Decoherence (5 page)

 

CHAPTER 8

“With age comes the choice: betray yourself, or betray your ­people. A person cannot serve their interests and the interest of the state at the same time.”

~ excerpt from
Broken and Betrayed: The True Story of the Last Soldier
by B. E. Contrite I1—­2070

Date Unknown

Magdelia Corporation Housing

Sequence 6—­Unit 27

Main Continent

Iteration 11—­Fan 1

H
ot blood flowed over Donovan's hand as he sliced his other self's throat with clinical dispatch. The body fell to the floor with a thud, the arterial spray caught on Donovan's clothes and hand instead of ruining the room. It was a selfish action. He wanted to look at this iteration's life one more time. Soak in the essence of another reality. Capture the memories of this Donovan for himself.

“Donovan?” a woman's voice called cheerfully as he heard a door open. Quick footsteps, then a beautiful woman with red hair stepped into the archway between the living space and the front door. Sunlight made her glow like an angel.

For a moment, she glowed. Her eyes alight with love. Her smile inviting, and sincere. She stretched out her arms . . . and stopped.

Too late, she noticed his blood-­soaked uniform, the knife in his hand, her beloved lying dead at his feet. Love turned to fear. She screamed.

She was still screaming when Donovan walked into the backyard and crossed through the portal, leaving the iteration to shatter around the broken woman.

He knew that there would be a sleeping pill next to his bed when he returned to Prime. And he knew with the same certainty that he wouldn't be taking it. He wanted to savor this Donovan's death. The man had looked at the pictures on the wall as he died. His last thoughts had been of the beautiful woman.

And now Donovan would have them for himself.

 

CHAPTER 9

“There is no shame quite like the one you feel when you look on what you could have been and realize only your own pride caused you to fail. I could have had so much more, but I thought I was invincible. I thought I was above it all. Now, look how I have fallen.”

~ excerpt from
Memoir of the Fallen Man
by A. N. Otra I3—­2064

Day 186/365

Year 5 of Progress

(July 5, 2069)

Central Command

Third Continent

Prime Reality

D
onovan tossed his Kevlar vest across the room so it clattered against the metal chair. It was an efficient alarm clock.

In his hospital bed, Senturi stirred, opened an eye, then winced. “What do you want?”

“To fragging talk. What else?” He rubbed a his thumbnail where a bit of his other self's blood remained.

“Do you know what time it is?”

“Doesn't matter.” Donovan leaned against the window overlooking a dark plaza and darker apartment windows. The government was cutting back on electric wastage with another set of rolling blackouts. “Time isn't real.”

“Not this again.” Senturi swore and pushed himself up into a sitting position. “Why do you do this to me? I don't need to be your Father Confessor or whatever those ­people were in that backwater iteration you were stuck in.”

“They were priests,” Donovan said. “They talked about death. I liked them.”

“You would.”

A shadow of a nurse passing by cut through the weak yellow light spilling through the frosted glass of the hospital room's door. Donovan waited patiently. Always patiently. He checked the window again, scanning the opposing rooftops for the telltale glint of a sniper's rifle. “I did another run.”

“I know,” Senturi said. “I still get the briefings.” He sighed. “Is this about Wagner?”

“No, she was grist for the mill. Emir sent me back. Alone. To a little sprig of an iteration. They had trees. The one where Wagner dies had an arboretum.” Donovan's leg bounced involuntarily. A dangerous tic. It was getting worse. He was losing control with every jump. Splintering. He locked himself down and turned to Senturi. “Trees. Gardens. Plants I'd never even heard of.”

Senturi shook his head and shrugged. “So?”

“There are ­people going hungry here. We can't produce enough food. We're growing algae to maintain oxygen levels because we strip-­mined the Amazon rain forest.”

“Again—­so?”

“So how is
this
the better iteration? How is this the better path for us?” He remembered the red-­haired woman, with wide green eyes and a sprinkling of cinnamon freckles across her nose.

Senturi shook his head. “I told you not to think like that. You can't question. That's how agents lose their minds. You stare at yourself from behind a gun too many times, and you start wondering if the right person came through the portal.”

“So what's the answer?” Donovan's voice cracked, breaking with a need he couldn't verbalize. Begging for reassurance. He could feel himself tearing between duty and desire.

“The answer is: That arboretum was going to lead to failure. They had trees. That doesn't mean they had stable leaders. That doesn't mean they were safe. We are months away from the decoherence event, and it is our job to make sure that the time collapse doesn't knock humanity back to the Stone Age. We've dodged so many missteps, narrowly escaped extinction, and you want to question that?”

The woman's smile was all he could think about. “I saw pictures of my other self. He had a home. A lover. Maybe a wife. He was happy.” An idea tickled the edge of his brain. The first whisperings of a plan. A way to escape.

There would be . . . consequences. Fatalities.

“Well,” Senturi said, “if you left the capital more often, you'd see ­people smiling around here, too. Not near Rose or Emir, but there are happy ­people. I've seen them.”

Donovan paced to the corner of the room, eyeing the dark night outside as he weighed how many lives he could justify as acceptable losses in this silent war. “That's the other thing. Rose . . . her head's all wrong.” She supported Emir with a pathological madness.

“Her head's wrong in every iteration,” Senturi said. “Ignore Rose. I have her under control.”

Donovan turned his attention to the pale man sitting in the bed, sizing him up and weighing his worth. “You've got nothing under control, including your own body. You're broken. Emir is ready to use you for parts.”

Senturi's lips pressed into a thin, grim line. “Emir knows what I'm doing. I keep the peace in the old corporation families. He doesn't have the head for politics, and Rose doesn't have the
cojones
. The Council listens to me. The Chief Minister of Defense is my cousin. Rose's father has debts owing to my family that he couldn't pay in three lifetimes. The only thing Emir fears more than death is a loss of control. He thinks he's manipulating the Council, but he's not. The Council is in control.”

Which meant that Senturi was a fool, too.

Donovan turned away, recalculating. “Manipulation, lies, and mind games. It's how the whole damn world works.”

The other man stretched, putting his hands behind his head. “As long as it keeps working.”

Donovan drew in a long breath. “How much longer?” He needed time. To win Emir's trust, to find the perfect place, to find his red-­haired woman . . .

“Decoherence should occur before March of next year. The iterations will flatline. Violence might spike for a week or two, then it gets better. We can let the probability fan run out, and when it hits the right point—­”

“We move,” Donovan said. Senturi's plan would push the Council into power, remove the iron grip of Central Command choking humanity, and replace Emir with someone more acceptable. Senturi thought he had a chance of taking over. Donovan thought Senturi had an excellent chance of being found dead with a knife in his back.

“Emir and Rose are out. You and I are in. The Council will accept me as a full member, and you'll be my right-­hand man.”

Donovan nodded. That wasn't going to happen, but Senturi's quest for power fitted nicely into his own plans. He waved to Senturi and grabbed his vest. “I need to take a walk.”

“Do that,” Senturi said. “And get some sleep, too. You look like hell.”

Donovan didn't bother saying that was because they lived in hell. They both knew the truth. Prime was stable because it was the lowest common denominator, the worst of all possible worlds.

Somewhere, there was an iteration where he was a good man. Or at least pretended to be. Either way, in this iteration, he wasn't, and he knew he didn't deserve a good man's life. But he'd take it anyway. Like a knife flashing in the dark, he'd carve himself into a better world and have everything the other iterations promised that he could only dream about now. Because one thing was clear:

He'd rather die with having had even a taste of happiness than survive only to remain in this misery.

R
ose waited until the third shift before she left the relative safety of her room for the medical labs three floors below. While she technically was Emir's second-­in-­command and had the right to go anywhere, she was wary of what lurked in the shadows. Central Command had once been a large, multibranched quasi-­military establishment with research, and training, and layers of protective red tape. Over the past two years, Emir had streamlined it.

The first cut, she hadn't noticed. Her team was ordered by Central Command to go to a new iteration that had spawned its own fan. The world had been virtually identical to Prime. It wasn't until months later that her habit of browsing data from old files had shown the single difference: a life. In the iteration she'd destroyed, Councillor Ibrahim Mesar survived what was considered an accidental encounter with a nut he was allergic to.

In the Prime, Counselor Mesar had not survived.

She took the stairs, not the lifts, down three flights, and opened a door with a broken lock that she'd neglected to mention to maintenance.

After the councillor's death, she'd started paying better attention to what was happening. The budget cuts that didn't look quite right. Little things like mortality rates and population counts not adding up kept her up at night. She noticed the changes between worlds, and a madness in Emir's eyes that she prayed was a reflection of her own paranoia. When Emir had announced they were within two years of a decoherence event six months ago, the changes had moved from large to reckless.

It was noticeable when she walked into the nearly empty lab. In a huge space that easily could have housed over a hundred ­people, there were only two research teams of six. Stations sat dark and vacant. There should have been programs running to extrapolate data collected from the other iterations to improve life here in Prime. Emir had ordered them all shut off six weeks ago. She took a deep breath when she realized her hand was shaking.

“Commander Rose?” A man with wispy black hair and gold, wire-­rimmed glasses stood, hands fiddling with something is his lab-­coat pocket.

“It's Dr. Basch, isn't it?” She smiled because she knew it would make him more likely to help her, and she hated herself for knowing that. She hated herself for choosing to manipulate someone. But it had to be done. Needs must.

The man nodded, his bangs falling over his glasses. “Yes, Commander. Thank you for remembering me.”

“I read your work on the new species of edible algae,” she said, not adding that she'd read it less than an hour ago as she researched her own ­people to prep for this mission in the same way she prepped to destroy a timeline. “I was wondering if you could help me with something.”

“Of course, Commander!” Basch practically glowed. The poor fool thought being noticed by her was a good thing.

If he only knew that everyone she focused on died, he'd know he should run in fear. But there really was nowhere safe for him to run. The towers where the civilians lived were actively decaying. The air outside was unbreathable. There was no safe place on Earth but here, at the right hand of the devil.

Basch's smile wilted under her examination, unaware of her inner thoughts. “Do you want to discuss this later, Commander?”

Rose shook off her melancholy. “No, now is good. I have a sample I need tested.” She took the evidence vial with the swab of blood from Locker 666 from her pocket. “It's probably nothing, which is why I didn't put a security alert out, but I found blood during a routine sweep of the command tower. I need to know who it belongs to so I can check the medical log and make sure they received the appropriate attention.”

Basch lifted the sample to eye level with a little frown. “Was this all you found?”

“Yes.”

“If it was by the gyms, it was probably just a nosebleed, those have been common since the new training regime started. I'm told the thirty-­seventh form is very tricky to learn.”

“It is,” Rose said. So far only she and Donovan had mastered it.

Basch nodded. “I can have this for you by my next shift tomorrow.”

“Are you working on something more important?”

“Only the samples Captain Donovan brought in. They were on the training floor, too. I think he's trying to find out who didn't clean up after their session.”

Her smile was calculated and flawlessly warm. “Great minds think alike. It's good to know I'm not the only one who noticed this. But, please, don't share the results. I'll let Captain Donovan handle the soldiers in his own way. There's no reason to give him another target if I can pull them to the side and give them a quick reminder.”

“You're so much nicer than he is,” Basch said with the openness of someone who wanted to be eliminated by Central Command's Internal Intelligence Division. The IID frowned on ­people's having favorites. Anyone with a power base was a threat to Emir, and IID was Emir's guard dog.

“Thank you for your ser­vice,” Rose said, stepping back. “I'll come by tomorrow to collect the results.”

“I look forward to it. Sleep well, Commander.”

“Good evening, Doctor.” Her smile never wavered, but her hands were shaking when she reached the stairwell. Her walk was nearly a run by the time she reached the floor where her room was tucked in a corner away from everyone else. The door closed behind her with a silent, solemn click before the panic attack swallowed her whole. She let the dread run over her, consume her. Felt the tears heat her cheeks and burn the cuts on her dry lips.

I am a force for good in humanity, a guiding light to the lost, a voice of hope for the hopeless. I believe in humanity and the greatness of the individual. I am the Paladin.
That had been her pledge. When she'd left the UN intelligence to work for Central Command, she'd come because she knew with a rock-­solid certainty that she was the Paladin, that she could change the future for the better.

The MIA was meant to be the answer to everything. The end of wars, famines, destruction, and senseless hate. Every tragedy could be averted by simply removing the iteration where it happened.

And she had failed humanity. Everyone who looked to her as their guiding light was stumbling into darkness because her blind faith in Emir meant she hadn't seen this coming. She hadn't seen his madness. Hadn't understood until it was far, far too late.

The dead girl in the locker had been a wakeup call.

Tomorrow, she would go and drag the future back into place. She would be the Paladin and make things right.