Moving Earth

by Dean C. Moore

DeWitt did the natural thing. An about face.

  And then he charged the sliding doors. He ran head first into them when they refused to part and fell back on his ass. “You aren’t going anywhere, mister. If you think you’re leaving me with these three kids to take care of all on my own…”

  DeWitt was still rubbing his forehead and trying to get his bearings from the floor. As his vision cleared, he did a head count. Sure enough, Thor, still all of eleven years old, had entered from the side room, in camo fatigues, along with the rest of his Zeta Force. “Never been a better time to pounce, guys,” Thor said. Then he disappeared into the kitchen. DeWitt could hear him whistling as he did the dishes.

  Zeta Force, all six of them, jumped DeWitt, securing him like the Lilliputians tying Gulliver down on the beach, hog-tying and gagging him. DeWitt squirmed helplessly.

  Corin sighed. “Fine, you take Thor. I’ll deal with the other two. I miss the old you already. You always put out the biggest fires first so I could attend to the other errands.”

  She smelled the toddler she was juggling in her hands. “And you need changing, don’t you?”

  She glared at her husband making squirming, helpless sounds on the floor. “If this is some kind of relapse back to the old you, proof you’ve just been pretending all along to be the perfect dad to these kids, I hope you can live with yourself, mister. And forget ever getting out of here, I don’t care how old the kids are, until you’ve made yourself into a better person for real this time.” She stormed out of the room to change the toddler’s diaper.

  “This must have happened when Leon touched you. Mother must have confused what timeline I was supposed to be in based on his faulty recollection. Techa, what a disaster! Did she just finish telling me that being the perfect house dad was the only way out of here?” He managed to rub his face against the floor enough to get the gag out. “Kill me now!” he shout-whispered to one of the Zeta Force operatives.

  “No can do, pal. Under strict orders from Thor. Endless torture is all that’s on the docket for you,” the Zeta Force soldier shout-whispered back.

  DeWitt spied the baby monitors throughout the room, as if the rattle wasn’t enough evidence the baby was happy. It was a sure bet all of the monitors were tied into the suite’s AI, in case Corin managed to ignore all of them. He could take solace in that. The room AI could do the bulk of the babysitting.

  “Nice try, pal,” DeWitt heard the suite AI say in his head. “Your wife shut down that option a while back, the last time you tried to over-rely on me for cover. I am no longer cleared to intercede.”

  DeWitt gasped. “It really is hell. And there’s no escape. How do I convince Mother, a supersentient, that she made a mistake? She’ll think it’s my latest ploy to dodge my fatherly duties. This is why people invent gods to worship! For some kind of hope!”

  He screamed at the top of his lungs, again and again.

  “Hey, good job getting into character, Dad,” Thor said returning from the kitchen. “All right, guys, let’s drag him back to the bedroom for the debrief. We’re set up for the waterboarding, right?”

  His Zeta Force commander gave him a salute by way of a yes.

  Waterboarding? Maybe he could at least get a watered-down version of the good old days, DeWitt thought, thanks to Thor. It was better than nothing.

  The baby’s rattle was playing the Nouveau-Viking battle cry that the race sounded charging into battle, from The Star Gate mission. Techa, the play selections on the baby rattle were like a highlights reel showcasing the best, most memorable moments of DeWitt’s life. Maybe the other you came up with the rattle to help get you through this hell. You’re going to have to smarten up like that, pal, if you expect to survive this. Or It’s madness, plain and simple, that you’re looking at. It’s just a matter of time.

  The baby started crying. It was one of those ear-piercing, back-of-eye stabbing, skin-peeling screams he’d been trained to elicit from his captives but could never finesse to this degree. Thank Techa Thor was in the middle of having Zeta Force drag him into the bedroom for waterboarding. Anything to escape dealing with that shit.

  ***

  When DeWitt’s head came out of the bucket, he saw two of the Zeta Force soldiers, each about two feet tall, standing on the rim of the bucket at opposite sides. They were holding on to his hair.

  “Just admit it, Dad,” Thor demanded. “You’re stuck in this tired drama with mother, she determined to make a decent human being out of you who can possibly put someone, anyone before himself. You doing everything you can to avoid responsibility. It is soooooooooo cliché!”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” DeWitt said between gasping for air and spitting water.

  Thor shook his head and rolled his eyes. “Hit him again. We’ll get him to cop to the truth. He can’t hold out forever.”

  “Oh, yes I…” DeWitt’s head was already plunging into the water. The gurgling sounds were on account of his mouth being turned into an aquarium air hose.

  “It’s sad, really,” he heard his son’s distorted voice saying, sounding far, far off. “Here we are, honored to live life hundreds of years or more ahead of everybody else, and he’s stuck in some timeless drama that belongs in every other era but this one. I just hope we can save him from himself.”

  DeWitt came up for air, gasping, spitting. “Do I not leave you alone for endless periods of time so you can get into all kinds of trouble? Do I not give you indirectly access to the coolest dramas taking place in the cosmos?”

  Thor sighed. “Techa, he’s really good at this. We should have realized we were dealing with a professional who’d just figure out how to turn the tables on us. Gentlemen, and one token, politically correct lady, same for black guy, Asian guy, and Hispanic dude, I see we’re going to have to redouble our efforts. Hit him again!”

  DeWitt was kissing water before he could cough up his rebuttal.

  ***

  ORIGINAL TIMELINE

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  DeWitt entered his and Corin’s private chambers through the sliding doors.

  The place had genuine gasp appeal.

  Thor had turned the entire flat upside down with his Zeta Force war games and Techa only knows what imaginary adversaries.

  Corin entered from the bedroom carrying a basket of laundry, and took a look around. She must have been lost in another world the entire time because she had to look back at the bedroom to confirm the room she’d just walked out of was in the same state. Then she turned those evil eyes on him. “You have one child, DeWitt, one child to look after! And you don’t even have to do that but on those rare moments Leon is not renovating the entire damn universe!”

  “I’m sorry, did you say one child? Not three, or five, or seven?”

  She gave him a funny look. “You aren’t suffering from timeline sickness, are you?”

  He shook his head slowly.

  Corin ratcheted her grimace down another notch. “You could also pass for a man who has multiple wives and lives multiple lives aboard this ship, and is just shell shocked enough to forget which one is which.”

  “Perish the thought. One woman is more than any man can handle.” He jumped Thor, and while straddling him proceeded to tickle him to death.

  At the sound of Thor laughing and spasming Corin relaxed out of defensive mode, despite the suspicious look on her face not going anywhere. Clearly she was happy just to see him playing with his son.

  When Thor and DeWitt had had enough of the tickle session, DeWitt said, “Okay, what’s the mission?”

  Thor snapped his fingers at the instant of inspiration. “Sort of like Ghostbusters. Remember that old classic? I’m giving the ghosts a trial run to see if I want you to get me a new Special Forces unit for Christmas, you know, modeled on Chi Corps or Psi Force.”

  “Not sure which of those guys handles which, but okay. Let’s suit up.” DeWitt stood up. “Alfie!”

  Alfie was the Suite’s AI. He materialized for them ghos
tbusting backpacks with nozzles attached, and, of course, the ghosts. DeWitt started blasting them as they came through the walls. Thor did the same right from where he was, supine on the floor.

  Corin shook her head with impatience but had clearly softened some more just to see them playing together. “I suppose we can get the suite’s robots to tidy up when you two are done playing.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” DeWitt said. “I’ll do it. I’ll take care of the laundry, too.”

  Well, he was getting smarter at least. He could recognize a trick question when he heard one. She was looking for evidence that he couldn’t get enough of his little domestic drama, versus constantly trying to run from it.

  “Go play in your lab,” DeWitt said to his wife, still busy shooting ghosts. “See if you can pump Mother for some best-guesses at who or what we’ll be tackling next so you can get to work on our next-generation bodies. Because, I tell you, dying, just to be reborn again in another bioprinted body, really sucks.”

  “Yeah, Mom, like totally. You carry the trauma with you. Trust me on this, PTSD is worse than PMS.”

  Corin chewed off a smile. “Fine, though I’d appreciate someone telling me what they did with my husband,” she mumbled, taking the laundry basket into the next room and setting it on the washing machine. All too happy to leave it there for her husband to attend to.

  DeWitt shouted at her from the next room. “Oh, and I’ll cook us dinner tonight, too. I’ll make your favorite.”

  “Okay, that’s it,” Corin said, wiping the sweat off her forehead. “What vicious, flesh-eating, alien spy is this from Galaxy Whatever, determined to turn us into pod people?”

  She just couldn’t shake the notion that something was off with her husband as she pranced into her study, which doubled as a smaller lab space, for when she didn’t need to morph the entire suite into a lab.

  She started playing with triple-stranded DNA configurations, looking for tweaks to the genome she could make so her son and husband would be that much more likely to return home to her in one piece, wondering if she should contemplate adding another strand of DNA. But experience had taught her that humanoids could only handle so much change at once before they got antsy, and antsy wasn’t good when heading into battle. So she backed off the idea of adding a fourth strand.

  Truth be known, Mother had done more human upgrades with her nextgen nanites during The Star Gate mission in one sitting than Corin could manage in a lifetime. But Mother found she’d overshot the mark on what humanoids could handle all at once. So Corin had taken over the comparatively more painful task of slower, more gradual modifications. Solo and Cassandra were the only ones that engaged Mother’s more advanced nanites from time to time anymore.

  It was still hard to know how much Corin was needed in this capacity, truly, as Mother was the queen of genetic makeovers, not just nanite makeovers, and if she couldn’t be bothered because she was otherwise too preoccupied, there was the nun, who could handle such things, building on a vast reserve of knowledge of the unique DNA configurations of every lifeform on the ship.

  However, Mother’s agendas with her genetic makeovers were never fully known to them. One thing was certain, she was less concerned with any humanoid surviving a short-term battle, for which bioprinted backups were readily available to cover the losses, than she was about how those humanoids fit in long-term with her colonizing the multiverse schemes.

  So, if Corin wanted the focus more on short-term survivability, it was down to her. And she sure as hell didn’t want her husband, far less her eleven-year-old suffering PTSD. Holding their family together was tough enough without that added burden.

  The thing was, she could work like this, tweaking genetics, entirely absently, and that’s exactly what she was doing. It was a way of meditating for her, to help her think about what was up with her husband.

  Then it struck her.

  This really wasn’t her husband. The bastard had snuck in from another timeline, where he undoubtedly had a lot more burdens in that lifetime than he had in this one. Maybe more children, maybe more pissed off wives gunning for him. One way or another, this living situation with Corin was turning out to be a vacation for him. So, of course, he was happy to baby her. The bastard.

  She could bet Leon was to blame. The last time out, after The Star Gate mission, he’d tried to sneak an avatar of DeWitt and her son past her, because DeWitt was dead from battle, and Mother too busy to reanimate him. And her son was lost in Dimension X somewhere, Mother too busy to retrieve him.

  Corin was getting ready to tear Leon a new one again when she realized, “Wait a second. My husband suffered multiple kids and or wives in other timelines just to learn to put someone else’s interests before his own, saving me a lot of work, by the way. Not to mention time. Yeah, you’re pissed off, Corin, that he’s secretly delighted he doesn’t have more kids, but you sure as hell can’t handle any more right now. I suggest you retreat from the moral high ground for a while and take the win.

  As to your actual husband, by the time he gets back, who knows, he too might be a decent human being, or at least learning to fake it a hell of a lot better. Yeah, screw it, justice has been served.”

  The more she thought about the bastard having a much tougher time of things in the other timelines, the wider her grin grew, until she was chuckling madly.

  She returned to her genetic tweaking. “Mother, you want to help me out here?” She hastily added lest that request be misunderstood, “with what my husband and son might be facing next time out of the starting gate?”

  “I am still juggling too many probabilistic timelines right now to narrow them down enough to speak with any authority. One thing the timelines all have in common: the alternate futures all have far more varied ways of causing cellular disruption, as well as for breaking molecular and atomic bonds in all manner of materials.”

  “Wonderful. You want to show me some of these?”

  “Which ones?”

  Corin sighed. “Just whatever I can manage in the time I have until the next military engagement, or your best guess as to the amount of time I have.”

  Corin wasn’t exactly assuaged by the paucity of visuals coming up on her monitors. She doubted Mother was underestimating her intelligence. More like Corin didn’t have nearly as much time as she thought to work her magic. Nothing new there.

  ONE HUNDRED THIRTY-NINE

  ABOARD THE NAUTILUS

  Crumley and the talking Ape, Aristotle, Crumley’s long-time poker buddy aboard the Nautilus, crossed paths in the circular hall winding around the inner courtyard of the ship.

  “Hey, I missed you for poker,” Aristotle said in a tone just one shade shy of a depressing whine.

  “I’ve been kind of busy. But I’ve got some downtime now.”

  The gorilla sighed. “I gotta come clean. I’ve had an alternative agenda all this time.”

  Crumley held his breath, while continuing their stroll together now in tandem, no mean feat.

  “I was kind of hoping we’d become more than just chums, you know?” Aristotle’s pitch had edged up a notch.

  Crumley flushed red. So much for his poker face. “Ah, I’m not really gay, buddy.”

  “You’re going to throw that in my face? The whole anatomical bigotry thing? I thought we were beyond that.”

  “I thought it was better than throwing the whole bestiality thing in your face.”

  “You’re a philosopher king like me. You’re supposed to be beyond the barriers that hold back lesser men.”

  Crumley groaned and pulled at the hairs growing up the back of his neck. “I can’t argue your point on merit, I admit. But we can only do our best to get over ourselves, and no more.”

  “So that’s a maybe.” Aristotle sighed. “Fine, at least that’s progress.” He scampered ahead on all fours, picking up speed over what he could accomplish by running on just his hind legs.

  Finally, he bounded into the tropical jungle of the courtyard, possib
ly to make do with actual gorillas—that could talk, just like him, mind you. But I guess a serious relationship with one of them is just too easy for a philosopher. Crumley sighed. “There goes the best poker buddy I ever had.”

  Leon ran into him next. “You look pretty down in the dumps for a man who just defeated the kinds of forces that would have made Genghis Kahn soil himself.”

  Crumley made a sour face as the two resumed their walk in the same direction, heading south, just like the rest of Crumley’s life. “Aristotle just proposed to me, I think, if I’m reading gorilla language correctly.”

  “You’re kidding? I thought he was straight.”

  “I think you’re missing the more salient point.”

  “You aren’t seriously considering it, are you?” Leon gave a glance his way as if hearing the truth in Crumley’s voice wasn’t going to be enough.

  Crumley shrugged. “It’s not like my record with women is particularly good. My last five wives all tried to kill me. And there are definite upsides to dating a man, who would be far simpler to please. I mean, it’s not like we don’t think alike. As to him being a gorilla, I could stand to have my back properly cracked and massaged on a regular basis. Not like I can find any humanoids with the strength or arm reach to do it. And as you’re so fond of saying, I’m halfway to being a gorilla already.”

  Leon shook his head. “Only a philosopher could rationalize like that. Look, whatever you decide, this stays between us. I can’t have this getting out to the whole unit. This is the kind of screw-with-your-head shit that could cause the whole team to unravel, and we’ve spent ages building the kind of cohesiveness that keeps Omega Force alive in the field.”

  Crumley sighed. “You think I want Ajax getting wind of this. Dodging the one-liners alone would be worth turning Mormon and remarrying all five ex-wives at once.”

  “Please tell me you’re planning to be the top in this relationship, at least. We’re Omega Force. We have a reputation to protect. And leading men are simply not bottoms.”

  Crumley groaned. “It’s that kind of thinking that got me into this mess in the first place. The big ape says we’re supposed to be evolving beyond these kinds of prejudices. It’s not like he doesn’t have a point.”