Day 274 - Repeat Offenders - Chapter 16 (1137 Words)

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REPEAT OFFENDERS

By Wayne Webb

CHAPTER 16

The bank looked as bad as it could possibly look, no amount of boarding up and tarpaulin would ever mask the devastating fire that gutted it and the adjacent buildings. The inside of the bank would undoubtedly be a mess and from the look of it it was an inferno of epic proportions.

They had to be careful with the loot, they did not want the evidence of the robbery turning up and giving the clues to the existence of other dimensions. So far they had managed to return a number of gem hauls, each had been divided and weighed into an approximate fair share for returning to each dimensional reality, the idea being that they needed to cover their tracks. The more than a dozen realities where they had robbed the boxes at night, they were easy pickings, it was straightforward to re-enter the vault and replace the stolen merchandise.

The hard part was creating an outpost of reality maintenance in each dimension under the umbrella of their own NSA and Project Banzai, because if they left even one reality to it's own devices, each subsequent version was at risk.

This was not a question of justice or of reparation, no one had any sympathy for the criminal enterprise that had been ripped off, if there was ever a victimless crime in their eyes this would have been it. The Robin Hood nature of the crime was the appeal of it in the first place, but what they did not want was exposure. At some point they would have checked the vault and found the safety deposit box empty. That would have lead them to take the law in their own hands and led them to the man they held responsible, the Bank Manager who should have maintained better security for their belongings. That in turn would lead to unfriendly conversations, none of which would involve the police directly, but security footage would reveal the accomplices and they would eventually lead to Brian and his warehouse property.

Brian Prime had a plan, to retrieve all the other copies of his frozen self and bring them to the central reality and then destroy the machines behind him, one by one collapsing all the realities back to one main one, the original. The machines were key to the existence of the reality in all but the original universe, so as long as they remained powered up and in play in the universe that it was created in, then it remained open for business, when it was off so was everything else in the next universe along. Every universe was dependant on the one before it, so if the first machine was turned off completely then all the following realities would cease to exist.

This was the conundrum for the Project Banzai team and anyone affiliated with the Special Access Program clearance, they knew that the universe as they knew it, the reality that they lived in was temporary. While the universe was eventually going to slow down and die as the momentum of energy eventually reached zero, the timing for that was in the uncountable aeons of time. In the final reality, the one where the plan had come to it's sticky conclusion with Brian Prime locked in stasis and the remnants of his team under lock-down in a secret government facility, the ultimate back up plan was revealed.

His plan such as it was would be to allow the remainder of the universe do whatever they wanted, they all lived on borrowed time, and when the copies all fell apart the inhabitants of the origin point would be alone once more, but with the copies taken from the other realities.

Mike, Ivan, Harold and George all lived in that reality but had no connection whatsoever to Brian or his projects. He would eventually rid himself of his co-conspirators and return to Dimension Prime along with whatever copies of himself he needed, with whatever technology, riches and cures he needed to survive. He had not lost sight of that, even when he was imprisoned in stasis in the final created universe, because when that all fell apart he was made of the same matter as the Prime universe itself.

He would bet his life on his ability to return once all the infrastructure holding him melted away. He did not know this for sure, but it was a huge gamble to make and yet the rampant cancer was a given, so he was willing to take the risk. He would not even have to wait, because he would be in stasis, time was irrelevant, it could be a day, ten days or a hundred years. He actually hoped it would be a hundred years, so he'd wake up in the future, where his disease was curable and his mind transferable.

Kyle Stone though was clear what they needed to do. They needed to protect the reality they lived in and in order to do that they needed to travel back to each one and secure each machine, prevent the discovery of the machines and preserve the chain of reality.

They had started off carefully, taking only the necessary precautions to secure the site, but them longer term thinking was required. Kyle needed to touch base with his own self in each reality and appraise the NSA of the fact that they were not as real as they though they were and what they needed to do to stay in existence.

Often this took some convincing, and inter-dimensional traffic increased substantially across each trip. Each person who took a trip exposed themselves to the ravages of whatever form of radiation was killing Brian and what had attacked Mike. Ivan Prime and Ivan Two had succumbed to symptoms after only a handful more trips and Harold White had voluntarily joined them all in stasis, knowing that if the mission failed they would not likely be repatriated to the original universe, they would just never wake up and it would be like they were never there.

George Samuels and Kyle Stone were the advance guard, they had travelled dimensions one by one, practiced in convincing their other realities that they had a problem, their reality was at stake and that they brought the solution.

Until the copy of the universe where Harold White had met himself and lost his fingers. This was the same place where Ivan Prime had departed the team and Ivan Two's copy was created from. This is where the George who had died in the warehouse had come from, this was the universe with the most amount of chaos and risk.

Here there were larger issues.

There was footage of them, footage of multiple copies of the Bank Manager and scenes of them disappearing into thin air.