Day 200/365
Year 5 of Progress
(July 19, 2069)
Central Command
Third Continent
Prime Reality
Mac watched Emir pace the floor. He’d counted the returning assassins twice with a look of frustration. Now they both watched as the portal darkened to an abyssal blue and faded into black.
“Everyone out!” Emir roared.
The soldiers and techs fled as Emir glared at their retreat.
Mac stood his ground. If he’d understood half of Jane’s notes, they were going to his iteration. Back to July of 2069, which was a long way from home in many ways, but he could make it work. The guards had kept him locked in the observation room when the portal was open. They’d been polite about it, of course. Offered him a meal that made his stomach clench in disgust and tepid water that tasted of poor filtration. Now they were gone. He opened the door and walked into the jump room.
Emir glowered. “I told everyone to leave.”
“They did,” Mac said. “But it’s obvious even to an outsider that something went wrong. You’re missing three people.”
“Yes. Commander Rose, Captain Donovan, and Mr. Senturi. I can live without Senturi, but the other two I need back.” Emir crossed his arms and regarded the closed portal. “This is unfortunate timing.”
“Yeah,” Mac said. “Everyone likes the battle cry, ‘Today is a good day to die.’ But the truth is there’s never a good day to die.” He tapped the top of one of the computers. “I could get them back for you.”
Emir turned to him. “What?”
“You want your people back. I was trained to extract soldiers from behind enemy lines. It seems to me that we could help each other out.”
Emir snorted in dismissal. “I’m to trust you? You must be intelligent enough to realize how unlikely that is.”
“Your people are in July 2069 in Alabama. I want to go back to December 2069 in Australia. You may not realize how far a walk that is, but I do. So I figure we can make a trade. Let me retrieve Jane and Donovan for you, then you can send me back to the moment after your commander abducted me. We all walk away happy.”
“That would be suicide.”
“For me or you?” Mac asked.
Emir’s face was frustratingly placid. “The decoherence is coming. You would return only to die.”
“We only have your word for this,” Mac said. “It seems to me you can’t even pinpoint how to pick the arrival date in an iteration. If you can’t do that, how could you possibly calculate decoherence?”
“No one can calculate an exact timetable like that.” Emir waved his hand, dismissing the problem. “I’ve worked on the problem for years with no success.”
“No success here you mean.” Mac twisted the knife into Emir’s ego. “The Emir in the Federated States of Mexico figured it out. I didn’t meet him, but I met some killers who used his machine. They had interesting things to say. In their timeline, the portal is used for vacations. You can jump back to watch your own wedding. Or go watch your parents meet. Sappy things like that.”
“Impossible!” Emir turned, eyes blazing with fury. “That sort of thing isn’t possible. If it were, I would be the first to know. This iteration is the base for all others. The bedrock of humanity.”
Mac shook his head. “And you base that on what? Your ability to kill other people better than someone else?”
“That is the basis of evolution.” Emir lifted his chin with pride.
Mac shrugged. “Survival of the fittest. People always get that concept wrong. It’s not survival of the strongest, it’s survival of those who pass on the most genes. If an animal doesn’t reproduce, it isn’t genetically fit according to biologists. Same thing happens to cultures. If you don’t create, if there’s no art, music, or architecture, the culture doesn’t just go extinct, it is forgotten entirely. I imagine it’s the same thing with iterations. Except you’ve been busy killing every seedling.” He rapped the computer with his knuckles once more for emphasis. “What happens when there are no more branches of history spawned by your iteration, Emir? Do you think that’s what causes decoherence? Because I do.”
He looked at the portal. “If you want your people back, let me know. I’m willing to trade their futures for mine. Better hurry, though. You leave Jane and Donovan out there together too long, and you’re not going to get anything back but corpses.”