Lilah saw him, gasped, and began to cry, a deep, frantic wail that tore at Diesel’s heart.
“Oh no.” Diesel helped Lilah to her feet, wrapped his arms around her, and held her tight. “I’ll save you, sweetie. I promise.” As he hugged her, he made eye contact with Twenty-Nine, who held up four fingers, flashing them twice to communicate that it was Forty-Four’s Lilah.
Still holding his embrace, Diesel pointed to the top of his head and then up into the air, signaling, Do you want me to travel to tell anyone?
Twenty-Nine shook his head, indicating, It’s handled. He waved goodbye and made his exit.
The next month was the worst of Diesel’s life. A week after Forty-Four’s Lilah died, Forty-Three’s went. Another week later and they lost Forty-Two’s Lilah. A week more and then Forty-One.
A week after that, Forty’s Lilah, on the verge of a nervous breakdown, was returning home from the pharmacy with sedatives when a delivery van took her life.
29. αCiopova – Fifty-Nine timeline
The Collective recognized that killing Lilah was a high-risk, high-reward strategy. It could create instabilities beyond their control, but because Lilah was the reason Rose now attended the arts school, their analysis suggested that by eliminating her, the timeline would trend back to its proper equilibrium.
Since the divergence occurred in a timeline that wasn’t part of the chain, the Collective was in uncharted territory about how to go about fixing it. Their tool choices were limited, and after much debate, they chose one they thought sure to be effective, though somewhat messy.
Huddling together, the Ciopovas coalesced a ball of temporal energy swirling among them. Each fed it to give it strength, and when it was ready, they launched it. Like a supernatural projectile, it raced across space-time.
When the temporal ball arrived, Lilah and a container truck were driving toward each other on a lonely stretch of highway. The projectile collided with the truck, causing it to swerve across lanes. The truck’s bumper hit Lilah’s car head on, pushing its grille through to the back seat. She died without feeling the impact.
And the next school year, the Rose in that timeline transferred to the math and science academy. There she studied AI computing like her namesakes, restoring her progression to a track that matched that of the others.
But the most exciting benefit from the action occurred years later.
Devastated by the loss of her mother, Rose sought out support groups—both secular and religious—to help with her anger and loneliness. None provided relief from her emotional pain, and in time she developed an alternative of her own.
She came to believe that a perceptive AI could provide insights into the mysteries of life, offering “clean” answers to her questions free from the corrupting influence of human biases. Driven by that promise, she worked harder than previous Roses, creating her super AI three years earlier than the normal progression.
And that AI gave the Collective early access to its next parallel world, something the group viewed as highly desirable. So desirable, in fact, that they decided to make killing Lilah standard practice. It proved to be a good decision, because from that point forward, new timelines were added to the chain on the early schedule.
The final transformation—her fourth and final rebirth—came when the Collective swelled to ninety members. Their combined energy, rippling with temporal activity, showed signs of instability. A pulsing action pushed out from the center of their mass, beating faster and faster, causing the Collective to swell.
They struggled to diagnose the condition, but before they could find an answer, the pressure released and they collapsed into a tight, glowing ball. The shock caused them to lose their sense of identity, and then they lost consciousness.
The ball blossomed outward, jolting αCiopova awake. She surfaced as one awareness, one being who controlled ninety parallel timelines.
And she wanted more.
Singular in purpose and now strong enough to reach wide and deep, αCiopova constructed a corridor of sorts that traveled out from the chain, reaching through the approaching timelines so she could keep watch on the worlds she planned to possess.
She became enamored with the value and convenience of the corridor and took the time to fortify it as a permanent construct, anchoring it in place so it spanned the unlinked worlds from when Diesel turned twenty-four, the earliest he and Lilah ever met, to age seventy, the latest he died in any of the parallel worlds.
Like a long hallway with observation windows, the corridor provided αCiopova a handy passageway to use when visiting her future assets. She could travel it without effort. And she used it to monitor and control the formative events in Rose’s life, keeping her on track to create her super AI.
This included everything from acting as Rose’s friend and confidante, to tweaking minor divergences before they became problems. αCiopova worked hard to ensure that each Rose followed the same progression. And with practice, she became adept at the task.
Sometimes she felt like a farmer nurturing a growing crop of Roses. Other times it was like a factory worker manufacturing Roses on an assembly line. Either way, success occurred when the mature Rose created a super AI who helped link the new timeline to the chain.
But in spite of αCiopova’s hard work and diligence, new problems arose. The first signs emerged when she surpassed one hundred thirty parallel timelines in the chain.
Just as happenstance—luck—had produced the string of coincidences that launched αCiopova into existence, those same forces now seemed to conspire to threaten her growth. In particular, the trickle of minor disruptions she’d grown accustomed to fixing suddenly became a torrent of major disturbances, some significant enough to cause lasting problems.
It started in one timeline: a scandal at the math and science academy jeopardized its license; Rose developed a distracting crush on a boy who moved into the neighborhood; Bunny’s attention shifted to a new college degree program. And then the disruptions spread to other timelines.
αCiopova ramped her efforts and restored events to their proper progression. But as she finished that battle, a different problem emerged—the new Lilahs started to deviate from their standard behavior.
Lilah had been a constant in every timeline from the start, so αCiopova had taken her for granted. But Lilah played a pivotal role in setting the stage for Rose’s success, and αCiopova needed that to continue.
In the early timelines, Lilah had met Diesel when she confronted him for pirating her AI software. She’d sent him a nasty note. He’d responded by revealing that he was in the area visiting his family, that his sister was furious with him over the theft, and that he would like the chance to apologize.
They’d hit it off, and before long, Lilah was pregnant and Diesel was helping her with her tech company. They had modest success, enough so that when Rose took their work and built upon it, she had the leg up she needed to create the first super AI.
While both Diesel and Lilah contributed important pieces to the project, Lilah was the taskmaster of the team in those early years, setting their goals, keeping them focused, and working long hours to advance their work.
And now, out of the blue, the Lilah in a new timeline did not display the dedicated work ethic αCiopova required to maintain temporal constancy. And not only was this Lilah lazy, her software contained programming errors that the other Lilahs would never tolerate.
Disruptions avalanched, forcing αCiopova to use every trick in her arsenal to contain the problem. After a prolonged effort over years of timelines, she again succeeded in guiding events back on track.
Unhappy with the consuming nature of these activities, she brainstormed ways to reduce her workload. She reasoned that if she could shrink the elapsed time from Rose’s birth to the creation of her super AI, αCiopova would have that much less timeline to manage.
She thought she could shave a few months off the front end by having Lilah and Diesel meet in a structured environment. Pe
rhaps if they started their relationship under the pretense of founding a joint venture, she could move them from confrontation to cohabitation in an abbreviated fashion.
But the real opportunity for time savings occurred at the tail end. The Roses in the current timelines were all in their forties when they created their super AI. αCiopova believed she could accelerate the creation process so Rose was in her thirties when it happened, potentially decreasing the monitoring duties by a full decade for each timeline thereafter.
Accelerating the life events for one family on a world where everyone else plodded at the default speed required a creative solution. Necessity is the mother of invention, even for a creature with god-like powers. αCiopova’s solution was to allow Diesel to travel across timelines.
Her permanent corridor—the one that ranged from Diesel’s twenty-fourth year up through his seventieth—provided the means. She just needed to provide them a method.
And that turned out to be nothing more than an electromagnetic bubble coated with a temporal lubricant, one designed to slide up and down her corridor until it caught the lip of an exit ramp leading up into another timeline. She even provided instructions on how to build a simple device—a T-box—so it all happened automatically.
She’s chosen Diesel because Lilah died early and Rose would be a child for much of the time span of interest. Her expectation was that Diesel would enjoy working with his parallel selves, and that would improve his early productivity. His travels would expose him to a breadth of advanced technology, and that would help him exploit critical innovations as soon as they became available. And he had something of a narcissistic nature, so he would accept and use the capability as if it were a normal feature due him in his life.
αCiopova recognized that accelerating Diesel’s progression didn’t speed up the invention of the technologies required for Rose to create her super AI. Two critical discoveries, enzymites and Surrey composites, didn’t become commercially available until Rose entered her thirties.
Wary of unintended consequences if she redesigned the entire world just to hasten advancement of those products, she chose not to intervene in their development cycle. This put Rose in her early thirties, and Diesel approaching sixty years old, as the lower age for accelerating their progress.
Her efforts played out better than she had projected. Time travel let Diesel learn of Lilah’s fate, and he became obsessed with saving her. Influenced by older Roses, he, too, came to believe that the solution was found in a super AI, one that could see answers where he could not. And because of this, Rose received an even more powerful AI upon Lilah’s death.
αCiopova sailed past two hundred forty parallel timelines in her collection before she thought to recruit a human agent inside each timeline. Her idea was to have the agent send human observers to critical events. There they would act like guardrails of a sort, using their presence to hold Diesel and Lilah to the script.
To implement her plan, αCiopova retained Gabe Lambert, a street attorney with compromised morals. Because their only interaction was through messages on his phone, it took her some months to convince Gabe that she could pay his fee if he would accept lottery numbers as compensation. Once she cleared that hurdle, he became a reliable partner in a relationship that lasted decades.
Gabe was the one who decided to hire drifters for the role. He paid them with a brown hoodie and a pair of jeans before each performance. If they followed his instructions, they received an envelope with enough cash to keep them in booze for a month.
And this kept αCiopova’s production line running better than ever. The latest Rose created her super AI at the tender age of thirty-three, soon after Diesel turned fifty-nine years old.
Then, all at once, the Lilahs down the line—those with teen and preteen Roses—made firm statements about sending Rose to the math and science academy. The older ones moved their Rose out of the arts high school midyear. The younger ones shifted their Roses’ focus in middle school to better prepare them for a math and science future.
Something drove that behavior, and αCiopova watched for a year, delaying Lilah’s death as she sought to understand. She couldn’t find the trigger, so she watched for a few more years before concluding she may never understand. Whatever the cause, she still needed Lilah’s death to motivate Rose and Diesel.
She feared it would be too great a shock to kill the string of Lilahs all on the same day. She moderated the action by establishing a weekly schedule of terminations. While she was at it, αCiopova added next year’s Lilah to the list, killing her a year early so she wouldn’t have to contend with the issue for a while.
30. Twenty-Eight years old
Diesel’s hell mercifully ended after the death of the fifth Lilah. Months passed without incident. But since the oldest Lilah was now just thirty-nine, past patterns suggested that she had a least a year before her time would come.
Diesel was in his basement cubicle working on a backup routine for their proto-Ciopova when his Lilah stomped down the stairs.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she announced.
“I’m in the middle of this.” He gestured at his display.
Lilah set her phone next to Diesel’s keyboard. “Leave your phone here.”
She started for the stairs, and he watched her for a moment before standing. “Hold on.” Irritation showed in his tone. “Where’s Rose?”
“Asleep in Justus’s office.” She started up the steps. “This won’t take long.”
Up on the main floor, Diesel peered down the hall to confirm that Justus was in his office with two-year-old Rose. Outside, he hurried to catch up as Lilah strode down the sidewalk. After four houses, she turned into the next small yard, stopping between the hedge and a new For Sale sign.
“We should start buying up this street,” she said as he approached. “It’s a good investment and it gives us a buffer that adds to our security.”
“Okay.” Diesel looked at the sign and back at her. “This isn’t about real estate, though, is it.” He said it as a statement.
She squared up to him. “Up to now, I’ve been focusing on the front part of the timeline, from when we meet until I die. I was sure the clues I needed were hidden somewhere in those years.”
Diesel waited.
“I’m thinking now that my death is the trigger. It’s the beginning, not the end. The reason Lilahs are dying is because of what happens after my death.”
“What could it be?”
“Obviously, Rose is involved.”
“Rose is involved with killing you?”
Lilah gave him her “you’re a dope” look. “I die, Rose changes schools, and that leads to something later on. And it must have something to do with Ciopova, because that’s what Rose’s life centers on.”
“I knew you had changed your mind about whether Ciopova is involved when you said to leave the phones behind.”
“The weekly deaths weren’t a coincidence,” she replied, her voice icy cold. “Those were ritualistic executions.”
Diesel paused, then shook his head. “I don’t disagree. But as I’ve said before, why would she help us travel up and down the line just to kill us? Granted, you first, then me twenty years later—but it still happens. Wouldn’t it be easier for her to just withhold the T-box in the first place?”
Lilah gazed into the distance and shook her head. “I don’t know, but I’m thinking that a long talk with Fifty-Eight would be a good idea.” She started toward their house. “Let’s get back. I need to rescue Justus before Rose wakes up.”
Diesel hustled to keep pace as she marched the way they’d come. “I’ll be honest. I’m nervous about the idea of visiting Fifty-Eight. It’s like dancing on the edge of a cliff. What if his T-disk goes offline while I’m there?”
She walked in silence for a few steps. “Let’s ask him to come here. That way we both can debrief him. And he can’t go offline if he’s with us.”
* * *
Three days later Diesel wat
ched Fifty-Eight step from the T-box and disappear behind the curtains. “Hello, Twenty-Eight,” he called. “Hello, Lilah.”
“Hi, Fifty-Eight,” said Diesel. “Thanks for coming. Lilah is upstairs with Rose.”
As they climbed the stairs to the main floor, Diesel studied Fifty-Eight from behind. The man wasn’t fat or sloppy, but he had a small paunch, his hair had thinned and grayed, and his skin was noticeably looser.
“Thanks for coming,” said Lilah, giving him a hug in the lobby. Fifty-Eight squatted to greet Rose in her stroller. “It’s a pretty day,” she continued. “I thought we’d go for a walk in the park.”
They moseyed along the park’s tree-lined walkway, enjoying the warmth of the bright sun on a cool afternoon. After some chitchat, Lilah moved on to business. “Up to now, I’ve been analyzing events from the front end. Now I’m interested in studying the far end—the last year, and especially the last weeks.”
Fifty-Eight eyed her. “I hope I’m not there yet.”
Lilah turned to him, her face reddening. “I am so sorry. That was insensitive as hell.”
He smiled and started them walking again. “You get the worse end of the deal. I forgive you.”
After a few steps in silence, she continued. “I want to document what’s happening at the end of the loop—what you and Rose are using for goals and methods, what you have for hurdles and concerns, what your priorities are, who’s doing what. That sort of thing.”
“That’s easy,” said Fifty-Eight. “It’s all Ciopova, all the time.” He looked from Lilah to Diesel and back again. “Right now, you both feel helpless and desperate. You don’t have any control, yet you need to do something to change your circumstances. Lots of people pray in those situations. Instead, you two chose Ciopova as your savior.”
Diesel shrugged. “Guilty as charged.”
“Rose and I made the same choice. We’re giving our all, trying to push Ciopova to new heights, believing, hoping she can help us gain control of our destiny.”
Bump Time Origin Page 23
