He relaxed; the panicked animal inside him receded.
They weren’t alone. Martin Hatch was there, patient hands clasped at his waist, dark-suited and unforthcoming, saying nothing before it served a purpose. Martin had been with Paul from the beginning. It was with this man, in this town, that the idea of Monarch had been formulated.
Martin was the face and CEO of Monarch Solutions, the umbrella company and global force that allowed Paul to quickly and easily assemble the technology and talent to do what the survival of the species required. A company rapidly built by capitalizing on Paul’s powers and knowledge of the future.
Martin received Paul’s glance, and returned an acknowledging nod of the head. You’re fine, the movement said. We have been here before. I am with you.
Paul breathed out, the strap snapping free. “Jack. Where is he?”
“When Talon squad located you, you were alone,” Hatch said, that voice as strong as the cornerstone of any parliament. “A citywide be-on-the-lookout has been issued for Mr. Joyce.”
“Regular police can’t-”
“I know. I’ve put Chronon-1 on it.”
“Paul,” Sofia interjected. “The debrief can wait. How are you feeling?”
“How long was I gone?”
“Not long. Less than an hour this time.”
These episodes were becoming more frequent. He examined his left hand, luminescence beneath the sleeve of his tunic. Sitting up and removing his shirt and gloves he examined the spread of the sickness Sofia was racing to understand, an illness that put Paul beyond the help of physical medicine. Six years ago the flesh of his left arm had been transformed, fractal and flickering-the first and most powerful sign of the spreading metamorphosis. Since then it had spread past his elbow, reaching for his vitals. Sofia told him of the inroads it was making, beneath the surface of his skin, fingers of bright corruption reaching upward to touch the underside of his brain.
He was shuddering. Thoughts of that thing were still in his head, its massive and distorted frame flickering between states. The hideous head-scream. The desire to make Paul one of them. To take away the mind he had jealously safeguarded for so long.
To claim him with the light of that shining palm.
The seizure he experienced at the library, while fighting Jack, was the illness’s latest attempt to wrest control of Paul, once and for all. Paul’s mind remained his own, for now, but the infection had claimed another inch of his arm.
“I don’t have long.” Saying it felt like an admission of death. “The visions, my reconnoitering of possible futures, they’re narrowing.”
Sofia took his hand, the sick one, without concern. “I’ve made good progress toward a cure. We will keep administering these treatments to keep the symptoms in check.”
“The time frame of your visions has been growing shorter,” Hatch said. “At a concerning rate.”
“I’ve never been present in any vision beyond October tenth, 2016. We knew this would come.”
Sofia’s face grew dark; throwing an accusing look at Hatch. “I won’t listen to this.”
Paul had to stay alive long enough to see the world saved. If he died with Lifeboat’s future uncertain then the world died with him.
Sofia’s touch was the one real, selfish comfort he permitted himself in seventeen years, but only because it served a higher purpose. She healed, better than anyone was able to.
She healed, but she could not cure.
Paul swung his legs off the gurney. There was a chamber at the far side of this small lab. It resembled a glass cube, hairy with connections to banks of monitoring equipment, boxed in by a four-point stutter generation field. Inside the stutter contained within that glass box was one of the creatures Sofia had classified, in non-formal nomenclature, as Shifters. It was a being similar to the Shining Palm, but smaller in size.
The stutter chamber was powered by chronon energy flowing directly from the Regulator, the source of near-limitless energy at the heart of Monarch Tower. The Regulator was the very core of Project Lifeboat, housed in a sealed chamber adjacent to Paul’s quarters on the forty-ninth floor.
What a boon to humanity the Regulator could be, if only they could understand how it worked. He cursed William for his pride, and turned his attention to the creature in the chamber.
At one time, not long ago, the thrashing thing in the glass box had been known as Dr. Kim.
Thing. Singular. Not strictly accurate.
Kim’s role had been to unlock the Regulator’s secrets, to better harness its potential for Project Lifeboat, and the overeager fool had gone too far. One mistake, a slip of the hand, and he had ceased to be Kim at all-transformed by the complex interaction of gravity, probability, and causality occurring within the heart of the Regulator.
Sofia had been told the device was the creation of Kim himself, a story the little man had been more than happy to play along with. But it was far from the truth.
Because of his error, Dr. Kim now existed in a state of quantum superposition. Moment to moment his form settled upon one configuration then manifested as another. The eye could not rest, detail could not be grasped.
The Kim-Shifter was a being of pure rage, thrashing against boundaries it could never escape.
Shifters manifested only within chronon-free areas-spaces in which probability and causality had ceased to function. Place a probability generator-such as a human-within their habitat and Shifters became incredibly violent. Sofia hypothesized that a Shifter’s natural state was placid, but exposure to potential was agonizing, driving them to destroy the source of pain.
Dr. Kim had been human. Paul himself was being colonized by a condition similar to Dr. Kim’s. Therefore, Sofia concluded, Shifters had once been human.
Examining Kim’s state of superposition she believed he now existed not as a Dr. Kim, but as all possible Dr. Kims.
The Shifter in the chamber was form and reality at war with themselves.
This, she concluded, meant that Shifters were beings that existed outside and across all times, living in the spaces between moments, four-dimensionally. The Kim-Shifter existed. The Kim-Shifter would exist. The Kim-Shifter had always existed-even before the moment Dr. Kim became a Shifter.
The thing had long ago given up attempting to attack its cage. Now it existed in a state of perpetual, thrashing frenzy, a dozen versions of itself half-perceptible from moment to moment. Paul had come to think of its layered, multitudinous shrieks as the sound of utter hatred.
“Martin,” Sofia said. “Cover that, please.” She nodded to Paul and his clear distress.
“He has been like that from the moment he transformed,” Hatch said, pulling a black cloth about the chamber. “Where does he get the energy?”
The cloth did nothing to keep the hate-sound from Paul’s mind.
“He chose his fate,” Paul said, more to comfort himself than anything else.
“One of him did,” Sofia replied. “The multitude he has become did not, and I suspect they hate him for it.”
Sofia went back to finishing her ministrations. “It is not a fitting fate for a man who may have saved all of humanity. The Regulator was his gift to us. Without it you have no way of sidestepping the end of all things. Lifeboat would be nothing.”
Paul was just as important to the Project as the Regulator, and Kim knew it. That’s why the man had locked himself inside the stutter chamber before the transformation had taken full hold: to provide a fully infected patient ready to be studied, and to help find a cure for Paul’s condition.
Sofia may not have found a cure, but the treatments she had developed through studying the Kim-Shifter had bought Paul enough time to lay the groundwork for Project Lifeboat.
Paul crossed the room. One wall was entirely glass, looking down upon a glass-roofed farm of laboratories, each one staffed by men and women at the peak of their field. Many of them, in that moment, would be working to find ways to save Paul.