“A judge’s gazebo.”
Nick was asleep on the couch by the time the coffee was ready. Jack cleared a space among the papers on the dining table, set both cups down, and took a seat. Morning light brought out more color in the place. Coffee steam rose fragrant and pleasing from Jack’s faded mug. Washed-away lettering advised never ever, ever, ever giving up. It was a Churchill quote. Jack’s father had given him the mug when he started taking guitar lessons.
His high school yearbook lay open on a page of class photographs. The university security guard looked back at him in black and white, thirty pounds heavier and braces on his teeth.
Jack memorized his name.
10
At that moment, Paul was off-site in an operations room composed of a nine-rack of monitors and three operators handling six different hazmat drones-not so different from those used for exploring radioactive death zones, though these had finer motor control. Here, within the green zone of the area designated in official Monarch documentation as Ground Zero, Paul watched as tracked, claw-handed drones and lumbering quanton-insulated scientists worked the forsaken landscape within Warehouse 21B. The view these multiple screens offered was not always perfect. The crews at Ground Zero had to replace cameras frequently. Not much survived in the red zone.
“It pains me that Will is going to be remembered as a lunatic,” he said to Sofia. “That his theories were never taken seriously.”
Sofia leaned into one console, bending the thread-mic toward her. “Doctors Connor and Chang, please attend to remote unit C. One of the receivers has degraded. Thank you.” She turned to Paul. “As will you, so you tell me.” She snapped a penlight on, flicked the beam from his left eye to right and back again, snapped it off. “As will I, for all the work I’ve done here.”
“The activation of the machine fractured the Meyer-Joyce field. The Fracture will grow, universal chronon count will hit zero, and time itself will end.” This was fact. “In that sense humanity is not going to remember anything: trapped, unaware, in a submoment self-dividing into infinity. Those of us chosen to go on will be tortured by more important things than a lack of recognition.” He sighed. “But we have five more years. Time enough for Project Lifeboat to be properly developed and become operational.”
Sofia pressed two fingers to his carotid. “About that,” she said. “I have rechecked my calculations for a third time and can find no error.” She checked his pulse against her watch.
“Sofia…”
She removed her hand. “You have been to this end-of-time event, yes, I understand. You saw clocks and calendars and papers. They provided you a date. But the data does not lie: we have mere days, not years. At the current rate of decay the Meyer-Joyce field will collapse-in two, perhaps three days at the most. You must take these findings seriously.”
“The waveform-”
“Has collapsed, as you have said so often. The future is written because events in the past led you to witness the future. I understand. But you must consider the likelihood that the reason your visions do not extend beyond a few days from now is because that is when time ends. Not five years, not next month, but this week.”
“Enough!”
Sofia flinched, stepped back.
“Please,” he said. “Enough.”
Another moment of lost control. This was becoming common. He was fighting to retain focus, to maintain his discipline and resolve. He had decided upon and built a protocol for his behavior when this final week arrived, knowing that raw programming may be the only thing to keep him on mission once his illness properly asserted itself. If he had to think too much, plan too much, adjust too much-it opened the gates to error, flawed thinking, damaged reasoning, and a lack of perspective. He had to trust to the plan laid out by his clearer-headed and less instinctual past self. He was a soldier now, taking orders from the more complete person he used to be. He could not tolerate anyone interfering with that coding.
“It is too late for a course correction. The future is locked.”
Sofia’s jaw was set. “I am not working night and day simply to pass the time between now and doomsday.”
“Let’s…” Paul glanced at the monitors. “Let’s change the subject. The Tower’s chronon stores, how are we doing?”
Warehouse 21B, nestled on the fringe of what had once been Riverport’s thriving dockyards, had been a very respectable laboratory. In some ways the fingerprint of the original owner survived, despite the fickle entropic fluctuations that possessed the place. The work benches remained upright, though most of the original equipment had long since crumbled to dust. A bunk bed, neatly made, survived layered in the accreted powdery fallout of age and time. Resting atop a caved-in twelve-cup coffee maker, angled toward the camera, was a dusty photograph of a family of four: mother, father, two sons. Tape yellowed and withered and curled on three corners.
How Paul wished he had never activated that machine.
The scientists at Ground Zero clicked life back into the tracked claw-robot and gave a thumbs-up to the camera. In the operations room a controller leaned forward on a throttle and trundled the ’bot toward the room’s centerpiece: a roiling and thumping time-space anomaly encapsulated and trapped within a twelve-billion-dollar contraption designed to harness and siphon off the rampant torrents of chronon energy it had been spraying out for the last six years.
Delicately, the operator manipulated the fine-work pincer to replace various burned-out components on the shell. Racked about the site an elaborate array of chronon batteries absorbed the anomaly’s output as fast as they were able.
“Our chronon stores are holding level,” Sofia said. “Containing Dr. Kim is our biggest drain, currently. But a necessary one. If we didn’t have the Regulator I doubt we would be able to contain him at all.”
“Lifeboat,” Paul said. “Is it getting what it needs?”
“At this rate the Tower’s capacitors will be fully charged in eighteen months. Well ahead of your schedule. However, if the end-of-time event occurs five years from now, as you say, and Ground Zero continues to generate chronon particles at the current rate, I estimate we’ll have enough chronon energy stored in these batteries to maintain causality in a limited area for a number of years. Long enough to develop a solution to the crisis. If there is a solution.”
“What if the M-J field were to collapse this week?”
Sofia glanced at him.
“Just answer the question.”
“Less than a year. Eighteen months if we’re extremely frugal. Less than a month if, for some reason, the Regulator ceases to function. I really do wish you would let me examine the research your people are doing on that. I feel confident I-”
Paul’s phone began vibrating against his chest.
“I want you to have your people keep an eye on ambient chronon levels,” he told her. “And look for any other fluctuations or deformations in the Meyer-Joyce field. If you detect anything-anything at all-let me know.” Paul took out his phone. It was Martin Hatch. He knew what this was about. “Martin.”
“Paul. We’ve held off, but I must insist we send in the troops now.”
“Is Jack still at the farm?”
“Yes. And his accomplice.”
“I’ll be free in…” Paul checked his watch, glanced at Sofia.
“Ninety minutes,” she said.
“I can be at the farm in one hour and forty-five.”
“The team is quite capable of bringing Joyce in without your involvement.”
“His brother is dead, Martin. He hasn’t been home in six years. Right now he’ll be going through grief and adrenaline crash. Two hours from now I’ll be able to talk him in, not hog-tie and drag him. Let me know if anything changes.”