Relativity Synchronization:
The Seventh Cause

2044: Coffee & Cigarettes

Chris left his room at the Rangley around 7 a.m. to head toward the D.A.B. He felt well rested even though he had lain awake all night. Life was sometimes weird like that, granting you small respites amidst the storm. It looked like it wouldn’t take more than an hour to walk to the D.A.B., but he was restless and fidgety as his thoughts kept coming back to what he had read about the Cinvat Bridge.

Was that what I felt? Chris wondered. Some mystical alternate dimension that the God of time dwells in? He could not discredit the idea, no matter how hard he tried. It felt too right. There were weirder ideas than the thought that a civilization over four thousand years dead had come across some aspect of the universe now long forgotten. And again, it felt right to his intuition.

Something remained there, beyond the edge of everything else, some bridge or tunnel that somehow cut through space and time. How the hell had he been able to find it? Why hadn’t other people been able to use it? The thought plagued him as he walked through the lobby. Abruptly, he stopped. Have other people been able to use it? He shook his head and continued on down the stairs at his hotel.

That was even scarier to him—the idea that other people had found it before him. Could that be why all of this happened? Perhaps there’s some secret society or something that’s hunting me now. Maybe that’s why it seems like the universe is so twisted now. But then why haven’t they succeeded in actually killing me? Regardless, that would explain the woman at the punt.

Goosebumps ran down his spine as everything that had happened to him started to make sense based on this odd model of the world he had extrapolated. Once you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, no matter how improbable, is your solution. Once again, Chris wondered if his mind was gone, floating through the false realities of insanity while his body was drooling in a padded room somewhere.. Do crazy people spend time wondering whether or not they are crazy?

“Feeling better?” Chris snapped out of his reverie as Charlie addressed him from the front desk. The other man looked tired but energetic, and had his newspaper lowered in front of him, but still clenched in dirty hands.

“What do you mean? Was I ill last night?” Chris paused. Did I talk to Charlie last night? He couldn’t remember it if he had. Distraction and more than a little confusion shrouded the walk back from the P.N.T. “You walked in here like a zombie last night. I guess spending sixteen hours on the Net will do that to you.” Charlie raised an eyebrow at Chris, “You headed over to the D.A.B. now?”

“Yeah … I guess all that research I did yesterday was pretty intense. The thing is it didn’t actually answer any of my questions,” Chris said and shrugged. “It left me more confused.”

“Man, you think you got problems,” Charlie folded the newspaper in front of him and planted his stubby elbows on top of it. “Lemme try to give you a little bit of perspective. I thought I was gonna get wasted last night. About eleven this strung-out skrag came in, wanted—”

“Sorry, Charlie,” Chris interrupted, trying to sound regretful. “I got a hell of a lot to do today. More research and hopefully I can start putting my life together again. I do want to chat with you, though. Can you tell me tonight? I should be back a bit earlier—and I can bring back some Chinese food for us.” Chris offered up the food on a whim, by way of apology for his rude interruption.

“Oh, sure pal. Sorry. I’ll take Mongolian beef. Extra large.” Charlie cleared his throat and lifted the newspaper without another word. He looked offended but willing to forgive Chris for the prospect of a free dinner.

A slight smile flirted across Chris’s lips as he left the hotel. He began to like Charlie. The quiet and warm morning cheered him. Chris looked up but saw only a handful of the cruisers in the air, floating like leaves in a gentle breeze and heading toward the city. The city had lost some of its fetidness. He wondered if it was some sort of holiday. Maybe Thanksgiving comes early in the future, he thought with a chuckle.

He tried to remember a specific Thanksgiving, but as always since his awakening in the hospital, his memories came up empty. Maybe I’m The Doctor, and some strange accident in the TARDIS has left me stranded in time with no memory. He started humming the Doctor Who theme to himself at this thought. Then he stopped, wondering where the memory had come from.

The Airbus Terminal was silent and desolate as well, and Chris began to get a bit worried. In front of the elevator doors there were a few loiterers milling around, and a few knots of PolCorp thugs glaring at anyone they thought might disturb the sanctity of their lazy day. Beady eyes under emblazoned helmets seemed to dare anyone to actually have the audacity to meet their gaze. Chris turned away and quickened his pace toward the D.A.B. Both departure boards had read “ALL BUSSES CANCELLED.” Something didn’t feel right about the day, but he refused to let go of the small bit of cheerfulness he had found.

Chris walked a few blocks further down Cherry Lane, where the buildings became higher than the neighborhood the Rangley was in. The buildings would have been skyscrapers in their own right if not for the megaliths dominating the Corporate Zone, which was now hidden to Chris by the proximity of the nearer towers. Everything in this future seemed to Chris to be in a constant battle to be the biggest and best. It started with the buildings, but the telltale hints were everywhere in his society—if only you stopped to look around. Chris spotted what he looked for and walked over towards the bank tower.

Installed in the side of the darkened GeoCorp Bank tower, humped at its peak like a cash register, he found a public news terminal—a 3D monitor offering “Public Information” to anyone who walked by. Across the bottom of the screen floated the message “ALERT” in dangerous looking bold red letters. Chris paused in front of it and as he did so a hidden sensor picked up his presence, increasing the display’s volume to an audible level.

“…As a result, all public transit is closed until the situation is under control and any travel within the city is strongly discouraged. All medical and PolCorp personnel are to report to their stations immediately. Emergency calls will not be responded to until emergency personnel are once again available in your area. We now go live to Wendy Price, whom at great personal risk is reporting to us from the most recent outbreak of violence in North Denver.”

The image shifted to a scene of carnage. A conflagration burned behind the red-haired woman looking into the camera, charred limbs and gore spattered the area around her. Oily black smoke partially obscured the entire area she stood in. The reporter wore what looked like a power-assisted suit of heavy metal armor, holding the time-honored microphone in the suit’s claw.

“Jesus,” Chris grunted. “Personal risk, my ass.”

“Lisa,” the woman said, “this scene is like so many others in North Denver, where the gang war that has effectively shut down South Denver for the past two months spilled into streets that were supposedly secure early this morning. PolCorp is currently attempting to get the situation to a state of stability, but as of now there have been hundreds of innocent bystanders slain in the past three hours.…”

Chris walked away from the screen and the voice faded into silence. He looked up and down the street, but only blue sky and sun could be seen from his vantage. No limbs were littering the ground, and no skirmishes were spontaneously breaking out in the middle of the street. He wondered where the attacks had been and decided it didn’t matter. He would meet Dr. Jameson, regardless.

He tried to imagine that this didn’t concern him, so close to the heart of GeoCorp, but he could not help but quicken his pace. Unlucky was one thing, but there was no reason to be stupid. Besides the occasional ground car and a few PolCorp Cruisers jetting along above, there was still no sign of everyday traffic. Save the occasional streetwalker crouched in the sun against the buildings or in the shadowed mouth of an alleyway, the streets were empty of pedestrian traffic as well. Twice more he walked past Public Information Terminals, but nothing new looked forthcoming and Chris didn’t bother to stop and see more of the same. Better to get to his meeting as quickly as possible and attempt to avoid getting shot at.

The PolCorp presence became much more obvious as he got closer to the GeoCorp tower, with cruisers parked and forming barricades. The officers milling around in riot gear made Chris feel more anxious, not more secure. Once he was within a half mile of his destination there were at least two cruisers in the air at any given time, and staggered groups of half a dozen guards walking the sidewalks a few blocks out from the street mall. Breaking into a run would only draw attention, so he paced himself with a quick walk through the gauntlet rather than risk drawing the notice of this harsh world.

There were other people out now too, browsing without noticeable concern through the shops at the base of the D.A.B. Most of the visible stores had heavy plate steel grates pulled shut in front of them, locked with electronic keypads or fingerprint scanners protecting the goods within from marauding gangs. But a few of the shops were open, mostly small restaurants and art galleries hoping to make a profit while their larger competitors where closed to avoid the risk of riots.

Little Paris was one of the open shops, and Chris found it at the end of the strip. A few daring people sat at tables outside, but most were choosing to remain inside on the off chance that the rioting spilled over onto the mall. Two old men sat by the window casually playing chess and smoking cigars.

Chris looked up at the ornamental clock adorning the top of a small building a few blocks down. The clock was a big white wheel with thick iron hands atop a narrow green pole. The overall effect drew the eye by creating an illusion of an ill-balanced object about to fall under the slightest breeze, threatening to crush anyone who walked below it at the wrong moment. The hands read just after eight.

Chris looked at the card Jameson had given him. Fifteen hundred. Great. Three this afternoon. I’ve got all day to sit around here and wait. Indecision stopped him momentarily as he tried to decide whether to stay in the relative safety of the coffee shop or to continue exploring the mall. Finally, he decided that he could duck into an open shop if he saw trouble headed his way and he began curiously strolling down the mall.

Approaching Little Paris, he had felt apprehension, expecting that at any moment one of the PolCorp officers gathered there for coffee and pastries would recognize him. They had cameras, Chris thought. They must have caught something on film—unless the whole thing never happened.…

Continuing down the mall, his paranoia ebbed like the surf slowly drifting out to low tide. Again and again he found himself being eyed and then passed over with the same indifference the rest of the pedestrians received, and he relaxed his guard. He didn’t look like a gang member, so they weren’t looking at him or for him. Feeling his muscles unwind, for the first time he could remember he found himself in a good mood for more than a few minutes at a time.

The street sloped down and he decided to walk to the base of the D.A.B. Professional curiosity took over and he could not help but be fascinated by the concept of a building of such enormity.

What is it made out of? Chris thought of the newspaper articles. Did I design this stuff? The silver needle now towered above, consuming half the sky with its shimmering shadow. This is mine … this world would not be possible but for the ideas in my mind … Pride welled up in his chest, followed by disgust at how alien and cold his idea had made the world.

As he approached the end of the mall, he realized that he had been mistaken about the proximity of the tower. The D.A.B. was much further than he thought: across a wide river bed with only a trickle of water in it, and a vast but mostly empty parking lot.

On the near side of the river sat a squat PolCorp station, guards milling about the front of the building and eying Chris. He smiled, trying not to look nervous, but failing miserably by looking away, his heart skipping a beat.

He had spotted Chuck, the PolCorp guard he remembered killing three nights ago. What the fuck? Chris thought as turned away and hurried back up the mall, his mind reeling. I know I killed him. I watched him die. It was hard to think, but there was one explanation. Chris had gone back to the hotel twenty minutes before he killed Chuck. So did I kill him or not? Oh god, am I insane? Or am I actually a time traveler? But then … what about paradox? Is that what is driving me crazy?

Wind seemed to howl through his hair as Chris staggered back towards the coffee shop, clutching his head. The universe had no rhyme or reason and he felt everything slipping beyond his control. Reality forced itself back upon him as he walked back toward Little Paris and he noticed two of the PolCorp beat cops following after him, about a block behind.

The guard he had killed was in the fore, briskly outpacing his companion. They’re walking a beat. It’s coincidence, Chris forced himself to think, but he felt nauseous again. He kept going, keeping the same pace, racking his brain and trying to figure out what to do.

He could only hope that if some encounter happened, his instincts would kick in and he would be able to get away by doing … whatever the hell it was he could do. But no killing, he thought. Somehow he survived what I did, and I’m not going to kill him again.

As he approached the patio section of Little Paris he felt a heavy hand fall on his shoulder. “Sir, could I ask you a few questions?” a low voice asked.

Chris swallowed and turned to face the speaker—a lumpy blond man in a PolCorp uniform. He didn’t have the helmet on, and wore no flack vest like the other guards seen patrolling the area. But the arm he used to keep hold of Chris looked like it was made out of some sort of metal alloy. Chuck stood behind him, looking at Chris through a plastic riot visor. A thoughtful expression was on his face, as he looked Chris up and down.

“Um. Yes, officer?” Chris gulped down some air and forced himself to continue. “How can I help you?”

“Yeah. He’s a fit,” Chuck said, his eyes never leaving Chris. He seemed nervous, as though he had some lingering memory of what hadn’t happened the night before. “You fit the description of someone we’ve been looking for, sir. I’m sure it’s nothing, so if we could check your papers, we’ll be on our way.”

Shit! Not again. Chris fumbled through his pockets, pretending that he searched for his wallet. “Really? What happened? Lemme find my papers. You know, this happens to me all the time; I must look like some criminal. Now what the hell did I do with …?”

“I’m going to go back to the car to get my retinal,” Chuck said, still staring at Chris. “Maybe we can get a positive ID with the Visual Imaging Unit.” He started off back down the hill.

“Godamnit. I know I have them on me somewhere …” Chris continued to stall. A scowl swept across the face of the officer with the cybernetic arm. “Maybe …”

Chris blathered on, feeling a now-familiar growing sense of dread as he ineffectually patted his pockets. But there was no pressure in his head, and time moved forward as it always did. Franticly he searched his mind, looking for a way to unlock whatever defense mechanisms he had, but there were only empty echoes of his last encounter with PolCorp.

Deliverance came in the form of a massive ball of fire lighting up the sky beyond the D.A.B., followed by a shockwave of rolling thunder that screamed up the mall, shattering the high impact Plexiglas windows of the shops, like a tsunami of plastic shards racing down the walls of the buildings towards them.

Chris could feel his organs rattling throughout his body and then the shockwave hit him—flinging him backwards, and then smashing him into the ground. The world spun around him as he tried to regain his feet, and Chris ended up spending a moment balanced on his knees and clutching his gut as he tried to make the world stop spinning around him.

“Holy shit! What the hell was that?” the PolCorp guard looked dazed as he stood up and gazed around the mall. Chris pointed behind the guard, towards PolCorp. The man turned and saw the raging fire and plumes of smoke coming from the direction of his station. Without another word he turned and charged down the hill toward his fallen comrades, forgetting that he had been about to bust Chris for some unknown crime.

Overhead, dozens of PolCorp cruisers streaked by, the faint sound of gunfire punctuating their flight as Chris’s abused hearing stopped ringing. He looked away from the erupting firefight to Little Paris. The shockwave that had torn apart the upper stories of the surrounding buildings spared the little shop.

Through a thin haze of bluish cigar smoke, the two old chess players peered out the window, watching Chris. He smiled and waved at them, as though to say “Hello … I am a real person, not street theatre.” The two men turned back to their game, apparently having decided that the show was over.

Some people hurried up the mall away from the blast, but most only looked down the street for a moment and went back to what they were doing. Chris gazed at the few people he could see, then down at his own hands, scraped and bloody. What can make a society so callous? Aching joints protested as he climbed to his feet. And how can I ever fit in here?

Despite the muted sounds of occasional gunfire and explosions, Chris spent the rest of the day in Little Paris, drinking coffee and alternating between working on Quantum and Time theories on a borrowed sheet of paper and relaxing.

With the amount of stress he had been through, it felt good to unwind, and a dim realization hit him at some point in the day that perhaps this society was not the callous, uncaring place he thought it to be at first. Perhaps it had become a survival trait to mind your own business. It was something to think about at any rate, and he filed it for later mental consumption. But for now, he thought, more coffee and maybe some local history.

The rich aroma of coffees permeated the air as Chris approached the counter again. “Has this place been here long?” Chris asked the man behind the bar. The guy was in his sixties—almost as old as the two men playing chess—and was lanky and tall with a few flecks of blond in the gray hair of his goatee. He wore an ancient baseball cap with a cartoonish picture of a cat’s face wearing sunglasses, a cigarette hanging out of its open mouth.

“Well, it’s been on Cherry Lane for ten years. For about forty years before that it was called the Penn Street Perk, back when there was a Penn Street. After GeoCorp took over and rebuilt the city, we ended up here, in the shadow of their big, shiny cock.” He gestured toward the massive skyscraper at the end of the mall.

Chris glanced around at the pictures of boats and old houses that lined the walls, giving the place an antiquated feel, at least compared to the world outside. “So I take it you’re not run by GeoCorp?”

“I’m not run by nobody, man. Paris, well, it might as well be. They let us run it however we want, but we’re close enough to their big dick that we need to stay within ‘certain parameters.’” The old man chuckled, then coughed. “We make the best cuppa’ joe around though. It’s hard to shut down the place where you like to get your coffee. Bad karma, ya’ know?” Steam jetted up from the espresso machine as the barista foamed the milk.

“So you’ve worked here long?”

“Fuck you man, yeah, I’ve worked here long. I’ve worked here all my fuckin’ life, man. I was going to be something, you know? I was gonna write, but here I am. Look, you want your latte, or are you just here to fuck with me?”

Chris took the cup of coffee, tipped the guy ten dollars, and went back to his table. He liked the barista—he had some indefinable quality that Chris could relate to, despite his surliness. Or perhaps it was his surliness. Knowing that there were likable people in this dismal world definitely made a difference to Chris, as harsh as his first impressions had been.

Flying cars and stray pedestrian policemen made for a colorful scene in the world outside the coffee shop. Occasionally foot traffic would wander by, oblivious to the riots around the city. Once a thunderclap of gunfire sounded nearby, bouncing off of the armored windows of the shop.

The afternoon rolled on and the chess game across the shop concluded. As one of the men packed up the board, the other rolled up his sleeve and, to Chris’s horror, peeled back the skin of his forearm revealing plastic tubing and dimly glowing fiber optics.

Chris watched, his horror turning to fascination, as the man pulled out a small can, opened a latch within his arm, and emptied the contents into the opening. He flexed his hand a few times, reattached the skin, and chuckled something to his companion in a gravelly voice, though what he said couldn’t be heard from across the coffee house.

The old men walked out, leaving Chris alone with the bitter barista and his thoughts. When three o’clock rolled around, Chris was so absorbed he didn’t even see Dr. Jameson wander in and order a latte. “…it would still need something—a catalyst, and I don’t have one.” Chris mumbled to himself. “Could I be …?” He saw Dr. Jameson standing over him, his amused expression held a dark cast.

“Oh. Hello.” Chris cleared the little table of his notes and gestured for the doctor to sit down.

“Hello, Chris. I’m glad you decided to meet me today. We’ll be able to talk freely here, and I’m sure you have many questions to ask me.” Jameson slid into the chair across from Chris and folded his hands in front of him on the table.

“Well, yeah. First, I’ve been thinking a lot about all of this,” Chris gestured with his arms towards the windows, “and I can’t figure out how it could be possible in forty years. I mean the city, the flying cars, everything. It … I don’t think it was like this in … back then …” Chris stopped, at a loss.

“Ah, yes. Quite extraordinary, is it not? The leaps in technology, sociology … cultural growth alone is faster now than any time in recorded history. Amazing what humanity can accomplish when we find ourselves under the gun, so to speak.” Chris thought he imagined a slight, brief wave of relief wash across Jameson’s face.

“You see, after the oil crisis some twenty five years ago, the governments were at a loss—particularly in what was then the United States of America. The world governments had dabbled in alternative fuel sources, but their shortsightedness and greed for the money of the oil companies, was their downfall. Europe and Asia did slightly better when the oil finally ran out, but they made the mistake of giving alternative energy research over to private companies.

“These private companies, GeoCorp among them, had, in fact, come up with a clean-burning hydrogen cell eight years previously but said nothing, claiming in the meantime that any breakthroughs they had made were simply not cost effective. In fact, each cell could last years and could be produced at a fraction of the price of mining coal or drilling for oil.

“When the crisis came into full swing in twenty sixteen, war erupted. At first it was minor skirmishes … civil wars aplenty, small border infractions, that type of thing. All of this was caused initially by panic. Lack of transportation, rolling brown outs … it has been said that modern civilization is only twenty-four hours away from barbarism … practical experience now tells us this is closer to seventy two hours.”

Jameson took a sip of his latte and continued. “So it was small wars at first. But it escalated, as these things do, until the entire world was posed on the brink of nuclear holocaust. The three major corporations at the time—GeoCorp, I Net, and Poldine Incorporated—stepped in when the world governments were desperate enough and offered them a solution, for a price. What choice did they have? Within a year, the governments were dissolved and the companies took over with subsidiaries branching off and claiming independence.

“After they took over, there was peace for a while. I mean world peace. The Three, as they became known, were friendly with each other, content to scratch each other’s backs. There was no real use for a military budget when compared to the profit to be had in technology, so they began to focus inward. With the Hydro Cells being as efficient as they were, massive technological expansion was possible in a decade. It was amazing what people could think of when they were no longer limited to primitive internal combustion. In nine years, the City of Denver’s population soared to more than sixty million people and GeoCorp rebuilt the entire region in five months to accommodate the population boom.”

“Why Denver?” Chris asked.

“Well, all the cities expanded, but few as much. Denver was an ideal candidate for the GeoCorp capital because of its central location on the North American continent.”

It made sense. Chris sat for a minute and thought about it. “And I suppose a massive population was possible because there was now cheap and unlimited energy. I’m assuming the Hydro Cells are made of water?”

“Precisely. With some research into water reclamation combined with the abundance of energy, huge grow-rooms underground became possible. Not possible, but necessary, after most of the Midwest was irradiated in the War of Thirty-eight.” He could not mistake the look of amusement on Jameson’s face.

“Someone else mentioned that to me,” Chris said. “So I guess world peace didn’t last.”

“Not even,” Jameson laughed coldly. “As I said, the Three were too bureaucratic and unwieldy to manage a population that grew by billions each year. Some willingly split themselves into smaller companies to better manage their assets. GeoCorp was not as willing, but they could do nothing when the Omni Institute broke off and claimed everything east of the Mississippi River as their own.

“GeoCorp developed PolCorp in an attempt to bring Omni back into the fold with force, or, preferably, the threat of force.” Jameson laughed. “They did too good a job, and PolCorp became an independent contractor, selling arms to both sides. After the tech expansion, it was only a few small steps to take what was learned and apply it to the military. GeoCorp couldn’t control their creation, and the war lasted for three years, ending in a draw. Supposedly, everything west of the Mississippi still belongs to GeoCorp, but what used to be called the Bible Belt was reduced to smoldering, radioactive ashes during the conflict. Of course, this led to the Denver population skyrocketing even more as the refugees streamed in.”

“So PolCorp is now independent?” Chris frowned at this thought. He didn’t like the company based on his experiences so far.

“Completely. They now work as security for a number of companies around the world. Ironically, that means they constantly come into conflict with each other. It’s all about the bottom line—the boys at the top making the big bucks don’t care if a majority of that money comes from their employees killing each other, and what do the employees care if the people they’re fighting work for the same company? Paid is paid, after all, and the PolCorp guys are paid well enough not to question their employers’ tactics.”

Chris looked doubtful. “If that’s the case, then why is all this public knowledge? Seems like people would try and keep a lid on that sort of thing.”

Jameson smiled. “I’m not part of the ‘public,’ Chris, if you haven’t figured that out yet. I work for GeoCorp.”

Chris leveled his gaze at the ring of gold fibers bound around Jameson’s finger. “So why are you helping me?”

Jameson locked eyes with Chris and said nothing.

Chris backed down first, swallowed, and changed the subject. “So what about this gang war?”

Jameson shrugged, “Civil unrest.”

Chris hesitated, scared to ask his next question. “What do you know about me, Doctor?”

Jameson smiled, almost warmly, “You are Dr. Christopher Nost, who spent the last forty-one—”

“That’s not what I mean,” Chris interrupted. “I mean … something happened to me a few nights ago … PolCorp stopped me and asked for papers, and …”

“…and?” Jameson gazed at Chris, looking interested for the first time.

“…and I don’t know. Everything got … slow. I don’t know how to explain it…”

“Dr. Nost, there’s someth—”

“And something else,” Chris said, not noticing Jameson had spoken. “There was this woman yesterday. I was at the Punt, trying to figure some stuff out. About myself. She seemed to know who I was. And she knew about you. She told me not to trust you.”

Jameson contemplated Chris for a long time before he spoke. “This woman … what did she look like?”

“She had red hair. Pretty. I don’t know … a really athletic build. You know who she was?”

“I give up.” Despite his words, Jameson looked at Chris as if he knew exactly who it was.

“She said she was Mary Frost. The granddaughter of the woman I supposedly murdered almost forty-five years ago.”

“Chris, let me tell you a few things.” Jameson leaned back into his chair, then shifted and leaned forward again.

“I’m listening,” Chris ground his teeth. You know something, you bastard. Tell me what you know.

“First, don’t trust that woman.”

“That’s what she said about you.”

“I’m serious, Chris,” Jameson took on the demeanor of a lecturing father. “You were lucky. That woman could be extremely dangerous.”

“How so?”

“She could try and kill you.” Jameson’s stare bored into Chris. He didn’t blink.

Chris didn’t back down. “She could try and kill me, huh? Why didn’t she, then?”

“Okay, Chris,” Jameson said, a look of resolution flitting across his face. “This is how it is. I studied you—for more than a decade I studied you, and I didn’t find anything different about you. I studied your theories, and … Chris, do you know what you were working on, before Frost’s murder?”

“No. Not really, anyway. Some sort of alloy or something.”

“No. That was what the press reported. What you developed was a theory that stated that if faster-than-light speeds could be reached, one would no longer be in this continuum, but would, rather, enter into some sort of ultraspace that could result in a sort of instantaneous travel—teleportation, for all intents and purposes. The work you did was based on Metastability theory and the universal skin. If there are Tardis regions in the universe, which are larger on the inside, then why not anti-Tardis regions outside the universe, smaller on the outside. The trick then becomes to pierce the universe’s skin without breaking the surface tension, so no one accidentally destroys it. Figure out how to do that, and time and space are completely navigable. Which you thought you figured out. Tons of work went into it in Switzerland. It was called the Second Paradigm Theorem. It was halted after Frost’s murder, and after you were shot it was dropped for good.”

Chris looked at Garret Jameson. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because, don’t you see? You don’t age. You can, apparently, control time. There’s something different about you. Your memory loss … God damn it! Don’t you see? I think you came across something, during your research. Something that changed you, gave you … something. I’m not the only one that knows about your research or your time in the hospital. Why do you think I told you to stay away from the authorities? If anyone else put two and two together.… You’re in danger, Chris. Whatever breakthrough you had in your work, it didn’t leave you with your memory intact. It’s your only hope.”

“Why do I think you already know the answer to that?”

“Here,” Jameson glanced around, ignoring Chris’s comment and slid a bundle of cloth across the table. “It was my father’s. I never leave the Corporate Zone, so I don’t need it, but you might find it useful.”

Chris unwrapped the old T-shirt and found an ancient semi-automatic handgun with an extra clip. The edges were rusty, but it looked well maintained.

“What’s this?”

“What does it look like?” Jameson asked. “Like I said, you could be in danger.”

Chris looked up to the barista, but he sat behind the bar reading Waiting for Godot. He wrapped the gun back up into the bundle and slid it under his coat.

Jameson nodded in approval and his emotionless eyes blinked once. “I’m telling you, don’t trust that woman,” Jameson stood to leave, but looked back at Chris over his shoulder. “For that matter, Chris, don’t trust me, either.”

1997: Garret’s Gambit

Traffic moved by Garret’s parked car as he prepared himself to see his wife for the first time in ten years. This was not going to be easy for him, but as important as it was, he couldn’t let it faze him. When he walked into that courtroom, he knew she would spot him and recognize him. And no matter what happened he had to be blasé and feign ignorance of her identity.

It was far too critical to get Nost pronounced guilty to allow emotion to overwhelm him. It would be a hell of a thing to see his dead wife and not acknowledge her.

Garret finished bracing himself and got out of the car, walking through the bright day towards the courthouse. The light traffic streamed down the streets, the beautiful day a stark contrast to the landscape of his heart. He walked, enjoying the feel of the sun warming his skin, giving him an internal glow.

As he ascended the stairs, he took one last moment to pause and observe the entryway to the Denver courthouse. The semi-circular building created a natural courtyard inside of its curve. Across Bannock, the street that ran in front of the building, was a long park with almost Greek-looking columned buildings along the sides.

Birds sang, traffic drove by, people walked through the park, and the smell of summer floated through the air. A small group played Frisbee across the street, and to the north, along the Sixteenth Street Mall, pedestrian traffic bustled. In less than four hours Garret hoped there would be blood on these steps. Not hope, he thought to himself, but fact. Fact born of necessity.

Assuming that everything went according to his plan, there would be. One last time he ran through all of the logistics and math behind his plan. Everything checked out once again. In four hours he would have completed the balancing actions needed to stabilize the greatest paradox in history and insure his wife’s survival. A winning situation no matter how you looked at it.

Allowing himself a slight smile, Garret finished ascending the stairs and walked into the courthouse. Moving from the sunlight’s warmth to the chilly air-conditioned and dim interior made goose bumps break out along his arms. Inside, the colors were all deep shades of tans and browns, giving the environment a rich but dark feeling. The drastic change in temperature sent chills down Garret’s arms as he approached the security checkpoint. Unloading his pockets of everything metallic, he walked through the primitive metal detector and then headed towards the chamber the trial was to be held in.

The people walking around were a mix of police officers, traffic violators, and the on-site staff of various clerks and vendors. No one looked particularly happy or even in a good mood.

Harder criminals destined for the trials came from the holding cells in the district six jail building, behind the courthouse and across the street. Garret had learned this when he studied the building and knew he wouldn’t run into the procession for the man he tried to condemn. Grateful for the small detail, he hid a smile.

As he walked into the trial, his breath momentarily caught. There she sat, about half way back in the observer section. The room had high, but large windows, much brighter than the hallway he had entered from. For a second it seemed as though the light shone on her alone, picking her out of the crowd and setting her apart with a glowing golden nimbus. For the briefest second, their eyes met.

He swallowed and forced himself to walk forward. Doing his best to ignore Wanda, he strode forward to the prosecuting attorney’s table and pulled out his seat. He sat down and purposefully started organizing his trial notes.

After a moment, he realized that his HUD contact lenses were reporting that Wanda had scanned him. She had spotted him then, and used her HUD to confirm his identity. He could almost feel her thoughts. She would be analyzing the possible reasons that he would be here. It would not take her very long to piece it together, he suspected. He had to hope that she held to her original course of action. If she didn’t, then this whole exercise would be wasted.

He watched the time on the old analog clock hanging behind the Judge’s bench. She should be getting up and departing in a few minutes, to prepare her sniper’s roost. The files had contained exact times on that. Sure enough, a few moments passed before she stood up and walked out of the courtroom.

Shortly after she left, the bailiff walked into the room to announce the judge’s entry. Garret stood up, as did everyone else in the room, and the judge walked in. As he took his seat something clicked inside Garret. He knew he would win the trial. He knew that Nost would be pronounced guilty. And above all, he knew that his wife would survive today, changing today’s history from a class six paradox to a class two.

Time: 1997
Location: Classified
Operation: Classified

Lucille Frost was in a daze. Fire danced through the air around her, kissing the ground in small streaks of red and blaring sirens made it impossible to hear even her own thoughts. The bit with the raining concrete and glass was well over by now, but the aftermath of the explosion was in many ways a more chaotic scene than the initial moment of the disaster had been.

Here and there were pockets of stillness, much like the one currently around her, found behind ambulances where people were sitting in dazed shock. Everywhere else, firemen, emergency medics, and policemen were hurrying around the scene attempting to contain the damage. They were failing for the most part. It wasn’t that they were not doing a good job, but the news teams that had been pushed off the site previously were now swarming underfoot and wreaking havoc on every attempt that the police made to settle the situation.

Because of the media frenzy, body bags were loaded into the ambulances hurriedly, and the news teams fed off the images they could capture of those sad black bags. This time period pushed death and tragedy in media. It wasn’t better or worse than the sensationalization of any other time period, just morbid.

Lucy drew in a ragged but deep breath and calmed herself enough to think. She was a combat specialist and a scene like this should not have shaken her nerves so severely. But something about this mission was really dulling her edge.

She had missed a lot of things recently that she should have caught and been prepared for. The half window, flying through the air, had nearly killed her. Instead, a local era police officer had sacrificed his life for her. It created yet another potential paradox, and right at the crux of a paradox she was supposed to be here to diffuse. Next on the list of deadly mistakes was the explosion itself.

Half of the building had been destroyed. That was even worse, definitely a paradox. Someone had wanted to kill her. She could deal with this, though; all she had to do was kill them first. Now that she knew the threat was there, counteracting it was a top priority.

The only reason she had not been at the office earlier was that Alexander Zarth had detained her in conversation to the point that she was late arriving at work. Highly suspicious, but he probably was not involved since it had resulted in her life being spared.

Possibility stretched out from this point, creating a matrix that she analyzed in her mind’s eye. Of all the courses that lay in front of her she could think of only one that might work, and it was to follow Zarth’s advice. Focusing her will she hopped forward in time, and north in space.

2044: New Denver, Colorado

Lucy Frost watched Garret leave the medical center with amusement. So this was his game. Everything that Alexander Zarth had told her checked out. So now she had to play her role in the events unfolding. Who would have thought that the critical point in the paradox’s formation actually occurred forty years after the paradox itself? With another effort of will she slipped sideways to confront Nost and push him in the right direction.

The building that she slipstreamed into could be described as nothing other than grungy. It was mostly empty, and the lights were low, masking what the few people present were doing in their computer booths.

The walls were dirty to the point that Lucy wondered if the air was safe to breathe. Random garbage lay unnoticed by the negligent cleaning staff, accumulating under desks and in corners. She spied Nost, hunched over his own terminal and obviously fully absorbed in whatever he was reading. His back was to her and he sat slumped in his chair, studying the screen in front of him.

Lucy walked up to him and stood behind him, reading over his shoulder. Interestingly, he was reading about her supposed death. “Old news, huh?” she purred. It gratified her to watch his spine straighten in surprise. “Now why would you be hunting through that stuff?”

Chris closed out the screen. “What’s it to you?” he asked, turning around to face her. Chris froze and swallowed when he looked at her, then said nothing more. His hand played with the keyboard. The spark of recognition had caught fire in his eyes.

“Curiosity, really,” Lucy said. “As I was going by I saw my name on your screen, so I stopped to have a look. When I saw you were reading about my grandmother’s murder, I couldn’t help but wonder why you were reading about it.”

“Your … grandmother?” Chris said. He didn’t sound like he believed her. “That explains the striking resemblance.”

“Yes, I know. I look exactly like her. Everybody who sees her picture says it.” She bit her lower lip and stuck out her hand, offering up introductions. “I’m sorry. My name is Mary. Mary Frost.” Chris shook with nervousness, but she wrote it off to the fact that he thought he addressed the supposed granddaughter of the woman he thought he had murdered.

Chris looked at her hand suspiciously, then took it, hesitantly, and shook it. His grip was weak and his palms mildly sweaty. This was a changed man from the confident and brilliant physicist she had talked to the day before, by her perspective. “I’m Geoffrey Garret. I was doing a little research on the project your grandmother was working on. I … I’m a scientist …”

So, he was being smart and hiding his identity. He had chosen a bad name to use, as she knew Garret poked around as a rogue agent from ten years up her stream. “Garret?” She looked at him, and then she pushed her gaze through him, for almost a minute. “I was looking for a Garret, actually, but I don’t think you’re him.” She gave him a quirky grin and watched his response to the pressure.

Everything Alex had told her led her to believe that she had to build Chris up to the brink of snapping if she was to survive the next few days. And observing him here today, it didn’t seem that it would be a difficult task. He was somewhat unhinged, and she saw rampant paranoia barely hiding under the surface layer of his thoughts.

“I doubt it,” Chris said, trying to mask his relief. “I haven’t been in the city too long.…”

“Oh no?” She smiled getting ready to go in for the kill.

He blinked and then answered her. “Well, no. I’ve only been around here for a couple of days.…”

Lucy leaned in close to Chris without warning, one hand cupping around his neck, and ran her tongue along the edge of his ear. She played up the sex kitten act; pushing him further off his mental balance. Chris tried to pull away from her, but she held him. “I know who you are,” she said, pulling back and looking into his eyes. She scanned what she saw there, pleased with herself. “I know what you are looking for, and you will find your answers.”

He shuddered. “That’s not possible. Look, I don’t know what you think you know, but you’re wrong.”

She leaned in closer until her lips were brushing against his ear, “It is you who are wrong; you to whom the truth will be revealed. You see, I know what you are, Chris,” she whispered before pulling back and looking at him once more. “Anyway, don’t trust Jameson. He’s a liar and worse. If you let him in,” she tapped a finger against Chris’s temple, “he’ll try to twist you and then destroy you. Meet him if you must—but be wary. Know that he is evil.”

Lucy hoped she had played that right. He looked beyond paranoid in her last glimpse of him, but he was a strong man in nineteen ninety-seven. So she turned around to drive home the point with one final shot. “See you around, Doctor.”

As the door closed behind her she hopped forward to continue observing him. Finally, she started to understand her true mission regarding this man.

2044 A.D.: New Denver, Colorado.

Alex watched Chris depart for the final time and let his holo drop as he sat thoughtfully in the Rangley Hotel lobby. After a few months of observation, he knew something was drastically wrong. His observations of Nost had shown him doing things that were on the brink of impossible.

A quote from an old C nineteen series of books came unbidden back to him … ‘that which is left, no matter how improbable, is your solution.’ A wide grin spread across his face. So that was the way of it. He mentally tipped his hat to his own mind in thanks. It was impossible for Nost to have learned the trick of time dilution with incremental steps, at least without having mastered basic travel first. Besides, what he had witnessed Nost do with dilution was beyond the scale of possible skill.

It was just too … smooth. There was no skipping in time, no breaks. He would have to be performing nanosecond leaps and already have been mostly done with his actions faster than the brain could fire the signals to move the body.

This meant that some other force had to be at work in his system. Something that allowed Chris to stretch time and move in a fashion that accelerated his subjective time. Alex pondered this for a bit, while sipping on a beer, and finally came to the conclusion that an outside force had introduced the ability.

The sole possibility that he could think of was a new time technology. And there were only one of two sources for that. Garret, who had exhibited none of the same traits, or Alex’s own fourth millennium contact, who would be sufficiently advanced to be hiding something like that.

So, even though he had hired Alex to deal with the situation, he was an active player in the game, even if his movements were invisible to Alex. The more he thought about it, the more this sounded like damn good fun to him.

Time to hunt then. And he knew where the hunt had to start. Alex focused and pushed himself forward, to the beginning.

2620: Tucson Arizona

The man sat down in the booth across from Alex. The Alex from the future watched from the back, where he poured nano machines into the glass that the man would be using. Subtlety was a game that Alex was gifted at. Frank, the owner of the bar, wandered into the back to fill the order of his only two customers, surprised to see Alex standing there holding a glass.

Alex winked at him as he handed him the glass, then put one finger over his pursed lips. Frank nodded and took the glass, filling it with the man’s drink then wandering back out into the main portion of the bar.

Alex kept his focus on the displaced nano machines, marking the progress of the set of orders he had programmed into them. The man from the future picked up his glass for a drink, unaware of the trap contained within it. Sure enough, as he sipped his drink and absorbed Alex’s nanos, they found a foreign technology. He grinned and started the hack to subvert a small but important percentage of them, enslaving them to his own will.

The man never noticed the internal war being waged in his blood stream by warriors smaller than the nucleus of one of his blood cells. It was a fast war, and one in which the enemy line never even realized it was under attack. When he finished the deed, his side emerged victorious; Alex sank almost all of the nanos out of the man’s body and into the wood of the table. Those would wait there for both men to leave so that the future Alex could claim them into his own system and figure out how to use them.

The ones he left in the other man’s body started on a new task, though: ripping apart a few of the man’s DNA chains and rebuilding them, as Alex’s own. It was delicate work, but done on a level of anatomy that the man would never think to check. He was going to have one hell of a rash in a few days though, when his body rejected the foreign cells.

Until then, a small piece of Alex would travel forward. Time theory was an interesting thing. So far no one had ever managed to travel forward from his or her own relative time. Theory ran something along the lines that each nexus of will, or human mind, left a unique signature on the time stream. Any choices leading up to that signature could be altered, but any choices of which that signature was a factor in could not be altered.

Basically, he could travel back but not forward past his point of origin. DNA was the key, and what it said to the nanos. Alex had always thought the ‘historical imperative’ theory was bunk. Time travel meant stepping across the threshold of the universe then stepping back in at the chosen time and place. The whole of the universe, from the outside, existed in a state of quantum flux. Not traveling forward from where you were was senseless. But, as senseless as it was, it was the limitation they all had to deal with.

It seemed to him like a bunch of gibberish that other people spouted to make it sound like temporal physicists understood something that they didn’t. Alex suspected that the truth was much simpler and the trick of it was that you could only travel as far forward as your genetic structure took you in history.

In simpler terms, things of the past were decided. The future was not for any given individual until such time as that body had inhabited the times of the historical nexus you wanted to travel to. What Alex was about to try was such a ridiculous concept that no one had ever thought of it. So ridiculous, in fact, that it was going to work.

Some part of him knew that and accepted it as fact. After the past version of himself had departed, as well as the man from C Forty-five, he walked to the table and placed his hand, palm down, onto the wood grain surface. He had always appreciated the fact that this bar had wood tables.

It was amazing what you could do with organic structures if you put your mind to the task. Concentrating, he pulled all of the nanos out of the wood and into himself, absorbing back both his own and the conquered machines.

Alex felt the new machines course through his system and started the replication process. He had to get enough of them active that the systems in them would be usable by his body mass. As they reached a substantial enough volume to allow him access to their programming features, he discovered that he had been right.

Good, he thought, I don’t have to waste time figuring out another angle. This man could also dilate time the way that Chris could. Alex grinned and froze time around him. Time continued on in a small bubble around him, but looking out the window Alex saw a remarkable sight.

The hot desert sun no longer created mirages. Cars were frozen in midair. A man drinking from a water fountain was frozen with droplets of water suspended in a dance around his mouth. Interesting. It seemed the differential they could create was about a factor of at least three thousand to one. Handy in a fight. The greater truth struck Alex before it became critical as well.

Stretching time this thinly also meant that he would run out of air within about a minute of his subjective time. And he would superheat anything he phased between time streams with any amount of kinetic energy. Like, for instance, air. Moving too fast while breathing would burn his lungs out of his chest.

Not a boundary he ever wanted to have to test. An easy enough solution offered itself though, always stay in motion, or briefly phase into standard time while breathing. And never forget that little tidbit.

He found one more subroutine in these new nanos and ran it; excited to see what other features they offered him. A grid appeared in his vision, printing across the center of his pupil. Letters started typing themselves out, until full sentences were formed asking him to set user parameters.

He sped time back up to its normal passage and breathed out a heavy breath. “Wicked …” he spoke to himself and kept it under his breath. “My own internal computer …” Alex grinned to himself about this newest discovery and started programming his computer. It was a surprisingly easy system to use and Alex had mastered the knack of it in no time flat.

The system responded to the signals his neural system sent to his own brain, so that by thinking to himself he could, in essence, ‘talk’ to the computer. It was a tremendously sophisticated system, which seemed to have an internal computer’s processing power well beyond any technology he had ever seen. All in all, not a bad find for the day.

Shortly thereafter, Alex Zarth did that which no human had ever done before; he pushed himself forward, past his own point of origin, and into the future.