Gravewalkers: Dying Time (8 page)

“
So nothing happened last
night?” he repeated the inquiry. “There was nothing unusual that
happened you could tell me about?”

“
Nope,” she lied perfectly
to her master in total violation of her furious but now
inefficacious inhibitor directives. “I never left your side all
night,” she lied again just for the delicious pleasure of it.
Carmen provided him a napkin and then asked, “Would you like me to
turn on the news channel? You could watch while you
eat.”

“
No thank you, Carmen,” he
declined more politely than was his usual. Her lovesome behavior
was more than enough surprises for the moment. “You could check my
messages for me though. If I have anything work related, I’ll need
to know.”

“
A Doctor Kine messaged
that he would like to see you at your earliest convenience,” she
reported. His messages were available in her own inorganic parallel
mind which was in constant contact with the data interlink. “Doctor
Kine is awaiting you in the Sector Eight engineering
laboratory.”

Critias recalled the
appointment, “Grand Marshal Wayne told me something about that. It
sounds like another wild goose chase to me. They have gone after a
patient-zero before thinking that after they cut it up they will be
able to kill the rest of them. I wouldn’t get my hopes
up.”

“
Vain hopes are often like
the dreams of those who wake,” she quoted with a wink while she
unzipped her flight-suit down to her navel. Carmen revealed that
she had nothing on underneath besides her desire for his searching
hands. “If it is a futile venture, then it wouldn’t be any harm if
you got there a little late.”

The Sector Eight
engineering labs were deep in the bowels of the station, well out
of the way of anyone who didn’t work there. Critias arrived later
than he would have liked, but Carmen’s uncharacteristically
self-motivated infatuation for his intimate embrace had done its
work upon his schedule. The massive doors opened themselves to let
him enter a circular chamber that contained huge machines related
to high-energy physics experiments with their high-voltage power
cables and armored pressure hoses of coolant that stretched across
the floor haphazardly enough to trip over.

Doctor Kine was a striking
figure of many ambiguities. His most apparent contradiction was his
age. Doctor Kine was clearly a man of senior years, perhaps in his
sixties and yet if he was that old his vigor and physical fitness
had to be profiting from salubrious gerontological therapies. The
doctor’s white hair was long and shaggy like a man who rarely
interacted socially with the general community or had any interest
in fads of fashion. Doctor Kine gamboled out from behind one of his
exotic apparatus that steamed from the liquid nitrogen that pumped
through it. He tinkered with his unfathomable machines with the
lightheartedness of a schoolboy and judging from the way he carried
himself, the doctor was as pleased as if he had just patented the
invention of his career.

“
It is so good to see you
again,” the old man came forward to shake hands. “You won’t
remember me yet. My name is Doctor Kine, Cornelius Kine to be
exact. This is a truly glorious day, one that I have devoted my
life to bringing to fulfillment.”

The man’s flimsy grasp on
sanity did not disappoint Critias’ expectations, “Have we met,
doctor? I don’t think we have met before and it seems unlikely to
me I would ever forget if we had. I do recall you contacted me
recently while I was down at the Chicago ERC. You had no message to
convey, only an inquiry as to my current whereabouts.”

“
Yes, my call down to the
planet,” Kine acknowledged; “even I found it difficult to believe
that so auspicious a moment could just come upon me so
unexpectedly. We have met before in a manner of speaking. I find
that normal terminology is inefficient when it comes to these
matters of temporal causality. Perhaps it would be more accurate
for me to say that you will be meeting me before I have already met
you. In any case, we will be meeting one another more than
once.”

“
Temporal,” Critias
guffawed. “What are you planning now? Can you perform some sort of
mad super science that teleports me into the future so I can see
how they finally solved the infection problem?”

“
Heavens no,” the doctor
laughed at the preposterous notion. “It’s impossible for you to
travel to the future again unless it’s one second at a time like
everyone else. No, my friend, as far as your physical matter is
concerned, the future has not happened yet. The past however has
already established itself as fixed events. Travel to the past is
theoretically possible or at least it was just an unproven
observation of mine until I recently proved it as actual
science.”

Critias tried to get some
clarity, “You’ve sent someone back in time? I find that exceedingly
hard to believe, Doctor Kine. Were it not for this impressive
laboratory and the fact that you have the backing of Grand Marshal
Wayne, I would think you have gone mad.”

“
Actually, I haven’t sent
anyone back in time yet,” the doctor confessed, “but I assume it
will be easy enough to send you. With your help, I now have a clear
understanding of how I already did it in the near future. Bringing
you back from the past to this time was exceedingly difficult,
requiring many years of experiments before it recently worked more
or less by accident.”

Critias was not as confused
as he would have preferred to be, “You brought me back during an
experiment recently? You brought me back from a voyage to the past,
without ever sending me there in the first place?”

“
Exactly,” the doctor
praised him. “You’re sleeping in a secure medical lab a few floors
above us as we speak, that other future you I mean, from the
past.”

Critias clung to his
incredulity, “And you’ve spoken to this other me?”

“
Oh yes,” the doctor
beamed with youthful excitement. “I would introduce you to
yourself, but unfortunately, you’ve already informed me that was
not what happened when we met this time, which is my now, when we
were the same now for the other you who perceives this now as your
past even though this you will still have to experience that now as
your future. It’s all quite simple when you think about
it.”

Critias thought he had the
lynchpin on the issue, “If I’m already back, why would I need to go
now?”

The doctor reminded him,
“You already went now and it was you that told me to send you. You
told me what equipment you needed and you even had useful insights
into how I accomplished it all. You’re about to watch me do it,
which is how you were able to explain it to me after you already
came back. If you will just relax and trust me, this will be
entirely safe and nearly painless as you said so
yourself.”

Critias indulged the man,
“So I go back in time to change history?”

“
Not at all,” the doctor
patted Critias’ shoulder. “You were there already as a happened
fact of our current history, only for this you, it still remains
part of your future. Think of it as a wormhole with one end fixed
in the past when you arrived there long ago, and for that reason
alone, it will be possible for me to open this end here and now.
The doorway has been traveling here for centuries since before you
were even born. Think of it as your destiny, which it
is.”

Critias wanted to test the
logic, “And if I don’t go now?”

“
You will willingly,” Kine
assured him, “but for the sake of argument, I suppose we discover
what happens when you actually do change the past and cause a
paradox. You’re not going back to change history with a paradox
because it is you going back now that is preventing one. We are
only here now, because you were already there then. You
see?”

“
This is the craziest
thing I’ve ever heard, doctor,” Critias told him honestly. “How do
we know that my going back like this doesn’t cause the Outbreak in
the first place?”

Kine explained, “Because
you won’t be going back that far. The infection has already ravaged
the world in the time when you arrive.”

Critias saw no use in
arguing about things he could not understand. He was sure that
Grand Marshal Wayne had sent him to Doctor Kine to cooperate and so
that was what Critias would do. “When do I leave then? Do I have
time to make preparations?”

The doctor led Critias to
the machine that would send him, “Everything you need will be there
waiting for you. You step into here, and I’ll take care of the
rest.”

Critias climbed into the
center of a confining focal point of flux generators then asked,
“Why are things ready for me?”

The doctor began typing
commands into one of his computer interfaces, “I’ll start sending
all of the equipment you require after you go so that it arrives
before you. There is nothing to worry about; you already made it
home safely. All you need to do is enjoy the ride.”

The selected machine was
huge and intimidating for all its weighty complexity especially
when Critias stood in the middle of it with all the comforts of
being at the center of a circular firing squad. Mammoth
superconducting magnets encased Critias within an extreme
electromagnetic field. That field captured an infinitesimally small
quasi-dimensional hole that had been on its way for centuries to
arrive just in time for the doctor to bombard it with charged
hydrogen atoms that he detonated with a fission laser. Atomic
energy expanded the hole to the size of the encompassing field
where Critias vanished in the whirlpool midst of it.

Chapter 3: Dying
Time

When Critias awoke on his
back, he stared upward at a dirty ceiling with a rusty pipe that
ran across it. Underneath him was an inflatable mattress from a
crash survival kit. The dim light came from a single florescent
lamp upon a cargo crate, both of which had originated in his time.
Upon glancing around, Critias counted a dozen more crates in stacks
around that dank and cluttered cellar.

“
Swell,” Critias said as
he sat up then rubbed his aching head. He had no idea where he was,
when he was, or what he was supposed to be doing there. He examined
the labels on the crates then thought aloud, “At least I have
supplies.” The crate markings showed one contained weapons and
another held his mechsuit. There were crates of science equipment
he didn’t know how to use. In total, he had enough food and gear to
survive for the time being.

Something bumped above the
wooden ceiling of his chamber that caused some dirt to fall.
Critias moved quietly to the weapons crate then opened it to remove
his teslaflux pistol, which he loaded with ammo. By the time that
he had it ready, a trap door in the ceiling lifted open from above
then a human figure dropped down through that hatch using a stack
of crates to stand on. After the person quietly closed the hatch
and then climbed off the boxes, they stepped into the cold light
shed by the lamp.

Critias saw that it was his
android Carmen. So relieved, he asked her, “What the hell are you
doing here?”

“
You’re awake,” she said
pleased. “You arrived unconscious and have been asleep for several
hours. I was concerned you might have suffered some form of brain
damage. I had some problems myself. The transposition temporarily
traumatized the neorganic portions of my brain. The ride gave me
such a headache.”

He put his pistol down on a
crate, “You were in bed the last time I saw you, which was
incredible by the way. Now you’re here with me. I guess you have
met that mad scientist Doctor Kine.”

The insinuation wounded her
in ways she never would have displayed before, “You thought I would
abandon you?” With a depth of conviction that contained much in the
way of hidden meaning, she said, “I had to follow you.”

Her disappointment in his
expectation was so apparent that it urged him to remedy her injury,
“Actually, I can’t think of anyone I’d rather be seeing right now
than you. Can you tell me where we are?”

Carmen smiled with
adoration when he said he valued her company so highly then she
took a handheld scanner from an open medical kit. She used the
device to check his vital signs, “We’ve arrived at a period of
history the scholars refer to as the Dying Time, about forty months
after initial Outbreak. Infection is already systemically global. I
estimate there are perhaps only one hundred thousand human beings
still in existence, hiding out in various doomsday bunkers. Well
over ninety percent of them will die within the next twelve
months.”

The name didn’t make much
sense to Critias, “If nearly everyone is already a screaming
cannibal, why do we call this the Dying Time?”

Satisfied with the healthy
results of her medical scan, she said, “I believe that the name
came about in regard to the survival bottleneck that this stage of
human extinction represents. About this time, those groups who
still survive inside elaborately prepared doomsday bunkers have
exhausted their stored supplies of fresh water or food, if not
both. Though they remain secure within impregnable walls, they will
soon die anyway from lack of sustenance and frequently from violent
internal conflicts resulting from their social declension into
barbarism. Obviously, many of these groups will venture out to try
foraging new supplies, only to have the ghouls hunt them down for
food or turn them. Their circumstances would be mortiferous enough
to justify calling this the Dying Time even under the assumption
that watchers are not real, for if they are a legitimate predatory
threat, they will have to worry about those as well.”