Second Paradigm Read online

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  Chris waited in the holding cell for over three hours, staring out to the world through a three-inch thick Plexiglas window. The glass, besides obscuring what he could see because of its thickness, also had some sort of thin metal woven through it in a diagonal pattern that formed diamonds, ostensibly to stop prisoners from smashing through the three inches of transparent plastic, squeezing through a tiny window, taking out armed guards, and escaping down the sheer wall. Just in case I had a hope of escaping they had to reinforce it with metal, Chris thought bitterly. Every moment of those three hours dragged by like an eternity as he watched the seconds creeping along on the wall-clock behind the guard, who was ignoring him while reading a science fiction novel at a desk.

  It looked like the same clock hanging in the courtroom. How long will it take them? he thought over and over. How long? He fantasized about moving time forward to get it over with, but soon gave up on the idle daydreaming, knowing that it was futile to try and distract himself. It could be days, he thought … or even weeks. Anger welled in him over this unfair situation, a throbbing tide in his blood, eaten away by a corrupting fear. Conflicting emotions ate at him until he became so lost within himself that he didn’t even notice when tears ran down his cheeks.

  Chris’s stomach lurched when the external door opened. His hopes and fears were answered as the bailiff walked in and, with a quick glance at him, began speaking to the holding cell guard. Chris took a deep breath, trying to make the nausea settle. It’s not going to be good. He tried to banish the cancerous thought, but it entrenched even before they opened his cell door. A certainty lay in his stomach like a lead weight. It’s not going to be good.

  As the holding cell door opened, the guard noticed the despair in Chris’s eyes and handed him a small stack of napkins. “Here. Wipe your cheeks off.”

  The guard looked away for a moment to give Chris a chance to compose himself. “I know it’s scary for you right now, but don’t give up. Me and the other guards have been watching your case on the TV and none of us think you did it. We can’t be the only ones thinking that way.”

  Their eyes locked for a brief moment. Truth gazed back at him from those eyes and with crystal clarity Chris, realized that his life had finished. Hope … they know I’ve lost, too. It’s not just me. As he focused on centering himself, trying to retain some shred of his dignity, he looked once more to the guard.

  “Thank you,” he said with no emotion in his voice, no fear, no hope. As they walked down the hall the guard once again became all business, but as Chris entered the courtroom and started walking towards his attorney, he felt a slight, reassuring pat on his back from the bailiff. He knew it should be consoling, but it only served to reinforce the hopelessness in his mind.

  It seemed like he had been through this scene a dozen times prior—and nothing he could do would change the scripted outcome of this play. As he took his seat, his lawyer leaned towards him. Alan Dunwich, a man who surprised him with his humanity and friendship. The man was older, in his sixties with pure silver hair. He was large, not necessarily fat, but headed in that direction as a lifetime behind a desk caught up to him. In many ways Chris thought him to be truly larger than life. “Something has happened,” Dunwich whispered. “I don’t know what, but as soon as you left a guy came in to talk to Judge M—”

  “All rise. The honorable Judge Miller is presiding.” The bailiff interrupted. Chris and Alan stood. Judge Miller emerged from the antechamber wearing a troubled demeanor, sat, and banged his gavel. He looked around the hushed courtroom, then turned towards the jury and sighed.

  “Foreman of the jury, have you reached a verdict?”

  “We have, Your Honor.” A wormy man with a greased comb-over and a Freddy Mercury moustache stood and handed the bailiff a slip of paper. The bailiff, in turn, relayed it to the judge, who unfolded it and read. His eyes gave away nothing.

  My life is on that paper, Chris thought. My continued existence hangs balanced on a thread of twelve people’s interpretations of the words of two men.… A man who cares deeply for me, and a man who hates me.

  Judge Miller frowned once as he looked again at the slip of paper, and then handed it back to the bailiff who returned it to the foreman. “Please announce your verdict to the court.”

  The foreman of the Jury looked at the watching crowd and cleared his throat, “We, the Jury, find the Defendant, Dr. Christopher Nost, guilty as charged of First Degree murder in the case of Lucille Frost.”

  Chris’ mind went blank as a wave of numbness crashed into his soul. He felt like he still waited for something. He could almost see it, hurtling toward him in time, something that he could not quite grasp. Looking deep inside himself, he knew he hadn’t done it.

  A susurrus swept through the watching crowd as people started to whisper their opinions to each other. Christopher Nost, a condemned man, looked up to the ceiling. It took everything he had to stop himself from bawling like a child in the middle of the courtroom. Even so, a few solitary tears made their way down his cheek.

  Judge Miller banged his gavel again, calming the stir of the courtroom. Chris had not been aware of the noise until it once again fell silent. “I am now in a position I have not before found myself in twenty years of serving as Justice of this state. I received a visit from someone who has shown me evidence that the likelihood of Dr. Nost’s guilt is very small, indeed.”

  He clenched his jaw, thinking. “This evidence, however, remains inadmissible. Therefore, this court will waive the lifetime sentence and reduce it to the minimum of ten years. Furthermore, this term will be carried out in a minimum-security prison in which Dr. Nost can continue to work with his employer, GeoTech, Inc., and will be provided with any and all equipment necessary to carry out his duties.”

  Judge Miller sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose, then continued. “Dr. Nost is to continue his sessions with Dr. Jorgensen in an effort to find a cure for his condition. And one last point: as a ward of the state, all of Dr. Nost’s medical expenses will be paid by Colorado.”

  Judge Miller looked at Chris. “I personally very much hope that someday you will find your memories returned to you, and I wish you the best of luck, Dr. Nost. This court is now adjourned.”

  So that’s it, then. Chris thought as he nodded to the judge in thanks. His lawyer said something about an appeal but Chris wasn’t listening. The feeling of waiting remained. If anything, it had intensified. The sentencing is over, he told himself. The waiting is done. You got off with your life, which is a hell of a lot more than you expected. Relax.

  Got off how? another voice within him asked. I’m sure I didn’t do it. I couldn’t do anything like that. I’m going to prison for ten years for a crime I didn’t commit. The feeling of shell shock wouldn’t go away.

  Guards marched Chris into the high, marble hall that led to the front doors of the courthouse. Despite the judge’s lenience, he counted six guards escorting him to the waiting prison van. Do they really think I’m that dangerous? he wondered. Yes, he answered his own question. In their eyes I am a convicted killer. I am a dangerous person to them.

  Then he began to hear something over the empty echo of their footsteps on the checkered black and gray marble floor, and saw, in the light at the end of the hall, (end of the tunnel he thought) more guards, facing outwards.

  He heard someone shout, “Here he comes!” and the footsteps were drowned out by the roar of the media circus outside. Dozens of voices all clamored to be heard over each other. Dunwich stepped in front of Chris to attempt to fill in as crowd control against the impending mob of media.

  Funny, he thought, you’d think that in a city like Denver a simple murder wouldn’t draw the attention it has. But the world didn’t work like that. Because of his memory condition, this case had become a sensation. Chris grimaced as his memory flooded with the headlines he had read about himself over the last few months. With no distant past to connect to, this trial was all he remembered of his l
ife. No family, no memory … the mystery murderer …

  One of the guards leaned in and tried to reassure him by squeezing his shoulder. The guard handed him his jacket, but Chris was lost like a deer frozen in headlights and didn’t hear as the man said, “You might want to put this over your head … you know … they can attack like vultures when they smell blood.” He waited, watching this unstoppable, unnamable event hurtle towards him through time.

  What’s happening to me? His head spun as he felt something beginning to awaken in him. What is this …

  Chris stepped out, brilliant sunlight blinding him, and questions and cameras immediately assaulted him. Why didn’t they give me something to cover my face? He wondered, and waived his hand in attempts to still the mob, the feeling of something about to happen churning his stomach as he did so. Dunwich stepped up to the forest of microphones and the cacophony quieted. “I would like to remind those gathered here, and the viewers at home, that Judge Miller offered his condolences to my client after sentencing—so convinced was he of Dr. Nost’s innocence. Furthermore, I would like to point out …”

  The waiting was over. Potential had become real. Chris saw a glint from behind one of the crowding news anchors—a woman wearing a red dress and matching lipstick, a permanent, plastic smile molded to her face even as she jostled those around her to catch Dunwich’s words. The woman, the moment, the waiting, his body sang in anticipation as his vision swam. What the hell is going on?

  I can stop this. The realization hit him below his conscious mind and he felt a primal power begin to surge through his veins. His heartbeat gained a crescendo and the rest of the world faded into silence. His blood caught fire and pumped through his body, surging and ebbing like the tide, orchestrated by the rhythm of his heart.

  Duck! Chris felt his blood scream to him, and everything began to move in slow motion. His knee buckled, and he fell down the stairs.

  At the same moment he heard a loud crack and felt something hit him hard in the face. Whatever had been fueling him fled, chased off by the gunshot. The world sped back up and the cacophony of the city hit him full force, harder than the bullet that had just lodged itself in his brain. “Murderer!” someone shouted. “Murderer, murderer!” in a familiar voice … and all went black.

  2873: Discoveries

  Garret sipped lukewarm coffee and studied the results of the latest tests. A handsome man in his late forties, his body had a muscular look, but he was not heavily built and tended more towards wiry. Close-cropped brown hair, lightly streaked with silver, framed his cold gray eyes—eyes that flickered back and forth across the papers in his hand. The datapad with the same results on it was discarded to the side. He was hopelessly lost in the past, preferring the anachronistic aesthetic to the modern.

  This made no sense at all. Whatever methodology he used to produce the nanomachines, it should yield the same results—a temporal circuit machine that piggybacked the body’s mitochondria. The entire effect should produce an internal machine that linked all of the body’s cells together and gave them the ability to manipulate temporal energy. In short, time travel. But this last batch, which he had engineered with his new process, didn’t pass the performance benchmarks. Specifically, they weren’t jumping the way they should. He sighed and put down the papers. They pushed out no energy at all. A complete failure.

  He popped in his steel grey control contacts and injected a test batch into his arm to rerun the benchmarks and tests. The hypo hissed and he felt a sting in his forearm as the injection pierced his skin. The contact lenses flickered to life, showing a Heads Up Display, or HUD, and outlined the circuitry for him, creating a floating ghost image, which, only he could see. With a small effort he activated his primary system travelers and hopped back one day into his safe window.

  As he appeared in his isolation chamber, the HUD threw up a diagnostic report on how the new nanos handled the jump’s energy spike. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary in the programming, except that the new nanos were not contributing to the jump. The system he had injected should have fused perfectly with his old system. Instead it was nonreactive. Rerunning his isolation routines, he separated out the new nanos and pushed an energy spike through them to hop forward to his ‘home’ time.

  Time froze. His HUD showed time running at a ratio of four to one Terra to personal. Garret gaped. If this was right, he was moving very, very fast. He cautiously opened the chamber’s door and walked into his lab. Back turned to the chamber, he moved at about a quarter of the speed he should be. Garret grinned and pushed on the new system—hard. He shot up to an incredible speed. Everything around him appeared to be frozen in place. The light coming through the large bay windows shifted from light blue to lavender. Garret decided to stress test the new system and leave the closed environment of the house. His mind raced, leaving him feeling like his thoughts were moving even faster than his newfound speed. The implications of what he had discovered staggered him.

  Blue light shimmered around him as he jogged down the highway, passing cars that should be going over a hundred miles an hour like they were standing still. After jogging for a couple of hours of his relative time, he turned off on a country exit, leaving the city behind for a more rustic area where he could perform a few experiments. As he trotted off the road into a field, he stopped for a few moments to think things through.

  Stopping revealed another surprise of slow time. He moved faster than the air around him and standing still too long depleted the supply of breathable air, forcing him into motion again. Once he dealt with this discovery by walking in circles, he got back to his main line of thought.

  What would happen if he interacted with an inert object and then reintroduced the object to the environment? Nothing for it but to try, he figured as he picked up a rock. With a quick flick of his wrist, he threw the rock and watched in amazement as it slowed to a standstill about two inches from him and turned red.

  Intuition screamed at him, and with a few ideas about what might happen when he released accelerated time he stepped back about twenty feet then phased back into normal time flow. The rock exploded in midair, throwing fiery shards in every direction. Garret threw himself to the ground. Shards of the stone shot over his prone form, and puffs of dust erupted around him. Luckily, he escaped with only a few minor scrapes, mainly from throwing himself to the ground.

  He stood back up and dusted himself off. A grin tugged at the corners of his mouth. Turning on his datastats app, he reviewed the physics of what had happened on his HUD. The reaction was not what he had expected, but it did make sense. The forces exerted upon the object as it moved between time speeds was spread evenly across the molecules of the stone, not just across the surface. The rock just hadn’t been able to withstand the pressures, at least not without the buffer of the nanites which he had in his system.

  His own shortsightedness had nearly caused him to be badly injured. He resolved not to repeat that mistake. Stretching his will again, he phased back into ‘fast’ time. Picking up another rock he glanced over it with the HUD and imprinted its structure on his nano’s object orientation subsystems. The HUD contact lenses had been one of his more inspired inventions; created one day when his wife argued with him about how much paper he left lying around the house. It was a little piece of history he had trouble giving up, his love of paper. Something about the visual layout of something being in front of him appealed his senses. But the HUD gave him a similar layout without having to waste hours a week on the 3D printer creating paper.

  Time to redo the experiment—but with a few altered conditions. This time around, he transferred a small batch of his nano machines into the rock, then threw it as hard as he could. The nanos in the rock acted as a field extension and the rock moved like a bullet through the frozen landscape. He pushed against the resistance, reaching out to the nanites now in the rock, increasing the rock’s ratio of time acceleration. Turf rippled in slow motion as the rock sliced through the earth, burrowing a hole about t
hirty feet long. Ripples in the ground continued to spread like aftershocks once the rock stopped moving and Garret had phased back into standard time to watch the results.

  Dirt and grass exploded upwards as time snapped back to its normal passing, the after effects of the high speed stone leaving not only a trench in the ground, but once the dust had settled, a full a crater. Garret walked up to the point of impact and started digging until he held the rock in his hand. He stared down at it, and then recalled the nanos back into his system. Filled with warring thoughts over his discovery, James Garret jogged back towards his laboratory, moving into the future about a hundred times faster than anyone else on the planet. But his eyes were on the past.

  Time: The Past, 4th dimensional Cartesian

  coordinates classified

  Location: Classified

  Operation: Classified.

  Wanda Garret was a damned good time traveler and she knew it. Besides her husband being the best causality control theorist in the world and her personal trainer in applied causality theory, she was the best hopper ever tested. Only thirty-four, her skill allowed her to transfer her grid points on a three-dimensional plane instead of having to utilize the fourth.

  Effectively, this gave her the ability to teleport herself on the world grid without hopping forward or backward through the time stream. That wasn’t her only advantage as an agent. Her strong jaw and cheekbones, yet soft face, luscious almost-brown amber hair, and warm eyes helped her fit into any era as a good looking woman, and good looking can get you far.

  So it made a certain amount of sense that she had been the one given the mission to assassinate the most important figure in history—at the time he was meant to die. If, for any reason, this mission was messed up, then the paradox she had been sent back to fix could shatter history. Once again she reviewed the mission dossier.

  History was on the brink of destroying itself in one nasty moment of time. The brass in the Time Corp had isolated the incident that created the instability in the time stream. This was the alpha and the omega of all paradox.