Beth double-checked her notebook, filled with dates and times and scraps of future information. Beth’s future self had written in that notebook that the Monarch gala was about to get hit with a stutter.
The elevator came to a stop. Getting off at thirty-five she turned on her rescue rig. Her skin tingled, sharp, and subsided.
Monarch Tower was a hell of an operation. Within five years it’d be a fully functioning arcology: a city within a building within Riverport. Entirely self-sufficient: apartments, a small school, gardens, water, recycling-the lot. The perfect place to hide out come the end of time.
Assuming Project Lifeboat was on its feet by then. Still only in the blueprint phase Horatio hadn’t been able to fathom how they’d get chronon efficiency to the required levels in time. Despite the size of the company, Monarch didn’t have the capital, resources, or personnel to pull it off within five years. Lifeboat didn’t just want to shield the Tower; it required operatives that could survive for months in the wild. The energy reserves required to do that were monstrous. Unthinkable.
Her ear mic patched her into Monarch comms. A couple of people in her unit were already on duty, lower down, updating over Monarch frequencies. Questions were asked about the fate of Jack Joyce. Through this Beth knew exactly where they were keeping him.
Beth carded herself through the first security door and into the warren of corridors on thirty-five. She accepted that her progress would be tracked, questions would be asked, but it didn’t matter. By the time tonight was over Monarch would know she had given notice. Abducting their key scientist would make that pretty clear. She would find Jack, free him, and incorporate him into the plan. Assuming the idiot was still breathing.
She rounded the corner, was heading for the room where Jack was being held when the first pre-stutter hit. It was unexpected but she seized the opportunity, broke into a run, double-pumped her left hand to get the chronon-flow going, got between the two frozen guards at the end of the hall, and used her live left hand to swing the time-locked door open.
She skidded to a halt, stopping in time to avoid crossing into the stutter field which would have nullified her rescue rig and rendered her immobile.
Jack was in his chair, frozen.
Beth closed the door behind her. The stutter broke.
“What’d you say?” one guard said.
“I didn’t say anything,” replied the other.
Jack was reanimated. Beth held a finger to her lips. Quietly as she could she deactivated the stutter pylons.
“Hey,” he whispered.
She unfolded her knife, snipped the zip ties holding him to the chair, looked him in the eye, and explained in detail how she intended to hammer his balls flat on a stump.
The lights dimmed by half and Hatch waited as the music swelled. The videoboard lit up with an on-message color-and-movement mélange: orchestral segueing to dubstep as family-values imagery cut to forest-fringed highways, gear-shifting vehicles, rapelling troopers. Sweat, strain, sharp eyes, and bared teeth, all coming to an explosive halt on the Monarch logo.
In exchange for six figures a Mayfair agency had provided forty-five seconds of idiocy.
Hatch waited respectfully as the applause faded.
“Friends,” he said. “Let’s talk about death.”
The videoboard behind him flared white: a scene in a hospital ward. A mourning family gathers at the bedside of a fading grandmother.
“No matter your demographic,” Hatch said. “The number one killer is time.”
The scene cross-faded to a desert battlefield, a lieutenant calling for backup, and a pall of orange dust providing fantastic depth of field.
“At Monarch Solutions we have elected to remove time from death’s equation.”
Back in the hospital now. The lieutenant lay on a gurney. Recognizing the pylons that surround the fallen lieutenant’s bed, the crowd aahed, intrigued.
“Imagine if we could pause time for the terminally ill. Imagine a mortally wounded soldier, or a gravely ill loved one, suspended perfectly for as long as is needed, at the flick of a switch.”
Hatch snapped his fingers, and a gently luminous canopy enveloped the bedridden lieutenant onscreen.
“Chronon-stasis technology keeps the patient safe within a moment that will continue to self-divide for as long as a medical technician deems it necessary. The person’s condition will never deteriorate, and they will never age. If need be they can remain in that localized zero state for years, even decades, until a cure for their condition, or a donor organ, is found or can be grown.”
The crowd applauded.
“But there are so many more applications.”
Spotlights sprang to life, swept to darkened corners at the back of the stage. Exclamations from the audience as two Juggernauts cycled to life, stood erect, and strode to the front of the stage-laser targeters panning across the assembled crowd.
In the wings, Sofia Amaral tapped her foot and checked her watch. Her cue was coming up, but her mind was elsewhere. She couldn’t stop thinking about the notes Paul had salvaged from the Joyce house: Dr. Kim’s plans for the Regulator.
How had Joyce purloined those documents? Joyce and Kim had been colleagues at one point, years ago, that much she knew. William Joyce must have acquired the documents during his time as a consultant on Project Promenade, and then studied Kim’s designs in secret. What scraps that remained were littered with parenthetical notes and observations. Had Joyce been an early collaborator on the Regulator project? Had he felt sidelined? Had there been bad blood between the two?
No matter now. Her crucial finding was this: it was now clear that the device was not intended to function as a power source, but had been designed to release its massive charge in one focused burst. But why? Why had Kim built such a device? And why his charade of attempting to plumb the device’s secrets, as though its creation had been little more than a quirk of fate?
She shook her head. She hadn’t been trusted with the details. There was more going on and clearly it had been deemed above her security level. The man she loved had been keeping her ignorant; her expertise and professionalism had not been trusted. That hurt her, deeply.
This had driven her to reassess her own calculations, and try as she might she still could find no error of process, calculation, or reasoning. The end of time was approaching. It was going to hit, and far sooner than Paul believed. She had to speak to him. He may not have trusted her with the true nature of the Regulator project or her role in it, but Sofia’s pride demanded that Paul hear her on this. The life of the universe itself was at stake.
“Handing yourself in was a dick move, Jack.”
Jack kept his voice low. “I got arrested so you wouldn’t have to risk yourself.” He stood, rubbing his wrists.
“You can worry once I go back and meet my younger self. Until then I’m protected by a chain of causality connected to a collapsed waveform. Take this.” She handed him her gun.
“What about you?”
“I’ll grab one when the next ministutter rolls in. I need you to tell me when you sense one about to hit. We use those to leapfrog from concealment to concealment until we get to the ground floor. Once the main stutter lands, we take Sofia, get to the roof, steal Paul’s helicopter. With luck we can be back at the pool before the stutter breaks.”
“I overheard Paul saying he was watching the gala from upstairs. Security’s supertight up there.”
“Okay, fine. I’ve got Nick outside on standby. We can book it out the western exit, take our chances on the road.”
The screen behind Hatch shifted to a collage of ten faces: the ten students killed early that morning at Riverport University. Standing at the back, watching, Nick recognized two people he had tried to save: a man and a woman, gunned down on Founders’ Walk as they ran for his cab.