Martin Hatch was known as the man who may have saved it.
The frozen world outside was waiting for him to succeed.
The Paul Serene asleep on campus now had known this. Saving her, making pancakes, holding her hand… he had known all this.
“Shit.” Dropping some charge, she reefed out a fat coil of textured cabling from the tray beneath the workbench. “Shit shit shit.” It ended in what looked like a compatible plug: multipronged with a threaded safety collar. It took a little force but eventually the connector snapped into the battery and she screwed the collar down tight. He had known.
Transferring a c-charge to the laptop she dumped half her rig’s power into the machine, releasing it from stasis. She checked the ladder, listened. Nothing.
A few keystrokes and the power gauge on the canister lit violet, the laptop registering a steady flow of c-particles from the canister to the corridor.
“One point two one gigawatts,” she muttered to herself, wandering over to the generator. “One point two one gigawatts… Here we go.” She double-pumped her fingers, pressed her palm to the flat casing of the diesel generator parked on bricks by the wall. “First you get sentimental over Gibson’s kid, now you do this.” Quickly she pulled off an access panel, hoped for the best, and kicked it off. “You’re too soft for this, Starr. I should have chosen someone else.” The generator sparked to life with a furious complaint, shuddering violently. Closing the hatch muffled the sound quite well.
She moved back to the laptop and tried not think about having just buried someone alive at the end of the world. “One point…” Oh God. “… twenty-one gigawatts…”
She had a choice.
“You’re weak, Starr.” Her voice resonated briefly, died suddenly, in stasis. “Go back.”
Events can’t be changed. We’re slaves to cause and effect. Paul Serene lives. Paul Serene founds Monarch. Paul Serene causes the Fracture. You’re weak. You’re weak. You’ve fucked up. “I’ve got to kill him.” But you can’t kill him. “I’ve got to kill him.” It’s not possible.
“You told me your name was Beth.”
In the reflection of the laptop’s screen she saw him: at the foot of the ladder, daylit.
She wasn’t afraid. She was ashamed. “Paul.”
She double-pumped her fingers, brought the terminal online, remembered she’d already done that.
“You know who I am,” he said.
“I know you’re a good person, and a sweet kid.” Locked it in. “And I know that you’d never want to hurt anyone.”
You’re the reason I am who I am. My whole life was authored by yours.
He was bare chested, in his worn-out jeans, standing at the foot of the ladder… a look of utter betrayal on his face.
“You weren’t asleep,” she said.
“Martin Hatch told me our machine was the only one. No previous working prototypes.” He took a few hesitant barefoot steps toward her, through the dust-mote tunnel she had carved out of the basement air. “You were going to kill me?”
She’d only ever heard stories about the powers Paul Serene was meant to have. If Jack’s fumbling around was a comparison, this may not end well for her.
She reminded herself: you can’t die. Not yet. By the same rule Paul couldn’t either. So where did this leave them?
Somewhere beyond the walls, Shifters howled.
Paul’s limbs locked, his breathing caught in his thin chest.
“Why do they make that sound?” she asked.
“We hurt them…” He choked on the words, swallowed. “Causality… potential… possibility… it all fountains off living people. It’s excruciating to Shifters.”
“That’s why they don’t bother the people frozen outside.”
“It’s why they kill,” Paul snapped. “To take you from being anything to being a thing.” His eyes settled on the machine. “Is this why they wouldn’t let me stay in the Tower?”
So that part of his story was true?
Paul’s eyes fell on the machine. “Am I supposed to go through that? Does it work?”
She felt the weight of it at her back, like a threat. “Paul. You have to be brave enough for an entire world here, man.”
He wasn’t listening, walking closer, halfway to her now. “What does that mean?”
“You know what happens if you leave here.” Paul wasn’t listening. He moved closer still, eagerly, his eyes tracing from the machine to the generator, back to the laptop. “Paul, back up.”
“Fundamentally, it’s almost identical to our model.”
Shifter shrieks shotgunned through her every cell. Beth and Paul shocked away from the direction of the sound, the front door, the world outside.
He spun on her, eyes bracketing nothing but animal violence. “Get out of my way.”
Six months learning to speed-draw paid off in that moment, side-drawing from inside her jacket and locking him square… but only for a moment. Paul vanished, her fingers wrenched, and the weapon swept away. She cried out in pain, clutching her hand.
He was at the laptop, her gun next to the keyboard. The dates were already changed.
She rushed him from behind, pointlessly. He was gone before she even got close.
As her world vanished in a blast of pain and light her inner ear lost all sense of vertical and horizontal. A bed of cold stone crashed into her spine, and the only sensible thing that penetrated her undoing was something someone had told her a long time ago in Arizona: “It’s the hits you don’t see coming that get you.”
She was bone and pain, a small mess of connections and associations that didn’t fit together. Something pneumatic engaged, and she heard something vent with a deep hiss. She blood-felt the discordant rage of Shifters, skipping and phasing toward them from the outside world, homing in faster as their excruciation escalated.
Paul was talking to her, panicked, moving about. He stepped over her legs to get to the laptop. “… this’ll never happen. You’ll be someone else. I’ll be someone else. I’ll never, never…”
The shattering cries of Shifters had become deafening.
“Paul…” She almost drowned on his name. Rolling sideways was like having her head stepped on. She cough-cleared her mouth of blood, watched sprayed droplets catch on suspended dust particles. Her voice was a croak. “Change is impossible-”
“It’s a time machine, you idiot! I helped build this thing!” He was white with fear.
“No…” Her hands pressed to the stone floor, trying to keep her gorge down. “You didn’t.”
He was moving again, backing for the entry ramp.
“I know the science. If we made this happen we can… I can unmake this.”
She wasn’t having this conversation again. Her hand slapped down onto the benchtop, grasped for the gun. It wasn’t there.
Paul had it. He pointed it at her. His voice was fragile. “Please don’t.” He had never hurt anyone before. He had never hit a woman. Now he had a gun pointed at one. She could see Paul was collapsing from the inside, knowing already what he was becoming.
He wasn’t looking at her, though.
Roiling humanoid non-shapes, barely coherent, stood at the far end of the basement. Snapping. Jigging. Agonized.
The gun wavered in Paul’s hand. “Please… don’t let them get me.”
She laughed. It hurt. “You can’t go back, Paul. You can’t change things.” She pointed to the laptop. “Because you haven’t primed the machine.”
Onscreen an amber text box requested: ACTIVATE?
Shifters rounded in their direction, caught sight of their infinite potentials, their fountaining causality. Their hatred and madness hit them like a physical thing.
Metal screeched as the corridor’s locking mechanism cycled. The airlock seal cracked, the lock auto-spinning as atmosphere vented and external hydraulics levered the door aside.