Second Paradigm (14 page)

“And something else,” Chris said, not noticing Jameson had spoken. “There was this woman yesterday. I was at the Punt, trying to figure some stuff out. About myself. She seemed to know who I was. And she knew about you. She told me not to trust you.”

Jameson contemplated Chris for a long time before he spoke. “This woman … what did she look like?”

“She had red hair. Pretty. I don’t know … a really athletic build. You know who she was?”

“I give up.” Despite his words, Jameson looked at Chris as if he knew exactly who it was.

“She said she was Mary Frost. The granddaughter of the woman I supposedly murdered almost forty-five years ago.”

“Chris, let me tell you a few things.” Jameson leaned back into his chair, then shifted and leaned forward again.

“I’m listening,” Chris ground his teeth.
You know something, you bastard. Tell me what you know.

“First, don’t trust that woman.”

“That’s what she said about you.”

“I’m serious, Chris,” Jameson took on the demeanor of a lecturing father. “You were lucky. That woman could be extremely dangerous.”

“How so?”

“She could try and kill you.” Jameson’s stare bored into Chris. He didn’t blink.

Chris didn’t back down. “She
could
try and kill me, huh? Why didn’t she, then?”

“Okay, Chris,” Jameson said, a look of resolution flitting across his face. “This is how it is. I studied you—for more than a decade I studied you, and I didn’t find anything different about you. I studied your theories, and … Chris, do you know what you were working on, before Frost’s murder?”

“No. Not really, anyway. Some sort of alloy or something.”

“No. That was what the press reported. What you developed was a theory that stated that if faster-than-light speeds could be reached, one would no longer be in this continuum, but would, rather, enter into some sort of ultraspace that could result in a sort of instantaneous travel—teleportation, for all intents and purposes. The work you did was based on Metastability theory and the universal skin. If there are Tardis regions in the universe, which are larger on the inside, then why not anti-Tardis regions outside the universe, smaller on the outside. The trick then becomes to pierce the universe’s skin without breaking the surface tension, so no one accidentally destroys it. Figure out how to do that, and time and space are completely navigable. Which you thought you figured out. Tons of work went into it in Switzerland. It was called the Second Paradigm Theorem. It was halted after Frost’s murder, and after you were shot it was dropped for good.”

Chris looked at Garret Jameson. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because, don’t you see? You don’t age. You can, apparently, control time. There’s something different about you. Your memory loss … God damn it! Don’t you see? I think you came across something, during your research. Something that changed you, gave you … something. I’m not the only one that knows about your research or your time in the hospital. Why do you think I told you to stay away from the authorities? If anyone else put two and two together.… You’re in danger, Chris. Whatever breakthrough you had in your work, it didn’t leave you with your memory intact. It’s your only hope.”

“Why do I think you already know the answer to that?”

“Here,” Jameson glanced around, ignoring Chris’s comment and slid a bundle of cloth across the table. “It was my father’s. I never leave the Corporate Zone, so I don’t need it, but you might find it useful.”

Chris unwrapped the old T-shirt and found an ancient semi-automatic handgun with an extra clip. The edges were rusty, but it looked well maintained.

“What’s this?”

“What does it look like?” Jameson asked. “Like I said, you could be in danger.”

Chris looked up to the barista, but he sat behind the bar reading
Waiting for Godot
. He wrapped the gun back up into the bundle and slid it under his coat.

Jameson nodded in approval and his emotionless eyes blinked once. “I’m telling you, don’t trust that woman,” Jameson stood to leave, but looked back at Chris over his shoulder. “For that matter, Chris, don’t trust me, either.”

1997: Garret’s Gambit

Traffic moved by Garret’s parked car as he prepared himself to see his wife for the first time in ten years. This was not going to be easy for him, but as important as it was, he couldn’t let it faze him. When he walked into that courtroom, he knew she would spot him and recognize him. And no matter what happened he had to be blasé and feign ignorance of her identity.

It was far too critical to get Nost pronounced guilty to allow emotion to overwhelm him. It would be a hell of a thing to see his dead wife and not acknowledge her.

Garret finished bracing himself and got out of the car, walking through the bright day towards the courthouse. The light traffic streamed down the streets, the beautiful day a stark contrast to the landscape of his heart. He walked, enjoying the feel of the sun warming his skin, giving him an internal glow.

As he ascended the stairs, he took one last moment to pause and observe the entryway to the Denver courthouse. The semi-circular building created a natural courtyard inside of its curve. Across Bannock, the street that ran in front of the building, was a long park with almost Greek-looking columned buildings along the sides.

Birds sang, traffic drove by, people walked through the park, and the smell of summer floated through the air. A small group played Frisbee across the street, and to the north, along the Sixteenth Street Mall, pedestrian traffic bustled. In less than four hours Garret hoped there would be blood on these steps. Not hope, he thought to himself, but fact. Fact born of necessity.

Assuming that everything went according to his plan, there would be. One last time he ran through all of the logistics and math behind his plan. Everything checked out once again. In four hours he would have completed the balancing actions needed to stabilize the greatest paradox in history and insure his wife’s survival. A winning situation no matter how you looked at it.

Allowing himself a slight smile, Garret finished ascending the stairs and walked into the courthouse. Moving from the sunlight’s warmth to the chilly air-conditioned and dim interior made goose bumps break out along his arms. Inside, the colors were all deep shades of tans and browns, giving the environment a rich but dark feeling. The drastic change in temperature sent chills down Garret’s arms as he approached the security checkpoint. Unloading his pockets of everything metallic, he walked through the primitive metal detector and then headed towards the chamber the trial was to be held in.

The people walking around were a mix of police officers, traffic violators, and the on-site staff of various clerks and vendors. No one looked particularly happy or even in a good mood.

Harder criminals destined for the trials came from the holding cells in the district six jail building, behind the courthouse and across the street. Garret had learned this when he studied the building and knew he wouldn’t run into the procession for the man he tried to condemn. Grateful for the small detail, he hid a smile.

As he walked into the trial, his breath momentarily caught. There she sat, about half way back in the observer section. The room had high, but large windows, much brighter than the hallway he had entered from. For a second it seemed as though the light shone on her alone, picking her out of the crowd and setting her apart with a glowing golden nimbus. For the briefest second, their eyes met.

He swallowed and forced himself to walk forward. Doing his best to ignore Wanda, he strode forward to the prosecuting attorney’s table and pulled out his seat. He sat down and purposefully started organizing his trial notes.

After a moment, he realized that his HUD contact lenses were reporting that Wanda had scanned him. She had spotted him then, and used her HUD to confirm his identity. He could almost feel her thoughts. She would be analyzing the possible reasons that he would be here. It would not take her very long to piece it together, he suspected. He had to hope that she held to her original course of action. If she didn’t, then this whole exercise would be wasted.

He watched the time on the old analog clock hanging behind the Judge’s bench. She should be getting up and departing in a few minutes, to prepare her sniper’s roost. The files had contained exact times on that. Sure enough, a few moments passed before she stood up and walked out of the courtroom.

Shortly after she left, the bailiff walked into the room to announce the judge’s entry. Garret stood up, as did everyone else in the room, and the judge walked in. As he took his seat something clicked inside Garret. He knew he would win the trial. He knew that Nost would be pronounced guilty. And above all, he knew that his wife would survive today, changing today’s history from a class six paradox to a class two.

Time: 1997
Location: Classified
Operation: Classified

Lucille Frost was in a daze. Fire danced through the air around her, kissing the ground in small streaks of red and blaring sirens made it impossible to hear even her own thoughts. The bit with the raining concrete and glass was well over by now, but the aftermath of the explosion was in many ways a more chaotic scene than the initial moment of the disaster had been.

Here and there were pockets of stillness, much like the one currently around her, found behind ambulances where people were sitting in dazed shock. Everywhere else, firemen, emergency medics, and policemen were hurrying around the scene attempting to contain the damage. They were failing for the most part. It wasn’t that they were not doing a good job, but the news teams that had been pushed off the site previously were now swarming underfoot and wreaking havoc on every attempt that the police made to settle the situation.

Because of the media frenzy, body bags were loaded into the ambulances hurriedly, and the news teams fed off the images they could capture of those sad black bags. This time period pushed death and tragedy in media. It wasn’t better or worse than the sensationalization of any other time period, just morbid.

Lucy drew in a ragged but deep breath and calmed herself enough to think. She was a combat specialist and a scene like this should not have shaken her nerves so severely. But something about this mission was really dulling her edge.

She had missed a lot of things recently that she should have caught and been prepared for. The half window, flying through the air, had nearly killed her. Instead, a local era police officer had sacrificed his life for her. It created yet another potential paradox, and right at the crux of a paradox she was supposed to be here to diffuse. Next on the list of deadly mistakes was the explosion itself.

Half of the building had been destroyed. That was even worse, definitely a paradox. Someone had wanted to kill her. She could deal with this, though; all she had to do was kill them first. Now that she knew the threat was there, counteracting it was a top priority.

The only reason she had not been at the office earlier was that Alexander Zarth had detained her in conversation to the point that she was late arriving at work. Highly suspicious, but he probably was not involved since it had resulted in her life being spared.

Possibility stretched out from this point, creating a matrix that she analyzed in her mind’s eye. Of all the courses that lay in front of her she could think of only one that might work, and it was to follow Zarth’s advice. Focusing her will she hopped forward in time, and north in space.

2044: New Denver, Colorado

Lucy Frost watched Garret leave the medical center with amusement. So this was his game. Everything that Alexander Zarth had told her checked out. So now she had to play her role in the events unfolding. Who would have thought that the critical point in the paradox’s formation actually occurred forty years after the paradox itself? With another effort of will she slipped sideways to confront Nost and push him in the right direction.

The building that she slipstreamed into could be described as nothing other than grungy. It was mostly empty, and the lights were low, masking what the few people present were doing in their computer booths.

The walls were dirty to the point that Lucy wondered if the air was safe to breathe. Random garbage lay unnoticed by the negligent cleaning staff, accumulating under desks and in corners. She spied Nost, hunched over his own terminal and obviously fully absorbed in whatever he was reading. His back was to her and he sat slumped in his chair, studying the screen in front of him.

Lucy walked up to him and stood behind him, reading over his shoulder. Interestingly, he was reading about her supposed death. “Old news, huh?” she purred. It gratified her to watch his spine straighten in surprise. “Now why would you be hunting through that stuff?”

Chris closed out the screen. “What’s it to you?” he asked, turning around to face her. Chris froze and swallowed when he looked at her, then said nothing more. His hand played with the keyboard. The spark of recognition had caught fire in his eyes.

“Curiosity, really,” Lucy said. “As I was going by I saw my name on your screen, so I stopped to have a look. When I saw you were reading about my grandmother’s murder, I couldn’t help but wonder why you were reading about it.”

“Your … grandmother?” Chris said. He didn’t sound like he believed her. “That explains the striking resemblance.”

“Yes, I know. I look exactly like her. Everybody who sees her picture says it.” She bit her lower lip and stuck out her hand, offering up introductions. “I’m sorry. My name is Mary. Mary Frost.” Chris shook with nervousness, but she wrote it off to the fact that he thought he addressed the supposed granddaughter of the woman he thought he had murdered.

Chris looked at her hand suspiciously, then took it, hesitantly, and shook it. His grip was weak and his palms mildly sweaty. This was a changed man from the confident and brilliant physicist she had talked to the day before, by her perspective. “I’m Geoffrey Garret. I was doing a little research on the project your grandmother was working on. I … I’m a scientist …”

So, he was being smart and hiding his identity. He had chosen a bad name to use, as she knew Garret poked around as a rogue agent from ten years up her stream. “Garret?” She looked at him, and then she pushed her gaze
through
him, for almost a minute. “I was looking for a Garret, actually, but I don’t think you’re him.” She gave him a quirky grin and watched his response to the pressure.