She felt panic rise. She didn’t like it. She barely recognized it.
She took the fear and compartmentalized it. Moved on.
“Tell me how we’re going to fix the fracture in the M-J field.”
“It will be a broad-spectrum solution-a carpet bombing-but it’s the best I can do with the resources available. It will be my life’s work. It’s also a long shot.”
“When can you start?”
He still hadn’t looked at her, his eyes still ranging over nothing in particular. “I started twenty minutes ago.”
Wednesday, 24 May 2000. 6:11 P.M. Fifteen months, twenty-five days after time core activation.
Point of view tilts sharply up, then down, then centers. Camera appears to be positioned on a writing desk. Location appears to be an attic-mostly empty.
William Joyce enters frame, sits, adjusts his glasses.
“I was averaging ten entries per three-hour videotape, resulting in a collection of over sixty cassettes. It became apparent to me after a… passionate… entreaty from my visitor that this posed a significant security risk. As you can tell from the empty bookshelves behind me that collection has now been sanitized. I will be restricting myself to a single videotape for the purposes of ordering my thoughts henceforth.” He gathers his thoughts. “I…”
Joyce reaches off-camera, retrieves a mug, drinks from it, winces.
“I ran the numbers again today. My initial ten-year projection holds firm, but the cost has not-as expected. I… have had to take the extraordinary measure of…” His voice fails, momentarily. “Without funds the Countermeasure I am creating cannot be completed. It follows, then, that if I fail in this task the universe itself will…” He becomes angry at himself. “Today I extinguished my parents, with the stroke of a pen, by taking what money they had set aside for my younger brother and funneling it toward my work. I took their final gift to Jack, the boy who is all that remains of my family… to correct my mistake.” He hit himself, in the chest, hard. “William Joyce! William Joyce… killed… everyone.” William’s formerly guileless expression has flushed, teeth locked. “I am the terrible thing at the end of the world. The figure poets and mystics foretold. And it is not great. It is not proud. It is not mighty.” He howls and then claps his hand over his mouth-as if afraid of being discovered. He listens, hears nothing, resumes in a lowered voice-trembling. “Buffoon. Simpleton. Idiot. I did not stride toward Armageddon, I stepped in it-like shit in the street. How does a person survive this kind of self-knowledge? I killed the universe. I killed… everything. It is destroying me… and I can tell no one. No one.”
He drains the mug. “I will require materials similar to those I used in the initial construction of the time core-and then some. I am tempted to neutralize the core I have but the sick truth of it is I need a working model for reference and observations. At present I believe I can refine my work on the chronon aggregator, allowing for the devising of a kind of… it’s a stupid term but ‘chronon bomb.’ ‘Bomb’ in the sense of an intense, localized hypersaturation of chronon energy calibrated to trigger particle propagation at a rate faster than I would expect an M-J fracture to foster dissipation. However, more research needs to be done in a range of areas-I can’t just make the fucking thing go boom. Propagation is one thing, but the damage to the field is another. If the device doesn’t attend to the problem at the very heart of the disaster-then causality will be left to bleed out once more. At best.”
He reaches for his mug, finds it empty, sets it down. Looks off camera. “She remains in the woods, in the shelter she built for herself. Residing in the town isn’t possible as she has no paperwork and can’t very well take a job. She’s let her appearance go, looking very little like the woman who stepped off the Promenade last year, and she avoids Jack like he’s contagious. And his little friend Paul. If I’m honest I fear we’re both losing our minds.”
Wednesday, 16 August 2000. 7:00 P.M. Riverport, Massachusetts. Seventeen months, seventeen days after time core activation.
She had to wait until spring before starting work on the shelter. Before then she had slept in the barn. Staying in the house was not an option. Things were complicated enough as it was without letting young Jack see her before he was due to actually meet her as Zed in ten years’ time. The first time she caught a glimpse of him from the barn, two feet shorter and seventeen years younger, was like vertigo. And anyway, Will wanted to limit contact with her for fear of learning more about the future than he needed. That was fine by her. So she got some bedding and set it up in the control room in the barn. The ground was freezing, but it was a small room, easy to warm with a space heater.
So she had killed time, watched actual music videos on MTV, and managed to avoid the final reactions to Clinton being acquitted, all while being quietly grateful that she wouldn’t have to witness and live through everything that was coming after in New York the following year. She had always known she would be here, and had always imagined the experience to be… cute? Fun? Instead, interacting with so many things that she knew to be dead-the news, the culture, a CRT TV, dial phones, newspapers, the music, the lingo-left her feeling ghostly.
Her time here had ended long ago. She didn’t belong.
Both she and Will agreed that once a potential future was witnessed that future then became inevitable. With that in mind she supposed they could have spoken candidly about everything that would occur between now and 2016… but they didn’t. It made Will exceedingly nervous and it made her homesick as hell.
Friday, 18 August 2000. 7:10 P.M. The Joyce farm.
Irene Rose had been with the company for almost ten years. Working under Randall Gibson had been some of the most fun she had ever known. He was the one who gave her the handle “IR.” As in Irene Rose. As in infrared. As in she was very good at murder-in-the-dark.
Gibson, IR, Donny, and the other muscle were the closest thing any of them had to a family. That fit Monarch’s selection criteria for their particular role. A couple years ago, Gibson had told Irene Monarch had been trawling her background for eighteen months before she’d even heard the name “Martin Hatch.” This was when Monarch had been half the size it was in the present day. She’d been running combat operations through Iraq and Afghanistan for years when the call came in.
No family, flexible morality, battlefield experience, top third percentile success rate, psych profile configured for uncommon resilience-that was the starting criteria. What it boiled down to, really, and everyone in the family knew it, was that Hatch wanted highly skilled, mentally reinforced, intelligent, and self-aware sociopaths who were perfectly loyal to a paycheck if not a person. Loyal without fault.
Monarch had her pulled back Stateside, then kept her waiting six months. She took a job in Vegas, analyzing poststrike drone footage of funerals in Afghanistan. A big burial turnout meant the target had a lot of support, so IR spent hours and days going over hi-res RPA footage and matching attendees against available intelligence. Before she clocked out each day she filed recommendations for future targets. She hated the job. She was a doer, not a giver.
IR had trouble breathing the same air as civilians, with their dumb concerns and cartoonish ideas of masculinity. She had no idea what Gibson got out of being married to one.
She had been one week away from heading back to the Middle East when Martin Hatch had called her in personally, and flown her first class to Massachusetts.
The non-disclosure agreements surrounding her employment with Monarch had been dense, with the ink-and-paper termination clause being standard and the verbal one being quite literal.