Authors: Cam Rogers
Beth smiled, her teeth backlit, her left eye going nova. “Oh buddy,” she said, with many, many soft voices. “I have not yet begun to fuck with you.” She unzipped her jacket, with a strange
ping-snap
sound, showing Paul what she carried beneath: five one-pound bars of C-4 wrapped in Gorilla Tape, attached by nine inches of rubberized fuse to an M60 igniter. “This is just the load screen.”
The fuse popped and hissed, throwing smoke in Paul’s eyes.
So many futures ran to meet Beth, so many possibilities revealed themselves to her starlight eye. So many Jacks.
Jack ordered misfiring limbs to action, hauled himself off the ground. One of the security grunts had Tasered him in front of their vehicle, and Beth was too far away to reach. His heart died the moment he realized he had failed her again.
Paul leaped back, folded into a moment, and fled. His men were less fortunate.
One future in particular shone brightest, clearest.
Beth whipped her head to look at Jack, one last time. “Hey, Trouble? Trust the villain.”
The first rule of a good disappearance: leave nothing behind.
“Beth!”
Supernova.
The C-4 kicked off. The three men gathered about her had no chance. The corners of both warehouses blew inward, top levels collapsing into lower. Beth’s car bucked upward, the hood blown off, tires blown out, a ton of brickwork sloughing down onto it from both sides. Every window for a block blew out. The soldiers milling about thirty feet away went blind, deaf, and were blown off their feet. The technician, running for the third unit, tumbled to the ground, clutching the Countermeasure—then got up and kept running. Debris rained down for two blocks. Somewhere in the docklands a car alarm started wailing. The air was choked with atomized dust and brickwork.
Jack lowered his arm from his face, his ears ringing. Beth was gone. The men who had gathered around her were gone. The second unit were laid out: two of them clutching their heads and screaming, eyes destroyed, eardrums burst. The remaining three were motionless. The third unit had fled for the cover of their vehicles, sheltering behind their window-smashed truck.
Clouds of dark orange haze rolled across the scene, obscuring and revealing. Here men screamed, then they were gone. There bricks tumbled from the smashed face of a warehouse … and were taken away.
No sound, save the ringing in Jack’s ears.
A dust-curtain breathed aside and there stood Paul Serene, some fifty feet away, his arm a shifting, sliding, starlight mess, his face fixed in a caught-red-handed little-boy expression of “what have I done?”
The clouds froze. Jack and Paul looked at each other—fate affording them privacy in this final moment. Jack raised his handgun, took his time centering the sights on Paul’s head. Paul didn’t move, didn’t fight it. Jack’s hand was as unsteady as it had ever been, muscles and nerves gone slack from shock. He could barely keep the gun raised. After a few seconds he couldn’t.
Paul seemed almost disappointed.
In one move the gun came up, level and braced.
On the other side of the iron sights, Paul’s expression melted into one of mortal fear. He had no time to escape.
Fifteen feet behind Jack a thousand roars and screams folded into one. It should have been bass enough to rattle Jack’s ribs, shrill enough to pain his ears. But the only place it resonated was within his mind. He turned to face the source of the discord and saw a thing that, surely, represented the final stage of Paul’s sickness: humanoid, of uncertain profile, a stumbling, heavyset sketch of flashing, fractal insanity.
It moved toward Jack, raising one arm as it did so, to reveal the well of starlight in its palm … crowned by a row of fingers sharp and phasing.
So this was where it ended, then. But he wasn’t letting Paul off the hook. Jack decided to take one last shot at changing the past. He wheeled around, raised his pistol, centered it on Paul’s head and …
The creature’s palm swept in from Jack’s left and took him by the face.
In that place of violent, chaotic energy—in a moment suspended in time—the shining hand descended on Jack, and his world had exploded in pain.
He was a million Jacks, and none. He was pulled a million ways down a million branching paths of causality … but guided firmly down one.
Monday, 10 October 2016. 12:03
A
.
M
. Two hours, relative, after Jack traveled to 2010.
Jack reassembled from nothing and crashed steaming, wet, and gasping, onto the ramp of Will’s machine. His handgun reconstituted itself from nothing and hit the ramp with a clang. He opened his mouth and drew breath as if for the first time.
The room spun and veered. He was in the swimming hall. It was night; no light through the grimy upper windows. The lights that still worked were on. The tang of cordite lingered in the air, still fresh from the gunfight with Gibson and Chronon-1. It was a couple of hours after he had gone through Will’s machine, back to July 4, 2010.
The ghosts of a thousand lives faded from his mind, coalescing into one. This one. The life where Beth was dead.
A sound came from his throat, from his chest, long and broken.
He heard voices. Sirens. He heard fear and panic. He understood that what he was hearing was the news.
He rolled onto his back, angled his head, saw two pairs of legs at the end of the ramp. High-tops. Angled up.
Riverport Newshour was exclaiming from its monitor. Lots of reds and blues and the occasional reporter snapping off bullet points, while clearly wondering if their job was worth what they were going through.
Jack’s eyes traveled up the legs.
“Mother of crap,” Nick said, softly. “You came outta nowhere.”
Beth was dead. The world outside was going mad, and he felt nothing for it. Beth was dead.
Sofia Amaral was seated in a wheeled office chair, before the workbench, still alive.
His entire body felt like a single deep bruise. Nick tried to help Jack up, was batted away. Getting up hurt Jack like breaking bones. He needed it. It felt like something.
“Leave me alone.”
Sofia wasn’t looking well. Her coat was draped over her shoulders, her right arm bandaged with what Jack now recognized as Nick’s shredded shirt. Nick was bare-chested beneath his Raptors jacket.
“She wouldn’t leave,” Nick said. “Said you might need her.”
“I can speak for myself,” she said, her voice faint, like wind over sand.
Sofia’s olive skin had gone flat and damp and pale. When she spoke her voice was thin, tired. “Tell me how you did that. How you … reconstituted from nothing.” She was more focused than her appearance suggested.
“Something grabbed me.”
“Describe it.”
Jack did.
“A Shifter.
The
Shifter, if it held a light in its hand the way you describe. That particular creature has been stalking Paul Serene for years. It features prominently in his nightmares, of which he has many.”
“I’ve never seen them do anything but kill people.”
“And I’ve never seen one tunnel a human being through time. Yet here you are.” Ever the scientist, she asked, “What was it like? The journey?”
“I … remember remembering. Lives I’ve never lived.”
“As Jack Joyce?”
Jack nodded. “I’d forget one as I remembered another. It felt like that happened … a thousand times? More?” He shook his head. “I can’t remember.”
“Alternate versions of you, living alternate lives in alternate timelines.”
“The creature pushed me away from every other path. Right back here.”
“The Shifter mimicked the process that takes place within the Promenade, and did so perfectly … but completely unassisted. The odds of your winding up at this place, at this moment, in this timeline, are so incalculably small—”
“—that it’s basically impossible. It wanted me here.”
“That would be a logical conclusion, but the question is why. If we accept that these creatures are capable of rationality, forethought, and strategy, I mean.”
“This one always seemed pretty measured.”
“The one Shifter Monarch possessed spent its days trying to kill us. It was rarely calm, unless left utterly alone within a stutter of substantial size. I never saw anything that suggested intelligence. I knew the man that creature used to be. Dr. Kim prized his mind above all. If he couldn’t hold on to even a scrap of who he was … I don’t imagine anyone could.”
Jack crouched, retrieved his handgun from the ramp. Motioned to Sofia’s injury. “No hospital was a stupid idea, Doctor.”
She gestured to the screen. In a couple of minutes Jack learned that a container ship had severed one of Riverport’s two major bridges, half the city had lost power, communications outages were being reported across the state, traffic accidents had reached pandemic levels and then ceased entirely, several buildings were on fire, at least one helicopter had crashed (into a church), casualties were being estimated in the thousands, the airport and bus terminals were choked, half the cops had walked off the job and as such the mayor had—within minutes—invoked martial law and outsourced peacekeeping to Monarch.
Nick sighed. “Sofia’s been saying it’s too dangerous to move, I’ve been saying she’s in a world of trouble if we don’t.”
“This has been a night for miracles. Perhaps I’ll get one of my own.” She nodded toward the machine, or more specifically the space from which Jack had appeared. “So here you are. Did you find the Countermeasure?”
Jack shook his head. “Monarch was there.”
Her face sank. “And Beth…?”
Jack didn’t answer.
Nick felt behind himself, found a chair, sat. Didn’t say anything either.
Sofia suddenly looked ten years older. “Then there is nothing to stop Monarch.”
Jack shook his head. “Monarch stole the Countermeasure. They still have it. Built Project Lifeboat around it.”
Sofia sat forward. “I was told Dr. Kim created the Regulator. It was his great legacy. You’re saying the Regulator is the Countermeasure?”
“My brother built it, in a workshop that’s now what you people think of as Ground Zero. The casing cracked, Paul got a strong dose and Beth…”
Sofia slumped backward. “I’m such a fool. That’s why Kim was never able to properly harness … he never really understood what … oh my God. I’m such a fool. It
was
all Dr. Joyce’s work. All of it.”
“Sofia,” Jack said. “Where do they keep the Countermeasure?”
She fixed her eyes on him, anger sweeping away infirmity. “Floor 49. There’s a security door in Paul’s office. I’ll draw you a map.”
* * *
The Riverport swimming hall sheltered beneath the overpass. Rain slashed crazy, blasting down out of a night sky that couldn’t make up its mind. The world outside was a chopped-up madness of lenses: myriad stutters popping up, lingering and vanishing at points across the city.
The elevated line above began to sing. A train was incoming, not far away now.
Monarch Tower was his destination, that train his ride.
Nick had gotten him a backpack from the cab. Riverport Raptors. Jack slung it, tightened it.
The stairs to the elevated platform were a block away. Jack warped.
The platform was dark, every lighting tube blown out. Jack was the only living thing stupid enough to be there. The freezing, wind-lashed platform offered a 180-degree panorama of a world tearing itself to pieces.
The bridge across the Mystic River was a smashed wreck, having risen too slowly to avoid a cargo ship stuttering right through it. The boat itself was a smoking, flaming ruin, sitting idle in a river thrashing upon itself as multiple stutters threw its motions out of synch with itself. Alien-colored lightning leaped from earth to sky, clouds roiling like an off-black special effect. Entire sections of the city had blacked out. The soundtrack to all of this was alarms, sirens, horns. The platform’s loudspeaker system was still running, piping Riverport Radio, the nighttime DJ rattling off disaster updates and urging people to stay in their homes.
That’s not going to help anyone,
Jack thought.
Nowhere is safe once the rules go out the window.
The only solution now was Will’s: Jack had to find the Countermeasure and, somehow, use it to fix all of this. To make things right.
The train was barreling its way toward the platform. Maybe it was automated, or maybe the driver couldn’t see the blacked-out platform, or maybe they were just flooring it in the hope of getting clear and getting out. Whatever the reason, the train wasn’t slowing.
He ran down the platform, climbed to the top of the rigid iron safety fence that protected commuters from a straight drop to the overpass below, grabbed the gutter of the shelter, and bounced himself onto the pebbled roof.
Jack took three steps back from the edge, angled himself to match the train’s approach as best he could, waited.…
The train was three blocks away.
Waited …
Two blocks, moving fast.
Waited …
One block.
And warped.
In less than a second he sprinted forward, covered the gap between the roof of the platform and the top of the train, and kept running forward, covering enough space within that folded second to match the train’s speed. As quickly as he could he decelerated, before that second expanded, got low, dug in, and held on tight to the lip of the carriage he was atop.
The second unfolded and tossed Jack face-first into a hurricane, his fingers almost snapping off at the joints as the train’s speed outmatched his by orders of magnitude.
He had to get the fuck off that train car.
He pulled himself forward, slid down into the gap between cars, and shouldered through the door, gasping.
His arrival was met with wide eyes and a few alarmed screams.
Passengers. Of course there were passengers. A handful in this car, and he could see others in the car down the line.
He felt that now-familiar pulse in his blood that said a stutter was coming.
This was the third-to-last car. Glancing behind him it looked like the others had been blacked out for the night. No other passengers. Small mercies.