Infinite
The world, when stripped down to its most elegant components, is made of numbers. Strings so large that lesser minds may call them infinite, spiraling backward and forward into past and future, splitting off with each breath into a thousand universes that grow and crumble and collapse in the space of a thought. For instance, if he should turn from his current path, step left...
A blank door, but beyond a woman with the tattooed face of a Loyalist looks up. He only glances are her briefly before turning back but she remembers the encounter into the evening, she fears she has been noticed.
Uncertainty dogs her step and she forgets to meet a friend for lunch as she had promised. From there the path branches into a million futures. Death, anger, connection, love lost and found. All if he paused to turn.
Once he might have done it, when he was new, just to see what would happen. He has since lost such puerile curiosity. He continues to his destination and the realities crumble behind him.
His brothers note his passing by the flicker of their gaze. He is known to them. He was born different, and because he is different he is better. None know the probabilities as he does. None of them have killed one of their own. It could be said they fear him, if fear could be calculated rather than felt in the weighing of options and probabilities. Even so, he finds their fears illogical. He has seen a thousand million pathways and while each contains a version where he kills each and every one of them, the probabilities are so remote as to be nonexistent.
He enters the door at the of the hall and removes his hat. There is a man within, sitting at a table. The room is white, sterile.
"Peter," the man breathes. His eyes widen with emotion: joy, relief, traces of disorientation and fear. He rises to his feet, age weakens his flesh and his body shakes as he does so. The old man, a human he once knew as Walter and many other names and titles, reaches out his arms and embraces him.
Peter remains stiff within the embrace. It is not that he has not observed this ritual before, or fails to understand the meaning, but the closing of one body around another is…messy. He frees one hand from beneath the embrace and places his hat on the table. Walter's arms remain around him, the muscles trembling. His breathing is labored, and Peter tilts his head slightly to catch the phonetics of those breaths. Heavy, liquid, not a result of illness or infirmity, rather an involuntary reaction to emotional overstimulation. Conclusion: Walter is holding back tears.
"I've been good, Peter. Very, very good," Walter says into the fabric of Peter's suit, sniffling and swallowing as he speaks. "New methods of- of making the air easier for you all. Also a device to—"
It has been long enough in this embrace. His assignment requires him to listen to the old man, it does not dictate that he experience physical discomfort while doing so. To extricate the man may damage him, and that too is against the assignment. Peter steps backward, phasing through matter and dimensions, and takes a seat at the table.
"Please, sit," he says, nodding for Walter to join him in the opposite chair.
Walter starts, looks around at Peter's sudden absence from his arms. "I'm sorry, I've made you uncomfortable."
"The discomfort is of no consequence. Continue with your report…please," Peter says. The man fumbles with the back of the chair, it shrieks as he drags the metal legs across the floor. After he sits he stares down at his wrinkled hands, fiddling with them as if wishing he had something to toy with, a nervous habit. He stutters, continuing once finding his voice. "As I was saying, I've created a device to open specific holes into different time periods. I know you can do so at will but I thought…" He halts, searching Peter's face. "Well, you might find it useful at some point." His gaze is hopeful. Peter's does not change.
"That was not required of you," Peter says. "You have deviated from your mission."
For the first time he sees a spark of a negative emotion in Walter, irritation. "I'm not some trained dog to create marvels on command. This device is the result of thousands of hours of work and research. It is a miracle of scientific innovation, and—"
"It was not your assignment," Peter says, his voice does not change its volume or measure. "It is a redundancy. You presented yourself as the greatest mind of your generation, but you have yet to come up with a single original thought."
"I've made vast improvements!"
"Improvements that were only possible because we had not yet turned our attention to those matters. I'm afraid that with your underdeveloped capacity any invention of yours is simply… inferior." The subject was growing agitated, the tiny veins of his eyes inflamed. The chemicals that made up his primitive brain, though admittedly advanced when compared to the rest of his species, were becoming unbalanced. The instability had only grown worse since Walter turned himself over to the Observers, bragging of his abilities and their use unnecessarily, in what later proved to be falsely grandiose terms.
Still, it violated his assignment to cause damage to the subject. Such chemical imbalance would require action to correct. Peter placed his hand over Walter's, a ritual used by the lesser humans to impart calm and to soothe spiking emotions. This, accompanied with an upturning at the corners of his lips, elicits a response from Walter that is as electrifying as it is immediate. The breath rushes out of him and his other hand closes around Peter's, the aged skin dry and smooth against Peter's pale, hairless flesh.
"Peter…Peter is that you? Are you still in there?" Walter says, his voice dropping to a fevered whisper. He begins to idly stroke the top of Peter's hand with his own.
"It's alright, Walter," Peter says, pitching his voice to an old memory of a distant time.
"I knew it, I knew it…" Walter whispers. The tears return to his voice and for the remainder of the hour he strokes Peter's hand, babbling. When the required hour is up, Peter stands, retrieves his hat, and leaves the room without a second glance at the old man.
A woman waits outside, a Loyalist. Her face is impassive but for the suggestion of a frown. She may believe it subtle, but he can see a thousand futures where she speaks a thousands words of reproach. In at least twenty he kills her for them.
Perhaps something in his gaze gives that away because she licks her lips and looks down. The probability drops to less than a dozen, the universes where she rages at him collapse in on themselves and she says, "He has worked almost a year without rest, just to earn an hour with you. Couldn't you give him a little more time?"
Peter tilts his head. In five hundred universes he leaves without answering her and when he does she curses him under her breath as he goes. He could gaze further into those distances to see all the variations that this tiny act would create. He finds he does not care. "That was not part of the assignment," he says, and vanishes.
The news of her capture comes in what the lesser beings name as days, revolutions of the planet around the sun that set an arbitrary and inexact count. Time flows through him, around him, like a river it can be transversed either forward or backwards, given the proper tools. Like water is difficult to mark any particular spot as more important than another, rather there are stones like islands, intersections of individuals and their environment in a manner that can somehow be deemed…important.
He does not go to her immediately, to do so would be to step in front of the chaos of bullets, a disorder of spiking emotions and tangled futures. There is little point after all, beyond the tangle lies an inescapable outcome.
Instead he makes arrangements, closing off futures that contain distractions, unnecessary meetings and events. He takes a moment to kill another Observer, one who would have protested Peter's presence in her cell some two days hence, creating a muddle of wasted concerns and reevaluations to be weighed, measured, and discarded leaving only wasted time in their wake. Peter steps behind him in and places the gun to the spinal cord, discharging it and taking his leave before the other Observer's knees have time to buckle.
His schedule cleared, his brothers too on edge to engage him for with their fleeting concerns, he steps sideways through matter and energy, illusions of space and solidity, into her cellblock.
Hands close around his shoulders and the crown of his heads. A tenth of a second's delay and she would have snapped his neck. An oversight, he should have predicted that she would attack any being that entered her cell, with her bare hands if necessary. She had nothing else left to lose.
Another Observer would have died then, for a human she is gifted and desperation has made her unafraid. But he is not other Observers and a second step forward takes him out of her arms and across the room, beyond the bars.
Bars. Already this is not as they had agreed. Half the room contains the basic necessities for life, but iron bars block the living space from the entrance. For the moment it has saved his life, but the flow of his thoughts is interrupted by a roadblock of…not irritation, but the disruption that comes from an agreement reneged upon. He had made it clear to his brothers that she was to be kept alive at all costs, even if the cost was their own lives. It had slowed the process of taking her, but there were many of them and only one of her, an equation even they can understand.
"Oh my god," she murmurs suddenly. He stands on the other side of the bars now, inches away, looking in on her. He can feel the cold radiating off the metal. She stands opposite, straight and tall as if arrayed for battle, but her eyes are wide and uncomprehending. Her arms fall slack at her side. "My god, Peter, is that you?"
Her hand flies to her mouth and she takes a step forward before it drops again. Her brow draws together and she is staring at him. He stares back, his head tilting to the side. Tension runs through her from crown to toe, and her intellect, that remarkable intellect augmented by cortexiphan and years of training, is taking in every detail of him. Her kind, the agents of this world, learn to look beyond hair and skin tone, characteristics easily changed to hide from the less observant eye. She sees beyond such superficiality to bone structure, the space between the eyes, the length of the nose and the shape of the lips, things not so easily changed. She knows him. To the core of her being: she knows him and the loss of his brows and hair would not be enough to trick her.
He nods, a slow and deliberate movement. In another time he might tip his hat, but in this era it would only appear mocking. That is not his intention. The tech in his brain thrums and he is hyper-aware of it, the implant that made him a god.
"Why are you here?" she says.
"To see to your accomodations." He regards the room. The walls are white, the lights bright and the vents that filter air to her body's needs run at full power. He will have to rectify the limited space, but otherwise there is nothing here to threaten her life.
There is a crinkle of emotion at the corner of her eye, a slip, and beneath it a fathomless well of grief. It is gone as quickly as it appears and at some point as he watched it he has taken a step closer to her. His fingers splay at his side and he looks down at them, frowns and closes them into a neutral position. Touching her now would serve no purpose. Still he feels the flicker within him as if from a distance, a memory of the need to touch her.
It is a disruption, possibly a dangerous one, and there is still much to be done. He turns to leave.
"Peter, wait." When he turns she is standing at the bars, her delicate fingers wrapped around the cold iron. She presses herself close.
He stops. A second passes and then another. She is watching him, her brows drawn together. She no longer wears the impassive, defiant mask. "I am waiting," he says.
"And if I asked you to stay?" she says, and her voice cracks on the final word.
Seconds pass them by. There is something… off, but he does not spare a thought for it yet. It is taking longer than was standard to answer her question. He feels a strange reluctance to answer. He feels a strange reluctance to leave. "Impossible. Other arrangements must be made. Your quarters require improvement."
"Peter, please!"
He steps away. The emotional pleading is…disturbing, enough so that he is miles and hours away before the unexpected element occurs to him.
There were no futures surrounding Olivia Dunham. Multiple pasts and futures dog his steps and yet and all he could see around her, stretching horizontally in every direction, blocking his sight, was her in that exact moment. Solid, unyielding, infinite.
Author Note: I'm still debating if I continue this story into another chapter, do let me know in the comments if such a thing would interest you, or any other thoughts you might have had. Thank you for reading!