Paralysis Paradox (Time Travel Through Past Lives Adventure Series Book 1)

by Sanders, Stewart

  I watched the old men laugh and swap tales of old adventures and felt like I had been taken into a community. The community of old men and memories, I dare say! I was surprised then, when their tales came to me. Ever the more shocked that it was Adwoliu who steered.

  ‘So, young prince, tell us your tale—how did you come to be pissed in a stable with two humble old soldiers?’

  ‘You must know, Adwoliu...’ I hesitated. ‘I’m not sure my tale is old enough to be tattled about as yet.’ The wife automatically refilled my tankard. If I drank much more, I would be vomiting. These old men had stamina.

  ‘I know of this rare and honest prince from his mother,’ said Adwoliu, with a grand gesture. ‘What I do know, I cannot say, ‘cause of my oath.’

  ‘Oh come, you old sheep, that’s not fair!’ bellowed Eamon.

  ‘Not fair, Adwoliu,’ I added.

  ‘I have taken an oath—forsake it I cannot.’ Adwoliu folded his arms in front of him smugly.

  ‘Then we can all take the bloody oath or forsake it you must!’

  They looked at me strangely, not accustomed to the ‘bloody’ term, but I was trying to communicate more with intonation than words right now. The right words were hard to find. Adwoliu stumbled as he stood and swayed a little. The wife announced that she was going to bed and Eamon ordered her to top up our tankards one last time. I knew that it was not quite right, the way he spoke to her. I knew, too, that we spoke to her in the same way, but I was too drunk to be anything other than obnoxious.

  ‘You must raise your right hand,’ Adwoliu said, so I raised my right hand, ‘No, Lord, you cannot swear it—the oath would be to yourself, tis not right.’

  I stood up too and the men laughed as I swayed. ‘Exactly. You must swear this oath to me!’

  Adwoliu fell straight from standing to his knees. It must have hurt. Eamon fell off his stool and knelt beside Adwoliu. Both looking expectantly at me, as if I knew what the hell I was doing.

  ‘Adwoliu, you say the words.’

  ‘I swear by Almighty God that I shall commit no act, nor disclose information, prejudicial to the safety or interests of the crown.’

  I laughed. ‘Doesn’t that go without saying?’

  ‘I want Eamon to say them,’ Adwoliu replied, looking deadly serious for a moment.

  Eamon stumbled through the words as Adwoliu helped him prop up his right hand. I sat back down and felt myself hiccupping.

  ‘Now you can tell us what my mother said?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, she didn’t really tell me anything, just that she had some little prince she needed saving.’ Adwoliu laughed. They both laughed. I think I laughed. I knew it wasn’t actually funny, but we were too drunk to care.

  ‘Bad men came. They killed the girl I loved and took my brother,’ I said in a monotone, more to myself than this audience.

  ‘And then they stabbed him, left him for dead,’ added Adwoliu, nodding my way.

  There was a hush, before the sound of wooden beams creaking from the fire broke the atmosphere with an awkward retort.

  ‘And so I run and hide. Hardly princely is it?’ I said.

  ‘You are a boy. They fear the man you could become,’ responded Eamon, before turning to Adwoliu, ‘and Lord Henry?’

  ‘A hostage.’

  ‘Your royal guard?’

  ‘Henry and I had escaped them,’ I hesitated and lied, ‘we often did that—we went and met with old friends.’

  ‘And the cheval, she’s not from royal breeds?’

  ‘I found her, when Eleanor requested a steed for her eleven-year-old son,’ responded Adwoliu, as if apologising to this equerry for the horse he selected.

  ‘So two princes went off without guard, or horse. Whose idea was that?’ asked Eamon. Adwoliu looked at me pointedly. The old fool thought it was my idea.

  ‘My brother, Henry’s.’

  ‘I suppose you told no one about where you were headed?’

  ‘We told Robert. Henry told our tutor, Robert.’

  Eamon glugged down his mead. I supped too. I thought about the dead guards. The ones I had crept passed and thought to be sleeping.

  ‘What of Robert?’

  ‘Gone,’ replied Adwoliu.

  ‘We had crept past the guards and they had looked asleep, but were in fact poisoned.’ I added.

  ‘How many guards?’

  ‘I passed three of them, but I don’t know how many were poisoned. And Henry and I saw the knights that took him riding along...’ I stopped, not wanting to share anymore. It was surprising that despite being drugged and intoxicated; my mind seemed to be able to process the facts, without being hindered by emotions.

  ‘Then it is Henry and Robert who orchestrated your tale, young prince,’ said Eamon, before belching loudly. ‘How does a tutor get to administer a poison to all at once?’

  Henry could have done it alone. He could have called all the guards and get them to consume a drink or food together. Our Duchy Flies would never have turned him down. He could have simply toasted the sunrise and they would have drunk down some poisoned brew in one. But the way he told Robert about where we would be at noon that fateful day, seemed contrived. This blacksmith was right, it was likely that they had acted together.

  ‘You shall no doubt hear rumours about Henry’s disappearance and of Richard’s death, after we are gone,’ Adwoliu warned.

  ‘You are meant to be dead, young Prince?’

  ‘I am.’ I replied.

  ‘Yes, yes—I will remain silent, as per my oath, for I know my life and that of my wife’s shall depend upon it.’

  I fell asleep wondering if Eamon and his wife would, in fact, wake up the next morning at all.

  Siberia

  Yet again life was visible through a lens, only this time it started in black and white. Men with hats and masks bustled around. They looked like surgeons, but they were moving so fast, it was hard to tell. I noticed white overalls, with long black gloves. At least that's how they looked in black and white.

  I was observing from a corner above them, but the quality of what I saw was poor. Grainy, like an old TV set. One of them pointed my way and then all eyes turned towards me, peering suspiciously over their masks. The picture shrank, the view blinking out into a fine white dot, just as sounds became audible.

  ‘...isolate! I’ve told you before this stuff can spread along circuits like a virus. See? It got into the security cams! Crap—now it's in the mic—’

  The sound was cut off and replaced with white noise, and I expected to traverse into my next life at any moment. Over the last four days I had experienced mere hints of this life. Snippets, but nothing tangible. I was surprised therefore when seconds later I was looking through a lens again. Only this time it was in colour, bright and clear. There was sound too, and I could hear the wind rushing past as I came to whilst flying over a turquoise sea, surrounded by hundreds of fellow spheres. Flying in formation.

  Sounds echoed inside my sphere, radio chatter. These were commands, firing at us in rapid succession. Most orders were trickling through me. It was peculiar, as if the chatter itself created a barrier between the outside world and me. Like a cocoon of electronic signals, encasing me.

  ‘Foxtrot 2121, clear for full acceleration and cruise climb to 100,000 feet.’

  Something inside of me snapped to attention. My conscious mind recognised that this was my call sign; that I needed to remember this and listen out. Normal operating procedure, as I was operating closely in a squad. I attempted to comprehend what this actually meant, but the other part of me responded without thinking. My own voice, but not under my control.

  ‘Roger.’

  I was an observer. Only I was self aware. Aware enough to realise that this snippet was growing. Perhaps my own attempts to comprehend the orders were enough to keep me here. To keep me mindful. The next step would be to actually comprehend them, and then to intervene.

  Surely I wasn’t experiencing and living and learning from all my lives,
simply to end up as a call sign in a squad? I had escaped and resisted before. Having other lives could help me be strong, because unlike others who may hold on despite being enslaved, I was willing to risk everything.

  The spheres were climbing and accelerating, hitting three times the speed of sound as we passed through 25,000 feet and over ominous clouds below. The sideways tornado was still there, hundreds of spheres encircling it, but this time I was travelling over and passing high overhead. I imagined the people within, the terror they would have experienced, like the citizens of Pompeii watching that inescapable volcanic plume. If only I could do something to stop it. Far below, a pattern of white lines and bright colour in an otherwise brown landscape hinted at roads. I could make out a river and fields, too square to be anything but manmade. If the cloud wasn’t stopped, that place would end up a ghost town, with scorched earth, a steaming river and no life.

  Investigate that town, I thought, expecting to drop out of formation and plummet earthward, but instead I proceeded to climb and received the response:

  ‘Negative, mission is to proceed and support the Anastasia.’

  I tried again. Identify that town.

  ‘Baghran’

  Investigate Baghran.

  ‘Negative, mission is to proceed and support the Anastasia.’

  The landscape below became harder to fathom as I flew up and became more distant, mountains ahead appearing as slight ripples on the surface. There were few clouds, way below, but apart from that the landscape was brown and harsh. I would have to find out more about Baghran, but I imagined an old town that had supported humans for millennia, being hit by the cloud and left lifeless.

  I was not alone in this sphere; there was another mindful device. The same device that informed me only a few minutes later that I was now accelerating past Mach 5 as I hit 80,000 feet, only it was in charge, not me. Those men in masks, whether surgeons or technicians, had enslaved me.

  I spotted two shiny objects ahead. One grew so colossal as we all sped past it that the sky became silver for a while, before being replaced by stars. I scanned back. This huge craft was travelling at a sluggish 420 knots and I could see it was called the Anastasia. It was a beast that bristled with cannons above, below and to the side. It had hundreds of portholes along the side, with four giant turbines connected to the hull, with giant bay doors opening up below. The other shiny object was fifty miles ahead, but at our speed my companions and I were about to go straight into it.

  Slow down, slow down, I repeated, but it was of no use. I was approaching the object at a relative velocity of 3,700 knots, so it was hard to fathom the size of the thing. No sooner had it loomed into view and I’d gained some perspective, than I saw the tracer of thousands of bullets firing in our direction. Some of the other spheres exploded or started to fall and I heard human-sounding screams over the radio chatter. Then came my turn to die, as I crashed into it. Only I didn’t crash and die as expected—and quite frankly, hoped for—but burst through into a huge pocket of compressed and dense helium before popping out the other side, a hundred knots slower.

  ‘Foxtrot 2121: return and destroy.’

  Before I could do that I would need to slow down, but my other brain was already on that as we dropped and plummeted 25,000 feet, dipping into the mesosphere to slow down. I climbed up again, and could hear a slight hum as my pulse weapon armed itself and I flew back towards our target. I could tell now that the object was huge. Larger even than the seafaring battleships I had read about in my Charlie life. All bright silver, but its hull was clearly collapsing as it fell. No need to attack, I thought, but nevertheless proceeded towards it and could only watch as I zoomed underneath and fired my weapon upwards, shattering parts of the hull. The barrel from a large cannon nearly fell onto us, but we dodged out of its way just in time. This monstrosity was breaking up, yet the commands came though on the radio, and I hooked on to ours:

  ‘Foxtrot 2121: leave no survivors.’

  Our successive pulse attacks ripped open the pressurised gondola and hundreds of crew members started falling out. There could be no doubt. What I’d thought for a moment might be alien spaceships, were giant airships. The logical derivative of a craft like the Mayfly; a true battleship of the sky. At 97,000 feet their human crew were silently screaming. We were weaving between them as we fired and three or four people were exploded, shattered and obliterated.

  Stop! Please stop!

  I thought of my happy place. The garden and how tranquil it was; yet it was a real location and surrounded by security. An ominous location now, like Earth had become in this time. Were there no happy places left?

  Two people fell past us, and we dropped down to give chase. They were easy to track as they left white trails behind them, like two small comets. As we closed in, I saw that these were coming out of their open, screaming mouths. Remnants of air and liquid being sucked out to boil into gas and freeze all at once. Their faces looked pale blue and we were close enough to see totally white eyes, their eyeballs frozen over. I wanted to command this other brain to leave them, that they were dead already, but the sensors we shared indicated otherwise. Their hearts were still pumping their dark, de-oxygenating blood around dying bodies and their brainwaves were in overdrive as they experienced sensations unbearable and incomparable. Minutes earlier I had flown high above a whole town that I wanted to save, and now I had these two. Could I find a way to save them?

  Where are we? What’s the date? Who are we attacking?

  ‘92,000 feet above Urumqi.’

  What county is that in?

  ‘That information is restricted.’

  Restricted by whom?

  ‘Enemy threat to Afghanistan airspace...’

  I kept firing questions as quickly as I could. I had always shared this sphere with another mind, and before it had been there simply to deliver me information, but if it was just a computer, then it would have to follow its programming. It would only take some coding to make the computer in charge, but it was still programmed to respond to me. I could fire hundreds of questions at it, and even if every response were ‘negative’ or ‘restricted’, it would still have to answer me.

  We were falling beside the humans now. All I had done so far was prolong their agony. I heard a crackle over the radio:

  ‘Foxtrot 2121, you are le...ing...sig...range, please...’

  I kept firing my questions. Why are they a threat?

  ‘China...’

  ‘Say again,’ I heard myself respond over the radio. ‘Radio check?’

  Not only was there no reply, but that information cocoon that I had perceived earlier was gone. Like a fog had been lifted and its very lifting meant that I could understand what had happened.

  De-activate coms unit, I commanded and the radio cackle ceased. I have control.

  There was a discernible shift in our course as I took control of the trajectory and kept myself close to the falling people. I would help them as soon as I could work out how. The trickle of radio chatter was in fact electrostatic signals to disrupt me from taking full command of the sphere. Electronic countermeasures, used internally rather than against an external enemy. But now that we were lower to the ground and so far away from our base, we had moved out of range.

  Grab them, I ordered, but there was nothing to grab them with. No physical protrusions, no force fields or tractor beams, which oddly enough I expected there to be. All I could do was fly, communicate and attack. I manoeuvred underneath one of the people and lifted slightly. It was hard to move around to the exact centre of gravity, but at least this crew member was unconscious, so they didn’t try to move. A dead weight, but still alive according to my sensors. I heard my own internal motors buzzing rapidly to keep us in balance. Once we were stable enough, I moved us underneath the other person, repeating the process until I had two people precariously balanced on top of me. All this whilst falling to Earth at hundreds of knots. A distinct crackle alerted me that the other computer brain was about
to switch on the coms, to verify the radio chatter it had overheard.

  Keep coms switched off, I ordered, but it didn’t work, so I changed our direction in a slow descent as otherwise my passengers would fly off, heading eastwards away from our base and the source of that signal. The radio buzzed and, afraid that it was about to come to life, I panicked and issued that fateful command whilst I still could.

  Stop! Reset!

  ‘Confirm reboot?’

  Confirmed.

  My flight motors hesitated, the view before me flickered as my own flight computer was switched off. I was lucky that I could maintain control at all, however everything became harder. A good twenty per cent of my own concentration was now occupied with keeping the people balanced.

  Time to restart? I asked in my mind, but of course there was no response as the computer was not yet operational. I anticipated that it would attempt to retake control once it was back online. And even if it didn’t, it would switch on the coms unit and if I had not escaped that crippling signal, then I would become powerless again.

  We were still descending, following the back end of a parabolic curve. At 77,000 feet my sensors informed me that the person right on top of me would soon go into cardiac arrest. This irregular electrical activity created interference that blocked the sensors from reading the life signs of my other passenger, so for all I knew, I could be losing both of them.

  I was killing them by keeping them up here in this highly rarefied atmosphere. I needed to get much lower as fast as possible, without hitting the ground so hard that we all ended up dead. But the extra weight I was carrying was problematic. If I travelled any faster than this, I doubted that I could slow down in time for us to survive the landing. I could not calculate a precise speed without the flight computer. Wherever we went it had to be as far away as we could get from that signal, so I accelerated an easterly descent, but keeping us much slower than our terminal velocity, as I searched for softer landing zones. Somewhere I could hit, at speed. The sea would be good, as we could land on that at up to thirty knots and still survive, but we were over central Asia. Soft snow would be even better. Soft snow with ice and liquid below it could be survivable at up to 130 knots, so I hunted for lakes. I detected a few south-easterly and many frozen lakes to the northeast, with a few very curious anomalies amongst them. Confident that we could survive an even faster impact into one of these anomalies, I sped up as fast as I could without losing my cargo, just as the computer brain reactivated. I sensed it attempting to restart the coms unit as we continued an accelerated descent. This was bad, but I knew now that we were all better off without this flight computer at all.