Tangent Point: Farther Than I Can Throw (Part VII)

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Reed Ellis and his people were better prepared for this mutiny than the last one, when they only had about a week to plan. This time, it was months, but the mission was four times harder. Actually, it was probably harder than that because the Teaguardians were infinitely more competent than the security guards on the Tangent. The platform could be moved with four fusion torches. It was designed for balance and power. But those torches could be removed, and that was how it was meant to be most of the time for a stable geostationary orbit. The only reason the torches had stayed on for this long was because they were evacuating from the poles, and stationkeeping in these positions was a whole hell of a lot more difficult. They were, at last, about to be removed, but outsiders were not expecting it. They assumed the Tangent would be returned to Bungula while the mutineers boarded a Teaguardian, and faced judgment. Well, they were boarding all right, though not for judgment, but self-preservation.

Matar Galo was expecting Reed to surrender, but they had other plans, and everything had to be perfectly timed, because once someone noticed something out of place, like the sudden detachment of the torches, or the near complete abandonment of two of the Teaguardians, they would react. The last of the evacuees were now gone, having been transported to other vessels, but before the mutiny could begin, the stragglers had to be dealt with too. For various reasons, these were the ones who chose to stay here for an extended period of time. Tertius, Aeterna, and baby Dilara were here, along with their associates, Breanna, and her people. Most of the others felt some debt of gratitude to the Tangent, and an obligation to stick around and help out. This was great, but it posed a problem now. He pointed to the shuttle. “This is large enough to fit all of you. A course has been plotted for the asteroid known as PC-1124E. It has become a staging ground for interstellar journeys headed for the Varkas Reflex. VR is a popular destination for evacuees looking to start new lives with the special energy credit dispensations that you have all received since your exodus is not your fault.

“Now, the reason this is being offered to you is because my people and I are about to stage another mutiny. And the reason I set this shuttle aside is because it has been stripped of its communications system. You will cruise towards the asteroid at a fairly slow, fuel-saving speed, but not so slow that it looks like there’s something wrong with you. You will not be able to course correct, and not be able to reach out to anyone else. I have to do this, because I can’t have any of you revealing the truth about what we’re planning to do. I decided, instead of simply shipping you off, and wiping my hands clean of you, that I would give you each a choice. You can stay, and you can help, or you can stay, and stay out of the way. You just can’t betray us.” He looked down and swept his foot across the floor a few times. “Let’s call this seam the boundary. If you stay on that side, you get on that shuttle, and leave the Tangent for good. If you come over here, you’re with us, and you face the same consequences that we do. If we end up getting caught anyway, you might argue that you were under duress, but I will argue that you made the choice. Because that’s the truth. This is your choice. I’m not here to sway you one way or the other.”

“Why are you doing this?” Breanna asked. “Exactly why, that is? Just so you won’t get caught?”

“Yep, that’s it,” Reed explained. “There’s no convoluted secret agenda here. We just don’t want to get in trouble, so we’re gonna keep fighting. We like all of you, which is why we kept you around, but this isn’t your fight, and we don’t expect you to stay. If you choose not to, I thank you for your service.”

Without saying a word to Reed, or even to each other, Tertius and Aeterna spun around, and began to walk into the shuttle. Reed let out a quiet sigh of relief. He liked them as much as everyone else here—that was not a white lie—but he couldn’t guarantee that baby’s safety. That was the thing about a posthuman society. As advanced as they had become, infants and children were still mortal. They were still developing, and thor brains were still plastic. Digitizing them that young was a hurdle that researchers still had not cleared. Around half of the helpers elected to join them in the shuttle while the other half crossed that line. Breanna, Cashmere, Calypso, and Notus expressed interest in taking a hands-on role in the mutiny, while the majority of the rest didn’t want to fight, but still wanted to stay. It was unclear what their motivations were, but they would be guarded in case it was only a ruse so they would retain the ability to warn Teagarden of their plans.

“Wait,” Reed said. “I forgot one thing, and it hopefully doesn’t change your mind.” He snapped his fingers. One of his guards opened a door to let in two more guards, who were escorting a chained up and gagged Vasily. “This man did betray us, and I finally have my opportunity to be rid of him. Now that we’ve finished the evacuation, I no longer need to worry about his influence. These two fine guards have volunteered to hold onto him en route to the asteroid. You will not be in danger from him. We rigged up a little hock in there for him, but he will be present, and I understand if you feel uncomfortable with that. Since I think you deserve to know, his crime...was murder. The permanent kind.”

“And I would do it again!” one of Vasily’s guards shouted. He took out his sidearm and shot his partner. Then he grabbed one of the men who was about to get on the shuttle, to use as a human shield. “Now that I have your attention, I want you to unlock my brother, get in that shuttle yourself...Captain,” he spat, “and fly yourself out of here. As a great man once said, I’m the captain now!”

“Packard. You’re brothers? Since when?” Reed questioned. It may have sounded like an irrelevant question, but he needed to understand what he was dealing with here.

“Since I’m not Packard at all, but figured out how to hijack his download,” the guy who looked like Packard volleyed. “Ever since that Sorel guy took over the consciousness backup department, your system has been for shite. It wasn’t even hard.”

“We had to upgrade it, it created vulnerabilities. That won’t work a second time. Now put down the gun, you dupe, and release the nice man. Last year, you killed what many would consider an enemy combatant. Today, you have someone innocent, which is a whole different ballgame. If you pull that trigger, you’ll start losing sleep over it.”

“I’ll live,” the duplicate version of Vasily contended.

“But you won’t remember anything,” Tertius said as he was casually walking down the ramp.

Dupe!Vasily’s eyes glazed over as he loosened his grip on the hostage, who managed to pull himself away from his captor, and rush into the shuttle. Dupe!Vasily, meanwhile, looked incredibly confused, and scared. When he realized that he was holding a weapon, he dropped it to the floor. “I don’t...I don’t know anything.”

“What do you mean by anything?” Reed questioned.

“Anything,” Tertius echoed. “He won’t be a problem anymore. His memories are gone.” He picked up the gun, and held it up in offering to Reed. “If you have the consciousness of the true owner of this body stored away somewhere, you should be able to overwrite the parasite. If you don’t, I can try to restore him myself.”

“Restore him how?” Reed asked while another guard secured Packard’s weapon. He looked down at the now husk of Vasily’s host, who was now on his knees, seemingly trying to figure out what his hands were all about. “You didn’t even touch him. You didn’t do anything.”

Tertius shook his head. “I didn’t need to touch him. It’s just something I can do.”

Reed stared at him for a moment, occasionally looking down at the victim again, and also the other people in the room. “How much can you scale that up?”

“Oh, God,” Tertius said before sighing. “That’s not what it’s for.”

“Let’s do it,” Aeterna said as she was coming up from behind him without her baby. “We all know what the Captain is thinking. This mutiny is happening, whether we help or not. We have the chance to make it bloodless.”

“We could stop it altogether,” Tertius argued, “by erasing everyone’s memories.”

Aeterna placed a hand upon her father’s forearm. She looked over at Reed. “This man, and his people, came for us. They came for all of us, and they did it as efficiently and as humanely as possible. Now they need to get away safely. These mortal affairs; we inserted ourselves into them. We are partially to blame for what happened on Doma. It cost lives, it might have cost more if not for people like Reed Ellis. Let us do one last thing for the humans before we take ourselves off the board and focus on my daughter.”

“This is why we lost touch for two centuries, my sweet girl,” Tertius said to her. “You wanted to help, I wanted to walk away. But now you have to think about the baby.”

“I am,” Aeterna insisted. “I want to teach her to do the right thing, and I want to be able to teach it by example.”

Tertius thought about it. “Fine, but we’re putting their memories on a timer.” He approached Reed, and pointed at him fairly aggressively. “You will have one day to bug out, which I believe gives you a head start of around two light years. I suggest you don’t leave a trail. These people may be your enemies, but they deserve to move on with their lives in whatever way they choose, so I won’t be taking their agencies away forever.”

“That is more than I could ask,” Reed told him. “I don’t know how you do what you’re evidently about to do, but I want you to know how grateful I am.”

Aeterna took a half step forward. “We’ll need a list, of everyone whose memories you don’t want suppressed. Preferably with faces.”

“We’re also gonna wipe your memories of this conversation,” Tertius added. “You’ll know what happened, but not who, or how it was possible.”

“That’s fine,” Reed promised.

Reed was aware that people’s memories were going to be erased. He believed that. He trusted that. Seeing it was a whole different animal. This was no longer a mutiny, but a humanitarian mission. He had Thistle compile a list of everyone they wanted to be immune to the temporary memory suppression. The rest were wiped. After it was done, a mass silent confusion fell upon the Proxima Centauri system. The targets, which were mostly Teaguardians, though some Bungulans too, didn’t freak out. They had no idea who or where they were, but they were calm and trusting. Instead of fighting them, Reed and the mutineers spent most of the energy on helping them.

They rounded up anyone with memory loss and consolidated them to three Teaguardian ships that they were not intending to commandeer. They told them to sit tight and wait for medical assistance to arrive. The targets accepted their instructions without question, without a single voice of dissent. There was only one hiccup. Well, two if you counted the infighting. All of the key participants were in their first and only face-to-face meeting. “Why the hell were my people targeted?”  President Abrams questioned with surprising anger.

“We don’t need them anymore. We don’t need them to hand over your two ships willingly. We are facing no opposition.”

“That wasn’t the agreement,” Abrams argued. “I don’t like seeing my soldiers like this. They’re like...children. They’re dumb children. It’s sad. They’re all sad.”

“It’s better this way,” Reed contended. “Now they never betrayed Teagarden. When they wake up from this—and they will wake up from this—they will be able to claim plausible deniability. Not even that, they will have done nothing. They won’t have to defend their actions at all. Honestly, I probably should have kept you off the immunity list too, to keep your hands clean. If I had had more time, I might have, but the window was closing. We had to act, either with the original plan, or the new one. There was no third option to delay entirely.”

“Oh, actually, there was,” Abrams said. “You could have turned yourself in, which was the noble thing to do. It still is.” It took more than the one conversation to convince him to get on board with this, and he still fought the plan every step of the way. Reed regretted making him immune. He should have put him on one of those Teaguardians as just another oblivious docile.

“He’s right,” Ajax agreed. He survived the runaway shuttle last year by jumping to a new body on the surface of Bungula after his death. He maintained his captaincy, and had since become an ad hoc liaison between the Teagarden forces and the Bungulan military. No one ever seemed to suspect his true loyalties, and he had restrained himself from demanding control of the Tangent. Which was actually kind of weird, because the baseline command structure for a captain included overseeing 256 troops, and you only needed a certain sized ship to accommodate that number. An elevator platform like the Tangent didn’t need a higher crew count, but it was orders of magnitude larger, and probably the best assignment this side of Earth. “I would have gotten my platform back.”

“I’m sorry I couldn’t talk to you about this before, but I didn’t know that mind-wiping was an option until it was time to act,” Reed defended. “But this is objectively better, so I don’t understand why we’re still arguing. There’s work to be done. Those Teaguardians aren’t going to attach themselves to the Tangent.”

“They kind of are,” Delegator Chariot reasoned. “I believe in our crew. This meeting is important. You have still not told us how you suppressed all of these people’s memories. You didn’t give them anything to eat or drink, you didn’t disperse any sort of bioweapon, or we would all be affected. Unless it was a DNA-targeting pathogen, in which case, you would have needed to plan this for days at the shortest. So are you lying? Did you cook something up in secret, or was it really just earlier today, and you genuinely accomplished the impossible?”

Reed blinked. “I don’t know.”

Abrams rolled his eyes. “What?”

“I don’t...I don’t remember.”

“Oh my God, you’re claiming you were bit by your own creation? You expect us to believe that?” Abrams scoffed.

“He’s telling the truth,” Shasta said. “I don’t remember either. I remember knowing that this was going to happen, and that we asked for it, but I don’t remember who or how, or any details. We may have asked for our own memories to be altered, possibly permanently, or they did it without our consent. But I know that the targets will recover. I know that we will get through this if we stick together, and stop arguing.”

Abrams crossed his arms and shook his head. “It smells fishy. Someone with the technology to do this doesn’t just let us use it for nothing.”

Ajax looked to his left. “You’ve been quiet. I have never seen you without a bag of opinions over your shoulders. Can we trust Reed?”

Vasily nodded, also with his arms crossed, but in a more authoritative than closed-off way. “I trust Captain Reed Ellis more than anyone in this galaxy. If he says that this will work, then this will work. I say we keep moving those empty Teaguardians into position, fire up their fancy reframe engines, and bolt.”

“I’m not bolting,” Ajax reminded the group.

“Neither am I,” Abrams said.

“As long as you don’t interfere,” Reed began, “that’s fine. No one has to go anywhere. In fact, I will afford the same opportunity to all of my people. They can pretend to have also lost their memories, and maybe the authorities will go easy on them.” He paused for a moment. “I want to thank you all for all of your help. I know it wasn’t easy, but I believe the history books will shine a bright light upon us...eventually. If that is all, this meeting can come to a close, and those staying behind can leave the Tangent.”

They all went their separate ways. Reed returned to his office, and found someone sitting in his seat who he did not recognize. Her legs were propped up on the desk, and she wasn’t scared of him at all. “Security!” he shouted over his shoulder.

“They can’t hear you,” the mysterious woman explained.

“Security!” Reed shouted again. He turned to walk out of the room, but was completely unable to. The door that was meant to lead to the bridge had become a mirror. He reached out to it, but instead of hitting glass, his hand slipped right through. Meanwhile, that hand reached out towards him, superpositioning with itself going the opposite direction. He stepped forwards, all the way through, and ended up back in his office, his back now turned to the impossible mirror.

“Tripy, right?” the woman said. “You can thank my liver for that little trick.”

“Who are you, and what do you want?”

“The chrysalis bioprinting room you have. I made that for you. I gave you that tech. I knew you needed it.”

“I’ve been wondering who our mysterious benefactor was.”

“Now you know.”

“I don’t, actually.”

She stood up. “I don’t really use my name anymore. I try to interact with others as little as possible. I used to go by Leona Delaney, but if you ever meet someone who looks like me, it won’t be me, and she won’t remember this.”

“You’re, like, a future version of her, or something? You’re a time traveler? Time travel is real?”

She laughed. “Of course time travel is real. Teleportation is real, ain’t it? That’s just a form of time travel.”

“And the second question?”

“You can’t daisy chain reframe engines,” she began. “It would be like duct-taping four pairs of scissors together. You end up with no scissors. This won’t work.”

“Trilby assures me that he’s synced them up properly.”

“Compared to the woman who invented them, Trilby is a drooling buffoon. I’m telling you, don’t do this. The results are unpredictable. Whatever course you laid in will become meaningless.”

He approached her menacingly, but he had no plans to harm her. “I don’t know you. I don’t trust you. I trust my people.” He looked at his watch. “Last I checked, we were on schedule, which means we’ll be leaving in less than thirty minutes. I’ve already given the greenlight. You can kill me right here, and they’ll still launch.”

“I’m not your boss,” Leona clarified. “I’m just warning you.”

“Either way, you should leave. These people are my responsibility, and whatever comes to pass, I’ll get them through it.”

She shook her head in disapproval. “No one thinks they’re Dr. Smith. Everyone thinks they’re Captain Janeway.”

“Thank you. You can go now.”

Leona literally disappeared. When he turned around, the magic mirror was gone. A half hour later, they spooled up the antimatter engines of the Teaguardians, now affixed to the Tangent where the fusion torches once were. They activated the reframe engines, and flew away from Proxima Doma. The traveler turned out to be right. They got lost immediately. But at least they weren’t in prison.

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The Advancement of Mateo Matic: April 30, 2005

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“Whoa. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. This isn’t right. You’re acting like you’re helping me, but the last time you did that, you turned out to be the bad guy. I can’t trust you.” Mateo and The Cleanser had jumped into a closet somewhere.

“Oh, that was ages ago.”

“How long?”

“What?”

“How long ago was that for you? It’s been only weeks since we’ve met.”

“I dunno,” the Cleanser said, like an actress who didn’t want anyone to judge her for her age. “Maybe 150 years?”

“How old does that make you?”

“More than 150 years old, that’s how old,” he answered. “You’re pretty pushy for a guy who desperately needs my help.”

“Do I need your help? I don’t even know what the problem is.”

“In this reality, Leona came to visit The Pentagon with her parents. They will all die in the 2005 attack unless you and I save them.”

“Okay, so what do we do? Pull the fire alarm?”

“First of all, that doesn’t work. That’s like cleaning the floors with a toothbrush, which I’ve tried by the way. Secondly, I’m still your enemy. I’m allowing you to save your family, but only them. Everyone else in this building who is supposed to die is going to die. There is nothing you can do to stop that.”

“Why not? I just killed Hitler. Let’s stop the attack as well. We know where the terrorists stole the planes from—I mean, I don’t personally remember, but you have ways of finding out. Let’s save everybody. Come on! Who’s with me?”

“Nope, that’s not part of the game. You either choose to save your family, or you choose to save nobody at all. Could I stop the attack? Yes. But that would mean screwing with my own timeline, and I’m not prepared to do that. An earlier version of me is in this time right now, and I have no intention of stopping him from carrying out his mission. Here’s something you have to understand. The powers that be, and the choosers are logistically capable of creating a perfect world. We could always, always go back in time and stop something bad from happening, replacing it with a better chain of events. We could stop Grog the Caveman from burning his face off when he tried to eat the fire he just discovered, and from there, we could adjust the timeline so that humanity never suffers. We could prevent all humans from ever knowing what pain feels like, but we don’t, ‘cause fuck ‘em.”

“That’s a pretty horrific perspective on the world ya got there.”

“That, Mister Matic, is everybody’s perspective on the world.”

“Well, I know better than to try to convince you to help your fellow man, and I do have to concede to the fact that you understand the timestream better than me. If you say I’m only allowed to save Leona and her parents, then I guess I have no choice but to go along with it. You’re too powerful for me anyway.” Was this Mateo maintaining his strategy of being unpredictable? Or was he giving up?

“I was expecting more backlash.”

“I’m happy to oblige.”

“No, that’ll be all.”

“Where is Leona?”

“Down the hall,” he said, sporting a knowing smile.

“What is it? What don’t I know.”

The Cleanser opened his mouth, hoping to release a bit of snark.

Mateo started speaking in a mocking voice, “yeah, I know that you could fill a fifty-two volume book series with what I don’t know. Har-har-har.” He went back to a normal voice, “tell me what you’re keeping from me.”

“I think it’ll be better if you just see.”

“If this is 2005, then I already know that she’s only a child, so if that’s what you have in mind...”

“No, it’s even weirder than that!”

“Okay,” Mateo said dismissively while opening the door.

He had seen photo albums of Leona from when she was younger, so it wasn’t hard to find her in the crowd. Little Leona was with a tour group, and was very excited to be there. As expected, her eyes were wandering. She wasn’t listening to the tour guide, instead taking in everything else around her. “Leona,” he heard from the crowd as he drew closer, but he couldn’t see who it was coming from. The voice was...very familiar, but that couldn’t be, because he had never met Leona’s birthmother. “Leona, get over here and pay attention.” A tall man finally moved over to reveal who was calling to her. No, it definitely wasn’t her birthmother. Or if it was, then his relationship with Leona would have been even stranger than they thought with the whole reincarnation bit.

“Carol, let her look around,” Randall Gelens said after coming into view. That’s right, Mateo’s adoptive parents from his original timeline were now Leona’s parents from the new timeline, presumably also adoptive.

“See what I mean?” the Cleanser asked him rhetorically.

“How did this happen?” It was neither good nor bad. It was just weird. And awkward. And weird.

“I actually don’t know the details, but I swear I had nothing to do with it. Both Leona’s parents died, instead of just her mother, and since you weren’t around to keep them busy, Carol and Randall ended up adopting her.

Leona was smiling in a way he hadn’t seen in a long time. Or maybe he never had. She was happy. Sure, both her birth parents were gone in this timeline, but if Mateo saved them, his parents would both live. She would never know what it was like to be painfully attached to a salmon, and the two of them would be able to live long and happy lives, possibly even long enough to reach that longevity escape velocity. Makarion and that Blender chick had left to take her from this life and pull her back into this one, forcing her to remember memories from another life without her consent. He now realized that that would not be fair to her. She had a life now, without him. She was better off, and it wasn’t like he could go back and stop her parents from dying, and create yet another timeline. No, this was as good as it gets, and it would be selfish of him to take that away from her.

“Could you do me a favor?” Mateo asked, still looking at the love of his life. She was, of course, way too young for him, even more so than when they had first met. But she still looked like the Leona he knew, and this was all he was going to get. He was going to savor every moment. If he only had had a phone, he could have kept an alternate photo of her on it. But he hadn’t had a phone since the early days of salmonhood, so this last sight of her would have to do. And bonus, he got to see his dead parents again as well. Maybe he had stepped into the best reality possible, even with the Pentagon attack. Erasing himself from the timeline might very well have been the single best act he had ever done in his life.

“You want me to stop Makarion and Nerakali from blending her memories from the alternate timeline?” the Cleanser asked.

“I know we’ve had our differences. I know you don’t like me for reasons I can’t even begin to understand. I know you are who you are, but for once, could you please try to do something nice for someone else, instead of what you think is going to be the funniest?”

“Yes,” the Cleanser replied somberly. “I sometimes make healthy choices. This will be one of them.”

“Thank you.”

“Find a way to get them out.” He teleported away.

Mateo spoke into the aether, “okay.”

How was he going to do that? None of them knew him, so it wasn’t like he could just ask that they leave the premises. He was already told that he couldn’t pull the fire alarm. He didn’t have a gun to wave around, and even if he did, he didn’t want to scare anyone. There was just no way out of this without looking like a terrorist. Yes, as a time traveler, he was one of the few people immune to retribution, but his ultimate disappearance from the timestream would raise eyebrows, making things worse.

The closet. Yes, that was the answer, as it had been before. After Mirage, the artificial intelligence tried to kill him in his birthmother’s home, Mateo jumped forwards through the year, and ended up appearing in Horace Reaver’s dastardly facility. But he hadn’t just landed anywhere, he had been in a closet. That closet happened to be filled with security guard uniforms, allowing him to blend in with his pursuers. The Pentagon closet had the same thing. He went back in and changed into the present guard uniform, hopeful that the mission would be easier than last time. Was this luck? Was this the Cleanser’s doing? Or was it something else?

He walked out with as much confidence as he could muster and approached Randall Gelen, the man who had raised him, but had no memory of it. For a second, Randall looked at him with some form of familiarity, but then shook it off. Maybe that was the answer to déjà vu, a brief peek into an alternate reality of things that once were.

“Yes, can I help you?” Randall asked, eager to comply with an authority figure.

“Sir, we are currently experiencing a threat to national security. I urge you and your family to quietly leave the premises, and move as far from the building as possible.”

“What about everyone else?” Carol asked, pulling Leona closer to her.

“We have protocol for this sort of emergency. It’s my job to methodically get everyone in my sector out, but a building-wide alarm would cause panic, putting civilians in further danger. Please tell no one of what you know.”

Randall thought it over for a second, but only to make sure Mateo knew that he knew how serious the situation could be. “I understand, thank you.”

It worked. His family quickly but carefully separated from the tour group and headed for the exit. Randall was keeping an eye on him, though, so Mateo started approaching other people, asking to see their visitors passes for a random check, making it look like he was trying to get them out of the building as well. Once the three of them were out of sight, and he was convinced that they would be safe, he walked away.

Mateo opened a door to the courtyard and slowly strolled toward the center, enjoying the scenery. He had never been to Washington D.C. before, and it seemed as good a place as any to die. He watched other people go about their day. They had no idea what was coming, but they were starting to see. Before too long, they could hear and feel a rumble, growing ever closer to them. Five airplanes were flying far too low, and getting lower. He stared up at them fearlessly, safe in the knowledge that everyone he loved would be able to go on with their lives without missing him. There was a sort of relief in that. He was the one person in the world who really could die without anyone caring. The worst part about death is the loss the survivors feel, and that was something he wouldn’t have to worry about. He was done. He wouldn’t have to jump through time anymore. What a nice thought.

I’m sorry to disappoint you, Saga Einarsson’s telepathic thoughts gently pervaded his mind. I’m not saving you for them, or even for you. I’m doing this for everyone else.

Mateo could see a person standing on the roof of each of The Pentagon’s five sides. It must have been Saga herself, but how she was able to be in five places at once was a question with no answer. As the planes dove towards the building, and everyone around him was screaming and fleeing, the five Sagas transformed into...something else. Just before their noses hit their marks, the planes disappeared. A sort of weird Matrixy ripple sort of thing fluttered through the air. Everyone who had been freaking out about the oncoming disaster flickered and returned to a state of calm. It was like several frames of film had been edited out of the movie. They continued as normal, none the wiser. Not only had Saga stopped the planes from hitting the building, but she had manually removed them from time so that only he could remember the version of events where they had existed. But why? Why could he? He was just a salmon. He shouldn’t have been immune to this particular change.

The Cleanser teleported next to him. “What happened? The planes should have hit. I’m the one who sent them here! This is not what I remember!”

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Second Stage of Something Started: Resignation (Part XIII)

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Vearden looked out the window to see the clouds flying by faster than they should have been. They were moving through time at an abnormal rate. He looked back to see The Cleanser dancing his fingers around in the air like he was lightly playing a floating piano. As he did so, everyone on the plane except for the door-walkers started drifting their head around in some kind of daze. “What did you do to them?” Vearden asked, probably a bit too curious.

“It’s like when you wake up and think you’re late for work but eventually realize it’s Saturday,” he tried to explain, “but that on crack.”

Saga violently grabbed him by the shoulder. “Forget about that! What did you say about crashing into the Pentagon?”

“Exactly what I said, bitch! Get your hands off me!”

“This isn’t what we signed up for.”

“What did you sign up for? Nothing? That’s what I thought. Now sit down and let me do my job.”

“And what exactly is your job?” Vearden asked, uncharacteristically more relaxed than his partner.

“I’m The Cleaner,” he replied.

“Don’t you mean cleanser?” Vearden asked.

“No, I mean Cleaner. What are you even talking about?”

As Vearden just stared at him in confusion, Saga quickly figured out what was happening. This was a past version of the Cleanser they all knew and hated. He did look significantly younger than before. For whatever reason, this chooser chose to change his name to the Cleanser, possibly as a response to whatever made him quit his chooser job and go rogue. Strangely, it would seem that Vearden had given him the idea for his new nickname all along. But if this were true, who came up with the name in the first place? “Nothing, sir,” she said, hoping he would drop the subject. “His bootstraps are just on too tight.”

The Cleanser Cleaner seemed to have understood the reference, and did make a point of letting it go. “Well, it’s my job to clean up the timeline. Some events are so pivotal to the timeline that when a chooser prevents them from happening, someone has to go in and put it back the way it was.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Saga pointed out. “I remember the 2001 and 2005 Pentagon attacks. The planes aren’t from the future. I mean, the government would have certainly tried to cover that up, but the events were so massive and far-reaching that we would have heard at least rumors.”

“First of all, you’re from a timeline where the 2005 Pentagon attack was carried out by humans, with regular airplanes that appropriately predate the event. Secondly, the government won’t have to cover up anything. We have ways of adjusting people’s memories by merging them with an alternate version of themselves through a quantum entanglement connection. I don’t expect you to understand how it works, because I certainly don’t.”

“We’ve heard that word before,” Vearden noticed. “Merging. We encountered someone called The Merger in 1975.”

“That’s quite interesting. I’ll have to remember that for my future, but I’m not talking about physical merging. I’m referring to blending.”

Remembering the problem at hand, Saga brought the conversation back. “So you’re going to send this plane to 2005 so it can crash into the Pentagon. Why would you need to do that? That human attack was successful.”

“Again, in the timeline you remember, but someone went back and stopped it.”

“Oh right,” Saga said. “I still see one problem with your plan.”

“That I’m short about four planes?”

“Oh yeah,” Vearden said, too excitedly. “Guess you better give up!”

The Cleaner smiled while he was interlocking his fingers to pop them. “I’ve not tried autocatalysis before, but I’ve seen it done, and I know that it’s one of my capabilities. I think I can do it for the whole plane, but I’m going to need your help.”

“Screw that, we’re not helping you,” Vearden argued.

“You keep acting like you have a choice. I recommend you get over that.” The Cleaner prepared himself and aggressively took both of them by the arm. He was incredibly strong, more so than he looked. Saga couldn’t think of any time manipulation function that would allow that, but maybe there was something. This particular chooser seemed to be excellent at finding loopholes, and using his powers in ever-creative ways.

They could feel energy surge through their bodies. The power didn’t move only from them and to him. Their combined powers cycled between all three of them like flowing water, methodically trickling out before shooting into the aether. With this power came knowledge. Both Saga and Vearden began to better understand time travel and the timeline. They saw the past, the future, alternate realities, spatial merging, extracting, regression, paradox stabilization, quantum blending, and autocatalysis, among others. They could feel the airplane split into two equal parts, and then those two separated into two more, and then those into one more pair. The Cleaner disintegrated the sixth plane across time, because it was not needed to accomplish his objectives.

The five remaining planes flew away from each other, headed toward the same spot. The three travelers could feel themselves in disparate places all at once, conscious of the slight differences, but still aware that they were but mirror images of only one thing. There was still only one plane, and it was about to crash into the past of the Department of Defense five times. In the original timeline, a powerful group of terrorists, angry from the ultimate failure of 9/11, coordinated a strike with five relatively small, but still powerful enough commercial airliners. Instead of hijacking preexisting flights, they simply stole the planes as they sat in their hangars. There was no lack of security, but certainly less than for aircraft being used for travel at any given moment.

The Cleaner had, probably inadvertently, bestowed upon Saga and Vearden a special level of perspective. A chooser, whose name was not relevant at the moment, traveled back into the past upon discovering her gift, before anyone else had a chance to introduce her to the world. A disproportionate number of family members of hers had died in the 2005 attack. So she used her foreknowledge to change the outcome of events, anonymously sending the authorities to the hangars before the terrorists could abscond with the aircraft. Her family was saved, but April 30, 2005 was too significant of a day in history. The powers that be were not happy with this change in the timeline. Though they did not particular enjoy the death of hundreds of people, they considered it too dangerous to prevent. Some events give rise to so many variables that not even the powers are capable of comprehending the ramifications. These variables stretch out beyond their purview, and create wrinkles in the fabric of space and time. Thousands of people are born or not by this single variation. And so they employed their Cleaner to repair the timeline for them, and restore their dominion. He was not the only one they used for this purpose, but he was one of their best. Ruthless and clever, he could always wrangle the variables. Or rather, he usually could. For one reason or another, he did not accurately predict what Saga would do.

The replicated time displaced airplane(s) plunged towards the building with even greater temporal precision than their counterparts in the other timeline. Vearden reached forwards with his mind and looked upon the faces of everyone in the affected area, including none other than Mateo Matic. He was standing in the middle of the courtyard, looking up at them with determination. At time slowed down from their point of view, the door-walking freelancers looked at each other in a way they never had before. In that moment, they both knew everything about the other one’s past...and Saga knew about Vearden’s future. She smiled. He frowned. But he understood. He couldn’t do what she had to. He had more work to do, and his time was yet to come. Her life was over, but he would see her again, in other ways.

Five copies of Saga Einarsson harnessed the fumes of the Cleaner’s special chooser powers to teleport themselves to five centers of the Pentagon’s roofs. They held their arms to the heavens, almost welcoming to the oncoming airplane barrage. She used the remnants of both her and Vearden’s power to transform herself into continuum bombs. The planes recombined into one and flew through a portal to a distant locations. The pilots reawoke and sprang into action, somewhat safely landing the plane in the ocean as if they thought it was the Hudson River.

Having lost his temporal insight and returned to salmon status, Vearden Haywood quietly crawled out of the airplane and swam to shore. He walked up to the stargate replica and stepped through. It sent him right back down the ramp, but about five years earlier. Harrison was waiting for him on the beach. “How long have I been gone?” he asked.

Harrison replied, “Several hours.”

“Mateo has yet to experience the tribulation.”

“Correct. Where is Saga?”

“She is not in this version of events. We changed history. She did.”

“What does that mean for what happens now?”

“It means I quit.”

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