by C. R. Berry
What the fuck is going on?
His heart was thumping as he crossed the C-Suite to Miss Morgan’s office. The door was open when he got there and Skinner saw Anthony Graves lifting what looked like a coffee stain off the carpet.
The CEO looked up from her MEc, saw Skinner hovering in the doorway. “Get in here now,” she snapped.
His heart sank. I’ve done something.
He tried to walk confidently into the room but ended up doing an awkward two-step jig to avoid tripping over his own feet. Miss Morgan looked at Graves. “Are you done?”
Graves smiled briefly, “Yep. All done.”
Miss Morgan nodded, “Close the door on your way out.”
Graves left and Skinner went to sit down in the chair opposite Miss Morgan’s desk.
Her eyes widened. “Did I say you could sit down?”
He stopped, swallowed hard and clasped his hands together in front of him. “Sorry, ma’am. How can I help?”
“Mr Skinner, what do you see when you look around this room?”
He looked, eyed the circular Roman numeral wall clock, with its sparse, skeleton frame forged from black iron and, beneath it, built into the plain, bone-white wall, the glass-fronted cabinet housing six glasses, six bottles each of Chase Vodka and Ridgemont Reserve Bourbon, all evenly spaced and symmetrical, labels facing outwards, with a small ice dispenser at the bottom. Skinner’s eyes drifted to the adjacent wall behind Miss Morgan’s desk, the ‘feature wall’ that had a 3D stone-effect wallcovering with Egyptian hieroglyphics that looked like they’d been carved into it. There was a single floating shelf on that wall, supporting three lever-arch files pressed between cubic, white marble bookends. Finally there was the black-tinted glass desk, dressed only with an ashtray, phone, coaster and MEc, free of all dust and blemishes thanks to probably obsessive amounts of polishing.
He wasn’t sure what she was getting at, so he thought he’d simply say what he saw. “A… clock, a desk, a cabinet of –”
“Order, Mr Skinner,” she interrupted. “You see order. Control. I don’t like mess, never have. But do you know what I abhor? When my employees make a mess and don’t clean it up.”
He felt the blood rushing to his cheeks. Oh shit. But what? What had he done?
Miss Morgan continued, “You told me Jennifer Larson was dead.”
What? She is dead.
Skinner remembered back to that tense night in the Guildford office when he was trying to write a completion report on an operation that wasn’t actually complete. Even though he was having to doctor the report anyway (there was no way he was going to include his failure to properly check for Jennifer Larson’s pulse after running her over or the fact that he’d secretly drafted in Katie McKinley to finish the job for him), he wasn’t prepared to submit a report to Miss Morgan confirming Larson was dead till he knew for certain that she was. That big a lie just wouldn’t stay secret, not from the most powerful woman in the world.
But then he remembered Katie McKinley phoning him and telling him it was done. Jennifer Larson was dead. Which meant the bitch fucking lied to him.
Feeling a solid fist of dread balling at the pit of his stomach, Skinner searched carefully for the right response. “Y-yes. I thought she was dead.”
“Well, she isn’t. Which means you didn’t make sure after you ran her down.”
“I checked for a pulse. I couldn’t feel anything.”
“Then you’re a fucking idiot, because clearly she still had one.”
“I – I should’ve checked again.”
“Yes. You should have.”
“It was… I had to get out of there quick. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t seen. It was a mistake. When the current crisis is over, I’m fully prepared to take the consequences.” And I’ll make sure Katie McKinley does too.
He took a deep breath. He knew he’d fucked up but surely there were more important things to deal with right now. Like restoring the timeline. Like restoring his wife, Karen. His two girls. He’d phoned Karen’s number right after the incursion, got through to someone else. The likelihood was that, in this timeline, Karen was not his wife, and that meant Carly and Shannon had never been born. For all he knew, Karen had never been born either.
“Ma’am, if I may,” he said carefully, “surely we should be focusing on what’s happened to the timeline.”
Miss Morgan shook her head with what looked like dismay. “Mr Skinner – we are. Jennifer Larson is responsible for what’s happened to the timeline. She stole some chronozine and travelled back in time, minutes before everything changed. What was it you were saying about consequences?” She gestured towards the window and the radically altered cityscape below. “There are your fucking consequences.”
“My God.” The ripples of guilt through his body made his stiff posture waver, his head dip and shake. He gripped the top of the chair he was standing behind, for support. “I – it’s my fault. My wife, my children – they’re gone. Erased. And it’s my fault.”
“Yes, it is. And you’re going to fix it. You’re going to clear up your mess.”
He stiffened. Yes. He could do that. He could fix this. He had to fix this, if he ever hoped to see his family again.
He returned both hands to his sides and stood straight and determined. “Yes, ma’am. What do you want me to do?”
“I learned from our operatives in Brighton that Larson went back to the year 1100. July 1100. But that’s all I got before the rewrite took effect. So I don’t know when in July. The safest course of action would be to send you back to the end of June with enough time to get to Brighton so that you can be there when Larson materialises. When she does, kill her immediately. I have approximate coordinates for where she’ll be; these are being sent to your phone.”
So he had to go and just wait for what could be weeks for Larson to appear? Great. “I understand.”
“Good. Now listen carefully because killing Larson is only part of it. More important than that is destroying the covert transcription device that she has taken with her into the past.”
Trying to hide his uncertainty, “Okay.”
“This transcriber is disguised as a book called The History of Computer-Aided Timetabling for Railway Systems by Jeremy Jennings. Not only is it highly sophisticated future technology that does not belong in 1100, but the first conversation the book transcribed contains some very sensitive information. My belief is that everything that has happened to the timeline is because of that transcription.”
“What information?”
“What I’m about to tell you is strictly level one clearance. Understood?”
He swallowed. It was above his own pay grade. “Yes, ma’am.”
“In the here and now, Million Eyes is preparing to carry out a high-profile assassination. The highest-profile assassination. The Queen herself.”
“The Queen? Why?”
Miss Morgan shook her head. “You don’t need to know all the details. Just that the Queen is a problem that needs dealing with. The transcription is of a conversation between two of our operatives discussing plans to assassinate her and bring about the abolition of the British monarchy. As I’m sure you can gather, such a transcription would have a devastating effect on our rise to power, hence my theory as to the cause of all this.”
“Y-yes, ma’am. Although…” He was confused. How could a Modern English transcription do damage in 1100? Was this really his fault or was Miss Morgan barking up the wrong tree? Maybe this incursion had nothing to do with Jennifer Larson…
“What?” Her glare intensified. Skinner felt a strangling heat beneath his collar.
“I’m just… wondering. How a book with Modern English writing in it could be… damaging. No one’s going to understand it in 1100. Nor many centuries after that.”
“It has an inbuilt translation matrix, Skinner. Anybody who reads it will understand it.”
Oh. Damn. Still looking like his fault, then.
“You’ll also need
to recover the chronozine she has taken with her,” Miss Morgan continued.
He nodded, “Yes, ma’am.”
She looked at something on her MEc screen. “I understand that you’re fully trained to time travel – but you’ve not actually travelled before.”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Alright. Report to Dr Ruben first. She’ll fit you with a chronode and a cognit. Once you’ve done that, report to Rupert Whistler. He’s in charge of Time Travel tonight.”
“Understood.”
“And there’s something else I need you need to understand before you go. Something critical.”
Another nervous swallow pushed its way painfully down Skinner’s dry throat.
“Larson has altered history. That means the timeline is in a fragile state right now. We can change it back, but – and this is a big but – the fragility of the timeline means that any changes you make when you go back will be permanent. If you screw with the timeline even further, we can’t undo it.”
“So you’re saying I get one chance to apprehend Jennifer when she arrives in Brighton.”
“Yes. And if you fail, you can’t nip back to before she arrived and try again. If you go back to fix your own mistakes while you’re already there fixing hers, you’ll cause a temporal earthquake that could very well destroy us all. Understand?”
Not really, but he got the gist of it: don’t fuck up.
“I understand.”
“Good. Then get moving. The Shield will only hold for” – she pointed at the clock – “five hours, forty minutes. After that, we’re done. We all get absorbed into the new timeline. You need to fix this fast.”
Feeling hot and shaken, Skinner nodded, turned and left Miss Morgan’s office. The steely glares of the C-Suite staff were on him again. Now he knew why. By the time he entered the lift he was all but shitting himself. It wasn’t just the fate of his wife and daughters that now rested on his shoulders. It was the whole bloody world.
Then, as his lift descended from the C-Suite to the Time Travel Department, a knot of anger made his thoughts turn to something else: all the horrible things he was going to do to Katie McKinley once the timeline was restored.
32
Half an hour after Skinner left her office, Miss Morgan got a call from him saying he’d arrived in June 1100. She waited for him to call again. Another half-hour went by. If Time Travel had configured the temporal alignment on Skinner’s chronophone correctly, weeks should’ve passed for him by now. Had he done it? Had he apprehended Jennifer Larson? Had he recovered the book?
She continued to wait, having now swapped coffee for vodka, checking the clock every minute and burning her way through another pack of Marlboro Reds.
When she couldn’t wait any longer, she picked up her phone and called him. “Mr Skinner, what’s going on? Why haven’t I heard from you?”
“Ma’am, I – I think I know where the book is.”
Her heart skipped. “You think? What do you mean you think? I already told you. Larson has it.”
“She did. She doesn’t anymore.”
“You mean she’s already there?”
“Yes.”
Miss Morgan felt every muscle in her body tighten. Both of her fists were balling. “Mr Skinner, you were supposed to go to Brighton, wait for her to materialise, and take the book from her the moment she did. Are you saying you haven’t done that?”
“There was a problem. I wasn’t able to get to Brighton in time.” As though he’d foreseen the furious tirade of abuse that was coming his way, he said quickly, “But I have everything under control.”
Grinding her teeth, “Oh, do you?”
“Yes. I’m posing as a lord called Walter Tyrrell to get close to the king, William II, and there’s talk of a bizarrely-dressed traitor currently imprisoned in the Tower of London on William’s orders, who no one can communicate with. It has to be Larson. Which means the king has the book.”
“Are you telling me that Larson, the book and a bottle of chronozine are all in the possession of the King of England?”
“Currently, yes.”
“And what is your grand plan to put this fucking mess right?”
“Kill the king. He’s just invited me to attend a hunt in the New Forest, on August 2nd. The day William II dies.”
Miss Morgan shook her head. “What are you saying?”
“According to history, William II dies while hunting, on August 2nd, shot by an arrow apparently meant for a stag, and fired by Walter Tyrrell – me.”
“So – what? You’re saying all this was meant to happen?”
“It would seem so, yes. And it’s possible that this one act – my killing the king – will restore the timeline.”
Miss Morgan wasn’t going to get into the temporal physics. “What about the book and the chronozine?”
“I’ll keep searching for the book. But the chronozine… I don’t think we need to worry about that. I think Larson must’ve lost it on her way through the Chronosphere. Otherwise she would’ve just taken another pill and travelled in time again. She wouldn’t have let herself get captured.”
A fair assumption, but an assumption nonetheless. In any case, they were out of options. Any changes Skinner made now were permanent and couldn’t be undone. He had to keep moving forwards, stop Larson from impacting the timeline some other way.
Now came a twist in this tale. It seemed Robert Skinner was supposed to kill William II. The funny thing about time travel was that not every change to the timeline actually changed it. Some were already a part of it to begin with. Predestined to happen. Dictated by fate.
Honestly, it all gave Miss Morgan a fucking headache.
“Fine,” she said. “Do what you have to do and keep me updated.”
At least Skinner seemed pretty sure of himself. What else could she say?
The future was in his hands.
Fifteen minutes later, Miss Morgan was puffing on a new cigarette and sipping her second vodka when Lara Driscoll was at her door.
“Ma’am, I have something I think you should see,” said Driscoll as she entered and laid a piece of paper on Miss Morgan’s desk. “It’s a printout of one of Gregory Ferro’s blogs. Göransson in Archives has been going through our Information Security files, looking for the papers on Ferro and Larson. He hasn’t found them yet but this printout was loose in one of the filing cabinets. It obviously fell out of the Ferro papers at some point.”
Gregory Ferro had started out as one to watch, but not stress about. He wasn’t the first person to make claims about time travellers messing with history, and since he hadn’t linked anything to Million Eyes or anyone working for Million Eyes, he wasn’t much of a threat. Miss Morgan was happy to let the Information Security Department deal with him and stay out of it.
Of course, everything changed when Ferro started delving into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. That’s when Miss Morgan took over the operation. And when the traitorous Stuart Rayburn breached security, learned about Million Eyes’ role in Diana’s death and decided to tell Ferro everything, that was it. Ferro had to go. Miss Morgan had made a promise to herself (literally) that she would not let anyone trace the princess’s death back to Million Eyes.
She read the blog. Ferro talked about having laid his hands on a 14th-century history of England by Simon of Stonebury, which described the rumour of a plague doctor who interrogated victims of the Black Death about a book with a strange title during the autumn of 1348. All the victims were surnamed Godfrey. Apparently this doctor was also seen talking on a strange device and disappearing into thin air. Ferro wrote: Just like the man who killed William II.
The book with a strange title. Of course. It had to be the transcriber. Nobody at the time Ferro was being watched would’ve known this – the transcribers disguised as Jeremy Jennings’ unspeakably dull book only went into production a few months ago.
And while she knew at the time that Ferro’s conspiracy theories were about th
ings that Million Eyes hadn’t done yet, it hadn’t occurred to her that she’d one day have to rely on his theories as a source of intel.
But hey, that was time travel for you.
“Thank you, Miss Driscoll,” said Miss Morgan. “Leave this with me. Tell Göransson to keep looking.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Driscoll left and Miss Morgan immediately called Skinner. “Report, Mr Skinner.”
“The king is dead,” Skinner replied quietly. Miss Morgan could hear the twitter of birds in the background. “Did it work?”
Miss Morgan looked out of her window. “No. Nothing’s changed. You presumed wrong. Killing William II had no effect.”
“Then I’ll continue searching for the book.”
“Yes, you will.”
“I’ll have to lie low for a while, change my identity. I think the king’s chief minister, Ranulf Flambard, might know –”
“No, you’re done with 1100. I’ve just been reading one of Gregory Ferro’s blogs. He found evidence of a plague doctor who interrogated victims of the Black Death about a book with a strange title and could make himself disappear. I think that could very well be you, which means, by the same logic you were using when we last spoke, that’s where you’re supposed to go next.”
“Are you ordering me to make another jump?” He sounded reluctant.
“Skinner, time is ordering you to make another jump.”
“When?”
“Autumn 1348. That’s all I know, so go to the start of September of that year. Ferro’s blog says that all those who were interrogated had the surname ‘Godfrey’, so it stands to reason that William II or whoever was doing his bidding handed the book to someone with this name in an attempt to hide it from us.”
“So shouldn’t I stick around here, find out if Ranulf Flambard was the one who – ?”
“We don’t have time to debate this. I just told you, you’re supposed to go to 1348, so go.”
He sighed. “Yes, ma’am. I’ll take care of it.”
Hanging up, Miss Morgan left her office and walked across the C-Suite to the office of chief technology officer Juanita Salazar. “Juanita, what’s the ETA on getting access to the internet of this new timeline?” Finding out more about the new world outside headquarters would’ve been invaluable to the effort to restore the old one.
