Second Lives

by Scott K. Andrews

  Was he shocked by the efficiency Kaz had shown?

  Was he angry at the ruthlessness?

  Was he proud?

  Zbigniew broke the gaze, his face a mask unyielding of answers. He rose to his feet. 'Kaz, with me,' he shouted. 'Let's make sure there are no other surprises waiting for us down here.'

  'Coming,' said Kaz, removing his balaclava.

  Kaz and his father explored all the lower levels of the facility - the original undercroft and the extra floors that had been added beneath it - and found nobody besides the prisoner they had rescued. Kaz whisked him off to Kinshasa as well.

  When he returned to the undercroft, Dora had already returned with Quil and a doctor. They were carrying Quil on a stretcher towards the stairs, heading for the room where she would recuperate.

  'That took a week,' said Dora as she passed him, shaking her head wearily.

  As they disappeared downstairs there was another flash and Jana appeared. She looked straight into Kaz's eyes and shook her head, his face a mask of regret. Kaz felt a hollow ache that he could not name. He did not know how to respond other than with a curt nod of acknowledgment.

  The next day Dora jumped away with Kairos to sabotage the bomb in Quil's lair in 1645 so that it was a dud before she even began the countdown.

  During their search of the subterranean facility, Kaz and Zbigniew hunted exhaustively for any means of access to the cavern that they knew lay deep beneath them. The lift shaft that Quil had used in 1645 had been filled with concrete and covered in flagstones a long time ago, and there was no evidence anywhere that the people who had expanded the undercroft had any knowledge of the army of genetically altered soldiers that slept below them. It made Kaz nervous to know they were setting up shop directly above an unknown force, but try as he might, he could imagine no way in which they would be a threat.

  After a couple of days, they convened in the conference room.

  'OK,' said Dora, taking the lead as she had done since the debacle on Mars. 'I think we're done. Quil is safe downstairs. I think it's time for us to jump forward. I can't think of anything we've missed.'

  'I stay here, yes?' asked the professor.

  Dora nodded. 'Yeah, you're here for the duration. Zbigniew, do you want to come with us or are you heading home?'

  'I will return to my home, I think,' said Zbigniew after a moment's thought. He did not meet his son's gaze, and Kaz again found himself frustrated by his father's stoic refusal to let slip any clue to his emotional state.

  There was an awkward silence until Kaz realised the others were waiting for him to volunteer to ferry his father home.

  'Let me,' he muttered, unable to hide his resentment as he reached out, grasped his father's hand and whisked them both back to Poland in 2014.

  They arrived in a patch of parkland in Kielce, hidden from prying eyes by a blizzard.

  Kaz let go of his father's hand and stood awkwardly, not knowing what to say. All he wanted to do was jump back to the future, but he felt that he had to say something, anything, before he left.

  'OK,' he said eventually. 'I'll just—'

  He was taken completely by surprise when his father cut him off mid-sentence by pulling him into a clumsy embrace. Kaz stood awkwardly for a moment, then returned it.

  When Zbigniew let him go and stepped back he simply said, 'Take care, son,' and walked away into the snow.

  Kaz waited until his father was lost in the whiteout, then took a deep breath and flung himself forward in time.

  There was something different about her head, Quil decided.

  Her body was a mess of anaesthetic, scar tissue and patching; it felt distant from her, as if it was something in another room to which she was only tangentially connected. That's what happened, she supposed, when you were patched up after taking a bullet.

  (Why did the soldier's gun use bullets? Would a laser weapon have interfered with the Hall's security grid somehow? She should be grateful, she supposed, because in the time it took for her to take a bullet, she could easily have been sliced in two.)

  As she lay in bed, floating gently on a cloud of drugs, she knew that there was something different about her head. Something had changed between before and after. An edge had gone, a fury and a fear. She wondered if perhaps she'd suffered brain damage, some kind of surgical accident, loss of oxygen to the brain. But no, that didn't feel right. It was more subtle than that.

  She heard a soft rustling to her left and rolled her head.

  There was another bed beside hers, containing a young woman, fast asleep. Quil wondered who she was and why she was here, in the recovery room with her. As she was pondering her room-mate, the young woman turned in bed, so Quil could see . . . her own face. A memory surfaced through her surprise, of a chameleon shroud blurring to reveal the same face, a face that horrified and astounded her. But now, through the haze of drugs, with her intangibly different brain, Quil couldn't place the memory. Was it possible that it was a dream? Clones don't dream, she told herself. But if they did, wouldn't it be like this? Blurry, indistinct but vivid at the same time, surreal and hallucinatory.

  She was not even sure the younger version of herself in the opposite bed was real. Was she dreaming now? She couldn't be sure.

  With some effort, she propped herself up on the pillows so she could sit upright and look down at her doppelganger and study her. She was beautiful, she decided, not sure whether she was seeing herself as she truly was, but wanting to believe in the beauty of her younger, more innocent self.

  After a few minutes of half-aware reverie, Quil spoke to her room-mate.

  'Your breathing has changed,' she said, her voice sounding muffled in her own ears, as if she was hearing herself through a tube or a closed door. T can tell you're awake.'

  There was no response for at least a minute, but then the prone figure said, T am not awake,' in the slurred voice of a drunk.

  'The only alternative is that I am a dream,' said Quil, meaning the girl she was talking to. Which of the speakers was she again? Was she the one sitting up or lying down? She didn't feel quite sure.

  'Do you feel like a dream?' asked the dream.

  Quil considered the question. 'You are Godless,' she told herself. 'You don't dream. So I must be real. I feel solid, but I am floating.'

  'Me too,' said her younger dream self, which was stating the obvious because they were the same person. Weren't they?

  'They have good drugs here,' said Quil. 'You were stabbed. I was shot.'

  She did not know how she knew this. Had she overheard someone talking while she was half awake? It was an odd detail for her to have made up.

  'Sucks to be us,' she said, lying down.

  'Sucks to be me,' she said, sitting up.

  'And me.'

  'That's what I said.'

  Quil was more confused than ever, trying to pin down her identity through a miasma of anaesthetic and brain fuzz. Was it possible she was just lying in a room talking to herself?

  Her imaginary (?) younger self opened her eyes then, and raised herself up on her elbows.

  'Do I know you?' she asked.

  'Kind of,' replied Quil.

  'Are you . . .'

  'You?' said Quil. She nodded, which made her head swim. 'Kind of.'

  - 'What do you mean, kind of?' her younger self said, seemingly irritated. 'Actually, forget it. You were right the first time. You're a dream. Hallucination. All you are is very good drugs.'

  As the dream girl lay back down and closed her eyes, Quil struggled to understand why she was so annoyed. She knew she was a dream. Hadn't she already said as much? She was dreaming this child. That was all there was to it.

  'Keep telling yourself that, kid,' she said to herself. 'Sleep now. But when you wake up, you and I have so much to talk about. So very, very much.'

  Glad she had made a note to have a good hard talk with herself, Quil lay back down and surrendered to sleep once again.

  As she was drifting off she thought she
heard a door open, and someone complaining, demanding to know why Quil had been put in a room with someone else. But that couldn't be right, could it?

  There was nobody here but her.

  Quantum Bubble

  Kaz put his feet up on the conference table and swigged his coffee.

  Jana sat next to him, sipping her drink and casting disparaging side-eye at his feet.

  'Are we finished?' she asked.

  Kaz nodded. 'I think so,' he said. 'We rescued Quil from the government, eliminated the poison that was driving her mad, fixed her up and let her recuperate here. We've all met her now, we know her story, she knows who we are, where we came from, why everything happened the way it did. She doesn't think we're government agents, she knows that the Mars disaster wasn't our fault.'

  'So we have changed history?' asked Dora.

  'Looks that way,' said Kaz, smiling. 'I can't see any way for her to become the woman who hunted us in 1614, or the woman who arranged Mum's death in 2010.'

  'But I remember your mother standing there, unable to move because of what Quil did to her,' said Jana.

  'Kairos is vague on the details - nothing new there - but he thinks that when we travel back to any time before this bubble we'll find history altered,' explained Kaz. 'He thinks there's a possibility our memories might be rewritten and we'll never know any of this happened.'

  'If Kairos is right, it didn't,' said Dora, who sat opposite them, staring into her tea. 'My mum was never brainwashed. And neither was my brother.'

  'You say it like it's a good thing,' said Jana, who sat beside her, munching her way through a bag of plums.

  'I think it is,' said Dora firmly. 'He will remain a dangerous zealot but at least he will be himself. He will have control of his own destiny, it will not be stolen from him.'

  Kaz didn't think that was much of a victory at all, but he could understand how it might look that way, seen through the prism of Dora's new obsession with free will.

  'Where is Kairos?' asked Jana, keen to change the subject.

  'He dragged Quil off into his little study downstairs and slammed the door in my face,' said Kaz.

  There was a long pause.

  'You don't think . . .' said Jana, eyes widening theatrically.

  'Euw, no,' said Kaz, laughing.

  As if on cue, the undercroft doors swung open to admit Quil and Kairos, who walked towards the conference room with focused intent. When Kaz saw the set of their faces he felt a rush of fear.

  No, not again. Not when they were so close . . .

  Kairos and Quil entered and took seats next to Jana and Dora. Kairos was pale as a ghost and looked almost as if he were in shock. Everyone was staring at them, wondering why they were so solemn but not wanting to ask. Nobody wanted to break the mood.

  'I am afraid we have bad news,' said Quil.

  'The . . . the quantum generator . . .' Kairos trailed off into silence, seemingly unable to complete his thought. He looked across at Quil helplessly.

  'The quantum generator malfunctioned when it was switched on,' she said.

  'Malfunctioned how?' asked Jana.

  'It did not malfunction,' whispered Kairos. 'It just created an unexpected phenomenon.'

  'I was caught on the edge of the bubble as it was created,' said Quil slowly. 'You were all inside the initial circumference, remember? I was furthest away from the device.'

  'I remember you said there were . . .' Dora also trailed off, and Kaz could see realisation dawning in her eyes.

  'What?' he asked, taking his feet down off the table and leaning across it urgently. 'Quil, what did you say?'

  'Two of me,' said Quil, meeting his gaze. 'I said there were two of me. For a moment, just a second, when the generator was switched on, I saw a reflection of myself, outside the bubble, looking in at me. But the image vanished as the bubble expanded. I thought it was an illusion. An echo. I don't know what I thought.'

  'I spent most of my time the last few weeks playing with calculations, trying to explain the quantum echo, as I called it,' said Kairos, staring at his hands. 'It was a diverting puzzle for me. A weird side-effect of the quantum generator, nothing more.'

  /So what has changed?' asked Kaz.

  'The mathematics led me to a conclusion,' said Kairos. 'An inescapable truth. I did the calculations over and over, trying to prove myself wrong. But I could not.'

  'The Professor tells me he explained Schrodinger's Cat to you,' said Quil. 'Do you remember?'

  Kaz, who had been embarrassed by his ignorance first time round, had made an effort to memorise this to avoid future humiliation. 'Something that exists in a state of quantum uncertainty can be both dead and alive until it is observed by a third party,' he said confidently. He had hoped for an acknowledgment of his cleverness from Jana, but she was staring in horror at Quil and Kairos.

  'Not just alive and dead, Kaz,' said Jana, still staring fixedly at Quil. 'But in one of any two states - up and down, left and right, here and not here. It's called a superposition.'

  'When I was caught in the quantum field, just for a moment, I existed in that state,' said Quil. 'I was both inside and outside the bubble. During that instant, everybody was looking at Kairos. Nobody was looking at me. And the version of me that was outside the bubble was pulled off into time before the superposition collapsed.'

  There was a long silence. Kaz could see that Dora and Jana were devastated but try as he might, he couldn't quite wrap his head ar^ind what he was being told.

  'Sorry,' he said. 'What are you saying? That . . . that we split you in two somehow and the other version of you is the Quil we met in the past?'

  'Oh God,' said Jana, burying her head in her hands. 'We thought we'd finally done it. We thought we'd actually changed history. But we didn't. We just created our own pasts. Again.'

  'You're Schrodinger's time traveller,' breathed Kaz.

  Dora leaned forward and clasped her hands together, addressing Kaz. 'We tried to alter the course of events, to prevent us arriving at this point. We failed utterly. Our response to that failure has been to take exactly the opposite approach - to dabble in time, creating closed loops and buttressing this timeline. We have manipulated and coerced our past selves into arriving in this moment. I cannot help but feel that we have betrayed ourselves. Made ourselves the kind of puppets to fate that the mad version of Quil believes us all to be. Have we at any point really, truly exercised free will? Because I am not sure that we have. I think we have stolen it from ourselves.'

  'Yes,' said Kairos, looking up at last, shamefaced. 'That's certainly one way of looking at it. If time is, as I now suspect, unalterable and fixed, then only people moving forward through time one day after another, or perhaps, moving forward and only forward through time in jumps, can truly have agency. Anyone travelling into the past, no matter how much they may perceive their actions to be chosen freely in the heat of the moment, is in fact destined to act in the ways they always did. They make a trap for themselves.'

  'Which would mean she is right,' said Dora, 'this other version of Quil who's living in the past. That it doesn't matter how many people she kills, what decisions she makes, no matter how obscene. She has no choice but to act that way.'

  'The ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card,' said Jana.

  'So does that make her less of a psychopath?' said Kaz. 'This is a pointless discussion. She chooses to behave in a certain way, her actions have consequences.'

  'Don't forget the poison,' said Quil, mildly. 'She still has that crap in her system, making her paranoid. Add to that the trauma you say she suffered on her trip back through time - the burning, the pain, the years of convalescence.'

  'You're making excuses for her,' said Kaz, unable to mask his disgust.

  'I am her,' replied Quil. 'Quite literally.'

  Kairos shook his head. 'You are missing the point, Kaz,' he said. 'I do not believe, and apparently neither does the

  other version of Quil, that she has a choice at all. Her actions are pre
destined. By surrendering to that you could argue that she is absolved of all responsibility for what she does. From her perspective, and from that of the model of time that we are discussing, she only regains her free will when she returns to the moment she left and resumes her journey into her own future.'

  'And the same holds for us,' said Jana. 'Every time we jump into our own past, no matter what we do, we only end up creating the exact events we are there to prevent.'

  'Yes,' said Kairos. 'Your whole lives up until this point may in fact have been predetermined by your older selves. In fact, there is nothing to say that we are not still slaves to destiny, being manipulated even now by our older selves for some purpose we cannot imagine yet.'

  Nobody replied to this and silence hung there for a minute as they all absorbed the implications of Kairos's theories.

  'So we make a deal,' said Dora. 'Here and now, we all swear that, no matter what, we will never, ever try to influence past events again. From this moment we only travel forward.'

  Everyone at the table nodded their agreement.

  'You're forgetting Steve,' said Kaz, looking at Dora.

  'Who?' asked Kairos.

  'Someone from our future,' explained Kaz. 'They wore a / disguise, refused to tell us who they were. They intervened after we first met, rescued us from Quil and Sweetclover in 2014.'

  'I'm not forgetting,' said Dora.

  'But you rescued him or her from 2014,' said Kaz. 'Brought them to Kinshasa, got the doctors there to fix them up and then let them leave. And you've not told us who he or she

  was. Is it one of us, breaking the promise we just made? Is it you?'

  Dora bit her lip. 'It's not me, I promise. I can't tell you who it is. They told me some elements of the future. Only some. But I can't tell you who they are. Not yet.'

  Jana hit the table hard in frustration. 'So we're still stuck,' she shouted. 'We're still being toyed with by someone from the future, possibly one of us. We're still time's playthings.'

  'I promise,' said Kaz, 'that if it turns out to be me, I will give myself a big slap the moment I realise. Promise.'