Authors: Aaron Frale
“Wake up.” For a brief moment, I saw the woman on the boat. The voice screamed again, “WAKE UP!”
The time agent was once again on her way toward the chamber. My body was moving on its own. My hands were reaching for the briefcase. “Wake up!” the time agent yelled.
I realized that I was fighting the nanomachines in completely the wrong way. I didn’t need to fight them. I needed to absorb them. The strain on my body reached a critical state. Keeping the time agent away from the chamber taxed my system. My future self must have sent his nanomachines to finish the job for both her and myself. I concentrated on absorbing his machines into my essence. I felt my control tighten on the nanomachines.
A few of my nanomachines sent a shockwave and disabled a couple of my future self’s machines. I scanned and studied them. My nanomachines latched on as I tried to absorb them into my own. His machines fought back, destroying millions of mine. I could feel his presence like prey feels a predator. I finally penetrated the defenses of one of his nanomachines and tore it apart. The technology from the future was complicated, but I could absorb it given enough time. Before I could reverse engineer the technology, his nanomachines discovered my breach and self-destructed. His machines were no longer attempting to control. They were set on destroy. They took out many of mine in the self-destruction process. It would take some time for him to replicate more. We now had time to escape.
There was a gunshot and the well-dressed man burst through the door. The time agent shouted as she was unable to prevent herself from entering the chamber. During my struggle, I realized his nanomachines were merely a distraction. The machines controlling her were still in effect. She succumbed to the will of his nanomachines. There was a growing hum as the chamber began its process. I reached out with what little nanomachines I had left and could now breach the walls of the chamber.
“Get her out of there,” I yelled. The well-dressed man dashed towards her, but he was a split second too late. They touched hands on either side of the window to the chamber. She blinked out of existence. The well-dressed man kicked the chamber and cursed. He slid down to the ground.
“I hate to bother you,” I said. “But we should probably go. We’ll find her. I promise.” I dragged him to his feet, and we started toward the door.
“Wait,” he said. “There is a nanomachine cloud seeping through the cracks in the door.”
“You can see them?” It was strange because I didn’t feel them trying to take control of me yet.
“Yeah.”
“Is there a lot?”
“Not yet.”
“We need to get out of here. Think about the 1908 World Series!”
“Why?”
“It’s the last World Series with the Cubs. But more importantly, I think our only option is to time jump. And we need to time jump to the same place. Since we don’t have access to the network in the future to make the proper calculations, the jumps are crapshoot at best. So thinking about the World Series with the Cubs will reduce our chance of ending up in a spot to far away in time to meet.”
“Sounds good to me. On three. One, two, three.”
We both concentrated on Cubs in the World Series, and nothing happened. I could feel my future self’s nanomachines beginning to assault mine, which were still in a weakened state.
“Why isn’t our time jump working?”
“I don’t know!”
Voices were coming from outside. They were getting closer. My future self’s nanomachines were now at war with my own. I pressed my abilities harder. I fought the nanomachines back from exerting their control over the both of us. The well-dressed man’s machines were under assault too, and I tried to defend him as best I could. The well-dressed man looked at the chamber.
“We can go in there,” he ventured.
“I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.”
“It’s a transport. It will take us away from here.”
“But it’s a transport controlled by them,” I protested.
“But our nanomachines will defend us. I think people enter these with their nanomachines turned off for a reason. We can defend ourselves. And more than likely, anyone who goes into these chambers are expected by people in the future. Who knows what will happen during an unannounced visit?”
There was a clatter outside. The nanomachines began to overwhelm my sense of control. With a lack of a better option, I agreed.
We both stepped into the chamber. Inside the chamber, most of my future self’s nanomachines were blocked by the same force that shut me out. I quickly disabled all the ones that snuck into the chamber with us. My future self burst into the room with a gang of well-armed men and women. We could see them looking at us through the chamber window. The chamber fired up, and seconds before we disappeared from the time period, I could swear that I could see my older self smirking.
Lights flashed and steam hissed into the chamber. Nanette’s head was cluttered. She felt like she was an older style computer with too much information to process. Her mind felt sluggish. She was pretty sure she was no longer in the past. There were some lights flashing through the chamber window, and she could see flashes of metal. She was not in an adobe hut anymore.
The steam was rising. She became groggy and realized the steam wasn't water vapor but nanomachines. They were attacking her system and attempting to put her to sleep. Her nanomachines fought the invasion and were losing the battle. The cloud of nanomachines hazed the room. She fumbled for anything to help open the door. The interior was smooth, and there was no way to access the outside.
Eventually, she slipped into a state of complacency with a crippling inability to act. The mist of nanomachines began to dissipate. She was completely paralyzed but no longer in a state of panic. She felt at ease. Time ceased to have meaning, and she wasn't quite sure how long she was in the chamber. After an eternity, the door opened.
Robotic pinchers scooped her up. She was in a large room full of many chambers like hers. The room was a cylinder that must have been miles across. The chambers on the far side were barely visible. The vertical direction stretched endlessly. With the efficiency of a factory, people were being harvested from the chambers. The arms were scooping them up and placing them on platforms on an elevator in the center.
It occurred to her that she should be worried, but she didn't care. She felt like a detached observer. People were being used in a giant factory system, and she accepted the reality. She swooped past another woman with the same blank expression on her face. The nanomachine mist must have removed her willpower. Nanette didn't care.
The pinchers plopped her on a metal platform. There weren't any restraints because she couldn't move. Her muscles were completely limp. Something caught her eye on a neighboring platform. She thought she saw herself on another platform, but she wasn't sure if it was her or a woman who looked like her.
While cloning and genetic modification became a fad for a while, nanomachines eventually beat out clunky genetic modification. With nanotechnology, people could change their skin, eye, and hair color at will. They could gain and lose weight. Cheekbones, hips, and parts of the body could be modified. People didn't need cloning when they could change the structure of their body at the molecular level. Her hair could lengthen or be short on a whim. Cloning became an outdated technology.
She thought it was a person who wanted to look identical to her. There were plenty of people who attempted to emulate their heroes by looking like them, but a person can change appearance and not personality. Emulators enjoyed the thrill of being someone else, but they never could be that person. They wouldn’t have the same quantum signature. DNA could be emulated, but a person’s quantum state could never be faked. So emulators were simply putting on a show. They were like street performers. They would provide entertainment for a moment, but they were always pale to the real person. There was also the possibility that she was hallucinating. The nanomachine mist filled her system with a designer drug.
She knew something sinister was happening. She imagined the tortures that were to follow. She had trained for torture. Agents would spend time in gulags from the oppressive governments in the past. Isolation gave agents a lot of time for self-reflection. Most agents were deeply in touch with themselves. They knew how it felt to be tortured, isolated, and lacking in control. The worst thoughts and acts people were capable of committing were real training experiences. Most people didn’t know their potential endurance during terrible circumstances because they never had the occasion to test themselves. They never would know if they were capable of surviving torture because they were never tortured. People’s true limits were never tested because most people never willingly placed themselves in dangerous situations. The agents were different. They knew their abilities. Nanette would have to reach into her endurance now.
She wanted to question the woman sprawled out near her. But she couldn’t move. She tried to move a foot and a finger with no results. Normally, her skills as an agent would bury the fear of the situation, so it would not get in front of her objectivity. She wasn’t burying the fear. She just wasn’t experiencing it at all. She had no fear for herself or any of the countless others with her on the elevator.
She rose through what seemed to be an endless cylinder of chambers. More pinchers brought more humans. Another man was dropped off to the empty platform on the other side. He was blank and limp. She wondered if he could see her. There were enough people on the platforms to fight back. She mused about a method to wake them with no results. The chambers flew by at a rapid pace. People were stacked until almost every slot was full.
After an eternity, she reached the top. The elevators leveled out into numerous conveyor belts. The platforms became individual spaces on the belts. The belts spread out into the horizon and were too numerous to count. Equipment hung from the ceiling. There were arms, lasers, saws, and observing equipment. People were being cut up, poked, prodded, and tested with every conceivable brutality. Limbs were removed. Brains sliced into pieces. Eyes were drilled, and there were scans every step of the way. The people seemed complacent and didn’t make any attempt to run. The creepiest part was the fact that there were no screams. A complete lack of any sound came from the people being tortured. It was just the hum, whir, and hiss of machinery.
A saw descended from the ceiling and cut into her shoulder. She felt every bit of pain shooting through her body, but she still didn’t care. Her muscles could not move, and she accepted her fate. The saw ground as it hit bone. Her body shook as it tore through her. The pain was very real, and she wanted it to stop. However, any will power to escape was gone. She would simply let it happen. The nanomachine mist didn’t take her pain away. It simply took her humanity. Her nanomachines were frozen. They gave her no relief. It was as if they were shut down along with her willpower.
We blinked into a similar chamber. The only way we knew we traveled at all was the view outside the chamber had changed. There was massive machinery. A mist began to envelop us. The well-dressed man said, “Nanomachines. We have to get out of here.”
I reached out with my weakened machines and connected to the mist. I knew I probably only had one good push left, so I focused every machine in my body on the singular task of absorbing the machines. For a brief moment, my heart stopped. My vision went blank, and my body felt like it was in a freefall. Then I felt the nanomachines punch through the defense of the mist. The mist dissipated. I cannibalized the new machines and sent my machines to work on upgrading my own. If I were to have a chance at outwitting my future self, I would need better tech. My machines began to strengthen from the influx of new machines. The advancements of the future tech began integrating into my system. The mist machines weren't as powerful as the ones my future self possessed because of their limited function, but any upgrade would help. I reached out to the door and opened the chamber with my mind.
Robotic pinchers burst into the chamber. We dodged to either side of it. The pinchers adjusted their course and turned toward the well-dressed man. I reached out with my nanomachines, and there was no software in the arm. It was all hardware. The well-dressed man jumped and grabbed the arm. It swung towards me.
“Jump!” the well-dressed man yelled.
I jumped and gripped the other side. The arm no longer sensed anyone in the chamber, so it pulled out. A vast chasm was below us. It looked as if it was almost infinite. Chambers circled the machinery in the center of the cylinder. Arms dropped people onto elevators. It was a massive operation, and there seemed to be no end to the supply of humans. We held the arm tight as it dipped into another chamber.
A woman in a green princess dress lay limp inside the chamber. The arm scooped her with ease and dropped her off on a platform. The dress looked medieval. It was out of place. We jumped onto the platform with her, and an overwhelming smell of body odor hit my senses. From the smell, the decay of her teeth, and the grime from her body, she probably was authentically from the Middle Ages. The people in here weren't just reprogramming victims from my time, but they were people from many historical eras. The future was collecting people from the past and experimenting on them.
The well-dressed man sized up the situation. The elevator system seemed to never end. He looked down at the girl and closed her eyelids. “Now what?” He looked at me.
“We find the girl and get the hell out of here,” I offered.
“How?” he said.
“Same way we got in.” I indicated the chambers on the wall.
“They probably can track us in here,” he said.
“I'm working on it. I'm trying to use my nanomachines to hide our biometrics.” I said reassuringly even though I wasn't quite sure my bubble gum and duck tape solution would work. I tapped into the medieval woman’s biometrics. After copying her rhythms, I spread the nanomachines with her rhythms to act as sort of a camouflage over our life signs. While camouflage was good cover for passive observers, it almost never stood up to intense scrutiny.
While the elevator lifted us upward, we had a brief reprieve from the madness. The well-dressed man was able to inform me the basics about our situation. The agency was a mysterious and clandestine operation. They protected history, and the well-dressed man used to believe they were working to save lives from people meddling from the future. However, it was a compartmentalized operation, so people only knew about what was happening in their particular department. From what little the well-dressed man could remember, he never saw a supervisor and just dealt with his mentor.
“How are you able to project your nanomachines?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Only agents can send their nanomachines out of the body without skin-to-skin contact and the options are limited.”
“Who knows? Maybe I was upgraded when I was in her position.” We looked at the woman lying on the platform. If what I was told about this place was accurate, this woman was conscious and unable to move. To a person from the Middle Ages, she was in a level of hell, and we were demons. I wondered how much myth from our past was time travel. In the limited time of my new existence, I have seen enough to create mythos of magic even though it was all considered science fact.
The platforms leveled out to slots on a conveyor belt. Machinery dangled from the ceiling. A laser lowered and pointed down at us. We both jumped from the platform as the laser sizzled layers of skin from her body. She was experiencing pain. They all were. It was an endless room for some cruel enterprise. The worst part was that it wasn’t a few conveyor belts. It was a massive operation that stretched from one horizon to the other. It was a laboratory with human subjects. There were many conveyor belts with machines chopping, slicing, dissecting, and experimenting.
I felt a queasy feeling well up inside my stomach. The fate of these people was cruel. I would somehow condone or at least let these tortures continue. My future self not only was a part of it but actively sent people to this fate. Somehow, I would be corrupted. My newfound power could be to blame. A teacher I remembered in my fragmented memory said that people with power over others would cease to have morality given a long enough timeline no matter how good their intentions. With nanomachines, humans could live forever. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. I had to believe it wasn’t true. There had to be some timeline out there where I didn’t let this happen. I believed in free will and part of the free will package means there are no absolutes.
The well-dressed man traversed the belt to my side while dodging the machinery. “We have to find her,” he said.
“This place is too big. Checking every belt would be impossible,” I said.
“Can’t you make nanomachine clouds?” he said.
“If I had enough time I suppose. This place is massive.”
“There must be something.”
“You love her,” I said.
“I do,” he said.
A knight passed us on the conveyor belt. First a princess and then a knight. I wondered if they were in love too. Maybe they ran away together and stumbled into some cave with a chamber. When the knight’s princess disappeared in the “demon gate,” he went after her. Now they were experiments. People did crazy acts for love. The well-dressed man was no exception. He held out hope when it was a lost cause. There was no way I could search this entire area in any decent amount of time. My nanomachines could now replicate and form clouds to search in different directions thanks to the mist I absorbed, but it would take forever. Then an idea hit me as a squire came next. Every person on the belt next to us was from the Middle Ages. A prince came after the squire. All of these people were from the same time period. The conveyor belts were specific to the time period.
“I think I know how to find her,” I exclaimed and took off running. The well-dressed man quickly followed pace.
It took a little running back and forth while explaining to the well-dressed man. I quickly discovered the belts to the right were ascending in time. We jumped over belts and squeezed under others. It was slow going because of the whir of machinery. I saw the faces of the people undergoing the torture as we went. I wanted to save them, but I knew I couldn’t. I burned them into my memory. I forced myself to memorize every single torture. It made me sick, but it was the best I could do to send a message to my future self. Remember every person because I would be an accomplice one day.
We found a belt that looked like it was from the right timeline. The people on the belt looked like they were from the city, so we began to follow the belt deeper into the room. As we went further, the machines were vicious and crueler, and the people looked less and less human. Their skin was taken off, limbs were missing, and sometimes there was just a mess of organic matter. There didn’t seem to be a purpose other than pure cruelty. We were about to give up hope of finding any recognizable version of her when we heard a cry. It was female.