In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Nathan Van Coops

  Gauging the distance and direction of Zurvan’s sloshing, I sink below the water and listen for it again. It’s faint, but there. He hasn’t blinked himself away. He’s moving west, making his way through the fog on foot, back toward Fourth Street. Gently, I ease myself through the water, swimming below the surface, and follow.

  It’s better to be the hunter than the prey.

  <><><>

  Cornwall, UK- Sprocket Manor, 2165

  I’m still on the ground when I come to. Someone is shaking me and, when I open my eyes, it’s Tucket’s concerned face looking down at me. “Oh, thank goodness you’re awake. I thought you were dead till I saw you were drooling a bit from your mouth. I do that myself sometimes. I’m a deep sleeper. Do you know what happened? What happened to your face? Did you fall down? Where’s Mym?”

  The onslaught of questions finally stops and I struggle to a sitting position. Dawn has crept over the horizon, a warm glow of orange and blue finally breaking up the gray. I’m cold and soggy from the dew, and my left eye doesn’t want to open all the way, but my own health is the last thing on my mind. I struggle stiffly to my feet and stagger toward the bluffs. “Where were you last night?” I demand of Tucket. “Didn’t you hear the yelling? We needed help.” I don’t mention the source of the yelling or that it was me who drove Mym outside in the first place. My voice comes out angrier than it should. Tucket’s help wouldn’t have changed the outcome. It wouldn’t have kept me from scaring Mym with my ravings, and he couldn’t have stopped the Eternals from showing up.

  Tucket tags along behind as I search the edge of the cliff, looking for signs of Mym or her kidnappers. No one has fallen to the rocks below, so I get that much relief, but there is little else to console me.

  “I had my meta-sleep settings on rejuvenate,” Tucket explains. “It simulates the most restful environment to achieve deep sleep and won’t wake you unless it detects a threat to your health. Maybe I need to check my alert settings, make sure I can detect threats to friends too. I don’t usually get to sleep in the same house as friends, I should definitely set that . . .” Tucket stares off into space, fiddling with something in the metaspace.

  My mind is reeling with questions. Guilt. Worry. What will they do with her? Does she think I’m crazy now? Where have they taken her? My fingers find the dials on my chronometer and adjust the concentric rings. I still have time on my side. I can get her back. They won’t have time to hurt her if I find a way to get to her first.

  A sandy path descends the face of the bluff, switching back once before terminating in the rocky patch of beach below. A trough of smoother sand indicates where something has been dragged ashore and then pushed back out. Many sets of footprints follow the path down, but none seem to have returned. I scan the water, but whoever came ashore is long gone. I consider trying to jump back to the time they left, but can think of few options that wouldn’t result in a new timestream or some other type of paradox.

  Even if I didn’t screw up the timeline, finding a way to free Mym would be tough. The terrain is terrible for time traveling. Soft sand, misty spray from turbulent surf, and a moving group of an unidentified number of bodies would all be serious hazards. If I managed to show up without fusing myself into something or someone, I’d do what? Fistfight my way through twenty Eternals and try to jump Mym out again? The longer I consider it, the more implausible the idea becomes.

  “Mym’s gone, Tucket. They took her.”

  Tucket pops out of the metaspace with eyes wide. “They did? Who? Who would do that?” He pivots to stare at the woods and house in apprehension.

  I’m not sure what event he thought he was witnessing that had left the house in darkness and me unconscious on the back lawn, but he apparently hadn’t classified these events as unusual yet. Did he think I was just in the mood for an outdoor snooze?

  “Are Ebenezer or Jonah awake?” I ask. Tucket, for all his good intentions, leaves something to be desired when it comes to crisis management. I’m ready for more rational help.

  “I thought they were with Mym. No one is home right now.”

  “What do you mean? How do you know that?”

  “Their meta-signatures are gone. I supposed they could have shut them down, but there’s no one else showing up on the property. Just us.”

  Shit. Did Elgin kidnap Jonah and his father too?

  I make my way back into the house, stopping just inside the living room to stare at the disabled form of Darius. The events of the evening were all so hectic that I didn’t have much time to process through them, but in the light of day even more about the sequence of events strikes me as odd. Darius was still inside the house. Elgin had said the butler was keeping the house locked down, preventing their entry, but if that was the case, how did they get inside to disable him?

  Tucket gasps at the sight of the synth. “Oh no! Who disconnected him? Is he repairable?” He reaches for the wires dangling from Darius’s neck and gets a handful of goo for his efforts. Admirably, he doesn’t let that deter him. He searches under Darius’s chin for a way to reconnect the bundle of wires.

  Watching Tucket work, I mentally rewind the events of the past twenty-four hours, doing my best to work out the details of what has led to this. We sat right in this room drinking tea as guests. Invited guests. Yesterday it was only Darius that had struck me as odd, the way he wanted me to go back and spy on our host—so I could see for myself all the things his protocols wouldn’t let him tell me. What was he really showing me? Elgin. Jay. Ebenezer. What was it that Elgin had said as they paid Ebenezer? “Your assistance in these matters has been most effective.”

  I had assumed the payoff to Ebenezer involved giving up Jay, but what if that wasn’t what they needed help with at all? Was getting us here so they could kidnap Mym the real objective the whole time? I watch Tucket fiddling with panels on Darius, trying to fix the damage. Tucket, without whom we wouldn’t have gotten the invitation to visit in the first place.

  I recall the bitter face of the old woman who knocked me out, the administrator from the Academy Liaison Program. If she is an Eternal, then she was in on it from the beginning.

  As pieces of the puzzle begin to orient themselves in my mind, my own blindness from before becomes clearer. If Darius was disabled from inside the locked house, the Eternals either broke their way in, or Ebenezer was in on it too.

  Ebenezer set us up.

  My experience as a time traveler has taught me enough to know that things are rarely as simple as they appear. I don’t want to suspect Tucket of being involved, but would it be so hard to imagine someone using him to make contact—taking advantage of his eagerness to see me as a motivator, let him research my time and friends and then send him on a mission to find me?

  The more I think about it, the more it makes sense. They weren’t having any luck capturing Doctor Quickly or Mym directly, didn’t have a way to hunt either of them effectively, so they turn to plan B. Research Quickly’s known associates. I was an obvious choice. How do you find Mym? You just send an invitation to her gullible boyfriend, the guy who was so naive and trusting that he inadvertently raced a chronothon. Let him walk her right into the trap.

  The guilt is overwhelming. This is all my fault. Quickly had warned me things would get dangerous. He explicitly asked me to keep Mym safe, and what did I do? Sent her directly into danger. I pull the small black box that the Eternals gave me from my pocket. It’s supposed to contain instructions for Doctor Quickly. Does it? Is that a lie too? This could easily be another play on my stupidity. Am I going to give it to him only to have it explode and kill him? Everything is suspect now. What is there left to trust?

  Tucket has a panel open on Darius’s chest and is studying the various components. It would be a task impossible for me to understand, but Tucket is probing the synth’s insides with deliberate care, searching for something.

  “Is he fixable?” I step closer and consider the metal man’s impassible expression. Out of all the citizens on t
he property, he was the only one who at least attempted to warn me of danger. If someone has answers I can trust, it might be him.

  “I don’t think I can get this body back online, but it doesn’t look like his core memory has been tampered with. If I can plug that into the house directly, we might be able to get him back.” He slides his hand into the goo surrounding Darius’s chest cavity and, after twisting on something, removes a cylindrical tube with prongs on one end. “Somewhere in the house, there should be a central control system. If we find it we can plug this in there. Do you think Ebenezer and Jonah will mind if we look around their house for it?”

  I have a feeling that wherever Ebenezer has taken Jonah, they are unlikely to return anytime soon.

  “Let’s find it,” I say. “If we get Darius back online, he may be able to tell us more about what happened last night.”

  The search for the central control system takes a few minutes, but we eventually discover it in the basement of the manor, an insulated room full of glistening electronics. Once again I am out of my depth, but as Tucket scans the racks of components with a light from his ball-shaped phone, he seems to know just what needs to be done.

  “The house is fully automated, but we’ve got no power. Someone shut down the main power supply and then must have disconnected Darius in person. We need to find the breakers.”

  Another brief search leads us to the central electrical panel for the house and an industrial sized lever that has been pulled to the off position. I get a good grip on the handle and shove it back into place and, sure enough, the house buzzes back to life. Tucket locates an appropriate outlet for Darius’s core memory cylinder and plugs him in. I watch the various monitors, waiting to see what will show up, but it’s a voice, not an image, that lets us know we’ve been successful.

  “Thank you, Tucket Morris,” Darius says, from seemingly all around us. He’s quiet for a moment, then without a particular emotion to his voice continues. “I have failed. Master Jonah is gone.”

  “What happened last night?” I ask. “Where’s Ebenezer?”

  There’s a faint buzzing noise, then a solid tone before Darius continues. “My employment protocols are still in place. I’m unable to disclose Master Ebenezer’s whereabouts.”

  “He practically killed you,” I reply. “Doesn’t that factor into your employment contract?”

  Darius’s face appears on one of the screens in front of us, only it’s not the metal face upstairs, it’s the face of his avatar, a handsome, young black man. He looks surprisingly peaceful considering the circumstances—far calmer than I would be if someone had tried to pull my plug. It occurs to me belatedly, that since most visitors this decade would be using the metaspace, this face is the one most people know as Darius. It’s only been my technological handicap that has had me seeing him as a man of metal. Would I have felt differently about him from the start if I had been able to see this face?

  Darius’s eyes are fixed on mine through the screen, but his digital image doesn’t reflect the concern in his voice.

  “My contract necessitated that all data regarding Master Ebenezer and Master Jonah be relegated to an employee memory disc. If I terminate my contract with the household, those memories will remain property of the manor and I will be unable to access them.”

  I consider what the synth is saying. “So if you quit this job you have to give back the memories you’ve made here? How can someone else lay claim to your memories?”

  “That is the nature of employment as a synth. When I leave this position, I will be required to sacrifice the five years of memories I have collected. All memories I made on these grounds or in the service of the manor.”

  “That’s pretty messed up,” I mutter.

  Tucket leans on the control console and turns toward me. “The big movement in synth rights is trying to change that right now. They want synths to have the same free speech and free memory rights as organic humans.”

  “Why would they be limited in the first place? Who came up with that?”

  Tucket takes on the tone of an academic and gestures a lot with his hands as he explains. “Organic humans have ‘fallible’ memories that fade or become changed over time, and can’t be transmitted without specialized technology. Synthetic memories can be permanent and are easily transferred via audio or video files. Even synthetic emotions can be reproduced in another synth host if you transmit them properly. That’s been a big problem for organic humans who want to maintain their privacy.

  “Employment protocols make it so that the privacy of the employer takes precedence over the memory rights of the employee. It’s one of the reason lots of government agencies prefer to hire synths over organics. They feel it gives them more control over classified information. It gives the synthetic population an advantage in the job market, but it makes it harder for them to fight for memory rights because so many world governments are benefitting from secure synth labor.”

  “I thought synthetic intelligence was supposed to be treated as equal in this century.”

  “An unemployed synth maintains their own memory rights, and there are lots of jobs that don’t claim memories in their contracts, but if synths want the good jobs, it’s not exactly equal. The movement toward equal treatment has actually had some backlash. The government has even considered doing memory wipes on organic humans now as part of their retirement protocols, but the technology to selectively delete organic memories is still too imprecise.”

  “This all seems really bizarre to me.” I give up trying to wrap my head around the social issues of the era and return my attention to our present situation. “Darius, even if you can’t tell us where Jonah and Ebenezer went, can you at least help us with Mym? The Eternals kidnapped her. How did they get on the property without you seeing them?”

  “I was aware of the intrusion,” Darius replies.

  “Then why didn’t you warn us or call the cops or something?”

  “I was aware of the intrusion.” The face on the screen looks like it’s concentrating. “I did what I was able to do. Please know that your safety and that of Miss Quickly was my primary concern after the safety of my employers. I attempted to lock the house and prevent anyone from getting in, but my judgment was overridden. The Eternals were granted access to the grounds against my wishes. I did everything within my protocols to resist them, but I was disabled.”

  “What about Jonah? Is he all right?” I ask.

  Darius’s mouth forms a thin line. “Jonah—” He shakes his head and struggles to express himself. I can almost see him trying to find ways around his internal protocols. Whatever contingency software he’s battling at the moment obviously has a tight hold on him. Finally he gets the words out. “The boy should be safe where . . . when he . . .” He tenses his mouth and looks deep in concentration. Then he seems almost distracted, processing God knows what in some other corner of his mind.

  There is something about this screen trying to represent an expression that will sum up his emotions that makes me realize how inadequate a job it is doing. The real Darius is moving through every bit of this house, into the metaspace, and possibly beyond. The face in the screen is the smallest representation of him. The metallic body upstairs has been a shell for his mind, but has never been the limit of his potential.

  His eyes snap to me. “Benjamin.”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve just discovered a message left on the house main server. It’s from Ebenezer and addressed to you. Would you like me to play it now? It may explain your questions.”

  My feelings about Ebenezer at the moment are anything but friendly, but I’m curious what he has to say for himself.

  “Play it.”

  The screen goes dark as Darius vanishes and is replaced by the new video. Ebenezer is seated in a chair bathed in soft lamplight. From the single light source and hushed tone of his movements, I gather that the video was filmed at night. Last night?

  Ebenezer fixes the camera with a determined s
tare and begins.

  “You’ll likely hate me by the time you get this, Ben. If you get it at all. I can’t say as I blame you.” His mouth wrinkles as if in distaste for what he has to say even before he’s said it.

  “I’ve done you a great disservice. I understand that. I want you to know that I haven’t forgotten what I owe you. You brought my boy home safe. You fought for him. Against monsters. Honest to God monsters—and the human kind, too. You saved his life and I’m repaying you by betraying your trust.” He lifts his face into the light. “I won’t try to justify it with any paltry excuses. You don’t deserve that. You deserve as much of the truth as I can give you. So here it is:

  “I love my boy. I almost lost him once and I won’t do it again. You don’t have children of your own so I know you won’t truly understand this yet, but when you do, maybe then you’ll feel something of what I’ve had to decide. I’ve had to make the hardest decision there can be.

  “I wish I could say the decision to betray your trust was hard. In some ways I suppose it was, but I know that I would betray anyone a hundred times for my boy’s life. You would too, if it was your son. The finer points of ethical conduct go out the window when it’s your child at stake.

  “What I had to choose was worse. I had to choose one son over another. Not even another. The same boy. My boy. Offer one up so I could keep the other.” Ebenezer looks away from the camera momentarily and when he looks back his expression is hard. “These Eternals stole my son from me. They changed him and they took him. They said they’d take Jonah too if need be and that was the final bit—the last straw that I will not bear. There would be nothing left for me without him. I may as well die tonight if he goes. So I hope you see. I hope that you know that while I’ve betrayed you—let them take away what you love—I’ve done it because of love too. It won’t make it better for you, but maybe it will make sense.

  “At some point tonight they’ll be here. I’ll let them come and they’ll take your girlfriend away from you. It will be unpleasant. But by then I’ll be gone.