by Damien Boyes
“Jas,” Alpha continues, “you’re on earworms and lenzes. We’ll relay comms through your loop.” She turns and gives everyone a final check. “Questions?” But at this point there aren’t any. Nothing now but “go.” “Jasmin jumps in ten. I want everyone ready for the moment we get her signal the tower is down. Dismissed.”
“Jasmin, you’re with us,” Gibzon says as everyone files out around me. “We’ll see you off.”
My stomach flutters, like I’ve just climbed up to the top of the highest diving board in the world, and now I’m expected to jump. I wait while everyone leaves the room, grateful not to have to move, as Gibzon packs the device in a long silver case. He seals it and then gestures out of the conference room.
This is happening.
I take a breath and walk up beside him, away from the view of New York and into the station’s white halls.
“We know you’re concerned,” he says, stating the obvious. “Questioning your fitness for this mission. You know that your counterpart attempted the same and failed, and even with your recent training, you still consider yourself unprepared.” He waits for my answer, but all I can do is nod. Of course I’m worried, I’m terrified, but what else are we supposed to do, sit around and wait for Thrane to take over the universe?
“Good,” he says, and turns us right toward the mess hall. “You have every reason to be afraid. We’re asking you to do the impossible.”
I look at him but can’t tell if he’s joking. I don’t even know if he has a sense of humor.
“Not the best pep talk I’ve ever had,” I say.
Gibzon’s lips twitch in the closest thing I’ve ever seen to a smile on his face. “Perhaps,” he says. “But you didn’t let us finish. We’re asking you to do the impossible—but how many impossible things have you observed since you had your first taste of the chronoverse?”
I don’t even know. Surviving the truck. The invasion. Jumping through time and space. An evil dictator hell-bent on taking over the universe … and plenty where that came from, each more impossible than the last. “Too many to count,” I say.
We turn down a short hall I don’t think I’ve seen before and stop at the doorway at the end—a silvery-gray slab embedded in the wall. It ripples, then peels open into the swirling fractal nothing outside and I fight through the vertigo. I’ve gotten used to the doors opening directly onto other worlds, but the station can’t get me straight into Deadworld. I have to jump there myself.
“Precisely,” Gibzon says, his head cocked, watching the colors spasm outside. “The impossible is our stock-in-trade. And from what we’ve seen of you, both now and before, there is no one on this team more prepared for the task ahead. To succeed will require the improbable, and you are more improbable than anyone we’ve ever encountered.”
I can’t tell if he’s complimenting me or seeing me as the product of an equation, but either way this is the first real conversation we’ve had since I arrived here. We’ve never even been alone. Gibzon keeps to himself, only emerging from wherever it is he keeps himself to issue orders. I don’t know anything about him. Who is he? Why does he keep referring to himself in the plural? How does this place exist? But more than anything, I want to know what he can tell me about the other Jasmin.
“What was she like?” I ask, nearly whispering.
He studies me for a moment. “Very much like you,” he finally says, “in many ways.” Then he pauses a second before continuing, “But not identical. She lost her world, like you did, but by the time the Omegas found her, her parents had already been lost to Thrane’s invasion. She joined with us immediately, with vengeance in her heart, while you had time to see for yourself what the universe holds—we believe that small variable may have set you on different paths.”
“For better or worse?” I ask, not sure what I want to hear.
His features are unreadable as he responds. “That remains to be seen. Even minor fluctuations in heading can have an enormous effect on destination, given enough time.”
A panel on the wall next to the door slides open and I grab a rifle and slap it around to the anchor point on my back, then wrap a pistol and band of magazines around my waist. My hands are shaking and I struggle to fasten the belt, and Gibzon reaches out and snaps the buckle closed.
I’m a soldier, about to go to war, terrified about what comes next. How many people before me have felt exactly like this, trembling as they stood at the door of an airplane, about to jump into enemy territory, or cowering behind a flimsy wooden shield as charging horsemen rode down on them?
At least they knew who they were fighting, knew who their enemy was. I still barely know anything about who we’re up against. Faceless soldiers and ancient superhuman conquerors, that’s it.
“Who exactly is Thrane?” I ask. “And those two others? Are they boundless gone bad?”
Gibzon’s lips part but he doesn’t speak for a beat. “We can say only this: they are not of this multiverse. They’re leftovers—remnants—of a previous multiverse. Products of a set of variables the chronoverse abandoned as flawed.”
“So when you say old, you mean how old, exactly?”
“Billions of years, we’d assume,” Gibzon says. I’m still a teenager and sometimes I feel like I’ve already lived forever—what would billions of years do to someone? Our lives are a blink of an eye to them.
“Just as the chronoverse conjures worlds within our universe, it also creates universes, where the laws of creation are different. Infinite outcomes over infinite permutations. And just as we walk between the worlds of this universe, with enough power, one could pass into other realms of being as well.”
There’s today’s impossible thing. Though I bet there will be plenty more before the day’s over.
“Do you really think I can beat them?”
He considers this a moment. “You do not need to defeat them; we’d suggest avoiding them if you can. Your mission is to destroy the singularity. That must remain your primary focus.”
My mission. I’ve gone through training. I’m standing here armored up with a gun on my back and it still only feels like I’m playing soldier, like none of this could possibly be real. Even Gibzon, standing not three feet from me, with his ramrod posture and milky-white eyes, is like something made up. He’s right beside me and I have no idea who or what he is. I know I need to go, but he’s talking to me now—this might be the only chance I ever get.
“There’s so much I still don’t understand—everything, really—but I want you to tell me one thing: who are you?” He blinks at me. Gibzon’s version of surprise.
“We are no one,” he says. “Merely a pawn in the chronoverse’s great unknowable game.”
“Yeah, but those words don’t actually mean anything,” I say. “You know everything about me, probably more than I know about myself, and I don’t know anything about you. Why are you doing this?” I sweep my arm around. “You’re asking me to do something we both know I’ll probably fail at. But you do the impossible every day. You’ve created this place—a place outside of time—to keep the universe in order. Can you think about what that means? How can you even be human?”
“We are not human,” he says flatly, as if that’s what I was asking. “Not in the strictest sense, in any case.”
“What are you then?”
“We are a polyneural, our personality a representative entity of a host of digital minds living in concert.”
Nope. This isn’t helping. My head’s spinning again.
“So ... you’re … a robot?”
His eyes reveal nothing, but the hesitation speaks volumes. “We are not a robot,” he says after a long moment. I think I might have offended him.
“Okay, not a robot—I guess you can explain that to me when I get back—but tell me this one thing: why are you doing all this?”
He cocks his head a degree to the left. “We would think the answer to that question would be obvious,” he answers. “The same reason we expect you’ve
chosen to undertake this mission—to protect life. That is our goal as well, to protect this universe and this timeline. At any cost.” He picks up the silver case and hands it to me. “Now, time grows short. We understand you have questions, and shall answer them all, but matters are at hand. Thrane must be stopped or none of the answers will mean anything. If we lose today, we lose forever.”
Right. We have a job to do.
I’ve never been more scared in my life.
“I’ll call you when I’ve knocked Thrane’s teeth out,” I say, stepping up to the doorway and hanging my toes over the edge.
“Remember,” Gibzon says, “courage is not the absence of fear.”
I want to make some smart-assed comment, but instead just nod and step out into nothing.
He stands fixed in the doorway as I drift away. The whole universe hangs in the balance of what I do over the next few hours, which seems like a lot to ask of someone who never finished high school, but if what Gibzon says is true, if I fail, nothing else will matter ever again. So, I guess I have no choice.
I’m just going to have to win.
My body surges with power as I get further from the station, and once I figure I’ve stalled long enough, I close my eyes, picture the inside of the warehouse Chen and I jumped to in Shanghai, and leap as hard as I can through time and space, aiming for the bright heart of Thrane’s timeline, pushing to hit his True Line, and the next instant I’m standing under the stars, surrounded by devastation.
33
Dead Souls
The air is heavy with the tang of a doused campfire. It’s the middle of the night, so I can’t see much, but the light of the stars is enough to make out that I’m standing in ruins.
The warehouse is gone completely, and only fragments of the surrounding buildings remain. Faint boxy shapes still stand way in the distance, but everything in between has been seared to ash. Whatever happened here, it was recent. I hope no one was around to see it.
I don’t see any bodies but I’m not sure that I would, given the state of the destruction. Thrane must have bombarded the area with those flying cannons, or maybe a giant laser from space, who knows.
The plan was to rendezvous with Chen here, so how am I supposed to find the Resistance now? They could be anywhere on the planet. What should I do, jump back to Eternity Station and tell the team I failed before I even had the chance to try? Or—I’ve got the needle device, maybe I can get through the shield without the Resistance?
No, I need to find them. If this is going to work, I’ll need their help.
I check around again, blinking in short hops, looking for some sign of where to start my search, for some clue that Chen might have left to lead me to them, but there’s nothing. I don’t even know if this is the timeline I met them in last time.
At least I won’t run out of energy. I’ve only been here a few minutes but my body is already humming. Thrumming with the power I’m absorbing from this world. I can barely keep my feet on the ground, and have to focus not to launch into the air with each step.
Something flashes in the corner of my eye and I turn—but nothing’s there, nothing but muddy ash, then it happens again. Unlike when I first came here, this time I know what’s happening. I think back to the Aperion, to the other worlds hovering on the periphery of my vision. If I shift my focus I can see through to versions of this place, the adjacent timelines running side by side with this one, and each of them mirrors the same devastation. In some the blast patterns are slightly different, some buildings were spared while others weren’t, but the outcome is the same. Thrane completely wiped this place off the map, destroyed it in every timeline.
Gibzon was right—the walls between worlds are thin here—which gives me an idea. I skip back six hours to what must be late afternoon and have a better look around. In the daylight, the scope of the devastation is even more obvious. Whatever Thrane hit this place with, he left nothing standing.
Still unsure of what to do, I jump backward a day and now can feel the heat all around me. Fires smolder in every direction. Then I raise my wards and, with the scintillating purple shields protecting me, jump back another half day, but aim my landing away from ground zero, out by where the buildings are still more or less intact.
I’m glad I have my wards up, because I appear in the middle of an inferno. I thought I’d be outside the blast zone but the whole world is on fire and I clasp the needle case to my chest and jump backward in time again, moving myself another mile or so away in the process, and when I arrive everything looks the way I first saw it—a city lost to the sea. Even with my enhanced eyesight it’s hard to make out from this distance, but while most of the city seems deserted, there are people milling around the warehouse. I want to jump to them, warn them what’s about to happen, but I already know it’s too late—even if I were to jump in and save them, my actions wouldn’t mean anything. The timeline would just branch and anyone I saved would be lost the second I left, swallowed up as inconsequential to the universe.
I’m considering doing it anyway, when the sky opens up and rains fire. One minute the buildings are there, and in a flashbulb instant they’re gone, replaced by a wall of flame higher than I’ve ever seen. Even from this far away, even with my shield surrounding me, I can still feel the blaze.
Fires rage everywhere, not only here, but on the other side of the gossamer fabric between timelines. All around me, all the worlds are burning.
I stagger, awed by Thrane’s power. He wiped a whole city off the face of the Earth in a second, across hundreds of thousands of timelines. How am I supposed to beat him?
I’m all by myself, with no way to find help. Fan said the Resistance cells keep insulated from each other. Even if I were to jump back a few hours and ask where to find their leader, they wouldn’t be able to tell me.
What if I jumped out into where Chen and I met Fan’s boat? I could just ask him where to go. But would he still be there?
Only one way to find out …
I don’t have a clue what day it is here but I know we met somewhere out to sea, so I take myself there and spend I don’t know how long peering through worlds and skipping forwards and back through hours but can’t find the boat anywhere. This isn’t working, I could be searching forever. There’s got to be some other way.
I drop my wards, jump back to the crater, catch up with real time, and feel the barrier of the present stop me from going any further. It’s so odd, having the universe corral me, like an invisible wall keeping me from leaving the marked path. I try again just to see what’ll happen, try to force myself into the future, but I can’t. I’m spinning my wheels against the impenetrable barrier of now.
I’m about to jump back to Midtown and see if I can find a way through the shield on my own when I sense time cracking nearby. I throw up my wards and spin around, ready to face a Remnant or a group of Thrane’s soldiers, and instead see Grackle, still wearing his ill-fitting tweed suit, not twenty feet away from me.
“Grackle?” I yell, surprised at how glad I am to see him.
“Jasmin Parker,” Grackle says, his reedy voice light, as though we weren’t standing in the middle of a burned-out city. “I am pleased to see you once again.”
I close the distance between us and grab him up in a hug. After all that’s happened, he’s somehow like an old friend. “How are you here?” I ask. “Alpha said no one else could jump into Thrane’s timeline but me.”
Grackle grins, sheepish. “None of the Omega Guard, perhaps. But they aren’t everyone.”
“They don’t know what they’re missing,” I say. “What happened to you in Buffalo?”
He twitches his head. “Your world was lost. Had I remained, I would have been lost as well. I share your grief, but I am pleased to see you escaped.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to assist you.”
That can’t be all there is to it. “How is it you always know where I’m going to be? Why do you keep helping me?
”
“Because I can,” he says, as if the answer is obvious. “Because I would help her, and you are her.”
“I’m not,” I say, not angry, but not willing to accept that either.
“You are,” he says. “Whether you want it or not.”
“Fine, for the sake of argument let’s say she and I are the same, what did I do to earn this loyalty from you?”
“Nothing.” His lips purse. “Everything. It may be hard for you to understand, and while I may not know you, I’m certain Thrane is evil, and will consume everything if given the chance. I don’t especially care for the Omega Guard, or for Gibzon, but I will help them because I trust you.”
“But why?”
He looks away from me, and when he speaks there’s pain in his voice. “Because last time I was too frightened to go with you, and you never returned. I won’t allow that to happen once more.”
Again, I don’t understand, but I know whatever happened between Grackle and the other Jasmin, he must have truly cared about her. I guess that’ll have to do.
“Then I’m glad you’re here,” I say, and clap him on the arm. “But we still need to find the Resistance and I have no idea where to start.”
“Luckily for you, I do,” Grackle says. He takes me gently by the arm and then we’re somewhere else.
34
Reunion
