Quantum Break

by Cam Rogers

  “Lifeboat,” Paul said. “Is it getting what it needs?”

  “At this rate the Tower’s capacitors will be fully charged in eighteen months. Well ahead of your schedule. However, if the end-of-time event occurs five years from now, as you say, and Ground Zero continues to generate chronon particles at the current rate, I estimate we’ll have enough chronon energy stored in these batteries to maintain causality in a limited area for a number of years. Long enough to develop a solution to the crisis. If there is a solution.”

  “What if the M-J field were to collapse this week?”

  Sofia glanced at him.

  “Just answer the question.”

  “Less than a year. Eighteen months if we’re extremely frugal. Less than a month if, for some reason, the Regulator ceases to function. I really do wish you would let me examine the research your people are doing on that. I feel confident I—”

  Paul’s phone began vibrating against his chest.

  “I want you to have your people keep an eye on ambient chronon levels,” he told her. “And look for any other fluctuations or deformations in the Meyer-Joyce field. If you detect anything—anything at all—let me know.” Paul took out his phone. It was Martin Hatch. He knew what this was about. “Martin.”

  “Paul. We’ve held off, but I must insist we send in the troops now.”

  “Is Jack still at the farm?”

  “Yes. And his accomplice.”

  “I’ll be free in…” Paul checked his watch, glanced at Sofia.

  “Ninety minutes,” she said.

  “I can be at the farm in one hour and forty-five.”

  “The team is quite capable of bringing Joyce in without your involvement.”

  “His brother is dead, Martin. He hasn’t been home in six years. Right now he’ll be going through grief and adrenaline crash. Two hours from now I’ll be able to talk him in, not hog-tie and drag him. Let me know if anything changes.”

  Hatch said nothing.

  “Martin?”

  “Yes, Paul. I’ll keep you notified.”

  11

  The morning light had shifted. Nick’s untouched coffee cup had stopped steaming. Jack’s never-give-up was half-empty, two fingers still looped through the handle. He had lost an hour flipping through the papers on the table. The stuff he could understand was bills, rejection letters from peer-reviewed journals, and several notes from a psychiatrist requesting Will come back for another appointment.

  The stuff he couldn’t decipher was 100 percent William Joyce moon language: calculations, scrawl, articles on Hawking radiation, footnotes on various isotopes, and—alarmingly—correspondence sourcing prices for a ten-thousand-terahertz laser. That had been slashed through with red. Through ’97 and ’98 he had been in contact with second- and third-tier universities around the globe—all of them about to come into possession of a nuclear research power plant. Beneath that stack of correspondence Jack found the fake credentials and airline stubs. Framed on the identity page of a forged U.S. passport, eight years expired, Dr. Howard Gordon Wells stared back at Jack with a distinctly unimpressed expression. Dr. H. G. Wells was a very young William Joyce.

  A stupid, on-the-nose flourish like that was something a younger Will would have deemed delicious. Will had been like that, before their parents died. Funny. Excitable.

  Lasers. Nuclear reactors. Isotopes. A ticket to Argentina. Fake passports. All that correspondence. H. G. Wells.

  H. G. Wells. Jack released his coffee cup, turned in his seat to face the window, and looked at the barn.

  The barn was the one place he had not been allowed to enter—the place where Will totally lost it one evening and frightened the life out of Jack and Paul.

  The two boys had been maybe ten years old at the time. It had been a cool evening, Jack remembered, and Will had not yet returned home. Jack had made dinner, he and Paul had watched that Team Outland DVD for the thirty-seventh time, and then ran around the house with their action figures and, not for the first time, Paul had asked Jack why they were never allowed in the barn. What did Will do in there?

  Jack had told Paul what Will always told him: “Work.”

  “What kind of work?”

  With that one obvious question the barn had gone from being something matter-of-fact and as impenetrable as a concrete block, as taken for granted as the ground beneath his feet, to a locked door on a big secret.

  Anything could be in there.

  “Bombs!”

  “Superstrength stuff!”

  “A spaceship!”

  It was a mission for Team Outland. Plotting the movements of imaginary guards, they sneaked downstairs, crossed the gravel path, waited, then leaped from bushes to press themselves against the barn’s rough, red wood.

  They quickly discovered Will kept the barn locked tight. Twenty frustrating minutes later Jack was about to call it quits when Paul realized the barn had a dirt floor: they could tunnel under the wall.

  Eight minutes later they were in: dirt all over their fronts, grass strands sticking to their hair, action figures in hand.

  “Whoa,” Jack said with wonderment.

  “Boring,” Paul said with wonderment.

  Jack rounded on him, hurt. “Seriously? Look at this stuff!”

  The barn’s interior had been crudely redesigned. The farm’s previous owners had run a stable, taking care of horses for private owners who lacked the space to do it themselves. The barn had a broad entrance at either end, the northernmost sealed permanently with neatly arranged nailed planks. All of the stalls had been knocked out, clearing a great deal of space, which was filled with stainless steel equipment the likes of which Jack had never seen. Much of it had power cabling running to it from a padlocked room once used to store feed.

  “Looks like a factory,” Paul had said. “What’s that?” He was pointing at the huge, flat, donut-like platform that took up the northern half of the space. A crude iron frame kept the walkway-ring off the dirt. Will had been building a frame around it. An oxy welder was off to the side, next to stacks of irregular steel and iron offcuts.

  The centerpiece of the ring was a large cup-cradle of clean and shining metal, empty of whatever it was meant to hold.

  Jack had been more interested in the benches and workspaces, all gleaming silver and perforated with neat rows of holes. Bits and pieces of equipment were bolted into the holes, keeping them steady. Black metal brackets secured lenses and cubes of glass. One long black tube pointed down a series of thick monocles.

  “I think that’s a laser,” Paul said. “Your brother must have a lot of money.”

  “This is why our power keeps cutting out,” Jack realized. “Like, every week, for a whole day. I wake up and nothing works.”

  Paul rapped his knuckle against a stack of boxes with a canvas sheet thrown over them: fuses. Hundreds of them. Paul had already moved on, was taking a closer look at a sequence of arcane objects of no identifiable shape and doing a lousy job of attempting to pronounce “interferometer.”

  Jack found a pair of dark safety goggles that made him look like the Terminator. Paul took the bait and a firefight erupted. Imaginary bullets bounced off Jack, so Paul grabbed one of the loose lenses, screwed it into his eye (painfully), and declared he was a cyborg. Jack fell on Paul. The lens fell into the dirt and a ’borg-on-’borg grapple-fest kicked off. This eventually segued into an unfair advantage to the Terminator when he resorted to tickling.

  Paul got loose, bounded backward with a two-handed blam blam blam …

  And then Will had been there, white as a sheet. What he beheld was Jack and Paul frozen mid-combat, like raccoons in a spotlight. Lenses and beam splitters scattered in the dirt, safety goggles hanging off Jack’s left ear. The madness passed, and Jack realized just how much trouble they were in.

  Will transformed. Shock transmuted to rage, a rage that made him unrecognizable. Jack had no words. Paul actually screamed. Paralyzed with fear they were easy pickings and within seconds Will had
seized both of them by their collars.

  Jack’s voice evaporated. Paul whimpered and started to cry.

  Will had dragged them bodily to the door, screaming like a demon. Jack said nothing, his shirt cutting into his armpits, sneakers scrabbling in the dirt. Paul kept whimpering, stammering excuses. At the threshold, Will tossed them both out into the night. Jack caught the fall on his bare hands, gravel tearing the skin of his palms. Paul rolled.

  A heaving silhouette in the doorway, a nightmare made flesh. With a final animal shout Will slammed the doors, banishing the boys to darkness. Then the thrashing of chains: Will locking the barn, violently, from inside.

  Paul was sobbing. Jack’s heart was taking up too much space, stopping his lungs from being able to do their job. Cries came from inside the barn as Will discovered each new disaster.

  “I wanna go home,” Paul had said.

  “Go. I’ll … I’ll…”

  “You’ll be okay?”

  As Will discovered some new horror fresh cries reverberated across the yard, echoed back from the treeline.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

  Back in the present, Jack stood outside the barn looking in. The doors were cracked open, the dark interior illuminated by morning light spearing through missing shingles and gaps in the planking. Teasing the door open with one hand, he slipped inside.

  Empty.

  The gear was gone. Every last bolt. The feed room on Jack’s left and the tack room on the right were unlocked. The floor of the room on the left had been dug out and wooden covers fashioned for the six-foot depression. The wooden covers had half circles sawn out of them at the edges, presumably for cabling. Similar gaps were cut in both the interior and exterior walls of the room.

  “Generators,” Jack mumbled. The interior of the hole and the underside of the cover had been padded. Soundproofing. He remembered crates of fuses, the mornings when nothing worked. Whatever Will had been doing in here had required juice. Lots of it. That wasn’t a small hole.

  The room on the right had been concrete-floored and air-conditioned. A window was fitted to look out on the barn floor. A control room, maybe.

  “‘A spaceship,’” Jack said, in his best little-kid voice. “If only we’d known, huh Will?”

  Something crashed on the porch. Nick cried out. Jack ran from the barn, skidding on the gravel and banking hard toward the house. He found Nick immobilized facedown on the boards, his left arm held painfully backward and aloft by someone in a jacket and baseball cap. A fireplace poker had skittered down the steps.

  “Let him go!”

  Nick’s attacker complied, bouncing upright and straight backed. “He started it.”

  Jack hadn’t been sure it was her he’d seen, and if it had been he mostly expected he’d never see her again. But here she was, and six years of anger, heartbreak, and unanswered questions all pressed tight in his throat, wanting out all at once.

  Instead Jack marched up the steps, helped Nick to his feet. “You okay?”

  “Peachy,” he said, working his arm. “Who’s this?”

  “Zed,” Jack said. “This is Nick. Nick, Zed. Zed, what the fuck?”

  “He spooked me.”

  “I mean ‘what the fuck’ in a more all-encompassing sense.”

  “Wanna know how I found you?”

  Jack closed his eyes. “The Breathalyzer. You tracked the camera and Breathalyzer.”

  “No. I asked myself what the worst place for you to go would be and went there.”

  Nick glanced nervously at the tree line.

  “He gets it,” she said.

  It was uncomfortable, but Jack had to admit: he wanted Paul to come after him. “Things have changed.”

  “I know.”

  “Monarch can walk in here but they won’t be walking out, I’ll tell you that.”

  “You mean troopers.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And not snipers, who are a mile away and invisible.”

  Jack had no answer.

  “Let’s go inside.”

  Nick twirled his keys. “Not me. I’m outta here. Also: fuck you for not telling me about your death wish.”

  “Nick, wait. It’s not like that. Monarch … they’re not going to just let this go. They know you were there.”

  Zed agreed. “Monarch’s been deeply preoccupied for the last few hours. Real pants-on-head behavior from management. Even so they’re probably organized by now. I can’t stop you going, but you need to know they could pick you up at some point.”

  “Dad needs his meds. I’m all he’s got.”

  Jack understood. “Take care, Nick.”

  “Yeah.” The cabbie twirled his keys—“frickin’ namaste”—and headed for his car. Jack and Zed watched him pull out of the drive and disappear past the flaming sycamores.

  “My name’s not Zed,” she said.

  “And you work for Monarch.”

  “And I work for Monarch.”

  “So who am I speaking to?”

  “Beth Wilder.” She touched his arm, placed a brief kiss on his cheek. “And she’s glad to see you.”

  Beth went inside. Jack followed.

  * * *

  Zed—“Beth”—took Nick’s cold cup of coffee and locked it in the microwave. While she set it humming, Jack cataloged the changes: her drugstore-black hair was now a natural red. Her tattoos were gone, and the piercings. Seeing her changed left him desperately missing who she had been. The changes time had wrought on her told him how much history he had missed. She carried herself differently now, straight backed and crisp where once she had been both loose-limbed and economical with her posture and movement. “Beth” brought the cup to the table and sat. Zed would have had one booted foot on it.

  He missed the glittering thread of her suicide chain running from nose ring to earring. Between the parkour, skateboarding, and general getting into trouble it could have ended badly. She hadn’t cared. Fate had backed down and her twinkle-eyed fearlessness had left Jack no recourse but to lift his game. The world had gotten him down less and seemed brighter when she was around.

  “Different hair,” she said. “Different skin tone, bearing, vocabulary, hair color, hair style, no piercings, no tattoos, a breast reduction. Working out reshaped the bod a little. Dental work shaped the face just a touch. Lost the Jersey accent.”

  “So which one was real?” He pulled out a chair, turned it toward her, sat. “The Jersey accent or this one?”

  She hitched that Bruce Willis smile he recognized so well, dental work or no. “This one.”

  “Why do all of this? Why did—”

  “Jack.” She leaned forward, her hand on his knee derailing him. “We can’t do this here. We don’t have time.”

  “You’ve got time for coffee.”

  “While you were overseas I’ve been here, working for Monarch. Making connections, getting inside their operation. I couldn’t risk either Paul recognizing me—the young one or the older one.”

  “The older one’s been here the whole time?”

  “For over a decade, behind the scenes and off the books. He’s got himself an apartment on the forty-ninth floor of the Tower. Very few people can get to it. When he leaves the building it’s always via helicopter to a private airfield. Never seen, never heard. All records say Paul Serene was the twenty-seven-year-old coordinator of Project Promenade, and that last night he died in an act of domestic terrorism. Killed by a group called the Peace Movement.”

  “If he’s a ghost how do you know so much about him?”

  “My buddy Horatio is deep in their system. He’s high up in one of Monarch’s side projects. Being where he’s not wanted is one of Horatio’s hobbies.”

  “I think he was a friend of Will’s. Hacker, moustache, boutique muffins?”

  She shifted uncomfortably. “That’s him. Clearly Horatio and I need to have a conversation about security hygiene. Anyway, listen: this is the important part. What
happened last night at the university was a disaster, and I’m not talking about the dead kids. The Monarch time machine initiated a small but lethal entropic feedback loop within the Meyer-Joyce field that will eventually result in a complete breakdown of causality.”

  “That explains a couple of things.” Stutters, powers, and visions among them.

  “Help me save the world. It’ll take a day. Two, tops.”

  “Zed…”

  “Beth.”

  “I spent four years looking for you.” Jack said, shaking a little now. Seeing her again was becoming physiological, made it difficult to keep his voice steady. “I wasn’t sure you were even alive. I thought … I thought Aberfoyle’s…”

  “I’ll be blunt,” she said. “I knew what my disappearing would do to you, and I did it anyway.”

  What a fucking day.

  “You don’t fully know it yet,” she said. “But we’re involved in something that’s so much bigger than anything else.” Then, again with that smile: “This might not mean anything anymore, Trouble, but I’ve really missed your stupid face.”

  “You…” The air felt a little thinner. He tried to breathe. “You have no clue how far I went, trying to find you.”

  “You got close, in Arizona. I was in the compound when you rocked up. I don’t say this to torture you. I’m telling you because I appreciate your sticking by me. I don’t take that for granted. You looked good on that bike.”

  “You saw me?”

  “As I left. Then I was under the wire.”

  “I rode that thing across the entire country. Those fuckers trashed it and left me by the interstate.”

  “They had to. Couldn’t risk you working out I was there and coming after me.”

  “You could have left a note and saved me four years.”

  “What did you find in the back garden of that house I was squatting in?”

  “You know what I found. Everything you owned. Right down to the jewelry. ID. Clothes. I freaked the fuck out, Zed.”

  “Beth.”

  “I thought Aberfoyle’s goons had murdered you.”