Quantum Break (38 page)

A blade of paper she had adhered to the canister’s shell by some latent static charge, slid to the benchtop: a printed screen cap. Wikipedia. The subject was Paul Serene.

She skimmed the article. It was all there. Everything she needed to know between then and now. A thought occurred and she opened the gym bag. The bottom of the bag was floored with a nest of similar clippings. She gripped the printout, read it all from start to finish in a rush.

Humanity knew it had been killed by Paul Serene. The narrative was simple: on the morning of October 8, 2016, he had sabotaged and activated a device—a time machine—that Monarch Solutions had decommissioned for ethical reasons. Twenty-four hours later, Paul Serene issued his one and only communique to the world, detailing what he had done and why: the M-J field had been dealt a fatal blow. The universe had a few years of life left. In that time the chronon levels would drop, causality would become increasingly schizophrenic, and then—finally—time would cease to flow altogether.

In the days after Martin Hatch had come forward with a proposal: Project Lifeboat. He spelled it out very plainly: the end of time was inevitable, but humanity could survive it
if
Lifeboat was operational. Humanity’s best and brightest could work beyond the end of time to engineer a solution.

Paul Serene was known and remembered as a monster: the man who had erased the universe.

Martin Hatch was known as the man who may have saved it.

The frozen world outside was waiting for him to succeed.

The Paul Serene asleep on campus now had known this. Saving her, making pancakes, holding her hand … he had known all this.

“Shit.” Dropping some charge, she reefed out a fat coil of textured cabling from the tray beneath the workbench. “Shit shit shit.” It ended in what looked like a compatible plug: multipronged with a threaded safety collar. It took a little force but eventually the connector snapped into the battery and she screwed the collar down tight.
He had known.

Transferring a c-charge to the laptop she dumped half her rig’s power into the machine, releasing it from stasis. She checked the ladder, listened. Nothing.

A few keystrokes and the power gauge on the canister lit violet, the laptop registering a steady flow of c-particles from the canister to the corridor.

“One point two one gigawatts,” she muttered to herself, wandering over to the generator. “One point two one gigawatts … Here we go.” She double-pumped her fingers, pressed her palm to the flat casing of the diesel generator parked on bricks by the wall. “First you get sentimental over Gibson’s kid, now you do this.” Quickly she pulled off an access panel, hoped for the best, and kicked it off. “You’re too soft for this, Starr. I should have chosen someone else.” The generator sparked to life with a furious complaint, shuddering violently. Closing the hatch muffled the sound quite well.

She moved back to the laptop and tried not think about having just buried someone alive at the end of the world. “One point…” Oh God. “… twenty-one gigawatts…”

She had a choice.

“You’re weak, Starr.” Her voice resonated briefly, died suddenly, in stasis. “Go back.”

Events can’t be changed. We’re slaves to cause and effect. Paul Serene lives. Paul Serene founds Monarch. Paul Serene causes the Fracture.
You’re weak. You’re weak. You’ve fucked up.
“I’ve got to kill him.”
But you can’t kill him.
“I’ve got to kill him.”
It’s not possible.

“You told me your name was Beth.”

In the reflection of the laptop’s screen she saw him: at the foot of the ladder, daylit.

She wasn’t afraid. She was ashamed. “Paul.”

She double-pumped her fingers, brought the terminal online, remembered she’d already done that.

“You know who I am,” he said.

“I know you’re a good person, and a sweet kid.” Locked it in. “And I know that you’d never want to hurt anyone.”

You’re the reason I am who I am. My whole life was authored by yours.

He was bare chested, in his worn-out jeans, standing at the foot of the ladder … a look of utter betrayal on his face.

“You weren’t asleep,” she said.

“Martin Hatch told me our machine was the only one. No previous working prototypes.” He took a few hesitant barefoot steps toward her, through the dust-mote tunnel she had carved out of the basement air. “You were going to kill me?”

She’d only ever heard stories about the powers Paul Serene was meant to have. If Jack’s fumbling around was a comparison, this may not end well for her.

She reminded herself:
you can’t die.
Not yet. By the same rule Paul couldn’t either. So where did this leave them?

Somewhere beyond the walls, Shifters howled.

Paul’s limbs locked, his breathing caught in his thin chest.

“Why do they make that sound?” she asked.

“We hurt them.…” He choked on the words, swallowed. “Causality … potential … possibility … it all fountains off living people. It’s excruciating to Shifters.”

“That’s why they don’t bother the people frozen outside.”

“It’s why they kill,” Paul snapped. “To take you from being
anything
to being
a thing.
” His eyes settled on the machine. “Is this why they wouldn’t let me stay in the Tower?”

So that part of his story was true?

Paul’s eyes fell on the machine. “Am I supposed to go through that? Does it work?”

She felt the weight of it at her back, like a threat. “Paul. You have to be brave enough for an entire world here, man.”

He wasn’t listening, walking closer, halfway to her now. “What does that mean?”

“You know what happens if you leave here.” Paul wasn’t listening. He moved closer still, eagerly, his eyes tracing from the machine to the generator, back to the laptop. “Paul, back up.”

“Fundamentally, it’s almost identical to our model.”

Shifter shrieks shotgunned through her every cell. Beth and Paul shocked away from the direction of the sound, the front door, the world outside.

He spun on her, eyes bracketing nothing but animal violence.
“Get out of my way.”

Six months learning to speed-draw paid off in that moment, side-drawing from inside her jacket and locking him square … but only for a moment. Paul vanished, her fingers wrenched, and the weapon swept away. She cried out in pain, clutching her hand.

He was at the laptop, her gun next to the keyboard. The dates were already changed.

She rushed him from behind, pointlessly. He was gone before she even got close.

As her world vanished in a blast of pain and light her inner ear lost all sense of vertical and horizontal. A bed of cold stone crashed into her spine, and the only sensible thing that penetrated her undoing was something someone had told her a long time ago in Arizona: “It’s the hits you don’t see coming that get you.”

She was bone and pain, a small mess of connections and associations that didn’t fit together. Something pneumatic engaged, and she heard something vent with a deep hiss. She blood-felt the discordant rage of Shifters, skipping and phasing toward them from the outside world, homing in faster as their excruciation escalated.

Paul was talking to her, panicked, moving about. He stepped over her legs to get to the laptop. “… this’ll never happen. You’ll be someone else. I’ll be someone else. I’ll never,
never…”

The shattering cries of Shifters had become deafening.

“Paul…” She almost drowned on his name. Rolling sideways was like having her head stepped on. She cough-cleared her mouth of blood, watched sprayed droplets catch on suspended dust particles. Her voice was a croak. “Change is impossible—”

“It’s a time machine, you idiot! I helped build this thing!”
He was white with fear.

“No…” Her hands pressed to the stone floor, trying to keep her gorge down. “You didn’t.”

He was moving again, backing for the entry ramp.

“I know the science. If we made this happen we can … I can unmake this.”

She wasn’t having this conversation again. Her hand slapped down onto the benchtop, grasped for the gun. It wasn’t there.

Paul had it. He pointed it at her. His voice was fragile. “Please don’t.” He had never hurt anyone before. He had never hit a woman. Now he had a gun pointed at one. She could see Paul was collapsing from the inside, knowing already what he was becoming.

He wasn’t looking at her, though.

Roiling humanoid non-shapes, barely coherent, stood at the far end of the basement. Snapping. Jigging. Agonized.

The gun wavered in Paul’s hand. “Please … don’t let them get me.”

She laughed. It hurt. “You can’t go back, Paul. You can’t change things.” She pointed to the laptop. “Because you haven’t primed the machine.”

Onscreen an amber text box requested:
ACTIVATE
?

Shifters rounded in their direction, caught sight of their infinite potentials, their fountaining causality. Their hatred and madness hit them like a physical thing.

Metal screeched as the corridor’s locking mechanism cycled. The airlock seal cracked, the lock auto-spinning as atmosphere vented and external hydraulics levered the door aside.

With a cry of relief Paul spun for his escape.

Waiting inside was the biggest Shifter either of them had ever seen: broad across distorted shoulders, its thrashing head snaking three ways through space. One distorted flashing shadow of a paw grabbed the lip of the airlock, levering itself forward as its second hand reached out, into the room, for Paul’s face.

The center of that hand shone with light.

Backing away Paul let it all go and screamed—because it was going to be the last thing he would ever do.

The Shifters rushed forward, half their frames missing as they flick-vaulted through space, over workbenches.

Beth hit
ACTIVATE
.

The chronon distortion wave kicked off the Promenade, hit the Shifters, and for a moment—as when Paul had saved Beth from them a few hours ago—they vanished.

It was all Paul needed. He was gone, in a blink, through the airlock. Beth swore and vaulted after him. She barreled up the two-step ladder and into the airlock as the distortion wave subsided and the Shifters phased back in. The big Shifter, Shining Palm, half out the airlock door, had time to roar once before Beth was through the right-hand door behind it. It locked behind her and …

Silence.

As fast as she could she ran—not to 2010, but toward the date Paul had set.

She ran to 1999.

18

Sunday, 28 February 1999. 8:53
P
.
M
. Riverport, Massachusetts.

William Joyce, twenty years old, finished his celebratory cocoa, rinsed the ceramic Riverport Raptors mug, and returned it to the cupboard above the sink. The house was dark, silent. He had taken Jack, his younger brother, over to the house of the Serene family. He’d be staying for the night.

Tonight solitude was imperative. Tonight Will would undertake a journey of great risk. One he had worked toward since he was a boy of fifteen. Utilizing grant money, academic connections, and a falsified passport he had secured through—of all places—a local biker bar, William Joyce had financed the construction of a device that learned men and women many years his senior had laughed off as ridiculous, impossible.

Screw those guys.

William zipped his jumpsuit to the neck, ensured his canvas utility belt was securely fastened. Clipped to it was everything a chrononaut might possibly need: penlight, cell phone, a roll of elastic tubing, alligator clips, pens, waterproof notebook, a digital multilanguage translator he had bought from a magazine, a canvas pouch containing aspirin and iodine and antimalaria medication. Around his neck were binoculars and a Brownie camera. Beneath the jumpsuit was a secondhand bulletproof vest.

The pack on the kitchen table contained a change of clothes, a bottle of water, three cans of spiced ham, seven novels, an edition of that day’s
New York Times,
and an untested chronon storage device—painstakingly charged over a period of years that he was fairly sure had been adequately shielded.

A note rested on the kitchen table beneath a thin vase. It read:

Dear Reader,

If you have found this letter, then I am gone. Grieve not for me, but make proper use of the gift I have left mankind. In the old barn, sitting stately outside the casement of this very kitchen, is a time machine.

Yes! You read that correctly! A time machine!

I bequeath now to the government of the United States, who are best equipped to plumb the secrets and discoveries I have made, catalogued extensively in the notes I have left behind, the right to license my work for the betterment of mankind. I leave the negotiations to Mrs. Serene of 94 Chestnut Avenue, who has more experience in these things than I.

As to my brother, Jack, I bequeath to him all the proceeds and royalties from all goods and services based upon my research, discoveries, inventions, and intellectual property. Additionally, this shall cover all costs of his being cared for by the Serene family of 94 Chestnut Avenue, as they continue to foster and care for him up until the age of 21.

All I ask is that great care be taken with the Chronon Core
™
for as long as it remains active and connected to my beautiful Promenade™. I may yet—someday—return.

Look for me in the year 2019.

Ad futura, ad astra.

—Dr. William Joyce (qual. pending)

William read the note one more time, nodded with satisfaction, hoisted his travel pack, and marched for the barn—stopping only for one last backward glance. How he wished his parents had lived to see this moment.

He opened the front door and, hunching against the icy winter air, closed that chapter of his life with the
thunk
of a lock.

An inch and a half of snow had fallen the night before, and several inches that month. William was pleased that he had invested his few remaining dollars in the sturdy utility boots he had found at the thrift store on River Street. They kept the moisture out well, the snow crunching satisfyingly beneath their worn tread. Warm light fell in subtly fanning lines from between the boards of the barn across the garden: amber illumination sparkling white, glowing moonlight blue. With shaking hands, he unclipped his key rings and snapped loose the three padlocked chains from the flimsy barn door. Gravity snaked them eagerly through their iron loops, sending them clinking heavily into the freshly packed snow.