Call Back Yesterday

Stolen Futures

This is how Remy's morning began.

He rose from bed at the crack of noon. A cursory look in his hotel room revealed one last set of clean clothes: a pair of jeans and a patterned shirt he normally wouldn't be seen with outside of a laundry day. Which probably meant today was laundry day. Fortunately, he was in New York for a job and the hotel had laundry service.

His tiny fridge was empty, as were all his cupboards. He didn't know why he bothered to check; he subsisted on take-out and restaurant dining even at home. Bella left a message while he was out contemplating burgers versus an actual sit-down restaurant. Her dad was visiting so he needed to stay out of town for a while longer; Daddy dearest didn't like his daughter consorting with no gambling coonass. Remy decided to treat himself to a restaurant. Nothing like a good lager and halibut on steamed greens to make a man forget a non-girlfriend. One beer turned into three then a couple of shooters.

What was the saying? Beer before liquor you'll never be sicker; liquor before beer, you're in the clear? That was his last coherent thought.

When he opened his eyes again, beer and seafood spewed out of his mouth and up his nose. He bent over, coughing. He hated the sour smell of vomit. It was why he hardly overindulged. Someone heavy approached. Remy lashed out with his leg but his sense of balance was still skewed and he toppled on his side, barely missing his own puddle of guck. Vertigo sucked. Remy, who was especially attuned to his surroundings, found it doubly so. He decided motionlessness was a better option until the world turned itself right-side up.

"You gonna chuck up any more?" asked Logan. The Canadian's voice was unmistakable.

"Knew you missed me," Remy said. "Been, what, three whole years since you lost your mind on that island? A guy gets to thinking he ain't appreciated no more."

Logan laughed and it was a harsh sound. Harsh enough that Remy curiously opened his eyes.

Logan had half a face. It wasn't that half his head was cut off; his head was intact and head-shaped. However, the whole of the right side was a mash of tumour clusters completely obscuring his eye, ear and part of his mouth. What remained his right nostril had a metal ring stretching it open. His head was misshapen, bald in some areas, tufts of wiry black hair sticking out in others. The growths seemed to cover his entire body; his clothing stuck out in odd places. His right hand resembled a caveman's cudgel while his left still had separate fingers and claws.

"Jesus," said Remy, "I didn't think you could get any uglier."

"And I didn't think I'd actually want to see you again," Logan retorted. "You're the last person on our list."

"Damn, that's cold, bro."

"It's a damn cold world." He pointed to the cherriest television Remy had ever seen-- twice as wide as it was high and embedded into the wall with a picture so sharp it looked hyper-real. It was a real shame the images it showed were so damn depressing. The newscaster reported fifty miles of American shoreline lost to rising waters while the tickertape under her counted off numbers of dead from something called Legacy. Emaciated faced stared listlessly up at the screen, the kind Remy had only ever seen between televised Sunday sermons. The reporter said these were people in Spain. The tickertape continued to count off the day's dead: a thousand to Legacy, a hundred to a suicide cult, ten to landmines, twenty to a civil war. The date flashed at the top lefthand corner: May 6, 2013.

Remy shifted his stare back at Logan. "What the fuck?"

After 2005, the world went to shit. That was Logan's summary. His partner in crime, someone who called herself Network, explained with more detail but the gist of it was after 2005, the world went to shit. Remy's brief tour to the outside world confirmed it. Supposedly, they were in Upstate New York, more to the west, really but the unmistakable shores of the ocean lapped up against pseudo-Victorian townhouses. All the papers had the same date. All the TVs were rectangular and thin. All the cars were purportedly powered by electricity. The music sucked.

"I still don't get what I'm doing here," said Remy, "Hell, or how you pulled me out from twenty years ago to now. And if you tell me I'm a sort of Chosen One, I'm gonna demand a harem."

"Hardly," said Network. "You're the twelfth person we've taken from the past to attempt this mission."

"Oh."

"As near as we can surmise, the key events leading to this... dystopia was the unveiling of the Worthington anti-mutation gene therapy to the Alcatraz Attacks later in '05. Within that week, three key figures died: Scott Summers, Charles Xavier and Jean Grey."

"And you want me to save them," Remy guessed.

"Just Summers and Xavier. Grey has to die." Logan lit his cigar with a dented Zippo. Smoke curled around his head, a wonky halo.

Network's assistant, Doug, launched into a physics lecture that went in through one ear and out the other. Remy was more worried about the itty bitty microchip injected into his wrist. (When he got back to 1993, he was going to invest in computers; the damn things ruled the planet.)

"You're saying this thing," Remy pointed at the slight bump, "is my return ticket."

"Yes," said Network. "Objects from the past cannot last in the future. To you, this reality is only a possibility and therefore not real. Were you to remain for an extended amount of time in the possible future, your very molecules would fall apart. At least, that's the theory."

Remy reared back. "Hold up, now. The theory? You mean you ain't sure?"

Network only paused for a second but it was enough.

"Okay, time the fuck out. You ain't sure if time travelling is bad for me but you're going to try anyway because eleven other people before me didn't seem to make a difference? I heard tell insanity is banging your head on the same wall over and over and expecting something different after each time."

A mite sulkily, Network said, "We have extensive notes from a collaboration between Dr. Reed Richards and Dr. Henry McCoy on the theory of time travel through the manipulation of pre-existing wormholes. During the Second Civil War, the hard drives were damaged. We've pieced together roughly seventy-five percent of their original research. It's enough for us to re-created the rest."

Doug launched back into his sci-fi babble. "As I was saying, wormholes are specific spots within space-time which creates a short-cut so to speak between two points--"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm more thinking about the part where you don't know if I could die from being in the future too long. That what happened to the people before me?"

"They couldn't do the job," Logan said. "The world's still shit."

"The world's always been shit; the trick's in manoeuvring around the floaters."

Wisely, Network interrupted the conversation before it escalated into physical aggression. "Think of space-time as a long, rough braid of rope made of mercury. An event in Point A, let's say 2005, will cause and event in Point B, here in 2013. That is the main line. Should one aspect of that event in Point A change, a strand splits from the mercury rope, becomes a separate entity but still follows the path to Point B. The farther back one goes or the greater the change in Point A, the more separate that mercury strand becomes, the further the mercury strand deviates until finally, it circumvents the event in Point B entirely."

"But that's all just a guess," said Remy.

"We do have the capability to see flashes of alternate dimensions parallel to this point in time," said Network., "My sister, Preview, is an interdimensional cognitive. She'll be tracking the deviances you create in space-time."

"Deviances?"

"Each new strand is an alternate dimension on its own until it meets with an event common to at least one other dimension during which time, the two strands meld together. Each time we sent someone back, they prevented the death of a different person yet the alternate dimension created from that change still resembles this one."

"And you're expecting me to be different."

"By trial and error, our proposal is the most logical solution."

Remy rubbed the bridge of his nose.

Logan snorted around his cigar. "What's the matter, Cajun? Chicken?"

"I didn't volunteer for this gig. You fucking kidnapped me through time and blackmailed me into doing this. Why the hell should I be the one anyway? I don't care about the X-Men, I got no stake in making sure they live or die."

"Which is exactly why you're perfect," said Network. "The closer one is to the major event, the less control they have over changing it. It's a variation on the grandfather paradox: If you go back in time to kill your grandfather as an infant, your father would not be born and therefore you would not be born to go back to change time. Likewise, if you change something in your past so that your present does not occur, you in the present cannot exist and therefore the past must have existed."

Remy dropped his head into his hands. "My brain fucking hurts. Did I mention I was hungover when you grabbed me out of my time?"

"You'd best sober up," said Doug. "We only have seventeen hours until the wormhole reopens. 0828 hours on the dot every day."

Remy never did like mornings.

"I was the first one who went back," Logan said. As if Remy really cared at this point; there were almost ten hours left until he got punted through time again. When he got back to '93, he was going to look for Logan specifically to kick his ass. His list of things to do in '93 was beginning to get fun.

"I went back five times before we finally accepted that no matter what I did, Jean, Scott and Xavier would always die. One way or another, before the end of '05, they'd die. So we tried a complete stranger--"

"Not complete," Network interrupted. "She was a private in my platoon but she had no other ties to the X-Men. She wasn't even a mutant."

"She got a bit farther. She actually killed Jean and kept Xavier from dying. Too bad the psychic backlash from that turned her into a psychotyrant himself. Global climate change and World War III still happened. We had to go back to square one."

The microchip itched. Remy rubbed at it gently, not wanting to damage his chances of going home. "Maybe the reason you can't change anything is 'cause it's meant to happen."

Logan growled. "You actually believe in shit like destiny?"

"I blow things up. I feel all the molecules all around me. I been yanked into the future like a taller, hotter Michael J Fox. Destiny's not much of a stretch after all that, hein?"

"If we can change one small aspect then we must be able to change it all," Network said. "With each successive re-entry into 2005, we change more and more and Novikov self-consistency principle is proven false."

"Whatever, Urklette. I just want you to make sure my ass don't turn into smoke." A though occurred to him. "What if I die back there? Is anything going to happen to the original me?"

"Do you mean a rupture in the space-time continuum?"

"No, I mean a rupture in my ass," said Remy. "If I die in 2005, is anything going to happen to me in 1993?"

"Of course not. Had you aged normally, your death in 2005 would not affect your life in 1993."

"But considering me-in-1993 aged to me-in-2005, wouldn't a displaced 1993-me in 2005 meeting 2005-me break something?" Remy shook his head. "I need another drink. I'm thinking a martini might do me right 'cause I think I understood what it was I just babbled."

"You don't have to worry about that," said Network. Near as Remy could tell, she was trying to be comforting. But Logan, walking off to the side, clenched his good hand open and closed, the claws clanking against each other. Tendons and deformed muscles writhed under his skin. Remy read body language like most people read headlines. They weren't telling him something, something that would get him dead. That was good and all; he didn't tell them that he had no intention of being an assassin.

You didn't just jump into a wormhole in a DeLorean, much to Remy's disappointment. Instead, they suited him up in a really heavy type of hazmat gear with a twenty-pound steel bucket for a helmet.

"I can't see out of this thing," he complained.

"Nothing to see," said Logan. "You didn't care when we brought you over."

"You stuck me in this thing and I didn't know?"

"Gumbo, you were so drunk, I could've stuck you in the bad end of a whale and you wouldn't care."

As if that wasn't claustrophobic enough, they led him into a sphere ten feet in diameter from the outside but only six feet on the inside. He sat in a bucket seat, about as comfortable as an old futon folded into a shopping cart.

"Remember: pay attention to the alarm in the microchip. You have less than seven days, only 150 hours, until the negative matter ring holding the wormhole dissolves," said Network. "Without a negative matter ring, you can't travel through a wormhole. You'll be trapped in the past."

"You mean the future," said Remy.

Network shrugged. "No matter what the point of view, you can't stay in 2005. You'll sicken within months, perhaps die in a year."

"I don't intend on staying for a year."

She nodded, pleased. "The wormhole will deposit you in this exact location in 2005. We know the following day, May 7th, Scott Summers will leave the school for Alkali Lake; Grey called him telepathically. When she rises out of the lake--"

Remy gestured the rest of the lecture away. "Yeah, yeah, I heard it the first twenty times. Summers gets his ass obliterated by his now-crazy girlfriend, she blows up Xavier next then goes with Magneto. A bit more recruiting on both ends and you got the Alcatraz Attacks. I'm supposed to keep Xavier and Summers alive and her dead."

"Do whatever it takes," said Logan. "I don't care if you have to stick them both in mental institutions for the next year, you keep Xavier and Summers alive. And don't forget to get all of this gear on and get into the sphere before you activate the tracer on your wrist," Logan said. "Activating it can pull your ass back through the hole but you'll be flattened to pieces if you go through naked."

"Sleep with the red-head then kill her, gotcha," Remy said just loud enough for Logan to hear. Quick as lightning, the other man grabbed his wrist. His claws grazed his skin, raising welts.

"Do your job, Lebeau. Get in, fix the timeline, get out."

Remy touched one of the claws with two fingers. Energy crackled down the edge of the blade. "Touch me again, we get to see if you can heal from an amputated arm."

Logan laughed. He brought up his mutilated arm, the one that looked like a club. "How do you think this happened?"