"You've got a death wish, boy!" His move interrupted, Kang the Conqueror was livid, and his voice turned vicious.
"Damn it—too late again…" Iron Lad worked fast, collecting the entropy readings the Algorithm gave off. The data was ugly. The machine had already been triggered—triggered several times over.
He was sick with frustration. He'd still arrived too late.
In the span of barely half a minute, several people had already been sent away. Worry gnawed at him, but hatred ran deeper—hatred for the thing he was destined to become.
He pulled his mask back on. "I'm going to stop you, Kang."
Kang the Conqueror bared his teeth in a grin. "You understand nothing, child."
"Wrong. I know your gear inside and out. I am you—the you who woke up before you ever took the wrong road."
They slammed together like two worlds colliding. One meant to guard time, the other to conquer it; one young and burning with justice, the other old and eaten through with ambition—two men out of the 31st century. They tore free of the present moment in seconds and carried the fight out into the boundless river of time.
High on his throne, Gungnir in hand, Odin spared the struggle along the timeline a single idle glance, as though it were a triviality beneath notice.
The Ancient One went on sipping her tea, unhurried.
Several god-kings, several powerful beings keenly attuned to time—Kronos, the God of Time seated at time's end, among them—all watched the two of them clash. Not one of them lifted a finger.
***
Bella had been in this world, at this point in time, for nearly a week now.
It was a world of brutal scarcity, its environment savage and hostile. Almost every stretch of land on the planet had vanished under the ocean.
The Earth was sick—gravely sick. When the skin is gone, what is left for the hair to cling to? Humanity had torn its own environment apart, and in the end paid the price for its short-sightedness.
Most of the human race had drowned in the tides. The survivors clustered in a single region they called the Peninsula, throwing up quarantine zones, rebuilding a city, scraping by on the last of the resources left to them.
Five days ago Bella had used a Charm spell to slip in among a group and follow them into the city.
There was no government here, no king. The city was run by a corporate Collective. The Collective had no name and needed none—there was only this one city left in all the world, and only this one Collective to run it.
Time is fair to everyone. Thrown clear by the temporal turbulence, Bella was drained and exhausted, most of her psionic energy spent. All she could do was strip off every ornament on her that didn't belong to this era and fall in behind a search party into the city.
She needed rest. She needed to get her strength back. Most of all she needed to rebuild her psionic energy.
The 21st century was considered a magic-dead environment, but there'd actually been a trace of it left—enough that a man like the Indian monk Daniel, after decades of arduous cultivation, could eventually work a handful of spells. This era was another matter entirely. Here there truly was no magic. Not a flicker of it.
Right now Bella was like a champion swimmer dropped into the Sahara. No amnesia, no missing limbs, every skill she'd ever learned still intact—but trying to cast in a magic-dead world to jump back to her own time, and with a working of magic like the Eye of Agamotto no less, one that outstripped her current level? That was no small thing.
The outside world had nothing to offer her. She could only lean on her own psionic energy to work magic.
The Algorithm had burned through the bulk of that energy earlier, and it crept back on its own painfully slowly. She'd walked two days through the wilderness without laying eyes on a single soul. With no better option, she'd made for the city. If nothing else, she could at least find a few people to praise her and top her psionic energy back up—right?
Getting inside was easy. She used a Charm spell to invent a nonexistent assignment for herself, then claimed her identity terminal had been lost mid-mission, drew a fresh wristwatch-style terminal, and used the chance to register a new identity.
The Collective's administrator judged that she had a real gift with words. After a test, they posted her to an office tower called Atmos to do descriptive writing.
Bella's first job in the future was cranking out copy.
In fairness, the setup here wasn't bad—comfortable across the board. Housing was handed out free; no such thing as tens of thousands a square meter. Food, clothes, transport, all free. Bella poked around the whole area for half a day and never once found anything resembling money. The place had a distinctly utopian streak.
Working at the Atmos tower was work in the most literal sense. The Collective wouldn't pay a cent for it, and no employee would think to ask. It was more that everyone was bored out of their skulls, inventing tasks to burn off the empty hours.
Seven in the morning, Bella was up on the dot. Today was a workday.
After washing up, she went to the wardrobe to pick out clothes.
Not that there was anything to pick. Every piece was the same: white cotton-linen shirt, white trousers, flat white shoes. Head to toe, all of it white.
She left her quarters. No bicycles here, no cabs, nothing—only the city trains ran, and the rest of the time you got where you were going on your own two feet. At least nobody was ever in a hurry.
The men and women in her line of sight all wore the same white shirts and trousers, all of them blank-faced. Their features differed, yet every last one of them carried the same air, as if pressed from a single mold.
"Only when each of us does their duty can the Collective function. Every employee is obligated to report any suspicious activity to the Department of Health and Safety… Switched-On Syndrome is a disease. Emotion makes a human being angry, afraid, grief-stricken. Switched-On Syndrome gravely undermines the healthy progress of society and is the single most urgent illness facing humanity today. Any employee who finds that they, or someone near them, has contracted Switched-On Syndrome, please report to the Department of Health and Safety at once…"
The screen at the city's heart scrolled that message endlessly—this so-called Switched-On Syndrome, SOS for short, this 'chronic affliction.' These people of the future had decided that emotion was a disease standing in the way of progress. They were leaning on every lever they had to smother human feeling, all to keep the sickness from spreading.
Bella watched for a moment. Soon enough the ticker rolled out a piece of 'good news': the Collective was pooling its resources to develop a drug, one meant to suppress human emotion at the root.
"Bullshit!" She had nothing but contempt for these people and their schemes.
Still, she didn't make a scene—just fell in with the crowd and walked on, face empty as the rest.
Beep. With a tone like a senior citizen's transit card at a turnstile, Bella lifted her left wrist to a device shaped like a ticket barrier. The all-metal wristwatch fed its data through, and her portrait surfaced on the screen beside it. She had a new name in this place now.
She was called Nia.
Just the one name. No surname.