Timecaster: Supersymmetry (4 page)

Besides, the only other timecaster in the Midwest was the guy brutalizing me. And even if his infraction was revealed, I guessed the world would turn a blind eye. Everyone thought I was the biggest mass murderer of the century. Teague would probably get a medal for beating me up.

I wiped my bleeding nose on my shoulder, then stared Teague dead in the eye.

“I’m not the guy you think I am, Teague. And I can prove it. Timecast back an hour. I came out of a wormhole at the brewery. A few seconds earlier, an alternate version of me came out of the same wormhole, with Vicki. He’s the one you—”

Teague swung at me again, but this time I was ready for him. I lowered my head so he hit the Ebooks by J.A. KonrathEa r stop of my skull. It hurt, but it hurt his bare knuckles worse.

Teague conveyed his disapproval by kicking me in the stomach. I flopped onto my face.

“If this is about Vicki…” I managed to sputter.

Both he and I were in love with Vicki. Even though he’d seen her first, she married me instead, and Teague and I went from being like brothers to becoming enemies.

“Vicki?” Teague laughed, taking a compression bandage off his utility belt and winding it around his knuckles. “I tap that whore twice a week, and she loves it. I got over that a long time ago.”

“So why the hostility?”

“You think playing dumb will save you from this ass-kicking, Talon?”

“Whatever you think I did, it wasn’t me. Look at my hands. They’re normal.”

Alter-Talon’s hands had been blown off defusing a bomb, and he’d been receiving surgical donor replacements that his body kept rejecting. So he came into my universe to steal my hands, among other body parts I’d grown attached to, because I was an identical genetic match.

Teague didn’t bother to look. Instead, he stomped on my groin, which was also one of the parts Alter-Talon wanted to appropriate.

“Time out,” I said, groaning. “Let me say that I’m really really sorry for whatever I did.”

“You’re sorry?” Teague snorted, then kicked me in the ribs. “My mother lived in Boise, you asshat.”

On my earth, Teague’s mother lived in Chicago, and leased him his apartment. His apartment was tiny, and she charged him too much and criticized him all the time. Teague often grumbled how he couldn’t wait for the old bat to kick off.

“I thought you hated your mother,” I said.

“I did. But she was still my mother.”

He began to kick me. I passed out somewhere around my fourth or fifth rib breaking.

Alter-Talon
(who didn’t consider himself Alter-Talon, but rather the original Talon because this was his earth and his universe) had to knock out Vicki soon after they went through the wormhole. Unlike his own wife here, who’d had her spirit crushed after years of being married to him, this Vicki was a fighter.

While her feistiness amused him, she kept trying to get away, and the simplest solution was to jab her with a sleep needle. Though his hands and feet were rotting, he was strong as a hyperboxer and easily threw her over his shoulder and ran out of the brewery.

He knew Talon would follow him. But he wasn’t ready to face him just yet. First he had to find a new transplant doctor, and then set a trap for Talon that wouldn’t damage the p talking about sciscreamingI puarts he needed to harvest from him.

Alter-Talon had parked his vintage Mustang next to the brewery in a handicapped spot—one of the only perks of having his appendages constantly falling off. Biofuel prices were at an all-time high, so the car cost a fortune to drive. But Vicki—his Vicki, not the one he was carrying—was very good at her job as a state-licensed prostitute, and she brought in a lot of credits.

After putting an obfuscation disk on her arm, Alter-Talon shoved this Vicki into the passenger seat, dug a rubber glove out of the aptly named glove compartment, and crammed his peeling hand into it to prevent anymore tissue from sloughing off. Opiates and a nanotech nerve block kept the pain of his own flesh rotting away to a minimum. But there wasn’t much to be done about the smell. The constant reek of putrefaction was a non-stop reminder of his condition. Even with the advancements in surgical techniques and medicine, his body still rejected cadaver parts. And the windows were getting smaller. These last set of hands began to decay after just three weeks.

He made a fist, watching a foul, pink-colored liquid seep out of the glove at the wrist. If the odor and pain weren’t awful enough, his hands just felt wrong. They didn’t belong to him. Instead, they acted like alien creatures that had attached themselves to his arms. And the auto-immune drugs he’d been taking to suppress the inevitable donor rejection were now having the opposite effect, forcing his body to reject his real appendages.

Alter-Talon knew, deep down, this was a large part of the reason for his psychotic hostility, and that killing half a million people was a pretty severe consequence of his diminished thought capacity. But he didn’t care. He wanted his body back, no matter how high the cost.

Also, being evil did have a certain degree of fun associated with it.

He dug an antique key from his vest pocket and used it to start the car. Then he pressed his earlobe and said, “Call Vicki.”

The headphone implant internally connected to his inner ear dialed his wife’s number. She answered the call, moaning.

“Pleeeeeease,” she said. “Pleeeease turn it off, sir.”

Alter-Talon forgot he’d kept her LLVV on before he left. He gave the off command. “Pay attention,” he told her. “I’m probably going to be arrested very soon. I need you to do as we’ve discussed, and then take me to the hideout. I won’t be acting like myself, so you’ll have to convince me. I’ll probably be talking crazy as well, saying that I’m somebody else. Do you understand?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ll do as I ordered.”

“Of course, sir. I always do.”

Alter-Talon frowned. Sometimes he wished she showed a little backbone. Granted, if she ever disobeyed him, he’d beat her to death. But her complete subservience did take some of the spice out of their marriage.

“If you have any clients today, cancel them. Wait for the police to come by and take you in. Tell them nothing the antidote for the nanopoison to get Schaumburget, but demand to see me. Got it?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Hang up.”

Alter-Talon merged onto the expressway, the small biofuel scooters frantic to get out of his path. The Mustang’s registration was in Vicki’s name, and he had an obfuscation patch over his chip, so the authorities wouldn’t be able to track him. They would, however, be able to track the Vicki in the car with him. That was fine, for the moment. It would buy the other Talon some time once he was arrested. Or else he’d be quickly executed and cremated, which was unacceptable. Alter-Talon had searched the multiverse for a genetic match, and didn’t want the government reducing his new body parts to ash.

While trapping Talon shouldn’t be too difficult, Alter-Talon wasn’t sure what the next step would be. Once he’d harvested Talon’s body parts, Alter-Talon needed to find another parallel universe to live in. That would be impossible without Sata’s help.

Things were getting complicated. And time was growing short. As he pressed the accelerator, Alter-Talon could feel his toe bones splitting through the decaying flesh.

There was also the matter of the poison. Sata had injected Talon with a nanopoison, and he didn’t have long to live.

“So much to do, so little time,” Alter-Talon mused.

He glanced over at Vicki and felt something strange. Unlike his Vicki, this one was unaugmented. No breast enlargement. No ass implants. No LLVV. She looked younger, almost innocent, even though she too was a SLP.

It made Alter-Talon remember his own wife, before his accident. Back when he still had feelings for her.

He’d kidnapped Vicki to lure Talon to him. His plan was to then dispose of her.

But now he was thinking differently. Maybe he could replace his old, worn-out wife with this one. It might be fun to break-in a new spouse.

New hands. New feet. New genitals. New wife.

She wouldn’t like it, of course. She’d resist. Fight back.

Alter-Talon would enjoy that.

“You have to be healthy
for your execution,” the prison doctor said. “It wouldn’t be humane to kill someone who had injuries.”

He was injecting my cracked ribs with carbon nanotubes, repairing the damage that occurred when I “accidentally fell down in the back of the paddy wagon a couple of times” according to Teague. Thankfully, I’d also been given a painkiller, so the large and scary-looking needle only made me cry a little bit.

I had a little over forty minutes before my trial recommenced. Apparently, they’d found one of my wives—the Alter-Vicki who lived at our regular address. But the other suddenly disappeared from the radar. I guessed Alter-Talon block# bananacibookI pued her chip from transmitting. That meant my chance of being freed was zero.

So not only had I failed myself and Vicki, but I’d also failed the half a million people of Boise. Even if, by some miracle, I got out of jail, rescued my wife, got the TEV back from the brewery, and sent Boise back to its proper location (sans intelligent, carnivorous dinosaurs), I also needed to stop Michio Sata’s murderous rampage while simultaneously convincing him to give me the antidote for the nanopoison he’d injected me with.

Also, I had a hangnail. Not the lead item on my priority list, but those things really sting.

My only good bit of luck was the Miranda pill had finally worn off, so I could close my eyes in silence without being informed of my right to remain silent.

A guard stuck his head in the infirmary, while Dr. Mengele tapped on his nanotube needle with a small hammer, to make sure he filled in every last crack in my bones. Nanotubes were the strongest substance known to man. I briefly considered trying to snatch a needle to use as a weapon, but the six guards in the room were watching me like I was the last meatball on a buffet spread at a fat farm. A meatball they all wanted to shoot.

“The prisoner has a visitor,” said the guard.

“All finished,” the doctor said, smiling. “Try not to lie on your stomach for the next thirty-eight minutes of your life, or these won’t set properly.”

I thanked him, putting on my bright orange prison shirt. It had a large smiley face on the front. Who said death row had to be dreary?

The six guards, plus the new arrival, lead me in wrist and leg shackles out of the infirmary, down a hallway decorated with more smiley faces, over to the visiting area. The booths had stools welded to the floor, and a wall of thick, unbreakable glass separating the inmates from the guests.

Using a marker, the guard who announced I had a visitor wrote the number 98829202 on my palm. Once I was sat on the stool, the guards all backed off, allowing me my state-guaranteed right to privacy. I faced an empty stool, waiting for my mystery guest. Would it be Alter-Talon? Teague? Sata? A reporter, who wanted a final statement? Some relative? On my earth, my only living blood relatives were my parents, who moved to Northern Ireland after the country gained independence. The thought of seeing them calmed me some, even though they were only alternate versions of the real thing.

Then Vicki walked into the visiting area and I actually did smile, my heart getting lighter. She was a red-head, one of the few natural ones left in the country, and her face and body were as close to perfection as human anatomy could get. But Vicki’s most attractive trait was her personality. She radiated an inner magnetism that made people happy to be around her. I’d caught hundreds of murderers, rapists, and bad guys, but marrying Vicki was easily the single best thing I’d ever done with my life.

My smile faded when she sat across from me. Her breasts were too large, lips too full, hair too long. This wasn’t my real wife. This was Alter-Vicki, Alter-Talon’s wife.

I pressed my earlobe and spoke the numbers printed on my arm, accessing her headphone. I couldn’ applause.

&osd at the same time.

ett hear her through the thick glass, but her voice was loud and clear in my head.

“I did what you asked, sir,” Alter-Vicki said.

She didn’t look happy to see me. In fact, she looked somewhere between scared and stoned. She also had a slight sheen to her, like she’d rubbed a thin layer of oil over her body. This oil was also on the faux-leather catsuit she wore, the green a perfect match for her eyes.

“What did I ask? Do you know where my wife is?”

Alter-Vicki reached down, into a pocket of her skin-tight leggings. She pulled out a small, white, bean-shaped object and held it in her palm.

As I watched, the object unfolded, then unfolded again, continuing to double in size until it was as big as a hyperbaseball.

In a quick, rehearsed motion, she slapped the object against the safety glass between us.

“Lean back, sir,” she said.

Whatever the thing was, it secreted some sort of clear goop, which dissolved the glass quicker than a sheet of toilet tissue in a rain storm. Not wanting to stick around for my state-mandated execution, I wasted no time crawling through the hole. Alter-Vicki squirted some of the goop onto my hands. It was warm and tingly, and under its own power crawled along my skin, disintegrating my handcuffs, leg irons, and supplication collar.

An alarm went off, and just as I got to my feet on the other side, guards began firing at us.

In this world, as in mine, real firearms were banned, replaced by non-lethal guns that fired Taser rounds. These bullets, made of wax, housed tiny needles, each fitted with a transmitter that attracted Tesla lighting. Once shot, the needle stuck in your clothing and/or skin and you were hit with a million volts coming from the Tesla field that surrounded the planet and powered the country’s wireless electronic devices.

Alter-Vicki and I were each hit with dozens of rounds. But rather than stick to us, they bounced off harmlessly. They stung—roughly the equivalent of being snapped by a rubber band—but we didn’t get shocked.