Gideon was an interactive artificial intelligence — sophisticated, responsive, deeply integrated into the Reverse-Flash's operations — but it was still an artificial intelligence. It couldn't refuse. It couldn't consent. It could only process.
"If you're not going to object, I'll take that as a yes." Jack Kadere walked over with a chuckle, pulled Gideon's core unit apart from the housing in S.T.A.R. Labs' hidden chamber, and left without another word to Caitlin Snow. Red lightning, and he was gone.
Back at the Aerie, he slotted Gideon into the console. The interface hummed to life, holographic displays blooming across the cockpit in pale gold. Having a futuristic AI plugged directly into his ship opened doors that brute force couldn't.
Finding people, for instance.
"Gideon." Jack settled into the pilot's chair, one ankle crossed over his knee. "Pull up everything on Brie Larvan. Current location, activity, recent communications."
The console flickered. Within seconds, Gideon assembled a dossier — surveillance feeds, financial records, communication intercepts — and projected it across the main display.
Just as expected. Brie Larvan, bitter and burning with resentment, was deep into fabricating mechanical bees. Revenge was the only item on her agenda.
Jack filed that away and moved on to the real question.
"Gideon — what speed is required to breach the dimensional barrier? And what about temporal travel? Walk me through the mechanics. You belonged to the Reverse-Flash; you should have a working understanding of the Speed Force."
Gideon answered without hesitation. Velocities, vibrational frequencies, the relationship between temporal displacement and spatial breach — data the Reverse-Flash had accumulated over years of traversing timelines. The answers came clean and precise, filling gaps Jack had been circling for weeks.
The difference between groping in the dark and having a map was staggering. Concepts that had felt slippery suddenly clicked into place.
"Time travel is the easier of the two," Jack said, more to himself than to Gideon. "Lower threshold. But I don't need to move through time right now." He drummed his fingers on the armrest. "Space — crossing between Earths. That takes more."
He stood.
"Let's find out if I can do it."
---
Fwsshh!
Red lightning erupted from the Aerie and hit the open ground running.
Jack pushed hard from the first stride. The city blurred, then dissolved entirely — buildings, streets, skyline smearing into a single wash of color and motion beneath him. Wind screamed past his ears, but he wasn't listening to it. His focus narrowed to the Speed Force itself, the raw current of energy flowing through every muscle fiber, every nerve ending.
A thousand miles per hour. Enough to punch through the time barrier. Not enough for a spatial breach.
He stacked his speed. Layered acceleration on top of acceleration, each boost compounding the last. The lightning around his body intensified until the boundary between Jack Kadere and the electricity he generated ceased to exist — impossible to tell where the man ended and the force began.
He stopped thinking about wind resistance. Stopped tracking the landscape. Stopped being aware of anything except velocity and the single, crystalline focus of his destination. The Speed Force flooded every cell, saturated every atom, and for one vertiginous instant Jack felt himself dissolve. No body. No weight. No Jack Kadere at all.
Only the Speed Force.
BANG.
A wormhole tore open directly ahead — pale blue, swirling like storm clouds lit from within. Jack plunged into it without slowing.
The tunnel was similar to the time stream, but wrong in ways he registered immediately. The time stream ran green. This corridor burned blue — the same blue as the wormhole's mouth — and the quality of the space was different. Denser. More present.
Images materialized around him in every direction, flickering past faster than thought. Moments from the past. Fragments of the present. Glimpses of futures that hadn't happened yet. All of it rushing by in a torrent that threatened to pull his attention in a hundred directions at once.
Jack glanced at one image — a street scene, people he didn't recognize — and felt the corridor tug him toward it. He looked away immediately. The mechanism was intuitive, almost dangerously so: focus on a time, a place, a person, and the corridor would deliver him there. Linger too long on any single image and he'd exit at that point whether he meant to or not.
He fixed his mind on one target. Doctor Harrison Wells. Earth Two.
The path stretched ahead, seemingly infinite. Jack stacked his speed again.
Fwsshh!
Yellow lightning — his Speed Force burning bright — surged forward. Two times faster. Four times. Ten. He had no way to measure his actual velocity anymore; the numbers were meaningless at this scale. There was only the thought and the motion and the blue light rushing past.
Running and running and running.
The corridor ahead flared white.
Jack burst through.
---
His momentum carried him three stumbling steps before he caught himself and stopped. The blue tunnel sealed shut behind him, soundless, as if it had never existed.
He was standing in an office.
Polished hardwood floors. Floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking a city skyline he almost recognized — Central City, but the architecture was subtly different, the skyline rearranged. The desk in front of him was heavy oak, covered in schematics and data tablets. The air smelled like ozone and old paper and something chemical — soldering flux, maybe.
Jack turned his head.
A man in glasses stood eight feet away, both hands wrapped around a compact energy weapon aimed squarely at Jack's chest. The barrel glowed faint blue, a rising whine suggesting it was already charged. The man's face was instantly familiar — the same sharp features, the same angular jaw, the same calculating eyes behind wire-frame lenses.
Harrison Wells. But not his Harrison Wells.
"Who are you." Not a question. A demand. Wells's arms were steady, his aim unwavering.
Jack looked him over and chuckled. "The resemblance really is perfect. But you're not the Doctor Harrison Wells I know."
"Answer my question. Who are you." The blue glow on the weapon intensified, the whine climbing a half-octave — the distinct sound of a weapon cycling to full charge.
Jack ignored the gun entirely. "Who's the mayor of Central City?"
BANG.
Wells fired. The energy bolt screamed past Jack's shoulder and punched a blackened crater into the far wall. By the time the sound registered, the gun was no longer in Wells's hands. He felt the weight vanish — one instant his fingers were on the trigger, the next they were gripping air. The weapon lay on the floor in seven distinct pieces, disassembled so fast the components were still warm.
"You—"
One syllable. That was all he got out before Jack's hand closed around his throat and lifted him clean off the ground. Wells's feet kicked empty air. His glasses slid down his nose. Jack pulled him close — close enough that Wells could see the red lightning still flickering in the edges of his irises — and smiled pleasantly.
"Answer my question. Who is the mayor of Central City?"
"Snart," Wells choked out.
"Captain Cold is the mayor?" Jack laughed and set Wells down, releasing his throat as casually as putting down a coffee mug. "Is your daughter's name Jesse?"
The shift in Wells's expression was immediate and total — surprise replaced by something rawer, something protective and afraid. His hand went to his throat, rubbing the bruised skin, but his eyes never left Jack.
He thought: He knows about Jesse. How the hell does he know about Jesse. If Zoom sent him — no. Zoom wouldn't send a speedster, Zoom would come himself. Who IS this?
"Who are you?" Wells's voice had changed. Harder now, and underneath the hardness, desperate. "How do you know about my daughter?"
"I'm asking the questions. You can have your turn after." Jack leaned against Wells's desk, arms folded. "Does this world have a Flash? Name of Jay Garrick? And someone faster than him — a speedster called Zoom?"
At the mention of Zoom, something shifted behind Wells's eyes. Not surprise. Recognition — and dread.
Jack caught it immediately.
"Zoom kidnapped your daughter." He frowned, the amusement fading into genuine curiosity. "That doesn't track. The breaches between the two Earths haven't been created yet — there's been no particle accelerator explosion to tear the dimensional walls open. Zoom shouldn't even know other Earths exist yet. So why would he take Jesse?"
Wells stared at him. The gears behind his expression were turning visibly, recalculating everything he thought he understood.
"You're from another Earth," he said slowly. "That means the multiverse theory is real. Parallel worlds exist. And Zoom's hypothesis — Zoom was right."
"What hypothesis?"
Wells hesitated for only a second. The information was worth less than Jesse. Everything was worth less than Jesse.
"He took Jesse to leverage me. He wants me to find a way to open stable portals between parallel worlds." Wells's jaw tightened. "And once I do, he intends to cross over and eliminate every speedster on every Earth he can reach."
The words hung in the air. Jack said nothing for a moment, watching Wells's face — the exhaustion in it, the fear held in check by sheer will.
Wells stepped closer. "How did you get here? You're a speedster — you used the Speed Force to cross over. That means if you're fast enough, you can breach dimensional barriers. Time travel too?" His voice accelerated, the scientist in him clawing past the father's panic. "Your speed must be greater than Zoom's. Significantly greater."
Jack didn't confirm or deny. He just watched.
Wells stopped talking about physics. His shoulders dropped. The mask of clinical inquiry fell away, leaving nothing but a father standing in a ransacked office with no cards left to play.
"I don't care why you're here. I don't care what you want with this world." He met Jack's eyes directly. "Save my daughter, and I will help you with anything. Anything."
The desperation was total. This was the same Harrison Wells who, in his own timeline, would eventually cross to Earth One to recruit Barry Allen against Zoom — and when that failed, would turn around and help Zoom steal Barry's speed without a second's hesitation, because Jesse was the only calculation that mattered. He'd confessed later, eaten alive by guilt after Zoom broke every promise. But he'd done it. He would always do it. For Jesse, there was no line Harrison Wells wouldn't cross.
Jack Kadere looked at the man in front of him — brilliant, ruthless when cornered, willing to betray anyone and anything for one person — and the corner of his mouth curled.
He uncrossed his arms and pushed off the desk, stepping past Wells toward the floor-to-ceiling windows. Earth Two's Central City spread out below, familiar and foreign at once — the same bones, different skin. Jack pressed one hand flat against the glass and watched the traffic patterns forty stories down, red lightning still flickering faintly along his knuckles.