Second Paradigm (16 page)

The first taxi that he found had a sleeping driver. Yuri shrugged to himself and rapped on the window. The man leaned back in his seat, ignition off, and snored. Startled out of his slumber when Yuri knocked on the glass next to his head, he rolled down the window. Yuri smiled at the man. “Sorry to wake you up, but I was hoping that you were available for a fare,” he said as he flashed a fifty dollar bill.

The driver blinked and yawned, stretching his arms as wide as the cab’s interior would allow. “Don’t worry about waking me up. A long, dead night. Hop in, I can get you where you need to go.” Yuri popped open the door and climbed into the cab. The newly wakened cabbie looked back in the rearview mirror as Yuri settled into the cab. “Where you headed?”

Yuri shut the door. “The desk at my hotel said there was a twenty-four hour coffee shop over by the air force base. You know where it is?”

The driver nodded and turned the car on, kicking it into drive and pulling out into the empty street. “It’s only about a five minute drive from here. I’ll have you there in no time, man. It’ll be about seven or eight bucks though.” Yuri nodded and watched the dark buildings pass by in the night as they drove through the islands of light the street lamps created. He marveled at the smell of the cab, the subversive odor of combusting hydrocarbons masked by the dangling air freshener on the rear view mirror. How different the twenty-first century was from any other time.

The journey, as the cabbie had promised, took about five minutes. Yuri smiled when they pulled up to their destination and gave the man the fifty. “Keep the change. I’ll need you to pick me up in about an hour if you can do that.”

The driver nodded. “Sure thing man. See you in one hour.”

Yuri walked into the shop and bought himself a cup of coffee. He took it plain black with four shots of espresso mixed into the already dark roasted blend. He would need as much energy as he could get. This old century stuff was nowhere near as good as his time’s coffee, but the flip side was that a cup of joe was a cup of joe.

He steeled himself and left the shop, walking down a side road to break into a classified military facility. For a field agent, used to hard, physically trained discipline, this would be a challenge, though doable. For an intelligence officer, willing to use his brain in a methodical and unhurried way, this would not be a challenge at all.

Forty minutes later, he walked back away from the facility, having finished the deed, and surprised at what he had found on Lucy Frost’s desk. Why was she pushing Christopher Nost away from the discovery of the travel nano machine he was about to discover? It made no sense. Nost had to invent the machine and then die; it was all in the mission dossiers he had read through trying to unravel the paradox back here.

He filed the thoughts away for later and scanned the semi dark parking lot, looking for Alex Zarth. His intuition had told him the man would be here. And his hunch had played out correctly. Across the lot, concealed by shadow lurked a figure that could only have been the twenty-seventh century renegade. Yuri started walking towards him, not bothering to try to conceal his presence.

The man waited for him. As he approached the Shadow, Alex held out his hand and Yuri stared at it for a second.

“Come now, Yuri, you are a brilliant man. You’ve pieced together enough to know that I would be here waiting, so you must also know what I am waiting for.” He finally got to hear Alex’s voice. It was a pleasant and intelligent voice, melodious even, not at all filled with the diabolical madness that Yuri had been expecting.

Yuri started and handed Alex the papers he had stolen from Lucy Frost. “Of course. Here you are. I have to ask though, what first clued you into this … situation?”

Alex laughed. “Thank you for the credit to my intelligence, but to be frank, someone tipped me off. They came back from C Forty-five to hire me. Said they didn’t have any local talent that could get the job done. So, they got me instead.”

Yuri nodded at that. He had suspected something similar, even if he had been unwilling to voice the suspicion to himself. And it could not have been a future incarnation of the Time Corp, otherwise they would have alerted the past mission centers that they were operating there. Yuri suspected he knew what that meant, but pushed the thoughts to the back of his mind.

Not his concern. “You know Alex, that when all of this is said and done, if I’m not fired, I’ll have to go back to hunting you.”

Alex let out a bark of laughter. He had a rich and deep laugh that Yuri found he trusted.

“Yuri, that will be a damned hard goal to accomplish. You see, we’re both going to die. No other course of action will solve this paradox except the one that results in our deaths.”

Yuri swallowed. He believed Alex. He nodded, accepting this tidbit that had been floating at the back of his mind as a possibility since he made the jump back. “Do you know how and when I buy it? I know that … well … I want to know how long I have.”

Alex nodded. “Fair request. I know you won’t try to stop it, since subjectively it is in my past. Tomorrow night, in this parking lot, you will meet Lucy Frost. You will hand off to her a file of all your research, as well as all your speculations about this event nexus. You will be shot from behind. I’m sorry, truly. I would have loved the chance to get to know you, Yuri, and to chase the hunt with you again.”

Yuri nodded again. “I see. One other question for you then. Do you know how long you have? Your death was never recorded in any era we could find in the databanks.”

Alex stepped out of the shadows and Yuri could see he looked thoughtful. “Yes, in fact, I do know basically how I will die. It’s odd to me that you asked.”

As Alex scratched his chin, Yuri noticed that the skin was heavily bruised, almost to the point of being jet black around his jaw. “Well, I don’t see the harm … on one condition.”

Yuri shrugged. “What is the condition? That I do not share it in the file I give to Frost? Fine. You have my word.”

Again Alex smiled in amusement, like he was privy to a joke no one else knew. “You nailed it in one. All right. I’m going to die of old age, in a sense. I’ve managed to break the Point of Origin and travel into my future. So now my body thinks it should be a hell of a lot older and it’s trying to catch up. To be specific, my body thinks it should be in the neighborhood of fourteen hundred years older than it is.”

Yuri’s mind spun, churning out math and theory. “But, if that’s the case, you should be dead already. There is no way that the math works unless the aging is an immediate factor.”

Alex laughed again. “Essentially you are right, Yuri. Except that I’m a hell of a lot smarter than your average bear. I did not go unguarded into the future. I’ve not much time left, but I did manage to buy myself some time by outthinking the situation in advance. And on top of that I got lucky. You know how lucky I am. Let’s leave it at that though. I have to use my time wisely, Yuri. Good luck in the next life.”

Yuri blinked and Alex was gone. With a sigh, he turned around and headed back to catch the cab.

Time: Unknown
Location: Unknown
Operation: Classified

Wanda opened her eyes and tried to take stock of her surroundings. The world spun and she felt the same sickness that most people get from drinking too much. She blinked a few times and managed to convince the world to swim into focus. The nausea in her stomach thankfully subsided to a controllable degree.

Something bound her wrists, waist, and ankles to a chair. It didn’t feel like rope, but it held her tight. A man sat in the room with her on a stool about ten feet away.

He smiled as she looked around the stark white room. “Welcome back from dreamland, sunshine. Enjoy your rest? You frankly looked like you needed it, so I let you sleep a bit longer than you would have from the drug.”

Other than a large black bruise disfiguring his jaw, he was ruggedly handsome and tall.

“You are the one who shot me at the courthouse, aren’t you?” Her mind was still groggy, but a memory marched into view for her. When she had been knocked out he had not had the bruise on his jaw.

He nodded.

A name swam into her addled brain. “Alexander Zarth. That’s you. The infamous criminal. Which begets the question, why am I still alive?” She tried to access her HUD to send out a signal only to discover that her contact lenses had been removed. “And you didn’t have that bruise when you took me down. What happened?”

He grimaced and rubbed his jaw. “Long story about the bruise. I’d rather not bore you with the sundry details. Though maybe I will sometime down the line. First, I want to go over a couple of basic details with you, so I can release your cuffs. Will you listen without interruption?” he asked.

Wanda Garret thought for a second and decided that the situation was not overtly hostile. If he had wanted her dead, she had no doubt she would have been. So listening could not hurt. “Alright, Mr. Zarth. You have my undivided attention.”

Alex smiled to himself. “Okay then. We’ll keep this as basic as possible. Firstly, I have hacked your nano system. Yes, I know it’s impossible to do that. Regardless, I have. If you try to travel in time you will fail. Instead, all that will happen is that you will become violently ill. Second point we have to cover, I have triggered a destruction bug in your system.
Any
attempts to counter hack or access your programming will result in your entire nano system destroying itself. This will not be pretty, and I will not be a happy camper if you attempt this. Which means that I will make you as unhappy as you have made me at that point.”

“This will not kill you. Don’t worry. But it does mean that you will be stranded here in the middle of the wilderness, not knowing when you are. And believe me, you are far from any civilization. Third point that we need to cover is that your nanos are now tied into my biomonitor. Until I release the departure frequency telling them I am leaving, any substantial change in my biosystems will alert your nanos and you will suffer the same fate I do.”

Alex stopped and scratched his chin, thinking for a moment before continuing. “I don’t like pain, and I suspect you don’t like needless pain either. Repercussions for attacking me will be exact, up to and including death. So please do not do anything foolish. I need you alive, and you need you alive even more, unless you want your husband to die. Rule number four, and the final rule, you are going to spend the next ten years of your subjective time stream here.

“Get used to it, it is a fact. It may seem unpleasant to you, but this is simply how it has to be. Once we hit the ten year mark, my inhibitors to your system will break down and allow you to leave. I know you will wait because it has been over ten years in my subjective time since I caught you, and under a week ago for me you were released from here. Now, since I am sure your mind is spinning from all of this, what questions would you like to ask? One at a time, please.”

Wanda thought for a moment and made her decision. The impulse to fight was strong, but her training was stronger. In a captivity scenario, you had to play by the captor’s rules until you found the way to break them. “I think this will be simple. I’d like to ask to test these things. If I can ascertain that they are true at some basic level, then I think I will be able to accept this and live within these rules. Or rather, I won’t have a choice about it. Is that acceptable to you?”

Alex nodded his assent and she felt the pressure of her bonds lift. The next half hour felt like a living hell. She pushed and pushed against the limiters, and every time it felt like a jackhammer was slamming against her intestines from the inside, trying to rip its way out. Even trying to hack the limiters produced a head splitting effect. One by one she went through the Corp’s list of how to break limiters, and every trick failed.

The only gratifying part of the experience was hitting Alex. Once she had caught her breath again and felt halfway stable, she asked the other question that had been nagging at her. “Okay, I believe you. Now what the hell am I supposed to do for the next ten years?”

Alex smiled once again at some private joke. Turning his back to her, he slid his hand across a spot on the wall that looked no different from any other spot on the smooth surface.

The motion activated a panel that had been concealed in the drab room. “You have a fairly spacious compound imprisoning you. Exercise, entertainment from your time, and here in the file marked Nost Paradox is a lot of reading. I’m not sure it’s actually ten year's worth of reading, but it is about three million pages of heavy information for you to digest. I expect it will keep you busy. If you need me to help explain anything, simply exert your will and aim towards me. Do
not
try to travel towards me, try to sense me. It will call the subjective me to you to help you answer any questions that you come up with.”

She nodded to Alex. “I’ll thank you for some privacy then, so that I can get down to the business of being a prisoner.”

No sooner had she finished the sentence than Alex vanished, time hopping out of the room. Wanda burst into tears and started punching the wall, hammering at it until her knuckles were bruised and bloody.

4016 A.D.: No man’s land, between the great western
city-states

Heat waves scoured the horizon, shimmering in a red and pink haze, creating battling optical illusions and provoking the eye by promising even more tantalizing visions beyond the edge of sight. Overhead, the sun shone down relentlessly, burning the ground and heating the sand underfoot until it scorched the air above it. Hundred-and-thirty degree air hammered at Alex, ripping his breath away with the extreme change of climate.

Acclimation into this new environment would have to be fast. Already the heat and sun were hammering on his system, draining his body’s resources and burning his skin. He scanned his surroundings, looking first for shelter. Desert sands stretched away in every direction, seeming to fill the horizons with death and offering no respite from the harsh environment.

Alex took his battered fedora out of his pocket and donned it, feeling a small measure of relief from the shade it provided. But far from enough, he was all too aware. Shelter could be anywhere he realized. The mirages being created by the extreme heat made his vision an unreliable tool to use beyond the range of about two hundred yards. Time to implement plan B and hope his guess had been correct.