“Every time we think we fully understand the mechanics of the machine, something changes. It is operating with a mathematics we do not yet comprehend.”
~ Dr. Abdul Emir, Prime—2069
Day 191/365
Year 5 of Progress
(July 10, 2069)
Central Command
Third Continent
Prime Reality
Rose pulled her hair back, stabbing pins into the severe bun with sharp, angry jabs. The woman looking at her from the mirror looked placid, but Rose could feel the turmoil roiling inside. Her breathing was even; her thoughts were not. Quickening her steps, she went to the small living area, where the kidnapped node was curled in the corner, sleeping. He looked like what he was: a vagabond from another place. She could only hope he wasn’t as useless as he appeared.
“Wake up,” she ordered, throwing light body armor and a coverall at his feet. “We have a meeting in twelve minutes.”
One eye opened with a baleful glare. “Twelve?”
“I was given short notice.” Donovan’s doing, no doubt. Last night, he’d made a formal complaint about her living arrangements. Laura Para’s death could have been ignored, swept under the rug for “morale purposes,” but now a civilian from one of the other towers had been found dead in a passage connecting the command tower to the less important living domes. Central Command was scrambling to gain control, Brost was blustering around like he owned the place, and Senturi was smiling far too much for her to be happy.
Donovan had suggested that Rose was unsafe living alone. That it would be better for her to bunk with some of the female techs. It was a logical argument, calculated to make her look weak without Donovan’s risking an outright attack.
If Emir or Donovan found out about MacKenzie on their own, it wouldn’t look good.
“Hurry!” she shouted, as he staggered to a standing position. “How do you stand being this out of shape?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m in shape, but I need more than forty minutes of sleep to operate effectively.”
“Just get dressed.” She paced by the door as she waited for him, burning the nervous energy now, so she could appear calm when she faced down Emir.
The odds were in her favor. Emir liked her for some inconceivable reason. He thought she agreed with his schemes, not quite realizing that her driving goal was always self-preservation and the preservation of humanity. It was a nervous tic she couldn’t suppress. She needed to protect people, even if it meant defying Emir or taking him out.
MacKenzie stepped out of the washroom, looking clean if not well-groomed.
“You need a haircut.”
He ran a hand through his short hair. “I’ll be sure to go to the barber the next time I’m out.”
Always with a little joke. She unlocked the door. “Dr. Emir is the leader of this iteration. You will speak only when spoken to. You will not question him. You will show him the respect he is due, or you will die.”
“Is he as crazy here as he is in other iterations?” MacKenzie asked, as they walked down the hallway.
Rose paused and took a deep breath. “No iteration of Emir is insane. Your inability to understand his genius reflects poorly on you, not him.”
“He’s a mass murderer with sadistic tendencies. It has nothing to do with IQ. It’s his personality that’s flawed. Maybe his genes.”
She pivoted, refusing to listen. “Don’t talk. I need to keep you alive.”
He shrugged and followed her the rest of the way in silence.
They drew curious looks from passing technicians, but no one said anything. This was her domain as much as Emir’s. People feared him, but they respected her, and that could be just as important in terms of intimidation. Everyone knew who she was. Their Paladin. Their shield against the dangerous future. Their advocate against time and human failings.
Pressing her hand against the lock pad, she opened the door to the conference room. It was cooler than the halls. The air was fresher and the fabric on the chairs a better quality. This was where the nodes met, and Emir maintained it with a sense of understated luxury the rest of Central Command was not afforded.
Emir sat at the head of the long wooden table, the king on his throne. “Commander Rose and . . . a bodyguard? Is this your answer to Donovan’s concerns? I’m surprised you acknowledged them.”
“I didn’t.” Because giving Donovan any ammunition against her would allow him to take her down, scoop her out of Central Command, and have her imprisoned like the other nodes if he didn’t have her killed outright. She couldn’t prove it yet, but Donovan was up to something. He was too calm, too focused, and spending too much time with Senturi. It was time to throw a wrench in Donovan’s plans.
“Dr. Emir, may I present Captain Linsey MacKenzie.”
Emir shook his head with a little frown. “I’m not familiar with the name. Is he important?”
“Only at home,” MacKenzie quipped.
Rose glared at him behind Emir’s back. “He was the original Soldier Node before his untimely demise in the final days of the War of Peace.” Thirteen decades of fighting had paved the way for the world government and Emir’s meteoric rise to power. Thirteen decades, and several billion lives. “I brought him here to stabilize our iteration until decoherence.”
Emir steepled his fingers in front of his chin. “A new node?”
“Donovan has been acting impulsively, even recklessly. We discussed this, and both agreed that the only way we could have lost our position as Prime was if we had lost a node. Donovan is clearly the broken link. Captain MacKenzie will allow us to regain preeminence.” Rose kept her face calm. Not a muscle moved, and her pulse didn’t leap, but inside she felt the familiar surge of joyful victory.
Emir was going to let her have this.
He looked at MacKenzie skeptically. “Where did you find him? I sincerely hope you didn’t entangle our own past to bring him here. Have you been trained as a solider?”
MacKenzie stared Emir down. “I have. I’ve also been trained in surgical medicine, forensic medicine, investigation, and physics.”
Rose wanted to slap him. He’d issued a blatant challenge, and only the thick layers of ego insulating Emir from reality were keeping MacKenzie’s execution from being ordered.
She rushed to retake control of the conversation. “Sir, I took him out of the iteration that was trying to take our position as Prime. You’ll notice that since his arrival, the two iterations are running parallel. The theory of Einselected Maximums seems to be holding true.”
It was a risky statement, skirting close to the possibility of insulting Emir’s theory without actually questioning it—but she had to press now; it was the only way to survive. “We’ve never been able to mature two einselected nodes of the same designation before. I know several of your students posited that such a buildup would result in a temporal instability.”
What she didn’t bring up was the fact that the ones who had posited that the iterations with the most options going forward would survive had been found dead within the hour. Directly contradicting Emir’s scientific discoveries was suicide.
“Their theory was that having several variations of the same individual gathered in the same space will cause instability and mental anguish,” Emir corrected, his goatee framing a patronizing smirk. “Very few people are able to handle the dissonance of seeing another version of themselves.”
Rose nodded. “It can be disconcerting at first, sir.” Inside, though, she was excited: He was going to say yes. She could practically see him writing MacKenzie into his plans, plotting how to turn this twist to his benefit. “MacKenzie won’t have that problem as his other-self is already dead.”
Emir stood, fingertips resting lightly on the table. “Very well, Rose. You may keep your experiment. Find him housing and a uniform. Get him into training. His nodal set never does well with forced inactivity.”
“Thank you for allowing this, sir.” She bowed her head to hide the first hint of a smug smile. She’d won.
Emir cleared his throat. “After he is settled, Commander, we need to talk about how you were able to bring him here. I know there was no authorized mission to that iteration.”
Now she smiled openly. “I’m grateful you asked, sir. I’ve found some unexplained temporal anomalies. New ones. Possibly caused by the spiral pattern of our interactions with the other strong iteration. It’s creating security risks.”
He raised a bushy white eyebrow. “The dead women?”
“Almost certainly related. The killer is either using the anomalies to enter our territory or as a means of disposing of the bodies.” The civilian who had died the day before was seen on video only. When the techs had gone to the remote area to retrieve the corpse, they’d found blood but nothing else. “Tightening security needs to be a top priority in the coming weeks. Before we lose someone else or gain someone we don’t want.”
Emir turned to MacKenzie. “You said you had experience with investigation?”
“Yes,” MacKenzie said.
“Yes, sir,” Rose corrected him sharply. “You’ll have to forgive him, Doctor, he wasn’t living in a rigid environment when I found him.”
MacKenzie glowered at her. “No, I was living at home with my wife and dog.”
“A dog?” Emir chuckled. “What a waste of resources! Why would you expend energy on keeping a creature that does nothing but drools? Oh, you poor boy, we’ve saved you just in time!” He reached for MacKenzie’s shoulder, and MacKenzie pulled away.
“Maybe you’ll have a chance to meet my dog, sir.” MacKenzie put a special emphasis on the title. “You’d be amazed what animals can be trained to do where I come from. You might find you like dogs after all.”
Emir shook his head, too wrapped up in his own narcissism to realize what MacKenzie was doing. “Yes. Of course. A dog in the Prime. They went extinct when, Commander?”
“Nearly a decade ago, sir.” She didn’t dare look to see MacKenzie’s reaction.
“Well, such is the loss of our times. The sacrifices we make.” Emir smiled at MacKenzie. “If you get lonely, let me know. I’ll see if we can find a stuffed bear for you from the nursery. Dogs!” He laughed to himself as he walked out.
Rose looked at MacKenzie’s fists, clenched and white-knuckled. “Let him go,” she ordered.
MacKenzie glared at her. “He is who you choose to follow?”
“No.” Honesty was the only way forward. “Not for some time now. He’s . . . I don’t know what’s wrong with him.”
“He’s an insane megalomaniac,” MacKenzie said. “You know how I know? Normal people don’t try to control the future.”
“Oh, of course they do!” Rose slammed the door shut, so their conversation wouldn’t drift into the hallways. “Everyone tries to control the future. We plan things in advance, we have preventative medicine. We have habits simply because it reduces the amount of choice-related stress in our lives. Everyone wants to control the future; Emir just happens to be better at it.”
MacKenzie shook his head. “Habits aren’t healthy. They become addictions. They box us in. If life doesn’t give you a few surprises, you wind up living in your head, and reality evaporates.”
“Maybe that’s what happened to Emir,” Rose said. “To all of us. We have our routines and our carefully plotted life, but we’re simply pieces in a computer. Interchangeable and replaceable.”
MacKenzie nodded.
“But we are still the only future humanity has. I realize how much you must abhor the thought.”
“I really don’t think you do.”
She ignored his protest. “When decoherence comes, it will destroy humanity. Not a few thousand people, or a few million, or a continent. Everyone dies in decoherence.” She had to make him see how real the risk was.
He leaned closer. “So stop the decoherence from happening.”
Rose stared at him. “That’s impossible.”
“Why?”
She frowned in confusion. “Because it is?”
“Citation needed, Jane. Unless you have scientific evidence that decoherence can’t be stopped, you’re going about this all wrong. You shouldn’t be trying to ensure one iteration survives, you should be trying to find a way for all of them to survive.”
Her throat went dry. “But, if that were possible, we . . . we’d be doing that already. Central Command would . . .” She licked her lips. “They would . . .”
MacKenzie raised an eyebrow. “You can’t say it, so you don’t believe it.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I’m sure there’s research on the matter. We can look it up. But you do realize how difficult what you’re suggesting is. Decoherence is a huge force, you can’t hold up a hand and expect it to stop for you.”
“An object in motion will stay in motion unless acted upon by an equal and opposite force. Physics 101. Time is in motion, it is moving forward, and that means it has more momentum than decoherence. All we need to do is remove the equal and opposite force.”