Fractured: Tales of the Canadian Post-Apocalypse(69)

I froze. If I turned my head and looked over my shoulder I could still see the one I’d stepped through pulsing its weird purplish orgasms of electrostatic light. Yet here was another one ripping its way into fiery existence in this previous moment in time. From…

An earlier time from mine? Or a later one?

I fought a wave of dizziness as the rupture stabilized into a shimmering corona. A shape appeared – a female moving, silhouetted in the flames. Then Jessie emerged, stepping down from the aperture into this When.

I blinked.

Hey, cuz. She grinned crookedly. Got a present for me?

I produced the small, black-wrapped, heavy package containing something obviously very important, and handed it over. Jessie slid it into her hoodie pocket with a smirk.

Be seeing you, cuz, she said, and stepped back into her rupture. A moment later it sealed up and disappeared. I stood staring for a full minute, wondering: how far into the future – or the past – did it lead? And what would have happened if I went in after her? When my brief visit in Jessie’s reality was up, would I be pulled through two ruptures back to my own time, or only as far back as this When? Had someone figured out how to time travel by stepping through one rupture after another?

A sucking sensation gripped the back of my head. Again I was yanked and stretched – this time, backward. I re-coalesced in my own time, lying flat on my back in a street crowded with flashing sirens and thronged by emergency response personnel. Mac knelt over me, shaking my shoulder.

Hey, are you okay? I knew you were gonna try and enter one! Listen, did the blast affect you? They’ve set off another one of those rupture bombs. Same kind that killed the president. Buddy, you gotta get up. We got work to do!

? ?

There were now too many ruptures for us to chase theft from every one. So XyTech handed me and Mac uniforms and told us to start guarding LTAs – long-term anomalies: ruptures that appeared and remained in place for hours or even days on end. It was boring work – rent-a-cop stuff. But we both had bills to pay.

When you were on shift you were expected to remainsober enough to answer call-outs to ruptures that appeared in your area. I’d get a call and saddle up with camp chairs and a cooler of food and drinks and meet Mac at a shopping mall or empty field or in the living room of someone’s evacuated home – wherever the rupture materialized. We’d remain onstation, making notes in the duty log on the anomaly’s behavior until relief arrived. Mostly, we just sat staring at them.

You might expect that with all these holes in time opening up that the past would start leaking into the present but it never did. Nor did we start leaking into the past. Instead, the LTAs just grew and linked up with one another. The throbbing sound deepened, and the purplish light brightened to an obscene corona around the largest apertures, now resembling suns in eclipse – great winking holes of negative light that swallowed vast sectors of our When – cars, streets, buildings – leaving behind not the past but… nothing.

The broken teeth of cement boulevards, the snapped wires of telephone wires and the skeletal steel girders of half-demolished buildings dangled out over the fog-ridden Abyss, straddling the event horizon at which everything just… stopped.

? ?

I killed Janus the next time I saw him. But by then it was too late – the damage was already done. And besides, Jessie just took over and began handing out orders. Because she paid better than Janus ever did, I did two more rupture runs, returning each time to a darker and slightly more smoke-streaked, night-ridden version of the world. Whatever they were doing in the past was having profound effects on the present.

I encountered Janus once. He had apparently entered a rupture during his lifetime that let out into the same past which I, coincidentally, happened to be visiting. Although dead in my When, Janus remained stubbornly alive in our common yesterday.

What are you doing? I demanded when I saw him lumber through the aperture.

Earning a living, he wheezed. Prime minister says the ruptures represent Canada’s next great economic opportunity and I’m gettin’ my piece of the action!

How? I demanded. But I already knew. Janus had developed the means to harness the ruptures’ massive energy for warfare, using me to transport the separate pieces of technology to his couriers for assembly at some predetermined point in the past. The next great opportunity for Canada, it seemed, involved blowing holes in reality large enough to swallow entire provinces. An environmental disaster to dwarf the Alberta tar sands – anything in service of the almighty dollar!

? ?

I never saw Janus again. After my last trip, I’d accrued enough savings to remain comfortable for the rest of my life. But guilt, and a weird desire to confess, tormented me.

The science fiction shows have time travel all wrong, I said. My voice, though hushed, carried easily through the deserted marble lobby of the Royal B.C. Museum where Mac and I sat watching a rupture mutter and twirl in the air by the elevators at 2 a.m.

Those shows don’t convey how confusing it is! Because they take place in linear time – start at point A, end at point B. But inside the ruptures it’s impossible to even think that way! The concepts of point A and point B become totally meaningless. It’s like…

I searched for an analogy. And gave up when the one that came to mind – being blindfolded and spun around, then having the blindfold torn off – fell short. Mac seemed to relate to my boggled silence.