Sanaa was looking around the area with her Cassidy cuff. “Love Kansas City.”
“You do?” Leona questioned? “I didn’t think you had ever been there.”
“No, that’s just what the painting says. I mean, I don’t hate Kansas City.
I don’t have any strong feelings about it.”
Leona lifted her own cuff. “Oh, the mural. Yeah, this is downtown KC. I’m
kind of surprised this building survived the decades.”
“I don’t think it did.” Mateo was down the sidewalk a little, looking
through AR mode. “They just left the wall up. The rest of the building is
gone. Who painted it?”
“I dunno,” Leona answered, like it was a dumb question.
“At-scribeswalk.” J.B. was pointing his cuff on the corner of the building.
“I don’t think this reality has Twitter,” Mateo presumed.
Leona sighed. “Anyway, the transition is happening over there, at that
construction site.”
Everyone turned around to see, and then followed her to get closer to their
destination. People in the main sequence were walking down the street, going
about their lives. The window was scheduled to open in under a minute, but
nothing looked dangerous. No one was standing on top of a roof, or chained
to train tracks. This was just a normal day, except that one of these people
was going to spontaneously disappear from the world. Mateo tried to find
someone he recognized, because so far, they hadn’t encountered a stranger
during one of these challenges. Who did he know in 2078? That was back when
he thought the Makarion he knew was his own person, and not being possessed
by the spirit of Gilbert Boyce. It wouldn’t be long before Mateo would watch
inmates from Beaver Haven Correctional fight in the Colosseum replica, and
shortly after that, he would go backwards in time to 1945, and then skip a
few years on his pattern as a result of the choice he made back then.
The flickering began, revealing their target. Yes, it was just some guy. He
looked upset and frazzled, but not like his life was in danger, more like he
was just having a bad day. Once he was fully integrated in this reality, and
saw that his environment had changed, he was stunned. Natives of the
Parallel were well aware of the Bearimy-Matic joint pattern. They were
expected to clear the area of every transition window, which they did
immediately after the four of them arrived, as if being directed by a film
director. So now it was just them, and the refugee.
He looked over at them. “What just happened?”
“It’s okay,” Leona assured him. “No one here is going to hurt you.”
“Where exactly is here?” the man asked.
“This is...you have...”
“It’s Kansas City in a parallel reality,” Sanaa jumped in. “You’ve been
transitioned to our world by a powerful frenemy of ours, whose motives are
hazy. It’s okay. We just have to get you to your exit window, and you’ll be
back home before the day is through.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” the man was getting mad.
J.B. took his shot. “Time travel is real. We don’t know why you were chosen,
but it’s completely reversible. You may just miss a few hours of your life.”
He consulted his cuff. “We just need to get you to Washington D.C. in...oh,
only twenty minutes. You won’t miss much at all.”
“That’s exactly where I wanted to be. I couldn’t get a flight out yesterday,
or today. The meeting is in an hour. There is no way we make it.”
Sanaa smirked. “We would have time for a quick breakfast, if we wanted.” She
placed her hand on his shoulder, and presented him with the AOC. “That’s our
spaceship. It can also teleport.”
“Teleport.” The man narrowed his eyes. “Are you people crazy?”
“Nah, man. We’re just from the future.”
He wasn’t convinced.
“What’s your name?” Leona asked him.
“Jericho Hagen, Esquire.”
“What do you need to do in Washington D.C.?” she continued.
“They’re working on a proposal. They want to completely blow up our judicial
system, and replace it with something entirely different. Of course, they’re
going to start out slow, but I know their future plans. You won’t recognize
the court system twenty-five years from now.”
“Oh my God,” Leona began, “this is the start.”
“What is the proposal?”
Jericho was hesitant to keep talking to them, but if there was even a chance
they would be able to get him to where he belonged, he probably figured it
was best to be nice. “They want to add, like, a professional jury member.
Every jury will have someone who studied law, so they can evidently keep the
others on track. That will taint the entire system. Our courts are founded
on a jury of peers. If we start contaminating the pool with people who have
that kind of education, the process will no longer be fair. It would be like
having a lawyer serve on the jury. That’s not technically illegal, but I’ve
never heard of an attorney selecting one of their own kind for a jury. We
just don’t do it. This is even worse, because they’ll be making it a
requirement. And like I said, it’s only the beginning. They’re gonna start
making juries smaller by default, and limiting the defending attorney’s
ability to vigorously defend their client. I cannot let this pass.”
“That’s interesting,” Leona said. “Just give us one moment to talk.” She
started leading the group away. “Just...don’t touch anything.”
“This sounds familiar,” Mateo pointed out.
“This really is the beginning. That bill is a historic moment. The first
step should happen in two years, and changes everything about how we handle
criminal and civil court. More changes will come later. Instead of having
one jury, they’ll have two arbitration panels, who deliberate separately,
and aren’t allowed to talk to each other. Attorneys start losing incentives
to win at all costs, as priority shifts to finding the truth, and not
letting the guilty get away with it. Judges become a completely separate
profession. The arbitrator procedures he’s talking about only become
stronger as time goes on. What he’s describing lasts for decades, at least,
and that’s only because I don’t know what the future looks like beyond
2278.”
“So, he fails to stop it,” J.B. guessed.
“Or maybe he fails to get to the meeting,” Sanaa suggested. She pulled her
head from the huddle, and looked back over to Jericho. “Maybe we’re here to
stop him.”
“That’s your choice.” Jupiter Fury was standing behind Mateo’s back.
“Where have you been?” Mateo asked him.
“I’ve been working on your pattern, making sure the right people get here,
so you can improve their lives.”
“Are we supposed to get him to Washington D.C., or not?” Leona questioned.
Jupiter pursed his lips, and shrugged his shoulders. “That’s up to you. I
can tell you that if you send him through the egress transition window, when
you return to the main sequence—and I promise, you will one day—the timeline
you end up in will be wildly different than the one you left. That man has
power. He’ll fight against progress, the jury system will remain, and
inequality will reign. His people’s drive to win every case possible will
send our country into a downwards spiral, until the very idea that the
United States of America was ever a superpower will be laughable for
students learning history two hundred years from now. They won’t believe
it.”
“That’s bullshit,” Leona argued. “Our system has stayed pretty much the same
for centuries already, and our status as a superpower hasn’t been questioned
since it became one in 1898.”
“True,” Jupiter agreed, “but nothing lasts forever...unless it changes. He
doesn’t know it yet, because he fancies himself a moderate libertarian, but
Jericho Hagen becomes synonymous with a major paleoconservative movement
that emphasizes maintaining the status quo above all else. He believes the
Constitution is perfect, and amendments should be kept to a minimum, and
that speaks to a lot of people. I’ve seen this future, and I don’t think you
want it. To be honest, I don’t really care. My friends and I thrive in all
realities; we just have to adjust our plans accordingly.”
“We have about ten minutes to make a decision,” J.B. alerted them.
Leona shook her head. “We’re not gods. Just because we have the power to
change reality, doesn’t mean we should. It was one thing to save my mother
from death, or let Elder Caverness go off to fight a war he wanted to fight.
It’s another thing to keep this man from his life.”
“Would you do the same for Hitler?” J.B. asked. “If he came through a
transition window in, say, 1910, wouldn’t we be obligated to keep him from
getting back until after 1945? Or, I dunno, hold him forever?”
The other three looked over at Mateo, who had first hand experience with
this scenario, several times. He rolled his eyes. “This is not the same
thing. Jericho Hagen is not Adolf Hitler. Believe me, I know. We have to get
him back. That’s the job. Like my wife said, it’s different when they don’t
want to go back. He does, so we should accommodate that. It’s what we do.
I’ve always been against messing with time, and if we come from a reality
where Hagen never makes it to D.C., then I imagine that’s the result of time
travel, and we would just be undoing that by teleporting him there.”
“You can’t possibly know that,” Sanaa contended.
“Ripples; not waves,” Mateo retorted.
“Ugh.” Now Leona rolled her eyes. “That’s a dumb line. But he’s right. He
wants to go back, so let’s take him back. We better hurry. Sanaa and I will
go set the coordinates, and prep for a jump. Go get him, and make sure he
boards the AOC.”
“Very well.” Jupiter really didn’t seem to care either way. “I gotta go get
Ariadna. I’ll see ya when I see ya.” He winked at Sanaa, then disappeared.
“My God, it’s real,” Jericho acknowledged when Mateo and J.B. went back over
to retrieve him. “He just blinked away.”
“That’s time travel for you,” J.B. replied. “Or teleportation? Or reality
jumping. I’m not sure how his power works. How does he do all this? Doesn’t
he make copies of himself? Why does that allow him to switch timelines?”
“We’ll ask Leona later,” Mateo said to him. “I’m sure she knows why it makes
sense. Anyway, you wanna get to Washington, we gotta go now.”
“Yes, definitely.” Jericho was all in now. He apparently totally believed
that they were there to help him, and he seemed grateful for the opportunity
to get back to his mission. Mateo might have even called him giddy.
Hopefully this meant they were doing the right thing.
They walked up to the ship, climbed the ladder, and crawled inside. Leona
was climbing back up from engineering. “We’re all here, and ready to go.
Hey, Thistle! Make the jump.”
The ship powered up, and disappeared, just as it was meant to.
Unfortunately, none of the passengers went with it. They were all left
behind, and now falling through the air, towards the hard surface below.
Leona thought quick, and caught Jericho in the air, so she could land him
safely on the ground. Mateo and J.B., on the other hand, fell hard, and
suffered painful injuries. Sanaa happened to have stayed down in
engineering, so she hadn’t had as high of a fall.
Mateo could feel the pool of blood form underneath his body. “What the hell
was that?”
Leona let go of Jericho, and dove down to tend to her husband. “I have no
idea. That shouldn’t have happened.”
“I’m sorry.” Sanaa was now standing next to Jericho. She reached up, and
slapped Holly Blue’s former Cassidy cuffs on his wrists. “Fortunately, the
people in this reality have magical powers. They’ll fix you up, so it’s like
you never got hurt at all. In the meantime, this will help with the pain.”
She shot J.B. with a jet injector, then went over to do the same for Mateo.
“What did you do?” Leona asked.
“I know more about how spaceships work than you might think,” Sanaa began to
explain. “Hokusai taught me a lot during your interim years. I’ve also been
experimenting with our cuffs. We’re stuck on this pattern, but these things
have other features Jupiter never restricted our access to. All I did was
quantum lock them to this position temporarily, so the ship could jump away
without us. It’s safe and sound in the Capital, waiting for us.”
“Why?” Mateo asked, wiping the blood from his lips.
“I come from a bloodline of telepaths. Not all of us kept their powers a
secret, or kept it well. My family has a long history of being screwed over
by small-minded white people who thought we were witches, or demons. The
only thing that saved us was a more fair adjudicative system, which this man
wants to dismantle before humanity even has a chance to start it. I can’t
let that happen. If I had had more time, I could have done something else,
but the window before the transition window was just too short. This was my
only solution.” She checked her watch. “And now the moment’s pretty much
passed.”
They could hear sirens in the distance, drawing nearer.
“The next window is in three years,” Leona nearly shouted at her. “We could
have gotten him back then. You didn’t have to slap the cuffs on him. Now our
job is really complicated, besides having to make sure these wounds heal.”
The ambulance approached.
Sanaa shook her head. “You were wrong. Jericho Hagen is Hitler. He
just doesn’t know it yet. Well...now he never does. When he finally gets
back to the main sequence, he’ll see the world he almost destroyed, and
he’ll thank us for it.”
Leona stood up, so the medics could start treating Mateo and J.B. “Will I?
Will I thank you?”
Sanaa took a half step towards her friend. “I hope so.”
