“We measure time in minutes, but lifetimes in memories.”
~ excerpt from the Oneness of Being by Oaza Moun I1—2072
Date Unknown
Location Unknown
Rogue Iteration
Nothingness bloomed into life. Green, was Rose’s first thought. There was green everywhere. An unforgivable number of fruitless trees and bushes with no visible purpose. She sucked in the air and all but gagged as it stuck in her throat, thick enough to chew.
Behind her, Bennet started coughing. “Mercy and life, where are we?”
“The coordinates place us less than a klick from the main facility in this iteration.” Logan sneezed. “Ma’am, there seems to be some sort of contagion in this city. The air is—” Her words were choked off by a wet cough.
“Masks on,” Rose ordered. She hated wearing gas masks, but already her eyes were swelling shut in response to whatever poison this iteration allowed to float around. Over the years, she’d seen some bad places. Smog-filled cities. Towers eroding from acidic clouds of pollution. This was something else entirely.
With her mask filtering everything, she fought for breath and scanned the area. “Did we land in an arboretum?”
“No, ma’am.” Logan’s voice was tinny, distorted by the breath mask. “It seems we landed in an open field with vegetation?”
“Is that a question or a statement?” Rose demanded angrily. She didn’t need to look over to know Logan was gulping down fear. “Never mind. Fan out. Let’s establish a perimeter.”
Times like this she wished she believed in a god so she could blaspheme just a bit. This iteration was the stuff of nightmares. Vines with little spikes hung everywhere, grabbing at her pant legs and threatening to rip the exposed skin of her forearms. Strange things ran along the tree branches, chittering and shaking the trees. Something in the distance made the sound of a broken buzz saw starting to scream. It sounded uncomfortably organic.
Sweat formed on the edge of her mask and dripped down her neck.
“What is that smell?” Bennet asked.
“Your mask,” Rose said, tallying what paperwork she would need to do to get filter replacements after this mission. Bennet coughed. From the corner of her eye, Rose saw him remove his mask to shake it. “Problems?”
Bennet nodded. “There’s a smell getting into my mask. Past the filters.” He coughed, sneezed, and shook his head. “This place is toxic.”
“Then aren’t you glad it isn’t going to be your permanent home?” The original mission parameters included embedding Bennet here as an intelligence asset, but she’d written that off the agenda after her first breath. There were limits to the torture she’d make her soldiers endure. Already, the damp heat of this place was soaking through her shirt and making it cling. After this, a cold shower would be a welcome relief.
“Ma’am, I have the target building in sight.”
“Thank you, Bennet.” Rose triangulated on her soldier’s position and moved through the dense foliage, cursing plants in general and this unknown genus in particular.
Logan stepped up beside her, pulling dangling vines off her pants.
“We aren’t supposed to leave a trail.”
“It was them or me, ma’am,” Logan said. “I wasn’t going to let the plant win.”
Bennet motioned for them to join him. “Are you sure about the coordinates, Logan?”
“You want to check my math?” she shot back.
Rose held a hand up for silence. From their spot on the tree line, it was easy to see why Bennet was confused. This wasn’t Central Command. In front of them, a small hill led to a green expanse of lawn, with picnic benches in a three-sided courtyard, and a small building that couldn’t have more than two floors at best. It hardly looked like the seat of a world power or the home to the most powerful weapon in human history. “Do you have any life readings?”
Logan scanned the building. “Two, on the far side of the building.”
“No perimeter guard?” Bennet scoffed. “What are they doing?”
“It could be a trap,” Logan said.
Rose checked her digital display for the local time. “It’s Oh-five-fifteen—no one’s at work yet.”
“That’s no excuse for lax security,” Bennet said.
Logan shifted on her feet. “Ma’am, is it possible they could have moved the machine? We sent the probe in twelve hours ago. In the early days, Dr. Emir had a floating lab that moved from location to location to prevent just this kind of attack.”
“It’s possible,” Rose admitted though she hated the idea.
If the machine was in a floating lab, they would need to leave someone behind to gather intelligence. It was possible Emir would even order her back to stay here. Not many of the others had her deep-cover training or her language skills. It wasn’t always a good thing to be the best. “Let’s check the building. Once we know what’s going on, we can report back. Making plans without proper intelligence is how you lose wars, not win them.”
She glanced at Bennet. “Time to the next portal alignment?”
“Sixty-seven minutes, ma’am.”
Rose nodded. “Make it snappy and keep it quiet.”
Logan went first, half running, half skipping down the hill until she skidded to a stop near a metal utility door. Bennet followed as Rose took a covering position. Both her soldiers were non-nodal, expendable.
Logan signaled that everything was safe, and Rose moved down the hill with as much dignity as possible. If she returned with grass stains on her pants, she’d never hear the end of it. “How’s it look?”
“Basic security,” Logan reported. “I have the cameras on a loop. There’s a key and a number pad for the lock. Do you want me to blow them or pick them?”
“Explosions draw attention, and this is just an information-gathering foray,” Rose said. “Keep it quiet.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Logan bent over the lock as Bennet surveyed the perimeter.
“Problems?”
“It’s just weird, ma’am.” He shrugged. “Nothing about this is natural. There’s no sky-cleaners, no major city in view, nothing that looks like home.”
She wished she could take off the air mask and wipe the sweat from her face. “All iterations are different.”
“Not this different. This is . . . where did we diverge from this? If this is one change in history, what was it that did this?” Bennet asked.
“It could have been a population control measure,” Logan said, popping up as the door opened. “Thirty years ago, the government vetoed a law that would have resulted in millions of deaths and a limit to the number of children allowed to live. No disabled persons would have been left alive. Life-limiting illnesses like asthma would have resulted in immediate termination of the individual. We voted it down.” There was a note of smug pride in her voice. “Maybe they didn’t.”
Rose pulled her gloves on and pulled the door wide. “Nice theory. Let’s prove it one way or another.”
They leapfrogged down the hall, taking refuge in empty alcoves and scanning for trouble. The halls were disquietingly empty.
Logan raised her hand. “This is the machine room.” The door swung open at her touch. “The lock’s broken.”
Bennet swore.
Rose pressed her lips against the plastic of her air filter. Fear, and the pressing certainty of death, chilled her despite the heat of this abominable place. “Stop playing tourist, kids. Get in the room. Get what we need. Get out. Bennet, time?”
“Fifty-nine minutes, ma’am.”
“More than enough time.” There was always time enough to die. She led the way into the room beyond the door. It was situated like a stadium with risers. Someone had marked out concentric rings on the floor with tape, but otherwise there was an air of haphazard slipshoddiness that made her uneasy. Like looking at a faked painting—it was almost correct, but some indefinable something was off.
“Accessing the computers,” Logan said. “They have no encryption.”
Not a good sign. Emir was a careful man in every iteration. “Bennet, sweep the room.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The lights turned on, revealing a strange box at the center of the taped circles. It looked . . . “Logan, check our date again.”
“Day 193, year five. We made a lateral jump.”
“This is one of the original prototypes of the machine,” Rose said, the enormity of the thought almost making her laugh. “That’s why this isn’t working. This machine is barely functional. It’s . . . it’s . . . an antique!”
Bennet stopped beside her. “That explains what we saw outside. This iteration must be decades behind us. There’s no protection because no one knows what this is yet.” He laughed.
Rose eyed the machine with a frown. “That doesn’t explain everything. The trees. The sounds. The poison in the air.”
“I’ve accessed this iteration’s main information hub,” Logan said. “We should have enough data to identify the deciding nodal event that turned this iteration into what it is.”
Knowing the change point of history would help at least.
“Forty minutes,” Bennet reported. “We should get out of here.” He poked at the machine, and the blue dial fell off, cracking as it hit the cement.
“Good job leaving no trace,” Logan said sarcastically.
“There will be replacements here,” Rose said. “Logan, get out of the system and erase your tracks. Bennet, start rummaging in the drawers. This is Emir’s lab, so it will be well stocked.”
It took them two minutes to find another dial, green this time, and for Logan to erase any evidence of their presence. Rose secured the utility door behind them as they heard a strange motorized vehicle pull up near the building. People were coming to work. “Back to the trees.” The blighted, benighted trees.
Once she got home, she promised herself an extra ration of soap in the shower. She’d need it to wash away the stench of this place.