The Rewind Files

by Claire Willett

  It was a thing of beauty. The control room fans had already spread the smoke through the room by the time they heard it, and even though there were only a handful of people inside, they did a credible job of creating a stampede to get out the door. This part had been Carter’s idea, and it worked marvelously. They were so panicked that nobody stopped to log out of their computer or take anything with them. They just bolted.

  The second the last one was out the door, Carter closed it behind them and I dropped down from the ceiling.

  “Locks,” I said over my shoulder as I raced over to the controls. “Shoot out the panels so they can’t get back in.”

  He pulled out his U.E. laser pistol and a beam of white light shot out, neatly frying the electronic locking mechanism on the main transport lab door. My hands flew over the control panels at the main console.

  “Are you in the system?” he asked.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “This is the high-end version of the crappy system they sold the federal government. This baby’s gonna do exactly what I tell her.”

  The transport system at United Enterprises was a thing of beauty, all sleek white panels and muted lighting. I ran my fingers over the touch-screen controls, fighting down a feeling of irrepressible envy towards the lucky bastards who got to use these computers every day. Whereas setting space-time coordinates from the Bureau’s main console was a laborious process that required specialized tech skills like Calliope’s, the lab at U.E. was so quick it practically read my thoughts.

  “Okay,” I said to Carter, “the doors from the guard transport hallway are sealed. Go do your thing.”

  “How long until they figure out how to un-disable it?” he asked.

  “If we’re really lucky,” I said, “nine minutes.”

  “So, plan on five?”

  “Three,” I said. “Run.” And I could hear him as I worked, running down the hallway and shooting out the control panels of every transport – except for one. I set the transport coordinates for the white box at the farthest end of the hallway.

  Then, with a tiny pang of regret for the gorgeous technology I was destroying, I pulled out my laser pistol, aimed it at the screen of the console next to me, and fired. It blackened and shattered with a viscerally satisfying bang, and the lights around it went dark.

  Bang. That’s for my dad, I thought, feeling a surge of energy run through me.

  I shot out the next one.

  Bang. That’s for those seventy civilians in Sharpeville.

  Bang. That’s for the city of Beijing. Bang. The Washington Monument.

  Bang, bang, bang. That’s for the twenty-two million Americans and thirty-four million Chinese people who died so you could build this company.

  Every small explosion felt like a tiny act of rebellion. Beth Rutherford and this company had destroyed so many lives. It felt good to destroy something of hers in return. It felt good to fire beams of hot white light into glass and metal and watch them explode. It felt like I was taking something back that she had stolen from me.

  The sound of pounding at the door and the high-pitched keening of laser drills snapped me back to reality.

  “They’re coming!” I yelled at Carter as I shot out the last console with a shattering crash.

  “Almost there!” he yelled back. “Two more!”

  “Hurry!”

  The room was now a blackened, smoking heap of broken glass and metal – all except one console, which controlled the one transporter Carter hadn’t blown up, and a discreet black panel in the corner labeled “Emergency Transmissions Only.” I had torched every piece of equipment that would allow anyone to interfere with that transporter. If Beth Rutherford wanted to find me, the absolute only choice in front of her was to walk into a white box and push the button without knowing where she was going.

  “Nice work,” Carter panted, running back into the middle of the smoke as the pounding on the outside door got louder. “What’s next?”

  I showed him the console where I had loaded the two jumps. He didn’t have the years of fluency with this computer system that I did, but he was smart, and I had made it simple.

  “You’re going to send me through,” I said, “and then you’re going to send her through on a time delay. I need a head start to find the second Beth. And then you’re going to lock onto the Comm you’re wearing and you’re going to jump yourself out.”

  “I’m setting your second jump to send you to Croatia. They don’t have extradition treaties with the United States and if you tell Marcus at the restaurant that you’re a friend of Leo’s, he’ll help you hide until I can come find you. Got it? Jump her when she enters the box, then jump yourself. Immediately. She’ll bring backup and they’ll try to shoot out this door.”

  The pounding on the doors got louder and louder.

  “Three minutes is up,” he said. “It’s time.” And he wrapped me in his arms, hard and tight, and kissed the top of my head.

  “I’ll find you,” I said. “When this is all over, I’ll come find you. Just be safe. Don’t do anything stupid.”

  “You either,” he said. “Ready?”

  “Ready.”

  I slammed my hand against the “Emergency Transmissions Only” panel in the corner and heard a reverberating hum as it opened a building-wide audio channel.

  “This is Agent Regina Bellows of the United States Time Travel Bureau,” I said. “I have a message for Beth Rutherford.”

  I heard my voice over the Comm system in the transport lab and out in the hallways. The pounding on the doors paused, as though everyone in the building was listening. And I knew that up there, dozens of floors above me, she was listening too.

  “You’re not a god,” I said, and as I spoke I felt a wave of white-hot anger rise up inside me, swallowing the panic, swallowing the fear. Nothing in the world existed right now except for Beth’s face, hovering before me in my mind.

  “You’re a monster. You rewrote Time and killed fifty-six million people. You may call yourself Mars, but I’m Nemesis. Goddess of vengeance. I’m here to rain down a metric shitload of righteous divine retribution on those who show arrogance before the gods. And I’m inside your fucking house. You want me? Come and get me.”

  Then I pulled out my stun rifle, aimed it at the Comm system, and fired. A deeply satisfying, deafening shriek exploded through the building-wide intercom.

  I looked at Carter. Carter looked at me.

  “All right, Nemesis,” he said, grinning at me. “Showtime.”

  “Good hunting,” I called over my shoulder as I sprinted out of the control room.

  “You too!” he yelled back, and as I ran I heard the sizzling sound of laser heat on metal as he sealed the control room doors behind me.

  I could already hear the sound of shouting voices outside the transport corridor – they were resetting the lock already, they’d be inside in a matter of seconds. I ran past the smoke-blackened doors until I found the one pristine, closed white one and sealed myself into a soundless white tomb just as the hallway door flew open and a stampede of heavy boots charged into the transport corridor.

  I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and then I was gone.

  Twenty-Four

  Remembering Where You’ve Never Been

  I landed hard, losing my balance as I stepped out of the Slipstream and collapsing with a thud on hot dusty ground. If Carter’s end of the plan worked, I had two hours before Beth Rutherford would crash through and land on this exact spot, which wasn’t a lot of time. Still, I wasted ten or fifteen precious seconds just to lay there and catch my breath.

  The air around me smelled of dust and tar and heat. I listened hard – shouting, like that of a crowd, but far away. Some English, some in a language I couldn’t make out. Singing. Lots of voices, but muffled at a distance. Maybe I hadn’t been spotted.

  I jumped up, dusted myself off, and looked around. I was on flat, dry ground patched with bits of dead grass, standing behind an empty, unmarked military-lookin
g jeep. There was nothing except dry grassland stretching away in front of me, with the faint shapes of a town in the distance. No people. The noises must be coming from behind me.

  I checked my HIO meter. 1.8.

  Not bad, I thought to myself approvingly. First crisis averted. I hadn’t been seen.

  I crouched low and peered around the side of the jeep. There was a decrepit shack about fifty feet away, surrounded by tattered fencing. A few men stood near the doorway, gesticulating wildly. As I moved around the corner of the vehicle, I finally saw what they were pointing at, the source of all the voices I had heard. Stretched far away across the dusty field in front of the shack was a vast crowd of African faces, thousands upon thousands strong, holding small paper booklets in their hands. It was an extraordinary sight. It was nothing at all like seeing it in photographs.

  My coordinates had worked. I had beaten Beth Rutherford here.

  I looked out at the vast sea of humanity stretching out in front of me and I let the singing and voices wash over me. “You are not going to die today,” I whispered, with more hope in my voice than I felt, trying to send it through the air, over the crowd, towards the seventy people whose lives would be lost when the shooting started.

  I had lied to Carter, a little. I had told him the plan was to create a Double Incongruity centered around Beth Rutherford. That was true. But that was only half of it.

  I was here to stop the Sharpeville Massacre.

  I was here to save not just the fifty-six million victims of the Third World War, but the people who were going to die right here, today: Seventy unarmed African civilians – and Agent Leo Carstairs, who had been shot in the back trying to save them.

  I was going to bring my father home.

  I inched around the other side of the jeep to get a better view. A cluster of police officers stood in the front of the station, collecting paper passbooks from the quiet and orderly crowd as they filed up one by one to patiently submit themselves for arrest. So far, all was just as it should be.

  Then one of the figures detached himself from the cluster and moved away, very near where I was hiding. My heart sped up a little and I pressed myself against the hot metal of the jeep. It would be just my luck to get spotted by a police officer thirty seconds after landing and ruin the whole plan.

  But it appeared I was in luck; he had only stepped away for a smoke. He pulled out a cigarette from his pocket, and as he lifted it to his mouth I saw him discreetly tap away on a wrist Comm disguised as a watch. My heart sped up even further as he turned his back towards the police station, staring off into the distance, facing towards me.

  It was my very first look at my dad.

  I knew him from my mother’s family albums, of course, and from the handful of documents in the Bureau archives that were redacted enough for my security clearance level. But to see him three-dimensional, living, breathing – not a ghost trapped in amber – was disorienting in the extreme.

  He wasn’t all that much older than me. He looked so much like Leo. Achingly so. Fairer skin and much more blond than his son, but the sweep of the hairline, the nose, the jaw, the ears, I knew them all by heart. They were my brother’s. And, I realized suddenly, mine.

  This was the best opening I was going to get. I took off my U.E. helmet and weapons, stashed them inside the jeep out of view, and approached him.

  “Agent Carstairs,” I said, and he stared at me.

  The range of expressions that overtook his face were dizzying. First surprise, then suspicion, then a baffled recognition, as though he knew my face from somewhere but couldn’t quite place it.

  “If you are . . . who I think you are,” he said hesitatingly, “then I don’t understand how you could possibly be here.”

  “I’m with the Bureau,” I said. He was still staring. “I have to talk to you,” I said urgently. “Alone. I need to tell you what’s about to happen. You felt something was wrong when you landed here. Something felt off.”

  He nodded.

  “It is,” I went on. “Something is very wrong. And I’m here to try and stop it.”

  He looked at me for a long, long moment, and I could see the wheels turning. I could see him trying to decide whether or not he could trust me. And then I watched something click, and he smiled.

  “I’ll be damned,” he said softly, and there was something almost affectionate in his voice as he added, “Follow me,” and led me inside the hot, dingy metal box that served as some kind of outbuilding of the police station.

  Once inside, he slammed the door shut and bolted it. “Low voices,” he said quietly. “Thin walls.” I nodded. “How’s your mother?” I looked up at him sharply, startled. He grinned. “You have her eyes,” he said. “My nose, but her eyes.”

  “Yes,” I said, smiling back at him. “I do.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Reggie. Regina.”

  “Regina. Of course. Of course her grandmother wins out over my grandmother.”

  “Your grandmother’s name was Mildred.”

  “Mildred is a classic name. And your brother? Christopher?”

  I froze.

  I had always known, of course, that my brother was named after my father, but had somehow never put two and two together. No one had ever told me that Leo’s name was not originally supposed to be Leo. It felt desperately wrong to lie to my dad, yet I couldn’t see any way to correct him without telling him it was because he was supposed to die here and his son would bear his name as a memorial. I hesitated.

  “Yes,” I said after a moment, seeing him look at me curiously. “Christopher.”

  “Does he work for the Bureau too?”

  “No,” I said. “He’s Europe’s most successful restaurateur under thirty,” and my dad burst out laughing.

  “That’s fantastic,” he said. “Don’t tell me any more. I want to be surprised. Don’t give all the good stuff away.”

  He pulled a chair out for me and waved me into it, then sat down across from me.

  “Okay,” he said. “Tell me.”

  “You were right about Gemstone,” I said, and his eyes widened. “You were right about everything.”

  * * *

  It took me nearly an hour to tell my father everything we had learned – that Beth Rutherford and Harold Grove had been working on both sides of the Timeline to create, and then conceal, a Chronomaly of staggering magnitude to promote U.E.’s rise as a global power. His money had been on John Dean too; he, also, had never seen Beth Rutherford coming. And he was heartbroken but unsurprised about Grove.

  “Your mother,” he asked. “Does she know?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I haven’t seen her since she went on the run, a few days ago. Or eighteen months ago. Or twelve years from now. Whenever it was. But anyway, she didn’t know then.”

  “She’ll be devastated,” he said. “They were at the Academy together. They’ve been friends since they were fourteen.”

  “I work under him,” I said. “Or, I did. I was his apprentice.”

  “It must have been awful, when you found out.”

  “It was,” I said. “It was like a nightmare.”

  “And you said the other one, the woman – Mars – you said she’ll be coming through the net here? Why? What’s special about this place?”

  “I sent her here to create a Double Incongruity,” I said. “It’s the only way to erase her from the Timeline. Her younger self is here already.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said, and that was the moment I realized that I had used up all my time, I had arrived, I couldn’t stall for a moment longer. I couldn’t explain what was about to happen without saying the thing I desperately didn’t want to say. I swallowed hard, took a deep breath, opened my mouth to speak, and choked on the words. No sound came out. I gritted my teeth to try again.

  But I was reckoning without Leo Carstairs.

  “Oh,” he said, instantly comprehending. “Oh, she’s good. She’s very good. Somethi
ng’s going to go wrong today, isn’t it? I’m going to die and it’s going to look like an accident. That’s brilliant.”

  He shook his head in grudging admiration. “I knew something felt wrong,” he said. “It wasn’t just that the crowd was bigger than it was supposed to be. It was something in the air. It was—”

  “Menace,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said approvingly. “That’s it exactly. I was expecting chaos, but I felt something much uglier and more dangerous than that. I didn’t know what it was.”

  “It’s Beth Rutherford,” I said. “It’s because she’s here.”

  “You’ve got to hand it to United Enterprises,” he said. “They cover their bases. This is a flawless plan. Is this all because of Gemstone?”

  “No,” I said, a slow, cold realization dawning over me. “I thought it was, but no. It’s bigger than that. It’s all connected.” I felt the world slow around me as the final pieces of the puzzle snapped neatly into place. I closed my eyes.

  Beth Rutherford had been running this plan on two parallel tracks – one running backwards from the 22nd century and one speeding forward the 1970’s – until they had collided in 1981 with the Third World War. It was all one endless loop of cause and effect. In the future, Beth Rutherford decides to build an empire, so she sends herself back to the past to groom a tiny security company into a global empire. She concocts a plan called Gemstone and gets the White House to sign off on it, maneuvering John Dean and Gordon Liddy around like pieces on a chessboard.

  Gemstone opens the door for rampant sabotage of Democratic campaigns, assuring a Nixon win and placing the Reagan administration firmly in Beth Rutherford’s pocket. Then – when she launches her war, pitting the United States against China – she’s the first in line to pick up the pieces on both ends and profit by trillions of dollars, building U.E. into the indestructible Goliath it remained until this day.

  But a century later, young Leo Carstairs uncovers the existence of Gemstone, and a twenty-five-years-younger Beth Rutherford – unable to shut down his investigation by pulling Colin Daisey’s strings – executes a cold-blooded murder, flawlessly camouflaged as an accident.