Supervisor Meyer pulled up the clock on the observation terminal. He realized it would be another couple hours before the Mistress and the Managers came in for the morning. He rubbed his hands on his face, relishing the warmth. He sat at one of the three terminals in the center of the department of timeline preservation. It was to this room that visitors came for a tour of the building. They would be in awe to stand in the room where Managers stood a vigilant watch, alert for discrepancies that may arise from Tourist traveling through time. It was a noble thought on the surface, Meyer knew, but if the general public knew what went on in the back rooms...
It was all for the ultimate good of the timeline, he knew. Meyer, in his new blue uniform, smiled as he looked over the display before him, rows and rows of grape vines swooping over rolling hills. The vineyard, his conceptualization of the interface, was his alone to tend over his marathon watch. The orderly lines had remained, as they should, except for one area, far in the back, a large blemish that was well known but left alone.
The air tickled behind him. Meyer turned away from the images floating in the air above his flat display. A group of individuals stood behind him.
Two he recognized: Andrea the Intern, and a former Manager. Another older man and the pentagon face of an old robot stood behind the familiar faces. Carthage Meyer opened his mouth to speak, but not even a word managed to escape before he crumpled to the floor.
Fenton Osorio drew the stunner back from the wilted Supervisor and turned to the others behind him. "Let's move. Andrea, you lead the way. Once we get to the secured unit, I will take Vega to the machine, and the others can free the boys. Now go!"
Envy spun on his dynamic tracks and started toward the back hallways, Andrea sprinting ahead, Greg close in tow. Vega glided after them, wrapped in his cloak. The former Manager started to move, but stopped and turned back to the previously occupied console.
He waved a hand over the surface and looked into the air. Moments later, a snap and hum lit the air throughout the department. Osorio turned away from the white block, coming face to face with the rest of the group. The other four had stopped and turned about-face.
"What did you just do?" Vega demanded.
"There has been a change, but I am not equipped to define it," Envy reported.
"I'm sorry, but I cannot take part in this any more," Osorio said, walking forwards with arms held open. "Despite my distaste for the practices of the Mistress, I took a binding oath, one which I am bound to keep even after I give up a life in the present. I hate what we do, but I cannot allow transients to destroy our timeline. I will not try to stop you. I have brought the last two lost coins home, and that should make up for my transgressions."
"You've betrayed us!" Andrea cried.
"That is a matter of perspective. I have dampened travel device use in this building. You will not be able to use the coins, but no one will be able to transport in here as well. Do what you must, but as for myself, my role in this game is complete. You will have to deal with the Mistress and the Enforcers now."
"Stupid old man!" Greg spit.
Vega smiled in spite of his disgust, "Move, the game is not over yet. Greg, get your brothers, then all we have to do is get outside."
A moment later, Fenton Osorio was left alone in the observation room, arms still open, head hung. A tear rolled down his chubby cheeks and disappeared into his beard. He took the required steps forward to the wall beside the door to the back areas. He slid down the wall and drew his knees up to his belly like a child. He rested his head on his crossed arms and waited for the Mistress to arrive, as she would be forced to come through the main doors this time.
The raiding party burst through the door to the secure area and Andrea lead the charge down the main hall. Past the period clothes lockers, the group ran at a panicked pace. In the central operations area, where Curt, and Peter before him, had been first brought, the group came to a halt.
"That door," Andrea pointed, "leads to the flash cloner. I don't know exactly how it works..."
"I can manage with Envy's help," Vega said, pulling his satchel from beneath his cloak. "Don't worry about me, just do what you need to. We leave as soon as we are all ready."
Greg nodded in thanks to his strange savior and followed Andrea through a door on the opposite side of the room. They ran into the prison without slowing, the door sliding shut behind the pair. Envy rolled after Vega, leaving the operation area clear.
Vega stood in awe before the flash cloning machine. He had come a great distance to find this machine. He could not help but to think of all the hours and lives devoted to the ideas that were now culminated into a single piece of functional equipment. He dropped his cloak around his feet and dug into his bag.
Vega dropped the satchel to the ground, and looked at the bundle he now held in his hand. Taking a deep breath, he unwrapped the common red cloth from the items hidden inside.
Open, he drew out two long bones, each unique in presentation. The longer was intact, but burnt. The other was unblemished with a clean cut at the top, leaving only the distal head. It was the second bone he chose to be first placed in the receiving box.
Envy made observations while Vega interfaced with the standard holo-display, so as to help his master work the machine. "I don't understand what this means here," Vega pointed to his assistant.
"It indicates that the provided genetic sample has non-standard DNA and will take marginally longer than a typical coalescence," The robot explained.
"Fine. Where is the age setting?"
"I believe the pathway to differ the age of the clone from that of the sample... should be here." Envy pointed.
Vega manipulated the controls.
The receiving tank filled with an opaque, green fluid. Vega took a step back to watch. He drew in a deep breath, still holding the burnt femur bone in his left hand as the body was organized.
The scene was gruesome, as Meyer had warned Andrea; but Vega had not heard this warning, nor would he have put much stock in the advice of a soft boy from the present.
Lights flashed from electrical impulses injected into the liquid. The nutrient rich fluid supplied the calcium to form bones. Soon a white skeleton was formed and was crawling with membrane coverings and ligament attachments. The color of the tank changed as muscles, tissues and vasculature grew from proteins injected into the tank. The body formed before Vega's eyes and the face of the clone began to take on a familiar face.
"Welcome back Aros," Vega whispered. His former companion was becoming recognizable, albeit a much younger version. It was a ghastly shell of the man he first met so long ago, now free of the scars and tattoos collected along their journeys. But Vega would not fool himself; this was not quite his old friend. This was an exact genetic copy, full of the originals instincts and predispositions, but devoid of his soul and memories. Vega felt the weight of the other bone in his hand. The second Tarkin he would resurrect would be the same. The clones would look like his friend and his father, but they would not be whole unless he escaped this world. He must get to a place where he could draw their souls into their new bodies.
The action in the tank paused and the water, now a dirty brown, began to drain. The clone was complete and the tank prepared for a self-cleaning cycle. The young boy, flash cloned in three minutes to the age of eight, was taken out of his birth chamber. The white, flaccid body was scooped out of the chamber by the solid arms of the reprogrammed war robot, and lowered down for Vega to see.
The naked boy had straight black hair. He breathed slowly as if sleeping in the robots' arms. Vega spoke in a language he had not used in years. The clone of his old friend opened his eyes. Purple irises met the hopeful gaze of the older man. Vega smiled and spun away to place the next bone in the machine, no time to spare for celebrating the completion of the first part of his quest.
"This is the prison!" Andrea shouted in the large quite room. She ran over to the movable pad that served as access to the stacks of prisoners
held in suspension. She took her place in the center of the pad and turned to wait for Greg.
Greg stopped short of the pad, embarrassed that he was out of breath. His heart was racing, his mind on overload from all he was seeing. It felt like something out of a movie; stacks of people being held in fluid cells, having their life force drained for nefarious purposes. But this wasn't a movie, this was a real place, in a future he would not naturally live to see. But at the moment, he was in that future, and it felt as real as anything he had ever experienced. His brother, who he had missed for so long, was now within grasp.
Greg had imagined Peter's life on lonely nights after his brother had disappeared. In the grand scheme of things, it had only been four years that the boys had been apart, but to Greg, those last years had seemed more real to him than all his other memories. Peter was a lifeguard in Southern California, tan in the heavy sunlight, red shorts and sunglasses. One day, Greg's mind wandered before sleep, I'll be on a trip to the beach and come across my brother and the mystery will finally be solved. But now, in the cold detention block, the questions left were truly answered. As Greg stepped onto the pad Andrea gave instructions to move towards to the upper cells in the secure unit.
Greg's mind was focused on internal thoughts as his eyes dragged past cell after cell. The people suspended in the occupied units did not register with his conscious mind until the pad suddenly stopped. It took a moment to process that the person in the cell before him was the prisoner they had requested to be brought to.
"Peter," Greg said. "He looks exactly as I saw him last."
"He has been in suspension for the last four years," Andrea said, operating the lock to remove the prisoner. "I've never done this before, so I don't know what kind of state he will be in..."
A light turned blue on the door and the glass doorway to the cell slid back. Expecting the fluid to come pouring out, the two passengers on the pad took a step back, but were surprised when the fluid encompassing Peter kept its shape.
"What do we do?" Greg asked, keeping his gaze locked on the body of his brother.
Andrea stepped forward and sunk both hands, up to her elbows, into the suspension chamber. The fluid reacted like gelatin, becoming soft and giving way under her movement. The older girl gripped the thin white boy by his shoulders and pulled him towards herself. The suspension fluid rolled off Andrea's arms, leaving her skin dry as she pulled Peter out of the chamber and onto their platform.
Peter flopped onto the cold metal and Greg dropped with him. The look on Peter's face was empty, confused, and he did not speak. The boy's eyes drooped as Greg shook his brother, calling him back to the present. A heaving spasm rolled up the collapsed figure, ending in an attempt to vomit, which produced nothing. Tears streamed down Greg’s cheeks as Andrea moved the platform over to Curt's cell.
The second boy was freed just as swiftly. Curt experienced the same symptoms as Peter, both boys fighting the incapacitation. Four passengers, two on their backs sucking down air as their brains reset, now occupied the pad. Peter seemed to be coming out of state first, his eyes darting around as he produced meaningless vocalizations. Andrea made their new destination the floor while Greg knelt over his brothers, a worried expression on his face.
Peter's face seemed foreign to Greg. The intervening years had not changed the face he knew, but the time Greg experienced had dulled his own memory. The thought of how far he had come struck Greg. Functionally, the two of them were now just about the same age. In fact, the same applied to the very familiar and haunting face of Curt who lay nearby. But in the present time, compared to the year they were born, the two brothers were now old men.
The pad suddenly came to a jolting stop. Greg popped his head up and looked around. With the overstimulation of everything to take in, Greg felt an overwhelming sense of tunnel vision limiting his perception. He shot his eyes around the room in a slight panic.
Andrea stood with trembling hands on the end of the pad, which hovered about twenty feet from the floor. At first Greg could not pinpoint the change, but knew something had happened by the posturing of their guide. And then it hit him. They were not alone in the room.
Standing in the doorway was a tall figure. She wore a long dress made of mono-tonal material that twitched as she stepped into the center of the room. Her face was white and her hair was black, pulled up into a bun. When she fully came into view, Greg gasped with recognition.
The face from the bronze coin.
"Come down from there and hand over that coin," the Mistress said to the still room. "Do as I tell you and I will take it into consideration."
"Who made you God!" Greg exploded. He stared down from the platform at the tall woman in the middle of the prison. His clone and brother coughed as they writhed on the surface below him. Anger welled up in his chest and there was nothing to stop it from bursting from his lungs. "What right do you have doing this to them!"
"I see you sent a double to be captured," the Mistress spoke, not being baited by Greg's anger. She began to pace the room, staying near the door. "That you could not have done alone. It was smart, but not even you, Andrea, could have thought of that alone. I saw Fenton cowering outside when I came in. I always knew he didn't have the stomach for this side of things. But I never thought he would work against me. In the end, I suppose he did get you to bring the final lost coin back to the present."
She paused and turned back to the escaping prisoners, "You must know there is no place for you to go. Come down and give yourselves up. I alone have a grasp on time that cannot be dislodged. There is no time or place you can go where I cannot find you. What do you say? Andrea, you are a smart girl. You have seen what we can do. Don't be foolish."
"No, Mistress! This isn't right. You can't do these sorts of things to innocent people! We were not out to take your power from you or destroy the timeline! We were just foolish children who got lost!" She pleaded. "We have learned some of your weaknesses. We have a transient helping us. We are determined to leave this place and just be left alone!"
The placid look on the face of the woman changed. Fire burned behind the black specks of her eyes. Her body became rigid as Andrea continued her attack.
"How many years did you wait, for mistakes to be made? An entire department of Keepers remaining tirelessly vigilant in their observation of the past, waiting for the coins to surface. I know that the present is your blind spot. The further back we go, the more warning you have of our movements. With all I know, with all I have learned from my education in the present, those facts have remained with me. If you think that you have been patient, I can be as well. If you do not free us, I will wait as long as it takes to correct this injustice. In the long run, it will save you so much energy to just let us go back to the past and live out our lives!"
"And me too," Greg said. He glanced at his older brother, who had regained the life in his eyes. Peter sat up, his back to a cell and began to look around, taking things in. "If you only knew how far I have come to save these two, you would be impressed. But if you knew that I would do all that over, one hundred times over, just to get them back for good, you would be scared!"
"Children," the Mistress began, "your youthful arguments are touching. But I am the first, in all of history, to truly perfect travel through space and time. I have constructed rules to govern the use of this great power. I'm sorry if you have found it unfair and have resorted to enlisting the help of supposed interlopers in your struggle against me, but I tell you; it is no use."
The woman on the ground floor made a subtle movement with her right hand. Soon, she was no longer alone in blocking the exit from the prison. Six creatures entered and positioned themselves evenly on either side of their Mistress. Greg was shocked to see the solid wall of seven-foot-tall lizard men. They wore nothing to cover their forms, standing like statues; the Mistresses muscle to be flexed at her will.
"You will not escape. You have broken the rules and are a threat to the continuity of the timeline. You
are all prisoners," The Mistress said.
"Isn't that just funny!" Vega boomed from the other side of the door. He walked forward into the room, repelling the Mistress and her six Enforcers. "I heard something similar to that... What was it? Oh yes, we are prisoners. And then something else about fear. What was it Greg?"
"Find what they fear," Greg shouted down to the older man as he entered the room, followed by their war robot and two young boys. The boys wore no clothes but each held a double bladed weapon in one hand. Vega winked up at the escapees on their island. He advanced to face their opposition.
"I also remember hearing that, they fear themselves. And the more I hear from this ones mouth, the more of it I am starting to put together," Vega concluded.
The mistress sneered at Vega.
"Transient!" She spit, making another sound that only the Enforcers understood.
The brief communication was all the lizards needed, and they sprung into action.
Vega spun around, his cloak flaring into a spinning shield. He burst out from behind the diversion and leapt, legs first, at an Enforcers mid-section. Envy also accelerated to striking speed, aiming at the two Enforcers to Vega's right. The young, nude, flash clones also wasted no time in attacking another pair of Enforcers. The final lizard protected the Mistress by backing her into a corner.
The chaos unfolding below Greg was almost too much to track. The impossibly strong lizards had their hands full with equally unyielding arms of their robotic adversary. Envy extended his mid section to full height and caught the two surprised Enforcers by the necks. With his long fingered hands, he forced them toward the right wall. Fighting wildly against their metal challenger, the Enforcers were marched backwards until they were pinned by their necks and taken out of the fight. Envy stayed in place, but turned his head backward to observe the rest of the clash. Envy offered up warnings to his comrades, finding any way he could continue to be of help.
Vega's clones were the next greatest things to catch Greg's eye. The school age children were like little pit vipers, moving fast and striking quickly at the Enforcers. They steered their two away from the Mistress and her lone protector. The boys were little acrobats, jumping and flipping, striking out at every blow or lunges the lizards aimed at them. Greg had to force himself to blink and reset his vision several times before he realized the odd hugging color surrounding the boy's hands was not a trick of the light. The Enforcers cried out in pain each time the double bladed weapons sliced at their thick hides.
Finally, there was Vega, who had latched in tight against the torso of his Enforcer. The Garlon tore with claws at the exposed back of his foe, but the old man hung on and worked his hands up to the neck of the tall lizard. The creature stumbled backward toward Greg and the others on the platform. When the Enforcer was about ten feet from Greg, it changed tactics. The lizard squatted slightly and attempted to pry his unwanted companion from his chest. Seeing that Vega's strength would be no match for the long arms of the lizard, Greg realized it was time to help. Without thinking, he took a flying leap from the platform. With arms outstretched towards his target, the young blond boy grabbed the Enforcer around the neck as his momentum took the three of them to the ground.
Greg held on and choked the lizard. He could feel Vega's hands under his own, doing the same. The two held on as the green scaled beast struggled about, but was unable to stop four arms from cutting off the blood flow to its brain. The Enforcer blacked out, going limp. Greg once again found himself partially pinned by the dead weight of an Enforcer. In a moment of déjà vu, Vega, who winced as he straightened his back, pulled Greg to his feet.
The pair stood over the fallen Enforcer as the moving pad lowered to the ground. Peter and Curt, now fully alert, stepped off with Andrea. Envy remained in place holding two struggling lizards against the far wall. One of the flash clones held security over two wounded Enforcers that sat against a wall in defeat. With Greg and Vega's adversary snoring on the ground, all that was left was a single Enforcer guarding the Mistress.
"Game's over, lady," Greg said as the large group surrounded the pair.
"I have alerted others!" the Mistress said. "Managers and Supervisors will be here shortly. I cannot be muscled about in my own house!"
"Tell your abomination to stand down," Vega said. His back was cut up badly, but he kept the tone of command in his voice.
The naked armed clone stepped forward in a crouched fighting stance, eyes locked on the final lizard threat, weapon raised.
"That one will be no match for the six of us. In fact, Akoda here could stop playing nice and end its life for good. But we don't want to hurt these creatures, we just want to leave. All of us."
"That will not happen!"
"It will," Andrea said. She stepped forward and put her hand on Akoda's wrist, lowering his weapon.
"I know," she continued, "what Vega meant when he said he was beginning to figure it out. The Snow King left hints along with his stashes. He intended it to make whomever found his treasure realize the farce we live here in the present."
The Mistress began to breath in snorts. Noise came from outside the prison room as the distinct voice of Fenton Osorio warned others to stay back while he checked on the situation. The old man peaked inside the room. Taken aback by the new size of the party and the remarkable turn of events, Osorio stepped inside slowly and closed the door.
Andrea continued, un-flapped by the traitors’ return.
"The entirety of the past is your prisoner. If something happens you don't like, you go back and stop it. If they fight back, you know just when to go to render them helpless! Look at this prison you have! You and the Keepers sit at the leading edge of time and impose your will over everyone down stream. I believe the rumors now," she cried, "I bet people have invented time travel before you, but since you perfected it, you wiped them away to claim the achievement for your own!"
"You are not quite there," Vega prompted from behind, "Keep going. Find what they fear."
"They fear a messy timeline..." Greg said.
"No," Peter croaked. "They fear the transients. They fear people like the guy who stole the coins in the first place. They don't fear the common man. It's the special ones, like you," he said nodding to Vega.
"That's right," Osorio admitted in a low voice by the door.
"And that brings us to the final piece of the puzzle," Vega said as if continuing his lesson.
"They fear themselves..." Greg said.
"Are you from outside this timeline yourself?!" Andrea shouted at the Mistress. "Are you a fake?"
"No!" she bellowed back. "I did invent and perfect time travel! I was the first one to do it! If any did before me, it was sloppy and could never come close to the understanding I have achieved! Others were given hints by saboteurs, which I had to clean up. That is how timeline preservation came about, to fix the leakers who wanted to mock my triumphs. I worked my whole life on the question of the nature of time, and I finally succeeded, but I was old and could not hand my work over to an ungrateful successor. I am no fake! The old woman Zala Jibboom came back to her younger self and shared her knowledge. I may be that younger version of myself, but it was me who did these things. I lived my life building the University and the Keepers! I deserve to enjoy my hard work!"
"They fear the paradox created by controlling time, but they are a paradox of creation themselves," Greg realized.
"Yes," Osorio admitted, "Yes..."
"She just wants to protect her power here, as Mistress of the Keepers of time and space. You want a perfect timeline, but in fact your own timeline is a result of a split," Vega said. "I have traveled to different worlds, different versions of this world, and other realities where the laws governing time operated differently. Your perfect timeline was too good to be true. Time splits sometimes! You may not see it, but it makes up a beautiful tree that does not need to be pruned. Silly humans..."
"We are leaving," Andrea announced after the sobering affect Vega
's words had on the room. "Vega will give you the third lost coin, and now you have them all back but mine. I'm going home too, but I will keep mine to ensure you keep your promise to let us live our lives. Can you agree to that, Mistress Zala?"
"Yes," she said, defeated, weeping on her knees. "As long as the transients go! They should stay out of my arrow of time."
"I have had my fill of this place," Vega said. He removed the coin from his suit pocket and tossed on the floor in front of the buckled woman. He motioned to Aros and Akoda, who took his hands as he walked from the room. Envy released his two restrained friends and followed the three out of the prison room.
"I'm sorry the way this all turned out," Greg said, looking at the final two adults in the room. "We were just lost children wanting to go home..."
The Mistress flapped her hand at the four as she hid her tears.
Greg looked to Andrea, the face he felt he had known for years. He put his hand on her shoulder and smiled. Peter took the hint and placed his hand on his brother’s forearm and gave a slight squeeze. Curt stared at them, wide-eyed. He clasp Greg's free hand in his.
The children from 2015 were ready to go home. Andrea spun the coin on the chain and the room became empty.
The roof of the building was blinding. The smooth tiles that covered the swooping architecture threw the early morning light into the faces of the escapees. Vega doubted that the Mistress, Zala Jibboom, would truly keep her word. The three were, after all, transients from outside her precious arrow of time. But that was fine with the old magician; it was time for him to leave time tourists and their tricks behind. Sunrise was the perfect opportunity for his escape. He drew the crystal egg from his satchel.
Held up to the sun, the oblong crystal orb was once valued by a previous owner at five pounds Sterling. The solid chunk of mostly transparent minerals caught the light and absorbed them into focus in its interior. With every photon, the crystal grew more luminous. If one were to have looked close at the orb, they would have seen a beautiful scenery, a green landscape spread out below. But of course they did not, for Vega took out a tuning fork, and at the apex of the gathering sunlight, he struck the egg, producing a sweet tone.
The light leapt from the upheld egg and projected a warbling wash of liquid colors onto thin air. The two young Tarkin, a Canadian War Robot, and a beat down old man ran into the portal. They fled the warped version of Earth that allowed time travelers to dominate the past.
CHAPTER 29