by Barry Lyga
Caitlin smirked as all eyes in the Cortex sought her out. “I know him,” she said, shrugging as if to say, No big deal. “I can tell you his name.”
16
The boy was Don, he knew. The girl introduced herself as Dawn.
“We’re the Tornado Twins,” she said with pride, and then she blushed a bit.
Barry waved it off. “Look, can you guys give me a hand here? I’m supposed to be in the year 6345.”
The twins passed another ineffable glance between them. Their body language said it all, though: They didn’t want to disappoint him.
“How far off the mark am I?” he asked.
“This is 2968,” Don said reluctantly.
Barry clenched his jaw and resisted the urge to swear, scream, or just plain whimper. All that running. All that effort. All that pain. And he hadn’t even gone a full millennium into the future. Aiming for the sixty-fourth century, he’d ended up in the late thirtieth.
“Look,” Dawn said, “we shouldn’t really stand around here. The Science Police will show up soon.”
“Science Police?” Barry was intrigued. Talk about combining the things he loved!
“Yeah, the Science Police,” Don said. “They investigate, you know, science.”
“Anomalies,” Dawn amplified. “And you popping out of the time stream, spraying chronometric energies everywhere in the middle of the Kanigher Cross-Ave, is gonna spike some readouts at the Time Institute and SP HQ for sure.”
“Kanigher . . .” The name was all too familiar to him, plastered on schools and roads in his own time. “So I’m still in Central City?”
Don shrugged. “Kinda. It’s technically a supersuburb of the Megalop—”
“Time for geography later,” Dawn interrupted. “Let’s beat feet. Think you can keep up?” she asked Barry.
He chuckled ruefully. Apparently tales of his speed had not survived the intervening centuries intact. The “Tornado Twins” would learn soon enough. “You lead on. I’m sure I can follow.”
And then—much to his shock—both kids took off at astounding superspeed.
It took him a moment to overcome his surprise. And then another to berate himself for being a complete idiot. They called themselves the Tornado Twins. Of course they had speed. Barry, you’re an idiot!
By that point, almost a full second had passed. The Tornado Twins were two purplish blurs on the horizon. Barry ran after them, cursing every step as his still-sore legs pumped. Nonetheless, he wasn’t about to let a couple of teenagers outrun him. He pushed through the pain and poured on the speed, catching up to them in no time at all.
“Not bad!” Don said admiringly.
“Do I live up to the legends?” Barry asked.
“So far!” Dawn said. “This way!”
She zigged left sharply and vibrated through a glimmering violet wall. Even though all his instincts cried out not to—Do NOT vibrate through walls when you don’t know what’s on the other side! he’d told Wally more than once—he followed along with Don. An instant later, the three of them were in a cozy space with walls and a ceiling that curved around like an igloo’s. Only the floor was flat and true.
Light glowed along a series of pinpoints that patterned the ceiling and upper portion of the walls, such that the room had no harsh shadows or dim spots. The furniture floated. Tables and things that looked like beanbag chairs but were made of clouds drifted along. Dawn flung herself onto one of them, and it locked into place.
Barry stood in the middle of it all and took it in. In addition to the tables and weird chairs, there were also what appeared to be display cases. They clung to the walls and occasionally swapped positions with one another, whether guided by some kind of artificial intelligence or a preprogrammed system, he couldn’t tell.
Artificial intelligence . . .
“Gideon?” he whispered.
Don laughed. “Wow, that’s a blast from the past. You think there’s a Gideon somewhere in the system, Dawn?”
Dawn shrugged. “Dunno. They purged a lot of the pre-revolution AIs after the—” She broke off.
“After what?” Don asked. He was rummaging in what appeared to be a cooler of some sort. “After the Great—”
Dawn zipped over to Don, slapped him upside his head, then zapped right back to her seat.
“Ow!” Don complained.
“You’ll have to forgive my brother,” Dawn said sweetly. “He was born thirty-one seconds later, and he’s still trying to catch up. There are things we shouldn’t tell you. Preserving the time continuum and all that.”
That made abundant sense. He didn’t want to know too much about his own future. The time stream seemed fragile enough as it was, and Cisco’s admonition about alternate timelines and such seemed suddenly more important. He didn’t want to fracture the timeline and make returning home even more difficult.
“Let’s watch the finals!” Dawn said to no one in particular, and suddenly a hologram burst into view in the center of the chamber. It was in full color, partly translucent, with resolution and color fidelity that made reality look fake. No matter where Barry stood in the room, the hologram always seemed to be “facing” him.
A youngish man with a sweep of black hair grinned at him, holding up a sleek bottle of some sort.
“—Rokk Krinn here,” he was saying brightly, “and when I get sweaty on the magnoball court, I recharge with a cool, frosty bottle of Polar—”
“Mute until the match is back on!” Dawn called, and the volume muted. “Stupid commercial.”
Well, some things never changed, it appeared.
Barry glanced around some more. There were floating “newspapers” like those he’d seen in Thawne’s time vault hidden in S.T.A.R. Labs. Some of them had English headlines, and he could read them. A few were familiar: FLASH HALTS GORILLA WAR! and RAINBOW RAIDER: LIGHTS OUT!
Others made no sense to him: THINKER STRIKES AGAIN! and ELONGATED MAN SOLVES LOCKED ROOM MYSTERY and KID FLASH JOINS TEEN TITANS.
He started thinking again about alternate timelines, about Cisco’s concerns. What if he wasn’t just in the thirtieth century . . . but the wrong thirtieth century? What if this was some sort of offshoot?
He had to trust that Cisco’s vibe pattern would keep him going in the right direction and that the wand would act as a compass for him.
All water runs to the sea, he reminded himself. Eventually, there had to be a place where the timelines met.
“So, is this where you kids live?” he asked.
“Nah.” Don handed Barry a slim flask of liquid.
Barry considered demurring, but when he looked down for the lunch Cisco had packed for him, he discovered that the plastic container had been crushed beyond recognition during his run to the future. And he was hungry. And thirsty.
It took a moment for Barry to figure out how to open the flask—you bent the top in one direction, then another, and a little straw popped out—and the blue substance inside was sickly sweet when he drank it. “Special electrolyte compound,” Don told him. “For speedsters.”
Barry guzzled gratefully.
“This is more like a hangout,” Dawn said. “When . . . you know, when our parents annoy us, we come here.”
“How did you get your speed?”
“Eh, the usual,” Dawn said airily. “A little chemistry, a little electricity. A certain genetic predisposition. Nothing exciting.”
“Zap, boom!” Don said. “Don and Dawn, the Tornado Twins!”
“Do people have last names in the future?”
Don threw his hands up into the air. “Holy grife! Do you want our help or our biographies?”
Barry wondered if maybe he’d stumbled into some kind of thirtieth-century taboo. “Sorry. Just making conversation while I recharge.” He took another slug of the grossly sweet fluid and felt it spread through his body, reinvigorating cells, repairing damage.
Something caught his attention out of the corner of his eye.
“Hey, I’v
e seen something like this before!” He tapped on a clear dome resting over a fabric-covered stand. On the stand was a golden ring emblazoned with a Flash lightning insignia. “Actually, I have one.” He stripped off his right glove and held up his hand. There, on the ring finger, was a ring just like the one in the case. He’d taken his from Eobard Thawne, the Reverse-Flash, after defeating him, and had been wearing it regularly since. Thawne had somehow stored his costume inside the ring. Barry had asked Cisco to do the same with his costume, but Cisco hadn’t figured it out yet.
“Wait a sec,” he said, leaning in to scrutinize the ring in the case. “Or is this the same one I’m wearing, just centuries later? Is that even possible for it to exist twice in the same time period?”
“Ow!” Don exclaimed. “Ontological paradox makes my head hurt.” He gripped his temples in an overwrought attempt at comedy. “Next you’ll be asking if it’s OK to kill your own grandfather and ride the paradox wave into a new timeline.”
“Wasn’t planning on asking any of that.” But he couldn’t help thinking of the other Barry Allen, the Flashpoint Flash. That Barry had mucked with history and paid a dear price. Barry had no intention of doing the same.
“Look, kids, I appreciate the drink and the future history lesson, but at this point, I have to be realistic about my options.”
Don settled into one of the cloud chairs and drifted nearby. Barry couldn’t fathom lounging on a cloud, and so he remained standing. In short, clipped sentences, he explained about Hocus Pocus, his reign of terror over twenty-first-century Central City, his capture, and his eventual escape from the inescapable Pipeline.
The twins nodded along at certain points. Some of this was familiar to them. He glanced around their hangout again, at the floating newspapers. Flash fans? Historians? It didn’t matter; they knew him and his past and his speed. If anyone could help, they could.
Cisco’s vibe had stabilized him for the time trip, but at this point . . .
“At this point,” he admitted, “my only option may be to cancel out the vibe, return to the twenty-first century, and try again some other way. Maybe Cisco can whip up something—”
Don shook his head violently, and Dawn waved her hands frantically, saying, “No, no, no, no!”
“Don’t go back,” Don said. “I think we can help you figure out how to get farther into the future without blowing out your legs again. There’s been a lot of research in time travel in the past few years. Guys like Dox and Vidar and Senius have really upped the game.”
“Building off research begun in your own period,” Dawn hastened to add. “You and Cisco Ramon really kick-started what’s thought of as the ante-modern time travel movement.”
Barry accepted the compliment but shrugged. “I don’t need you to stroke my ego. I just need a way to get to the sixty-fourth century and figure out what’s what with Hocus Pocus.”
Don and Dawn did their twin-thing again, that shared, indefinable glance that seemed to communicate so much more than the time elapsed would indicate. Speedsters were fast; twins were faster. At transmitting ideas, at least.
“We think our first move is the university,” Dawn said after the shared moment. “We can help with a couple of things there. Fix up your costume, for one thing.”
“Kids, that’s nice of you, but I need a physicist, not a tailor.”
“Hey!” Don hopped down from his cloud-chair and planted his fists on his hips. “You’re going to get to the sixty-fourth century, and when you arrive, do you want to look like the living legend you are, or do you want to look like you left your nice costume back in the prehistoric twentieth century?”
Barry couldn’t help chuckling at the kid’s verve and passion. “You might have a point. But I don’t think you can really call it prehistoric”—he gestured to the newspapers—“and it’s the twenty-first, not the twentieth.”
Don blushed. “Right. My bad. Sorry.”
“Let’s just call it a mopee,” Dawn suggested.
“What’s a mopee?” Barry asked. The plug in his ear had given him the word but not its meaning.
“That,” Don explained, “is when something happens and everyone knows it, but we all pretend it didn’t.”
“Fine by me. It’s a mopee. Never happened.”
Don relaxed. He chugged the last of his drink and said to Dawn, “Professor Giffitz?”
She nodded. “Let’s go.”
They ran so fast through the streets of future Central City that Barry hardly had time to study it. The roads were seamless and felt slightly plastic, with a pleasing give that made running on them easier. Were there so many speedsters in the future that they’d designed special roads for them? Nah, he couldn’t believe that. But he enjoyed the coincidence.
The buildings blurred by, a polychromatic kaleidoscope of towers and turrets.
“How do you guys know a university professor?” Barry asked at one point.
“He’s our instructor in Superthermoplastic Design this semester,” Don explained.
Barry blinked. “You kids are in college?”
“Why not? We’re sixteen.”
Oh. The future. Where teenagers studied superthermoplastic design in college. Of course. Barry said nothing more.
“We just skim around that,” Dawn said, pointing, “and the university’s on the other side.”
She gestured to the massive bulk of the hemisphere he’d noticed earlier. This close, it was even bigger, a gigantic, impossibly smooth dome surrounded by an enormous park. Even at their speed, it would take a few seconds to detour around.
“Why not run over it?” Barry asked. “Or through it?”
Don nearly choked. “That’s the fusion powersphere!”
“It provides clean energy to the entire region,” Dawn explained. “If you ran through it, well . . . a few of your atoms might make it out on the other side, but I kinda doubt it.”
“And it’s illegal to run over it,” Don said. “They, uh, they kinda passed that law just for us, but it probably applies to you, too.”
If Barry had gotten his powers at sixteen instead of in his twenties, he could imagine all sorts of trouble he might have gotten into. It made perfect sense that this era had to clamp down a little on the Tornado Twins. Good kids, he thought, but still kids.
They skirted the perimeter of the “fusion powersphere.” It sounded horribly dangerous, and yet the future had decided to plop it right in the middle of the city, with some absolutely stellar landscaping around it. Fusion power was generally safer than fission, he knew—less chance of radiation leaks, for one thing. In his own time, no one had yet made fusion power practical, but here in the thirtieth century, it seemed as though the energy scientists knew what they were doing.
Still, safe as it must have been, he kept a distance as they circumnavigated the bulk of the powersphere.
On the other side, the city opened up into a breathtaking space that nearly stopped Barry in his tracks. He was almost a thousand years in the future, yeah, but he recognized a college campus when he saw one. Even one where the buildings were . . .
. . . floating!
The campus itself was a wooded field that stretched for several acres in all directions. Pathways cut among the trees and across great swaths of green grass. Students milled about in the shadows of the trees and of the buildings that levitated thirty feet above the ground.
He followed Don and Dawn as they raced down a gentle slope. Finally, though, he called to them to stop for a moment so that he could stand and stare. The buildings varied in color from burnished gold to bright silver, each a rhombic prism with the rounded corners he’d already come to associate with this era’s specific architectural language. He knew he probably looked like a rube, a hick, one of those tourists to the big city who couldn’t stop staring up at the skyscrapers, and yet . . .
The buildings were floating! How could he not stop and stare?
Someone—some genius—had plotted out the hovering structures’ positions
so that they didn’t block all the sunlight. The park beneath the buildings seemed no darker than any random city block Barry had ever strolled. Maybe they used some sort of reflective alloy on the outside of the buildings to enhance and direct the sunlight, too. Maybe . . .
The scientist and the aesthete in him were both in awe. The university blended science, art, and the environment in such a seamless fashion that it would be impossible to imagine any of those elements separate from the others.
The beauty of it brought a tear to his eye.
“Is everything OK?” Dawn asked.
“It’s just . . . amazing.” Barry immediately felt like a loser for using such a small word for something so powerful. Iris would have had a better word, he knew, and the thought of her jabbed at his heart. He hadn’t seen her since leaving for Earth 2, and while it had only been a day or two, the jump into the Multiverse, his adventures on Earth 27, and now his trip to the future made it feel as though it had been years since he’d seen her, touched her face, held her in his arms.
He wanted to go home. He wanted to rest.
But he was the Flash.
“It’s just the university,” Don said. “No big.”
How easy it was to get used to miracles, Barry thought. He’d become accustomed to his speed in short order, and here in the future, a sight that would trigger a million Instagrams in his own time wasn’t even worth commenting on.
“Let’s go meet this professor of yours,” he said. Because as much as he admired the future, he wanted to end this nonsense with Hocus Pocus and get back to where he belonged.
17
Earthworm’s name, Caitlin revealed, was Herbert Hynde.
“We were residents together at Central City General Hospital about five years ago,” she said. “Right before I accepted Dr. Wells’s offer to join S.T.A.R. Labs.”
“He’s a doctor?” Iris said in disbelief.
“Makes sense, actually,” Joe said. “Barry said that the organ removal was top-notch, that whoever was doing it knew what he was doing.”
Caitlin nodded fiercely. “Herbie was a great surgeon. Enormous potential.”