Second Paradigm (18 page)

Grabbing the dead man's still somewhat warm hand, Arbu pushed Yuri’s thumb up to the locking mechanism. Releasing his own nano’s into the dead man’s body, Arbu cloned Yuri’s systems then said ‘Yuri’ in the dead man’s voice. He heard the clasp inside click as it released. Walking back over to the other table, he sat back down and readied himself. Arbu popped the case open. Inside rested a large sheaf of papers. He picked them up and began leafing through them. The first several pages were media reports surrounding the trial of Christopher Nost. Nearing the end of the pages was a picture of the assassination attempt.

He scanned the picture, done in the old style black and white that came out pixilated. Director Arbu sat bolt upright. Off to the right in the photo frame, smudged but still well visible, stood James Garret, listed in the frame below the picture as the trial’s prosecuting attorney.

Mentally, he thanked Yuri, hoping that the dead man could hear him from where his spirit now dwelled. This research had been oriented around Yuri’s mission and Arbu could already feel the tingle in his fingertips that let him know something akin to a picture built in the back of his head. With any luck there would be enough clues in this file for him to progress to whatever Yuri had figured out.

At least Holly had done one thing right in bringing this briefcase back with him—even if the rest of his mission had been a catastrophic failure. Arbu continued to scan through the files before him, managing to rebuild the events that had happened seven hundred and eighty-four years before.

And as the pieces of the puzzle clicked into place, Arbu saw the shape, and then the truth of the paradox building up around Christopher Nost. His hands shook and he became paler and paler as he read further into the file.

4016 A.D.: No man’s land, between the great western
city-states

Alex woke with a killer headache. His mouth was dry and a disgusting taste of copper and salt coated his tongue. “Good gods. What did I drink too much of last night? A battery?” he grumbled as he sat up, massaging his throbbing temples. Clenching his jaw, he braced himself then popped his neck, easing creaks and crackles out of his spine while breaking in old joints and easing his waking stiffness. Cool air brushed at his skin, sending goose bumps down his arms and making him shiver.

He stood, scratching the back of his neck, and shook his limbs out to get the blood flowing back to them. He felt full of energy, to the point that he became fidgety. Something here was odd. He didn't crave a cigarette.
Computer—how long have I been asleep?

‘Subjective to your personal time stream, you have spent almost eleven years absorbing the information that was in the mainframe I downloaded to your subconscious.’

Eleven years—!
he started to exclaim, but he was cut short as knowledge crashed into his consciousness like a tsunami, a painful wave smashed into his mind and tore down all the barriers ever built in it. He stumbled forward and fell to his knees and started vomiting. But nothing came up as his stomach spasmed, just bile, bitterly stinging his mouth as he dry heaved.

Over the next several minutes, Alex watched his life flow by before him. It felt like he was dying, but he had felt that way before. He clamped down with an iron will and started beating his body back into submission.

Once the heaving finished, he pushed himself back up to standing, using the wall for support. He gasped for breath, breathing came hard, as he fought for internal stability.

As his body started to relax again, he asked his internal computer
Okay, several questions. First—how the hell have I been asleep for eleven years without wasting away to nothing? Second, how do I stop this bulk of information from making me physically ill every time I access it? Third, which you might not have an answer to, why has no one been here in eleven years?

The computer took a moment before responding. ‘The first and third questions are tied together in their responses. By accessing and using your inherent time traveling routines I was able to accelerate your subjective time by a substantial factor. All that was required was a monitoring of your bio functions and to properly time your synchronization of subjective time with standard time flow. That was to refresh your oxygen supply. With an efficient usage of this technique I was able to accelerate you to a factor of one thousand, seven hundred and sixteen times standard time flow. So to the Earth’s objective time flow you were only asleep for an approximate time of fifty-six hours and ten minutes.’

Alex grunted. The whole process was brilliant; inspired, really. Not something a computer should have been able to come up with without instructions to solve the problem. He filed that thought away for the moment, letting his mind digest the implications it presented.
And how do you explain eleven years of not eating? I’m curious how you came up with that impressive feat.

The computer continued. ‘The second piece of the process was simple enough for me to implement as well. I multiplied and reprogrammed a portion of myself to strip the surrounding area of all required proteins and necessary minerals your body required. By rebuilding the substances I was able to introduce all needed nutritional materials to your body. Through careful observation and interaction with your metabolism, I assisted you in eating through osmosis during your sleep. Had anyone else arrived here during your down time I would have begun a process which would have shifted you to your safe house time and location, then kept you in the absorption cycle till you awoke.’

Alex scratched his chin, feeling smooth skin there.
And I’m clean-shaven, why? After eleven years shouldn’t I have a rather luxuriant beard?

Alex felt the computer perform the mental equivalent of a shrug. ‘Hair is essentially protein. It required less time and work to rebuild it into usable nutrition for your body. So I used it. You will find that with the exception of the hair on your head, all of your body is now devoid of that substance.”

Alex laughed aloud at the thought of eating his own beard.
That’s amusing. All right then. I’d like an answer to the second question please. Best method for processing without making myself physically ill? Or is there any method of accessing the information in my head while maintaining a physical balance?

‘I have analyzed your system and all effects of absorbing the knowledge you did should have been worked off already. All indicators which I can find are that the illness you underwent was a onetime reaction to the bulk of the information you absorbed; as well as the rebuilding I performed on your neural network.’

Alex blinked. The computer had slipped something into the sentence that triggered a red flag for him.
You rebuilt my neural network while I was asleep!? What exactly did you do to me?

‘Nothing in my databanks shows this procedure having been previously performed before, so I cannot give you a procedure name or operation diagnostics, but the results of what I did should be a reduction of core processing waste time. Your neural network was processing at approximately forty-seven percent of its capacity, which seems to be a rather high percentage and an anomaly for a human. However, with what ended up being a very simple restructuring, you should now be processing at a gain of approximately one hundred and twenty-four percent of your previous capacity. I find it worth mentioning that your network appears to be, from all available information, somewhat unique in a human. Had it not been, this operation would have yielded a much lower success ratio, unlocking at most forty to forty-five percent additional capacity.’

Alex thought about this for a moment. That the computer inside him had this degree of autonomous decision-making capability made him slightly uncomfortable. It also made him suspect something else as well. He shrugged it off and filed it away with the other information brewing at the back of his mind.
I see. Then let’s give this a whirl, and see what relevant information we can pull out of this data we grabbed.

Alex opened his mind to the information that had been crammed into his brain, making it an organic library of dizzying scope. Contained therein were hundreds of thousands of terabytes of information, compiled over thousands of years of human history.

He started sorting. Scanning at the speed of thought, he knocked reams and reams of information into one or the other of two categories forming in his head. One he marked useless and pushed aside for later perusal. The other he marked useful and, though it started off small, it rapidly grew in scope and size. His mind raced to keep up with everything stacking up in it and he finally started to assemble a working, though not full, picture of what happened to the world. Over the next several hours he thought, focused inwards on his own mind’s landscape and the history of the world that lay out across it.

He stopped. Having reached a saturation point, he found that his mind finished processing. He had reached the limits of his newfound capabilities. He had to let it settle before he tried to process anything else.

Knowledge burned like fire behind his eyes as he looked up and truly saw the world for the first time in his life. A smile graced his lips and he said, “I see.”

Internally however, the dialogue picked back up as the computer spoke to him ‘Now you understand why I allowed you to subvert me. And you see that you will die shortly.’

Alex nodded.
I do.

‘And you understand what must be done to ensure that you may be reborn in your death, and that the world will be reborn in its death?’

Alex nodded again.
I do.

‘Then it is sealed. We go back to kill him, thus freeing the cycle.’

Alex shook his head.
No. I will not allow that to happen. I have seen something that you have not. And because of this, we must work to save him.

The computer took several minutes before responding. ‘I do not understand. You know that my core functionality allows me a processing time exponentially higher than yours. There is nothing that would allow you to process a piece of this that I have not. Why do we not go to perform my recommended course of action? What faculty do you have which I have overlooked? Which piece of information?’

Alex shrugged.
Easy. Human intuition. And a memory. Something which happened to me long ago. That memory now starts to become clear to me in its meaning. And it means that we must save him, or all that we have done will be undone, and all that is will no longer be.

And Alex proceeded to share an old memory with the computer and to tell it why it was wrong. The computer processed over the next several minutes, at billions of decisions per second, what Alex had pieced together with intuition and a single clear memory, burning like a candle that warded the darkness away. And then they jumped backwards in time to play their hand.

The way Alex figured the game now, they were sitting on the royal straight flush. They had to get the other players to stay in the game long enough for it to matter.

***

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.