The man stands over me and watches my helplessness with amusement. He squats and holds up some type of weapon. Three separate coils protrude from the end of a black baton handle.
“Had it set for Anya Morey in case he decided to be uncooperative. That’s some tough skin those green buggers have.” He lifts the weapon and studies the handle. “Could have reset it for a human I suppose, but I didn’t really feel like it.” He looks down at me. “That’ll explain the pain you’ll be experiencing. Your body’s still in shock at the moment, but the pain will come. If you’re lucky you’ll pass out and miss the worst of it.” He flips something on the handle of the device and slips it back under his coat. “Figured you might’ve been a little more of a challenge. I haven’t had a good hunt in a while. When you split out of that party and left all the mucky-mucks in a tizzy, I thought I was finally going to have some fun.” He picks up my limp right arm. “But you decided to make it easy.” He pushes the sleeve back on my jacket and checks my wrist, then drops my arm and starts rooting through my pockets. “Ah. Here we go.” He holds up Bozzle’s race bracelet. “And here I had you pegged for more brains.” He taps the bracelet against my forehead a few times then idly tosses it away.
I’m angry, but it’s a hazy sort of anger. Anger at myself for getting caught by this guy. More than anything, I’d like to punch him in the face, but even the desire seems hazy. I can hardly make out his face anymore. He’s rummaging through my bag now and extracts the EMP canister. He lets out a low whistle. “Is this what I think it is?” His blurry face appears to be smiling. I wish I could blink because my eyes have started to water.
“Ope, leaving so soon, Ben? You don’t want to stay conscious for the fun part? I thought you might have lasted longer. Pity really . . .” His words circle through my mind like so many bubbles around a drain. They move faster and faster till they’re swallowed by deep, soundless darkness.
When I open my eyes, the sensation comes as a relief. I’m glad to be moving anything. But when I blink a few times and try to feel my limbs and other body parts, I get a weird feeling of weightlessness. I look down to find myself hovering above the floor by a couple feet. The sensation jolts me awake. There is a circular disk on the floor below me and, when I look up, I find an identical one on the ceiling above. I don’t seem to be suspended by anything in particular. My jacket is gone, as is my shoulder bag. I’m relieved to see my chronometer still on my wrist, but I’ve been lightened of my other belongings. I feel the pockets of my jeans and find them empty. No degravitizer or pocket knife. Charlie’s compass and anything else I had to work with have all disappeared. My heart sinks when I remember I’ve lost the EMP.
I inspect the room and realize I’m back in one of the labs at the Temporal Studies Society. This space hasn’t been decorated for any festivities and has retained its scientific atmosphere of beakers and microscopes. These are mostly shoved aside for new items that don’t look like they belong in 1996 at all, a digital projection screen and a gravitizer, as well as a device that vaguely resembles Jettison’s ascension gun. A table has been cleared for the collection of ore samples gathered from the race. All of them have been labeled and little chunks of each are missing. Jonah’s is there and others like it. I recognize my gravitan stabilizer attached to the microwave-shaped gravitizer.
I’ve just twisted to try to look behind me when the double doors to the hallway burst open and the host of the party leads an entourage of followers inside. He’s ditched his suit jacket and has the sleeves of his shirt rolled up. His tie has been loosened, but he retains his swaggering confidence as he rounds the tables at the far end of the room. I spot Pia Chopra among his eager followers, and a couple faces I vaguely recognize from the race committee. Geo Amadeus casually trails the group, and more trickle in behind the initial swell. Traus Gillian enters alone, but a delayed following that includes Ariella and Horacio are not far behind. A half dozen people I don’t know round out their group followed lastly by my nameless enemy in black who, to my surprise, is guiding the little girl from Major McClure’s video.
“Ben Travers. It’s so nice you could rejoin us.” The man in the shirt-sleeves stops only a few feet from me and beams his bright-white smile at me. “It’s a shame you missed the speech and the champagne.” He shrugs. “Some think it was my best yet.”
Pia Chopra bobs up and down next to him. “A beautiful speech for such an occasion. We’ll be replaying it for years.”
“Who are you?” My voice comes out raspier than usual and I wonder if my vocal chords are still feeling the effects of the stunning.
Shirt-sleeves laughs and claps his hands together. A few others smirk, too. “You’re just fresh as wet paint, aren’t you, Ben.” He grins and gestures to the group around him. “I guess I should introduce myself, eh?”
His followers chuckle and he gives me a bow. “Declan Ambrose, at your service.”
Pia Chopra pipes up immediately. “Don’t forget the ‘Doctor’.”
Ambrose waves a hand to dismiss the title but he seems pleased by the comment. “We won’t trouble the young man with details. He looks like he has a lot to digest as it is.” His cluster of friends laughs heartily this time, amused grins passing among them like so many inside jokes.
I search the group of faces, trying to gather some clue about what’s happening to me. I catch Ariella looking at me from the back of the room and she’s not smiling. Her mouth actually presses into a firmer line when we make eye contact, but she looks away before I can discern anything more from her reaction.
“Since you had to dash out before the speech, I suppose I should give you the highlights.” Ambrose steps close enough to brush the toe of his leather dress shoe across the disc below my dangling feet. “It doesn’t look like you’ll be going anywhere this time.” His hand reaches toward my chronometer and I reflexively jerk it away, tucking it under my other arm. Ambrose merely smiles. “Amazing bit of workmanship. Not to mention the lock you’ve got on the band.” He places his arms behind his back. “Traus wanted to detach your hand to get it off, but I thought that might be a bit too ghastly an activity for a festive brunch. Today’s about celebration after all, and it only makes sense to include you in the festivities now that you’re here.”
I keep my chronometer buried in my armpit. “What do you want from me?”
“Nothing at all, Ben. You have already performed fantastically for us. In fact, your knack for building new relationships is why we selected you for this race.” He grins his bright-white smile again and looks toward Traus and the rest of his followers.
What is he talking about? What new relationships? I scan the crowd and note where Ariella and Horacio have moved toward the door. Does he mean how I let them dupe me into this? The thought just makes me angry.
“Why are you here then? Why are you in St. Pete?”
Ambrose crosses his arms and considers me with his still amused smile. “We’re not in St. Petersburg because of you. We’re here because of history.” He gestures to the room around us, then glances at the others. “Forgive me, those of you who are hearing this twice, but I think our friend Ben ought to hear at least this part of my speech.” He addresses me again. “This is where it all began, Ben. This very lab is where Dr. Harold Quickly first sent himself through time. October 18th, 1996. The day time travel was made possible. It’s only fitting that we use today to celebrate the rebirth of the time travel universe. It’s true that the good Doctor Quickly declined to be a part of this new universe, but we will always owe him a debt of gratitude for what he began. Without his research we wouldn’t have had gravitites, and without his theories, we never would have discovered the gateway to our new destiny, the gravitans.” He pauses and gestures to Pia Chopra. “And yet another great mind has showed us the way onward.”
Pia blushes at the compliment and bows to a few people around her, her floral dress stretching at her hips as she does so. She returns her gaze adoringly to Dr. Ambrose, and I get my first sense of her fee
lings toward him.
“Dr. Chopra brought us into the next stage of evolution as it were. And today we shall all embark on that journey together.”
I scowl at him. “Your next stage of evolution involves building weapons to kill time travelers?” I’m not sure how much of my knowledge I should reveal to this man, but dangling helplessly above the floor, I have no better options.
“Once again your simple understanding of the situation shows your naiveté, Ben. This project has never been about killing people. It’s about new beginnings!” He spins and gestures to one of the men near the projector screen. “But since you’ve provided me such a handy segue, we may as well continue with the second part of the celebration. The demonstrations!”
A cheer goes up from one of the more drunken members of the party and there is a smattering of applause that quickly fades. The man by the projector screen gets it activated, and the Ambrose Cybergenics logo springs to life on the display.
“Ladies and gentlemen, you all know the crisis that has brought us to this point. You’ve all seen the data and recognized the dangers or you wouldn’t be standing here today. We all were once like Benjamin here, fresh and innocent. We didn’t understand the effects that ungoverned time travel was having on the universe.” He gestures toward the screen, and a timestream chart appears. A thin spider web of threads adorns the chart.
“When Dr. Harry Quickly first discovered that the true nature of time was a fractal and not a line, he himself charted the first fractures. His experiments became the basis for our system of primes. Since his day, other time travelers have carried on his work, delving farther into the reaches of time. Men and women in this very room were part of the research and development that became the foundation of our society.” He points to a gray-haired man in the corner who looks like he’s had too much to drink. “Dean Templeton was the first head of the Academy of Temporal Sciences. Karla Drummond—” he points to a middle-aged woman wearing a fur—“gave us the very first Temprovibe, the amazing technology that every one of us uses today.” The woman gives a small wave to her contemporaries. Ambrose places both of his hands to his chest. “I myself have advanced time travel, albeit responsible, paradox-free time travel, via the trace system created by my company, Ambrose Cybergenics.” A few more people applaud.
A pair of female drink servers glide into the room bearing trays of champagne and begin refilling glasses. Ambrose appears annoyed that they’ve chosen this moment to interrupt his speech, but he lifts his chin a little higher and opens his arms wide. “We,” he continues, “are responsible for the current shape of the universe. However well intentioned we all have been, we are responsible for this!” He points dramatically to the screen and it changes from the thin spider web of lines to a giant tangled knot. One woman actually gasps, but she also uses the feigned shock as an excuse to reach for more champagne.
Ambrose scans the room and finally his gaze lands on me. He takes a step closer, apparently about to make me the recipient of his magnanimity. “It is a responsibility, Benjamin, that drives us to this day. Time travelers have fractured the universe beyond comprehension.” He zooms in on a particular section of the chart, then returns his attention to me. “We have fractured it to such extremes that one can get irretrievably lost in time. There are more timestreams now than could ever be explored in a lifetime. With that expansion we have lost our individuality, we have lost our uniqueness, we have lost our very purpose.” Murmurs of agreement emanate from the crowd. Reading the audience, Ambrose raises his voice. “The time has come to right the wrongs of our generation. We will take responsibility for the recklessness we showed with our youthful yearnings for the unknown. In our quest for new horizons, we lost our way. The time has come to cleanse the map and take us back to a simpler time. One time. One system of operation that we can use to regulate responsible time travel and keep it out of the hands of those unable to use it properly.” He changes the image on the screen to a single unbroken line. His audience applauds heavily at this.
“So you’re going to kill the rest of us?” I clench my fists and shift a little in my prison of weightlessness. I don’t want to move too much because I don’t understand the physics behind whatever is holding me and I don’t want to suddenly find myself ass-end up in front of all these people. I point to the wall where the nameless Zealot has a hand on the shoulder of the little girl. “You’re what? Going to join a crazy religious cult and get them to do your dirty work?”
Ambrose looks exasperated, but he smooths his hair back and lowers his voice as if speaking to a particularly difficult child. “Yet again you have missed the point, Benjamin. This weapon is the ultimate technology of the age. It doesn’t kill time travelers. It makes it so they never even were time travelers. That is the sheer brilliance of it.” He strides to the table and picks up the device that looks like the ascension gun. There is something familiar about it. The lines and shape of it remind me of Jonah’s ‘organism gun.’ That must be what Ebenezer Sprocket designed.
“Phase One was a weapon like that.” Ambrose continues. “Pia’s research team discovered the way to target the gravitites in a person’s body and remove them while still keeping the patient alive. A feat that even the great Harry Quickly could never accomplish.” He sets the gun back down and walks toward me. My heart starts to accelerate as he approaches. Ambrose doesn’t stop at me, however. He walks past me and I crane my neck to see what he’s doing. That’s when I notice the other two prisoners. Behind me, forming roughly a triangle with my own position, Donny and Viznir are each suspended in a stasis field of their own. Neither of them appears to be conscious.
Ambrose pauses in front of Viznir. “Gioachino, have you finished with Mr. Najjar’s services?”
Geo is leaning against a set of sinks along the wall and crosses his arms at the question. “He’s served his purpose.”
Ambrose gestures to a wiry man in a paisley tie. “Wake him up. I want them both awake for this.” The man with the tie rummages through a cabinet and extracts two syringes already primed with fluid. He pops the cap off the first syringe and sticks it in Viznir’s arm. He uses the second syringe on Donny and both begin to wake.
Ambrose steps over to Donny, and I have to pivot the other direction to see what he’s doing. “We’ve used Dr. Chopra’s Phase One device on our friend Donny here. He had doubts, too. His reluctance in appreciating our research earned him a degravitization. He is no longer a time traveler.” Ambrose signals the man who had the syringes and the man hands him a Temprovibe. “And we will prove it.” Ambrose slides the device over Donny’s arm and fastens it to his bicep. “You all can appreciate the position our friend Donny is in, suspended above the ground, free of any suitable anchors. Not a place to be traveling in time if you expect to make it back. Of course Karla Drummond was smart enough to include a safety in her design to avoid such a lapse in judgment, but we’ve bypassed that for the purposes of this demonstration.”
A few murmurs go up from the enraptured audience. Donny is alert now and squirms a little. “Wait, what are you doing?”
“Have no fear, my boy. We’ve made some changes to your constitution. If Doctor Chopra’s device has worked, you are no longer a time traveler and need not fear being flung into the ether of the Neverwhere.” He says this last bit with all the showmanship of a magician on stage. A few members of his audience laugh, but nervously, as it’s a circumstance I doubt they would volunteer for themselves.
Ambrose sets the Temprovibe and gets one of the audience members to check the settings are correct. When the woman nods in confirmation, Ambrose smiles and, with a flourish of his hand, presses the button.
Donny doesn’t go anywhere.
“Ta da!” Ambrose gives another flourish and takes a bow. The audience claps and laughs, and Donny relaxes. Ambrose pats him on the shoulder and turns to his assistant. “Get him down, he’s done his part.”
Ambrose makes his way to me again.
Shit. Am I the other half of
this demonstration? Is he planning to send me to the Neverwhere? I bury my chronometer under my arm again.
Ambrose merely smiles at me. “Each of you racers did your part in this competition. Some of you smuggled items for us, some of you were persuaded to perform specific tasks, and with the exception of the Anya Morey, all of you gave us blood samples.” He motions to the man with the paisley tie again. “Dr. Emory, show our guests the materials.” The man has lowered Donny from his imprisonment, and as Donny shrugs his way through the audience to stand near Horacio, Dr. Emory crosses the room to a locked refrigerator. He extracts a tray of vials and sets it on a stainless steel rolling cart, then wheels the cart in front of me where everyone can see it. One of the vials has my name on it. It contains only a tiny drop of blood at the bottom. I look up to find the Zealot staring at me from the far wall. Vaccinations my ass.
“We were very specific about the racers we selected for this chronothon.” Ambrose gestures toward the clump of people near the door. “Montgomery McCandless of the chronothon committee was especially key in that role.” A few people look behind them, but I don’t see who McCandless is. “We needed to ensure our project was able to reach all corners of the time travel community. We already had a vast collection of project material collected as part of my company’s tracing program. Each recipient of a trace volunteered for blood tests in advance. For this race, we selected persons connected to vital clusters of the time travel community who are not in the trace program. There are notable families, alumni of the Academy, and—” Ambrose makes his way around to me again. “—had Benjamin not surprised us with his presence instead, we would have had one member of the oldest family line of Anya Morey. Why, you ask? Because these individuals are a path to others.” Ambrose walks past me and stops at Viznir again. “Mr. Najjar here had a different task, one which he failed to accomplish. I hold him responsible for our current lack of an Anya Morey.”
In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 98