Day 268 - Repeat Offenders - Chapter 14.3 (1366 Words)

 ©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 14.3

So there was five times that George had stopped time, or five times that the machine had malfunctioned. Brian Two looked at the intervals and knew which one it was. The fourth intervention was the one that gave it away, it was about the same time as the sudden and violent 'marking' episode between Ivan Two and Brian Prime. The first coincided with their arrival in this reality, when he had given George a demonstration of the freeze time controls, when they had practiced it on Ivan Prime, with his knowledge and agreement of course. The second was minutes after they had secreted him in the room and taken their positions inside the lab space. That would make perfect sense, because that was George making sure he could do it on demand. So he froze time with them there, they had no idea that it was happening, how could they?

The the fourth he knew, was the assault, the one in between must have had something to do with the arrival of Brian Prime and his cohorts, maybe their arrival, maybe the brutality displayed by Brian Prime? It was around that time, so something then had triggered George to want to hold them in stasis while he … what? Then one more after that, just a few minutes ago and it was another freeze, one that slipped right passed them when they were frozen and George was using the machine to some unknown advantage?

Brian Two looked at Ivan Prime and nodded towards the door, getting an quick but alarmed face from the original Ivan, as original as was possible given their frame of reference, and then a glance at the controls, with a split second raise of the eyebrow.

Not before Ivan Two saw the all too brief exchange and spoke up.

“What? What's going on with you two? What's going on with the machine... and ...” Ivan stared down Brian Two who blushed and flicked his gaze towards the freeze room door. “What is with that door? What's behind that door? I don't think I've ever looked in there. What's in there? Who's in there?” Ivan Two made a number of logical conclusions very quickly assuming that was connected to the copies of the Brians that were now in play.

Embarrassed into revealing their secret so easily Brian Two shrugged his shoulders and tried to look anywhere except at the suspicious gaze of Ivan Two and the disappointed face of Ivan Prime. Brian Two looked down at the console again and saw that yet another freeze event had added itself to the listed logs, this one only seconds ago. Whatever George was doing, it was in reaction to the events taking place in the warehouse space.

Ivan Two was getting more and more paranoid and was taking no chances. His gun was on the shelf near the kitchen, he had put it there at the request of Brian Two, when they were being shown the ropes of dimensional machine navigation. Seeing his weapon so far away made him uneasy, but he needed to know how to get out and to use the machine to escape if necessary, so the weapon was shelved temporarily. The gun made Brian Two nervous, unlike Brian Prime who had taken to the use of a weapon with ease and a familiarity.

“Freeze! Police!” George shouted from the suddenly open door of the freeze room, appearing out of nowhere, the door was open and the detective's stance was measured and aiming a gun directly at Ivan Two's head. Ivan kept moving towards the shelf, but he hesitated just long enough to allow a shingle warning shot to be fired at the shelving unit, embedding itself in the wall spraying the backing board and plaster in the air, some hitting Ivan's face.

He came to a complete stop and raised his hands, sullenly staring at the man with a gun. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Ah, yes there was one other thing.” Said Ivan Prime apologetically to his other self, wincing as he knew what he had to say to him. “We picked up a new companion, kind of. This is detective George Samuels. George, that is me, the newer version that was created after the others left your dimension, the one where I … well.”

“You're working with the pigs? What the fuck man?” Ivan Two was stunned, he was having as much difficulty with the changes in himself as Brian Two had with his own Prime. Ivan Prime at least had the decency to be embarrassed by dealing with the police, unlike the murderously selfish Brian Prime.

“It's complicated, you know it is. Remember... I know you do come to think of it. When you killed Barbara? And then I got, we got all uppity about something, I can't even recall exactly what now, it might have been Harold joining us? Yes, and then I got left behind?”

“No actually.”

“Ah yeah, I guess you wouldn't but I guess you know about it?” Ivan Prime was back in the jail cell in his mind, pondering the nature of reality and the true nature of the crimes he had committed. The truth about the state of them, being real and not erased at all. I was, left in the bank that time and that was where I was arrested.”

“Eventually.” George qualified from his position, the grip and stance with the gun had not altered.

“Yes, true I almost got away, but then... well then... this is where we picked George up and we discovered.... did you know about the Freeze Time option? You know what else the machine can do?”

“What?” Ivan Two sat down on the chair nearest him heavily causing George to step towards Ivan Two, bristling and holding the gun slightly closer as it would make a difference in it's proximity. “Go ahead, shoot me if you want, I'm out. I … I just don't understand what the fuck is going on anymore. Did I really ...” Ivan Two hung his head and looked at the floor, the faces of the dead swimming in front of his eyes.

“Yeah. You did.” George stated this and then swung the gun in an arc from the despondent Ivan Two and covered Ivan Prime, showing him his time was up too. “You both did, and I have no idea how we charge two people for the same crime in the dimension where it didn't happen? But nothing will stop me trying.”

Ivan Prime was not taking the threat of the gun, and the potentially confusing idea of a trial that seriously, he moved and gestured as if the gun was intangible or non-existent.

“Did you find the fingers?” Harold asked from the back of the room, which made George spin around and take his guard down from Ivan Prime in just the amount of time it took to reach the gun on the shelf and then dodge away to cover as a hastily fired, un-aimed shot ricocheted off of the concrete floor.

“Ivan!” George shouted and he too raced for cover, but ultimately the new situation was a stalemate. Ivan Prime had a weapon but he was in cover, George was trying to keep a line of sight on the remaining people in the room, of which only the Ivans and Mike were really paying attention to him and the weapons.

“Yes, they're in the freezer, we left them there. I guess we could go back and give them to the other version of you and try and repair the hand? They'll be all right – in the freezer yeah?”

Brian Two shook his head, “Time progresses in the dimensional reality they came from. So the fingers might be good, but the hand they came from? He'd be dead or the wound's healed by now, too hard to reattach for the sake of a few...” Brian looked at Harold who had gone white in the face, rubbing his own fingers gently in sympathy.

“Sorry man. Wasn't thinking, I know they're not yours but... yeah.”

Day 267 - Repeat Offenders - Chapter 14.2 (1342 Words)

 ©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.