by Leon, Mike
EXT. JAY PRITZKER PAVILION - DAY
“Is that it?” Sid dryly intones. He’s unimpressed. Frankly, even a little disappointed. Apparently the transient thought it was showing him something disturbing, terrifying, world shatteringly awful. Not so. Sid has seen a bunch of stuff like that before. He’s done half of it himself. “That’s all you got?”
The transient reels, emitting black mist from its hollowed out shell and breathing heavily. “How?!” the monster bellows. “How can you be so callous?”
“Dipshit, my old man once summoned up an avatar of Nyarlathotep and made me punch it in the face just because.” Sid rolls his eyes. “We’re talking about the Crawling Chaos here. He literally breathes cosmos crushing forbidden knowledge. You’ve got what? Some mangled dead people?”
“You’re a psychopath!”
“Duh.”
The transient howls mournfully at the sky as the black flame consumes its form. “No! I need more time! We were all wrong! The future refused to change! That can only mean. . .” He explodes into a burst of expanding black flame and then fades from existence, leaving no trace he was ever there—no trace but the field of debris and burning steel behind him, and the fleeing tourists screaming and crying throughout the park.
INT. THE CATACOMBS - DAY
SUPER: The Future
Harper’s death scream is loud enough that it bleeds through the sound-proofing of the sensory deprivation pod. Colonel Green does not hurry to climb the ladder and open the hatch. He is hesitant, bordering on averse. He doesn’t really need to see what remains inside. For a moment he stops and considers the option to leave it. They’ll never need to use the tank for anything again. He could just leave Harper in there and avoid one more nightmare burned into his psyche.
He looks back at the nurse, searching for approval he doesn’t need because of his rank, but because he is human. She is already crying. He looks past her to the monitor Harper was always screaming about. Nothing about it has changed. He didn’t think it would. He admonishes himself for even looking at all.
Green breathes a sigh at the top of the ladder and reaches for the hatch. He opens it up to see the mess inside and cringes.
What’s one more nightmare? A drop in the bucket.
EXT. JAY PRITZKER PAVILION - DAY
Beneath the trellis of the Pritzker Pavilion, the kill team sheathes his Murder Machetes as Jamie Chan approaches cautiously.
“Is it dead?” Jamie says.
“I’m pretty sure,” Sid says, having seen the theatrics the transient made on its final fade from this reality, although he has only vague notions of what actually did the monster in. “I think his time finally ran out for good.” He hears the oncoming commotion of ambulances and fire trucks as he scans through the chaos around him for police. “We don’t have much time either. We need to get out of here now.”
“What about all these people?”
“I’m a killing machine, not a doctor. We need to go.”
It is already too late to avoid the police completely. Two uniformed cops are rushing in from the south with guns drawn. They must have run across this by happenstance. If they had any idea what they were getting into they would have come with a whole SWAT team.
“Police! Hands in the air!” one of them shouts. Sid ignores the request, but Jamie complies. That is probably for the best. With the transient dead Jamie should be safe with the cops, though there is the matter of the destroyed monument and any casualties in the park, for which they are both at least partially responsible. They’ve caught him out in the open in broad daylight, with no good hard cover nearby. Sid considers whipping an FNX from its holster and blowing both these fools away, but he knows Player will find that distasteful. He puts his hands up to buy time as both cops continue to shout directions over the encroaching sirens. “Keep your hands up! Hands up!”
It’s funny, but they’re blind to Jamie Chan in some way. It’s as though they only see the big guy in the scary ninja armor with all the weapons, and a five foot tall unarmed waif is not any kind of a threat to them. Jamie actually backs away from him hesitantly, then more boldly as it becomes clear that neither of the cops’ guns are shifting from their present aim at Sid’s chest.
“Get on the ground!” left cop shouts.
“On your knees!” right cop yells. It’s like a contest for them. Sid glances around to see if any more cops are here yet. If they come a little closer he can seize one of them as a human shield and proceed to beat them both senseless without killing them, but if they do the smart thing and wait for backup he’ll be outnumbered and have no choice but to kill his way through whatever fraction of the police department shows up.
Sid lowers himself to his knees, and left cop steps a little closer. It looks like he’s taking the bait and making the stupid move even faster than expected. In another few feet Sid will be able to close the gap. . .
A dark shadow is his first inkling of something wrong. Sid notices it before the police can react. The transient. Grey and crusty, but whole again, the monster is somehow fresher than just before. It screams wildly at the police, waving its hands and exhaling blackened fog. “Die! I’ll kill you all!”
The cops do the thing anyone would do. They blast the transient with every last bullet they have, but it never stops coming. In the end they’re both screaming with the monster standing in their midst, desperately trying to wrestle with something that isn’t really there. The ghostly thing looks back at Sid and smiles, for the first time showing some feeling other than melancholy or rage.
Jamie Chan is dead. Dropped by a hail of bullets meant for a thing that can’t be shot. The blogger’s body lies in a slack-jawed heap on the ground, wide-eyed and unquestionably gone. At least it was quick.
Sid snarls angrily. He stands up and strides toward the transient. The cops are on the verge of hysterics when he smashes their heads together.
“I saw you die!” Sid screams at the monster. The transient only seems to grow confused in response.
“I remember nothing of the sort,” he says. He ponders the situation with a perplexed frown as Sid stabs him in the face with a Murder Machete. It does nothing, not even in some mildly therapeutic way. He gives up after a few angry thrusts. Usually stabbing motherfuckers he hates feels good, but this is just air. He wants to kill somebody now. The urge is looming and undeniable. He’ll get the name of some human trash from Player before he does anything else. He doesn’t have a preference for anyone in particular. He only knows that no matter what they’ve done, it will not have been terrible enough to make them deserving of what he will do to them. “That means I must come back. I can’t imagine why.”
“You were right there!” Sid says.
“Chan is dead. I changed everything. I beat you this time. I saved us all.”
“I will find you, and I will kill you.”
“We were never enemies, even if you never understood. I have to go back now—back to a better future than the one I left.”
The transient fades out like a bad special effect, looking content for once. Sid doesn’t understand what just happened, or what that thing thinks it accomplished. He doesn’t have time to wait around worrying about it either. He makes his way north, for the cover of the auditorium, and steals some clothes from the first person he encounters. He heads over the Fahey bridge to put distance between himself and the park. He calls Helen from the end of Navy Pier and waits on a bench to see the chopper coming in to pick him up. He’s only there for ten minutes when F4pl0rd’s phone rings. It’s F4pl0rd, calling from a different phone.
“Did you get it?” Sid growls. It’s too late to help Jamie, regardless of what the hacker found, but Sid is still hungry for a place and a name if F4pl0rd can provide one. He wants to make someone pay for this.
“Are you guys okay?” F4pl0rd asks. “The news says there was a police chase and an explosion. . .”
“Did you get it?” Sid demands. He doesn’t care about the stupid details. He doesn’t
have time for that. He only has time for blood.
“I got it.”
“Where?”
INT. BLACKHAWK - DAY
On the bench seat inside one of Graveyard’s unmarked black UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters, Bruce Freeman is trying to cheer Mary Sue out of her depressed funk.
“We could go to the museum before we leave,” he suggests. “You like museums, right?”
Mary Sue shrugs, only somewhat despondently—a good sign. Bruce is really glad they didn’t bring Mary Sue into that weird remote viewer clinic. She didn’t need to see anything that happened in there in her state, especially the part where he almost executed a kid.
“Can we see Sue?”
“Sue?”
“The T-rex at the museum.”
“Absolutely we can see Sue the T-rex!” Bruce says. “How about that? And get some of that pellet ice cream! What do they call that stuff?” He is honestly uncertain which one of them he is trying to cheer up after that debacle. It’s not that he likes museums so much, though he does like ice cream. He just thinks he can make himself feel better if he makes somebody else feel better.
Helen Anderson interrupts his obtuse beguiling attempts from across the chopper cabin, where she sits between Fleabag and her analyst sidekick. “Bruce, you understand we can never tell you-know-who about you-know-what.”
Despite Helen’s description lacking any broad specificity or cleverness, Bruce knows exactly what she’s talking about. She means they can’t tell Sid what they found at that clinic, particularly about the identity of the transient. While Bruce stayed his hand due to sentiment, Sid is a truly remorseless engine of death and destruction capable of atrocities that would break most men.
“I don’t think he would do it,” Bruce says, uncertain if he is lying to himself.
“He would do it,” Helen counters with a serious stare. She’s probably right.
They pick the kill team up at the end of Navy Pier, barely touching down on the pavement behind Aon Grand Ballroom for him to hop up the skid into the helicopter. He tears off his sleek dread mask and dumps it on the floor, not caring to take a seat anywhere.
“Wyatt’s in Missouri,” he growls. “Take me there.”
“I wish it were that simple,” Helen answers. She hops up from her seat and holds on to a handle on the ceiling as they lift off.
“Who’s Wyatt?” Bruce asks. He doesn’t expect an answer.
“The mystery man who built the machine for BuzzWorthy,” Sid waves him off, then goes back to growling at Helen. “I have the location. If we go now, we might get there in time to murderize the fucker.”
“Sid, we already know all about the Missouri IP address,” Helen hollers. “My engineers started dismantling the codification engine almost as soon as you told me about it.”
“Then what are we waiting for?”
“We already sent operators out there. It was nothing but a proxy server piggybacking off a public Wi-Fi in a coffee shop. All it did was redirect traffic.”
“Redirect it to where?”
Helen glances back at Dave the analyst, who is currently viewing their heated discussion over his laptop screen. “Dave, tell him.”
The analyst hesitates in the glare of the angry kill team. He gulps. “Jamie Chan’s apartment.”
“It’s a setup,” Sid instantaneously responds.
“I don’t think so, Sid,” Helen argues. “The codification agents were pretty certain about the list. And what about the transient? You really think he wouldn’t know who he was looking for coming from the future?”
“He told me himself he didn’t understand what he was doing.”
“There were no devices on Chan’s network redirecting anywhere else,” Dave says. “And Chan’s laptop contained encrypted copies of the queries from the codification system in Garfield Park. Even the MAC addresses matched up when we checked them. The process for someone to have planted that evidence and not left any trail would be unusually involved.”
“But not impossible?”
“Technically no. Aside from physically operating Chan’s laptop, I suppose you could use spyware to remotely operate it, then delete the spyware, make an image of the entire drive on an identical drive, and swap them to prevent us from recovering the deleted spyware files. It might be easier to clone the network controller from the laptop and access Chan’s Wi-Fi, but you would need the capability to manufacture a chipset from the ground up.”
“You mean like somebody who can build a supercomputer?”
“Yes. You’re not wrong,” Dave says. “He’s not wrong,” he repeats for Helen more directly. “The measures are just extreme.”
“This sounds like paranoia,” Helen says. “It took some of the best computer analysts in the world using software backdoors that officially don’t exist and heavily armed strike teams illegally searching multiple locations just to dig up what we have. The FBI would not have been able to do what we did. You really think Wyatt saw that coming ahead of time?”
“He accurately predicted an assassin from the future would come back to kill him and successfully outplayed that assassin.”
“Or he was Jamie Chan all along, just like all of the evidence suggests. It’s a far more believable explanation.”
“I think you’re underestimating him. If it was my dad, but like a nerd version of my dad, he would be that far ahead of you.”
“Where’d the money come from?” Bruce asks. Following the money is always a good strategy. “For the codification mainframe, I mean.”
“Offshore bank accounts,” Helen says. “The accounts and pins were all found on Jamie Chan’s laptop. Guys, I know you don’t want to believe it was Chan, but it was Chan.”
“I didn’t kill Chan,” Sid says. “The recording said only I can kill Wyatt.”
“It said only you can stop Wyatt. I think this is how you did.”
“If Chan was Wyatt and the transient killed Chan, then the transient prevented the nightmare future, so he would have never come back to kill Chan in the first place, which means the nightmare future still happens. So that means he must have nailed the wrong guy.”
“If that’s true it means it’s impossible to prevent the future no matter what we do.”
“That zany time paradox again,” Bruce says.
“No,” Mary Sue says, shifting everyone’s attention to her in some surprise. “The future he came from could be just one possible future.”
“Hey! There you go!” Bruce says. “That’s the spirit. It’s some other future. Alternate universe shit. He wasn’t just a ghost from the future. He was a ghost from the future from some other dimension too. See? So now it makes sense.”
“I hope so,” Mary Sue says, looking glassy-eyed at the cabin floor.
INT. FIREHOUSE - DAY
Sid rises from his bed on the top floor of the firehouse and grabs his towel for a trip down the hall to the shower. Behind him, Sapphire moans in the sheets.
“You were kinda rough last night,” she says, barely keeping her eyes open.
“Yeah. Work stress,” Sid says.
“What is it that you do?”
“Backend analytics.” This is something Bruce told him to say if asked about his job. The answer is apparently something so boring and sophisticated that hardly anyone will ever inquire further about it, eliminating the need for a complex backstory and research. Also, butts. Indeed, Sapphire doesn’t want to know anything more after that initial question, so Sid leaves her money on the nightstand beside her and then walks down the hall for a shower.
He’s still a little angry from Chicago, despite taking out his frustration on a serial child molester, two gang bangers that killed a grandma in a crossfire, and a heroin dealer. Player located them all for him quite easily, using the satellite. He beat, crushed, twisted and eviscerated them all over the course of the last few nights, then pounded Sapphire through the bed as soon as she was available.
Early TV news reports notwithstanding, there was o
nly one death in Millennium Park. When Graveyard circulated the false story that the accident was caused by a drunk driver, the big news channels almost immediately lost interest. Bruce seemed annoyed by that for some reason Sid does not understand.
Sid discovers Mary Sue already occupying the bathroom down the hall, only she hardly looks like Mary Sue at all. She’s wearing even teenier shorts than usual, with black suspenders and a teensy yellow vest that barely contains her epic breasts. Her legs are covered by heavy white boots and nude-colored thigh high stockings. She is wearing a purple wig. She looks ridiculous. Sexy, but ridiculous.