Second Paradigm (12 page)

Two minutes before he left, Director Arbu had placed an agent on a mission to track Yuri’s illegal movements in the twentieth century. Yuri didn’t realize it, but he had lost before he even knew he played the game.

Time: 1997
Location: Classified
Operation: Classified

Agent Holly watched Yuri leave the fast food joint with a greasy bag tucked under his arm. He got bored with this assignment, as his target had spent the preceding month basically in a repetition of the same routine. Wake up at the crack of dawn, eat greasy food at a diner, go to the library all day, eat greasy twentieth century fast food, then go to sleep after it got dark. Bio-monitor tracking all night long showed never a single variation in his sleep pattern.

Following the most elite of intelligence officers was not what Holly would have thought of as a boring mission. This should have been cloak and dagger. There should have been constant time shifts to shake any followers. Following a renegade agent was also not something Holly would have thought could be boring. A renegade agent, well, frankly, should be doing something illegal. Yet somehow this combination of renegade and intelligence officer put him to sleep on a daily basis.

Perhaps if Holly had been freshly assigned, and not locked into a month long routine that took his edge off, he would not have made the mistake he was about to make. But, he was bored, and he did make the biggest mistake of his career.

It happened thirty-two days into Holly’s operation, between Agent Yakavich’s evening meal at a seemingly random burger joint and his return to his hole in the wall hotel. Yakavich turned off the main roadway that ran towards his hotel and drove down a dead-end road that led only to a C-Twenty government building. Yakavich made his move—or at least made a move of some sort. A move that Holly could bring him down for. He stayed far back, using illegal C twenty-nine technologies to mask his car.

Yuri pulled into the building’s parking lot. The building had several scaffolds and cranes around it. Pieces of the upper stories were jagged and missing. The building had suffered some damage and was being rebuilt. Waiting in the shadowy edge of the parking lot stood the dimly lit silhouette of a female figure. Yakavich got out of his car with a briefcase, scanning the lot for other people. Holly recognized the model of the briefcase. It was also an illegal C twenty-nine piece of technology.

Holly jumped to the only conclusion that he could with the evidence at hand: Yakavich passed future information to a native local. Holly reached into his jacket, pulled out his pistol, and started moving towards the two figures at the far side of the lot.

As he snuck up on them, he laid down a dampening field to block Yakavich from escaping by hopping into the time stream and stepping to a different time. He got within easy earshot and started listening to the conversation, trying to gather more information before making a decision on his course of action.

Yuri kicked the briefcase and it slid across the ground to the shadowy figure. “It’s all there. Information covering the next forty-five years. It should be everything you need.”

A female voice came from the shadows. “Thank you, Yuri. What you have risked to help me in my situation … I appreciate it. I appreciate it more than you can ever know.” She sounded sad.

Yuri smiled grimly. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve broken so many of the laws of time travel at this point that I figure—how much damage can one more broken law do? If I ever go back to my home, I know I’m sitting on a lifetime of imprisonment.”

The woman in the shadows reached down and picked up the case. Her movements were sensuous but also very sure. “Yuri, this gift will let me change history. I can undo what would have happened over the next several years and make things go the way they should. Make them go the way we need to in order to ensure our ends are met. Please, don’t feel like you are breaking the law, you are freeing the chains which have bound us.”

Red rose in Holly’s vision. He had taken this job because he believed truly in his heart of hearts that agents needed to be guardians to the time stream. Guardians who protect it, and who stop people from manipulating time to their own ends. That someone he had admired a month ago should turn against their core mission … Holly really didn’t stop to think.

This was a potential class six paradox unfolding and his training took over, mixing freely with the rising betrayal he felt, and leaving his mind behind in the quagmire of boredom created over the last month. He raised his pistol and shot them both in the head. Two clean shots, surgically executed, before either could respond. He holstered his pistol and purposefully walked to the woman, now lying face down in a pool of blood, and pulled the briefcase from her limp fingers. Releasing the field he had created, he grabbed Yuri’s body, jerking his head off the ground by his hair, and hopped forward with his two packages to the future.

The next morning, one of the other scientists from the building found Lucille Frost lying dead in the parking lot when she left from an all night shift to grab a cup of coffee from the twenty-four hour coffee shop down the road. The only other scientist in the partially reconstructed building was Christopher Nost, who was there all night trying to reconstruct the files he had lost in the blast weeks before.

2044 A.D.: New Denver, Colorado

Machine gun fire echoed through the streets as Alex watched the scene unfold before him. Christopher Nost vanished from the street and the move saved his life as concrete directly behind where he had been standing exploded from stray heavy-caliber fire.

Alex felt the flux hit the time stream as someone jumped. Interesting. It seemed likely that Nost was developing some subconscious control over the nano systems in his body. An impressive feat, considering that the first generation machines Nost had created were unstable and in most subjects wiped out the memory chains, making the ability to use the machines transitory at best. There seemed to be a trace of a second jump, but not forward or backward.

Alex filed that one away to puzzle out later. The scene in the street ended in a fiery disaster as Alex wandered away. The situation here in twenty forty-four was interesting to say the least. Something odd was happening with Nost. He had awakened unaffected by aging, something Alex had never heard of before. First generation machines definitely were not supposed to do that. Hell, no time machine granted the user that ability to Alex’s knowledge.

But it had happened somehow. And James Garret had been there, studying the phenomenon. He would be a slippery fish to catch when the time came. Flexing his will, Alex hopped forward, past the earthquake, to the Rangley Hotel and activated his holographic disguise kit. Bringing future technology back was always so much fun. His face seemed to fold in on itself, reassembling itself to be bald and squished a bit. He seemed to resemble nothing so much as a pit bull.

Hair appeared on his ears and the back of his hands. He worked his muscles and stretched his jaw, getting back into the character of his Charlie disguise. Drunks and barflies at inns and hotels around the world knew him in this guise, depending on where and when you went.

Observation of Nost gave him some interesting tidbits. The first being that apparently Chris had no idea yet that he could travel, even though he had done it at least twice. The second was that some event had triggered shell shock and Chris’s memory was now fractured.

It seemed that the fracture went way beyond the medical knowledge of what first-generation time nanos did to the brain. But Alex worked on Chris, helping him learn the tools that would ensure his eventual survival. At least that’s what he hoped he was giving him. If he were miscalculating this, Nost would end up a splattered bug on the windshield of time, as would the rest of humanity along with him.

Humanity was at stake here and either Chris would master himself or not. If not, the results would be disastrous to the time stream and would result in the destabilization of history. Of course, history shattering was only theoretical. Since history was currently intact, no one knew what would happen if it hit the ‘shatter’ point.

He watched a future version of Chris go up to the room and raised a single eyebrow. Now, this was finally getting interesting. He grabbed a broom and started sweeping ineffectually at the rubble from the earthquake, waiting for the current time frame Chris to arrive.

He stopped sweeping when he saw Chris come up to the front door. The man looked battered and shaken. Worse than shaken, more like he was concussed and had no idea where he was.

Alex decided to go for broke and said mischievously, “I didn’t see you leave again.” He looked Chris up and down, feigning shock at the man’s condition. “Man, you look like shit. What the hell’d you do in the last fifteen minutes?”

“What are you talking about, Charlie?” Chris got a queasy look on his face as what Alex said registered.

“I mean, you walk in looking sharp fifteen minutes ago, you walk in now looking like shit. Don’t tell me, you’ve been in a coma,” he snorted and watched Chris’s reaction, hoping that he fed him enough so that the time travel would finally click. It didn’t.
Oh well
, Alex figured,
it would click soon enough when he encountered his future self upstairs
.

Chris looked at him, so he shifted his stance and feigned at discomfort, playing to his part. “Hey, man, fuck you. I didn’t mean nothing by it. I’m curious, is all, to how you could get all jacked up like that in fifteen minutes…”

Chris spun around and started purposefully up the stairs toward his room, pulling an old gun from under his coat as he went.

“Holy shit, man, I haven’t seen a Glock in years!” Alex said to his retreating back. Well, worst-case scenario, he’d have to intervene. Best case, Chris had pieced together the secret of time travel. Alex let him go to confront his future self and got back to an honest day’s work cleaning up the damaged hotel.

***

Relativity Synchronization:
The Seventh Cause

2044: Coffee & Cigarettes

Chris left his room at the Rangley around 7 a.m. to head toward the D.A.B. He felt well rested even though he had lain awake all night. Life was sometimes weird like that, granting you small respites amidst the storm. It looked like it wouldn’t take more than an hour to walk to the D.A.B., but he was restless and fidgety as his thoughts kept coming back to what he had read about the Cinvat Bridge.

Was that what I felt?
Chris wondered.
Some mystical alternate dimension that the God of time dwells in?
He could not discredit the idea, no matter how hard he tried. It felt too right. There were weirder ideas than the thought that a civilization over four thousand years dead had come across some aspect of the universe now long forgotten. And again, it felt right to his intuition.

Something remained there, beyond the edge of everything else, some bridge or tunnel that somehow cut through space and time. How the hell had he been able to find it?
Why hadn’t other people been able to use it?
The thought plagued him as he walked through the lobby. Abruptly, he stopped.
Have other people been able to use it?
He shook his head and continued on down the stairs at his hotel.

That was even scarier to him—the idea that other people had found it before him. Could that be why all of this happened?
Perhaps there’s some secret society or something that’s hunting me now. Maybe that’s why it seems like the universe is so twisted now. But then why haven’t they succeeded in actually killing me? Regardless, that would explain the woman at the punt.

Goosebumps ran down his spine as everything that had happened to him started to make sense based on this odd model of the world he had extrapolated.
Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is your solution.
Once again, Chris wondered if his mind was gone, floating through the false realities of insanity while his body was drooling in a padded room somewhere..
Do crazy people spend time wondering whether or not they are crazy?

“Feeling better?” Chris snapped out of his reverie as Charlie addressed him from the front desk. The other man looked tired but energetic, and had his newspaper lowered in front of him, but still clenched in dirty hands.

“What do you mean? Was I ill last night?” Chris paused.
Did I talk to Charlie last night?
He couldn’t remember it if he had. Distraction and more than a little confusion shrouded the walk back from the P.N.T. “You walked in here like a zombie last night. I guess spending sixteen hours on the Net will do that to you.” Charlie raised an eyebrow at Chris, “You headed over to the D.A.B. now?”

“Yeah … I guess all that research I did yesterday was pretty intense. The thing is it didn’t actually answer any of my questions,” Chris said and shrugged. “It left me more confused.”

“Man, you think you got problems,” Charlie folded the newspaper in front of him and planted his stubby elbows on top of it. “Lemme try to give you a little bit of perspective. I thought I was gonna get wasted last night. About eleven this strung-out skrag came in, wanted—”

“Sorry, Charlie,” Chris interrupted, trying to sound regretful. “I got a hell of a lot to do today. More research and hopefully I can start putting my life together again. I do want to chat with you, though. Can you tell me tonight? I should be back a bit earlier—and I can bring back some Chinese food for us.” Chris offered up the food on a whim, by way of apology for his rude interruption.

“Oh, sure pal. Sorry. I’ll take Mongolian beef. Extra large.” Charlie cleared his throat and lifted the newspaper without another word. He looked offended but willing to forgive Chris for the prospect of a free dinner.

A slight smile flirted across Chris’s lips as he left the hotel. He began to like Charlie. The quiet and warm morning cheered him. Chris looked up but saw only a handful of the cruisers in the air, floating like leaves in a gentle breeze and heading toward the city. The city had lost some of its fetidness. He wondered if it was some sort of holiday.
Maybe Thanksgiving comes early in the future
, he thought with a chuckle.

He tried to remember a specific Thanksgiving, but as always since his awakening in the hospital, his memories came up empty.
Maybe I’m The Doctor, and some strange accident in the TARDIS has left me stranded in time with no memory.
He started humming the Doctor Who theme to himself at this thought. Then he stopped, wondering where the memory had come from.

The Airbus Terminal was silent and desolate as well, and Chris began to get a bit worried. In front of the elevator doors there were a few loiterers milling around, and a few knots of PolCorp thugs glaring at anyone they thought might disturb the sanctity of their lazy day. Beady eyes under emblazoned helmets seemed to dare anyone to actually have the audacity to meet their gaze. Chris turned away and quickened his pace toward the D.A.B. Both departure boards had read “ALL BUSSES CANCELLED.” Something didn’t feel right about the day, but he refused to let go of the small bit of cheerfulness he had found.

Chris walked a few blocks further down Cherry Lane, where the buildings became higher than the neighborhood the Rangley was in. The buildings would have been skyscrapers in their own right if not for the megaliths dominating the Corporate Zone, which was now hidden to Chris by the proximity of the nearer towers. Everything in this future seemed to Chris to be in a constant battle to be the biggest and best. It started with the buildings, but the telltale hints were everywhere in his society—if only you stopped to look around. Chris spotted what he looked for and walked over towards the bank tower.

Installed in the side of the darkened GeoCorp Bank tower, humped at its peak like a cash register, he found a public news terminal—a 3D monitor offering “Public Information” to anyone who walked by. Across the bottom of the screen floated the message “
ALERT
” in dangerous looking bold red letters. Chris paused in front of it and as he did so a hidden sensor picked up his presence, increasing the display’s volume to an audible level.

“…As a result, all public transit is closed until the situation is under control and any travel within the city is strongly discouraged. All medical and PolCorp personnel are to report to their stations immediately. Emergency calls will not be responded to until emergency personnel are once again available in your area. We now go live to Wendy Price, whom at great personal risk is reporting to us from the most recent outbreak of violence in North Denver.”

The image shifted to a scene of carnage. A conflagration burned behind the red-haired woman looking into the camera, charred limbs and gore spattered the area around her. Oily black smoke partially obscured the entire area she stood in. The reporter wore what looked like a power-assisted suit of heavy metal armor, holding the time-honored microphone in the suit’s claw.

“Jesus,” Chris grunted. “Personal risk, my ass.”

“Lisa,” the woman said, “this scene is like so many others in North Denver, where the gang war that has effectively shut down South Denver for the past two months spilled into streets that were supposedly secure early this morning. PolCorp is currently attempting to get the situation to a state of stability, but as of now there have been hundreds of innocent bystanders slain in the past three hours.…”

Chris walked away from the screen and the voice faded into silence. He looked up and down the street, but only blue sky and sun could be seen from his vantage. No limbs were littering the ground, and no skirmishes were spontaneously breaking out in the middle of the street. He wondered where the attacks had been and decided it didn’t matter. He would meet Dr. Jameson, regardless.

He tried to imagine that this didn’t concern him, so close to the heart of GeoCorp, but he could not help but quicken his pace. Unlucky was one thing, but there was no reason to be stupid. Besides the occasional ground car and a few PolCorp Cruisers jetting along above, there was still no sign of everyday traffic. Save the occasional streetwalker crouched in the sun against the buildings or in the shadowed mouth of an alleyway, the streets were empty of pedestrian traffic as well. Twice more he walked past Public Information Terminals, but nothing new looked forthcoming and Chris didn’t bother to stop and see more of the same. Better to get to his meeting as quickly as possible and attempt to avoid getting shot at.

The PolCorp presence became much more obvious as he got closer to the GeoCorp tower, with cruisers parked and forming barricades. The officers milling around in riot gear made Chris feel more anxious, not more secure. Once he was within a half mile of his destination there were at least two cruisers in the air at any given time, and staggered groups of half a dozen guards walking the sidewalks a few blocks out from the street mall. Breaking into a run would only draw attention, so he paced himself with a quick walk through the gauntlet rather than risk drawing the notice of this harsh world.

There were other people out now too, browsing without noticeable concern through the shops at the base of the D.A.B. Most of the visible stores had heavy plate steel grates pulled shut in front of them, locked with electronic keypads or fingerprint scanners protecting the goods within from marauding gangs. But a few of the shops were open, mostly small restaurants and art galleries hoping to make a profit while their larger competitors where closed to avoid the risk of riots.

Little Paris was one of the open shops, and Chris found it at the end of the strip. A few daring people sat at tables outside, but most were choosing to remain inside on the off chance that the rioting spilled over onto the mall. Two old men sat by the window casually playing chess and smoking cigars.

Chris looked up at the ornamental clock adorning the top of a small building a few blocks down. The clock was a big white wheel with thick iron hands atop a narrow green pole. The overall effect drew the eye by creating an illusion of an ill-balanced object about to fall under the slightest breeze, threatening to crush anyone who walked below it at the wrong moment. The hands read just after eight.

Chris looked at the card Jameson had given him. Fifteen hundred
. Great. Three this afternoon. I’ve got all day to sit around here and wait.
Indecision stopped him momentarily as he tried to decide whether to stay in the relative safety of the coffee shop or to continue exploring the mall. Finally, he decided that he could duck into an open shop if he saw trouble headed his way and he began curiously strolling down the mall.

Approaching Little Paris, he had felt apprehension, expecting that at any moment one of the PolCorp officers gathered there for coffee and pastries would recognize him.
They had cameras,
Chris thought.
They must have caught something on film—unless the whole thing never happened.…

Continuing down the mall, his paranoia ebbed like the surf slowly drifting out to low tide. Again and again he found himself being eyed and then passed over with the same indifference the rest of the pedestrians received, and he relaxed his guard. He didn’t look like a gang member, so they weren’t looking at him or for him. Feeling his muscles unwind, for the first time he could remember he found himself in a good mood for more than a few minutes at a time.

The street sloped down and he decided to walk to the base of the D.A.B. Professional curiosity took over and he could not help but be fascinated by the concept of a building of such enormity.

What is it made out of?
Chris thought of the newspaper articles.
Did I design this stuff?
The silver needle now towered above, consuming half the sky with its shimmering shadow.
This is mine … this world would not be possible but for the ideas in my mind …
Pride welled up in his chest, followed by disgust at how alien and cold his idea had made the world.

As he approached the end of the mall, he realized that he had been mistaken about the proximity of the tower. The D.A.B. was much further than he thought: across a wide river bed with only a trickle of water in it, and a vast but mostly empty parking lot.

On the near side of the river sat a squat PolCorp station, guards milling about the front of the building and eying Chris. He smiled, trying not to look nervous, but failing miserably by looking away, his heart skipping a beat.

He had spotted Chuck, the PolCorp guard he remembered killing three nights ago.
What the fuck?
Chris thought as turned away and hurried back up the mall, his mind reeling.
I know I killed him. I watched him die.
It was hard to think, but there was one explanation. Chris had gone back to the hotel twenty minutes before he killed Chuck.
So did I kill him or not? Oh god, am I insane? Or am I actually a time traveler? But then … what about paradox? Is that what is driving me crazy?

Wind seemed to howl through his hair as Chris staggered back towards the coffee shop, clutching his head. The universe had no rhyme or reason and he felt everything slipping beyond his control. Reality forced itself back upon him as he walked back toward Little Paris and he noticed two of the PolCorp beat cops following after him, about a block behind.

The guard he had killed was in the fore, briskly outpacing his companion.
They’re walking a beat. It’s coincidence,
Chris forced himself to think, but he felt nauseous again. He kept going, keeping the same pace, racking his brain and trying to figure out what to do.

He could only hope that if some encounter happened, his instincts would kick in and he would be able to get away by doing … whatever the hell it was he could do.
But no killing
, he thought.
Somehow he survived what I did, and I’m not going to kill him again.

As he approached the patio section of Little Paris he felt a heavy hand fall on his shoulder. “Sir, could I ask you a few questions?” a low voice asked.

Chris swallowed and turned to face the speaker—a lumpy blond man in a PolCorp uniform. He didn’t have the helmet on, and wore no flack vest like the other guards seen patrolling the area. But the arm he used to keep hold of Chris looked like it was made out of some sort of metal alloy. Chuck stood behind him, looking at Chris through a plastic riot visor. A thoughtful expression was on his face, as he looked Chris up and down.