midas: part eight: broken

‘So, it appears that they met and that he received the packet.’

‘Yeah, well he wouldn’t be here now if Carsmile hadn’t gone through with it, would he?’

‘No, I suppose not.’

‘Carter?’

‘Yes?’

‘This is not good..’

‘What gave you that impression? The fact that our messenger boy and the fucking guy who was supposed to fix all this are in a room which has been decorated with their insides?’

‘Now is not a good time to be a smartarse, Carter. Exactly how the fuck do we fix this? The chronotech we hired is dead and the bargaining chip we had that got him here is dead.’

‘Well, sir, and I know this might not be the best suggestion ever, there is …’

‘What, the motherfucker that appears to have killed him?’

‘It’s him, sir.’

‘Yes, I understand how this shit seems to be working, Carter, One version turns up dead, another version turns up alive with blood all over their hands. Now do you mind explaining to me how the hell Carsmile has a time travelling duplicate? As far as you’re aware had he, before this moment, ever jumped?’

‘Well, I couldn’t with all confidence say that he’d never jumped.’

‘Fuck me, Carter, what could you ever say with confidence? That your arse is something that follows you around? You have to be the most useless excuse for a law officer that I have ever heard of.’

‘Mr Hent, with all due respect, you can go fuck yourself. This shit that is going down here is something that has never happened before – there is not a man alive that would know what to do given these events.’

‘Well, now, that’s not strictly true is it? Your eviscerated friend in that room might have had a clue; so might his killer.’

‘I don’t think that is his killer. I don’t think any of these people have been killed by versions of themselves.’

‘You seem very confident in that assertion, and how exactly do you arrive at it?’

‘It’s just a hunch, I got to thinking, what would be the motivation? There is nothing that could compel most people to do that to themselves. Suicide’s one thing, but going out and shooting a version of yourself? No, that doesn’t compute.’

‘So who is doing it? Who has the ability to kill them in this manner?’

‘I haven’t quite got there yet.’

‘Surprise surprise.’

‘So what do you suggest? What is it that you want to do about this?’

‘I’m not sure. I hate to think about closing down the port but it is beginning to look like the easiest way to trap the killer here and prevent any further murders.’

‘Or it might increase them – concentrating everyone in one place.’

‘It might. I’m not sure I’ve totally ruled out the idea you floated of using the live Tensing to do what the dead Tensing was supposed to do.’

‘Well needs must as the devil drives and all that.’

‘Wonderful, already falling back on homilies, Carter? No wonder I have so much faith in you.’

‘Fuck, Hent, could you try not being a dick for one moment?’

‘Does he have any connection to us, apart from Carsmile, I mean?’

‘Well, yeah, and that’s something I didn’t realise; I’ve had dealings with him before.’

‘Great, well if any of this leaks out you know what’s going to happen, don’t you?’

‘Oh, don’t worry, Hent, I already knew you’d throw me to the lions as soon as anything bad happened.’

‘It’s not like that, Carter, it’s just …’

‘It’s exactly like that, Hent, no need to bother with the bullshit. I understand – I’d probably do the same thing myself.’

‘Fuck, this would be so much easier to make it go away if these duplicates stopped turning up. What in the hell is that all about? How is it even possible? Isn’t it supposed to be physically impossible?’

‘What two copies of the same person in the same space? Well, I thought so too – but here we have them, and spacetime doesn’t appear to be collapsing in on itself.’

‘I wonder if that’s the eventual intent. But why here? Why Midas City? Is there something special about this place that makes it a good candidate for the apocalypse?’

– * –

Tensing was confused – they were saying that he had killed himself, but there was no straight line from that event to the now in his head. Something had broken the sequence of events and he could not forge any kind of causal chain. The thing was though, he knew that he had done it – knew that they weren’t lying to him. The other detail that stuck out in his mind was that he had known perfectly well who it was that he was going to kill and he had still gone ahead and done it.

The people who he had been hiding from all this time were sure to notice his outputs suddenly peaking on their little devices and that meant it wouldn’t be long before they were here trying to reclaim him for their own justice systems. Carter and Hent would not hesitate to hand him over because at the end of the day they didn’t have a clue how to deal with him – they really didn’t have much of a conception of what he was and what he could do. He knew that they weren’t in on this thing, whatever it was – they were already way out of their depths and him being in a cell meant the whole thing had just got a damned sight more complicated.

They’d stripped him of all his tech – all the important stuff anyway; most of the internal devices were purely about keeping his body functioning whilst plugged into the machinery that kept him here. This wasn’t irony at play – him ending up trapped by the same skullfuckery that had got all these other poor schmucks behind bars on murder raps; no, it was design, someone had planned this fucking thing.

He would like to say that he had been in stickier situations than this but he might have been lying to himself. Whoever had the power to be able to fuck with the people he was fucking with from a distance and in a way that seemed to contradict physics was not someone who you took lightly. What connected each of them though? What was the Rosetta Stone that would make all of this make sense? Was it even something about each of them? Might it not be something about the very act itself that was being commited? With Carsmile they had stepped outside of the exclusive group that they had been hunting in before, because Carsmile wasn’t a time traveller.

He had to work this out. In order to do so he may have to find a way out of his cell. He was in here with resourceful men and they were being policed by men who had barely any skills at their disposal and were being stretched way beyond their ability. How hard could it be?