“You’re always like this.”
“You’re always a crisis.”
“That’s simply untrue.”
As if in rebuttal green lasers snapped on over Jack’s shoulders. Will shoved him to the ground as two silhouettes snapped off a series of probing three-round bursts. Gun-cracks reverberated down the narrow throat of the corridor.
“I never shot at you,” Will said, face-to-face. “I needed your attention.”
“We have to get out of this tunnel.”
Tactical lights snapped on atop the troopers’ assault weapons. They were coming in. Jack reached up, yanked the pistol from the back of Will’s pants, rolled, and squeezed. Nothing happened.
“What was that?” The troopers crouched.
Jack flicked off the safety and squeezed again.
His wrist took the kicks, shots going everywhere. Silhouetted and vulnerable against the light from the entrance, the troopers scrambled back into the maintenance loop. Will grabbed Jack by the collar and hauled him upright. By the time the troopers hosed down the tunnel, Will and Jack had crashed around a left-hand turn.
Jack pressed Will against the warm wall and dragged him down into a kneeling position. Pistol braced, he aimed at the corner as best he could, and waited.
The guards didn’t pursue. “I need an eyewash station,” Jack croaked. “Or a cafeteria.”
“Cafe-?”
“Milk, Will. Something alkaline. For the eyes.” He stood up, tried to bring the tunnel into focus. It was like staring into hot light.
“Follow me.” Will moved off, then stopped. “‘It happened once before,’” he muttered.
Jack blew a nose full of something offensive onto the floor. “Will, we gotta go.”
“Back there, you said, ‘It happened once before.’ The stutter. How could you know that? If time had stopped and restarted, it would have appeared to you as it did to me: seamless. Unless-”
“The world froze, but I didn’t. Then I grabbed you and-”
Will’s eyes were scanning again, not seeing Jack. “Your proximity to the pulse altered your relationship to the chronon field. My reanimation must… there must have been chronon-transference from you to me. Meaning a non-affected person can act as a kind of causality battery, of sorts. Chargeable, yes, by someone who is a causality source, even in a state in which causality has ceased to self-generate.”
“Will! What’s…?”
“Time go bad! Get it? Causality, the flow of time, of cause and effect, is a lake. The lake contains an ecosystem. We live in that ecosystem. The lake itself is held in place by a dam. That dam is now leaking, thanks to you and Paul activating that machine. Now the cracks are going to widen, and then-”
“The dam breaks.”
“No more causality-stasis. A forever now. An eternally frozen present moment. Monarch knew this was going to happen. Banked on it, I think. The machine was calibrated incorrectly. Monarch blocked my case against activation at each step, refused my evidence. They wanted this to happen, Jack.”
“Why? If the world goes down, it takes all of us, Monarch included.”
“I have a contact inside the company. Horatio. A nice enough person. Boutique muffins, outrageous moustache, you know the type…”
“Will.”
“He tells me Monarch’s been incubating something, an initiative directly related to the work at the university time lab. Project Lifeboat. Very few know about it. Nobody except the CEO Martin Hatch, a handful of experts inside the company, an unnamed contractor, a single lobbyist in D.C., and a lone recruiter in Europe.”
Then it clicked. “Those guys in the masks are Monarch.”
“Monarch doesn’t need to steal the machine, Jack: they own it.”
“I told you something was off about this.” Jack took Will’s arm. Tried to look him in the eye, but it was so dark in there he may have been staring at Will’s navel for all he knew. “Where’s your car?”
“In the parking lot, of course.”
“And the parking lot is where?” Just like old times.
“Three hundred feet from the rear of this building.”
“All right, let’s-”
A pattern of high-frequency noise penetrated the tunnel, from outside the building. It started as a series of three triple-claps, and then became applause.
Panic cut back into Will’s voice. “Is that gunfire? From outside?”
Jack moved past Will, feeling his way along the wall.
“Are they shooting on campus?” Will’s voice was rising. “Who are they shooting at?”
“It’s an announcement. They want people to know this is going down.”
Will was breathing harder than Jack, about to hyperventilate. Jack ran his free hand over the 9mm, made sure the safety was off. “Three hundred feet to the parking lot, right?”
“Yes.”
In Jack’s current condition a flailing or unconscious Will would have been more than he could handle. A lifetime with his brother had provided a number of ways to get Will’s shit under control.
“Hey Will, what’s the capital of Nebraska?” Feeling along walls of warm steel. A light ahead.
“Lincoln.”
“Hey Will, what’s the temperature on Mercury?” Okay, that was definitely a door in front of him.
“That’s not my field. I know what you’re doing. Around five hundred degrees Fahrenheit as an average.” Will’s breathing was calming down.
“Hey Will, what’s a big word for someone who uses too many big words?”
“Sesquipedalianist.” He didn’t even have to take a breath in the middle of that one.
The corridor ended. “Hey Will, where’s this door lead?”
“That’d be the server room on the fifth floor,” Will said, taking a deep breath. “We’re below the time lab. The corridor beyond that has an elevator approximately a hundred and fifty feet to the right. That will take us to the ground floor.”
The elevator was dangerous. If anyone was watching the bays they’d notice the elevator moving. The doors could open and they could walk out into a half-dozen guns. But with Jack half-blind and unable to make out anything farther than thirty feet away would the stairs be any safer?
“Will, I’m gonna need you to keep your eyes open. Tell me everything you see. Quietly.”
They stepped out of the tunnel into a cold, dark room humming with quiet purpose.
“No one’s here,” Will whispered. It was just them and sequential racks of fat vertical servers: midnight-blue twilight speckled with thousands of yellow and green LEDs. There was only one door, manual, domestic looking, and opened from their side.
“Hey, Will?”
“Yes, Jack.”
“When Paul went through, I caught a look at the readout. It said ‘destination error.’ What does that mean?”
Will thought about it. “Oh, dear.”
“Can you elaborate?”
“Because Paul did not appear prior to his own departure he must have traveled forward. I would assume the error indicates he traveled to a point where a date becomes redundant. It’s likely Paul sent himself far enough ahead to witness the inevitable collapse of the Meyer-Joyce field.”
“The end of time?”
“When Paul emerges from the machine he will be stepping into a moment that is infinitely self-dividing. He will freeze, and there will be no coming back from that. I’m afraid he’s gone, Jack. I’m sorry.”
“Maybe… maybe I can use the machine and get him.”
“Let’s get out of here alive first. If Paul is at the end of time, he won’t be going anywhere.”
Jack listened at the door, couldn’t hear anything, and Will risked opening it, gently. The sounds of war outside, still muffled, grew louder.
“I don’t see anything,” Will said.
The corridor was dark, lit by illuminated exit signs and a light coming through a wall window at the far end of the corridor.
“What is that?” Jack said.