Hey, guys. When in doubt, call an engineer! :') More edited!
55
West Dome, near the end-
He'd kissed the woman he loved, and then left her behind, shutting the door upon all that remained of humanity. Now, Hiram Hackenbacker ran like a man pursued by Rakshasas, heading from the underground shelter, "outdoors" to his shifted time lab. Behind him followed a cloud of swooping, darting Mini-Maxes. They were not his primary concern. Looking up, Brains could see the network of fine, branching cracks which now covered the last inhabited dome. Like slow-motion lightning, those fractures grew and spread, attacked from without by that grey nanite "dust". Above the psychotic music of cracking perma-glass, Brains could hear the dust, itself. Like billions of microscopic buzz saws, the killers produced a high-pitched, chittering shriek. He had to block out their noise, though. Had to focus.
The time lab was just as he'd left it. Floor and one wall, workbench and field-gripped crystal shard, with the banner "Wilcome Travailers" hanging proudly above.
Hackenbacker sprinted from the ancient tunnel system to his workbench. He had perhaps five minutes to act. Ten, at the very most. Ordering the Mini-Maxes into a sonic resonance configuration, Brains cut off the time crystal's containment field. The stone began to glow, emitting a softly hypnotic blue pulse.
"Max," he snapped, meaning all of them. "You will p- produce a tone at, ah… at th- thirty octaves below middle C, at one-hundred-ten decibels, for precisely sixty s- seconds."
His assistants chirped a response, then maneuvered into formation, just over the pulsing time crystal. If left to its current pattern, the shard of creation would leap back into the past again, two days from present. He hadn't time enough to wait, however, and didn't want to just go back home. He needed to reach a certain point in the timestream, and he had to do it, right now.
Brains was a multitasker on par with John, who was dead; a thought that the engineer pushed away with all of the mental force he possessed. While breeding viruses, while extracting doped plasma, Brains had also attacked the knotty problem of how to control and direct that crystal. What he'd come up with was sonics; the voice of a newborn universe. If hit with the sound of the big bang, the crystal would resonate, and respond. All he had to do was mimic that sound.
Into his field equations, Hackenbacker worked a specific set of spacetime coordinates, intending to prime the crystal, and then shift its destination. He'd had partial success in the past. Would succeed completely, this time, or die; torn apart and consumed by rapacious nano-particle dust. The stuff was already seeping into the dome, having ground away at a widening crack. Next, great long slivers of perma-glass broke away from the dome, falling like blades from a suddenly open grey sky.
Looking down at his instruments, Brains calmed his breathing, made ready to trigger the field, and said,
"Now, Max."
A deep, bell-like tone sounded, much too low-pitched to hear. He felt it, though, all through his atoms and cells. The time crystal felt it, as well, and its pulse converted at once to a bright, continual gleam. Patting his jacket to be sure that the plasma vial was still in place, Brains pressed a remote projection switch. A wave of coded information shot from the field projector, telling the crystal where, and how far, to jump. It gathered energy, absorbing sound and heat, as a smoke-like tendril of questing dust bled down from the shattering dome. Just behind Brains, those few blades of grass and potted blooms writhed and vanished, consumed by invisible flame. Then, the crystal jumped, and…
…standing in his laboratory, Brains blinked. He'd made it. There was an odd, doubled effect, because the bench, crystal, floor and wall already existed, here. The time-jumped versions were slightly skewed. Say, half a dimension off the originals, in a direction he could not quite describe. Interesting effect, exposing odd sides (and insides) of the structures as he shifted position. But Hackenbacker had no time to gawk. To the transferred Mini-Maxes, he said,
"R- Remain here, Max. Prevent incursion, if, ah… if p- possible."
A sensible precaution, though he did not recall any alerts from the lab complex on this date. Shaking his head, Brains left the time lab and snuck over to bio-med. Avoiding cameras, he slipped that plasma sample into one of the cold storage bins, together with a certain coded message. That set of containers was not scheduled for cleaning until after he'd traveled into the future. No paradox there. Delivery accomplished, he sighed with relief and allowed himself a handful of seconds to rest. One down, but he was very far from done with his mission.
With the vial in place, Hackenbacker returned to the door, checked his wrist comm, and then very cautiously let himself out. His previous self would be blundering along soon, tearing his hair out over Kane's demand for new cyber-goggles. He couldn't afford to meet himself, or Kayo and Parker. Too many potential time splits, branching universes and fields of gaping paradox. He had to make his way up to the desk, somehow, without alerting Mrs. Tracy. He'd changed too much, you see; was scruffy, thin, exhausted with grief and unkempt. She'd know the difference at once. Big Max, too, had got to be avoided, turning the house into a giant temporal obstacle course.
That's why it took as long as it did to get back upstairs, distract Sally Tracy, and find a safe place to jack into the cyberverse. Made it at last, by the hair of his littlest fingernail, with half an hour to work, if memory served.
Gazing into a computer screen full of digital snow, Brains returned to the Last Chance Cyber Café, just after Grandma Tracy had pulled him away the first time, but before the Mechanic logged out. The view was familiar, and quite disorienting. Overhead and all around him stretched a 4D internet Dyson sphere, filled with shifting money, mayhem, and open crime. Before him, still nursing a big glass of stimulant code and watching events on Ross Island, sprawled the Mechanic.
His form was that of a cartoonishly muscular, tattooed young man wearing bronze armour. His head was a lion's, making him look like some sort of neo-Egyptian god.
"Back already?" he said, yawning widely enough to reveal digital fangs and a big cat's ridged palate. "Don't tell me you had a pair of goggles just lying around."
Brains shook his head, coming back to the rotating, inverting booth and claiming a seat… nearly five months after he'd left. He wore no icon at all. Not this time.
"N- No, Kane. I have not, ah… not r- returned to speak of your c- commission. I am here to p- present my case, and reason with you, man to, ah… to m- man."
The Mechanic snorted. As he moved about, those tattoos shifted and flared with cascading green alphanumerics.
"Thought you'd be back at home, ready to welcome your sh*t-hot crashing pilot."
"I am there, Kane. At least, the, ah… the m- me appropriate to that point in s- spacetime is there. I have c- come to you from, ah… from y- your future, and mine."
The Mechanic did not seem impressed. In fact, he scratched himself and yawned again. (Affectations. Nobody itched online, unless they'd paid for a haptic suit with an itch-feature.)
"Uh-huh. You're from the future, I want lottery numbers, Horatio. Otherwise, piss off, and stop wasting my time. Got a raid to plan."
"On the K- Kyranos," Brains told him. "I know."
That got Kane's attention. All at once, he sat up, his golden lion's eyes deadly fierce and direct.
"You've cracked my system?" he asked, in a dangerously quiet voice.
"N- No, Kane. I have c- come back here from nearly five months and seven hundred years in the f- future. I know y- your plans because I have, ah… have s- seen them, and lived through the result."
The Mechanic sat back once more, and ordered another stimulant, interested despite himself. Wasn't every day "Brains" grew a set of balls.
"Keep talking. If you're lying, I'll gut you, then piss in the wound." He would, too; without a second thought or a moment's regret. "I won, didn't I?"
Brains nodded, ordering himself a glass of mild sedative.
"Yes, K- Kane. You succeeded. Your attack all but d- destroyed the, ah… the K- Kyranos, and won you Sentinel."
Those jaws gaped in a wide grin, as the Mechanic's massive fist thumped down hard on the table, temporarily fuzzing it back into source code.
"Knew it," he exulted. "It's going to be mine, all of it. Family, world, Thunderbirds… everything."
Brains received his order, paid up, and then absorbed the calming subroutine. Not exactly the same as Parker's vile witch-brew, but helpful, anyhow.
"I am, ah… am h- here to offer you a b- better deal, Mechanic. Sentinel is, ah… is n- nothing. I can b- build and design better, can supply you with an AI of my own c- creation, Braman, and promise to provide all of y- your technical needs, in return for one s- small change to your, ah… your p- plans."
This was it, the moment that would change all of history, if only that blood-drunk, sociopathic monster would listen. Kane laughed at him.
"Right. Where's Horatio? What've you done with him? That coward wouldn't say no to his own shadow, much less give me whatever I need to take over the Family. What's your ploy, vermin?"
Brains shook his head.
"N- No ploy, Kane. I am b- being one-hundred percent honest with, ah… with y- you. Leave the Kyranos alone. They are n- no threat to you. D- Destroying them will only l- lead to…" To the rise of General Steele, the creation of a hideous virus, and to no one at all at the wheel, when death rained down from space. "…to chaos and destruction."
The Mechanic was not a stupid man. Just violent, capricious and playfully cruel.
"Explain," he demanded. "Five minutes. If I'm convinced, we deal. If not, you die. Win-win for me, either way."
So, Brains started talking, describing all that the Mechanic was yet to do, and every result thereof, including the death of the Hood. Ended up with,
"I am w- willing to, ah… to offer you these things, K- Kane, because only your kind has a h- hope of stopping th- those nanites. John…" He stopped for an instant and almost broke down, but hardened himself to continue. "John t- tells me that, ah… that y- your leader is able to produce and control s- such devices. This is, ah… is t- true?"
Cautiously, the Mechanic nodded.
"The Mother of cyborgs can implant circuitry and bio-med nanites, but what you're describing isn't the same. Bottom line… A: What the h*ll difference does it make to me, what happens seven hundred years from now, and B: How could I stop them, anyway?"
Brains took a shallow, rather tentative breath. Five minutes had passed, and he hadn't yet died. Pinned like a mouse beneath a lion's great paw, he was still interesting enough to be listened to. Time to… as Virgil would put it… "cut to the chase".
"It is an enormous, d- derelict ship, Kane, from Brahma knows how long-gone a civilization. I have s- seen pictures. You are able to c- control and empower mechanical objects, are, ah… are y- you not?"
The trick with making a sale, staying alive, was getting your subject to just say "yes", about anything. Very slowly, the Mechanic nodded.
"Yes," he admitted. "I'm a cybermancer. I can bring constructs alive. Pain in the ass, sometimes. What about it?"
Thinking: Praise Brahma, praise Vishnu, praise Krishna, Ganesh, give me wings… Brains started talking, outlining a plan. Didn't seem to have much of an effect, at first, but very slowly, the fate of the world changed its track.