BACKTRACKER by Milo Fowler (e book reader txt) 📕

"Hey Captain, what about this?" He reached for the twosmashed wristwatches on the desktop.

"They belong to Ms. Wycliffe," Jeannie replied.

"Move out." The captain left, as did the other threeBlackshirts and their fugitive, head lolling forward, toes sliding down thehallway outside.

The last Blackshirt to exit took his time, sorting through thewreckage of the two timepieces with his gloved fingers. A frown creased hisbrow.

"Why would she keep this kind of junk lying around?"

"Unless you have a warrant, I would recommend that you leaveMs. Wycliffe's personal effects alone, officer."

He glanced at the ceiling and looked like he was going to saysomething. Jeannie waited, curious how far this one would press matters.

"Robo-bitch," he muttered at length and strode from theroom, leaving the smashed components where they lay.

"Fascist," Jeannie replied as he stepped out into thehall.

He glanced back sharply, but she closed the door and locked itbehind him.

Alone in the silence, the AI with a woman's name and a woman'svocal interface slowly allowed the light inside to dim, save for the glow castupward from the desk's surface. The deskscreen began to pulsate as thefootsteps of the men outside retreated down the hallway toward the elevator.The throbbing luminescence came to focus on one area of the desktop: thesection beneath the two sets of electronic components, broken asunder by thatchunk of obsidian and abandoned by the albino.

He was a synthetic being. Of this Jeannie had no doubt. The heartthat beat within the chest cavity of Mr. Cade had been genetically engineered,its rhythm too consistent to belong to a mere mortal. There were other featuresas well that set him apart from humans. Not that he was perfect—much unlike themodels available from SYNCorp, Mr. Cade had his share of physical flaws, no doubtpainstakingly designed by his creator for the sole purpose of confusing thepopulace.

One eye socket was 0.8 millimeters lower than the other, thebridge of the nose angled 2.5 degrees to the left, etc. He looked human. Heacted it. Somehow, by trick or manipulation, there thrived a strong will insidehim, something Jeannie had never witnessed before in a SYN. But the deceptiononly went so far. Mr. Cade was not human, and his own heart was the traitor,its rhythm too consistent. It declared his true nature with every beat.

The deskscreen was now dark save for the rapid pulsing glowbeneath the two shattered wristwatches.

SCANNING... scrolled across the periphery of thedesktop.

Within moments, the AI would know every constituent of thesebroken timepieces and, more likely than not, the identity of their creator aswell. Educated conjecture had led Jeannie to one name—Cyrus Horton—and now allthat remained was a simple matter of elemental analysis. If there was anyorganic residue, no matter how microscopic, she would detect it.

Temporal displacement. The ability to travel forward and backthrough time. The dream of all mortals: to conquer the one boundary leftuntouched. To be able to return to their past; to redeem a missedopportunity, or to atone for a regrettable mistake.

To play God, according to followers of the Way.

Of course, true Way-followers were not able to upload theirtreatises to the Link. Their aversion to the subdermal plug made it impossible.But there were those religious chic, as many referred to them, who hadbeen the hands and feet of the Way, in a manner of speaking, for decades.Doing the dirty work, uploading file after file, claiming it was a means ofpreserving part of the world's culture, its history. And so, while the Link wasdecried by many a Wayist as nothing but a cesspool of virtual debauchery, itdid in fact provide every verse of holy scripture both in Common and Eurasianas well as a wide range of commentaries, sermons, and dissertations on the Wayfor anyone interested in Linking them up.

For an AI such as Jeannie, while contemplating the infinitepossibilities of time travel in relation to the lives of mere mortals, it wasonly to be expected that disparate views on the subject would collide in herLink-suffused mainframe. Among them, ever-present, were the admonitions of theWayists that no human should ever presume to act in the power of their Creator,whether the topic of interest be human cloning, genetic engineering, ortemporal displacement. Many of these arguments were evidently outdated,considering the necessity for rapid repopulation following the Plague. Manyother files contained extensive counter-arguments tagged by influentialscholars who held no belief in any higher power and who argued that the world hadmoved on long ago to become post-religious. But there was very little relatedto the subject of temporal displacement. Perhaps it was due to the fact thattime travel was thought to be too trivial a topic for the philosophicalelite—mere science fiction, as they put it.

Jeannie the AI would have smiled at that, had she a body—cloned orotherwise.

SCAN COMPLETE.

The smashedtimepieces contained the expected remnants of quartz,copper, and steel nanotechnology, minuscule shards of crystal, razor-thinsheets of superconductive material that had withstood the blows from thatobsidian ornament for the most part. But these pieces did not interest the AI.She focused only on the organic residue and the analysis of its source.

Multiple sources, as appeared to be the case.

One timepiece carried residuum of Irena Horton, daughter of noneother than Cyrus Horton himself. Government scientist and inventor, once aprized military innovator before he fell from favor due to a change indirection—one which, according to his superiors, indicated an unfortunate breakin his psychological well-being. There came a time when he would do nothingelse but speak of alternate realities and temporal displacement, whether hestood alone muttering in his government-funded laboratory or in front of the chagrined provincial governors and their perplexed militarycommanders. Shortly thereafter, he was dismissed from his duties in disgrace.

The real story? The governors had outlawed any sort of scientificresearch that threatened the status quo. They knew full well that Cyrus Hortonsuffered no psychotic break. They pulled the proverbial plug on his researchbecause of the potential ramifications. Multiple realities were a threat to thecurrent power structure. Start fiddling with the membranes between worlds, andwhat's to keep an otherworldly outsider from trying to take over the Provinces?As for time travel, what if a historical alteration impeded the presentgovernors from ever being