Quantum Break

by Cam Rogers

  Beth turned back to the cab. “Nick, you got a crowbar, tire iron, something…?”

  Nick, out of the car, clicked his tongue and gave her pistol-fingers in the affirmative before jogging around to the trunk.

  “So,” Jack said, trying to be casual. “Did you … see … anyone while you were away? A guy?”

  “Not really.”

  “Oh?”

  “I had a lot to get done in that time. Well, there was one guy, I guess.”

  “One guy who?”

  Nick jogged over. “Here ya go!”

  Beth took the tire iron, tested the heft, moved for the door.

  Jack sidled over, dropped his voice to a whisper. “Was it serious?”

  Beth was busy trying to wedge the iron between the two doors.

  “Are you … in touch?”

  Beth stopped what she was doing, looked him in the eye, and said his name in the most well-meaning tone she could manage. “Jack.” He got the hint.

  She got the tire iron in there, started sawing the other end of it to and fro.

  Jack found it oddly uncomfortable to watch, looked away.

  Metal and wood complained, splintered, finally popped. “I think I got it.”

  Jack grabbed the handle on one of the doors; she got the other. Sure enough the lock had fallen apart as it separated from the housing. The doors shrieked across the concrete.

  Beth surveyed what this revealed. “Oh, get bent.” A proper, actual security door. Thick, metal, heavy, with a code lock.

  Nick whistled. “He wasn’t screwing around.”

  Beth gestured at it. “Where’d your brother get that? NORAD?”

  “Wait a sec.” Jack stepped up to it. The code lock looked like it still had power. He punched in six digits. Waited.

  From deep within the door’s body came a weighty triple-thunk and, just like that, the half-ton iron door popped loose—opening an inch.

  Beth examined it, looked at Jack.

  “My birth date,” he said.

  “Huh.” Beth pushed the door open easily. “After you.”

  “Hey!” Nick was waiting, twenty feet back, shifting uncertainly on his feet. “Your brother, uh, he wouldn’t … there’s not like shotguns on trip wires, or claymores … he wouldn’t have stuff like that set up, right? He wasn’t that kind of dude? That’s a serious door, is all I’m sayin’.”

  Beth glanced at Jack. Jack shrugged. Beth went in first. Slowly. Jack followed, stepping into the twilight foyer of the swimming hall. Light struggled through soaped-up ceiling-level windows, revealing a cold, thickly aired time capsule to the mid-nineties lit by what light filtered through. There was signage for the 1996 Riverport Swim Meet (“Fun in the Sun!”), a wetly disintegrating corkboard that still held rainbow pushpins and handwritten ads for second-hand flippers and puppies that needed good homes. A dusty arcade cabinet stood in the corner, its colorful cartoon siding peeling away and the particleboard beneath coming out in leprous chunks.

  Jack faux-retched. “Tastes like the inside of an air conditioner in here.”

  The counter faced turnstiles, which led to floor-to-ceiling swinging doors—the kind that made Jack think of a hospital.

  A laminated sign announced the pool would be shutting down for good on March 1, and the staff thanked everyone who had been swimming there—some of them for fifty years. A few photographs curled on the floor beneath the sign, sticky tape yellowed and withered on the corners. Jack examined one—three old guys, holding up a black-and-white of their younger selves at the same pool, not long after the end of the Second World War.

  He let it go.

  Nick stuck his head in. “Smells like feet.” He tentatively stepped inside. “And not the good kind.”

  Whatever that meant.

  Jack opened a cardboard box, dug through report cards (all grades declining over time) and shrink-wrapped comics, and came up with a framed color photograph of a white mouse in a cage next to—

  “That looks like Monarch’s machine,” Beth said. “A model version of it.”

  Nick wandered over. “Monarch has a machine? What kind of machine?”

  The device in the photograph was small—mouse-sized—and certainly not built with aesthetics in mind: all exposed ribbing and loose wires. Written neatly in Sharpie were the words: “In Memory of Schrodinger, the world’s first time traveler.”

  Beneath that was a twelve-thousand-dollar bill from a moving company

  “Pickup address was from home,” Jack said. “Dated 1999. Delivery address here.”

  Jack put down the bill, smoothed it thoughtfully on the two-tone boomerang-patterned Formica countertop, and then took the turnstiles at a vault. Booming through the push-doors granted a deep vista of dim light and deep shadows. The doors banged against the tiled walls, echoed off the opposite end of the hall, then back again.

  He wheeled around to Beth and Nick. “Can we get power in here?”

  Beth took the more civilized route through the turnstiles. “You think there’s gonna be power? After all these years?”

  Jack couldn’t see much of anything. Anemic light filtered through filthy glass that lined a raised middle section of the roof, but it was still pretty murky in there. He could make out the doubly dark depression of the Olympic-sized pool, and a few things covered in canvas against the walls on either side.

  Nick came in, working his phone.

  “No calls,” Beth reminded him.

  “Chill, sister.” He held up his glowing phone. “Just making light of the situation.” He thumbed an icon and the LED flashlight kicked in. Nick strolled around, playing the light across the walls. “You seeing all this cabling? Industrial. Well hel-lo.” Nick’s phone lit up a large yellow metal prism, about eight feet high and maybe fifteen long. Stacked next to it were four forty-four-gallon drums, one of them fitted with a worn metal hand pump.

  Jack took a closer look. “What is that?”

  “Generator,” Beth said, her own phone-light up and probing. “Diesel, judging by the drums.”

  “This thing’s hefty,” Nick observed. “The enclosure keeps it quiet. You were saying something about your brother having a machine?”

  Jack glanced at Beth. She swung her light down to the base of the generator, followed the mass of cabling across the floor to where it dropped down into the dry pool. Jack and Nick followed suit. As one, the three pools of light tracked the path of the insulated lines across mold-encrusted tiles, over workstations set up on folding tables, to the textured steel of an access ramp, to the massive circular construction that dominated the deep end.

  Silence, until Nick said what nobody was thinking: “Your brother found a fuckin’ UFO?”

  Beth snorted.

  “No, Nick, that’s crazy.” Jack jumped into the pool. “It’s a time machine.”

  “We gotta get the lights on,” Beth said. “Nick, you seem to know something about this. Can you get the generator to run?”

  “Time machine?”

  “Nick?”

  “Uh … yeah, sure, sure.”

  Jack was exploring the benighted guts of the swimming pool, scanning the contents of various workstations that Will had set up. “Computers, diagnostic equipment. A lot of this is stuff I remember from when I was a kid. He had all this set up in the barn. Except the laptops, those are new.”

  Nick called out. “Hey guys?” The generator thudded to life. “I think someone’s been here.”

  Beth checked the drums against the wall, near the generator housing. “Jerry cans here. Not as dusty as the forty-fours. Nick might be right.”

  Nick found the breaker box, flipped it, and long racks of fluorescent overheads sputtered and snapped discordantly, laying Will’s laboratory bare.

  Hunkered in the deep end of the swimming pool, taking up the whole space, was a kit-bashed-looking version of the machine he had seen in the university lab. Ring corridor, airlock, and at the center of it a geometric sphere connected to the rest of it by knots of heavy gau
ge cabling. Monarch’s project was neat and clean and tooled. This thing looked like it could have been powered by an old Buick. It was scrap metal and solder, with occasional touches of tungsten and titanium where it counted; around the core, for instance.

  By the ramp was an old laptop on a burnished trolley. The laptop was open, a fluorescent green flash drive jutting from a side connector. Taped to the top of the screen was a note in Will’s handwriting. It read: Message for September on flash drive.

  Jack pressed the laptop’s power stud. The computer pieced its thoughts together and booted the OS. “You think he wanted someone to find this?”

  Beth dropped into the pool, checked the laptop. “So he and someone else used this place as a monthly drop point, a way to stay in touch off the grid. September was the last one. I wonder what year.”

  Jack checked the flash drive’s directory. Just one video file. “Let’s see who he’s talking to.”

  His finger hovered above the mouse button.

  “Jack? You okay?”

  This might be the last time Jack heard his brother’s voice say something new. The last time he would see his brother alive.

  He clicked the file. The player popped open. The view seesawed as Will got the angle right.

  “July fourth,” Will said. “2010.” He had recorded the message here, on this laptop. The background was the workstations, the shallow end of the dry pool, the swinging exit doors. “September, I hope you receive this.”

  A chill in his chest. “September’s a—”

  “—person,” Beth concluded.

  The video continued. “I … I’ve come back here because I’m left no choice. It’s happened. The Countermeasure is—was—finished, completed. Ready to use. I went to my workshop by the docks. It’s a disaster. The Countermeasure, it’s gone. Taken. I’m hoping to God you have it, because … whoever took it…” Will shuddered, both hands now gripping his head. “The workshop was destroyed. Utterly destroyed. I need to know for sure. If what you said is true then someday our lives may depend on my knowing the truth about what has happened. Contact me. Find me. Please.”

  The video ended. Jack closed the laptop. “Countermeasure?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I think you do.”

  “I don’t!”

  Nick was watching from the far end of the hall, wondering why Mom and Dad were fighting.

  Jack let it go. “I say we get this thing fired up.”

  Beth wasn’t convinced. “Safe cracking I can wing my way through, but kick-starting a time machine is one of the few things not covered on the Internet.”

  “Paul walked me through it. I think I can do it again. How different can it be?”

  “That’s not my concern. My concern is that this is a time machine, Jack. As a student of popular culture, I have no desire to go the full Bradbury.”

  “Think about it: we fire this up, we go back to before the university incident. We get in there, we stop it, and then this never happens.”

  Beth shook her head. “I know you know that’s not possible.”

  “Of course it’s possible! We have a—”

  Her hands came up, T for time-out. “Stop. It isn’t about going back earlier. It’s about causality. We are here having this conversation because the university happened. If we could go back and prevent the university event from happening—and we can’t—then causality would fall apart.”

  Jack’s expression was stage-one grief. She felt like she’d kicked a dog. “We go back, Jack. Of that I’m certain. But it doesn’t play out the way you’d like.”

  “You want to explain that?”

  “We’re in your brother’s hidden lab. He left a message for someone he’s collaborated with about something called a ‘Countermeasure’—a measure that counters. The only time-machine-related thing that needs countering right now is the Fracture. He just said that the Countermeasure was taken on July 4, 2010. It sounds to me like there’s a chance that we’re the ones who took it. Maybe that’s what we do. Take it, bring it back to our time, and fix the Fracture.”

  “And you just pieced that all together.”

  “It’s a theory.”

  “And you think I didn’t notice who that message was addressed to? September?”

  Beth’s heart sank.

  “‘Go Team Outland’? Skinny weirdo with a—”

  “With a sniper rifle, I get it.”

  “You want to tell me what’s really going on here? Zed?”

  “I honestly don’t know if Will’s message was meant for me, Jack. I don’t know if ‘September’ is a name I give him at some point. That’s the truth. I’m more interested in the date of that recording. You remember July 4, 2010?”

  How could he forget? Sixteen years ago. Paul, Zed, himself at the Overlook. “Aberfoyle.”

  “Coinkydink, you think?”

  “Coincidence that you disappeared the same day the Countermeasure did?”

  “Now wait a minute, that’s not—”

  “It’s not what? Paul and I got woken up at four A.M. by three goons who then decided not to kill us because you called their boss. They drive us across town and you pull that magic trick on top of the Overlook. Will—who was being held at gunpoint across town—is suddenly released without question, and later that day his workshop is trashed. Then both you and the Countermeasure disappear on the same day. But hey, now you’re back. And you work for Monarch.”

  Beth chewed her lip. “That does look bad doesn’t it?”

  “Yeah, Zed, it looks pretty fuckin’ bad.”

  “What do you need me to do?”

  “If you work for the other side then I can’t stop you doing whatever you’re going to do next. All I can do is ask you not to do it.”

  “I’ve always been on your side, even when I left.”

  He didn’t want his emotions to dictate what he said next, so he looked at the machine.

  “Here’s what I know,” he said, trying to sound confident. “A machine can only take me back as far as the moment of its activation. This machine was activated long before Monarch’s. If it can get me back to just before Monarch’s university machine was activated, then I can find Will. I can save him and he can help us fix this.” Complex arguments weren’t his strength, but he did his best. “Wait, hear me out: just because right now says I didn’t go back and save Will doesn’t mean I can’t make a present in which I did. Proving that I can or can’t change the past is impossible, right? Because whatever the present is it’s connected to a past built on a causality that has denied all attempts at changing it. That doesn’t mean creating one of those alternates is impossible. It just means proving that it’s possible is impossible. Right? All I can do is try and see what happens.”

  Nick piped up from the back of the room: “What?”

  “You really are Will’s brother,” she said. “I had a few conversations like that, back in the day. Maybe that’s why I like you so much.”

  Jack shrugged. “So maybe stick around this time.”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Saturday, 8 October 2016. 3:43 P.M. Outside Riverport Swimming Hall. Five hours and thirty-seven minutes later.

  Beth snapped off a piece of grass, adjusted her sunglasses. Amber light bounced intensely off the water. “They say the river’s coming back to life these days, since the docks shut down.” Beneath the bridge, on the other side of the broad support across from the swimming hall, reeds poked out of an artificial peninsula of accumulated trash. The ducks didn’t seem to mind.

  Jack’s eyes were on the one building that dominated Riverport’s new skyline: Monarch Tower. “The news is saying the gala’s tonight, and it’s going to be huge. Their CEO is launching a whole range of promise-the-world bullshit.” The building was an asymmetrical black obelisk fifty floors high. The Monarch logo—a fragmented, geometric butterfly—glowed incarnadine against that surface of glossy black glass.

  “We call it Mordor,” Beth said.

  “‘
We’?”

  “Not everyone in that building is a reptile, Jack. Monarch does well because it delivers on most of its promises. Look around. Remember what Riverport was like when you left? It was devolving into this.” She jerked a thumb toward the discarded neighborhood around them. “Massachusetts flyover country. Not even a second-rate cousin to Worcester. Six years later and look at it: dog walkers and artisanal coffee and people who couldn’t afford a trailer are now bitching about their McMansion not having a Ping-Pong table.”

  “I’m going to use that machine, Beth. I have to.”

  “I know.”

  “I could go back early enough to stop Paul going through, y’know. Stop him turning into whatever he is now.”

  “You can try, you’re right about that.”

  “You’re not going to stop me?”

  “I don’t need to, Jack.”

  “You’re very relaxed about this.”

  “Want to see a trick?”

  “Sure.”

  Beth reached into her pocket, pulled out two sets of soft foam earplugs. Handed one to Jack and put hers in. Jack did the same, skeptically. Then Beth pulled out a revolver.

  “Uh, you got that where?”

  “Nick’s glove compartment.” She snapped the cylinder open, popped out all six shells, put one back in. The barrel chittered when she spun it, then she snapped it shut.

  “I’ve seen this movie. Knock it off.”

  Beth pressed the barrel to her head—

  “No!”

  —and fired.

  Click.

  Jack made a grab; she sidestepped.

  Click.

  He grabbed again. She deflected.

  “Stop it!”

  Click.

  “Zed!”

  The gun was still to her head. “If I stop, you won’t get it.”

  Click.

  Jack punched her in the face. Her head jerked back. The gun discharged, the bullet flying at a forty-five-degree angle past her head. It ate a piece of brickwork with a short, sharp shriek.