Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Page 5

  As he saw the others gathered around the table, a look of relief washed over his face, but then he looked at Tim with a little bit of irritation. “Holy cow! When you’re in a strange bed in the year... twenty-two-something... you at least expect your roommate to let you know when he’s leaving the room!”

  Rose laughed. “Holy cow?” Rose asked. “Who says that?”

  Billy rolled his eyes, but smiled a bit sheepishly. “Apparently I do, when I’m disoriented from Time Travel.”

  “Well, anyway,” Rose said, “Julie didn’t tell me she was leaving either, and I figured out how to wander through the door and find her without going all ‘holy cow’ on her.”

  “Oh, all right,” Billy conceded, sitting down in the only remaining chair at the table, next to Rose. “But Tim, you can always feel free to wake me up when you wake up in the morning.”

  “It’s early afternoon, apparently,” Tim said with a shrug. “But I get your point.”

  “Would you like something to drink?” Paul asked..

  “Well, what do you have?” Billy asked.

  “Anything,” Paul said. “Or, just about, anyway.”

  “Coffee?” Billy tried.

  “Cream or sugar?” asked Paul.

  “Bit of cream, no sugar,” Billy said.

  “Coming right up,” Paul said.

  After giving the teens a moment to chat, Hopkins spoke up. “Now that you are all up, I suppose you would like to know where we are.”

  The teens nodded. Or, at least, Julie, Rose, and Tim nodded. Billy was too busy looking perplexedly at the coffee coming out of what appeared to be a water-faucet.

  “Well, the Emperors of Time are looking for me now. I needed a place to hide out until we change things back again and leave them vulnerable once more. Since they have gained control of the government again, I am not safe in my own time, and they have begun to look for me in other times as well. I came here because we are currently in a place that the Emperors will have a hard time monitoring and an awful time getting into even if they found out I was here. We are currently standing in an elaborate bunker that houses the last resistance to the world government engineered by the Emperors of Time,” Hopkins said.

  Billy chimed in. “Wait, so you’re saying the Emperors of Time are out there now?” he gestured vaguely toward the world outside the four walls of the kitchen.

  “No,” Hopkins answered. “But they’ve put events in place to get to this stage of history. Remember, by my own time in the original timeline, there will be an extensive American Empire, but no world government. The Emperors’ main goal in controlling history is to cause there to be a world empire by their own time, so that they can put themselves in control of it. Right now, in 2276 in this timeline, is when the last chip is about to go to the world empire the Emperors have manipulated time to create.”

  “Is there anything we can do to stop it?” Rose asked, with a sense of urgency in her voice.

  “Not from here, no,” Hopkins answered with a shake of his head. “We have to go much further back to change things. But the important thing is that right now, all the resistance in the world to the one world government is in this extensive underground bunker. In another year, the world Empire will take it over, and the names and stories of everyone here will be taken down and put on files that the Emperors of Time will easily be able to access from 2347. But for now, this area is off the grid. Any records being kept here will be destroyed when the new world government torches this last symbol of resistance on the day that the rebels give up. It is one of the few places in modern history where we can relax and recuperate without worrying about the Emperors of Time finding out about it by mining old data from the internet, newspapers, or other sources.”

  Julie nodded at this point. Billy frowned. “I’m sure you have more on your mind than just relaxing and recuperating, though.”

  Hopkins gave a half-smile. “Yes, I am afraid I do. Because I have been stymied in my attempts to capture any more of the Domini, I have had a bit of time to plan our strategy for our next counter-attack. There are resources here that will make that plan easier. In fact, there are resources here without which the plan would not even be remotely possible.”

  Chapter 6

  Mind-Control

  “This timeline diverged from the original timeline in 1854, with the passing of--” Hopkins said.

  Rose squeaked, and Hopkins paused to look at her with raised eyebrows. Rose turned the slightest bit pink as she said, “Well, no, nothing-- it’s just… We had figured that out already, that’s all.”

  Hopkins’ eyebrows stayed raised as he looked around at the teens. “That is rather impressive. I thought you had come to see me right after you got back from 1916.”

  “Well, nearly,” Julie clarified. “We stopped for a moment to try and figure out what was going on, because we weren’t sure if you would have a chance.”

  “Well done, then,” Hopkins said. “But undoing the change that they made will no doubt be harder than finding out when it occurred was. Their plan this time is more subtle and complicated than setting off a bomb in a crucial precinct on Election Day. Our counterattack will have to be correspondingly more complex.”

  “If not a bomb, what did they do?” Tim asked nervously. It had been plenty complex preventing the bomb going off, and they had only barely succeeded at that.

  “Well, I do not know exactly, but I have a theory,” Hopkins stated. “You see--”

  But at this point, Paul cleared his throat emphatically. “Listen, you guys are going to be here for days, aren’t you? Do you have to brief them on all this right now? You guys just woke up from a long nap, and you haven’t even given me a chance to offer you something to eat!”

  Hopkins looked politely confused for a moment, and then shrugged. “I suppose it is nothing that cannot be put off until after some light refreshment.”

  Part of Tim wanted to object. He was still nervous about whether he and his friends would be up to the task of saving the world from the Emperors of Time again. But he was a bit hungry, and Hopkins had the tendency to drone on at times. It might be better to have the conversation over dinner. Looking around at the others, he discovered that they were relieved by Paul’s interruption.

  “So what do you guys want to eat?” Paul asked.

  At this, Billy and Rose both pushed out their chairs from the table in preparation to get up. Tim and Julie began to follow suit, but Paul remained seated and looked at the teens with a confused expression for a moment. Then, he grinned, and said, “Oh, there’s no need for us to leave to get food.”

  “But there’s no refrigerator…” Rose objected faintly. Then, she shrugged and yawned. Julie was right about her not being much of a morning (or early afternoon) person.

  “Yes, well, with our limited space down here, it didn’t make much sense to give every apartment a refrigerator. So instead, we get the food delivered to us. But you’ll see that in a moment. First, what do you want?”

  Billy shrugged, then decided he might as well go first. “I can usually get on board with some pizza.”

  Paul smiled. “Good choice. Toppings?”

  “Um… Pepperoni and mushroom, I guess,” Billy replied.

  “That will work.” Paul went over to the machine that looked like a microwave that Tim had noticed before. Without putting anything in the machine, Paul tapped keys on a keyboard that looked like the panel beside the tap. “While we’re waiting on the pizza, what do you three want?”

  Tim, Julie, and Rose had barely ordered their cheeseburger, chicken nuggets, and Caesar Salad when the machine beeped.

  Even though Tim had halfway caught on to what must be happening, his jaw still dropped involuntarily when Paul pulled what appeared to be a freshly baked personal-sized pizza from the machine. All told, maybe a minute and a half had passed since Billy had first mentioned he could go for a pizza.

  “So how does that thing work?” Rose asked after taking a bite of Caesar Salad. By thi
s time, all the teens had their meals in front of them, and Paul was entering Hopkins’ order of salmon and steamed broccoli.

  “I thought you’d never ask,” Paul said, with a mischievous grin on his face.

  “Well, I had to try it first,” Rose explained, after another bite. “Otherwise I couldn’t be sure that this wasn’t some kind of elaborate prank with plastic food or something. But my salad’s good, and the others don’t seem to be complaining, so spill it. How’s it work?”

  “All right,” Paul said, as he handed Hopkins a plate of salmon and broccoli. “There are several automated kitchens throughout the bunker. I put in an order up here, using a code-- it’s lucky you didn’t ask for anything more obscure than a Caesar Salad or I’d have had to look them up-- and then it is sent on a conveyer belt through ducts to this room and lowered into the compartment there. Looking up the code’s the hardest part of the process. It takes about 45 seconds for the kitchen to prepare the food and 30 seconds for it to get here.”

  “Forty-five seconds to make the food? A pizza takes at least 10 minutes to cook!” Julie said, apparently offended by what she perceived as a slight to logic itself.

  “Yes, I suppose it once did,” Paul conceded. “But not anymore. We use more concentrated heating methods. It goes quicker.”

  “What, like lasers?” Billy asked.

  “Not exactly,” Paul said. He chuckled. “But I suppose that’s close enough. I don’t understand all the inner-details myself. I’m not a chef.”

  “And you don’t care that you don’t understand how your food is made?” Rose asked with a frown.

  “You had microwaves in your time, right?” Paul asked, with one eyebrow raised.

  “Yeah…” Rose said.

  “And can you explain to me how they worked?” Paul asked.

  Rose hesitated. Then she laughed. “I push some buttons and the food gets hot. Alright, I guess I see your point.”

  “What about the fountain that can give you any type of drink you want? You don’t find that as hard to believe?” Paul asked, teasing the four teenagers in general. Tim supposed they must have seemed awfully old-fashioned to Paul. After all, Tim thought it was funny that his grandmother couldn’t work a cellphone, and there was a lot more time separating the Tim from the technology in this kitchen than there had been separating his grandmother from a cellphone.

  Rose shook her head, “Nah, we have machines in our time where you can get a bunch of different kinds of sodas from the same nozzle. I figure they just mix in the syrup. They could basically do the same thing with un-carbonated stuff, just use carbonated or non-carbonated water as necessary.”

  Paul nodded throughout this line of reasoning.

  “Still, the milkshake part is impressive,” Julie said, taking another sip. “Weird ‘cause it’s a different consistency, too. I suppose the inside of the nozzle must clean itself between uses.”

  “Hmm… I guess so,” Paul said. “I’d never really thought about that, either.”

  “I’m starting to wonder if you do think about anything,” Julie teased.

  Hopkins was smiling indulgently throughout this conversation, but his voice betrayed a hint of sarcasm when he spoke up next. “Now that you’ve had a chance to offer everyone a warm meal, is it quite all right if I continue where I left off in briefing our guests about their upcoming mission?”

  Paul shrugged. “I suppose I’m okay with it if they are.”

  None of the teens seemed to know how they would have objected if they wanted to, and so Hopkins continued. “What we know is that the Emperors blocked the passing of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and caused another law to be passed instead. This implies that they would have had to exercise considerable influence over events for a long period of time, so that they could influence the course of Congress.”

  “So, what, you think they dressed up as senators or something?” Tim asked.

  “Well, no,” Hopkins said, although for some reason Tim caught a flicker of a guilty smile across his face, as if he was hiding something from them. “I imagine that with the success with which I have been hunting them down recently, the Emperors will be careful to keep themselves from being tied down to any time period for too long. But I believe that the Emperors have found other ways of influencing events than dressing up as people who control them.”

  “I apologize for my nephew’s flair for mystery. I don’t know why he can’t just tell you what’s happening instead of building it up like this,” Paul said. Billy had finished eating, and so Paul took his plate. To Tim’s surprise, he put it back in the microwave-looking contraption that it had come out of in the first place. Paul must have seen Tim’s confused expression, because he said, “It’ll take the dish back to be cleaned.” He pressed a short series of buttons next to the machine.

  Hopkins simply shrugged at his uncle’s criticism and continued with his story. “As you know, the other scientists who worked on the Time Travel problem with me make up the Emperors of Time. A few of those scientists had worked on another project together a few years before. This project had to do with mind-control.”

  Rose raised her eyebrows when Hopkins said this, Julie mouthed the word “oh”, as if she had just found a missing puzzle-piece that helped everything else fall into place. Tim caught himself rolling his eyes, though. First time-travel, and now this? It was starting to sound like maybe the future’s inventors should just have contented themselves by making weird kitchen appliances, because they had certainly outdone themselves in the area of dangerous and unethical weapons.

  Billy seemed to be thinking something along the same lines, because he threw his hands up and said, “Well that’s just absurd. Were you involved in that project, too?”

  Hopkins frowned patiently and shook his head. “No, I was not responsible for that particular debacle.”

  “We don’t mean to be offensive to you, personally, of course, Dr. Hopkins,” Rose clarified hurriedly.

  Billy looked at Rose for a moment and then looked back at Hopkins. “No, yeah, I do think I mean offense to you. I mean, how could you do something so irresponsible and stupid as trying to invent time-travel?”

  Of course, they had all known since they met Hopkins that he had been one of the scientists responsible for time-travel, but Billy’s repressed anger about the issue must have just boiled over.

  “Billy!” Rose whispered. “You can’t say something like that!”

  Paul was chuckling, the only one in the room who seemed at all amused. “Ah well, it took longer for you to say it than it did me. I told him off ten minutes after I met him.”

  Hopkins’ expression remained impassive. “Well, I know I made a mistake and am doing my best to fix it. If it is any consolation, it would have happened with or without me, but I would not be able to stop it if I had not been in on it.”

  Paul chimed in again. “He messed up, he knows it, and he’s still the best option humanity’s got to save the world from the mess he’s created. So unless you’ve got a better plan, we should let him get on with telling us his because, let’s face it, he’s a little wordy and he’s going to take enough time to get on with it without us getting off topic.”

  Billy raised his hands in and said, “Okay, I get it. I know I was Monday morning quarterbacking anyway, just… it gets frustrating.”

  Paul nodded, but gestured toward Hopkins so that he would continue. “At any rate, I believe that the Emperors have perfected a mind-control machine and are using it to control a select group of people from 1854 to alter the timeline.”

  The four teens thought about this for a moment. It was a lot to take in. Rose spoke up first. “If they can control people’s minds, why do they need to go back in time at all? Couldn’t they just use the machine to make everyone do what they’re told in their own time?”

  At this question, Hopkins actually laughed. “No, it is not quite that simple. Each machine must be painstakingly programmed. I cannot claim to be an expert on mind-control technology, but fro
m the articles I have read, they also need to have a special understanding of the psychology of each subject to be manipulated in order for it to be most effective. I do not understand quite yet how they would be able to do that to even a handful of people in 1854, but I can guarantee that they will not be able to do it to the whole world in my own time period.”

  Rose shrugged. “Just seemed like it’d be easier. Not that we want things to be easier for them.” She shook her head slowly, as if dazed.

  “Sorry, Dr. Hopkins. You weren’t here when we discussed how Rose takes a long time to wake up,” Julie teased, with a smile at Rose.

  Hopkins did not seem to get the joke, but continued. “The key to fixing the past this time will be finding the people who are being influenced and destroying the machines that are doing the controlling, which I am confident must be somehow hidden in the victims’ homes. The machines require close proximity to work as well.”

  This time Tim spoke up first. “But if you had to pick just a few people to influence and change the course of history, wouldn’t you have to pick some pretty influential people? It was one thing when we had to go back in time and convince some alley-thugs and a couple suffragettes that we were from 1916, and even then we didn’t fool the Emperors once they knew to be looking for us. How are we going to go back there and talk to the movers and shakers in 1854?”

  “Yes, well, you have identified the trickiest portion of our plan. You will need to employ an element of disguise. The most influential people of 1854 will talk to you and, hopefully, accept you because you will have the advantage of looking like individuals who they already know.”

  Chapter 7

  Deep Cover

  “I went through a phase a couple years ago where I watched a lot of TV crime shows,” Rose said, as she sprawled out on a patch of grass four days later. “When one of the detectives did something really crazy- I dunno, becoming a mule for a drug ring- they called what he was doing going under ‘deep cover’. I think we’ve got him beat.”