CHAPTER ONE: Twice Upon a Time
THE DAY Benjamin Bantam had waited for all his life was here at last.
Crisp, light-blue skies filled with marbled clouds drifted in small whirls. A perfect sun-soaked wind keened off nearby Mirror Lake.
Perfect. It was exactly as he recalled.
As Bantam sat on the park bench, he glanced over his shoulder at Fort MacLaren, the massive army base. Somewhere beyond the barbed wire lay the top secret Gaultier-Ross supercollider. The thought of it charging made his scalp tingle.
It would have been charging for weeks by now. Remember?
He laughed at the faded memory, inevitable for a man of his advanced age.
Somewhere close but beneath the ground, a great circular chamber several miles in diameter was purring with enriched tachyon energy, building up to release a Volzstrang Wave in a single massive detonation.
“Excuse me. Is your name Benjamin Bantam?”
A young woman of twenty-four stared down at him. Her Facebook photos had prepared him for the resemblance—obvious even beneath her surgical mask—but he was shocked by uncanny similarity of her voice.
For a long moment, Bantam could not speak. His mind tumbled with split-second jabs and cross-cuts of another time and place. Emotions he had assumed long-forgotten suddenly rushed to the surface in an overwhelming flood of love and pain. Or aether and iron, as she would have said.
Still, he didn’t dare falter. Not with so much at stake. He couldn’t afford to spook her into running away. Bantam stood and held out his hand. “Yes, I’m Benjamin. Thank you for coming.”
The girl recoiled from his outstretched hand. Her germaphobia was understandable; blackpox had destroyed one-third of the planet.
Blackpox, commonly known as the Shadow, was an especially violent strain of smallpox that produced huge black fleshy boils. The disease soiled the blood of the infected, turning it into dark ink. The dead produced a viscous flow from their mouth, as if they’d vomited oil immediately before expiring.
Extremely contagious and lethal, the Shadow had depopulated entire continents within weeks. Endless miles of ghost cities existed in China and India. In the United States, the Shadow had wreaked a trail of black blood from Washington to Oregon. In San Francisco, the death toll had reached nearly 90 percent. The Northeast was largely spared, but as of late, a fresh outbreak was blooming in New York City. Another eruption of death was imminent.
Bantam forced a tight smile and dropped his hand. “Sorry. I always forget. Hard to get used to it again.”
She seemed embarrassed. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’m Sabine Portis. But you already knew that.”
Bantam surveyed her face. Unlike her distant great-grandmother, Sabine was a goth girl. She’d dyed her hair a rare shade of midnight with a pencil-thin streak of blue. Several silver crosses hung from her too-white neck. A sunken, surly expression creased her face.
“Please. Have a seat,” Bantam said.
She sat, and they stared at each other for a moment.
“Well, I came. Like you asked.” She fidgeted, twirling her hair around her finger mindlessly.
Bantam knew she’d only come because Bantam had offered to foot her college tuition bill, not because she knew him. He’d messaged her on Facebook, saying it was imperative to talk.
She noticed him staring. Her eyes darted. “You don’t like the way I dress. Neither did my mom. Be the strange you wish to see in the world, is what I always say.”
“Ghandi?”
“The Joker,” she replied.
Normally, she would never come to a weird meeting like this. But the pox had taken her parents, leaving her destitute. Her boyfriend’s parents were pox-slain as well, and his meager savings were about to run dry.
Sensing her unease, Bantam handed her a check. “You needn’t worry. I’m keeping my promise. Not only will your college loans be paid, but you will be taken care of financially for the rest of your life. One condition: you listen to my story.”
Sabine gasped when she read the amount on the check. “Is this real?”
Bantam chuckled. “I’ve done well in the stock market, Miss Portis. I bet on Apple when they nearly went out of business in the nineties. I was one of the first angel investors in several well-known internet companies. I was in on the Ethereum ICO and I’m a limited partner in several of Silicon Valley’s most respected venture firms. Of course, that was before the blackpox came and blew the market to hell. But the check you hold in your hand is good. It’s all yours.”
Sabine was shaking. “All I have to do is listen to you? Why?”
Bantam grinned. “Because I assure you, you won’t think I’m telling the truth. Not at first. You’ll think you’ve wasted your time but you’ll stay because of that check in your hand. By the end it will make sense, and you’ll realize everything I’ve told you is true.”
She glanced up nervously. “I’m listening.”
“Let me get the recorder first.” Bantam pulled out his iPhone. “I’m going to tell this story only once. Want to make sure I get it all down.”
Sabine grinned. “I didn’t know someone your age even knew how to use an iPhone.”
Bantam looked her straight in the eyes and said, “I grew up with this. Do you know what it was like, waiting all this time for iPhones to be invented again? Going back to paper maps? No GPS, no nothing? It was insanity! I had to use rotary dial phones again. No call-waiting. I’d forgotten what a busy signal sounded like.”
Sabine blinked.
“See? There we go. This is what you’re getting paid for,” Bantam said. “To sit there and think I’m babbling. At least at first. What would you say if I told you that you and I were the same age?”
“Umm . . . ”
“We were born in the same year, anyway. I’m twenty-four. In real time. I’ve never been past the day that is today. I’ve been waiting for it all my life. This whole time, I’ve known exactly what was going to happen in the world every single day. I’d wake up and say, Today’s the day Kennedy is shot. Or Today’s the day of the Challenger explosion. Or Today’s the day of the dotcom meltdown.
“But I have absolutely no idea what will happen tomorrow. For the first time ever! I’m terrified—and I love it—and I’m terrified. I’m not used to surprises these days. Tomorrow is an absolute mystery, but at least I’ll move forward in time for the first time in—”
“You said you knew my grandmother,” Sabine said impatiently.
Bantam’s entire demeanor shifted. Her words hit him deeply.
Bantam swallowed thickly. “Your great-grandmother. Rachelle Archenstone. An extraordinary person. Wonderfully beautiful.”
“I never knew her. She died before I was born.”
“Yes,” Bantam whispered reverently. “I know.”
“Explain,” Sabine snapped. “How did you supposedly know my great-grandma if you’re supposedly my age?”
“Because there are two of me,” Bantam said. “Pretty soon there will only be one of me—the one here now.” Bantam jabbed his thumb at Fort MacLaren. “See that behind me? That’s why I asked you to meet me here. You need to see for yourself what happens when they make the Volzstrang wave. They didn’t know it would put on such a light show outside the collider.”
He laughed, and continued, “My twenty-four-year-old self is in that building. One of the best soldiers the army has, I’ll have you know. Young Bantam is in there, deep underground, being strapped into the capsule this second. Very soon they will fire up the world’s largest supercollider and produce a Volzstrang wave.
“The Volzstrang wave can propel a capsule containing a living person back through time, and it can be surfed with great precision. The young Ben Bantam will surf the wave back to 1944. Humanity will have achieved time travel for the first time.”
Sabine’s expression indicated she didn’t believe any of it. “So the army is sending people back through time.” She rolled her eyes. “Why?”
“Blackpox,” Bantam said. “Everybody knows that but almost nobody knows the Shadow was created as a weapon during World War II, right here at Fort MacLaren. They planned to win the war by infecting all the Nazis.
“But before that happened, the war ended. There was no need to use the weaponized, highly lethal smallpox anymore. It was stored on a shelf somewhere and forgotten until three years ago, when it somehow got loose and started killing half the planet.”
Sabine raised an eyebrow but didn’t say anything.
He continued, “The other part nobody knows? Back in 1944, there was a cure.”
“Right,” Sabine said. “Why make a plague if you might catch it yourself.”
“Exactly,” Bantam replied.
“So they sent you back in time to get the cure?”
“Yep.”
“And you were the first person to go back in time?”
Bantam nodded. “One small step for maniacs.”
Sabine stewed on this. “How do you know you were the first?”
“They told me, and they gawked at me like I was about to fry inside that capsule.”
Sabine laughed and made a buzzing sound, like a bug hitting an electric zapper.
“Another guy posted on the Internet back in 2000. A soldier named John Titor. Said there was a time-travel branch of the military in his time, 2036. He had traveled back to the seventies to find a schematic for an old IBM computer part, claiming it was critical in the future. Anyway, he posted online that he was stopping off in 2000 on his way back to his own time. Sort of sightseeing. But I think he was full of crap.”
“Really,” Sabine said, clearly amused by Bantam’s story.
“His time-travel technology didn’t sound right. Two rotating singularities mounted in a car? Sound familiar? Why post all that stuff online with your real name? Especially if you’re a real time traveler? Someone might come along and kill your young self to see if that erases your Internet posts.”
“Well, would it?”
Bantam winced. “I’m getting to that.”
“So you’re my age, and you were born when I was born. What music did you listen to?”
Bantam snorted a laugh. “I listened to Planet Furious. But I’ll bet your speed is more Dandelion Smash. I’m guessing your favorite tunes are ‘Tantricity’, ‘Sea Mountain’, and ‘Catatonic Leopard Print.’ Am I close?”
Sabine whistled, impressed. “You nailed it.”
“I figured you for the glowsticks-and-lollipops crowd.”
“Not anymore,” Sabine said, scraping the black nail polish off her thumb nail.
“That music sounds like a broken washing machine. But I’ve got Furious on my iPod. Or at least, it was. Back now. No iPods in 1944.” Bantam scrunched his face.
“You were saying?”
Bantam’s eyes snapped back to the present. “The first time I was in today, on that base behind us, about to travel back through time ... ”