Quantum Break

by Cam Rogers

  … knocked down, but I get up again …

  … and clicked it off. Looped the cords around the steel-gray plastic body, put it on the kitchen counter. Made herself a sandwich. Raspberry jelly and cheese. Held it on one hand, walked to the TV. Stopped. Noticed the door to the back porch was open. Someone’s shadow stretched on the wooden decking, someone on the porch.

  Starr padded over and peered up at the person leaning on the wooden railing. Dressed in dirty jeans, a pocketed old canvas jacket. Made her think the lady did the same work her Dad did: construction. Concreting. The railing’s flaking paint pressed beneath her palms, the sun on her face.

  The lady smiled at Starr, but Starr could tell she had been crying. Starr guessed the lady was doing that to her face—smiling—to make her feel better. Just like Starr did with other people. The lady had red hair, like Starr, and looked like family.

  “Hello?” Starr said, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  The stranger turned around properly and got down on her haunches—eye to eye with Starr—and her smile felt more real now. She wiped the tears from her eyes with the swipe of a thumb. Laughed at how silly she was being.

  Starr reached out and touched her arm, and tears fell from the lady’s eyes anyway.

  “Hey, me,” the lady said. “It’s you.”

  Friday, 18 August 2000. 6:07 A.M. The following morning.

  Will woke up every morning at 5:55 A.M. The paper was deposited in the mailbox by the road at 6:00 A.M. Will walked to collect it, with his coffee, at 6:05 A.M, while oatmeal warmed on the stove.

  That morning’s edition of the newspaper ran with the story of a local girl—Starr Donovan—missing from her home, believed abducted. Her mother was frantic and her father was believed to be flying back from the Gulf where he had been working on an oil rig. The girl had been missing less than twenty-four hours.

  Will snorted, sipped his coffee. That passed for news in a flyover town.

  There was something extra with that morning’s edition: a handwritten note.

  Will,

  I unplugged the core. Don’t know if I did it right, don’t care. I’ll be back in two weeks. Strip the Promenade, the whole thing. We’re moving it. No more arguments.

  The bleach stain at the bottom of the stairs was me. Don’t blame Jack.

  September.

  PS: I’ve wired the house to explode. Instructions on your desk.

  The missing girl looked back at Will from the front page, redheaded and blue eyed. It felt awfully cold for that time of year.

  Thursday, 18 June 2009. 10:00 A.M. Nine years later.

  Randall Gibson had wondered what it’d be like to go back in time. What it’d feel like to be inside that corridor once it charged up. Turned out he had been well prepared: it didn’t feel so different from a stutter. Over the years he’d racked up about two hundred hours in simulated zero states, but this week he found there was something about the real thing he liked a whole lot more. Everything got real quiet. He could go anywhere, do anything. It was a powerful feeling, being the only person in town with agency and will—maybe the only person in the entire world.

  Inside the time machine, he kept his assault carbine tucked tight into his shoulder as he moved steadily around the loop. Nothing and nobody in here except him. Wherever his team was, that wasn’t where he was going. They were gonna find that Joyce kid, and they were gonna kill him, just like Mr. Hatch ordered. But the thing Gibson wanted more than anything else was to find Beth Wilder and hurt her till she died. He hoped Voss or IR hadn’t beaten him to it.

  His face hurt. His face never stopped hurting. The Monarch medics said he could keep his eye, but it wasn’t what it was. In his pockets were enough high-grade painkillers to keep him going for weeks.

  He wanted—needed—Wilder dead; the bug in his brain wouldn’t stop wriggling unless he knew she’d died screaming … but he had a family to think about. So he sent himself through last, made sure he came out later than his crew. 2009. If one of his squaddies managed to smoke her, he’d just have to live with that.

  The exit door came into view around the corner. Gibson slapped the release plate and stood back as the hatch opened. Then he crossed the threshold from zero state to causality, moving into the airlock, scanning left to right, up and down. Clear.

  He slung the carbine, snatched a quick look out the grimy viewplate. Looked like the machine was set up inside a concrete room, basement maybe. Some kind of signage was sprayed on the opposite wall. Standing lights provided stark illumination. Gibson worked out how to release the hatch and crank it open.

  The stench hit him like a physical blow: stale and rich and sweet. His wife’s huevos rancheros belted up and out of him in a single wave. He recognized that smell: it was the stench of pits, execution chambers, and abattoirs.

  With one arm pressed tight against his nose and mouth, Gibson moved down the ramp, carbine slung, sidearm in hand.

  The standing lamps were bright in his face, so bright that he almost tripped over Voss’s body, gone black and leathery, curled up on the ramp, recognizable only from insignia and name tag.

  Gibson’s vision adjusted and the rest of the cramped room came into focus. The room had been built up around the machine, built to enclose it. There was barely enough room for the machine, the ramp and the lights.

  There was a body on the ramp. From the haircut he knew it was Chaffey. Half his head was missing, his sidearm still clutched in one bony black hand.

  What was left of Dominguez sat on its knees, lonely behind a standing lamp, head pushed into a corner. MRE and candy bar wrappers lay scattered here and there.

  Leave the laws of the universe to me, Hatch had said. Bullshit. His plan was rolling and C-1 knew all about it. They’d been sent here because they were now on the wrong side of Hatch’s cost-benefit analysis. Gibson gave the tiniest laugh, because this wasn’t real. But just the one.

  There was another body, this one at the foot of the ramp.

  Propped against the wall, at the base of the ramp, was what had to be IR: half-skeletonized and collapsing into her bloodstained uniform, carbine resting across her lap.

  They were all dead. He was the last of Chronon-1. Gibson wheeled around, frantically scanning the machine. The controls had been removed. He spun back looking for any advantage, anything he could use, any—

  Behind him the airlock hissed—Gibson threw himself at the door—and it smooched shut.

  He bellowed, red with fury and frustration, knowing beyond doubt he and his crew had been set up. Wilder had gotten there early and sealed the machine inside a fucking sarcophagus. They had all landed here, greeted by IR’s corpse, and slowly starved to death. How long had they sat here, making their rations last, with corpses for company and knowing they was looking at their own future?

  This would not be his fate! He would not die here. Not like this.

  The words spray painted on the wall at the base of the ramp said otherwise.

  YOU LOSE, PUMPKIN BUTTER

  Gibson read them, and roared till he tasted blood.

  When that was done, the security camera adjusted focus, giving itself away with a tiny whirr. Gibson looked up into the lens that looked at him, knowing who was on the other end.

  “You know I’m getting’ outta here, don’tcha? You know. And when I—”

  There was a loud snap and a descending whine as power to the machine cut off.

  Gibson noticed, wouldn’t be intimidated. “—and when I do—”

  Power to the left bank of lights cut abruptly, throwing the coffin-room into bleak twilight.

  “—I’m comin’ for you, ya little bitch! For Donny! And … and … for Irene!” He knew what was coming, and he met it. But the remaining lights didn’t switch off. He glanced back at them, then back at the camera.

  The camera whirr-whirr-ed, shaking its head left to right. No.

  Half-mad with rage and terror, he screamed, put all he had into it, as though volume
might save him, or kill her.

  Light vanished, and blackness devoured Randall Gibson.

  Sunday, 4 July 2010. 00:01 A.M. Riverport Swimming Hall. One year later.

  Jack stepped out of the time machine onto the ramp, armed and scanning.

  He recognized the swimming hall. Pretty much everything was the way he remembered it from 2016, but with one difference: someone had built a concrete enclosure around the machine, and had then tore it down. The jagged track across the empty pool’s width remained.

  The air smelled different, too. Like fresh laundry, and cooking. Hot, frying smells. Bacon.

  Someone was living here.

  The workbenches in front of the machine were still there, one now cleared of Will’s clutter. Laid across it was a neatly arranged kit: Kevlar vest, assault carbine, handgun, three magazines for each—all Monarch-issue.

  Someone appeared in the doorway at the far end of the pool, equipped with the same kit that rested in front of Jack, her red hair tied in a ponytail.

  She stepped into the light. It was her: Beth. But changed.

  The years had left their imprint, the line of her jaw a little softer, care around her eyes etched more deeply than she deserved. She looked tired, but it was still Beth, still strong, still unbowed.

  “Hey, Trouble,” she said, quavering. “Want breakfast? I got an early start.”

  Jack dropped his gun and ran to her.

  Half an hour later.

  He had a hundred questions and she did her best to answer what she could. She walked Jack through her eleven years here—living from 1999 to 2010, the present day: the almost perpetual déjà vu, distracting herself from everything she knew by obsessively searching for things she didn’t in an effort to remain engaged with the world, to not think of it as a video game she had played before. To think of lives and events as happening to real people, and not simulations of history. She told him about Gibson and his crew, and how they had ended. She told him how she had lived for years in a hideout in the woods, keeping an eye on Jack’s younger self and Will, ensuring no threat from the present or future interfered with Will’s work. If enemy action resulted in the Countermeasure being somehow flawed, it was all over.

  “Hey,” she said. “Remember what goes down this morning?”

  Jack nodded. “Aberfoyle. Bannerman’s Overlook.”

  “My younger self’s all grown up. She’s Zed now. Got in touch a few weeks ago, asked for some help. I obliged.”

  Jack looked at her. To him, forty minutes ago, in another world, everything had been as it was. Now … forty minutes later, the woman he loved had spent eleven years without him. Had grown eleven years older than he.

  Was a different person than the one he had known.

  That, at least, he was used to.

  His hands closed tight on hers, and he kissed her. She was still Beth.

  She rested her forehead against his.

  “Let’s take a drive,” he said.

  Sunday, 4 July 2010. 4:52 A.M. Riverport, Massachusetts.

  Bright morning light pushed through the pines and birches that blanketed the hillside sloping gently toward Riverport. Jack and Beth stood on a slanting boulder, squinting toward a channel in the woods that framed an excellent view of Bannerman’s Overlook two miles away.

  “Funny thing,” Beth said. “I’m history’s only Scorpio with a birthday in March.”

  Jack took a pair of binoculars from their backpack. “Say what?”

  “I was born October 30.. I went through the machine October 9—twenty-one days before my birthday. I came out February 28, 1999, a leap year. February 28 plus twenty-one days is March 20. So now the day that I age a year is March 20.”

  Jack slung the binoculars’ strap around his neck. “And I thought what I disliked about time travel was the jetlag.”

  Beth checked her watch, clicked her pen, made a note in her Moleskine pad. Jack focused the binoculars, bringing the Bannerman’s Overlook platform into sharp focus. Their twenty-two-year-old selves and Aberfoyle came into focus: Jack and Paul looking over the rail toward Riverport, Aberfoyle and Zed talking thirty feet behind them. Jack panned. Three goons, waiting with the car. Panned back to himself and Paul.

  “You okay?” Beth asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Really? ’Cause for a second you sounded like a dog having a nightmare.”

  He couldn’t look away. “I didn’t know how this would make me feel. Being back here.”

  “So … how do you feel?”

  “Mortal.” He lowered the binoculars. “Did you talk to her then?”

  “Zed? Sure. I practically raised her. Well, I left her in the care of friends. I checked in a few times a year.”

  Jack shook his head. “You abducted yourself. Gave yourself to strangers. Couldn’t you have trained her while she was still living with her folks? Your folks, I mean?”

  “No, Jack. Because that’s not what happened. I also don’t have the resources or facilities to raise a child here, and how exactly do you imagine I’d go about negotiating with her parents? I’ve lived with this whole deal, every detail, my entire life. You just got here. Believe me, I’m across it.”

  Jack was still twenty-eight. Yesterday she had been, too. Now, a day later to him, she was thirty-nine.

  Jack reached out and took her hand, wanted to say something, but didn’t know where to begin.

  “Gonna need you to keep an eye on the Overlook,” she said, taking her hand from his. “Need exact times for the detonations.”

  He let it go, glanced back through the trees. Their younger selves were still in the same places; nothing had escalated yet. “But you set the explosives a week ago, right?”

  “After Zed got in touch, yeah.”

  “So, that trick you pulled … Zed pulled … pulls … pointing and having things explode. How do the two of you expect to get the timing exactly right? That’s a hell of a needle to be threading.”

  “It’s impossible for the timing to be anything but exactly right.” Beth held up her notepad. “The timers on the explosives have been set to detonate at the exact moments required.”

  “Yeah … but … that’s some really fine choreography. I don’t see how you’re gonna get it to—”

  “It breaks down like this. You ready?”

  “Sure.”

  “Think of Zed as my Younger Self, and me as my Older Self. My Younger Self gives my Older Self the detonation times.”

  “Yeah, but how did she get—”

  “Hut!” Beth cut him off with a waved finger. “Hear me out. My Younger Self gives my Older Self the detonation times. My Older Self sets the bombs to those times. The bombs detonate. As they detonate my Older Self notes the exact timing of the explosions and writes them down in a new book.” Beth held that new book up. “My Older Self then gives my Younger Self this new book. My Younger Self transcribes those times into her own new book—the one that is a precise copy of the old book her Older Self gave her when she was eleven, so that she can in turn give it to her Younger Self, in 1999, when she becomes her Older Self. Then that eleven-year-old Younger Self grows and becomes that same Older Self … and here we are.”

  Jack wasn’t blinking.

  “So,” she continued, “to boil it down: the buildings explode at exactly the right moment because I’m sitting here noting the exact time when Zed gestures and then, when she becomes me, that information is used to set the timers on the charges.”

  Jack wasn’t saying anything.

  “I know. I had the same problems. Will was very patient with me on that front, actually.”

  “If I’m understanding this … that doesn’t make sense. I mean, there has to be a point somewhere in there when that happens for the first time, right? When you don’t have any of that information? When you can’t set the bombs for the right times?”

  “Yes and no. Yes, and this is the first time, right now. And no, there is never a moment when I don’t have the information. How much do you kno
w about this stuff?”

  “I skimmed a Terminator argument on Reddit once.”

  “No. The bottom line is: it works. The paradox is accounted for or factored out, because the behavior of fundamental particles on the quantum scale under certain conditions aren’t strictly deterministic. They follow ‘fuzzy rules.’”

  “What?”

  “General relativity works just fine for predicting paradoxes, but once those paradoxes are considered in, or subjected to, quantum mechanical terms they pretty much vanish—provided causality is maintained.”

  “Says Will.”

  “The dude built a time machine. I’ll take his opinion over Reddit’s. Also”—she waved the book again—“I have the times.”

  “Jesus.”

  “You should have been there when I explained this to Will. He was really upset. He said this observation could be critical in formulating a theory that unifies general relativity with quantum mechanics but, ironically, he didn’t have time to look into it. He was too busy building the Countermeasure and trying to save the future.”

  “I thought science wasn’t your thing.”

  He took each of her hands in his. She was still Beth. Still Zed. Still the person he fell for.

  “Jack, how much do you remember about being sixteen?”

  Weird question. “Not a lot, it was twelve years ago.”

  “Jack,” she said. “You remember being sixteen the way I remember you. I haven’t seen you in that long.” Beth steeled herself and said, as gently as she could, “If it wasn’t for me watching you grow up I probably wouldn’t remember what you looked like. It’s been eleven years of living off the grid, staying out of the way of the future, and trying to keep both you and Will alive. I don’t need love, I don’t need romance, I don’t need drama. I just want to go home.”

  Jack let go of her hands, stepped away, and turned back toward the Overlook. Paul was standing alone. Zed had led Aberfoyle away from Jack. Aberfoyle raised his gun, level with Zed’s head.