“It is,” I say.
“So, we’re living in a big Schrodinger’s Synergy,” Kuzneski says. “Dead and alive at the same time. Except some of us are alive twice and some of us are dead once.” He looks at Cassie. “Sorry.”
“First,” Flores says. “I’m impressed you know that. Didn’t think you were that smart.”
Kuzneski offers a fake smile and middle finger. “Don’t be a dick. I’m not that guy out there.”
“Second, some of us are alive three times.” Flores looks at Langdon to explain.
“We believe the effects are far reaching.”
“Beyond Synergy?” I ask.
“The facility stretches far beyond the mountain,” Langdon says.
I grip the back of the chair, taking out my frustration on the hard wood. “Why didn’t I know that?”
“Your job was to protect our people from harm, and everything within our perimeter. The rest of the facility is underground.”
I remember the large pipe running through the Indian graveyard, and the roadwork completed near my house. “The tunnels leading down the mountainside.”
He nods, but I can tell there’s more.
“What is this place?”
“A particle collider,” he says. “The largest in the world. Built under the mountain.”
“And under Black Creek,” I guess, and I don’t wait for confirmation. “Which means there are layers of town, and all the people in it from multiple time periods. That could be thousands of people, many of them armed, and all of them terrified.”
I can’t help but picture a bloodbath. Then I fixate on one possibility. One person, cast through time, who means everything to me and to Owen. I turn to Cassie. “Three lives. You were in town the day before my father died. We had planned to meet after church, but my father took me hunting.”
Her eyes widen. “I was shoe shopping with my mother.”
I try to figure out a way to reach town and save Young Cassie, as much for myself as for Owen and my Cassie. But saving them won’t be possible as long as we’re being catapulted through time. And that’s not going to stop until all of my questions have been answered, starting with…
“Three lives,” I say to Flores. “You weren’t talking about Cassie.”
He shakes his head. “I was talking about the man who brought us here. About the man who inspired us to risk everything, to fight against a lunatic whose actions could destroy the universe—” He looks at our Langdon. “Sorry.” Then back to me. “The man who knew this mountain better than anyone, who loved this town and the people in it. Who Cassie would do anything for, including die.” He leans forward, eyes intense. “I was talking about you.”
30
“Am I dead?” I ask, and then I mentally adjust for the fact that I am one of three people. “Is he dead?”
“I’m not sure,” Flores says. “We were separated on the mountain. He gave himself up to save me. That was before Boone’s people found me. You ever catch up with him?”
“Stray fire from a drone dropped him.”
“Huh.” He’s unmoved by the news.
“He wasn’t all bad in the end,” I say, surprised by my defense of the man.
Flores gives a nod like he already knew that. “When you’re up against the kind of people we’re facing, most bad men look good in comparison.”
Langdon rubs his head. It must be hard to hear that in seven years, you’ll be a monster of a man responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, not to mention an entire town being ripped through time. But if he’s right, the man before us will never become that monster. They are separate and disconnected by time and space. In theory. The only real way to test that would be to kill someone from the past and observe what happens to his future self. Someone expendable.
Someone like me. If the future me—the rebel leader waging war against his former employer—is still alive. “How does that happen? How did we get to…this?”
“We meet, a year from now. You hire me a few months before this place becomes a shit show.”
“When my wife dies of cancer,” Langdon says, cloaked in a shroud of dismay. What killed her in the future will still kill her now, but in a year’s time. He might not become a madman, but the sting of death will leave its mark. It’s already got its talons in him. I can see it in his eyes.
“Cancer…” I say.
“You were expecting something else?”
“Your older self claimed the people of Black Creek killed her. Said the country was on the brink of civil war.”
“Never happened,” Flores says. “And our country was a mess for a while, but was actually on the mend. He was fishing for sympathy. Trying to improve his image. Which means he’s probably not done with you.”
“Peachy keen,” Kuzneski says. “He’s done with me, though, right?”
Flores looks at Kuzneski for a moment, but says nothing. Then he turns to me. “I’ve been with you…with him, ever since. Wrecking your truck. That was you. And it wasn’t just to protect you. It was to keep you out of the way. Not that it helped.”
“He could have told me the truth.”
“He didn’t think so.”
I’m having a hard time believing I wouldn’t trust my future-self just seven years from now. Am I really that blindly loyal? Would I have defended Synergy even from myself? From Cassie? Without the experiences of the past day, without seeing everything for myself, maybe I would have. At the very least, I would have slowed them down. Not that it helped, like Flores said.
My future self might have inspired Flores and Cassie, and those other folks now dead in the woods, to fight the good fight, but he wasn’t prepared for this. And now his people are dead. Knowing exactly how hard that will be for him, I determine to not repeat his mistakes.
Problem is, I’m even less prepared for this dangerous new Synergy, not to mention everything we’ve encountered along the way.
What do I have?
Flores, if he’ll follow a younger version of his friend. Kuzneski and Cassie. My father and Owen are a no-go, but Inola, who is—as far as I know—still stalking the mountainside, will fight for her people. Five people against a futuristic army, who our more prepared, more heavily armed counterparts couldn’t handle.
Step one is getting the hell out of this prison, which shouldn’t be hard. With evil Kuzneski the only guard, all we really need to do is either trick him, or wait for someone new to open that door. If he’s facing his younger self, he won’t pull the trigger. Won’t risk killing him. But once we’re outside, where endless drone eyes are watching, it won’t be long before we’re discovered. And when that happens, we’re mini-gun paste.
We’ll need to get to the trees. If we can find Inola and—
“You’re doing it,” Flores says.
I snap out of my machinations. “Doing what?”
“Planning,” he says. “You make a face.”
“You do,” Cassie says.
“It’s kind of like…” Kuzneski stares off at nothing while moving his eyebrows up and down. “Like a golden retriever in deep thought. Only not as smart.”
Kuzneski manages to get smiles out of Cassie and Flores, and I can see how they’d be friends, united by my future self. Who is not here.
“And if I am?” I ask.
“I’d rather fight and die,” Flores says, “then give up and live.”
Kuzneski raises his hand. “Is there a ‘fight and live’ option? Because, you know, that’s probably better. I mean, you sound super badass. Like John McClane badass. But I’m partial to not getting shot. Or eaten. Or whatever the hell else has been going on out there.”
“That’s the plan,” I say. “Fight and live.”
“Is it?” Kuzneski asks. “Because really, what would be the plan? I mean, how do we stop all this?”
“That’s what he’s going to tell us.” I point to Langdon, who shrinks in on himself a bit. As much as he doesn’t like who his future self has become, he’s a scie
ntist, not a fighter. And he’s not crazy. Not yet.
“Even if we stop the time…the…”
When I can tell he’s struggling to come up with the right word, I offer, “Flux. That’s what I’ve been calling it.”
“Time flux,” he says it like the words taste bad, but he moves past the issue. “Even if we stop it, we still have to deal with all this.” He motions to the room’s four walls, but his imaginary reach envelops all of Synergy and the monstrous creations standing sentinel over it.
“One problem at a time,” I tell him, “but the quick version is this: if we can cut the power, it will interrupt his ability to control the drones.”
“They can operate autonomously,” Flores says.
“But they need to recharge,” I point out. “I saw the docking bays. No power, no recharge. He’ll have a window to reverse what we’ve done, but—”
“So we make it irreversible,” Cassie says.
“Leaving all of us without power,” Langdon says. “In the past. With no way to return.”
“Huh? With no what?” Kuzneski says.
Langdon rubs his forehead, looking a bit peaked. “We’re in a new dimension, and with every flux, we move on to another. There is no future for us to return to, because here, the future has not yet happened. The year in which we stop will be our home, forever.”
That takes a moment to sink in. If I wasn’t sitting already, I’d have plopped down into the chair. Kuzneski leans against the door and slides down to the floor. He doesn’t have a wife or children, but he was close to his brother and his parents. Now he knows he’ll never see them again, no matter the outcome.
Cassie steps closer to me, putting a hand on my shoulder. I take her hand and hold it tight. Whatever happens, at least we’re in this together. With my father. And Owen. And maybe even Cassie’s younger self.
At least I have my family, I think, and then I realize that, for the first time since I was a day older than Owen, I’ve got a lot to lose.
“And now you’re caught up to me,” Flores says. “That’s about as far as I got with him before you arrived. He was about to tell me how all of this is possible.”
“I don’t know,” Langdon insists.
“But you have an idea,” I say.
“A hypothesis.” He squeezes his hands like he’s holding two invisible stress balls. “Synergy was built for the express purpose of detecting subatomic particles, like the Higgs Boson.”
“Higgs bosom?” Kuzneski asks.
Langdon grunts his disapproval and continues. “The Higgs Boson is also known as the God Particle, simply because of its importance to the standard model of particle physics. We’re looking for its antithesis.”
“So…” I say, “the Devil Particle?”
While I’m not exactly a churchgoer, the analogy does not help put me at ease.
“I prefer to call it the ‘Langdon Particle,’ but for those who prefer quirky nicknames, yes. It is the anti-particle to the Higgs Boson. Together, they create a kind of supersymmetry that keeps the entire universe stable. Where the God Particle contributes to universal mass, binding things together, the Devil Particle is the force pushing the multiverse ever farther apart. Theoretically. I have yet to discover the particle. But if it is real, and the hypothesis correct, it is possible that my future self found a way to disrupt the two particles’ symmetry, releasing gravity waves capable of bending time and space.”
“How could two little particles bend time and space?” Kuzneski asks.
“If you believe that all of creation came from a subatomic particle a million billion billion times smaller than an atom, then this is really just par for the course. When it comes to the subatomic and theoretical physics, size often doesn’t matter.”
“And if all that is accurate?” I ask. “How would we stop it?”
He looks confused for a moment. “I thought that was already established.” When no one speaks he says, “Cut the power.”
“That’s it?” Kuzneski says.
“Well, it would stop the reaction. Free the particles from whatever effect is controlling them.” Langdon says. “The collider has been running this whole time.”
“How do you know that?” Cassie asks.
“Listen,” Langdon says, and everyone goes still. In the silence that follows, I don’t hear much, other than voices on the door’s far side, but I feel a gently pulsing vibration beneath my feet. I felt the same outside, when standing on Synergy’s concrete foundation.
I’m about to ask how to cut the power when I notice the vibration growing more intense. And I’m not alone.
“Umm,” Kuzneski says.
Langdon grips the bed cushion. “It’s happening again.” When none of us reacts with more than a groan he says, “Hold on to something! The reaction is quite powerful at the epicenter!”
The roaring buzz explodes around us, along with a mind-bending warping of everything I can see—time and space bending before my eyes. Then I’m lifted off the floor and sent flying into the ceiling.
31
I don’t remember feeling gravity’s return or hitting the floor. I barely remember colliding with the ceiling, but I don’t think that’s what knocked me unconscious. My head hurts, but not concussion bad, which is good. I’m not sure how many whacks to the head I can handle in one day without becoming a useless lump.
I’m lying on my side, head on my arm. Sore, but alive.
I open my eyes and find Cassie lying beside me, eyes closed. For a moment, I imagine this is a lazy Saturday morning. That we’re waking up together. That we’re more than friends, and I think we are now. Maybe. The moment is broken when groans from the hallway beyond the closed door reach my ears.
I stretch out and place my fingers against the side of her neck. I don’t immediately find her pulse, but I don’t need to. My touch makes her eyes flutter and open.
“Okay?” I ask.
She grunts, pushing herself up. “Think so.”
“How in the name of Captain Crunch’s testes did I wind up on the floor?” Kuzneski asks. His back is on the floor, but his legs jut straight up against the bed. He leans to the side and flops over. “Wait, now I remember. I was fucking flying. Again.”
“Again?” Flores says, sitting up on the top bunk opposite Langdon, who is exactly where I last saw him, still clinging to the bed.
When Kuzneski sees Flores has been spared the pain of being dropped down onto the hard floor, he says, “Seriously? How lucky is this asshole?”
Not very, I think, but I keep the observation to myself. If his story is true, he came to Synergy to stop Langdon from unleashing hell on Earth. Instead, he got swept up in it, and lost all his friends—including future me and Cassie—in the process.
“The effect was far more powerful this time,” Langdon says. “Before, it lifted us a few feet off the ground, but nothing like this. If not for the ceiling…” He looks up, no doubt imagining the sky above.
“Will it be like that for everyone?” I ask, concerned for Inola, not to mention the layers of people in Black Creek.
Langdon shakes his head. “We’re at the epicenter. Whatever is happening in the collider, it’s directly below Synergy. Here, we experience it as an eruption of space-time. On the mountainside, it would be more like a pyroclastic flow of bending space-time as it races outward.”
“Sounds about right,” Cassie says.
“But I can’t imagine what we just felt would react gently with the world beyond Synergy.” Langdon says.
“Any ideas why that one was more intense?” Flores asks.
Langdon pales a bit. “A more powerful flux.”
Kuzneski pushes himself up. “Meaning?”
“A larger flux.”
I look to the walls, expecting to see windows, but find none. I don’t remember any in the outer hall, either. Whenever we are, it’s beyond the dawn of civilization in the Americas. At this point, I’m not sure it matters how far back we go. It’s possible there are still Ch
erokee tribes about, but if the jumps continue to grow, we’ll eventually predate the human migration that brought people out of Africa, across Asia, and down to the Americas via Russia and Alaska…if that’s how it actually happened. In this universe, our band of time travelers might become the very first Americans.
The question is why?
Why go back at all?
Why take all these people?
Why risk playing with science as powerful as the God and Devil particles?
Part of the answer comes in a moment of realization. My Dr. Langdon is here, but Jacqueline is nowhere to be seen. Future Langdon has reclaimed his wife a year before her death. But why would he do that…
Unless…
He has a cure, I think. Something from the future that would have saved her now. That will save her now. But even if he manages to save her, his mind won’t be restored. You don’t create a robotic army, slay dozens of people, and tear an entire community through space-time if there is a shred of sanity left in you.
But I understand his motivation. I already decided to save my father from his fate in the mine, to change time for my own selfish gain. I wouldn’t have sacrificed an entire town, but I was willing to risk the unknown consequences of altering the past. Now that I know we’re in a new dimension of time-space, I can protect my father, free of guilt. But that doesn’t absolve me of being willing to take the risk. And it doesn’t absolve Future Langdon for what he’s done.
Thinking of my father, I yank open the door and find myself facing a room full of people in various states of recovery. Some are still unconscious, being tended to by those who have already woken up. The segregation I found when I first entered has evaporated. People are helping who they can, whether or not they come from the same nationality, tribe, or time.
My father is being tended to by one of the older Cherokee women. He’s got a good gash on his head, either from hitting the ceiling, or the floor on the way back down. Owen looks no worse for the wear, crouching beside Dad.
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