Second Paradigm (15 page)

Everything Alex had told her led her to believe that she had to build Chris up to the brink of snapping if she was to survive the next few days. And observing him here today, it didn’t seem that it would be a difficult task. He was somewhat unhinged, and she saw rampant paranoia barely hiding under the surface layer of his thoughts.

“I doubt it,” Chris said, trying to mask his relief. “I haven’t been in the city too long.…”

“Oh no?” She smiled getting ready to go in for the kill.

He blinked and then answered her. “Well, no. I’ve only been around here for a couple of days.…”

Lucy leaned in close to Chris without warning, one hand cupping around his neck, and ran her tongue along the edge of his ear. She played up the sex kitten act; pushing him further off his mental balance. Chris tried to pull away from her, but she held him. “I know who you are,” she said, pulling back and looking into his eyes. She scanned what she saw there, pleased with herself. “I know what you are looking for, and you will find your answers.”

He shuddered. “That’s not possible. Look, I don’t know what you think you know, but you’re wrong.”

She leaned in closer until her lips were brushing against his ear, “It is you who are wrong; you to whom the truth will be revealed. You see, I know what you are, Chris,” she whispered before pulling back and looking at him once more. “Anyway, don’t trust Jameson. He’s a liar and worse. If you let him in,” she tapped a finger against Chris’s temple, “he’ll try to twist you and then destroy you. Meet him if you must—but be wary. Know that he is evil.”

Lucy hoped she had played that right. He looked beyond paranoid in her last glimpse of him, but he was a strong man in nineteen ninety-seven. So she turned around to drive home the point with one final shot. “See you around,
Doctor
.”

As the door closed behind her she hopped forward to continue observing him. Finally, she started to understand her true mission regarding this man.

2044 A.D.: New Denver, Colorado.

Alex watched Chris depart for the final time and let his holo drop as he sat thoughtfully in the Rangley Hotel lobby. After a few months of observation, he knew something was drastically wrong. His observations of Nost had shown him doing things that were on the brink of impossible.

A quote from an old C nineteen series of books came unbidden back to him … ‘
that which is left, no matter how improbable, is your solution.’
A wide grin spread across his face. So that was the way of it. He mentally tipped his hat to his own mind in thanks. It was impossible for Nost to have learned the trick of time dilution with incremental steps, at least without having mastered basic travel first. Besides, what he had witnessed Nost do with dilution was beyond the scale of possible skill.

It was just too … smooth. There was no skipping in time, no breaks. He would have to be performing nanosecond leaps and already have been mostly done with his actions faster than the brain could fire the signals to move the body.

This meant that some other force had to be at work in his system. Something that allowed Chris to stretch time and move in a fashion that accelerated his subjective time. Alex pondered this for a bit, while sipping on a beer, and finally came to the conclusion that an outside force had introduced the ability.

The sole possibility that he could think of was a new time technology. And there were only one of two sources for that. Garret, who had exhibited none of the same traits, or Alex’s own fourth millennium contact, who would be sufficiently advanced to be hiding something like that.

So, even though he had hired Alex to deal with the situation, he was an active player in the game, even if his movements were invisible to Alex. The more he thought about it, the more this sounded like damn good fun to him.

Time to hunt then. And he knew where the hunt had to start. Alex focused and pushed himself forward, to the beginning.

2620: Tucson Arizona

The man sat down in the booth across from Alex. The Alex from the future watched from the back, where he poured nano machines into the glass that the man would be using. Subtlety was a game that Alex was gifted at. Frank, the owner of the bar, wandered into the back to fill the order of his only two customers, surprised to see Alex standing there holding a glass.

Alex winked at him as he handed him the glass, then put one finger over his pursed lips. Frank nodded and took the glass, filling it with the man’s drink then wandering back out into the main portion of the bar.

Alex kept his focus on the displaced nano machines, marking the progress of the set of orders he had programmed into them. The man from the future picked up his glass for a drink, unaware of the trap contained within it. Sure enough, as he sipped his drink and absorbed Alex’s nanos, they found a foreign technology. He grinned and started the hack to subvert a small but important percentage of them, enslaving them to his own will.

The man never noticed the internal war being waged in his blood stream by warriors smaller than the nucleus of one of his blood cells. It was a fast war, and one in which the enemy line never even realized it was under attack. When he finished the deed, his side emerged victorious; Alex sank almost all of the nanos out of the man’s body and into the wood of the table. Those would wait there for both men to leave so that the future Alex could claim them into his own system and figure out how to use them.

The ones he left in the other man’s body started on a new task, though: ripping apart a few of the man’s DNA chains and rebuilding them, as Alex’s own. It was delicate work, but done on a level of anatomy that the man would never think to check. He was going to have one hell of a rash in a few days though, when his body rejected the foreign cells.

Until then, a small piece of Alex would travel forward. Time theory was an interesting thing. So far no one had ever managed to travel forward from his or her own relative time. Theory ran something along the lines that each nexus of will, or human mind, left a unique signature on the time stream. Any choices leading up to that signature could be altered, but any choices of which that signature was a factor in could not be altered.

Basically, he could travel back but not forward past his point of origin. DNA was the key, and what it said to the nanos. Alex had always thought the ‘historical imperative’ theory was bunk. Time travel meant stepping across the threshold of the universe then stepping back in at the chosen time and place. The whole of the universe, from the outside, existed in a state of quantum flux. Not traveling forward from where you were was senseless. But, as senseless as it was, it was the limitation they all had to deal with.

It seemed to him like a bunch of gibberish that other people spouted to make it sound like temporal physicists understood something that they didn’t. Alex suspected that the truth was much simpler and the trick of it was that you could only travel as far forward as your genetic structure took you in history.

In simpler terms, things of the past were decided. The future was not for any given individual until such time as that body had inhabited the times of the historical nexus you wanted to travel to. What Alex was about to try was such a ridiculous concept that no one had ever thought of it. So ridiculous, in fact, that it was going to work.

Some part of him knew that and accepted it as fact. After the past version of himself had departed, as well as the man from C Forty-five, he walked to the table and placed his hand, palm down, onto the wood grain surface. He had always appreciated the fact that this bar had wood tables.

It was amazing what you could do with organic structures if you put your mind to the task. Concentrating, he pulled all of the nanos out of the wood and into himself, absorbing back both his own and the conquered machines.

Alex felt the new machines course through his system and started the replication process. He had to get enough of them active that the systems in them would be usable by his body mass. As they reached a substantial enough volume to allow him access to their programming features, he discovered that he had been right.

Good
, he thought,
I don’t have to waste time figuring out another angle
. This man could also dilate time the way that Chris could. Alex grinned and froze time around him. Time continued on in a small bubble around him, but looking out the window Alex saw a remarkable sight.

The hot desert sun no longer created mirages. Cars were frozen in midair. A man drinking from a water fountain was frozen with droplets of water suspended in a dance around his mouth. Interesting. It seemed the differential they could create was about a factor of at least three thousand to one. Handy in a fight. The greater truth struck Alex before it became critical as well.

Stretching time this thinly also meant that he would run out of air within about a minute of his subjective time. And he would superheat anything he phased between time streams with any amount of kinetic energy. Like, for instance, air. Moving too fast while breathing would burn his lungs out of his chest.

Not a boundary he ever wanted to have to test. An easy enough solution offered itself though, always stay in motion, or briefly phase into standard time while breathing. And
never
forget that little tidbit.

He found one more subroutine in these new nanos and ran it; excited to see what other features they offered him. A grid appeared in his vision, printing across the center of his pupil. Letters started typing themselves out, until full sentences were formed asking him to set user parameters.

He sped time back up to its normal passage and breathed out a heavy breath. “Wicked …” he spoke to himself and kept it under his breath. “My own internal computer …” Alex grinned to himself about this newest discovery and started programming his computer. It was a surprisingly easy system to use and Alex had mastered the knack of it in no time flat.

The system responded to the signals his neural system sent to his own brain, so that by thinking to himself he could, in essence, ‘talk’ to the computer. It was a tremendously sophisticated system, which seemed to have an internal computer’s processing power well beyond any technology he had ever seen. All in all, not a bad find for the day.

Shortly thereafter, Alex Zarth did that which no human had ever done before; he pushed himself forward, past his own point of origin, and into the future.

***

Relativity Synchronization:
The Eighth Cause

2044: Answers & Questions

Chris sat by himself, staring into space, lost in a maze of contemplation. Every thought was another wall, and there was no sign of the cheese at the center. He watched the barista as he fiddled with the bar, looking up from his work periodically to glare at Chris through black-rimmed glasses.

It had grown late and Chris was the only remaining customer. Generic music filtered through ancient speakers with a tin-like quality, as it attempted to fill the silence in the shop with a cheerful atmosphere, but failed abysmally. The clock on the wall above the counter, said it was not yet four but continued to slice away the past in one second increments. The gun weighed heavy in his pocket, pulling at his conscious mind, making him all the more aware of how alien this world felt even though he had no memory of his own. He stood to leave, clutching at the bundle under his coat with a sweaty hand. The barista watched him go but said nothing.

The brilliant oranges and reds of autumn light painted the landscape, the sun cast its rays though the maze of glass building fronts, making Chris squint from the glare on the closed storefronts around him. It was a picturesque scene, a forest of glass that felt more like a painting than a city. While many of the upper story windows had shattered that morning, the ground level seemed unharmed. He could no longer see smoke coming from behind the D.A.B., which looked like a chrome phallus sun, casting a second, silver brilliance down the mall, eradicating the shadows made by the slanting yellow light in the cloudless sky.

Chris walked down North Cherry Lane in a daze, only half noticing that the streets and skies were now abandoned.
Jameson KNOWS something,
Chris thought.
He knows all about me … or least more about me than the record archives. Why did he give me this?
He hefted the weight of the old handgun under his coat. It comforted him and yet filled him with suspicion.

Jameson said he didn’t need it because he never left the Corporate Zone, but he was at the coffee shop.
But that didn’t make sense either. Jameson didn’t try to cajole Chris into trusting him. He had told Chris
not
to trust him.

He knows what I am,
Chris stopped in his tracks.
He figured out what I am while I was … sleeping. Goddamn him! He met with me and left and managed to not give me any answers about myself. Why did he bother? To give me this?
Chris once again felt the weight of the gun under his coat.
Then why?

Chris knew what he needed to do. This Frost woman knew something, too. He needed to find her, ask her all the questions that Jameson didn’t answer. Frost’s murder, whether or not by him, at least had been committed
because
of him.

His … ability, Jameson’s ambiguity, and the Frost woman who happened to be in the Punt at the same time he was. She knew what he was, too. Chris began to wonder if he was the only person in the world who didn’t know about himself. He shook his head and kept walking.

The question: what
was
he? Chris tried not to think about the answer, the
only
answer that he could find, beyond the reach of theory or reason, forcing its way out of his subconscious and into the forefront of his weary mind.

Am I Kronos? Some time traveler controlling the byways of history with no conscious memory?
Chris allowed himself to think it, once, before trying to laugh it down. He was successful. Almost.
I am Zrvan.
That thought brought a strained smile to his lips. He tried to laugh out loud, but it came out dry and hollow. He began walking again, but he could feel the press of the void filled with all things, lurking beyond his reach.

He tried to touch it again, without success. Only this time it was not quite nothing. It was like many little nothings, like little holes of absence that all together made up reality.

Chris stumbled and snapped out of his daze, looking around. He no longer recognized where he was. A street pole loomed above him, but he couldn’t tell for which street—all the signs were missing save one, obscured by soot and ash, hanging high above his head. He turned around, but could no longer see the spire of the D.A.B., and the wall of the Corporate Zone, beginning to illuminate itself in the dying evening light, seemed far away. He could tell he was in a shopping district, but the stores around him were not closed, they were abandoned. One side of the street was lined with high, residential complexes, while the other consisted of a low strip-mall of abandoned pizza joints and burned out grocery stores.

How long have I been walking?
The sun had already set behind the city and the mountains beyond that, and the sky turned purple as night chased the fire-filled sunset in its eternal pursuit. There was still not a cloud to be seen.

Chris turned and started back the way he had come from, reaching under his coat and clinging to the gun. He tried to figure out how he had passed the Rangley, and wandered off North Cherry Lane without noticing it, when he heard the gunshots.

At first they were distant, rapid-fire things, and he needed to think a moment before understanding what they were. He scanned above the buildings in front of him one more time for a glimpse of the D.A.B., saw nothing, and jogged over to the shelter of the doorway of an abandoned apartment building. He squatted there, listening to the sound of approaching internal combustion engines, thinking of Rat.

I need to find him. I can trust him, because he doesn’t know anything about me. And he would know what to do, now.

Chris tried the door, but the rust and gunk of years stuck it closed. He looked closely, running his hand over the surface, and felt little bumps, evenly spaced, on its metal-reinforced wood.
Someone boarded it shut from the inside. Maybe there’s a window …
He only had time to take a step from the doorway before chaos exploded around him.

From his right burst a full-sized Hummer, rolling over the mangled hulk of a Cadillac as it rounded the corner. There were several figures hanging off of it, and a 50-caliber machine gun swinging on a tripod mounted to the open back. A bloody mass hung over the low railing behind the mounted gun, which bounced and slid off as the rusted, yellow vehicle crushed the last of the life out of the Cadillac. Chris had time to see the looks of ecstatic fear on the driver’s face before a shadow dimmed the star-lit sky.

The chopper approached without warning. Even as it slid into view, low over the destitute apartment building, it emitted only a faint whine, higher and quieter by far than the PolCorp Cruisers, and barely audible now over the roar of the rampaging Hummer.

One of the Hummer riders clambered to the back to replace the once human chunk of meat now lying by the Cadillac. A low roar from anti-tank guns protruding from the nose of the helicopter broke the silence and huge chunks of pavement exploded around the truck as it swerved to avoid the hole created by the blast. The climber tumbled with a scream and was crushed by the rear wheel of his allies, but another took his place behind the machine gun.

Chris assumed that the helicopter must be PolCorp, but as it swung around above the canyon of the buildings for another attack, he saw that it had a green bug-face sloppily painted on the side. Chris thought of the Skragsuit costumes he had seen in Jones Drugs & Merchandise.
The gangs have attack helicopters.
Chris started laughing—for some reason the idea was funny to him. Funnier, anyway, than the thought that
he
might be the God of Time.

Among the violence of full urban combat, shrapnel and stray bullets ricocheting all around him, Chris felt something in his mind snap, and the laughter kept flowing, an unstoppable tide barely audible above the noise of the gunfire.

The guy on the back of the Hummer positioned himself and let fly, the roar of the gun shots echoing up and down the abandoned street. His wild shooting, drew a wide, curving line of destruction across the building opposite Chris, shattering windows and concrete, but coming nowhere close to the silent predator above that flew into position for another burst.

Swerving, the Hummer tried to get out of the line of fire, turning ninety degrees until it headed right for Chris. He could see they weren’t going to make it—the chopper changed its course to come in right behind them. Chris watched, fascinated, as the gun on the nose of the helicopter dropped down to come in line with the hummer.

He could see the look of terrified resolve on the young, scarred face of the driver and his female passenger; she would have been pretty but looked more tired and used up than anything. The man on the machine gun shot bursts, but his inept shots only succeeded in blasting away at the already shattered buildings lining the wide street.

This shouldn’t be happening,
Chris thought, as he backed further into the doorway. He knew he had seconds, and he knew that should be enough. But he wasn’t going to make it. He saw the nose of the helicopter light up and his head filled with the awful roar of gunfire.
I’m trying too hard
, Chris thought.
It will happen.

But he couldn’t stop trying to grasp time, to change it, and so he knew he would fail as the Hummer burst into flames and came rolling toward him.
I’m doing it!
Chris thought at first, as he watched the flaming wreckage fly at him and heard the engines of the helicopter whisper in pain as the pilot tried in vain to pull up over the building towering over Chris.

He heard the explosion above him, but he didn’t move.
No, I’m not doing it. I’m about to die.
An incredible calm suffused him with a complete absence of thought as he stood in the doorway, watching his destruction hurtle toward him, an angry deity of twisted metal and fire.
Then I’ll be a god,
he found himself thinking, when behind him, he felt a hand and something pulled at him …

Chris expected to find himself inside the apartment building. He stood on a rooftop, the tar still warm from the October sun, the sky black and clear, speckled with a few stars. He could smell smoke, and he walked to the edge of the roof, peering down onto the fires below him.

The wreckage of the Hummer lay strewn in a smoldering line, reaching from halfway across the wide avenue all the way to the building opposite him, where it joined another pile of burning junk. Near the top of the building was the smoking hole left by the impact of the helicopter. The oily smell of smoking plastic filled the air.
How did I get over here?
Chris wondered, looking around.

He saw a small bundle near where he had found himself, and picked it up. It was Jameson’s gun. He unwrapped it and put it in his coat pocket before going back over to the edge of the building. By the sky and the low flames of the fires, a few hours must have passed, but there were no signs of fire trucks or police cars. He had no memory of anything that happened between standing in the doorway and being on the roof, but he knew,
knew
he didn’t manipulate time. He remembered the hand that grasped his shoulder, and looked around.

A figure, barely noticeable through the dark and the haze of smoke, stood down the street where the shadows were complete. It wore a long, black coat and a black fedora. Chris squinted at it, and the figure tipped his hat at him, and walked away.

Jesus Christ,
Chris thought.
I need to get out of here.

1997: Yuri’s Gambit

Shivers ran down Yuri’s spine, like tiny spiders crawling under his skin, as he left the hotel in the middle of the night. For the better part of the past four weeks someone had been watching him, but it didn’t matter now. He had played along, masking his nighttime bio-signature trail with some intelligence tech that he had the foresight to bring along. With a clever mix of a monotonous daytime routine and effectively used night hours, he was pretty sure he had duped whoever was on him.

The thought that there was no one on him never crossed his mind. Time Corp’s procedures dictated that a hunter would be sent after any unauthorized jump and he hadn’t had the right tools to mask his jump from the agency’s scanners. Giddy, he climbed out the bathroom window and started working his way down the wall below him.

Whoever followed him was a moot point now and didn’t really concern him. He had managed to unravel the trail of Alex’s movements and the results were disturbing, to say the least. This paradox was far bigger than anyone back at headquarters had imagined. And far more dangerous as well. Right dead center in the whole thing stood Alexander Zarth, seemingly making all of the right moves needed to keep the entire paradox balanced and moving forward without actually breaking down the fabric of history.

Considering that Yuri’s job, over the years he spent in the Time Corp, had become that of hunting down Alex, a known time criminal who had created some of the only unsolved paradoxes in the Time Corp’s history, he had a difficult time fitting it into his mental picture. But he had to try. And if his suspicions were actually correct, tonight, breaking into Lucy’s office would reveal the missing part of his equation.

It would also present Yuri the opportunity to meet the man he had chased across history without ever actually encountering face to face. That, more than anything else, drove Yuri. To meet the man who spun history from his fingers and danced around agents like they were children. To meet the man known as the uncatchable thief of time by the most elite police force known to history.

Lost in thought, his foot slipped from the crack he had it wedged into. He dropped the final story down the back wall of the hotel, but managed not to hurt himself much. He grinned at that. Director Arbu had been more than correct when saying that Yuri was not up to snuff for the physical demands of a field mission, but regardless, he enjoyed himself.

Being in the field was a rush and as with most things that provided a rush, Yuri found it addicting. Catching his breath after the fall, he composed himself, then started off at a light jog, moving away from where his watcher had to be and heading a couple streets away to catch a cab.