CHAPTER NINE: FUTURE BECOMES THE PAST

I was coming out of a bar on main street when I overheard a conversation. A man in a black suit was asking people if they’d seen someone. He was holding up a photograph. I looked down at his right arm and saw on his sleeve that he was wearing a Sequence Bracer. Quickly, I made myself hidden and slowly followed him along, waiting for an opportunity to get the jump on him. If I could kill the assassin and get his Sequencer it wouldn’t matter if Cinema was unable to fix mine.

I followed him into an alley. He was apparently trying to be stealthy too, in hopes to come across me. When the opportunity presented itself, I lunged, grabbing him in a headlock. We scuffled around a bit, and he reached into his jacket with his left hand for a pistol. But because of my angle, he couldn’t get a shot off directly at my face. He fired twice, the second shot just barely grazed my forehead before I contorted his arm away from a clear shot.

I commanded him, “Put the gun down and give me your Sequencer, or I’ll break your fuckin neck!”

He garbled and answered back, “I’ll never let you take this from me, Hail Tet!” he shouted as he directed the gun at the Bracer and fired into it.

In a rage I snapped his neck and got up to flee as I heard the sound of the police response to the shots that were fired. I thought about grabbing his Bracer for parts but it was so mangled from the bullet that it wasn’t even worth it. I ran all afternoon until I was sure I had evaded the authorities. When nightfall came, I went to Cinema’s dormitory.

“What happened to you?” she asked as she answered the door and saw my head wound.

“An agent caught up to me. I figured this would happen since they think I just jumped ship and took off with their device. I tried to bring his back for you but it got destroyed in our fight.”

“Oh geez,” she lamented, “but that doesn’t matter. Because guess what? I 100% believe you now!”

She hurried me into the room and shut the door, showing me the Sequence Bracer on the desk, fully operational.

“Oh my god, Cinema, you’re amazing!” I exclaimed, as I sat down at the desk to look at

it.

“I know right,” she touted, “It wasn't easy, but I got it put back together.”

“And you’re sure it works? I know you were worried before.”

“I’m sure it works,” she assured, ”Once I got it lighting up again it made a lot more sense to me. The circuitry might be advanced, but I totally get the concept behind it.”

“Well, I’m impressed. I’m gonna go out right now and find a Dark Space…”

Before I could finish, Cinema had turned my chair around and climbed up on my lap, straddling me with her legs and trying to kiss me.

“Don’t go yet,” she whispered, “I want you to take me. Right here, right now.”

I pushed back on her and said, “Cinema, what are you doing? You’re fifteen!”

She leaned back with her arms around my neck and said, “It’s okay, the age of consent was lowered at the turn of the century to fourteen in order to encourage population growth.

Besides, I’m a mature woman.”

I stood up from the chair with her still straddling me, turned and tossed her off of me onto her bed. I’ve done some pretty shitty things and I’m no saint, but I’m definitely not a pedophile, though I suppose this would be more ephebophilia since she’s post pubescent, but still. Fuck that! I don’t care how they do things in the future, that just ain’t my style.

I stood back and watched the shock on her face from my rejection turn into a smile. She lifted one knee up and traced her hands along her thighs, raising her black and red tutu up slightly.

I threw my hands up and put them behind my head while shaking it and looking off in the other direction. I said, “I’m out,” grabbed the sequencer, turned around and walked right out of her dorm, shutting the door behind me.

“Guy, wait!” she yelled as the door slammed.

Once I hit the staircase, I took off running out of there while clamping the Bracer back onto my arm. I ran down the street into the night, ensuring she couldn’t pursue me. After a few minutes, I was able to locate a nearby Dark Space and went to it but didn’t enter immediately. I stood there for a moment with the display up on the Bracer. Where was I to go? After contemplating my next move for a moment, I sighed a deep breath and made a decision. I entered the year 2226 into the Sequencer display and walked into the Dark Space.

About one hour later, I found myself at the doorstep of an apartment I had not been to but was sure this was the right choice. I gave the door a knock and waited. A moment later the door was answered by a now twenty one year old Cinema. Not much had changed about her physically but the last bit of childhood immaturity had finally been washed away.

She answered the door and said, “Hello?...Oh Goddammit. Now that is fucked up!”

She shuffled away from the door allowing me to walk in before continuing on, “Seriously? Really Guy? Really? You storm off out of my dorm without saying where you’re going and then make me wait six goddamn years before showing up!”

“I’m sorry, it’s just, you gotta understand that what was going on was not right for me,” I implored, “I’m sorry! It was the only thing I could think of. I at least had to close the gap on our ages a little. Please forgive me for just leaving like that.”

She stood there angrily with her arms crossed, looking to one side like she was pissed. Then with one second fading to the next she lunged towards me and resumed what she had attempted before all those years ago but had only been about ninety minutes for me. This time, I reciprocated and with our throws of passion we damn near destroyed her apartment making our way to the first unobstructed flat surface we could find.

The following day, after we had gathered ourselves, she initiated a serious conversation.

“So have you decided what you’re going to do yet?” “About what?” I asked.

“About this organization that’s after you,” she reminded me.

“Oh,” I said, “I really don’t know what to do. I don’t even fully know what I’m up against.

They know way more about this stuff than I do, and I was just meant to be their lackey.”

“Well, if you let me look at the Sequencer again, I could probably build another one. Then at least you have another option. Maybe you could use it to throw off their trail. Or I could use it to go with you.”

I looked at her and asked, “What have you been up to these past six years?”

She said, “Well, I finished up my courses and became the youngest person to ever teach at Appalachian. Working on your Bracer gave me all kinds of ideas about how time and space operate, so I did my dissertation on some theories I had about it.”

“You what?” I asked, as I suddenly remembered what Tet had told me about how he combined his own ideas with an anonymous writers' ideas on the theory of time and space.

“Yea. It gave me tons of ideas. I’d have never come up with them had I not met you.

Well, maybe I would’ve but not at fifteen.”

“Hold on,” I halted her so I could think, as it had just hit me…Cinema was the one who created time travel and Tet somehow stole the ideas from her. But this is a different future than his Alpha origin. I wouldn’t have been there for that. So that means that Cinema wrote her dissertation at a later point than she did in this time lane.

“Cinema, what happens after you write a dissertation?”

“Well, a committee goes over it and if they like what they see, you get to graduate,” she explained.

“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean, where did the paper you submitted end up?”

She started to follow what I was saying and said, “It gets archived at the university.”

This all started to make sense now. This is why the Command Center was located in the Appalachian Mountains. Because it’s the closest large Dark Space to the university. Tet must have attended that school at one point. I shared that thought with Cinema and she agreed.

“Wait,” she added, “what did you say this guy's name was that was running the show?”

“Tet is the only name he’s given me and all his people call him that. No first name.”

Her eyes lit up and she shouted, “There’s a nineteen year old kid in the physics class I teach named John Tet! How old did you say he was when you met him?”

“He looks like he’s about fifty,” I answered loudly.

“2226, 2230,...” Cinema murmured under her breath, “That’s it! It has to be the same guy. If I wrote my dissertation or a paper similar to it and it was enough for him to go off of, he could probably have created the device in his early forties and definitely be the age you met him by that time.”

“What are the chances he’s already read your dissertation?” I asked.

“Certainly, it’s not uncommon at all for students to read their professors' papers. Why do you ask? It should have no effect on your timeline.”

“Because if he’s ready to build the Sequencer now instead ten years into the future, couldn’t that destroy me?!” I suggested.

Cinema looked at me with pity and replied, “What? No, why would you think that?”

Confused, I told her about how Tet and Brittany explained that if you traveled past the point of the device's creation it could land you in oblivion. And how they weren’t sure what would happen if you traveled before that time and reached the zero point of its construction. She gargled out a laugh and said, “That wouldn’t happen.” “Why not?” I asked.

“Because it doesn’t matter what’s going on in another time lane. You’re still you and it wouldn’t change a thing. No different than if you traveled back and killed your grandfather. You’d only be preventing another you being born. You’d still exist and be standing there. You might not be able to travel past the invention of the device, but Tet probably just tells agents not to visit the time near it because he doesn’t want them to see what he’s got going on in the future.”

We both looked at each other and without saying anything further, we both got dressed. We knew we had to at the very least see what, if anything, Tet was up to at this stage of life. Cinema took me to the dorm he was living in. We waited in her car to see him leave. It was strange seeing a late teenaged version of the man who sent me all over time itself. When the coast was clear, I went in. Cinema said she would wait outside to see if he was coming and try to stop him from going up if I wasn’t back yet.

I went up to his dorm, dodging the other students. I used an old trick of the trade to get his door open. Centuries later and they're still not using any better locks on these dorm rooms. Once inside, I quietly and carefully started going through his stuff. He had a lot of books and paperwork. There was tons of stuff related to performance enhancing drugs and a detailed history of breakthrough studies concerning them.

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I was as careful as I could be to not disturb anything enough for him to notice that I had been there. But I moved as quickly as possible. I stopped for a moment to look around the room and I saw a peculiar picture on the wall. There was some kind of digital picture frame with a picture of the young Tet and his arm around a familiar face. It was the dark haired vixen I saw at the command center the day I left to visit Grady! Even more alarming was the noticeable resemblance in appearance between her and the young Tet. They could’ve been siblings.

I didn’t have time to dwell on the new discovery I had made, so I went back to snooping. After a short time, I came across a collection of copies of newspaper clippings that related to things I had done back in the past. This must be when he started studying me. He even had the records of my abandoned car being salvaged on the side of the road and the death certificate that was printed after I destroyed my apartment! Tet had told me he knew a lot about me, but he never mentioned anything about how he was aware of my past identity.

That’s when I found what must have been the single most horrifying discovery I had ever made since my journey began. The immense amount of dread that washed over me upon this next revelation cannot be put into words. I found an extensive collection of information on the dig site I had helped uncover in the Red Sea. I then remembered the name of the mummy…Amrah Anucktet. Tet…

What the hell was going on here? The image flashed in my mind of that horrible monster killing poor Harry down in those tunnels and then turning its sights on me.

‘Raawwwrr!!’ the sound echoed in my brain.

But how could this be? Was Tet, this kid from the future who grew into a sour ole government agent somehow also an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh? Was he even a government agent? I had more questions leaving Tet’s dorm than I did going in. Before leaving, there was one more thing that caught my eye. A notebook titled, ‘Secrets to immortality’. I was then reminded of Ken, just before he died after our battle. He warned me of Tet’s research and implored me to destroy his computer archives. That must have been a collection of the research he was sending agents to collect. Secret’s of immortality, and this was the beginning of that collection.

I looked out the window and saw Cinema walking away from her hover car and towards the building. That must mean only one thing. Tet was back and she was trying to stop him from finding me. I knew I could destroy this Tet now but it wouldn’t affect the one seeking me. This Tet had no clue who I was aside from the stories he read about me and technically he hadn’t done anything wrong yet. If I were to attack him now and failed, that could potentially cause two different Tet’s trying to seek me out. But if I snuck out of there and he didn't have a clue I came to visit, he would just go on to another timeline unrelated to the ones I’ve been a part of. These were the exact kind of paradoxes Brittany warned about.

I went with the second option and snuck out of the building. On my way out, I could see Cinema playing defense against a grocery bag carrying teenaged Tet.

“So, John. What are you up to later?” she asked him.

“I’m just gonna hang out here at my dorm and go over some notes. Was there something you wanted, Professor Zang?” he responded.

She tried to not draw attention by looking over his shoulder at me as I came down the stairs by saying, “Please, call me Cinema. We’re not in class and I think it’s perfectly fine for us to be more personable with each other.”

“You do?” he said, as he gulped.

“Yeah, I’m totally into…breaking the ethics of student teacher relationships,” she tried to say with a straight face.

At that point, I had slipped by them and took off in the opposite direction.

“So…umm…were you wanting to maybe come upstairs with…umm…” Tet said nervously.

“Nah, you know maybe we should keep the ethics intact okay, good talk,” she said once she realized I was gone and returned to her car to come get me.

“Umm, yeah,” Young Tet said, half relieved as he made his way back upstairs.

Back at Cinema’s apartment, I explained all of my findings. With her help we deduced that in Tet’s Alpha time lane, he had created the Sequencer, traveled back into ancient times, became a king and was ultimately buried in that tomb until Dr. Tambora discovered him. When another Tet in the future somehow learned of this, he must’ve gone out of his way to try and find a way to cheat death. Myself and the other agents were gathered to execute all the necessary research for him to achieve this.

“Let me see the Sequencer again,” she insisted.

“Sure, what for?” I asked.

“You said Tet’s assistant told you that data is collected and stored in the Bracer to be brought back to their main computer. There must be some kind of back door to the device where we can see what’s been collected so far. I’m sure I can hack into it.”

Cinema took the device and connected it to her computer. She typed away furiously in an attempt to get into the Sequencers archives. Surely it would have traces on it of what the agents had been collecting. She ran a decoder program to try and decipher a five letter password. One by one it keyed in each of the matching letters before it found a match...

‘NEFFY’

A data bank opened up on the computer screen.

“Look!” she pointed out, “this is a list of all the agents travel logs and data collections. It’s a huge list, so we can’t possibly go through it all but maybe something will stick out.” The screen read as follows…

[Agent Aaron]

[Agent Alan]

[Agent Albert]

[Agent Alex]

[Agent Alexander] (X)

[Agent Aurora]

[Agent Brittany]

[Agent Blake]

[Agent Bobby]

[Agent Caroline] (X)

[Agent Chris]

[Agent Christian]

[Agent Corey]

[Agent Daniel]

[Agent Darrell]

[Agent Elizabeth]

[Agent Frankie] [Agent Garrett]

[Agent Gregory]

[Agent Guy]

[Agent Jacob]

[Agent Jade]

{Agent Jen}

[Agent Jeremy] (X

[Agent Joseph]

[Agent Joshua]

[Agent Kade]

[Agent Ken] (X)

[Agent Louis] (X)

[Agent Mark]

[Agent Mason]

[Agent Matthew]

[Agent Miles]

[Agent Milo]

[Agent Moses] (X)

[Agent Nancy]

[Agent Ned]

[Agent Nefratara]

[Agent Nola] (X)

[Agent Porche]

[Agent Phil] (X)

[Agent Ralf]

[Agent Rembrandt]

[Agent Ron]

[Agent Samuel] [Agent Scott]

[Agent Stewart]

[Agent Steve]

[Agent Travis]

[Agent Terry]

[Agent Trent]

[Agent Waldo]

[Agent Winston] (X)

Right away, I assumed that the Xs were next to names of agents that were eliminated. I saw Ken’s name so I had Cinema click on that. In a cursory look, nothing stood out. Everything lined up with what Tet had told me Ken had done. But further back in his log we could see that he had gathered info for Brittany under a task called ‘Project Omni’.

“Go back and click on Agent Brittany. She’s one of Tet’s top aides. I’m sure we can find something outside of what we already know,” I instructed.

Cinema clicked on Brittany’s name and we could see all the files she was associated with. It basically encompassed everything in the organization. We found ‘Project Omni’ and clicked on it. What we found made a lot of sense. In addition to the performance enhancers and life extension technology Tet was seeking, he had been researching a way to combine the consciousness of every version of himself into one. The young Tet that had been tipped off in the future about me, the old Tet that conquered the ancient world, and god knows how many Tet’s from other timelines in between. He was becoming Omni-Tet.

We could only come to one conclusion after this. We had to go back to my Alpha lane's origin point, where I had just left Tet, telling him I would think about continuing working for him. Then we had to try to get the surprise jump on him and his team so we could destroy those files. It’s the only way we could ensure that Tet would leave me alone and stop whatever diabolical plans he had for the future of my world.

Cinema asked to go with me. She said if she had two weeks’ time she could build a replica Sequence Bracer based off of mine and travel back with me. I told her I was fine with that, but she needed a gun and some proper training before she could accompany me. It was almost a sure-fire thing that we would run into resistance from Tet’s agents. Either here or back in 1994. She agreed, and using a 3D printer, she made herself a replica of an FN 509 pistol. A gun developed in the year 2015 but could feed ammo easily found back in 1994 if needed.

“Let’s train in the Metaverse,” she suggested.

“The what?” I replied, wide eyed.

“The Metaverse. It’s a virtual playground where you can do all kinds of stuff that you can’t easily do in the real world.”

“I’m still not following.”

“A video game?” she reiterated, having to simplify things down for my archaic mind.

“Video game? Like Asteroids or Mario Brothers? I don’t see how that’s gonna help us pull this sort of thing off.”

“Ugh,” she said, “For Darwin's sake, I’ll just show you.”

She took me into the living room and opened up a cabinet. There was a red and blue headset that each looked like a set of those big headphones from the 1970s. But they had a visor that dropped over your eyes that made you look like a combination of Geordi from Star Trek and Macho Man Randy Savage. She explained that when you put them on, a binaural beat would come from each side and put you into a trance. It would then allow for your subconscious to upload into the virtual world. Seemed pretty high tech, but she swore they’d been around awhile. I’m not sure when exactly Radioshack started carrying them.

When we jacked into the Metaverse, we first appeared in a room that seemed to go on infinitely with a neon green grid covering the walls, ceiling, and floor. I looked down and was wearing a skintight blue rubber suit that correlated to my headset. Cinema appeared next to me. She was also wearing a skintight form fitting suit, hers was red, correlating to her headset. And it fit her quite well if I do say so myself.

“Alright, we’re in. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

“No, this is quite comfortable actually,” I noted.

“This is just the lobby. I’m gonna cue us into a scenario that will simulate the 20th century better. Since I’m going with you to the 1990s, it’s best I get a feel for what things will be like.”

A few moments passed and a bright light slowly enveloped us. The next thing I knew, I was sitting at a desk wearing a 3-piece suit and a fedora. Everything around me had a grayscale appearance. Like I was in some kind of black and white tv show.

Suddenly, the door to…my office…opened and a guy with suspenders busts in biting down on a cigar. In the most ridiculous sounding accent he said, “Hey chief, there’s a dame here that wants to see ya.”

“Who the fuck are you?” I asked.

“Who the fuck am I? Who the fuck are you wise guy?!” he shouted back at me, still gritting his teeth on the cigar.

I got up and followed him to the lobby. There was Cinema, dressed in a form fitting hourglass suit with a matching hat.

“What the hell’s going on?” I insisted.

“Shh, play along. This is the only way I’ll learn to fit in when I travel back with you,” she whispered.

The guy with the cigar ran to the window and looked out. He reached for his revolver and said, “Holy smokes! It’s Suge Knight and his gang. Hit the deck.”

The glass shattered from gunshots pouring in. Cinema and I took cover as the other man started firing back. Cinema pulled a pistol out from her purse and signaled me to grab mine from my holster. We crept up to the window with our new partner and I looked outside. The street was full of Bloods and Crips having a shootout with one another. Bullets were flying into the office around us and we did our best to stay covered. The guy with the cigar ran back into the other room.

“Please explain what’s going on?” I continually insisted.

“The city’s divided between red and blue areas. Your office is situated on the blue side. I came from the red side to get your help and the Bloods followed me here. The Crips are doing their best to hold them off.”

Just then, the man returned with a tommy gun in hand, still biting down on his cigar and said, “Let’s see how they like the ole Chicago typewriter.”

He started firing relentlessly out the window while laughing hysterically.

Cinema said, “Come on, now’s our chance.”

I followed her out the back door into the alley. There was a red pickup truck with a lift kit sitting outback.

“Let’s take your car,” she said, as she pointed at the truck.

“Why on earth would that be my car?” I asked, holding my hands out in reference to the private eye suit I was wearing.

“I thought all men in the 1990s had pickup trucks?” she replied, confused.

We didn’t have time to argue. The two of us got up into the truck and started driving away.

“Okay, where are we going?”

“Well, I figured since this Tet guy was such a nasty threat, I’d run a scenario that put us up against the most dangerous adversary the world had known from your time period. Follow the GPS.”

I looked down and saw an IBM monitor on the dash underneath the tape deck. I followed the little icon on the screen that led us to our destination. When we arrived, I parked the truck and looked up out the windshield.

“Umm, Cinema, are you sure this is the right place?”

“Yeah, this is it,” she said, with viciousness in her voice.

Dead ahead was an all too familiar structure…Trump Tower.

“Okay, let's hang on a minute. None of this is at all like what we’ll be doing when we travel back. I’m not even sure if an accurate scenario would help us train. You need time practicing with an actual trigger, to build up some muscle memory. Then there’s the wind factor, reload time, recoil…”

She started to look upset. I knew she was just trying to help, but there’s no way I was gonna be able to teach her anything of value in this fantasy world.

“Look, can we just go back and train in the real world?” I suggested.

Cinema nodded and choked back a tear. We exited the Metaverse and I consoled her. I told her I appreciated what she tried to do but it would be much better to do things my way. She agreed and we started training the old fashioned way immediately.