Murphy responded to the sudden chill of fear by heading straight at its source. “Then spit it out: why is the date so important?”
Mr. Nephew’s eyes did not blink as they sought his. “Because it’s not that date anymore. Not even close.”
Murphy kept pushing toward the center of the growing terror. “Stop the theatrics. What’s the date?”
“August. 2125.”
Murphy shunted his burgeoning terror into outraged facetiousness. “Okay, guys. I don’t know who you are, or who put you up to this, but this is a pretty shitty joke. I mean, maybe if we hadn’t lost someone on the chopper, it would be okay, but it’s lousy to build a practical joke on the copilot’s grave, because that’s pretty much what you’re doing here.”
“You’re right,” Tiger-Nephew said with a slow nod. “That would be a shitty joke. But this isn’t a joke.”
Murphy had been watching their eyes. They were somber, even sad. They didn’t check their performances against each other, nor were they so rigidly focused on the act that it caused an unnatural sense of timing or predetermined intent. Unless, that is, it wasn’t an act— “No,” Murphy rebutted, surging forward, “this is all bullshit. Weirdest damn strategy for producing POW disorientation I’ve ever heard of, but it isn’t going to work. It’s too freaking ridiculous.”
Mr. Nuncle sighed, rose. “We presumed you would have that reaction. We’d probably have the same one, put in your place. That is why we’re going to let you spend as long as you need with someone from your time. He even served in your theater of operations—Somalia—albeit a few years later.”
The heavy bulkhead door slid aside—just like in old reruns of Star Trek—and a new guy walked in, saluting the two already in the room. He wore a uniform Murphy recognized. Pararescue jumper. Lieutenant. A little younger than Murphy. He saluted as he introduced himself. “Ike Franklin, Major Murphy. Nice to meet you, sir. Wish it was under better—well, sane—circumstances.”
Time to blow their cover, whatever game they might be playing. “Nice try. Uniform is a complete match. Accent is perfect. You guys have done your homework well. Or are you working for some rogue cell? Is that it?”
The new guy sighed. “I get it, Major, I really do. Those of us who had higher clearances wondered the same thing when we were awakened: was this some elaborate mind game to disorient us, get us to drop classified information? And you know what we figured out?”
Murphy shook his head, swallowed. The guy who called himself Franklin seemed so natural, so genuine, that Murphy’s worst fears—no matter how irrational—were growing. “No. What did you figure out?”
“That none of us knew anything important enough to warrant all of this.” The guy in the pararescue fatigues waved a broad hand to take in the whole compartment. “Tell me, Major. Just what do you know that would make an enemy willing to put on this kind of crazy show? I’m familiar with the info that is dished out at your rank, probably heard a lot of the same material since I served roughly during those years. I heard it because we might have to make snap decisions having to do with wounded personnel with sensitive intel. So I know most of the same sensitive data points about nukes, particularly small ones. I’m also guessing we both know a bit about comm protocols that probably never made it online, at least not where Netscape could find it.”
Murphy blinked. There was something about the casualness with which he said, “Netscape”…
“But at the end of the day, you know how it goes: the services are full of folks from O3 to O5 who have a gambling habit, a drug habit, a sex habit, or alimony payments to beat the band. Those are the folks who are spilling the semi-secrets, not us—and for pennies on the dollar, compared to what it would cost to set up something like this.”
Murphy struggled to find something to say, some brash counterpoint to which he could affix his flagging defiance and courage—but nothing showed up. His well of snappy comebacks was dry.
Mr. Nuncle rose, followed a moment later by Mr. Nephew, who said, “Sorry, Major. I really am. I’ve known several people who’ve had to grapple with this kind of one-way trip into the future. It’s never easy, and the longer the time they’ve been gone, the harder it is. And you—well, you’ve been gone a very long time.” He nodded and departed right behind Mr. Nuncle.
Murphy swallowed again, realized he was shaking slightly.
Franklin slid into the chair Mr. Nuncle had vacated and folded his hands. “Listen—”
“NO. You listen.” Murphy clasped his hands to keep them still. “I don’t buy this. Any of it. There’s no way I could be in the future. That I could have—what? Slept through more than a century? That kind of technology—no one has, or had, it. Not even close.”
Franklin shrugged. “You’re right about that. But like the others said, our people weren’t the ones who recovered you.”
“So who did?”
Franklin leaned back and sighed. “You’re not going to like or believe the answer, not at first.”
“Of course I won’t, because this is all bullshit. But tell me anyway—just for the entertainment value.”
“Okay. You were abducted by aliens.”
“By—?” And before he could stop himself, Murphy was laughing. Hysterically. Too loud and too wild, even to his own ears. Because if this wasn’t an increasingly improbable charade…
“By aliens,” Franklin repeated. “The same ones who grabbed me.”
Murphy didn’t immediately realize that he had stopped laughing, as if someone had turned off a switch. “What do you mean?”
“I mean just what I said, Major. Me and a buddy—Special Forces—we were as good as dead near the Ethiopian border in Somalia. Surrounded. No water, and not half a mag left between us. Then everything goes quiet. A few minutes later, a guy in shades and a suit walks up toward us and gives us the spiel a lot of us heard, ‘You can come with me or you can die right here.’ Not much of a choice. And we didn’t know that going with him meant a one-way ride into the future. And even farther.”
“Even farther?”
“Really? You haven’t guessed by now? That we are nowhere near Earth?”
Murphy suppressed a shudder. “Go ahead: it’s a good story. Lie to me some more.”
Franklin shook his head, frustrated but smiling. “Major, you’re one tough nut. Gonna be a real asset when you come around.”
“Don’t count on it.”
Franklin’s shrug was larger this time. “Suit yourself. The universe has got plenty of time. We’re the ones who are playing beat the clock.”
“And what does that mean?”
“It means that there’s a reason you’re being awakened at this place and at this time. It’s because we’re at war. Have been for a few years, now.”
“At war with whom?”
“Well, as it turns out, with the same people who snatched us from Earth.”
“Yeah, sure. So, tell me: are we fighting the greens or the grays?”
Franklin frowned. “Far as I know, there aren’t any ‘greens.’ And the grays—if that’s what they are—are on our side. Kinda.”
Murphy was shaking inside but steeled himself to keep plunging forward, to get this impostor to finally show his hand, to reveal a crack in his act, a flaw in the story. “Okay. So why don’t you tell me about the enemies who abducted me and the war and all the rest.”
“That’ll take a while.”
“Well, according to you, I’ve got nothing but time.”
Franklin smiled. “True, that.” Then he leaned back and started to talk.
* * *
Murphy held up his hand. “Stop.”
Franklin halted mid-word and squinted appraisingly at Murphy. “You look…uh, ill. Major.”
“Nope,” Murphy lied. “It’s just a lot to take in.”
Franklin smiled sympathetically. “Don’t I know it.”
Well, maybe you do and maybe you don’t, Murphy retorted silently. But it sure did sound like he did. Franklin had answ
ered every question not only with ease, but the kind of casual side commentary that you just didn’t get in a constructed scenario. Frankly, not even the best spies on TV shows or in films demonstrated the unaffected, almost lazy inventiveness that Ike did. Which meant that it might not be invented. Which would mean that what he was saying was the truth.
Murphy once again had to clamp down the rising nausea. For a brief moment, he envied the contents of his stomach; at least they could escape. For Murphy, there was no leaving himself behind, no way to find the ejection seat if this was his new reality, slightly more than one hundred thirty years further along the timeline from the moment when he’d lost consciousness in the Blackhawk heading down toward the Indian Ocean. Which brought up an interesting glitch in the story of his “abduction,” one that might prove to be the loose thread that would undo Franklin’s tapestry of lies. “Wait a minute. You said that the abductors—the Kuh-torr—?”
“K-tor,” Franklin corrected with a nod, eliding the syllables until they almost ran together.
“Yeah—you said that they gave you a choice. They spoke to you. Why not us?”
Franklin nodded—a casually confident gesture which made Murphy’s hopeful stomach plummet. “That happened sometimes. For instance, some of the other abductees were on subs when their ticket was about to be punched. The Ktor intervened, but there wasn’t the time for any chitchat. For them, like you, all they knew was that one moment they were expecting to be dead, the next they woke up safe and sound.” Franklin’s expression hardened. “Well, comparatively speaking. Not much safe about this new life. Not for us, anyhow.”
“Not for us.” No special emphasis, nor any theatrical de-emphasis. Just a conversational tone, a phrase like any other. Jesus Christ, he’s telling the truth. He really is.
Murphy managed to turn his head before he threw up.
* * *
Franklin offered a second face towel. Murphy waved it away.
“Another glass of water?” the pararescue asked.
“No, thanks.” Murphy coughed. “I’m good.” Which was probably the biggest lie he’d ever told.
How the hell could he—or anyone—be “good” when their entire life was wiped away in an eyeblink? It was kind of the reverse of dying. Dying meant that you dropped out of everybody else’s story, that you ceased to be. Which was terrifying. But this way, it was everybody else who dropped out of your story—leaving you as alone as any human had ever been. Family, friends, dreams went flitting past his mind’s eye—and were gone, like vapor. Like they’d never existed. The nausea threatened again, but he choked it back down.
“We can stop now,” Franklin said quietly, shifting in his chair as if he meant to get up in the direction of the hatch—if you could really call it that.
Murphy didn’t respond. Did he want to stop? First, he’d wanted to disprove it all. Just now, he’d wanted to escape it. But the second after the desire to escape had passed, he knew—without even thinking—that there was nothing left but to go forward. Yeah, but forward into what—?
To hear Franklin tell it, he was now in a world which, about half a century after he left it, had slid into a crazy patchwork quilt of decline. Not what all the doomsday predictors had foreseen, either. Yeah, climate impact played a role, but before it could really roll out the huge effects that everyone had been talking about, simple human issues trumped them.
And even there, it wasn’t what had been expected. It wasn’t anything as simple as global overpopulation or famine. Because although the globe was more interconnected than ever, that didn’t mean that a disaster in one region or at any given economic level turned into equally awful disasters in all the others. Instead, the bow wave of the crisis struck at coastal cities—well, megalopoli. Places like Manila and Rio and Lagos and Mumbai, where the services fell so far behind the urban influx, chaos, and crime, that cargo ships ultimately started avoiding them, urged along by Lloyds’ refusal to insure any docking there.
That was the tipping point. Once cut off from sea-borne goods and supplies, the local population almost immediately became exponentially greater than those cities’ carrying capacities. Unrest became revolt. Hunger became starvation. And crime lords became war lords.
Economies toppled. Refugees fled to the countryside, hoping to find a way to feed themselves. Others, paradoxically, collapsed upon the cities, the lure of jobs and services stronger than the fear of, or belief in, the decaying conditions there. Cities in the interior were swamped, drowned in the same wave of human desperation.
Currencies collapsed, followed by the governments that backed them. Coups pitted military juntas against crime syndicates that were almost as powerful as they were, and often came from the same backgrounds. Clean water, already in short supply, became the new currency in many places, along with canned food, medicines, and bullets.
And what had the rest of the world done? Less and less. Most of the Western powers that had the money and power to possibly—possibly—make a difference were also decried as opportunistic recolonizers. Voting publics in the West fretted and fought among themselves about what steps to take—but even if they had been able to make any productive plans, the situation deteriorated too rapidly for it to matter.
The other great powers? Russia was still attempting to sort out its own maelstrom of conflicting sociopolitical currents: capitalism, cronyism, communism, and crime. China saw the chaos as an opportunity to realize its global ambitions, attempted to intervene, and found itself mired in regional and tribal wars and even campaigns of genocide, old hatreds given new life by the struggle to survive. Ultimately, the PRC spent billions—right before their own very different demographic problems crushed them: the number of dependent-aged persons rose to make up seventy percent of the population. The Party’s solutions were logical, ruthless, and led to large-scale “disaffection.”
Meanwhile, the smaller but stable nations of the Developed World responded the only way they could: duck and hunker down, particularly those who had large and unstable neighbors.
And so, the globe did not plunge into complete darkness, but rather, along the predictable fault lines of developed infrastructure and geographical separation. Countries with functional economies and at great remove from the disintegrating states of South America, Asia, and particularly Africa, watched—first in horror, then in mute numbness—as almost a third of the globe’s population sank into disarray, despair, and a desperate struggle for survival. And as if making good on apocalyptic prophesy, famine and death were quickly joined by war and pestilence, which only led to a greater hardening of borders.
Franklin had referred to the entire period as the Megadeath, which sounded like the name of a thrash metal band to Murphy. But it turned out that the name was not inspired by a dark poetic response to the unfolding tragedy, but by actuarial statistics. Specifically that, during the peak years of the crisis, the daily fatalities exceeded the normal average value by one million. Or about a third of a billion every year.
Ultimately, the Megadeath burned itself out. Nations restructured, began to rebuild, but the world was never quite the same. The greater powers lived with the inchoate but lingering guilt of not having done more, and the new nations nursed the grim conviction that they had been abandoned in their hour of need. Neither was completely true, yet neither was completely groundless, either.
As rebuilding began reenergizing economies and nations, cybernetic implants moved out of the realm of enhancements for the wealthy into main market. But numerous waves of hacking and targeted EMP attacks resulted in widespread avoidance. And just as that panic was dying out, the resurgent space programs of various countries collectively discovered and confirmed an object heading straight for Earth. They dubbed the interloper from the Kuiper Belt the Doomsday Rock, which was intercepted and diverted just in time to save Earth from being blasted back to the Bronze Age. Or worse.
It was, however, a galvanizing moment. Space research budgets mounted, and as access to space became hab
itation in space and ultimately communities in space, the competition between nations increasingly moved off Earth. One or two small wars flared and were quelled, and just after the turn of the 22nd century, a successful interstellar field effect system—the Wasserman Drive—was invented. Colonization of green worlds—a surprising, even suspicious, number of them—commenced with unusual drive and fervor.
But that lasted for just a little over a decade—because that was the point at which ruins were discovered on Delta Pavonis Three, only seven years ago. The events that followed were difficult for Murphy to keep straight: Earth tried to form a confederation; exosapients contacted humanity; what should have been a friendly meeting went sour; Earth was invaded; but with some ill-defined assistance, it threw back the occupiers and turned the tables on them in their own systems.
And just after all that was finally winding down, a mission was sent to one of those enemy’s worlds: Turkh’saar. There were humans there, which should have been impossible. But there they were, anyhow—and all of them from the twentieth century. The abductees of which Franklin spoke. The so-called Lost Soldiers. Of which he was one.
And therefore, so was Murphy.
He hung his head. “I’m going to need a little time to…to take it all in.”
Franklin rose. “Sure.” On the seat of the other chair, he left behind what looked like a pane of glass acting like a computer screen. “We’ve patched the OS so that it will be easy for you to use. Anything you want to know, it’ll be right there.” He started toward the bulkhead door, turned back. “Need anything else?”
“Yeah.” Murphy tried to grin, knew it must look feeble. “A time machine to go back home.”
Franklin sighed. “You and me both, Major. You and me both.” He left.
Murphy let out a long shuddering sigh and lay back on the gurney/bed. He was tired—exhausted, all of a sudden—but he didn’t want to go to sleep.
Because if he did, he’d have to wake up and realize—all over again—that this was not a nightmare; it was his new reality.
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