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“An altered Meridian,” said Paul, and the silence following his words was profound.

Part VIII

Altered States

“All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream.”
—Edgar Alan Poe

“Reality is but an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

—Albert Einstein

Chapter 22

Lawrence Berkeley Labs, Arch Complex, 12:15 P.M

“It’s a real possibility,” said Paul. “I’ve considered it many times before this—every time I run across an oddity in our own history. I know, I could be imposing my own inner fears on external events, but don’t you all agree that this looks like deliberate intervention?”

“It does, but you can’t judge a book by its cover,” said Maeve, unwilling to think that the world and history she knew so well was the creation and result of a conflict that had been raging in Time, unbeknownst to her and the others. She considered what Paul suggested. Once they demonstrated Time travel to the past was viable, that possibility instantly migrated forward on the continuum as well. How hard would it have been for someone to take action to alter events affecting the history they knew? Any moment they spent outside the protective influence of the Nexus Point they were vulnerable.

Kelly’s RAM Bank idea, and the Golems, had been created to try and immediately warn them when tampering was occurring. The Golems would sample available information and it would be continually compared to the RAM Bank, with all variations noted and color coded and charted in a chronological Meridian. Yet she realized that if anything had changed before he built the RAM Bank, they would not know about it. Though their Touchstone database was an enormous accumulation of data, was it comprehensive? Was it all encompassing? No, it was merely a record of what was known to happen, and 95% of all that actually had happened remained unknown, unwritten, lost in Time. Changes could occur and they would not be aware of it. The world would seem to be normal, but it would not be the world they were born to. Was it so even now? It was an uncomfortable feeling to think that their hold on reality depended on the thin stream of battery power that constantly fed the live RAM Bank data.

How did it work? Kelly had explained it to her before. There was a low level Nexus constantly in force, limited in size and scale, yet surrounding and protecting the bank, their touchstone on the history as they believed it should be. But what if it had been contaminated by an earlier intervention? Or worse, what if it failed one day? Look what had just happened to the Golems! With multiple Nexus Points open, and interventions being run by all sides in the conflict, they could no longer reach a sure weight of opinion. So instead of knowing the outcome of their interventions, it was coming down to simple human judgment now, fraught with the endless possibility of error and compounded by too many cooks, spoiling the broth of Time.

“It looks like tampering,” she said, “at least from our perspective, but it may not be that at all. We can sit here and discuss this all day until the power fails again and the generators run dry, but this is something we cannot know to a certainty. We just have to proceed on faith, as it were. We already know that if we shut down the Arch and dissipate the Nexus Point we’re living in an altered Reality. This whole effort is to try and reverse that, but don’t be surprised if I tell you that looks to be nigh on to impossible now. This damnable Time war is causing too many fractures in the continuum. Look at this situation here! We’ve changed things, they’ve done the same—both sides. If the Order is involved in this operation as well, then we have at least three open Nexus Points impacting these events. Who’s going to have the final say here?”

“We are,” said Paul.

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because our position on the continuum antedates any Nexus that may be open in the future. Any change they make can never be certain as long as we’re here in their past capable of making an alteration to counter it before any of them were even born! Yes, there’s a damn war on, and it’s clear to us that both sides are trying to manipulate these events. We may see demons in every corner of the history now, but we know this is likely—they are tampering here, and it may involve more than we think or realize at the moment. I mean, why not just blow up the transport this Lt. Thomason is on? Why go through all these hoops involving the fate of the Bismarck? Hasn’t that occurred to any of you?”

“I must say,” said Robert. “We’ve been going round and round about magnetic pistols on the torpedoes, but a good Glock pistol with a silencer would be a much simpler solution than the things we’ve been planning here. The Assassins got that name for a reason. Yes, why couldn’t they just go back and find this man and kill him before he leads his raid at Bardia, and make an end of it that way? For that matter, why don’t we just go and arrange the unfortunate demise of an ancestor to this terrorist, Kenan Tanzir. We know who his father is, and I’ll bet we can find his grandfather as well. See what I mean?”

“The grandfather problem,” said Maeve. “If you kill his grandfather he never existed, and therefore you never had a reason to do so. Time’s solution seems to be to prevent that from happening, by some means.”

“Except in the case of a Zombie,” said Paul.

“A Zombie?” Kelly laughed. “What are you talking about? You’ve been watching too many movies, Paul.”

“Yes, a Zombie,” Paul explained. “The walking dead. Kenan’s father is supposed to have died, but the Assassins did something to prevent his death. He’s alive, a walking dead man now, and we’re trying to put him back in his grave so that the Heisenberg Wave that generates will re-arrange the quantum state of the universe to our liking. You can’t do the grandfather thing because in that instance you deny his existence completely and Paradox prevents your action. But you can kill a Zombie by restoring the moment of his natural death to the continuum. We did it with old St. Lambert and Grimwald just a few days ago. They were both Zombies created by interventions taken by the Assassin cult.”

“What about Ra’id Husan al Din?” asked Kelly. “We prevented his birth to reverse Palma the first time. We denied his existence completely with that act.”

“Did we? I’m still not sure exactly what we did on that mission, though we clearly got an outcome that reversed Palma. We certainly went nose to nose with Paradox in that event. You’re right. If we prevented his birth that what reason did we ever have to do so? I think Paradox made a compromise with us. It wanted you as wergild, Kelly. It accepted our intervention, but the price was your life, until Mr. Graves and his associates reneged on the deal when they snatched you away into a safe Nexus Point in the future. I’ve been thinking about that and it comes down to this: Time is not a zero sum game. It has rules, principles, yes, and it tries to enforce them but it doesn’t always succeed, and it never gets an absolutely perfect balance sheet. Like DNA itself, it makes mistakes, glorious and magnificent errors, and sometimes catastrophic ones, from our limited perspective. When they pulled you out, as far as Paradox was concerned, you were gone. It moved on, closed the wound in the continuum, and that was that.”