Erasing Time

by C. J. Hill

  Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed movement on the street. She looked up to see several Enforcers skimming around other stopped cars, rushing toward hers. Sheridan pressed her hands against the car door. “Open,” she said. “Open right now.” When it didn’t, she hit it with her fist, then turned to the control panel and pushed everything that looked like a button and several things that didn’t. “Let me out of here!”

  The Enforcers were in front of her now, descending on the car like spiders ready to wrap their prey.

  She searched the interior of the car for something to use as a weapon. Anything. There was nothing.

  The doors slid open. She didn’t see the faces of the men, only their hands. They reached into the car pointing laser boxes.

  She heard a ripping sound, saw flashes, then her body tightened as every muscle contracted. She couldn’t breathe. Her lungs refused to move. The last thing she heard was the soothing voice on the car radio. “Happiness can’t be purchased. Happiness can only be given to you by the city.”

  chapter

  27

  Slowly, Sheridan’s thoughts began to assemble themselves. Her fingers throbbed. Her limbs felt unnaturally heavy. Numb. She tried to move her hands and found them cuffed behind her back. She tested her legs. They were restrained too. She blinked, struggling to make sense of what was happening.

  Two men were carrying her into the Scicenter. She wanted to move, to say something, but the numbness that had overtaken her body hadn’t completely left her brain. Were they going to do a memory wash on her now?

  She didn’t want to forget her life, or Taylor, or Echo—although she wasn’t sure what she wanted to remember the most about him: that he had kissed her, or that he was Dakine.

  Why couldn’t she think straight?

  That had been her problem in the car. She couldn’t think her way out of her problems. Taylor would be so disappointed.

  Sheridan lifted her head, and one of the men said, “She’s awake.”

  She turned her head to see her captor—an orange-faced man wearing a black Enforcer’s helmet. He looked back at her with stark contempt, so she turned her head away from him. It was getting easier to move. Her muscles were slowly warming and losing their stiffness.

  The first man shifted his hands to get a better grip on her. “You gave us quite a time, little runner. We had to go through a kilo of tracking to find your car.”

  He turned his attention to the other Enforcer. “We should ask Helix to authorize a priority crystal implant on them both. We can’t have them evaporating into air again.”

  The orange-faced man shook his head. “Helix wants them in detention until he’s through with them. No chance they’ll turn into vikers there.”

  Vikers? Through with them? What was Helix planning? She almost asked, then, with a jolt of returning clarity, remembered she wasn’t supposed to be able to communicate with people from the future. She didn’t want to let them know she understood them.

  The men stopped in front of a metal door and set her on her feet. A detention cell, she supposed. The orange-faced man bent down and removed the bands that restrained her legs but left her arms shackled. She lost her balance, took a wobbling step, and straightened up. It felt like she was stepping on pins.

  One of the Enforcers pushed the door button. Even before it had completely slid open, Sheridan recognized Taylor’s voice. It was raspy and hoarse, probably from yelling. Maybe from screaming. “I don’t know anything about it,” she said wearily. “I’m not who you’re looking for.”

  The room looked like some sort of office. Computers, desks, and chairs lined the walls. Taylor was strapped into a chair in the middle of the room. A man with green hair and matching green lips leaned over her, menacingly. His face contorted into a sneer, and he slapped Taylor across the face. It must not have been the first time. Her cheeks were covered in bright red patches, and a trail of blood leaked from a corner of her mouth.

  The man raised his hand again, and Sheridan lunged toward him. “Stop it!” She meant to kick him; she still had use of her feet.

  One of the Enforcers grabbed Sheridan’s hair and yanked her backward. Pain shot through her head and she stumbled, nearly falling to the ground. The green-haired man smirked at Sheridan, then struck Taylor again. The smack reverberated through the room, as did Taylor’s cry.

  The green-haired man straightened, tugged his shirt back into place, and let his gaze run over Sheridan. When he spoke, his accent was different from the ones she’d heard in Traventon. A mix between the past and the future. “Perhaps your twin is the one we’re searching for then. Should she take your place in this chair?”

  Taylor’s chin dropped against her chest. Her words slurred. “You made a mistake. Why can’t you accept that?”

  The man turned away from Taylor and walked toward Sheridan with slow steps. “Perhaps you’re right. Neither one of you looks smart enough to wipe your own snot, let alone build a QGP.”

  Sheridan hadn’t noticed how old he was before. The strength of his blows made him seem young, but as he came toward her, she saw wrinkles sagging across his face like crooked cornrows. His jowls sank into his neck.

  He stood in front of Sheridan, his face nearly level with hers. That was odd. All the men she’d met in Traventon were much taller. The rank badge on his shirt read 43, which meant looks didn’t play into rank nearly as much as power did.

  A smile turned up his lips as though he was playing the host. “You came in here ready to take me on even though your hands are cuffed. Are you brave, or just stupid?”

  Probably stupid. “Brave,” she said.

  He nodded. “Glad to hear you’re not stupid, because if you’ve a gram of intelligence, you’ll tell me everything I want to know immediately. Are you Tyler Sherwood?” His jowls moved up and down as he spoke. Something about them tapped at the corner of her memory, and a moment later she knew what.

  He was older, decades older than the picture she’d seen, but it was the same man.

  “You’re Reilly,” she said.

  His green eyebrows rose in surprise. “You know who I am?”

  “Yes. You’re a thief and a murderer.”

  Taylor tilted her head back against her chair and let out a slow moan. Sheridan knew what Taylor was thinking as well as if she had said the words out loud. Don’t tell him you know who he is. To tell him is to admit you have a reason to know him, to admit you’re connected with Tyler Sherwood. Think it through!

  But Sheridan was thinking it through. Reilly already knew one of them was Tyler Sherwood. If they kept denying the fact, it would lead to more beatings. Eventually, Taylor would give in and tell him the truth. If one of them had to admit to being Tyler Sherwood, it should be Sheridan. It had to be, because she couldn’t possibly betray any scientific knowledge.

  “A thief and a murderer?” Reilly’s face swung in threateningly close to hers, so close she could smell the scent of coffee on his breath. “I was the greatest mind of the twenty-first century.”

  “Well, I’m not sure about your mind, but you’re certainly the most lively four-hundred-year-old man I’ve ever seen.”

  “Brave and flippant. Dangerous characteristics for someone who’s handcuffed.” Reilly motioned to one of the men behind her, and Sheridan winced. He wanted someone to hold her so she couldn’t run while he hit her.

  Instead, the enforcer took off her handcuffs.

  Sheridan brought her hands in front of her and rubbed her wrists, eyeing Reilly warily. “How did you get here?” she asked. “Did the Time Strainer bring you here?” And if so, what had happened to age him so dramatically—an accident? She was not quite so brave or so flippant as to ask him that.

  His lips twitched in between a smile and a frown. “I brought myself here inadvertently.” While he spoke, he turned and leaned against a desk, nearly sitting on it. “I made a careless error while I was putting the finishing touches on the quark-gluon plasma converter. I can admit that, you see, because
part of being a great scientist is knowing when you’ve made an error and knowing how to correct it.”

  He seemed to expect some sort of response from Sheridan at this point, so she nodded.

  “While I was experimenting with the plasma stream,” he went on, “I accidentally caught myself in it. Very tricky business that plasma stream. Without DNA specifications, the QGP has a hard time distinguishing one piece of matter from the next. If I had been working with a colleague, he could have reversed the accident and changed my state from energy back into matter. It would have been so simple, but I was working alone. That was the first lesson I learned. No matter how much you want the credit, never work alone. It’s too risky.”

  “Dr. Branscomb might argue it’s too risky to work with you,” Sheridan said.

  Reilly didn’t flinch at her accusation. “I admit I killed him. I also admit it was a shortsighted thing to do.” He smiled at her, deepening the wrinkles around his eyes. “You’re surprised I’ve confessed my crime. That’s the nice thing about living in the twenty-fifth century. No one cares about a murder that happened four hundred years ago.”

  Sheridan’s gaze cut over to Taylor. Her eyes were still shut, but her hands were clenched into fists. Sheridan forced her attention back to Reilly. “I suppose they also don’t care that you stole my QGP.”

  “You admit to being Tyler Sherwood then?”

  Sheridan felt herself trembling and tried to hide it by standing straighter. “Would my admission be more convincing if you had to beat it out of me first?”

  He appraised her, unimpressed. “Well, Tyler Sherwood, the science chairman put me in charge of a project to replicate the QGP. So much of their scientific knowledge was lost during the twenty-second and -third centuries. All those plagues and wars and whatnot. They’ve been rebuilding everything for the last hundred years, starting from scratch on a lot of things. Scientists like us, we’re needed now. We’re appreciated.”

  The twenty-fifth century was not a foreign place for him. He was talking about it casually. She looked at his face more closely. “How long have you been here?”

  He ran a hand along the keyboard of one of the computers, stroking it as if it were a pet animal. “Back in the twenty-first century, when I was first testing the QGP and determining its parameters on living matter, I decided to transform a geranium for seventeen days—four hundred and eight hours. I had the QGP on a timer so that the energy flux would automatically reconfigure into matter. I wanted to see if the geranium would remain in its unchanged form or whether there would be a substantial energy loss during the transformation, which would affect its cell structure.”

  Sheridan gulped. Pretty soon he would be throwing out unintelligible phrases and schematics, gibberish that only scientists understood.

  Reilly gave a shake of his head, which made his jowls jiggle. “I was caught in the plasma stream myself, and reconfigured not four hundred and eight hours later, but four hundred and eight years later.” He smiled at her again, showing unnaturally white teeth. “Those are the types of glitches that just irk a scientist, aren’t they?”

  “You don’t seem too bothered by it.”

  “Oh, I was at first. Sangre, I couldn’t understand most of what anyone said for the first month I was here. I hated the tiny apartment they stuck me in and resented government officials always hovering around me—keeping me a secret. But I came to understand that they were guarding me from the Dakine.”

  He ran his fingers down the corners of his mouth while he spoke, caressing a beard he didn’t have. “Once I convinced the science chairman that I could build QGPs here, everything changed. I’ve spent the last two decades working not only on that, but on building the Time Strainer. So I’m quite adjusted now. I even see the many benefits to living in the future.” He swept his hand toward the computers. “The lab equipment is far superior to anything we ever had. I’ve been able to make my QGPs one-twentieth of the size yours was. And scientists here are well salaried.” He pointed to the number on his badge. “Do you know what this means?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “It means I can have anything I want. Food, entertainment, drugs”—his eyes ran over Sheridan, lingering on her curves in a way that made her shudder—“company. The more important the project is, the better salaried the scientists are. You, my dear, will be well taken care of.”

  “What project will I be working on?”

  “Didn’t I make that clear?” He pulled out one of the chairs by his desk and gestured for her to sit down. Reluctantly she did.

  After she was seated, he sat down in the chair next to hers. He seemed to have forgotten not only that there were two Enforcers in the room but that Taylor was sitting, bleeding, not far from them.

  “I haven’t been able to get my QGPs to work properly.” Reilly’s lips twitched in annoyance as he said this. “Right now I can’t keep the energy flux stable enough for any practical use. I can’t even get the plasma stream up to the efficiency that your prototype had. Virtual particles keep creating a repulsive field, and every so often I get gauge bosons popping up, causing the protons to decay. That’s why I needed to bring you here: to help me build QGPs.”

  It didn’t make sense to Sheridan. If QGPs were just the freezers of time travel—changing people into energy waves that the Time Strainer could reconfigure again later—why build more?

  “Aren’t you worried about changing the past?” Sheridan asked. “Even small changes could have disastrous effects—”

  He didn’t let her finish. “This isn’t about tinkering with the past. Let the historians worry about that. This is about now. Think of the power the QGP will generate.”

  The chair felt stiff and uncomfortable against Sheridan’s back. “The power? I’m four hundred years into the future, and you’re telling me the world still hasn’t solved the energy crisis?”

  Reilly laughed as though she’d been joking. “I was talking about the power of a strategic weapon. A person can’t hide from the QGP. If you have his DNA signal, and he’s within range—then zap. You can change him into an energy flux wave. With modification, QGPs could be used to take out large groups of people. Think of it. Wars could be won without any physical destruction.”

  The word destruction landed on her ears with a thud. She put a hand to her throat. “You want me to help you kill innocent people?”

  Reilly hit one hand against the side of the desk with a loud slap. His eyes grew razor sharp. “That’s just the point. The innocent people will be spared. It’s a weapon that will kill only our enemies. You haven’t been here long enough to learn about our society, but there are divisive groups here: the Dakine and the DW. They could be completely eliminated with the QGP.”

  A weapon. He wanted to use Taylor’s machine as a weapon. No, not Taylor’s machine. Sheridan couldn’t allow herself to think that way or she’d slip up. It was her machine, and she was brave and smart, and she wasn’t going to let some second-rate scientist intimidate her. “I’ve seen enough of this society to know how the government runs. I don’t think I trust their judgment as to who the enemies are.”

  Reilly crossed his leg, another habit she hadn’t seen in the twenty-fifth century. “You realize what will happen if you refuse to help? You’ll be given a memory wash. It will take away your memories, but not your intelligence. When your memories are gone, you’ll have to be taught math and physics all over again, but in the process you’ll be indoctrinated to our ways. Then you’ll help us, and you’ll have no qualms about it. Why not save both of us the trouble? We will, as they used to say, make it worth your while.”

  Sheridan let herself glance at Taylor. Her head was still leaning back against the chair, eyes closed. Where the blue swirls didn’t cover her face, red slap marks did.

  “What will happen to my sister?”

  “She’ll stay at the Scicenter with you. If you get a memory wash, she gets one too. If you work with us, she’ll be taken care of handsomely.”

  Could Sheridan propose a de
al? She could promise to help Reilly as long as he let Taylor go.

  Before she uttered the words, she stopped herself. That sort of deal would only make Reilly suspicious. If she was really agreeing to help him, why would she want her sister to leave instead of sharing in the profits of her actions? Besides, even if Reilly agreed to free Taylor, Sheridan couldn’t trust him to keep his word about it. How would she know if they actually let Taylor go free or just took her away somewhere?

  Think, she told herself as harshly as Taylor had ever said the word. Think your way through this.

  “You’re considering my offer,” Reilly said. “A wise decision. I trust you’ll come to the right conclusion.”

  The only thing Sheridan could do was buy herself time. “I want to know exactly what I’m going to get. In writing. I want to know how much salary, how much equipment, and what living conditions the government is going to guarantee for the rest of my life.”

  “Easy enough to work out.”

  If it was easy, then she wasn’t putting up a good fight. “And I don’t want one of those crystals put in my wrist.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Why?”

  “I don’t like the idea of anyone tracking me.”

  “Everyone has a crystal. If you didn’t have one, you wouldn’t have a way to buy anything.” He tapped the badge on his chest. “You wouldn’t be able to display your rank.”

  He’d been here too long if he thought rank would sway her more than privacy.

  “I won’t have one. Tell the government, if they want my help, then no crystal.”

  Reilly shook his head, his jowls swaying like fish gills. “Being difficult won’t serve you.”

  “Ideas are triggered by memories,” she said. “Perhaps if you put me through a memory wash, I’ll never be able to duplicate my success with the QGP. Perhaps great ideas only come to a person once in a lifetime. Think of that and talk to your government.”