Eschaton

by Andrew Hastie

  They sat beside the window and Josh described what had happened when they went back to his mother’s university, how he’d followed the stranger in the suit into the future and found Fermi’s facility. The founder interrupted him to go over some of the smaller details, specifically about the power plant and how it had been built into the heart of a volcano. He seemed less interested in the cloning of Lenin but became very excited when Josh explained how he was being used to travel to key points in time.

  ‘Can you remember exactly which points he was targeting?’ the founder asked.

  Josh shook his head. ‘Not really, there were too many — Caitlin was paying more attention.’

  The founder failed to hide his disappointment.

  ‘Was it important?’

  ‘Potentially. There has always been an issue trying to link the external factors of the Eschaton theory — Nostradamus has been looking for a single unifying thread that would explain how the cascade is triggered. I thought for a moment that your professor and his experiments might have held the key.’

  ‘It wasn’t really him; he was using Lenin. Somehow he was able to transfer his mind into Lenin’s body, using this black stuff — he called it dark energy.’

  The old man’s eyes narrowed at the mention of the word.

  ‘He was using dark energy?’

  Josh nodded. ‘He said it gave him extraordinary powers, but it was changing him — he wasn’t human.’

  ‘It’s a hazardous substance; Rufius’ condition is probably due to no more than a single drop of it.’

  ‘Is he going to die?’

  The founder placed his hand on Josh’s shoulder. ‘Not if I can help it.’

  ‘Is he getting worse?’ asked Josh, staring at the frail old man lying in bed.

  Nostradamus consulted the colonel’s notes. ‘Yes, his timeline is slowly being broken down, corrupted by the dark energy — we call it aetherium.’

  Josh realised that Lenin must have infected the colonel somehow when he knocked him out back at the university. ‘How do we fix it?’

  ‘It’s not that easy. Reversing this kind of corruption will take a great deal of energy; a lifetime is a very tricky thing to put back together.’

  ‘He’s still in there,’ said Lyra, clutching the colonel’s hand. ‘Waiting for his wife — she’s pregnant.’

  ‘I thought he lost her?’ said Josh.

  ‘He’s holding on to his most precious moment,’ said the founder, walking back into the room. He was carrying a small leather bag over one shoulder.

  ‘Are you leaving?’ asked Caitlin.

  ‘No, you are, if we’re going to save this man’s life.’

  ‘We can’t go back to the continuum. The Protectorate has imposed martial law, and Dalton’s already tried to kill us once!’ protested Lyra.

  The founder took the small box out of the bag and placed it on the table. They all recognised it immediately.

  It was the Infinity Engine.

  He opened the box, and they were surprised to see it empty. ‘I’m afraid there are far worse things than master Eckhart awaiting us.’

  ‘Where is it?’ Caitlin asked, staring at the empty case.

  ‘It is safe, for now, but it’s the only thing that can save him, and I need some of you to go back and retrieve it.’

  ‘I’ll go,’ volunteered Josh without a second thought.

  ‘No. I need you for another mission. I believe that the recovery of the engine is probably best left in the hands of the Makepieces.’ He handed the box to Caitlin’s parents. ‘I take it your timeship can travel back beyond the datum point.’

  Juliana nodded. ‘It can go anywhere in the continuum. As long as we have an artefact to locate with.’

  ‘For that, you will need to find a friend of mine.’

  55

  Capture

  The creature held him off the ground, razor-sharp talons gripping his throat. Dalton stared down into the many dark eyes and felt the alien mind probing his.

  WHO ARE YOU?

  The question appeared in his mind as it began to explore his timeline. The Nihil had none of the subtlety of a seer, and it raked over his life like a wolf devouring a kill, looking for some tasty morsel.

  But Dalton was a master seer, and while it focused on pillaging his past, his mind skilfully delved into the creature’s timeline.

  The Nihil’s chronology stretched far back into the distant past, its branches weaving across millions of years, creating a lattice more complicated than the continuum itself.

  It was an epic history of conquest, shaped by the countless lives the creature had taken, every world it had destroyed. Dalton followed the roots of its devastation back into the maelstrom and beyond. Through the chaos and out into other timelines. As the scale of what this creature had experienced became clear, his mind struggled to cope with the wonder of it all. He witnessed so many alternate realities, some just like his own, while other civilisations were far more advanced than theirs — and all had fallen before the Nihil’s forces.

  He learned from the lips of the dying why they called themselves ‘Nihil’, they were annihilation incarnate, but it was just one of a thousand names. They were a legion of nightmares that existed beyond the physical dimensions. To them, time and space were nothing but rooms in a house, and they showed no mercy, decimating everything as they ravaged time in search of their goal. Dalton could feel the hunger within the creature, the burning need for something that was just beyond its grasp, gnawing at its soul, driving it forward in search of the one thing it needed to survive.

  Aetherium.

  They craved the dark energy but had no way to collect it, relying on others to refine it for them. Their need for it drove them into a frenzy, and that was their weakness, one that Dalton could use to his advantage.

  Dalton felt the creature becoming aware of his presence and withdrew, leaving the Nihil studying the moment he’d first met the Nemesis.

  WHO IS THIS?

  It demanded, replaying the moment over and over again.

  NO ONE.

  Dalton responded.

  HE IS NIHIL?

  It asked in a way that wasn’t entirely a question or a statement and opened Josh’s timeline — which seemed to also expand in many different directions.

  ‘I’, Dalton struggled to speak, putting his hand to his throat trying to loosen the claws that were sunk deep into his skin.

  The creature tightened its grip further.

  I CAN TAKE YOU TO HIM.

  56

  Armageddon Gallery

  The founder looked deep in thought when Josh arrived. He was standing in the middle of a small circular room, one that sat precariously at the very top of the spiral staircase, the highest point in the Citadel. The chamber had twelve arched doorways, each with a number on the keystone above it, and looked out on a different point in time. The tenth seemed to be on fire.

  ‘They call this the Armageddon Gallery,’ the founder explained. ‘Each one of these is linked to the most likely event that could cause a crisis. Please take a seat,’ he added, waving to a chair.

  Josh did as he was told and sat on the only seat in the room.

  The founder swept his arm around the walls. ‘Nostradamus has spent many centuries studying all but one of the crises. Can you guess which one?’

  Josh stared at each of the arched portals, trying to pick up any clues from their appearance. ‘No.’

  The founder laughed, walking over to the door with the Roman numeral ‘I’ above it.

  ‘The first, strangely enough. No one has ever been able to identify the source of the Paradox. Not even I. Your existence has always been just a statistical probability on which everything else was based. Although there have been many theories, no one has ever proved how you came to exist.’

  Josh looked down at his feet. ‘You asked me to find my father, and I failed.’

  ‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that. You’ve opened up many new lines of enquiry. From what you
and Caitlin have told me, this professor may well be the missing link — he’s certainly experimenting with dangerous materials.’

  Josh remembered the face of Fermi inside the glass tank, his eyes full of darkness, and wondered if he was nothing more than a science experiment. It worried him to think that he might be another one of the professor’s clones.

  ‘We can’t go back there,’ said Josh. ‘Something went wrong. The whole thing was going to collapse.’

  Nostradamus entered with Caitlin following behind.

  ‘So shall we begin?’ he asked the founder, coming to stand beside Josh.

  The founder nodded, and Nostradamus walked to the second portal, which was marked with the Roman numeral II.

  ‘As you know, twelve key crisis points have been identified within the Eschaton Cascade. We have divided these into four parts.’

  ‘The first three,’ he said, pointing to the arches on either side of him, ‘you all know. Prophecy, Division and Insurgency. We refer to these as the primaries. Joshua, you are quite literally the first proof we’ve ever had of the first; the other two were very predictable outcomes based on your existence.’

  Nostradamus shut the doors to the first three and walked to the number IV.

  ‘The next section is more ambiguous. We have named these ‘environmental’, and they involve chronospheric abnormalities, temporal fluctuations and deviations in standard random.’

  ‘Like the Wyrrm?’ asked Caitlin.

  Nostradamus smiled. ‘Exactly, and the creature that you captured during your second mission was a prime example. My abnormalists were very impressed with that particular incident.’ He closed the fourth door. ‘Although they’re still unsure as to how it will play a part in the crisis.’

  He moved to the fifth door. ‘Which brings us to the fifth crisis — “the awakening of the elder gods” and something that I should explain about the cascade. Many believe they don’t occur in sequence, which is why we have always placed them on the round; it may well be the five is the trigger for four but has not occurred as yet — such is the nature of non-linear consequences.’

  Caitlin saw the confusion in Josh’s face and tried to explain. ‘The crises are connected through quantum entanglement — they can happen at a distance and in different times,’ she tried to explain.

  ‘Like calling Australia?’

  ‘Kind of. They don’t occur one after the other, but they still affect each other.’

  Nostradamus waited patiently for them to finish, and continued. ‘From what you have told us it is quite possible that the future is interfering with past events, and up until now we could never identify any kind of pattern.’

  Josh thought back to the analogue computer they stole from the Romans. ‘Rufius stopped an attempt to give the Romans a piece of advanced technology, and I witnessed a whole different timeline based on gunpowder being used at the Battle of Hastings in 1066.’

  ‘Both of which were most likely initiated by your professor,’ the founder observed as Nostradamus moved to the seventh door.

  ‘Interventions from beyond the frontier,’ the curator intoned. ‘The details of what you saw in the future gives us a clue as to the source of the threat, but we still have no clear picture of what the final sequence will be.’ He nodded at the last two doors.

  They all looked at XI and XII, whose portals were dark.

  ‘No one is to enter those scenarios until we know exactly where they lead.’

  ‘So where do we begin?’ asked Josh impatiently.

  ‘What are they working on in the eighth?’ asked Caitlin, staring through the door at a Nazi base carved out of the side of a mountain.

  Nostradamus consulted his almanac. ‘The eighth is investigating the Nazi Nuclear programme. There are signs that someone may be trying to help them develop an atomic bomb.’

  ‘Are we going to try and find the scientist from the Titanic?’ Josh whispered to Caitlin.

  She sighed. ‘Kapteyn. Yes.’

  57

  Cerebrium

  [Richmond, England. Date: 11.580]

  Alixia stepped out of the Nautilus onto the marble floor of the Copernican Cerebrium. She was wearing the traditional scarlet robes of the guild, with her black hair tied tightly back, as was the requirement for Copernican women.

  The ceramic tiled rooms of the subterranean basement were a restricted area, dedicated to the processing of members who bequeathed their minds to the Order. One wall was lined with shelves of glass jars, each one containing a brain preserved in formaldehyde.

  She grimaced at the overpowering smell of sandalwood and camphor. It reminded her of the cholera epidemic she’d witnessed as a child in Lisbon, the town’s guards used it to hide the smell of decay and death, so much so that she had come to hate it as much as the odour it was trying to mask.

  Juliana joined her and immediately covered her nose with her hand.

  ‘Holy shit, what’s that smell?’

  ‘The dead,’ replied Alixia.

  ‘But this is a Copernican archive. They deal with numbers, not corpses.’

  Alixia turned towards her. ‘They also prepare their departed for the Intuit,’ she said, walking along the rows of mortuary drawers and pulling one open.

  Da Recco and Thomas — both wearing the robes of master statisticians — appeared from the ship and came over to join them.

  They all gaped at the sight of the body within.

  ‘What on earth have they done?’ asked Juliana, looking at the body of Professor Eddington.

  ‘Limited the threat of resistance,’ said Alixia stoically. ‘The Copernicans present the greatest threat to authority if their calculations don’t agree with the Protectorate plans.’

  ‘So they executed him?’

  ‘It would appear so,’ Alixia said, closing the drawer.

  They walked silently along the avenues of minds until they reached a central elevator shaft.

  ‘Engineering is three floors up and two over,’ Juliana said, pulling back the metal shutters.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The chief is an old friend of mine from the institute. If I know him, he’ll have crawled inside a bottle by now, better if we go in bearing gifts.’

  58

  Briefing

  ‘The eighth have lost a few members recently, so they’re likely to be a little tetchy,’ warned Nostradamus, ushering Josh and Caitlin to their seats in an auditorium filled with Augurs dressed in Nazi uniforms.

  ‘Permission to speak sir?’ said a young man, raising his hand in the row behind Josh.

  ‘Yes, Brother Bartholomew.’

  The man stood up, cleared his throat and addressed the room in a polite German accent.

  ‘I believe I speak for all of us when I ask — who are these people?’

  ‘Quite right,’ agreed the curator. ‘Your work has been a closely guarded secret for so long it would seem strange to share it.’ He turned to Josh and Caitlin. ‘Our rules forbid us from sharing knowledge with another team, but in this case, I believe we can make an exception. Bartholomew, this is the Paradox — Joshua Jones,’ he said pointing at Josh, ‘and this,’ he added with equal sincerity, ‘is Caitlin Makepiece — who has some new information for us.’

  Caitlin stood up and cleared her throat. ‘During a recent mission, we learned that someone might be altering the development of quantum research. We have reason to believe that Kapteyn may have been abducted and is working with the German Nuclear Research programme.’

  There was a collective intake of breath from the crowd, followed by half-whispered conversations that Josh couldn’t quite catch.

  ‘Now, they’re merely joining as observers,’ Nostradamus added, raising his voice over the hubbub.

  Josh realised they seemed to be more interested in Caitlin than him, a fact not lost on her as she started to blush.

  Nostradamus turned his attention to Bartholomew, who was still standing. ‘Perhaps, brother, you would like to brief our guests on the
current situation of the eighth crisis?’

  The young man nodded and stepped down onto the floor.

  ‘We have been plotting the rise of the atomic age. Since many believe the eighth predicts the use of nuclear warfare, we have concentrated on the latter half of the twentieth century. Our previous mission was to study Oppenheimer and the Los Alamos laboratory.’

  ‘The Manhattan project?’ asked Caitlin.

  Bartholomew nodded. ‘Yes. The development of the atomic bomb.’

  ‘And quantum tunnelling.’

  He looked impressed. ‘Indeed.’

  Josh always felt a small twinge of pride when they realised how smart Caitlin was. He, on the other hand, had no idea what they were talking about.

  ‘We recently detected a slight fluctuation in the timeline,’ continued Bartholomew. ‘There are signs that Germany may be closer to developing their own fission bomb than was originally speculated.’

  ‘But that didn’t happen!’ Josh interrupted.

  Everyone smiled politely.

  ‘Nor will it if we do our job correctly,’ said Nostradamus, joining Bartholomew on the floor once more. ‘If someone is manipulating the past to their advantage, we must understand how, and ascertain how it could escalate in the future. A crisis doesn’t just appear out of thin air.’

  Bartholomew motioned to someone at the back of the auditorium, and a black and white film flickered into life on the screen behind him. It was grainy footage from an old newsreel showing a group of German generals being taken around a scientific institute by a team of bespectacled, white-coated scientists.

  ‘The year is 11.944 and Uranverein, the Nazi uranium programme is close to a testable weapon.’

  The camera focused in on four men. ‘This is Kurt Diebner, Abraham Esau, Walther Gerlach, and Erich Schumann,’ — he pointed at each one in turn — ‘the lead scientists on the project and the current focus of our investigation. Schumann in particular.’