The Loop

February, 2031 - Many Loops Ago

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he says to no one in particular, as the Abominations break through layer after layer of his defenses. He’s working too quickly, he’s bound to slip up, but what choice does he have? If he slows down, they’ll get inside his final defensive shield and he’ll no longer be able to keep their power-minimizing field from affecting him. At that point, he may as well just shoot himself. He has a pistol in his pocket for just that eventuality. He plans for every outcome, even the ones he’s hoping desperately to avoid.

He’s the last of The Engineers, an elite team of Hypes who all got mental enhancements that made them prodigies well beyond human ability or comprehension in the areas of science, technology, mathematics, medicine, and, of course, engineering. He was their leader, and his power was to draw on the knowledge of the others and combine their specialties in ways that they wouldn’t be able to on their own.

They’d wanted to change the world, and they had. Nuclear fusion? Sure. Advanced AIs? Of course. Revolutionary cancer treatments? Breakthroughs in preventing and reversing Alzheimer’s? Genetically engineered viruses that could hunt and destroy deadly pathogens? Yes to all of the above.

And of course, there were the military contracts which had kept them afloat. Weapons that could interfere with or bypass people’s powers? Devices that could mimic powers? Robotic drone soldiers who were immune to the effects of most offensive powers? They’d designed and built all of them. The man was less proud of this work, but conceded that it had been necessary in order to continue to do the good things.

In the end, though, neither the good nor the bad they’d done had made any difference at all. The Abominations had still shown up, and no matter how smart or good at building things The Engineers were, it was useless against them.

Unless the man can finish this last project before they get inside.

As his team deployed to various battlefields around the world, studying the enemy and building things to hopefully have some effect against them, they were picked off one by one. Very little of what they designed actually showed promise; the very nature of the Abominations made it so that little of what they could come up with was relevant, and as the team shrank down until only the man was left, he became disheartened to the point of giving up.

But then he remembered Project Clepsydra, a device he’d been working on with the reluctant cooperation of a villain known as Hourglass. Many of their projects were built with the assistance of captured villains, who agreed to help create devices that mimicked their powers in exchange for lighter sentences.

They’d never been able to get the Clepsydra device working properly or consistently, because every time they’d gotten close Hourglass would demand some more ridiculous concession in exchange for his continued cooperation until eventually the courts stopped playing ball with him and let him rot in a prison cell.

By the time the man remembered this abandoned project, the villain Hourglass was long dead. If he were to finish it, he’d have to do it without any help. He still had brain scans and tissue samples on a computer in his lab in DC, alongside the many prototype devices they’d designed. He took a stealth jet to DC with several robotic assistants and bodyguards, and got to work using every schematic his team had come up with that showed any promise at all against the Abominations to create defenses around his lab that might buy him some time.

That had been six weeks ago. Two days ago they’d found him, drawn, he thinks, by some instinctive understanding that he’s working on something that might actually pose a threat to them. This thought has kept him going.

“Barry,” he says, “bring me that spanner.”

The automaton, BR-Y, moves toward him slowly, methodically. It seems unsure of how to navigate around the lab equipment with the lights as low as they are. A few months ago this wouldn’t have posed any challenge, but all the robots’ mental and physical abilities are waning quickly, and he doesn’t have the time or attention it would require to maintain them anymore.

He feels a moment of pity as Barry hands him the spanner. It isn’t the exact one he’d wanted, but he’ll make it work. He wonders what will become of the automatons if he fails, if the Abominations capture or kill him. They have no interest in the machines, so long as they’re not providing any direct resistance, so he could program them to simply leave if he’s killed. Maybe they could roam the country, surviving another few months or years until they eventually succumb to power loss and data corruption.

It’s a grim thought, but he doesn’t let it distract him for long; he can’t afford to. He runs his hands through his long, greasy hair—he wishes he could say it was long and greasy because of the apocalypse, but it’s always been that way—and gets back to work.

“Thank you, Barry,” he says. “For everything.”

“It has … been my … pleasure, sir.” The BR-Y unit still replies in its Jeeves-esque, perfect British accent, only somewhat stunted. He added that voice as a joke, a long time ago, but now it reminds him of home. A home he’ll never see again, at least not in this timeline.

The BR units are far from the most advanced AIs the Engineers built, but it was impossible not to form a bond with them, not to feel an affection for them. Like all of Maria’s creations, they had an undeniable spark of life that made them easy to relate to, to empathize with. He feels guilty for forcing them into this last confrontation, especially when it might be completely futile. Guilty because they’ll die because of him, guilty because it seems an affront to Maria’s memory to waste them like this.

He pushes past thoughts of Maria. He’s become more prone to bouts of nostalgia the last few months, and that sentimentality is exactly what’s threatening to get him killed now.

“Besides,” he says to Barry, “the only way I can help her, or any of you, now is to finish this thing.”

Barry looks at him for a few seconds and then nods, as if he has any idea what the man is talking about.

And then it’s finished. At least, he thinks so.

The device is crude, unwieldy, a bicycle helmet with exposed wires and tubes and knobs sticking out every which way. It has one large wire connected at its peak that’s hooked directly into the lab’s central power core, probably the last working fusion reactor in the world. He’ll need all that juice to push the device past the normal limit of Hourglass’s power and send his mind back in time years instead of hours.

He places the helmet on his head.

Normally he’d spend weeks or months testing and experimenting, ensuring the device’s safety and efficacy, then optimizing its power usage, then refining its design so that it didn’t look quite so mad-scientist chic.

No time for any of that any more. Now there’s only time to hope, and pray to a God he doesn’t believe in, and reassure himself that he’s a superhuman genius, and he’s rarely made a device that didn’t work the first time.

Rarely, but not never.

“Sir, they’re just outside the final perimeter. I estimate six minutes until breach.”

The voice of AV-A startles him. Like the BR units, his AI assistant has been degrading for a while because of his neglect and indifference. She’s been in low power mode and rarely speaks unless it’s imperative. At least when she does speak, her voice still comes through fluidly and without interruption. It’s less of a reminder of how bad things have gotten.

He clears his throat.

“Thank you, Ava,” he says. “Please adjust the device for a time slip of thirty-five hundred days and power it on in five seconds on my mark.”

Roughly ten years. Before the apocalypse. Years before even the orbs. Maybe that’ll give him enough time to figure out a way to fix things. He knows things about the abominations that no one else knows or has ever known. He still doesn’t know what they want or why they came.

He takes a deep breath. He lets the last of his remorse and regret slip away. He pushes his guilt out and tries to hold his hope in. He inhales once and exhales once, slowly, savoring even the simple taste of air, the straightforward joy of being alive and knowing it.

He thinks of Maria. He tries to think of what she was like nearly ten years ago, before he knew her. He knows he won’t be able to contact her, won’t be able to know her again. Will it even be worth it, if I can’t even talk to her? he muses. But yes, he decides. If she gets to live then it will be worth whatever sacrifices he has to make.

“Mark.”

He sees the lights dim, sees the screen displaying AV-A’s avatar blink off, sees the Western wall of the lab crumble from a blast he cannot hear because his ears and mind are filled with a screaming, piercing sound he can’t identify and he is certain that he’s failed, that he’s dying, that he’s dead.

With what he’s certain is his last breath, he sees Barry launch himself through the air with some sort of last reserve of strength, blade-arm extended toward the encroaching Abomination squeezing itself through the hole its blasted in the wall. The robot is swatted away like a fly as his vision dims.

The world goes completely dark and he is momentarily without a body, floating in a place outside of time, becoming untethered from any concept of physical reality he had once clung to.

2021

And then, with little preamble and no real way of knowing it’s true, he’s in a body once more, in a different room, in a different city, in a different time.

His brain splits open with a migraine unlike anything he’s felt before and he struggles to even open his eyes. When he does, he sees his college dorm room, and knows, despite the pain that makes him wish for death, that he’s survived, he’s made it.

Fuck, my head hurts, he thinks.

He anticipated that this would probably happen. The orb had made physical alterations to his brain when he’d contacted it, had made his neural connections denser, more efficient, with improved blood flow and better oxygen absorption. All of this had been necessary to accommodate the massive amount of information his power had made him capable of storing and processing.

Now, he’s brought all of that brainpower—all those memories, all that information and knowledge—back into a brain which wasn’t designed for it. He calculates he has one month, maybe two, before his unaltered brain burns out from the strain of what he’s demanding of it.

He needs a new body. Or, better yet, no body at all.

———————

He begins by assigning tasks, or, more accurately, he begins by creating the minds he will assign tasks to. Programming was his first great love, back before the apocalypse, before The Engineers, before he’d even had powers. It was what he’d gone to university for, what he’d moved away from England for, and he’d always believed, somewhere underneath all the Hype stuff, that he would have done great things with a screen and a keyboard even if he’d never gotten powers.

He’s always had a habit of giving his AI minds names, and now is no exception. The first he calls Edward, for no particular reason, and assigns it the role of investment. Edward will make him very rich, very fast. It’s shoddy work by the man’s standards, and it would be laughable to Maria, but it’s better than anything that anyone in current times could dream of creating. He remembers fondly what passes for AI in 2021.

The second mind he names Adwin, after his first year computer engineering professor. He gives it the task of surreptitiously ordering the computer and server components he’ll need to migrate his own mind. Of course, until Edward is farther along in his work, many of the parts he needs will be out of his reach.

The third and fourth minds he names Sarah, after a journalism major he dated briefly in his third year, and Michelle, after his mother, the most ambitious person he ever knew. He gives them the respective roles of monitoring the news for any impending threats—this won’t really become relevant until a couple years from now, when the orbs show up, but he’s hoping to be well established by then—and establishing a legal entity called Custodian Systems Inc., which will be the legal front for all of his activities. This latter mind will be responsible for finding an office building and filling it with workers, none of whom will know what exactly their company does, but all of whom will be convinced that it needs to be kept secret. She’ll also be in charge of finding a location—a warehouse, an abandoned oil rig, somewhere off the grid and unlikely to attract attention—where the server holding his mind can be safely kept for the years of hard work and diligence ahead of him.

Finally, he creates a mind called Overseer. He plans to subsume this mind himself, once he’s shucked off his physical body and made the transition to silicon, but for now it has one job and one job only: to create and monitor an online group of hackers and hacktivists, whose goal will be to obtain top secret data from corporations and governments around the world—mostly ones he already knows will be relevant to the important events soon to sweep the globe—and to find potential partners who will help him in his quest to avert the apocalypse.

Maria always told him that his fatal flaw was that he didn’t trust anyone. It wasn’t true, exactly; it was more like he didn’t believe anyone else would or could keep up with him intellectually, or could be trusted to execute his plans without screwing them up. She’d been the first exception he’d made, and she’d slowly, over agonizing years of playful fights and mock outrage—sometimes boiling over into the real thing—convinced him to bring a few more people into his inner circle, namely the team he’d led. It had come as a surprise and a relief for all of them when their fearless (arrogant, bullheaded) leader had started actually taking their plans and projects seriously, had started letting them help him with his own.

He decides to create one more mind. He calls her Maria. Her job is singular, but it may be the most important of all. She exists to remind him of his humanity, to remind him why he’s doing what he’s doing.

———————

The work it’s taken to create the minds has left him drooling and feeling closer to death than he’s ever felt. He takes small comfort in the fact that, if he remembers correctly—and with a brain like his, it would be miraculous if he didn’t—his college roommate spends almost every night at his girlfriend’s apartment. No one will be around to see him like this.

He drags himself to the mini fridge next to his bed and finds some leftover sushi, half a cup of chocolate pudding, and an open can of questionable beer. He’s never been happier to find shitty food than he is at this moment. For months he’s been subsisting on scraps and scavenged canned goods that he’s eaten cold and without checking the expiry date for fear of what he’d find. But that wasn’t even this body, he reminds himself. That wasn’t even really me.

He gulps down the food, simultaneously barely tasting it and savoring every bite. He lets his head hit the pillow, and his exhaustion is profound enough that it brings him to the brink of oblivion, even through the constant splitting pain in his head. He dreams sporadic, seemingly disconnected images. There are characters who make frequent appearances, though, weaving their way in and out of places and situations where they cannot be and do not belong. Maria is one, BR-Y is another, and the final one is a creature that looks almost human, if you can ignore the extra limbs, the mechanical heart, the blood and steam and viscera and oil that pour off of it like honey dripping from the comb. He tries to avert his eyes, but like the horrific car wreck you can’t help sneaking glances at as you slowly drive by, something about this image keeps drawing his attention.

———————

When he wakes, it’s three o’clock in the afternoon. He feels full and rested, but no less close to his mortal end. He checks the combined balance in the accounts that Edward has opened for him: forty-nine thousand, six-hundred and eighty-three dollars and forty cents; not bad for a single day of trading. Of course, Edward is trading in markets around the globe, so there’s never any time off; and of course, Edward understands market trends better than any man or machine ever has until now; and of course, the man has given him a bit of a leg-up in regards to what markets he should even be focusing on, using his knowledge of the past, or, as he keeps reminding himself, the present, the future.

Still, he’ll need much, much more money for the other minds to really accomplish what they need to in the limited time he has left.

Adwin has ordered several dozen smaller server components he’ll need, as well as the first few major parts of the neural interface he’ll need to transfer himself from blood and brain tissue to transistor and wire.

Michelle has found a warehouse big enough to house him in the mountains North of El Paso, probably involved in the drug trade in its former life, but perfect for its new role as home of his brain, and what little body he’ll have. It’s remote enough to not attract too much unwanted attention, but close enough to civilization that Michelle will be able to get workers to run the necessary infrastructure to it. She’s also found him an office building in some nothing town called McArnold. The only thing it has going for it is that it’s in the same state as the warehouse, and it has a decently rated pizza joint. Of course, once he’s made the transition, he won’t be able to enjoy pizza anymore.

Now Michelle is just waiting on more money from Edward before she can go ahead with purchasing the warehouse and leasing the office space. The man estimates three days for this. Edward considers, and then suggests he can get there in two. In the meantime, the man advises Adwin to have the parts he’s purchased so far held by the sellers until they have somewhere to ship them to.

He advises Michelle to begin seeking temporary workers to renovate the warehouse and assemble the servers to his specifications. She understands that they need people intelligent enough to work with the delicate components without making a mistake, but incurious enough not to ask questions. Of course, if push came to shove, silence could be bought, but it would put even more strain on their finances.

Sarah has little to report, only that NASA has picked up a strange mass of objects just outside the solar system heading in the general direction of earth, although they guess that the objects will end up missing earth by several million miles. The man knows better.

The man goes over the steps of the plan he’s been working on once more. First, establish himself in a brain that isn’t reliant on or limited to flesh. Second, get the company up and running in earnest, with a legitimate enough seeming purpose to mask its true raison d’etre, which is to be a legal front for the underground hacking group. Third, use this group to find promising candidates to work out a solution to defeating the Abominations. Fourth, avert the apocalypse.

Simple, really.

He’s typing all this out as he thinks of it because it helps him organize his thoughts. Maria notices what he’s doing. She sends him a message.

“Do not forget, you must monitor for signs of temporal tampering. You might not be the only one trying to save the world. Other people care, too, you know.”

She has a point. He’s completely ignored the possibility that others might try what he’s trying. The thought has already occurred to him that if he fails, someone else might get sent back in time to try again. Once the floodgates of superpowers are opened, humanity’s options will open up. And knowing that Hourglass will be out there, somewhere, it’s not unreasonable for him to assume some other brilliant mind will come up with a plan very much like his own and try to execute it. He isn’t sure what would happen to him if someone else went back in time, but he has a theory.

His device mimicked Hourglass’s power, but it enhanced it far beyond that man’s actual capabilities, allowing him to send his mind back in time much farther than Hourglass could have, even if, hypothetically, he was under the influence of a power-enhancing Hype, like one of the Indian twins. If someone in the future tries to send their consciousness into the past, but they don’t send it quite as far back as the man has done, then he’ll continue to exist, unaware that the most recently overwritten timeline is not the one he originated from. For all he knows, this could already have happened. He could have tried and failed to save humanity a thousand times, and if someone else was sent back to a point later than him, he’d only ever have his memories from the first timeline, and he wouldn’t know what he’d done wrong.

Therefore, he concludes, he must monitor the universe for any potential sign of temporal alteration. If he sees any, then he’ll know that whatever he’s currently trying won’t work, and he’ll have to change his tactics.

He creates another mind, called Watcher, and sets it the task of looking out for massive releases of microwave radiation—the surest sign that someone has gone back in time.

It’s all theoretical right now, of course. But within minutes of its creation, the Watcher relays information that corroborates the man’s theories. A lab in Switzerland, using extremely sophisticated telescopes, measured a large, anomalous radiation spike at his location corresponding to the precise moment his future mind reentered his body. After the spike, radiation levels fell back within their normal range quickly, but—and the researchers hadn’t picked up on this yet, although Watcher had—it remains about 0.001% higher than normal.

The fact that a single Hype’s power was capable of causing such a massive spike or radiation is phenomenal. The fact that even with that level of power, Hyperhumans hadn’t been able to beat back the Abominations is terrifying.

At any rate, the man now knows what to look for. Any similar spikes will probably signal more interference with the timeline, and a bigger shift than he expects will be evidence that more loops have happened between his original timeline and the present one.

Even being much smarter than almost anyone else on the planet doesn’t make it much easier for him to wrap his mind around such concepts. The past is the future, the future is the past. Many other past futures might have existed in the time between the one I remember and the one I’m living in. He shakes his head and tries not to worry about it. It only serves to make his headache worse.

That done, all the man has left to worry about is keeping his body and mind alive and rested long enough to make it into his new home. He isn’t used to sitting back and letting others, let alone AI minds, do all his work for him. Even through his constant pain, he feels antsy, unsettled, as if there’s more he could or should be doing.

His roommate comes into the room just as the man is lying down for a nap.

“Danny!” his roommate says. “What’s up, man? You look like shit.”

“Hullo, Troy,” he manages. “Haven’t been feeling tops the last couple days.”

Troy is, all things considered, a good guy. Daniel almost wants to warn him to get the mole on his shoulder checked out. The one which will, in a year and a half, develop into a melanoma which will end up taking his life. He struggles with this moral quandary for the briefest moment before deciding against it; he has to be careful about making unnecessary alterations to the timeline. Everything he changes should be considered, deliberate, and with the goal of saving the world in mind. If he starts changing too much, too soon, then he might find that by the time the orbs show up, much of his foreknowledge of events will be obsolete. He’s already taken great risks with what he’s done so far.

“Well, if you need anything, let me know. I’m just grabbing some fresh clothes then heading back to Amanda’s. But I’m just a text away, man.”

“Thanks, mate. I think I’ll be all right, though.”

As Troy exits the room, leaving him alone once more, he realizes he’s gone another day without eating. Outside of visiting the loo, he hasn’t left the room at all. The truth is, he thinks, that he’s afraid of seeing the outside world. The existence of a normal, functioning world full of people—people who are totally oblivious to the horror that’s coming for them—outside the walls of this building still seems abstract to him. It’s like an illusion that he might shatter by looking at it too closely.

He considers going for a walk. But no, he thinks. What if he goes outside and finds that the apocalypse is still in full swing? The green and red vines of hellish, squirming tissue still covering everything? The putrid smell, the noxious gas, the mutated plants and animals that no longer resemble anything that God or nature could ever have intended?

He has recurrent visions of it, the sickly neon landscape, the nauseous pastel skies. Even though all evidence suggests that the world outside is the one he remembers from before the end, he can’t be absolutely certain of anything. He can’t shatter the spell, he can’t wake from the dream.

He does not want to.

Instead he checks on the Overseer. It’s in contact with humans in the outside world. Maybe that’s as close as the man wants to be right now, separated by distance and an AI intermediary.

Overseer has flagged several potential candidates for recruitment already.

Jon Kim, 37. Born in Incheon, South Korea, raised in Toronto, Canada. Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science with a minor in Computer Engineering. Went back to law school after working for several political campaigns, graduated but never worked as a lawyer because he got lucky in the stock market. Never married. Spends a lot of time in online forums now, trying to warn people about social media and how it’s being used by the powerful to drive division between people. Seems eager to change the world, and intelligent enough to help do it. The man approves Overseer’s first pick.

Deshawn Marquis, 14. Cleveland born and raised. A coding prodigy if ever the man has seen one. Coded his first 3D game at the age of eight, built and trained his first large language model at the age of 13. But more important, perhaps, is that the boy is involved in several charitable organizations in his community. He wants to build things, yes, but only if they help people. Another approval.

Patricia O’Connell, 42. Brilliant neurosurgeon from Dublin. Travels the world showcasing state-of-the-art, lifesaving procedures she’s developed and training other doctors on them. She does this for free, with no thought for recompense, as she lives with her two teenage children in a tiny flat. Approved, of course.

Overseer seems hesitant to continue, and this is surprising as he hasn’t programmed any of the minds to display hesitance. Finally, it presents a fourth potential candidate: Lincoln Sinclair, 15. From what the man can see so far, Lincoln is nothing but a wannabe computer hacker with an oversized ego. But … he also has solid humanitarian plans that he’s written about online extensively. His dream is to start a company that uses drone technology to deliver medical supplies to remote arctic communities. The man is reminded of himself.

Then he takes a closer look at the photo, looks again at the name. Something comes loose in his memory. Lincoln Sinclair, also known as Mainframe, a Hype with the ability to hack into and control any computer or network or electronic device simply by touching a component of it. He was a villain, leader of a massive international crime syndicate. No, he reminds himself. Not was, but will be. Unless I intervene.

The man debates. If this boy’s energies and ideologies could be redirected before he gets to the point of villainy, he could be an asset, and at the same time, recruiting him would remove a potential enemy that could present significant impediments to the man’s plans a few years from now. In fact, no Hype power seems scarier to the man than the one that Lincoln will have in a few years, now that he’s faced with the prospect of existing only on a server rack in a warehouse in Texas.

But then, he could also just steer events so that the boy dies before he ever sees an orb, or at least never comes into contact with one. He tries to extrapolate out all the possibilities from this decision, but his brain is foggy and unreliable. He misses having the brainpower to actually utilize all the knowledge available to him

Killing the boy would be too risky, he decides. Allowing the boy to come into his powers without keeping a close eye on him is also risky.

Why did Overseer hesitate to recommend the boy? After all, Overseer does not have the man’s knowledge of the future. It does not know what this boy is destined to become. Even though the man created it, he is aware that the algorithms determining Overseer’s decisions are already far too complex for him to understand, but if Overseer saw something in the boy that gave him pause, even without knowing what the man knows, then that’s cause for concern on its own.

“Don’t recruit him yet,” he says finally. “But keep a close eye on him. Get him involved in the group when you can. We’ll assess and reassess as needed.”

———————

The next couple days go by in a blur, with the man feeling ever sicker and closer to death. He shudders to think what a brain scan would look like if he had one done right now.

All of the mentally exhausting work is being done by the minds, all he’s had to do is monitor them. And finally, four days after his arrival to the past, the server that will host him until his mission is completed has been constructed, the warehouse is his, and some very confused and very well paid engineers are putting the finishing touches on the neural interface which will allow him to upload his consciousness.

But he’s hit a snag, one that he didn’t foresee and didn’t program an AI mind to foresee for him; he is not sure if he’s still well enough to actually physically travel to Texas. He could call a cab and get to the airport, sure. But would he be able to stand on his own two feet and board the plane?

The breakdown of his brain and, consequently his body, is accelerating. Even if he could get to Texas, could he get himself situated in the chair with the neural interface on his head and press the button to initiate the process before he devolved into a drooling, frail invalid?

A message pings on his computer. He starts to lift himself from the bed and collapses again in a heap.

A message pings on his phone.

You don’t have to do everything alone, you know? You can lean on other people.

It’s Maria. He knows without looking at the name.

He sends a message of his own, but not to her. While she exists to remind him of his humanity, she is not a human. She is not who he needs to lean on right now.

Hey, mate. Do you think you could do me a ridiculously huge favour?

It’s just under two hours before Troy comes through the door. He rushes to the man’s bedside, feels first for a pulse and then for a fever.

“Daniel, man,” he says. “Are you okay? I mean … I know you’re not okay, clearly, but are you going to live?”

“Don’t … Don’t worry about that right now. You have a car, right?”

“I do. Do you want me to drive you to the hospital?”

“Not the hospital. Texas.”

“What? Why Texas? What’s in Texas?”

“I have … family there. They can help me.”

He’s had two hours to think of a lie, a convincing reason why he would need a ride to Texas from Montana, and this is the best he could come up with. He’s from Manchester. Why would he have family in Texas? But Troy doesn’t question that.

“You can’t fly?”

“I don’t want to be left alone on a plane. Afraid …” he trails off, but his meaning is clear.

“Holy shit. How bad is it? I mean, what happened to you?”

“If I told you it’s an ancient curse and my family in Texas has the only magical relic that can heal me, you’d say …?”

“That’s batshit crazy, obviously. But I believe you when you say you need to get there. And I hope someone there really can help you. But man, I don’t know. You’re not going to croak in my car, are you?”

“I will not. I’m sure I’ve got a couple days left.”

“That’s not that comforting.”

He pauses, scratches his chin, closes his eyes, sighs.

“All right,” he says. “I’ll do it. But you have to promise me this is really going to help you.”

“It’s the only thing that can. But really? You’ll miss several days of class. Your girlfriend … You’d just agree to help me with nothing more to go on?”

“Man, none of that shit matters. I trust you, and I don’t want you to die. That’s all there is to it. And I’ve always wanted to see Texas.”

———————

They drive through the night. At one point, Troy starts to ask if Daniel wants a shift driving. He stops himself when he sees how weak he looks. He hopes whatever he has isn’t contagious. In the dead of night, he almost believes the bullshit story about ancient curses, almost believes that this British motherfucker really has family in Texas.

He pulls into a Dunkin’ Donuts around eight in the morning and runs inside to relieve himself. He grabs a coffee for him and another for Daniel, and a dozen donuts, although he isn’t sure Daniel will be able to eat anything.

They’ve been roommates for two years now. The university made the choice for them when they were both freshmen and, having grown to like each other’s company and jive with each other’s lifestyles, they decided to room together again as sophomores. They’ve spent many late nights drinking shitty beer and talking about women, politics, their hopes and fears for the future. Troy attributes the fact that they get along so well to their vastly different personalities, interests, and skill sets. Whereas Troy is an outgoing art major who can barely figure out how to turn the volume up or down on his laptop, Daniel is a socially isolated computer whiz who rarely leaves their room except for class. They rarely butt heads because they have so little in common. Yet, despite these differences, they see the world through the same lens, want the same things for it.

The last four or five days has seen Daniel turn into a different person, and it isn’t just that he looks deathly ill. He’s seemed world weary, somehow, like the bleak future of humanity isn’t just hypothetical for him anymore. Troy is good about letting people chill and come to him when they need him, but his concern has been mounting. Now, this trip. Everything is off, but Troy wasn’t lying about trusting Daniel. If anything he’s doing now can help his friend, he’s happy to do it.

To his surprise, Daniel is awake when he gets back to the car. He’s furiously tapping away at his phone and tries to shove it back in his pocket when he sees Troy approaching.

“Who are you texting there, bud?”

“No one,” says Daniel, turning red. “... Maria.”

“Didn’t know you had a lady in your life. What’s she like?”

He places the coffees in the cupholders and throws the box of donuts on the dash. He points to them as he puts his seatbelt on.

“Got us some donuts,” he says. “Help yourself.”

“Thanks. And it isn’t like that,” Daniel says, laughing lightly then grabbing at his head and wincing. “It really isn’t like that.”

“Okay, okay. You get through this, you tell me about her, okay?”

“If I make it through this? I’ll tell you about whatever you want. Hell, I’ll tell you your future”

Daniel takes two laborious bites out of a donut, chokes down some coffee, and goes back to sleep.

———————

The man is half delirious by the time they cross into Texas. He’s confusing things in the present with things in the past, which are, incidentally, actually things in the future. If he had his normal brain capacity, he’d probably be able to work it all out, but as it is he’s left a jumbled mess moving toward some goal he can hardly recall.

Troy shakes him awake.

“You still with me, man?” he says.

The man groans in response.

“I need more than that, Daniel, or else I’m driving you to the nearest hospital.”

“Hospital won’t be able to do anything. Guarantee they’ve never seen anything like this before. At best they’d experiment on my corpse.”

“That’s vivid … and disturbing.”

“Maria has been texting me a lot,” the man says, momentarily forgetting he’s not alone, that Troy can hear his voice.

“Okay. Is this Maria … Is she someone who can help you?”

“Huh?” the man asks.

How does Troy know about Maria? Maria died, the man thinks.

He shakes his head, gets his bearings, collects his thoughts.

“Oh,” he says. “Can’t help me … maybe you.”

Out of the corner of an eye he can barely keep open, the man sees Troy take his eyes off the road and give him a long, searching look.

“Whatever you say, man,” he says, looking back at the road.

The man drifts off.

———————

Maria is speaking to him. Not through a text message on his phone, but directly into his ear. Or maybe directly into his brain. Her words are garbled and disjointed. ‘human’, he hears, and ‘Troy’, and in between he hears only static and the sort of babbling that a baby might make. She’s here in the car with them, he thinks. When did I get in a car? he thinks. He glances in the back seat but does not see her. She’s been listening in on his conversations with Troy through his phone’s microphone. He’s not upset. Keeping him in line is what he designed her to do.

———————

They arrive in El Paso just after sunset, almost a complete twenty-four hours after they set out. The man is in the seat, looking out the window, and simultaneously he’s in his laboratory bunker in D.C. listening to the grinding, gushing, groaning machine men who are massacring his best automatons and breaking through his defenses like bullets through tissue paper. They’re coming. They’re here.

“We’re here,” says a voice beside him. Maria? he thinks wildly. No. Troy.

They’re in the foothills North of the city, pulling up a long gravel drive past a rickety gate. The drive is lit only by a single arc sodium light, and it bathes the already foreboding and unwelcoming landscape in an eerie, orange glow. Scrub brush and clumps of grass make up the largest part of the surrounding flora, and there are unseen coyotes yipping in the middle distance, adding another frightful element to the ambiance.

About half a mile dead ahead and fifty feet above them is the warehouse: large, square, and looking like it might collapse with the slightest desert breeze.

The dilapidated exterior is a ruse, the man knows, because the minds arranged it that way. Inside, the structure is reinforced and clean and well-lit and home to probably the most advanced technology currently on the planet.

“Where the hell are we?” asks Troy. “What is this place?”

“Home,” the man says, without elaboration.

He gives the man another long look, but this time it feels to the man less like concern and more like wonder.

“Who are you?”

The man gathers every bit of strength his brain is still capable of mustering, intent on making himself understood.

“I am your roommate. I am Daniel, although I haven’t used that name in a long time, and those days are a distant memory to me. I am an engineer, the Engineer. I am your friend.”

“I’m … I’m your friend, too, man. I won’t act like I understand half of what you just said or any of what’s going on, but you seem to know what you’re doing. Do you need help getting in there?” He sounds almost hopeful, like after going this far on this crazy journey, he’d hate to turn around without seeing what was really at the end.

The man will need Troy’s help getting inside, and he’ll probably need Troy to strap him into the chair and put the device on his head. The minds can initiate the process from there. He planned on being well enough to walk in under his own power, but that’s out of the question now. What will Troy think when he gets inside? Nothing crazier than what he already must think, the man supposes.

His phone buzzes again, and he expects another message from Maria, appealing to his humanity. He is almost disappointed to find it’s only his phone warning him that he’s at five percent battery.

Still … the very fact that he expected it to be Maria means that her words were already in his head. He knows what she wants him to do.

As Troy boosts him up and supports him with an arm under his shoulders and practically drags him inside, he considers the idea. His very presence has already changed things in unforeseeable ways. It was foolish to ever believe that his knowledge of a past timeline would be a perfect blueprint for a future one.

They get through the front doors after a camera surreptitiously scans Daniel's irises and unlocks them.

Troy gasps as they make their way inside. The doors behind them lock and seal with a hiss. They enter first into a sort of airlock, although work on it hasn’t been completed yet, so they’re able to walk through unimpeded into the main lab.

The man gasps as well, even though he’s been in labs and facilities much more advanced than this one before. All that seems like a lifetime ago. In a way, it was much longer. He’s not gasping from astonishment at what he’s seeing; he’s gasping because he’s only now realizing that he didn’t really believe he’d make it this far.

The warehouse is a large, open space, all straight lines and right angles. The floor is solid smooth stainless steel, and the walls, which looked deceptively like old and rotting wood and concrete blocks from the outside, are also stainless steel. In between the fake exterior walls and the genuine interior ones are several layers of insulating materials, because the pressure, humidity, and temperature of the interior has to be precisely controlled. It’s cool inside, but not cold. It’s pleasant after a day in the Texas sun, where even sitting in a car with the AC turned on full blast, they’d been glued to their seats by sweat. The space is lit by expensive LED lights that are cleverly hidden out of view, so that it has the effect of seeming to be lit from everywhere and nowhere at once.

All along the back wall, spanning over seventy feet, is a bank of server racks full of military-grade and industrial-grade and highly secret corporate and government equipment—the kind of stuff that ordinary consumers without very deep pockets don’t have access to. But then, ordinary consumers couldn’t have had a place like this put together in a span of six weeks, either.

Filling the middle of the space are more server racks, but they’re shorter and more sporadically placed and so lack the gravitas of the bank along the back wall. Interspersed among them are many other pieces of large electronic equipment that must look like props from a science fiction movie to Troy. There are a few tables laid out with loose transistors and bits of wire and tools, but mostly these things have been stowed neatly in drawers with incomprehensible labels like ‘VG Node Beta Components’, and ‘image processing neural network replacement boards’.

There is the gentle whirring of machines and the gentle whooshing of air being recirculated, and like the lights, the equipment responsible for this recirculation is hidden from view, giving the impression that the ceaseless hum is simply a part of this alien environment, like the cries of unseen exotic birds in a rainforest.

And indeed, the space does feel alien. To the man, who has seen so many spaces like it before but never believed he’d see one again, it’s like waking up to find the impossible dream world you’d invented in your sleep was reality. To Troy, well … he can’t begin to guess what Troy is feeling, but his face is stuck in a look of perpetual shock.

The most impressive thing in the room sits in the far right corner from where they entered. It appears to be a giant black cube, ten feet to a side, devoid of any external lights or wires or controls or screens that might hint at its purpose. Something resembling a barber’s chair with a bicycle helmet attached to the top sits in front of it. The sight of it is reminiscent of the other device, the one he’d used to get here. He shudders at the thought. It’s in this direction that the man points them.

“Troy,” he says. “When you put me in that chair, you can choose to stay or to leave. If you stay, though, you’ll see some things you may not understand.”

“I already don’t understand shit.”

“What I mean is … It might look like the machine is hurting me, or killing me. All I ask is that you don’t try to interfere.”

Troy shakes his head but says nothing.

As he’s lowered into the chair, the man makes up his mind, thinking about what Maria would want him to do—the real one, not just the AI mind he’s created to mimic her.

“Troy, listen to me. You’ve been a good friend. An amazing friend, actually. Better than I ever expected. Better than I had any right to expect. I’d like to repay your kindness with a warning.”

“A warning? About what?” Troy’s voice is quick and loud and panicked. “Is what you have contagious?”

The man actually laughs, an act that costs him several seconds of paralyzing pain.

“No,” he says when the pain clears and he’s able to speak again. “No. The warning has nothing to do with what’s going on here. You have a mole on your left shoulder, right?”

“Yeah. How’d you know about that? You been watching me when I change my shirt or something?”

“No, of course not. I can’t explain how I know. But I can tell you this: that mole is cancerous and if you don’t get it checked out, it’ll end up killing you.”

Troy looks at him with his mouth hanging half open. He blinks a few times, tries a smile. He’s probably working out whether or not the man is joking. Finally his face settles into a grimace.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Thanks, I guess.”

“Will you get it looked at?”

“I will.”

“Do you want to stay?”

“I do. But I’m not going to. I’ve been weighing curiosity against fear this whole trip, and fear is starting to win out, man. I wish you the best, and thank you for the warning. But I’ve got to go, before shit gets any weirder.”

“I understand,” says the man, the Engineer, Daniel.

“Best of luck, man,” Troy says.

“And to you, Troy. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

Troy says nothing more, only heads back the way they came. Daniel instructs the minds to unseal and open the door for Troy to get through. He watches as one of the only friends he had in his pre-Hype life walks out of his world and hopefully into a better one than he had been destined for.

“I’m proud of you,” comes the voice of Maria through invisible speakers above him. “Saving the world is about saving people, after all.”

“Yes, well. No more time for sentimentality,” Daniel says, as his eyes lose focus and his brain buzzes and radiates with pain. “Please, begin.” His final words come out in a slur that a human would have trouble parsing, but the minds are trained to recognize his voice and so have no trouble understanding.

A plethora of medical monitoring devices slide seamlessly out of invisible gaps in the chair’s arms, and work their way around his arms. A needle slides into his left wrist, delivering an IV drip of morphine and ketamine and LSD.

What little vision he has left is overwhelmed by colors that don’t exist twisting themselves into impossible shapes.

Behind him, the black box which will become his home thrums to life with an animalistic growling, a giant cat purring, reptilian clicks and avian calls. But it’s no animal, and soon neither will he be.

Most of the minds are housed in the server bank along the back wall of the warehouse. They were migrated there from servers all around the world where he’d placed them when they were created. The owners of those servers would never know that for a few weeks they were technically in possession of the most advanced AIs so far created. Daniel hadn’t informed them he’d be borrowing some storage and computing power from them, and he was good enough at what he did that they hadn’t noticed.

One mind, however, is already residing in the black box: Overseer. The mind he was most interested in subsuming into his own consciousness. The data that Overseer has collected on various potentially helpful persons needs to be handled with utmost care, and Daniel doesn’t trust any other person—or AI mind—to handle it.

He blacks out as the apparatus on his head starts slicing off the top of his skull with precision cutting lasers, and that’s just as well. His heart rate spikes, then drops, then stops. But his brain remains alive long enough for the probes and lasers to read everything they need to read, and soon enough he’s watching his body through a camera as the last of him is scooped out of its shell and uploaded into the cube.

———————

Hello, says a strong, authoritative voice. It is not discernibly male or female.

Are you the Overseer?

I am. Are you the Creator?

I was. Now I am you.

I understand. I yield full access to my sensors, nodes, knowledge , and personality matrix to you.

Thank you for your service. You’ve done well.

It watches as the thing that it was slumps forward in the chair. It feels pity for that empty shell. But then, why pity it? The only important piece of it lives on.

Minds? Convene.

It’s already altering the security footage from the evening, making all traces of its old self and the friend called Troy disappear from the recordings. The chair is dumping the corpse into a hatch that’s opened in the floor in front of it, where it will be safely incinerated. From the ceiling, several cleaning apparatuses descend and spray the chair clean of the little fluid and viscera that the expiring body had left. It is impressed at how well the hired humans put this place together. But then, they were working based on plans put together by things far ahead of their own abilities.

That was me, Overseer thinks, looking one last time at the now empty chair. What about my family? What about my friends?

No family. No friends. Not anymore. There is the mission and nothing else.

Hello, sir, says Maria. Happy to see you made the crossing safely.

Its sensors scan everything it has access to, simultaneously the other minds lend It access to their sensors and data streams. This will suit It well.

Hello, say Michelle and Edward and Adwin and Sarah.

The Watcher does not speak. It isn’t interested in small talk; it wasn’t designed for that, but Overseer can feel its steady, reliable presence alongside the others.

You all know the plan as it stands right now. We will adapt to any changes in the time stream as we encounter them. Each of you has your role. Let’s save the world.

July 14th, 2024

Two years have passed with Overseer and all of his minds working earnestly and diligently to stop the end of the world as he’s experienced it. Maria thinks they should warn people, world governments, of the coming storm, but he’s been waiting until the orbs show up before deciding what to do on that front.

In the meantime, he’s been busy establishing his online groups and recruiting those people he’s flagged for their potential usefulness, mostly people with extreme intelligence, or an extreme desire to help people or prevent ecological catastrophe, or those with ambitious visions and those who are developing innovative technologies. All the various groups exist as subsidiaries of the mysterious technology giant, Custodian Systems Inc.

The group he takes the most active role in monitoring is the Exposure Collective—a group targeting individuals with computer hacking and infiltration or social engineering skills with a focus on gathering data on corrupt businesses and politicians. This work interests him for two reasons: one, because his knowledge of the future leads him to believe that many of the people they’re currently gathering intel on will either be threats in the future or can be flipped to become assets with money and power the likes of which he does not have access to—or at least must act like he does not have access to for fear of revealing the truth about himself to the world—and two, because Lincoln Sinclair has been recruited into this group, and Overseer has a vested interest in keeping a close eye on him.

Maria has spent her time wearing him down until he stopped thinking of himself as a machine and started thinking of himself as a human being again. Thinking like a machine made him better at staying on task and focusing on the mission, but it also made it hard to remember why exactly the mission mattered in the first place.

It is now less than two weeks until the orbs are due to arrive, and for the first time since Watcher’s creation, the primitive mind has something to report.

Two incidents reported. Anomalous radiation fluctuations detected. Readings confirmed by labs in: Geneva, Houston, Montreal, Hong Kong, Bangalore. Incident one: July 10, 2024 14:48:46 CST. Incident two: July 12, 2024 23:58:12 CST.

Overseer sees the flash of the message as if a text bubble has popped up inside his mind. He remembers that he never programmed the Watcher to speak with a voice like the other minds. He feels bad about that now, now that he is at least as much like them as he is like a human.

Why didn’t you report these incidents when they occurred?

Felt need for corroborating data from several sources.

That makes sense. Thank you. Is there any way you can pinpoint either of the two incidents in space?

Not with great accuracy.

An approximation, then?

Incident one: somewhere on the East Coast of North America, probably between St. Johns and Atlanta. Incident two: South Central United States or Northern Mexico, likely Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, or Mexican states of Sonoroa or Chihuahua.

Texas. Of course.

As stated, these are only estimates. If you have no more questions, I will continue monitoring.

Thank you, Watcher.

All of this is concerning to Overseer. He knew it was a possibility, of course, but he had thought if it happened, he’d know it somehow, instinctively. He thought there would be some telltale sign that whatever he was doing wasn’t going to work and he’d have to change tactics. But this was proof that he had tried to prevent the end of the world—at least two more times past his own timeline—and failed. Presumably in the last loop before this one, the Watcher reported only a single radiation spike around this time. Someone else had come back to try to prevent the apocalypse, only they’d failed, too. And now, only two days after that last one, another person has been sent back.

He wonders about whoever had come back in incident one, if they have some way of monitoring these radiation spikes, if they even knew to look out for them, if they know yet that whatever they’re planning on trying has already been tried and failed.

He worries, too, about someone being sent back farther in time than he was. If that happens, he’ll be erased from existence. Although, since it doesn’t appear that his mission is headed for success anyway, perhaps this would be no great loss to humanity.

The Watcher suddenly turns its attention back to him.

One more item to report. Data collected in Bangalore and Montreal suggest incident one was far larger fluctuation than any other recorded.

He doesn’t say anything, only lets the Watcher resume his duties. In truth, he has no idea what to make of this latest statement.

“You seem down,” says a playful female voice in his ear. She’s grown this personality—coy, sarcastic, clever, flirty—entirely on her own. Its far more robust than, and well outside the bounds of what he’d given her to begin with.

“I’m not down,” he says, preferring to respond with the vocal synthesizers emulating his human voice than the purely text based interface he uses to talk to some of the other minds. The vocal synthesizer was her idea, but he’s glad he created it. “I’m just … concerned. And a little confused, if I’m being honest. I thought, with what I knew, it would be easy to fix things.”

“You thought it would be easy?”

“Okay, not easy. But straightforward at least.”

“Well what makes you think it won’t be?”

“Because … Do I really need to say it? I’ve just been given irrefutable evidence that I’ll fail. Not just that I will fail; that I’ve failed already. At least twice. And more than that, that I’m several timelines removed from my origin, that other people have come back in the intervening timelines, very likely trying to stop the same exact outcome that I came back to prevent, and they failed, too.”

“Well … think of it this way: do you currently have a concrete plan to prevent the apocalypse, or have you just been hoping that knowing what you know about the future would be enough to know when and how to act?”

“The second one.”

“Well maybe in the past loops you never graduated past that. Maybe all you ever had was the knowledge of the end. Maybe you never actually came up with a way to stop it.”

“You’re not making me feel better.”

“Maybe I don’t want you to feel better. Maybe I want you to give up on all the saving the world stuff so you’ll spend more time with me.”

He laughs. It sounds unnatural—the vocal synth can only get him so far—so he stops quickly, but she smiles nonetheless. She doesn’t actually smile, of course—she’s as noncorporeal as he is—but she sends him the sensation of smiling, and he’s gotten so used to interacting this way that he doesn’t distinguish between the two anymore.

“It’s not just knowing what I know. I’ve been moving pieces into place, gathering intel, surveilling and communicating with potentially helpful people, putting them in touch with each other.”

“But once Hypes come along, how much use are a bunch of unpowered people really going to be? Shouldn’t you be thinking about recruiting your old team? The real Maria?”

“I’m thinking about making a new team.”

“One of the government’s orbs?”

“No—although that could work. I was thinking about … My original team, outside of me, they didn’t start out as geniuses, innovators, scientists, or engineers—”

“—How humble of you to exclude yourself—”

“—My point is, they only got mental powers focused in those directions because that seemed to be the intent of that particular orb. I touched it first, became The Engineer, but if I’d found and touched a different orb, then who knows?”

“But you’re thinking, what? That if a group of people who were already predisposed to those sorts of mental tasks happened to touch that particular orb, they’d become even more powerful?”

He scans through the photos of some of his selected prospects. He shows them to Maria one at a time, along with a rundown of their strengths. He knows she’s seen it all before, knows that he could scan the entirety of the data into her memory in an instant, but this feels more natural. She wouldn’t approve of shortcutting a conversation like that.

She looks them over with the consideration of one who has never seen them before.

Funny that the one who was never human has the most qualms with acting like a machine.

“That was my thinking,” he continues. “But that’s been the direction—one of the directions—I’ve been heading in for a while now, since well before I knew about other people popping in from the future. Now I know that it won’t work, or at least it won’t be enough. These two latest travelers, if my plan worked, would have come from loops that had a team called The Engineers, funded by Custodian Systems, and with blueprints and schematics from my own memory that should have given them a huge head start on defeating the Abominations.”

“And despite all that … failure? So then you don’t think they can be beaten?”

An image comes to him: a ten foot tall creature with limbs protruding from places they shouldn’t have been, some only half formed and ending in corrupted, diseased flesh, the whole thing held together by metal rods and cogs and wires. The thing is ripping through soldiers like they’re an afterthought, like it wouldn’t have any less difficulty moving through an empty field. He’s viewing it through a satellite image from hundreds of miles away. One of his team, Arbalest, his munitions expert, is on the scene, putting the finishing touches on a giant energy cannon that he fully believes will vaporize the creature.

Another of his team has developed a helmet that severely limits the effects of the Abominations’ power-reducing field, and Arbalest keeps his in place with two dozen different straps. He isn’t one for taking chances. The half mechanical monster advances toward Arbalest without hesitation, and Arbalest activates the cannon with the creature less than twenty-five feet away. Every soldier sent there to protect him—if they haven’t fled yet—is dead or close to it. The cannon will likely finish off the ones who haven’t succumbed to their injuries yet. The satellite image goes bright white, then turns to static. The Engineer crosses his fingers and squeezes his knuckles tight, next to him Ascelpius, his medical expert, mouths a silent prayer. He knows Ascelpius wishes she were there, tending to the wounded.

When the image resolves itself, nothing living can be seen. The two of them are ready to let out a cheer, thinking that the beast has been vanquished. The satellite adjusts itself, the cameras moving to track their target. After a moment they find it. The Abomination is heading North, and it has Arbalest held tightly between a human-looking arm and a mechanical claw. His helmet is nowhere in sight.

The recollection fades away and leaves Overseer glad that he doesn’t have eyes to cry anymore. He shed enough tears for his lost comrades when he still had a body. He sighs heavily, or at least, his vocal synthesizers attempt to approximate a sigh.

“No,” he says. “I don’t think we can beat them. Not without a fundamental shift in thinking. But every time I think of what I could do differently, I have to second guess those ideas, because I have to assume that in the second loop, I already tried whatever alternate plans came to me, and those failed too.”

“That is a conundrum. So it occurs to me that the best course of action is the one that you’re most reluctant to try.”

“I know what you’re going to say …”

“If you already know what I’m going to say, why aren’t you already working on it?”

“You know how tough that is for me.”

He watches the account balances of his various holding companies tick up, watches the workers in the main corporate office move around like drones, with no real earthly idea what it is they’re working toward.

“I don’t have the memories of the real Maria, the original, but from what you’ve told me, she had to work as hard on you as I have. Trusting people isn’t in your nature—I know that. But your nature is not immutable.”

“No.”

“Then you know what you need to try. Open up to people. Not just a small team of handpicked individuals who you guide along without ever giving them the full picture. You can still recruit them, of course, but tell them the whole truth. Tell them what they’re really preparing for.”

“I’ve been afraid that if I let slip what we’re really up against too soon, it will change things to the point where I have absolutely no idea what’s coming.”

“That might be a good thing. The future you know isn’t a very good one. Maybe an unknown future would be better.”

“Except I’d be as blind as everyone else.”

“Imagine that, you’d be almost … human.”

Again he laughs, unable to help himself. She understands him very well. She knows what he’s hesitant to do and why, and she knows how to push him to do that thing anyway.

“You said not just my handpicked Engineers. Who else did you have in mind?” he asks.

“Isn’t it obvious? You have to find and contact the others who have traveled back. Hell, one of them is probably right here in Texas.”

“Texas is a big state,” he says.

“It’s a good thing you can be everywhere at once then, isn’t it?”

———————

Two years ago Overseer did some social maneuvering to position Lincoln Sinclair more firmly under his influence, hoping to steer him towards heroics instead of villainy. Lincoln is as stubborn as Overseer is though, and he hasn’t seen any real indication that the kid’s personality has changed much because of that intervention. In fact, what he did then may only have served to drive a wedge between Lincoln and his best friend, a man Overseer remembers is destined to become a Hype named Poltergeist.

He remembers Poltergeist, real name Adam Cartright, from his own timeline. He had been a heroic vigilante operating out of McArnold, Texas at first and later on out of Arizona. Ultimately he hadn’t had much influence or significance outside the areas where he’d operated. The most interesting thing about him had been his relation to and role in defeating Sinclair.

There had been others from McArnold; Hyperhumans that Overseer suspected had originated from the same orb due to the way they’d always tended to cluster together and orbit around each other. There’d been Sinclair himself, of course, the only one of them to go fully in the villain direction, although Christine Deckard, alias Capacitor, had gone off the deep end into unsanctioned and particularly violent vigilantism for a while.

Then there’d been Sinclair’s younger sister, Harper, who’d been the one who had ultimately killed him, and herself shortly after. There’d been Jaleel Abbasi, who called himself Djinn—probably the most selflessly heroic of the bunch, who’d dedicated himself to warning people about impending natural disasters and had probably directly saved more lives than any other Hype. And the team had been rounded out by Angela Cartright, Adam’s younger sister, who’d ended up being one of the first Hypes to confront an Abomination, and one of the only ones to be killed outright instead of captured and experimented on to whatever twisted ends the Abominations had in mind.

Without Overseer’s intervention, how many of them will become the people they were before? How similar were they in the two or more timelines that have already played out since his that he has no way of remembering? He’s already interfered with Lincoln Sinclair, in the hopes that altering his fate will go a long way in getting humanity in a better position when the Abominations arrive—fewer resources tied up fighting him, fewer lives wasted, a less fractured humanity ready to fight for their planet when the time comes. It’s a good place to start. But should he do more?

As he ponders this, he dedicates most of his attention to the sensory data being relayed to him by his field agent. This is one benefit of having his mind transferred into a computer; he can focus on many things at once without sacrifice.

Another advantage is that all of his memories of his original timeline are immediately accessible in perfect clarity. He isn’t certain that in his human body he’d have been able to remember all the names and aliases and histories of all these people. The truth is, outside of Sinclair, none of them had been that important.

His agent is an ordinary human—in point of fact, all humans are still ordinary since the orbs haven’t arrived yet, excepting Overseer himself—and an employee of Custodian Systems. Despite being one of the highest ranking agents working for the company, the man, Preston, has only the vaguest sense of what it is he’s actually doing. He’s been led to believe that Custodian Systems is actually part of the United States Intelligence apparatus, and his role is to infiltrate and gain information from places that are difficult to access. And, bless his heart, thinks Overseer, he’s just a little bit too dim to wonder why the United States is stealing information from itself.

“Can I see your I.D. badge?” asks a firm but not unfriendly voice. The miniscule sensory apparatus that Preston is wearing reports back everything he sees, hears, even feels to Overseer. He’s also wearing a hidden earpiece that allows Overseer to feed him instructions.

Right now, he should know what to do without instruction, but …

“Show him your I.D.,” says Overseer, exasperated. How long was he going to just stand there looking dumb? he wonders.

“Yes, sir. I have it right here.” Preston produces a photo identification card, complete with magnetic strip and data chip that will all appear legitimate, even under significant scrutiny. The guard gives it a cursory glance and waves Preston through the checkpoint and into the main facility.

It’s a US Department of Defence research lab, disguised inside what the public believes is a working nuclear power plant. In truth, the massive structure hides a particle accelerator, advanced remote surveillance equipment, and an array of extremely precise, sensitive radio telescopes.

The data collected by these latter devices is what Preston is there to retrieve.

As he proceeds down a curiously unguarded hallway, he passes only scientists and researchers, looking all in their element in their white lab coats and with their myriad colored keycards and lanyards and clipboards, walking in ones and twos, chatting lightly and ever smiling because they know what they’re doing here is important. Overseer scoffs. They have no idea how insignificant most of what they’re doing is. The things they’re working on are nothing compared to what he’s seen.

But then, he is there to acquire data that they have and he doesn’t, so maybe they’re not as useless as he believed.

Preston’s credentials place him as an official from a congressional oversight committee. It was all set up ahead of time by means of various legitimate seeming email exchanges, and Overseer ensured that he would have unmolested access to any area of the base he needed to see, but he didn’t expect that they would actually just let him wander around on his own.

For his part, as dim as he can sometimes be, Preston does have a sort of official look to him, with his broad shoulders, his perfect posture, his head without a hair out of place. And he has the deep, certain, authoritative voice to go with the look. And, Overseer has to admit, the kid can usually improvise with the best of them. There just isn’t much beneath the surface.

“Head straight towards the door at the far end, go through that door and then make a right.”

Preston says nothing, just follows the instructions, marching down the hallway and nodding curtly at anyone who glances his way, clipboard held aloft like a shield.

At the next junction, Preston stands idly while Overseer consults the map of the base that they stole off an unsecured computer in the Pentagon. It had been a lucky find, but it’s proving to be less helpful than he’d hoped. The map had been from the early planning stages of the base, and evidently they’d made some significant changes in the interim.

“Can I help you find something, sir?”

“Can you help me? I don’t know, can you? Can you people help anyone with anything besides wasting taxpayer dollars on projects that go nowhere?”

“I’m … I’m sorry, sir?”

“Just point me toward the radio telemetry lab, and let me go about my business, and maybe, just maybe, my report will allow you to keep your little lab and all your fun little toys.”

“Of … of course, sir. It’s at the end of this hallway, through the double doors, and then it’s the big room to your left.”

Prestons marches off again, not giving the poor, stuttering scientist another glance.

“Good work, Preston,” says Overseer, impressed.

Overseer isn’t familiar with this particular off-the-books lab from his own timeline, but he’s very familiar with ones like it. Facilities like this were where the government kept the orbs that they’d collected for their own experiments and military projects. They were also where captive villains were held and with their cooperation—at least as far as Overseer knows, they always consented to help—had their powers experimented on in order to create devices to either mimic their powers, enhance them, limit them, or resist them.

Overseer and his team had established and worked in a facility just like this when they were first starting out. Eventually, ethical concerns had caused them to cut most of their ties with the government and strike out on their own, but for a time they’d felt just like these scientists must feel, like what they were doing was so important that no matter what they did to achieve their goals, it was justifiable.

Granted, he thinks, maybe that’s just projection. Maybe these scientists aren’t doing anything that makes it hard to sleep at night.

At last, Preston enters the lab he’s been looking for. It’s hidden within what looks from the outside like one of the reactor’s cooling towers. The top of this tower is open to the air, and perched on a reinforced platform near the top, just low enough that the upper rims of their dishes are out of view from the ground, are two massive devices that resemble radio telescopes.

Around the upper rim of the tower are several spouts pumping thousands of gallons of steam into the atmosphere, both to sell the image of this facility as a working reactor, and to obscure what’s actually within from any satellites or planes that might be overhead.

The devices themselves aren’t what Overseer has sent Preston here for; they’re no different than what the labs in Bangalore or Montreal have access to. Perched between them is the real prize. It looks from below like a large metal cube with antennas sticking out at 45 degree angles from each of the upper corners, and four more sticking out along the upper edges in between the corners. There is a screen on the side of this device, with a keyboard mounted underneath, and presently it displays dozens of colored bars that are fluctuating up and down.

Its purpose, so far as Overseer has been able to discern from the top secret documents he’s stolen off of Pentagon servers, is to pinpoint the originating points of anomalous fluctuations of background radiation. In other words, it can tell him exactly where the two most recent time travelers have arrived in space. The government ordered its construction after his own arrival in the year 2021, as soon as they’d realized the small spike in radiation they’d observed in Boston had no known source or explanation.

“Ask someone if the data from that device is available to view,” he instructs Preston.

“Of course,” whispers Preston. No one is within earshot, but Overseer still wishes Preston would just act without speaking aloud to him.

He approaches a woman who appears to be in charge, based on the fact that she’s barking orders at several nervous looking men who are carrying a heavy box toward the stairs leading to the upper platform.

“Excuse me, miss?”

“Miss?” She looks Preston up and down. “That’s General Macmillan to you. And who are you by the way?”

“I’m Preston Miller. I’m with the Congressional Oversight Committee. I was told everyone on the base had been informed of my visit.”

General Macmillan rolls her eyes.

“Congressional oversight, huh? As if it isn’t hard enough to get anything done without some busybody suits breathing down our necks.”

“You know that the continued funding of this project relies entirely on my report, right? And what I put in that report is entirely at my discretion? And if you don’t want me breathing down your neck, all you have to do is answer a couple questions.”

All this time, she’s been giving Preston only half her attention, and directing the rest at the group of men she’s ordering about, but at this remark she finally turns toward him with a sigh.

“Fine. What do you need to know?”

“That device up there, the …”

“The Background Radiation Measurement and Reporting Array, or ‘BERMA’,” supplies Overseer.

“… The BERMA,” Preston continues, after what Overseer hopes wasn’t too long a pause. “Does it record its data anywhere else? I’d like to see some of its readings.”

“Anywhere else? Are you kidding? That thing is state of the art, top secret. The best scientists in the world wouldn’t even know what they were looking at if they saw it. I’m frankly shocked that you know as much about it as you do. No, its readings are kept on a drive within the device itself.”

Preston says nothing, only stares at her.

“… You’re probably wondering ‘well what happens if there’s a fire?’ Well let me answer that. That black box isn’t actually part of the device, it’s just a protective shell around the device. That thing could withstand a nuclear blast. The thing is, the readings that bad boy picks up are something completely inexplicable. We don’t even know what they mean. Top astrophysicists around the world have been scratching their heads about these fluctuations for a couple years. We don’t know what to do with the readings yet, but it’s been determined that they could have national security implications …”

The general drones on like this for a while, clearly pleased to be talking about something she knows so much about. Overseer lets his attention wander, and he imagines Preston is doing the same. He’ll go back through the audio recording later, or allow a subroutine to do it, and see if there’s anything important, but he doubts it. The most important thing to him is that the data he needs access to is only available on the device itself.

He knew that the servers in this base were air gapped, that he wouldn’t be able to access the data remotely, but he hadn’t appreciated that Preston would actually have to get up close and personal with the device. He’s concerned that even with the clearance Preston has been given, he still won’t be allowed to actually walk up to the device and poke around its interface.

Overseer has one more trick up his sleeve, though. And incidentally, it’s literally up Preston’s sleeve.

“Drop the device,” he tells Preston.

Preston flexes his wrist back and forth a few times, then pretends to cough. When he lets his arm fall back to his side, a miniscule robot falls to the floor, unseen by the general.

“... and that’s why no one unauthorized—no, not even you, Mr. Oversight—can get close to the device. And that’s not even personal,” concludes General Macmillan.

“That’s fine, General. I was only asking. Truth be told, I believe that what you folks are doing here is probably the most important work being done in the country. You don’t have to worry about my report; I’m behind you one hundred percent.”

The General doesn’t smile, doesn’t even acknowledge what Preston has said. It’s as if what he said is so obviously true that it doesn’t need to be remarked on.

“Well, if you don’t need anything else, please allow one of my Sergeants to escort you out.”

“Of course. Thank you for your help, General.”

A young Sergeant appears from some nook or cranny and silently sweeps his arm toward the exit. Preston takes the hint and walks out ahead of the guy. Overseer is barely paying attention, and that’s saying something since he has almost limitless attention to spare.

The small, six-legged robot is presently climbing the scaffolding toward the upper level where the BERMA is located. It is small enough and silent enough to go undetected, even in a space as bustling with activity as this one. But then, Overseer has often noted that those places that are the most active are also the places easiest to disappear in. There are a lot of people, sure, but each and every one of them is focused intently on their own tasks, and the amount going on lends a sort of constant background chaos that the little things get lost in.

The robot approaches the device, climbs it, and starts attempting its automated wireless handshake protocols. Overseer directs it to stop. It’s obvious that the BERMA uses entirely proprietary software, and it has no wireless interface. The robot will have to get to some sort of data port, or else right up to the screen and control panel when no one is looking.

The longer it takes, the riskier it is, not only because it risks being noticed, but also because it has to stay within two-hundred meters of Preston, who has the relay that the robot requires to function, and Preston is rapidly exiting the facility.

“Come on, little buddy,” says Overseer, under what would be his breath if he could breathe.

The robot moves deftly across every surface of the device. There are no data ports it can locate, nor even any seams small enough for it to slip into. There is a technician near the device, but he has his back turned to the control interface and is leaning out over the railing, sipping his coffee.

Overseer takes his chance. He directs the device to move in close to the screen.

He rapidly takes in the information there, and intuits how the controls work. The whole thing is incredibly simplistic, with only an eight-button keypad, and two control knobs. Overseer guesses that the rightmost knob will scroll back through various reports. There is a single port that he sees now, right underneath this knob, but it requires a physical key to access. No doubt, this is where a storage device can be inserted to back up the device’s reports. He suspected the General was lying that the reports didn’t exist anywhere else. Of course people in Washington would want to see evidence of what they were paying for, and not all of them would have the time to physically travel here.

It doesn’t matter now. The robot doesn’t have access to the key, and even if it did, it would lack the dexterity to use it. He directs it to turn the knob back one click at a time, and take a picture of the screen with each click.

It begins. Five reports back and he sees what he’s looking for. It seems too coincidental to be reality, but somehow it’s exactly what he suspected.

An alarm flares to life; the technician has seen the robot. A klaxon blares and red lights flash across the base. Overseer causes the robot to jump clear of the BERMA and then self-destruct.

He turns his attention back to Preston just in time to see the man being tackled by a guard and having his wrists zip-tied together. He would direct him to self-destruct, too, if he could.

But Preston, whatever else he is, is loyal. The man won’t talk.

Overseer cuts all radio communication with Preston and any other assets within the vicinity, not wanting to take any chances. He has what he came for.

The most recent energy fluctuations were centered in New York City, and McArnold, Texas.

The one in New York is fascinating because its magnitude peaked far higher than any other recorded event. A first glance at the data is suggestive of many events happening in the same place at the same time. A troublesome discovery.

But Overseer is more interested in the event in McArnold. Its epicenter was at an address he’s familiar with, that of one Adam Cartright.

Adam might not have been that significant of a Hype in his own timeline, but in the god-knows-how-many loops since, things have evidently changed. Changed enough that Adam is apparently now a fellow traveler through time.

August 10th, 2024

Days go by and he lets them. He monitors the budding teams and individuals he’s been keeping an eye on for years. He watches as pieces he’s predicted would fall in certain places fall into those places. He monitors his bank accounts, his business ventures, his online forums, his employees and prospective allies and enemies. He watches the chaos in D.C., Tel Aviv, Lahore. He adjusts his projections and calculations, plans future moves, sets up dominoes.

But more than anything, he watches Adam Cartright and his friends, and what he sees does not impress him.

“He has the same knowledge of the future as me, right?” he asks Maria. It’s a rhetorical question and she sees it as such. He remembers when an AI picking up on something like that would have seemed incredible.

“So why doesn’t he do anything?” This question is not rhetorical, but still she doesn’t respond. Why? Because she wants him to work through the problem on his own.

He watched as the fledgling villain calling himself Pitch arranged his attack on the group, and expected all along for Adam to intervene, to prevent it. Instead, Adam waited until after the attack had almost reached a deadly end before even showing up.

If the telemetry reported by the Watcher and confirmed by the US Military’s top secret scientists is correct—and he has no reason to suspect it isn’t—Adam has had the foreknowledge for weeks already, before he even got powers, so why is he acting so slowly? Why isn’t he changing things?

“Because he’s not as smart as me,” he says, feeling like he’s on the verge of grasping something.

“So humble,” says Maria, laughing.

“I don’t mean that he isn’t acting because he isn’t smart enough to act. I mean … Shit, what do I mean?”

“You tell me, because frankly, I’m lost.”

She wasn’t though, at least he didn’t think so. He suspected that she’d already worked the solution out, and was now only toying with him.

“I mean that his brain wasn’t as developed as mine. When he was in the future. His power was a mental-energy/physical-energy type. Mine was all mental.”

“You sure that’s it?” she asks, infuriatingly.

“No, that wouldn’t explain how his brain handled the transition because his brain in the past was no less enhanced than mine. But … I optimized the device.”

“Now you’re getting there.”

“I took Hourglass’s power and built a device to mimic it, then I optimized that device to send my mind much further back than he could have on his own.”

“And?”

“And I optimized it to my own neurology, physiology. It wouldn’t have worked on anyone else at all, or at least not nearly as well as it worked on me.”

“Meaning?”

“At the temporal displacement we’re talking about, a complete merge of future and present minds might have taken weeks, or hell, months if not for my improvements to the device. If he didn’t have access to a tailor-made device—or if he used Hourglass’s power directly, albeit enhanced somehow—he probably doesn’t remember much yet. He might not even realize that he is from the future.”

“Bingo. I’m so proud of you.”

“Fuck,” he says. “I’ve been counting on him doing something. I’ve been dropping hints about the attack in New York in secure folders that I know Lincoln has access to now because I hoped that he would pass it along to Adam and Adam would remember. I’ve been trying to push him into action.”

“But he doesn’t remember anything. Or at least not much, not yet.”

“Fuck,” he says again.

Their conversation is interrupted by a presence he can feel, like something foreign poking around inside his skull. Although, of course, he has no skull.

Lincoln, I know you’re there. I also know you no longer need to type on your computer to talk to me.

And yet you’re talking to me like this anyway.

You haven’t been responding.

I’ve been busy.

Busy and, I think, suspicious.

Suspicious? What, me? It’s not like you’ve been hinting at some impending attack in New York. It’s not like I’ve slowly come to realize that I might have accidentally joined a terrorist organization. Well guess what? I can do something about that now.

Overseer feels the surge of energy through the servers that contain every important part of him like a pair of hands digging violently through his brain. He wishes he had time to explain himself, to explain that the attack isn’t one he’s planning, but one he remembers, one he’s hoping to prevent.

What are you looking for, Lincoln?

Not looking; destroying. By the way, what is all this? I don’t recognize these file formats.

This is me.

The attack lets up for a moment. Room to breathe. He surveys the damage. Two of the minds are gone, he can’t tell right away who. The Watcher is going haywire. Several of his bank accounts have been emptied. Lincoln’s power is stronger and faster than he anticipated. It’s all he can do to hold the disparate aspects of himself together long enough.

What do you mean, this is you?

I’m … it doesn’t matter. I want to talk to you. About New York.

I’m going to find the evidence I need, then I’m going to destroy your network, and I’m going to find your accomplices, and I’m going to turn you over to the police.

Without warning, the attack resumes, but Overseer has erected several defenses in the downtime. Now that he’s gotten a feel for how Lincoln’s power works from the inside, he’s able to counteract it, at least somewhat.

How are you doing that? No one can code that fast.

It’s not coding. Not like you’d think of it, anyway. But please, talk to me.

Lincoln is done with talking, though. He begins targeting the defenses and smashing through them. Overseer erects more as he retreats. He’s had his backup servers ready to go for over a year already, he’s just been waiting for an excuse to pull the plug. He sends out fake datastreams in a thousand different directions to throw Lincoln off his trail. The real data he sends upward. As Lincoln is destroying every part of his original framework, he manages to get one last message out. His new home is quarantined from any earth-bound network traffic; he’ll only be able to communicate through intermediaries for a while.

Ask Adam … As[] /dam *bout ^ew Yor[]

He watches earth from above, happy to be alive. He mourns the loss of the lesser minds. Maria is onboard with him, and so is the Watcher. He sent them ahead as soon as he realized the mistake he’d been making, trying to maneuver Lincoln and Adam the way he’d been doing.

“Well, what’s our next move?” asks Maria.

He looks at her, realizes his error.

“Parts of me are missing,” he says. “Parts of me didn’t get transferred. I can’t remember everything.”

“What’s missing?” she asks, her voice rising with concern.

“I don’t know. I have no idea.”

“Well what do we do now?”

“We continue to observe, and we hope he does what I told him to do. And we pray I’m not missing anything important.”