“Security is on their…,” they yelled at each other. “Ah screw you.”
Jack’s clone spread his arms in a theatrical ta-da, utterly pleased with himself. “Huh? Yeah? How about that?”
“We’ve got two minutes,” Paul snapped.
Jack rounded on his clone, snapped his fingers. “Hey! Whoever you are. Inside pocket.” He snapped his fingers again, opened his palm.
“Way ahead of you,” his clone said, and handed over a key ring.
Jack stared at the key ring, familiar as his jacket, his bathroom mirror, his own bed. They were all there: the rusted old key to his cabin in Chiang Mai, the sixty-four-gig flash drive he used to back up his articles, his iPhone tool, the bottle-opener he picked up from an aeronautics plant outside of Oxford, Mississippi-all attached to a branded key ring that came with the last pair of shoes he bought new. By contrast the silver.38 slug was overdressed, thin leather strap threaded through the forty-eight-gauge hole at the base.
Jack looked at Paul, wanting confirmation. “This guy is me.”
Paul produced his own set of keys: Mercedes key ring, two keys, one silver bullet.
“This is a time machine,” Jack said.
Jack’s clone took back his keys. “I’ll be needing those.”
“Into the airlock, Jack. That’s how this happens.”
Jack’s clone’s head was on a swivel, taking them both in. “Intense. Hey Paul, what would have happened if I didn’t do what I did? Y’know… screw with you. The parroting thing.”
“To answer your question,” Paul said to the clone, “it’s not possible. You would always have said and done what you have just said and done. You’re here as a direct result of what has gone before. Now get off the ramp. You’re staying. Jack, you’re going.”
“Going? Going where?” The real Jack this time.
“I’m sending you two minutes into the past, so that we can have this conversation.”
The machine waited, thrumming heavily. “And what if this plays out like the end of Evil Dead 2?”
“You’re not going to the fucking Middle Ages. You need this machine to step out of, and that wasn’t functioning until we turned it on four minutes ago. That’s as far back as this machine will take you-to the moment it was first activated. Now move. I’ve been waiting three years to try this thing.”
Jack walked cautiously up the gangway, eyeing the distortion waves emanating from the machine’s housing. “If I get lymphoma I swear to God…”
“It’s not radioactive; it’s chronon-active. Completely revolutionary and entirely clean. As far as we can tell.”
“Swell.” Jack stepped over the lip, into the airlock, looked around inside. No controls, no handles. “Hey, if something goes wrong, how do I reopen this thing?”
“You don’t,” Paul said. “Once the charge builds up within the Promenade it needs to be expended before the internal atmosphere is vented. Failure to do so could cause… big problems.” Hydraulics engaged, hefting the door away from the housing and sliding it toward the seal. “Just walk counterclockwise around the core. One full rotation will complete the journey.”
“Fine. But when I get out of here I want a full-” The door pressed into place, then locked off with a rubbery smooching sound. A blast of cool air filled the room. Jack’s ears popped. Wiggling a finger in one ear, opening and closing his jaw, he peered through the viewplate.
Outside, Paul was waving him to the left. The other Jack smiled and waved beside Paul.
The airlock had two internal doors. On cue the left door disengaged. Jack stepped into the Promenade, the airlock sealing behind him. The interior of the circular corridor was made of some kind of nonconductive white ceramic, featureless, blood-warm beneath his fingers and floored with waffle-tread black rubber.
The thrum of the core sounded louder inside the corridor, the womb of some furious monster. The thrum transmuted to a sudden whine, the floor kicked, Jack said, “Fuck,” and…
Silence.
The regular, adrenal pound of the core was gone, though it couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from where he stood. The airlock was so perfectly soundless Jack could have believed it was floating in space. Blood pulsed in his eardrums, his breath rasping like it was piped through earphones.
“Jack?”
He took a step forward, peering around the eternal corner. “Hello?” No response. He started walking.
No other sound was forthcoming. The trip around the core felt a lot like walking on a treadmill, like the corridor was moving around him rather than he moving through it. Then the exit door appeared.
Jack hit the red release button, the seal cracked, the hatch slid aside, and he stepped into the airlock from which he had departed a minute ago. Peering through the viewplate he saw the gangway, the time lab, Paul, and his double. His past self.
The airlock hissed open. Jack steadied himself against the lip of the seal, suddenly light-headed. Internal atmosphere vented and he stepped outside, giddy. He knew this scene. He knew what the Jack before him was feeling. He hadn’t noticed how utterly dumbstruck Paul had looked the first time around.
“Hey me,” Jack said to his clone. “It’s you.” Then shook his head. Too weird, like vertigo in his own skull, like waking up from a dream inside a dream to realize he was still dreaming. “Damn.”
The clone at the bottom of the ramp took off his goggles, peering at Jack with an expression that resembled hostility.
Jack put his hands up. “Hey, it’s cool. This all works out. And Paul, you still owe me a fucking explanation.”
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 4:17 A.M. Riverport, Massachusetts. Quantum Physics Building.
Jack’s past self reentered the machine and peered anxiously from the airlock as the hatch closed. He and Paul waved him off. There was a powerful snap, the distortion effect around the corridor pulsed outward, vanished, and the machine returned to its usual low hum.
“Jack.” Paul smiled alarmingly. “With this device, this machine that you’re looking at right now, we can put an end to… suffering. Disease. Catastrophe. We can… we can go back in time before… imagine if this machine had existed on September 10, 2001. Imagine how different our world would be today if we could go back with enough time to stop those flights. Imagine being able to develop a cure for a terrible disease in the future, and then bring it into the past. Just think.”
Jack looked at the machine. “If in the future you know that this works, like you said, wouldn’t you come back to this moment, right now, and tell yourself that?”
Paul’s mouth opened uncertainly. He glanced at the machine. “I… I don’t know. I…” He laughed it off and made a final adjustment. “Okay, my turn. The destination date’s been set for two minutes from now. All you have to do, once I’m inside, is hit the Go button. Got it?”
“Paul, security is about to walk in here and find me alone with eleven billion dollars’ worth of bleeding-edge whateverthefuck. They will not buy that I was looking for the cafeteria.”
“Two minutes, Jack. The door’s locked. You’ll be fine.” Paul moved up the gangway, pivoted, thrust both arms into the air, and hooted.
“Woo,” Jack responded and opened the airlock, realizing four cameras were filming him in commission of a federal offense.
Paul stepped inside. “Okay, lock me in.”
Jack tapped a key; the airlock sucked itself shut.
A green alert flashed: the elevator had just opened on the other side of the lab’s security door.
“Paul, make this quick. We don’t have-”
The security door beeped, and hissed open.
“Long.”
Paul’s face fell. “Oh no.”
A forlorn figure stood at the top of the stairs, thin and haunted inside a beaten old coat, looking at Jack and Paul like a child betrayed. “What…?” said William Joyce. “What have you done?”