The Time Traveler's Almanac

Pierce dived toward the grassy strip beside the path as flaring crimson threat markers appeared all around him. As he fell, his suit bloated and darkened: rubbery cones expanded like a frightened hedgehog’s quills as his collar expanded and rotated, hooding him. In the space of a second the park’s population doubled, angular metallic figures flickering into being all around. Time flickered and strobed as timegates snapped open and shut, expelling sinister cargo. Pierce twitched ghost muscles convulsively, triggering camouflage routines as the incoming drones locked onto each other and spat missiles and laser fire.

“What’s going on?”

“Palimpsest ambush! Hard…”

The signal stuttered into silence, hammered flat by jammers and raw, random interference. Pierce began to roll, rising to sit as his suit’s countermeasures flared. This is crazy, he thought, shocked by the violence of the attack. They can’t hope to conceal—

The sky turned violet-white, the color of lightning: the grass around him began to smoke.

The temperature rose rapidly. His suit was just beginning to char from the prompt radiation pulse as the ground opened under him, toppling him backward into darkness.

REDUX

Army of You

When you see the ground swallow Pierce you will breathe a sigh of relief – you’ll finally have the luxury of knowing that one of your iterations has made it out of death ground. But the situation will be too deadly to give you respite. If Internal Affairs are willing to start with combat drones and orbital X-ray lasers, then escalate from there, where will they stop? How badly do they want you?

Very badly, it seems.

There’s going to be hell to pay when it’s time for the cleanup; ur-history doesn’t have room for a nuclear blitzkrieg on the capital of the Second Reich. The calcinated, rapidly skeletonizing remains of the governesses and the organ grinders contort and burst in the searing wind from the Hiroshima miscarriage, and the four faces of the clock glow cherry red and slump to the ground as a dozen more of you flicker into view, anonymous in their heat-flash-silvered battle armor. The echo-armies of your combat drones fan out all around, furiously dumping heat through transient timegates into the cryogenic depths of the far future as they exchange fire with the enemy’s soldiers. “Extraction complete. Prepare to move out,” says your phone; the iteration tag of that version of you is astronomical, in the millions. This isn’t just a palimpsest ambush: it’s an entire talmud of rewrites and commentaries and attempted paradoxes piled up in a threatening tsunami of unhistory and dumped on your heads.

You’ll grab your future self’s metadata and jump toward a timegate to a dispersal zone drifting high in orbit above ruddy Jupiter’s north pole, nearly a billion years in the future: the rocket motors at your suit’s shoulders and ankles kick hard, and as you loft, you’ll catch a flashing glimpse of the Mach wave from the first heat strike surging outward, lifting and crumpling schools and hospitals and churches and apartments and houses and shops in the iron name of Internal Affairs.

They won’t find this dispersal zone. They won’t uncover the truth about Control, either, or about the Opposition – you’ll be sure of that for as long as you continue to live and breathe.

You will look down, between your feet, at the swirling orange-and-cream chaos of Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Your armor will ping and tick quietly as it cools, and you will wait while the star trackers get a fix on your position, your mind empty of everything but a quiet satisfaction, the reward for a job well-done: the extraction of your cardinal iterant from the grasp of Internal Affairs. Somewhere else in time – millions of years ago – the rewrite war is still going on, the virtual legions of you playing a desperate shell game with Kafka: but you’ve won. All that’s left to do is to deftly insert the zombie ringer into ur-history on his way into Kafka’s court, primed to tell Internal Affairs exactly what you want them to know, then to orchestrate a drawdown and withdrawal from the ruins of Berlin before Kafka overwrites the battle zone and restores the proper flow of history.

Your suit will beep quietly for attention. “Scan complete,” it announces. “Acceleration commencing.” The thrusters will push briefly, reorienting you, sliding Jupiter out of sight behind your back. And then the rockets will kick in again, pushing you toward the yard, and the fleet of thirty-kilometer-long starships a-building, and Yarrow.

He Got Your Girl

I’m alive, thought Pierce, then did a double take. I’m alive? Everything was black, and he couldn’t tell which way was up. There was a metallic taste in his mouth, and he ached everywhere.

“Where am I?” he asked.