by Al K. Line
"Sorry, I thought you'd gone for good. I can't lose you again Dale, I've lost you so many times in the—"
"Hush, it's all right." Dale could feel himself adjusting, already the strange scent was becoming familiar, connected to the woman he loved so much, a duality that was at once both unsettling yet oddly comforting.
He loved Amanda, he really did, and was it so wrong that this woman, this beautiful, scared woman, had slightly different experiences to the Amanda he loved? He no longer had an easy answer, but he knew that if this was all that was left, however much he would worry for the other Amanda over the years, he would still love this woman holding him tight with as much energy as he had inside of him. He would do anything to protect her. Anything.
"I take it everything went without a hitch?" said Cray, shading his eyes and looking into the sky before putting his hat on. The day was really warming up, and the vast plaza was radiating heat intensely.
"It went fine, but now it seems like I have to jump back a little further to tell Peter I'm coming. This could go on forever."
"Worry about that later, the main thing is that you leaked the plans?"
Dale just nodded.
"Good. Let's get some shade, this weather is getting a bit much."
Could always take your jacket off.
Dale didn't speak aloud — although lessening, he was still getting that familiar tingle of nervousness when confronted with authority.
Get a grip Dale, you just jumped through time three times and you get all clammy because this man is, used to be, a policeman.
Dale shook his head, astonished at his own body. He took a firm grip on Amanda's hand and followed Cray toward the shade of buildings lost in a heat-haze circling the plaza like sentries watching over a space that no longer needed protecting.
~~~
Once out of the fierce sun — Dale was sure that they were in a foreign country, however far into the future they were he couldn't imagine temperatures so high in the UK — he began to appreciate just how bizarre and incredible the architecture truly was. There were hints from the plaza, but it wasn't until you got a little closer that you could truly appreciate just what fantastical complexity had gone into the construction. It was, and Dale knew it sounded stupid even thinking it, like he was far into the future where things were very different indeed.
Because I am.
Cray led them through a maze of Escher-esque architecture, dizzying and far beyond merely impressive. It was true futuristic stuff, CG movie graphics from the biggest and best studios, except this was real.
Finally, Cray led them into a vast room, clearly a place that saw a lot of activity. The style was a combination of comfort and opulence on a rather surprisingly tasteful level, complete with functional spaces and desks, uncomfortable looking chairs for minions to be kept in their place, and everything a person could need to run an empire.
"I kind of got a little carried away," said Cray rather meekly. "Power will do that to you. I couldn't stop myself, it was like a dream. I was like a god, well, a very rich man anyway." Cray walked over to a desk and ran a finger through the dust of years, maybe centuries.
"What exactly did you do?" asked Amanda, inspecting the quarters like she wouldn't mind stealing a few ideas, if not actual things.
"I told you, I sold a few Hexads. Got incredibly wealthy. I don't just mean rich, I mean most powerful man alive rich. It was a strange time."
"And how long did it last?" asked Dale.
Cray stared at him as if not quite understanding the question. "Oh, right, I haven't really explained everything have I? It's still going on I suppose, except there is nobody left. I jumped one day and when I came back I was alone. Nobody here, all gone. But I guess it was only a year or so, then, well, I tried to change it all, went back, killed myself, and—"
"About that," said Dale, something nagging at the back of his mind. "How could you kill yourself and still be here? That was you, so you should be dead. And how did you meet yourself anyway? I thought that was one of the major paradoxes? Meeting yourself, touching yourself."
"I never saw myself, although that's safe enough. I cut the brake cables on my crappy car and that was that."
Cray filled them in on lots of missing details, Dale only half listening, obsessing over how exactly to get out from the mess it seemed like not only he and Amanda had created, but involved a cast that was growing with each jump. First them, then Hector and The Factory, now Cray. Dale wondered how many other people were responsible for what had happened.
Cray had jumped forward initially to a world that was entirely strange, so different to their own world that he didn't know how to even begin to understand it at first, but he did, and he quickly came to realize that humanity had advanced extraordinarily well.
People were civilized, polite. Crime was basically unheard of as each and every person had as much as the next, and although there were mega-rich, and powerful positions, it was different to how it used to be: everybody was happy and the world ran as smoothly as an atomic clock.
Then he ruined it all.
His strangeness singled him out immediately: his dress was so archaic people hardly even understood the concepts behind the materials or production. He spoke in a way that many found hard to understand due to the use of old language long ago incorporated into others to form a globally recognized dialect that ultimately became the one language everyone used, and with his talk of the past, trying to convince people that he was somebody that didn't belong, he was a person of immense interest to the global community.
Within days of him appearing he was a viral sensation. Every person on the planet watched his every move, replayed his every word through the connected Web that was implanted directly into the brain at birth, a right of every citizen, the entire human history since digitization there for the taking, and much more besides. When people finally accepted what he said as the truth, which they did almost immediately as lying was to them little more than an abstract concept rather than something people actually practiced, he was already rich in material goods and land given by those wishing to gain his favor and spend some time with him.
For an ordinary detective inspector it was too much. The man once obsessed with his job, and doing things by the book, got lost in a strange world and was replaced with somebody that saw a new life before him where the possibilities were endless. So he gathered a crowd in the plaza of the capital and demonstrated the Hexad.
After that it was downhill rather rapidly.
"That's enough of my sorry tale anyway. I got powerful, things began to get strange, and after one jump I came back and they were gone. Then I pieced together what had happened, did the you-know-what, and here we are. The only ones that can fix it."
"We need to go back," said Amanda. "To The Factory in the mountains, to... to that room, to stop Hector."
"Yes, we need to do that."
"Wait. I thought we were going to go to when the Hexads were first made, stop things there, stop them ever being made in the first place?"
Amanda and Cray both stared at Dale like he was a total idiot. "I thought you got it Dale?"
"What? What am I missing here?"
"That is when it all happens, that's when they are first produced. Hector gets the plans, he makes a few, then he steps it up and makes millions. He's the one we have to stop."
"No, wait, that can't be it. I thought people in the future made them?"
"Well, yes, in our future, if we were back in our proper present, then that is the future. But in this future, where and when we are now, all the Hexads came from me, from the ones I stole, the ones you dug up."
"So who put them there?" said Dale, feeling smug.
"I did," said Cray.
"No, no, no. This can't be happening. That's an impossible loop. Me and Amanda dug them up, dug them up and reported the trunk and you stole them. Now you are saying that it was you that buried them in the first place? This isn't possible."
"I know, tell
me about it," said Cray. "But I knew at once what I had to do, so I did it, not long ago in fact. I went back and put them there, so that all of this would happen as it was supposed to. Now we are on track, we just have to stop Hector, then everything will be back to normal."
"What about the plans? On the Web?"
"What about them? If Hector can never build Hexads then the plans are just the ravings of a madman Online, lost in a sea of millions of other useless pages, buried under the daily onslaught. It means nothing."
"Okay, whatever. I can't even think about this any longer. The Hexads were invented by nobody then? It was just us all along, back and forth in time, playing games and catch-up with ourselves?"
"That about sums it up, yes."
"I need a lie down."
"Help yourself," said Cray, pointing to a very bizarre looking recliner. "It's very comfortable."
Dale had a lie down.
Convoluted Plans
2817 Years Future
There were so many holes in the plan that Dale didn't know where to start. But maybe that was the point: nothing made sense and nothing seemed like it could be changed, so why worry about it? With life now impossibly complicated and him the last to realize that there were no future uber-technical wizards that created the Hexad, then maybe stopping Hector was the only plan that had any chance of succeeding. Besides, what else was he going to do, lock himself in a dark room and rock back and forth on his haunches? It did sound appealing.
There was a severe problem though: they'd already met Hector and Laffer right at the end of it all for both of the men. They'd killed Laffer and Hector killed himself, and by then it was too late. But that wasn't true, said Cray, as in Cray's timeline he'd got the Hexads, gone forward and there were still people, so it wasn't like Hector had ruined everything at the same time, at least not until Cray had gone forward and started the whole thing off. So all they had to do was go back to just before everything went wrong in the timeline that Dale and Amanda had experienced.
Cray had asked if that made any sense, but Dale just groaned, turned over and tried to go back to sleep. The precious unconsciousness eluded him totally. He tried to just shut down for a while, just to let his brain catch up with events and maybe even put things in some kind of order — wishful thinking, he knew. After tossing and turning he finally gave in and sat up, head feeling thick like a feather pillow, stuffing coming out of his ears, and he looked at the surprisingly calm Amanda, amazed she could be so composed after all that had happened to her, and what she was thinking of doing.
She's resolute. She's also building up to something, I know that look.
Dale waited for her to speak. He could see her start and stop numerous times, trying to say words that she really didn't want to say. Dale wondered just how bad it was going to be.
Finally she spoke. "There is only one way to stop this." Amanda nodded to herself, confirming in her own mind the truth of her words. "We have to go kill all the other Amandas. If he can't get them then there is no Hexad."
"You can't be serious?"
"Look, this is me we are talking about. I don't like it any more than you do, in fact I bloody hate the idea, but no Amandas means no Hexads, and if we kill them all then that's it, no Hexads."
"Which means..."
"Which means we won't really have killed me."
"This is stupid." Dale stood and shuffled nervously from one foot to another. "So far everything has led to us having to do our best to ensure that events happen, now you are talking about murder on a mass scale."
"Come here," said Amanda, beckoning to Dale with a finger. "You too Cray, you know about how they work, right?" Cray just nodded, sadness and sympathy radiating from him. It seemed that even Cray had a heart after all. "Hold on."
Dale and Cray held on to Amanda and she set her Hexad. She turned to Dale and said, "You not going to make the noise?"
"It doesn't seem appropriate, not if we are going where I think we are."
Amanda smiled weakly. "Please? For me?"
"Okay, if you insist." Dale made his time travel noise. "Whoooooooooooooooooosh."
~~~
46 Years Future
"So, are you telling me that my plan is worse than this?" Amanda managed to get her sentence out before the tears began to flow. Dale hugged her tightly and Cray politely stepped aside, looking at the floor not out of embarrassment over the intimate moment, but because like Dale and Amanda he didn't want to look at the room: The Factory. He'd seen it before too, and it was clear that the guilt over the part he played in such a monstrous scene was hanging heavy.
"Hush, it's all right. No, nothing is worse than this. You're right, we'll stop this." Dale stroked Amanda's hair as the quiet tears turned into sobs that shook her whole body, ripping apart Amanda's composure, tearing Dale's heart into a million pieces and flinging them throughout the universes.
Nothing could be worse than this. Nothing.
It was the stuff of nightmares come real, revisited out of a necessity to prove to themselves that the plan Amanda had suggested really was worth the sacrifice they were all going to have to make to see it through. Dale worried for his sanity and that of Amanda's once they began along a route there would be no turning back from.
Scared, that was it. Dale realized he was scared witless and wondered if he even had it in him to kill versions of the woman before him that he loved more than life itself.
Damn, this isn't even her. Not really.
After an embrace that lasted what felt like forever, and Dale felt was a goodbye as much as anything else, Amanda stepped back and dried her tears, setting her face in grim determination, staring around the room just like the others were now doing.
It's like she's daring what went on here to break her; she's showing she is strong.
They were in the most important room by far when it came to Hexad production, The Factory proper, not the fake glitz and glamor closer to the surface, but the real deal. An abomination. This was a room they had both been in once already. Dale couldn't argue with Amanda, not after what they'd seen before, what confronted them now.
They'd jumped to a time when Hector had realized what he'd done, what he had become and what effect it had on the world. When they'd seen the room before it was clear that things had come to a halt: the space was quiet, only the machines making their rhythmic noises, keeping the bodies alive and fed, little more. But it was, and had been, quite clear as to the function of The Factory: this was the secret ingredient that ran all Hexads, the secret guarded so closely by Hector that only a few other people even knew of the room's location, let alone what it contained.
The space was vast, sterile, clinical and warm. Perverse.
Dale took it all in once again. This time he wouldn't flinch or avert his eyes, he owed it to Amanda to take in every detail, imprint it on his mind so he knew exactly why he had to do what they were going to do. They had to ensure, no matter the cost, that such evil was wiped from history: past, present or future. Gone. Eradicated for good.
On the ceiling, receding into the distance between lines of bright strip-lighting, were row after row of tracks, with jointed mechanical arms hanging like robotic preying mantis. Tubes, cables and various bizarre pieces of equipment were hooked up to the bodies, almost like a high-tech abattoir or a bizarre organic production plant. A chicken factory, that was what it was like, a sickening, warped version of a chicken factory.
But this was no production line in the traditional sense, this was a warehouse sized facility for the farming of cerebrospinal fluid, extracted via a lumbar puncture. This fluid that ran through the spinal cord and into the brain was taken out of countless Amandas that were hanging from the metal arms that ended with a form of cradle, resulting in the Amandas being compressed into an upright fetal position, opening up their vertebrae so the needles could slide easily between the lower part of the spine and extract the miracle fluid.
The tracks ran in a circular motion at each end of the room, weavi
ng back and forth on a never-ending cycle that kept the bodies moving while various mechanical exoskeletons manipulated the limbs to keep blood flow regular and stop muscles from atrophying.
It was insanity come real, and that wasn't even the worst of it.
Dotted around the room at regular points were huge machines that Dale could only liken to mechanical milking machines he had marveled at when he and Amanda had visited an educational working farm, one of those places perfect for whiling away a few hours before then sitting and eating a decadent scone oozing out cream and jam. They'd watched as the cows simply walked into the machine when they wanted to be milked and the mechanized unit would do the rest, even give them a scratch while they were milked.
The Amandas had no such luxuries. As the bodies slowly made their way around the room the machines were given various pieces of information about the Amanda before them: body temperature, heart rate, blood work, information on the brainwave patterns, and much more that made no sense to Dale when he got up close to the atrocities. Then it seemed like if all was in order it would, for want of a better word, milk the Amanda.
They stood and watched as an Amanda moved past them, eyes closed, naked and beautiful, hair gone from a patch on her scalp that revealed the clear mark of whatever sick operation was performed to remove any part of the brain that allowed consciousness, leaving behind just a body that was alive but unknowing of its reality, incapable of thought, feeling or emotion. The machine whirred and closed in around the suspended Amanda as she was lowered, then a thick needle slowly sank into her spine just above buttocks that were clearly far from the muscular and pert form they used to be.
It was the same with all the bodies: most were in anything but great shape, the endless rows a history of the time each had spent being nothing more than a lump of meat, it's prize too valuable to allow to be lost. Some bodies were extremely thin, muscles wasted away, hair grown extremely long yet dull and lifeless. Others were fresh and still shone with radiance, tanned and healthy, many of them reflecting the various styles Amanda had over the years, her body changing depending on the physical activities she pursued and the way she wore her hair in countless different timelines in the numerous universes she had been taken from.