jack’s hand was as unsteady as it had ever been, muscles and nerves gone slack from shock. He could barely keep the gun raised. After a few seconds he couldn’t.
Paul seemed almost disappointed.
In one move the gun came up, level and braced.
On the other side of the iron sights, Paul’s expression melted into one of mortal fear. He had no time to escape.
Fifteen feet behind Jack a thousand roars and screams folded into one. It should have been bass enough to rattle Jack’s ribs, shrill enough to pain his ears. But the only place it resonated was within his mind. He turned to face the source of the discord and saw a thing that, surely, represented the final stage of Paul’s sickness: humanoid, of uncertain profile, a stumbling, heavyset sketch of flashing, fractal insanity.
It moved toward Jack, raising one arm as it did so, to reveal the well of starlight in its palm … crowned by a row of fingers sharp and phasing.
So this was where it ended, then. But he wasn’t letting Paul off the hook. Jack decided to take one last shot at changing the past. He wheeled around, raised his pistol, centered it on Paul’s head and …
The creature’s palm swept in from Jack’s left and took him by the face.
20
In that place of violent, chaotic energy—in a moment suspended in time—the shining hand descended on Jack, and his world had exploded in pain.
He was a million Jacks, and none. He was pulled a million ways down a million branching paths of causality … but guided firmly down one.
Monday, 10 October 2016. 12:03 A.M. Two hours, relative, after Jack traveled to 2010.
Jack reassembled from nothing and crashed steaming, wet, and gasping, onto the ramp of Will’s machine. His handgun reconstituted itself from nothing and hit the ramp with a clang. He opened his mouth and drew breath as if for the first time.
The room spun and veered. He was in the swimming hall. It was night; no light through the grimy upper windows. The lights that still worked were on. The tang of cordite lingered in the air, still fresh from the gunfight with Gibson and Chronon-1. It was a couple of hours after he had gone through Will’s machine, back to July 4, 2010.
The ghosts of a thousand lives faded from his mind, coalescing into one. This one. The life where Beth was dead.
A sound came from his throat, from his chest, long and broken.
He heard voices. Sirens. He heard fear and panic. He understood that what he was hearing was the news.
He rolled onto his back, angled his head, saw two pairs of legs at the end of the ramp. High-tops. Angled up.
Riverport Newshour was exclaiming from its monitor. Lots of reds and blues and the occasional reporter snapping off bullet points, while clearly wondering if their job was worth what they were going through.
Jack’s eyes traveled up the legs.
“Mother of crap,” Nick said, softly. “You came outta nowhere.”
Beth was dead. The world outside was going mad, and he felt nothing for it. Beth was dead.
Sofia Amaral was seated in a wheeled office chair, before the workbench, still alive.
His entire body felt like a single deep bruise. Nick tried to help Jack up, was batted away. Getting up hurt Jack like breaking bones. He needed it. It felt like something.
“Leave me alone.”
Sofia wasn’t looking well. Her coat was draped over her shoulders, her right arm bandaged with what Jack now recognized as Nick’s shredded shirt. Nick was bare-chested beneath his Raptors jacket.
“She wouldn’t leave,” Nick said. “Said you might need her.”
“I can speak for myself,” she said, her voice faint, like wind over sand.
Sofia’s olive skin had gone flat and damp and pale. When she spoke her voice was thin, tired. “Tell me how you did that. How you … reconstituted from nothing.” She was more focused than her appearance suggested.
“Something grabbed me.”
“Describe it.”
Jack did.
“A Shifter. The Shifter, if it held a light in its hand the way you describe. That particular creature has been stalking Paul Serene for years. It features prominently in his nightmares, of which he has many.”
“I’ve never seen them do anything but kill people.”
“And I’ve never seen one tunnel a human being through time. Yet here you are.” Ever the scientist, she asked, “What was it like? The journey?”
“I … remember remembering. Lives I’ve never lived.”
“As Jack Joyce?”
Jack nodded. “I’d forget one as I remembered another. It felt like that happened … a thousand times? More?” He shook his head. “I can’t remember.”
“Alternate versions of you, living alternate lives in alternate timelines.”
“The creature pushed me away from every other path. Right back here.”
“The Shifter mimicked the process that takes place within the Promenade, and did so perfectly … but completely unassisted. The odds of your winding up at this place, at this moment, in this timeline, are so incalculably small—”
“—that it’s basically impossible. It wanted me here.”
“That would be a logical conclusion, but the question is why. If we accept that these creatures are capable of rationality, forethought, and strategy, I mean.”
“This one always seemed pretty measured.”
“The one Shifter Monarch possessed spent its days trying to kill us. It was rarely calm, unless left utterly alone within a stutter of substantial size. I never saw anything that suggested intelligence. I knew the man that creature used to be. Dr. Kim prized his mind above all. If he couldn’t hold on to even a scrap of who he was �
� I don’t imagine anyone could.”
Jack crouched, retrieved his handgun from the ramp. Motioned to Sofia’s injury. “No hospital was a stupid idea, Doctor.”
She gestured to the screen. In a couple of minutes Jack learned that a container ship had severed one of Riverport’s two major bridges, half the city had lost power, communications outages were being reported across the state, traffic accidents had reached pandemic levels and then ceased entirely, several buildings were on fire, at least one helicopter had crashed (into a church), casualties were being estimated in the thousands, the airport and bus terminals were choked, half the cops had walked off the job and as such the mayor had—within minutes—invoked martial law and outsourced peacekeeping to Monarch.
Nick sighed. “Sofia’s been saying it’s too dangerous to move, I’ve been saying she’s in a world of trouble if we don’t.”
“This has been a night for miracles. Perhaps I’ll get one of my own.” She nodded toward the machine, or more specifically the space from which Jack had appeared. “So here you are. Did you find the Countermeasure?”
Jack shook his head. “Monarch was there.”
Her face sank. “And Beth…?”
Jack didn’t answer.
Nick felt behind himself, found a chair, sat. Didn’t say anything either.
Sofia suddenly looked ten years older. “Then there is nothing to stop Monarch.”
Jack shook his head. “Monarch stole the Countermeasure. They still have it. Built Project Lifeboat around it.”
Sofia sat forward. “I was told Dr. Kim created the Regulator. It was his great legacy. You’re saying the Regulator is the Countermeasure?”
“My brother built it, in a workshop that’s now what you people think of as Ground Zero. The casing cracked, Paul got a strong dose and Beth…”
Sofia slumped backward. “I’m such a fool. That’s why Kim was never able to properly harness … he never really understood what … oh my God. I’m such a fool. It was all Dr. Joyce’s work. All of it.”