Flux

by Jeremy Robinson

  They’re torturing him, I realize, and then I see the room for the first time. It’s not large, a ten-foot cube. The back wall is taken up by my older self, hands and feet bound to the wall, arms spread wide like some kind of Jesus figure. Countertops on either side of us are littered with the tools of torture. Spikes, blades, heat sources, construction tools, saws, electrical clamps. There’s even a small cabinet filled with vials of drugs. This is not a hastily assembled torture chamber. This was planned by someone who knows what they’re doing.

  I run through a mental list of past Synergy employees and the few current that I’ve met. None of them struck me as men capable of something like this. Not even Langdon. He approves of all this, but he is not the architect.

  When the door closes behind me, I ask, “Are you okay?”

  My older self glares at me. He’s putting on a good show of strength, but he doesn’t have a lot left in him, which probably has something to do with the blood staining the grated floor beneath him. “I should have known you’d play the good company boy. I used to be so weak.” His eyes flick up to the left.

  “I’m trying to keep people safe,” I tell him. “That’s something you used to care about, too.” I turn to inspect some of the tools lining the counter, casually glancing at the ceiling in the corner of the room where a security camera watches and listens.

  He let me know to guard my language. While there might be some grains of truth in his feelings toward me, he knows I would never turn on myself, that I would never support what Synergy has become.

  His strength wavers, the weight of his body pulling hard on his wrists.

  They’re killing him. Horribly.

  “What do you want to know?” he asks, his voice a gravelly whisper.

  “Just give me a minute, man.” I feign exasperation, picking up a long, serrated knife, shaking my head and putting it back down. When I turn back to face him, the look in his eyes confirms he understood my clumsy message: Minuteman is alive.

  “How many people did you come here with?”

  “Four,” he says, wisely leaving Minuteman out of the count. “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

  Shit. My message about Minuteman has clued him in to the possibility that the rest of his team didn’t make it. That Cassie didn’t make it.

  “There’s no one else?” I ask. “Someone…enhanced?”

  The screwed up expression on his face is the same one I make when I hear something ridiculous. He coughs hard, blood staining his lips.

  I scan his body for bruising and find it on his side. He’s bleeding internally. The right doctors would be able to help him, and Future Langdon might have them on staff, but this future iteration of myself would never go for it.

  “I just need to hear it,” he says. “Tell me the truth. Is she gone?”

  My closing eyes weigh down my head.

  “Was it Langdon?”

  My head dips a bit lower. When I look back up, meeting his tear-filled gaze, I mouth the words, “I’ll kill him.”

  “But she’s still here,” I tell him aloud. “From my time. And earlier.”

  “Then you still have something to live for,” he says. “Something to fight for.”

  “We’re here, too.”

  That catches him off guard, and for a moment he fights against the unconsciousness threatening to whisk him away.

  “Age eleven,” I tell him. “A day before Dad… He’s here, too.”

  He coughs in surprise, and then in pain. “Dad? Alive?”

  I nod.

  Tears leave clean streaks behind on his cheeks.

  “Then you have more to fight for than I ever did.” He’s got more to say. Things that would fuel my fight, but speaking the words would put Future Langdon’s trust in me in peril. His body sags again. “Do you remember Marjah?”

  Marjah is a small town in the Helmand province of Afghanistan, one of the most dangerous and deadly in the region. While men from the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment held the perimeter, my job was to recruit local villagers. No one knew that the Taliban had arrived before us. We found ourselves pinned down by enemy combatants, taking fire for two straight days. I lost three men, but in the end my squad was saved by an Army Ranger Sniper. It wasn’t our proudest moment, a bunch of Marines being rescued by an Army boy. I never met the man who saved us from nearly a mile away, but I’ll never forget him.

  I’m expecting more, but he lets the story hang there, like I’m supposed to understand what he’s getting at. So I prod. “Well?”

  “Just give me a minute,” he says, taking a deep, raspy breath, “Man…”

  I try not to react, but it’s hard. The man who saved me all those years ago is in the next building over. No wonder I trust him so much in the future.

  I give the slightest nod of understanding while he holds my gaze.

  Then his jaw pops to the side a little, and I hear a muffled crack.

  “Save them,” he says.

  Then his eyes roll back.

  His body twitches.

  Foam gurgles from his mouth.

  “No!” I shout.

  Behind me, the door is flung open. A pair of doctors rush in. They had no intention of letting him die, but he’s just made saving him impossible.

  As I stagger back into the rear wall, Future Langdon rushes in, face red with anger. “What happened?”

  “Cyanide,” I say. “Hidden in a false tooth. It’s an old spy trick. You should have looked for it.”

  “He’s right,” one of the doctors says, and something about his voice sets me on edge. I don’t recognize the man, he just sounds heartless. The kind of sociopath it takes to run a torture chamber. “He can’t be saved.”

  “Then you failed,” Future Langdon hisses at me, and I suspect that I will soon replace my now dead older self.

  I stammer for a moment, choked up after watching myself die, but I manage to say, “H-he told the truth. You heard him. He had four people with him. And they’re all dead. The moment he pieced that together, he didn’t have a reason to live.”

  “Suicide risk is not part of your profile,” Future Langdon says.

  “I’m not him.” I point to my dead self, as the doctors unclasp his wrists and let the body fall to the floor.

  “You’re sure?” he asks.

  “Reading him wasn’t hard. Whatever problem you’re dealing with, it’s not him, or his people.” I turn away from the sight of my body. “And it never will be.”

  “That is…unfortunate,” Langdon says. “Dr. Robles.”

  I take note of the man who looks up—the architect of my future self’s torture—committing his pock-scarred face, round glasses, and wispy balding hair to memory.

  “Incinerate the body.”

  “But—”

  Future Langdon holds up a hand, silencing the man before he can say exactly how he’d like to desecrate my body.

  “Out of respect for the living,” Future Langdon tips his head toward me.

  Robles lowers his head in submission.

  “Thank you,” I say to Future Langdon, as he leads me out of the torture chamber. They’re the two hardest words I’ve ever spoken.

  “Perhaps you should save your thanks until after you’ve seen what we’re…what you’re up against.”

  I don’t like the sound of that, but until I’ve gathered all the intel I can and have gained his trust, I need to play along. Then I’ll think about wrapping my hands around his throat.

  34

  Future Kuzneski meets us at the security control center, which is four times the size of what I’m used to. Where there were once three screens displaying a total of 27 camera feeds, there is now a wall of large flat-screens surrounding one massive screen. There are at least fifty camera feeds from inside the facility, various points around the mountain, and what looks like a misshapen 3D-puzzle of Black Creek.

  “Wait here,” Langdon says, stepping inside the room. I can’t hear what he’s telling the two men monitorin
g the feeds, but large chunks of the wall go black. He’s either hiding something from me, or trying to keep me focused on his problems, and not those of the people I care about. When he’s done, all videos from Synergy and Black Creek have disappeared, replaced by a large number of feeds from the facility’s perimeter and the mountainside.

  “You okay, dude?” Kuzneski whispers. “You didn’t look great before, but now… What happened?”

  “I killed myself.”

  “You look pretty alive to m…” Realization settles atop him like a lead blanket. “Oh. Shit.”

  He looks ready to lose control, but reels himself back in with a sniff and a stretch of his face. “Did you learn anything from him?”

  “Only that all his people are dead,” I say. “Except for you.”

  “Damn…” He leans his back against the wall.

  “What about you? What do you know?” I motion toward Future Langdon. “About him? About when he’s taking us?”

  “Wish I had answers, but...” Kuzneski shrugs.

  “What did he offer? Couldn’t have been money.”

  “Why not?”

  Does he not know? Did I not know?

  “This is a one-way trip.”

  He squints at me. “Bullshit.”

  “According to Langdon’s younger self, we’re creating new dimensions of reality with each new jump. Our future won’t be there, even if we could reverse direction and go back.”

  He doesn’t look dismayed, shocked, or even frightened.

  He looks pissed.

  Like he’s just found out the Rolex watch on his wrist is a Casio in disguise.

  Like he’s been conned.

  Because he has been.

  Future Kuzneski is not my inside man.

  “Come in,” the elder Langdon says. I step inside the command center to find all the screens now displaying external feeds. The large screen holds a paused video of the forest, taken before our arrival in the Ice Age. I’m caught off guard when I see the rest of the large space. There are twelve terminals, all manned by men wearing VR headsets. The displays in front of them show aerial views of Synergy and the surrounding mountain.

  This is where they control the drones from. Given the large number of drones, both flying and grounded, I reckon that the machines can operate autonomously, or under direct control. They’re searching the surrounding mountainside, but for what?

  From above, I can see that the forest still exists, encased in thick snow, but still present. The tree line is just a bit further down the mountain, about where it began in my time, thanks to the strip mining.

  “We’ve been losing drones,” Langdon says, pulling my attention back to the big screen. “This is how it began.”

  The video feed plays, showing a smooth recording of the forest. The image suddenly goes shaky and drops straight down. Then static.

  “Looks like your pilot ran into a branch,” I say.

  “That’s what we thought at first, but the drone was self-piloting at the time, and they have a perfect track record with avoiding even the smallest obstacles. We sent a recovery team and found this.”

  An image fills the screen. The drone is lying on the ground, crushed and torn apart.

  “Then, someone shot it out of the sky. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are a lot of armed and frightened people on the mountain.”

  “There was no evidence of gunfire, and that doesn’t explain the wreckage. It would take a very strong man with a sledgehammer to do that.”

  “Also, not out of the realm of possibility.” My doubt is frustrating him, but I can tell there’s more. “Show me the rest.”

  A second drone feed plays, ending in nearly the same way, except this one is smashed against a tree twice before the video ends.

  “It was plucked from the air and manhandled,” Langdon says, stating the obvious. But then he adds, “It was twenty feet up when that happened. It wasn’t long after this that we started finding bodies.”

  I nearly point out that there are a lot of bodies on the mountainside, too, which is ultimately his fault, but I can’t deny playing a part in some of their deaths.

  A third video plays, and this time the footage is uninterrupted as the drone slides up to a corpse lying in a tree’s branches. It’s stretched out and bent, like all the joints have been popped out, or worse. Given the amount of blood soaking the man’s body, it’s possible his 1920s-style clothing is the only thing holding him together.

  The video feed switches again. This time it’s a woman. She’s lying on top of a tree, impaled by several branches, as though she’d fallen out of the sky.

  Another feed shows what’s left of a Cherokee Indian, his arms and legs removed and piled beside his torso, most of the meat missing.

  “You thought this was me?” I ask. “Future me? I can’t imagine any timeline where I’d be a part of this.”

  “You were…are…a resourceful man. When faced with overwhelming odds, you generally find a way to even them. Given your history with psy-ops, I thought you might be trying to put the fear of God into me.”

  “By killing innocent people?”

  He shrugs. “Fire with fire.”

  I decide a moral argument is not in my best interest, and that full disclosure in this case, will benefit all of us. “I came across a body like this. The flesh was eaten by a large predator. Probably a bear. If it’s an extinct species—something with the power of a grizzly—that could explain the killings. I’ve also seen a large cougar stalking the mountain. Many predators are known to hide their kills in trees, so maybe—”

  “It’s not a bear,” Kuzneski says.

  I glower at the man operating the displays. “Show me.”

  “This was our first view of direct contact,” the operator says, playing aerial footage of a drone flying fifty feet above the forest canopy. “Center of the screen. Close to the horizon.”

  When I see it, I’m not sure what I’m looking at. It looks like a fly buzzing straight up past the camera. But what appears to be close at first, looks far away as it grows larger. And closer. I identify the projectile as a basketball-sized rock just before it careens into the drone.

  “Have you heard of anyone in the history of Black Creek that built a catapult?” Langdon asks. I don’t bother replying. He already knows the answer. And I’m pretty sure that no one in the history of catapult building ever had enough skill to shoot a small moving drone out of the sky.

  “You have another theory?” I ask.

  “One that I am loathe to subscribe to on the fact that it is both improbable and impossible.” He looks me in the eyes. “Someone threw it.”

  I couldn’t throw that stone more than a few feet. I doubt the strongest man on Earth could get it much further. “Then this is something we agree on.”

  “What don’t we agree on?” he asks, suddenly suspicious.

  “I just watched myself take a cyanide pill to avoid being tortured by your very own Dr. Mengele. I reckon a generous helping of revulsion is appropriate. I understand that you were defending what you’ve built. That Synergy was under attack from him. And that he took his own life. But there is no time where I will abide by torture.”

  Standing my ground puts our faux relationship at risk, but letting all that be swept to the side like it was nothing… He’d see through it eventually.

  “Well…” Langdon grins. “If he was telling the truth, as you believe, there will be no need for such tactics in the future, or rather, in the past.” He gives the operator a backhanded tap on the shoulder. “Play the last video.”

  Unlike all the other video feeds, this one is at ground level, bumbling up and down as a tank-treaded drone rolls over uneven terrain. Its mini-gun is pointing straight out in the feed, like it’s a first-person-shooter video game.

  Then it stops.

  The camera whips from side to side, tracking a shadow of movement. The blur is so fast that making it out is impossible. I get a sense that I’m looking at a man, but
the scale seems to be off, or the trees in this part of the forest are small.

  It disappears in a thick copse of trees. Is that it? I actually jump when a hand snaps into frame, grasping the mini-gun, wrapping meaty, thick, and pale fingers around the coffee can-thick barrel. Then the whole vehicle is wrenched off the ground and flung skyward. The video records a spiral of forest and sky until it drops back down and goes dark.

  An image of the massive hand returns to the screen. It’s human, but is far too large. Too strong.

  “What do you make of this?” Langdon asks.

  I step closer, trying to take in the details. Aside from the very pale skin, it looks human, except…not. Something is off. I place my finger on the massive index finger and then slide it over the knuckles, one by one.

  “My screen,” the operator complains when my finger leaves a smudge. He falls silent when I continue counting aloud.

  “Four…five…” I look at Langdon. “Six.”

  35

  “It would appear that I am not the only monster whisking through time,” Langdon says. The words are loud enough for all to hear, but I think his inner monologue has just escaped the confines of his mind. Perhaps there is a part of him that knows what he is doing here is wrong?

  “The fuck is that?” Kuzneski asks, leaning closer to the screen, recounting the fingers on the massive hand.

  I surprise everyone, including myself, by providing an answer. “Tsul’Kalu.”

  Langdon turns to me, waiting for more.

  “A Cherokee god of the hunt. It was buried at the bottom of the mountain, in a clearing not far from my home.”

  “Since when are gods buried in Appalachia?” Kuzneski asks, his distaste for the region shining through.

  “The stigma around Appalachia has nothing to do with the landscape or the people who called it home before coal mining’s slow demise left people jobless, hungry, homeless, and desperate. And if you spent more than a few minutes in Black Creek, you’d realize that stigma is based on a very small portion of the population. Most—”