by Various
“Get moving before you are discovered. That’s an order, Captain.”
I had to at least walk into the bathroom, just once. No one could begrudge me that.
“Where are you going? You need to disable the electronic monitoring devices or risk discovery.”
The bathroom was everything I could have hoped for and more. And it had running water, running hot water and scented soap, just lovely. And to keep the voices in my head silent, I went over to the security station and quickly typed in a nasty virus. The shutdown happened a heartbeat after my fingers left the keyboard. The monitors went black, allowing me to move freely.
“Take the stairs. No time for the lift.”
There had to be a way to make the voices in my head stop talking. I made it to the stairwell and closed the door just as soon as the guard returned. I could hear him cursing over the crashed computer system and talking to someone named Tech Support.
“Proceed to the twenty-fifth floor. Hurry.”
“You have to be kidding,” I said. “Twenty-five floors!”
“Keep your voice down. The guard’s coming this way. Get to the top of the first flight and exit on the second floor. Don’t let the door slam.”
Time was short and a cat-and-mouse game with a security guard was a luxury I could ill afford. I turned left down a hallway and entered a large room filled with separate work stations and row after row of computers.
I ducked into a darkened closet that contained, among other things, discarded technology. The one device looked like a cryotube with a flashing red light. In the dark, I listened for the door to open and close and for approaching footsteps. After several minutes of nothing, I ventured back out.
There were so many empty stations, and the walls were painted a drab color of beige. The low hum of ceiling illumination stirred the silence. Flowing air rumbled through the overhead vents. I followed the carpeted footpath and passed another empty office. I became startled when the lights came on automatically. There must have been a motion detector I accidently tripped.
The only other sound I heard was the tick of a wall clock that was twenty minutes behind the time. I nearly panicked when I turned the corner and there was someone working. Fortunately, her back was to me and her ears trailed some type of wires. Perhaps she was hearing impaired. She remained oblivious to my presence and continued to push the waste barrel with wheels down the hallway.
“Head toward the exit, take the west stairwell, and ascend.”
“Keep an eye on the security guard,” I said.
“We’ll keep tabs on him. You retrieve the computer and wipe the hard drive.”
I wasn’t the confident young man I used to be. Staying psychically fit took a backseat to staying alive these many years. My legs throbbed after the first few flights of stairs. I decided to take the elevator the rest of the way up.
“Stop! What are you doing? You’re going to alert the security guard to your presence.”
“Look, I’m not going to make it to Starling’s office in time without some mechanical assistance. Unless, of course, you’d like to beam me to the twenty-fifth floor?”
“We’re getting too much interference. And even if it were possible, we don’t want to leave a trail of bread crumbs for those thieves.”
It took me a moment or two to work out the controls, but I got the lift moving. The most wretched music issued from its internal sound system. I endured the sonic barrage until the doors dinged open upon arriving at the twenty-fifth floor. I made for Starling’s office, thirty years too late.
What I would have given to be inside this building before I became a vagrant. A chance to rewrite history and reclaim my future by avoiding this mess altogether. Every knot, no matter how complicated, can be unraveled. It just takes time and patience, and armed with a new operational timeship I would have all the time in the universe.
“Wait while we turn off the silent alarm system.”
The door clicked open, and I stepped inside. The man’s office was just as gaudy and tacky as the man himself. This man-child littered his workspace with toys: a train set, a model Ferris wheel, and a pinball machine. I didn’t think I could despise him more. Again, I was proved wrong.
A high-backed throne sat at a marble-topped half-circle desk. The green wall behind had a bookcase overstuffed with nonsense Starling had written, multiple copies to fill the shelves. Awards and photos of himself with dignitaries and the like adorned the walls. He even displayed a trophy cup on his desk. I didn’t bother to read the engraving. More nonsense, I was convinced.
This whole room was like a pharaoh’s tomb, a monument to the oversized ego of a corrupt little man. I wanted to smash everything in it. He wrecked my life, it only seemed fair.
I was chuckling over a bronze monkey statue when I noticed the world map window broken and taped over. Through the cracks, I saw the room beyond. It was a hastily constructed hangar bay with a smashed pane-glass window covered in plastic. That’s where he flew the Aeon out over the city and the ocean beyond before heading into deep space to die.
My ship was imprisoned in these very same walls. He probably tortured the ship’s computer to free his secrets. I wouldn’t put it past that snake Starling. Recursive algorithms and a worm virus that slowly eroded his firewalls and safety protocols. Those same invasive programs ate away at his higher functions, making him more docile and compliant to that barbarian’s wishes.
I thought of the A.I. as a friend and a shipmate. His quick thinking saved both our lives on numerous occasions. Even if he was programmed to act independently when circumstances warranted it, like the time I was exposed to Thalaron radiation on Gamora V. The ship beamed me back aboard and plotted a course through time to the nearest Federation hospital.
“Well, where does he keep the computer?” I asked.
No reply. No chirp from my combadge. No voices in my head. Nothing.
Was this all fantasy? Did I break in here out of some misplaced feelings of revenge and concoct this whole scenario to protect my sense of right and wrong? Had I finally lost my feeble grasp on sanity? These thoughts crossed my mind. No, I decided that my imagination hadn’t gotten the better of me. Someone beamed me out of the police car. That was real.
Where would Starling hide his latest creation? Where else, but in plain sight.
Newspaper clippings and magazine advertisements of his latest technological terror had been gathered in a folder on his desk. I now knew what the computer looked like, but that was no help. The boxy hardware was just an empty shell. The program hid in the software of his workstation computer right in front of me. It had to be the answer.
I sat in the king’s chair and began my slow decryption of his passwords, malware, firewalls, and ghostings. The keyboard slowed me down considerably. I was accustomed to a more direct interface, a conversation between man and machine.
“You’ve got mail,” an automated voice announced.
I looked around the room and realized the computer had spoken. That wasn’t good. I clicked on the paper icon and the message popped up on the screen:
From: [email protected]
Sent: Today, time unknown
To: [email protected]
Subject: Mission
You’re not alone anymore.
My verbal answer elicited no response. So I typed my reply:
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Mission
What does that mean? And why aren’t you using comm lines?
From: [email protected]
Sent: Today, time unknown
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Mission
Too much interference. Finish the decryption. You’re running out of time.
From: H.Starlin
[email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Mission
I’d be further along if I didn’t have to keep responding to these infernal messages.
From: [email protected]
Sent: Today, time unknown
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Mission
Look for a break in the code. Something like this:
001001XXXXYYY0101
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Mission
I know what to look for and stop interrupting me.
From: [email protected]
Sent: Today, time unknown
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Mission
Keep typing and don’t look up.
You should never tell a person not to do something, because invariably they will. And I was no different. I looked up to see two hazy outlines, humanoid in shape, struggling to break into this reality.
Another message marked urgent popped up.
From: [email protected]
Sent: Today, time unknown
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Mission
I told you not to look up. Keep typing you have seconds.
Seconds until what? I didn’t bother to type that, but instead thought it. If I stopped answering maybe he’d stop sending stupid messages. I kept the search engine going, combing through terabytes of data seeking out the elusive code.
“Take your hands off the computer,” a voice commanded.
Vorgons. The time-traveling thieves were a pair of Vorgons.
They had beamed into the outer office. Purple-pink-skinned humanoids with rows of gills between eyes and mouth and a tapered mound of flesh like a mohawk atop their heads. They had golden cybernetic implants carved into the sides of their skulls, a low-tech, twenty-seventh-century recall device easily available on the black market for the right amount of credits. With a touch of a flipper, the Vorgon could be pulled back to his or her timeframe.
At the moment, the male leveled a red crystal in one outstretched flipper directly at my chest. The female began to slowly move toward me.
Another message popped up making an absurd sound.
From: [email protected]
Sent: Today, time unknown
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Mission
Click this hyperlink. Hurry.
“Step away from the computer,” the male said.
He was prepared to make good on his threat, but the mission came first, even before my own life. The hyperlink probably hid an overwrite virus of this century. No sense leaving more advanced code behind.
I used the computer to screen my hand moving left to right and clicked the mouse and icon floating on the computer screen. That one small click sounded like a gunshot. The Vorgon gave me a slight grimace before firing.
A blue energy blast lanced out. The beam bloomed against my chest, drove me into the bookshelf, and I spilled out of the chair and onto the carpeted floor. The female quickly stepped over me to get to the computer. The weapon had been set to stun, thank goodness. I was alive, but groggy. I could hear what they were saying through my fogged senses.
“This human has damaged the hard drive of this device,” she said. She looked down at me and waved a small handheld device over my body. It had to be some kind of tricorder.
“Boratus, he is not of this time, perhaps this world,” she said. “I’m reading low levels of chroniton radiation.”
“We agreed not to use names, Ajur,” Boratus said. “He’s probably a temporal agent.”
“Everybody freeze. Hands in the air.”
Although the speaker remained hidden from view, I recognized that voice. It was the same voice that sought out help from a person named Tech Support. The security guard had followed me to the top floor.
“Get up and disconnect the wires from the back of the data storage unit underneath the desk. Do it now while the guard distracts the two Vorgons.”
What he meant to say was do it before a gunfight erupts between a twenty-seventh-century antique and a twentieth-century artifact. Best not to think too much about orders and just carry them out. My vision blurred and doubled, but somehow I managed to grab all the yellow and blue cords and yank them out of the back of the device without arousing suspicion.
“Good. Now pick it up, walk three meters to your left, and toss it through the world map window.”
“In the middle of a standoff?” I asked. “Are you crazy?”
Fortunately, no one paid any attention to me or my outburst whatsoever. After thirty years in this wretched century, I expected nothing less from its inhabitants or visitors from another place and time.
I stood up with my back to the antagonists, shielding the computer tower in my hands. The guard and Vorgons were too preoccupied intently watching each other for provocative movements to worry about me, at first. When my intentions became clear, all eyes and weapons were trained on me.
My Vorgon was a little rusty, but I’m pretty sure he called me a Denebian slime devil and sprinkled a few curse words as both nouns and adjectives. Their grammar structure is fluid to say the least, worse than Federation Standard.
The guard spouted the same droll consequences of disregarding his dire warnings. Something along the lines of “Halt or I’ll shoot,” though I can’t be one hundred percent sure of that. At the time, I was more focused on crossing the few short meters that felt like kilometers.
Strange how time slows down in some moments and speeds up in others. The perception of time passing can easily be influenced by half a dozen different catalysts. While I waded through the swampy morass of what could have been my final moments, all I could think about was tossing this data storage device fifteen meters down to break open like a cybernetic melon on the gantry floor below.
The details of what happened next were slow to resolve in my mind. I did toss the computer tower through the window and shots were fired. Who fired first? Who got shot? Who tried to escape? Those answers became a bit blurry.
One fact became readily apparent, though. I thought Braxton had me destroy the tower to erase any twenty-ninth-century code left behind, and he did. But the true purpose was to bring down the wall of interference that blocked the Relativity’s temporal transporters from getting a lock.
Not a lock on me, but on the two criminals. Braxton was more concerned with doling out justice than saving himself. The Vorgons attempted an escape. The pair tapped the sides of their heads, adjusting and readjusting the controls on their black-market time-recall devices to no avail. (They probably bought a cheap knock-off from a particular Ferengi stolen-goods dealer who owns his own moon.) Ducane or another of Braxton’s subordinates kept one step ahead in the modulation.
This could only end one way.
The Vorgons managed to prolong the inevitable for as long as they could, but in the end they were pulled up the line. Ghostly screams warbled through the matter stream to mark their passing from this reality. The sound of their disembodied voices chilled my bones and left me covered in goose bumps. I was glad to see them go.
I had one problem left. How was I going to stop the bleeding? I didn’t even know that I’d been shot by a hunk of lead propelled by a chemical reaction. Like I said earlier, it was all kind of blurry. I slumped against the far wall. A good lie down was in order.
“Hang in there, mister,” the guard said. “I have to go down the hall and call a bus.”
He wanted to put me on a public transportation vehicle in my condition and at this hour? And they called me the crazy one. I was in no shape to give my assent or disagree. So I sat and bled and listened to his footsteps as
he ran down the hallway to find a phone that worked.
A single chirp issued from my vest. They couldn’t even leave me in peace to die. I wonder if the service bothered Lynter in his final moments?
“Prepare for emergency beam out.”
It was a simple directive that required a simple answer that I was unable to give. My life was slipping away faster and faster. But in truth, I didn’t need to respond. They could tell how severe my injuries were. Just like they knew the medics of these dark ages had about as much chance at saving my life as a vole sprouting wings and flying.
I blacked out. Can’t say for certain how long I was out. When I came to, I immediately knew when I was, not so much where. I was back in the future in a sterile timeship’s dispensary. The past has such vibrant sights, sounds, and smells, not like the antiseptic insides of a timeship fully under way.
My safety was guaranteed by the timelock as long as I stayed aboard ship. Temporal shielding protected me from the vagaries of time. Beam down to anywhere but late-twentieth-century Earth, and I could be erased.
The surgery was a success, naturally. I would recover in record time under the careful attentions of Doctor Selsi. Ducane and Selsi were probably adolescents when I first took command of the Aeon. Either that or the service had begun recruiting child soldiers. Doctor Selsi had an annoying habit of telling and retelling me how lucky I was. I didn’t feel very lucky. And recounting the same sad facts that if the entry wound had been a few scant centimeters to the left, I would have died right there in Starling’s office.
Wouldn’t have mattered. Braxton would have just recruited me again and again until the mission was a success. I liked to think I knew him pretty well.
I paid myself a visit. My prior conversations were concerning one subject, my health, with one person, my doctor. I actually looked forward to speaking with myself.
“Well done Captain Braxton,” he said. “We have the two Vorgon criminals, Ajur and Boratus, in custody. We are in the process of dismantling their time-travel capabilities and wiping their memories before turning them over to the temporal authorities of their own time.”
