by Liana Brooks
She started reading the files, hunting for the crime scene and answers for the CBI.
CHAPTER 13
“We measure time in minutes, but lifetimes in memories.”
~ excerpt from the Oneness of Being by Oaza Moun I1—2072
Date Unknown
Location Unknown
Rogue Iteration
Nothingness bloomed into life. Green, was Rose’s first thought. There was green everywhere. An unforgivable number of fruitless trees and bushes with no visible purpose. She sucked in the air and all but gagged as it stuck in her throat, thick enough to chew.
Behind her, Bennet started coughing. “Mercy and life, where are we?”
“The coordinates place us less than a klick from the main facility in this iteration.” Logan sneezed. “Ma’am, there seems to be some sort of contagion in this city. The air is—” Her words were choked off by a wet cough.
“Masks on,” Rose ordered. She hated wearing gas masks, but already her eyes were swelling shut in response to whatever poison this iteration allowed to float around. Over the years, she’d seen some bad places. Smog-filled cities. Towers eroding from acidic clouds of pollution. This was something else entirely.
With her mask filtering everything, she fought for breath and scanned the area. “Did we land in an arboretum?”
“No, ma’am.” Logan’s voice was tinny, distorted by the breath mask. “It seems we landed in an open field with vegetation?”
“Is that a question or a statement?” Rose demanded angrily. She didn’t need to look over to know Logan was gulping down fear. “Never mind. Fan out. Let’s establish a perimeter.”
Times like this she wished she believed in a god so she could blaspheme just a bit. This iteration was the stuff of nightmares. Vines with little spikes hung everywhere, grabbing at her pant legs and threatening to rip the exposed skin of her forearms. Strange things ran along the tree branches, chittering and shaking the trees. Something in the distance made the sound of a broken buzz saw starting to scream. It sounded uncomfortably organic.
Sweat formed on the edge of her mask and dripped down her neck.
“What is that smell?” Bennet asked.
“Your mask,” Rose said, tallying what paperwork she would need to do to get filter replacements after this mission. Bennet coughed. From the corner of her eye, Rose saw him remove his mask to shake it. “Problems?”
Bennet nodded. “There’s a smell getting into my mask. Past the filters.” He coughed, sneezed, and shook his head. “This place is toxic.”
“Then aren’t you glad it isn’t going to be your permanent home?” The original mission parameters included embedding Bennet here as an intelligence asset, but she’d written that off the agenda after her first breath. There were limits to the torture she’d make her soldiers endure. Already, the damp heat of this place was soaking through her shirt and making it cling. After this, a cold shower would be a welcome relief.
“Ma’am, I have the target building in sight.”
“Thank you, Bennet.” Rose triangulated on her soldier’s position and moved through the dense foliage, cursing plants in general and this unknown genus in particular.
Logan stepped up beside her, pulling dangling vines off her pants.
“We aren’t supposed to leave a trail.”
“It was them or me, ma’am,” Logan said. “I wasn’t going to let the plant win.”
Bennet motioned for them to join him. “Are you sure about the coordinates, Logan?”
“You want to check my math?” she shot back.
Rose held a hand up for silence. From their spot on the tree line, it was easy to see why Bennet was confused. This wasn’t Central Command. In front of them, a small hill led to a green expanse of lawn, with picnic benches in a three-sided courtyard, and a small building that couldn’t have more than two floors at best. It hardly looked like the seat of a world power or the home to the most powerful weapon in human history. “Do you have any life readings?”
Logan scanned the building. “Two, on the far side of the building.”
“No perimeter guard?” Bennet scoffed. “What are they doing?”
“It could be a trap,” Logan said.
Rose checked her digital display for the local time. “It’s Oh-five-fifteen—no one’s at work yet.”
“That’s no excuse for lax security,” Bennet said.
Logan shifted on her feet. “Ma’am, is it possible they could have moved the machine? We sent the probe in twelve hours ago. In the early days, Dr. Emir had a floating lab that moved from location to location to prevent just this kind of attack.”
“It’s possible,” Rose admitted though she hated the idea.
If the machine was in a floating lab, they would need to leave someone behind to gather intelligence. It was possible Emir would even order her back to stay here. Not many of the others had her deep-cover training or her language skills. It wasn’t always a good thing to be the best. “Let’s check the building. Once we know what’s going on, we can report back. Making plans without proper intelligence is how you lose wars, not win them.”
She glanced at Bennet. “Time to the next portal alignment?”
“Sixty-seven minutes, ma’am.”
Rose nodded. “Make it snappy and keep it quiet.”
Logan went first, half running, half skipping down the hill until she skidded to a stop near a metal utility door. Bennet followed as Rose took a covering position. Both her soldiers were non-nodal, expendable.
Logan signaled that everything was safe, and Rose moved down the hill with as much dignity as possible. If she returned with grass stains on her pants, she’d never hear the end of it. “How’s it look?”
“Basic security,” Logan reported. “I have the cameras on a loop. There’s a key and a number pad for the lock. Do you want me to blow them or pick them?”
“Explosions draw attention, and this is just an information-gathering foray,” Rose said. “Keep it quiet.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Logan bent over the lock as Bennet surveyed the perimeter.
“Problems?”
“It’s just weird, ma’am.” He shrugged. “Nothing about this is natural. There’s no sky-cleaners, no major city in view, nothing that looks like home.”
She wished she could take off the air mask and wipe the sweat from her face. “All iterations are different.”
“Not this different. This is . . . where did we diverge from this? If this is one change in history, what was it that did this?” Bennet asked.
“It could have been a population control measure,” Logan said, popping up as the door opened. “Thirty years ago, the government vetoed a law that would have resulted in millions of deaths and a limit to the number of children allowed to live. No disabled persons would have been left alive. Life-limiting illnesses like asthma would have resulted in immediate termination of the individual. We voted it down.” There was a note of smug pride in her voice. “Maybe they didn’t.”
Rose pulled her gloves on and pulled the door wide. “Nice theory. Let’s prove it one way or another.”
They leapfrogged down the hall, taking refuge in empty alcoves and scanning for trouble. The halls were disquietingly empty.
Logan raised her hand. “This is the machine room.” The door swung open at her touch. “The lock’s broken.”
Bennet swore.
Rose pressed her lips against the plastic of her air filter. Fear, and the pressing certainty of death, chilled her despite the heat of this abominable place. “Stop playing tourist, kids. Get in the room. Get what we need. Get out. Bennet, time?”
“Fifty-nine minutes, ma’am.”
“More than enough time.” There was always time enough to die. She led the way into the room beyond the door. It was situated like a stadium with risers.
Someone had marked out concentric rings on the floor with tape, but otherwise there was an air of haphazard slipshoddiness that made her uneasy. Like looking at a faked painting—it was almost correct, but some indefinable something was off.
“Accessing the computers,” Logan said. “They have no encryption.”
Not a good sign. Emir was a careful man in every iteration. “Bennet, sweep the room.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The lights turned on, revealing a strange box at the center of the taped circles. It looked . . . “Logan, check our date again.”
“Day 193, year five. We made a lateral jump.”
“This is one of the original prototypes of the machine,” Rose said, the enormity of the thought almost making her laugh. “That’s why this isn’t working. This machine is barely functional. It’s . . . it’s . . . an antique!”
Bennet stopped beside her. “That explains what we saw outside. This iteration must be decades behind us. There’s no protection because no one knows what this is yet.” He laughed.
Rose eyed the machine with a frown. “That doesn’t explain everything. The trees. The sounds. The poison in the air.”
“I’ve accessed this iteration’s main information hub,” Logan said. “We should have enough data to identify the deciding nodal event that turned this iteration into what it is.”
Knowing the change point of history would help at least.
“Forty minutes,” Bennet reported. “We should get out of here.” He poked at the machine, and the blue dial fell off, cracking as it hit the cement.
“Good job leaving no trace,” Logan said sarcastically.
“There will be replacements here,” Rose said. “Logan, get out of the system and erase your tracks. Bennet, start rummaging in the drawers. This is Emir’s lab, so it will be well stocked.”
It took them two minutes to find another dial, green this time, and for Logan to erase any evidence of their presence. Rose secured the utility door behind them as they heard a strange motorized vehicle pull up near the building. People were coming to work. “Back to the trees.” The blighted, benighted trees.
Once she got home, she promised herself an extra ration of soap in the shower. She’d need it to wash away the stench of this place.
CHAPTER 14
“The human body is exceptionally adaptable, the human mind even more so. An individual can be made to accept almost any circumstance if the one who controls their environment is careful.”
~ personal study notes found in the margin of the textbook Principles of Rule by Anton Fiarro I6-2062
Day 188/365
Year 5 of Progress
(July 7, 2069)
Central Command
Third Continent
Prime Reality
Breathing in the recycled air of home, Rose felt the stiffness in her muscles finally ease up. Chow tonight was a simple grain salad with parsley, peppers, and diced chicken. It wasn’t particularly savory or inspiring, but it was nutritionally balanced and . . . she poked at the quinoa as she fumbled for an adjective. Homey? Reassuring? Safe. That’s what it was: The salad was safe.
Familiar as the recycled air or the hum of the generators outside.
Soothing as the steady flow of encrypted data across her console.
This all felt right. Deep down in her bones, Rose knew this was how life was meant to be. This was the safest path for humanity. The true line of time and history. Every time she stepped away from it, things felt jagged, like rolling across a floor of broken glass.
She took another bite of her supper as she scrolled through the data from the iteration they had stumbled through. The major change point in history seemed to have been a world plague. In the Prime, political tension had kept the borders closed. In the other iteration, peace talks had allowed for free travel and the death of billions.
Ironically, the worldwide tragedy meant that there were more resources available, including the awful forest she’d been forced to walk through. Trees, land, food, jobs . . . the other iteration didn’t need population control because they had an embarrassment of riches. All fairly well distributed by the local governments.
Rose tried to imagine living like that, having a house rather than a barrack room with a shared mess hall and a communal shower like she had until she’d reached the rank of commander. Or vacation time to go climbing in mountains where the land wasn’t irradiated by war. It was nearly impossible to picture.
Her eyes watered at the thought of more trees giving off poisonous fumes.
With a shake of her head, she went back to reading the reports. There had to be a reason the Plague Iteration had gained dominance. And it wasn’t because of the plague or the trees. She’d seen iterations that were spiraling toward universal extinction. Those were easy to deal with, and they’d always been on the far reaches of the probability fan.
She flicked through the files. Sorting out the primitive work the Plague Iteration Emir had done. She saw that he had identified a few nodes—hypothetically at least.
Her door chimed, and Dr. Emir entered.
Rose stood. “Sir? Is there a problem?”
“Nothing significant,” he said as he circled his hand, gesturing for her to sit back down. “I came to ask for your impressions of the new iteration.”
“It’s an unpalatable, backward hell, sir. Years behind us in terms of development and with significant nodal shifts. I’m not sure how we’re connected.”
Emir nodded and paced the three-step space between her wall locker and her bed.
“It will make removing the nodes difficult, sir,” Rose said, the problem had plagued her on the way home. “It’s unlikely they’ll congregate in any one place, not this early in the development of the MIA.” She hesitated a moment before plunging onward. “Sir, our theories—”
Emir’s sharp glare cut her off.
“I thought,” she said, carefully rewording her sentence, “nodes were nearly static across all iterations. History-changing events are very rare. The nodal people are all individuals of a certain age at the time of nodal events, who have the personality traits that drive them to seek change and who score high as influencers for their spheres.”
Another spear of a glare hit her.
“I may have misunderstood, sir, but this shift doesn’t . . .” She couldn’t say the rest. Her tongue wouldn’t move. The air wasn’t in her lungs. Some baser instinct and drive for self-preservation locked her up. “I just don’t understand the situation, sir.”
“That is painfully obvious, Commander,” Emir said in a tone of deep disapproval. “After all these years of training, I would have hoped you had a better grasp of the basic mechanics that hold the universe together. What is the one thing that gives our iteration precedence over all others?”
“Nodes, sir.” The answer was a rote one she’d learned when she’d first been pulled from military intelligence to work for Dr. Emir. “But we have the nodes but no longer have precedence.”
Making a sound of disgust, Emir shook his head. “Were you subjected to brain trauma on your last mission? You sound like a child! Think of what you’ve said. Think.” It was an order.
Rose took a deep breath. “The answer is that Prime has fewer nodes than the other iteration—but that simply isn’t possible, sir. We have all the nodes. All of them. At this stage in the evolution of history, the other—”
Emir held his hand up for silence.
“Sir?”
He sat on the edge of her bunk, looking almost weak.
A frail body, ravaged by age and the lack of proper nutrition. It was moments like this, when his iron will failed, that Emir looked almost vulnerable. It affected Rose the same way a change in the gravitational constant of the universe would affect the orbit of the Earth. She wobbled. “Sir?”
Emir took a
deep breath, inhaling the recycled air to fuel the savage fire that burned in his eyes when he looked up. His voice was utterly calm as he asked, “What did you think of Donovan’s behavior during your last mission with him?”
Rose stilled, aware that this could very easily be a trap. “I found him to be an acceptable soldier.” She struggled to remember any variation. “He followed orders as well as he ever does. Fulfilled his mission. I don’t believe Wagner’s death was his fault.” Even though he should have taken the rearguard, she found she couldn’t be angry at him for living. Her carefully won control faltered, and she frowned. “I’m sorry, sir, I noticed no abnormalities. Should I have?”
“Perhaps.” Emir stood again.
Rose stood as well. “Do you suspect him of something, sir?”
“Not of anything unseemly, but he is not filling Peterson’s place well.”
“Captain Peterson was an exceptional man. There aren’t many who could compare to him, and I don’t think we can fault Donovan for not being Peterson. He doesn’t need to be. He only needs to hold the loyalty of the soldiers so he can influence them.”
“But we have lost preeminence. That can only mean we have lost a node. You and I are here, unchanged. The ones who cannot serve on the front lines are under careful watch in IID safe houses. That only leaves one possible traitor to our cause.” Emir waved his hand with a little gesture, indicating the futility of life and the downfall of fidelity.
“Sir, with all due respect, I cannot support calling Donovan a traitor unless I have evidence. If I accuse him publicly, I will lose the respect of the soldiers under my command.” So would Emir, but mentioning that would result in the deaths of those soldiers.
“With all the respect you are due, Commander, it is not the soldiers you should be worried about.” Emir looked disappointed with her. “Donovan leans heavily on Senturi. Perhaps too heavily, considering how reliant Senturi is on his masters in the Council.”
