Hexad: The Factory (Time Travel Thriller) Book 1 (10 page)

The greed of corporations meant they sold them for vast sums, more than whole countries were worth to the uber rich, the money allowing for investment on an astronomical scale that led to the creation of huge and extremely dangerous and complicated factories to be constructed that made mass production possible.

It all got out of control.

People popping in and out of existence randomly. People using the Hexad to send themselves back in time to alter their future to make it better, resulting in everyone else on the planet's future changing too, ripples spreading through minutes, hours, years and even centuries, lapping against the shores of time, meeting, crossing over each other as more and more people jumped, each jump changing reality for the world, each warp of time meeting the ripples of countless other jumps, sending things haywire, until there was little concept of 'now' for the majority, and people's lives became impossibly convoluted and strange as nothing was linear any longer.

It escalated until nothing in the present, Hector's present, could function as it should. Nobody was in the now, everyone had jumped somewhere, changing things until nothing was possible any longer. There was no firm reality, no anchor for existence, no linear path of birth, life, having a child and so on and so on. Time and reality couldn't keep up, everything was too tangled, getting worse and worse the more jumps that were made — too much manipulation of the past, and the future, for any universe to cope with. Time was broken and nobody had a history that made sense. People's parents never met, ancestors took different paths and never had children, and paradox after paradox built until it rippled out into every imaginable universe that ever existed and ever would until it all came to an end point.

Everyone simply vanished.

The universes, all of them, became too complex and too convoluted for anything to have a chance of making any kind of sense. As people changed their own pasts and that of others, so the paradoxes meant new universes were created to cope, or people found themselves in different universes and timelines just so their actions could have consequences and could have ever been made to happen in the first place.

Then the cosmic order became impossible.

So there was only one answer.

None of it ever happened. Reality had to continue to exist, of course it did, and time had to be real, a linear progression even though when you got right down to it everything was happening at the same time, past and future all wrapped into a cosmic ball. But peel back the layers and reality had to make sense: if one person was left alive in the present then the world simply had to exist, it stood to reason, so the universes did the only thing they could and the rest of humanity simply popped out of existence so there could be order once more.

"Oh, well, right, glad we got that sorted out then." Dale put his head in his hands and tried to stop his brain oozing out from the cracks that were surely forming all over his battered skull.

"Makes sense to me," said Amanda brightly, actually looking quite perky when Dale lifted his head and peered at her from between his fingers.

"Seriously? What? You believe all that? It's impossible, it doesn't sound even remotely plausible. And what about him?" said Dale, pointing a finger at Hector.

Placing Blame

47 Years Future

"Well?" Dale knew the conversation was far from over.

"What about him?"

Dale couldn't believe she wasn't seeing the obvious. "If all that is true and the what? the Universe simply couldn't cope and got rid of the mass of confusion to timelines and reality itself, history and all that, then how come he's here?" Dale pointed a finger at Hector accusingly, although he was beginning to feel a little guilty about keeping the old guy tied to the chair for so long. Maybe they should untie him? It wasn't like he could do much to them, he was far too frail and weak.

Dale could see the cogs turning as Amanda ran through things in her head, trying to work her way up to the question.

Good luck with that, this is proper mind-bending stuff now.

"Okay, spill it Hector. How come you are here at all if what you said is true?"

Hector stared at them solemnly, as if what he was about to say could be any more monumental than what had already been said. "I am one of the last men on earth as I hold the burden on my weak shoulders. I am still here as it was me that brought about the end. My company provided the one element that nobody else could produce, the one thing that made the Hexads function. Without me none of it could have happened, so I guess I am left behind, for my sins," he admitted.

"And you tried to blame us!" shouted Dale. "It's you that is to blame. You did it." Dale jabbed a finger into the old man's bony chest. He recoiled like he had been shot.

"How dare you touch me!? Don't you know who I am? I'm the one trying to stop this. I'm the one trying to put things right. I'm the richest man in the world; I owned whole countries, entire continents. People did anything to own a Hexad. I could have crushed you like little bugs. And you dare to jab your finger at me!"

Dale had heard enough. "How's that working out for you old man? How are your billions doing? Nice being a despot is it? All that's gone, you said so yourself. You're to blame, not us. You. Let's go, this is getting ridiculous. My head is spinning so fast I think it's going to shoot right off my shoulders."

"Where to? But first I need to ask one more question anyway," said Amanda, staring around the well-appointed but fake room.

Dale sighed. "Fine, go ahead."

"Why this room? What's it all about?" She leaned forward eagerly — it had obviously been bugging her. Dale had totally forgotten about the strange room within a warehouse they found themselves in.

If he looks at us like we're idiots one more time I swear I'll—

"You don't know where we are, do you?"

Dale was getting a really bad feeling all of a sudden.

"I wouldn't have asked if I did," said Amanda.

Hector let out a raspy cough before saying, "This is the only safe place left. We're in The Factory. Where the Hexads were produced. This 'fake room,' as you call it, is the only safe place left. Nobody can find me here, it's deep, deep within the bowels of the institution. It's coated in the very material that allowed me to make the Hexads in the first place. Nobody can see into it. Only Laffer could come here, as he was told of the location. If anyone else tried to locate me they would never succeed."

"And what is this material that allowed the Hexads to actually work?" Dale wished he hadn't asked, the questions could go on for eternity.

"I wondered when we'd get to that," sneered Hector, "but that is something I will never tell. I cannot."

"Why not?" shouted an exasperated Amanda. "I thought you wanted this all to be over? What difference does it make now?"

"Just in case you two do succeed, or fail, it doesn't matter now to me, this was the last play of a man that won't live to see it either way, but just in case it makes a difference and leads to something even worse happening then I will never tell. And, finally, I am ashamed. I thought what I gave the world was worth the personal price I have paid. It was not. I was so very wrong. So wrong."

Amanda let him loose; the questions had to stop. It was no use, they had heard enough, and Hector seemed to be visibly shrinking before their eyes, getting weak from so much talking and from sitting for so long tied to the chair.

It was a bad idea. The second he was free he opened a drawer in his desk, pulled out a Hexad and just before he disappeared Dale caught sight of a zero flashing angrily on the domed top as a bony hand pressed down on it weakly. He was gone.

"Well, that cleared a lot of things up," said Amanda cheerily.

"Are you out of your mind!? Cleared things up? It's confusing as hell. If he was right, about all of that, then it means that once this whole mess is over, and hopefully put right, then we go back to living our lives but in ten years we have to pretend like we don't know what Hexads are, let the police have them, only for them to be stolen, and then send one back to us, keep one of them for ourselves, somehow allow the world to know about them and get the plans Online and—"

"Yes, yes, I know all that, I was here you know? But at least it will give us something to look forward to," said Amanda with a wink. "And at least we will have stopped it from happening."

"But we won't, will we? It will still have all happened. Whatever we do now we still have to let it all play out or none of this will have happened. Stands to reason. It all has to happen, there's no escaping it."

"Oh, you and your paradoxes. Look, let's just go and save the world, stop this from happening, and it will all turn out okay in the end."

Dale had to give it to her, she was always an optimist. It was what he loved about her and what he found infuriating at times. How the hell could they stop it if that meant that they had to do things in the future to ensure it happened just so they could go back and stop it? It made absolutely no sense.

Dale decided to simply save the world. It would be less confusing and anyway, if Amanda said it would turn out all right then he was sure it would.

He was an excellent liar, even to himself.

Nasty Surprises

47 Years Future

There was one Hexad; one jump remaining. Searching through the fake room they unearthed nothing of interest, neither of them expected to if they were honest, but it seemed like the right thing to do. They talked about where Hector might have gone, concluding that it didn't matter, he'd obviously given up, probably as he didn't have long left anyway.

Once the room was checked they decided that rather than use their remaining jump yet, they would take a look at the world they found themselves in, taking advantage of the fact that nobody was chasing them — no deranged giants, there were no lumps of flesh landing, and maybe they could have a little less confusion too. Maybe.

The story had been fantastical but it did make sense in a kind of perverse way, but it still left an awful lot unexplained: like what the elusive thing was that actually allowed Hexads to function, why they were to be in their garden anyway in the future — which also meant they wouldn't be able to move house for ten years even if they wanted to — and not to mention the question of why exactly people in the future that invented them hadn't done something equally messed-up themselves. They must have simply been a lot more intelligent, but not so intelligent that they managed to stop the chaos that was the result of Hexads becoming available to the populace. What would the far future be like if this happened? How could there be a future where Hexads were invented if there were no people any longer? Dale assumed that there simply had to be a way around it, as if they were never invented, well, none of this would be happening.

God, he hated time travel. There was no glamor, no fun to be had, just confusion compounded by more confusion.

Oh, and there was the matter of the strange Caretaker too, but that seemed pretty normal now in comparison to the day they'd had thus far.

They walked through the huge warehouse, silent in their socks, and made it to the far end, where the doors slid open easily on well-greased and silent rollers, only to be greeted by another similar space. On and on it went, twisting and turning through corridors, rooms large and small, seemingly climbing ever upward through sloped floors or short groups of steps that led to who knew what, little of it making sense.

Finally, after endless rooms, some empty, others containing masses of equipment way too esoteric looking in nature, and other rooms they could only peer into through the glass, off limits without the correct means of unlocking them, they came to a door. Dale opened it, revealing a sight that would haunt him and Amanda for the rest of their lives, setting them firmly on a path that would see them do anything in the world they possibly could to ensure that such a future never came to pass.

There was no way Dale was going to let happen what had happened here. No wonder Hector had taken what remained of his life: if Dale had got his hands on him after what he'd just seen then being mangled into a pulpy mass of flesh as you hurtled through space and time would have seemed like a nice way to go in comparison.

What Price Freedom?

47 Years Future

"Dale?" said Amanda, staring at him through red-raw eyes full of questions and despair, tears still streaming down her face.

"Yes?"

"Why would he do that? How could he do that? I don't understand." She grabbed him tight, hugging him like he could take away the vision. He wished he could; he'd do anything to take the burden onto his shoulders and his alone. He couldn't.

"I don't know, I wish I did. But I promise you, look at me Amanda." Amanda lifted her head, hair soaked, and stared into the eyes of the only man she had ever loved. "I promise you that I will not let it happen. That will not happen. He was messed up. He kept it all there, as a reminder of what he did I guess. I don't know what he expected to happen, some kind of a miracle."

"What are we going to do Dale? I can't take this."

"I don't know honey, but we will stop it. We will."

They'd wandered around the vast complex, Amanda lost to a world of grief and confusion, Dale repeatedly saying they should go home, Amanda refusing until they'd seen everything. So they walked, and they walked, and the horror and the terrible nature of The Factory and Hexad production was revealed to them. On and on it went, through countless spaces as large as cathedrals, impossibly complex in nature, full of machinery alien to the pair, the cost of such an undertaking obviously astronomical. But what would be a few billion from the first few sales of Hexads compared to the amount that must have been earned once they were available to the masses and sold for a fraction of the cost, but still a price that would put people into debt for eternity?