Authors: Cam Rogers
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“I’m fine. Busted my knee a few years back, is all.”
“Hockey?”
“I was … in a car accident.”
It clicked: the ignition in Nick’s cab, slaved to a Breathalyzer. Nick “The Prez” Marsters. Jack knew this story. It had made the news a year or so before Jack left Riverport.
The realization must have been all over Jack’s face because Nick rolled his eyes, laid his head back, and said to the ceiling: “It wasn’t like the news reported it. I wasn’t drunk.” Shooting Jack a glance: “I wasn’t.
Drinking,
yes. Drunk, no.”
Jack went looking for coffee, found the kitchen had been used more often than cleaned. The fridge was empty, save for four small cartons of milk, a jar of pickled ginger, two bottles of sterilized water, and a decaying clutch of rubber-banded shallots. Coffee was in the cupboard, the milk was barely decent, and the sink held a stack of plates textured with outcroppings of dark green mold. That would have been the musty scent that Nick found so familiar.
The faucet juddered and spat. He rinsed the kettle, lit the burner, set the water to boil, then wandered back to ask Nick how he took his coffee.
“It was a pedestrian,” Nick said. “They popped up in the middle of the road, I swerved and the car I was driving barrel-rolled through a fence and destroyed a gazebo.”
Jack hooked a thumb back toward the kitchen. “Black?”
“A
judge’s
gazebo.”
Nick was asleep on the couch by the time the coffee was ready. Jack cleared a space among the papers on the dining table, set both cups down, and took a seat. Morning light brought out more color in the place. Coffee steam rose fragrant and pleasing from Jack’s faded mug. Washed-away lettering advised never ever, ever, ever giving up. It was a Churchill quote. Jack’s father had given him the mug when he started taking guitar lessons.
His high school yearbook lay open on a page of class photographs. The university security guard looked back at him in black and white, thirty pounds heavier and braces on his teeth.
Jack memorized his name.
At that moment, Paul was off-site in an operations room composed of a nine-rack of monitors and three operators handling six different hazmat drones—not so different from those used for exploring radioactive death zones, though these had finer motor control. Here, within the green zone of the area designated in official Monarch documentation as Ground Zero, Paul watched as tracked, claw-handed drones and lumbering quanton-insulated scientists worked the forsaken landscape within Warehouse 21B. The view these multiple screens offered was not always perfect. The crews at Ground Zero had to replace cameras frequently. Not much survived in the red zone.
“It pains me that Will is going to be remembered as a lunatic,” he said to Sofia. “That his theories were never taken seriously.”
Sofia leaned into one console, bending the thread-mic toward her. “Doctors Connor and Chang, please attend to remote unit C. One of the receivers has degraded. Thank you.” She turned to Paul. “As will you, so you tell me.” She snapped a penlight on, flicked the beam from his left eye to right and back again, snapped it off. “As will I, for all the work I’ve done here.”
“The activation of the machine fractured the Meyer-Joyce field. The Fracture will grow, universal chronon count will hit zero, and time itself will end.” This was fact. “In that sense humanity is not going to remember anything: trapped, unaware, in a submoment self-dividing into infinity. Those of us chosen to go on will be tortured by more important things than a lack of recognition.” He sighed. “But we have five more years. Time enough for Project Lifeboat to be properly developed and become operational.”
Sofia pressed two fingers to his carotid. “About that,” she said. “I have rechecked my calculations for a third time and can find no error.” She checked his pulse against her watch.
“Sofia…”
She removed her hand. “You have been to this end-of-time event, yes, I understand. You saw clocks and calendars and papers. They provided you a date. But the data does not lie: we have mere days, not years. At the current rate of decay the Meyer-Joyce field
will
collapse—in two, perhaps three days at the most. You must take these findings seriously.”
“The waveform—”
“Has collapsed, as you have said so often. The future is written because events in the past led you to witness the future. I understand. But you must consider the likelihood that the reason your visions do not extend beyond a few days from now is because
that
is when time ends. Not five years, not next month, but
this week.
”
“Enough!”
Sofia flinched, stepped back.
“Please,” he said. “Enough.”
Another moment of lost control. This was becoming common. He was fighting to retain focus, to maintain his discipline and resolve. He had decided upon and built a protocol for his behavior when this final week arrived, knowing that raw programming may be the only thing to keep him on mission once his illness properly asserted itself. If he had to think too much, plan too much, adjust too much—it opened the gates to error, flawed thinking, damaged reasoning, and a lack of perspective. He had to trust to the plan laid out by his clearer-headed and less instinctual past self. He was a soldier now, taking orders from the more complete person he used to be. He could not tolerate anyone interfering with that coding.
“It is too late for a course correction. The future is locked.”
Sofia’s jaw was set. “I am not working night and day simply to pass the time between now and doomsday.”
“Let’s…” Paul glanced at the monitors. “Let’s change the subject. The Tower’s chronon stores, how are we doing?”
Warehouse 21B, nestled on the fringe of what had once been Riverport’s thriving dockyards, had been a very respectable laboratory. In some ways the fingerprint of the original owner survived, despite the fickle entropic fluctuations that possessed the place. The work benches remained upright, though most of the original equipment had long since crumbled to dust. A bunk bed, neatly made, survived layered in the accreted powdery fallout of age and time. Resting atop a caved-in twelve-cup coffee maker, angled toward the camera, was a dusty photograph of a family of four: mother, father, two sons. Tape yellowed and withered and curled on three corners.
How Paul wished he had never activated that machine.
The scientists at Ground Zero clicked life back into the tracked claw-robot and gave a thumbs-up to the camera. In the operations room a controller leaned forward on a throttle and trundled the ’bot toward the room’s centerpiece: a roiling and thumping time-space anomaly encapsulated and trapped within a twelve-billion-dollar contraption designed to harness and siphon off the rampant torrents of chronon energy it had been spraying out for the last six years.
Delicately, the operator manipulated the fine-work pincer to replace various burned-out components on the shell. Racked about the site an elaborate array of chronon batteries absorbed the anomaly’s output as fast as they were able.
“Our chronon stores are holding level,” Sofia said. “Containing Dr. Kim is our biggest drain, currently. But a necessary one. If we didn’t have the Regulator I doubt we would be able to contain him at all.”
“Lifeboat,” Paul said. “Is it getting what it needs?”
“At this rate the Tower’s capacitors will be fully charged in eighteen months. Well ahead of your schedule. However,
if
the end-of-time event occurs five years from now, as you say, and Ground Zero continues to generate chronon particles at the current rate, I estimate we’ll have enough chronon energy stored in these batteries to maintain causality in a limited area for a number of years. Long enough to develop a solution to the crisis. If there is a solution.”
“What if the M-J field were to collapse this week?”
Sofia glanced at him.
“Just answer the question.”
“Less than a year. Eighteen months if we’re extremely frugal. Less than a month if, for some reason, the Regulator ceases to function. I really do wish you would let me examine the research your people are doing on that. I feel confident I—”
Paul’s phone began vibrating against his chest.
“I want you to have your people keep an eye on ambient chronon levels,” he told her. “And look for any other fluctuations or deformations in the Meyer-Joyce field. If you detect anything—anything at all—let me know.” Paul took out his phone. It was Martin Hatch. He knew what this was about. “Martin.”
“Paul. We’ve held off, but I must insist we send in the troops now.”
“Is Jack still at the farm?”
“Yes. And his accomplice.”
“I’ll be free in…” Paul checked his watch, glanced at Sofia.
“Ninety minutes,” she said.
“I can be at the farm in one hour and forty-five.”
“The team is quite capable of bringing Joyce in without your involvement.”
“His brother is dead, Martin. He hasn’t been home in six years. Right now he’ll be going through grief and adrenaline crash. Two hours from now I’ll be able to talk him in, not hog-tie and drag him. Let me know if anything changes.”
Hatch said nothing.
“Martin?”
“Yes, Paul. I’ll keep you notified.”
The morning light had shifted. Nick’s untouched coffee cup had stopped steaming. Jack’s never-give-up was half-empty, two fingers still looped through the handle. He had lost an hour flipping through the papers on the table. The stuff he could understand was bills, rejection letters from peer-reviewed journals, and several notes from a psychiatrist requesting Will come back for another appointment.
The stuff he couldn’t decipher was 100 percent William Joyce moon language: calculations, scrawl, articles on Hawking radiation, footnotes on various isotopes, and—alarmingly—correspondence sourcing prices for a ten-thousand-terahertz laser. That had been slashed through with red. Through ’97 and ’98 he had been in contact with second- and third-tier universities around the globe—all of them about to come into possession of a nuclear research power plant. Beneath that stack of correspondence Jack found the fake credentials and airline stubs. Framed on the identity page of a forged U.S. passport, eight years expired, Dr. Howard Gordon Wells stared back at Jack with a distinctly unimpressed expression. Dr. H. G. Wells was a very young William Joyce.
A stupid, on-the-nose flourish like that was something a younger Will would have deemed delicious. Will had been like that, before their parents died. Funny. Excitable.
Lasers. Nuclear reactors. Isotopes. A ticket to Argentina. Fake passports. All that correspondence. H. G. Wells.
H. G. Wells.
Jack released his coffee cup, turned in his seat to face the window, and looked at the barn.
The barn was the one place he had not been allowed to enter—the place where Will totally lost it one evening and frightened the life out of Jack and Paul.
The two boys had been maybe ten years old at the time. It had been a cool evening, Jack remembered, and Will had not yet returned home. Jack had made dinner, he and Paul had watched that
Team Outland
DVD for the thirty-seventh time, and then ran around the house with their action figures and, not for the first time, Paul had asked Jack why they were never allowed in the barn. What did Will do in there?
Jack had told Paul what Will always told him: “Work.”
“What kind of work?”
With that one obvious question the barn had gone from being something matter-of-fact and as impenetrable as a concrete block, as taken for granted as the ground beneath his feet, to a locked door on a big secret.
Anything
could be in there.
“Bombs!”
“Superstrength stuff!”
“A spaceship!”
It was a mission for Team Outland. Plotting the movements of imaginary guards, they sneaked downstairs, crossed the gravel path, waited, then leaped from bushes to press themselves against the barn’s rough, red wood.
They quickly discovered Will kept the barn locked tight. Twenty frustrating minutes later Jack was about to call it quits when Paul realized the barn had a dirt floor: they could tunnel under the wall.
Eight minutes later they were in: dirt all over their fronts, grass strands sticking to their hair, action figures in hand.
“Whoa,” Jack said with wonderment.
“Boring,” Paul said with wonderment.
Jack rounded on him, hurt. “Seriously? Look at this stuff!”
The barn’s interior had been crudely redesigned. The farm’s previous owners had run a stable, taking care of horses for private owners who lacked the space to do it themselves. The barn had a broad entrance at either end, the northernmost sealed permanently with neatly arranged nailed planks. All of the stalls had been knocked out, clearing a great deal of space, which was filled with stainless steel equipment the likes of which Jack had never seen. Much of it had power cabling running to it from a padlocked room once used to store feed.
“Looks like a factory,” Paul had said. “What’s that?” He was pointing at the huge, flat, donut-like platform that took up the northern half of the space. A crude iron frame kept the walkway-ring off the dirt. Will had been building a frame around it. An oxy welder was off to the side, next to stacks of irregular steel and iron offcuts.
The centerpiece of the ring was a large cup-cradle of clean and shining metal, empty of whatever it was meant to hold.
Jack had been more interested in the benches and workspaces, all gleaming silver and perforated with neat rows of holes. Bits and pieces of equipment were bolted into the holes, keeping them steady. Black metal brackets secured lenses and cubes of glass. One long black tube pointed down a series of thick monocles.
“I think that’s a laser,” Paul said. “Your brother must have a lot of money.”
“This is why our power keeps cutting out,” Jack realized. “Like, every week, for a whole day. I wake up and nothing works.”
Paul rapped his knuckle against a stack of boxes with a canvas sheet thrown over them: fuses. Hundreds of them. Paul had already moved on, was taking a closer look at a sequence of arcane objects of no identifiable shape and doing a lousy job of attempting to pronounce “interferometer.”