The Last Enemy, page 14
part #3 of A Time Traveller's Best Friend Series
Worst case scenario…
Selroy trod softly back into his workroom with a nutrient-rich drink in one hand and a biscuit in the other, and opened his console. It lit up at once, replete with the usual displays and lights in a pleasing combination of teal and lemon, but around the edges warning lights in purple immediately glowed.
He touched the screen with a curious feeling of finality, and saw his worst case scenario in every interconnected warning light that formed an equation with a single, inevitable conclusion.
Selroy laid a finger over his comm and said, “Director Bell. I need to talk to you.”
Someone toggled the comms on and off, then on again in an unwary—perhaps a somnolent—movement, and a mumble of noise in the background said something like, “Who is it?”
Director Bell’s voice muttered, “The one with the green hair, dear. Go back to sleep.”
Selroy waited patiently. If he’d had friends, they would probably have called him Celery. Since he didn’t, he went by an assortment of appellations that ranged anywhere from sir to the weird one with green hair. Selroy didn’t mind the different names, so long as they were intuitive enough to be easily grasped: he couldn’t change his hair colour, and in general he was the most senior person in any given room, though he had no official rank. People often tended to say things he didn’t understand, and it was a relief at least not to have to guess if they were speaking to him or not.
Finally, Director Bell’s voice said, heavy with sleep, “Selroy? Is that you?”
“Yes.”
There was a brief pause, and Director Bell said impatiently, “Well?”
“Yes, it’s me. Selroy.” Selroy cleared his throat.
“What is the problem, Selroy?”
“Oh,” said Selroy. He cleared his throat and said again, “Yes. Well. It seems that the universe is ending today.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Director Bell, coldly.
“The universe is ending: I’ve been tracking changes in the timestream and the Other Zone for half an hour now, and I’m quite certain.”
“Are you joking—no, of course you’re not joking; you wouldn’t know how. You’re—you’re absolutely certain?”
“Yes, sir.”
“How long have we got?” asked Bell. From the change in his speech patterns, Selroy guessed that the man had risen and was now dressing hurriedly.
“I should think we’ve got about fifteen hours before things start falling to pieces in a meaningful sort of way,” Selroy said, his mind ranging over the different strands of information available on his dashboard. “There should be signs of decay already: you’ll notice it around the Facility sooner or later.”
Bell’s voice came sharp and hard. “What do you mean by falling to pieces? Is the timestream already at risk? Our mechanisms?”
“The timestream,” agreed Selroy. “And everything else. Things are starting to cease to exist.”
There was another pause; this one longer. Undoubtedly Director Bell was looking at his own console, in which case he could see a report of what Selroy had already seen in his own workshop.
This time, Director Bell sounded as if he was finding it hard to breathe when he spoke. “And this has something to do with the bits of the Facility that are apparently missing?”
“No; the bits of the Facility that are missing have to do with the universe ending today. They’re a product, not causative.”
“The universe—” Director Bell stopped, as though frustrated, and began again. “How can the universe be ending?”
“It was bound to happen someday,” opined Selroy. “It shouldn’t have been today, but here we are.”
“Selroy,” said Director Bell, and by the weary sound of his voice, Selroy guessed that he had finally found the right question to ask instead of the inane ones he had hitherto been asking, “why is the universe ending today?”
Tuan Li woke with a gentle feeling of wellbeing that lasted for roughly three seconds after he opened his eyes and smiled at the curved, closer-than-usual ceiling above him. He wasn’t aboard the TCS Slider; he was aboard the Upsydaisy—finally, and properly.
For those three seconds, he was as contentedly warm on the outside as he was on the inside; then a small, angular whirlwind with too many sharp edges and far too little care exploded into the room and launched itself onto him.
Tuan gasped as Kez’s full weight drove itself into his stomach, creating the agony of a thorough winding while depriving him of the breath to fully express that agony. Her weight wasn’t a sizeable number, despite her currently nineteen years, but as with every other aspect of Kez, size was very much deceptive, and served merely as a funnel-like conduit by which to channel all of her energy into a single, potent force.
“’Allo, TuanTuan,” she said, grinning down at him. “Ain’t you glad you’re ’ere?”
Tuan groaned on an indrawn breath, and Kez wriggled until she was sitting next to him instead of on top of him. He hoped for a reprieve, but the movement was only so that she could flop down and hug him tightly enough to force the groan back out of him again.
“Missed you, TuanTuan,” she said.
TuanTuan said “ouch” as she bit his arm, but couldn’t help the glad smile spreading over his face again. “Is that what it means?” he asked. “Biting me?”
“Means I’m glad to see you,” she said, in a muffled voice.
“There are other ways to tell people you miss them,” Tuan said, but he wrapped his arms around her and returned the hug with all the gladness in his heart, squeezing his eyes shut to prevent her seeing the tears that had gathered there. She probably already knew, but Tuan would prefer not to actually weep on her.
“Yeah?” Kez pulled away a little just as he opened his eyes, but only to rest her folded arms on his chest and her chin on her arms. She grinned at him. “Missed me, didn’t ya?”
“I always miss you,” Tuan said.
Again, Kez moved; this time she wriggled forward a little and planted a very small, very precise kiss on his nose. Tuan froze; blinked. Kez sat up and he followed her, and this time he was looking down at her, as incapable of words as before.
Without knowing exactly what he was saying, he finally said again, “I always—I always miss you.”
“You never say it, though,” Kez said. “That’s the first time. Fort I was the only one.”
“Where did you learn…that?” Tuan asked, touching his nose.
“Seen Arabella wiv Mikkel,” explained Kez. “I’m not a kid, you know.”
“You can’t tell me Arabella and Mikkel go around kissing like that,” Tuan said. He had been assigned to the TCS Slider for service—Mikkel’s ship—which meant that he had also seen Arabella and Mikkel together when they thought they weren’t observed.
“Yeah, but it’s wot she does when he does summink she likes,” Kez said. “Collars ’im and pops one on ’is snoot.”
“You don’t—you don’t go around doing that to everyone who does something you like, do you?” asked Tuan, rather worried.
Kez stared at him. “’Course not,” she said. “Ain’t anyone else but you who does stuff I like.”
“But what if there was?” pressed Tuan. He was unsure of how to get the answer he wanted other than by outright demanding that Kez not kiss anyone but himself, and he was rather afraid she might hit him if he said that. “Would you kiss them, too?”
Unexpectedly, Kez laughed. “Ain’t met anyone as clever as you, TuanTuan,” she said. “But you’re also flamin’ stupid sometimes. ’F anyone else did what you do, I wouldn’t like it, ’cos it wouldn’t be you.”
There it was, realised Selroy. The actual question Bell had wanted to ask from the start. He wished, not for the first time, that people would ask what they wanted to know in the first place instead of asking questions all around it, as if they expected him to guess what they were asking.
“Someone untethered two Fixed Points at once,” he said. “I don’t know which two, because they no longer exist. The universe has split into three versions of itself, and whichever one we’re in is falling apart. The other ones probably are, too, just not as quickly as this one. It’s one thing to unfix one Point; unfixing two at once is just asking for trouble.”
There was silence on the other end of the comm for a moment or two, then someone bustled through the door. Director Bell, Selroy saw, as he turned to greet the interloper. He didn’t know why the man had to come to Selroy’s workspace: there was nothing they could discuss face to face that they couldn’t have talked about over the comms.
Behind Bell was a v-formation of Very Important Men who were tousle-headed, half-dressed, and highly alarmed.
“You’d better have a good explanation for this,” Bell said. “Because—”
“I already told you,” said Selroy, rather annoyed. “The universe is falling apart. If you don’t want to know about it, you shouldn’t have asked. It doesn’t need your permission.”
A babble of sound rose into the air, to be split by one central voice that bellowed, “Cut it out!”
An uneasy silence fell; grew in both unease and awkwardness. Selroy, who didn’t really care about awkwardness or unease, said into the silence, “It won’t do any good standing around here. I mean, it won’t do any good standing around anywhere else, either, but I’m going to be rather busy and you’re all in the way.”
“Selroy,” said one of the men, “what do you mean, it won’t do any good? What can we do to stop this?”
“You can’t,” Selroy said simply. “It’ll happen no matter what we do. Unless we get knitted back into the other timelines, that is; and in that case, none of us will exist in the state we currently do anyway.”
“How do we knit ourselves back into the original timeline, then?” asked Bell.
“We don’t,” said Selroy. “Well, we can’t: no time.”
Bell sounded rather strangled. “How do we stop ourselves dying?”
“Can’t do that, either,” Selroy said.
“Selroy,” Bell said, through his teeth, “What are you going to do?”
“I thought I might work on the Newlands Box,” Selroy said. “I would have liked to have had more time on it, but I can probably do a decent job on it anyway, with the time I have left.”
“The Newlands Box is a glorified message box that hasn’t got anything to do with time, space, or the death of the known universe,” Bell grated. “I refuse to allow you to work on it!”
“I hope you won’t,” said Selroy, running through the three viable scenarios wherein he could once more get his lab to himself and secure all the resources he needed. “It would really make things difficult for me and wouldn’t help you at all.”
One of the scenarios Selroy had in mind involved Bell’s death, and he would much rather not kill the man. Death was messy and itchy and made it hard to concentrate; Selroy wanted to concentrate as best as he could. If Bell and the others would only leave him alone, it would be much easier to begin. He had reported the situation to them, and now it would be preferable if they would leave him alone to work. There was so little time left.
“I need to concentrate now,” he told Bell. Sometimes being straightforward seemed to work particularly well, and sometimes it didn’t: Selroy simply had no more time to waste. “If you’re going to ask more questions, please make sure you ask important ones.”
“What is being done about reality as a whole?”
That at least was an important question. Selroy unlocked the Newlands Box and connected it to his console, and as he did, said over his shoulder, “Remember those aberrations you’ve been keeping an eye on?”
“I’m aware of them,” said Bell, and Selroy was pretty sure he was still speaking between his teeth. “So is the Time Corp, if that matters.”
“Time Corp always matters,” said Selroy. “But they’re stuck to their Core, and it isn’t always accurate—especially now. That’s why I came to work for the Incursion Specialists instead: I wanted to meet those two aberrations. They’re the only ones who can stop this from happening in the original timeline, too. I’m going to send them help.”
“Send…them help? Why? And how?”
Selroy kindly ignored the first two questions. Bell always did need help asking the right questions. “There’s the Newlands Box,” he said. “I’ll get that finished and try to find a way to ship it off. It won’t stop the universe from ending here in this reality, but it might stop it in the original.”
“Selroy,” said another of the men, breathing too heavily, “we want to know what you’re going to do to fix this reality?”
“Nothing,” Selroy repeated. “We’re not even original. So long as the original universe stays around, we’ll all be there in one form or another.”
“You want us to sit around and wait for the universe to fall apart?”
“You can do what you like,” Selroy said, by way of offering a sop. “Have a cup of tea; eat a biscuit. It won’t matter. You might as well do something enjoyable. I don’t need your help.”
“Thank you,” said Bell grimly, “but I’ll stay, all the same.”
Tuan didn’t mean to, but he found himself tugging at the hair behind his ear, his face warm.
Kez gave her deep little crow of laughter and said, “Told you. I ain’t a kid anymore.”
Tuan would have liked to try and kiss her properly, but a shadow fell by the hatch and Marx’s dry voice said, “There’s breakfast in the mess-room; we’ll discuss sorting out some real quarters for you once you’re finished eating.”
He didn’t wait to hear them reply; didn’t stop to ask why the two of them were sitting nose-to-nose, either, but Tuan didn’t dare to stay where he was. Maybe one day he’d be as brave as Kez when it came to Marx, but he thought he’d have to trust Marx significantly more in order to be able to do so, and he was rather sure that Kez was the only one who had reason to trust Marx to that necessary extent.
Tuan cleared his throat and wriggled off the bed. He pulled on a jumper he knew to be Kez’s favourite, and asked through the cable-knit fuzz of it, “Why did you two just steal the Newlands Box again?”
“Saw a kerfuffle in the Core an’ knew we were s’posed to do it.”
“That’s—that’s no reason to go doing things,” Tuan said, emerging from the jumper with the hair on his neck standing on end. “Time Corp is sure to catch you if you go around doing things like that! They have access to the Core too, you know.”
“’Course!” scoffed Kez. “But they don’t know we got access to it, see? Works out well. We just try to do stuff in an unexpected way.”
“How can you do things in enough of an unexpected way to confuse Time Corp if they already know you’re going to be there?”
“That’s the thing,” said Kez, chuckling again. “Don’t reckon you understand wot ’appens, TuanTuan. The Core just records stuff an’ updates as it ’appens: they can’t update stuff quickly enough if we’re always changin’ our minds. An’ sometimes while it thinks we’re doin’ summink, we’re doin’ summink else.”
“I vaguely follow that,” said Tuan. “But that still doesn’t explain how you knew you were going to do something because you saw it in the Core, did it, and still weren’t caught in time.”
“Cos the Core doesn’t know it’s us, of course,” Kez told him. “We know it’s us wot’s doin’ it, but they don’t. They just record it as summink that happened.”
“What about the times when they know it’s you? There are loads of direct references to you in the Core!”
“Yeah, but ’ow many of them is Fixed Points?” countered Kez, grinning. “Anyway, look at it like this, TuanTuan: today we pinched the Newlands Box, but we also pinched you, too.”
“You didn’t steal me, I came along!” Tuan said indignantly. He had fought very hard to be allowed to come along, too; it had taken years for Marx to agree to it, and while Tuan thought he might, distantly, understand the reasons as to why, he still resented that achievement being taken away from him.
“Yeah, but the Core don’t know that,” pointed out Kez. “It thinks someone made away wiv you, see? So instead av goin’ there wiv the idea of stealin’ you, we’d go there wiv the idea of stealin’ the box!”
Tuan stared at her for a very long time before he asked, “Is that what you did?”
“Nah,” said Kez, grinning. “We just wanted the box. We’ve been chasin’ it around for a while. Oi. You get breakfast; I gotta check on summink.”
Selroy didn’t so much find himself left alone as he studiously and determinedly ignored everyone in the room until they stopped asking questions of him and left him alone to do what he had to do. One or two nagging annoyances remained in the room, but Selroy was very good at ignoring persistent niggles, and he continued to do so, grateful for his comfortable quarters at the WAOF’s Incursion Specialist Facility that meant it was extremely unlikely that any of those niggling annoyances would ever be waving a weapon in his direction.
What did he need to do? First, thought Selroy, he needed to make sure he knew where those two aberrations were. He also needed to pinpoint where the trouble had begun, but that wasn’t possible; the Fixed Points that existed in another reality—the unfixing of which had created his own reality—didn’t exist here. In order to save the real universe, he would need to make use of the only people besides himself who seemed to be able to make changes and cause waves in other realities. He had already been tracking the two aberrations for some time, insofar as they could be tracked, which wasn’t much, and he wasn’t quite certain of his ability to find them today.
He searched his system for them, momentarily encountering a hiccough that suggested there might, in another reality, be three aberrations, then found exactly what he was looking for. There they were, about to do something that would make the timeline bulge a bit. Selroy hoped that meant they were already working on the same thing he was working on. It would be nice not to have to explain too much: he’d already been pretty specific with the files he put in the Newlands Box, after all.
