Authors: Cam Rogers
Beth got close to the glass. “Oh Christ.”
“I didn’t know what it was.” Then: “What is it?”
“It contains a self-replenishing chronon charge powerful enough to brute-force the M-J field back into shape.”
Jack eyed the bent panels. “And what if it breaks open?”
Beth glanced at him. “Then an infinite number of your alternate selves cease to get along.” She straightened, rechecked her watch. “Catastrophically.”
She glanced at the device lying battered on the floor of the glass chamber. Something changed in her suddenly. Jack watched the tension drain from her, urgency fading.
“Beth?”
“Dr. Kim was credited with creating a self-replenishing source of power that was intended to be the heart of Project Lifeboat,” Beth mumbled. “The Regulator.”
Jack looked back into the chamber, skin flushing cold.
“Kim didn’t create the Regulator, Jack. Will did. This is it. The Countermeasure and the Regulator are the same thing.”
Something heavy thudded in the far wall: the security door was being deactivated.
“The Countermeasure doesn’t go missing because we steal it, Jack. It goes missing because they do.”
Jack grabbed her sleeve and pulled her behind the scaffolding that ran north-south between the box and the small eastern-side office.
Two people—a man and a woman—entered, the guy carrying a rubberized gym bag. With a finger on one ear the woman said, “We’re inside.”
Her counterpart muttered, “Aw no,” and moved to the open door of the box.
“Looks like the device has been damaged, Actual.”
Beth glanced at Jack and closed her eyes in despair.
Monarch.
“We can stop this,” he whispered to her.
She shook her head, frustration turning to fury. “
You can’t change the past,
” she hissed, softly.
“It’s a fucking impossibility. We’ve
lost.”
Looking through the gaps in the scaffolding, through bundles of wiring, Jack could tell the two intruders weren’t decked out in the Monarch outfits he remembered. The logo was similar but cruder, and the uniforms were cheaper, dun-colored, off-the-rack.
Jack unslung his carbine. “You want to gift wrap it for them, or are you going to help me here?”
The guy carrying the gym bag stepped into the sterile room and picked up the Countermeasure, barehanded, without precaution or ceremony. “Yeah, it’s pretty banged up.”
Beth tensed, fingers flexing on her gun. With a glance Jack understood what had to happen.
As the guy left the room with the device, Jack and Beth swept out from behind cover, weapons level.
The woman spotted them, eyes wide with shock. Beth pressed one finger to her lips. The woman screamed.
The guy, whose back was turned, leaped, saw the guns, also screamed, and ran.
The muzzle of Beth’s carbine followed him as he bolted for the door—sweeping across the woman’s head as her finger tightened.
Jack leaped in, knocked her barrel skywards with the barrel of his own, a three round burst ringing out.
Beth wheeled on him, furious.
“You can’t just
shoot him
!” he said.
Patience spent, Beth shouldered past the woman and out through the security door.
Bright sunlight resolved into shapes, and some of those shapes turned out to be men with guns leaning against a four-wheel-drive, startled to action by the sound of gunfire.
Beth skidded to a halt, sixty feet from them, armed, as the entire team brought their weapons up.
The guy with the gym bag kept running, straight toward them. The Monarch crew were just guys in jeans, shades, and Monarch-branded T-shirts.
The runner was in the line of fire.
The space around the four-wheel-drive snapped and froze—a shimmering dome of stuttered time.
From the doorway Jack said, “Get the Countermeasure. I’ll take care of these.”
She took off after the runner, past the security team.
Jack headed straight for the mini-stutter when a gunshot rang out and a cannonball of force took him in the torso. He hit the concrete with a disbelieving cough.
Before Jack could refill his lungs, Paul Serene was on him.
“The machine changed you, too. I knew it had.”
Paul’s face was six inches from his own. This version of the face he knew so well was a little younger than the bastard who would kill Will in 2016.
“You’re the second you,” Paul said. “Not the one who rode away just now. You’re from 2016. Which means Will’s machine is intact. That has to be how you got here. Where is it?”
“It’s good to see you too, buddy.” He could feel the bruise forming, sharply and painfully, beneath the Kevlar, and then tickling as it quickly healed and faded.
Paul let go of Jack’s shirt. Jack noticed that both of Paul’s hands were pristine, normal … human. No sickness. So that first trip through the machine in 2016 hadn’t made him sick. What had?
“Good to see you too, Jack. I have so much I need to tell you.”
The runner had recoiled from the sight of the stutter bubble encasing the security team and kept on running. Countermeasure in hand, he pounded for the gap between the warehouses where Beth had parked the car. She didn’t like the way that gym bag was bouncing around in his hand. If the Countermeasure cracked open it’d be game over.
“Stop!” she yelled.
She raised the carbine’s barrel, cracking a warning burst over his head. The runner skidded to a stop. As he threw his hands over his head the gym bag containing the Countermeasure slipped from his fingers.
Beth recoiled, shielding her eyes as the bag hit the ground, hard.
Nothing happened.
“Stay down, Jack,” Paul said. “This’ll be over soon, and then we can talk. This is so weird, man. You won’t believe it.”
Just as suddenly Paul’s weight was off him.
Paul folded himself back into a moment, propelling himself across the open ground and past his frozen security team. In a blink Paul tore the carbine from Beth’s hands, flipped it, and jabbed her square in the forehead with the butt of her own weapon.
Beth’s head snapped back and she went down. Jack heard her cry out and began struggling to his feet, breath burning in his chest.
Behind Paul, the security team sprang back to life as Jack’s mini-stutter collapsed. Paul marched toward them, hand up, ordering them to hold fire. They were confused, but this would be a key learning experience for them. All in all, this was turning out to be a most beneficial day.
Paul addressed the guy with the gym bag, now gratefully relaxing against the hood of Beth’s car parked between the buildings some fifty feet away. “Well done. You’re safe now. Is that it, in the bag?”
The man was nodding, loose-jointed with relief. “Yes sir, yes it is. Thank you.”
Past the security team, closer to Will’s workshop, Jack got to his feet. The scene filled itself in: the security team covering him. Beyond them Paul, with Beth’s carbine. Beyond Paul, Beth laid out flat, clutching her head. Past her, leaning against the car, the tech. At the tech’s feet, the gym bag containing the Countermeasure.
Paul gestured to the waiting vehicle. “All right, technician. Get yourself to—”
Like a living thing the gym bag at the technician’s feet leaped off the ground—the bag disintegrating instantly—and all the light in Heaven spilled out.
The self-replenishing source within the battered Countermeasure hosed out a density of chronon particles orders of magnitude greater than the environmental baseline. The technician—engulfed by a roiling, expanding distortion field—was rapidly reinvented by a flickering, shifting phage that swept from his center of mass toward his extremities, and raced upward toward his mind.
Eyes open, terrified and ignorant, he felt all that he was being replaced a thousand times over.
Paul shouldered Beth’s carbine and shot the doomed tech through the head.
The tech’s sickness vanished upon death, and he slid to the concrete fully human.
Silhouetted against the crazed, strobing light, Paul let the weapon slip from slack fingers. Caught within the Countermeasure’s ongoing blast, the left side of Paul’s body was already changing. His hand was reskinned by the same iridescent transformation that had claimed the doomed technician. Both terrified and entranced, Paul saw his flesh alternate between versions of itself, the shining facets of the sickness like shifting windows on to alternate versions of his own flesh, nothing constant, always changing, always different. The change crept toward his shoulder, inch by slow inch, accelerating as Paul’s cells absorbed more and more of what the Countermeasure threw out.
The roar of approaching trucks came to them from blocks away, echoing off the closely packed buildings: Monarch backup, responding to the emergency.
Jack was on his feet. Beth too. The light was blinding.
Beth received the worst of the blast. She had been caught between the tech and Paul, much closer to the epicenter, twenty feet from the Countermeasure. She faced Jack, her head a silhouette against that killing light, one transformed eye shining like a dying star. Her teeth, clenched against pain, were backlit.
The backup squads arrived as the warehouses and Beth’s car met alternate versions of themselves: fading in, falling apart, building up, redesigning, self-defacing, flashing clean. The first security team stood unmoving, trembling, hypnotized by the vision.
The slowly expanding radius of oversaturation showed catalogs of could-have-been. The sections of the warehouses caught in the blast were raw brick, then pristine white, then tagged with gang symbols, then gone entirely, then overgrown and abandoned. One second they were made of corrugated iron, the next they were a parking lot, followed by an outdoor café. The car changed models and colors. Sometimes it wasn’t a car, other times it was a Bronco, or gone, or riddled with bullets, or a motorcycle, or a solar-powered three-wheeled covered trike the likes of which Jack had never seen. The ground itself changed, rioting and fighting with versions of itself: concrete, blacktop, overgrown, lawn, mud …
Brakes were hit as the driver of the first backup truck spotted the anomaly, the three-truck convoy skidding to a halt outside the oversaturation’s radius. Armed men disgorged from the vehicles without order. Nobody advanced. No one wanted to get close. None of them understood what they were seeing.
Beth saw Jack. He was running to her. She brought both her hands up, intersected. T for Time-Out. Think Before You Act.
There was nothing he could do.
“Go.”
Her throat, the interior of her mouth, luminesced, flickered, snapped.
Then she turned and walked toward the mad light.
“Beth!”
She didn’t look back. Her rescue rig sparked and crazed as it shielded her against the madness. Connections shorted out, sparked, burst into flame at elbow and shoulder. But it was enough to keep her going, to get her closer to the Countermeasure before the change took her completely.
Discordant energy arced and flailed from vehicles and brickwork. Men stumbled backward, scrambling like scalded cats from flickering arms of violent energy that leaped and bounced from one surface to another.
The space between the warehouses had become a storm; a force Beth had to push against, and through. It cost her to do it, as every cell in her body was forcefully introduced to its countless others. Her brain revolted. She understood in moments what it was like to be a thousand people all at once. A thousand simultaneous versions of herself. She saw infinite lives running parallel to each other; infinite futures in this life branching away from that moment. She held herself together, in this life, to finish what she had come here to do—to retrieve the Countermeasure, intact. She had given too much, lived too long, to be swept away by a torrent of potential and chaos before she had sung her final note.
She crouched before that fount of mad energy, and plunged her flickering, shifting hands—hands she didn’t recognize—into the roiling light.
The Countermeasure was in there, a thrashing, discordant sun. It plunged tendrils into her body and mind, showing her infinite possibilities, distracting her from the most important of all tasks, unmaking her capacity to be singular, introducing her to flavors of agony few people had ever known. Her rescue rig shorted out completely. Her hair caught fire, a corona around her head.
Sliding and fumbling across the surface of the Countermeasure, she was able to locate the damaged access panel. Using hands that were in the process of ceaseless reinvention, faster than she could process the changes, and with what remained of her strength and control, she forced the tiny hatch back into place, hoping against hope it would be enough.
It was.
The blinding glare vanished as Beth toppled to her side, the hot, heavy weight of the Countermeasure clutched to her chest.
“Beth…” Jack vaulted forward. The nearest security specialist fired his Taser. Jack tensed, and dropped like a side of beef.
Beth lay on her back, blue morning sky broken and wrong-colored in her new, changed, starlight eye. So many versions of her wanted to be known inside that singular body. So many lives. An infinity of other nows and heres; lives where she and Jack had walked away from this. Where this had never happened.
Men gathered, carefully, nervously, at the corners of her vision. She saw the surviving technician reach down to take the Countermeasure from her, eyes full of fear and misery.
She heard Paul howl. He staggered into view above her, all messed up, his arm and the side of his body a flashing, fractal mess.
“What have you done to me?”
An aftershock pulsed. The world reinvented shockingly as something else, something alien, for just a moment. Returned to normal.
The technician took her prize and ran toward a waiting security team. The Countermeasure was gone, and with it any hope of repairing the M-J field.
One of the security team ventured to speak. “Sir, we should get you to a doctor immediately.”
Paul ignored him, fell to his knees, got in her face, screamed again, “
What have you done to me?
”