Second Paradigm by Peter J. Wacks Read Free Book Online

walked to the door and out into the rain.
    2873: James Garret’s Laboratory
    Another beautiful twenty-ninth century day shimmered around him. Recycled air breathed through the city’s cycling vents. The sun shone through the rebuilt atmosphere; the sky embraced the world in its rich deep blue arms. Today’s weather patterns called for bright and sunny so there were no clouds in the sky. That would be next week, when the Environmental Control Agency called for heavy rain.
    Patting his pockets one by one, James checked through his mental equipment list. All present and accounted for. With a quick flex of his mind he accelerated his personal time stream to about two hundred times the relative Terra flow and walked out of his lab.
    The frozen world around him was peaceful, in a beautiful harmony of stillness, which the supposedly utopian society he lived in never managed to actually achieve. At least not from his perspective.
    At the end of his driveway a motorcycle waited, already infused with his phase nanos. He hopped on and fired it up, walking it forward as the ancient monster’s engine lumbered to life and warmed up.
    Vehicles like this were one of the major reasons that the Environmental Control Agency had been born. The Earth had been torn to shreds by a humanity too young to truly grasp what it was doing to the world it had to live in. Luckily, the technology to keep the human race alive on a healthy planet had been born in the nick of time, and now everything was artificially controlled.
    But phase time changed the rules of what James could use as tools. An electrical engine would fry in the accelerated time, with the nanos burning out the more delicate modern technology, so he had been forced to rebuild an archaic internal combustion engine. The major problem he’d had to overcome with the combustion engine had been airflow. In accelerated time flow, the air moved slower than the time field and if he stood still too long the air supply would exhaust itself. Igniting sparks in the engine only compounded the problem by using up the air faster, so he had to stay in motion. The simple solution was to shift time flow after starting the bike, but he didn’t know if he was under surveillance and didn’t want to risk being spotted.
    Once the engine warmed up and he no longer had to trot the bike around to keep it running, he gunned the throttle and headed out on the highway, dodging through the frozen traffic faster than the near frozen cars’ proximity sensors could detect him.
    After about an hour of travel on his subjective time scale, he arrived at the Time Corp base headquarters, and on a spot of luck, a car headed through the gate. He smiled at the good omen that he didn’t have to resync time to wait for an opening to enter the complex.
    Any point that he had to sit in Terra’s time stream would only increase the odds that he would be spotted while at this task. He dodged through the gate by the side of the car and pulled into the main lot, circling it until the cameras that watched the lot were cycled away from where he needed to park.
    As he rolled in to park, he killed the engine and let the bike drift to a stop so it would have a fresh field of oxygen to draw from when he left. It would have to, since he had a very short window of opportunity before the bike would be spotted and the gate would close again.
    Hopping off the bike he popped a concentrated energy pill, dropping about five thousand calories into his system. He had designed the pill for his own metabolic system and had manufactured three of them for this job. Reaching into his belt back, he pulled out a mini scuba mask affixed to a six-inch air tank and put it over his mouth.
    Now, for the hard part. Focusing his will, he pushed against the time stream as hard as he could, accelerating himself until he felt the physical effects of the strain on his body. As though on cue, he felt the pill kick in and a surge of cold energy washed through his