“Sir, I just need your thumb print to authorize payment.”
Jared looked up at a tall young man with a shaved head and the muscular build of a soldier. He held out a data pad, a small red square blinking angrily in its center.
“Two million bucks, huh?” Jared frowned. That was nearly every cent he’d carefully hoarded in twenty years in the business. Sixty-one successful hits. Sixty-one murders that couldn't be traced back to him because he was careful, because he never let it get personal. Until now. Murder number sixty-two was the most colossal fuck-up in his entire forty-seven years on this planet.
“A small price to change your past and your future.” The young man looked like a grunt, but he delivered the line with an ad-man's charm.
Jared showed his teeth, but it wasn't exactly a smile. “Yeah, we'll see.” He pressed his thumb to the data pad and held it until the device beeped. “I've been sitting here for two hours. When will the technician get to me?” He was getting anxious. The clock was ticking, and the headless corpse of his wife's lover, Sebastian Dade, would soon be discovered by the cops, who would connect the dots and seek Jared's arrest, or, worse, by Sebastian employer, who would connect the same dots and hire one of Jared's competitors to add to his murder total.
The receptionist flashed Jared another well-practiced smile. “It takes a while to get everything coded to your DNA and temporal signature. I'll let you know as soon as they're ready.” He put the data pad away and returned to his post behind the reception desk. Jared couldn’t help but notice the heavy pistol on the kid's hip. The receptionist’s weapon and the rifles on the shoulders of the Temporal Regulatory agents Jared had passed when he'd entered The Infinite You sent the same message. Time dilation technology was dangerous, and the government had a strict “shoot to kill” policy for anyone attempting to fuck with the time stream in a major way. Companies like The Infinite You were allowed to operate because they changed small things that wouldn’t make a difference in the grand scheme. That, of course, did not include undoing a murder, but Jared had come prepared.
The guards worried him, as did the weapons detector he'd passed through, but the internal holster concealing his Smith & Wesson G34 gauss pistol worked like it was supposed to. His body heat masked the weapon, so the thermal scan didn't pick it up. The holster was uncomfortable when full. The black-market surgeon he’d hired had to move his liver over a few inches to accommodate the silicon bubble that held the weapon, but the internal rig was the last word in concealment. A raised tab of skin would open a flap of synth-skin and instantly release the gun into his hand. It had saved his ass on more than one occasion.
The gun itself was small but powerful, and Jared allowed himself to luxuriate in the memory of its most recent use. The G34’s magnetically charged slug had removed most of Sebastian's head without more noise than a mouse fart. There had been a lot of blood: on the sheets, on the walls, even on the goddamn ceiling. Jared was never that messy, and he never let his targets see him, but he'd wanted to watch the dawning horror in Sabastian's eyes when the man realized what was going to happen. He wanted Sebastian to know who was pulling the trigger and why. Afterward, Jared had stood there admiring his handiwork, thinking about Hannah finding out. How shocked and horrified she'd be when she discovered the guy she’d been fucking behind Jared’s back was more than just dead. He was mutilated.
Then reality had crashed down. He'd just killed a man who was a) sleeping with his wife (a fact any idiot would discover within five minutes of research); and b) was the star accountant for Eddie Sanchez, a man with his fingers in every conceivable type of vice in Seattle. Sebastian had been cooking Eddie's books for years, hiding the gangster's money with a skill that bordered on the supernatural. Jared had done hits for Eddie in the past, and he knew the man was ruthlessly efficient when it came to removing problems that threatened his business. He would certainly view the murder of the man keeping him out of prison to be a big fucking problem.
Jared grimaced and then swallowed hard. Can't think about that now. That's why you’re here. In a few minutes it will have never happened.
Ironically, he'd gotten the idea to come to The Infinite You from Sebastian. Jared had heard of the company in passing. Who didn’t know about the miracle process by which rich folks could change the decisions they'd made months ago?
Sebastian had been wealthy, and The Infinite You literature on his bedside table had felt like a godsend. Jared still had the blood-spattered brochure in his pocket. He had no idea what that asshole had hoped to change, but that hardly mattered now.
“Mr. Stiles.” A dark-skinned man in a white lab coat walked toward Jared, one hand extended. “It is a pleasure to meet you. My name is Dr. Christopher Omondi. I will be your temporal consultant today.”
Jared rose from his seat and shook Dr. Omondi's hand. He rarely encountered another man taller than him. At six foot four, Jared generally towered over others, but Dr. Omondi had him by a good three inches. “Good to meet you, Doc.”
“If you will follow me, we'll begin your consultation.” Dr. Omondi led Jared to a door to the left of the reception desk. He placed one long-fingered hand onto the DNA scan-pad next to it, and the door slid open to reveal a white hallway. Cables and wires ran along the ceiling, and the slight hum of electricity made the hairs on Jared's arms stand up.
Dr. Omondi led him to a silver door, which slid open as they approached. The room beyond had walls so white they were almost blinding. More cables and wires grew from a central hub on the ceiling and spread to every inch of the room. Below them stood a terminal desk and a padded leather chair, its organic material a stark contrast to the rest of the hi-tech room.
Dr. Omondi sat at the desk and waved a hand over the vid screen. It flared to life, showing an array of brightly colored readouts and gauges. “Please sit down,” Dr. Omondi said, and gestured to the leather chair. “The process can be disorientating.”
“What do you mean?” Jared asked. He'd need to keep his wits about him during and after the procedure, and the word “disorienting” bothered him.
Dr. Omondi smiled politely. “Nothing serious. Some clients experience temporary dizziness or even a mild headache. We will supply you with an analgesic of your choice should that occur.”
Jared nodded and sat down. He rested his hand on his side, over the skin tab that would open the internal holster.
Dr. Omondi tapped the screen again. “I see the appropriate funds have transferred from your account. We are ready to proceed. Now, what is it you wish to change?”
Jared only had one play, and it needed to go right, or he was a dead man. “You can change anything, right?”
Dr. Omondi shook his head. “Not anything. I can only manipulate the time stream to change a single decision point, and I cannot go back further than two years.”
“Why not?” Jared asked. He put his hand under his shirt, as if to scratch an itch.
“The science is…complicated, but the time stream becomes less mutable the further back we go.”
That wouldn’t be a problem for Jared. He'd only killed Sebastian last night. “Okay, Doc,” Jared said, keeping his hand beneath his shirt. “Here's what I want: I killed a man last night, and I need for that to not happen.”
Dr. Omondi laughed. “You have a sense of humor, Mr. Stiles.”
“Is it possible?” Jared asked, his voice flat, monotone. He didn't want to pull the gun yet, but he needed the answer.
Dr. Omondi blinked and sat back in his chair. “Theoretically…yes. But I no longer find this funny, Mr. Stiles. I suggest you tell me why you are really here.”
Jared pushed the skin tab above the internal holster. The small compartment in his abdomen opened and disgorged the gauss pistol into his hand. He pointed it at Dr. Omondi. “I don't find it funny either.”
The doctor froze. “I don't know how you got a firearm in here, but the Temporal Agents outside will kill you.”
Jared rose from the chair and leveled the pistol at Dr. Omondi's forehead. “If you don’t do what I ask, I’ll paint this room with your brains and take my chances. Those Temporal Agents will probably kill me, but that won't make much difference to you, will it?”
“I cannot…” Dr. Omondi said under his breath. His eyes darted to the data on screen.
“It doesn't have to go like that, though, does it? Look at it this way. You'd be undoing a murder and saving a life, right? Oh, and if you touch that screen before I say so, I'll shoot you in the guts and make you do what I want while you bleed to death.”
The doctor let his hands fall to his sides. “You do not understand. Such a thing is not easy to change. A decision as significant as murder is more stable, more permanent. We specialize in smaller decisions.”
“Yeah, I know. Like helping people decide to eat more vegetables and go to the gym,” Jared said. He knew people who had plunked down the money to change their decision to eat like pigs for a year and instead work out like maniacs. Kind of like hitting a re-do button and then gaining all the benefits after the fact. “But you can do this too.”
Dr. Omondi shook his head. “Even if I do, I will still know you killed this man.”
“But how will you prove it? To everyone but you and me, it'll be like it never happened, right?” Jared had read the brochure. Only the client and the temporal consultant would know what had changed. The room, or pod, or whatever, was shielded in some way so the client would see the results and remember what he'd paid for. Of course, people did talk about it after, but he sure as shit wasn’t going to.
Dr. Omondi stared fixedly ahead at the white walls, his face unreadable.
“Plus, there's this,” Jared said. He knew he'd have to sweeten the deal. “I'll pay you half a million dollars to keep your mouth shut. So, there you go; you get to save a life and make a shit-ton of money. What's to stop you?” The bribe was every cent he had left in the world, but he could always make more. Murder was always in demand, even in a world where it could be undone.
“It is wrong,” Dr. Omondi said. “You are a murderer.”
“Doc, murder is what I do for a living. Nothing you do today is going to change that. But if you do what I ask, you can reduce the number of people I've killed by one.” Jared started to wonder if he'd still have to kill the doctor after the procedure.
“You do not understand. There are infinite time streams with infinite possibilities. All we do here is take one time stream with a chosen outcome and overlay it onto a client's. You will still have murdered this person. They will still be dead in the original time stream.”
“But not in this one, the one this version of me lives in,” Jared said. “This version of me is just fine with that.” He thrust the gun closer to the doctor, inches from his face. “So, what's it gonna be? Are you gonna get rich with me only having killed sixty-one people, or do you want to be number sixty-three?”
The doctor's upper lip curled in revulsion. “I do not want your money.”
“Fine by me, but if you don't help me, you are going to die. Do you believe me?”
The doctor balled his hands into fists. For a moment, Jared wondered if the doctor was brave enough to do something very stupid. Then the man relaxed and folded his hands in his lap. “Who is this man you murdered?”
Jared grinned. Much better. “His name is Sebastian Dade, and I killed him for fucking my wife.”
The doctor made a disgusted snort. “I will do what you ask. My own wife will not thank me for dying.”
“There's the pragmatic scientist I was hoping to find,” Jared said. “So, here's how this is going to work. I'm going to stand right here and watch what you do. I'm going to put the barrel of this gun against your head, and if I see anything I don't like, I'm going to pull the trigger.”
“You won't understand what you see,” Dr. Omondi said.
“I'll understand enough, and you're going to explain the rest. If I think you're lying, well, you know what happens.”
Jared moved behind the doctor and put the barrel of the pistol against the base of the man's skull. “Comfy?” He'd begun to enjoy himself, and a tiny flower of hope blossomed in his mind that things would soon be right. Well, not completely. He’d still have to deal with Hannah. Nothing as drastic as what he'd done to her lover, but she needed to understand the consequences of her actions. In the new time stream, Eddie Sanchez wouldn't give two shits what happened to Sebastian's sidepiece.
“May I touch the screen?” Dr. Omondi asked.
“Sure,” Jared said, but he put a little extra pressure on the man's neck with the gun barrel to remind him it was there.
Dr. Omondi tapped the screen, and a dialogue box appeared. “I need to enter your temporal signature,” he said. “It's going to look like a long equation.”
“Go ahead.”
The doctor pulled up a touch keyboard and tapped in a series of numbers, letters, and symbols. He could have been typing hieroglyphics for all Jared knew. That worried him a little, but what could he do about it?
“I'm going to hit ‘enter’ and then go to the moment of the decision you requested. Can you tell me when the event occurred?”
“Last night at 11:15 p.m.” Everything about that moment remained fresh in his mind. He even remembered the clock on Sebastian's wall, spattered with blood.
Dr. Omondi tapped the screen again, and it went blank.
“What the fuck?” Jared said. He pushed the gun barrel hard into the back of Dr. Omondi's head.
The doctor winced. “The computer is collecting the necessary data. It is a complicated process, and it may take a few seconds.” The screen flashed once and went white. “There, you see? It will show us the time stream now.”
The white screen turned gray and became pixelated, like a swarm of black dots on a slab of stone. The dots moved and swirled, and then began to make shapes. It reminded Jared of the Etch A Sketch toy he had as a kid.
“Doesn't look like much.”
“Viewing the time stream is not like turning on a holo-screen,” Dr. Omondi said. “What you are seeing is the computer's interpretation of the stream so we may view and understand it. Give it a moment.”
Jared watched as the dots swirled, then coalesced into something he recognized. “That's Sebastian's bedroom.” Jared recognized the big clock on the wall. It showed 11:13, a few minutes before the murder. He saw the door to the right of the clock that he would walk through in two minutes. “Good job, Doc. I might not have to put a bullet in you.”
Dr. Omondi lifted his hands from the keyboard. They trembled. “As you can see, I am cooperating, but what comes next is challenging. If you remove your gun from my head, I will be better able to concentrate.”
Jared studied the man's body language but couldn't detect anything suspicious. Reading people when they had guns pointed at them was a specialty of his, and he was confident in his assessment. He stepped away. “Just remember what happens if you fuck around.”
“Understood. We are approaching the decision point, and I must enter the proper commands,” Dr. Omondi said.
“Don't let me stop you.” Soon Jared’s fuck-up would be erased, and he'd still have the memory of Sebastian's murder to keep forever. It really was the best of both worlds. He imagined shaking Sebastian's hand after this, looking into the man's eyes and knowing what he looked like as a corpse. The thought was intoxicating.
Dr. Omondi tapped the keyboard in a rapid, staccato rhythm, and numbers and symbols flowed into a dialogue box below the picture on the screen.
Jared watched the event unfold. He watched the door open, watched himself walk into the bedroom. “Hey, wait. This isn’t right. Why am I seeing him?” Dread seized his heart with icy fingers.
Dr. Omondi said nothing, and his typing became furious, frenzied. Data raced across the screen.
Jared raised the gun again. “Doc, stop what you’re doing!”
Dr. Omondi tapped one last key with authoritative finality, then dove to the floor, and rolled behind the terminal.
Jared tracked the doctor, but out of the corner of his eye he saw the images on the terminal screen jump and writhe. He saw a gun similar to his own in Sebastian’s hand. The gun went off, the muzzle flash scattering black and white pixels in a two-dimensional burst.
Something struck Jared in the abdomen, like he’d been punched in the gut, and he grunted. He tried to fire his pistol at Dr. Omondi, but his legs went numb, and he fell to the ground. He looked down wide-eyed at a softball-sized hole in his abdomen that poured blood onto the white tile floor.
Dr. Omondi sprang from behind the terminal, and Jared tried to raise the gun, but his arm moved like it was made of lead. The doctor showed surprising agility and kicked the weapon from Jared's hand.
“What did you…” Jared's mouth filled with blood before he could finish.
Dr. Omondi squatted next to Jared, careful to avoid the pooling blood. There was no fear in him, only a cold and righteous confidence. “You are a ruthless man, but not an intelligent one, Mr. Stiles.”
Jared felt the strength draining from his body, but he managed a grin. It must have looked ghastly with all the blood.
“Sebastian Dade came in for a consultation last week,” Dr. Omondi explained. “He’d been sleeping with a married woman and feared this woman’s husband. He would not tell me why, only that this man was dangerous, even evil, and that he feared what the man might do. I suspected criminal activity, so I refused to help him, but his DNA and temporal signature had already been uploaded to the system.”
Jared coughed blood. A terrible chill settled in his chest. “You…warned him.”
The doctor smiled. “A simple decision, really, for a man sleeping with a killer's wife: start carrying a gun.”
