Engineering Infinity (35 page)

He thought this through while his
smart sofa whispered soft, encouraging tones. His entire world was smart.
Venture to jaywalk on a city street and a voice told you to get back, traffic
was on the way. Take a wrong turn walking home and your inboards beeped you
with directions. In the countryside, trees did not advise you on your best way
to the lake. Compared to the tender city, nature was dead, rough, uncaring.

There was no place in the
claustrophobic smart world to sense the way the world had been, when men roamed
wild and did vile things. No need for that horror, anymore. Still, he longed to
right the evils of that untamed past. Warren saw his chance.

Spacetime intervals were wedges
of coordinates, access to them paid for by currency flowing seamlessly from
accounts, which would never know the use he put their assets to - or care.

He studied in detail that
terrible past, noting dates and deaths and the heady ideas they called forth.
Assembling his team, he instructed them to work out a trajectory that slid
across the braided map of nearby space-times, all generated by quantum
processes he could not fathom in the slightest.

Each side-slide brought the
transflux passenger to a slightly altered, parallel universe of events. Each
held potential victims, awaiting the knife or bludgeon that would end their own
timelines forever. Each innocent could be saved. Not in Warren’s timeline - too
late for that - but in other spacetimes, still yearning for salvation.

The car crash had given him a zinging
adrenaline boost, which now faded. As he let the transflux cage’s transverse
gravity spread his legs and arms, popping joints, he learned from the blunders
he had made. Getting in the car and not immediately shoving the snout of the
0.22 into Clifford’s neck, pulling the trigger - yes, an error. The thrill of
the moment had clouded his judgment, surely.

So he made the next few joggs
systematic. Appear, find the target, kill within a few minutes more, then back
to the cage. He began to analyse those who fell to his exacting methods. A
catalogue of evil, gained at the expense of the sickness that now beset him at
every jogg.

Often, the killers betrayed in
their last moments not simple fear, but their own motives. Usually sexual
disorders drove them. Their victims, he already knew, had something in common -
occupation, race, appearance or age. One man in his thirties would slaughter
five librarians, and his walls were covered with photos of brunettes wearing
glasses. Such examples fell into what the literature called, in its deadening
language, “specific clusters of dysfunctional personality characteristics,”
along with eye tics, obsessions, a lack of conversational empathy.

These men had no guilt. They
blustered when they saw the 0.22 and died wholly self-confident, surprised as
the bullets found them. Examining their homes, Warren saw that they followed a
distinct set of rigid, self-made rules. He knew that most would keep photo
albums of their victims, so was unsurprised to find that they already, before
their crimes, had many women’s dresses and lingerie crammed into their hiding
places, and much pornography. Yet they had appeared to be normal and often
quite charming, a thin mask of sanity.

Their childhoods were marked by
animal cruelty, obsession with fire setting, and persistent bedwetting past the
age of five. They would often lure victims with ploys appealing to the victims’
sense of sympathy.

Such monsters should be erased,
surely. In his own timeline, the continuing drop in the homicide rate
was a puzzle. Now he sensed that at least partly that came from the work of
sideslip space-time travellers like himself, who remained invisible in that
particular history.

Warren thought on this, as he
slipped along the whorl of space-time, seeking his next exit. He would get as
many of the vermin as he could, cleansing universes he would never enjoy. He
had asked his techs at Advanced Spacetimes if he could go forward in time to an
era when someone had cured the odd cancer that beset him. But they said no, that
sideslipping joggs could not move into a future undefined, unknown.

He learned to mop up his vomit,
quell his roaming aches, grit his teeth and go on.

He waited through a rosy sundown
for Ted Bundy to appear. Light slid from the sky and traffic hummed on the
streets nearby the apartment Warren knew he used in 1971. People were coming
back to their happy homes, the warm domestic glows and satisfactions.

It was not smart to lurk in the
area, so he used his lock picks to enter the back of the apartment house, and
again on Bundy’s door. The mailboxes below had helpfully reassured him that the
mass murderer of so many women lived here, months before his crimes began.

To pass the time he found the
materials that eventually Bundy would use to put his arm in a fake plaster cast
and ask women to help him carry something to his car. Then Bundy would beat
them unconscious with a crowbar and carry them away. Bundy had been a
particularly organized killer - socially adequate, with friends and lovers.
Sometimes such types even had a spouse and children. The histories said such
men were those who, when finally captured, were likely to be described by
acquaintances as kind and unlikely to hurt anyone. But they were smart and
swift and dangerous, at all times.

So when Warren heard the front
door open, he slipped into the back bedroom and, to his sudden alarm, heard a
female voice. An answering male baritone, joking and light.

They stopped in the kitchen to
pour some wine. Bundy was a charmer, his voice warm and mellow, dipping up and
down with sincere interest in some story she was telling him. He put on music,
soft saxophone jazz, and they moved to the living room.

This went on until Warren began
to sweat with anxiety. The transflux cage’s position in space-time was subject
to some form of uncertainty principle. As it held strictly to this timeline,
its position in spatial coordinates became steadily more poorly phased. That
meant it would slowly drift in position, in some quantum sense he did not
follow. The techs assured him this was a small, unpredictable effect, but
cautioned him to minimize his time at any of the jogg points.

If the transflux cage moved
enough, he might not find it again in the dark. It was in a dense pine forest
and he had memorized the way back, but anxiety began to vex him.

He listened to Bundy’s resonant
tones romancing the woman as bile leaked upward into his mouth. The cancer was
worsening, the pains cramping his belly. It was one of the new, variant cancers
that evolved after the supposed victory over the simpler sorts. Even
suppressing the symptoms was difficult.

If he vomited he would surely
draw Bundy back here. Sweating from the pain and anxiety, Warren inched forward
along the carpeted corridor, listening intently. Bundy’s voice rose, irritated.
The woman’s response was hesitant, startled - then beseeching. The music
suddenly got louder. Warren quickly moved to the end of the corridor and looked
around the corner. Bundy had a baseball bat in his hands, eyes bulging, the
woman sitting on the long couch speaking quickly, hands raised, Bundy stepping
back -

Warren fished out the pistol and
brought it up as Bundy swung. He clipped the woman in the head, a hard smack.
Her long hair flew back as she grunted and collapsed. She rolled off the couch,
thumping on the floor.

Warren said, “Bastard!” and Bundy
turned. “How many have you killed?”

“What the - who are you?”

Warren permitted himself a smile.
He had to know if there had been any victims earlier. “An angel. How many, you
swine?”

Bundy relaxed, swinging the bat
in one hand. He smirked, eyes narrowing as he took in the situation, Warren,
his opportunities. “You don’t look like any angel to me, buster. Just some nosy
neighbour, right?” He smiled. “Watch me bring girls up here, wanted to snoop?
Maybe watch us? That why you were hiding in my bedroom?”

Bundy strolled casually forward
with an easy, athletic gait as he shrugged, a grin breaking across his handsome
face, his left hand spread in a casual so-what gesture, right hand clenched
firmly on the bat. “We were just having a little argument here, man. I must’ve
got a little mad, you can see -”

The
splat
of the 0.22 going off was mere rhythm in the jazz that blared from two big
speakers. Bundy stepped back and blinked in surprise and looked down at the red
stain on his lumberjack shirt. Warren aimed carefully and the second shot hit
him square in the nose, splattering blood. Bundy toppled forward, thumping on
the carpet.

Warren calculated quickly. The
woman must get away clean, that was clear. He didn’t want her nailed for a
murder. She was out cold, a bruise on the crown of her head. He searched her
handbag: Norma Roberts, local address. She appeared in none of the Bundy
history. Yet she was going to be his first, clearly. The past was not well
documented.

He decided to get away quickly.
He got her up and into a shoulder carry, her body limp. He opened the front
door, looked both ways down the corridor, and hauled her to the back entrance
of the apartment house. There he leaned her into a chair and left her and her
coat and handbag. It seemed simpler to let her wake up. She would probably get
away by herself. Someone would notice the smell in a week, and find an
unsolvable crime scene. It was the best he could do.

The past was
not well documented...
Either Bundy had not acknowledged this first
murder, or else Warren had side-slipped into a space-time where Bundy’s history
was somewhat different. But not different enough - Bundy was clearly an adroit,
self-confident killer. He thought on this as he threaded his way into the
gathering darkness.

The pains were crippling by then,
awful clenching spasms shooting through his belly. He barely got back to the
transflux cage before collapsing.

He took time to recover, hovering
the cage in the transition zone. Brilliant colours raced around the cage. The
walls hummed and rattled and the capsule’s processed air took on a sharp,
biting edge.

There were other Bundys in other
timelines, but he needed to move on to other targets. No one knew how many
timelines there were, though they were not infinite. Complex quantum processes
generated them and some theorists thought the number might be quite few. If so,
Warren could not reach some timelines. Already the cage had refused to go to
four target murderers, so perhaps his opportunities were not as large as the
hundreds or thousands he had at first dreamed about.

He had already shot Ted
Kaczynski, the “Unabomber.” That murderer had targeted universities and wrote a
manifesto that he distributed to the media, claiming that he wanted society to
return to a time when technology was not a threat to its future. Kaczynski had
not considered that a future technology would erase his deeds.

Kaczynski’s surprised gasp lay
behind him now. He decided, since his controls allowed him to choose among the
braided timelines, to save as many victims as he could. His own time was
growing short.

He scanned through the gallery of
mass murder, trying to relax as the flux cage popped and hummed with stresses.
Sex was the primary motive of lust killers, whether or not the victims were
dead, and fantasy played strongly in their killings. The worst felt that their
gratification depended on torture and mutilation, using weapons in close
contact with the victims - knives, hammers, or just hands. Such lust killers
often had a higher cause they could recite, but as they continued, intervals
between killings decreased and the craving for stimulation increased.

He considered Coral Watts, a
rural murderer. A surviving victim had described him as “excited and hyper and
clappin’ and just making noises like he was excited, that this was gonna be
fun.” Watts killed by slashing, stabbing, hanging, drowning, asphyxiating, and
strangling. But when Warren singled out the coordinates for Watts, the software
warned him that the target timeline was beyond his energy reserves.

The pain was worse now, shooting
searing fingers up into his chest. He braced himself in the acceleration chair
and took an injection his doctors had given him, slipping the needle into an
elbow vein. It helped a bit, a soothing warmth spreading through him. He put
aside the pain and concentrated, lips set in a thin white line.

His team had given him choices in
the space-time coordinates. The pain told him that he would not have time
enough to visit them all and bring his good work to the souls who had suffered
in those realms. Plainly, he should act to cause the greatest good, downstream
in time from his intervention.

Ah.
There
was a desirable target time, much further back, that drew his attention. These
killers acted in concert, slaughtering many. But their worst damage had been to
the sense of stability and goodwill in their society. That damage had exacted
huge costs for decades thereafter. Warren knew, as he reviewed the case file,
what justice demanded. He would voyage across the braided timestreams and end
his jogg in California, 1969.

He emerged on a bare rock shelf
in Chatsworth, north of the valley bordering the Los Angeles megaplex. He
savoured the view as the flux cage relaxed around him, its gravitational
ripples easing away. Night in the valley: streaks of actinic boulevard
streetlights, crisp dry air flavoured of desert and combustion. The opulence of
the era struck him immediately: blaring electric lights lacing everywhere,
thundering hordes of automobiles on the highways, the sharp sting of smog, and
large homes of glass and wood, poorly insulated. His era termed this the Age of
Appetite, and so it was.

But it was the beginning of a
time of mercies. The crimes the Manson gang was to commit did not cost the lot
of them their lives. California had briefly instituted an interval with no
death penalty while the Manson cases wound through their lethargic system. The
guilty then received lifelong support, living in comfortable surrounds and watching
television and movies, labouring a bit, writing books about their crimes,
giving interviews and finally passing away from various diseases. This era
thought that a life of constrained ease was the worst punishment it could
ethically impose.