by Lee Bond
Would be the maddest thing in all of Creation. Floating, there, at the cusp of Entropic Decay, vast and moaning disappointment into the endless well of destruction.
He was bloated now, so stretched out and pulled wide and far that he knew he was barely human. Were his own parents to look into his eyes, they’d see nothing more than a madman, but it didn’t matter.
All that mattered was the vision of the perfect and pure future he’d discovered inside himself, and if it took billions of years to make that happen, he, Baron Samiel, was more than willing to make and take all the sacrifices necessary.
“Because it is worth it.” Samiel could barely hear his own voice. The whistling and groaning that was part of this far flung future filled his senses. Even The Lines sprouting from the machine at his massive fingertips were almost too hard to see. All around him, the leather and wire and ropes he used to keep himself together strained and creaked like sails on a ship in the midst of a terrible storm, and there was nothing he could do but hold on tight. The damage could be undone, if only he could find the right key for this damnable lock.
Thousands and thousands of attempted future-tense assassinations had swiftly and irreversibly transformed him into the bloated thing he now was, and well ahead of schedule. And still, 'Garth's' future was the same as his past; a single moment in the 21st century, a particular day –Samiel couldn’t even remember the name of the day, let alone the month-, a singular green shining bit of light representing the life and times of 'Mister Garth Nickels'. Staring him down, refusing to disappear.
All life on either side of that moment disappeared following Garth’s death, and for such a long time, filling a weary Samiel with the faint stirrings of hope that somehow, in some way, this assassination attempt was successful, that this time, his most dreaded enemy faded into the temporal ether.
“By now, I should be undoing the damage done to The Line.” Samiel moaned as a particularly awful shrieking whistle blasted his poor eardrums. “But I am not.”
Sometime after all life surrounding that singular moment ceased to be, life returned.
Both backwards and forwards, moments and decisions and actions refilling The Line up to the moment of death rapidly, a cup filling with water in the blink of an eye.
Which was –to Samiel’s certain knowledge- impossible.
“There is only one being in all of creation capable of doing what is being done, and I am most definitely not bringing this man back online.” Samiel ground molars the size of dinner plates back and forth, back and forth.
This was impossible.
“It is impossible,” Samiel reiterated, “and I am missing something. This Nickels character should be stuck in a closed loop, one that should be neatly excised out of The Line once it’s been firmly established, but … he ... it ... comes back. And, from my ancient point of view, does exactly the same thing, over and over again, bringing him to precisely the same moment of death as every other time. Nothing changes. Everything is the same. Even I can’t keep the flow of The Line the same, every time."
It was true.
A bit of a shock to discover, in those early days, that though you were capable of communicating with previous temporal versions of yourself, that no matter how careful you were in trying to rearrange a bit of time in between those two points, there were always differences.
Usually small enough to compensate for without losing track of the main project, but there was always something.
If it was too big, if it buckled things too far out of shape, hasty maintenance –in the form of another iteration from further up communicating backwards to an earlier point- was required, but it worked. Eventually, enough similarities between what'd been and what was were dragged into focus so that he could begin again, without too many problems.
Samiel estimated he’d wasted about eighteen to twenty thousand personal years throughout his bold endeavor working solely to correct those minor imbalances.
This? This was shaping up to be worse. Irrevocable. Irredeemable. Either he stopped doing as he did, thereby admitting defeat, or whoever Nickels truly was did the same.
Neither one of them could sustain a detente like this. Not forever.
“Everything about this man is impossible.” Samiel griped loudly to be heard over the din pummeling him from all sides.
He wished he could go back into one of his much earlier selves, one of the versions no longer associated with any version of The Line, just to see if he could somehow drop a temporal bomb down on Garth's head from that invisible, non-existent point of view. But he couldn't, and at this point, Second-to-Ultimate Samiel really kind of suspected it wouldn't work.
“And I am missing something.”
Samiel considered moving further up, just a few hundred years. If there was an Ultimate out there, it was thousands -if not hundreds of thousands- of years further forward. A handful of decades would be as nothing, and could possibly provide him with a much ... clearer view.
The changes that'd be wrought in his already unfairly mutated flesh would be that much greater, would, in fact, bring him closer than ever to the hideous vision he held in his mind of Ultimate Samiel, but ... the transformation might very well be worth it!
"Taking the risk, getting rid of 'Nickels', getting back onto the task of controlling the Bishop's chimerical DNA ... once that's all back on line and in proper order, I can just undo what I've become." Samiel nodded, albeit microscopically.
On the face of things, the summation seemed perfect. He was the Master of Time. All he needed to do was take his time, wait his foe out, defeat him, then ... redo everything. Use Ziggs and ODDities to smooth out the wrinkles left behind by Nickels and ... voila.
History, revised. Nickels, excised. It would be perfect.
Except...
What if it wasn't that simple?
The more Samiel thought about this 'newest' foe and his impossible resilience to someone who should be infinitely more masterful at controlling Time, the more Garth's own brand of time travel was brought into focus.
"Not quite time travel." Samiel muttered as he stared, mostly blind, at the singular green pulse belonging to this strange enemy. "More ... more an immunity to time travel, which is ... worse.”
What if this man … this thing calling himself Nickels had been there in the background this whole time, purposefully manipulating Bishop in ways that had –until this bold appearance- always remained invisible.
What if the so-called Garth Nickels was, in fact, responsible for Bishop’s mercurial DNA? What if Bishop was a fishing lure, designed for no other purpose than to confuse him, to lure him away from things that truly mattered?
“Nonsense.” Samiel howled the word into the air where it crackled with power. “Not even possible. In a moment where there is only impossibility, I would’ve noticed someone standing in my Lines, immovable as a stone in a river, long before now... No. He’s a strange attractor, kicked into being by the Universe itself. His existence implies that what I am doing is not right, but I won’t allow it. I am in the right. My goals are the right ones, and the Invaders must be stopped be me and mine alone! And I am missing something!”
Whatever he was missing, it had nothing to do with the so-called Garth Nickels; if this intruder was capable of doing anything other than dying every few minutes, he would've done so.
The spiritual and physical agony experienced by people not imbued with certain specific gifts was beyond comprehension. The mortal body would dissipate over time, painfully and grotesquely.
"I am the only being capable of physically moving through time, and there are scant enough reasons to ever do so." Samiel started flicking through The Lines he held under his control.
Lissande, of course, was perfect. She'd been with him for so long that even if there were something wrong with her Line, she'd remain cognizant enough to warn him so he could repair the damage. As always, her Line was partially occluded thanks to her convergence with Bishop's Line, but that was to be expe
cted; the bizarre nature of Drake Bishop's genetic gifts had a tendency to create minute skips and stutters along Lissande's Line, but Samiel'd been at the game long enough now to instinctively know the difference between something that could be ignored and something that needed dealing with right away.
For now -as always- Lissande Amour was just fine, motoring along towards the goal of getting Drake to Vegas, where -in fits and spurts- he'd be exposed to fractional doses of incongruous power, just enough to warp his DNA so that, when the ... time ... was right, future Bishop spawn would be ... amenable.
Samiel moved on to the other Lines, skipping speedily through most of them when he saw that they remained true to the original flow of their Lines. It was as he'd expected; 'Garth's' -Samiel couldn't keep from mentally addressing his foe this way- influence along the Lines extended only to the San Francisco area.
His men in Vegas, the woman in DC -ordinarily tasked to keep a closer eye on Granger but now tasked to see if she could dig into Nickels from a different angle, all too no luck thus far- ... they, too, showed no...
"Granger." The word escaped his bloated lips, a grotesque hiss. "Granger."
Of course!
There was no other man or woman in the entire world who possessed the same kind of temporal unboundedness. In a very real sense, Granger's peculiarity rivaled Bishop's, but it wasn't nearly enough to steel his Oddities fully against the Invaders.
No, Granger's ability -if it could be catalogued- would be useful, but for one being alone. If Granger survived the temporal storms surely plaguing his existence, the fat Fed would find himself hauled up the Line and pulled to pieces.
Time, then, to see how his most illustrious -and fallen- foot soldier was handling being caught 'twixt temporal storms. Samiel rubbed thickened fingertips together, licked his stretched lips nervously, then touched the unstinting green line that represented the sum and total that was Delbert Granger.
Scything slices of fractured time scissored out at him from Granger's line, razor-sharp crystal chunks flinging outwards from when the agent's life became most turbulent with an almost crazed need to exact punishment.
Samiel reared away from the assault, yanking his consciousness away from the wounded spot and completely out of Granger's Line. Scintillating beads of pain whispered through Samiel with vicious relentlessness, but the conqueror bore the agony with silent stoicism.
Now was not the time for weakness. Not with so much hanging on The Line.
"No wonder I missed it." Samiel twiddled fingers nervously. "Unbound in time, nothing he suffers makes an impact on any other point in the Line! Further, being ripped loose as he is, his frame has become a focus for any changes! Ahhh, the pain he must endure. Worse than anything I might visit upon him. Hmm." Samiel pulled backwards further from The Line, gauged Granger's essence in connection to the whole; the poor Fed's condition was but one side of this temporal feedback loop.
"What else could be ..." Samiel plucked at his lip, as he seemed to do all the time. Nothing came loose for a change, which was nice. As he yanked and yanked, a lightbulb popped. "The phone! Of course. The phone is causing the delay and nothing Nickels is doing. Damn you, Delbert Granger, damn you to the lowest bowels of temporal ignominy. Surely by now you aren't long for this world, but how long do you have left? More importantly, though, is this skip. How long is it?"
For the longer the skip was between the moments of the man's future death and present resurrection, the greater the chance of his canny foe maneuvering things to his event, all unseen. Samiel did the math in his head, using all that was inherent in the Last Swan Song of Special Agent Delbert Granger to complete the esoteric functions in just a few minutes.
"Four hours. Too long. Too long." It was time to put in a call. Delbert Granger was going to be undone once and for all. The loyal dog had reached the end of it's leash. But it had to be done now, when there was but a few minutes left before Nickels gained another four hours in which to play.
Four hours more where the enemy could do whatever he wanted, under a blanket of temporal darkness.
"Not on my watch!" Samiel ground the words out, determination burning through him like fire. Not-Quite-Ultimate Samiel, so far up The Line that he was the only line worth mentioning any longer, did just that. The machines keeping him alive hurried to do his commands.
Delbert Granger, already in temporal distress, would be split into pieces the very second he answered this, the last phone call he'd ever get. After that, when the metaphorical dust settled and loose ends left behind by the man’s deviation from the Line were sewn up, it’d be the right time to refocus on killing this … distraction.
***
A sense of urgency hung in the air.
Garth danced from foot to foot while Rommen inexpertly picked the lock to Granger’s room. “Come on, man, I thought you were some kind of Spec Ops supersoldier guy. You know, like, Captain America, only without the tights.”
“The last time I broke into a hotel room,” Rommen replied calmly, part of a lock picking kit in his mouth, “was over five years ago and at the behest of an employer who simply couldn’t handle his son’s overdose to make the news.”
“Oh yeah?” Garth put his hands to the windows, which resulted in disappointment; Granger’d wisely shut the blinds, making it impossible to see anything beyond a few pointless shadows. He could just barely make out someone on the other side, talking to themselves in one of those voices that you ordinarily only ran across during Shakespearean monologues.
Delbert Granger was definitely in there. If there was one thing Garth remembered about the guy that didn’t involve him being a sadistic asshole, it was that the dude had gone through some seriously high levels of education before, you know, literally joining the Dark Side of the Force.
“Yeah.” Rommen grinned slyly when the lock on the door popped open. He stepped up, swung the door open, and gestured grandly for Garth to go inside; ordinarily, the best course of action involved him going in first, but … there were many reasons not to. He, too, had heard Granger's drunken mutterings, but that didn't mean their target was ... incapable.
Garth pushed past his employee as politely as he could, which wasn’t very, because they were down to the last five minutes here and there was a definite vibe in the air that suggested that their time was, quite literally, up.
The first thing to hit him was the stench. More than just cheap whisky and the rank scent of everything you’ve ever eaten rolled off the bed sheets and the walls; the room was saturated with more than the odor of a man who hadn’t really properly left the room in the last few days and it was more than a guy who’d suddenly decided that he didn’t really care to push that old gross hotel room soap bar across his body anymore.
It was fear. It was loathing. It was the stink of a wretched animal trapped, with no way out save death.
The redolent stench rolled up and shook hands with Garth’s olfactory receptors, good old friends greeting a man who’d caused more than his fair share of both. The Kin’kithal stood there, blinking the stink out of watering eyes and by the third blink, it was gone as if it’d never been.
Rommen –who’d walked in right behind him- gagged, stepped back outside to hawk out a loogie of epic size, then stepped right back in, nose nestled in the crook of his elbow.
“You!” Granger tried pointing with his cuffed hand and succeeded only in digging the metal bracelet into his arm. He looked drunkenly at the easy injury, then raised the other hand to point –rather lush with condemnation, he thought- accusingly at Garth Nickels in the flesh. “You can’t be here!”
“And yet,” Garth danced sideways into the room, “here, I am.”
“Jesus Christ, what the fuck is wrong with his skin?” Rommen took one look at Delbert and rushed to the man’s side, training automatically overriding concerns of puke and bile and whatever else might be on the floor. This was an injured man, injured in ways he’d never seen before, except maybe in nightmares.
“Are y
ou caught?” Garth demanded, eyes roving around the room, predator in search of hidden prey. Didn't feel like there was anyone in the room with them, but with Samiel raging hot and heavy as he had to be up the Line, that didn't mean a goddamn thing. “Are you somehow caught with me?”
“The moment you arri… arrived.” Granger belched nastily on the back of the kind, blue eyed man’s head then offered an apologetic smile made all the more comical because he wasn’t entirely in control of his face. “From … from the moment. I … I was talking to him when he tried killing you in the school.”
Rommen pressed a finger into the fat man’s nearly translucent skin and tried not to gag when the flesh took the indentation and … kept it. If he had a magnifying glass, he’d verify that his print was in there, but he … didn’t want to go that far. “Are you saying that your employer tried using a drone strike on Garth?”
“Hundreds and hundreds of times.” Granger hung his head woefully onto his chubby chest. “And I was there, on the phone. With him. When that happens, you’re ripped and torn to pieces every time. And there were hundreds. It was awful. Three minutes fifteen seconds.”
Rommen grabbed Delbert by the cheeks and hauled his face up so he could look into watery, bleary eyes. “Where is your boss?”
“Somewhere in the future, Blue Eyed Boy. Somewhere up The Line, looking down into the past, shaking his fingers like a puppet master. Whenever he moves a line, things change. He moves things back and forth, up and down. He’s trying to do something. Something with Drake Bishop, only it never works. Bishop is chimerical, you see. A true random particle. Like … like …” Granger raised his hand again. “Like this man. Only this man is worse. When things go awry with Bishop, we start over from the beginning and everything is fine, but Samiel is preoccupied. Two minutes forty-five seconds. Oh. Oh my.”
Garth seized on a particular word. “Where’s the phone, Granger? Where’s the fucking phone?”
