by Barry Lyga
He broke off. All around him, doors opened in the sides of spires, and people spilled out. Where before there had been only Citizen Hefa and he (and, of course, what Cisco would no doubt have already dubbed The Magical Flying Menaces), there were now dozens—no, wait, hundreds—of people clustered on the weird, flat, spire-pocked plain that made up what had once been Central City.
This he could deal with. He didn’t know what “coordinates thirteen-alpha-twenty” meant, but moving people from a danger zone to a safe zone was Flash Action 101. It was basic, first-day stuff, and, sure, there were a lot of people, but he’d done this many, many times. He knew what to do.
At top speed, he bolted for the rapidly growing crowd of sixty-fourth-century Citizens, reaching out to grab the first one and haul her off to safety. Just as his fingers brushed against her arm, though, he felt a tingling sensation go up to his elbow. Before his eyes, the woman he’d been so intent on saving vanished, blinking out of his existence at a speed that caught even the Flash off guard.
Well, OK.
He’d already picked his second rescue target. With speed like his, it always paid to plan ahead in order to maximize efficiency, so in big-crowd rescue scenarios, he pre-plotted the initial ten or so rescues so that he wouldn’t waste precious micro-seconds figuring out whom to snatch up next in those first crucial moments. He juked slightly to his left and put his hand on a man’s shoulder . . .
Only to get the tingling again. The man disappeared.
Barry spun around. All around him, in every direction, Citizens were melting into the air, slipping away before he could get to them.
Teleporting. Of course. Rescuing themselves faster than he could rescue them.
It was gratifying to see it but also a little frustrating. What was he supposed to do?
Just then, he heard a bellow from above, and a frozen ball of something hurtled from the sky, peeling off flecks of ice and steam so frigid, it could burn. One of the wizards had conjured what looked to be the core of a comet.
They’re creative; I’ll give them that much.
Barry scoped out the situation quickly. Most of the crowd was gone. The comet head would hit with great impact but no harm to anyone. In the meantime, he knew without a doubt what he needed to do. He needed to get up into the sky and stop this battle before it spilled into farther territory and risked more lives.
Twenty-first century or sixty-fourth, the job was the same.
He ran up the nearest spire. With powers like his, science was crucial, and math was a necessity, especially trigonometry. You had to figure out the angles, the best ways to use your considerable momentum to get to places flat-out speed couldn’t manage. As fast as Barry could move, he couldn’t fly, so he relied on being able to calculate angles in his head, a trick that had moderately impressed his teachers in middle school but was now a literal lifesaver.
It was basically like turning your body into a billiard ball that could break the sound barrier, and the world was a weirdly shaped pool table.
Halfway up the spire, he pushed off, twisting in the air like a high-diver, then somersaulting at the last moment. His feet came down on the comet. He felt the burn of the cold for just an instant as he pushed off with all his strength, flinging himself through the empty air. He had just enough juice left for another flip, landing with his feet on the vertical surface of another spire. Before gravity could blink and say, “Hey, wait a second!” Barry raced farther up the side of the spire, ran partway around its circumference, and jumped again, aiming at a new spire.
In this manner, he ping-ponged himself back and forth from spire to spire along his pre-calculated route, dashing up sides just long enough to build up the right amount of momentum to let him launch himself at the next spire. Until, finally, his target wasn’t a spire anymore.
Nope, not a spire at all.
With plenty of force at his back, he shoved off from the tip of the last spire. With his arms held straight at his sides, he was like a red-clad humanoid missile flying through the air on a perfect arc that carried him right to his target.
At the last possible second, he tucked into a ball, lowered his head, and twisted his shoulder forward. Right on schedule, he slammed into Abra Kadabra.
Bodychecking Kadabra wasn’t nearly as satisfying as doing the same to Hocus Pocus would have been, but he would take what he could get. This was where the angles and momentum and possibilities took him. Boom. Right into Kadabra’s back.
The magician gasped and flailed and staggered in the sky. Then he began to plummet, dropping like a stone.
Of course, Barry did the same. Fast was fast, but eventually gravity caught up. Gravity always caught up.
But sometimes you could keep fooling it, for just a little while, at least. If he’d calculated correctly . . .
He dropped for a split second, then brought his feet down on Kadabra’s back as the magician fell. With a mighty heave, he launched himself back up into the air and just barely managed to snag one of Hocus Pocus’s feet.
“Get off of me!” Pocus howled, thrashing his feet in rage.
“Nah,” Barry said and he held on tighter, now using both hands.
Whatever nano-wizardry Pocus was using to stay afloat, it was clearly designed to hold up his weight and not much else. With gratifying speed, the two of them started drifting down to the ground. Barry risked a quick peek down. He was up higher than he’d realized, and vertigo made his head swim for a moment, but then he shook it off and was pleased to see a tiny dot on the ground below. Abra Kadabra was already down for the count.
“This time I won’t just defeat you,” Hocus Pocus raged. “This time I’ll destroy you!” He waved his wand, and a blast of energy exploded forth.
Barry managed to swing off to one side, still gripping Pocus’s calf. The energy beam sizzled by him, singeing the left arm of his suit but otherwise doing no harm.
“Brush up on your ancient history, Pocus! You didn’t defeat anyone. We beat you.”
“You cheated! You had help!” Pocus wound up his wand-arm again, a devilish gleam in his eye. Even as they picked up speed in their free fall, all he could think about was hurting Barry.
“Your one-track mind is gonna get you killed one of these days,” Barry warned him. He pulled with all his strength and managed to “climb” up Pocus’s body a bit, just far enough to get a hand around the magician’s wrist and tilt the wand so that the beam of whatever he’d been ready to fire at Barry instead shot off harmlessly into the air.
“Maybe try killing me less and not hitting the ground more,” Barry suggested. The ground was rising up at them at a concerning, brisk pace.
As if he’d just realized they were falling, Pocus cursed, gestured again, and blinked away as though plucked out of the sky by an invisible giant, leaving Barry falling on his own.
Terrific.
Abra Kadabra still lay there on the ground below him.
Barry started churning his legs as fast as he could, whipping up a cushion of air beneath him. It slowed him down just enough that when he hit the ground, it only felt like falling from a second-story window, not from over a hundred stories straight up. Still, it knocked the breath out of him for a moment.
When he managed to collect himself enough to stand, he saw only Citizen Hefa. “Where did Kadabra go?”
“Teleported away as soon as he regained consciousness,” she said, coming over to him.
“Do you have backup coming?”
It took her a moment to figure out what he meant. Clearly the idea of backup wasn’t a typical conversation topic. “There are other Quantum Police officers coming from other sectors, yes. But personal teleportation is a short-range technology. They are hep to the danger, but it will take them several jumps to get here.”
Barry sighed in resignation. He stretched, feeling his ribs ache. “All right, then. What do we do in the meantime? If teleportation is a short-range tech, where did the magicians go? They have to be nearby, right?”
&n
bsp; “Within thirty kilometers or so, yes,” Citizen Hefa explained. “No doubt they’ve returned to their spire to lick their wounds. But their battle will once again spill out into the world, endangering innocent Citizens.” She stood quietly for a moment. “There is no need for you to remain, Flash. You’ve done more than you should have. Return to your time period. Live your life. Let me and my fellow officers handle this.”
“Not a chance.” He didn’t even have to take the time to think about it. “Doing my job can be tough, but at its core, the job itself is conceptually really, really simple. Are there people in danger? If yes, then I get to work. I don’t make a distinction between people in different cities or different countries or even different universes. I can’t see any reason I should do so just because I’m in the future.”
Citizen Hefa considered him for a moment, then nodded once. “Thank you, Flash. You are as woke and fab and gear as the legends portray.”
“Glad to live up to the history books,” Barry told her. “Show me the magicians’ spire.”
31
On the way to the magicians’ spire, Barry couldn’t help but think about what Abra Kadabra had said. About Savitar. About the other timeline.
Was Cisco right? By traveling into the future, had Barry somehow sidestepped his own reality and crossed over into another timeline? Was the sixty-fourth century the logical conclusion of that other timeline and not his own?
Or, more maddeningly, at some point, did Abra Kadabra travel from Barry’s own future to the wrong past and end up in the Flashpoint reality? Maybe Kadabra had gone to an alternate history instead of Barry running into an alternate future.
Or maybe they both . . .
Ugh.
It went beyond migraine territory and straight to set-your-brain-on-fire. There were infinite possibilities and no way to determine which was real. He shoved those thoughts away, determined to return to them when he had less on his plate.
The magicians’ spire hovered into view before him. It was nothing like what Barry expected. He’d thought it would be a smallish, low-key affair, most likely executed in black or maybe just muted gray tones. Something designed not to attract attention, a building made to conceal its nature and the nature of those within. Your basic criminal hideout, in other words.
But . . . not so much.
The magicians’ spire was the tallest within sight, rising to a needle point that seemed to poke right through the sky. It gleamed with a kaleidoscope of colors and patterns—bright blues, resplendent yellows, fervent reds, glowing greens. Drifting around it in a perpetual loop, a series of holograms spelled out something that Citizen Hefa translated as, “WORLDS OF ENCHANTMENT AND BEWONDERMENT WITHIN!”
Unlike every other spire he’d seen, this one had a very large, very obvious, very bright orange door.
Of course. These guys wanted attention. They wanted an audience and applause.
But they weren’t idiots. The door was securely locked.
“So, can we force the door somehow?” Barry asked. Surely the Quantum Police had some sort of security override that would allow them entrance to the spire.
“Force the door?” Citizen Hefa’s perplexed expression told him everything he needed to know. Those words just didn’t combine into anything sensible. Even the very idea of barging in there was foreign to her.
“You have no way of breaking in?” he asked. “Really?” He thought of the cops in his own time, with their battering rams and carefully placed explosive charges that could knock doors off their hinges. Ugly displays of primitive brute force, yes. But they worked.
“Breaking in?” she said in the same tone she’d used to say Force the door? Thanks to her download of English, they could understand each other’s words, but apparently some concepts just didn’t jibe here in the sixty-fourth century.
“In my time, the police can—if they have to—use, uh, whatever means necessary in order to get into a criminal’s home or hideout,” Barry told her. “You Quantum Police have no such capabilities?”
Citizen Hefa looked slightly ill at the very notion. “The privacy of Citizens is paramount in our time, Flash. I understand that in your era, individual liberties were restricted, but in our time, this isn’t the case.”
It didn’t make any sense to argue with her further. In an era in which any Citizen could “raise a spire” and use nanotechnology to accouter it in any fashion, yeah, crime was probably at an all-time low, with police powers being lowered accordingly. No point fighting over it.
But, there was something . . . Something she’d said that jogged his memory . . .
Ah, yes! “When I first came here, you told me that Hocus Pocus was formerly known as Citizen Hocu. So am I right that his various . . . misbehaviors have caused his citizenship to be revoked?”
“Yes.” Citizen Hefa bobbed her head. “Many of the techno-magicians have had their citizenships terminated.”
“What, exactly, does that mean?”
“Their spires are decommissioned, locked into their current shapes and configurations. But they still have the right to remain within.”
Barry groaned and kicked at the synthetic ground. “Come on!” he complained. “You mean there’s nothing we can do to stop these guys?”
Citizen Hefa pulled herself up to her full height and locked eyes with him. “Flash, I understand that in your era, there were . . . expediencies. But our time prioritizes liberty and freedom from the state.”
Barry ran a hand through his hair. It was a different time. A way different time. So much advanced technology . . . so few people on the planet . . . Of course attitudes about law and order would be different. And of course the legal needs of the people would change.
“I’m sorry I lost my temper,” he said. “It’s just frustrating. I don’t want these guys to be able to cause any further hassles for you and for your people.”
She nodded in agreement. “Our age is idealistic. Maybe even naive, considering. We are not equipped to handle—” She broke off as a figure blinked into existence a few yards from the door to the magicians’ spire. It was a man, short and squat, wearing a tuxedo that would have been considered outdated even in Barry’s time, as well as a threadbare top hat. As Barry and Citizen Hefa watched, the portly fellow waddled to the door.
“Who’s that?”
“Aliskaiszisamis,” Citizen Hefa said. “Citizen Ali. He still possesses his citizenship. We can’t arrest him.”
Barry’s palms itched. He wanted to arrest someone.
As he watched, Aliskaiszisamis stood before the door. The techno-magician paused, then turned to wave cheerily at Barry and Citizen Hefa. Barry resisted the urge to Superspeed to the man’s side and shake him until some useful intel fell out.
Citizen Ali rummaged in the pockets of his tuxedo for a moment, then produced something small and flat. He held it out at arm’s length, and the door to the spire opened.
“Wait, what did he just do?” Barry asked. Citizen Hefa had opened doors with what appeared to be mere gestures. Citizen Ali had had something like a remote control.
“Token access,” Citizen Hefa said. “The Citizen who raises a spire controls entrance to it, but there are automatic systems that can be engaged to recognize passphrases, faces, and so on. The techno-magicians use such a system for their spire.”
Barry licked his lips. “Then if we can find out what they use to get in . . .” He trailed off to let Citizen Hefa get the idea.
It took her a few seconds longer than he figured it would. Being devious did not come easily to the denizens of the sixty-fourth century. But she got there eventually, a crooked smile breaking out on her lips.
“If we can mimic their token, we can have access to the spire. And . . .”
“And arrest Pocus and Kadabra.”
Citizen Hefa nodded crisply, all business. She gestured with her hands, and to Barry’s astonishment, a hologram appeared there—a three-dimensional, full-color, perfectly proportioned 1:6 scale replica of th
e moment they’d just witnessed: Citizen Ali at the door to the magicians’ spire.
Before he could ask how this was possible, Citizen Hefa anticipated his question. “Tachyonic replication technology,” she said. “Crime scenes are logged for replay automatically by nanotech in my helmet.”
Awesome. Barry’s job as a CSI—not to mention Joe’s as a detective—would be infinitely easier with this kind of tech at their disposal.
Which made him remember: His job as a CSI was in jeopardy. He needed to wrap things up here in the future and get back to his present.
Citizen Hefa’s fingers fluttered, and the hologram scrolled forward. Citizen Ali rummaged, pulled something out of his pocket, held it up . . . The door opened.
“Can we zoom in on his hand?” Barry asked. “Get a better angle?”
Three of Citizen Hefa’s fingers jiggled in a brief, complex pattern. The hologram sizzled and spat sparks, rotating so that Barry would have a clear view of the palm of Citizen Ali’s hand when he raised it with his token. The hologram settled back into place and began to run again. Citizen Ali rummaged . . . held it up . . .
Barry stared. No. Impossible.
“Do it again,” he heard himself whisper.
She ran the hologram again. Barry watched more closely this time. No. No way.
“I don’t recognize it,” Citizen Hefa said, squinting into the space between her own hands. “It seems to be completely flat, almost two-dimensional, with an image of some sort on it . . . Does it look familiar to you?”
It did. It looked very familiar to Barry. So familiar, in fact, that his stomach heaved and lurched with the impossibility of it. His brain rejected it. This simply could not be happening.
“Yeah,” he whispered. “I know what it is. I have one.”
Citizen Hefa did a double take. “Truly? You would not front, would you, homie?”
Swallowing hard, Barry felt for the concealed pocket in the tunic of his costume. It took only a moment to locate and withdraw the item he’d tucked within.
