Second Paradigm (3 page)

Effectively, this gave her the ability to teleport herself on the world grid without hopping forward or backward through the time stream. That wasn’t her only advantage as an agent. Her strong jaw and cheekbones, yet soft face, luscious almost-brown amber hair, and warm eyes helped her fit into any era as a good looking woman, and good looking can get you far.

So it made a certain amount of sense that she had been the one given the mission to assassinate the most important figure in history—at the time he was meant to die. If, for any reason, this mission was messed up, then the paradox she had been sent back to fix could shatter history. Once again she reviewed the mission dossier.

History was on the brink of destroying itself in one nasty moment of time. The brass in the Time Corp had isolated the incident that created the instability in the time stream. This was the alpha and the omega of all paradox.

The target somehow escaped an assassination in the late nineteen hundreds, surviving through an indeterminate time afterwards and destabilizing the time stream. Recorded history, and the initial time monitoring databanks, all said that he died. For nine hundred years, the world had been hanging under the modern equivalent of Damocles’ Sword.

But she had doubts nagging at her. Undoing nine hundred years of history in order to undo a class six paradox seemed like it might be more harmful than helpful even though, since the incident of that giant paradox, nothing greater than a class two paradox had occurred. There had to be something missing from her files.

Once again she did the math on the situation and it returned results in the positive. Just like the countless other times she had done the math since accepting the mission. She sighed and rubbed her temples. If only she could disclose this to her husband and have him review the results. Deep in her gut, she had a feeling she, and everyone else, had missed something important about the equation.

But then again, according to the algorithms the computers spat out, this guy was meant to die here and now. The disparity between her gut and the facts was maddening. Ultimately, her job was to be an agent. It created a certain focus, simplifying the choice. And when it came to simplicity of form and action, it had a certain beauty as a form of conflict resolution. She followed orders.

Following orders didn’t leave her a lot of choice. She settled down in her seat to watch the trial and to try to piece together the reasons that the missed death of the man who created time travel served as the greatest paradox in all of history.

***

Relativity Synchronization:
The Second Cause

2003: The Sea & The Swimmer

“…bullet appears lodged in temporal bone, possible meningeal and or brain penetration. Blood is flowing freely. Continue open IVs with lactated ringers. Blood here? Good. Nurse, clamps and sutures. He’s tachycardic, tachypneic. His eyes are moving, he’s shocky … I think he’s waking up!”

Chris didn’t understand. He couldn’t see and his face itched. He tried to remember the last thing that he had done, but organizing his thoughts was like digging in mud with a butter knife. He tried to reach up to scratch the itch on his face, but for some reason his arm wouldn’t respond. Why couldn’t he move? Was something holding him down?

“I need suction now. Damn it! Anesthesia? Get him back under now! How’s his paralytic? Intact? If he moves we’re d…”

“…up again? What are you doing? Get him under and keep him there! Are you a first year resident or what? Do you want a malpractice suit on our hands?”

“Doctor—any more and I’ll bottom his pressures out. His body’s burning through everything five times faster than anyone I’ve ever seen. I’ll start him on presso …”

Both infinite and stagnant, time formed not a line or a circle, but a sphere. And along the curve of that sphere were an infinite number of planes, overlapping, intersecting, and warring for space. The surface was measurable, but it was larger on the inside, creating an infinity of possibility inside the construct.

Spinning along the planes of existence were motionless solar systems, people, planets, every conceivable perspective. Each of them projected a sheath, protecting it from the other planes of existence.

An entity moved through the sphere, swimming in the substance of time, at first without awareness. As time passed—a misleading statement, since within the substance of time things that happened instantly also took eons to transpire—it became aware that it was a “he.”

At the same, and yet separate, time, he became aware that he served as part of a greater sum. In the bright darkness and silent roar of the substance of time he sought anything that could be identified as himself. He ranged and spread throughout the infinite sphere until he found an anchor—a mass of flesh and matter (the word ‘man’ entered into its thoughts, then, ‘I am a man.’), both within but outside the Time Sphere.

It could sense a boundary between ‘he’ and ‘himself’ and he briefly wondered if he had found the edge of time, but quickly discarded the idea. This was something else; a veil that allowed the substance of time to ooze through to the other side, but not enough to create or destroy the dual purpose of time. It was only enough to … progress.

He studied the veil and became aware that it was indeed porous: that, in fact, tiny holes that allowed the raw substance of time to seep into the universe covered the whole of the Time Sphere. With this understanding came awareness that on this side of time, he had no body, and, therefore, the size of the pores did not in the least bit matter.

With that realization he moved toward himself, and reached through the veil at the sleeping figure on the other side. While what he saw and understood was wrong, it built a picture that allowed him to pretend at understanding, and it was enough for him to find his way back.

2873: James Garret’s Laboratory

James sipped his coffee, going through the motions of his day. His mind and spirit fought each other, and somewhere amidst the joined battle his heart had slipped in and stole the victory out from beneath the two combatants.

Since his discovery of the “Down” Nano a week ago, allowing him to alter the speed of his personal time stream, his thoughts had been trapped in the past. With an all too vivid recall, his mind went over and over the death of his wife. Replaying for him the scene when the message had arrived from the Corps that she had died while on a mission. He now had to deal with a pain he thought he had buried years ago. But now … the picture had changed. He had a new tool at his disposal that went beyond the scope of the Agency.

The Time Corp Agency had refused to share the details of her death with him, insisting that undoing it would create a class five paradox. All of the details of the mission were listed as classified. The suspicion that had gnawed at him back then was that they had classified it to keep the details from him. They were afraid that he would make an unauthorized jump to try to fix the outcome to result in her survival.

Garret knew that he was the best analyst that the world would ever see and it was not a source of pride. It was simply a stated fact within his soul. And because of this, it drove him into a near fury every time he thought about the Corp’s refusal to allow him to take a crack at figuring out how to save his wife. If anyone could find a better solution, he could, but they were so damned afraid that emotion would rule him that they wouldn’t let him work on the files.

With a sigh he put down his cup of coffee. He made his decision. Stretching time would make it rather difficult for them to stop him from getting the details for himself. Since they would not allow him to work out a solution with them, he must follow a different course of action. The more he thought about it, the more the idea crystallized in his mind.

He knew what he had to do, and he even thought that he knew how to do it. With more than a little nervous excitement he began preparing himself. There were several things that he did not yet have. He wrote out to-do lists, started preparing to rebuild technology that had not existed in a long while, and started pulling information from his dead wife’s computer, which he had hacked long ago. It was an arduous task, preparing to pit himself against the Time Corp, but he would finally be getting answers.

Time: Classified

Operation: Classified

Wanda sucked in a breath between clamped teeth as she watched her husband walk into the trial in place of the prosecuting attorney. What was he doing here? Had he seen her? She had to fight the urge to abort the mission on the spot. What the hell was he doing here? She looked closely at him and was surprised to see that he looked about ten years older. His frame was about the same, no weight lost or gained, but his hair had started to go to a silver-white in streaks here and there. And his eyes …

His eyes were very different. They were not the warm playful eyes that she remembered. Instead, they now looked like the eyes of a lifelong insomniac, with permanent dark rings below them. His smile wrinkles were gone. She used her Optical HUD contacts to confirm his identity. It was a positive match. Ten years older. Well then. Perhaps field control had given him a secondary mission. But why would they send a scientist into a field situation? Her HUDs weren’t showing him as chipped with an active mission, so odds were against him being here on legitimate business.

The only conclusion that she could jump to was that he was acting independently as a time rogue. She shook her head in horror at that thought and clamped her fingers over the bridge of her nose. She had developed the habit to help herself stay silent when she needed to. Just what the hell happened in the future to bring about this series of events? As tempting as it was to contact him and ask, she knew that the results of talking with him alone could create a huge paradox and piggybacking even a class two onto a class six could have devastating results on the stability of the time stream. Contact was not a viable option and she summarily dismissed it. Puzzling out the situation from secondhand and observational facts would to have to do.

Could procedure have changed so much in the ten years separating them that he would be allowed to come back here? That was an easy answer: no. James was on an unauthorized leap, trying to alter the time stream without field command’s knowledge. She didn’t even really need logic for that one. He would have sent a message via the HUD if he were here on a legitimate mission. So, logic followed that her husband’s motivation was either born of desperation or that he was hell-bent on destroying the world. Wanda thought it through. No matter how bad things were for James upstream from her relative time, she knew her husband well enough to know he would never act on a course he felt would be destructive to the world around him. He was too good of a man.

This meant that he was desperate. So it followed that one of two things caused him to be here. Either she failed or she died on this mission in his relative time. The third possibility floated into her mind that it could also be a combination of the two. She might fail and die. One was as bad as the other so far as she was concerned, without adding to the weight by combining them.

But from James’s viewpoint she couldn’t see a simple failed mission inspiring this kind of action in him. Even if it became such a grand failure that it destroyed her career. Ergo, she must be about to die. She sighed and shut her eyes, closing out the trial’s beginning. Retreating deep inside her mind, she analyzed the situation looking for the best course of action.

Unless she followed her original course of action, she would be creating paradox at the nexus of all historical destabilization. That was not truly an option, since any aberration in history at this time and point brought with it the possibility of destruction of the course of history. And not just by splitting out the time streams. This one was much larger than that. If she altered her course, it could simply cause them all to cease to exist, replaced by who knew what.

She got up and walked out of the courtroom, a single tear running down her cheek.

2344 B.C.: Unmapped land.

Alex wiped the sweat from his brow and leaned the shovel against a tree. Rubbing the small of his back, he stretched and yawned. It had been a long day, and he was only half done as of yet. He leaned back against another tree and watched the sky for a few minutes. The brilliant and clear day shone down on him, warming him.

Birds chirped and he could hear animals in the distance. He didn’t get beauty like this upstream. Or rather, all of the pollution and then repair done to the Earth had created a different kind of beauty that lay upstream from this point. This time seemed purer, untouched by the hand of mankind.

With a sigh, he pushed himself forward. Back to work. Kneeling down at the lip of the small hole he had dug, he reached his hand down and into it, letting nanos slip from his system into the claymore he had placed in it. Once the transfer completed, he closed the lid of the silver box, trapping the mine in its airtight container.

While the machine would corrode and rot, regardless of the hermetic sealing, the space would be there still because of the box, and land erosion should make it at the perfect height for his use when he needed it. The nanos he had dropped into the system would remember the shape and function of that mine. They were programmed well. And though the mine might be gone by the time he needed it, the nanos would replicate the effect on an invisible scale.

He stretched his senses through the time stream and checked all of his traps. He had over seven thousand placements and he felt no strain monitoring them all. With an impish grin to himself, he said aloud “Damn, son, you
are
good.”

The traps served a secondary function, linking up to his home time. He hoped he never had to trigger the function … or rather, since he would be dead when it triggered, he hoped it never triggered for him. Scooping the shovel back up in his long, calloused hands, he filled in the hole and moved to the next time to continue placing the traps he would need to survive his death.

***