Quantum Break

by Cam Rogers

  The main headline told her everything: in the week preceding the catastrophe suicides had spiked by more than 5,000 percent globally. People were ending their lives in droves. Governments the world over had been using Monarch as a means to comfort and calm the populace with assurances of progress being made to correct the instabilities triggered in 2016. Clearly, at some point, people stopped buying it and the wheels began to fall off civilization as everyone chose between dying or not living. The conversation among Christians circled around the issue of “can you get to Heaven if you never die” and the counterargument that the end of time was the end of the world as we know it and was the herald of the Lord’s return. Secular sources urged people to remain calm, illustrating that the subjective experience of the end of time would be unremarkable. One moment chaos, the next the M-J field may have repaired and all would be well.

  Beth knew that was wrong. This was the end. If the M-J field ever repaired then the “end of time” would have been a sub-second pause in the flow of causality. The odds of the machine threading that needle and landing her in it were statistically impossible. But if the end of time is the end of the line … then getting here was as easy as hitting a brick wall.

  The police had stopped being police, for the most part. Economies had begun to collapse. Death, mourning, and fear had become a global pandemic. Looting had become par for the course.

  The universe ended. Her machine’s progress—or non-progress—was a testimony to that. And it never, ever recovered.

  She tossed the paper into the street. It flew open, joyfully, fluttered, slowed, barely touching the icy blacktop before halting altogether.

  These people, the ones who had stuck around for the end, had seen their world lose its mind on every conceivable level. The end hadn’t come neatly and cleanly; it hadn’t been a quiet cessation that had claimed them unawares.

  The Meyer-Joyce field had broken down unevenly as it lost the charge to sustain itself. At first one galaxy moved out of synch with another. Then planets. Looking up at the sky the people in Riverport would have seen the stars become jumbled. That would have been when they realized—knew—that their reality was caving in on them, redesigning itself in ways that couldn’t possibly work.

  Continuity errors between nations would have come next. The first aircraft disasters would have occurred then. Shortly after, cracks and fuckups and discord would have shocked the country … and then, in no time at all, ships would be stuttering into bridges that didn’t have time to rise, traffic would be smearing through crosswalks, mechanisms would have broken down, planes would have fallen into oceans, mountains, fields, and streets. Time would have been carved along strange new borders that shifted and shrank. “A” would no longer fit “B” as well as it once had. As electric wiring disagreed with itself, families would have slept soundly in houses that burned to the ground around them … while others would have burned to death in houses that hadn’t yet become bonfires. The dead would have come back to life, wondered what had happened, and frozen mid-sentence to never move again. Animals would have turned on owners. Minds would have snapped.

  The world around Beth wasn’t easily understood. As apocalypses went it wasn’t as mercifully comprehensible as hordes fleeing the killing flash of a mushroom cloud. Every single stage of The End was represented here, before her eyes, pulled and pushed in ways that made no connective sense. The world had been blanketed in a kaleidoscopic Venn diagram of fluctuating stutters as the universe’s chronon field fought for its final breaths. The spaces in between stutters—the places where causality still worked—would have been places of high madness. One by one these oases of time and causality would have dried up, myriad on/off stutters vanishing completely as the M-J field died and everything finally stopped.

  Here, at The End, the Earth was a planet-sized diorama, staged by a child who had grown bored with his tiny toys.

  On a sidewalk, a humanities student played guitar for coins, while a portly Mexican in a Captain America T-shirt shielded an arguing couple from a Molotov cocktail thrown by a gleeful old woman who had retrieved it from an array of such weapons set up next to an academic bookstore, bearing the spray-painted words: “Embassy of the End Times—All Welcome.”

  Beth had seen every vehicle in a dealer’s lot set alight, while across the street people wandered out of a warm café sipping cocoa.

  Another anomaly, like the hanged man and his tree. A helicopter had attempted an emergency landing on the Riverport University campus, and failed. Forty feet above it the same helicopter was attempting the same emergency landing: same markings, same horrified expressions on identical occupants, doppelgangers all.

  She found these places difficult to look at. It strained the mind in ways it was not built for, and she quickened her pace past such sites.

  When the end came, it would have gone from business as usual to bedlam very quickly. Every one of these people would have seen something different, depending on where they stood. Completely alone they would have been locked in their own version of universal death by madness. Step to the left and it would have been something else entirely. Step to the right, something else again.

  By then the total collapse of the M-J field would have been a mercy, locking everything into a final agreed-upon tableau.

  The existence of this tomb planet told her that she would fail. She would not save the world. Nobody would. Look around. This is where we end up.

  But it wasn’t where she ended, she knew that. At some point Beth was destined to meet her younger self, and would ensure that girl was trained. That meant Beth was getting out of here, and it meant that when Beth met her past self she still believed enough in the mission to ensure that young girl was taken and trained.

  That meant there was hope: It meant her future self had reason to believe it was still worth trying to save the world.

  This world may be still, but she had agency. She could retrieve the Countermeasure and, if not activate it in 2016 … she could activate it here. That’d work, right?

  Didn’t matter. It was a direction. That was all she needed right now.

  She needed to find chronon energy, stat.

  She turned toward the university.

  * * *

  A copse of twelve-foot-high polycarbonate stelae occupied the site of the old library. Each of the four-sided columns bore a plaque memorializing a student who had died on the morning of October 8, 2016. A piece of the destroyed library was entombed inside each stela: a fragment of scarred, charred wood suspended two feet from the ground.

  Fifty feet away from this small crystalline forest stood another monument: a piece of rough black stone. Bolted into it was a plaque of textured, blackened brass, with these words:

  Land of Heart’s Desire,

  Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,

  But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.

  —W. B. Yeats

  New buildings had been erected over the years, designed to pair with the older construction on the western side of the campus. They swept eastward from the crystalline hump of the Quantum Physics Building to curve south. To Beth it looked as if the bulk of the university buildings were like a top-down view of a pair of arms encircling the campus, the Quantum Physics Building as its bejeweled head. The monument to the dead students was in the southeast corner, separated from the street by frosted hedgerows.

  Across the way from the memorial a young woman, collar turned up against the cold, had walked southwest along a companion path to Founders’ Walk. Beth made her way toward her—a little tricky as it turned out. The pathways were covered in stutter-locked snow that didn’t yield to her tread, making the ground uneven; but, surprisingly, because the ice wasn’t melting beneath her steps, not slippery.

  Whoever the girl was she had been strolling alone, her earphones in, a smile forming on her lips. Beth wondered what she had been listening to as the world ended.

  Beth pumped her fingers twice and touched the girl’s arm.

&n
bsp; The charge on the rescue rig dipped significantly, the smile bloomed on the girl’s face, and as momentum kicked in, she spilled forward. Arms pinwheeling backward she righted herself, saw Beth suddenly there, and reflexively panicked. With a scream she pitched backward, her boot concreted within an inch of stutter-locked snow. She hit the ground hard, breath punching out of her with a dull, human sound. Stunned, blinking, she struggled to her elbows.

  “Hey hey!” Beth said. “I’m friendly. Here.” She extended a hand. “Hand up.”

  The girl swatted the hand away, eyes wide with outrage, and turned her attention to her trapped foot.

  A voice echoed across the expanse, like a gunshot: “No!”

  At the northeastern fork in the path, where it carried on north toward the Quantum Physics Building, stood a lone, desperate figure. Male. Mid-twenties. Lean beneath a scavenged weather-rated jacket and jeans gone faded and worn along the knees and thighs. Even from that distance Beth made out the shadows under his eyes, the frantic hair, anxious and fretting.

  Beth immediately recognized Paul Serene. Early twenties, filthier, but undeniably him. The Paul Serene who had first traveled through Monarch’s machine, that night at Riverport University.

  In that moment all she felt was the weight of the gun in her armpit.

  “Leave her,” Paul shouted. “She’ll draw them in! Leave her!”

  Draw them in. She knew exactly what he was referring to. The campus seemed clear. No movement other than herself, the girl and young Paul Serene—still waving urgently.

  She wasn’t leaving anybody. “She’s coming with us!”

  “Leave! Her!” Then: the howls. Fractured, broken; ten voices, each as if shrieking from three different directions at once. A sound felt, received, but not heard. A sound that resonated in the oldest chambers of Beth’s mind, heirloom fears disinterred from dark primordial soil.

  The girl on the snow began screaming.

  “Wait … just hold still.” Beth said, trying to keep the quaver from her voice. The girl at her feet was thrashing, wrenching at her ankle. Beth kneeled, double-pumped her fingers.

  Beth released the snow around the girl’s boot, and the girl scrambled free. Paul was already running—north. Then Beth saw them, suddenly present, coming for them from the southern streets and from behind the shrine to the east.

  Shifters.

  “I’m sorry,” Beth said, but the girl had already taken off, slipping, collapsing, scrambling. “I’m sorry!” Beth got to her feet and ran, stiff-legged, each heavy landing on her wounded leg like a knife twisting in her flesh.

  South and east weren’t options. To her left was a building and she didn’t have time to be releasing doors—plus anything could be in there. She ran north, following the girl, following Paul Serene, headed for the fork in the path. “Bank left,” she called out. “Make for the Quant—”

  The girl stopped so abruptly Beth had no alternative but to turn her shoulder and take the impact.

  It was like running into a wall.

  Beth spun with the impact, cycling around the girl’s right-hand side. In slow motion Beth saw that the girl’s flight had been arrested mid-run, both her feet off the ground, hair thrown forward over her face by the force of a fractal fist slamming between her breasts, passing through her chest, ending her instantly—immobilizing her in the microsecond of her death. The monstrosity’s phasing face tracked Beth as she stumbled, her steepled fingers pressed to the cobbles to keep her from going over completely. For a horrifying second pain bloomed bright and she was certain her bad leg would betray her, but then, like a runner at the blocks, she propelled herself north toward the Quantum Physics Building.

  Behind her the thing howled again. Its siblings answered the call, and they were everywhere.

  Her leg was stiffening, seizing. She wasn’t going to make it.

  “Move!” Paul was at the end of the path. It terminated at a paved walkway that ran east–west. “Follow!” He ran west, alongside the crystalline Quantum Physics Building, making for the entrance.

  Behind Beth were at least a half dozen of the shifting, flickering, howling things, converging fast, lurching weird, grasping and spasming, as if each one was having a violent argument with infinite versions of itself. She couldn’t die like this.

  She hit the walkway, used hands-on-wall to arrest her momentum and shift it forty-five left, powering after Paul.

  “What are they? What are those things?”

  He didn’t answer. He was at the door, disappearing inside. Don’t you lock it, fucker. Don’t you lock it.

  She slammed through.

  “Leave the door open,” he yelled. “Over here!”

  The atrium was no longer an open reception area with a wealth of superfluous space: the interior of the dome was now crowded with a maze of smaller buildings and construction. Beth ran into the narrow lobby just as Paul toppled a heavy drum onto its side in front of the doorway, and—

  “Is that a grenade?”

  “Door 3 behind me, get inside”—and he pulled the pin, held the spoon, released a safety seal on the drum.

  A wall of flickering, roaring black forced its way through the door.

  She heard the spoon ting as she leaped into the room. The room was a techno-hive, but she’d worked at Monarch long enough to know a chronon aggregation setup when she saw it: racks of charging chronon batteries, sterile surfaces, monitoring stations.

  Batteries. Aggregators. Chronon energy: exactly what she needed.

  Paul crashed in behind her. “Floor!” he cried, gesturing frantically. “Floor!”

  A panel of flooring had been lifted aside, down which he leaped. The roars were deafening. They’d overrun …

  “Floor!”

  Beth leaped into darkness. Paul appeared out of nowhere and yanked the hatch shut.

  The grenade detonated. Most of the howls ceased entirely. Outside, from what Beth could hear, the stragglers reluctantly, resentfully retreated.

  “That,” she said, “was a chronon battery. You blew up a chronon battery.”

  The crawl space beneath the aggregator was intended for maintenance. It was tight, airless, crammed with the underguts of an apparatus that might have been giving them lymphoma if it weren’t as stutter-locked as everything else. The crawl space led away from the hatch, opening into what looked like a small service area. Beth saw a wax candle, immobile as anything else: a source of perpetual yet strangely static light.

  “They … we…” Paul seemed to be having trouble with language. “They don’t like … the chronon burst restarts causality for a brief time in a limited area. They can’t manifest outside of chronon-free areas, so … they’re my safeguard. Potential. It … they find it … painful.” He turned on all fours and crept toward a dim light past neat knots of fat cabling. “Hurts them. When you’re alive, you can be anything,” he was murmuring. “When you’re dead … you’re just one thing. I keep batteries up there. They … only exist in stutters.”

  Beth looked to the light ahead, hand to her gun, out of a need for security.

  There was a reason her Zed persona had been so extreme. It was to make her Beth persona unrecognizable by contrast. In this moment it paid off: Paul didn’t recognize her at all.

  Checking her gun again she crawled toward the light.

  “Cost me a week’s sleep,” he was saying. “What you made me do. When you made me waste all that chronon. A week’s sleep.”

  “A week’s…?” She emerged into his hidey-hole. Ambient light from underfloor diagnostics lit the place midnight blue and shadow. He had enough space for a thin, closed-cell foam sleeping pad—with a jacket for a pillow. By this was a hunk of technology Beth recognized as being a refined, miniaturized version of the stutter shield generators Monarch used to run Strikers and Juggernauts through their paces. This was smaller, though, redesigned. “Hey,” she said. “Nice place. How long have you been sleeping here?”

  Paul closed his eyes, shook his head. “Don’t know
. Meaningless question. Don’t know.” He tapped the device. “Slept … a lot.” She leaned forward to get a closer look, minding her head against the low ceiling. “Don’t…,” Paul said. “Don’t touch it.”

  “I won’t. Is it … it’s a stutter generator?”

  Paul shook his head. “Causality.”

  She took a closer look. Science really wasn’t her thing, but … “This generates a causality bubble?”

  Lifeboat. Of course. Its directive was to ensure people would remain mobile and aware once time stopped flowing. Just like the bubble she had seen around the top floors of the Tower.

  “Can’t sleep without it. Fall asleep, I’ll become like…” He gestured toward the hatch.

  “The monsters?”

  Paul shook his head. “The other people. I’ll … never wake up.”

  Beth remembered: the Joyce farm. Jack knocked out by the erupting BearCat—freezing at the moment he lost consciousness. If Paul lost consciousness in a chronon-free zone he’d become as immobile as anyone else.

  She imagined him, living here, under the floor, for months—maybe years—scavenging not only food but time, living in fear of Shifters, in an effort to stave off oblivion.

  “My name’s Beth,” she said. “Who are you?”

  He trembled. “Paul,” he said and, just like that, that pathetic figure of a man burst into tears. When was the last time someone had asked him his name? Asked him anything? “Please,” he said. “Take me back inside.”

  “Inside? You mean upstairs? The lab?”

  “No,” he said, hurt by her obvious cruelty. “The Tower.”

  The flickering shield around the top floors of the Monarch building. Someone keeping the lights on.