She knew what this was, when she was.
A stutter was a hiccup, a moment temporarily self-dividing. Eventually it ends and time continues. As such the odds of her emerging directly into a specific split second that had been affected by a stutter were statistically impossible. The only way the machine could have delivered her into the heart of a frozen moment is if the machine’s destination parameters had been thrown forward so far into the future that there was nowhere-no when-farther to go.
She reached for the faux-brass door handle, stopped, caught by the sight of her rig-thimbled fingers, the wires tracking up her sleeve.
Beth rapidly squeezed her right hand together twice, felt her fingertips tingle. Quickly she touched the door, freed it from the stutter, opened it, and double-squeezed again to kill the flow. She was going to need to conserve all the energy she could.
The street was the same as the sandwich shop, which was the same as the basement: uniform temperature, no resonance to sound. Muted colors, as though life had bled from the world.
Beth knew immediately where she was. The treelined street led straight to Riverport University campus several blocks away.
The library was gone. A forest of twenty-foot-tall crystal prisms stood in its place-a memorial, she supposed. The dome of the Quantum Physics Building was still there. No doubt repaired and refurbished after Gibson had gotten through with it.
The skyline wasn’t so different. A few more skyscrapers, a few more apartment complexes. She turned and looked the other way. There it was.
Monarch Tower. Still the biggest bastard on the block five years into the future, but not unscathed. Something had taken a swing at that misshapen obelisk, and snapped a bite out of its top third. Black glass and reinforced concrete had been swept away, the rectilinear honeycomb of its innards now open to the air. The familiar distortion-flicker of a chronon field enveloped the top of the building.
Someone was alive up there, and keeping the lights on.
It had been a brisk winter’s day when everything had stopped for the final time.
Riverport. The world. The planets in their rotations. Galaxies, even.
Every last thing in Creation’s inventory accounted for, and stopped.
2021 was when it happened. All her efforts would come to nothing. The Countermeasure would not work.
She sniffed, ran the heel of her palm across one eye, and checked the charge on the buckle of her rescue rig. She had three hours before she became one with the universe.
17
The man’s legs were tense, angled, frozen in a position of struggle. He had stepped off the hood of his car, which he had parked next to the tree for this purpose. The noose about his neck was electrical cable. If Beth looked at the tree from one angle it was burning. If she looked at it from another it was dead, the branches caked with ice. From another… there was no tree, the man and noose hanging from nothing at all.
Not everywhere was as torn between timelines as this tree; almost everywhere, thankfully, was consistent. The upsetting product of conflicting realities coming to a bizarre settlement, yes, but blessedly concrete.
The man had failed to kill himself in time. The terror in his eyes told Beth he had known that.
Paul had said time would end in five years, and he had been right. The evidence bore that out: the changes to Riverport, headlines, dates on phones. Despite the evidence of their eyes and Sofia’s calculations, the rising chaos of 2016 hadn’t stopped the world.
How?
Her rig had two hours left in it. She had been wandering for an hour. Walking, and trying to piece together how her universe had died. The best place for answers was probably Monarch Tower, but she had no interest in spending her final moments anywhere near that place. If things ended with her never having to see that deconstructed butterfly logo again that’d be just fine, thanks. Instead her feet had taken her around the familiar, through parks and down side streets, taking the scenic route toward the university.
Almost every block had men and women bearing tracts and alarmist sandwich boards: SELF-ANNIHILATION LEADS TO THE FIRES OF DAMNATION!
Riverport was a jumbled toy box, the panicked mingling with the sanguine; men and women walked hand in hand past parents and children rigid in the act of fleeing from something that no longer existed in this settled-upon waveform. On the sidewalk outside the park Beth almost tripped over the head and arms of a man protruding from the sidewalk-his reality betraying him to some facet of another reality-one in which the sidewalk was a hole in the ground, probably-delivering the grim fate of materializing inside earth and concrete.
There was a pattern to the evangelists: they were all preaching the same platform. Not Jesus, not redemption, but “suicide is sin.” Every single one of them, from ecstatic to miserable, railed at the world: meet the fate God had intended for them. Do not rob the Lord by meting out death at your own hand.
She scanned what she could from the static, windblown, and weeks-old pages of Metro in parks and bus shelters. She spent an iota of her rescue rig’s energy to release a fairly intact issue from where it had been tucked beneath the wipers of a parked electric car. Garbage was everywhere, the papers were out-of-date, windows were smashed. Everything pointed to a society where people just stopped going to work-including cops.
The dateline on the papers read January 12, 2021-and those papers didn’t seem fresh. Newspaper distribution would have broken down days or weeks earlier. Birthrates were way down, attendances at religious services way up… even as the number of self-proclaimed faithful in developed nations had plunged. There was a recession, China was capitalizing on that, and it looked like many First World police forces were now so heavily militarized they were indistinguishable from the actual military. Beth noticed American cops wore the Monarch logo somewhere on their uniform. All of which was by the by. The paper she held was stained and stiff and fading. Things would have gotten a lot worse since it had been printed.
The main headline told her everything: in the week preceding the catastrophe suicides had spiked by more than 5,000 percent globally. People were ending their lives in droves. Governments the world over had been using Monarch as a means to comfort and calm the populace with assurances of progress being made to correct the instabilities triggered in 2016. Clearly, at some point, people stopped buying it and the wheels began to fall off civilization as everyone chose between dying or not living. The conversation among Christians circled around the issue of “can you get to Heaven if you never die” and the counterargument that the end of time was the end of the world as we know it and was the herald of the Lord’s return. Secular sources urged people to remain calm, illustrating that the subjective experience of the end of time would be unremarkable. One moment chaos, the next the M-J field may have repaired and all would be well.
Beth knew that was wrong. This was the end. If the M-J field ever repaired then the “end of time” would have been a sub-second pause in the flow of causality. The odds of the machine threading that needle and landing her in it were statistically impossible. But if the end of time is the end of the line… then getting here was as easy as hitting a brick wall.
The police had stopped being police, for the most part. Economies had begun to collapse. Death, mourning, and fear had become a global pandemic. Looting had become par for the course.
The universe ended. Her machine’s progress-or non-progress-was a testimony to that. And it never, ever recovered.
She tossed the paper into the street. It flew open, joyfully, fluttered, slowed, barely touching the icy blacktop before halting altogether.
These people, the ones who had stuck around for the end, had seen their world lose its mind on every conceivable level. The end hadn’t come neatly and cleanly; it hadn’t been a quiet cessation that had claimed them unawares.