“Then we’ve created a time paradox. Lundergaard remembers you traveling again, but you can’t. So …”
“So what?”
Erasmus said the three hardest words an AI can ever say: “I don’t know.”
Kyle stared out the window. “Yeah. Neither do I, pal.”
He had never felt this way before. All his life, he’d been able to accomplish just about anything he set his mind to, whether it was outwitting his parents, making his teachers look like fools, or pulling the wool over Sheriff Monroe’s eyes. Yes, he had had setbacks before, but never had he failed so completely, so abjectly. What was his next step? What should he do now?
“I guess we should trash the school,” Erasmus said.
Good point. Kyle couldn’t risk someone figuring out why he’d been in the school. There was a slim chance that someone could see what he’d done on the computer and trace it back to Danny, which Kyle could not abide. So he tossed the computer on the floor, where it popped into a somewhat disappointing display of sparks.
Then he went and wrecked the school so that it would look like vandals had come through and randomly trashed the place. He ripped open lockers and scattered their contents down the hallways. Broke into the cafeteria freezer and hauled frozen food out into the classrooms to melt there. Spilled gallons of paint and cleaner from the maintenance room on walls and floors.
It wasn’t nearly as much fun as Kyle thought it would be.
He flew off in the predawn light. But where could he go? He was an exile here. He wouldn’t even be born for years and years and years.
Off to the west, the smoke column from the coal mine rose, a thick, black, twisted pillar of choking carcinogens and pollution. His nose wrinkled. Ugh. This was his fate. Trapped in a primitive age of coal mining and no Internet and televisions that were big and boxy and pixelated. What a tremendous pile of garbage his life had become.
He looked north — the Bouring Lighthouse stood against the lightening sky. Kyle put in a burst of speed and soon was at the top of the lighthouse. He landed on the balcony that ran around the structure and leaned against the railing, gazing down at Bouring. He heaved out a tremendous sigh.
“So, trashing the school didn’t make you feel any better?” Erasmus asked.
“Not really.” As a younger kid, he’d fantasized about wrecking the place, but now that he’d done it, it lacked something. It wasn’t sophisticated. It wasn’t pranksterish. It was just random, wanton destruction.
Like the “zombies” he’d seen in his own time, wandering the town, destroying everything in their path.
“But wait,” he mumbled. “They weren’t destroying everything in their path.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Be quiet for a second, Erasmus.” Kyle thought. The zombies hadn’t been destroying things. He remembered now, flying over Bouring the night he’d left the twenty-first century — they had been attacking things that moved. Even windblown street signs. They weren’t destroying things at all. It was more like they … like they wanted things to be still …?
“That doesn’t make any sense….”
“Kyle, talk to me. That’s why you built me.”
Kyle quickly filled him in on what he’d realized about the zombies. “But I’m not sure what it means.”
“Don’t you see, Kyle? It’s all about the time capsule. Lundergaard stole it.”
Kyle smacked his forehead with the heel of his palm. “Of course! I’m an idiot! I was thinking he wanted to steal something from it. But he put something into it.”
“And then he buried it in the plot for the year we came from,” Erasmus went on, “and when it was dug up —”
“It caused the zombie plague.”
“But why? Why would he do that?”
Kyle didn’t have an answer to that. “I’m not sure it matters. If Lundergaard is doing it, it can’t be for a good reason. He’s up to something —” And then it hit Kyle. He knew exactly what Lundergaard was up to, and he launched himself from the top of the lighthouse and flew as fast as he could.
“Darn it!” Kyle exclaimed.
“Nothing?” Erasmus asked.
“Nothing,” Kyle agreed.
He knelt down on the grass at the burial site for the Bouring time capsules. Twenty yards away was the hole for the 1987 capsule, dug a few days ago by deputies, then staked and roped off for safety. Nothing would ever be buried there, now. The time capsule was with Lundergaard.
And would — in the future — be unearthed from the very spot where Kyle now knelt.
He had hoped to come here and dig up the time capsule, thereby foiling Lundergaard’s plans and saving the future, but there were no signs at all that the dirt here had been disturbed. The time capsule wasn’t buried. Not yet.
“He could bury it any time between now and the day it’s dug up,” Kyle realized.
“We’ll have to check,” Erasmus said. “We’ll check every few days, and see if the ground is disturbed…. We’ll keep checking….”
“Yeah, for the next few decades,” Kyle said. “If we could only find Lundergaard …”
“He blew up his own house to get away from us. I think he’ll be difficult to find.”
“Maybe there’s a clue back at what’s left of his lab….”
“Or maybe you should just talk to his accomplice,” Erasmus said drily. “Assuming he’s still in the tree house.”
Duh! In all the excitement of hacking the Internet, Kyle had completely forgotten that the Mad Mask was sleeping peacefully in his father’s tree house. Bouring was waking up, so he stuck to the ground, moving quickly, using trees and parked cars for cover. In the backyard, he looked up at the empty window of the tree house.
“I bet you a million dollars he’s already gone,” Erasmus grumbled.
“I’ll take that bet,” Kyle said. “I have a feeling.”
“You and your ‘feelings.’”
Kyle scrambled up the ladder and poked his head into the tree house. He had a moment of panic when he didn’t see the Mad Mask, but then he realized that Jack was still here — he’d just turned around in the sleeping bag, facing away from Kyle.
“You can deposit that million bucks any time you want,” Kyle said.
The Mad Mask rolled over to face Kyle, rubbing his eyes. A good night’s sleep seemed to have done him a world of good — his eyes were brighter, his expression less downtrodden. He visibly perked up at the sight of Kyle.
“Kyle! For a minute there, when I woke up, I thought maybe I was dreaming that I’d escaped. But I really did, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, with a little help,” Erasmus snarked.
Kyle chose not to relay that message. “You’re free of Lundergaard, for sure. But we need to talk some more.”
“Of course.”
It had been risky enough planting Jack in the tree house overnight in the first place; Kyle wasn’t about to compound the risk by hanging out when everyone in the Camden house was awake. He flew the two of them to the top of the lighthouse for privacy. In his own time, there was a chance Mairi’s mom would be puttering around up there, but in 1987, the lighthouse was abandoned. They stared at each other for a moment. It was unreal — Jack Stanley, so much older (and saner!) than the last time Kyle had seen him, three weeks ago, running like a lunatic through the sewers of Bouring, raving about his deformed face….
“So,” Kyle said, “I, uh, see that pimple of yours has cleared up.”
The Mad Mask leveled a quizzical look at Kyle, then memory flashed in his eyes. “Oh, right. Right. I really was crazy, back in the day, wasn’t I?”
“You referred to yourself in the third person. All. The. Time.”
“Was that annoying?”
“You have no idea.”
“Sorry.” A shrug.
“You can make up for it now. I need you to tell me everything you know about Lundergaard’s plans,” Kyle said. “I have to get back to my own time, and once I do, I’ll need to know ho
w to stop him.”
Jack sighed and rested his chin in his palm, gazing out over the 1987 Bouring skyline. “I wish I could tell you everything, Kyle. But I don’t know much. I was basically his slave. And his computer. A combination of the two. Once he had me create a sort of functioning brain-wave manipulator, he could erase and restore my memories whenever he wanted. He kept me just aware enough to build things for him, to power them.”
Kyle’s guts squirmed at the thought of being so enslaved. Yes, Jack had done something horrible — he’d built Ultitron and nearly destroyed Bouring — but no one deserved the torment he’d been undergoing at the hands of Walter Lundergaard.
“There’s nothing you can remember about his plan?”
“I just know that a couple of days ago, he got really excited. He told me we had a guest coming.”
“A guest?”
“What guest?” Erasmus asked.
Jack shrugged. “Yeah. His exact words: ‘We need to be ready, Jackie-boy.’ He called me that all the time. I hated it. ‘We need to be ready, Jackie-boy. Our guest is coming.’” Jack frowned. “And then he said something like, ‘Exactly on schedule.’ And he had me create a gadget for him that could collect zero-point energy —”
“Kyle!” Erasmus shouted at top volume.
“Yeow!” Kyle yanked his earbud out. “Keep it down!”
When he reinserted the earbud a moment later, Erasmus was at the tail end of a halfhearted apology. “… be able to handle a little shout anyway. But listen, here’s the important thing, Kyle — you are the guest!”
“Of course….” Kyle whispered. It made perfect sense. “That’s why we ended up here in 1987. Lundergaard knew we would be here.” Kyle smacked a fist into his palm. “There was someone watching us when we ‘landed’ here, someone who followed me all the way to the library with Danny. It must have been Lundergaard all along. He knows us in our future, so he knew exactly when we would land in 1987. And he had Jack build a gadget to suck up the zero-point energy from the chronovessel —”
“— to power whatever nefarious plot he has going on,” Erasmus said, picking up the thread. “And since he was siphoning our energy —”
“— the chronovessel pooped out and we ended up in 1987!” Kyle finished.
Jack stared at him. “It’s really strange watching you have half a conversation with yourself.”
Kyle waved it away. “Not now.”
“But I remember something else, Kyle. It wasn’t just the zero-point energy collector.”
“Uh-oh,” said Erasmus. “This won’t be good, I bet.”
“It had to do with you!” Jack said in horror, his expression guilty and terrified at once.
“I told you,” Erasmus singsonged.
“He wanted to be able to … to scan you. He had me build a device that recorded everything about you as soon as you walked into his house!”
“Say that again?” Kyle’s head was spinning.
Jack jumped up, speaking rapidly. “It was his special project. We collected the zero-point energy and then …” Jack stomped his feet in frustration. “I’m trying to remember! I really am!”
“I know, Jack,” Kyle said gently. “Take your time.”
“Don’t coddle him!” Erasmus demanded. “He helped get us into this situation!”
“And now he’s going to help us get out,” Kyle said with confidence. “Talk it out, Jack.”
“His plan … Somehow it’s tied into you.” Jack shook his head. “No, not you. Your powers. The way they work. He gathered — he had me gather — all this information about your biology and physiology. About your powers, Kyle. How they work. How the plasma storm altered you on a quantum level, making you superhuman.”
Kyle rocked back on his heels. Incredible! With the Mad Mask’s help, Lundergaard had managed to study Kyle without Kyle being aware of it.
“And — oh. Oh, Kyle … I can’t remember it all, but … something to do with a time capsule. I remember that part really well. Because I assumed it would have to do with a time machine, but he specifically said time capsule.”
“So …”
“He has your journal,” Jack said. “I just remembered. I couldn’t read it — it was in some kind of code —”
“A symmetric polyalphabetic cipher,” Kyle said with justifiable pride. “I created it myself.”
“Well, at some point, Lundergaard got ahold of it. He cracked your code. That’s how he knew …”
“That’s how he knew everything,” Kyle whispered. “It’s how he knew I would time travel….”
“It’s how he knew we would leave the day of the time capsule burial,” Erasmus added. “That’s why he planned whatever-it-is for that day. Because he knew you’d be out of the way, trapped in the past.”
“Whatever Lundergaard did to the time capsule, it had something to do with your powers,” Jack said.
“What?” That made no sense at all! Unless … Unless the “zombies” weren’t really zombies after all. What if they were just plasma-powered drones? What if Lundergaard had done something to them and then sent them out to … to … “To what?” he asked aloud.
“Maybe if we knew his ultimate goal,” Erasmus offered, “we could figure out what he was doing with the time capsule.”
“Well, if I had a time capsule,” Kyle said, “I would put a message in it, telling someone to get me back from 1987. But there’s no one in 1987 smart enough to —”
He broke off because in that instant he figured it out. Erasmus did, too, because they started talking at the same time:
“He’s building an endpoint —!”
“— figured out how to time travel without a chronovessel!”
They babbled over each other for a moment until the Mad Mask finally shouted, “Stop it! I can only hear half the conversation!” and when Kyle stopped to take a breath, Erasmus said, “He can’t build a chronovessel in this time period, but he’s figured out how to time travel without one.”
Kyle quickly filled Jack in on what he and Erasmus had figured out. “Look, it’s simple, once you have all the pieces. Lundergaard’s making a puzzle, and the final solution to the puzzle is going to send him through time. The zombies are the key. He created them in our time by putting something in the time capsule, something that uses the same plasma science that gave me and Mighty Mike our powers. Heck, the same plasma that gave you your powers, Jack. When I saw the zombies before we came back to 1987, I thought they were after motion but they’re not; they’re absorbing time from things. Stealing it. Movement is just a function of time — you move because you have the time to do it. The zombies are freezing things in time with some kind of artificial superpower created —”
“— created by the same phenomenon that gave us our powers!” Jack said, catching on. “And when they absorb enough of it —”
“— they’ll create a time-dense endpoint in our time. Dense enough to pull Lundergaard through time and transport him back to the twenty-first century. He’s from there, too — he’s trapped in 1987 like we are. He wants to go home. And he needed me in 1987 to do it.”
“Wait, wait, wait!” Erasmus chimed in. “Wait! You’re not thinking straight. Lundergaard is already in our own time. He already exists there. If he succeeds in this plan, there will be two of him at the time capsule site.”
Kyle pondered this and relayed it to Jack, who shrugged in a non-super-genius way. “Look, I told you — Lundergaard time travels. It’s what he does.”
“But if there are two of him at once —”
“He doesn’t care.”
“Kyle, there’s a chance that all of that plasma energy, combined with the zero-point energy of time travel, could have some bizarre side effects,” Erasmus warned.
“Like what?” Kyle held up a finger to hold off Jack while he listened to Erasmus.
“Well … my calculations aren’t perfect because we don’t have access to all of Lundergaard’s data, but there’s a chance that the 1987 version of Lunde
rgaard would pop into our present and push that version of Lundergaard out of the way, knocking him into the timestream, probably propelling him into the future.”
Kyle told this to Jack. “That doesn’t sound like a big deal,” Jack said, and Kyle agreed.
“But depending on what the version of Lundergaard is doing in our own time … Depending on what he’s set up to do … There’s a chance that both Lundergaards will end up in the same space and at the same moment in time. Both of them supercharged beyond belief, existing in the same quantum configuration.”
Kyle’s stomach went sour. “Oh, man. If that happens …”
“What?” Jack asked.
“If that happens, then there’s a good chance Lundergaard will split the universe wide open,” Erasmus said to Kyle. “He’ll rip space/time from end to end. He might survive and be tossed into a parallel universe, but every other living thing in the universe will be wiped out.”
In halting phrases, Kyle explained this to Jack. “But that can’t be his plan, can it?”
Jack sighed. “I’ve been trying to explain to you — he’s crazy. And obsessed with time travel. He’s been trying to perfect it forever. If he has to blow up a universe to do it, he will. It’s all one big experiment to him, all one more step toward his ultimate goal: the ability to go anywhere, anywhen, and do anything he wants to anyone.”
“And he’s gonna use my technology and data about my superpowers to do it,” Kyle said grimly.
“I don’t get that part,” Jack admitted. “Why not just use my powers?” Jack asked. “He’s had me as his slave for years now, and he never scanned my biology.”
“Tell him, Kyle,” Erasmus said. “Tell him how your situation is unique. You were directly exposed to the plasma energies. The Mad Mask only got a residual whiff days later. His biology isn’t as intimately mutated.”
It was true. Kyle explained this to Jack and even as he did, he realized something. “I can handle my powers. Because I got a direct dose of the real plasma. But Lundergaard can only fake the plasma. So when the zombies finish absorbing all of that temporal energy, they’ll turn on each other and start absorbing each other for the final burst Lundergaard needs.”