“Sir.” Gibson didn’t like this. He had never imagined that one day Mr. Hatch might look at him like that. Now he was imagining all kinds of things. Like who he might be at the end of this interview, and suddenly he couldn’t get one thought to connect to the next. Like a fucking chump. “With respect, Mr. Hatch, I was assigned to oversee Guardian squad’s sweep-and-clear. I left Donny-”
“No mind on Earth grasped chronon theory so well as Dr. William Joyce.” Hatch moved to the front of his desk. “You were tasked by me, explicitly, with keeping him alive. With keeping him out of the hands of our Consultant.”
“Paul Serene, I understand, but-”
“That,” Hatch emphasized, “is an excellent example of what I am talking about. Do you understand why we refer to Mr. Serene as ‘our Consultant’? Paul Serene’s primary role is to play the villain of our upcoming drama. In time Monarch’s role will be to play the rescuing hero. Therefore Paul Serene being tied to Monarch will destroy our credibility with the governments of the world.”
Hatch took a measured step toward Gibson.
“That unquestioning trust is the pillar most essential to the success of Project Lifeboat. Unheard-of technology must be delivered within a very short time frame. Technology requires development. That development will require unlimited funding, manpower, and intergovernmental cooperation, and it will have to happen very, very quickly. Time is quite literally running out, Mr. Gibson. Dr. Joyce’s expertise would have bought us time. But now… now he is dead.”
“Holographic. Right. I got it.”
“I’m removing you from command of Chronon-1, Mr. Gibson. Henceforth you will be taking your orders from Donny.”
“Sir-”
“This close to the end there’s no room for second chances. You are in receipt of the last chance I will give you. Were you about to throw it in my face?”
Gibson said nothing.
Hatch turned to face Riverport, screwed in an earpiece, and got back to work.
Life escorted Randall Gibson to the door, and closed it.
Paul Serene was a man who lived in the space between moments, known to very few. In his too-long-seeming lifetime he had learned many truths. He had built a diverse, multinational corporation in secret, from hiding, using skills and gifts unique to himself. He had met many extraordinary people, many of them terrible to know.
That’s how it had been for seventeen long years, from the moment he first stepped into the time machine until now.
All for this critical moment. For Project Lifeboat.
Chronon particles are critical to the functioning of causality. No particles, no causality. No causality, no flow of events-and what is time but a linear flow of events?
The activation of the Monarch-built time machine at Riverport University fractured the Meyer-Joyce field: the field of chronon energy essential to the functioning of causality. Eventually that fracture would cause chronon levels to drop disastrously low, the field would collapse, and time would end.
The universe would become locked in a single moment, dividing infinitely.
Because of him. Because of what he did.
For seventeen years Paul Serene had lived with this knowledge: Paul Serene had killed the universe.
He had but one chance to make amends for his great evil.
Project Lifeboat would enable areas of the Earth to be shielded from the collapse of the M-J field. It would enable operatives to move freely about the planet in their quest to repair the field, to reseed chronon levels and thereby restart the flow of time and causality-freeing humanity from its coma.
Then there was the issue of the Shifters: violent, non-Euclidean monstrosities indigenous to causality-free environments. Every single laboratory encounter with one had resulted in violent fatalities. Paul knew well enough what they were capable of. At the age of twenty-eight he had spent what seemed an eternity hiding from them, bunkered down beneath floor panels, waiting for death at the end of time.
The technology-and the defensive capabilities required to protect the last and best of humanity from the Shifters-would require development. Only five years remained. Development within that time frame was not possible without focus and assistance on a planetary scale.
It required nothing less than humanity coming together, united by a desire to survive.
That would require some doing.
The threat would need to be seen as formidable, the solution as clear and simple and singular.
All this spun through Paul Serene’s head as he fought for consciousness.
Many great people do not fear death or pain, but there is not a person alive who does not dread aloneness without hope or end.
One night terror differed from another. But however it began Paul was always choking on the acrid fumes of burning insulation and superheated long-chain polymers: the atmosphere that had filled that failing airlock.
This thick mix coated his tongue, mucus membranes flavored themselves toxic, the drug-taste dripping down the back of his throat as he retched and fought for breath.
A knocking sound always accompanied the initial suffocation: a dull pounding against a wall Paul could never find, and Jack’s voice calling his name from very far away.
Paul always panicked. He would run for the voice but never found a way out of the smoke and back to the real world. He always knew what would happen next, and always wished that the smoke would kill him first.
Paul knew what it was to be buried alive in a moment without end, to feel his psyche crushed like a shell of spun sugar. He knew the killing fear all humans are susceptible to, and yet his fear of the monstrous thing that knew his name, that had stalked him across time, dwarfed even that.
It was here now. He could hear it, in the smoke. Often there would be years between encounters, but each time they met the thing got closer. It howled from within Paul’s head.
Infinite potential futures split and bloomed before him; endless corridors spraying in infinite directions. He chose one and fled down it as easily as a frightened child runs to their parents’ bedroom.
The campus. The burned library. Jack had Paul’s gun, the dull-chrome.45 Paul had picked up years before, a gift from the widow of a Russian warlord, one of Paul’s zealots.
In this future Paul had no seizure. In this future he flicked the pistol from Jack’s grip, sent it spinning into darkness. Jack’s eyes widened with terror-a fear that had nothing to do with Paul.
The monstrosity was there, as always. The thing with the killing light in its palm. It strode from the flames of the library’s ruin.
Panic rising, Paul focused on Jack as a means of escape, saw a hundred futures split off the man, chose one, and dived. The scene split, clone images separating, and then the present coalesced.
There was no escape. In this future Jack was gone, and Paul found the thing waiting, as always. It howled. Nothing living sounded like that. Nothing. It was a howl from within the head, not without.
Bestial, fractal, glittering, and hideous it swung for his face.
The palm of its killing paw shone like a star.
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 5:50 A.M. Riverport, Massachusetts. Monarch Tower.
Paul woke, gasping, the straps of the breather biting into his face.
“Paul.”
The smoke was gone. He sat upright, in a narrow, steel-framed bed, rubber straps straining as he pulled the mask from his face.
Her hands were on his shoulders. The sharp taste of the chronon-rich formulation filled his mouth, lungs, body, settling the seizure. His cells felt intact and reliable. He was alive.
He knew this bright room. Her laboratory. He was home.
“Paul.” Sofia: kind, worried eyes and gentle-faced.