Second Paradigm (8 page)

Regardless of that, the math said that she could not have survived, which meant someone in headquarters wanted her dead. Or possibly both. Garret couldn’t shake the belief that Ex-Director Warren had wanted Wanda dead. Perhaps the motive and the missing information were linked.

He ran the math yet again, to be sure. Simple math showed that no single person could affect the catalyst actions needed to counterbalance a paradox above a class three magnitude. The computers could not have missed that little piece of this mission.

Bloody thoughts of vengeance filled Garret’s head. Visions of storming into Warren’s house and killing him … but he shook those thoughts out, instead focusing on the more productive lines of how to save his wife’s life. Chief amongst those thoughts was how to create a secondary paradox that resulted in his wife’s survival without crashing the time stream.

It was fairly obvious to him that walking in and trying to avert the events which led to her death would have much the same results as Wanda’s mission had ten years previously. Starting to see a path that would result in getting Wanda back, he got to work on the mathematics, cranking out possible solutions with temporal physics.

Shadows grew longer and the air chilled as the sun made its journey over the horizon. Hours and hours of math had not yet revealed a simple solution to him, nor did he feel one would be found in the math alone. An elegant solution sat somewhere in this problem, he could sense that much—but where was it?

Starting from scratch he listed out his tools. ‘Up’ nanos allowed access to the past. ‘Down’ nanos allowed him to stretch and manipulate the time flow. HUD contact lenses allowed him faster computational power than anyone in the world, except his dead wife—who would be active in the time frame. Any non-anachronistic appearing technology would be usable as well.

But there were so many variables in accessing the paradox nexus and changing the outcome. Frustrated, he walked out of his laboratory and into the living room to attempt relaxing on the couch. And there, on the History Channel, came the solution. It took him a moment of watching the show about historical wars for it to click in his mind, but it finally did.

If you spun a smaller paradox to brush the larger one, instead of amplification you would create a small shift in the large paradox’s spin. A smile spread across his face as he formulated the plan.

Time: Classified

Operation: Classified

Lucille Frost shifted through the paperwork on her desk. There were a hell of a lot of good points about this era, but paperwork was definitely not one of them. She missed the future, where you never needed to see paper unless you wanted to. Instead of these ungainly heaps spread across her desk, everything would be centrally filed and easily accessible through her data pad—anywhere in the world. The global net had effectively put an end to the need for desks, replacing paper with desktops.

On top of that was the scientific level of this century. Talk about mind numbing. Reviewing archaic technology had to be the most boring assignment she had ever been given. She sighed again and sifted listlessly through her pile of documents.

Finally, she surrendered to the advancing lines of infantry paperwork. They were almost successful in managing to storm the chasm at the edge of her desk and she did not have the patience for this. So, to hell with it. The best combat specialist in the twenty-ninth century should not be stuck behind a desk so far as she was concerned. Organizing her desk into piles of random paper she got up and left the office, stealthily moving through the hallway towards the elevator.

Just as freedom was at hand, someone cleared his throat behind her. She nearly jumped out of her skin, but managed to retain control of her reflexive reaction. Squaring her shoulders she took a deep breath and waited for the verbal attack to begin. She knew she had been cut off, but it had yet to be seen if she would be routed.

“Hey there, Lucy. Where are you sneaking off to?” The voice belonged to Christopher Nost, the primary reason she was stuck in this outhouse of a century behind a boring desk with nothing of real importance to do.

She turned around and sweetly smiled. “Why Chris, I was heading to grab a cup of coffee. I finished reviewing your paper on the nano drive and I wanted to try to digest some of the science in it. It seems to me that it will have a particular weakness to neutrino decay, so I figured I missed something.” For good measure she took a deep breath, making sure her breasts were straining at the blouse she wore. Best to use every weapon at hand when trying to escape the office.

Chris blanched. He was a typical male, insofar as liking beautiful women. And Lucille Frost was indeed a beauty. As she pulled in that breath, he found he had trouble staying focused on her project comments. He went for the gambit, “Hmm … You know, it never even crossed my mind. Mind if I come with you and discuss some of this?”

Lucille nodded in assent. Internally, she danced with joy. She had escaped the office! Freedom was at hand! “Of course. I’ll wait for you in the lot.” She celebrated another type of victory as she realized what he was coming to discuss with her. How easy that had been.

Two months of casual conversation and a touch of tactical flirtation unlocked a mission that should have taken upwards of ten months to break through the initial phase.
Never underestimate the power of being a tease in a tactical situation
, she reflected. Heading into the parking lot, she had high hopes of knocking out an easy mission fast. And she had no idea just how wrong she was.

1997 A.D.: Colorado Springs, Colorado

Alex tipped his hat forward, blocking the sun from his eyes, and watched the scene playing out in the coffee shop across the street. Lucy and Chris were talking, and it seemed to be pretty heated, with a lot of disagreement expressed in curt motions of the hands and jerks of their heads. But the way he leaned forward and the way she faced him and stroked her hair as they talked …

It definitely seemed that a romantic bond was forming. So, a commando from the twenty-ninth century and a brilliant physicist from the twentieth … Interesting mix. Hell, interesting breach of Time Corp’s policies and procedures. But who was he to say what was right and what wasn’t, he thought wryly.

With a slight flexing of his will, he hopped forward in time by half a second to test to see if Lucy would note the travel in this proximity. He knew from personal experience, and one memorable night, that she was more than skilled. She was one of the best travelers out there. But she also seemed distracted at the moment.

He was only fifty meters from Lucy Frost, but she didn’t notice the time skip at all. Alex rubbed his chin. Interesting. If she was this enamored of her scientist, it might make his job a hell of a lot easier. He spun an ancient Roman coin, one of Judas’s thirty pieces of silver, across his knuckles as he thought.

His introspection snapped as the couple got up and left the shop across the street. Alex settled up on his bill, dropping a fifty to cover his cup of coffee, and then got up to discreetly follow them. He was pretty sure that using time travel for anything greater than a micro hop would alert Lucy to his presence, so instead he used the good old cloak and dagger method of staying a few cars back and tailing them C-Twenty style.

It took about half an hour for Lucy to drive Chris home. During the drive, Alex decided on his approach to dealing with Lucy. This time he would go with absolute honesty. Well, he admitted to himself, he would be mostly honest, anyway. After she dropped Chris off, he went ahead and pulled up next to her on the road, motioning for her to pull over into a random lot.

He saw her do a double take as recognition hit her, then she glared at him. With a sigh, he pulled behind her car. His decision had been made; he would try to reason with her. Failing that, he’d have to figure out how to take her down. Though, that would not be easy, as he well knew. He genuinely hoped that reason would work, and not for her sake. As she pulled off into the parking lot, he followed her in, then got out of his car. When he leaned forward to shut the door something hit him from behind and slammed his head into the frame of the car, leaving a dent over the door. Blackness erupted behind his eyes and he slumped forward.

On pure reflex, in the confusion of pain, he hopped forward in time. He found himself still in the C-Twenty parking garage with Lucy Frost standing triumphantly above him. He looked up and chuckled, still dazed. “I’m not sure I actually deserved that, Lucy.”

She looked down at him as he spoke. With a brief shrug, dismissing what he had said, she returned fire. “That was too easy for the infamous Alexander Zarth. I cannot believe you are the same man that bested me back in Salem, lover boy. So what have you got hidden up your sleeve?”

With a grunt he scythed her legs out from under her and counter blocked her slipstream. Glancing over to her he made eye contact. “Easy. I came here to talk with you. Mind if I take a second to get rid of this headache?”

She shakily stood up and nodded. “Go ahead. You’ve proven your point well enough I suppose, so I’ll listen. But I’m warning you—if I don’t like what you have to say I will do my damndest to take you down, traveler. And it better be extremely convincing after the way you gave me the run around then dumped me back in Salem. I still haven’t forgiven you for that little incident.”

Alex laughed. “I would expect no less. Especially after the situation I left you in during the witch trials. I can still hear the cries of ‘witch!’ as you proved them right and vanished into thin air. Boy, the whole clergy was in an uproar for months about that. Though in all fairness you owe me a right beating for that one, and I know I’ve got it coming.” He winked as he reached into his glove box and grabbed some aspirin.

Lucy let herself smile, just a little. “For an arch-nemesis you sure are being pleasant. Particularly after sleeping with me, then framing me as a witch and leaving me to be hanged.”

Alex massaged his temples. “Well, would it be too harsh of me to point out that you were there to kill me?”

Lucy raised an eyebrow. “Alex, I know. It was just a job, though. Now talk. Why have you come here to talk to me? Why aren’t you finishing the job of trying to kill me in return? Or am I wrong—do you harbor no ill will towards me?”

With a sigh, Alex leaned back against his car and looked Lucy in the eyes. “No ill will, Lucy. I really did mean everything I said that night. But it’s also true that we are from different worlds. So, as to why I am here—simple. I’m here to try to avert the greatest paradox in history, and it centers on the man you are here to distract from his discovery of a drive that will break the light speed barrier. Lucy—you are at the center of this, so I have to talk to you. It’s not a matter of want to. The last thing I want to do is hurt you again. But he is going to die soon, and it’s my job to save his life. And to do that I need your help, though it is a course that will most likely kill us both.”

Lucy reached into a pocket, pulling out a cigarette and lighter. She lit up and pulled a couple drags while putting her thoughts into order. “Alright. Somehow you know my mission. And you know about a paradox that can’t be calculated with the mathematics of your time. So something is going on here beyond what you’ve said so far. Talk to me, you’ve definitely got my attention.”

Brain still throbbing, Alex settled down to tell Lucy Frost a story that would hopefully make her betray the Time Corp. They didn’t part company until after dawn.

***

Relativity Synchronization:
The Fifth Cause

2044: The Laws Of Time

Chris stepped out of the hotel into the dawning night. At that same moment, the lights went on throughout Denver North. Now that the day’s light had fled beyond the horizon, he could see the city, even through the dense, wet haze that still clung to everything, filling the air with a faint, moldering and acidic stench. Advertisements and floating halogen headlights glowed through the wispy remnants of the fog like a psychedelic neon wall, stretching from horizon to horizon and covering the entire eastern skyline.

Flecks of lights danced like fireflies as the little flying vehicles descended and rose from the lines of traffic that swarmed between the buildings. The physical bodies of the flying crafts remained hidden; he could only see the pinpoints of the halogen headlights that crawled through the mist. Only a slight damp whirring accompanied their passage.

He unfolded the map the hotel clerk had given him. With a rough circle, the man had marked an all-night drugstore that looked to be about twelve blocks west from the hotel. The shimmering dance of lights faded in that direction, showing only a few skyscrapers. Much smaller buildings, with a feeling of dinginess about them, stood tightly side-by-side down the street. It looked more to Chris like what a city
should
be like, but he could come up with no specific examples of why—he only had a vague, almost instinctual understanding. He had the same reaction with the flying cars; the cars on the ground, abandoned or otherwise, had a familiarity to them that the ones rushing above did not, though he had no distinct memory of either kind.

This must be the old part of town
, Chris thought. He felt a sense of recognition at the dumpster-lined alleys and worn apartment buildings with a few ground cars parked outside. A tremendous rush of air buffeted him, and Chris looked up to see one of the air cars land on a rooftop in the midst of whirling trash and bright landing lights.

A block down from the drugstore Chris passed a PolCorp station. Two officers sat in a vehicle outside. It looked like a big ground car, all rounded bulges and chrome fins, until Chris noticed the vents along the back and sides. They eyed Chris as he walked by and he heard the engine whine to a start as he approached the drugstore.
Whatever
, he thought.
I’m not doing anything illegal. At least I don’t think I am.

“Jones Drugs & Merchandise” was lit with the same harsh white fluorescent light of the hospital. Lacking the sterile smell, it seemed, rather, that mold had taken residence in the walls. The only other person in the store, a tiny woman, sat behind the counter. One glazed, white eye peeked out from behind her long, brown bangs and she had a tattoo of a black widow spider on her forearm.

Chris wandered the aisles, looking at the wares. Some things gave him the same feeling of secure familiarity that the ground cars did: toothpaste, Twinkies, aluminum foil and Coca-Cola (“Original Recipe! Coca Leaf Extract in Every Can!”); others disturbed him. There were toy PolCorp guns and uniforms alongside “Skragsuits,” plastic yellow jumpsuits with green stocking caps depicting strange insect heads. There were bottles of pills called “Rush,” and others called “Doze,” and liquid in bottles simply labeled “H.” None of the pharmaceuticals had any sort of description or directions on them—it seemed to be assumed that everyone knew what they were for.

The ceilings were lined with flat TVs. The images had a distinct three-dimensional feel and offered a deluge of ads—all products offered “In this quality establishment.” Chris learned that “Rush” was for those times “you need to cruise for more than twelve hours straight. Can take up to five safely.” Right after that came a commercial for one of the flying vehicles, a large, fast-looking thing called “the GeoFord Terrestrial III,” shown whizzing through isolated canyons and over plains. “Why drive, when you can cruise?” the woman on the monitor asked Chris. The faces in the images had a disconcerting habit of appearing to be looking directly at him, no matter where he stood in relation to the screens.

Chris selected a tube of “White-O” toothpaste, a toothbrush and a comb, and approached the lone cashier. He noticed a PolCorp Security vehicle parked in front of the doors, but through the narrow windshield he couldn’t tell if there anyone sat in it.

I didn’t do anything. What would they want with me?
Chris tried to tell himself, but he had a sinking feeling of apprehension, a gut anticipation that something was about to happen.

Sure enough, as soon as he left Jones Drugs the car flared to life and a line of spotlights along the top of the vehicle blinded him. “PLEASE STEP BACK,” boomed a voice from the car, amplified to painful levels. “PUT THE BAG DOWN AND YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR. THANK YOU FOR OBEYING THE LAW.”

Chris stepped back, put his bag of toiletries on the sidewalk and raised his hands. He expected someone to get out of the car and ask him for papers and tried to think of an excuse for not having them when the voice asked, “Sir, where are your papers?”

Before Chris could formulate an answer, a door lifted and a massive black man got out, pointing something at him that looked, at least in the blinding spotlights, like a small Gatling gun. “Sir, where are your papers?” he asked with a different voice than had come across the megaphone.

“They were stolen. On the way here. This guy, he …”

“Sir, I am sure you are aware that it is a felony offense to not report lost or stolen papers immediately.”

“I just needed some stuff. I was going to …” he hadn’t seen that one coming.

“I said
immediately
, sir. We saw you walk by our vehicle. Why didn’t you go to the PolCorp station on the way here to fill out the required forms?”

“I …” Chris felt fear growing in the pit of his stomach as the strong, sour taste of bile rose in his throat.

“For that matter, what exactly, took you so long to—” the PolCorp Officer walked over to Chris’s Jones Drugs bag and pulled out a gun. “Ah. I see. I don’t suppose you have the paperwork for this little beauty, either, do you?”

Where the hell …? Oh god, why are they setting me up?
Chris nearly panicked.
What do they want from me?
If this was how PolCorp operated—simply planting evidence to compound what seemed to Chris like a minor crime, he was doomed from the moment he walked by their car on the way to the drugstore. But why had they tagged him? Was it plain boredom, or was his underlying paranoia actually on the mark?
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

The other door opened and Chris heard “… ten-twenty-two, over. Waiting for back up. Over and out.”

Before he approached his partner, the second cop did a once over of the situation. “What do you think we have here, Chuck? Some slumming High-riser wanting a taste of the under-city?”

“Don’t know. More likely he’s some wasteoid out for some quick cash. Look at him … his clothes don’t even fit right. He probably tossed some exec so he could pull off looking like he was from the upper levels. I figure he saw us parked outside before he had a chance to roll this place, tried to wait us out, gave up and bought some toothpaste to try and cover his tracks.” Chuck pulled out a pistol from the arsenal on his belt and pressed it against Chris’s temple. “Even wasteoids need papers, loser.”

Chris said nothing. If they were going to play this game, anything else he said would only get him into more trouble. The pressure of fear he had felt in his stomach had moved up his spine to the base of his skull and built into a mounting rage. He was no longer scared of these two. Now, it was time to act. Something primal grabbed control of Chris and he felt his mind lash out. Dizziness overtook him and the world blacked out.

2873: James Garret’s Laboratory

Files and papers were scattered haphazardly around the lab. The general feel of the place was that a hurricane had hit it, in a small, indoor, and semi-contained way. Lieutenant Yuri Yakavich looked around the place again and sighed. It was fairly obvious that Garret was gone and he was not coming back.

On top of that, the man had some type of experimental tech that interfered with the Corp’s attempts to back step in the time stream into the lab. Every field team they sent back got kicked forward to their origin time when they entered the building.

So Yuri had taken the only route left open to him. An army of clerks worked, dancing around piles of paper, which were growing into veritable mountain ranges. In an age of paperless technology, the man must have killed entire rainforests to get this much paper. Yuri watched the system of files being rebuilt into a tangible set of information that would give him a clue as to where the doctor had vanished.

He switched his attentions back to the monitor in front of him to watch Garret fly through central Corp’s headquarters at an estimated speed of twelve hundred miles an hour, on foot. Again he sighed. The man was armed with at least two new pieces of technology and Yuri had to stop him from creating a paradox that would shatter history. At times like these, Yuri wished he hadn’t scored so high on the Internal Intelligence tests.

Every few moments Yuri would get interrupted in his viewing of the robbery by a clerk handing him another document that they felt would be relevant. As the afternoon wore on, the pile in front of Yuri grew to be about a three-inch stack of papers. From every indicator, Garret had armed himself with historical information about his late wife’s mission time, then hopped back to try to save her. But it didn’t sit right in Yuri’s gut. Something about the whole situation stank. He still missed some relevant piece of information—some key that would unlock this landslide of information growing in front of him.

James Garret’s jigsaw puzzle of a mind started to fit together for Yuri when one of the clerks handed him a coffee stained napkin with a cigarette burn on it. Yuri walked into the kitchen and started looking around more closely. First, the air filter.

Cracking open the hermetic seal on the environmental system for the house, he pulled the filter out and glanced over the toxin levels it had recorded. No trace of nicotine in the environment’s filters. He tapped the napkin and thought. ‘Zarvan’ was the word written on it. An ancient God of time. And a cigarette burn that could come from any time over a thousand-year period.

Turning in a circle, he opened his eyes and looked. Not just to see the environment surrounding him, but to truly look at everything in front of him as if he were the missing Doctor Garret himself. A nagging suspicion started to form on the edge of his consciousness. He grabbed a clerk walking by and pulled the man in front of him. “Get me his newspapers. I know he had them printed up. Bring me the crossword section of any paper that has coffee stains. NOW.”

The clerk nodded and hurried over to his comrades to reorient their search. Old mountains of paper were chipped away and new ones formed as the clerks shifted their dance to this new beat. Yuri walked to the couch and turned on the television, holding the image of a frustrated James Garret in his mind’s eye and trying to retrace those steps.

Hunting down the remote, he found the last view button and brought up the last program watched. It was a historical show about twentieth century wars. An hour later, Yuri finished watching the documentary and started going through the pile of newspapers stacked in front of him. As he suspected, a pattern emerged.

Every problem numbered twenty-six and twenty had been completed in every paper. Here and there, others would be done, but that was the only consistency. So, what had happened in the year twenty twenty-six? Yuri racked his brain and came up blank. Then he switched out the number set. Twenty-six twenty. And all of the lines of suspicion in Yuri’s mind clicked into place. The pattern set and became real for him.

Yuri stood up shakily and looked to the clerks who were watching him. In a scared voice he said, “Get headquarters on the line. The son of a bitch got Alexander Zarth working on his side.”

Time: Classified
Operation: Classified

Lucy drove to the office in a daze that the morning light only worsened. Rays of bright sunshine made the road impossible to see. Squinting to see the road, she couldn’t make out any of the landmarks she passed. But she drove as though guided by an invisible force, not needing to see the road before her or the traffic on either side. The conversation with Zarth had lasted for over ten hours and she had a hell of a lot of thinking to do.

She was at least mildly surprised by this, as she found herself agreeing with the most wanted criminal in history instead of with her own policing force. But he had a lot of information that the Time Corp didn’t, and it came from further up the line, if he could be believed. Though the fact that he had laid out all of the internal politics in her department from her time, well upstream from him, only lent credibility to his claims.

Paradox was the byword of the day. By pushing forward in her mission she would help facilitate the greatest paradox in history and bring the timeline to the brink of shattering. As unpleasant as it was, it seemed to be staring her in the face that the Time Corp had created the very paradox which they spent all their time fighting.

Slamming the steering wheel with her fist, she cursed aloud. “Fuck. A field agent should NOT be forced to make these choices.” Though it appealed to her internal sense of irony, it was still hard to swallow. All the facts laid out though, and to be frank with herself, she had already decided to help Alex hours ago. Now she was justifying it to herself.

She pulled into the office’s parking lot only to find that there were fire trucks and police surrounding the building. Threading her way through the maze of emergency vehicles, she finally found a spot to park in. Getting out of her car, she walked up to the sergeant who appeared to be in charge of the scene and flashed her security clearance badge for him. All thoughts of Alex and catastrophic paradox were temporarily shoved from her mind. “What the hell is going on here, Sergeant?”

The man, tall and heavily built with muscle and maybe fifty years old, huffed through his moustache as he studied her identification. “Well miss, you’ve had a bomb threat called in on your building. We’ve evacuated and we have the squad sniffing through the building.”