Chapter 32: Change of Plans (1/2)
Ryan woke up on a terrible mattress, with a cat on his chest.
The animal looked at the courier with its big blue eyes, as he emerged from his deep sleep. The Persian cat had a coat of fur of the purest shade of white, and the lazy expression of a creature sleeping eighteen hours a day without shame.
It was...
It was the perfect Bond Villain cat!
Ryan immediately let out a cry of joy, while the cat looked at him with noble curiosity.
“I’m gonna call you…” Ryan briefly raised the feline above ground to check if it was a male or female, and then let his imagination do the rest. “Eugène-Henry von Schrodinger!”
Eugène-Henry meowed in response.
“The name sucks,” someone complained from the ‘room’ right next to his—another animal cage repurposed into a prison cell. Ryan recognized the voice as Sarah’s. “It sucks hard.”
“Much like many geniuses, I’m way ahead of my time,” Ryan replied, scratching Eugène-Henry behind his ears. “You like that name, don’t you? You like it, don’t you?”
“Is that the white cat?” Sarah peeked into Ryan’s private space, finding the courier sitting on his bed sheet, the cat on his lap. The courier promised himself to work on his diabolical mastermind pose, though he needed to get a cashmere suit first. “It has a sixth sense to find suckers willing to feed it. That’s why it’s so fat.”
“Hey, he’s not judging you on your appearance!”
“Once, I showed him a rat, like one meter away from his face, and that lazy furball didn’t even react.”
“Slander!” Ryan defended his new sidekick. “Is there a shower though? I think I caught fleas sleeping on that bed.”
“Yes, but the water is muddy. Ma says she will fix it today after she checks your car.”
Check his—
“Goddammit, I hope she doesn’t find the bodies,” Ryan said, rising up from the bed. Eugène-Henry instantly took over his place and moved below the bed sheet, to better protect the mattress from intruders.
“There’s a spot for that,” Little Sarah said casually. “The druggies call it the Happy Hole.”
As it turned out, Rust Town did have tourist spots.
Ryan started dressing, but immediately noticed something wrong. Namely, his A-bomb was missing, and some of his weapons weren’t at their place. Someone had clearly checked on his belongings while he was asleep.
Shortie may be willing to help, but she didn’t fully trust him yet.
The courier emerged from the orphanage to find Len tinkering with his car, having opened the car hood to look inside. She had put the water gun aside, to her right.
“Comrade Shortie, just because it’s an all-American car doesn’t give you the right to wreck it,” Ryan said. “Find yourself a Lada.”
Len turned her head away from the engine, and Ryan's playful demeanor disappeared instantly when she grabbed the water gun. “Riri, what have you done?”
What did he do?
What didn’t he do?
Ryan glanced inside the car hood, his old friend keeping her weapon aimed at his head. Unfortunately, Len had found the brain and jumped to the wrong conclusions.
“Riri, have you…” Len clearly didn’t want to finish her sentence but forced herself to. “Did you put someone in there?”
“You wouldn’t believe how many tries it took before I found the right person.” He immediately raised his hands while Len made a mortified face. “Relax, I’m kidding, I’m kidding! It’s not even sentient!”
“Riri, don’t, don’t joke about this,” she sputtered, keeping her weapon raised.
“Sorry, sorry,” he apologized. “I default to humor when I’m stressed, and I didn’t have my morning coffee.”
Len remained as stiff and grim as ever. “Riri, where did it come from?”
“It’s vat-grown, a gift from another Genius.” No answer. “Shortie, I’m not a serial killer, and I don’t abduct hobos off the road to experiment on them.”
“Riri, I… I want to believe you’re not crazy. I really want to.” She shook her head. “But you keep a thermo-nuclear device with children nearby.”
Oh God, if only she knew about the plushie. “Len, there are no permanent consequences around me.”
“But what if you’re wrong?” she asked, biting her lower lip. “What if you jump into another universe every time you die, and leave a nuclear crater behind?”
“That’s not how my power works,” Ryan reassured her. “I guarantee you I’m not jumping into an alternate universe whenever I die. I checked. I wouldn’t do like, half the stuff I pull on a weekly basis if I knew I left a mess behind. My power only affects our universe, and all I do is give it an alcohol blackout.”
“That’s even scarier,” Len said, still struggling to understand his power’s full scope. “If what you say is correct, then you can rewrite the entire space-time continuum almost at will. It’s not mere time-manipulation, but reality warping.”
“Yes, Shortie, some people get water guns for Christmas, while I got a Fat Man,” Ryan said, putting a finger on the tip of her gun. “So, can you…”
She hesitated, clearly torn between trusting him and her own fears about him, but eventually lowered the water gun. “You will behave while you stay here,” Len said. “I… even if there are no consequences from your point of view, I don’t want anything dangerous near the kids.”
“Len, they have guns.”
“Because they need weapons to defend themselves in this shithole,” the Genius replied. “But that nuke, Riri, won’t help anyone. It’s just death in a can.”
“Okay, I will get rid of it.” He would hand it over to Vulcan, as a sign of friendship. “Can you give it back then? I swear you will never see that bomb again.”
She hesitated for a long, agonizing minute, before searching in her jumpsuit and handing him the bomb. Ryan put a hand on it, their gloves brushing against the other. The courier sensed her reluctance to give the weapon away, but she did it.
Although Len didn’t trust him, she wanted to. He wouldn’t disappoint her.
“Riri, why did you even put your hands on a weapon like that?” she asked, as the courier put the bomb inside one of his coat's inner pocket.
“You really want to know?” Len nodded, and Ryan sighed. She wouldn’t like his answer. “Because I was bored, and I thought it would be fun to have a nuke as a restart button.”
”Can't you automatically restart with your time-stop? You said it caused you early restarts.”
”No. When I said an early restart, I meant an early restart. Have you never wondered why I called myself Quicksave?”
She finally caught on. ”That's how you 'save.'”
”Yeah.” By the time the courier had caught on to this mechanism, he had already burnt a lot of bridges. ”And since I need to commit suicide to get back in time, I figured I should make it interesting.”
The Genius looked at him with a mix of pity, sadness, and compassion. “Do you think your life is worthless?”
“No, of course not, I love living.” If he had wanted to die for good, he would have picked a fight with someone like Cancel long ago. “As long as I exist, there’s always a chance things will improve.”
After an uncomfortable silence, Len abruptly changed the subject. “You slept well?”
“Eh, I’ve slept in way worse places,” the courier replied, before shuddering as he remembered one of his worst deaths. “Whatever you do, Len, don’t sleep in Monaco.”
“Monaco? Why?”
“Shortie, I come from the future. Don’t go to Monaco.” He glanced at the car, and a flustered Len started putting the engine pieces back in their proper place. “Should I expect a mounted water turret? Please tell me that you added a gadget.”
“I was just checking the Chronoradio and its associated parts.” Only then did Ryan notice that while she had stopped pointing it at his face, Len kept the gun in hand.
Baby steps.
“Pretty good tech, huh?” Ryan boasted about his car, putting a hand on the hood. “You’re the last Genius in a long line to work on this baby.”
“I saw that. There’s a lot I could work with, actually.” Len closed the hood once her work done. “Riri, why did you hook up a miniature particle accelerator to your radio?”
Ah, that was such a long story. Ryan worked many loops and decades on that particular quest.
“The Purple World is something of a crossroad, not only between time and space but between various dimensions,” the courier explained. “You know some Violet Genomes summon creatures like that monster from Alien? Or gremlins?”
“They’re pulling them from these dimensions?”
“Yes. Most of these universes radically differ from our own, but some are alternate histories Earth could have taken. Usually, these histories aren’t stable and constantly fluctuate, only becoming ‘real’ when observed.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“Well, we humans think time is stable, that the past is set in stone, but in truth, it’s like the water you love so much, ever changing.” Ryan’s experience had taught him as much. “I mean, I just have to jump back and poof, it changes.”