James Axler – Rat King

contained the mainframe computer, the couches, the trailing wires, but not the

skeletal forms that were molded to the couches.

These men were now standing in front of him, clustered in the middle of the

room. They looked as they had to have when first joined to the mechanism—fat,

sleek, well-fed military and intelligence services men, middle-aged and experts

in their own fields of diplomacy and conflict.

Fields that were too rapidly rendered barren by sky-dark.

One of them smiled. They all smiled.

Doc shivered. Their eyes reflected only the same glow of insanity that he had

noticed in Wallace.

“Welcome to the mechanism. It wasn’t designed to admit fresh blood, but the

technicians have done a fine job in joining you. It was unfortunate about our

colleague, but we were warned that accidents and acts of nature could occur.”

“Acts of nature?” Doc spit, backing away from the man’s outstretched and

welcoming hand. He checked himself when he realized he was in cyberspace, a

virtual reality where they couldn’t physically harm him.

“Death can come to us all. From nowhere,” the man continued in a bright tone. He

lowered his hand awkwardly, feeling snubbed by Doc but not wanting to lose face.

He turned the lowering into a sleeve-tugging gesture on his Air Force uniform.

“I hardly think from nowhere. Extreme old age is hardly an unexpected cause of

death,” Doc said with a heavily sardonic tone.

The Air Force general looked momentarily confused. “Old age?”

He turned to his companions, and they muttered among themselves, obviously

excluding Doc by choice. Doc took it as an opportunity to survey the room

further.

It was an almost perfect replica of the room in which they were all strapped,

with one glaring omission: the wall where the glass observation window into the

control room beyond was situated. There was no window. There was nothing but a

blank wall.

Doc also noticed that the door into the anteroom was open. What lay beyond that?

He was interrupted from his reverie by a cough. He turned back to find them

looking at him again.

“I find that we have some questions to ask you before we accept you into our

fold,” the Air Force general said softly. “Not the least of which is how you

came to be here. My colleague here—” he indicated the sole soberly suited man.

“—was under the impression that the Chronos operatives had tired of your

constant disruption and had used you as part of an experiment in forward time

travel. You were their great success in trawling, but as for forward travel…” He

shrugged.

Doc felt a bile of anger begin to rise. A “success”? He remembered the

obscenities that were Judge Crater and Ambrose Bierce, remembered the pain and

agony of being trawled by the cruel whitecoats and was painfully aware of his

own mental instability. So that was ‘success’?

“Do you know what’s happened outside your moribund and absurd machine?” Doc

snapped.

“No,” the general answered ingenuously, so much so that it took Doc aback.

The uniformed man continued, “We have been cut off from the outside. Some sort

of communication breakdown. It happens, even in the best-run complexes, and this

is such advanced technology. We’ve been running through simulations, waiting for

the call. But so far there has been nothing. In truth we, ah, have rather been

hoping that you can tell us.”

Doc was drained of anger by his surprise. For a moment he forgot that these men

were part of a project that had ripped him from the bosom of his family and

hurled him—twice—into futures that he should never have witnessed. For a moment

he looked on them as human souls as lost as himself, trapped by harsh

circumstance in a world for which they were not made.

“Have you been fed no information about the world?” he asked. “Hasn’t Wallace

been giving you the data?”

One of the men—Army by his uniform, and bunching large fists in frustration as

he spoke—said, “Wallace is a good man, but it seems to me he’s losing his grip.

I’ve noticed a deterioration in his mental capacity over the time period we’ve

been hooked up.”