CHAPTER ONE

Memo from the Edge

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I  keep the gun at the top of my backpack so I can grab it quickly like I  did last night. I was spooning a bite of shoplifted ravioli into my  mouth when I heard footsteps. The silhouette of a man appeared in the  mouth of the storm drain. At first, I thought he might be one of the  Archon’s soldiers hunting me. Turned out to be a drunk looking for a  place to piss. He froze when I stood, and we had a stare-down that  lasted a minute but felt like forever. Then the lights from a passing  car glinted off the gun in my hand and he decided to go elsewhere.

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This  stretch of the interstate is pretty deserted. A small cluster of  businesses where two highways intersect provides the only food and  shelter for a hundred miles in any direction. It takes me an hour to  walk there. I’m careful to wait until noon or sun-down so I can blend  with the peak-time traffic of cops and truckers and highway homeless. I  beg spare change in the lot then slip in and buy (or steal) what I need  from the convenience store. So far, I haven’t been caught but I have to  be careful. They have surveillance cameras and I know my image, captured  on video, is fed into a database that’s instantly available to  government, military, and law enforcement worldwide. I’m in a world of  computers, where everything is interconnected.

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As near as I can tell it is the year 2019 or 2020.

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~ * ~

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The  convenience store door chimes its descending two-note welcome, and  sweeps closed. Today’s clerk is the Navajo kid with the thick-framed  eyeglasses. He glances up long enough to verify I’m not some tumbleweed  the desert blew in then resumes texting up a storm on his cellphone. I  tilt my head away from the CCTV camera and make for the coolers.

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Only  two trucks in the lot today and the one driver I spare-changed told me  to fuck off so I’m going to have to steal. And not “go for the discount”  kind of stealing where you pocket one thing then pay for another, but  outright theft, which means coming in with nothing and leaving with  something but not paying for anything. Larceny on a high wire, without a  net.

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I  can get the things I need pretty quickly but have to be careful because  I’m the only one in the store right now. It’s best to wait until the  clerk is ringing someone up before boosting. I don’t have to wait long. A  car pulls up and a family emerges—two pot-bellied parents and a  puppy-tumble of kids. A chorus of arguing voices enters. The chime goes  off a half-dozen times. I make my move: two loaves of bread and a  squeeze bottle of mustard go into my pack.

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The  kids are prowling the aisles, fiddling with merchandise, and staring at  me in that dumb belligerent way little kids have. I smile back at them.  The oldest boy and girl giggle and whisper to each other. I hear the  word weird, the word dork.

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I  wait until I hear the beeping of the register keys before swiping two  packets of cold cuts from the open snack cooler into my pockets. When I  turn, I see…

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…the mother staring at me.

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Shit.

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She  leans forward and whispers something to the clerk, who reaches for the  phone. The mother hisses for the kids and they immediately cluster  around her legs.

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The  father meanwhile is getting agitated. An ex-military type with a beefy  sunburned neck and blond brush-cut, he obviously feels he ought to be  doing something. So he starts flexing and psyching himself up to come  over and confront the skinny teenage shoplifter. When I step for the  door, he moves to block my path.

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I  duck around the end of the aisle to the potato chips. As his footsteps  approach, I take a deep breath and clear my mind, waiting to hear that  ticking at the far edge of my consciousness. When I experience the  sensation of falling, I wait for the next wave of the time-space  continuum to rise and slip under it. It feels like stepping into a  small, dark closet and pulling the door shut behind me.

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When  the father corners the end of the aisle, I am still there but tucked  inside a fold in time eight seconds before, when I was somewhere else.  So by the laws of physics, I can’t be here now. But of course I am. Just  completely invisible to him. I stay put until he gives up and leaves.

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~ * ~

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That evening back in the storm drain, I light a candle and make a bologna sandwich while pondering my situation.

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I  can run but I can’t hide much longer. I thought jumping thirty-five  years into the future would put me beyond the Archon’s reach, but it  hasn’t. If anything, his power, and influence have grown since the  Nineteen-Eighties. This squares with what I know about the next fifty  years, when a destructive war is unleashed. The devastating violence  flushes the last of my kind out of hiding and brings human civilization  under the Archon’s total control. But like any future, until it happens  it is only a potentiality. I know it can be changed.

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I’ve  been studying the Archon’s ways. He’s an expert at seeing tipping  points in time before anyone else and exploiting them to his advantage. I  have learned how he selects critical moments in the present to deflect  the future in whatever direction he chooses. He got practice by  experimenting on me as I was growing up.

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He’s my father.

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~ * ~

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I’m  going to fix this somehow. Writing it all down is the first step. There  has to be a record. They say history is written by the winners, but  it’s made by those with the power and influence to shape it. My father  has been planning to conquer this planet since arriving as a refugee  eight thousand years ago. Being able to move through time as easily as a  dolphin through water enabled him to master the time-streams,  stage-managing history to his advantage. Humans don’t stand a chance  against that kind of power.

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There’s  a lot to understand. But if I write it down, then I can at least begin  to see the broad outlines. If nothing else, the story of what we are  will survive so humanity can find it and perhaps figure out a way to  stop him. With my backpack and this laptop computer I stole, I plan to  keep moving.

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Catch me if you can, dad.