Fugitives of Time: Sequel to Emperors of Time Read online

  Tim thought it a bit maddening how laid back Hopkins sounded as he explained this. It may seem like no big deal to him, but he wasn’t the one undergoing this weird futuristic version of plastic surgery.

  Chapter 8

  Paul’s Story

  After Hopkins had finished explaining the procedure, Paul left the room and came back with a cart. While the nanobots themselves were very small, they would have to add a fair amount of tissue and fat to the teens. The raw materials for this took up most of the space in the cart.

  According to Hopkins, the nanobots would carry tiny bits of synthetic skin, fat, and bone from containers on the cart and fly it through the air to the teens. Assembly would be done on site, with the site being the body of each of the four patients. Though much of the work would be done on the surface, like tweaking skin and hair color, the bots were also small enough to get into the teens’ bodies through their pores. Once inside, they could do whatever they had to do to sculpt their bones into the proper shape.

  The experience was no less weird than Tim had imagined it would be. It would have been freaky enough to go to sleep and wake up to look in a mirror and see how much you had changed. It was way weirder to sit in one of these chairs that looked like it belonged in a dentist office and wait while the nanobots went to work on you.

  “So, like I said, no more than forty-five minutes to get everything done. Everything has been preprogrammed for all of you, so the bots will do the work on their own. There are enough bots that you will each have your own team working on you at the same time. Are you all ready?” asked Hopkins.

  Each of the four teens sounded some degree of nervous as they confirmed they were ready to go.

  Hopkins had been right about one thing, though. The procedure was completely painless. An odd tingling sensation visited different parts of Tim’s body as the nanobots added extra bits of padding under his skin.

  At first, the teens talked to each other to try to get their minds off what was going on, but they soon found that it was hard to keep conversation going when you’re trying to imagine what weird things the nanobots were adding or subtracting from your body.

  So eventually Rose had the sense to ask someone who wasn’t being operated on to carry the conversation. “So, Paul, as you’ve probably gathered already, Tim and I are huge history geeks, and July and Billy have gotten good at tolerating that. So I think you should tell us your story. How do you go from being an -- I assume -- normal kid in the 23rd century to living in a huge underground bunker?”

  Paul frowned thoughtfully. “I guess I was fairly normal in the beginning. But I started to think things around me were getting weird when I was about your age. The world was changing.”

  “How so?” Rose asked. “Ew… wait. If my eye feels all weird and itchy, does that mean they’re changing my eye-color right now?”

  “If by ‘they’, you mean the nanobots, then yes,” Paul said.

  “Well that’s just gross,” Rose said. “But continue with your story.”

  “It’d better be a good one,” Julie registered. “I’m about going out of my mind over here.”

  “Well, fifteen years ago, 2262, the American Empire had just declared war again. War’s different than you’re used to in your time. Lots of digital components. We were at war with Germany, so there were long periods of time where any device connected to a network in Germany was infected by a virus that made it incapable of doing anything but play pro-American propaganda.”

  The teens laughed at this. Even if it they were enemies with the people pulling the strings on the American government in that war, they had to admit that was a bit clever. Billy spoke up, “That’s hilarious.”

  “Well, not exactly,” Paul said. “Just keep in mind that even though we’re not talking about guns or bombs-- both of which were also used in the war—that doesn’t mean people didn’t die. Computers that people relied on for controlling the heat in huge apartment complexes went out in the middle of winter. The banks were broken, so even millionaires couldn’t pay for food. Electricity went out in most parts of the city, because the major electric companies had huge digital components in their management structure. Refrigeration for food failed, and hospitals were sent back to pre-industrial times. Rioting was rampant.”

  When Paul paused, Julie spoke up. “Geez, so the nanobots are on my eyeballs now, too... Gross!”

  “Right, which is why we need to let Paul tell us his story to distract us,” said Rose. “So America was at war with Germany, then what?”

  “Well, the Germans resisted for a long time, even when the Americans started to cut electricity to the rest of continental Europe, the core of Germany’s empire. Europe stuck together with the German empire, guarded by hundreds of thousands of armed troops, until finally Washington decided the European Empire was weak enough to go in with more conventional troops, planes, and tanks. Berlin fell in 2267, but by then, all of their colonial holdings in Africa and Asia had achieved independence from Germany because all their attention was on keeping control in Europe during the digital blackout.”

  “So they had territory in Europe and Africa and Asia?” Billy asked. When Tim glanced over at him, he noticed that Billy had sprouted facial hair, though only in patches. It seemed like the bots were changing his face one bit at a time.

  “That’s right,” Paul affirmed. “The American Empire had already controlled the Western Hemisphere, Australia, India and Northern Asia… basically the Asian parts of old Russia. Until they were conquered in this war, Germany controlled Europe, and that was their highly developed zone, but they used Africa and Southeast Asia as secondary zones where they would get their materials and cheap labor. When America took over Berlin, all of Europe was quickly integrated into the American Empire.”

  “So then in 2267, the African and Asian colonies are independent?” Tim asked. He was having a hard time tracking the story with the thought of what all the tickling sensations throughout his body meant the nanobots were doing to him, but he was glad for the distraction.

  “Right, but not for long,” Paul explained. “The territories in question had belonged to Germany for about a century in most cases, from at least since the Chinese Empire fell in 2162, but suddenly they were free. Quickly, various fledgling states and confederacies were popping up in parts of the world that hadn’t been independent in a long time. Some of them showed promise of developing into democratic states. But America quickly decided that the former colonies needed to be part of the American Empire, which had been the plan all along.

  “Soon, America started putting out propaganda saying that they’ve received hundreds of thousands of pleas from the locals in these places asking for the United States to topple their failing governments and give them American stability. It was in 2268, I was just over the age you are now, when I saw something disturbing enough that it finally pushed me into the camp of those against the American government.”

  “And it wasn’t the fact that they kept calling themselves the American Empire even though they now controlled all of Europe and Australia?” Tim asked. “Because I’ve got to say, that’s the thing bugging me most about the story right now.”

  Paul gave a tight smile. “The United States at that time-- the original forty-eight, I mean, which still held special privileges within the empire-- was divided mostly into ten metropoles where ninety percent of the population lived, with the other ten percent farming the open land. I was living in Chicago at the time. I was in University, and I lived in a huge apartment complex with about ten thousand people in it. Anyway, one of the other men in my complex, he was a few years older than me, but I had known him growing up, had recently finished up his studies in journalism. He found out, or maybe he just deduced it, that the government was making most of these requests for American intervention up. He reported on it, and was quickly arrested.”

  “Freedom of speech had pretty much gone out the window in our timeline by the time we were around, too,” Rose registered regret
fully, but now her voice sounded funny and Tim noticed that her hair was brown.

  “It gets worse,” Paul revealed. “The government was big into using symbolism. He was charged with treason. As any time that the government started an unpopular war, there was a rash of treason accusations. Some of us… the government called them radicals… knew this was the last step to a one world government. So the government rounded up the treasonous people across the country, anyone who had said anything publicly against the government. The number of treason accusations in Chicago was something like a thousand, which given the city’s population of thirty million made it a ridiculously small percentage of how many people actually opposed the government.”

  “So they killed them?” Julie asked.

  “Yeah, of course,” Paul said, with a wave of his hand. “But the disturbing part, the dreadfully creative part, was how they killed them. It was advertised ahead of time that the problem with these thousand treasonous citizens was that there was something wrong with their heads. They were defective, according to the government. The government had also been working on technology that could diffuse matter using light and energy outside of the human vision spectrum, so that it would look like the object just vanished out of thin air.

  “They gathered the population into public areas. This was considered a patriotic event, so everyone was forced to go. If you didn’t, you were considered treasonous yourself. I was in one of the arenas, with fifty-thousand other citizens. Each location got a handful of the treasonous defectors sent to it. It just so happened that my neighbor was at mine. They brought the five criminals out into the center of the floor of the arena and chained each to a pole. The guards got off the stage, so it was just the defectors out there. The crowd was invited to see what the government did to people whose heads were defective. And then, in the blink of an eye, all five of the heads of the defectors were gone. Just vanished. Of course, it was the new technology, but not everyone in the crowd even knew such technology was being developed, and it was disturbing even for those of us who did. That was the intent, of course. And the thing is, most people were scared into behaving well. I, however, was motivated to seek out others who were disgusted by the government and see what we could do if we didn’t get caught.”

  “Wow,” Tim said. “I can’t say that’s necessarily the reaction I would have had.”

  “Well,” said Paul, “you never really know until you’re put into a situation like that. Anyway, soon, I was done with college. They had trained me in hacking, what they called weaponized computing, assuming that I would be a good asset against the resistance. I managed to play double agent for a few years, and scored a good bit of useful intelligence for the resistance. That, and I tricked the computers at one of the major banks into making a rather generous contribution to the rebel cause, through a dummy account I set up. Of course, I couldn’t do anything to stop them as they took over Africa and the rest of Asia. It would have aroused too much suspicion, and I couldn’t have held them back for long anyway.”

  “Well, this has taken my mind off the nanobots, but it’s also super depressing,” Julie complained.

  “Yes, well, imagine how I feel now that my grand-nephew has told me how it’s all going to end. Of course, we’ve known for a while that we were living on borrowed time, and we’ve worked out strategies to make sure we won’t be taken alive by the government, but I suppose if you succeed with your plan, it will all be a moot point anyway,” Paul said.

  “And speaking of our plan,” Hopkins said, breaking an uncharacteristically long silence, “you should have noticed the odd sensations have stopped. You have completed your transformation.”

  Chapter 9

  The Golden Watch

  The four teens, three of whom now looked like adults, had been standing and watching the clock for the last several minutes. They knew they had to wait six hours from when they saw Hopkins leave, as he jumped back in time to 1854 to make preparations for their jump back to the 19th century. Finally, now there was only one minute left.

  The teens now looked like the four people they were going back in time to impersonate. This was really weird for Tim. Even though he knew consciously that he was standing in the room with three people who he would consider his best friends, he felt like he was looking at strangers. The nanobots had done a great job, as the four of them looked exactly like the pictures they had seen of their 19th century targets and nothing like themselves.

  It was absurd to see Rose with long straight brown hair and green eyes. Julie looked about fifteen years older than she normally did and had thick dark-blonde hair. Billy’s hair was now dark brown and graying, but at least his beard was closer cut than Tim’s. Tim still hadn’t gotten over the huge dark-brown beard he was now sporting.

  But of course, all this would only work if the people who they were supposed to be weren’t also running around. So Hopkins’ current mission was to go around 1854 Washington DC, on the same day that they were preparing to visit, and kidnap the four people they were going to impersonate.

  He was then going to take these people back to his own time and look after them there, so that he could return them to their own time when the teens had completed their mission. He’d have to persuade them to trust him and follow his instructions, because he himself would be unable to go back to that year, so he’d have to loan them one of the Domini Temporis.

  The idea that they would be traveling back in time was brought a little closer to home by the outfits that the four of them were wearing. The girls’ costumes looked most outlandish. When they had first tried their costumes on the day before, they had been quite the topic of conversation.

  “So… why does it look like you’re wearing an upside down ice-cream cone below your waist?” Billy had asked Rose.

  “It’s called a frocked skirt,” said Rose impatiently.

  “Calm down, there, Rose,” advised Julie. “Not everyone grew up with an aunt and uncle in the antique business.”

  Rose sighed. “It means it’s bunched up to make it… you know... poofy.”

  “That’s the technical term, eh?” teased Billy.

  “Well, it’s what my Aunt Jane calls it,” said Rose, sticking her tongue out. “Besides, the technical term was ‘frocked.’ It’s not my fault if you couldn’t understand the technical term.”

  “And, just in case it comes up in conversation, what’s you’re uh… shirt… called?” Tim had asked.

  “In conversation with who, your fellow congressmen?” Julie asked with a laugh. Then she gestured to her top. “And did you just call this a shirt?”

  “I never claimed to know anything about fashion,” Tim shot back. He would have assumed this was obvious to Julie, who would have seen him wearing jeans and one of about a dozen t-shirts he liked just about every day they had known each other before this whole time traveling habit had diversified his wardrobe.

  “You can just call it a jacket,” Rose said. Tim would call it whatever he was supposed to, but it didn’t look like any jacket he’d ever seen before. It looked almost like a multi-layered cape, with big ornamental sleeves. The overall effect, when combined with the dress, was that each of the girls’ heads appeared to be poking out of the top of a miniature tent. Rose’s dress was pink, and she wore it with a jacket in different shades of red. Julie’s dress was light blue, and her jacket was a variety of shades of purple.

  “All right. Jacket I can remember,” Tim said, with a self-deprecating smile.

  But Julie wasn’t finished with him yet. “All right, and can you tell me what this is?” she asked, gesturing toward what she was wearing on her head. “I’ll give you a hint, I’d better try not to get a bee in it.”

  Tim rolled his eyes. “It’s a bonnet, and I could have gotten that without a hint.”

  “Sure you could,” Julie said with a sly smile. Tim thought it was annoying how cute he found that smile.

  “All right,” Billy said, “and there’s no surprises in what all this is call
ed, is there?” He gestured to his costume, a motley collection of light blue slacks, a blue dress shirt, and a brown jacket. This ensemble was completed by a bow-tie that, to Tim, looked particularly outlandish, with its loose ends trailing off around his neck.

  Not that Tim felt more comfortable in his own outfit, which was, perhaps befitting his character’s higher status in society, a more formal looking combination of black slacks and jacket with white jacket and neatly-tied black bowtie. They had put on the costumes with help from a picture Hopkins was able to produce of each of their marks, but that hadn’t helped with the process of tying a bow-tie, which Tim felt to be unnecessarily difficult.

  “Nope… Men’s clothing seems to have been almost as boring in the 1850s as it is today,” Rose said, then flinched slightly. “Er… and by today, I mean, a few hundred years ago. I don’t mean to impugn the fashion sense of our illustrious hosts in this underground bunker.”

  The four teens laughed at this, because they had all seen the jumpsuit-like outfits that were apparently the preference of their subterranean hosts.

  But right now, this was all in the back of the teens’ minds. It was only a minute before they would be jumping back in time, and Tim could only imagine that the others were feeling the same kind of butterflies that he was. It was surreal to know that he was about to move from this underground bunker in the 23rd century to 19th century Washington DC.

  And all this because of the microchip he was holding and the golden watch in his hand. The watch, according to Hopkins, had once belonged to Russell Sage, the man he was preparing to impersonate. Hopkins had acquired it at a museum sometime in the 20th century, and now Tim would be able to use it to get into Sage’s boarding-house room in 1854.

  Each of the other teens was holding a memento from the life of the person they were about to impersonate. Rose had a doll, Julie had a necklace, and Billy was holding a set of keys.