Francis Jackson had conquered the world successfully, but that morning when he looked out of the office window he saw nothing he had planned for. The world was frozen. Birds hung in the sky, rain drops lay half fallen into puddles like shaped glass. He stood up, stunned, crossing to the door. With relief, he found he could open it. Whatever was holding things static was not affecting his power to move objects at least. Halfway down the hall his secretary stood frozen, one foot lifted and balance impossibly suspended in the middle of a step. His greeting died in his throat. She was not even breathing.

He pressed the lift button but it would not light up. After a moment, when there was no sound of the lift responding, he turned and went for the stairs. He needed to see how far this spread. In reception, the television had frozen on one channel, and outside the front doors the world was absolutely still. He breathed an irritated sigh, trying not to panic. After all, this was probably just a side-effect of his invention. It would be easily fixed, since he had all the time in the world. He laughed, the noise loud in the complete silence of the hall, and began to walk up the stairs. His private lab was on the top floor, but just for once he could take time to savour what he owned.

The technology company had been middling, nothing special before he took it over, but with all the connectivity built-in and the huge manufacturing network it headed it was the perfect base of operations. He had not even planned on it, but after he removed the former owner from history and life, it had been an unexpected windfall. He looked at the people scattered across the floor in various poses, all busy in the open plan office. All his. He had to fix whatever had gone wrong. He had come far too far to fail now.

From somewhere across the floor he heard a sheaf of paper drop. Jackson stiffened, suddenly alert. He walked quietly towards the noise, trying to see what could still be moving in this silent, static, world. He stopped. In the sunlight that shone through the window a shadow was moving in one of the cubicles. As it froze again he peered in.

A man was sitting behind the desk, static and unmoving. A woman was leaning over the desk towards him, equally still. As Jackson watched she reached out with a pencil, prodding the seated figure. The man did not move. Jackson coughed.

The woman turned with a shriek, hand raised to her neck in shock. She was dressed like a secretary, pencil skirt, high collar blouse, minimal make-up, and well into her forties. He would want someone more attractive, personally.

"Mr Jackson?" she asked, breathing fast from the shock. "You made me jump. Do you know what's happened?"

"The world seems to be frozen," he replied, enjoying the chance to be in control. She blinked at him. "Some kind of temporal stasis."

"Can you fix it?" Her voice was quiet, breathy and awestruck.

"Let's see. Why don't you come with me?" She nodded, falling obediently into place behind him. He wondered for a moment why she had not been affected by the freeze. She looked familiar, probably one of the old staff he had inherited and not bothered to upgrade. Perhaps her lack of exposure to the ray had protected her. Once the time freeze was corrected he would have to call her into one of his special meetings, replacing her with various other time line possibilities until he found one more pleasing. Just because he had managed to make most of the world the way he wanted it did not mean he could not make a few tweaks here and there.

She stopped short at the door to his private laboratory on the fifth floor, and impatiently he took her arm and hustled her in. With the electronics disabled, he'd need a second pair of hands to work the double-key lock.

"Here. Take this and turn it on three." He handed her a key, watching as she slid it into the key lock on the other side of the door. "Ready? One Two Three." The locks clicked and he pushed the door open, walking across the laboratory and ignoring the experiments in their frozen states around him. The device was still there, locked in its hidden container under the lab bench. He hauled it out, placing the heavy metal device on the bench and started to assemble it. The secretary stared from behind him.

"That device can solve this?" she ventured quietly. It was almost complete in front of him, a large clumsy gun, the most powerful weapon in the world.

"Yes," he said, and some devilment made him add: "it caused it, after all."

"This device caused all this?" she asked, meek and appalled. The look on her face was gratifying. Why not boast a little, he thought. He so rarely got to talk about his work, his greatest achievement, and he would just erase her when time restarted. If that did not work, he had a backup option in a pocket.

"Yeah, sweetie. This little device did all of it. Made me the most powerful man in the world. It lets me make sure that everything goes just the way I need. If someone stands in my way, I can simply erase them until there's someone more malleable in their position. It's done everything it's supposed to." He began to remove the control panel screws. "Everything except for the time freeze."

"No. For that, Mr Jackson, you can blame me." There was steel in her tone that wasn't there a second ago. He turned, to find her staring at him with an expression as cold as ice. "Susan Chapman, Mr Jackson, part-owner of Killgrace Industries, whose building this was originally."

"You can't remember that. I changed the time line, remade the world."

"Mr Jackson, I am well aware of your offences. You will find my reality less flexible than that of the people you killed."

"I didn't kill anyone."

"They existed. Now they do not. This is because of your actions."

"They do exist, just as different versions of them."

"Mr Jackson, your gun removes its target entirely from reality. Because reality sometimes puts someone else in their job, with a different name, personality and life outside their work, it does not mean that the substitute is the same person. Instead they are the person who would have got the job if the original had not existed. Many of the people you 'removed' died in childhood in your new world." She looked at the device with scorn.

"Then there's an easy way to end the time freeze. Good bye." He flicked the power on, hoiking the device to his shoulder in one smooth movement, and fired. The beam hit her. She raised an eyebrow, completely unfazed.

"That was pointless. Your ray gun is designed to remove the origin points of people in this universe, not those who originate outside it." She looked at the gun and himself with an equal measure of contempt, as he lowered the device slowly. "Set to only affect organics. That, at least, was sensible of you, Mr Jackson."

With the device resting on the bench, his hands were free. In desperation he reached into his pocket for his fallback, pulling out the small pistol and firing.

The bullet slowed, freezing and hanging in time. He tried to pull the trigger again, but he could not move his hand. He could not even feel his hand. He tried to let go of the gun, but the numbness was creeping up his arm. Then time stopped for Jackson.

"I could repair your device and use it to erase you, but timelines don't recover well from such snarls," she said, even though he could not hear her. She tutted, tapping her fingers on the desk as she looked the device over. Pulling a screwdriver out of her pocket, she detached the control panel and delved into the wires beyond. The operation logs of the device were quickly accessed. "What you have created is not a tree of time lines, it is an ivy mass that parasites off it. After a certain point with ivy it becomes self-sustaining. Cutting the main stem is not enough, you need to cut strategic places to stop it growing back."

Assessing the major uses of his device she looked for the actions which had made the largest changes. It took her a while, but she isolated four, and the device's own creation date. Satisfied she had the data she needed, she stood up and faced Jackson. He could not hear her words now, but when time restarted he would – for that blink of an eye when this world still existed.

This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

"One of the people you erased was Mr. Killgrace. He may be irritating, but he is my colleague in the field. His removal destabilised several galactic sectors, and a quarter of a million years of history. And I don't particularly want to have to single-handedly repair and relive every single incident we have ever been involved with.

"You have made a lot of work for me, Mr Jackson. The time freeze I have implemented extends to most of this quadrant, fading towards the edges to prevent a paradox rupture. Once I release it, everything in it will run at accelerated rate until it catches up. Before I release it, I need to be somewhere outside it, unless I wish this version of me to cease to exist.

"You however will remain here to share the fate of the world you created. It will be a rather lonely place, Mr Jackson, since this false world is where I am going to get the extra time I need to put the main universe back on track. Good bye."

#

She walked down the stairs to the basement. Opening doors was simple, but making lifts work for her in a time freeze would take far too much concentration. At the foot of the stairs the cellar was still there and, with luck, behind the locked doors so was their laboratory. It was fortunate that Jackson's changes had made the locks switch to conventional technology when he erased Killgrace. With a sigh, she went to work with a nail file, and the door swung open. Sometimes low tech solutions were the best. She could never have broken through their original, DNA-encoded locks.

The Transport Capsule was still there, where she had built it all those years ago, untouched and waiting. Its shields were more than a match for this type of event. The rest of the laboratory flickered hazily in misty half-existence, torn between her current reality and the erased work of her vanished partner. She had stepped in to stop Jackson just in time, or everything they had built would be gone.

Susan looked across the bench for the small pack of copper mirrors, used for their industrial laser work. They were fading in and out, ghostly and translucent until her hand closed on them and pulled them back into reality. She slipped them into a pocket. Ten, so she would have a few spare. Then she entered the Transport Capsule.

She had accessed the engine core a hundred times for maintenance. It was easy enough to open the engine shields, watch the motor rotating in its housing, and then timing the movement precisely, reach inside. Her hand closed on the bronze rod that stood as analogue for the engine, and with a quick yank she removed it. She stood up, taking a breath, and focused on the engine rod, attuning it to the ring. The strange thing about infinite mass objects was that they could be so light when most of their mass was elsewhere and half of it did not exist yet. Holding the engine core in one hand, signet ring gleaming on the other, she stepped into another time.

The stadium was packed, jubilant people taking their seats ready for the game. The silence was odd in such a throng, and she had to push her way through the frozen crowd, packed shoulder to shoulder at the entrances. Jumping the stiles she walked towards a door marked "Staff only". The security door could have been a problem, but the guard's keycard was on his belt and she swiped it for access. Returning it, she felt quietly grateful that she would not have to come back this way, and climbed towards the roof. According to the logs Jackson had vanished a helicopter, then two security guards who tried to stop him, then hit the VIP box and erased those inside, who were many of his remaining competition. She looked at the eclectic guest list and wondered if he had invited them himself. By this point in time he had had the power.

There he was, kneeling in the roof girders, bracing the gun against a joist for greater stability. She picked her way across the girders, careful of the long drop, and unscrewed the lens of the device. Trying not to look down at the drop below, she slid the copper mirror inside, and reattached the lens. In a nanosecond he would pull the trigger and the splash-back would erase both man and machine. All the timelines he had changed from this point would vanish.

Taking a breath, grateful she did not have to find a way out of this stadium or back through the rafters, she stepped through time and space. Her feet hit the pavement a month earlier and she swayed from vertigo and relief as her balance came back. Jackson was easy to find, leaning out of his moving car, the gun already aimed at the police headquarters, specifically the two investigating him. The area effect would hit most of the building. The knock-on effect would be international. Stepping round the solid water splashed up from a puddle under the wheels, she placed her second mirror. At least Jackson had confined his activities to one geographic area. Trying to find her way to Paris, Tokyo or Australia in a time-frozen world would be difficult.

The next point: the G8 summit the year before. She swallowed. He had simply erased politicians until he got the combination who did what he wanted. Before that he had casually erased people until he found the combination that got him access to the summit. She stopped for a moment considering the death toll. Jackson might have claimed he was just turning them into someone else, but she suspected he had not actually cared. Susan ignored the summit. The security would be high, and completely ineffective, and she needed to catch this one at the start of the chain, not the end.

Ignoring the motorcade she walked into a sleepy suburb, walking down the road passed a milkman frozen in the act of dropping a milk bottle. She could not blame him. The scene in front of him, through a window, would have made her drop things if she had not been expecting it. The gun had already fired, the woman on the sofa cowering back as a pulse of energy rolled and coiled in slow motion towards her, and Jackson stood there with the most demented grin Susan had ever seen. Irritated at herself for the misjudgement, she took the pole in both hands, giving it a sharp half-turn against the ring.

Time reversed. The milk bottle leapt back into the milkman's hand and his float rolled back two driveways. The light beam from the gun withdrew and its eerie radiance faded. The woman half rose, floating oddly halfway through falling onto the couch, and Jackson blurred back and stilled on the point of pulling the trigger. Susan walked through the front door, which was ajar, and fitted her third mirror.

The fourth one would be harder. She hesitated a moment, and then stepped through time again, to the building she had just left. The sign outside read Killgrace, not Jackson. It took her a moment to control herself, and then, face professional once more, she walked into the car park. Robert and Charlie were sharing a cigarette outside, the smoke frozen in mid rise as their breath steamed in the cold. Both were turning, reacting too slowly as Jackson aimed. Even augmented reflexes had their limits. She looked at the gun, checking the settings. He had taken the whole building in one shot, as he had tried with the police. Susan carefully did not think about what that meant for the people she knew who worked there. Losing her temper would not help to get them back. She pulled out the mirror, sliding it inside the gun in front of the lens. Only one more to go. It was as well. The Capsule core was beginning to run down.

Stepping back into another reality, she looked round sadly. It was not a nice place, she saw. Looking out through the broken garage window, she could see a run-down estate. Jackson was bent over a machine, a cruder version of the time gun. On a chair opposite a small boy sat nervously. Susan looked at the open door beyond, the fingers curled round it, and peeked into the future. As the weapon fired, the boy's mother would dive in to save him. They would both be hit.

Jackson had made no attempt to restore them. He had not even grieved. How could he, she thought, when he did not even remember they had existed? She looked at him, wondering if he had even realised what he had done to himself with each use of the weapon. In a moment of mercy, she moved the machine slightly before she fitted the final mirror.

Then she left, stepping backwards outside time, following the pull of the engine core she held back to the Transport Capsule. Sealing the door, she called up a display of the quadrant, the frozen stars a strange static patch on the ever-expanding space. With the feeling of putting down a heavy weight, she released the freeze. There was a rushing sound and a blur of lights as stars moved, appearing to accelerate into their rightful places, before they slowed into their familiar cosmic paths. She knew it was an illusion. As time itself moved, their velocity never changed, but her mind could interpret it no other way. As the world set itself to rights she gave it a few moments longer, from her point of view, and let herself fall back into the flow of her own reality.

She was still inside the Transport Capsule, and as she heard movement she peeked outside. The sign on the wall read Killgrace Industries. Relaxing, she focused, using the signet to enhance her own abilities as she performed a final check. Everything was back in place, the grating sense of wrongness removed and time progressed once more.

Quickly she replaced the bronze pole in its case, watching to make sure it resumed its steady constant rotation. Then, hearing Cet moving outside, she pulled the signet ring off, placing it in the shielded box, and reached under the wall controls to secure it in the hidden compartment she had built. There were some things she did not wish to explain to her partner. As she closed the compartment over it, the Capsule door opened.

"There is an anomaly in my internal chronometer," her colleague said, still in human guise. No greeting, no confusion. He, at least, was back to normal. Susan smiled and sat down on the bench.

"A human with a temporal device started re-writing the world to suit himself. I have taken care of it."

"Where is he?" There was a harsh deadliness to the tone that reminded her why she handled matters like this, instead of leaving them to Cet.

"One version is enjoying a day in the park with his family. We may want to hire him. The other, from the false timelines, is watching." She smiled coldly. "And he will continue to watch from outside time until the last of the timelines that he created can no longer sustain his existence. It will take a year or so chronologically." There was a pause.

"How did you defeat him?" Cet asked eventually. It seemed there were some questions even he did not want to ask.

"I was fortunate. When he attempted to erase me I reflected the beam, erasing his machine," she said. She did not mention doing it five times, or freezing time for the world. The alien gave her a suspicious glare but she said nothing more. After all, she thought, a woman should have some secrets.

# End #