Memories of Earth's Past
A discharge from a powerful taser can incapacitate a person for up to half an hour. That didn't serve my interests, so I'd reduced the output of my device to minimum in advance. Even so, it was enough to make Bobbie convulse for a few seconds before sliding down the wall and spending several minutes pulling herself together.
In that time I took her weapon, her phone, and her wallet. With access to the internet, I decided to verify a couple of facts — and by the time an irate Bobbie had gotten back on her feet and assessed her situation, I already knew that no hospital in the city had a patient by the name of Amelia Rose Stansen.
— Parker… — Bobbie hissed, but I cut her off mid-word, waving the gun barrel in front of her face.
— I ask, you answer. Question one: is Stans still in this mansion? — That was genuinely the most important thing I needed to know. If the doc had been taken somewhere else, I'd have to make myself a victim and witness in the case in order to give the cops grounds for a search.
Bobbie was silent, in no hurry to answer.
— Don't complicate things, sweetheart — trust me, neither of us is going to like where this goes if you do, — in truth, I hadn't even thought about what to do if Bobbie refused to cooperate, but right now… where was this certainty coming from? I'd never interrogated anyone. It seemed I'd forgotten some very important chapters of my life.
— Yes, — Bobbie finally spat out.
— Do you know exactly where?
— No, — the girl answered quickly. Too quickly — as if she were afraid for Stans.
— Come on — you were with her all that time. Can you really not care that she might die here without proper help? — Yes, that was clearly the right angle — surprise and fear for her friend were visible in Bobbie's eyes. — Cindy has no idea what the doc did to herself. She needs to be examined, and the doctors need the data on what happened to her. She's in danger, do you understand that, Bobbie? Time is running out.
— The doc is on the second floor, there's a room with medical equipment, — the girl gave in. — But a doctor visits her, and he said her condition is stable.
— You were keeping Stans locked up. That's not a question — I know. I'm going to report a double kidnapping to the cops, and the fact that Stans was essentially held in captivity. There's enough evidence in that lab. Be so kind as to keep that pretty mouth of yours shut while I make the call, — I handed the girl a piece of cloth. — What? It's clean, and I don't want you pulling anything. Like giving the cops my name.
The conversation with the police went surprisingly smoothly, apart from the five times someone tried to get my name. The officer who answered didn't allow herself to doubt my words and wrote down the address of the estate along with all the other details I provided.
— So, Bobbie, — I continued after the call, — you have a choice: help me escape right now and go on living a relatively peaceful life, or stay here and go to prison alongside Cindy and everyone else. Keep in mind — if I can't get out before the cops arrive, I'll have to give a statement.
Surprisingly, Bobbie actually hesitated.
— If you help me now, I promise I'll personally deal with Stans' situation. You don't have much time to think it over, — I pressed a little more.
— Fine, — Bobbie made up her mind, and immediately tried to start giving orders. — Then first we need to wipe all our traces.
— I already did that, — I cut her off.
The girl was taken aback by this. She asked uncertainly:
— And my accounts on the doc's computer…
— I trusted your good sense… — I smirked. — Now — one meter ahead of me. Head for the exit, open the door.
The corridor was empty. Bobbie moved to go straight to the service exit, but I held her back.
— Need to lock the door, — I explained what I was doing, — Cindy might try to destroy evidence, and we don't want that, do we?
Done. Now getting back into the lab would require breaking the door down — and it wasn't a simple one.
— Head for the garage, — I directed, and Bobbie started off by the shortest route, which went right past the post with the guard who'd had opinions about face hunters. — No — the security post is that way, we go past the showers.
— But there are electronic locks there, I don't know the codes, — Bobbie objected.
— Nobody does, — I smiled. — Except me. And we need to hurry before anyone raises the alarm about it.
I miscalculated. When Bobbie opened the second door on the way to the garage, she came face to face with two guards who were obviously trying to do the same thing from the other side.
For a moment the girls stared at each other. Then Bobbie attacked her former colleagues first, before they'd grasped what was happening. At that moment I could only be glad I'd thought ahead — if I hadn't made Bobbie open every door for me, our escape could have ended right there. She was unlikely to have taken my side if I'd already been in the hands of the guards. As it stood now, on one side were two armed security officers, and on the other — me, also with a gun — the girl simply had no choice.
A brawl broke out. The girls fought with skill, using a force-based style to overpower their opponent — exactly as a real security guard should, though they were a little short on mass. Bobbie managed to knock the gun from one of them and pin the arm of the other. I didn't want to make unnecessary noise with gunfire, so I made a dash for the dropped weapon — as did the disarmed guard.
For a moment I panicked. I wasn't going to get to the gun in time, and my opponent was clearly dangerous in close combat.
The guard's first strike landed on my clumsy block. She was far physically stronger than me, but we were already too close together. I didn't believe I could overpower a trained guard with muscles like mine, but muscle memory took over: grabbing my opponent by the collar of her uniform, I dropped onto my back, pulling her with me, and as we fell I shoved her with both feet in the stomach. During the fall she managed to put her fist in my face twice. Charming manners they have here.
I rolled smoothly to the side and sprang to my feet, while the guard was in an extremely awkward position — sliding down the wall she'd been thrown into, upside down.
I was afraid she'd get up before I could catch her off balance again, so I rushed over and knocked her out with the butt of the gun — I really did not want to take another hit to the head. Normally I'd web criminals up — with my agility it was trivial — but I knew where and how hard to strike to stun a person.
— Wow, — Bobbie whistled behind me. — The boy is so dangerous, — she sang with a smirk.
The second guard was lying with a broken nose and rolled-back eyes, but alive. Bobbie was spinning her trophy gun in her hand.
— Ladies first, — I nodded toward the door. So you've got a gun now — what of it? The cops are already on their way. We're either in the same boat, or you're going to prison.
Bobbie understood this too, and so she followed the suggestion — though she laughed as she did, as if I'd said something funny. Or maybe she was still tickled by her own reworking of the Jackson song.
We reached the delivery truck I'd scouted earlier without incident. Bobbie got behind the wheel, and I hid in the sleeper cab behind her, pulling the curtain closed from my side. A fully closed sleeper might have raised suspicion, though as it turned out the precaution wasn't necessary.
We weren't even stopped at the gate — the guards couldn't have cared less who was driving or where the truck was going. And that was how we left Cindy Shaw's den.
On the way out of the forest, a police car flew past us heading the other way, going at full speed.
— Wow, — I said, surprised. — That was fast. Impressive — a little longer and we might not have made it out in time.
— Pfft… what did you expect? A report of a kidnapping from a guy — and a minor at that.
I didn't comment on that. There were more important things to discuss:
— You need to disappear. I called from your phone. But don't doubt it — I'll keep my promise. As soon as Stans is transferred to an official hospital, I'll help the doctors arrive at the right diagnosis. Though there's a chance the matter might attract the attention of… more competent agencies, — naturally I said nothing about S.H.I.E.L.D. — In which case they'll sort it out even faster than I can.
Bobbie gave me a suspicious look.
— You're not a normal teenager, are you?
— Normal teenagers don't get kidnapped to work on illegal research, — I said drily, examining the bruises blooming in the mirror.
I'd suggested we split up, but she insisted on driving me home. Strange girl — she should be worrying about herself. We agreed she'd drop me at the same spot where they'd grabbed me — a five-minute walk from the house.
The girl smirked and suggested I stop taking that route, saying that the alley, which ran almost to my back yard, was an ideal place to jump someone — even in broad daylight.
I didn't pay much attention to her words and set off toward home, hood up, thinking through how to explain my absence over the past several days to my family — and the bruises. Though I had some experience with that kind of thing… my entire superhero life had been built on lying to people I loved, and it wasn't something I'd ever been thrilled about.
It only now occurred to me that the police could easily connect my tip about Cindy Shaw to the disappearance of Peter Parker — my aunt and uncle had almost certainly filed a missing person report… Damn.
Then my right shoulder exploded in blinding pain, something shoved me from behind, and a flurry of wild blows rained down on my head.
In shock, I stumbled back and threw my arms up. What the hell? Was Bobbie's warning going to prove right this fast? In the dim light of the alley a shadow was darting around in front of me — a figure in a hoodie. Some goddamn teenage mugger!
Cold fury swept through my mind.
I caught the arm holding the piece of pipe, blocked the other one, and headbutted my attacker squarely in the face.
The body reeled. The teenager's knees buckled — they pressed against a dumpster and covered their face with their hands, sobbing. I wanted to hit them a few more times, but such a pitiful display knocked me completely off course. They weren't attacking anymore, weren't defending — just sitting there pressing their hands to a heavily bleeding nose. Long bangs covered the attacker's face.
I turned and walked on. My head was empty. I'd acted on instinct, on reflex — and with that much brutality. I'd wanted to beat them, and I would have, if they hadn't given up so suddenly and so pathetically. At the end of the alley I glanced back for a last look at the hunched figure shuffling away — it was a girl.
The house was empty. Maybe that was a good thing — I'd have time to prepare for facing my aunt and uncle. But why was it so bare, like a bachelor's apartment? Aunt May would never have let it get like this. Strange.
I open the refrigerator. The smell of rotten sausages hits me immediately. The milk is expired too — by a week. Nobody has been living here, at least for as long as I was gone. But where could they have gone?
Walking through the kitchen and living room brought up no clear memories, yet I still recognized the place. I knew where things were kept, I knew which floorboards had warped and where mold had appeared on the drain pipe. I definitely lived here — but the place gave me no sense of home or warmth.
In the bathroom I cleaned and treated all my cuts and scrapes. The time when I could come home covered in bruises and wake up healed the next morning hadn't arrived yet. Absurdly, the worst bruise came from that girl in the alley — the skin had actually split where she hit me, and my entire shoulder had swollen up.
Done with the bathroom, I headed upstairs out of habit, but instead of my room I found a hybrid between a storage space for old junk and a laboratory. Strange — I never would have let my workspace get like this. Was that dirty laundry in the corner? And yet at the same time I understood that this was where I'd worked on the Stans project.
A thick layer of dust — no one had entered this room for months. Though wait — there, a trail in the dust, worn to the disassembled computer tower from which the graphics card and power supply had been removed. This place… it felt like it had been temporarily converted into a lab, then abandoned again. Nothing to do here. What I need is a bed and proper sleep.
I found my bedroom on the first floor. Only there was nothing there that I remembered from my childhood. No posters on the walls, no tools, no traces of my activities whatsoever — just furniture, clothes, and a computer.
The PC started without issues. User account: Peter. No password. What the hell?! I would never leave my computer unprotected.
I open the browser. Time to find out who I really am.
The first entry in the browser history: The Three-Body Problem.
That…
I remember.
The Three-Body Problem… that damned game.
Three suns in the sky.
Eras of chaos… eras of order… the Crisis Era… the Trisolaran Crisis.
— Trisolaris, — I didn't say it — I spat it.
So much was packed into that word: hatred, horror, despair, fear.
I remembered.
I looked through the browser history again.
"The Three-Body Problem game" — my Google search.
Liu Cixin, "The Three-Body Problem," the "Remembrance of Earth's Past" trilogy, read online — the last opened page. Just a book. "Remembrance of Earth's Past" — what a terrible title. What a precise one.
I am the last remembrance of Earth's past. My Earth. Nothing worked. I didn't go back in time — this is not my universe. In this universe, Trisolaris is just a book. Which means it was all for nothing. Everyone is dead.
All at once, with perfect clarity, I understood that I had lost them — those who had once lived here with me — forever. I wanted to disappear. To cease to be.
I made it to the bed and fell into the mercy of sleep. I was no longer glad that I'd remembered — on the contrary, I wanted to forget everything again, the way I had a week ago. Only I couldn't. Instead, my mind kept feeding me memories of those events, over and over again…
Earth's conflict with Trisolaris had been one-sided from the very beginning. Every attempt by Congress and the UN to organize a defense was doomed from the start. We had four hundred years to prepare for the invasion, but the war was lost before the first Trisolaran ships had even left their home planet.
Traitors. The ETO — the Earth-Trisolaris Organization. They had given the aliens all the information about humanity. And the Trisolarans had used it. They understood the threat posed by rapidly developing humanity. A technological explosion — that was what they feared. By the time the Trisolaran fleet reached Earth, who could say what heights Earth's science might have achieved.
They created their ultimate weapon — the Sophon: a supercomputer inside a proton.
Just a proton. A tiny particle with no real force of its own — but by interfering with particle accelerators, it destroyed the foundations of Earth science.
The first victim of the Sophons and the ETO was Tony Stark. Initially, Trisolaris had identified other people as Earth's most dangerous scientists. Reed Richards, whose space-time theory was ahead not only of Earth science but even of Trisolaris's own. Bruce Banner, whose gamma radiation research results were simply staggering. Hank Pym, who had come closer than anyone to a technology based on the strong nuclear force. However, the ETO's leaders had convinced Trisolaris that all these brilliant minds paled before the threat represented by Tony Stark. No, he wasn't the most brilliant scientist on the planet, and his greatest creation — the cold fusion reactor — though ahead of Earth's scientific level, didn't deviate from Trisolaris's projected trajectory of civilization's development. But Tony Stark possessed two other qualities that mattered far more than the genius of the others on the list.
Psychological resilience, and the rational mind of an engineer and weapons designer. Tony wasn't obsessed with fundamental science the way the other scientists on the list were — he had built his own reactor out of necessity. The collapse of fundamental physics theories that the Sophons' actions were intended to produce would have affected Iron Man far less than it would the others. Tony had plenty of other interests in life — he was already a superhero, he already had a damn iron suit. In the end, he simply knew how to enjoy living. It was extremely unlikely that a man like him would take his own life because of the Sophons' interference. As for the second quality: under conditions of stagnation in all fundamental science research, established technologies would have moved to the forefront, along with people capable of applying them with maximum effectiveness. It was precisely Tony Stark's engineering and weapons talent that made Trisolaris view the future with unease. If the resources of the entire planet ended up in the hands of such a man, there was no guarantee that Trisolaris's technological advantage would remain equally unassailable four hundred years later, at the time of the Doomsday Battle.
The Sophons attacked Tony as soon as they arrived on Earth. His research was the first they sabotaged. While other scientists were hunting for errors in their calculations and equipment faults in accelerators, Tony Stark had already arrived at an understanding of humanity's place within the Shooter and Farmer hypotheses.
A couple of days later the press once again captured just how eccentric a billionaire could be during one of his drunken public episodes. That same night, shocking footage of Iron Man's death became public knowledge. The ETO had struck. Tony Stark was a superhero — his death didn't need to be disguised as an accident. People who wanted revenge on him could have formed a line from Stark Tower to the Statue of Liberty. And even the subsequent destruction of Stark's laboratories, while it raised questions, still fit within the Avengers' cover story. The ETO, guided by the omnipresent Sophons, systematically erased every sample of cold fusion technology.
Others followed Stark. In most cases the ETO was barely needed. The Sophons were enough. A wave of mass suicides swept through the world's leading scientists. Otto Octavius, Hank Pym, Amadeus Cho, and many other less prominent scientists couldn't withstand the pressure. Bruce Banner was psychologically broken as well, though he had no way of ending his own existence. His mental state, however, was such that he no longer represented a threat as a scientist.
Reed Richards nearly followed his colleagues — the collapse of his space-time theories and the inconstancy of the fundamental laws of physics became an unbearable weight for him. I managed to prevent his suicide at the last moment. And then protected Reed from assassination attempts by the ETO on more than one occasion after that.
Many desperate actions were taken by us during that period. In truth, all of humanity had descended into a global hysteria. In the end, Reed and I decided to go into cold hibernation for two hundred years and wait for the completion of the space elevator.
But humanity exceeded our expectations. When we woke, people had already built an enormous space fleet and developed gamma laser and thermonuclear fusion technologies. Not cold fusion, unfortunately. What's more, people were confident in victory over Trisolaris, and the ETO had been destroyed. Society had passed through the Great Rift and the Second Renaissance; the superpowers had vanished, and a Golden Age was now in full swing — only fundamental science had still not moved forward, and universities could still have professors awakened from my era teaching from two-hundred-year-old textbooks. To my shame, we believed in the strength of our race as well — because it was like a dream, a sweet dream made real. By fortunate chance, Reed and I happened to be aboard the Blue Space at the moment when our recently awakened contemporary seized the fleet's flagship, the Natural Selection. He was convinced Earth had no chance of victory and was trying in this way to give humanity a chance at survival. I genuinely admired that man.
Blue Space and three other ships were dispatched to intercept. And then came the shocking news — a single Trisolaran probe that had reached the Solar System fifty years ahead of schedule, the Drop, the size of a truck, had destroyed Earth's entire space fleet. An alloy based on strong nuclear force technology, and an engine beyond human comprehension. Nothing in the Solar System was capable of destroying the Drop. No one could outrun it. But by that point we had already left the Solar System.
The Natural Selection was heading toward a star whose system contained a gas giant planet. It could be used for refueling. The journey would take only a couple thousand years. Our fleet of five ships was capable of covering such a distance.
But the calculations turned out to be wrong. We hadn't accounted for the deceleration effect of passing through gas and dust clouds. In reality, the fleet was looking at fifty thousand years of travel. There were neither parts nor fuel enough for such a journey.
I don't know the name of the ship that attacked first. Thermonuclear bombs detonated fifty kilometers from all vessels simultaneously. For twenty seconds the thermonuclear fireballs pulsed at infrasonic frequency. When the powerful electromagnetic pulses reached the ships, their hulls vibrated, generating infrasound waves of monstrous intensity. Everything was engulfed in a red mist. The crews perished, but the fuel and spacecraft remained intact.
I had anticipated the attack. The Captain of Blue Space and I decided not to strike first. Instead, the crew suited up in spacesuits and all air was pumped from the ship. In this way we protected ourselves from the infrasound bombs. Afterward we destroyed the last enemy vessel, collected the fuel and resources, and continued on our way.
Reed and I had the trust of the crew. Everyone pinned their hopes on our minds. People believed that we could invent new technologies using the captured resources — the Sophons had finally left us in peace, after all. Some even believed that thanks to our inventions they might live to see the moment of finding a new home. Faith was all those people had left.
But Reed and I didn't have faith — we knew it was impossible. We had other plans. In six months Reed completed his two-hundred-year-old space-time theory and built the first time machine in human history. We intended to go back to the past and prevent the catastrophe. To stop Red Shore from transmitting its radio signal to Alpha Centauri. To prevent Trisolaris from ever learning that Earth existed. But we weren't allowed.
The Sophons had apparently been watching us all along, and in the end decided to intervene. Instead of being transported to the past, I found myself in some kind of parallel universe where the history of the conflict with Trisolaris is merely a science fiction novel — and what happened to Reed, I can't even begin to imagine.
Note:
*The Shooter Hypothesis goes like this: a sniper fires at a target, punching holes through it every ten centimeters. Now imagine that the surface of the target is inhabited by a race of intelligent two-dimensional creatures. Their scientists, observing the universe, discover a great law: "At every ten centimeters in the universe, there is a hole." They take the sniper's momentary whim for a law of nature.
There is something of a horror film about the Farmer Hypothesis. Every morning on a turkey farm, the farmer comes to feed the birds. A learned turkey, having observed this phenomenon for almost a full year, arrives at the conclusion: "Every morning at eleven, food arrives." On the morning of Thanksgiving, the know-it-all proclaims this law to her companions. But on that day, at eleven, instead of feeding them, the farmer slaughters all the turkeys.
**Here "Avengers" is used in its original meaning.