A short story about time-travel set in a dystopian near-term future.

The Rules

Some rules are made to be broken. But when those violations can lead to the extermination of your entire line of reality, people tend to take that a might serious. Jump School was created so that every jumper understands exactly what The Rules are, and the consequences of breakin’ em’.

Today’s the last day of Jump School, and I’m candidate 15, soon to be jumper 15. My birth name’s James McRowin, but I’m known as “fifteen” by the instructors. Keeps things from gettin’ too personal -- and by that, I mean personal in the slightest.

The other candidates gettin’ learned today are fuck-ups with coarse pasts, like I had: loyal, honed by rubbin’ ‘gainst life’s rough edges, valuable for bein’ alive and desperate. Some of us will jump, the others are alternates. They call em’ alternates; I call em’ replacements, since odds are fair that some of us won’t be comin’ back. More on that later.

“FIFTEEN, ARE YOU FUCKING PAYING ATTENTION?”

That would be Sarge. Sarge ain’t so much a man as he is a bull pretendin’ to be one. He got a voice you can hear all over the station – runnin’ gag is he eats bullhorns for breakfast. His job is to make sure we spend all of class shittin’ bricks. He is very good at his job.

“SIR, YES SIR”. That’s me. I sound like a wet paper sack next to Sarge’s baritone, and would probably last about as long even if I got the jump. He knows I ain’t payin’ mind. My thoughts are already on tomorrow.

Up on the front platiscreen, Professor Akin’s givin’ a lecture on chaos theory, drawin’ diagrams with crazy arrows. “In a chaotic system, small differences in initial conditions can lead to large and unpredictable variances in outcome”, he lectures. He draws some Greek letters and connects them with more arrows.

I look around and catch Kaylie’s eye. Still not sure why she took an interest in me, but I don’t question these things. Now she’s my co -- I’ll be jumpin’, she’ll be mannin’ the comm. She points a finger at Akin, tellin’ me to pay attention, but subtle so as to avoid Sarge’s attention. I pretend to oblige her as Akin rambles on.

The Rules can be summarized in three basic principles:

Rule #1: Energy must be conserved.

When a body is sent into the future, an equal amount of mass must come back into the now. We call this “the swap”. An insertion mass compensator locates and pulls in the right amount of mass for the object bein’ inserted. Most of the time, the stupid thing brings back a pile of future-dirt. The amount of energy to do a swap is enormous – you ain’t never seen so many zeros in your life in a number like that. And the farther into the future you go, or the farther you displace your subject from the jump site, the more energy it takes. Practical terms, that limits how far we can jump.

Every manned jump consists of two swaps: one to insert the subject into the future, and one to bring the jumper back. Missin’ your swap home is somethin’ you do not want to have happen. Most of us think it’s pretty damn nice that they bother ‘bring us home at all. Sarge’s secondary job is makin’ sure you don’t get to feelin’ too important ‘bout that.

Rule #2: The universe hates paradoxes.

The future is not linear. It branches in a near infinite bloom of alternate realities. Some of these are more n’ likely come to pass than others. Best I understand it, “now” as we know happens as time picks a set of particular branches to travel down, like a bubble travellin’ through a river delta, floatin’ on the current that offers the least resistance.

The universe, it don’t put up with messy realities. Branches of reality only hold so long as they’re consistent. You do somethin’ to put reality into an inconsistent state, like gettin’ killed by your future self, the universe will shatter that reality like a glass stirring rod hittin’ concrete. We call this “paradoxing”.

Fortunately, the universe is kind enough to ensure that paradoxed branches are pruned and discarded, so they never become now. However, their contents are irretrievably lost. If you’s that content, guess what?

Akin’s been yammerin ‘bout chaos theory all day for a reason. There are innumerable number of ways to paradox a line of reality -- Most of these can be summarized as “If you see yourself, don’t say hello”. It’s too easy to change the way things happen. When you’re not in your own time, you’re a contaminant, and contaminants have a way of spreadin’. Somewhere in a meadow a butterfly turns left instead of right, some shit like that. I don’t really know all the details, but it can put a right hole in the consistency of your reality. Then BLAM, your branch is shattered, and you with it. That means you don’t get to come home. See note about replacements.

In practicality, this means jumpers keep small a footprint as possible after bein’ inserted.

Rule #3: Never, ever, ever, go back into your past.

This rule’s the most important one, penalizable by death of your loved ones for even plannin’ it. That may seem harsh, but the consequences are too great: the risk of paradoxin’ the past. Were that to happen, the universe’d prune the branch holdin’ now like a twig snapped in a hurricane. Nobody’s sure what would happen in this case, but none of us wants to find out. Nothin’ good, that’s for sure.

There’s one ‘ception to this rule – jumpin’ back into your own timeline after being inserted. That’s just squarin’ things up. All insertion chambers come with a built-in safety on em’ that ensures you can’t jump backwards. Doesn’t matter how good yer reason is, ain’t good enough.

Tomorrow’s the big day -- they don’t waste any time ‘round these parts. “They” bein’ Rane Corp, my employer, caretaker, and general big brother. Rane’s always watchin’, and don’t put up with no miscreantin’, though those days are behind me anyway. They take pretty good care, provided you work hard and don’t fuck up. They feed and house ya right enough, and trainin’ for a career to your capabilities. Certainly better than tryin’ to make a livin’ scrappin’ metal in some podunk town out in the cacti fields of New York. Well, what was New York.

Sure, there’s other Megas out there, but once you been black’d from one of em, good luck gettin’ into another, ‘less you got information, and information don’t generally flow beyond the know. When you put your chips down on a Mega, you go all in. Your Mega is your new family.

Professor Akin’s windin’ down, which means it’s gettin’ close to final testin’. Pass, you jump tomorrow. Fail, you’re on scrappin’ duties in the cacti fields for the forseeable future. I promised myself I ain’t doin’ that again. Too many ghosts from the past. Time to ace this thing, then later tonight, Kaylie and I are gonna celebrate horizontal.

Awakening

Rane frowns on fraternizin’ between jumpers and their co’s, but hormones bein’ what they are, and Kaylie bein’ cute as she is, a man can only have so much care. Even Sarge has a hard time gettin’ between that. The first day of Jump School I met her, I knew we was somethin’ special. Six months later, we’re sharin’ a pod.

It’s 5:30am, and I’m bolt upright and flush sweat. I ain’t too man to admit some of them hurricane butterflies musta turned left into my stomach. First jump and all later today. Kaylie ain’t around, which strikes me odd. She’s normally sleepin’ past me. Maybe she’s got em too. More n’ likely, she’s crunchin’ her comm ops manual with the other co’s. She more a plannin’ type, I’m more’a trust my gut kinda guy. The fact my gut’s still intact after my past proves it got somethin’ to know.

Once my lenses are in, my augmented reality assistant (ARYA) maps out my joggin’ route for the morning, tracks my progress, and monitors my vitals. Still not sure what the Y stands for, probably just a marketin’ thing to engender empathetic. Right out the door, I almost step on Chrome, the neighbors cat. How folks can keep a cat in a pod is beyond me -- It ain’t right. But Chrome struts around like he don’t care his domain is measured in feet. Podblock 171 is clean and geometrically unimaginative, and I run this circuit ‘nuff times to do it on autopilot. Rane likes to keep things simple and orderly, a legacy from their background as a research contractor. Even at this time of mornin’, there are people movin’ about their business, a mix of gym wear, suits with briefcases, lab coats and clipboards, and uniforms carryin’ mag-rifles.

‘Bout 10 minutes in, I pass the turnoff to the Arboretum. Two guards big as Sarge are posted there, carryin’ handheld disintegrators. There’s also an oversized wall mounted disintegrator pointed at the entry gate. Thing could probably demolecularize a tank unless it was plated in tungsten carbide. Beyond the guards are a set of double entry gates, only one of em’ can open at a time. Nobody gets in the Arboretum Rane don’t want in.

Truth is, this whole jumpin’ business been ‘round for less’n a year. The Arboretum’s proper name is Jump Control, and it’s where all the jumpin’ happens. The whole lab’s been built custom on top of a fission reactor. First time we’ve had enough power concentrated in one place to swap a mass of ‘preciable size.

First test jump, Rane’s engineers inserted a mannequin wired with sensors two days into the future, out in the desert in case somethin’ went wrong. The engineers opened up the chamber, shovel in hand, expectin’ to scoop out a load of future-sand. Instead, they was surprised to find a live prickly pear cactus.

There was active debate over whether the mannequin would appear out of thin air two days later. Some argued that it would be inserted into a timeline that would be pruned before it became now, and disappear without a trace. Others thought that insertin’ an object from this reality would increase the resonance between the two timelines and make it more likely that future would become our now. Whatever the truth is, two days ain’t much time for divergence.

There was also some thought that even if the mannequin did appear, Rane would be hard pressed to find it in the endless sand and scrub brush – the insertion routines ain’t so precise. They was right, but for the wrong reason. Couple days later, a massive explosion leveled four square miles of desert. Turns out magnetizable metal don’t insert so well. But that lucky cactus that swapped in, it’s now growin’ happily in the center of Jump Control. The engineers took to callin’ the place the Arboretum on its behalf.

Future-cactus in hand, Rane’s engineers spent the next six months developin’ a way to measure the resonance between now and a future-object, and another three months figurin’ out how to make it portable. All objects resonate at the frequency of the timeline they’re in, and timelines resonate at different frequencies. A high resonance means the future timeline is more related to now, and thus more probable to become our now, someday. Said cactus would have had a resonance of somewhere around 0.9996, before it adjusted to this reality.

The first human trials took place shortly after – bout three months ago -- fortunately with no subsequent explosion.

Case you haven’t realized it by now, things are kinda messed up outside the Megas. Earth’s caught in a feedback loop of global warming gone amok. The Megas started out mostly as companies with different ideas ‘bout how to address the issue, and was the only ones takin’ preparations serious. When the food riots hit and governments began to destabilize, only the Megas was prepared. Folks flocked to where the resources and safety was. ‘Least the decent ones did. Like any self-concerned macro-organism facin’ possible extinction, the Megas exist largely for their own survival and health, and have variable motives ‘bout how to ‘complish that. Some of em’ are tryin’ to figure out how to fix Earth (and make a healthy profit doin’ it), others are focused on tryin’ to get off of it. Most of em’ are tacklin’ it on several fronts, with a healthy dose o’ politics n’ backstabbin’ between em’.

Needless to say, fixin’ Earth is a project scale of massive proportions, requirin’ resources and level of risk unacceptable was there anybody with authority to say no. Soon as jumpin’ theory got discovered by Rane, they immediately saw the potential: insert jumpers into various futures to investigate whether any of the solutions succeeded. The cost of spinnin’ up a couple of jumps don’t cost much compared to a failed Terran-sized project. Course, one jumper is just one data point, and a jumper who lands in a low resonance future ain’t worth much. That’s where us multiple jumpers come in. Enough of us tell the same story, odds are good that story’ll come to pass. Better than shootin’ blind. Few of us don’t come back, well, that’s collateral damage, and a healthy payout to next o’ kin.

‘Time I get home, Kaylie’s back and makin’ coffee. One of the perks of havin’ a good job is you can afford the stuff on occasion, and today’s definitely an occasion. She seems distracted, so I give her a peck and head towards the shower. Long and hot’s my one indulgence, but the water’s all ‘cycled anyway so it don’t go to waste. I’m probably showerin’ in yesterday’s pisswater, but one learns not to think ‘bout such things when you’re drinkin’ it too.

Insertion

“Warning: All non-authorized personnel must vacate the premises immediately.”

Deep in the Arboretum, Kaylie and I are inside one of 8 identical enclosed blast-proof and disintegration-resistant rooms. Just in case. Me in the jump chamber, her runnin’ pre-jump configuration checks. ARYA’s providin’ me with a visual feed of the preparation sequence, sync’d with Kaylie’s lens, since I can’t see anything through the thick metal chamber casing. For me, it’s mostly waitin’ at this point, and without much to do, I’m feelin’ a bit restless.

“Computer’s calculating your trajectory and energy requirements”, Kaylie says, even though I knows this. She sounds a little tinny through the aluminum earpiece that’s part of my jump suit. The jump suit’s nothin’ special, but it’ll keep me temperate and generate enough juice for the various magnetically-neutral gadgets I’m bringin’ just by movin’ around. As Kaylie goes through the routine, I occasionally catch a glimpse of a large plastiscreen behind her. The status of all the checks bein’ run are listed, each line turnin’ from grey to green consecutive.

My insertion point: 20 years in the future.

My objective: Swap in, assess whether Rane’s project has been successful, take some environmental readings, keep my head down, and make sure I’m back to the jump point in time for the swap home.

There’s a heavy thunk as the chamber maglocks engage, and I can hear the hum of machinery startin’ to warm. We’re ready to go hot, soon as my fellow jumpers are all online.

“HAVE A NICE JUMP, LADIES”. Guess whose voice that is. The hum gets louder and there are claxons in the distance.

“Warning: All personnel must now be in prescribed safety zones. Failure to comply may result in injury or death.”

In my lens, I can see that all the rows are now green, ‘cept the injection status indicator. That one I’ll only see green from the other side. It ever goes red while I’m out there, that means the link has been severed, and I ain’t comin home.

“You ready to ride the lightnin’?” Kaylie asks, as the injection status indicator turns yellow. I grin, as the chamber suddenly smells like ozone and burnt toast. The hum turns into a buzzing, subtle at first, but then becoming pervasive, like a million bees fillin’ my head. Thoughts fall apart, crushed under the weight of infernal buzzing.

Gravity fluxes, and invisible arms tug at me wildly from all directions, leaving me with the sensation that large fish are nibblin’ at my bones. The metal walls of the insertion chamber waver and slowly evaporate, leaving nothing but a tranquil field of static beyond. The light in the chamber hues blue, and the world slows and begins to ripple, as if underwater. Everything takes on a murky, dreamlike quality. The air hangs thick. I sit, enraptured.

There’s a sudden unexpected thud, and the buzzing subsides, replaced by the drill-like sound of machinery carefully self-adjusting. I awaken momentarily from my hypnotic state, and hazily note the injection status indicator’s flashin’ yellow and red. That can’t be good. Light-headed, I feel the strange urge to laugh.

The buzzing returns as suddenly as it was gone, now muffled, and with it, lucidity escapes. The rippling turns into heaving. My vision slowly fills with strange surging waves of color and texture, and then fades into darkness. The buzzing becomes even more distant. I feel cold, and vaguely realize I’m losing consciousness.

There’s a distant pop.

When I come to, I’m lyin’ face down on a pile of sand, small fibrous bits, and bone fragments that appear to have no relationship to me or my gear. Slowly I get to feelin’ whole.

“I’m not sure what happened,” Kaylie’s voice says in my ear. Her voice and image in my lens are now tinged with static, artifacts of the data bein’ compressed and sent over a quantum link. “The insertion mass compensator did a last minute recalculation. But you look to be in one piece.” The last statement is a half-question.

I slowly roll into sittin’ position and wait for my head to stabilize. “I’m alright’... I think.” After everything stops swimming, I look around. Something is clearly wrong. My resonance meter is showin’ 0.63, a fair bit lower than it should. This far into the future, the insertion targeter can usually place jumpers into timelines with a resonance of at least 0.88. At 0.63, the odds of this timeline becomin’ now where I’m from is pretty low. Which is maybe lookin’ to be a good thing. The air is filled with a smoky haze, and my radiation detector is warnin’ me that I ought not overstay my welcome.

Akin once said the lower the resonance with our own timeline, the more heavily things can diverge with our now. One test jumper who ended up in an 0.34 landed in a swamp filled with ‘normous mosquitos and reptiles, like he’d gone back a couple million years in time or somethin’. He didn’t come back. Point bein’, can’t be too careful. All assumptions best be question’d in these cases.

While ARYA initiates a connection to the Rane JumpLink network, I pocket a small coyote bone as a souvenir, even though it’s against protocol. ARYA’s state of the art, but for 20 years ago. In this timeline, she can’t connect to the GlobalNet directly, her access protocols deprecated. Rane’s JumpLink network acts as a bridge for the legacy technology of jumpers to connect to the GlobalNet of the future, no matter what technology it's using – it’s one of the few tools hosted outside Rane’s headquarters, just in case. Won’t be able to get much off of it, seein’ as how my link is so slow, but it should be good for enough basic, anonymous recon needed to complete my mission.

ARYA chimes a connection to JumpLink, then suddenly displays a cryptic message: “GlobalNet Error: RaneCorp servers not found.” I feel unease creepin’ up inside.

“Kaylie I can’t establish an uplink to Rane’s server. Like it’s offline or somethin’. Also gettin’ a resonance readin’ of six-three and my rad meter’s at 7.47 mSv. This shouldn’t be.” Through my lens, I see Kaylie fiddlin’ with a screen full of data and graphs. She don’t seem too concerned for the situation, which both puts me at ease and strikes me as wrong. There’s a dull thunking sound in my earpiece and a moment of silence.

“And yet it is,” a voice says out of nowhere. It’s not one I immediately recognize, but it tickles at familiarity.

In my lens, I see Kaylie’s vision spin around. There’s a gruff lookin’ man standin’ square in front of her, holdin’ a personal disintegrator leveled at her body. This is a clear impossibility, cause’ there ain’t no way to sneak into the Arboretum.

“My sincerest apologies,” he says, and pulls the trigger. A beam of red light shoots out and strikes her in the chest. She screams in agony. Her vision in my lens turns sideways and drops, desk rushin’ up. There’s a loud clatterin’ of metal furniture and small objects, and a thump. I find myself lookin’ at the ceilin’ of the insertion preparation room. There’s a wet splash of deep red on it. My unease turns to rage.

“WHAT THE FUCK!” I yell into the comm link. It’s futile, as there’s nothin’ I can do, lookin in’ on the scene from 20 years in the future.

A moment later, the man’s head appears upside-down, lookin’ straight into her lens, and by extension, straight at me. “I suppose yer’ gonna have some questions for me, James.” he says, serious. “You gonna’ hate me for a bit too I reckon’. But soon enough you’ll get to understandin’ why this had to get done”.

Identification

“We don’t got long, so listen up good. Things ain’t as they appear,” he says. He disappears for a moment and there’s a red hue from the corner of the lens. Then he returns. My lens switches to a view of the room, broadcast from a wall-mounted camera.

“FUCK YOU!” I yell back, tryin’ to keep tears from welling in my eyes. “You killed her!”

“Yes, I did. James, I want you to listen to me carefully. I know you loved her, but Kaylie ain’t what she appeared to be.” His voice is measured, like he’s been rehearsin’ this speech for a while. “First, I want you to recalibrate your resonance meter.”

“GO FUCK YOURSELF”. I’m still yelling. My brain is scrambled, and it’s all I can think of to say.

“Your meter, it’s been tampered good. Recalibrate ‘gainst somethin’ you brought.”

My distrust begets stubbornness. But here’s a man whose existence in the jump chamber is a near impossibility. Next to that, the chance that he’s tellin’ the truth, an improbability, seems almost reasonable.

Blinking away dampness, I recalibrate the meter against my jumpsuit. It now reads just short of 1.0. I take careful aim at the ground, and measure the resonance. It drops to 0.96. I don’t say nothin’. Either the insertion compensator nailed this one, or my resonance meter ain’t workin’.

“Who calibrated your meter this morning?”, he asks.

I stay silent, and glower at him.

“Kaylie did”, he says, as if it were fact. “While you were showerin’ in pisswater. Now why you think she miscalibrated your meter?”. His eyes shine for a moment. He knows he’s got me here.

I don’t have an answer. This doesn’t make sense at all! Could someone else have miscalibrated my meter? I think for a moment, and rule out the possibility. But why would Kaylie do such a thing?

A pounding sound resonates through my earpiece.

“I fused the door controls”, he says, showin’ me the disintegrator. “They’re tryin’ to get in. Eventually they’ll melt through the door.” His voice doesn’t waver. “Now, this is the most important question I’m gonna ask: your ARYA still gettin’ an error ‘bout RaneCorp servers not found?”

I make the slightest of nods.

“Damn it!”, he says, and pounds the table with his fist several times. It’s the first sign of real emotion I seen from him. I take small satisfaction in that he didn’t get whatever it was he wanted. He suddenly looks weary, and sits down. “Well, that’s cause RaneCorp don’t exist no more.”

This catches me off guard. “What?! That can’t be,” I accuse him. Who could destroy Rane in such a short period of time?

“Check ARYA, you still have a JumpLink connection to GlobalNet, right?”

I ask ARYA to fetch the latest news on Rane headquarters. ARYA fiddles for a moment as she trades information with GlobalNet, then informs me, “The Rane facility and leadership council were destroyed in a fission reactor accident.”

“I was there when it happened”, he says, bitterly. “Not at the headquarters itself. I was away. Irradiated the whole area. Took me five years to understand all of what I’m about to say next, so don’t expect you to get it in a few minutes.” The pounding on the door turns into a hissing. I suspect they’re tryin’ to disintegrate the door. “Kaylie, she wasn’t workin’ for Rane.”

“That’s... not possible!” I exclaim. “She’s been livin’ here for years! She went through jump school with me!”

“Yes, and you know most of her story already. Escaped the food riots in ‘DC, refuged in Vermont till that blew over, worked as a researcher for the University of New Washington. What she didn’t tell you is that she was actually placed at New Washington by Paragon.” Paragon is one of the other Megas. They ain’t known for bein’ team players, and the regional proximity to Rane don’t make em any closer friends. “Paragon gave her a new history, and she was inserted into Rane”.

“How do you know this?” My anger has been partially replaced by skepticism. I still don’t believe it, but I haven’t found anything to pick about his story yet.

“Ain’t the first time I killed her”, he says quietly. He seems sad about this.

My anger returns furious. “Fuck you. How you kill someone more than once?”

“I’m a jumper,” he says, as if this were an answer.

“First human jumpers were only 3 months ago. There ain’t no other jumpers yet.”

“Yet, for you.” He pauses.

“This is where things get squirrely. I ain’t from your timeline no more. My timeline, absent me showin’ up, Kaylie don’t die cause there’s no me to do it. Instead, she sends a message out to Paragon tellin’ them that their project had succeeded, along with enough recon data to ensure they could replicate that success.”

“Wait wait wait”, my head is startin’ to hurt. “Paragon was… piggy-backin’ on the technology Rane developed? But… what was their project?”

“You’re looking at it”.

I look around. The landscape is bleak. Off in the distance, I see burnt desert and a massive jumble of concrete and metal – the twisted remains of some large compound. Slowly it dawns on me that I’m lookin’ at the remains of Rane HQ, from about 10 miles out.

“Paragon was tryin’ to destroy Rane”, I say, now in awe.

“Clever, ain’t it. In my timeline, they succeed. I had no idea till later Kaylie was even involved. See, like you, I jumped into a future where Rane was destroyed. Rumor has that it was an inside job, that someone inserted magnetized iron directly into the fission core. Boom!”. He waves his hands, mimicking an explosion.

I briefly wonder what happened to Chrome.

“Low resonance future though, so figured chance of that comin’ to pass wasn’t good. Still, I was smart enough to fetch the date of it happenin’, just in case. I wrote up my report, said the project was a failure, and noted Rane didn’t exist no more. Given the low resonance, wasn’t paid much heed. Want to guess what my resonance readin’ was?”

Seems like a trick question, so I take a shot in the dark, “0.63?”

“You’re startin’ to get it. Tampered. With Rane gone, my life fell apart. My girlfriend disappeared, my friends were dead, I had no job. Within a year, my savings run out and I was scrappin’ again in New Middletown, barely puttin’ together a livin’.”

His shoulders slump. “Every day I thought about my jump, the things I’d seen. Whether I could have or should have done anything different while I was out there, or after I came back. Whether there was any way to set things right. But all the jump technology was destroyed in the explosion. Even had it existed, there’s no way to jump backwards. You know The Rules.”

I nod.

“Took me a few more years to realize maybe there was a way out of this after all. A few months of intense plannin’. A few years to track down Kaylie and get the truth of the matter. That didn’t change nothin’, that was for my own revenge. A few years longer to find the spot I’d been to previous. And then heck of a lot of time waitin’.” He seems defeated now.

I’m suddenly gettin’ a lump in my throat and a pit in my stomach. “You went back to your original jump spot and rode in as your own swap!”

He smiles a smile that’s got no warmth.

“Which means if you ended up there, now”, I conclude, ”that you’re me!”

Fallout

All sorts of warning signs go off in my head. Rule #2, don’t fucking say hello to yourself! Rule #3, never go back into your own past! My imagination tries to picture what it might be like were the universe to prune now, and simply fails.

He reads the expression off my face clear, “Paradox is a risk, though you and I bein’ in separate timespaces does minimize that.” He pauses for a moment, then adds, “Somewhat.”

“How can you even exist?” I ask, “if my future has already been changed by you bein’ here. What if I don’t become my own swap in 20 years?”

“Don’t matter”, he says, “time has already been altered. Maybe you jump in from a parallel reality. Maybe it’s someone else. Universe’ll find a reality that makes it work, or it’ll prune if none exist. Since we’re still here...” He doesn’t finish that thought. “Look, reason I came back is, I thought if I killed Kaylie before it happens, I remove Paragon’s agent, maybe my shit future don’t have to be your shit future. Rane survives, and you don’t end up scrappin’ a miserable livin’. But apparently this ain’t enough -- Rane still bein’ gone where you are now is likely proof of that. It still happens. Maybe there were others.”

“It hasn’t happened yet in my timeline! Can’t I stop it?” I feel desperation rising in my voice.

“I don’t know I can answer that. What I know is that future you’re in now, that’s likely your future regardless how you get there. Your actual resonance readin’ says so. Maybe you get there in better shape n’ I do. Maybe not.”

“I’ll stay here and collect information, bring it back.”.

“You don’t have time. Your ride home’s in ten minutes. You stay, you ain’t comin’ back. Maybe you do come back and warn them, maybe they take precautions. Somehow it still happens. Maybe you don’t even survive the blast.”

There’s a quiet moment, where the only sound is the disintegration of tungsten carbide and muffled yelling.

“Time’s almost up,” he says, “and when they get in, they ain’t gonna be in a question askin’ mood. With the timeline altered as it is, I’m not even sure where I’m goin’ back to. Could I end up back in a future I never jumped out of in the first place? Will that paradox that timeline? I don’t know, but I’ll take my chances over stayin’ here.”

He walks over to the jump chamber and climbs in. The view in my lens switches to what he’s seein’ from inside the chamber. He uses the disrupter to fuse the chamber door. “Sorry”, he says, “gonna take a while to get you out again. Might want to take a piss while you can.”

That sounds like fair advice. I walk over to the nearest shrub, and relieve myself. Thoughts race through my head. What am I going back to? Betrayal. Kaylie dead! Rane going to be destroyed, and I have no idea what to do ‘bout it, if anything can even be done. Not even sure I survive! If so, odds are, I end up scrappin’. I promised myself that life was behind me, but push come to shove, a man’ll do what’s necessary. Includin’ killin’, apparently. That’s who I was once. That’s who I became again. Is that my destiny?

No, it doesn’t have to go down that way. I ain’t a killer no more. Not this me. Not this time. It ain't too late for me.

I get a plan in my head.

Ten minutes later, the last of the tungsten carbide gives way, and Sarge and his men pile into the room with disintegrators drawn, just as the jump chamber spins up. After the chamber cools down and the area has been declared safe, an engineer stands by with a shovel in hand while they disintegrate it open. All they find is a cactus and a coyote bone.

A moment later, the injection status indicator goes red. Imperceptibly, the universe reroutes its occupants toward a different future. The prior one no longer exists.