Timecaster: Supersymmetry (8 page)

Then she changed her grip again, her hands moving so quickly I simply couldn’t control myself anymore. I clenched my teeth and gave into the release.

I may have also y too much woman for that.”

“you,” Phin said.etelped a little.

“Wow,” she said, when I finished spasming. “That was impressive. How long has it been?”

“I’ve had a rough few days.” I let out a slow breath. “Can you unlock me, please?”

Alter-Vicki fished the handcuff keys out of the nightstand drawer, releasing me from bondage. The first thing I did was reach for the pistol next to the bed.

“Not loaded,” she said, wiping off my chest with a towel. “Bullets are impossible to find.”

I ejected the clip and checked it anyway. She was telling the truth.

“Where is your husband?” I asked.

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Will headphones work this deep underwater?”

“No. When he contacts me, it is via sonar.”

I frowned. There was a lot I needed to do. Saving my wife was number one on my list, but I assumed Alter-Talon would use her as leverage and wouldn’t harm her until he’d gotten what he needed from me. So, for the momen
t, she was safe. But he would no doubt be armed, and I had no weapons.

The last time I had seen my wife, I told her a tiny white lie, promising that I would save Boise and the half a million people who were sent to a dinosaur earth before I tried to rescue her. I was still planning on saving Boise, but I was planning on getting Vicki first.

Also, I had some kind of poison in my system. Sata told me it would begin to shut down my system within hours. And it had already been hours.

“Did your husband say anything about an antidote for me?”

Alter-Vicki shook her head.

“How are we supposed to get out of here?”

“He has a submarine.”

Of course he did. What good is an underwater lair unless one had a sub?

“Do you have more than one scuba tank?”

“No.”

Her lower lip trembled, and I could sense she was worried about me leaving her here. If Alter-Talon showed up, and I was gone, no doubt she would incur his wrath.

“Okay, we’re just going to have to share the tank, and swim back to shore.”

Rather than look relieved, Alter-Vicki’s eyes became wide with fear.

“What?” I asked.

“The salmonster repellent we took. It only lasts half an hour.”

“When did we take them?”

She frowned. “AlmostEbooks by J.A. KonrathEsho s half an hour ago.”

Great. I swung my legs over the side of the bed. My knees had lost some circulation, and were tingling. I rubbed them, waiting for the pins and needles sensation to go away.

It didn’t.

The nanopoison.

It had apparently begun to take effect.

Alter-Talon and his doppelgänger
fired their tasers at the exact same moment. Their wax bullets smashed into each other in the air, at the midpoint between them. Sparks flew, but no one was tazed.

“Cool,” they said in unison.

Then they both began talking over each other, before Alter-Talon managed to get in, “Who are you? A Talon from a parallel universe?”

The double shook his head. “I’m not from a parallel universe. I’m from this universe.”

“I think I would have seen you around before.”

“Not exactly. Ever hear of sparticles? It’s a concept of supersymmetry.”

Alter-Talon wrinkled his brow, remembering back to science class during his school days. Sparticles were superpartners that existed beyond the Standard Model of particle physics. Bosons had partner fermions, and fermions partner bosons, though only one of the superpartners could be detected.

“I think so. They’re partner particles with an equal quantum number but a spin of one half. Selctrons partner with electrons, squarks with quarks, leptons with sleptons…”

“Right. But we’re not talking about antimatter here. That’s the wrong conclusion to leap to. We’re talking about dark matter.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. Because I’m essentially the dark matter version of you. We’re both from the same universe, but we’ve been invisible to each other. Up until a few days ago, we’ve lived exactly the same lives, mirror images of one another, except you’ve been, in simplest terms, half of my spin.”

Alter-Talon tried to wrap his head around this. He knew dark matter accounted for about twenty-five percent of the mass of the universe, and normal matter only five percent. So this Dark Alter-Talon had come from that twenty-five percent that we couldn’t see, but could only detect mathematically.

“You’re not dark anymore,” Alter-Talon said.

“Actually, from my perspective, you’re not dark anymore. That’s because of a timespace break that allowed me into this perspective of reality.”

Alter-Talon looked at Dark Alter-Talon’s rubber gloves, then turned his attention to Dr. Patel. “You’re here for the same reason I am.”# bananacilookI pu

“Of course I am. We’re exactly the same, so we think alike. We both need a doctor in order to transplant Talon’s hands and feet and procreational parts onto ourselves.”

Alter-Talon lifted his taser again. “Talon is mine. Go search the multiverse for another one.”

“It’s okay,” said Dark Alter-Talon. “There are two of them. I followed the other one here.”

“How?” Alter-Talon asked. But he realized he already knew.

“Sata,” they both said at the same time.

“So Sata perfected a way to illuminate dark matter? And you’re my superpartner?”

“In a manner of speaking. It’s a type of quantum teleportation entanglement.
You remember from school, how a particle can appear in two different places at once?”

“I never understood that. Are you sure that this is the same thing?”

Dark Alter-Talon shrugged. “I’m as sure as you are. We both got Cs in science class.”

“Remember our physics teacher, Mrs. Wiener? With the huge tits?”

“Boy, I wanted to tap that,” they both said at the same time.

Which was probably the reason for the less-than-stellar grades.

“So if I touch you, do we both explode?” Alter-Talon asked.

“Dark matter doesn’t make things explode. Antimatter does.”

“Right. Got it. But let’s not touch each other just the same.”

“Agreed. I guess now we proceed with the plan.”

“You know the plan?”

“It’s my plan too.”

Alter-Talon folded his arms. “So where is your Talon?”

“As I said, I’m a bit ahead of you in time, though we now share the same timespace. So a little while ago, he was with my wife in the SS Wisconsin. But he managed to escape a few hours before my world was destroyed.”

“Does that mean this earth will be destroyed as well?”

“According to quantum entanglement, it should have blown up at the same time mine did. But because I’m three point four hours ahead of you—the time equivalent of the half spin—we can assume that the same sequence of events will follow here.”

“It sounds like a bad science fiction novel.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So who destroyed the earth? Sata?” applause.

&osMr. Trouttet

“No,” Dark Alter-Talon said. “Talon did.”

Genetically engineered plants
were the greatest boon to mankind since the Voss vaccine rid the world of all viruses. Being able to grow superfoods—healthful and loaded with nutrients and able to thrive in inhospitable environments—saved humanity from starvation caused by the population explosion.

Genetically engineered animals… not so much.

I had an acquaintance named Harry McGlade who owned a bonzai elephant that was sort of cute in a diminutive sexual-predator kind of way, and my neighbor, a real dick named Chomsky, had a pet miniature llama. Genipets tended to be mostly harmless, though every so often one would explode for some inexplicable reason. When that happened, the Genipet company always offered a full refund, plus dry cleaning expenses.

But science didn’t stop there, and many instances of splicing and tweaking DNA resulted in some pretty bad results. The worst were the byters—mutated bed bugs that weighed forty kilograms each and sucked your blood while you slept. The byters have proven near impossible to exterminate, with shells thicker than steel and mandibles that could sever a man’s leg. They were responsible for tens of thousands of deaths annually, plus a hit reality TV show.

A close second on the hideoso list were chickulas. Food researchers combined the DNA of the
gallus gallus domesticus
, aka the fast food chicken, with the
theriphosidae
, or tartantula, in an effort to create a bird with eight drumsticks. Instead, they invented flying spiders with poisonous beaks who caught pets and small children in their massive webs.

Admittedly though, chickulas were delicious.

But for sheer audacity, the Shame on Science Award had to go to the salmonster. Besides being mean, ugly, deadly, and a hazard to the ecosystem, it also tasted like raw sewage, so it couldn’t be commercially fished. Not even pigs would eat it. The salmonster was a big steaming bowl of epic fail.

So I wasn’t thrilled with trying to get to shore in salmonster-infested waters. Especially since the repellant had almost worn off, my limbs becoming numb from the nanopoison, and those ugly critters scared the absolute piss out of me.

“How far away is shore?” I asked Alter-Vicki.

“Over a kilometer.” She shivered, her bare breasts jiggling. “There must be hundreds of salmonsters between here and land. Maybe even thousands.”

“Do we have any weapons?”

“It’s said they can bite a person in half,” she continued, her eyes wide. Rick Schieve.”

ed to , your honorn my peripheral visionnfinite versions of “And that they smell fear, and can track you in the water from two kilometers away.”

“Vicki? Weapons?”

“The big ones swallow you whole, and they put you into a kind of suspended animation where they digest you slowly while you’re still alive. After the tenth day, you supposedly go insane from the agony.”

“Vicki!” I grabbed her arm and gave her a shake. “Yes. They’re scary. I know. Now focus. Are there any weapons in the hideout?”

“Harpoons,” she said.

“Harpoons?”

“I wish we had harpoons. But we don’t. We don’t have anything remotely like that.”

“What do we have?”

“I think maybe there are some forks in the kitchenette, sir.”

She wiggled over the a small breakfast bar and tugged open a drawer. The forks in question were actually sporks—spoons with small tines on the tips. They wouldn’t be able to defend against a goldfish attack, let alone thousands of salmonsters. And as audacious as Vicki’s claims sounded, I knew they were true. The mutated fish supposedly could smell pheromones released by fear, and there have been reports of people being swallowed whole and being found alive inside the salmonster’s belly after several days, partially digested. As could be expected, these unlucky people suffered some emotional problems, and have found it difficult holding down jobs and maintaining long-term relationships after their ordeal. Also, because the salmonster’s gastric juices had stripped away their skin so their nerves were permanently exposed to the air, they indulged in constant, non-stop screaming.

If the choice was mine, I would have stayed here and waited for Alter-Talon to arrive with the submarine. But in order to save my wife, I had to get on the offensive.

Alter-Vicki, however, was a different story.

“You should stay,” I told her. “There’s no reason we both have to become salmonster food.”

She shook her perfect head. “If my husband comes back and you’re gone, he’ll kill me for letting you get away.”

Was Alter-Talon so insane he’d murder her? I didn’t think so. Even with our differences, he was still, essentially, me. I’d never kill my wife.

But then, I’d never send half a million people to an alternate earth where they’ll be eaten by dinosaurs.

I walked up to a dresser, removing some folded boxer shorts. It took two tries to get my right leg through them. The advancing numbness made balancing difficult. I opened another drawer, looking for a shirt, and instead found a collection of sex toys, some of which were new to me, a few of which looked downright dangerous. There was also a long length of rope, and what appeared to be a grappling hook. I raised an eyebrow.

“Shibari, sir,” Alter-Vicki said. “Japanese bondage applause.

&en wide with fear.

llveryone . My husband ties me in various kinbaku patterns and suspends me from the ceiling. Then he uses various toys to—”

“I think I understand,” I said, interrupting her because she was getting a bit breathy.

“Does your Vicki know shibari? I’d be happy to teach her.”

I picked up the rope, and Alter-Vicki let out a little gasp.

“If you wish to tie me up, I won’t fight you. The
sakasa ebi shibari
is a particularly demanding position, keeping me suspended and completely immobile while also allowing you access to my—”

“Throttle down, babe,” I interrupted. “I’ve got another use for this. How stocked is your refrigerator?”

• • •

One of the strongest memories I had of my grandfather, who died when I was ten years old, was him taking me fishing. He and Grandma owned a cabin on a lake, and we spent many a day spincasting for bass and pike. Few things in my adult life matched the joy, and the peace, I felt while in the boat with him, pulling in lunkers. Grandpa was a classic
Old Man and the Sea
type. Tough, grizzled, world-weary, but full wisdom and possessing the kindest eyes. He taught me how to catch dozens of varieties of fish, and there was nothing about angling he didn’t know.

But I doubted Grandpa ever went fishing for salmonsters using bondage rope and a twenty ounce sirloin steak.

The grappling hook wasn’t sharp, but I hoped it didn’t have to be. The meat was secured to it using a twisted coat hanger. I also opened a package of bratwurst, to use as chum.