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©Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com, 2013. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Wayne Webb and constantwriting.blogspot.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
REPEAT OFFENDERS
By Wayne Webb
CHAPTER 14.2
"Seriously I
fucking hate computers."
"The next words
out of your mouth better be something useful."
"Or what? You
can barely stand." Ivan Two was barking at Mike out of frustration and
pain. The day had not been going at all well in his mind and the sting of
the self-inflicted wound was driving daggers into his nerves. Mike was starting
to recover and he had started giving orders again, like his current incapacity
was in no way affecting the state of play in the group. Brian Prime was in
shock and not much use to anyone, and for now they were waiting to find out
what was going on.
Mike was feeling
better but still did not have the energy to stand on his own unaided by
furniture or people. He had little or no rage left; instead he was scared by
his body’s betrayal. He was not prone to sickness and this affliction had hit
him hard, like a bolt from god, a divine retribution for the things he had
done. Things that were much more permanent than he’d been led to believe. Still
it did not affect the outcome, after all that was the nature of theft was it
not? Someone would lose out, someone was the victim of the crime and someone
reaped the rewards.
Rewards in this case
were huge and the people who had died along the way? They were on Brian, the
one that was taking a nap on the floor right now. He deserved every fucking
beating and knifing that he had, and more. Had he not been as sick as he was,
if Brian had not been holding the key to whatever ailment he was suffering
under then that bastard would be dead already.
Slowly too, he would
have been under no illusions that death would have been on the cards for him,
but Mike would have made him pay humiliations and pain in spades. Now though he
had to recover and then give them all the explanation about what was going on,
and the cure.
There had better be
one, or death would be a release that would not be found.
Ivan Two and Ivan
Prime were both watching Brian Two who was giving a brief on how to use the
machine to skip back through the previous universes, and how to create the next
one. It was not as complex as the other Brian had made it out, but Brian Two
made no mention of freezing time or the fact that they were not alone.
It was a glance at
most that he could give to Ivan Prime to try and raise the issue of the man in
the Freeze Room across the warehouse space from where they stood. They had
nothing more than the barely seen shake of the head from Ivan Prime to close
the subject and nothing more could be done or said about the Cop they had
secreted away in the adjacent room as a contingency plan.
The idea had been
simple enough, they trusted their future selves very little despite being the
same people neither man felt that they could not rule out how the time travel
had changed them, not changed them or just made things more violently complex
than it needed to be. So they had an ace in the hole, with George, whom they
knew little about other than he seemed to go along with what was going on. If
things got out of hand, there was an armed man who was used to dealing with
difficult situations just on the side and ready to intervene.
He had the gun, he
had the training and he had a video and audio feed hooked into the sound
proofed rom he was hiding in. Brian Prime had made the room with help from
Brian Two, so he though initially before he realised that the original room and
creation were in his memories, but he was several copies removed from that
point in time. Right now the ‘right minded’ versions of Brian would outnumber
the mad version significantly because they had been replicated in time frozen
capsules, with no experiences to alter their personalities and not even the
normalised ageing process that Prime had been going through. He was weeks ahead
of where Brian Two and his brother copies were.
The readout was
confusing Brian Two as he stepped the two Ivans the basics of selecting the
destination entry in the dimensional creation logs, and then aiming the
apparatus at it. It was straightforward, really much easier than the way Brian
Prime had been mystifying it. Most of the extra settings and work that Prime
had been doing was to ensure that there were no new copies of Mike and Ivan in
the next universe they created. With that step out of the mix, the concept of
travelling backwards to the previous destination universe was straightforward.
The process was linear;
they already knew this from the journey that the three of them took to get to
the current and most recently created version of reality. They could move
backwards, they could more forwards and they could create a brand new reality.
The creation thing was a problem though, that suddenly seemed like it was a too
casual situation. From nothing and with no though they were creating a whole
new universe, unbound and unlimited they had created almost twenty universes in
the last few days, maybe more if they could travel far enough they could count
up the ones that Brian Prime must have created in order to get so far ahead and
so different from the men that he froze up.
That dying and cancer
story was bullshit, but it worried Brian Two none the less, because it was
probably close to being true. He had a theory, one that he had not yet decided
to share with anyone, but he wanted his Prime to confirm it, when he came to
and was making sense again.
George on the other
hand, had not intervened when Brian Prime was sliced from cheek to ear, and did
nothing when Mike had been brutally bashed, incapacitated and then bound to the
chair. It had occurred to Brian Two that perhaps George had taken the instructions
on how to stop time that he had given him, and gotten it wrong. That was
possible, but the Freeze Room console only had two functions, freeze the box
with Brian inside it, the latest of more than a dozen copies, blissfully
unaware of the action outside his tomb, or freeze the entire world except the
Freeze Room. Since the other Brian, Brian Three or Twenty Three, it was hard to
know what else to call him, had not come on out or made any moves then it had
to be that George had not gotten the controls wrong.
He had elected to not
intervene.
Why would he stay out
when things were spiralling out of control like this? Ivan Prime did not seem
too concerned, and he said nothing, keeping his own nods and winks to his
conspirator as minimal as possible. He too must have had a plan and wanted the
Ace in the Hole just in case.
Then the surprise
came, when Brian Two was checking the logs, of the anomaly logs not the universal
creation records, but the times that the freeze must have been activated. Between
the creation of this reality and when Brian Two was checking activity there had
been five spikes in quantum level changes in time itself. So someone, perhaps
George had been freezing time, thinking about what to do or how to interfere
and then doing nothing, or…. Something else was happening?
Was there a malfunction?
Did that gel with Brian Two’s theory about what was eating away at Prime and
what was crippling Mike now? He was not sure; he needed more data, and not just
the unreliable words of his future self. He wanted evidence and a hypothesis to
prove or disprove.
"Seriously I
fucking hate computers."
"The next words
out of your mouth better be something useful."
"Or what? You
can barely stand." Ivan Two was barking at Mike out of frustration and
pain. The day had not been going at all well in his mind and the sting of
the self-inflicted wound was driving daggers into his nerves. Mike was starting
to recover and he had started giving orders again, like his current incapacity
was in no way affecting the state of play in the group. Brian Prime was in
shock and not much use to anyone, and for now they were waiting to find out
what was going on.
Mike was feeling
better but still did not have the energy to stand on his own unaided by
furniture or people. He had little or no rage left; instead he was scared by
his body’s betrayal. He was not prone to sickness and this affliction had hit
him hard, like a bolt from god, a divine retribution for the things he had
done. Things that were much more permanent than he’d been led to believe. Still
it did not affect the outcome, after all that was the nature of theft was it
not? Someone would lose out, someone was the victim of the crime and someone
reaped the rewards.
Rewards in this case
were huge and the people who had died along the way? They were on Brian, the
one that was taking a nap on the floor right now. He deserved every fucking
beating and knifing that he had, and more. Had he not been as sick as he was,
if Brian had not been holding the key to whatever ailment he was suffering
under then that bastard would be dead already.
Slowly too, he would
have been under no illusions that death would have been on the cards for him,
but Mike would have made him pay humiliations and pain in spades. Now though he
had to recover and then give them all the explanation about what was going on,
and the cure.
There had better be
one, or death would be a release that would not be found.
Ivan Two and Ivan
Prime were both watching Brian Two who was giving a brief on how to use the
machine to skip back through the previous universes, and how to create the next
one. It was not as complex as the other Brian had made it out, but Brian Two
made no mention of freezing time or the fact that they were not alone.
It was a glance at
most that he could give to Ivan Prime to try and raise the issue of the man in
the Freeze Room across the warehouse space from where they stood. They had
nothing more than the barely seen shake of the head from Ivan Prime to close
the subject and nothing more could be done or said about the Cop they had
secreted away in the adjacent room as a contingency plan.
The idea had been
simple enough, they trusted their future selves very little despite being the
same people neither man felt that they could not rule out how the time travel
had changed them, not changed them or just made things more violently complex
than it needed to be. So they had an ace in the hole, with George, whom they
knew little about other than he seemed to go along with what was going on. If
things got out of hand, there was an armed man who was used to dealing with
difficult situations just on the side and ready to intervene.
He had the gun, he
had the training and he had a video and audio feed hooked into the sound
proofed rom he was hiding in. Brian Prime had made the room with help from
Brian Two, so he though initially before he realised that the original room and
creation were in his memories, but he was several copies removed from that
point in time. Right now the ‘right minded’ versions of Brian would outnumber
the mad version significantly because they had been replicated in time frozen
capsules, with no experiences to alter their personalities and not even the
normalised ageing process that Prime had been going through. He was weeks ahead
of where Brian Two and his brother copies were.
The readout was
confusing Brian Two as he stepped the two Ivans the basics of selecting the
destination entry in the dimensional creation logs, and then aiming the
apparatus at it. It was straightforward, really much easier than the way Brian
Prime had been mystifying it. Most of the extra settings and work that Prime
had been doing was to ensure that there were no new copies of Mike and Ivan in
the next universe they created. With that step out of the mix, the concept of
travelling backwards to the previous destination universe was straightforward.
The process was linear;
they already knew this from the journey that the three of them took to get to
the current and most recently created version of reality. They could move
backwards, they could more forwards and they could create a brand new reality.
The creation thing was a problem though, that suddenly seemed like it was a too
casual situation. From nothing and with no though they were creating a whole
new universe, unbound and unlimited they had created almost twenty universes in
the last few days, maybe more if they could travel far enough they could count
up the ones that Brian Prime must have created in order to get so far ahead and
so different from the men that he froze up.
That dying and cancer
story was bullshit, but it worried Brian Two none the less, because it was
probably close to being true. He had a theory, one that he had not yet decided
to share with anyone, but he wanted his Prime to confirm it, when he came to
and was making sense again.
George on the other
hand, had not intervened when Brian Prime was sliced from cheek to ear, and did
nothing when Mike had been brutally bashed, incapacitated and then bound to the
chair. It had occurred to Brian Two that perhaps George had taken the instructions
on how to stop time that he had given him, and gotten it wrong. That was
possible, but the Freeze Room console only had two functions, freeze the box
with Brian inside it, the latest of more than a dozen copies, blissfully
unaware of the action outside his tomb, or freeze the entire world except the
Freeze Room. Since the other Brian, Brian Three or Twenty Three, it was hard to
know what else to call him, had not come on out or made any moves then it had
to be that George had not gotten the controls wrong.
He had elected to not
intervene.
Why would he stay out
when things were spiralling out of control like this? Ivan Prime did not seem
too concerned, and he said nothing, keeping his own nods and winks to his
conspirator as minimal as possible. He too must have had a plan and wanted the
Ace in the Hole just in case.
Then the surprise
came, when Brian Two was checking the logs, of the anomaly logs not the universal
creation records, but the times that the freeze must have been activated. Between
the creation of this reality and when Brian Two was checking activity there had
been five spikes in quantum level changes in time itself. So someone, perhaps
George had been freezing time, thinking about what to do or how to interfere
and then doing nothing, or…. Something else was happening?
Was there a malfunction?
Did that gel with Brian Two’s theory about what was eating away at Prime and
what was crippling Mike now? He was not sure; he needed more data, and not just
the unreliable words of his future self. He wanted evidence and a hypothesis to
prove or disprove.
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