Army of You
When you see the
ground swallow Pierce you will breathe a sigh of relief—you’ll
finally have the luxury of knowing that one of your iterations has
made it out of death ground. But the situation will be too deadly
to give you respite. If Internal Affairs are willing to
start with combat drones and orbital
X-ray lasers, then escalate from there, where will they stop? How
badly do they want you?
Very badly, it
seems.
There’s going to be
hell to pay when it’s time for the cleanup; ur-history doesn’t have
room for a nuclear blitzkrieg on the capital of the Second Reich.
The calcinated, rapidly skeletonizing remains of the governesses
and the organ grinders contort and burst in the searing wind from
the Hiroshima miscarriage, and the four faces of the clock glow
cherry red and slump to the ground as a dozen more of you flicker
into view, anonymous in their heat-flash-silvered battle armor. The
echo-armies of your combat drones fan out all around, furiously
dumping heat through transient timegates into the cryogenic depths
of the far future as they exchange fire with the enemy’s soldiers.
“Extraction complete. Prepare to move
out,” says your phone; the iteration tag of that version of
you is astronomical, in the millions. This isn’t just a palimpsest
ambush: it’s an entire talmud of rewrites and commentaries and
attempted paradoxes piled up in a threatening tsunami of unhistory
and dumped on your heads.
You’ll grab your
future self’s metadata and jump toward a timegate to a dispersal
zone drifting high in orbit above ruddy Jupiter’s north pole,
nearly a billion years in the future: the rocket motors at your
suit’s shoulders and ankles kick hard, and as you loft, you’ll
catch a flashing glimpse of the Mach wave from the first heat
strike surging outward, lifting and crumpling schools and hospitals
and churches and apartments and houses and shops in the iron name
of Internal Affairs.
They won’t find this
dispersal zone. They won’t uncover the truth about Control, either,
or about the Opposition—you’ll be sure of that for as long as you
continue to live and breathe.
You will look down,
between your feet, at the swirling orange-and-cream chaos of
Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Your armor will ping and tick quietly
as it cools, and you will wait while the star trackers get a fix on
your position, your mind empty of everything but a quiet
satisfaction, the reward for a job well-done: the extraction of
your cardinal iterant from the grasp of Internal Affairs. Somewhere
else in time—millions of years ago—the rewrite war is still going
on, the virtual legions of you playing a desperate shell game with
Kafka: but you’ve won. All that’s left to do is to deftly insert
the zombie ringer into ur-history on his way into Kafka’s court,
primed to tell Internal Affairs exactly what you want them to know,
then to orchestrate a drawdown and withdrawal from the ruins of
Berlin before Kafka overwrites the battle zone and restores the
proper flow of history.
Your suit will beep
quietly for attention. “Scan complete,” it announces. “Acceleration
commencing.” The thrusters will push briefly, reorienting you,
sliding Jupiter out of sight behind your back. And then the rockets
will kick in again, pushing you toward the yard, and the fleet of
thirty-kilometer-long starships abuilding, and Yarrow.