The Meyer-Joyce field had broken down unevenly as it lost the charge to sustain itself. At first one galaxy moved out of synch with another. Then planets. Looking up at the sky the people in Riverport would have seen the stars become jumbled. That would have been when they realized-knew-that their reality was caving in on them, redesigning itself in ways that couldn’t possibly work.
Continuity errors between nations would have come next. The first aircraft disasters would have occurred then. Shortly after, cracks and fuckups and discord would have shocked the country… and then, in no time at all, ships would be stuttering into bridges that didn’t have time to rise, traffic would be smearing through crosswalks, mechanisms would have broken down, planes would have fallen into oceans, mountains, fields, and streets. Time would have been carved along strange new borders that shifted and shrank. “A” would no longer fit “B” as well as it once had. As electric wiring disagreed with itself, families would have slept soundly in houses that burned to the ground around them… while others would have burned to death in houses that hadn’t yet become bonfires. The dead would have come back to life, wondered what had happened, and frozen mid-sentence to never move again. Animals would have turned on owners. Minds would have snapped.
The world around Beth wasn’t easily understood. As apocalypses went it wasn’t as mercifully comprehensible as hordes fleeing the killing flash of a mushroom cloud. Every single stage of The End was represented here, before her eyes, pulled and pushed in ways that made no connective sense. The world had been blanketed in a kaleidoscopic Venn diagram of fluctuating stutters as the universe’s chronon field fought for its final breaths. The spaces in between stutters-the places where causality still worked-would have been places of high madness. One by one these oases of time and causality would have dried up, myriad on/off stutters vanishing completely as the M-J field died and everything finally stopped.
Here, at The End, the Earth was a planet-sized diorama, staged by a child who had grown bored with his tiny toys.
On a sidewalk, a humanities student played guitar for coins, while a portly Mexican in a Captain America T-shirt shielded an arguing couple from a Molotov cocktail thrown by a gleeful old woman who had retrieved it from an array of such weapons set up next to an academic bookstore, bearing the spray-painted words: “Embassy of the End Times-All Welcome.”
Beth had seen every vehicle in a dealer’s lot set alight, while across the street people wandered out of a warm café sipping cocoa.
Another anomaly, like the hanged man and his tree. A helicopter had attempted an emergency landing on the Riverport University campus, and failed. Forty feet above it the same helicopter was attempting the same emergency landing: same markings, same horrified expressions on identical occupants, doppelgangers all.
She found these places difficult to look at. It strained the mind in ways it was not built for, and she quickened her pace past such sites.
When the end came, it would have gone from business as usual to bedlam very quickly. Every one of these people would have seen something different, depending on where they stood. Completely alone they would have been locked in their own version of universal death by madness. Step to the left and it would have been something else entirely. Step to the right, something else again.
By then the total collapse of the M-J field would have been a mercy, locking everything into a final agreed-upon tableau.
The existence of this tomb planet told her that she would fail. She would not save the world. Nobody would. Look around. This is where we end up.
But it wasn’t where she ended, she knew that. At some point Beth was destined to meet her younger self, and would ensure that girl was trained. That meant Beth was getting out of here, and it meant that when Beth met her past self she still believed enough in the mission to ensure that young girl was taken and trained.
That meant there was hope: It meant her future self had reason to believe it was still worth trying to save the world.
This world may be still, but she had agency. She could retrieve the Countermeasure and, if not activate it in 2016… she could activate it here. That’d work, right?
Didn’t matter. It was a direction. That was all she needed right now.
She needed to find chronon energy, stat.
She turned toward the university.
A copse of twelve-foot-high polycarbonate stelae occupied the site of the old library. Each of the four-sided columns bore a plaque memorializing a student who had died on the morning of October 8, 2016. A piece of the destroyed library was entombed inside each stela: a fragment of scarred, charred wood suspended two feet from the ground.
Fifty feet away from this small crystalline forest stood another monument: a piece of rough black stone. Bolted into it was a plaque of textured, blackened brass, with these words:
Land of Heart’s Desire,
Where beauty has no ebb, decay no flood,
But joy is wisdom, time an endless song.
– W. B. Yeats
New buildings had been erected over the years, designed to pair with the older construction on the western side of the campus. They swept eastward from the crystalline hump of the Quantum Physics Building to curve south. To Beth it looked as if the bulk of the university buildings were like a top-down view of a pair of arms encircling the campus, the Quantum Physics Building as its bejeweled head. The monument to the dead students was in the southeast corner, separated from the street by frosted hedgerows.
Across the way from the memorial a young woman, collar turned up against the cold, had walked southwest along a companion path to Founders’ Walk. Beth made her way toward her-a little tricky as it turned out. The pathways were covered in stutter-locked snow that didn’t yield to her tread, making the ground uneven; but, surprisingly, because the ice wasn’t melting beneath her steps, not slippery.
Whoever the girl was she had been strolling alone, her earphones in, a smile forming on her lips. Beth wondered what she had been listening to as the world ended.
Beth pumped her fingers twice and touched the girl’s arm.
The charge on the rescue rig dipped significantly, the smile bloomed on the girl’s face, and as momentum kicked in, she spilled forward. Arms pinwheeling backward she righted herself, saw Beth suddenly there, and reflexively panicked. With a scream she pitched backward, her boot concreted within an inch of stutter-locked snow. She hit the ground hard, breath punching out of her with a dull, human sound. Stunned, blinking, she struggled to her elbows.
“Hey hey!” Beth said. “I’m friendly. Here.” She extended a hand. “Hand up.”
The girl swatted the hand away, eyes wide with outrage, and turned her attention to her trapped foot.
A voice echoed across the expanse, like a gunshot: “No!”
At the northeastern fork in the path, where it carried on north toward the Quantum Physics Building, stood a lone, desperate figure. Male. Mid-twenties. Lean beneath a scavenged weather-rated jacket and jeans gone faded and worn along the knees and thighs. Even from that distance Beth made out the shadows under his eyes, the frantic hair, anxious and fretting.
Beth immediately recognized Paul Serene. Early twenties, filthier, but undeniably him. The Paul Serene who had first traveled through Monarch’s machine, that night at Riverport University.
In that moment all she felt was the weight of the gun in her armpit.
“Leave her,” Paul shouted. “She’ll draw them in! Leave her!”
Draw them in. She knew exactly what he was referring to. The campus seemed clear. No movement other than herself, the girl and young Paul Serene-still waving urgently.