Invictus

by Ryan Graudin

  No match found. On to the next life.

  Subject Three. Eliot started even further back. Dr. Ramírez had warned her against scanning alternates outside of a present parallel to her own, since doing so might skew the results, leading to unnecessary neutralization or a skipped catalyst. She lingered in Subject Three’s past just long enough to ruin it, sabotaging what would become the Ab Aeterno’s final mission. Altering the nav system and stealing the extra fuel rods meant that Empra’s ship landed a few centuries off course, with no way back to Central and no chance of rescue. Making her own mother a castaway in history was a heartless move: palatable only through necessity. Eliot promised herself she’d rescue the Ab Aeterno once everything got sorted.

  The immutability threshold was breached, and this time, when the final exam Sim went awry, the Academy did its part, tossing a protesting Subject Three out on his arse. But he wasn’t as grounded as Eliot had hoped, for wherever time travel existed, so did the black market. Every universe had its own version of Lux, whose sights were always set on Cadet McCarthy. Subject Three was skipping centuries inside an illegal TM within days. It was all Eliot could do to keep up, aligning his present with hers through burning buildings and pirate battles, scavenging scanner percentages whenever Subject Three brushed shoulders with her mid-disaster. The process was even slower this time around. Something had to change….

  She had to get closer to the subject. She had to join his crew. The task was harder than it sounded; theirs was a tight-knit group and approaching them led to more suspicion than open arms. Subject Three—their captain—was wary. He remembered Eliot’s face from the Sim, which led to questions she couldn’t really answer. They elected not to take her on board, and so more weeks were lost chasing them through history for the final few percentages. Subject Three was not a match.

  Agent Ackerman checked in. As predicted, he wasn’t thrilled with the new universes in Eliot’s wake, but he was even less pleased with her pace. “Hurry it up, history hopper! My superiors in MB+251418881HTP8 are breathing down my neck to get this situation contained and resolved.” Not the best pep talk.

  Round four. Eliot did everything over again, but this time, when the present points in their timelines intersected in the den of the Caponian Collective, she resorted to blackmail. They faced off in the vault: Subject Four in a rainbow-bright suit, Eliot palming the Cat’s Eye Emerald. There was a chase—there was always a chase—and after a begrudging agreement, she was part of Subject Four’s crew: bunk, nickname, and all. It seemed she’d worked out a system. The scanner finished its read inside two days: not a match.

  Eliot didn’t skip worlds immediately; it didn’t feel right, leaving the Ab Aeterno stranded, making Subject Four’s loss of mother permanent. She stayed just long enough to guide the crew in Empra’s direction. Their universe might be doomed, but they found each other—embracing in the flaming city, hearts made light by the fact that for now, the Ab Aeterno was saved.

  The fifth world. A pattern had emerged: strand the Ab Aeterno, sabotage the final exam Sim, intersect the subject’s timeline at present point, blackmail, join crew, take scans, rescue mother. It wasn’t easy, but it felt rhythmic, something Eliot could keep up with. Something that might even outrun the Fade…

  Then the forgetting started.

  They weren’t small losses: no five-second delay recalling the name of Solara’s childhood pet. What Eliot could not remember were large swathes of past: sophomore year at the Academy, her first kiss…. Logic told her these things had happened. Freshman year, junior year. Never-been-kissed, second base. Memories fit in the middle, but—much like a secondhand jigsaw puzzle—whole picture pieces were missing.

  Universe MB+178587977FLT6, the world Eliot came from, was fading.

  If there was a fate worse than death, it was a life unremembered. Mom, Solara, Strom, her Academy friends… moment by moment they melted away from Eliot’s recollection, herself with them. She found no solace in her interface footage, for photographs were meant to preserve memories, not resurrect them, and so her family pixelated—three strangers on a Venetian boat, adrift in ruins.

  Eliot watched the datastream of Dr. Ramírez again so she wouldn’t forget what she was doing, why she was here. Why was she here? Who was she trying to save, really? How could she make it count when the life she’d lived was falling into oblivion?

  It wasn’t a question she could contemplate for long. Decay was hot on Eliot’s heels. The forgetting stretched on, over, out, spilling into the universes of Subject OneTwoThreeFour, hounding their countersignature through history with gathering strength. Subject Five was not a match, and Eliot left him in the arms of his mother in Alexandria. Once more saved, once more on the edge of burning.

  Subject Six. Same routine, new haste. Eliot had no way of knowing when the Fade would find her, but she knew the force was close, its fingers of forgetfulness scratching at every universe she’d ever traveled through. Her days were spent on high alert—watching every moment for signs of the Fade’s arrival. Dr. Ramírez had shown her footage of the decay, but even watching herself watch it, Eliot knew there’d be no comparison between screens and life. The hologram’s projection looked fake, something stripped from a Sim programmer’s nightmares.

  Her first encounter with the Fade was in Far’s universe. The sight was as horrible as it was magnificent—view of all views. Eliot stood on the Titanic’s first-class promenade, hip bones pressed against the railing, awaiting the arrival of the Invictus. Atlantic wind whispered salty nothings into her ears; water sped below, folding froth into the ocean liner’s hull. There was a peace to the scene Eliot only felt in hindsight: the calm before.

  It started at the horizon, where the blue of the sea struck the blue of the sky. A pinpoint of not-blue appeared between the two elements. The spot mushroomed up and out: drinking the ocean, gnashing the heavens, devouring two of the vastest expanses known to twentieth-century man in seconds. Eliot stood on deck, transfixed by the magnitude of the force. It was too big, too massive for holograms or descriptions or human feeling. Even her fear was dwarfed in its presence….

  Presence. Present! As soon as the Fade reached the promenade and clashed with Eliot’s present, she’d be unmade.

  Jump immediately!

  She did. The leap was through time, not dimensions, and even then only into later that evening. Eliot spent much of the night in the first-class dining saloon, waiting for the Invictus and the Fade in turn. The decay did follow at a delay, creeping into a not-distant-enough past, savoring the minutes she’d also spent eating, stripping the taste of poached salmon from Eliot’s tongue even as it sat in her belly.

  She would have abandoned the day altogether, if her present wasn’t scheduled to intersect with Subject Seven’s present here. Roughly. The hours she was forced to skip worried her, but they mattered little in the end. The Invictus bounced off six o’clock—a time that no longer existed—and the resulting ten o’clock crash landing meant Eliot only had to jump another thirty minutes to realign their timetables, giving Far an extra half hour to fumble through the cargo room.

  From there it was a familiar story, mostly remembered. Flashing the Rubaiyat. Teleporting onto the Invictus. Blackmail. The party in Vegas. Cucurbita conversations with Imogen. The meeting with Lux. Mission prep for Alexandria. Eliot had recorded every moment—even the ones that seemed too simple to store. The crew of the Invictus watched themselves through her eyes, their own transfixed. Only Imogen had moved, sliding from couch to floor, drowning her face in aquamarine hair while starry-eyed confessions played. Eliot was surprised at how much she felt for her, for all of them. In a matter of days, her loved ones had become strangers, while the strangers themselves became people she wanted to save….

  The chip held almost a year’s worth of footage—but the Grid’s timelessness allowed them to watch it in a single sitting. A year. A minute. A month. A life. Seven infinite lives until only one memory remained in the systems. It opened with Imogen gazing
into ash-strung skies. “The fires have already started.”

  “Are we too late?” Then-Far asked.

  “That’s enough.” Now-Far stood. “Pause.”

  But the chip was programmed to respond to Eliot’s voice alone, and as much as she wanted to spare them the horror of Empra’s unmaking, she couldn’t. The Invictus’s crew knew what happened next, but soon they wouldn’t. They had to watch the footage to understand what the Fade took and remember the stakes….

  “Stop!” Far tried again, louder. The stitches in Eliot’s hand throbbed alongside his shout—a fresh and oozing grief. “Make it stop!”

  She wanted to. She didn’t.

  The hologram dashed through Alexandrian streets, up the library steps. Eliot hadn’t rushed to Sappho’s scrolls but kept to the central stacks instead, watching to make sure Far got to the right place. Empra was always in the library’s southeast corner on this date, at this time. Her children always turned at the sound of her voice—their reunion always curdled inside Eliot’s heart. Empra McCarthy looked identical in every world, and even though Eliot knew these were other mothers, it was easier to imagine her own as a transient soul than to accept the Fade’s sentence.

  That erasure wasn’t so abstract anymore. On the Titanic, it had been the decay’s size that struck Eliot; from the ground, it was the hunger. No element was safe. Water, air, earth, fire, stone, paper. The Fade destroyed everything.

  Skin. Bone. Soul.

  Empra was gone the instant the Fade touched her: presents intersecting. The Invictus would have unraveled, too, if Eliot hadn’t initiated the TM’s jump into the Grid. And so they were here, watching until the moment in the hologram overlapped with the moment they were sitting in. It could’ve gone on—ouroboros endlessness: serpent’s tail to serpent’s mouth to serpent’s tail to serpent’s mouth—but Eliot finally spoke.

  “End sequence.”

  The world within a world folded in on itself, becoming a clear chip in a velvet box once more. The crew stared at the space the hologram had filled—its emptiness played back in their expressions. Imogen hid beneath waves of hair. Gram, too, had turned inward, making calculations of everything he’d heard. Priya sat more still than steady, parted mouth vacant of words. There was no need to observe anymore, but Eliot watched them anyway, all too aware that they could look back and see her. The veil of secrets had been ripped away and here Eliot stood. World-hopper, alternate cousin, other self, executioner, girl forgotten by her universe—

  she was who she was, but only because he was who he was

  —boy unmoored from time, snag in the fabric of the multiverse, eye of the storm, system error, catalyst. Farway Gaius McCarthy didn’t look like any of these things, seated on the scorched couch, blaster drooping at his side. Often he carried himself with the surety of someone convinced they were destined for greatness, but after realizing what he actually was destined for, the boy sat with his shoulders hunched.

  When Eliot spoke again, he flinched. “Don’t you see, Far? You’re the epicenter. My countersignature emission scans confirm it. You’re the reason the Fade has torn apart these universes, and there’s only one theoretical way to stop it….”

  No one said a word.

  They understood now, all of them did.

  “You have to die.”

  PART III

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

  —W. B. YEATS

  “THE SECOND COMING”

  34

  PAST THE END

  IT WAS A BAD MED-PATCH NIGHTMARE, Far told himself. Reality couldn’t possibly morph like this, until it had more in common with a Salvador Dalí painting than the world he’d wandered for eighteen years. Everything was swimming, as if he’d fallen back-first into a river and was seeing the rest of the Invictus through its flow. Bright hair, bloodstained scrubs, rainbow cubes on the floor. The ship full of colors seemed to be moving and swirling, yet nothing was.

  “I’m the catalyst? Why? How?” Far knew the answer. It was something he’d carried his entire life—a badge of honor. Being born outside of time had always felt like a mark of something greater, culling him out for an extraordinary existence.

  But this existence was becoming a bit too extraordinary.

  “It’s your unbirthday,” Gram said. “Think about it. Every one of your alternates is your genetic match, which means you all share the same father. Nothing aberrant there. It’s the birthday, or in your case, a lack of one, where you diverge. The rest of them were born on April eighteenth, 2354.”

  And Far was born in the Ab Aeterno. Eternity. Surely there was a scientific reason for the collapse of the multiverse, but all Far could think about were the Linear protesters who sometimes gathered on the Academy steps—their digital ONE LIFE, ONE TIME banners blazing. Their leader’s magnified words rapped at the school windows: When humanity steps into the shoes of gods, things will go awry.

  You don’t belong here. Eliot wasn’t just a premonition. She was course correction, God’s will, karma, fate—call it what you will. This was the universe’s way of righting itself, handing Far an eviction notice….

  The dreaming feeling ebbed enough for Far to recognize Priya’s breath beside his—thick with emotion, too thin to hold back her sob. Their hands turned into a tangle of each other’s fingers. Hold on for life, dear.

  He didn’t want to go.

  “But if it really was my birth that set all this off, why’d it take the Bureau so long to find me?” Far asked. “Everyone in Central knows about my unbirthday. Surely that would’ve set off some red flags.”

  “The Multiverse Bureau isn’t omniscient or omnipresent. Your universe is just a number to them—MB-178587984FLT6—though I suppose that number’s changed since I broke the immutability threshold twice….” Eliot trailed off. “Regardless, I think Gram’s correct. You’re the only alternate who was born outside of time. It’s not a stretch to believe that your birth broke something.”

  “So why’s the Fade attacking the other universes first?” Far knew it wasn’t important in the end, but maybe, if he could wrap his head around his doom, it’d be easier to accept. “Shouldn’t it go the other way, if I’m the epicenter? Inward out?”

  “The Fade isn’t springing from you,” Gram said. “If I understood Dr. Ramírez correctly, it’s hunting you down. Does anyone have a pen? Imogen?”

  “What? Pen.” The Historian started at the sound of her name. “Yes, pen. I have. Somewhere. Definitely.”

  “Could I borrow it?” Gram prodded.

  Imogen brushed her hair from her face, set to scouring the table. She found the felt-tipped pen and handed it to the Engineer over her shoulder. “Yeppers.”

  “Thanks, Im.”

  She nodded, still not looking at him, and sank back into her hair.

  Gram grabbed the sole paper they had on board—the Corps of Central Time Travelers’ Code of Conduct—and traced a circle on one of the cover’s un-doodled spaces. “Inside this circle are all of the FLT6 universes where your genetic alternates exist. Here you are”—stick figure jotted in the middle—“the epicenter. Now here’s your birth, causing the countersignature.” Tiny lightning lines, splintering out of the toothpick man. Were they signals, or cracks? To Far, they looked like both. “Crux knows where the Fade actually comes from, but for this illustration we’ll just say outside the circle. It’s honing in on you, following the trail through the other universes, and obliterating them in the process.”

  His friend etched arrows, until Far’s entire likeness was ringed with points, every one of them aimed inward. A dozen sharpnesses. You don’t belong, you’re wrong, wrong, wrong!

  Far looked to Eliot. The gleam of her handcuffs was mirrored in her eyes. “You said the Grid keeps us safe from the Fade. If I was born here, maybe I should stay. That way the decay wouldn’t have anything to follow.”

  “No can do, Far.” Gram placed the pen back on the table. “All ti
me or no time, our resources are finite. We’d run out of fuel and food if we didn’t land.”

  “Food.” Imogen perked up again, rising off the floor, drifting toward the kitchenette. “Good idea.”

  Far’s stomach was hollowed past the point of appetite. Saturated fat wouldn’t repair the universe—universes—his existence had broken. Sugar couldn’t resurrect his mother. “The Ab Aeterno didn’t wreck because of the Fade. You—you stranded it.” Eliot wasn’t the villain. Far knew this, but the knowledge didn’t translate into feeling. “You took my mom away.”

  “She’s my mother, too,” the girl whispered.

  The blaster in his hand had grown heavier. Far wanted to lift it but found that he couldn’t. Who was he going to aim it at anyway? Himself? His different self? No shot would make anything that had happened untrue….

  “You had eleven more years with her than I did—”

  “And I can’t remember any of them. You want to toss around blame, Far? Those years are gone because you exist. I stranded your mother because I was trying to save her. I tried to save all of them….” Eliot sagged, marionette past motion. Wardrobe clothes shuddered from the extra weight on the pipe. “If I’d known the Fade was going to appear in Alexandria, I never would’ve taken you there and let your present align with Empra’s.”

  “So why bother with target practice?” Far looked past the brown-white weave of his and Priya’s fingers, at the burnt satin below. “You should’ve just left me in Alexandria, let the Fade do what it set out to.”

  “The countersignature scan wasn’t complete. The Multiverse Bureau wants hard evidence that you’re the catalyst, proof that the Fade might halt with your death.”