by Walker, Rysa
I’m tempted to pull out my CHRONOS key right now, but I’m pretty sure that would be a major mistake, since there’s a decent chance that Sutter and his lackeys will assume we’re going for weapons. Plus, it takes a couple of seconds to lock in a stable point, so I guess we’ll have to wait for an opportunity to blink out.
Sutter motions for the guards to follow him. Every eye in the place is on us as we’re hauled out of the restaurant toward the lift. We exit on the third floor and are marched down the corridor that overlooks the Redwing Room. As I glance down to see if the other diners are still watching us, I spot a man emerging from the game room. Tall and thin, with short dark hair and a pale complexion. It could be Saul, but I can’t see his face through the branches of the trees, and the security guard keeps dragging me forward.
“My legs aren’t as long as yours! Could you stop for a second?” To my surprise, the guard listens. I take a step backward and can now see the doorway.
The man who might have been Saul is gone. So is the guard’s patience. “Move it,” he says.
Sutter stops at an office a few yards ahead of us. He presses his thumb against the pad, and the door opens, revealing a small cubicle with a desk and three chairs. We’re pushed into the two chairs in front of the desk, and Sutter takes the third, facing us so that we get the full effect of that freaky, pulsating eye. Right after his butt hits the seat, his head jerks up and he taps the comm-disk behind his ear.
He listens for a moment, then looks over at the guards who are standing near the door. “Go up and check on Campbell. He was due in Redwing a half hour ago. We may have a . . . situation.” The slight disapproving twist of his mouth tells me that there’s another similarity in this timeline. Morgen Campbell has a deep and abiding love of stimulants, which necessitates other drugs to help him sleep. Saul has, on numerous occasions, arrived at Campbell’s quarters for a scheduled game, only to find the man barely conscious.
“You want both of us to go?” the guard on the left asks, giving the two of us a brief glance.
Sutter chuckles once and taps the pen thing he’s holding against the desk. “I think I can handle this.”
When the guards are gone, Sutter clips the pen gadget to his shirt pocket and begins rummaging through Rich’s backpack. I hold my breath, expecting him to pull out Rich’s CHRONOS diary and start inspecting it. He does, briefly, but it doesn’t work for him, and his attention seems to be on something else in the bag. He extracts a bottle with Latin words on the label and holds it up to the light. “Can’t say I recognize the brand. But since there are no outside beverages allowed in the OC, I’ll just be keeping this.” There doesn’t appear to be anything else in the bag that interests him, so he tosses it aside and pushes a button on the desk. A display appears on the wall behind him. It’s a picture of a young guy. He’s very handsome. In fact, he reminds me quite a bit of an actor I stumbled upon while researching a jump to the 1930s. I can’t remember the man’s name, but he played Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights.
“Richard Vier . . . meet Richard Vier. Do you want to explain to me how your fingerprints are a match for his? Because you’re sure as hell not identical twins, and I don’t think Mr. Vier is going to be especially happy when our New York branch informs him about the tab you’re running up on his account. And you . . .” He turns the eye toward me. Well, both eyes, but they move slightly out of sync, and I’m not particularly worried about the ordinary one. “You’re not in the system at all. Either you’re not a citizen or someone paid to scramble your data. Which is it?”
I open my mouth, not entirely sure what I’m going to say, but Sutter holds up one hand. “I’ve got a feeling your story is going to be the more interesting of the two, so why don’t you let him go first, sweetheart?”
“She’s not your sweetheart,” Rich says calmly, both hands clasped in his lap. “And we’re not telling you a damn thing.”
I shoot him a look, trying to figure out why he’s trying to rile Sutter up. True, he’ll almost certainly know that anything we tell him is a lie, but I thought we were playing for time, waiting for a few seconds unobserved so that we could use the key. But then Rich’s forefinger reaches up to a tiny button on the Timex watch Angelo gave each of us before we left for Memphis. An instant later, Sutter’s head thuds against the desk.
“I forgot all about the watches. Wish I’d had the forethought to wear mine.”
Rich grins. “It wasn’t exactly forethought. I just forgot to take it off last night.” He stuffs the diary and bottle back into his backpack, then tugs on the chain inside his shirt to pull out his CHRONOS key. “Shall we?”
“Yes, but . . . hold on.” I take a few steps toward Sutter and unclip the tiny pen gadget he was aiming at us when he told the guards to take us away. I have no idea what it is or how to use it, but it’s almost certainly a weapon.
“Good idea,” Richard says. “We can figure out how to use it later.”
I take one final look at the doorway before pulling up the stable point in Memphis. There are plenty of tall, dark-haired men in any reality. The guy I saw out there couldn’t have been Saul. All of the keys, with the exception of the three Tyson, Rich, and I were wearing, were locked in the operations suite, so there’s no way he could have survived the time shift. There’s still a tiny, niggling doubt, which I’m pretty sure is going to echo in my head, however, and I consider setting a local stable point for this office so I can come back and silence it. But I push the temptation aside. It would be a distraction, and I need to focus. My best hope of getting Saul back—of getting my parents, Angelo, and everyone I know back—is to reverse this damned time shift. And as Tyson said earlier, we can only do that in the past.
FROM THE TEMPORAL DILEMMA USER’S GUIDE, 2ND ED (2293)
APPENDIX B: STYLE POINTS
As most TD players are aware, games often end without a temporal change. In such cases, victory is determined by game points, which are awarded for the achievement of concrete, stated objectives and subobjectives. (See appendix A for details.)
With the release of Temporal Dilemma 1.6, a new component was added to the scoring rubric: style points. Without that twist, TD would be far less challenging and, we would argue, far less exciting!
There are five major categories of style points:
Character Assist: Pull major historical characters into your simulation. Bored with simple assassination plots? Convince someone else to do the dirty work, and rack up the style points!
Chronological: Give your simulation an extra layer of complexity by restricting your moves to a small window of time. Bonus: Make your moves in reverse chronological order.
Geographic: Limit your moves to a specific continent, country, or state. Bonus options: All moves in one city and/or within a 1- or 5-kilometer radius.
Social Movement: Utilize existing political, religious, and social organizations. Bonus: Create your own political party, religion, or social movement to change the timeline.
Government: Unseat a major political leader at the ballot box. Bonus: Achieve your objective through legislation and litigation alone. (Expert mode only.)
Probability: TD runs millions of background calculations, assigning a probability that any given move will affect the timeline. Receive up to fifty bonus points for each move played by a winning player or team that has a probability of less than 10 percent effectiveness if taken alone. Combine tried-and-true methods with something totally off-the-wall, and watch those probability points rack up!
The examples here are just a few of the ways you can achieve style points. See the full catalog for additional options. When playing in Assist mode, the computer will recommend actions that could help you accumulate style points, or you can browse the index on your own (alphabetized, by category, with numerical values). Play with style and watch your win ratio soar!
∞10∞
TYSON
PEABODY HOTEL
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE
AUGUST 21, 1966
&nb
sp; I blink. We’d been keeping our voices low since Madi and Jack sat down at the booth, but apparently, we weren’t keeping them low enough. Two women at the table across the aisle are now staring directly at me. I take a bite of my pecan pancakes and then continue in a slightly louder voice, “And then in act two, it will look like Tony, the James Darren character, is actually the one who shot Lindbergh. My friend seems to think we can sell it, assuming Time Tunnel is green-lighted for a second season. He came really close with his script for The Green Hornet a few months back. Actually got it into the hands of a janitor at the studio who’s convinced the producers to buy scripts in the past. And the janitor only charged Lewis fifty bucks because he really liked the story, but the studio passed on it. It’ll probably cost more this time, but split between the four of us, it shouldn’t be too bad.”
Neither Madi nor Jack has the slightest idea what I’m talking about. There’s a very real possibility that the eavesdroppers don’t, either. In our timeline, the ads for the upcoming series Time Tunnel have been running for several weeks. I saw one plastered to the inside of a bus stop near Mid-South Coliseum. Given the magnitude of the changes, I doubt the TV schedule for 1966 is exactly the same, but hapless writers must still be trying to sell screenplays in this reality because one of the women chuckles, and when I risk a glance back at their table, they’ve both returned to focusing on their breakfast.
For the next few minutes, we do the same. I make random comments about the fictional script between bites. Madi and Jack mostly just move stuff around on their plates and nod at appropriate intervals. By the time I finish my pancakes and move on to the scrambled eggs, our eavesdroppers are gone.
“I don’t know how you can eat,” Madi says.
Jack agrees. “It still feels like someone punched me in the stomach.”
“I’ve had a bit of time to adjust to the news.”
“No,” Madi says. “I meant physically. You didn’t feel the shift?”
“Felt it back in the courtyard at HQ—well, what used to be HQ, but not just now. You only get the jolt once, and we were further removed from the triggering event, so it was a fairly mild one. I don’t think it would matter either way, though. There’s only so long the body can go without fuel. All I’ve had is a candy bar since breakfast and that was . . .” I stop to tally up the hours since Rich and I had breakfast. “About thirteen hours ago. Like I said, I’ve had to be creative. If we get stranded, we’re supposed to head to the nearest CHRONOS safety-deposit box. There’s one in most major cities, usually at the oldest major bank. Not that anyone has ever been stranded before this, but that’s the stated protocol we learn in training. You’re supposed to pick a new identity packet from the collection, along with some starter cash, and then you assimilate as best you can. But when I got there, I discovered there are subtle differences in the currency and—”
“Wait.” Jack looks confused. “If the agency was erased, if it never existed, then those safety-deposit boxes shouldn’t exist. Right?”
Madi shakes her head. “They should still be there. The diaries—”
She falls silent as the waitress approaches the table to see if we need anything else. We tell her no, and she heads off to get our check. I could actually do with another stack of pancakes, but cash flow is going to be an issue for us at any point after 1941.
“Are you planning to finish that?” I ask Madi, nodding toward her mostly untouched waffle.
“No. Help yourself.” Then she looks back at Jack. “As I was saying, though, the diaries have a CHRONOS field, and they leave a diary in the box.”
I’m about to ask how she knows that, when she turns to me and adds, “But what if the bank was never built? I mean, that has to have happened in at least a few cases, right? What happens to the box?”
“Good question. Probably the box continued to be in that same location when the shift occurred. Which means a number of people back in the early 1800s or whenever found a curious box they couldn’t open. But that’s just a guess. Anyway, I had to go back to a point before the rift caused all of these changes and get cash there, then find a place after the rift that was willing to trade in old bills, at a massive markup, of course. I was hoping to get up enough so that you could rent a place outside of town, somewhere you won’t encounter so many people, but . . . maybe we can find a smaller hotel. We need to get you out of here, though. Hope you didn’t have anything of value in the other room, because unless it was under a CHRONOS field, it’s gone. And . . . both of you, don’t take those medallions off. Sleep with them. Shower with them.”
Color drains from their faces as they get my point.
“Are you sure?” Madi says. “I mean, did you check our birth records?”
“In your case, I think it’s obvious. I haven’t checked Jack’s status yet. But we have to go on that assumption, at least until we can get somewhere advanced enough to check that sort of data. I was thinking maybe your place could be the new CHRONOS HQ. We’re going to need a base of operations.”
“If it’s just you,” Madi says, “then sure. But Katherine is the original owner of the house I live in. She’ll be in her seventies when she purchases it, and there have been some renovations since then, but having her see the place seems like a very bad idea. And she can’t know who I am. That could really screw up the timeline.”
“Madi, I think you’re going to find that the timeline is already pretty screwed up, both now and in 2136.”
“But not permanently,” Jack says. “The goal is to fix this. And you could unravel the whole chain of events that leads to CHRONOS being founded if Katherine changes course and Madi’s ancestors aren’t born. She wouldn’t even exist outside of a key.”
“True. But that’s the case for all of us right now. And our options are limited, both in terms of time and money.”
Jack looks like he’s about to protest further, but Madi holds up her hands. “Fine. You’re right. I’ll try to keep things vague with Katherine, but . . . CHRONOS being erased probably changes everything anyway. As a heads-up, though, I don’t think you’re going to be impressed with our tech. The Anomalies Machine seems ancient even to me.”
I pull the SimMaster from my jacket pocket. “We’ll have to make do. The bigger issue is going to be patching this into your existing network and coming up with three initial predictions in a matter of hours. They apparently racked up the style points. She said they maxed out chronological and geographic, with bonuses.”
Jack shakes his head. “What does that even mean?”
“I’m not entirely sure,” I admit. “I don’t have the full list of style categories, but I do know that to max out geographic, you have to confine your moves to a single city. And based on some of the changes we saw in those videos in 2304, I think we can safely guess that the city is New York. When we get to your place, I’ll see if I can nail it down further. But first, we need to find a place for Jack.”
“I’ll be fine,” he says. “As Madi pointed out a few minutes ago, she can just come to this moment and tell me how things went. Not like I can be of much use.” There’s a hint of bitterness in his voice, and Madi gives him a hurt look.
“That’s not what I meant, Jack.”
He sighs. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong. I’m just—”
“You’re frustrated,” I say. “You want to help. That’s good. We’re going to need all the help we can get. Even if you can’t jump, you can assist with research and monitor the stable points. And . . . you can’t stay here. Once the game officially starts, you’ll have a target on your back. According to Campbell’s daughter, Saul didn’t take too kindly to you . . . ,” I stop, lowering my voice even further. “To you removing one of his observers from the last match.”
“But . . . I did the same thing,” Madi says.
I shrug. “Morgen is apparently less put out about losing pawns. Because that’s how they look at these observers. Alisa is hard to pin down on anything, but I got the sense that professional players u
se them as a revenue stream, since they pay for the privilege of tagging along, and/or use them in dangerous situations where they don’t want to put their own necks on the line. I’m guessing they each had at least five in the field, probably more, because Alisa kept emphasizing that they were limiting the upcoming game to just five, like that was some sort of huge restriction. And it’s a totally moot point, since we don’t have five other people who can use the key. To be honest, though, Jack, even without this complication, I’d have suggested getting you out of here. You’re likely to attract attention if you’re here for more than a day or so. Your accent, mostly.” I nod toward the table where the nosy women had been sitting. “That’s probably what attracted their attention as much as what we were talking about.”
Madi looks at Jack and then back at me. “His accent? You’re kidding. He barely has one. You’d think mine would be more of a problem.”
“He sounds Californian, and the West Coast states seceded to join Canada when the US signed the nonaggression pact with Germany in 1944. The California border is one of the spots where there are still fairly frequent skirmishes. Your accent may be more pronounced, but they won’t be able to place it. It’s more New York or maybe British, and the Brits are allies.”
“I’ve never even lived in New . . . York . . .” Madi’s eyes widen and she reaches into her bag to pull out a familiar-looking diary. “Do you have enough cash for a train or bus ticket to upstate New York? Jack won’t even have to hide what he’s doing,” she says as she begins scanning through the diary’s pages. “In fact, they might be able to help.”
