Relativity Synchronization:
The Fifth Cause

2044: The Laws Of Time

Chris stepped out of the hotel into the dawning night. At that same moment, the lights went on throughout Denver North. Now that the day’s light had fled beyond the horizon, he could see the city, even through the dense, wet haze that still clung to everything, filling the air with a faint, moldering and acidic stench. Advertisements and floating halogen headlights glowed through the wispy remnants of the fog like a psychedelic neon wall, stretching from horizon to horizon and covering the entire eastern skyline.

Flecks of lights danced like fireflies as the little flying vehicles descended and rose from the lines of traffic that swarmed between the buildings. The physical bodies of the flying crafts remained hidden; he could only see the pinpoints of the halogen headlights that crawled through the mist. Only a slight damp whirring accompanied their passage.

He unfolded the map the hotel clerk had given him. With a rough circle, the man had marked an all-night drugstore that looked to be about twelve blocks west from the hotel. The shimmering dance of lights faded in that direction, showing only a few skyscrapers. Much smaller buildings, with a feeling of dinginess about them, stood tightly side-by-side down the street. It looked more to Chris like what a city should be like, but he could come up with no specific examples of why—he only had a vague, almost instinctual understanding. He had the same reaction with the flying cars; the cars on the ground, abandoned or otherwise, had a familiarity to them that the ones rushing above did not, though he had no distinct memory of either kind.

This must be the old part of town, Chris thought. He felt a sense of recognition at the dumpster-lined alleys and worn apartment buildings with a few ground cars parked outside. A tremendous rush of air buffeted him, and Chris looked up to see one of the air cars land on a rooftop in the midst of whirling trash and bright landing lights.

A block down from the drugstore Chris passed a PolCorp station. Two officers sat in a vehicle outside. It looked like a big ground car, all rounded bulges and chrome fins, until Chris noticed the vents along the back and sides. They eyed Chris as he walked by and he heard the engine whine to a start as he approached the drugstore. Whatever, he thought. I’m not doing anything illegal. At least I don’t think I am.

“Jones Drugs & Merchandise” was lit with the same harsh white fluorescent light of the hospital. Lacking the sterile smell, it seemed, rather, that mold had taken residence in the walls. The only other person in the store, a tiny woman, sat behind the counter. One glazed, white eye peeked out from behind her long, brown bangs and she had a tattoo of a black widow spider on her forearm.

Chris wandered the aisles, looking at the wares. Some things gave him the same feeling of secure familiarity that the ground cars did: toothpaste, Twinkies, aluminum foil and Coca-Cola (“Original Recipe! Coca Leaf Extract in Every Can!”); others disturbed him. There were toy PolCorp guns and uniforms alongside “Skragsuits,” plastic yellow jumpsuits with green stocking caps depicting strange insect heads. There were bottles of pills called “Rush,” and others called “Doze,” and liquid in bottles simply labeled “H.” None of the pharmaceuticals had any sort of description or directions on them—it seemed to be assumed that everyone knew what they were for.

The ceilings were lined with flat TVs. The images had a distinct three-dimensional feel and offered a deluge of ads—all products offered “In this quality establishment.” Chris learned that “Rush” was for those times “you need to cruise for more than twelve hours straight. Can take up to five safely.” Right after that came a commercial for one of the flying vehicles, a large, fast-looking thing called “the GeoFord Terrestrial III,” shown whizzing through isolated canyons and over plains. “Why drive, when you can cruise?” the woman on the monitor asked Chris. The faces in the images had a disconcerting habit of appearing to be looking directly at him, no matter where he stood in relation to the screens.

Chris selected a tube of “White-O” toothpaste, a toothbrush and a comb, and approached the lone cashier. He noticed a PolCorp Security vehicle parked in front of the doors, but through the narrow windshield he couldn’t tell if there anyone sat in it.

I didn’t do anything. What would they want with me? Chris tried to tell himself, but he had a sinking feeling of apprehension, a gut anticipation that something was about to happen.

Sure enough, as soon as he left Jones Drugs the car flared to life and a line of spotlights along the top of the vehicle blinded him. “PLEASE STEP BACK,” boomed a voice from the car, amplified to painful levels. “PUT THE BAG DOWN AND YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR. THANK YOU FOR OBEYING THE LAW.”

Chris stepped back, put his bag of toiletries on the sidewalk and raised his hands. He expected someone to get out of the car and ask him for papers and tried to think of an excuse for not having them when the voice asked, “Sir, where are your papers?”

Before Chris could formulate an answer, a door lifted and a massive black man got out, pointing something at him that looked, at least in the blinding spotlights, like a small Gatling gun. “Sir, where are your papers?” he asked with a different voice than had come across the megaphone.

“They were stolen. On the way here. This guy, he …”

“Sir, I am sure you are aware that it is a felony offense to not report lost or stolen papers immediately.”

“I just needed some stuff. I was going to …” he hadn’t seen that one coming.

“I said immediately, sir. We saw you walk by our vehicle. Why didn’t you go to the PolCorp station on the way here to fill out the required forms?”

“I …” Chris felt fear growing in the pit of his stomach as the strong, sour taste of bile rose in his throat.

“For that matter, what exactly, took you so long to—” the PolCorp Officer walked over to Chris’s Jones Drugs bag and pulled out a gun. “Ah. I see. I don’t suppose you have the paperwork for this little beauty, either, do you?”

Where the hell …? Oh god, why are they setting me up? Chris nearly panicked. What do they want from me? If this was how PolCorp operated—simply planting evidence to compound what seemed to Chris like a minor crime, he was doomed from the moment he walked by their car on the way to the drugstore. But why had they tagged him? Was it plain boredom, or was his underlying paranoia actually on the mark? Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

The other door opened and Chris heard “… ten-twenty-two, over. Waiting for back up. Over and out.”

Before he approached his partner, the second cop did a once over of the situation. “What do you think we have here, Chuck? Some slumming High-riser wanting a taste of the under-city?”

“Don’t know. More likely he’s some wasteoid out for some quick cash. Look at him … his clothes don’t even fit right. He probably tossed some exec so he could pull off looking like he was from the upper levels. I figure he saw us parked outside before he had a chance to roll this place, tried to wait us out, gave up and bought some toothpaste to try and cover his tracks.” Chuck pulled out a pistol from the arsenal on his belt and pressed it against Chris’s temple. “Even wasteoids need papers, loser.”

Chris said nothing. If they were going to play this game, anything else he said would only get him into more trouble. The pressure of fear he had felt in his stomach had moved up his spine to the base of his skull and built into a mounting rage. He was no longer scared of these two. Now, it was time to act. Something primal grabbed control of Chris and he felt his mind lash out. Dizziness overtook him and the world blacked out.

2873: James Garret’s Laboratory

Files and papers were scattered haphazardly around the lab. The general feel of the place was that a hurricane had hit it, in a small, indoor, and semi-contained way. Lieutenant Yuri Yakavich looked around the place again and sighed. It was fairly obvious that Garret was gone and he was not coming back.

On top of that, the man had some type of experimental tech that interfered with the Corp’s attempts to back step in the time stream into the lab. Every field team they sent back got kicked forward to their origin time when they entered the building.

So Yuri had taken the only route left open to him. An army of clerks worked, dancing around piles of paper, which were growing into veritable mountain ranges. In an age of paperless technology, the man must have killed entire rainforests to get this much paper. Yuri watched the system of files being rebuilt into a tangible set of information that would give him a clue as to where the doctor had vanished.

He switched his attentions back to the monitor in front of him to watch Garret fly through central Corp’s headquarters at an estimated speed of twelve hundred miles an hour, on foot. Again he sighed. The man was armed with at least two new pieces of technology and Yuri had to stop him from creating a paradox that would shatter history. At times like these, Yuri wished he hadn’t scored so high on the Internal Intelligence tests.

Every few moments Yuri would get interrupted in his viewing of the robbery by a clerk handing him another document that they felt would be relevant. As the afternoon wore on, the pile in front of Yuri grew to be about a three-inch stack of papers. From every indicator, Garret had armed himself with historical information about his late wife’s mission time, then hopped back to try to save her. But it didn’t sit right in Yuri’s gut. Something about the whole situation stank. He still missed some relevant piece of information—some key that would unlock this landslide of information growing in front of him.

James Garret’s jigsaw puzzle of a mind started to fit together for Yuri when one of the clerks handed him a coffee stained napkin with a cigarette burn on it. Yuri walked into the kitchen and started looking around more closely. First, the air filter.

Cracking open the hermetic seal on the environmental system for the house, he pulled the filter out and glanced over the toxin levels it had recorded. No trace of nicotine in the environment’s filters. He tapped the napkin and thought. ‘Zarvan’ was the word written on it. An ancient God of time. And a cigarette burn that could come from any time over a thousand-year period.

Turning in a circle, he opened his eyes and looked. Not just to see the environment surrounding him, but to truly look at everything in front of him as if he were the missing Doctor Garret himself. A nagging suspicion started to form on the edge of his consciousness. He grabbed a clerk walking by and pulled the man in front of him. “Get me his newspapers. I know he had them printed up. Bring me the crossword section of any paper that has coffee stains. NOW.”

The clerk nodded and hurried over to his comrades to reorient their search. Old mountains of paper were chipped away and new ones formed as the clerks shifted their dance to this new beat. Yuri walked to the couch and turned on the television, holding the image of a frustrated James Garret in his mind’s eye and trying to retrace those steps.

Hunting down the remote, he found the last view button and brought up the last program watched. It was a historical show about twentieth century wars. An hour later, Yuri finished watching the documentary and started going through the pile of newspapers stacked in front of him. As he suspected, a pattern emerged.

Every problem numbered twenty-six and twenty had been completed in every paper. Here and there, others would be done, but that was the only consistency. So, what had happened in the year twenty twenty-six? Yuri racked his brain and came up blank. Then he switched out the number set. Twenty-six twenty. And all of the lines of suspicion in Yuri’s mind clicked into place. The pattern set and became real for him.

Yuri stood up shakily and looked to the clerks who were watching him. In a scared voice he said, “Get headquarters on the line. The son of a bitch got Alexander Zarth working on his side.”

Time: Classified
Operation: Classified

Lucy drove to the office in a daze that the morning light only worsened. Rays of bright sunshine made the road impossible to see. Squinting to see the road, she couldn’t make out any of the landmarks she passed. But she drove as though guided by an invisible force, not needing to see the road before her or the traffic on either side. The conversation with Zarth had lasted for over ten hours and she had a hell of a lot of thinking to do.

She was at least mildly surprised by this, as she found herself agreeing with the most wanted criminal in history instead of with her own policing force. But he had a lot of information that the Time Corp didn’t, and it came from further up the line, if he could be believed. Though the fact that he had laid out all of the internal politics in her department from her time, well upstream from him, only lent credibility to his claims.

Paradox was the byword of the day. By pushing forward in her mission she would help facilitate the greatest paradox in history and bring the timeline to the brink of shattering. As unpleasant as it was, it seemed to be staring her in the face that the Time Corp had created the very paradox which they spent all their time fighting.

Slamming the steering wheel with her fist, she cursed aloud. “Fuck. A field agent should NOT be forced to make these choices.” Though it appealed to her internal sense of irony, it was still hard to swallow. All the facts laid out though, and to be frank with herself, she had already decided to help Alex hours ago. Now she was justifying it to herself.

She pulled into the office’s parking lot only to find that there were fire trucks and police surrounding the building. Threading her way through the maze of emergency vehicles, she finally found a spot to park in. Getting out of her car, she walked up to the sergeant who appeared to be in charge of the scene and flashed her security clearance badge for him. All thoughts of Alex and catastrophic paradox were temporarily shoved from her mind. “What the hell is going on here, Sergeant?”

The man, tall and heavily built with muscle and maybe fifty years old, huffed through his moustache as he studied her identification. “Well miss, you’ve had a bomb threat called in on your building. We’ve evacuated and we have the squad sniffing through the building.”

Lucy sighed, “How much of a dent is this going to put in the day, Sergeant? We have a lot of work to get done here and we don’t really have time to mess about with bomb threats in a high security government building.” She put a heavy emphasis on the high security.

The sergeant looked put upon and took a moment before he replied. “Well Director Frost, since there was a break in last night, and your ‘high security’ building was already having issues with its ‘security’ we felt that it might actually be credible that someone got by your systems and left a little gift for you last night. Especially since the perpetrator was not apprehended. As I understand it, our department’s attempts to contact you about this matter last night were unanswered. Have a little too much fun last night, Director Frost? I know I didn’t. I was up all night trying to contact you.”

Lucy went red with a combination of rage and embarrassment at the sergeant’s comments. She also remembered that her cell phone was on vibrate in the glove compartment of her car. “Point taken. And as eloquently as you put me in my place, you have still failed to answer my question. How long will this take?”

The sergeant sighed. “I concede.” He threw up his hands in a placating gesture and continued, “The sweep team should take about an hour, ninety minutes tops. That is only if they don’t find anything. If there is a bomb in that building, I have no idea how long this will take to get done.”

He thought for a moment, then decided to give some ground to the frustrated woman standing in front of him. “Containment and disposal are about thirty minutes each. Diffusing a bomb though … it could take five minutes, it could take five hours. But even with the break-in, I’d say that the odds are low of anyone having planted a bomb in your building, Director Frost.”

And then the building exploded.

It came with no warning, no moment of dread foreshadowing the explosion. One moment the building was intact, the next fire was ripping it apart in a deafening roar. The explosion started on the top floor, in the corner closest to Lucy’s office, and it seemed to hit a chain of detonations throughout the top floors, exploding in series.

Pebbles of concrete and tiny shards of glass flew outwards from the building, showering down into the parking lot and injuring people indiscriminately. Lucy felt shards tearing at her cheeks and leaving bloody trails as she stared in awed surprise. Then the bulk of the sergeant’s weight hit her as he tackled her to the ground and held himself over her.

Lucy looked up in a daze at the man over her. Blood trailed down his chin and he collapsed onto her. A giant shard of glass, fully half a window, stuck out of his back.

1997 A.D.: Colorado Springs, Colorado

Alex sat on the motel bed, shirt off. Even with the air conditioning blowing, sweat poured down his face and chest. He studied the pictures spread across the foot of the bed. A Time Corp agent had been spotted by his drones breaking into the building Frost and the scientist worked in while he had been talking to her in the garage. He pulled out his computer and started running through the agent database that he had painstakingly assembled.

Alex preferred to work with a late twenty-first century laptop. Anachronistic compared to the technology available to him, but still pleasing to him because of the symmetry and stylized lines of the time period. It might not be the fastest, but it was the sleekest looking machine he had seen in any time period. The most durable as well.

The computer chimed and pulled up a match on the agent, Yuri Yakavich. Alex was somewhat familiar with the man, as he was usually the brain behind the agents that managed to catch up with him. With an already sweat-dampened towel, Alex wiped his brow. This job was getting thick. He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, lining up his thoughts.

Two of the top three agents in the Time Corp were pitted against him. He had to assume they had pieced together his involvement in this situation, because of who they were. The worst of the top three was also aware of him and perhaps marginally on his side. But that margin could vanish in a heartbeat. The two most brilliant scientists history had ever seen were also involved, though one was unaware of the whole situation and the other a random factor, seeming to be working against the actions of everyone.

Throw in one Alexander Zarth and a shadowy figure from the fortieth century and what do you get? Alex pondered that for a long while before setting the thought aside for later review and going back to the question he needed an answer to first.

Why did the number two agent in the Time Corp make an attempt on the life of the number three agent, as well as the scientist who invented time travel? Could he be a rogue agent attempting to shatter history? His gut feeling said no. It was a specific attempt on Lucy, not on Chris Nost. Back to the basic question then, why the hell would one agent be attempting to kill another?

A musical chime sounded from the computer to indicate it was done with the temporal annexing portion of the profile on Yuri. Alex leaned forward and studied the screen with interest. Revision to the basic question—why would an agent from ten years upstream come back and try to wipe out Lucy? If he was upstream, he had to know it would fail.

So assessment one had to be that Lucy was not the target. Why then would Yuri plant the bomb if assessment one was correct? Assessment two followed: that Lucy was the target and Yuri was trying to create a paradox. And assessment three: no one was the target and that it was a warning. But a warning about what, and to whom?

Rewinding the video file, Alex watched it again in slow motion, hoping to catch something that he had missed on the first time. As he started, he lit up a dented cigarette and poured himself a glass of scotch. Twenty minutes later, the scotch was untouched and five cigarette butts were smashed into the ashtray.

He grinned like a maniac and laughed to himself. “Oh, Yuri. You sly, sly dog. I see your game now. You are far too clever for your own good.” The video frame froze on a shot of Alex, hidden in the shadows, accepting a package from Yuri after his break in.