Quantum Break

by Cam Rogers

  Chronon-1 wasn’t the only squad of chronon-enabled operatives. Technicians were trained for lightweight short-term operations. Strikers were heftier, flashier. Juggernauts … well, Juggernauts were still in the test phase. They were scary as shit, but overdesigned in Beth’s opinion.

  Randall Gibson’s crew was different. Trained to adapt, survive, and operate at peak efficiency within prolonged zero-state exposure were using minimal gear, with negligible psychological impact. They were rock stars and they were concrete.

  Gibson, his second-in-command Donny, then Irene, Reeves, Dominguez, Voss, Mully, Bristol, and Chaffey. Chronon-1—the jewel in Special Project’s shiny crown. Proof of what was possible.

  Question was, why were they gathered here?

  Beth watched as Gibson hunkered down in front of his daughter and held up his palm again.

  “What does the billy goat do?” he drawled, thick as molasses. “C’mon now, show me whatcha got.”

  Beth knew he was playing up to the crowd that had gathered on the mezzanine, groupies from admin, Industrial, Pharma, and all the rest.

  Lorelei giggled, toddled at her dad, and flumphed her head into his hand. Onlookers cheered. Lorelei plopped her hands over her face, embarrassed.

  Her mother swept her up, blew a raspberry on Lorelei’s fat little cheek. Lorelei reached for her dad, grasping inexpertly, all big brown eyes and “Hug Dada!”

  Gibson took her, Lorelei pressing to his fatigues, arms clamped around his neck.

  “I gotcha punkin’ butter, I gotcha.”

  Yeah, the Gibsons have it all. Beth envied Lorelei’s ability to love like that. Beth barely remembered her own father’s face.

  Horatio nudged her. “Don’t feel bad.”

  Horatio was a white dude in his thirties, handlebar moustache, wearing a theater sports T-shirt. DON’T SHOOT, I’M A PLOT DEVICE!

  Hilarious.

  “Do I look like I feel bad?” Beth wasn’t super tight with most of the other Monarch Security personnel, but the guys over in Innovations liked her just fine.

  “Cheer up, dude. Better people than you washed out of the C-1 program.”

  Beth blinked. “‘Better people’?”

  Horatio backpedaled. “I mean … you know what I mean. Shit.”

  “Yeah I know what you meant. Do you know what’s going on?”

  Beth had made it a good way through the tryouts. Further than most. Flaked at the last hurdle. Now she was mid-level Monarch Security. Stable. Vanilla. Unremarkable.

  Just how she liked it.

  Horatio shook his head. “Nah. I’ve spent half of today trying to get our product demos into a showable state for the gala tomorrow night, so I haven’t been poking around as much. I was banking on Will Joyce helping me to get the platform stable but he totally flaked out on me. Hey, are you free? I need a newbie to run through our flow, see what you get snagged on.”

  “Sorry. Plans.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  The mood on the mezzanine changed, the crowd dispersed. Gibson’s smile vanished. He handed his kid back to his wife without even looking at them. Which meant Martin Hatch had just made an appearance.

  His wife understood, turning and leaving without a word, child in one arm, dragging her luggage with the other.

  Yep, there was Hatch: A tall, good-looking motherfucker with a killer smile he rarely deployed. Luminous midnight skin and a voice that was pure alpha-wave richness.

  He scared the shit out of Beth.

  “Ugh.” Horatio rolled his eyes. “Gibson may be big dog, but Lord he’s got daddy issues. The way he looks at Hatch I’m surprised they’re not picking out curtains.”

  The elevator doors opened. Gibson’s wife dragged their luggage inside. Lorelei called for her dada. If Gibson heard, he didn’t react. The doors closed, and they were gone.

  Beth walked out of the project management bullpen and hung by the door. Next to the elevators, Hatch had one broad hand on Gibson’s shoulder, addressing the team. After a while, the chosen nine, Chronon-1, followed Hatch to a glassed-in meeting room.

  Beth stayed back, watching.

  Gibson never took his eyes off Hatch, hardly blinked, nodding sharply at anything the CEO had to say.

  It was a short meeting. Hatch departed. Chronon-1 filed out, marched briskly past project management.

  Gibson saw Beth as they passed.

  “Yo, Wilder,” he called out, all Louisianan.

  “Looks like the squad’s got something on the boil tonight,” she said.

  The squad came to a halt while Gibson broke off to get closer to Beth. “Your shift ends around six, yeah?”

  “My squad’s on call. Monarch Actual didn’t say why.”

  “I’m gonna need to blow off some steam later. I’d like to give you a ride home.” He smirked. “You gonna say yes this time, or what?”

  Gibson had the corn-fed steroidal physique of a career operator and a face like a thumb. Whatever juice he was on expressed through his sweat, sour and chemical, half-masked by liberal splashes of Green Irish Tweed.

  I know about the gym bag in the trunk of your car. I know what you keep under the bottom lining. I know where the blond hair caught in the zip came from.

  “No thanks.”

  “Treat me nice and maybe you’ll find out what you’re missing. I’m talkin’ about C-1 now, punkin’ butter.”

  Irene hitched a smile behind him. She was loving this.

  “Y’know, sometimes we still watch your washout footage. For a laugh. All that screaming.” He waved his arms around. “Calling for Daddy. Goddamn, Wilder.”

  “Hey, boss.” Donny was lightweight, tightly muscled, shorter than Gibson. “Come on. Almost show time, yeah? Let’s do it.”

  Gibson kissed his fingers, waved her off. “Later, punkin’.”

  Horatio crept over. “Do you think tonight has something to do with Project Lifeboat?”

  Beth turned on him. “Don’t ever talk about that. Especially in this building.”

  Saturday, 8 October 2016. 3:45 A.M. Riverport University.

  Jack zipped his jacket against the cold and headed down Founders’ Walk, hands stuffed in pockets. Gone were the electrically retrofitted gas lamps he remembered, the ’70s-era garbage cans, chattering sprinklers, the occasional stray dog, and the grandfatherly feel of the scattered buildings.

  They had been replaced by track-lit paths, trimmed hedges, solar-powered lamplight, and buildings that evoked a Future Europe designed by robots—all steel, glass, angles, and facets. A guy in a letterman jacket rested with his sleeping girlfriend on an ergonomic bench. Behind them an older woman in a Ramones T-shirt twirled a set of LED poi, inscribing Möbius figure eights in the air, strobing red and green. In the distance a three-sided infoscreen wished passersby a pleasant evening and directed them to the nearest campus exit. The only thing out of place in this better, brighter Riverport U was the library: a tottering old dame of a building from a time few cared to remember.

  Jack hadn’t set foot in there since a senior-year orientation tour. It was a shock to see the changes time had wrought.

  The protest camp was in the largest triangular section of lawn he had seen from the street: a collection of tents and canvas shelters, ringed by a makeshift wall of wilted placards, bicycles, sodden bunting, and plastic sheeting adorned with spray-bombed anti-Monarch logos. A few sleepy-eyed protesters shambled from one tent to another, to the mixed soundtrack of acoustic guitar and Rihanna’s last hit. Jack wasn’t sure if the people inside were winding down or waking up.

  In the east the sky was lighting up steel. The last time he had seen dawn over this town was from Bannerman’s Overlook.

  Again he thought of Zed, wondered where she was, and why life had pathed the way it had. He had spent the first four and a bit years following what passed for leads: things Zed had said, references she had made that sounded like slipups, rather than another fiction.

  He was never going to know who she was, where she had c
ome from, or where she had gone. That was just the way it was. After six years, he was beginning to make peace with that.

  Or he thought he was, until he found himself here again. Seeing Zed’s house. The 7-Eleven where they’d pour vodka into a Slurpee on a Friday night. The bridge where she free ran. The skate park where she spent some afternoons. He could feel that clear ache pouring into his cracks and he needed to get out of Riverport before it set and became a part of him again.

  “Hey, if you’re waiting for the demolition it isn’t happening till eleven tomorrow. Take a flyer.” The girl was in her early twenties, scraps of day-old Day-Glo zinc still visible on her cheeks. She was cherub-faced and surly, zipped into a thermal hoodie and proffering a flyer identical to the one Jack had peeled off the sidewalk out front.

  “How’s it going?” He gestured toward the old library. “Are they still going to—”

  “Tear it down? Yeah. If this were happening in Europe cars would be burning.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that. I mean—”

  “Oh yeah,” she snapped. “No time no time? Got some important importance going down? Your dog walker forgot to pick up Mr. Snuggle’s homeopathic Prozac foam? You’re looking at history, an abstract concept made real and it’s standing right there. It was built in a different world, by people with different values. That library is more than the knowledge it houses. It’s shelter from another age, a time capsule, and all that makes it irreplaceable. Once it’s gone we can’t fake it back into existence, like so much other bullshit. For the good of others at least pretend to give a fuck.”

  A trip wire snagged in Jack’s head. “Listen,” he said, low and even. “Across the ancient world ten-thousand-year-old relics are being jackhammered into talcum by morons from the Stone Age. In Australia three-thousand-year-old rock art is being dynamited to make way for coal that nobody wants. In Tasmania some of the oldest forests on Earth are being wood-chipped for toothpicks. In China millions of tourists are using legions of terra-cotta warriors as gum receptacles. In Africa billionaires are bidding to be the one to kill the last of a species. In Greenland the ice has pretty much vanished. Prime farmland is being fracked into uselessness. Food prices are set to triple. In ten years we’ll be eating bugs. By comparison this building was erected last week and has as much meaning as the beer cans your hashtag warriors are sleeping on.”

  “You’re saying this doesn’t matter?”

  “I’m saying this is a flyover town. You need to get out more and I’m not your therapy.”

  “This is my backyard, fucko. I can’t chain myself to a Syrian obelisk, but I can do this. So take your smarmy been-there-done-that high-minded fucking—”

  “Hey! Sir?” A rent-a-cop was marching over, flashlight in hand. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five. “Is this person bothering you? Amy, we talked about this. You and your people can hand out your material, but you were warned: one more incident and you’re out.” The cloth badge on his sleeve flagged him as Monarch Protective Services.

  Ah crap, now the hangover. Guilt. He hated this part. “Wait, wait, wait.” Enough to be miserable; no need to be a miserable asshole. “She didn’t do anything wrong.” He extended his hand to her. “Give me a few flyers. I’m heading into the city later. I’ll hand them out.”

  Amy glanced at him, skeptically.

  “Really,” Jack said.

  Amy handed over five. The guard sighed, clicked off the flashlight. “Can I take you somewhere, sir? If you’re not part of the protest you shouldn’t…” The guard’s eyes narrowed. Jack took a half step back. “Jack Joyce, right?”

  “Yeah. That’s me.”

  The guard extended a hand. “You and me were in the same year, Riverport High. How’ve you been?”

  Amy sighed.

  “Oh, hey…”

  The guard laughed uncomfortably and waved a downward paw. “Ah, you don’t remember me. Doesn’t matter. I was carrying more weight then.”

  Amy surveyed them for a heartbeat, then turned on her heel and walked back to camp. “Don’t lose any sleep over it, Jack Joyce. We’re just a flyover town.” Hand painted in white on the back of her hoodie: RESPECT EXISTENCE OR EXPECT RESISTANCE. She tossed the remaining flyers away, a fluttering pink cloud.

  The guard sighed. “I hate to see the library go, but folks’ll be glad to get these tents off the lawn. Who knows why the board let them camp there in the first place. You know your brother doesn’t work here anymore, right?”

  An alarm went off in Jack’s head: when people he didn’t know mentioned Will it almost always meant trouble. “Sure,” Jack lied. “Hey, can you point me to the Quantum Research Lab? I wanted to take a look and then I’ll get to my hotel.”

  Since when had Will worked anywhere, let alone in a respectable lab at a respectable university?

  “It’s almost four A.M.,” the guard said.

  “Flight just got in.” Jack smiled. “Still on Thailand time.”

  The guard laughed, pointed east. “It’s always lit up. Oh and hey, stop by the Tavern on a Friday. Some of us still hang there. Dave’s managing, so we get a discount.”

  Jack gave a relaxed salute. “Will do. See you.” He had no idea who Dave was.

  A game plan Tetrised into his head: see Paul, clean up after Will, rebook an exit flight. If he did this right he could be back in Asia before Thursday. Maybe he’d move on from Thailand, up stakes and get to Cappadocia; subsidize the whole trip with a few articles on food, politics, and the underground cities. Or he could do a follow-up on the scopolamine trade in South America, or a character piece on the attendees of Lebowski Fest in Louisville, or pretty much anything that let him grab a few more years of not thinking about whether his life was a panicked exercise in fleeing from himself.

  “Jack!”

  And there he was, right on time, saving Jack from further thoughts: Paul Serene. Less polished than his Facebook photo, way tidier than the frightened kid who thought he was going to die on Bannerman’s Overlook six years ago. Clean, healthy, and in a starched shirt that probably cost more than everything Jack was wearing.

  “What are you doing lurking on the lawn?”

  Paul hopped over a park bench at a leap, bounced onto Founders’ Way. “You know that guy?”

  “The guard? Didn’t even get his name.”

  “He didn’t ask why you were here?”

  Strange question. “Just told him I wanted to check out the fancy lab, then head home. Everything cool?”

  Paul smiled, extended his right hand and pretended he hadn’t heard the question. “How are you, man? You know all that sun’ll have your face falling off by the time you’re forty right? We’re working on treatments for that. The reports are saying we could have Keith Richards looking like Gosling by 2025. Look at you!”

  Jack opened his arms. “Bring it in, buddy.”

  Paul looked at him sideways, gave Jack his best are-you-serious face.

  “Ah, right. Massachusetts. Where people don’t hug. How’d you survive eighteen months in Paris?”

  “Denial, wine, and nightmares. C’mon I’ll show you the lab. Gimme the latest. When are you coming home?”

  Jack zipped his jacket higher, stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets. “Is it far? It’s colder than I remember.”

  “Just around the corner. Don’t change the subject.”

  “I’m fine. Thinking of maybe moving to New Zealand. I hear it’s really … livable.”

  “The last time you messaged me you were talking Kabul.”

  “The expat culture there’s been covered. Time was all over it years back.”

  “You’re still doing that?”

  “Being awesome?”

  “Reportage.”

  Ugh. What is that feeling? Oh yes, guilt. He was meant to be a working reporter, not someone making his savings last on a beach in Asia.

  “You realize that you’ve become a manifestation of Zed’s fictional idea of herself, right?”

  “Beat
s working at Walmart.”

  “One day she ran away from home as a kid. The next day her dad was a millionaire astronaut who left her a bundle in the will. After that she was in witness protection. After that she was—”

  “On the run from the mob, had amnesia, had a terminal illness, was a retired dental hygienist trying to visit all fifty states … I know. I was there. The stories were a game. She was real.” He looked Paul in the eye. “She saved your life.” A helicopter thudded overhead, spotlight briefly playing across the quad, light turning to spears as it fell through the sparse canopy of elms. “You said you work for Monarch?”

  “Yep.”

  “They’re funding you?”

  “Monarch Innovations, their fringe R-and-D division. It’s been a total game changer for outliers like the Riverport lab.”

  “Ten years ago everybody lost their minds because someone opened a Wings Over Riverport. Now this.”

  “People do like chicken.”

  Jack had to admit: the new campus did a good job of killing nostalgia. It was beautiful, pristine, calm, and confident. It said: We’ve got it under control. Things are going to be okay.

  He thought about cops in Chiang Mai, rolling on Monarch tires, and Riverport cops working hand-in-glove with Monarch Security. Monarch Agricultural drones were using seed bombs to replant swathes of clear-cut Amazon, while Monarch Pharmaceuticals subsidized the espresso machines of hardworking unlicensed cab drivers.

  “Hey, funny thing: that guard said Will used to work here.”

  Paul smiled uncomfortably. “Yeah, about that. When did you last hear from your brother?”

  Here it comes. “A week ago. He said I needed to come back and talk sense into you, actually.”

  Paul stopped in his tracks. “That’s why you’re here? Not because I asked you to?”

  “I’m here because he sent me that e-mail and then you asked me to. What’s going on? The message you left was pretty…” What was the word? “Grandiose.”

  “Where’s Will now?”