Authors: Cam Rogers
The airlock smooched shut as the first creature slammed into the door. The right door opened and Jack stepped into safety.
There was one person who could still make this work, and Jack had a plan to bring him back from the dead.
Fuck the laws of the universe.
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 4:35
A
.
M
. Riverport University, Quantum Physics Building. Two days earlier. Twenty minutes after initial time machine activation.
The silent trip around the Promenade ended with Jack stepping back into the night that changed his life forever. He expected commotion on his arrival, but the lab outside the airlock was oddly quiet. Risking a peek through the viewplate, the Riverport University time lab was as he remembered: ramp leading down, time controls to the right. Stairs ahead, leading up to a left–right platform. Glassed-in control booth up a short flight of steps to the right from that, the way out up steps to the left.
He triggered the airlock to open, then emerged.
“I’m telling you something just happened.” Voices from beneath the machine. The two grunts who chased Will and Jack on the night they got caught up in Paul Serene’s madness. “Someone’s up there.”
Two Monarch troopers, hunkered on either side of the access tunnel down which Jack and his brother had fled, glanced up as Jack popped his head through the gap overhead. “Boo.”
Jack had intended to freeze them in a stutter. Instead, shockingly, the causality within the confined space around the troopers disconnected, reentangled incorrectly, and then erupted in a violent contradiction that saw the skeletons of both men spontaneously disarticulated. Joints interacted bizarrely with bone; physics reinvented itself while clashing with causal outcomes that existed only in foreign timelines. The men were refashioned savagely in the blink of an eye, pinballing with terrific force from surface to surface within that confined space. Death was instantaneous, and what slumped to the grill floor beneath the machine resembled abused marionettes more than men.
Jack recoiled. “Maybe I should have just said ‘hands up.’”
His powers hadn’t stopped evolving. He was still changing. What did that mean, and where did it end?
He dropped into the maintenance cavity and, with thumb and forefinger, gingerly removed the earpiece from one of the troopers.
“… Physics Building. A couple of regulars are cleaning the lab, the rest of us are on the tenth floor.”
“All right Donny, clean house, top to bottom. Catch you after.”
“Copy, boss.”
Gibson. His crew was about to sweep through the building and kill everyone inside. People whose jobs Paul had been trying to save. The ones Jack and Paul had passed on the way to the time lab the other night—this night.
People with families,
Paul had said.
* * *
Jack headed for the stairwell.
He passed the fifth, hearing a trooper in Reaper squad yell, “Grenade! He popped my grenade!” before air displacement from the detonation thumped the stairwell door in its frame as he passed.
He exited the Quantum Physics Building on the third floor and crossed over the ramp into the western administration building. This took him out from under the dome—the dome where everything went to shit and he and his brother fought for their lives. Were about to fight for their lives.
“Sir?” Donny piped up over Jack’s earpiece. “The two strays from the time lab weren’t among the bodies.”
“Do what we do, Don. Lock it down. They’ll be in there.” Then, “Don? Go look out a window.”
“Well shit, boss. Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”
“Wait twenty seconds, Don, then tell me what you see.”
He moved as fast as he could, folding into moments and accelerating along straight corridors. In his earpiece and through the walls he could hear the successive thumps of Gibson’s grenades striking the underside of the Quantum Physics dome, with Will the target. Time was running out.
Elevators were shut down. He found the admin stairwell, taking stairs five at a time, slamming out onto the ground floor, speeding down another corridor, emerging into a reception area and out into the night.
He’d kicked the rear door open onto a small parking area, knocking over a coffee can filled with old cigarette butts. Energy levels low now, he folded into a moment, zipped about a hundred feet toward the parking lot. That got him just outside the north side of the dome—the opposite side from the protest camp and Founders’ Walk.
Guardian squad was scattered about inside the dome. A wide section of glass at ground level had already been blasted white by Gibson’s last grenade—the one whose force had thrown Jack face-first into the grill of Gibson’s BearCat.
He caught a glimpse of the camp. It was a flat mess, with very few tents left standing. Some of it was on fire. There wasn’t a single kid in or around the camp, just a few stray troopers walking a circuit, being thorough.
Headlights flashed to life on the south side of the dome. Jack saw his bloodied past self rise to his feet in front of Gibson’s BearCat as Monarch’s number one chronon operative threw the vehicle into reverse.
That meant Monarch had Will.
Right on cue the sound of struggle on the steps inside. Two goons had Will by each arm and were dragging him down the central stairs, toward the north doors—about 150 feet in front of Jack.
Ducking down, he figured he had enough energy left to zip across that space fast and hard, which should be enough to take out the goon on the left. Getting the one on the right would come down to luck. He stayed low, waited.
The doors opened and out they came, Will protesting the whole time. “You’re destroying yourselves! The…”
Jack launched at them—
—and never made it.
He’d covered twenty feet when a forearm swept across his path, collecting him from the throat, knocking his feet skyward, and slamming him back-first into the ground.
He couldn’t breathe. Someone stood over him, adjusting his tie.
Hatch. He said just one word: “No.”
Neither the troopers nor Will noticed, and Will was dragged toward a waiting BearCat.
Hatch glanced at the dome, then down at Jack. It was the same examining stare Hatch had used on him a short time ago in the Tower: unconcerned, as if wondering why Jack even existed.
Jack’s thoughts were suffocated, strangled by his own half-closed windpipe. He struggled to sit up but a foot shoed in fine Italian leather gently pushed him down. Hatch waited, watching the BearCat pull away and tear toward the library, then turned his attention to Jack.
“All right,” Hatch said, and removed his foot.
Jack blinked hard, tried to swallow, could barely form the question: “Who are you?”
He said it to the night air. Hatch was gone. Jack was alone. The fucker must have ghosted back into the western admin building. What was he doing here? Who had Paul partnered with?
Thunder rolled across the parking lot: the sound of the BearCat waking up, then peeling toward the library. No time for subtlety. Low on energy and struggling to breathe, Jack cut through the dome. Gibson and his own past self were already gone; the person he had been would already be at the library.
Jack accelerated toward the library. He only did one burst. He was going to need every scrap of energy that he could muster for what came next.
When a moment is witnessed the waveform collapses. That’s what Will had said—and Paul. Events cannot be changed once those events intersect with and influence causality.
Jack ran straight at the particleboard barriers around the rear of the library, converted momentum to mantling, swung a leg over, and landed facing the open entry to the rear of the library, stripped of its door.
The room was perfectly square, empty save for limp lengths of plastic like the shed skin of giant snakes, dust and insulation.
The stacks were through the empty door frame to his left and beyond the south door Paul and Will were in the final moments of their futile conversation.
“But we don’t have years for you to come to the same conclusion. We have moments.”
That was it. Jack jagged left.…
“Actual,” Paul said. “this is your Consultant. Trigger.” And then warped out.
Jack rounded the corner in time to see Paul go out the main doors. His past self looked on in horror as Paul slammed into him, sweeping him out of the building as the first charges detonated upstairs.
Jack skidded on the smooth black-and-white flooring, fingertips trailing in the dust, and dashed forward as a curtain of debris descended.
Jack kicked into a slide as the top floor came down behind him, colliding with Will’s legs at the same time as he slammed hands into the dust.
The weight of a building fell to earth on the spot where the brothers stood. The collapse kicked out a cloud that swept across the campus, obscuring everything in a thick, rolling shroud of pulverized marble, masonry, and concrete.
Jack coughed. “Will? Will!” He couldn’t see anything. “Will!”
“I think I broke my watch.”
Will was right there, sitting up beneath the flickering bubble of self-contained causality. Alive.
Jack crashed into him, holding on to him with everything he had.
“You, uh,” Will said, with difficulty. “You’re getting quite good at this.” Then he realized: “You’re not Jack. The Jack I met tonight had shaved. You have not.”
Jack let him go. “This won’t last long.”
“I should be dead,” Will said. “Same clothes, more stubble. I’d say you’re, what, two days older? Three? You’ve come back in time. For me, for this. Meaning you thought I was dead. I should be dead.”
“There’s some space outside this bubble. I’m gonna blast us clear. I doubt anyone’s gonna notice at this point.”
“I
was
dead, to you, but you’ve saved me. The only way that could be possible is if … if between now and when you come back for me the world has every reason to believe me dead—if I never interact with causality between now, and two days from now. Which we can achieve if you and I now travel
forward
in time, bypassing those two days. Jack,” Will said. “The waveform never collapses. I never die. What a brilliant solution to have formulated.
Well
done.”
“Cover your ears.” Jack shoved his hands through the bubble, and did to the wreckage what he had done to the two Monarch troopers beneath the time machine.
Tonnage blew outward.
* * *
Jack and Will emerged from the wreckage of the library into a world that had stopped moving.
They carved through the chalk-white atmosphere, making their way across the shattered ruin of the library and out onto the campus.
“I completely missed this the first time around,” Jack said.
“Missed?” Will inquired, dusting himself off. They were walking briskly toward the Quantum Physics Building—and their way home.
“Yeah,” Jack said. “She found me. And … oh man.”
“She?”
Jack wasn’t listening. Or walking. He’d seen something, on Founders’ Walk, and was now running toward it. Will called after him, then followed.
Beth was frozen, marching along Founders’ Walk with the unconscious body of Jack’s past self slung over her shoulder. There she was, beautiful and alive. Unmoving. The fighter he’d fallen in love with.
Jack stepped closer to her. Here she was, so very much alive. “You knew her, didn’t you?” Jack said to his brother.
“I’ve known Beth Wilder for seventeen years,” Will replied. “The first thing she did was save my life. Yours, too, actually.” Then, “You can’t save her.”
“You know what happened to her?”
“In 2010? I think so. I returned to my workshop at the dock and the area was ruined. I saw the anomalies, recognized them as the product of a Countermeasure breach. I’d hoped she was alive, had taken the Countermeasure and returned to 2016—but I knew the exposure would have killed her first. Then Monarch bought out the entire area, and set up a chronon-harvesting operation. ‘Ground Zero’ they call it. So, with eleven years of work wasted and Armageddon due, I bought a gun and tried to shut down Monarch’s lab myself. Which brings us here.”
If Jack had heard, he made no sign. “She deserves to live.”
“You have to let her go, Jack. We have a universe to consider.”
Jack couldn’t open his mouth to say a single word. He just leaned into Beth, slid his arms around her, and held her as best he could. Just for a moment.
He whispered something he wished she could hear, but knew she never would.
Monday, 10 October 2016. 12:55
A
.
M
. Monarch Tower, Time Lab. One minute, local, after Jack’s departure.
Jack and Will clasped each other’s hands as they walked the Promenade, side by side, in lockstep, staying in synch as they walked two nights forward.
“What you’ll see is going to be shocking, Will. Fair warning.”
“I’ve been prepared for this since you were ten. I’m confident I can handle it.”
Arriving at the airlock they opened the seal and stepped into the first hour of Monday morning.
Jack checked through the viewplate. The airlock hissed, the seals depressurizing, and the two brothers stepped out onto the ramp.
The lab was vacant. They were alone.
“Oh,” Will said. “I expected something more dramatic.” Then, “Is that … music?”
What they heard was a lilting series of high notes, as though someone in a distant room were plinking on a xylophone, building from slow rhythm to something faster. Coming in under this simple score, abruptly, was the sound countless girders might make if they were bent and tearing beneath a weight they could no longer support.
The floor shifted alarmingly, betraying them as the far wall detached and slipped away without so much as a sound.
Freezing air rushed in and far below came the sound of hundreds of tons of concrete, glass, and iron waterfalling clumsily and catastrophically into the street.
Riverport—bucking, flaming, dying—laid itself bare to them.