Paul nodded, buried his head into his bunched-up jacket, his hand vise-tight on hers, and shuddered, grateful to no longer be alone.
A room, just for her.
Paul had a gym bag he used to store cans of beans, sachets of meal replacement powder, and bags of old T-shirts. The chronon canister fit neatly into it. She left it by the dome’s main door, then went back into the chronon accumulator lab and climbed through the open floor panel. Paul was still asleep, fingers curling and uncurling in his sleeping bag blanket.
She couldn’t kill him. She couldn’t. Beth remembered the look of terror and betrayal on that girl’s face as she had woken up to the end of the world. The terrible sadness that had flooded her face as she died.
Beth had done that. She didn’t have it in her to kill another innocent.
So she did what she could do. She kneeled beside him and, deeply ashamed of herself, turned off the chronon umbrella. The light faded from inside the tiny hidey-hole. And in no time at all Paul’s breathing stopped. It was just Beth now, kneeling in the twilight.
“I’m sorry,” she said, wiping the back of her hand across her eyes. “I promise we’ll do everything we can to fix this.”
She got up, bending beneath the low ceiling, wiping her hand on the legs of her fatigues. Hoisting herself aboveground, she double-pumped her fingers and moved the floor panel into place-sealing Paul Serene into his sad little refuge for the rest of lightless, self-dividing eternity.
She snatched the bag from beside the dome’s doorway and got out of there, the canister feeling heavier than it should.
It took a relative hour to get from the campus to the gutted building that housed Will’s machine. Exhaustion weighed her down by the time she got there. She hadn’t slept since before the university shooting and her leg still wasn’t taking weight as well as it used to.
She took a direct route to Will’s machine, an almost straight line between campus and Monarch Tower. Company vehicles, hardware, and troops were thick on the main streets, making for the Tower at speed as causality fell to pieces around them. A BearCat had swerved, two wheels lifted off the ground. A Monarch operative hung out the side, carbine loosing a final spray before the vehicle surely flipped. Beth noticed the damage to the vehicle’s antiballistic surfacing-deep tears, ripping whole panels free in places. The killing blow had ripped along the passenger section, killed the gunner, and took out the vehicle’s chronon rig. They’d been running from Shifters.
A Juggernaut was caught in a pose of alarm and distress, most of the front plating torn from the protective suit, the shoulder-mounted micromissile pod hanging by a single joint. The pilot had been killed halfway through jettisoning himself out the back of the rig, like a skeleton stepping backward out of its own skin.
A four-way intersection was where two thick conical sprays of destroyed vehicles and dead people had plowed into each other, disintegrated at high impact, got airborne, and sprayed killing debris in two fat directions simultaneously.
Causality had fallen into a disagreement with itself here. The flow of traffic both ways had stuttered, machine-gunning twin rivers of vehicles into each other at speeds that should have been impossible. It was as if hours of traffic from two directions had fed into each other in an instant. Cars, shrapnel, and bodies hung in a wide spherical radius centered on the intersection, debris so heavy that the site was like an imperfect, damaged dome of steel studded with contorted bodies.
Car frames reduced to ugly blasts of metal, human bodies ruined and unidentifiable. In those last moments every rule had gone out the window.
This would have been happening the world over.
With all her heart Beth hoped her parents hadn’t lived to see it.
She released the front door and entered. “Get to July fourth, grab the Countermeasure, and split.” She slung the bag across her shoulder and climbed down into the excavated basement, doing her best to compartmentalize everything she had seen at the intersection-next to the compartment set aside for what she had just done to Paul. “See you there, Jack. Don’t stand me up.”
Not Monarch Paul, Jack’s friend Paul. The kid who couldn’t operate solo at parties; the kid she and Jack had relied on to keep an eye out for the cops when they were up to no good, much as Paul had hated it; the kid who had sat through a couple of episodes of Team Outland one night, defending the character of the show’s dork-genius.
The place gave her the screaming heebies. Not just the basement but the whole tomb-like silent world. She had to get the fuck gone, as a matter of priority.
Cricking her neck, she began piecing together what had to happen next.
The corridor needed a conventional charge as well as a chronon load. The core would also be brought online electrically. Whoever had relocated Will’s machine down here had provided a generator, and it seemed to be in good shape. All she needed was for the chronon charge in each critical component to hold long enough in this chronon-free world for her to run the fastest lap of her life.
She double-pumped her hand and reanimated the clear-screened laptop. The charge she imparted lasted long enough for her to lock in her destination date: 4 July 2010. She unzipped the bag and hauled out the canister. It was a standard Monarch capacitor design, sealed and insulated. The socket design was unfamiliar; she hoped it was standard to 2021. If Monarch tech and Will’s kit-bashed jalopy weren’t compatible she was going to have to make a run at the Tower for another way out of this time zone. Fuck that.
She just wanted out of this grave to someplace where she could breathe life for a few more years. This place was too final, too sad, too… meaningless. Too nothing. She had never realized how much she depended on ambient sounds and smells and surprises to know she was alive. Voices. The way snow didn’t crunch under her feet, the way streets didn’t smell like carbon monoxide cut through with the occasional sharp line of perfume or aftershave, the silence… were killing her by degrees. It was claustrophobia by way of agoraphobia. It was like falling off a cliff, flailing and helpless. Surely it must be what astronauts felt in deep space. To be the only living thing in a void is to be both dead and forgotten, but alive enough to know it.
A blade of paper she had adhered to the canister’s shell by some latent static charge, slid to the benchtop: a printed screen cap. Wikipedia. The subject was Paul Serene.
She skimmed the article. It was all there. Everything she needed to know between then and now. A thought occurred and she opened the gym bag. The bottom of the bag was floored with a nest of similar clippings. She gripped the printout, read it all from start to finish in a rush.
Humanity knew it had been killed by Paul Serene. The narrative was simple: on the morning of October 8, 2016, he had sabotaged and activated a device-a time machine-that Monarch Solutions had decommissioned for ethical reasons. Twenty-four hours later, Paul Serene issued his one and only communique to the world, detailing what he had done and why: the M-J field had been dealt a fatal blow. The universe had a few years of life left. In that time the chronon levels would drop, causality would become increasingly schizophrenic, and then-finally-time would cease to flow altogether.
In the days after Martin Hatch had come forward with a proposaclass="underline" Project Lifeboat. He spelled it out very plainly: the end of time was inevitable, but humanity could survive it if Lifeboat was operational. Humanity’s best and brightest could work beyond the end of time to engineer a solution.
Paul Serene was known and remembered as a monster: the man who had erased the universe.