Her wounded leg ached, powerfully.
Ninety-eight percent of chronon trainees washed out once they hit their first laboratory stutter. Finding themselves isolated in a death-calm reality, a world in which they had no agency whatsoever, flipped most trainees out. They couldn’t open doors, move objects, eat or drink anything. They couldn’t be heard. Monarch psychologists concluded this triggered base-level lizard-brain fears of entrapment, inflaming terrors of suffocation, dying alone, being forgotten, and nullification of self.
Twenty percent of candidates who washed out in the stutter training phase left the company, followed by institutional stays at Monarch’s expense.
Something about it disassembled people on a code level.
Something about being in that tight curving corridor, the air thick with the hot nasal tang of superheated metal and the world gone voiceless, she understood why so many couldn’t handle it. It was as close as Beth had come to being buried alive.
She marched forward, fast, cleaned out her thoughts with improvised rituaclass="underline" handgun, loaded. Hair, tied and out of the way. Figured she must have been halfway around the loop. It was getting harder to breathe. She tried not to think about the possibility of the door not being open at the other end. Cricked her neck, rolled her shoulders. Three quarters. Breathe, Zed. Ashleigh. Starr. Wilder. Whatever. Breathe.
The exit hatch, dead ahead. Punched the release plate.
Fuck. Come ON.
She felt the charge bleed from the air. The Promenade deactivated, causality kicked back in.
The Promenade transformed completely.
Lighting flicked from warm to cold, amber to white. The sterile chill of environmentally friendly fluorescents, half of which didn’t work, replaced the warm filament bulbs.
As the floor beneath her feet snapped from waffle-treaded insulation to cheap and heavy iron grillwork she almost lost her balance.
Will’s pentagonal corridor was gone. She was now in a four-sided corridor, the construction of which made Will’s look like a masterwork of thoughtful craftsmanship.
Will’s Promenade was gone, Beth laying at the doorstep of what could have been the entrance to a moonbase’s methadone clinic.
Get it together, Wilder. This is just the load screen.
Beth leaned against the new wall. Her leg didn’t want to take the weight, but she made it. Ignored the pain, put it in a room, locked the door.
She glanced at the overheads. That type of fluorescent hadn’t existed when Will made the machine. The machine had grown older.
Gun held in a double-handed grip, Beth peered into the airlock.
Whatever this is, she told herself, it doesn’t end here. Whatever this is it can’t possibly hurt you. She still had an appointment to keep with herself.
Get out, reconnoiter, set a new destination, bug out. Simple plan’s a good plan.
The airlock had also changed. It could have been an old-school diving bell. Beth stepped inside, stiff-legged, the sound of the rusted grating a short squeal underfoot. The exit hatch was as heavy and submarinal as the rest of the machine’s new construction. There was a single circular viewplate bolted into the exit hatch. Through its grimy cataract she could tell the machine had moved. It was now in a very wide, open space. There were… arches? Just outside. Beyond them: light. Was the machine in some kind of pit?
A four-spoked iron wheel was affixed to the center of the hatch. Leaning against the hatch was a crowbar. Holstering her pistol, she wedged the bar into the wheel, got leverage on it, and pushed downward. Two attempts and it gave. Beth cycled the wheel, released the hatch, and swung it wide.
Thank fuck.
The air outside was little better than the stale, static atmosphere inside the machine, but she disembarked gratefully. Wherever she was, whenever she was, this place was almost certainly a basement. She descended a short stepladder onto a floor of reclaimed brick. The roof was wood-reinforced plaster. The basement was divided by a plaster wall, itself broken into three brick-reinforced archways.
Beth thumbed the light on her phone and looked back at the machine: it was a different beast now. Cruder, crappier, like a weekend survivalist’s attempt at creating a submersible bunker. The only familiar thing about it was the core-that was Will’s-wired into an odd new housing.
By the stepladder was a wooden workbench, scored from decades of use. Its undershelf housed the cabling and innards of what Beth recognized as some kind of chronon battery-but it was markedly different from the models Monarch was iterating upon. Fundamentals were all in place though: plus-sized chronon aggregator, some kind of capacitor, shitloads of insulation and cabling. One strand of the tech-spaghetti led up to a rubberized mat on which rested a thin plate of glass. The glass was illuminated with diagnostics-a viewscreen. The diagnostics told her the machine had a chronon charge of zero.
Her way home had gone out of business.
If she didn’t find a source of chronon energy someplace, the mission was a bust. Beyond the basement arches a curtain of blue-white light dropped straight down from a smashed-out ceiling. Cautiously she moved toward the light, noting banks of old freezers left and right, and wooden shelves stacked one atop the other, pressed to the sides of the pit. It was freezing in here. A wheeled scissor lift stood against the left wall. Construction lighting-halogen lamps on thin telescoping yellow stands-were arranged in four corners, dead-eyed. Looking up it was clear what had happened. The ragged lip of the pit was about twelve feet up, accessible by a metal ladder or the lift. Up there she could see what remained of what had once been a kitchen. Someone had knocked out the floor, without grace or care. They had also knocked out at least one of the kitchen walls. Someone had gotten a hold of William’s time machine core, had chosen this place to set up operations, and used this house as a cover-a shell over their subterranean base of operations.
All this she could deal with. What bothered her was her hearing. The sound down here had a strange quality to it, super-crisp. Her footsteps, an experimental cough, all began and ended very sharply. No resonance.
The atmosphere was thick with dust; she felt it against her face as she moved. Resisting.
She stopped by the ladder and gazed at the light that fell down from the upstairs world. She reached up, sweeping her hand gently through the day-lit particles suspended there. The motion of her hand carved a track, the motes moving aside obligingly, but nothing swirled to fill the space her hand cleared.
Stasis.
She shone her phone-light back the way she had come. Her passage from the machine to the ladder had carved a tunnel in the dusty air. She wiped a hand across her face. It came back thick with dust.
Holstering her weapon and pocketing the phone, she climbed the stepladder up to the surface.
Hands gripped to a floor paved in cracked red-and-white tiling, she emerged into what could have been either construction or destruction. The wall between kitchen and living area was gone; the jagged remnants of the wall-that-was remained at ceiling level, trailing scraps of flower print paper from the fifties. Seven or eight tables were stacked atop each other and pushed to the walls. A few were kept as surfaces on which to array tools and supplies. This had been a home converted to a sandwich shop. Chalkboards remained nailed to one wall, offering basic food and soup at steep prices. Four bucks for a glass of water.
There was a pile of mail gathered inside the front door. Beth walked through the clutter, shielding her mouth from the dust, and scrutinized the luridly enveloped junk letter at the top of the pile. The date stamp was enough to flush her heart with cold water. 2021.