Quantum Break (39 page)

Stepping into his barn laboratory he pulled the door closed behind him. It was only a few degrees warmer inside, made so by the grumbling generator and the ambient temperature of his beautiful Promenade and its stout, multifaceted heart.

William surveyed his kingdom, nodding as he found each essential piece as it should be. The generator: jouncing and thrumming. The chronon capacitor: running a little hot, but the charge at 100 percent. The departure station, created from a dozen PCs running in tandem, the date prominently onscreen in satisfyingly retro font: November 1, 2019. The systems monitoring station: online, all gauges reading nominal. That would change once his creation was brought to life. Which left the core.

The core was offline. Utilizing a 10,000-terahertz laser, small quantities of multiple isotopes, a small reaction chamber within a nuclear research lab at a South American university, a homemade carbon launcher, and a supercomputer, William had fabricated within a magnetically sealed geometric sphere one stable and relatively safe microscopic black hole.

That’s what was resting at the center of the machine, within that sphere, waiting to be brought online.

No time like the present.

He crossed to systems monitoring. A socket rested at the center of every facet of the core’s geometric casing. Resting half-inserted into each socket was a fat eight-inch connector. Running from each connector was a wide-gauge length of cabling, connecting directly to one segment of the Promenade.

Triple-checking all settings and conditions, William deemed all things to be optimal. Five years, great risk, and all of his grant money and professional earnings had gone toward this: his moment of truth.

“Make it so.”

He clicked a single key. Masses of black cabling jumping once as electromagnets charged and plugs slammed into sockets. Will’s eyes flicked from the core, down to the diagnostics screen, and back to the core.

A bass thump kicked pleasingly through his ribs as a single distortion wave pulsed off the Promenade. Electricity plugs sparked and burned out. Lightbulbs exploded, dropping the barn into freezing half-light. The generator screamed and black smoke poured from all the wrong places. Will’s eyes scanned information feverishly as it poured down the line, filling pulsing onscreen gauges, numerals skittering as they extended.

The Promenade lit up from within, a solid bar of white light blasting thickly from the airlock, through winter air grown pungent with diesel fumes and burning insulation. Diagnostics informed him that the Promenade had flooded itself, momentarily, with chronon particles. That wasn’t meant to happen. Not yet. He hadn’t yet primed the Promenade for departure.

AIRLOCK: DISENGAGING
.

Deadbolts thunked back within the Promenade’s housing. Chronon levels were now at normal levels within. Hydraulics engaged. Atmosphere vented.

William forgot the diagnostics. He stepped away from the bench to stand before the airlock.

The hatch levered aside, and someone appeared inside the Promenade’s airlock, lurching into sight from the left. A visitor?

The translator! He fumbled on his utility belt. He may need the translator.…

“Wel-welcome, traveler,” William said, stammering. “Damn it. I am—”

What the stranger had to say needed no translation. From the ramp of the airlock the figure raised one arm and shot William in the head.

*   *   *

Paul popped into existence the second Beth stepped out of the corridor, into the airlock. She caught him leaning heavily on the door, pointing the gun he had stolen from her at whatever was outside the machine.

She didn’t stop to think but barreled right into the little fucker, snapping one elbow into the side of his head. Paul’s skull rebounded off the heavy iron door frame. The bounceback pitched him slack-bodied down the exit ramp.

It’s the hits you don’t see coming that get you.

She swept up the sidearm as it hit the ground and came up level with Paul’s head.

Paul’s face was a mess of tears as he rose weakly up off his knees. “No.” He put his hands up. “Please.” Backed away, half-naked, stumbling. “No. No no…”

Oh fucking hell.
She gritted her teeth. Steadied her arm. “Shut up.”

“Please. Please …
please …
no … no.”

It was freezing but Beth felt nothing but sick. “Stop saying that. Shut up.” Their frantic breaths misted in clouds before them. She advanced, he backed away—off the ramp, onto a dirt floor.

She recognized this place. They were in the Joyce barn; the same barn in which she’d have her altercation with Gibson seventeen years from now.

There was a body on the floor, dressed like a cut-price Ghostbuster. It was Jack’s brother, Will.

Paul chose that moment to turn and run.

“Stop!”

She fired. The round caught him above the hip, splashed right through him, impact turning him around. He was looking at her as he stumbled backward to one knee, tears streaking his quivering face. Staring down at himself in disbelief, seeing what had been done to him, he screamed in a ruined voice wet with despair. Even then he was still trying to get to his feet, still trying to get away.

Paul looked back up at her, as Beth shut her eyes and fired again.

It took him through the shoulder, wrenching him around and down again. He coughed, scrambled weakly, trying to buy a few inches closer to an escape from this nightmare.

“Don’t,” Beth said, trying to see clearly.

She shuddered, trading a little piece of herself to aim at the back of Paul’s head.

Then, just like that, he was gone—the barn door smashing wide open in his wake and all the cold in the world rushing in.

Shock.

He was gone. Paul Serene was out there, in the world. Loose.

“Fuck!”

She flew to the door, liking her chances of being able to find him quick in the snow. The tracks were there all right, stretching all the way to the woods. Paul had covered hundreds of feet in no time. In this weather, wearing nothing but jeans, she wanted to believe he wouldn’t make it.

She needed confirmation. She needed a body.

The one on the floor behind her groaned. Will was alive.

Paul was out there, but Will was in here—wounded.

She couldn’t give chase, so she just screamed at the trees. Her own rage echoed back twice. Seconds later she was at Will’s side, telling him to remain still. Will’s response was to shout something incomprehensible and utterly fail to follow instructions.

“Calm down!”

Will froze. She could see the livid tear across the left side of his skull, the flowered bruise, the free-flowing blood.

“I didn’t do this to you. That was—”

“
Chut!
” Will barked. “Nothing!”

“What?”

“Don’t! Just…!” He panted, eyes ranging back and forth across nothing in particular. “Have I been shot?”

“Yes.”

Will fainted.

If she was honest with herself she was tempted to leave him there. The adrenaline was draining and a freezing cold was working its way to her bones. He had a canteen clipped to an overloaded belt. She unscrewed it, poured ice water across her fingers, and flicked it at his face. Will snapped to, barking.

“Agh! Agh!”

“You were grazed, that’s all. But you need to get to a hospital.”

“Stop,” he snapped, totally confused. “Talking.” Then: “Don’t tell me any—”

“Don’t tell you anything about the future, got it, I saw the same movie. Can you stand?”

That took the wind out of his sails, and Beth felt a little bad about it. She imagined he might have been preparing that speech for years. He righted himself, got to his feet. “I should have expected this. Why didn’t I expect this?”

“Getting shot?”

Will looked pale, like he might throw up. “Please stop saying that. It’s very … just, please stop saying that.” He took a couple of steadying breaths. “Visitors. I should have expected it once I activated the core. It stands to reason that future users would want to go back as far as they could.”

Beth looked around. “Looks like it’s just us, though.”

“Yes,” Will said. “My thoughts on that are undecided.”

“Will,” she said, hugging herself. “I need to get out of this cold. And … there are some things you
need
to know. That’s just how it is.”

“Wait,” he said. “Just … wait. What do I call you? And, please, no real names. I don’t want to know anything about you.”

Beth remembered Will’s video message from the swimming pool. The vast universe felt suddenly like a small, tightly-arranged room with everything in its place. They had always been in their place.

“September,” she said, feeling very far from home. “Call me September.”

Sunday, 28 February 1999. 9:49
P
.
M
. Riverport, Massachusetts. Forty-six minutes later.

The kitchen table was an oasis of light. Beth’s mug was empty; William had no interest in his tea. She was silent as he processed all that she had told him.

He hadn’t looked at her for twenty minutes, eyes scanning left and right, processing.

Eventually she broke the quiet by asking if he understood what had to be done.

“You will not find his body,” Will said. “The man you pursued here.”

“I know.”

The index and middle fingers of Will’s hands wiggled nervously. Processing. “All the events of the future world of which you are a citizen will come to pass. In a sense they have already happened, and cannot be avoided or undone. You must understand that, September.”

“Dr. Joyce, you know all you need to know: a machine based on your design damages the M-J field. We need to repair the field. Can you design something that we can use, in my time, to repair it?”

“It will take ten years.”

“2009. Perfect. I’ll jump ahead ten years, meet you and…”

Will was shaking his head. “It took five years for the Promenade to accumulate enough of a chronon charge for one journey, and your arrival depleted most of that.”

Beth put her mug down, carefully. “You haven’t perfected chronon aggregation.”

“I’ve barely begun. Most of my funds went into the creation of the machine’s core.”

She felt panic rise. She didn’t like it. She barely recognized it.

She took the fear and compartmentalized it. Moved on.

“Tell me how we’re going to fix the fracture in the M-J field.”

“It will be a broad-spectrum solution—a carpet bombing—but it’s the best I can do with the resources available. It will be my life’s work. It’s also a long shot.”

“When can you start?”

He still hadn’t looked at her, his eyes still ranging over nothing in particular. “I started twenty minutes ago.”

Wednesday, 24 May 2000. 6:11
P
.
M
. Fifteen months, twenty-five days after time core activation.

Point of view tilts sharply up, then down, then centers. Camera appears to be positioned on a writing desk. Location appears to be an attic—mostly empty.

William Joyce enters frame, sits, adjusts his glasses.

“I was averaging ten entries per three-hour videotape, resulting in a collection of over sixty cassettes. It became apparent to me after a … passionate … entreaty from my visitor that this posed a significant security risk. As you can tell from the empty bookshelves behind me that collection has now been sanitized. I will be restricting myself to a single videotape for the purposes of ordering my thoughts henceforth.” He gathers his thoughts. “I…”

Joyce reaches off-camera, retrieves a mug, drinks from it, winces.

“I ran the numbers again today. My initial ten-year projection holds firm, but the cost has not—as expected. I … have had to take the extraordinary measure of…” His voice fails, momentarily. “Without funds the Countermeasure I am creating cannot be completed. It follows, then, that if I fail in this task the universe itself will…” He becomes angry at himself. “Today I extinguished my parents, with the stroke of a pen
, by taking what money they had set aside for my younger brother and funneling it toward my work.
I took their final gift to Jack, the boy who is all that remains of my family … to correct my mistake.” He hit himself, in the chest, hard. “William Joyce! William Joyce … killed … everyone.” William’s formerly guileless expression has flushed, teeth locked. “I am the terrible thing at the end of the world. The figure poets and mystics foretold. And it is not great. It is not proud. It is not mighty.” He howls and then claps his hand over his mouth—as if afraid of being discovered. He listens, hears nothing, resumes in a lowered voice—trembling. “Buffoon. Simpleton. Idiot. I did not stride toward Armageddon, I stepped in it—like shit in the street. How does a person survive this kind of self-knowledge? I killed the universe. I killed …
everything.
It is destroying me … and I can tell no one.
No one.
”

He drains the mug. “I will require materials similar to those I used in the initial construction of the time core—and then some. I am tempted to neutralize the core I have but the sick truth of it is I need a working model for reference and observations. At present I believe I can refine my work on the chronon aggregator, allowing for the devising of a kind of … it’s a stupid term but ‘chronon bomb.’ ‘Bomb’ in the sense of an intense, localized hypersaturation of chronon energy calibrated to trigger particle propagation at a rate faster than I would expect an M-J fracture to foster dissipation. However, more research needs to be done in a range of areas—I can’t just make the fucking thing go boom. Propagation is one thing, but the damage to the field is another. If the device doesn’t attend to the problem at the very heart of the disaster—then causality will be left to bleed out once more. At best.”

He reaches for his mug, finds it empty, sets it down. Looks off camera. “She remains in the woods, in the shelter she built for herself. Residing in the town isn’t possible as she has no paperwork and can’t very well take a job. She’s let her appearance go, looking very little like the woman who stepped off the Promenade last year, and she avoids Jack like he’s contagious. And his little friend Paul. If I’m honest I fear we’re both losing our minds.”