Still focused on Treggen, I put the Glimpse on reverse again. I wanted to see how the hell he’d gotten into the office. I followed him as he un-knocked Doc out, and walked backward out of Medical. He came down the hallway from the lobby, just out of sight of Jake’s desk. I continued following him for two more steps, and then he was gone.
Just flat out gone, like he’d never been there at all. I let the Glimpse play normally and, sure enough, Treggen popped into being right where I’d last seen him. I rewound the Glimpse in slow motion. One backward step, two, poof, gone. Glimpse forward. One second, and pop, there he was.
I froze the Glimpse and stared at the scene, wondering what I was missing. Down the corridor and in the lobby, I could see Megan talking with Jake. They hadn’t noticed Treggen entering. I stretched out, feeling for any extradimensional residue. If Treggen had teleported in, or used any kind of dimensional jumper, I’d be able to sense it. Nothing. Maybe some invisibility glamour? He hadn’t been able to use magic before, but who knew what sorts of tricks he had access to?
Something nudged me. I dismissed the Glimpse and found Doc Ryan poking me in the forehead. “Hello, Corinthos, you in there? Snap out of it, boy.”
I shook my head. “Sorry, Doc. You okay?”
“Yeah,” he said, rubbing the back of his head. “What the hell happened?”
I filled him in. “Where’s Mrs. Rita? She should be able to get readings if Treggen has some kind of magic to bypass our security systems.”
“She’s coming in late today, hence my double shift,” Doc said. “Something with one of her grandkids that needed tending to.”
I mentally pinged Jake and asked him to pull up the security logs for the time I’d seen Treggen appear. I joined the big man at his security desk a minute later.
Are you sure of the time, Vincent? Jake sent as I approached.
“Positive,” I said. “Treggen came in, bonked Doc on the head, and then made off with the Black Flash podlings. Did you alert Galahad yet?”
“He did,” the boss said as he rounded the corner. “What’s going on, Vincent?” I gave Galahad the highlights and his face darkened. He turned to Jake. “Anything?”
Jake shook his head as he flipped some switches on his security board. After Treggen planted cameras in our office, Gearstripper had gone absolutely crazy installing new security systems. They let Jake review all manner of information, though how he makes sense of the blips and beeps is beyond me.
There were no extradimensional spikes in that time, Jake sent. I acted as interpreter so Jake didn’t need to stop and sign to Galahad. No magical pulses either. The only invisible creature that was detected was Mist.
“Can you review the logs for life forms, Jake?” Galahad asked. “You know how many of us should have been here. Perhaps if we isolate Treggen’s life force, we can see how he got in.”
Jake nodded as he flipped a few more switches and twisted a dial.
There is another life form reading starting right when you indicated, Vincent. Then it goes into Medical, and then leaves. It makes it nearly to the end of the hallway… Jake’s brow furrowed and he turned to look down the hallway in question.
“What is it, Jake?” I asked.
It makes it to the end of the hall and then it just stops, as if it were never there in the first place.
“Did anyone else leave the building at that time?” I asked.
Jake shook his head. Megan walked out of the building two minutes later, but no one left the office at the moment of disappearance.
The look on Jake’s face was one of angered bewilderment. I couldn’t blame him. There was no logical or reasonable explanation for how Treggen could just wink in and out like that.
A faint extradimensional ping reached me. “Keep working on this, Jake,” I said, turning to the boss. “I have something I need to attend to.”
I stepped outside and Opened a peephole at the location the octahedron was broadcasting. Wheatson was in a small room, seated in a recliner. He had a cup of what looked like coffee on an end table next to him, a blanket over his lap, and an e-reader in hand. He looked quite comfortable. I almost felt bad that I was going to ruin his moment of tranquility.
Almost.
I portaled into the room, telekinetically grabbed onto the recliner, and unceremoniously dumped Wheatson onto the floor.
“What the hell, Corinthos?” he demanded as he tried to untangle himself from the blanket.
I grabbed him by the shirt and hoisted him to his feet, using telekinesis to hold him a few inches off the ground. Using a bit of fire and force, I cut the chronometer on his wrist and called it into my own outstretched palm, then pocketed it.
“You and I are going to have a little chat, Wheatson,” I said. “You’re going to tell me what the hell happened on the Bright Side.” He opened his mouth to protest, but I held up a finger, “And you’re not going to give me any B.S. about Chronicler secrets. You still owe me for that thing with Laplace’s demon, remember? You weaseled out of giving me answers then, but not this time. So start talking.”
Wheatson’s shoulders tried to slump, but couldn’t because of how I was holding him. “All right, Corinthos, all right. Let me down and I’ll talk. No tricks, no B.S. Scout’s honor.”
I let him down, and he took a moment to pick up his e-reader and blanket, and deposited them back on the recliner. He gestured for me to join him at a table whose wood pattern was straight out of the 1970s. “Okay, here’s the deal,” he said as he settled in his chair. “We Chroniclers know pretty much everything there is to know about the time stream. We know what events are going to come to pass, and we ensure that those events, do in fact, come to pass. If some outside force or crazy scientist tries to muck about with history, we step in and stop it. Or, in some cases, the Tempus can simply undo the person who caused the problem.”
“What do you mean by ‘undo?’” I asked.
“He can make them cease to exist at the moment before they would have caused the problem. That way, any events they had attempted to alter would take place, unchanged.” He waggled his fingers as he spoke, as if trying to pick out the right words for what would come next. “Thing is, people like you and your dad, you’re different. Because you’re both gods with time as a domain, well, the Tempus’s undo powers don’t work on you. Time has to obey you. If you go off your predefined course, time has to find a new way to flow to accommodate whatever you’ve done.”
“And he couldn’t undo Commander Courageous?” I asked.
Wheatson picked at his nails. “Not exactly,” he said.
“Not exactly,” I repeated. “He couldn’t undo Commander Courageous”—I took a breath—“because Commander Courageous is me.”
Wheatson blinked at me. “How did you figure that out?”
I felt hollow inside, but I tried not to show it. I counted the points off on my fingers. “He knew everything that had happened in my life, down to the finest detail. He knew everything I was thinking, even before I did. He could use the same sort of extradimensional energy as me, and”—I swallowed here—“Courageous’s last word was ‘Petra,’” I said. “It was the only explanation that made sense.”
Wheatson let out a long breath. “This is going to be a bit of a mind job for you, I’m sure, Corinthos, so I’ll take this as slowly as I can. Yes, Commander Courageous was you. Or, a future version of you. Actually, I think he would be classified as a future version of a possible you, who can’t actually exist now, because the circumstances that led to his creation no longer apply to you.” Wheatson chewed his lip, and he looked up at the ceiling as he considered. “So, technically, I suppose he was a kind of orphaned temporal revenant. I’ll have to look that up. He may be one of the only beings like that in known history.”
“Wheatson, I’ve had a hell of a day,” I said. “I
’ve just watched myself die. So would you kindly speak English?”
“Right, right, sorry. Okay, here’s what was supposed to happen, Vincent. Treggen was supposed to bring some sort of contaminant to the Urisk people. It was going to mutate them and turn them into vicious creatures hell-bent on killing everything around them.”
“Black Flash podlings,” I said.
“Right,” Wheatson said. “Anyway, this was going to spread like wildfire. Whatever it was would affect their mental faculties—make them extremely aggressive and turn them against one another. They were supposed to get involved in a very short, very brutal civil war, which would end with both sides wiping the other out. We’re talking the whole thing would last only an hour or so. You were supposed to get to the Bright Side right as it ended, with only a handful of the Urisk still clinging to life. Without a sufficient number of followers, you weren’t going to be able to heal them.”
Parts of me started to shut down at the horror of this. My mind struggled to stay focused on Wheatson.
“And so, the Urisk were supposed to become extinct,” he said. “You… you wouldn’t recover from this event. You would go into a deep depression and never quite come out again. You were going to leave the Caulborn, push away anyone who’d ever mattered to you. Your friends, your other followers, your family, even Petra. You became a hermit, for all intents and purposes.”
I was struggling to take all this in. “But the costume, the amulet, acting as my advisor, how…. Just how?”
Wheatson gestured with his hands as if he were trying to sort out his thoughts. “In the late 1930s, a pair of magical amulets was discovered by Caulborn operatives. One of them is what you’d recognize as the Anisa Amulet. Yes, it’s real. When one of those agents retired, he used it as the basis for the Commander Courageous character. At some point after the Urisk went extinct, you found that amulet, and it gave you all the powers of the Golden Age Commander Courageous. You assumed that as your identity, and wouldn’t answer to the name Vincent Corinthos anymore.
“Now, remember how I said time has to rewrite itself for things that gods of time do? Well, you set about using portals to reach backward in time to contact yourself. To give yourself hints about things that were coming up, to try and dampen the impact of the disasters you’d encountered.”
“That doesn’t sound like something the Tempus would go for,” I said.
“Hooo boy, it was not,” Wheatson said with a laugh. “But Janus interceded on your behalf.”
That got my attention. No one had seen or heard from my father in years. “What happened?”
Wheatson spread his hands. “Best as I can tell, and I wasn’t in the room with them when they hashed this out, mind you, I think they came to an arrangement. So long as Future-You didn’t tell Past-You anything that would dramatically alter the course of time, it was okay. But if Future-You told Past-You something like, oh, say, that you should prevent the Urisk from being wiped out, that was another story.”
“There was a time when I got hit with a supernatural virus,” I said, thinking back to last year. “And Commander Courageous told me to go to the Bright Side. He said full exposure to my followers’ faith would heal me.”
Wheatson nodded. “Right. Before there was a Commander Courageous, the time stream showed you were supposed to get sick, make it to the brink of death, and then Petra was going to carry you to the Bright Side in desperation. The outcome was still the same, you were going to survive without Courageous’s intervention, and you still survived, with his intervention. The only difference was it happened a little faster than originally intended, but we’re talking the difference of a couple of hours, which is insignificant in the grand scheme of things.”
My mind was racing now. “So that’s why Courageous didn’t warn me to watch my words when I spoke to Megan,” I said. “He didn’t tell me not to make a promise. He didn’t tell me that Ulysses Pendleton was going to escape from Ashgate. He couldn’t intervene on those events because he didn’t want to skew time too much.” I ran my hand over my face. “All right, but what about my dad? How did he get the Tempus to agree to this deal?”
Wheatson clucked his tongue. “Your father and the Tempus have had a rather rough relationship,” he said. “The Tempus doesn’t like what you can do, but at your core, you’re mortal. You have a much greater life expectancy than a normal human, but the short and sweet of it is, Vincent, you can and will die someday. Your father won’t. And that means there’s someone out there who can tweak the time stream however he likes, and the Tempus can’t do a ruddy thing about that. It drives him mad. So, the condition to this bargain was your father would step outside time, leave the normal time stream until you died.”
My jaw dropped open. “Outside time? Where is he? Who is he with?”
Wheatson shrugged. “No idea. I’m way too low on the food chain to rub elbows with the likes of Janus. You’d need to talk to the Tempus for answers like that.”
“Somehow, I get the sense the Tempus wouldn’t want to speak with me.”
“You’re not his favorite person in the world, I’ll give you that,” Wheatson said. “And the Tempus and Janus had discussed what would need to happen if Future-You stepped out of line and gave Past-You too much info.” He paused. “Pretty much what you saw happen today.”
“So now what?” I asked. “I’m not going to get any more insight from my future self. Isn’t that enough?”
Wheatson shook his head. “Nope. See, thing is, Corinthos, this was never supposed to happen. When the Urisk ceased to exist, you were supposed to lose their powers. If time and reality were flowing as they were intended, you would be without telekinesis, pyrokinesis, and telepathy. But now, you have them. Imagine two countries from your planet’s past, ones that fought each other with swords and arrows. But now, poof, suddenly, time has been altered so that one side has swords and arrows, and the other has lightsabers and bowcasters. That’s what’s happened to you. You’ve got more power than you should, and that means the things you were supposed to do in the near future are changed or undone completely.”
“I don’t get it, what’s the problem?” I asked. “I’d still be dealing with things the way I always have. As far as I’m concerned, nothing’s changed.”
Wheatson raked his hands through his shaggy black hair. “No, no, no. Okay, let’s try it like this. Let’s say you’re Thomas Wayne. You, your wife Martha, and your son Bruce are gearing up to go to the theater one night. You’re in a sharp suit, your son is dressed to look like a boy version of you, and your wife is wearing this snazzy set of pearls you just gave her. You’re feeling pretty good about life.” Here, Wheatson held up the index fingers of both his hands. “And then, just as you’re leaving your stately manor, your butler, Alfred, discreetly hands you a revolver and says,”—Wheatson affected a British accent at this point— “‘One can’t be too careful on the streets of Gotham, Master Wayne.’
“And about three hours later, as you’re coming out of the theater, you find the wisdom in Alfred’s words when a couple of thugs try to mug you. You frighten them away with the gun he gave you. You and your family are rattled, understandably so, and your son probably has nightmares for a while, but your family is safe. Everyone is okay.” Wheatson affected a great, broad smile. “A great tragedy has been averted.”
The smile vanished, and Wheatson’s eyes were intense, nearly manic now. “But the thing is, an even bigger tragedy has happened and no one knows about it. Because now, a defining moment, a formative moment for a man who was destined to be a hero”—he spread his hands—“didn’t happen. Maybe Thomas and Martha grow old together, and watch their son Bruce grow into a fine businessman and philanthropist, and then, one day, some fucking psycho clown rolls into Gotham and kills the entire population with nerve gas.” Wheatson bounced his empty palms for emphasis. “No one there to stop the Joker,”
he said somberly. “Because Thomas had access to a weapon he wasn’t supposed to. And the damnable thing is the world wouldn’t know it was missing Batman.”
Wheatson deflated here, as if he were getting tired. “It’s the same thing with you, now, Corinthos. The Urisk’s powers are the same as Thomas Wayne’s revolver, but it’s on a much bigger scale because of who and what you are. Time and reality are fractured now, and it will take time for them to heal. The only reason they aren’t broken completely is because of your divine nature. You are literally holding them together. Eventually, the flow of time will stabilize and the future will become clear to the Chroniclers again.”
“Is that the real reason why the Tempus is so pissed at me?” I asked. “Because I muddied the waters of time so he can’t tell the future?”
Wheatson cracked me upside the head. “No, you moron, he’s angry because your future self’s actions literally jeopardized all of existence. Not being able to see the future certainly doesn’t help your cause, either, but it’s small potatoes in comparison.”
I thought for a moment. “You and the Tempus both keep talking about me having powers I’m not supposed to. But you’re not talking about the Urisk still existing. About a people that were supposed to be dead. Why don’t you seem worried about the ramifications their continued existence might have on the Bright Side?”
Wheatson shrugged. “To tell the truth, Corinthos, the Urisk are insignificant in the scope of the universe. They’re a small people, they keep to themselves, and they don’t cause trouble. On their own, they don’t really matter.” He put up his hands as I started to speak. “They don’t matter from the Chroniclers’ perspective, okay? But someone like you, a god with powers you shouldn’t have, that’s dangerous. Dangerous to the universe and dangerous to time itself.”
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