Confusion

Columbus Small awoke all violent with his face on industrial carpet and after a bad dry gasp began coughing. Mushroom clouds of chowder grey soot set in motion by his desperate confused exhalations arose around him as he convulsed; his thirsty eyes followed to take in his surroundings between spasms. Above him a mournful alarm cried.

Office. An office. He was in an office. Greys, whites, and beiges permeated through the smoke.

Where there’s smoke there’s...

He pulled his button-up white (but very dirty) shirt up to cover his mouth, aiming to protect his tender lungs from further damage, and, digging his fingernails into the tight dust-covered knots of the carpet, hoisted himself to his feet and looked around.

He had never been here before, but he recognized it for what it was, even though it was completely trashed. A Place to Conduct Business in Person, clearly. They had looked more or less the same for a very long time. From the examples of technology spread about Columbus dated the place to be either (very) late 1900s or (very) early 2000s, in a small window of time when the world had just stumbled onto some very exciting stuff but wasn’t quite sure yet what to do with it.

… Fire

Focus

He stood between two cubicles of many in a large room. The floor was littered with paper, office supplies, old telephones (current telephones), and foam squares rattled loose from the grid on the ceiling. Everything was covered in dust. To his left was a wall of windows, which he moved toward, careful not to trip over the debris. As he approached he saw some of the window panes had no glass, but he did note the shards along the wall and was careful to avoid these as well.

He was very high above a city. It only took him a moment to recognize New York. There was an eerie still uneasiness he couldn’t quite put his finger on, but bringing his gaze down closer to his building he saw the streets were lined with people seemingly looking right back up at him. He leaned out the window and peered down at the swarming crowds, lost, organizing facts and observations with his efficient, science-inclined mind. A mind he almost lost seconds later when a dark object fell heavily past, only a few feet from him. He strained to get a good look as it fell away and was overcome with a sickening coldness when he realized what it was.

My God that’s a person.

Up!

He gripped the frame of the broken window and twisted his body to get a good view of the floors above him. He saw fire. An enormous inferno about fifteen storeys up which he could not see beyond. He felt the heat on his face, it hurt to look at, but he could not avert his eyes. This proved to be fortunate when, at that moment, several large chunks of concrete came falling through the flames. Columbus swung himself back inside just as the rubble came bounding down the side of the building, his heart racing.

He knew where he was. The genesis of so many evil things that would someday poison the world could be traced back to this infamous day. It was taught to school children. It was the World Trade Center.

This is sick. Fucked up. Pretty fitting, I guess, eh Jakobi? Is this how it’s going to be?

His attention to the piercing wail of the alarm was renewed unwelcome, and he resolved to get moving. He didn’t know how much time he had, but it was understood to be: not very much. At this thought he happened to glance over at an old-style analog clock stubbornly hanging askew on the wall. If the thing was accurate it was apparently just shy of 9:45 in the morning.

He turned and surveyed the room. Where is it? Jakobi had provided him with the four-dimensional coordinates that had landed him in this room, but Columbus thought it unlikely that he would hide the prize in the same area. But maybe he had, exactly because it would be an unexpected move. He glanced back at the clock that was so oblivious to its advancing destruction. Time was slipping away.

Shit, he thought.

“Shit!” he said out loud. It was more satisfying than the thought. “Fuck it!” He added, and grabbed the nearest file cabinet, flinging it open. Nothing in either drawer, just clean and neatly organized papers. It was surprisingly refreshing to see their order in the surrounding chaos. A fleeting moment of peace. But there was no time to admire aesthetics. He scrambled to the adjacent desk and opened everything that was capable of opening. Fruitless. He moved on to the next cubicle and rummaged through. Then the next. Then the next.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

He found a thin scarf, however, in a drawer untouched by the dust. He wrapped it around his mouth to filter the filthy air in lieu of his shirt, which, despite his best efforts to keep it hooked up with his sweat-drenched nose kept slipping. The scarf smelled strongly of perfume. It had probably been used only hours before by its rightful owner, snatched up on her way out the door for what she assumed would be another dull workday.

Fucking focus.

The thought that it was unlikely to be in this room returned. Acutely aware of the passage of time, Columbus decided to go with his intuition and get the hell out of this office. There was plenty of doomed building to go through. He headed towards the large doors at the end of the room, glancing once again at the clueless clock as he rushed past. He had wasted 10 minutes. At least I found a scarf, he thought, frustrated with himself. He used the surge of self-directed anger to quicken his step as he burst through the doors.

The alarm was far louder in the hallway, slicing at his ears with its wide wail as it ricocheted crazy down the claustrophobic corridor. He adjusted the scarf to cover his ears as he walked, but it did little to filter the noise. Fluorescent flashes haunted the aisle as the lighting failed, and Columbus felt a ludicrous moment of hesitation to continue onward. The airy well-lit office felt safe compared to the ominous terror of the halls, but he checked himself. He was not safe anywhere in this place. There was no hiding, only the mission. Jakobi had concealed a piece of pre-coded time film somewhere close by, and he needed to find it. There was nothing else.

Hand on the wall to guide himself, he strode down the hall, his eyes wide despite the damned smoke. Looking for a way up. He remembered now. Jakobi had not abandoned him to this tormented quest completely in the blind. He had provided a clue: “Up.” Columbus took that at face value. If Jakobi had wanted to kill him for what he had done, he had the chance already, a hundred years in the future. No, he had plans for Columbus. And he dangled clues and hope like a carrot on a string. The two men knew each other well. Columbus was a survivor, and Jakobi contorted that personal strength into a weakness for his own… amusement? Not quite. Something, though.

He passed by several doors on either side until he reached a junction. He trusted his intuition and took a left, and was immediately rewarded with relief as he spotted, halfway down this section of corridor, a pair of reflective silver panels which were fairly obviously doors to an elevator. He felt a momentary wave of confidence and satisfaction that he could navigate through this world so far removed from his own. This satisfaction died heavy in his gut, however, once he tried to operate the adjacent controls; they were unresponsive. He was reminded that the elevators of this time, while matched in principle and purpose, were obviously not the style to which he was accustomed. They were not automated and powered by anti-gravity tech. These were probably the kind that used pulleys located far above. And there was quite a lot of destruction between him and them. He turned away dejected, but caught sight of a diagram on the opposite wall with the words “Fire Safety” and “Evacuation Route” jumping out at him. He scanned it over quickly, there were stairs close by, he had actually walked right past them without noticing. Renewed, he started back down the hall when his heart froze in his chest.

Down the corridor, just before the junction, was an older man in a wheelchair. For a beat, Columbus hoped he hadn’t been sighted. But that was ridiculous. Unless he was blind, the man could see him clearly. As Columbus squinted, he saw to his weird panic that the man was indeed looking straight at him. He actually seemed to be saying something, but all Colombus could hear was the intense howl of the alarms. The old man was wheeling himself weakly towards him. Shaking as he coughed from the acrid smoke. In the flickering spasms of the pale dying lights. The morbidity of the nightmarish scene chilled Columbus to his core.

He cursed and straightened up, preparing for an unpleasant interaction. He had to pass the old man to get to the stairs. There was no time and no real point in attempting to find an alternate route. He furrowed his brow and tightened his lips to reflect his steely resolve and detachment. He had no business with this stranger. The old man was already dead. He strode forward with purpose.

He tried not to look at the man, but he could not help it despite himself. The seconds it took to clear the distance between them stretched out to eternity. He saw first the man’s relief, as he took his hands tiredly from his wheels. He had found someone to push him to safety. A miracle. The spectre of death faded momentarily. Then, confusion, as he recognized Columbus’s body language as being out of place for the dire situation at hand. The calm, purposeful stride had to have thrown him off. At that moment he was wondering “is this strange man not afraid?” Next, worry, followed by panic, as he began to understand that he would not receive this person’s help that he so desperately needed. It had not even occurred to him until that moment, and it hit him like a punch in the face. They were only a few meters apart now, and Columbus did not slow down. It was too much. He closed his eyes as he passed the man. He caught a foul whiff. The poor bastard had almost certainly shit himself. At this proximity his voice could finally be heard over the din: “... followed you! Please, please, I need your help, they forgot about me! Please, sir, hey, what are you…”

He was past. And he hated himself. True, he did not belong here, and the old man’s fate had been sealed long, long ago. He could not alter that. It was not his fault. But it was also not in his nature to ignore someone in need. Someone right in front of him who desperately required his help. He could throw all the logic in the world at it, but it still just wasn’t right.

“You son of a bitch!” The old man was finally angry, and that had apparently bolstered him enough to be heard over the alarms. Columbus Small did not look back. He reached the door to the stairwell and left the man to his destiny.

He launched himself at the ascending stairs two at a time and the thought pervaded that he had no direction. Should he try the next floor up? The next? Farther still? How much time did he have? There was no use in attempting to rack his brain in an effort to recall the timeline of events on the morning of September 11th, 2001, that was not the kind of thing he would have remembered. He had no idea where to even begin looking for the time film. That realization gave him a physical chill underneath the dust-caked sweat.

His eyes widened. The sensation had triggered something in him and he stopped his climb, almost tripping. Another chill, but this time it was born from the profundity of his realization. Columbus became aware that he was overwhelmed with the strange tingle of deja vu, and had been under its spell without realizing it since he arrived.

This in turn generated another weighty understanding on his part. Columbus was not a stranger to this sensation. Precisely the opposite: he hadn’t recognized the feeling of deja vu because he was inured to it. It had been a nuisance more than anything in previous trips to the past, a mental distraction, and had launched much speculation in the early days between him and Jacobi. But the pieces were coming together in his mind now in the stairwell, and in a moment his despondency had turned to hope. He had a powerful tool in his arsenal that he hadn’t expected.

He wondered if Jacobi had foreseen this eventuality when his new tool filled him with terrified apprehension. He had the faintest taste of what was about to happen right as it began: first a low rumble, then some slight vibrations, which grew into a horrifying cacophony within seconds. It was as if two men were screaming into Columbus’s ears at point blank range, and his hands were too busy stabilizing him to protect him from the sound. He gave that up and collapsed to the floor, arms wrapped tightly around his head. He felt the entire building sway side to side, as the walls cracked and plaster powder erupted from the fissures. After an eternity of seconds it was over. Columbus vomited.

Stillness again, but there were sounds. Creaking and cracking, a low permeating bass rumble. Some screams, far away. And Columbus’s unsteady breathing near tears.

Alright, he gathered himself, standing up. That was the first tower. He was short on time. He bounded up the stairs confidently, however, because deep in his mind he had navigation. Looking upward determined, striding, he followed a small sensation deep in the vinyl record grooves of memory in his hippocampus. Seeing a brown paint mark on the wall he recognized somehow, he was bolstered and doubled his pace. He was becoming gripped, not just with an animal instinct for survival, but also with a renewed scientific interest.

He and Jacobi had begun to notice a side effect to their repeated trips fairly early on in the game. A nagging feeling that cropped up from time to time; a sense that they had been there before, whether it was in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Ptolemaic Alexandria or in the front row of a Led Zeppelin concert in 1972. A strong sense of deja vu that affected them, then became lost in the overwhelming excitement of discovery and/or stimulation and forgotten, only to crop up again later in the trip. Deja vu was generally understood by Columbus as a rogue electric impulse in the short term memory portion of the brain. The shock generates a sensation that is not strictly tied to the mechanics of recognition, but is associated with it from experience. Therefore it delivers the strong feeling that one is remembering something, but there is no mental image behind the facade. The significance of the sensation had been elusive to him, he had written it off as a physical side effect; extra electricity left over from the jump, finding its way out. But whether it was the stress of the moment that elicited some out-of-the-box thinking or just the momentousness of the occasion, only now did an explanation reveal itself to his mind. Perhaps it wasn’t deja vu at all, but a memory from the past.

Columbus had ascended four floors when he slowed. He turned the corner to continue his climb when the nagging sensation began to fade. This part of the stairwell had a different color handrail, and it wasn’t familiar to him. He took his hand off it, and instead moved to the door. It read:

78

SKYLOBBY

Taking the handle, he tested it. Unlocked. Entering into another hallway. He left the stairwell.

It was darker on this floor, even the emergency lights were out. And there was no siren. Columbus took a moment to think: he hadn’t actually heard it since the first tower fell. At one end of the hallway there was pale early morning light offered by a wall of windows identical to the ones in the office downstairs, but before them was a tiled room with potted plants lining the wall. Charred potted plants. Everything was burned. Columbus was reminded of a forest fire, but he wasn’t quite sure why. He realized he was standing in water and looked down, something caught his eye and he followed his line of sight to the corner of the room where there was the body of a man, also burned, holding a still trickling emergency hose. Columbus swallowed hard. It seemed he had missed the inferno. Probably a gas line that was severed, but it had either burned itself or been shut off remotely. At any rate, the danger was far from over.

Columbus stood in the room for a moment lost. The scene was truly eerie. Dim light, smoke, police sirens, and the heavy stillness that comes with the presence of a visible corpse in the room. He scanned the room for a mental nudge, but as he did the weight of the moment crept in and he felt the tight pressure of tears in his eyes and nasal passages before he even recognized the need to cry. Putting his hand against the wall he let out a few private sobs, barely present enough to allow a release of tension in his shoulders, as on some level he was clinically deducing paths of action given the evidence. He had always imagined himself the misunderstood, detached clinical type (much like Spock, he liked to think), and on some level he held true to that, consciously allowing the outburst to vent some of the pressure so he could think with optimum clarity. Satisfied that he had done just that, he pushed off the wall and gathered himself, adjusting his stance to match the unflappable figure he imagined himself to be, as men do.

        In that spirit, Columbus reflected. The fleeting mental image of a forest fire had occurred a moment before, and he recognized that to be not borne of a random inclination but meaningful. Again he looked around. The only thing in the room that could potentially trigger something like that were the burnt potted plants lining the window wall. He would start there. Figuring he might as well work his way down the line, he moved to the far left pot. It seemed ordinary enough. For a scorched plant located in a superstructure perched on the doomed fulcrum of disaster and history. He began to dig. The time film itself was small enough, and could easily be concealed in the soil of the small pot. So he dug. Within moments the entire damp dirty contents of the pot had been spilled on the marble tile floor, and Columbus moved to plant two of nine. Same deal, so he kept moving. He was halfway through the soil of plant five when the stairwell door flew open.

        A man in a dirty dark red dress shirt burst into the room where Columbus was enjoying, or at least, appreciating his privacy. He was short, dirty, bloody, and wild eyed. He went through several quick stages of emotion when he saw Columbus, finally settling on somewhere between disbelief and anger.

        “Hey, yo fucko come on man what the hell you doin’ let’s go we gotta go come on we gotta fuckin’ go right now, come on, hey…” Red began as he made a beeline towards Columbus, who was still elbow deep in a potted plant. He pulled a gross soily hand out and held it up in protest to his misguided would-be rescuer.

        “No!,” he began, having no desire to explain himself to this person. “Ah, you go ahead it’s fine, man, really…”

        “”Hey, guy,” the short man expressed intensely, “I don’t know if you’re fuckin’ payin’ attention but we gotta go motherfuckin pronto. We got minutes, pal.” He came close to the protesting Columbus and was saying this absently with his arm outreaching, and his eyes darting around the room. Columbus snatched his extended wrist to get his attention. The short man quickly looked at that, and then ascended to meet the gaze of Columbus. His brown eyes were pink-haloed and desperate.

Columbus looked at him so calmly that it disarmed the short man and said with the confidence of someone who was merely visiting the disaster at hand: “You need to leave right now or you are going to die the most horrible death you can possibly imagine.” He let go of the man’s arm.

Red staggered back and didn’t quite fall on his way back to the stairwell. Then he was gone. Columbus gave him a silent sincere wish of luck, for the hell of it, and moved to the next plant.

It was almost immediate: he had just thrust his hand into the soil when a hard smooth surface met his grasp. He clasped his fist around the foreign object and ripped it from the bed of dirt. His heart raced and his attention became attuned. Already, he had found the way out of the nightmare, and it had not been the fools’ task that he had assumed when thrust into his unenviable position as… competitor? Lab rat? Difficult and disagreeable to say, at the least. With no desire to linger, he loosened his belt and reached into his slacks, feeling for the holster on his thigh which held his “time machine,” for lack of another term. He and Jacobi hadn’t quite decided on an alternative appropriate designation that would be unburdened with the association of two centuries’ worth of science-fiction. It was, however, a fitting term for the small disk-shaped device that allowed for the transportation through the dimension of time, while compensating for the movement of the earth, the solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, the local universe, etc.

Where Columbus came from, the ability to travel backwards into time was attainable, generally speaking. The math belonged to no one specifically, and was available freely. The hardware and transportation vessels were buildable without any special license. But there were two problems. The first, as with many pursuits, was money. Traveling through time absorbed an obscene amount of energy, and someone needed to pay for it, and also the infrastructure prepared to handle the amount of voltage required. The second issue was three-dimensional compensational navigation. Without the complementary and admittedly ingenious programming supplied by the team of Small and Jacobi, one could easily travel back to July 4th, 1776, say, but they might find themselves a few light years away from Independence Hall. These two issues saw to it that the general population had no way of accessing this power, and the experiments made were limited in scope. Anyone brave enough to volunteer for a mission were made to understand that it was a one-way trip, and most certainly a suicide mission. Columbus had developed programs that adjusted for the three-dimensional displacement, however, and that had given him and Jacobi free reign of history. They had not been careless, but they had not been particularly careful.

Columbus took the hard small plastic cylinder he had extracted from the soil and turned it over in his hands. He found the slit on one side that allowed a small protrusion of the time film. Grasping it delicately between his fingernails, he extended it from it’s casing, exposing the full eight inches of its three-quarters inch wide cellophane that provided the coordinates in third and fourth-dimensional space for his next challenge, he supposed. Thankfully, the film itself was free of dirt, so he prepared to feed it into his time machine.

“One down, eh, Small?”

The voice came from behind him. He recognized it and wasn’t surprised, so he turned with a look of appropriate disgust already on his face.

“Jacobi. Checking in? What, you couldn’t just be patient?”

“Why be patient, Small? I can come and go when I please.” He sneered when he said Columbus’s surname, as if it were a term of degradation. He didn’t used to, when they were friendly. But now that he did, Columbus thought wryly that it was ironic to draw attention to their respective heights, as he towered over the diminutive Jacobi.

“Must be nice.” he responded. Jacobi just looked at him, a maddening look of self-satisfaction on his stupid ugly face. Columbus continued:

“Well, fine, I found it.” He held up the strip and his small time travel device. It was designed to look more or less like a large watch in metallic blue, with a matte black wrist strap. Generally, though Columbus found it cumbersome to wear and usually kept it in his thigh-holster or pocket where he could feel its weight instead. “I don’t suppose these coordinates are going to get me home though, are they?”

“Home!” Jacobi laughed mirthlessly. “That’s not… Listen, Small, I think you can forget all about ‘home.’ There is no such place for you and I anymore.” He moved to look out the broken windows down on the city and said more absently “It’s not as easy to go forward in time.” and after a few seconds added “Well, not faster than this anyway.”

Columbus thought. He harbored no aspirations of friendship with Jacobi now, but if he could talk him out of this insane idea of haphazardly throwing Columbus back in time as some sort of misguided punishment, he could at least regain equal ground and deal with Jacobi… somehow. As it was, Columbus was at the mercy of a madman. But still, while Jacobi was right about it not being easy, perhaps not even possible, to travel forward into time with any accuracy, their devices had a “round trip” feature that allowed them to return to the original point from when they left. But it was only good for one jump. And Columbus would have jumped back to his time the second he arrived in the office downstairs except for one snag: Jacobi had encrypted his device before, and without the encryption code, Columbus couldn’t access his origin point.

“Listen, Jacobi. Right now, right at this moment, it is easy. My machine has only made one jump. I still have the coordinates to get us back.”

“Won’t take two.” Jacobi seemed to have lost his buoyant mood. He was still looking out the window. Columbus took advantage of his distraction with a small step towards him.

“Well we could write the code out. It’s long, but, ahh...” He looked around the room as though he would magically spy a pen and paper amongst the burnt wreckage. A tremor shook the one remaining tower. Jacobi momentarily regained a bit of mirth and looked at him.

“We don’t have time for that, Small.” He shook his head and turned back to look out on the city. “So many people.”

“Alright, well, where is yours set to? You can decrypt mine, I’ll go back and then, from there, go back to where you are, we’ll copy the code and we go back together.”

“That’d turn the tables real quick, wouldn’t it? So I’d be at YOUR mercy. I don’t think so.”
        Columbus had hoped he wouldn’t see it that way, but he had, and now his options were running out. “Jacobi,” he began and took another good step towards him.

The shorter man straightened and held up his wrist, where his time machine was secured tightly. “Not another step, Small. Anyway, forget it. You made your fucking bed and now you’re going to shit in it.” He held up his other hand close to his device. A low groan reverberated through the building. “I wanted to send you to Hell, you know. But there’s no guarantee that if I kill you, you’d even end up there. I needed to know.” He smiled nastily. Another low groan, and some cracks began to snake across the wall. “So I made Hell for you. This way I know.”

Columbus took his chance and launched himself as forcefully as he could manage, lunging for Jacobi’s arms. But by the time he reached where they should have been, they were gone, with no evidence of having ever been there. All momentum, Columbus continued propelling forward and wasn’t quite able to catch himself from tripping. He hit ground hard on his shoulder and lost his grip on the time film canister which rolled across the floor. The film snapped back into its casing.

The low groan sharpened quickly and a rumble joined it. Sharp cracking sounds emanated from the walls around Columbus and then an ear-splitting pop like a cannon blast rattled through the building.

Overwhelmed with panic, Columbus lifted himself to his feet and scattered to the far corner of the room where the time film lay. The floor was shaking. A deafening roar began. Columbus was two meters away from the canister when he lost his balance again, and pushed off with his good foot towards it. Dust was flying into the room through the cracks in the walls. Columbus landed squarely on top of the canister and grabbed it from underneath him, turning onto his back.

There was no time left. Gritting his teeth, Columbus relied on his muscle memory to gently grab the corner of the film and pull it out. The room was so dusty he could barely see. It was difficult to breathe. He fed the end of the strip carefully into the opening of his device. The walls buckled. Chunks of drywall fell from the ceiling onto him on his back, choking and blinding him. He felt the strip meet gears and it was mechanically pulled through.

And then the roof collapsed and a hundred thousand tons of concrete, steel and souls plummeted through where Columbus had been, not stopping at the floor but continuing its barrage of destruction downward, crushing everything it met. And then finally the World Trade Center rested; collapsed and dead, having erased all evidence of its futuristic interloper.