Relativity Synchronization:
The Tenth Cause

2044: The Earth’s Rebellion

Filled with questions, Chris looked for a way down from the roof. He could see nothing from the side of the building that faced the street and the ruined, burning vehicles piled down below. Pausing, his mind replayed the scene that had just occurred; he decided to wait a few moments before leaving.

Far too shaken, more than anything he needed a few minutes to let his mind melt in the aftermath of recent events. So, he sat instead on the edge of the abandoned building, not looking at the wreckage below him, holding his head, eyes closed, and cursing softly to himself.

I want to remember. Oh, God, I want to remember. Shaken as it was, his mind went back to the prevalent theme it had been stuck on. He tried to think back to anything, anything, from before he woke in the hospital. Who was Lucille Frost? What was it like working with a woman he would kill—or arguing with her, as he must have? He sought anything that might shake loose a memory. Nothing came forward, so he switched the gears of his mind.

Another enigma, Dr. Garret Jameson teased his memory but, like all else in his life, was just another gap. Pushing onwards, he tried to remember his parents, his pets, the games he played as a child … but there was nothing there.

He tried to think more on his childhood—how he grew up, and where. Something seemed to unlock itself in his mind as he imagined himself as a child. Blue crept in at the edge of his vision and he saw the image of a young boy, who looked like him, playing some sort of superhero game. Turning back time and leaping ahead for the benefit of all mankind.

Like a Hero.… Like a God.… Like a Physicist.… And like that, he was back to the beginning again. The thread of memory, dangling somewhere in his mind, had tantalizingly presented itself to him and he had fumbled it.

I’m thinking in circles, Chris thought. I need to get out of here. Now. Blood pulsed through his hands as he pushed them down hard on his thighs, using the pressure to force his body into motion again. The post adrenal pit receded, and he started to feel normal again, given certain values for normal. He forced himself to his feet and walked the perimeter of the roof.

A suitable climbing spot hid among the industrial solar cells, giant panels lined up in rows, near the back of the building. A gutter drain bolted to the old brick wall looked secure enough to hold his weight peeked over the top of the crenellated edge of the roof.

He swung himself over and hung suspended by his fingertips for a moment before he could find an awkward toehold on the pipe, above a bracket. He slid his hands over to the drain. Oh my God, Chris thought of the irony inherent in this climb. If he were to fall now and die alone in the alley, after being rescued in such an odd fashion, it would be a bittersweet ending. How did he get me up here, anyway? Chris wondered. Certainly not by the route I am taking down now.

He shimmied down until he was about ten feet off the ground and dropped the rest of the way, twisting his ankle on a broken brick as he landed. He cursed and staggered around in a small circle until the pain subsided enough that he wasn’t limping anymore. He grimaced once more, mostly for good measure, and set off. In the narrow alley, he could not see the Corporate Zone, but by his calculations, it was to his right, so he stumbled to the mouth of the back street and turned that way. Sure enough, the wall of lights shimmered about six miles away. The sight comforted him.

When he had woken up, dazed and confused on a hospital bed, those tiny points of light streaming between the highest towers had seemed so alien. The State of Emergency must be over, Chris thought about that for a moment. PolCorp must have forced the fighting south again. It has to be coming straight towards me now.

Chris stumbled down the street, not caring anymore if he was shot or stabbed or taken to prison or tortured to death behind a dumpster. Tired of thinking, the only reason this situation wasn’t more confusing was that everything was confusing. In the midst of a hurricane, sleeting rain did not seem that bad. He had had no idea what was going on since waking in the hospital three days ago.

For all he knew they were all lying to him. Maybe he’d only been asleep for a week. Maybe they had the technology to erase his thoughts and give him new ones; make him think he was Chris Nost, the murderer, the amnesiac, the physicist. Possibly, the god of time. With his memory being completely wiped, they could tell him anything. Hell, the possibility existed that the doctors had wiped out his memory at his own request.

But I can still control time. He knew that for sure. I don’t know how. He chuckled to himself and kicked at a bottle lying in the gutter, half-full of yellow water. It flew twirling into the fractured Plexiglas of an abandoned storefront, spewing its contents in an arc before exploding in a spray of glass and leaving a wet spot on the dried mud that crusted to the window’s remnants.

At the precise moment the bottle impacted against the window, the ground leapt and a great groan emitted from everywhere at once. Chris stumbled backwards, looking around, expecting to see another Hummer rumble around the corner, ready to do battle. But everything around him shook. The streetlights, long extinguished, swayed in front of him, and debris rained down from the buildings all up and down the street.

Further on, now only a mile distant from where he stood, Chris could see the power flickering off, then on, then off for good as the earth shook again. The great towers of the Corporate Zone a few miles past swayed, and the lights of the cruisers swarmed in all directions. Then, in a blink, all went black for a moment—even the multitude of colored lights of the Corporate Zone; before the streets were once again lit, this time by a dim, yellow light that reminded Chris of the desk light in his room at the Rangely Hotel.

An earthquake? It didn’t seem right, but nothing else could explain it. He couldn’t make any association in his fragmented mind between Denver and earthquakes. He regained his footing and watched dim lights flicker in groups across the Corporate Zone.

Chris ran toward the Rangely. He figured by the towers in the Corporate Zone, barely visible on the dark horizon, that he still had a mile or so to go. How did I wander so far out here? he wondered. Not for long though. I’m not going to drive myself crazy by thinking in circles. Not anymore.

In a few minutes he arrived again in more populated areas. A few blocks further on and he recognized Jones Drugs & Merchandise. Little knots of people stood or milled around, sifting through piles of rubble, trying to reclaim lost goods or save people lost to cave-ins.

For the most part, no serious harm was done. Though buildings had collapsed, the roads themselves were still whole and no worse for the wear than they had been previously. He heard someone in one of the little groups ask an old lady whether there had ever been an earthquake in Denver before; her answer was a definitive no.

A rock solid certainty concreted in his gut. This has something to do with me. I have enemies, and I have friends, and I have no idea who any of them are, but we are all somehow involved in something huge. Something gods would be involved in. And our actions have caused this.

Half a block away from Jones Drugs, Chris fell. He didn’t even at first know how he came to land flat on his face, until he realized that, although he had landed on the ground, he still felt as though he were falling. He heard a loud pop to his left and, rolled over in time to see the darkened Jones Drugs & Merchandise collapse with a groan in a shower of sparks and a geyser of dust that filled the parking lot.

People screamed, cries of panic intermingling with the cries of pain, and Chris sat up in time to see a house, easily a hundred and fifty years old, fold into itself and collapse in a plume of wreckage, dust obscuring the last vestiges of its attempt to stand against the earthquake.

A woman outside lay on the ground screaming and covering her ears, her legs caught under a large piece of mortar, as the earth continued to shake. Amidst all the dust and destruction raining around them, what hit Chris the hardest was the trail of clean skin being ripped free, streaking through the grime, on the trapped woman’s face.

Somehow, Chris got first to his knees, then he gained his feet, and staggered out of the way as a huge old cottonwood tree shuddered and toppled, splintering at the base, into the street. The jagged stump stuck up into the air like a serrated blade of torn wood. Why isn’t it stopping? he wondered as air-raid sirens began to wail.

It seemed like it lasted forever. Chris’s mind slipped as he half-walked, half-crawled down the street. He caught his foot on a widening crack in the street and fell on his face again. He had not yet regained his feet before a line of tall apartments a block down collapsed in a roar even louder than that of the rolling earth, filling the street with rubble that stopped a few feet in front of Chris.

As he got to his feet, another sudden lurch sent him sprawling. A cruiser, out of control, soared five feet above Chris’s prone body before careening into the ruins of the apartment complex. The sputtering roar of its engines drowned out everything and he felt an intense heat on his back before he heard a shattering crunch and the sound of tearing metal. Fire billowed out of a gutted out pile of metal and concrete that used to be a building, then died down, leaving only the charred dead behind.

Just as suddenly, it was over. It had seemed like an eternity to Chris, though in truth the entire experience had lasted just a few seconds. The earth stopped shaking, the bass groan of it replaced by the sounds of the dying, and the distant wail of PolCorp sirens.

The slow creaks and groans of buildings hung in the balance between staying upright and collapsing in defeat created a background tempo to the other noises in the quake’s aftermath. The air-raid system had long since stopped its wailing and the yellow emergency lights had been snuffed into darkness. The only light now was that of the fires all around and the sweeping beams of Emergency Cruiser spotlights seen in the distance through rolling clouds of dust and smoke.

So much smoke, Chris thought. Since I woke up, everything is covered in smoke. I’m in a war, and I don’t know whose side I’m on. Hell, I don’t even know if there are sides. He rolled over into a fetal position and buried his face in his hands. He wanted to wake up, and remember, and know this wasn’t the real world. Not only to wake up and be in ‘his time,’ but to know, without a doubt, that the world could never really be like this. What’s wrong with them? What’s wrong with these people? I … I’m not like them. I’m a man, who’s forgotten and been forgotten.

And Chris felt something, felt the little holes of nothing that make up everything all around him. He reached out to them, could look through them, look until … until he saw how to fold the tesseract.

Chris opened his eyes. The early dawn light of morning surrounded him and the frigid fall night gave way to morning's warmth. He could see the azure canopy of the sky through swirling, gray smoke above him. The smoke didn't trail up like the smoke of a cheerful fire, but rather the dense gray smoke of destruction. I fell asleep, he thought. Or something like that, anyway. He realized that his system had been overloaded and he had shut down.

Rising to his feet, he stretched out his abused muscles and got his blood to start circulating again. His coat felt stiff, moving unnaturally against his body as he stood, so he took it off, only to find that the back was charred and torn beyond repair. He almost threw it on the ground until he remembered the old pistol, now visible at his waist. He put the coat back on.

The screams of the dying he remembered hearing the night before were replaced by quiet moans and whimpers. Or silence, from most directions. But coming from the apartment building up the block were several muted cries for help. Staggering over to the remnants of the building, he tried to sift through the rubble, but pain lanced up his arm as if it had broken. He kicked at the larger chunks in frustration, feeling sick every time he heard another faint cry for help coming from the wreckage.

He cradled his injured arm, probing at it. Not broken, but damaged. Thank god for small miracles. He started walking away from the collapsed building, moving until it was out of earshot.

Scanning the sky, he looking for an Emergency Cruiser to flag down when he found his eye drawn instead to the Corporate Zone. What once had looked like a great shimmering wall now more resembled a shattered crystal palace, still brilliant but fractured and strewn about in deadly pieces. Executives who live in glass houses should not throw stones. The thought made him laugh.

Many of the highest buildings had broken off; the remnants stood barely twenty stories, shorter in some cases, and dozens of plumes of black smoke stretched like thin twisted fingers into the placid, cloudless sky. That’s where they are, Chris thought, and gave up on being the hero. He jogged toward the Rangely. He passed groups of people, coughing and crying and begging each other to help uncover their mother, or their lover, or their brother, or their best friend. Chris ran by, ignoring their pleas and pushing back the tears in his eyes.

After a few blocks, he heard a sound from a half crushed Public Information booth. Curious what might be being reported, he walked over and peeled the twisted door off the wreckage with his good hand, revealing the rolling image on the fractured monitor. The volume tried harder to stabilize, his presence tripping its sensors, and Chris heard a few snippets.

“… world … Australia … Europe … parts … Scientists don’t yet … ‘there are many things in nature, poorly understood.’”

The last was a man in a white coat who spoke with a thick French accent. He stood near a river, the rubble of a European city visible behind him. Paris, Chris thought. How did I know that? But he would bet on it. That man was in Paris, a city he had no actual memory of outside the name, yet somehow Chris knew it. There was no Eiffel Tower standing in the wrecked cityscape behind the reporter. So whatever that was, it happened all over the world, Chris thought. And in the same way he knew that was Paris shown on the P.I. Box, he would bet it had something to do with him.

Half a block from the Rangely, Chris came across Rat. He lay on his back, grinning with glazed eyes, cut in half at the chest by a half-ton block of masonry from one of the small, old office buildings that dotted the area.

The sight filled Chris with a sense of loss. He was the only one I’ve met so far that I could trust. Sorry I never got to look you up, pal. At least you finally kicked that cough. With a chest tight from sorrow, Chris knelt over the dead man and shut his eyes. For no reason he could think of, he pulled two coins out of his pocket and placed them over the eyes he had closed. He stood back up and finished walking to his hotel.

The Rangely was better off than some of the other buildings on the street, though glancing around the side he saw the back third of it had collapsed. Poor Charlie, thought Chris. I wonder if he’s okay. Chris realized then that he trusted Charlie, too, and laughed, despite himself, at the friends he’d chosen.

Charlie swept broken glass and wood splinters out the front door. Smoke rolled from somewhere behind the desk, which didn’t seem to concern him. He stopped sweeping when he saw Chris and leaned forward on his broom. “I didn’t see you leave again.” He looked Chris up and down, genuine shock in his eyes. “Man, you look like shit. What the hell’d you do in the last fifteen minutes?”

“What are you talking about, Charlie?” Chris got that feeling again, deep in the pit of his stomach. Something more than it seemed was happening here.

“I mean, you walk in looking sharp fifteen minutes ago, you walk in now looking like shit. Don’t tell me, you’ve been in a coma,” he snorted at his own wit, genius insight in Charlie’s world, and Chris couldn’t begrudge him that.

Chris looked at Charlie, who shifted uncomfortably when he got no response. He said nothing, trying to catch up to his spinning mind and see the bigger picture.

Charlie got a slight red flush to his cheeks and said, “Hey, man, fuck you. I didn’t mean nothing by it. I’m curious, is all, to how you could get all jacked up like that in fifteen minutes …”

Chris spun on his heel and marched up the stairs toward his room, pulling the old gun from under his coat. Time to sort this out.

“Holy shit, man, I haven’t seen a Glock in years!” he heard Charlie say behind him, but the clerk didn’t follow him up the stairs despite his apparent excitement.

2873: Alexander Zarth’s Isolation Compound

Cold scotch burned its way down Garret’s throat and a burst of heat flooded through his body. He twirled the glass in his hand, watching the amber liquid form a whirlpool through the center of the cubes of ice. He grimaced and gulped down the rest of his drink.

He looked up through his tears. The universe reeled around him as he stared again at his dead wife. Standing in front of him, in his subjective time. And his age; even more beautiful than the day he thought he had lost her. The impossible had happened.

“Wanda.” He cleared his throat. “Why? Why haven’t you sent me word? Why have I been made to suffer this?”

His wife, standing alive and beautiful in front of him, smiled sadly. Both happiness and pain twinkled in her eyes. “Love, I had no choice. Alex trapped me here. And with what I’ve learned over the last ten years, I agree with his decision, as hard a decision as it has been on us.”

“How could you agree with it?” he managed “I … I was torn apart. Damn it, I thought you were dead.” His fingers dug into the arm of the chair as his fists tightened.

Again that sad smile graced her lips. “Because ultimately, what you are doing must be done, and no one else could have initiated it. Only you, Love. Like Alex said, you’ve made mistakes in your path, but regardless, no one but you could actually have set these events in motion. And to have not done what he did would have created an even bigger paradox.”

Worry lines creased her eyes as she smiled sadly to her husband. “Please understand why, Love. The last ten years have ripped me apart too, to know that you lived through the deception. But each of us must do what we must. I know it hurts you to hear this, but personal, no matter how close to the heart, is not the same as important. This was important, James.”

Her words splashed like ice-cold water across his face. James fought down ten years of loss to ask the next question, somehow forcing his voice to stay level. “What, then, would be paradoxical? Why did this situation require me to do what I have done? To lose you?”

Wanda sat down across from him and sighed. “I don’t pretend to understand the entire math set behind the situation, but let me try to explain this for you in the way I came to understand it. The paradox is that without Lucille Frost’s murder, Christopher Nost would never have invented time travel. Yet for Lucy to create the situation in which Chris could make the discovery she had to travel almost nine hundred years into the past; and be alive while he made the discovery. Are you with me so far?”

Garret nodded. “Of course. This is all basic, not at all difficult. A displaced cause and effect chain which requires the effect in order to create the situation in which the cause can exist. It does get a bit slippery when you add in the multiple state matrixes of her simultaneous life and death, but I’m sure it is solvable. It has to be.”

He leaned forward, scratching his chin as he went on. “In a way, if you look at time travel as an object, it is an ontological paradox. Just like any other bootstrap paradox, it creates the conditions for its own existence. Frost would be another, if you argued that alteration of the time stream would not produce her.”

Wanda noted that her husband seemed to be moving out of the emotional overload and instead heading into his analytical headspace. A good sign. This was a James Garret that could hold her in his heart long enough to do what he must do. And one that she could heal after that was done.

“Here is where it gets … odd then. Lucy would never have been sent back on her mission—less than one year ago for us, if not for you having shown up and altering the outcome of the trial. And ten years ago, I would not have been sent back, if not for Lucy getting killed on her mission now.”

Garret pursed his lips and shook his head. “That cannot be. Paradox is linear and has to travel in one direction or the other to build itself. Your piece of the equation should be a reset point, creating a secondary paradox line which masked the first.”

“No, James. That is where the Time Corp went wrong. Our math systems are … bluntly put, wrong. They work in a limited fashion, but apparently in certain functions they fall apart. Here, James. Solve this problem.” Wanda waved her hand over the hologrid sensor and sketched out equations in the air. The blue letters, symbols, and numbers of quantum calculations and paradox resolution theory cast a minute reflection in James’s eyes.

James bent to work on the problem, filling up the space in front of himself with floating notations as he worked out a solution to the paradox. His brow creased as he got further into the problem until he sat back, eyes closed, and drummed his fingers on the seat’s armrest. His fingers knocked the antimacassar off the arm, but he didn’t notice. Reopening his eyes, he looked back to the page in his other hand, then back up to Wanda.

“Okay. Not solvable with modern math. I see your point. Now where the hell did you find this? I’ve never seen a problem like this one. Hell, I never even thought up anything with these variables or anything like them.”

Wanda looked grim. “It’s the equations surrounding your jump back into Christopher Nost’s trial. There were certain key points to the jump that you were missing, and that is the whole of the problem. It includes the changes you have made in that time stream. And it is the first such paradox in known history. So don’t feel bad. As brilliant as you are, Love, you’re still human.” She knew he tended to be hard on himself when he thought he had overlooked information.

Garret looked again to the page in his hand as comprehension dawned on him. “Then … but …” he sighed in frustration. “Okay. I’ll buy it then. How the hell do you work this out?”

Wanda keyed open the wall display unit and brought up a section of the materials she had been studying for the last several years. “Our understanding of paradox was incomplete. As I understand this information, there are three types of paradox. The first is a closed loop. Closed loops are the traditional paradox type, already known to us. Everything the Time Corp has dealt with in the past are closed loop paradoxes, which you already understand.”

Wanda scanned forward in the information on the wall display and continued talking. “Here is where we move into the new math. The second type of paradox, which appears to be what we are locked into, is most easily called an open loop paradox. It destabilizes time as much as a closed loop, but in this case it’s basically a situation in which time cannot move forward unless the paradox occurs, because a factor, or effect, from the ‘future,’ creates a condition which is necessary for the cause which will produce it. Here is the kicker, James— the effect must be the sole unique condition which can create the cause.”

Garret leaned his head back and stared at the ceiling for a minute, absorbing the information. Something in his mind clicked into place and he leaned back forward. “I see. Please continue.”

Wanda smiled in pride. “The third is the destructive force behind paradox. Alex refers to it as a ‘Point of Origin’ paradox. It occurs when you take an open loop and try to resolve it with closed loop mathematics. It’s kind of like taking a bootstrap paradox and trying to resolve where the object was before, or after for that matter, the loop. Resolving Point of Origin paradox does not, however, shatter history, as we have always thought. This is the weirdest thing I’ve ever seen. Truly it is. What Point of Origin paradox does is create the mythical divergent time stream. The reason you were never able to find it when you sought it is fairly simple too.”

She licked her lip as she thought, then continued. “Divergent time splits backwards, James. It doesn’t change what happens moving forward, it changes everything downstream to create a set of events that could have produced the paradox. Imagine time as a lightning bolt, striking down from the sky and hitting history, which is a tree rooted in the ground. The tree grows up, so we perceive a forward, or upwards motion through time, but when the lightning hits, the motion rips through it in a way that we perceive as backwards to the growth momentum, or motion.”

James sat bolt upright, jaw agape. “How has no one in the history of … history, ever thought of that? There isn’t some science fiction novel somewhere that speculates something like that?”

Wanda shrugged. “Not that I’ve found.”

“The hells.” James bent over the problem. “In a non-relativistic framework, when we embrace that the universe isn’t linear, but mashed into a giant ball, that would mean that paradox is a fracture? So time is like a … pincushion? That is seriously all that a paradox does? A little puncture—then it just heals over?”

“Not exactly. But you are on the right track at least partially. James, I just spent a decade figuring this out.”

He nodded, distracted. “I’m forgetting something simple, aren’t I? Of course I am. Heliosheaths. The big bang casts a protective sheath around the temporal universe. So … surface tension.” He scrabbled furiously in the air, blue tracers flowing from his fingers as he worked the hologrid.

He muttered as he went. “Could there be a temporal version of Metastability?” Finally he looked back up to Wanda, and she could see genuine fear in his eyes. He said the only thing that came to his mind. “There’s no unifying theory … Oh, fuck.”

Time: 2873
Location: Director Arbu’s home; Aspen, Colorado
Operation: Recovery

The future was a bleak place from where he stood, looking into the past. Arbu meditated over the things he had learned in his office that day. Questions swam through his mind and sixty-four years of life and experience pushed one of them to the forefront. Will there be a tomorrow?

Always, humanity had weathered the darkness of the night by knowing deep within the collective soul this one thing: that with tomorrow will come the sunrise. When all is obscured by the darkest hour, humanity has known as a race that the brilliant hues of sunrise are just over the horizon. If only they could survive that long.

And as a byproduct of millions of years of evolution, those very processes forced Arbu to come face to face with events that challenged the very foundations and precepts of his faith, while admitting to himself that he was part of the chain of causes that had unfolded into this. The sun might not rise from the darkness of this night he had helped create. But there was one other who could see further than him and maybe had set the stage for his actions. He had to hope.

Scenarios of destruction played themselves out in his head, but Arbu fought the oppressive weight of them and reached for the light deep within himself, standing and pushing his body into motion. The body, mind, and soul must be one.

And to center his body would then center also his heart and soul. Cleansing his body came as second nature to a man of Arbu’s background, having traveled the ages and studied under most of the great martial masters. He focused on the core of his being, finding the stillness inside.

He raised his hand, flattening his palm until the edge of his hand mimicked that of a knife’s blade. With a delicate sweeping motion, arcing around the front of his body, he traced a semicircular blocking motion, pivoting as the arc concluded, allowing the block to continue in a circular motion. This transferred the movement’s energy to his hips as his balance shifted forward to his left and his other hand snaked outwards in a lazy motion, striking an invisible opponent in front of him.

He held the pose, poised between block and strike, feeling the symmetry and balance of his body, allowing his subconscious to be eased by the control he exhibited over his muscles and balance. With no visible signs of warning, he sprang into action, allowing his reflexes to rule his movements, losing himself in the lightning fast motion of his martial dance.

Over and over he struck at non-corporeal opponents, lashing out and striking down his doubts as though they were enemies standing in front of him, barring his way to resolution.

As his movements quickened, the man re-emerged who had trained Wanda Garret, as well as most of the other agents in the modern Time Corp, to fight using basic and temporal combat skills. His tempo sped up, the dance becoming more and more intricate. Quick sidesteps through time made it appear as though he had several bodies, all seamlessly flowing through the stances, fighting side by side and using each other’s movements to create perfect symmetry.

The dance reached a climax, moving so fast that all of the multiples of Arbu appeared as one blurry man, moving faster than the eye could track.

Reality snapped and once more he was a single man, standing at the ready, focused in poise and in spirit. Sweat poured down his face and chest, but his breathing remained steady and slow, not showing any signs of exertion.

Relaxing his mind, will, and body, he stepped back off his mat, bowed to the invisible opponent, and then turned around and walked into his house. A solution had presented itself to him; now he had a course of action. And because director Arbu was a learned man who happened to be fairly wise, he took a hot shower and then went to sleep, in order to be well rested when he started his journey.

2001 A.D.: Denver, Colorado

Alex watched Garret sit in his car with interest. He seemed to be fighting some internal demons, which gave Alex a greater scope of understanding regarding the man. Perhaps he had realized that there were some factors that he missed, or perhaps not.

Alex suspected that he was readying himself to be in the same room as his dead wife without breaking. Regardless, Alex’s course of action remained unchanged. Focusing his will on the immediate area, he spread his senses outwards until he found the Hazer he had placed across the street.

Once he had located it, remote activation was simple. He ran a diagnostic, making sure that time had not decayed it. All systems checked out as fully operational. He smiled to himself and walked back to his car.

Like a fine wine, he could taste epic events unfolding, and it was exhilarating. Time for him to start preparing for his role. He turned around and glanced to the courthouse a block away. He could make out James Garret walking inside. Good. Garret was right on time.

Turning back to the black sedan he favored in this era, he popped the trunk open and started suiting up with his gear. He had a small list of items he needed for this task.

The first was a small air filter and tank, entirely self-contained. The design was a compact modification to standard SCUBA gear that had been created for U.S. Special Forces in the late twenty-second century. It provided about five hours of breathing in any situation. He slid the small tank into a special holster he had designed. The holster hung under his right arm and was obscured by his coat.

The second object he slid to its rest under his other arm. It was a Desert Eagle fifty caliber, modified to fire tranquilizer rounds. He had replaced the firing mechanism with another Special Forces design, one with an electro-thermal sequencer. The rounds it held were modified as well, from a twenty-fifth century recipe that knocked out the target and left them down for about two hours.

These were the third and final materials he pulled out of the trunk, loading them into his pistol and readying one backup clip. Though if it came to needing a second clip, he was probably already well past the point of being screwed. He pulled his black canvas duster across his chest, snapping it taut across his shoulders, and then took a deep breath, relaxing himself.

His timing would have to be perfect. Otherwise, he’d have to risk additional paradox to replay the events. As he scanned the visible areas around him, he spotted an old man watching him and talking to himself. The man looked like another part of the homeless population so prominent in this era, but better to be safe than sorry.

Alex had his computer run a quick scan and the man showed no anachronistic technology. Good, not another piece of the equation. He already had too much to keep track of right now. Any more could throw a wrench in the plan.

The grungy old man smiled at Alex and then walked to a full trashcan, which he started rooting through and pulling tin soda cans out of. Alex laughed at his own paranoia. Then he spotted the agent walking out of the courthouse. Wanda Garret, not just a well-trained Time Corp agent, but one of the very best, was right on time. Alex grinned. If only the rest of the universe had been trained to keep such a tight schedule.

Blues shifted to purples in the sky as Alex accelerated time and walked over to Wanda Garret. He tracked her movements, following a couple of feet behind her as she moved. She crossed the street, then stopped and scanned the area before entering the building she had chosen to be her sniper’s roost. His first system went well, she missed him standing in front of her in accelerated time.

He grinned to himself and walked to a nearby coffee shop on the Sixteenth Street Mall to kill a few minutes of the trial. If he showed up too early for Wanda’s shot, he would increase the odds of her being able to detect him.

At the coffee shop, he stopped in the restroom to relieve himself; best not to have the jitters. He froze as he walked past the mirror. Streaked along the left side of his jaw was an ugly black and red bruise. He turned to analyze himself in the mirror. Nothing had happened to him to explain this. He sought his answers of his computer.

Computer, is this physical bruising a result of the procedures you performed on me in the fortieth century?

‘Negative. I believe it is a result of you having broken one of the laws of temporal physics and traveled ahead of your own subjective time. My data is showing that pieces of your body are aging to match up with the future time you visited. No data is present to explain why this did not occur while I kept you asleep in the future.’

Alex waved his hand. Easy. I was still there. Alex thought about the answer for a moment, connecting the mental dots. I believe I see. If my understanding of this phenomenon is correct I will essentially begin randomly aging in a much-accelerated fashion, as pieces of my body catch up and die. To all outward appearances I will appear to have leprosy. Is this summation correct?

The computer responded, ‘This is a correct summation. I have also run several thousand resolution scenarios, and I have not yet found a cure to this for you. With your permission I will continue to divert a piece of my processing power to curing you.’

Alex grinned at his marred reflection. Permission granted. This does mean, however, that I will have to change my plan in dealing with Wanda Garret. I will need your assistance in setting up a compound and situation in which she will be a forced captive for a ten-year period. Also, this scenario must contain the ability for her to read information I leave for her on a computer. I no longer have the time to personally oversee her tutelage. The scenario is also restricted to her point of origin in twenty-seven seventy-three for her and James’s subjective reasons. His mind spun, calculating all the possible scenarios as fast as he could.

There was nothing for it; he’d need to have a facility to take Wanda to. Frustrated, he threw his paper towel in the trash and then stretched his will. He arrived in a beautiful, lush countryside, greener than any other era he had visited. Planet-wide environmental controllers kept the time verdant and optimized for species balance. Alex breathed, enjoying the freshness of the air, then stared at the stack of materials at his side. He had no worries about being caught here, since the Corps wouldn’t be looking in their own time for him. The real pressure was his weakening body.

Alex had pushed himself forward in time to the twenty-ninth century in order to build a secure compound capable of containing the world’s best Time Corp’s agent. Not an easy task, but with the aid of construction bots, the whole process took him less than a week of his subjective time, during which the bruise across his jaw grew to about twice its original length.

He spent a lot of time reflecting on interrupting his mission to do this, but he couldn’t find a way around it with his newfound condition. Over the course of the week he also discovered similar bruises across his chest, back, and legs. The infection of temporally maladjusted cells grew too quickly. At the rate they were spreading, he wasn’t even sure if he could finish what he had to do.

But, never one for melancholy thoughts, Alex enjoyed the countryside and time he had while wrapping up the intricate jail. He found no small irony in the fact that the woman he wanted to imprison was at the same time training for the mission he would be interrupting.

Once the compound was complete, with a renewed sense of urgency, Alex jumped back to the early twenty first century to capture Wanda Garret.

He reappeared in the same spot, both spatially and temporally, which he had departed from. Walking back out of the restroom, then out of the coffee shop, he headed towards the spot that Wanda had chosen. Jumping ahead and being forced to do so much between moments here in the past had thrown his sense of timing off by a small fraction.

He hoped he wasn’t walking onto the scene too late. As he rounded the corner that would place him in her line of visibility, he phased into accelerated time while slipping his oxygen tank on.

Glancing to his right, he saw that a crowd was already beginning to form around the courthouse and that Wanda’s target was in the crowd. Cursing under his breath, he sped to the building with her sniper roost, and up the stairs.

His timing was, by sheer stint of luck, immaculate. Her back tensed up, lining up the shot as he walked in. Positioning himself between the room’s light and Wanda, he pushed himself into the fastest accelerated time he could. Purples shifted to deep reds outside the window. He glanced to the crowd outside. She was almost perfect on her shot, despite the Hazer. He cursed to himself and pulled his pistol out. Sucking in a deep breath and lowering his oxygen mask, he braced himself. He phased into standard time flow, casting a shadow over Wanda right as she started pulling the trigger of the tripod-mounted pistol.

Wanda tried to pivot to assess the threat behind her. Her pistol slammed back against her shoulder then spun out of its tripod and went sliding across the room. Alex smiled. That could not have gone any better for him.

Screaming and sounds of panic came from the direction of the courthouse. Alex had his Desert Eagle pointed straight at her face and he could see her eyes looking straight up the barrel of it, trying to penetrate the shadows that meant her death. He felt her try to slipstream to safety and blocked it. Alex deactivated the Hazer and, using his peripheral vision only, scanned the scene out the window. At a cursory glance it looked like everything had gone well. As Alex stared down at her he winked and grinned. “You missed, Wanda.”

She gasped in recognition after he spoke. “Alexander Zarth. Pleasure to finally meet you. Though I would have preferred a less … intimate setting.”

Alex chuckled, “The pleasure is all mine,” and pulled the trigger. Wanda slumped back as he holstered his pistol. Scanning the room, Alex picked up all of her effects and tools, then he grabbed Wanda herself and hopped forward in time to the prison he had built for her.