by Liana Brooks
Rose moved around the quiet command room, trying to find the files compiled from the latest MIA runs. The lights were at 30 percent, mimicking night and discouraging anyone from lingering after their shift was over. She was alone with the soft hum of data collection interrupted only by the occasional chirp of a computer spitting out data.
Sixteen iterations had been demolished in the past twenty hours. There was no rhyme or reason that she could see, but she was searching. At the moment, she had six computers running. Five were collating data and comparing the recently destroyed timelines in a hunt for a pattern. The sixth was scrolling through the information collected from a thousand iterations in the search for Dana Cardenas, the woman in the yellow shirt Rose had found in Locker 666.
Dr. Basch had given her the name but couldn’t place the adult Cardenas in any one iteration. Which was very odd. Every iteration they’d made contact with had a file. But Basch’s research had only pulled up Cardenas because she was from Prime. She’d died at age six during a bombing of her city, and her DNA was on file.
One by one, the computers turned up zero results. It was improbable that Emir was operating without a reason. Even with decoherence looming, the other iterations didn’t present a threat. They’d all self-destruct when the iterational fan collapsed in that one moment where the only possible future became Prime’s future. When all other options ceased to be viable, when some earth-shattering catastrophe hit and only Prime had the answer, the other iterations would vanish.
Collecting the information made sense. Pruning certain radical futures made sense. But this current surge in missions was senseless to her.
With a quiet sigh, she went to each computer, erasing her search history and wiping the stations clean of any genetic evidence. She was supposed to be on duty watching the MIA in case there was an unexpected intrusion, not hacking into the system to run unapproved searches.
Cleaning everything up brought her a sense of peace. For a moment, she could pretend that everything was going well and enjoy the sense of awe she felt standing here.
This was the very center of the universe. Prime was the master control, the heartbeat of the universe.
Rose’s fingers brushed across the synthapaper scrolls that showed the constant sine wave of time. With training, she’d learned to read each dip of the iterations.
Here, the birth of an einselected node.
There, the tragic outcome of an event that crushed a million iterations and left only four struggling forward.
The future had a unique brilliance. During the times of expansion, all of time looked like a rainbow fracturing into infinite color. Now the lines of possibility were thickening, collapsing. Decoherence was drowning the rainbow in brutal black.
Quietly, the machine drew the newest line. Tomorrow shifted into view.
Prime appeared as a thin black line at the base of the sine wave. The scroll rolled out, and the black line surged up like a wave, following the possibilities of the lesser iterations. Hour by hour, ink drop by ink drop, the future appeared. She held her breath as the wave crested and crashed down, back to where it belonged at the baseline.
For a moment the whole universe held its breath.
Prime sank, and sank, and plateaued as a rogue iteration shot past it.
Heartbeat stuttering with an unpleasant rush of fear, Rose watched another iteration take Prime’s place. Another line touched the baseline and took dominance.
Someone was stealing her future.
Rose went to the communications board and dialed a number she thought she’d never need to use.
After a moment, the screen shimmered as the stern visage of Emir appeared.
“Dr. Emir, my apologies for calling at this late hour, there’s been a mishap here at the command center.”
He raised a bushy white eyebrow. “A mishap? A flood perhaps? Did you run out of synthapaper? You’re a commander. You are supposed to be able to handle these things on your own.”
Rose bristled at his tone, furious and fearful. “There is a problem with the machine, sir.” She only barely managed to keep her tone respectful.
“The MIA?”
“No, sir. The reader attached to the MIA. The probability fan, crashed and Prime didn’t take the Prime position again. It must have a glitch.”
“Impossible.” Emir sneered. “The machine is infallible.”
“If that is the case, sir, then we have lost our place as the dominant iteration.”
“Impossible!”
“Then the machine is broken. Sir.”
Emir’s scowl burned through the screen. “Call the techs. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Rose slapped on her Kevlar vest with more force then was strictly required. Under the blue-tinted glow of the lights, she found herself trying to avoid catching her reflection in the polished chrome of the lockers. Afraid she’d no longer see the pride and righteous fury that she needed. Afraid that she’d look into her own eyes and see confirmation that, somewhere, she’d made a wrong choice. This was an impossible situation. Untenable. Utterly ridiculous.
The silent room became an echo chamber of memories. From her first mission as a freshly minted lieutenant shaking with excitement at the idea of going to a different timeline, to a seasoned veteran, shaking with exhaustion from the years she’d spent in the pursuit of maintaining their Primacy. Now she wondered if all those choices had been right. There had been a few tiny, unauthorized changes to ensure that Samantha Rose got the promotion, to ensure that the stars aligned for her and her alone.
All of those choices haunted her. Begged her to question if that was why Prime was no longer truly the Prime. If her selfishness had doomed all of them to a horrible fate.
The locker room door snapped open with a metallic clatter. “Do you know what hour it is?” Cornelius Senturi, her second-in-command, asked as he opened the locker next to hers.
“I see the surgeon was unable to fix your lack of discipline,” Rose said, but there was no bite to her words. She was glad the emergency had pulled in Senturi instead of Donovan. Despite Emir’s assurances, the thought of having two nodes out of the iteration made her want to vomit.
“It’s three in the morning,” Senturi grumbled.
“Time is irrelevant.” The response was almost automatic now. Everyone in Central Command knew time was an illusion. And the illusion was running out.
Senturi gave her a put-upon look. “Sleep isn’t an illusion. I’m supposed to be healing. Why are we going now? This can wait until I’ve had my beauty rest.”
Rose didn’t even bother turning to watch him strip. Senturi fishing for compliments was as common as the ticking of a second hand. “No amount of sleep is going to make you pretty, Senturi.”
“If time is ours to control, we can wait to run this op until after breakfast. That’s all I’m saying.”
She tugged her boots on. “Time slipped.”
“What?” Senturi demanded, pushing her shoulder so she was forced to turn. He glared at her with pale eyes and an ugly sneer that very few ever saw. “Time slipped? What’s that even supposed to mean?”
“We are currently not the prime iteration. Someone else has taken over.”
“Impossible.”
“Improbable,” Rose corrected calmly. “There wouldn’t be a possibility fan if things were impossible.” Her hand shook a little as she thought about it.
Somewhere out there was the far edge of the fan. A world where she existed, but was so foreign as to be completely alien, and they were going there.
This wasn’t a matter of small-change iterations where the wrong politician was elected to the World Council—they were going to a place where there was no World Council. No Central Command. No Ministry of Defense. Nothing she knew existed on the far edge of the fan.
Too late, she realized Senturi was s
crutinizing her. She stared back. “What?”
“Commander, is this a drill?” For the first time in his life, he looked serious.
She lifted her chin. “Does it matter? If you can’t perform correctly on a drill, you won’t do your job in the field. Suit up and meet me in the jump room. I’m taking Bennet in the field, but you’ll be needed no matter what.”
“What about Donovan?”
She grabbed her travel kit from her locker, slammed the door shut, and waited for the gene lock to cycle closed. “This is not a situation we can afford to risk two nodes on. If something goes wrong, Donovan needs to stay here.”
“This doesn’t sound like a drill, ma’am.”
“Then maybe this will be your first bad hair day.” With a small, cynical smile, she walked out of the room, leaving Senturi to admire the chiseled perfection of his reflection . . . even with the confused look on his face. It felt good to rattle his cage, and safer keeping the Council off guard. The longer they were kept in the dark, the more time she had to put everything back together.
Under her breath, she hummed the tune to Humpty Dumpty. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men.
The jump room was really three rooms built in concentric circles focused on the time portal. The core was dark still, lit only by the sullen, purple glow of the closed portal that rippled with lazy waves. The secondary circle should have had data screens brightening the place like noon on a clear summer day, but today there was nothing. A sick feeling in the pit of her stomach made her blood colder than a time jump.
“Commander Rose.” Dr. Emir waved to her from the far side of the room.
She walked through the outer layer, where techs in pale mint-green scrubs and masks carefully prepared for every eventuality. An agent could step through the portal and be in an operating room in under ninety seconds if needed. Which has been necessary more and more often. “Doctor.”
“I traced the aberrant iteration to the outer edge of the fan.”
“Let me guess, dinosaurs and cavemen?”
It was a joke, but Emir treated her to a withering glare. “One would think that after committing such an egregious error, you would be do your best to perform as a professional. Your levity is not welcome. Nor are your sloppy mistakes.”
“My mistakes?” Practice kept her tone from rising or from blood flushing her cheeks an unsightly red. He didn’t know what she’d done in those other iterations. No one knew. So he could only be blaming her for the machine readings that were beyond her control. “Don’t put the blame for this fiasco on my doorstep. We both know I’m not the one who’s made a mistake.” It was so close to what she wanted to say and still so far away.
“The machine and my science are infallible,” Emir said curtly.
“Your MIA and your science aren’t being questioned.” Only his motivations, but she kept that to herself because she had a healthy sense of self-preservation and a desire to live to see old age. Facts were facts, and the one fact that could never be forgotten was that Emir was the one who chose who lived and died. “But this isn’t an iteration where my team was sent in and failed. This is . . .” The word IMPOSSIBLE bubbled up in her mind. “Unheard of.”
“Nevertheless,” Emir said. “It will be your fault in a few short hours. Unless your team manages to topple the iteration.”
Senturi walked in, dressed in the team’s black uniform and trailing the other seven members of their jump crew behind him.
Rose motioned for them to go into the second tier for briefing.
Senturi glanced at the dark ring and crossed over to her and Emir. “Where’s the data for this launch?” he asked.
Her mouth twisted into a bitter scowl. “There is none. We have no operatives there. No safe house. Not even local identities.” She looked at Emir and hoped he read her silent fear. They were taking a huge risk sending her in first. It was a calculated risk, no one had more experiences on the far side of the MIA portal than her, but she’d only gone in blind once before. Her knee still ached some days because of that mission.
Emir ignored her with practiced arrogance. “It’s an inconsequential iteration on the far side of the third fan. There were never enough variations of it to justify exploration.”
“So why is it taking precedence?” Rose demanded, furious at this little nothing-timeline. There were rules. The prime iteration was always the one with the most variations branching off it, like the trunk of a tree. A healthy tree had many branches and deep roots. A weak tree had a few spindly branches and shallow roots.
A terrifying thought gripped her. They call us Gardeners. Was it possible? Could we have pruned away too many branches?
No. Logic asserted itself, stuffing her fearful fantasies back down to her subconscious psyche.
Senturi was studying her again. “Commander?”
She shook her head. “Your orders, sir?”
“Three-man strike team,” Emir said.
She nodded. “Senturi, have your team on standby in case we need an extraction.”
“Aye, ma’am.”
Emir’s eyes flared with cold fury. “Rose, go find out why these parasites are stealing our future.”
CHAPTER 12
“Individual choice is the driving force of history. No movement, philosophy, or law can ever replace the individual as the fulcrum point of change.”
~ excerpt from Thoughts on History by Levin Duprey
Tuesday December 3, 2069
Florida District 8
Commonwealth of North America
Iteration 2
“Clemens!”
Ivy skidded to a halt two feet from the front door of the precinct. She’d worked a twelve-hour shift, and the ice-cream truck was pulling away. If this was a mutt run to chase missing mugs from the break room, she would . . . well . . . she’d suck it up and do her job because she had no choice. But she’d be thinking about physical violence the whole time.
The ice-cream truck pulled away, playing Evinna Madier’s hit single “Summertime Beach Waves,” and with it went her orange creamsicle push pop. The highlight of her day for $3.75. She’d have to run two blocks to catch it.
With a sigh, she turned around. “Yes?”
“I got something for you,” said Tom Wall, the overnight officer in charge. “Just came in.”
Her shoulders slumped. “Missing dog? Lost skateboard? What is it?”
The older man smiled sympathetically. Wall was one of the few decent people on the force. It was going to suck manatee balls when he moved to Boca in two weeks.
“This is good, promise. There’s a murder case from up north. The ME sent the autopsy over and asked if you’d look it over.” He held out a datpad.
Ivy’s eyes went wide. “Really?” No one had ever asked for her help on a major case. She’d tagged along, even managed to help once or twice, but this was unprecedented.
“I skimmed it, and then double-checked the send code. It came from the CBI ME’s office.” He raised an eyebrow. “What’d you get up to when you went to that exchange conference?”
She shook her head. “Nothing. I just asked a few questions about a Jane Doe they had. It wasn’t a big case.” But maybe Runiker had sent it out of sympathy. If Jane was a clone, no one else was going to care about who killed her.
Wall looked at her. “You sure that was it?”
“Yes!” She paused. His tone was all wrong. “Why?”
“There’s multiple case files in there–including one from Alabama, where a teacher was found dead in her kitchen. The CBI is putting together a serial killer case up there.”
She stared at the datpad. “Really?” This was the biggest case she’d ever worked on. Ever even been asked to think about. This was so much better than stolen cars with disabled trackers!
“Cool your chill, Clemens. You get to
look at the file, that’s all. Chief isn’t going to let you go up north to actually work on it.”
“Of course.” She tried not to sound disappointed. “Still . . .”
“Still, it’s a step forward,” Wall agreed. “Sorry I made you miss your ice cream.”
“It’s okay.” She flashed him a smile. “Have a good evening, sir.”
“Stay out of trouble, Clemens,” he said with a wave as he headed back to the bullpen.
“Yes, sir.”
She walked to her car in the fading evening twilight, only half seeing the world around her. Ocean breezes and museum-worthy sunsets happened 350 days out of every 365.
Serial killers were rare.
Her car was a late-model Firebright Racer that the city had taken in a drug bust, bright orange with a dented door panel and the backseat stripped out. It was ugly and didn’t drive great, but it was all she had. There was a chance it might even transfer in January to become her official property. Until then, she drove it like an old lady creeping toward church on a Sunday morning because the supply officer would charge her for every scratch. Come January, when she could run her own bank account instead of having it go straight to a caseworker, and have 95 percent docked for expenses, she was going to save. In a few years, things were going to be different.
Once she reached the studio efficiency apartment, she raced upstairs. There was leftover oatmeal in the fridge for dinner, but what she really wanted were her binders.
When she’d first started working for the department, they’d cleaned out old cases, and she’d wound up liberating a few case binders in her first act of rebellion against her oppressors. Even if their oppression was limited to treating her like a thing to be bought or sold and didn’t actually involve whips, chains, or genuine oppression. But that wasn’t the point.
The point was she had nearly seventy years’ worth of case files that would help her find patterns the CBI might miss.
It probably wouldn’t break the case. And she doubted they’d listen to her if she found anything, but she could try.
Laying the cases on the floor in a rainbow around her, she leaned against the metal frame of her bed and turned on the datpad. The very first note was a scrawl reading, “Where were the crimes committed? Find the crime scene. LM”
