Quinn sipped his black coffee, thinking about how much he wished he had a pair of glasses. His eyes were not getting any younger. As soon as they got tired, he had to strain to keep focus; and he was pretty darn tired.
He stared at the display on the timer. Nine days left, give or take. There was never enough.
The data extracted from Maggie’s cell samples had been sufficient to populate the formulas, and it was looking pretty bleak. They had at most a week to separate the Maggies before the process became irreversible.
Sam’s provision of his time travel equations were incomplete thanks to his patchy memory, and apparently he had a whole thing with his younger double needing to travel here so Al could show up; the whole thing was a mess.
Meanwhile, the combined knowledge of Michael and himself gave them a pretty good picture of the vortex equations, but there was a significant downgrade in computer tech to bring up the timer code. And that was where he was at now: sitting at one of the world’s most sophisticated computer terminals outside of the military, and it was still taking forever to load. He wondered bitterly whether it would take as long to load as Sam had taken to type the whole thing up. Assuming he didn’t crash the thing.
“How’s it going?”
Quinn looked up mid eye-rub to see his father looking on.
“I feel like the timer’s going to run down to zero before this old thing loads,” he whined.
Michael chuckled. “Old thing? I thought you said it was state of the art.”
“For the seventies, sure.” He stood from his seat. There was no point in watching this take its sweet time. He turned to Michael, straightening his back.
“Listen, I’ve been avoiding this, but… I need to know.”
Michael picked up on the grave tone. “Know what?”
Quinn pressed his lips together. “How did your world stop them?”
“The Kromaggs, you mean?”
Quinn nodded. Michael thought for a moment.
“How do you know about them?”
“We’ve run into them a bunch of times. And they’re going to invade this world in about twenty years. It’s… gonna be bad.”
Quinn evaded his father’s eyes, fearing he’d start losing his cool. He felt a hand on his arm.
“Not all of them are irredeemable monsters, you know. We actually managed to come to a truce.”
“You did?” Quinn certainly didn’t expect that.
Michael looked down, regretfully. “We came up with a weapon, called the Voraton device, but its use would have meant certain doom for all of us. So now, it’s… our trump card, I suppose.”
So it’s like a nuclear deterrent. It sounded like a pretty tense situation.
“So why are they invading all these worlds in my time?” Quinn rubbed his forehead, and began to pace, trying to get a handle on all of this.
“I didn’t know they were! Maybe the truce gets broken some time in the future. Or…”
“Or what?”
“Part of our truce was that all who disagreed would migrate to another Earth. Probably ninety per cent of Kromaggs were sent away, and I set up what I called a ‘Slide Cage’ to prevent anyone from returning without the proper backdoor access. But I wasn’t aware they had sliding tech.”
Quinn clenched his teeth as he tried to put everything together. His double, the one who he had met so long ago, had claimed to have given them that technology.
“I’ve been to the Slide Cage,” he said simply, avoiding the shame associated with his double. “I’m not sure what you expected that place to be, but it was a warzone until I managed to get everyone out of it. Almost everyone.”
“What? How?”
“I was able to reverse engineer the data from the microdots to work out the backdoor. You know, you could easily redesign it not to capture, but to deflect like a mirror. You just need to–”
“I thought I’d… made it comfortable,” Michael cut in, looking crestfallen.
Quinn sighed. His Dad was a brilliant engineer and scientist, but he didn’t have a great deal of foresight. Then again, Quinn was little better in that department, jumping into a vortex without knowing what he was doing all those years ago.
“You made Purgatory,” Quinn said, with a grim look. Michael nodded sadly.
“You’ll have to explain your idea to me, then.”
“Sure,” he said, taking a final swig of his coffee.
But that won’t stop the other me dooming the multiverse.
If there was anything he wished he could go back and stop, it was that Quinn. But he just didn’t see any way to influence that Quinn, even now that he was in a position to change things.
“Come on,” he said to his father, heading out of the computer lab, “I’ll draw you a diagram.”
* * *
Around eight at night, Sam was in the lecture theater, with a yawning Quinn sitting on one of the student seats scribbling something on the half-desk. Sam was in the front of the room, double checking some calculations on the chalkboard, when Al’s face popped in right through the chalk scribblings, making Sam jump backward in surprise.
“Oh, for the love of…” he cried, and struggled to regain his composure. “Listen, Al, I’m glad to see you, but can you just use a door? One day I’m gonna drop dead of heart failure.”
“Hi to you, too, Sam,” Al said, nonchalantly puffing his cigar. “Your half-baked self just got off the Greyhound.”
He turned around to the chalkboards. “Sorry to interrupt, uh, whatever all this is.”
Quinn had approached him now. “Al’s here?”
Sam nodded. “And I gotta go meet myself at the bus depot. You know where it is?”
“Of course,” Quinn confirmed. “Let’s go.”
Twenty minutes of walking through the dark streets, and the two of them, along with the hologram, had arrived at the bus station.
Sam peered at the face of his mid-twenties double, and it almost felt like looking in a mirror; but the smoother skin, the lack of deep set lines, and the full brown head of hair, the style of which reminded him of the Bee Gees, made the whole experience surreal.
Similarly, the younger him was glaring back with a mixture of recognition and fear, presumably put off by the signs of aging.
Sam waved at the kid awkwardly.
“Hey there,” he said, and trailed off, not really knowing what else to say.
The younger Sam nodded a greeting, his eyes wide and lips speechless.
“I’m Quinn,” the slider broke the silence, and held out his hand. Sam took it and they shook their greetings.
The young Sam seemed to relax more looking away from Sam and towards Quinn, and Sam looked between them, thinking how close they must be in age.
“We’ve got some fun things to discuss,” Quinn said with a grin. “Do you want to go get something to eat?”
“Sure,” young Sam replied.
Al met Sam’s eye as Quinn led the young Sam away. He looked worried.
“Ziggy has no opinions on messing up the timeline of this world, you know. She said it’s ‘outside her parameters.’ For all she cares, as long as she gets you and your niece back to our Earth, this place can take a jump.”
Sam frowned.
“I’m pretty sure Quinn has a few opinions on the matter, because we’re on his home world, and we’re quite sure he’s already changed some things.”
“Oh boy,” Al’s eyebrows shot up. “I’ll have to talk to Gooshie…”
“If Ziggy won’t help preserve the future here, then I’ll have to follow my instincts,” Sam said, his jaw set.
Al laughed. “Sure, when has that ever gone wrong?”
* * *
Colin wandered, absent-minded, through the busy evening streets. He wasn’t sure what day of the week it was; he never really paid attention to that. His timekeeping was dictated by the timer. But it seemed like it must have been a Friday or Saturday night.
He didn’t know where he was going. He just needed a little alone time, to think about his choices.
He’d spent a lot of his life on his own. Then, after Quinn found him, he’d spent almost no time alone at all. It was quite a change. While his life on Amish World had been plagued by intense loneliness, there were times he craved solitude, and he appreciated the small windows of time he had to himself.
And now, although the streets were bustling, he was certainly alone.
The chilly early December air caused a shiver in his shoulders, and he finally decided he’d better go inside. He chose the nearest dive bar, and went inside.
That’s odd.
Although the streets outside were full of bodies, this place was empty, save for one bartender, who glanced over at him, and nodded a greeting.
Colin looked back outside, as people walked past the glass doors. On the glass, a sign, which Colin saw as inverted: ‘Al’s Place.’
He looked back at the bartender, a somewhat stout man with greying hair and moustache.
“Can I get you a drink, son?”