movie.act3p2

scenes lxiv-lxviii

Breaking the Great Horizons

           “Her André,” Wes repeated, as the director led them though an elevated express hallway, which still offered them a view of the station’s packed central hub through columns of glass. “If he’s from that Millie’s timeline, then… we’ve never met.”

           “Well, technically, you and our André might never meet in our world now,” Jace reminded his uncle. “But I get what you’re saying. He could be, like, on her ‘side?’”

           “We can figure this out in a moment,” Mr. Kestin said with a huff. “First, we’ll take an elevator to the control tower. Which is also where our max-security cells are.”

           “That seems like a logical locational pairing…” Millie quietly remarked.

           “It works for us. Our systems are all secure and biometrically locked, if you were thinking a prisoner might take control of the station. Anyway, the VIPs we lock up there typically only stay a few hours, to wait for a ride to… well, elsewhere.”

           “Black sites,” Arthur impulsively replied. “Er… I mean, I assume. But what’s with the sudden increase in severity? I thought Bad Mill was just a petty criminal.”

           “Not anymore. We’ve confirmed that she and Mr. Corathine have created a non-regulation and functional time machine, which is dangerous enough. It’s also made with 21^st century tech. Since we still haven’t brought her into custody and her motives are unknown, we’ve got more than enough reason to add her right onto our top ten list.”

           “You hear that, Mill?” Warren said. “You got some real criminal potential.”

           “Guys, some more context—that isn’t good,” Nyra emphasized. “I’m not talking about just the bootstrap device, either. A time machine made outside of a 29^th century lab isn’t something to trust. A few eccentric scientists have tried throughout history; as you know personally, Wes, they usually don’t work so well. At best, they’re unstable.”

           “And yet… you’re just keeping something like that impounded on this station,” Colin muttered. “Are we in danger? And what’s Charlie got to do with all of this?”

           “If a quantum destabilization event occurs, better it happens up here instead of a metro area,” Nyra replied and hit the elevator button at the center of the walkway level. “Not to worry. Usually, the damage isn’t so bad that we can’t go back and prevent it.”

           “Because… time itself could be damaged? You’re not filling me with confidence.”

           “Pippin hasn’t said a word to us yet,” Kestin answered. “We were hoping he’d open up to some friends from his own time. Even if you aren’t so close anymore.”

           “But his time machine was supposed to self-destruct…” Jace whispered as the lift arrived.

           The elevator took a while not because it was slow, but because it had a lot of distance to cover, as was evident when they piled in and watched the station shrink under them. To keep the entirety of it in view, the control room was about a mile above the orbital platform. They went up from the center of a ring-shaped structure made up of multiple decks and sections. Between the four crossing “spokes” were wheel-shaped latticed glass chambers, making them look like giant aviaries. And inside those cages…

           “Ugh… Time Daemons,” Wes said, visibly shuddering. “You have four of them?”

           “Had.” Kestin gestured to the chambers over the western horizon, one of them empty. “Efficiency went down a quarter after you and your boys destroyed Red.”

           “Which is impressive, mind you,” Nyra added. “Their defenses are pretty good.”

           “Yeah, uh… sorry about that,” Wes sighed. “I didn’t exactly have a choice.”

           “All the makeup overtime has been rough. But, actually, the heavy industry corps that make the things have been trying to sell us on a next generation model anyway; now we have an excuse to try it out. It’s supposed to arrive in a couple weeks.”

           “That blue-eyed one looks ferromagnetic…” Jace observed as he watched the monstrous spider-like supercomputer machine correct errors throughout time using dozens of portals. “But the purple and green-eyed ones—they’re different…”

           “They use aerogel instead of liquid metal. Different material for different work.”

           “Fascinating technology…” Colin said. “But why operate them in space?”

           As the lift slowed, Kestin answered, “Aside from isolating criminals or dangerous material that gets pulled in, the portals work across time and space. It takes less energy to create the portals in a vacuum, so the chambers are only pressurized for maintenance.”

           They came to a stop, and the doors opened to reveal the control center, which seemed to be in a constant state of rotation. It was divided down the middle, with one half hosting a variety of work stations, and the other, a laser grid jail cell. Four cyborgs guarded those inside, while several organic workers ran daily operations from their seats.

           “Now this is a weird reunion,” Arthur said the moment he saw Charlie in the cell.

           “It gets weirder!” replied Jared’s seldom heard chipper voice. He and André came around from the other side of the elevator pillar, wearing a big grin and holding a tablet. “Wow, you guys finally made it! Aaand… you brought Jace. And Warren. And Laurie… The Millie I’m assuming we know. And her younger self. And… Nyra, right? Big party.”

           “Grandfather,” said a mid-fifties version of André. “I was told you were coming, but I… wasn’t prepared. We aren’t from the same timeline, but still, to see you again…”

           “Hello, André,” Malcolm said wistfully. He then turned to the others. “Would you give us a minute alone? I know he has much to tell you, but… a moment, please.”

           “Yeah, sure,” Jared replied. “We need to say, uh, hi to Charlie, anyway.”

           “J, you seem to be enjoying yourself, considering your arrest,” Arthur noted.

           “Eh, these guys are okay. Hell of a place to end up after starting the day at an expo.”

           “Sorry you didn’t get to see Royal Valley with us,” Colin said.

           “I zoomed in each time we orbited over, so I saw plenty of it. Also been helping the tech team study Charlie’s device, which is in the impound bay. The TMB appreciates having a guy that knows 21^st century code. Of all the people to make a time machine…”

           Jared led them over to the laser-grid cell, where old Charlie Pippin was sulking in a corner. He looked up with indignation on his face, guided especially at Millie.

           “Look at us!” Jared exclaimed. “The OGs, back together at last! Here and now of all places… Hey, Charlie, do you wanna tell them how you got here, or should I?”

           He groaned. “Millie tricked me. Got me to build a damn time machine that got me put in here. And those two helped her,” he added, glowering at Jace and Laurie.

           Millie replied, “While I agree with shutting you down, the design wasn’t from me.”

           “Yeah, but hold on…” Jace murmured. “She lied to us, too—she said that the machine would blow up in your face. Did it actually… work instead?”

           Charlie grunted and shrugged. “Hell if I know. All my tests ran fine, but the moment I tried to use it, the thing shut down and apparently sent out some kind of temporal bullhorn. A second later, I got cyborg cops warping into my garage.”

           “Garage?” Wes wondered. “You didn’t work with André, in the Time Lab?”

           “I didn’t need him. He’s a genius, but I knew he’d be reluctant to actually use the finished product. Besides, Wes… I haven’t forgotten the timeline from before your big ‘revelation.’ I’d already memorized everything about the science. By 2025, I was rich off crypto and hired dozens of people to make all the pieces I needed—separately, so they didn’t know what they were for, and had them shipped to my house. You getting all this, officers?” He looked at Kestin and Nyra. “Take me to trial. I’ll never stop trying to time travel. And not because I’m full of nostalgia like Wes here; I want to. I love the freedom.”

           “Ah, Charles…” Nyra sighed. “What are we going to do with you?”

           Kestin’s eyes flickered for a second, and he informed the group, “We’ll decide later. Impound is ready for a thorough deep scan of the device. Who wants to watch?”

           “Sure. I’m interested in what an alternate Millie and our Charlie cooked up,” Wes replied. “Not that I can help. Unlike him, I got, uh… no memories of the science.”

           Kestin led them to a command console, where André and his grandfather were already watching a large holographic display in mild fascination. It showed a warehouse style building, and a small tech crew in heavy protective gear. They were examining a sleek metal cylinder with an active display on its side, about the size of a phone booth. The unmarked apparatus was secured inside of a glowing containment field.

           “This is the director,” Kestin spoke as the visitors gathered around the display, and the operators continued their menial duties. “Any further developments?”

           “No, sir,” one of the men replied from behind his helmet. “My team has finished the basic tests, and it’s still not broadcasting on any frequency. We need to proceed with direct contact to learn anything more about it. Permission to try a hard line?”

           “Like… plug it into something?” Arthur replied. “Isn’t that dangerous?”

           “If we were rookies at this, yes. Any interaction will happen through an offline computer, running a sandbox within a sandbox.” The director then spoke to the team again, “Hold positions. I’m going to confer with some… ‘experts’ first.”

           “Charlie said it fired off a ‘bullhorn,’” Millie noted. “What’d he mean? Wouldn’t that have been a wireless signal? I have a home alarm system that can reach me here.”

           “Many amateur devices simply make a big mess that we pick up on. His went haywire; registered a hundred micro-travels in seconds and lit up our temporal ‘radar.’”

           “Strange…” Wes said. “Maybe the other Millie decided to get Charlie busted and teach him an even bigger lesson? It wouldn’t be the first time he’s been in trouble with the law.” He looked at André. “Or is that sort of thing just a fault in the hardware?”

           “Don’t ask me,” André grumbled. “Mr. Colton, was it? I don’t know you. I’m from a world where an earthquake broke up your friend circle, and you left town after college, so I’m told. My expertise is in crossing timelines, not so much navigating them.”

           “Okay, but still, if you worked with Millie in your world, then could you at least tell us what suddenly made her so dangerous? I thought she wasn’t a threat.”

           “That was how we saw her, until Mr. Corathine came into our reality only hours ago, with the same technology she used,” Kestin replied. “To warn us about her.”

           André exhaled. “I would’ve come sooner. But she took the only prototype of the world-jumper, so I had to build a new one for myself. I should’ve seen it coming, since she came to me in a time machine that I had yet to build. And she was already carrying drafted plans for a jumper… but only told me that years into development. She’d been given her time machine by a previous, older Millie, who received it from another, and then another. She had looped four times, giving her younger self our latest design revisions. I estimate that the two of us had been working on the machine for at least five decades.”

           “She’s that determined to cross universes?” their world’s Millie replied. “No one stopped her? If she already had a time machine, why not just prevent the quake?”

           Nyra answered with a huff, “Her timeline was severed, at the moment Wes dealt with the earthquake bomb. We lost access to that world, and for her, the time horizon reset to that point, making pre-1996 history permanent. Her universal clock still moved while she went back for each R&D cycle, but unless it took her eight centuries worth of looping, her TMB couldn’t be created yet; there was no one policing. You following?”

           “I think so…” Wes murmured. “Basically, her world’s time span was… small.”

           Kestin added, “Worst of all, she’d be the only person in her world who knew time travel was real. She probably pushed André harder on that first go-around than Wes’ other self ever did. When she finally jumped timelines all those loops later, she must’ve stolen a quartz from somewhere and when, and proceeded to stage two. Or three?”

           “But, if I’m getting this right…” Colin groaned, wracking his brain. “Why does she care about this world’s Charlie enough to seek his help? I’m sure the time machine he whipped up isn’t anywhere near as good as one Mr. Corathine can create.”

           “Yeah, there had to be a specific reason to get him involved,” Arthur continued. “Even if his work was maybe more ‘under the radar,’ it still doesn’t quite make sense.”

           Kestin mulled it over, and after a meditative breath, replied, “Regardless, l doubt we’ll learn more until we figure out how it works and what it’s made of. I’m confident our security systems and professionals can handle primitive tech. Any objections?”

           The gang looked at each other anxiously, and it was Jared that replied, “If Millie designed it, and Charlie built it… I mean, they’re not exactly, like… terrorists, right?”

           Kestin got back to his waiting inspection crew, “Team, lower the containment field, and proceed carefully with an adaptive hard wire. Assume… hostile intentions.”

           “Aye, Director,” the crew captain replied, and began tapping on his tablet.

           “Okay, Mill…” Millie, eyeing her teen self, exhaled. “Let’s see what we made—”

           She couldn’t finish her thought, because things went to hell in an instant once the containment shielding was only halfway down into the floor. As originally promised, the device suddenly detonated—but not in the way anyone had expected. It discharged a powerful flash that momentarily blinded and scrambled the video feed, and when the cameras returned to normal a few seconds later, the machine was smoldering. The techs were on the ground nearby it, alive but dazed by a small explosion.

           “What happened?” Kestin asked them. “Hello? Do you read me?”

           “Director,” one of the room’s operators reported, “we’re losing systems. That thing, it… It seems to have released a brute-force override packet bomb.”

           “Aaagh… Damn it, shut down that sector’s systems. Don’t let it spread.”

           “Was it carrying some kind of, like… EMP… virus?” Colin wondered.

           “Fairly accurate,” Nyra said. “But more sophisticated; it blasts smart scripts into wireless systems. It’s high-end tech, usually only available to militaries.”

           “Then are we in danger?” Arthur fretted.

           “We shouldn’t be. The station’s countermeasures are top of the line, and…” Her eyes went to a monitor that had gone red with verbose data. “Shit. Kestin, it’s spreading much faster than the station’s immune response can adapt. What the hell is this code?”

           “Sir, I don’t understand what I’m seeing,” the other operator said, also nearing a panicked tone. “The attack vectors, the way it’s taking down nodes… It’s foreign. The station doesn’t have defenses against this mess—it-it’s like a brand-new strain.”

           “So it’s a virus full of unknown code…?” Wes murmured. “Could Millie have…”

           The control room lights flickered, and the operators—and Kestin himself—were hunching over in pain a few seconds later. As the lights shut off entirely and emergency illumination replaced them, multiple thuds were heard and felt. The posted cyborg officers had all locked up, and some had fallen lifelessly to the floor.

           “Ah… crap…” Kestin, holding his head in pain, grunted. “All of my bionics are seizing. I can barely see through the distortion in my optics… What’s the station status?”

           A tech replied through an off-pitch voice enhancer, “Comms, offline. All cyborgs are immobilized. Shuttle ports, armory… sealed. We’re losing everything but life support. We need to… w-wait… Violet control has been lost. And its chamber is pressurizing.”

           “Is someone trying to steal it? How could this be happening… a second time?!” Kestin glanced at Wes. Barely able to move, he then turned to Nyra. “Are you still…”

           She answered, “All of my bionics are still operating; I’m not networked to the station. Director, this is worse than last time. If we lose a daemon and headquarters, we’d be looking at a disaster. But I can’t regain control… Not by myself.”

           “We’ve lost access to the armory, but there’s still some equipment up here, in that locker,” Kestin said to everyone. “Look, call it transhumanist hubris all you want, but right now, we need some help from a few orgas out of the 21^st century.”

           “What do you need us to do?” Arthur asked him.

           Before Kestin could explain, the other operator reported another development apparent to the group on the video feed, “Sir… the daemon is pulling someone out of a portal. It looks like they’re wearing a breather mask and using an exo-suit.”

           “That’s her. That’s Millie,” Wes stated. “Here I thought I was done with all this. Well, screw it, who wants to help me stop her? Me, Jace, and Warren have some experience.”

           “I’ve gotten to know the systems up here a bit,” Jared said. “Maybe Colin and Arty should stay with me, and we can try bringing the station back online?”

           “That’s a good idea,” Kestin said. “But we don’t have time to wait for backup.”

           “I at least got to see and remember how those exo-suit things work, and if anyone can talk some sense into her, maybe it’s me,” Millie said. “Mill, Laurie—stay and help.”

           “What? No way!” Mill argued. “I’m coming, too. This is about all three of us.”

           “I don’t want to watch helplessly from up here, either,” Laurie said. “This is all really scary and crazy, but I’d rather be helping Jace. And Warren.”

           “Fine—the seven of us will go together. Better odds than we had last time…” Wes said. “Kestin, I take it we need to arm up right away. What do we have on hand?”

           “Not much, I’m afraid,” he grumbled and forced his body to move over to the locker and open it, revealing a small variety of tools and defensive objects. “But if that daemon’s aerogel hardens… you’ll need this plasma blade to cut through it.”

           Warren’s hand shot into the air, and he said very quickly, “I’ll-take-that-thanks.”

           Jared, Arthur, and Colin, working with the director, managed to get the tower’s elevator working again within a minute of the others getting inside. Once the gang was back down on the primary deck, Nyra led the way through long, sterile corridors to the Violet Daemon’s chamber. On the way, they passed dozens of disabled Time Cops and the hobbled, squishier station workers trying to revive them, restore local systems, or taking care of their own variety of cybernetic augments that they relied on every day.

           About five minutes after the start of the attack, Nyra had gotten everyone to the chamber’s airlock, where she opened a storage shed and passed around simple breathers and goggles. There were also several pairs and sizes of insulating outerwear, but by chance, everyone already had covered arms from their jackets and hoodies—other than Laurie. The smallest size was still big on her, but she remained determined to help.

           “She’s not wasting time in there,” Nyra said, looking through the doors’ glass as the airlock cycled. “The chamber is huge; it takes a while to fill it with air and heat it up. It’s going to be bitterly cold in there for a while yet, so keep on the move.”

           “Is this… really all worth it?” Millie wondered as she stared down at her breather.

           “If you’re getting cold feet, I totally understand. Since backup won’t be here in time… even if the rest of you want to stay behind, I have to go in and do what I can.”

           “I’m not scared, Nyra. It’s just… all of this is because of me, and my issues.”

           “Don’t think about that right now,” Nyra said, then unlocked the airlock hatch and checked her laser pistol. “Careful with your non-lethals. They still pack a punch.”

           “Let’s also not go in with weapons out,” Wes cautioned. “Assume there’s still some chance we can talk her down from doing… whatever it is she wants to do.”

           They walked into the cold airlock, and after another cycle, entered an even colder big room made of flexible metal that gave the place its appearance of a bird nest. Heavy condensation from the atmospheric changes covered the floor, obscuring their feet, and in the center was exo-suit Millie, looking up at a quiet daemon. A supercomputer sphere with an aperture-iris, it was suspended in indigo-hued translucent undulating aerogel. Its many tentacles were unmoving; the machine had been paused in the midst of work.

           “… Really?” Other Millie’s digitized voice grumbled through her mask. “Seven of you came here to stop me? I figured two or three, at best. Do I get a chance to explain?”

           “Not if you’re just stalling for something,” Millie Prime growled back.

           “It doesn’t matter. I won’t back down, and I’ve already practiced this routine in other timelines. Seven others, in fact, and I’ve gotten better at it. And all of that practice was with an inferior viral bomb; I couldn’t even disable the cyborgs. Yet I’ve still made it to this point before. Do you get it? I already have a big advantage. The station is under my control, and I can take as much time as I need to get some delicate work just right.”

           “Cool, cool…” Wes scoffed. “Are you going to let us in on what you’re after?”

           Other Millie looked at Jace and Laurie. “I’m sorry that I abandoned you both in 1998. That wasn’t my intention—I was going to come back and get you. Eventually.”

           “You sure freaked out a lot when Jace found out about your eyes,” Laurie noted.

           “I know. I was a nervous wreck back then. I guess I didn’t realize Jace would not have remembered visiting my world, and he’d have no concept of a different… me.”

           “Back… then?” Jace replied. “How long have you been…”

           She took a deep breath and removed her breathing mask, revealing that she was older than when last seen at Skate pLace. Not significantly so, but it was noticeable.

           “Ten years,” she exhaled, her breath visible in the frigid chamber. “But I knew, ever since I was your age, what a daemon can do. An older me explained her discovery.”

           Nyra replied, “I’m sorry that you became aware you were living in an earthquake-altered timeline, but you can’t change it. I know all about the machines, too. And even if you control one, I don’t see how they’re going to help you do anything to make it better. But I also know you, Millie. Why don’t we talk about this, and work things out?”

           Bad Millie’s exo-suit’s spider legs lifted her several feet in the air, making her look more imposing as her nearly invisible forcefield shimmered in the moon’s light.

           “You’re lying,” she stated. “But I get it. It’s dangerous technology. So, hey guys, guess what? Daemons can stitch together severed timelines. The tendrils work through a ton of portals, going backwards through time, fixing every event that keeps two realities separated from each other, as best they’re able. By the end, according to a top-secret file, you get a new, merged universe; a hybrid timeline. They are amazing machines, aren’t they?”

           Good Millie looked at Nyra, a little shocked by this, asking, “Is… is that true?”

           Nyra huffed sharply. “There is a program that can fuse timelines, but it exists as a fail-safe for catastrophic situations. It’s not as gentle as she makes it sound. Two worlds would crash together violently. Personalities, people and their unique histories, all collide.”

           “Couldn’t that really mess up anyone who exists in both timelines?” Wes asked.

           “Yes, or one version will be overwritten completely. Erased. There’s no telling who might be born, or… unborn. Millie, how can that kind of risk be worth it?”

           “Because I’ve worked too hard, too long, and across too many lifetimes to stop now,” Millie’s shadow proclaimed. “I didn’t have the benefit of forgetting. My existence is an unending nightmare, in a hellscape that I was never meant to adapt to.”

           “Millie…” Jace choked. “I’m sorry. There was… no way I could’ve known.”

           “It’s too late, Jace. I don’t blame you. But I can’t live like this anymore.”

           The daemon’s many aerogel tentacles began to wriggle, quickly picking up speed as the machine may have completed some reconfiguration for a pressurized, warming environment. Rather horrifyingly, several of the tendrils latched onto the exo-suit and began pulling its pilot into the center spherical mass. And she didn’t seem to mind.

           “Millie, stop!” Nyra pleaded. “This is crazy—you don’t have to do all this!”

           “Having a ‘boss battle’ with us isn’t going to fix your problems, Mill,” Wes said. “Why don’t you come over here and… Ah, hell, this is happening no matter what.”

           After she put her breather mask back on, Millie replied, “As it always has.”

           She and her combat frame were brought into the jelly, and once she hit its core, the four pointy spider legs spread out and formed a connection with the daemon, filling its tendrils with wiry pulsing blue “veins.” The machine went into overdrive, working at its maximum output and at speeds that turned its dozens of tentacles into writhing blurs. Portals opened and shut in an instant all across the room, the appendages going through them and retracting in less than a second. This effort quickly generated intense heat, and the visible daemon core, floating inside like an amoeba’s nucleus, began to glow. The heat was dispersed throughout the dozens of limbs, causing the chamber to warm up.

           “She’s not… fighting us?” Warren cautiously wondered.

           “She doesn’t need to,” Nyra said angrily and faced the group. “She’s keeping it focused on the stitching routine. But we can fight back. There’s no right or wrong way—attack everything, sever tendrils, do whatever it takes to become a nuisance and get her to go after us. We need to buy time, give the guys a chance to shut her down. Got it?”

           “Then why are we wasting time talking about it?” Warren fiercely replied, and ignited his glorified welding torch of a sword. “I’ll do a daemon rematch, no problem.”

           “This day just gets insane… er,” Laurie muttered. “Jace, you’ve done this before, right? I think we should stick together, because I’m barely hanging in there.”

           “Split up!” Nyra ordered. “Attack from all sides! Force her to acknowledge us!”

           The Millie pair projected plasma shields from their armlets, creating two domes of fiery protection that expanded to cover their fronts, while Warren’s equally toasty weapon spewed out a blade of flame. He and the younger Mill took off together, and she covered him while he slashed at whatever tendrils he could catch, with each sliced appendage turning to jelly somewhere in the fog below. Running and gunning on the other side of the daemon was Jace with a new toy: a compact disruption rifle, which fired sonic bursts that shattered aerogel on contact—though given the tentacle velocity, that contact wasn’t easy to make. His partner Laurie was strapped with two bandoliers full of EMP grenades that had a wide area of effect and also spattered gel, but she was frustrated that she couldn’t lob them fast enough to hit her slippery tendril targets.

           “That’s good, everyone! Everything we have is effective!” Nyra directed amidst her repeated quick streams of laser fire. “We can either cut them apart, or fry the nanobots in the gel that act like its muscles. Keep at it—chip down the mass! It’s finite!”

           “But there’s so much of it,” Wes puffed as he blasted apart gel with the repulsors on his palms and the nearby older Millie batted away incoming tentacles with her shield. “Augh! If I still had a quartz, I’d show you a trick that could take it down fast!”

           “There’s a person in there this time, Unk!” Jace shouted. “It doesn’t matter if she’s gone off the deep end—we shouldn’t hurt her! Nyra, are we actually making progress?”

           She explained, “It’ll shrink with every bit of damage! Get it small enough, and hopefully, we can just reach in and yank her out. Millie! If you can hear me in there, you have to stop! You’re only scarring your timeline, maybe making things worse!”

           Bad Millie didn’t react at all, and continued to focus on her needlework.

           “If she doesn’t devote anything to going after us… She must already know that she can finish the process no matter what we do,” Good Millie loudly fretted.

           “It doesn’t matter. You always do everything you can in a bad situation.”

           Unexpectedly, another voice entered the chamber. “Everyone,” Arthur’s dulcet tones echoed from unseen speakers, “we made some progress up here. Kestin says we can’t pick up any sound in there, but give us a signal that you can hear us, would ya?”

           Nyra did so by waggling her pistol, sending a laser upward as if she was at a rave.

           “Okay, so, you’re not going to like this…” Jared came in. “The stitching program doesn’t have, like, a progress bar, so we have no idea how long it might take to… what was it again, Colin? Merge universes? Of course. Listen, we’re going to have to ditch the daemon chamber so that thing disconnects from the station’s reactor. That should reduce its power to a third and make it run slower. But you’ll also lose a few systems.”

           “Gravity,” Colin clarified. “You’re going to be floating. So… remember what you’ve seen in the movies, Newton’s laws, that sort of thing. We’ll still have a network connection to the chamber and can keep working on it. Just… do your best. Maybe you can talk some sense into her. Don’t forget, the Millie we know is still in there.”

           “We’re going to lose our gravity?!” Wes exclaimed. “Great.”

           They heard the sound of machinery disengaging, and the chamber trembled as it decoupled from the station. The effect was instant, and there was no longer a ground.

           “Ah-aaah! I can’t stop!” Laurie freaked out as she drifted away and fruitlessly kicked her legs. Jace grabbed her arm to try and pull her back ‘down,’ but this only resulted in both of them now taking to the air. “J-Jace! Remember science class!”

           “Gah! Not good!” Millie gasped out after a tendril smacked her shield and sent her tumbling away. “Nyra, what do we do now? Moving is impossible!”

           “Try to steady yourselves, and kick off of the chamber sides,” Nyra, who had some experience and was better able to control her direction, replied calmly. “Look—at least the machine’s slowing down. Breathe and don’t focus so hard on trying to orientate yourselves. Wait for a good shot and take it. If you feel sick… close your eyes.”

           Without access to dedicated power, the violet-eyed daemon did drastically slow its stitching pace, and the tendrils were no longer a blur of motion. Nyra and Jace had an easier time with their recoilless weaponry; the others were subject to that pesky third law. Every swing of a shield or Laurie’s futile grenade throw attempts only resulted in more flailing, and Warren’s sword swung about like a fiery noodle.

           “I think I’m going to puke…” Warren, moving like a cat in zero gravity, groaned.

           “This is so annoying,” Bad Millie’s digitized voice suddenly came through on the chamber speakers, which she must’ve hacked into. “I was making progress, and now I’m losing too much gel.” She sighed. “Fine. I really wish you weren’t making me do this.”

           The dozens of small metal orbs floating throughout the daemon swam to the surface of the gel and opened up, revealing the machine’s army of violet eyeballs.

           “Get ready, everyone,” Wes warned them. “It can see in all directions now; she’s about to seriously fight back. Keep moving, and let’s try to form up… W-wait, what?!”

           He, and even Nyra, were taken off guard by Millie’s sudden attack. Instead of whipping tendrils at the gang, in the span of seconds she had them retract back into the body—and then propelled them outward. Or, more accurately, aerogel exploded in all directions, separating from the center mass and slamming into the seven attackers with varying degrees of accuracy. The goop pinned everyone against the chamber and then hardened a moment later, ensnaring them in a very light but incredibly strong resin.

           Aside from shutting down the battle, the immobilizing eruption also reduced the daemon’s size by half and nudged the chamber, causing it to bump into the station and start to spin slowly, away from its docking clamps and towards the upper atmosphere.

           “My sword!” Warren grunted as he reached out for the deactivated hilt with his one free arm, only to watch it steadily drift away. “Damn it! Can anyone free themselves?”

           “I can’t move in this stuff!” Mill exclaimed. “Ugh, I hate this! It’s like I’m in a web, trapped by a giant spider! My other self is a total psycho… Nyra, how do we get free?”

           “My laser gun’s buried deep under the gel,” Nyra replied as she struggled. “All we can do is find where the gel is thinnest and try to break out from there.”

           “You being here changes nothing,” Bad Millie spoke through the sound system while some tendrils reformed and got back to it. “I’ve gotten this far twice already. But the stitching attempts failed, so I had nothing to achieve in those timelines. I can tell this is working. I wanted to fuse a different world, but they were too divergent; incompatible. All roads led back to this reality, the root of my own. Jace, Laurie, Warren… You don’t need to worry. You weren’t born in my world. You won’t replace other versions of you.”

           “What about me, and Lucy and Sadie… and all of our other friends, Mill?” Wes shouted from his crystalline prison. “You have no idea what’ll happen to us, from either timeline. Or yourself! Is your universe so awful that you’d risk everything like that?”

           “It’s no use,” Nyra grumbled. “She either can’t hear us, or isn’t listening.”

           Minutes went by, in which the tendrils kept going and the group tried to break out of the cocoons keeping them pinned at varying angles and degrees of freedom.

           The more agreeable of the two adult Millies, both her arms and legs covered and upside down, noticed that the fog had dissipated. They were orbiting over California, and she found the lights of Royal Valley on Earth below. “Home’s down there… The world’s so big,” she said wistfully. “And all of this, for and because of one person…”

           “Millie, you talking to yourself? Or coming up with a plan? That’d be nice.”

           “No, Nyra. Just commiserating about how ridiculous this is. You all just ran into here without a second thought, for me of all people. I’m not worth all this effort.”

           “Hey, you’re a friend, Mill,” Wes shouted back. “If it were a Shadow Colin or Evil Arthur or any of the others going berserk, I’d be here just the same.”

           “You’re so hard on yourself,” Nyra sighed. “But there’s a lot to like about you. It’s as if you can’t see past your social outcast childhood to see how you’ve changed since then. You’re selfless, and caring, and can see the true person behind their mask.”

           “Millie, Jace had you document before he forgot… you helping to save me from a vengeful time cop,” Wes continued. “I kind of wish I could remember it now, because you must’ve been brave to do such a thing. You still have that in you.”

           “Thanks, Wes, but look at what I also have in me,” Millie said, staring at her other self. “We’re the same person. If we traded places, I’d probably be doing all this, too.”

           “I wasn’t planning on saying anything since it’s still weird meeting you…” Little Mill spoke up, “but, even from the brief time we’ve spent together, I’m amazed that you’re so… so cool. I’m serious. You’re what I want to grow up to be.”

           “Hate to interrupt the bonding, but I might be about to give us another chance,” Laurie said, and everyone noticed that the plasma sword had floated across the chamber and was closing in on her—and she had one leg entirely free. “Warren, heads up!”

           She caught the hilt with her foot and carefully propelled it upward and hit it with her heel, quite forcefully. All eyes tracked the twirling weapon on its way to Warren, and he was just able to reach out and grab it. He quickly fired it up and cut himself free.

           “Good kick, Lor!” he shouted and repositioned himself into a launching posture. “Okay, okay… hold on… Lemme get this just right… Dad, I have an idea. Incoming!”

           He shot himself over to the other side, and Wes caught him before he might have crashed into the side and bounced away. Once steadied, Warren extended his blade once more and broke his pop out of the cocoon. Bad Millie still didn’t seem bothered.

           “Thanks, kid…” Wes said, brushing off lingering shimmering particles. “Okay, what do you have in mind? This isn’t like the red daemon. We need a new strat.”

           “Those repulsor things on your hands—think we can use them to Tony Stark ourselves, and maybe pick up the others on the way? We could, ugh, you know…”

           Wes smirked. “Become Dad Jet? Heh. It’d be a bit more than just you and Sally.”

           “This is so cringe. More like Dad Gunship if we get this working right.”

           “Well, we do have zero gravity, so my back might be able to take it. Speaking of, climb aboard like you’re four again. Just watch where you’re pointing that fire sword.”

           Warren grimaced, but swallowed his pride and grabbed his dad by the shoulders. Following a few test fires, Wes took off with his powerful twin palm rockets.

           “Jace, hold onto your cousin,” Wes said after arriving at his spot next, as Warren cut him free. “It’s a little weird, but I think Warren just came up with a good plan.”

           With a shrug, Jace got aboard, and contributed his own idea by tying his jacket around Warren so he could be back-to-back with him—to keep his rifle aimed outward.

           “Oh, that could work, too,” Wes remarked. “Just hold your fire for now, okay?”

           Though his acceleration was taking a hit with the added mass, Wes still arrived at the older Millie and Nyra seconds later, and Warren was quick to get them untrapped.

           “My heroes…” Millie huffed. “What’s your crazy plan here, Wes?”

           “Making it up as we go. Nyra, can you wrap your right arm around my left and shoot at the same time… while holding Mill on your left as she gives us some shielding?”

           “Yeah, I can try,” she said and gave her neck a crack. “If the other two kids are your starboard ‘wings,’ you’ll be a little lopsided, you know. Can you compensate?”

           “I’ve played my share of flight sims, and these things kinda control like a game.”

           Laurie and Teen Millie were the last to board the Wes plane, on his right. While having shields covering the flanks was nice, Laurie really had no way to toss her bombs.

           “Wes…” Laurie took a breath as she grabbed on. “I’ve seen you do stupid things when I visit, but this takes the cake. And what am I supposed to do with the grenades?”

           “It’s not stupid if it works! Um, hm… They’re too hard to throw in this gravity anyway, so hold them to your chest and ‘drop’ them behind us if we get chased. Okay, everyone strapped in? It’ll take a bit to gather speed, but we will end up going fast.”

           “Jace, wait for my signal,” Nyra said. “I have a feeling this will piss her off.”

           Once everyone was properly positioned as an aerial performance troupe, Wes took off again. Clumsily at first, but with plenty of empty space in which to get a handle on maneuvering. Before long, he was using subtle hand movements to navigate around the chamber, faster and faster, until his little repulsor-jets got them to a hot rod’s speed.

           “Jace, now!” Nyra ordered. “Keep shooting at the center!”

           “Got it!” he replied and opened fire with her, their disruptor rifle bursts and laser streams blowing away chunks of the gel-orb and the upper segments of working tendrils.

           With Wes concentrating on flying, Jace and Nyra’s strafing salvo got Millie’s attention, and this time she stopped the stitching process entirely. Her masked face was noticeably tracking them around the chamber, and she sent a command to the daemon.

           “You all look absurd…” her voice said through the speakers. “What a pain.”

           “Maybe, but this is the most fun I’ve had in a while!” Wes shouted back. “Can you say the same, Millie? Spending time with the kids, flying around in space…”

           The daemon lifted up and reached the center of the chamber—its thick clusters of wires stretching underneath and giving it the appearance of a protruding eyeball. Not finding any enjoyment on her end, Millie put the machine into attack mode, and it began condensing gel into thin yet solid spears that fired out and stuck into the siding, creating obstacles that Wes had to avoid. Other spaghetti-thin strands of hard-to-see tentacles chased the “gunship” from all angles. Those that came down on the wings were bashed away by the Millies or vaporized by their shields, while the ones that tailed them either got blasted by Jace’s rifle or turned to liquid by Laurie’s bombs, which she had set for two seconds and dropped into the air; on detonation they fried the nanobots in the gel.

           “Running out of space in here, guys!” Wes announced. “I do not turn easily, and if I hit any of these gel-pillars, I’ll be lucky if I only break an arm. Jace, how we doing?”

           He reported from Wes’ back, “The daemon won’t shrink anymore, no matter how much I hit it. More of the aerogel stuff puffs out to replace whatever I blast off.”

           “The core has deep reserves of it in liquid form,” Nyra said. “Even a little bit can expand a whole lot. There’s no way we’ll break the core itself—so just keep firing.”

           “Nyra, it’s starting to take more effort to stay airborne,” Wes said as he threaded the needle between two pillars. “Maybe the repulsors are starting to run out of fuel?”

           “They shouldn’t be. They run off solid fuel that can burn for days.”

           Concerned, and with science class on her mind since the start of her adventure in space, Laurie looked around the wheel-shaped chamber at the dozens of columns that had been rapidly propelled into its side, and then outside the glass at the moving stars.

           It occurred to her what was happening, and she loudly exclaimed, “I can’t tell if she did it on purpose, but Millie made the chamber spin! Gravity’s increasing!”

           “Crap, she’s right,” Nyra confirmed. “And every impact is making it rotate faster. Wes, we can’t stay in the air—set us down now, before we crash!”

           “Tch. Man…” Wes sighed. “Okay, landing. Skies were getting crowded anyway.”

           He throttled down the repulsors and came to a messy, skidding stop, giving his front a few friction burns. Everyone disembarked, and Warren, now separated from the shield maidens and a grounded sitting duck, got to slashing apart incoming tendrils.

           Bad Millie then started ignoring the group again so she could get back to work, but only briefly. Laurie hacky-sack-kicked her last EMP bomb right into the daemon’s gelatinous body and cooked a chunk of the nanobots, which were limited in supply.

           “Hey!” Laurie shouted. “Millie, just stop already! You know this is wrong!”

           She growled through the speakers and replied angrily, “Here’s what’s wrong. My entire timeline shouldn’t even exist. The instant Jace and Wes went back to stop his own bomb from going off, I should have disappeared—become one of those two Millies by you without any memory of a Royal Valley and friendships ruined by an earthquake that Wes caused. And when that didn’t happen, I waited for Jace to come back and help me. For years… stuck in a dream, a false world everyone else could accept but me…”

           “I said I was sorry!” Jace yelled. “But even if I knew, I had no way to come back.”

           “It’s fine. Soon, it won’t matter anymore. Our worlds will merge, and I’ll send my mind back like Charlie did, and start over.” She tapped at the controls on her exo-suit’s wrist, and a thudding mechanism began to audibly engage. “Don’t worry, Wes. I won’t get in the way of your own journey. All I want… is some of the happiness you found.”

           “What is she…?” Nyra looked around with the others, and through the chamber glass noticed many metal rods extending outward from the external shell—along with an increasing amount of glowing plasma. “Not good. She knows about the auxiliary conduits. And we’re in upper atmo. Millie, you have to stop—they aren’t designed for this!”

           Wes asked, “Okay, what are those now? And why is this bad?”

           “They convert heat from an aux source’s lasers to power the chamber whether or not it’s still on the station. But re-entry plasma is way too much. Mill, you’ll overload it!”

           “I’m too close to fixing my world to stop now,” her voice replied as she devoted most of the remaining aerogel into stitching tendrils. “Just a little more…”

           Powered from the heat of air compressing against a de-orbiting giant wheel, the appendages accelerated back into a blur of motion once more. Within seconds, portals were popping in and of existence almost as quickly as they could be perceived, the daemon core began to glow again, and the interior temperature rose drastically.

           “Wes!” Colin’s voice came through the speakers, after what felt like hours since the last update. “We had to reboot the station’s systems, but we’re connected again.”

           Arthur added, “We’re getting a shuttle prepped for a rescue. Get to the airlock!”

           “Can we make it?” Wes, now quite worried, asked Nyra. “Before we burn up?”

           “It’s more likely that it’ll implode into a temporal black hole first.” She realized what she had said, and looked at the unsettled reactions. “If a daemon opens too many portals to too many dates at once, it might lose quantum stability and… We aren’t sure.”

           “But… can’t someone just time travel and stop Millie sooner?” Laurie wondered.

           “I don’t know. If it’s as destructive as a quartz cracking, it might not be poss—”

           “Ah—aaah!” Millie cried out, and everyone turned to see her panicking as the gel all around her was suddenly starting to boil. “Burning… Burning… Lever… where…”

           She managed to trigger the exo-suit’s escape pod, but it either malfunctioned or was inhibited by the surrounding gel, as she was only propelled a few feet from the legs and ended up stuck, with her head poking out of the overclocked daemon’s mass.

           “Hang on, Mill, I’ll come get you,” Nyra said, crouching down and running some numbers in her head concerning the low gravity, by first tossing away her pistol.

           As it floated off in a shallow arc and the daemon collapsed into uncontrolled self-destruction, Wes and his Millie tried to comfort the four frightened teenagers.

           Nyra launched herself all the way to the instigator, pulled her out in one swift motion, and landed with her on the other side of the big chamber. She held the masked Millie in her arms and tried to calm her down, before glancing over at the others.

           “I’m sorry, I don’t know how—” was all she managed to say, before the daemon, in an instant, collapsed into a singularity and erased everything around it from existence.

           …

           No, there is something. A faint, muffled sound at first, that soon becomes a soft wind to the ears and skin. The chirping of birds, traffic on a road below. As if the world has to piece itself together from collective, nearly forgotten memories, its reemergence arrives slowly. And it never does entirely arrive. It is missing multiple somethings.

           All three Millies, Nyra, Wes, and Jace and his best friend and cousin opened their eyes to a most unexpected, inexplicable sight. They were in a garden of some sort. Only, the flowers had no color. Nothing had color, in fact. Everything was painted in shades of black, white, and grays. Nor was there any sense of smell or taste. But sight and sound still seemed to come in just fine, in this strange old rabbit ear basement TV of a world.

           “W-wha…” Warren was the first to murmur. “We’re not… dead, are we?”

           “I don’t think so…” Laurie replied, looking at her arms and wiggling her fingers. “It doesn’t feel like a dream. The last few seconds are still clear and sharp…”

           Nyra, who was right by the group again despite her prior distance, took a deep breath and looked at the watch on her trembling left arm. “Um. S-so… my chronometer isn’t picking up a time-date… H-hey, I’m not the only one seeing monochrome, right?”

           They looked at one another, and Wes answered, “Guess not… But we definitely time traveled. Just… differently. Is this still Royal Valley? Where are we…” He took in the sight of the plants without moving, and then it hit him. “Wait, I know this place. It’s the terrace garden at Royal Valley General. I fell asleep up here when I was around eight, while my mom was having a minor surgery, or something like that.”

           “The hospital…?” Millie quietly mumbled, and followed Wes and everyone else except for her otherworldly counterpart to the edge of the terrace. “You’re right…”

           “The skyline…” Wes leaned over the railing for a better view from the building’s fourth floor. “Dawn Tower, no Victory Plaza… I see the old arcade on Main… I need another hint. Oh, that billboard’s advertising the debut of Murphy Brown. That means…”

           “We’re relying on you here, resident expert of the late 20^th,” Nyra implored.

           “Hm… Mm, yeah, we should be… Wait, no. That can’t be right. 1988?”

           Masked Millie, who had snuck up on them, muttered back, “August 14^th. 1988.”

           This elicited some subtle startlement from the other Millies, while Nyra only looked more puzzled and stated, “It’s past the time horizon. So that’s not possible.”

           She replied in a choking stutter, “Apparently, it is… But I never expected to…”

           “Hm? Hey… are you crying?” Nyra steadily approached her, and after getting no reaction, gently removed the breathing mask to confirm her suspicions. “Mill…”

           Noticing that her younger self was staring at the terrace tile with wide, anxious eyes, the senior Millie from Wes’ timeline stepped forward and explained, “Nyra, today is… important to us. The three of us share this moment, exactly as it is. Our mom…”

           “Oh,” Nyra exclaimed. “I… I see. But that doesn’t explain how we’re here. Since daemons work through both time and space, I could accept that, maybe, upon imploding its great power could break us through the barrier and put us here… But why this day?”

           “I did this,” the other Millie revealed, and turned back to the others, no longer with any anger or determination on her face. “I brought us here. My virus overwrites a daemon’s rollback coordinates to right here and now, so should something go horribly wrong and it needed to go to a ‘safe space…’ It was a setting I noticed I could change way back when I was planning my first takeover. I figured if there was any chance that, in some timeline, such a cutting-edge machine could reach this place and date…”

           “You always just wanted to see your mom again,” Nyra lamented.

           Young Millie sheepishly spoke up, “We only have vague memories of her, and of what she told us on this… this day. Her… last one. I think we always felt guilty that we couldn’t hold onto her words, but… it’s not our fault, right? We were just little kids.”

           For a few moments, no one said a word, and the sound of the wind seemed to amplify. It was Laurie who brought something else up, while poking at a tulip.

           “Strange…” she said, mostly to herself. “I can’t push the flower. No matter how much I try, it’s like pressing against a solid wall. Can we not, like… manipulate things?”

           “At least the air isn’t solid,” Warren said and crossed his arms. “Place is creepy…”

           A nurse helped an old woman with a walker onto the terrace to see the greenery just then, leaving the door open behind them. It didn’t come as too much of a surprise when the two didn’t appear to notice the eight visitors in their weird futuristic clothes.

           “They can’t see, or hear us, can they?” Jace was the first to surmise.

           “It’s like we’re only seeing an afterglow of the past, locked in time,” Nyra added.

           Noticing the other Millies staring at the open door and contemplating, the local adult one remarked, “I know it’s… a lot. But… we’ll never get a second chance.”

           With some trepidation, everyone headed inside and through the fourth floor’s waiting area, where a hanging television played news that further cemented the era.

           “How do we find the right room?” Wes asked. “Is this at least the right floor?”

           “It’s 409…” the younger Millie replied for her trio. “We remember that much. Coming here day after day, when we were three and a half… that’s a core memory.”

           Treating things sensitively, even while being a teenager, Warren murmured, “This… could be pretty tough. If the three of you want to go in without us…”

           “No, it’s okay,” the older Millie assured them. “I’d rather be there surrounded by friends.” She looked at her counterpart. “That’s all right with you, isn’t it? I don’t know who you’re friends with in your world, but… I know you must’ve made a few.”

           The other Millie nodded, but didn’t say a word.

           “Just be careful to avoid people,” Wes cautioned after swerving to dodge a doctor walking down the hall. “These… uh, phantoms might not see us, but if they’re solid and immovable, I don’t want to find out what happens if they squish us against something.”

           “I’m with Warren…” Laurie said quietly and shivered as they went down a sterile black and white corridor from the past. “Being here feels… all kinds of wrong.”

           Mill replied, barely audibly, “Maybe, but it might give us a chance to…”

           They stopped at the open door for room 409, occupied by a patient named Pearl Vanbusen. Inside, a small and timid Millie was held by her dad, who already had his eyepatch. They were in a chair by a thin, tired mother who had long black hair and wore a smile despite being surrounded by beeping machines. She looked very much like her daughter. The Millies took the lead and deep breaths before going in, at a solemn pace.

           Of note was a framed picture among the well-wishes on the bedside table, which was a wedding photo that revealed a bit about the couple when they were younger: the happy bride and groom—who still had two functioning eyes—were wearing their best 70s clothes and posing in front of a pair of motorcycles amid a desert backdrop.

           “Millie…” her mom said, her words louder than those of her prior conversation. “You’re getting so big… Hey—hey, it’s okay. You can look at me. I know I look a little scary, but it’s still me.” Encouraged by her dad, Millie did turn to her mom again but kept a firm grip on her healthy parent. “There you are… Ah…” She grimaced as she sat up in bed. “Baby Bear, I’d love to see your cute little smile again. It’ll brighten my day.”

           “Sorry, honey. She hasn’t been saying much recently…” Millie’s dad sighed.

           Her mom did the smiling for her, and continued, “Oh, Mill. I’m sorry for all this. I had so many plans for our lives together… I even wanted to give you a sibling. We can be angry at our bad luck, or hide from the world, but sometimes, things just don’t turn out… the way we hoped. I think the best thing you can do after moments like these… is to remember the love we still have. And find more of it. You’ll do that for me, won’t you? One day… I know you’ll find someone who cares about you as much as I do. Your life is off to a rough start, but I’m certain that… you will…” She felt lightheaded.

           “You should rest. I’ll take her to your mom’s and come back in a few hours.”

           “Ah… Papa Bear, what I just said goes for you, too…”

           He gave her a feeble smile. “I could never find someone that would replace you.”

           She laughed, weakly. “I’d hope not. But… please try your hardest, for me. And take good care of Millie. Get her to eat something other than mac and cheese…”

           He held her hand as the young Millie buried her head into his shoulder. “I don’t know about the other requests… but I’m sure I can do that second one. Millie… say goodbye to Mom. If she’s feeling well tomorrow… we’ll… see her then.”

           “… Bye, Mommy…” Millie’s muffled voice sputtered out.

           The interlopers parted to let the two leave the room, and watched as Millie’s mom settled back into bed and seemingly fell asleep within moments. It was evident that at this point, she had to expend much of her energy to talk for more than a brief time.

           “Bye, Mom…” Other Millie repeated over the silence. She breathed deeply and took out the quartz she had stolen from Wes. “I guess we’ll see if this still works…”

           She stopped when her adult counterpart reached out and grasped their mom’s hand from across the veil of time and space. Once the younger Millie had followed suit, the third one felt compelled to do so as well, placing her hand over theirs.

           Then, for a brief instant, their mom’s eyes fluttered open and looked around the room—almost as if part of her subconscious could perceive three versions of her child holding her hand from someplace far away. She then closed them again without a word.

           Nyra somberly spoke up, “I’m glad you got to hear those words, Mill…”

           Laurie looked at the Millies and said, “Your mom’s wish… It’s not too late.”

           “Maybe…” Other Millie, staring into the quartz, replied. “I can still find out.”