by K. D. Mack
“I haven’t actually been here since some family visited from out of town,” Elliot explained as they sat. Amy caught herself before she laughed about how their worlds lined up in that way. “It was pretty good though. The steak was great, and they have really good desserts.”
“Were there always two kinds of cow?” Amy asked as they perused their menus.
“There are lots of kinds of cows,” Elliot replied, bemused.
“Right, but different enough that they get a whole different entry? And apparently have three times the nutrients?” she pointed out the other steak on the menu. They paused, furrowing their brows, before coming to a conclusion.
“The Biologics specimen,” they said in unison.
Amy scribbled it on a napkin. “I mean, at least that one doesn’t seem evil. A super-cow that makes you healthier being introduced to the past? I know Blaine says it seems innocuous while being evil but I’m having a hard time believing that. ”
“Hmmm. Doesn’t seem evil now, but this is the same guy who robbed a bank for all our plans. Who knows what he could do with a super-cow in the right situation?”
“If this ends with us fighting a mutant cow, I swear I’m going to retire,” Amy declared. Elliot laughed. They both ordered the super-cow, just to try it.
“This is good, honestly,” Amy said. “I’m glad we got to try it before we reset the timeline and make everything right.”
“Cheers to fixing time,” Elliot replied, raising his glass for a toast.
They stayed at the restaurant so long the waiter started hovering, asking them again and again if they needed anything else. Amy couldn’t remember the last time talking to someone was this easy. He was funny, too, funnier than she expected for a science guy. When they finally gave in and freed up the table, he walked her home.
“What would you change, if you were in charge of time?” he asked as they walked.
Amy looked up at the evening sky. “First, I’d visit Ancient Egypt. I always thought it sounded so cool, and I’d want to see it. Maybe visit a bunch of places in time, honestly. I always wondered how they looked during people’s everyday lives, you know? All the people living in interesting times we read about, but most of them were just doing laundry or going to work or talking about what their crazy neighbor had been up to lately. Then… I don’t know. Maybe bring back some medicine, something that could help people sooner? Or just leave really confusing future-predicting graffiti in weird places for a laugh.”
Elliot squeezed her hand. “Let’s go to the past after all this is over. Just as tourists. We don’t want to ruin the time-stream continuum like our dear friend Mathews. But I’d love to see the sights.”
“Would Blaine let us do that?” Amy asked. “I figure all you time-travel scientists would be day tripping already if he did.”
“If we save the world? Letting us drop by the Sphinx being built is the least he could do,” Elliot assured her.
They did a little song and dance at her front door – out of habit or politeness or coyness, she wasn’t sure – something about how it was getting late, but maybe a coffee would be nice, and he hemmed and hawed for a minute, until she helpfully mentioned they could use the evening to review the notes they’d collected. He agreed that was a wonderful idea.
The two headed upstairs and Amy ushered him into her tiny apartment. “Sorry, it’s small as hell here.”
He looked around. “Paying for the location? It’s nice, though.”
“I could afford somewhere better, but I end up spending so much time at work, it didn’t seem like worth it to go crazy on a big place. Anyway, it is a good location.”
“I feel you. I’m never home either. You’re really are into history, huh?” he asked, perusing her bookshelf. “And what’s this, natural biology?”
“Rebecca lent me that one,” Amy replied as she flopped onto the couch. “It’s pretty good. I think she’s trying to convert me to the sciences.”
“Nothing wrong with that.” Elliot smiled, joining her on the couch. “I wouldn’t mind working alongside you in the lab.”
“I don’t mind working alongside you in the field,” Amy said, catching his eye. He didn’t look away. Amy felt herself falling into those deep green eyes. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt like this. The last time anything felt like this.
“Y’know,” he said, quietly, “I know the world could end, and I know I’m bad for thinking it, but I can’t help but be glad this is all happening.”
“Yeah?” Amy asked, and they were drawing closer to each other. His hand covered hers, and before he could respond she was kissing him, they were kissing each other, hungrily. Before long they were tumbling into her bed. All thoughts of investigation, of crisis, of schemes and plots fell from Amy’s mind. They pulled off tangled clothes and shoved pillows aside and he kissed her so deeply she felt her body arch.
Then he was against her, she pulled him close, as close as she could, and for both of them, time stopped.
5
Amy rolled over, pleased to see Elliot still passed out in the bed beside her. Act casual, like nothing happened, she thought as she dressed and headed across the miniscule apartment to the area that passed for a kitchen. Act casual, and it’s more likely to happen again. She grinned to herself.
She was almost done throwing together a breakfast of sorts when he groaned and rolled over. His dark, curly hair fell across his face and he peered out through his bedhead at her.
“Hey, you.” He smiled cockily.
“Hey, you.” She smiled back. “I’ve got cereal and toast.”
“Excellent.” He leapt up with the grace of someone used to moving quickly. “And then we’ve got to get to work. We’re down to three days now.”
Amy’s morning calm faded a bit as she steered back towards reality. They wolfed down their food, re-reading the notes they’d gathered. Amy couldn’t help but feel a rising frustration. Some moments, she felt like they had made so much progress, that they knew so much more now about everything that had been happening, but when she sat down and put it all together, it felt so paltry.
Elliot reached over and grabbed her hand. It was like he could read her thoughts.
“We know enough to track Mathews down and stop him before he goes back,” he said. “That’s all we need for now. That starts the chain and stops the rest of it.”
“You’re right,” Amy said, stretching and standing up to pace. “So three days from now we go to the site and we take out Mathews before he uses the machine. And then just… loose ends? Tying things up?”
“I hope so.” Elliot frowned at the projections in front of him. “Look,” he said, pulling out a pen and drawing a rough diagram. “So we’ve got to think about the time travel he’s managed to do like a kink in a hose. He travels back, and when he does it’s like he’s literally folding the timeline back on itself. The sides of the… um, ‘time tube’, I guess, are close enough that he can interact with the past. Then, when he’s done his deed, he re-folds the timeline back again, so we’re basically stuck with this zigzag in the timeline, where he overlaps three times. We’re cutting that bit out. We stop him here, before he goes back, and then…” Elliot trailed off, staring hard at the page.
“And then what? Does the tube rejoin itself?”
“Then, I don’t know what happens. None of us do. We’ve known this sort of time travel was possible, this folding, for some time – but it basically creates a deterministic future and past. He has to go back the first time for him to show up in the past, and him showing up in the past is what brought you and I to this point. People always think about a time machine like it clones a person, makes a copy of them or something, but there aren’t two or three versions of him. There’s just the one who goes back. Which means that it all only happens once for him, but it always has to happen.”
“But then we stop it from happening, the thing that’s always happened –” She could feel the impossibility of it, the millions of ways they
would be breaking time.
Elliot’s thoughtful grimace shifted to a grin. “And then we learn something totally new about time travel.”
Amy smiled back. “Alright. We have the date. We have the location. We know what sort of stuff he starts changing after that. What’s stopping us? Let’s go.”
They hurriedly dressed – Amy couldn’t help but blush a bit when she caught Elliot stealing a glance – and packed what they hoped was all they would need: sidearms, some rope, basic safety gear, flashlights, a small tech kit Elliot had assembled which could resolve any minor issues with the device, and a few days’ worth of food, in case things really went wrong.
The two walked to the Corp. It was close enough to Amy’s home, and they didn’t want to risk mistiming the situation, rolling up in a Blaine Corp. car right as Mathews was about to try and get into the building. A cab would be too risky. Too many listening ears. Elliot received a call from the lab as they walked. They had managed to detect changes in the time-stream – a new change was happening almost every twenty minutes now. Some small, some large. They had field agents out everywhere interviewing people, recording every version of the timeline they could. Amy and Elliot picked up their pace.
As they walked along, Elliot’s hand wandered over and grabbed hers. Amy smiled and gave it a quick squeeze.
“So we’re going to travel to the point right before Mathews travels for the first time and neutralize him, easy-peasy,” Elliot reiterated. “And then – I think this will be safest for the timeline – wait for the rest of time to catch up with us. Kind of like Tony had to hang around, but we’ll be waiting for ourselves to catch up with us. We’ll keep records of everything in the device so that Blaine Corp. doesn’t think we’re crazy when we show up in three days with a bound and trussed Mathews.”
“Will there still be evidence of his first trip in the timestream?” Amy asked, “Even if we undo it? I mean, its ripples will have caused our travel.”
Elliot looked stressed. “I’m honestly not sure. We’re playing with paradoxes, and I guess we’ll find out how paradoxical they could really be.”
They made it to Blaine Corp. without any incidents. In an antechamber before they got to the room with the device, they were sprayed down with disinfectant – standard procedure, an aide explained. Anyone travelling through time had to be fully decontaminated to avoid introducing pathogens or bacteria to a time they didn’t belong, even if they were only jumping a few days here or there. Blaine Zellow himself waved at him through the window to the chamber. “Be safe!” he shouted. “We’ll try to remember you’ve saved the world!”
Rebecca had come to see them off as well, as had many of the other employees. Everyone looked anxious. Rebecca gave Amy a thumbs-up through the glass. “Go win us back our cow!” she said, her nervousness betraying her joke. Amy tried to smile at her reassuringly.
Amy couldn’t help holding her breath as they stepped into the device. Technically, they knew it worked because Mathews had used it, but that was days from now. Her mind churned through possibilities. What if someone had thought up some last-minute fix before Mathews had gone? What if one little tweak would change everything? Elliot hurriedly typed the coordinates – temporal and physical – into the display.
“First human trials, here we go,” Elliot said, taking a deep breath and her hand as he hit the button to initiate the sequence. They gripped each other tightly as the timer clicked down towards launch: 4… 3… 2… 1.
A sudden, loud, roaring surrounded them, and the room outside the small porthole that was the device’s only window faded away. Amy felt nauseous and headachy all at once. The noise felt like it took over the entire world, blanked everything else out. She felt completely still and like she was moving at immense speeds at the same time. Elliot looked like he was going to throw up. And then, suddenly, there was total quiet. Amy’s ears echoed with the memory of overwhelming noise.
6
Still looking ill, Elliot fumbled with the door handle, and pulled it open. He ran around behind the machine and puked. Amy pretended she didn’t notice, and stepped out to a totally different environment. The machine could traverse both time and space, and had relocated them to the back of the laboratory in three days’ time, where Tony had told them Mathews had snuck in.
Amy surveyed the layout as an embarrassed Elliot walked up next to her. “We’ll have to hide the device, first off. We don’t know exactly what time he’ll get here.
I tried to give us a good chunk of time, based off of Tony’s story, but who knows how accurate that was.”
There were several dumpsters to their right, and a maze of storage containers to their left. Amy knew that some of these were used for temporary lab sites while others were stocked high with the huge number of resources Blaine Corp. needed.
“Let’s hide it in one of the units,” she suggested, and Elliot nodded. The pulled and shoved the time machine, slowly but surely, across the backyard.
“I’ll make note these things need wheels,” Elliot wheezed. “You think we’d have thought of that.”
They managed to shove it in the closest container, slamming the door shut.
“What now?” Elliot asked, his eyes darting around the storage yard. They were both on edge, expecting any moment some cavalcade of dark cars to pull up, another machine to appear, Mathews to go charging across to the closest exit to the building – anything.
“Tony said he got in through the back. How did a fired employee get in? I’ve seen people get fired before. It’s not pretty. HR has them locked out of everything before they even come in that morning,” Amy said.
“I’ve been trying to think that through,” Elliot replied. “He was a great physicist, but not a computer whiz, so unless he brought someone else in or hired someone from the outside, I don’t think he’d be able to hack his way in.”
“Could he have known he was going to get fired? Duplicated keys?”
Elliot paced next to the machine. “I’m starting to feel awfully unprepared for this.”
Amy shrugged. “I’m not sure how much more we could have tracked down. We’re as prepared as we can be, we just have to figure out where to position ourselves… Elliot, I’ve got it.”
“What?”
Amy pointed to the machine. “We hop in, go forward what, a day? Even to this evening. Get out, check the surveillance tapes from today, figure out how he gets in, come back and circumvent him.”
Elliot slowly smiled. “Yes, it’s so obvious! You have the clearance for that, right?”
“Oh, absolutely.” They hopped in, Elliot grimacing as he thought of facing the whirring sickness again. Amy continued, “We can even keep the machine here. The more we use this thing, the more I realize how much power Mathews has. This is insane.”
Elliot agreed and they took off for later that evening. Stumbling out, they made straight for the surveillance office, hurried explanations and flashing badges getting them the tapes they needed.
“He just walks right in,” Amy breathed out, looking at the tape. “How is that even possible? With all the new security they’ve set up now?”
“Well, he’s got someone’s key card, or something,” Elliot pointed out. “My guess is that he has a few people on the surveillance team here on his side. It would only make sense.”
The two shot quick glances at the surveillance members at the desks near them. Amy had the sudden realization that one of the men was working very, very hard to seem invested in his work.
“Elliot, we have to go, now,” she whispered. As they bolted out the door, she saw the man place a call.
“Back to the machine! We have to get back!” They heard feet running behind them and put on an extra burst of speed, just managing to make it outside and into the supply crate.
“We know exactly when he shows up now,” Amy panted, “Go there, 2:15 pm today – a few minutes before. We have to stop this. This goes way deeper than we thought.”
For a few seconds, over the r
oar of the machine, Amy heard a banging on the crate outside them before they blinked out to the new time settings. Mathews wasn’t such a lone agent after all.
They crouched behind the storage units, weapons at the ready. Amy cautioned Elliot to switch his to stun; Blaine would want to question everyone involved in this. They had to dig out every last traitor.
They didn’t have to wait long. In mere moments, Mathews, with two armed guards, furtively approached the back of the building. Amy and Elliot looked at each other and nodded, then turned in unison and fired two knockout rounds at the chests of the guards in unison. They collapsed with a quiet whumph.
Mathews looked around, panicked, as they leaped out behind the storage unit and rushed towards him. He looked down at his wrist where a large, bulky device was strapped, quickly typing in some sort of code or message into it as he hurriedly backed away from them.
“What is he doing?” Amy shouted to Elliot.
“I don’t know! I haven’t seen one of those before!” They were close now – merely some feet away – when three more armed men burst out of a storage unit behind them. Mathews looked up and smirked, darting around them as they were tackled from behind.
Amy and Elliot wrestled on the ground with their attackers. The third man ran alongside Mathews, swinging his gun around in protective, sweeping motions as they ran for the door to the building.
“Get off,” Amy growled, cracking her attacker across the head. He reeled back and she rolled out from underneath him, kicking him into the side of the man who was trying to get Elliot into a chokehold.
Elliot fired off a shot as his attacker was impacted, knocking him unconscious. Amy followed suit and took after Mathews. She jerked back and forth as she ran, interrupting his guard’s aim, firing at him with every other step.
Mathews stared back in panic, briefly dropping to one knee to type into his wrist some more before getting up and taking off again. A handful of guards came charging up from the side again.
