Etta followed her father down the brightly lit corridor, glancing through the eye height windows into the labs that lined either side of the long corridor. What she saw outraged her, even knowing what went on at this facility. The place had the air of a hospital – the smell of disinfectant and industrial cleaner, the tones and beeps of medical equipment, the blue-white fluorescent lights - but that would be a misunderstanding.
No one ever got better here.
The view through the next window on the left made her gasp, and her world fall away. "Simon..."
Simon Foster's cleanly severed head was held in a skeletal frame of chromed steel. Cables dangled from attachments at the base of his neck, leading to various machines. His eyes were open. An Observer wearing a lab coat had his back to her, overseeing some device.
Etta shrunk away, but was unable to keep from staring. Then Simon blinked, causing her to gasp again. Horrifyingly, recognition animated his features, and his lips started to move.
"Etta..." she read on his lips through the window, though she heard nothing.
She felt something ignite inside her chest, burning her heart and lungs. Pistol in hand, she kicked at the door, but it rebuked her attempts to enter.
"Etta..." Simon begged again, though all she could hear was her sole of her boot smashing against the unyielding door.
If only she could reach him, she could close his eyes forever and give him the rest he surely deserved...
"Henrietta! WAKE UP!"
Her father's command was stern, and accepted no argument. She sat straight up in bed, arms extended, still pulling the trigger of a gun that thankfully wasn't in her hands. She stared at Peter, who was sitting on the edge of her bed, his soothing right hand stroking her left shoulder.
"You were dreaming, sweetheart." Peter said.
His arms were open, beckoning, but he was giving her the option of accepting his embrace or not. She moved into it eagerly, burying her face in his chest and wrapping her arms around his waist. When she came up for air, placing her chin on his shoulder, she noticed her mother's silhouette in the doorway, looking on with concern. Etta gave her a discreet wave with her fingers, feeling like a little girl again, and Olivia nodded, relief lightening her features.
"Simon's eyes, Dad..." she whispered, and felt him tense.
"I know...I was hoping you hadn't seen it." he whispered back.
"He blinked his eyes. He knew me. He's still alive in there."
"I know sweetheart, I'm so sorry."
He held her tighter.
"Promise me, Dad. We'll get him out of that place."
She felt him nod.
"I promise, sweetheart."
He drifted in and out of awareness, with nothing to mark the passage of time. At first, there was the all encompassing embrace of the Amber, the Harvard lab glimpsed through golden resin, and the constant sure knowledge that Etta and the Bishops would surely rescue him, when they had the opportunity.
That went away, and was replaced by cold bright lights and white walls and bald men in lab coats. Time passed, but he was barely aware of it.
Once he thought he saw Etta, through the window in front of him. Her face contorted in shock and anger, and was replaced by another, vaguely familiar one, this one a man, with an expression of shockingly grim determination.
The faces disappeared.
When he was allowed to think, there were questions. Who is The Engineer? Have you ever met The Engineer? Where does The Engineer live?, and most urgently and frequently, how does The Engineer get his knowledge?
He understood, with his limited awareness, that the questions were not being asked in words. He was being read, repeatedly.
Then there was a bright flash. He wasn't being allowed to think that day, so he could barely be considered sentient. He smelled smoke and ash, and heard words that had no meaning. A man looked at him, a man with bright blue eyes and a fresh red gash on his cheek.
"Jesus Christ, Moira. Give him a sedative, or at least bonk him on the head. I can't get him out of here with him staring at me like that," the face growled.
"Sure thing, boss," said another voice, a female, from off to his left.
Simon Foster drifted away.
Sensation returned. Impossibly, he became aware of his torso, arms and legs. His chest contracted and expanded, and he breathed. Was he dreaming? Was this his vivid Imagination gone amok? A phantom body?
Simon's neck hurt. Or more precisely, it itched, like a newly healed injury. He groaned, and the sudden, echoing noise startled him. He heard a stirring nearby, shoe echoing on concrete.
"You can open your eyes. Don't be frightened."
A deep voice, from off to his left.
Simon did so, and it revealed the impossible - he was laying on a cot, his head attached to (his?) body, once again. He right hand moved according to his will, and he stared fascinated as he opened and closed his hand. Then he noticed something.
"This isn't my body," he muttered out loud.
He had broken the middle knuckle of his right ring finger, years ago, during the riots. Never set properly, the swollen member had been noticeable, but this knuckle matched the others on the unfamiliar hand.
"Technically, it is. We cloned it for you, from your own flesh, and accelerated the aging process. Aged it about forty years in three months. Then of course, we had to cut the poor bastards head off and put yours back on. Tricky. Probably unethical, too. But then, I'm not a doctor, and I never took any oaths to do no harm."
Simon turned his head toward the voice. The room he was in was mostly cloaked in shadow, but he could make out numerous benches with piles of mechanical and electronic equipment, all in various stages of assembly. He also made out the silhouette of a lanky, tall man, standing at one bench, apparently working at some piece of equipment.
"Turn up the lights," Simon demanded, "I want to see you."
The man made a gesture, palm up, hand raising and the florescent lights flickered and then filled the room in harsh white light. He had curly brown hair, blue eyes, a few days growth of beard. A jagged, healing scar on the left cheek, and a grim expression on his visage.
"Peter Bishop." Simon said, and the man in question nodded.
The man nodded, but continued working on the device on the bench in front of him.
"Guilty as charged. Hello, Simon. I suppose I should thank you for shoving me out of the amber. For all the good it has done."
"Where is Etta? I saw her through the window...and you."
Bishops face clenched, then returned to normal.
"I'm surprised you remember that. That was three years ago, Simon. Etta...my daughter died two days after that. We just happened to be in the building for an unrelated op, we didn't know you were there. She kind of freaked out after seeing you."
Simon gasped and nodded, taken aback. The knowledge of his young friends death was like a punch to the gut. "I'm very sorry. And I suppose I should thank you for making all this effort."
Bishop shrugged. "She wanted you out of the amber, either walking around or laid to rest."
Simon sat up slowly, moving gingerly, testing his new limbs. He swung his legs over the side the side of the cot. His probing hands found a scar, going around the entire circumference of his neck. He scratched it, nervously, wondering if his head would fall off if he turned his head too quickly.
"So how goes the fight?" Simon asked, "...Did Doctor Bishop's..."
Bishop threw some apparently burned out component into a nearby trash bin, and seized another, interrupting him.
"Walter died a month after Etta. We'd finished his damn scavenger hunt, but without Walter, we couldn't assemble the pieces of the plan. Whatever mad spark of creativity Walter had...I don't."
Simon blinked. Bishop looked up at him with a madman's grin on his face, then returned to working on the device on the bench before him.
That left almost three years unaccounted for. He almost hated to ask.
"What happened after that?"
"We've fought. But it's been futile, because whatever we do is in their past. They adapt upstream, so to speak, and come right back at us. Broyles was found out, and took out Fringe HQ with an antimatter bomb. My Olivia died in an ambush six months after that. Astrid left not long after. I don't know where she is. After that I became the de facto leader of the resistance."
Simon had a sudden flash of insight. "You're The Engineer. I heard...whispers about you in the lab. They tried to read me for information about you.
Bishop nodded again.
"Good to know they care. Yeah, I've killed a few of them. I can adapt some of their tech, and I've raided other realities for more. But it's a losing battle, because they've completed the atmosphere converters, and they're in the process of migrating the rest of their population here."
Bishops' fatalistic tone caused Simon to misread his intentions.
"So that's it?" Simon asked, "...you're just giving up? Why did you bother getting me back?"
Bishop frowned at Simon, obviously annoyed and offended.
"Oh, hell no. I'm the man with the plan. Follow me."
Bishop walked out of the room, and Simon followed him.
Simon stared at the device through the window. It was an assembly of geometric shapes, hexagons and octagons and triangles, cast from some grayish-silver alloy. A ghostly blue-white glow emanated from the core of the device, suggesting that it was emitting radiation.
Foster had a degree in Physics from Cal Tech, one of the last alumni of that institution, but he had no clue what the purpose of the device was.
Beside him, Bishop scratched absently at the scar on his cheek, before speaking.
"I call it The World Burner. We'll drop it into the ocean. It sucks in water, splits the oxygen from the hydrogen. Releases the oxygen, fuses the hydrogen to power itself. It should add about 1 percent more oxygen to the atmosphere per week."
Simon looked him. "So it will reverse the damage to the atmosphere? That the Invaders have done?"
Peter glared at him, as if he were an idiot.
"Yeah, for a while. But it won't stop. I figure once the atmospheric oxygen reaches thirty percent, the fires will start. All it will take is a spark."
"For gods sake, Peter, why?"
"Scorched earth. All of the observers will have migrated here from the future, within the next two weeks. They've already changed the air so much that we'll all die out in one more generation anyway. So we're going take the bastards with us. But that's only half the plan."
"What's the rest?"
"That involves another piece of tech, in another room, and you."
Bishop left the chamber, and Simon followed him through a maze of corridors.
In another chamber, Simon stared at a pitch black doorway that shouldn't have existed. This, at least, he had an inkling of the purpose of.
"A wormhole?" he said, fascinated, "...how in creation can you keep it stable for so long?"
Though they were deep underground, there was a slight breeze - air was being sucked through the mouth of the wormhole, to God know's where or when the other side existed. All theories that Simon knew of suggested that wormholes, if they existed, should only do so for minuscule fractions of a fraction of a second, on the order of Planck time, the smallest tick-tock of the universe.
Bishop shook his head.
"You don't need to worry about that, I told you, I can adapt some of their tech. What you do need to worry about is what's on the other side."
"What's on the other side?"
"Hope. September - he was our Observer ally, before the shit hit the fan - told me once, that the Observers were just one possible future for humanity. We're going to make sure that this reality is untenable for them. I need you to go back and bend the course of history, so we don't go down this one way street."
The two of them stood side by side, staring at the cold, black maw of the wormhole.
Later, Simon sat on a bench after having been shoved by several technicians into a homebrew spacesuit. Or timesuit, he supposed would be the better term. Bishop had explained that the null environment within the wormhole - one couldn't really call it space - existed at absolute zero, so the suit was a necessity, even though he would pass though almost immediately.
"You ready Simon?" Bishop asked.
Simon looked up, while pulling the thick boots on, and sealing them.
"As I ever will be I guess." he replied.
"Going back in a time, in itself, will create an alternate timeline. Of course, that's not enough when dealing with the Observers."
Bishop crouched to help Simon with the thick gloves. As he did he spoke in a low voice.
"Walter loves puzzles, so he'll love this, he wont concern himself with your veracity. Olivia always saw the best in people, so she should trust you pretty quickly. I'll be the hardest to convince. Just remember the words."
"Einai kalytero anthropo apo ton patera toy," Simon repeated the Greek phrase.
Peter nodded, finished sealing the gloves and helped Simon to his feet. He searched for something in Simon's eyes before blurting out, "Did you love her?"
Simon made sure Bishop wasn't armed, before replying. "Yes, I did."
Peter hesitated, then continued.
"Family means everything to me. I had it all for a while...my dad, Olivia, Henrietta...and fate took it all away. Again."
Bishop sighed, put the helmet over Simon's head and sealed it. He helped the worlds latest time traveller to stand in front of the black mouth of the wormhole. Then Peter stepped clear and gave a thumbs up.
Simon stepped forward, and let ultimate blackness take him.