A Bridge of Years

Nineteen


Billy entered the tunnel with his armor fully powered and most of his fears behind him.

He had lived too long with fear. He'd been running from things he couldn't escape. This visitation from the future was punishment, Billy thought, for a life lived in exile.

After he killed Lawrence Millstein, after a failed attempt on his legitimate prey, Billy had retired for two days to his apartment; had powered down, hidden his armor, retreated to the shadows. Two days had been enough. He didn't feel safe. There was no security anymore, no anonymity . . . and the Need was deep and intense.

So he took the armor out of its box and wore it with all its armaments and accessories here, to the source of his trouble, this unpatrolled border with the future.

Where his prey had retreated—he knew that by the tangle of footprints amid the rubble.

Here we begin some reckoning, Billy thought. The beginning or the end of something.

He stepped through fallen masonry into the bright and sourceless light of the time machine.



Fear had kept him out of this tunnel for years: fear of what he'd seen here.

The memory was vivid of that apparition, huge and luminous. It had moved slowly but Billy felt its capacity for speed; had seemed immaterial but Billy felt its power. He had escaped it by a hairbreadth and was left with the impression that it had allowed him to escape; that he had been evaluated and passed over by something as potent and irresistible as time itself.

Now—under the bravado of his armor, the courage pumped out by the artificial gland in the elytra—that fear remained fresh and intact.

Billy pressed on regardless. The corridor was empty. Here in the depth of it, both exits out of sight, he felt suspended in a pure geometry, a curvature without meaningful dimension.

Beyond these walls, Billy thought, years were tumbling like leaves in a windstorm. Age devoured youth, spines curved, eyes dimmed, coffins leapt into the earth. Wars flashed past, as brief and violent as thunderstorms. Here, Billy was sheltered from all that.

Wasn't that all he had ever really wanted?

Shelter. A way home.

But these were vagrant, treasonous thoughts. Billy suppressed them and hurried ahead.



The cybernetics had entered the tunnel as a fine dust of polymers and metal and long, fragile molecules. They began to infiltrate Billy almost at once.

Billy was unaware of it. Billy simply breathed. The nanomechanisms, small as viruses, were absorbed into his bloodstream through the moist fabric of his lungs. As their numbers increased to critical levels, they commenced their work.

To the cybernetics Billy was a vast and intricate territory, a continent. They were isolated at first, a few pioneers colonizing this perilous hinterland along rivers of blood. They read the chemical language of Billy's hormones and responded with faint chemical messages of their own. They crossed the difficult barrier between blood and brain. They clustered, increasingly numerous, at the interface of flesh and armor.

Billy inhaled a thousand machines with every breath.

The exit loomed ahead of him now, an open doorway into the year 1989.

Billy hurried toward it. He had already begun to sense that something was wrong.