Emperors of Time (18 page)

The bright side,
Tim realized begrudgingly as he drifted off to sleep at about two AM that
morning, was that the room they were being held captive in was much nicer than
the one at the YMCA.  Tim wasn’t sure how much it would have cost to rent
this room for the week, but he was pretty certain he had never had that kind of
money, not even in twenty-first century dollars. 

Not only were
there two large beds in the room, so that he and Billy were sharing a bed
instead of a patch of floor, but there was also a private bathroom.  This
was apparently not a given in hotels at that time, from the way the thugs who
had brought them up to the room talked about it.  This meant that the
girls had finally been able to take their first showers since they had arrived
in 1916, and whatever else the implications of their capture would be, they
were at least excited about that.  Yes, they were being held captive, but
they were being kept in style.

When he first
led them into the room, one of the thugs had mentioned something about how
dinner was coming soon (it did, and it was actually pretty delicious) and gave
them a letter from people who the thug referred to as his superiors. 

Reading the
letter was the second thing they did once they got into the room.  The
first was to confirm that they had been right about the number of stairs they
walked up and that they couldn’t get out by going out the window.  It was
definitely too high up to try anything.  If they’d wanted to get killed,
they might as well have let the thugs shoot them.  So they stayed inside
and read the letter. 

It said,

To our
dearest Julie Chapman and her Time-Traveling Friends,

No doubt, you
have already heard our former colleague Hopkins’ side of the story, but we
thought you might like to hear ours as well.  We know he brought you to
see the world how it is in our time, because we have security footage of
Hopkins with you and your friends.  Of course, we had rigged building
security to let us know whenever Hopkins makes an appearance.  He is
awfully hard to catch these days, but we still make a point of being aware of
his movements.  When we found video of him with the four of you, we ran an
analysis on the faces and quickly found out we had been playing host to the
soon to be famous Julie Chapman.  That is, soon to be famous in your
timeline.  For us, you always appear to do something important no matter
how we manipulate the timeline.  Of course, we could have identified your
friends are as well, but after finding out we were dealing with you, it did not
seem necessary.  We know you well enough to know that you will listen to
reason.  You have a very gifted mind.

Speaking of
which, I feel it is only fair to satisfy your scientific curiosity.  You
are no doubt wondering whether we were involved with the Russians breaking
through the American defense grid in your own modern day.  Yes, it was
us.  We attempted to kill you before you came back to the year 1916. 

You must
understand, this was nothing personal, and we see this as no reason why we
cannot be friends in the near future.  We have no intention of killing you
any longer, now that you have made it to 1916.  But we had to try to keep
you away from this year at any cost, even if it meant creating a timeline where
I will never have been born.  Because I am a first-cause in all the
current variability of timelines, I will continue to be able to jump into
whatever timeline I create, unless I personally get killed.  But the more
we have to meddle in this year, the harder things become.

Which leads
me to another point.  No doubt, Hopkins has told you the Dominus Temporis
will only take a person back in time to a year once to change things, and then
allow one trip back in order to try to restore them.  On an elementary
level, that is the case, but it leads to confusion in the present
situation. 

You see, we
had originally only sent two of us back to the year 1916.  I am the third.
 I came back now that the current wrinkle of your presence in 2347 made it
appear that our original plan was in jeopardy. 

We were able
to figure out the exact date when Hopkins first recruited you.  Starting
on that date, the Domini would not allow us to travel back to change events in
a unique way for one year forward or backward, since only one event can be
changed per year.  Of course, what I did by trying to help the Russians
kill you does not count as changing the year a second time.  I was simply
trying to undo what Hopkins did.  If you were dead, the mischief would
have been undone. 

When we heard
from the police officer you disappeared in front of, we knew you had
left.  This is why I came back to 1916 as well, trying to keep our
original change on track.  It is still the same change, so the programming
on the Dominus allows it.  Of course, it was still necessary that someone
other than the original two be sent back, because it is impossible for any one
person to visit the same year more than once.

Immediately,
we expended resources to make sure we found you, including the hidden cameras
that Margaret and Anna were unwittingly carrying.  We discovered from our
own headquarters that you would be at their event tonight, so we told some of
the folks we hired from this time to be on the lookout. Now we have caught
you. 

Do not worry,
we will hold you until the bomb goes off and then take you back to your own
time and take the Dominus Hopkins has stolen from us and given to you
back.  We would have had our recent hires from 1916 take it from you, but
we wouldn’t want them accidentally figuring out what kind of technology they
had.  Of course, you still have a Dominus now, which means that if you
want, you can go back to your own time yourself, but you will be unable to
return to this time once you go, and we will get the Dominus back from you one
way or another.  Do not make us harm you.  You have tried, you have
failed, now you must wait for us to come chauffer you back home. 

If you hear
any loud noises coming from the next room over, do not fret.  It is simply
the bomb makers.  Of course, we could have built the bomb in our own time,
but there were certain materials, TNT, for instance that are easier to get
here, and we did not want the bomb looking like it was made in a later century,
since the police will no doubt analyze the debris once it explodes.  If
you try to get out of your room to go see the bomb, you will be shot on
sight.  But perhaps we will introduce you to bombmakers once the bomb has
gone off on Tuesday.

You need not
feel guilty that you have failed.  Do not let Hopkins mislead you. 
In our own time, now that I and my comrades govern, there is a promised land
for our citizens.  A utopia where crime is almost nonexistent, and poverty
and want are entirely unknown.  There are a few who choose to live outside
of our system, and they are given that choice.  They choose anarchy. 
But just because some people do not choose it does not mean that our utopia is
flawed.  Some people are merely ungrateful. 

Do not be one
of them, Julie.  Relax and enjoy this room.  I look forward to
meeting you tomorrow.  You become quite famous one day. 

Dr. Russell

There were a
couple places in the letter when Tim wasn’t sure whether to fall asleep with
boredom or vomit because of Russell’s overbearing pretension.  As it
turned out, he did neither, but waited until all four of them had finished
reading it. 

Then, he turned
to Julie.  “You’re not falling for any of this, are you?”

“Falling for
what?” she asked with no irony.

For a second,
Tim worried she didn’t see the trick, that she actually believed the Emperors
of Time had done the world a favor by taking it over.

Billy seemed to
be having similar concerns because he said, “No, don’t tell me you don’t see
he’s trying to trick us…”

Julie looked at
them confused for a second, and then shook her head.  “Oh, wait… 
No..  I get that they’re not really the good guys…  I thought you
were trying to say that we weren’t really trapped in here and that was all a
bluff or something.”

“Ah,” said
Tim.  “Yeah, no such luck on that one.”

“Right,” said
Julie.  “I’m also kind of weirded out by this whole thing where everyone
keeps saying I’m going to be famous.  I mean… that’s spooky, right? 
What about that, do you think that might be a trick?  ‘Cause I think that
might be a relief.”

Rose
laughed.  “No, I’m not sure I can think of any reason why they’d try to
trick us on that, plus it was Hopkins who told us about that first.  But
let’s try to keep your famously logical mind focused on the problem at hand,
for now.”

So they’d
concentrated for a while, but they hadn’t come up with any solutions. They
could leave, but wouldn’t be able to come back.  They could think of no
way to get out of the room without using the Domini.  As they concentrated
on it more and more, they became more and more frustrated, until finally they
decided that maybe concentrating on the problem at hand
exclusively
wasn’t a good idea.  Maybe a good idea would come to them if they were cleaner,
so they took turns showering.  Or if they weren’t hungry, so they ate the
food that the thugs brought by and handed them through a door cracked open
while a pistol was aimed at them.  Or, they decided at about one-thirty,
after hitting their heads against the problem at hand for over seven hours
without making any progress, maybe they would think better if they got a little
sleep. 

So finally, at
about two in the morning, Tim fell asleep, still without having come up with
any good ideas.

“I’ve got
something!” said Billy as soon as the four teens all woke up the next morning,
with the sun glaring into their seventh story window. 

But although
Billy had shouted, it hadn’t been his shouting that had woken them.  So
the collective attention at 7:30 that morning was split between being curious
as to what idea Billy had just had and wondering what it was that had woken
them up.  They didn’t need to be curious for long, though, as it was only
another fifteen seconds until someone knocked at the door again.  Tim
shuffled over to the door, took their breakfast delivery at gunpoint, and
closed the door again. 

“So what’s the
idea?” asked Rose, as she put cream cheese on one of the bagels that the most
recent thug had delivered.

“What?” asked
Billy.  “I don’t have any idea.”

Tim raised a
confused eyebrow, but noticed that Billy was looking around the room. 
Finally, he spotted what he was looking for.  A pen.  He also grabbed
the sheets of paper that held Russell’s letter to them.  The backs of the
papers were blank, so he started writing on them, after motioning for the
others to huddle up close.  They weren’t sure why, but they followed
Billy’s mimed instructions.

He wrote the
following sentence on one of the pieces of paper. 

Not sure if
the room is bugged visually/audibly/both, but why chance it?

The others
nodded in agreement and showed by their faces that they understood.

Is there
anywhere in this room something could stay hidden for a year?  Keep
talking normally…  We can at least throw off an audio bug…  That
might be all they did…  They think we’re done for.

“So back to
square one,” Rose said in an awfully convincing voice of defeat and
frustration.  She had that voice down, Tim figured, given the amount of
time they had each been using their disappointed, defeated voices recently.

“I’m starting to
think we should just give up…  Won’t make much of a difference to us
whether we succeed or not.  Why should we care what happens to the world
centuries after we’re dead?” Julie asked.  She was looking around the room
feverishly for the sort of place that Billy was describing as she asked it,
though.

Rose snatched
the pen and wrote,
How big of a ‘something’ are we talking?

After half a
second’s pause, Rose crossed out the word “talking” and amended it to
“writing.”

After Billy was
done rolling his eyes at Rose’s precision, he took the pen back from her and
wrote
Couple cans of mace…  maybe a taser?

Julie narrowed
her eyes and took the pen.

Tim realized
they had forgotten to keep talking.  “Julie, we can’t give up now,” he
said.  Julie nearly dropped the pen in surprise at him accusing her of
doing such a thing, until she remembered they were supposed to be putting on a
show for any potential listening devices the room might contain.  “We
can’t let that pretentious loser Russell win!”

Julie cracked a
smile at Tim for his description of Russell as she struck one of the words she
had just written with an underline.  Tim saw that she had written

Where on
God’s Green
Earth
can you get a taser in 1916??

Bill took the
pen back and wrote quickly. 

Not
1916.  My uncle works mall security back home.  They let the idiot
carry a taser.  And maybe he’ll definitely let me borrow it from him.

At the same time
as he wrote this, he verbally responded to Tim’s last spoken sentence. 
“Tim, I’m as competitive as the next guy, but when you’re beat you’re
beat.  You take your starters off the floor and put the benchwarmers
in.  No shame in admitting defeat.”

Tim figured they
were doing a somewhat passable job at keeping up the charade of having a verbal
conversation, as long as anyone who was listening bought that they had to take
an absurdly long time to think of what to say next.

Julie again:

We can’t go
home and come back again.  Hopkins told us that from day one.

Billy: