The Mojave Desert didn't care about time. To the sand and the sun, 1963 was the same as 2005. But to Max Tennyson, the air felt like it was vibrating at the wrong frequency.
Max sat on the hood of his government-issued Jeep, the metal groaning under his weight.
He was twenty-three. His skin was tanned dark by the Nevada sun, and his hands were calloused from wrenching on jet engines and firing experimental sidearms. On the surface, he was the Golden Boy of the Air Force a candidate for the stars.
Inside, he was a wreck.
The memories didn't come as a movie. They came as sensory triggers. He'd smell ozone, and suddenly he was sixty years old, watching a giant mechanical tick drain the life out of Mount Rushmore. He'd see a shooting star, and his heart would plummet because he knew it wasn't a star it was a prison transport carrying a warlord.
"Max? You're doing it again.
Phil Billings stepped out of the shadow of the hangar, tossing a cold soda to Max. Phil was younger here, leaner, his face not yet etched with the bitterness and greed that Max remembered from the "Future." In the other life, Phil was a traitor who ended up trapped in the Null Void.
Looking at him nowsmiling, loyal, a brother-in-arms made Max's stomach churn.
"Doing what?" Max asked, catching the bottle. The condensation felt like needles against his palm.
"Checking out," Phil said, leaning against the Jeep. "You get this look in your eyes, man. Like you're mourning someone who's standing right in front of you. It's creepy. The brass is starting to notice. They think you've got 'high-altitude sickness' or something.
Max took a slow, deliberate swig of the soda. He had to be careful. In this timeline, the Plumbers were still a shadow organization, barely a blip on the radar. If he sounded too crazy, they'd lock him in a padded room before he could ever meet Verdona. Before he could ever ensure Carl was born.
Just thinking about the mission, Phil, Max lied. The lie tasted like ash. The readings from the crash site don't make sense. If it was a Soviet satellite, there wouldn't be traces of ionized polonium in the soil."
Phil whistled. Ionized polonium? Where'd you get that? The lab results don't come back until Tuesday.
Max froze. Dammit. He knew the results because he remembered reading the declassified file in a Plumber archive forty years from now.
"I... I have a hunch," Max said, his voice dropping an octave.
He turned to Phil, his expression hardening. "Phil, listen to me. When we go out to the flats tonight, don't go into the crater first. Stay on the ridge. Provide overwatch."
Phil laughed, but it was a nervous sound. "Since when do you give me tactical orders, Tennyson? We're partners. I'm the one with the better marksmanship scores, remember?"
Max didn't laugh back. He reached out and grabbed Phil's arm. His grip was a little too tight, a little too desperate. "I'm serious. If you go down there tonight, things... things change. Stay on the ridge. Please."
Phil's smile faded. He saw the raw, jagged fear in Max's eyes—not the fear of a coward, but the fear of a man who had seen the end of the world. "Okay, Max. Jeez. If it means that much to you, I'll play sniper. You're becoming a real weirdo, you know that?"
Max let go, his hand trembling slightly. One change, he thought. In the 'canon,' Phil went into the crater and got sprayed with alien neurotoxins. It didn't kill him, but it changed his brain chemistry made him more aggressive, more prone to the darkness that eventually led him to betray the Plumbers. If I keep him out of the crater, maybe I save my friend. Or maybe I break everything.
I wasn't just fighting aliens anymore IAM fighting the script of the universe.