Timecaster

FOUR

When I’m tuning in to the spacetime fabric, my brain sort of splits in half. Not literally, or even figuratively. But I don’t really know how else to describe it. One part of my mind is intensely focused. The other part just spaces out, like I’m daydreaming.

Each click of the focus dial is one-hundredth of a millimeter, and most people can’t distinguish the movement. But to me, each click feels like a huge chasm that I’m traversing in slow motion. People watching me have commented that my fingers aren’t moving at all. But they are, on a very sensitive, very minuscule level.

First I needed to locate the eighth membrane. According to Michio Sata, the world’s first timecaster and the genius who helped invent the technology, there was no way to actually locate its physical presence. Either you could sense it, or you couldn’t. I could, and when I tuned in to the 8M I sensed that it looked and felt like a furry, bloated, red raisin. But the descriptors looked and felt aren’t appropriate, because I really couldn’t see or feel anything. It was all happening in my head.

Even though I hadn’t done a visualization in a long time, I focused in on the 8M pretty quickly. But it seemed strange. A little too small. A little too orange. I chalked that up to being out of practice, and then switched from the focus dial to the fine-tuning dial.

If one out of a thousand could locate the membrane, only a fraction of them could fine-tune. Unlike the raisin sensation, fine-tuning appeared in my imagination like a long, winding road. I had to follow its twists and turns, using the dial, maneuvering this way and that way until I reached the pinpoint of light at the very end. But it wasn’t actually light. It was more like a single point that pulled light in.

The point itself was weird as hell, and supposedly different for everyone who found it. But if you could sense the point, getting to it wasn’t any more difficult than driving a vehicle.

“Oh, my…”

I opened my eyes and looked at Neil, who appeared to be disappearing and reappearing, switching on and off like a flickering monitor. Actually, it was me and the TEV who were disappearing. Though I didn’t understand the science or the math, I was getting close to the octeract point; the center of the spacetime eighth-dimensional hypercube. While I didn’t understand what any of that meant, I knew what it felt like when I got there.

Strangely, it felt like petting a bunny between the ears.

As I got closer, the octeract point unfolded, and I sensed my mind being stretched, like it was made of chewing gum and someone was tugging on either end. One more delicate twist of the fine-tuning dial and the light enveloped everything, providing me with the very real but decidedly unmacho bunny sensation.

I locked the dials. The flickering had stopped. The world was tangible and real again. Neil’s jaw was hanging open.

“Close your mouth, Neil, or you’ll accidentally swallow the eighth dimension and your head will explode.”

His jaw clicked shut at my lie. Newbies were so much fun to mess with.

I directed my attention to the TEV monitor. It looked like a live video. The lens was pointed at the sink, and the monitor showed the sink. But when I waved my hand in front of the lens, it didn’t appear on the monitor.

That was because we weren’t looking at the sink in present time. We were looking at the sink from seventy-two hours ago. The liquid display was round and full-color, highly realistic, on par with the best real-definition displays. It had filters to compensate for the way light reflected off objects. Unfiltered, the center image was tinted blue, and around the edges was a deep red-blueshift and redshift due to the Doppler effect.

I checked the filters and tweaked them, because the current image was a bit too orange. Unable to lock it in, I played with the hue, trying to match the colors in the room. Eventually I got it looking pretty close.

“Incredible,” Neil said.

“Shh. Mouth closed.”

He obeyed, pursing his lips. I hit the fast-forward button, resuming play again when I saw a woman go to this sink. She was older, gray hair, comfortable shoes, wearing a combination of purple and green that only the elderly could get away with. I watched her place an empty plate in the sink, then drain the last drops of what looked like liquor from a rocks glass. Enjoying her alcohol still, apparently.

I looked away from the monitor, into the sink. The plate and glass were still there.

“Oh…”

At Neil’s gasp I glanced back at the monitor.

It was ugly.

A man in a black jumpsuit and gloves had come up behind Aunt Zelda and was ramming her face into the sink. After the third crack, he placed his hands on her ears and with one violent turn – he twisted her head 180 degrees, so it was facing the opposite way.

Neil made a gagging sound. I hit the pause button. From this angle, all I could see was the back of the man’s head. He had dark hair, a muscular build, and his jumpsuit looked like a uniform of some sort. I picked up the TEV by the handle, and walked it to the other side of the sink. While the action on the monitor remained paused, the angle changed as the lens moved, allowing me to view the scene from a different perspective. I set down the TEV and zoomed in, getting a close-up of the bastard’s face.

“Totally fuct!” Neil uttered.

Totally fuct was right.

The murderer looked exactly like me.

His hair was darker than mine and slightly longer than I wore it. But everything else about him was identical.

“You! You killed her!” Neil backpedaled, raising up his hands in case I was going to grab him and twist his head off.

“I didn’t kill her, Neil.” I was shocked, but kept my voice even. “That’s just someone who looks like me. A disguise. Or someone with facial reconstruction. Might even be a clone.”

Neil’s voice was shaky. “He’s your age. He would have had to have been cloned at the same time as your birth.”

“Look, I’ll prove it isn’t me.”

I zoomed out and switched the resolution from the visible spectrum to a preprogrammed wavelength and frequency, bringing up an electromagnetic radiation resolution. The effect was similar to old-fashioned X-rays. The killer and Aunt Zelda became phosphorescent skeletons. I used the joystick to focus in on the man’s wrist, then zoomed in.

His chip filled the screen. A twenty-digit ID number, followed by the birth name.

I paused it, and then got an even bigger shock.

The ID number and the name were mine.

“You killed her,” Neil whispered.

“The… uh… chip has to be a counterfeit.”

“It’s impossible to counterfeit chips. They’re specific to individual DNA.”

I zoomed in even more, to a microscopic level, seeing the nanocircuits trading electrical impulses with nerve endings. The chip had indeed fused with this guy’s biological system. It was real.

That was all the confirmation Neil needed, because he turned tail and ran for the door, yelling, “Fuct! Fuct, fuct!” and waving his hands in the air.

So I did the only thing I could do.

I drew my Glock and shot him in the back.