by K. D. Mack
“He’s calling them somehow!” Amy yelled, firing off round after round at the incoming guards.
“I’ll handle them!” Elliot responded. “Take his guard out and get him!”
Amy nodded, wishing him luck in her mind before turning and dashing after Mathews. He was maybe fifty feet from the door now – not long before he would close the gap. Once he was inside, she knew it would be insanity trying to track him down. So many corridors, twists and turns, and who knew how many in there would be trying to help him and stop her.
She dove below a shot fired by his guard, responding with her own and finally making contact. He fell behind and she heard Mathews shout in anger and frustration, leaping over his prone form.
“Mathews! Give it up!” she yelled after him, “This is over!”
He ignored her, holding out the key card he inexplicably had, trying to catch the door’s sensor as soon as possible. She put on an extra burst of speed, pushing herself as hard as she could, and leapt.
The two of them slammed against the door, hard, as she crashed into the back of him and brought them to the ground. His head cracked against the metal exterior and hers against his. Amy’s mind reeled, but she had him. He was down. The door’s sensor beeped green as it recognized his entry card, but she yanked it shut before he could get up.
“I’m afraid your trip’s been delayed,” Amy snapped, pulling his arms behind his back and locking them in the pair of cuffs they’d brought.
He struggled manically. “What are you doing!” Mathews gasped. “I’ve already gone back, don’t you realize? What are you doing!” He kept trying to scrabble for the door, kicking at her ferociously.
She held her weapon to his side. “Come with me quietly, Mathews, don’t make this harder for yourself. We know everything.”
“Still – have – a minute –” he wheezed, and Amy realized everything had happened so quickly that they were still shortly before he had originally broken in. Panic rose in his eyes as the seconds ticked by.
Elliot was still fighting off Mathews’ cronies behind her. She could hear their shouts as he picked them off, one by one.
Mathews made one last plea. “Look, you have to let me go through that door, or everything that’s happened – whoever you are, this has to happen.”
Amy shook her head, “We get that it’s risky, but we can’t let you –”
The whole world shifted. Mathews blurred in front of her, and Amy suddenly was outside herself, saw herself, then was herself again, receding away into the distance, like a fractal spreading out that seemed to bifurcate the two of them into an ever-expanding design. In a ghostly rewind, she saw what had happened before: Mathews quietly approaching with two guards, scanning his key card, entering the door – but then that whisked and faded away. Elliot called out in surprise behind her. She tried to turn, and saw herself and Elliot receding as well, moving and changing, the guards both appearing and snapping out of existence. The sun passed back and forward through the sky. Her own hold on this world felt tenuous, like it could snap at any moment.
She tried to stand, move, and it was like running from a monster in a dream. The air, shattered as it was, clung to her like molasses. Amy struggled over to Elliot who was staring blankly where guards had been moments before.
“Great job!” Mathews screamed at her, his voice sounding a million miles away and right next them simultaneously. “You just broke time!”
Elliot turned to look at Amy, his face pale.
“What do we do?” she asked him, and behind her voice she heard the thousand other questions she could have had in that moment, as if every possibility were lining up for its chance at being said and then vanishing in the same moment.
“I think time’s trying to fix the paradoxes,” he replied, looking terrified. “I don’t know.”
“The machine is outside all this, right?” she said. “We have to get in there. Help me get him in there.”
Elliot nodded, like a wave, distorted and strange. The nausea was ten times worse than it had been in the machine. They dragged the cackling, furious Mathews after them, cramming the three of them into the device.
The air calmed. The world calmed. Time snapped back on itself as they entered. She took a deep, normal breath as relief washed over her.
“How long will it take to fix itself?” she asked Elliot.
“I’m not sure. Hard to say because I don’t think real time is… happening out there right now. But we can monitor it from in here.”
What felt like hours passed, Mathews continue to rave and ramble until Elliot sedated him. Amy was glad for the quiet. They sat in the machine, side to side, gripping each other’s hands while they stared at the screen, waiting for the ripples tearing across it to calm.
At last, the time stream was still. As they stepped out of the machine, Amy’s wristwatch clicked back to life, showing less than a minute had passed from when the break had happened.
“It looks normal,” Amy said, relieved. “It’s all – oh, God, who’s that?”
“How could that?” Elliot exclaimed, as the two of them watched Mathews – the same Mathews as the one bound and unconscious behind them, enter the back door of the laboratory. Amy tried to run forward, but she hit some sort of invisible barrier which threw her back. The air rippled and shifted, and suddenly the two guards Mathews left behind him at the door were gone.
Elliot jumped back in the machine, checking the screen. “Oh, no,” he breathed out.
“What is it?”
“Well, time did fix itself, I guess the only way it knew how. By splitting,” he turned to her, his face drawn.
“You mean…?” Amy asked, looking down at Mathews.
“Yeah. Two timelines. We just created a parallel universe.”
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About the Author
I've enjoyed reading science fiction and fantasy from a young age, under the covers with the flashlight at night, enthralled in the worlds of Asimov, Heinlein, and Foster, to name a few. My clever dog, Dejah, is named for a Burrough's character - Dejah Thoris of the red planet we call Mars.
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I'm pleased to be able to share my love of all things weird, different, magical and out of this world, and I hope you'll be able to lose yourself in new worlds, on fantastic adventures in my books. Enjoy!
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