by Lee Bond
“Fucking hell, I’ve got to…”
“In 3 … 2 … 1 …”
“Bollocks.”
***
Chezzik Elteren stared at the convention center. He tried moving, but couldn’t. He’d been clumsy. Too clumsy. All of his ‘pieces were screaming that he’d done something stupid, that he’d somehow either overplayed his hand or he’d fallen into some sort of trap, but none of that made any sense.
A door fifteen feet away from where he was locked into place, held like a fly in a cybernetic flytrap, exploded outwards, startling the people around him like birds; they flocked away from the scene, dropping their phones and just … running away.
Chez recognized the man limping his way through the smoke and rubble. Garth Nickels. The ‘pieces in his mind suggested he try to run away, but all systems were locked into place, held there by the invisible network. Behind Garth, people followed, all of them with guns.
The assassin from the future could hear the argument as if he were in the crowd. Someone named … Devlin … was petrified over the amount of blood leaking from Garth’s eyes, ears, nose and mouth while General Habercome was still quite adamant that all secrets be revealed before he –being Nickels- dropped dead right there on the spot. Behind the two most voluble members of Garth’s entourage, an older gentleman in a crisp tweed suit with expertly trimmed hair spoke gently and softly into a recorder, commenting on everything he was seeing.
“Wot have you done to me, Nickels?”
“You remember?” Garth plucked at a lip, grimacing at the taste of his own blood. “Guess I can’t be surprised. You share a name with a most amazing individual.”
“Unique, me.” Chez tried picking up a foot and got nowt but whining servomotors for his efforts. “You is in a bad way.”
“Side …”
“Effects, aye, I recall enough, now.” Chez jerked a chin at the General and Devlin. “Got them all on your side, hey?”
“Doesn’t matter, though, right?”
Chez shook his head. “Nah. What’s in the future becomes real in the past, hey?”
Garth smiled and nodded, wincing as the red lines of the quadronix circuitry began to finally flicker, a deeper shade of purple energy inexorably creeping out of the center. Soon. Very soon. “Yup.”
Habercome bulled forward, eyeballing the man in the white suit. “What’s all this about Nickels? Is this the man that used grenades against this facility or not?”
“Doesn’t matter, General.” Garth put a hand on Chez’s shoulder, then felt bad about smearing the man’s EverKleen suit with his blood. He ignored the gasps as the bright red lifestuff dripped downwards without leaving a single streak. “Chezzik. He’s going to notice soon. He’s going to try and leave. He’s going to pull you back to a few seconds, give or take, before you jumped here. He’s … not going to be happy. There’s something I’d like for you to do. For me. For the world. For the history of this place.”
“I ain’t sayin’ I’ll do as you ask, Master Nickels, but if it’ll get me out of this mess, I reckon I might do so. Fuck time travel in the arsehole.”
“Time travel?” Devlin, Habercome, and the gentleman in the tweed suit all demanded, tones so incredulous that it was almost laughable.
“Nice. Now. First thing you need to do is make certain he sees a picture of me. Because that’ll be funny as fuck. And second?” Garth leaned in and started whispering. Whispering the truth of the world. Of what everyone really was. Of what did and did not matter.
Of plans and of secrets.
And, of course, about the con.
Because while Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez was alive and breathing, even in a simulation, you could rest easy knowing that there was always a con.
“Izzat the truth?”
Garth held up three fingers. He nodded. “One last thing. It’s going to be kind of gross.”
“Wot’s that?” Chezzik looked sidewise at Garth.
Garth ‘Nickels’ N’Chalez dabbed one of his fingers in blood and wiggled it at the futuristic assassin. When the cyborg didn’t move or flinch, he started sketching a diagram on the man’s forehead.
“Wot’s this for?” Chez could feel the blood mingling with the skin of his forehead. It wasn’t pleasant and his hands itched to pull the EverKleen handkerchief from a pocket.
“Mm.” Garth winked. “Let’s call it … a … thing. For storing memories in.”
“It’s fookin’ disgustin’, is wot it is.”
Garth nodded furiously, as if to say ‘you got that right’.
“In 3.” He tucked a finger away.
“Blimey. This is gross.” The blood had disappeared, consumed by his predatory flesh, but he could feel the intricate diagram drawn onto his forehead. It felt as if it would be there until the end of time, an ice-cold, burning sensation.
“In 2.” Another finger went down.
Chezzik braced himself. Gods. Could you imagine if Nickels weren’t lying? “I’ll fookin’ gut you if you are lying.”
“Of course you will. In … 1.”
The final finger went down.
The world went sideways.
A Decision on Who Garth Is Leads to a Slow and Painful Death. Oh Yes, And the End of Everything?
Baron Samiel of the 25th century ‘sat’ moodily in his chair, widened, leather clad and tightly bound fingertips idly tracing The Lines he’d cast down, hoping to pull some information from the individual lives represented by unwavering green lights into the present.
Alas, it seemed to be –still, infuriatingly so- a hope against hope; he’d long ago come to accept that his remaining –and most masterfully twisted- terrestrial agent, Rommen deShure, would and always would fail in his attempt to assassinate Garth Nickels. That was why he’d ultimately chosen to send Chezzik Elteren to the same place at the same time, but the radio silence whispering up from the console was too much.
“There should be some kind of change by now.” Samiel whispered to himself, wide lips stretching to the point where they cracked, just the tiniest bit, but enough to have off-colored blood tainting the flesh there. “Something. Somewhere. I’m four hundred years and more in the future. It never takes this long for things to begin!”
Samiel dabbed fretfully at the tiny wounds in his lips, pulling away fingers stained with purple-hued blood.
Long-term exposure to the incongruity. It had done so many things for him that it was often easy to ignore the things that it was doing to him. The widening, the stretching, the pulling, the continual threat of being forcibly pulled back through to where he’d come from, those were all –to his mind- the price of doing business. The one thing, the only thing that bothered him more than it should was the discoloration of his blood.
Samiel hoped the momentary distraction had yielded a change, some small revelation …
But there was nothing. Not even the slightest hint that either Rommen –in some bizarre flight of fancy, the yellow haired soldier could possibly do what he’d been programmed to do- or Chezzik had even come into contact with Nickels.
Samiel tapped Lissande Amour’s Line. It flickered, but remained resilient.
“Some small measure of peace, at least.” Samiel nodded at ever-ready Lissande, the leather ropes holding his head into place creaking mightily with the gesture’s execution. “She’s a good girl. She knows her role inside and out by now. She’s just fine. Out there, dealing with Bishop and that moronic friend of his.”
Only, how successful could she be? The nightclub he’d been forced to build instead of the one he’d wanted to build was –in the parlance of the 21st- a complete and utter clusterfuck, as the Overlord of The Line had known from the very beginning it would be; no one wanted to go to a nightclub on the block, not when it was –essentially- a stone’s throw from the local police, and definitely not when there was this Arcade of Awesomeness built right at a local nexus.
As far as masterstrokes went, Nickels’ first move had been one of brilliant and cunning design.
Sparks and Drake spent most of their waking hours in the establishment, forcing Lissande, who found the lights and noises inside uncomfortable to say the least, to wait impatiently for their return. And when they did return, they were only interested in talking about what they planned on doing when they came back the next night. There were next to no opportunities inside an Arcade to introduce Bishop to the darker side of life, not with teenagers and idiots –all of them sober- running amok all over the place.
Maddening.
Samiel turned his attention to the sheaf of rotting, ill-used and otherwise ancient papers off by his left hand. He had no access to Line data at the moment –and he frankly wondered quite worriedly if he would ever again- but his best and smartest field operative was no dummy.
Realising that there was something wrong with The Line, reasoning that everything was still at least partially functional because she was still alive, still doing her job, Lissande Amour had taken to providing her savior and employer with handwritten dead drops.
There were gaps in the data. Naturally there were. Stretched out over four hundred years, the expectation that every piece of paper written by Lissande and secreted around the world, all labeled with a set of coordinates by which the discoverer of the page could reliably take it to someone else who would be able to put it in the hands of the man who needed it was minimal: paper was indeed resilient enough to last for centuries, but that was under optimal circumstances.
You could hardly expect a ‘loader to keep a piece of paper dry or safe or even reasonably intact when they were struggling across the Saharan White Sea, could you?
Well, Samiel could, but he’d learned to deal with his inappropriate expectations over time.
Always brief, always coded, Lissande’s messages through time were all the same, to a degree.
The only real difference was that Bishop seemed slightly more amenable to Lissande’s attentions this time around, a slight … twist … in his behavior that was a strong indicator that –when Nickels was put into a cage and left to rot until the sun died and the rest of the stars went dark- full and total control would be a success.
“It’s just dealing with Nickels that is beginning to drive me mad!” Samiel’s shouted scream tore through the Ziggurat, causing brilliant purple sparks of incandescent plasma to shiver from one end to the other. “Back there, in the past, using my own tools against me! How dare he!”
Samiel took several deep breaths. Tried calming himself down. Maybe … maybe he didn’t even need to worry about Nickels. Maybe … maybe there were no changes to see because he hadn’t really considered the implications of having the Elteren assassin barricade Nickels up. Had he?
Samiel quested through himself, looking to see if any of the other versions of himself had bothered to take into account what, precisely, would happen when Garth Nickels was removed from the field of play.
None of him had. Not even inchoate, howling mad Ultimate Samiel, though present Samiel did wish from time to time that the most ancient version of himself –one of the many things they were all working to prevent- would get off his ass and apply his vast wisdom more often. They were all of them adrift back here in the past, down The Line. Flailing about like stupid fish on stupid hooks, pulled out of their environment, gasping in mystified awe at sights and sounds that were too grand and complex for their tiny minds to understand.
Samiel punched The Line machine. The lights of a few people flickered and waned, but that was it. No information. No actual release from the growing sense of inability rising through his chest.
“Only sore knuckles.” Samiel thought to nurse his wounded knuckle, but the sight of torn flesh and weeping purple blood had him think better of it. “So. Perhaps there are no changes that I can see because although Chezzik was successful in apprehending Nickels and throwing him down a deep, dark hole, the man’s plans remain on target. He certainly proved himself to be something of a planner, didn’t he? Well, I am a planner as well.”
Localized time was out of bounds. Nickels’ acquisition of the temporal cell phone had created a bubble emanating from the point of said acquisition to some future moment when Garth no longer owned it, an ever-expanding sphere of influence preventing any other time travelers from making any sorts of changes. It was an undeniable, unstoppable black dome of implacable, unalterable history and it was driving Samiel to distraction.
“But that doesn’t mean I am without options.”
He just didn’t like them. Not at all. Finding anything out meant doing more of the same as he’d done to Rommen deShure, which in turn meant that he’d be exposing himself to countless thousands more years of experiential life, an occasion Samiel preferred to leave for things of a more important nature. He’d already tacked on an extra eighty thousand years to an already too-long lifespan, all in a vain effort to bring Nickels to heel.
But he needed to know. Needed to see something. Anything, of the past.
Someone simple. Someone unassociated with Nickels. An ordinary person, living an ordinary life in an ordinary city, with an ordinary, boring job. That was all he’d need. Someone intelligent enough to string a sentence together, someone smart enough to follow orders, someone capable. Samiel wanted to use Lissande for this, desperately so, but he dare not; with the Bishop situation seemingly on point towards the ultimate goal, even the slightest temporal nudge in Lissande’s person experiences might very well bring that particular house of cards down so hard that he’d have to try for a full reboot of the entire thing.
That thought grabbed hold of Samiel and the bloated fat man hovered there for a long, long while, considering the deeper implications of just such a thing.
“Reboot. Reboot. Reboot.” The wounds in his lips healed. As they always did. The ragged tear in his knuckle had yet to vanish, and while he considered restarting the Universe –as it were- Samiel saw with a disappointed tsk that he’d gone and leaked all over the console.
Would a reboot work?
That was the question, wasn’t it? Nickels was buried in like a temporal tick, wedged right into the fleshy skin of History itself, an aggravating nuisance that simply would not go away no matter how hard those around him tried to cleanse the surface.
Staring off into the middle distance, Baron Samiel pondered the implications of another reboot. It’d been an eternity since this particular march towards his goals had begun, and what a march it’d been so far. So many ups, so many downs, losing purchase in the 21st … such a mighty blow. Nickels. It always fell back to Nickels. Sitting there, in the past, smirking at him from his apparently unassailable throne.
“Has anyone of us seen him in our own presents?” The question escaped his lips before he’d even had a chance to properly think on the ramifications.
It rarely happened any longer, but the top of Samiel’s skull felt as if it were going to blow right off, revealing an incongruity-altered brain for the whole world to see.
Such a simple question, but one with answers and insinuations so insanely profound that the massive incongruity –hovering far, far, far above his head, an amethyst-colored moonlet wreathed in lightning so bright your eyes burned for days afterwards, should you be stupid enough to gaze upon it- buckled in it’s unbreakable prison.
“Any of you. Have any of you seen or heard of Nickels outside the 21st century?” Samiel’s question shrieked into the incongruity, and each instance of himself, no matter where, no matter when, no matter what they were doing, heard the question.
Samiel felt all of himselves reach outward into their own particular stretch of time, hunting for signs of Nickels, anywhere, at all.
As he knew Nickels was not in the 25th –for it was indubitable that if his enemy was in the here and now, the two of them would be going at it head to head in your more traditional, easier to manage global conflict than duking it out across The Line- present Samiel chose to do as he’d planned before the stunning revelation of Garth’s curious absence; he was going to burrow like a tick into the past, find som
eone capable of watching Nickels’ activities and recording them in a manner that would survive the Invasion and the rest of the madness long enough for the data to matter.
***
The bright fires of the incongruity were often the only light Samiel needed to see by. Conventional methods of illumination literally paled in comparison to the glorious effulgence of the incongruity. Brilliant purple lightning, softer but still so bright diaphanous wine-colored fog, both, both provided a weary time traveler with all the light he’d ever need.
The gentle flickering of the lightning far above his widened skull was a comfort to him. Samiel wished there was someone –anyone- capable of understanding just what it meant to be surrounded by such power, all the time, day in, day out. He’d tried, in the past, tried introducing random people to the incongruity, to see how it would affect them, and it was always the same: madness, followed by disintegration.
“I’m different, though.” Samiel whispered the words into the relative darkness of the Ziggurat. “Me. I’m different. My flesh is stranger than this place knows. I traveled so far to get here, and I will not let this man bearing a name too similar for comfort to do anything more to ruin my plans!”
Samiel was feeling good about himself. Perhaps for the first time since Nickels had reared his ugly head, he was capable of seeing the purple lining in the storm surrounding him on all sides. He’d finally managed to create a man, almost quite literally from the ground up, from just a few days after his birth until he was wise enough to move out on his own, there in the past.
A man smart enough to see the trends, track the mysteries, grab hold of them, and keep them to himself. A man who’d stay out of the limelight, a man who’s voracious appetite for the truth regardless of consequence would drive him, eventually, to America, whereupon he would begin.
