Second Paradigm (5 page)

He found the elevator, two massive brushed aluminum doors at the end of the hallway. Once he was inside he glanced at the number panel. ‘Sixty-six’ was glowing red. Surprised to see the numbers went all the way up to one-eighty-one, he took a moment to clear his mind then hit the ‘L’ button.

So it’s 2044, what am I supposed to do now? Forty-one years asleep and I still have the better portion of my life left to figure out how to survive in a world that seems hostile to its inhabitants. And they have the advantage of knowing how everything here works.

Chris realized with a start that he was feeding himself on a growing cycle of self-pity and anger. And paranoia.
Enough! Get out there and do it. Otherwise you won’t need this world to chew you up—you’ll do it to yourself.

Chris still stood in the elevator, even though the doors had opened, staring at the wall. He shook his head, then stepped into the lobby and looked around. The image of a hospital lobby he had in his mind didn’t resemble this. Vast and empty, massive marble pillars stretched up to support the ceiling fifty feet overhead. At the far end he could see through the revolving doors emptying into the street, though a haze of rain hid the details beyond. Near the elevator, to his left, a security guard sat at a sprawling circular desk stacked high and wide with a bank of security monitors.

The pudgy man wore something that looked faintly like a thin bulletproof jacket over his uniform. An automatic rifle leaned on the wall behind where the man sat, within easy reach. A little video camera nestled on the guard’s helmet with a ‘G’ contained in an upside-down, gold triangle. The emblem was also on his sleeves, and, Chris saw, behind him, between the elevators and above the guard’s desk, thirty feet high. Below the triangle on the wall read “GeoCorp,” and below that: ‘Bringing the Future of Tomorrow, Today!’

“Can I help you?” With the unfriendly offer, the guard eyed Chris and rested one hand on his gun while he made it.

“Um … yes. Sorry to disturb you while you’re so busy, but could you tell me what day it is?”

“Monday. Now get out. No loitering, or I’ll need to throw you out, and believe me, that would be a real shame.” The man smirked and hefted his rifle.

“Yeah. Thanks. Asshole.” He said the last under his breath. The guard glared but said nothing as Chris walked to the door and out into the rain.

2873: James Garret’s Laboratory

Another beautiful twenty-ninth century day shimmered around him. Recycled air breathed through the city’s cycling vents. The sun shone through the rebuilt atmosphere; the sky embraced the world in its rich deep blue arms. Today’s weather patterns called for bright and sunny so there were no clouds in the sky. That would be next week, when the Environmental Control Agency called for heavy rain.

Patting his pockets one by one, James checked through his mental equipment list. All present and accounted for. With a quick flex of his mind he accelerated his personal time stream to about two hundred times the relative Terra flow and walked out of his lab.

The frozen world around him was peaceful, in a beautiful harmony of stillness, which the supposedly utopian society he lived in never managed to actually achieve. At least not from his perspective.

At the end of his driveway a motorcycle waited, already infused with his phase nanos. He hopped on and fired it up, walking it forward as the ancient monster’s engine lumbered to life and warmed up.

Vehicles like this were one of the major reasons that the Environmental Control Agency had been born. The Earth had been torn to shreds by a humanity too young to truly grasp what it was doing to the world it had to live in. Luckily, the technology to keep the human race alive on a healthy planet had been born in the nick of time, and now everything was artificially controlled.

But phase time changed the rules of what James could use as tools. An electrical engine would fry in the accelerated time, with the nanos burning out the more delicate modern technology, so he had been forced to rebuild an archaic internal combustion engine. The major problem he’d had to overcome with the combustion engine had been airflow. In accelerated time flow, the air moved slower than the time field and if he stood still too long the air supply would exhaust itself. Igniting sparks in the engine only compounded the problem by using up the air faster, so he had to stay in motion. The simple solution was to shift time flow after starting the bike, but he didn’t know if he was under surveillance and didn’t want to risk being spotted.

Once the engine warmed up and he no longer had to trot the bike around to keep it running, he gunned the throttle and headed out on the highway, dodging through the frozen traffic faster than the near frozen cars’ proximity sensors could detect him.

After about an hour of travel on his subjective time scale, he arrived at the Time Corp base headquarters, and on a spot of luck, a car headed through the gate. He smiled at the good omen that he didn’t have to resync time to wait for an opening to enter the complex.

Any point that he had to sit in Terra’s time stream would only increase the odds that he would be spotted while at this task. He dodged through the gate by the side of the car and pulled into the main lot, circling it until the cameras that watched the lot were cycled away from where he needed to park.

As he rolled in to park, he killed the engine and let the bike drift to a stop so it would have a fresh field of oxygen to draw from when he left. It would have to, since he had a very short window of opportunity before the bike would be spotted and the gate would close again.

Hopping off the bike he popped a concentrated energy pill, dropping about five thousand calories into his system. He had designed the pill for his own metabolic system and had manufactured three of them for this job. Reaching into his belt back, he pulled out a mini scuba mask affixed to a six-inch air tank and put it over his mouth.

Now, for the hard part. Focusing his will, he pushed against the time stream as hard as he could, accelerating himself until he felt the physical effects of the strain on his body. As though on cue, he felt the pill kick in and a surge of cold energy washed through his system. His HUD clocked his relative time at just over a factor of one thousand times Terra’s standard time flow. He smiled and walked into the Time Corp’s headquarters.

First, the lobby. Scanning the area quickly he found the security guard walking back from the restroom towards the front desk where he should be stationed. Grabbing the guard’s security badge, he worked his way through the building; methodically stealing badges to work past higher and higher level security checkpoints. At each point he had to push some of his own nanos into the security systems so that they could let him through a bit faster.

Not accelerating to the security checkpoints drained his energy. If he moved too rapidly, he would fry out the systems and make this whole exercise useless. Working hard and fast, he made it to the top of the building without any major problems.

Terra’s time flow showed three seconds had elapsed when he found himself in the head Administrator’s office. Leaning over the frozen man, Director Arbu, he accessed the computer, scanning through the files surrounding his wife’s death.

He didn’t bother reading yet, instead just having his HUD record all the files. That had been another stroke of luck for him when originally designing the HUD to utilize the body’s cells as its circuitry board instead of using electrics with it.

The last file scrolled by his eyes and then he closed out the files, returning Director Arbu’s monitor to the display it had been on when he walked up. Less than five seconds had elapsed so far. Another stroke of luck then, that Arbu had not been looking at his monitor when James arrived. Two seconds Terra time was too long and he surely would have noticed that something was amiss. He grimaced and started moving as fast as he could back downstairs.

There were only two seconds left in his window before the bike would be noticed, even in phase time. If he hopped back to reset it, all the alarms would be triggered and the time it took the Corp to discover their files had been stolen would speed up.

James Garret pushed himself even harder, making it further into phase time, pale and sweating. But he raced against time and he couldn’t afford to lose this race. He sprinted between doors, and a few times even got lucky, managing to make it between thin gaps as other people were walking through check points.

He made it back downstairs, replacing all of the badges he had stolen as he went, with fifty milliseconds to spare. He sprinted across the front walkway of the building, hopping the railings around the perimeter and running across the water of the fountain rather than wasting time going around.

He made it to the bike and threw himself onto it. Seventeen milliseconds left. It took him three milliseconds to have another energy pill in hand. Taking as deep a breath as he could, and then holding it in, he ripped the oxygen mask off of his face and affixed it to the intake on the bike, popping the energy pill he’d palmed a few milliseconds ago.

Eight milliseconds left. He fired up the bike, listening to the sweet sound of it rumbling into life. It took the bike seven milliseconds to fire into life, and he sped out of the lot and drove back to his home, finally holding the information surrounding his wife’s death.

Leaving the bike in his driveway, he stumbled back into his house, barely able to retain consciousness. Pale, drained of all energy, his hands shook. The theft had exhausted him, and even with a boost of ten thousand calories metabolized into his system, he felt utterly wiped out. He collapsed into his chair and leaned back, taking the weight off of his drained muscles. He stared at the ceiling for a moment, allowing himself a second to relax.

The base white of the ceiling, unmoving and all encompassing hypnotized him. He drifted off to sleep. With a start, he snapped back into full wakefulness, focusing away from the ceiling only with a great effort of willpower.

Gathering his mind back to here and now, he allowed himself a wan smile. He had actually done it. A scientist, untrained in the rigors of physical combat or espionage had just bested the Time Corp and succeeded in breaking into their headquarters to steal information. Highly classified information, no less. He laughed aloud.

Calling up the information on his HUD, he started to review what he had stolen. Everything that he needed to know about the events surrounding the death of his wife lay there in front of him. Finally, he would be able to solve the riddle of how to unwind time and replay it in such a way that he could bring the love of his life back to him.

But there is only so far he could push the human body, no matter what boosts he gave it to help it weather the course. He may have intended to work away the night, but he had gone well past that breaking point for his untrained body. He fell asleep.

Time: Classified
Operation: Classified

Wanda settled down in her position, spot-checking the pistol’s scope to make sure she had it aimed correctly in the makeshift housing built onto the tripod. Seated in her roost, she had the entire courthouse exit area covered.

She had chosen an optimal perch. Not only did it give her a perfect sighting on her target area, but it had multiple exits and she would be able to hear anyone who came from the level below her.

The wait before the target came into sight should be a brief one, and then the deed would be done. Despite all the paradox surrounding this mission, she could, and would, achieve the task she had been set. She settled her nerves and focused into perfect stillness, ready for the shot.

To all outward appearances she was a perfect sniper, locked into a death trance, awaiting her kill. Internally though, she warred with herself, trying not to think about her assumption that something would happen here to result in her death. Thoughts and contradictions played out in her mind, clashing with each other. Visions of how she would die kept playing themselves out in her mind’s eye and she clamped down on her imagination, a hard won struggle.

Her attention drifted and she had to fight with herself to snap her focus back to the job at hand. She knew such conflict proved deadly to an agent under fire.

She almost missed it when the crowd gathered, but caught the movement in time to reposition herself for the shot. Oddly enough, the target had not exited yet, though quite a mob stood on the courthouse steps. She scanned the crowd, catching brief glimpses and forming impressions of the faces she saw.

People were definitely upset by the verdict, which firmed her faith in the validity of the mission. The man had obviously not committed the murder. But now he had to die, and she would make sure, for the sake of history, that he did. Police formed contact point lines to act as crowd control and it looked like some movement came from the inside of the courthouse.

And then the impossible happened. She saw the target in the crowd, instead of in the courthouse procession. The target kept his head ducked and seemed to be moving into the heaviest density portion of the crowd.

Watching him, she managed to get a quick scan of his eyes as he looked around himself to make sure no one observed him. His retinal pattern checked out positive. And there was no aging. This was her target. Odd, but that would explain why the crowd had grown into such an uproar.

Adjusting her sights, she took a bead on him and eased back the trigger. He pulled a gun out of his jacket and aimed it towards the courthouse. That was odd. Very odd.

But she didn’t have the time left to analyze the situation or change her point of aim. And skipping back in time would only add another small but important weight of paradox into history’s already weakened fibers. Not a risk she could justify taking.

In a moment of perfect stillness everything unfolded for Wanda Garret. The target pulled the trigger of his pistol. His wrist jerked back as the recoil hit his arm, and a bullet screamed out, marking someone unseen for death. As this happened, a shadow darkened Wanda’s sight.

Someone had managed to sneak past her alert system and, improbable as it seemed, stood behind her. Wanda jerked and pulled the trigger as her body tried to pivot to assess the threat looming behind her. Her pistol slammed back against her shoulder as she lost control of the gun, then it spun out of its tripod and went sliding across the floor to the opposite corner of the room. Well out of range for her to grab.