King of Thieves

My boyfriend was acting crazy again.

The thing is, he knew I was actually working late. The new recombinant batch was almost at gestation, and we wanted this set to finally live. If we succeeded, our reputations and careers were set for life.

And we were nervous. We’d been so careful all along! But something always went wrong. Equipment failed at odd times; test tubes and beakers shattered. Once the incubator door was left open, and all our effort was sticky goo on the floor. Another, the whole grid got knocked out on the eastern half of the city. Yes we had generators and yes they were set up properly – and plugged into a dead line.

Of course we suspected sabotage. What else could it be? I didn’t have this much bad luck in D&D when I throw a hundred d-6’s! But the cameras showed nothing, and yes those were checked for hacking and sabotage too. Things just kept happening.

In the beginning, we were competing against a few other companies for the tech. The one in China… well, you saw the news and lived through the pandemic. The one in Korea kind of disappeared around the time of some rather unsavory indictments and rampant fraud. Theranos – ‘nuff said.

I know the other CRISPR machines in China are busy cranking away at other projects, lots of papers being published on discoveries. But anything related to dinosaurs, and the problems start.

So I guess we were the next, and the closest to actual accomplishment.

But we had no idea how the saboteur was getting in and out. The pattern made no sense, and the methods were so different that I even wondered if it was the same individual. Maybe a whole foreign government? All of us were vetted and invested in success, and we didn’t pick up anyone from the other failed companies. Our IT department is the best too. So, how?

Nothing made sense.

And we were so close!

So, of course, Mark decides to suddenly become a royal pain in my posterior.

Whining about all the time I’m in the lab. Whining about the time I take to myself to decompress. Whining that I can’t work from home. Whining that I don’t cook enough. Whining to go on a weeks-long trip.

Gah!

Of course I don’t work from home – does he realize how many billions are on the line? Bringing home anything with any of our copyrighted tech is instant grounds for dismissal. Others fell into that trap, and they’re gone, and banned from the industry. And mostly under house arrest for what they might know and could sell.

Legal? No. But with that kind of money invested, do you think anyone really cares?

So when Mark started whining about wanting to “watch me work,” my inner alarm bells went off.

Of course I shut him down. Of course I reported it to my boss. Of course I changed my levels of security at my apartment, and locked my badge in a digital safe, and started meeting him outside my place.

The sabotage tailed off, then came back full force. All our vehicles were broken into, all in one night. At our homes.

That did it. We took up residence in the building till the newest round hatched. I felt bad for the ones who had families, but they could do video calls. We have a few in-house chefs, and they did a rotating schedule of overnights with us. Anything we needed, we got. The exercise room and pool is awesome, in case you needed to know that.

Mark predictably amped up the whine-o-meter, and I told him in no uncertain terms to knock it off or he’d never see me again.

With only twenty-four hours to go and the odds of a successful hatch astronomically high, he called again. Begging, pleading, for me to come to dinner. To talk.

Hunh.

Security drove me there. Half the diners were hired cops. HR and my boss insisted on it, and I didn’t mind. I was also wired.

But now I wished I wasn’t.

I knew Mark was off kilter, but in a funny quirky way. We had a good relationship at the start; he was looking for someone fun to have adventures with, and with all my time in the labs, I didn’t want anything serious till I’d made it and could retire filthy rich.

One night, he kissed me impulsively. Before that, we were flirty, we were touchy-feely, we were good in the sack. But, somehow, I knew that kiss was different. And that’s when Mark changed.

This Mark, this serious, haunted-looking Mark, I’d never seen. And there he was, in one of the best restaurants on this side of the city, wearing that strange helmet hat and those weird designer shoes. “Designer Nikes,” he called them. Hi-top sneakers crossed with sandals, with ridiculous puffy wings stitched onto the ankle. As always, though, no one seemed to notice.

And he brought his own food. Again. I can never show my face here again, I’d die of embarrassment.

But it’s what came out of his mouth that seriously concerned me. Old gods? Fates? His dad, charged with keeping Tartarus sealed? Like, used to rule the entire world, now demoted to keeper of the monster cage? Titans trying to break out?

“Dinosaurs,” he insisted. “Titans. What monsters do you think we fought? Chained up in Tartarus? Dinosaurs. Creatures that went bad. Epic battles whose traces are all but erased from the earth, except for fossils and craters. Religions and belief rise and fall with civilizations, but we remain, and must do our duty. If we are no longer in charge of ritual, we must return to our original duties.”

“Mark, I-”

“Mercury.”

“Riiight. You know I can’t believe you. I am a scientist, and I believe in evidence, not to the ramblings of an overly paranoid person who’s been sabotaging my company, and likely the others, and now has obviously snapped and gone off the deep end.”

His shoulders slumped; he sighed. “Fine. We do this the hard way.” He reached into his jacket-

And all the cops and security people, my friends, people I knew, I baked cookies for them, also reached into their jackets-

Mark was faster. He was pulling out a strange rod thing, looked up, and seemed to take in the whole room in a nanosecond-

There was a blur.

When they say “everything happened so fast,” I get it now.

Everything grayed out, and I was grabbed. I would have had more flexibility if I’d been stuffed into a straitjacket, and don’t ask me how I know that.

When the gray faded and was replaced with “reality,” it didn’t get much better.

“Where are we?”

“Nowhere. Literally. This is a pocket in the space-time continuum, where we can do the work we have been tasked with maintaining.”

“By whom? And how did we get here?”

“You’re not cleared to know, and I told you I’m Mercury.”

My brain couldn’t process what I was surrounded with, so of course I can’t describe it to you. But I could look at Mar...Mercury. He seemed very solid, and so did I. The rod – oh, right, that snake rod thing Mercury carries. The wings are alive, and so are the snakes. Everything else was indistinct, though I could feel beings moving around me. And through me, once. That was creepy.

Mercury nodded. “Explains ghosts now, doesn’t it?” he said quietly. “When those of us who live outside of time interact inside it. And it explains the strangeness of all the creation stories around the world. And the concept of the Land of Faerie, and even the parallel worlds theory. You can’t explain what you’re seeing, so you try to make sense of it in terms your minds can comprehend. Minds, products of time and circumstance and culture and curiosity and the urge to improve.”

Sometimes my brain moves fast to grasp concepts. I thought it was one of the reasons my boyfriend liked me, but now I just didn’t know. “So the clockwork theory is more correct that we realize.”

“Not quite. Grandfather had his reasons for creating the concept of Time, and Great-Grandmother had her reasons for forming herself out of the primordial Chaos, and pushing it back to the limits of human comprehension. It is a useful construct, but of course, limited. And it’s a shredding terror to maintain. Which is why you’re here – to see this part.”

There was another blurring, and when I could see again, I beheld the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

And I still can’t properly describe it. I will never be able to. But think of it as the most beautiful tapestry you have ever seen, lit from within by its own light. Well, lights. Each thread was the presence of a human life, and its position in this three-dimensional creation showed their life and interaction in the grand scale of existence. Some strands were bright, some glimmered darkly, some barely flickered, but when seen as a whole… Look, I don’t throw words like this around lightly, but the whole of Life and Creation and our place in this world made perfect sense.

“Don’t touch it,” Mercury said quietly, “but the places where people have sex are amazing. Like here, and here. This is where the act of bodies merging becomes a thing greater than we are, and you can see it in the solidity and color.”

It was amazing.

“And here, you can see when people create things and art. It’s just as bright as the sex parts, but a different kind of light. A merging of a different type, but just as powerful.” He was right.

“Now, this is where Death comes in. Natural death, when the being known as Atropos cuts the thread from the weaving of Time, is fine and natural. See here, and here?” And I could see how the threads left the tapestry, but they traveled – elsewhere. Mercury nodded. “They enter another realm at this point, and no, I will go no further on the subject. But you see it. Now, here, see these?” And he pointed to parts that seemed – well, diseased. The colors, the intensity, were wrong.

He nodded. “Disease, murder, assault, abuse. The big blots are wars. It is a stain on Life itself, the complete destruction of all. Not Death, that is also a construction that has its uses. But a thing that is warped, twisted beyond its proper utility, that is the true opposite of Life. And it takes everything around it into itself, sickening all it touches, weakening the threads of the weaving.”

I was forcefully reminded of black holes, the thing that powers galaxies that can spawn life, but will also destroy it all in the end.

Mercury nodded. “Just so. So, to show you the important thing-”

Another blurring, another stop. But this part of the tapestry – what happened? Gaping holes of nothing but angry beyond-black fury, rips, tears, shreds fraying into nothing, ending in a section where the whole tapestry almost broke apart. Tiny sparkles of light, nothing more. Dull colors. Far, far in the impossibly long distance, I could barely see the start of colors again.

“The great war. Where it all fell apart, where my siblings and parents fought our ancestors, and we finally gained victory over our monster aunts and uncles, and cast them into Tartarus, so that order and reason could again rule the hearts and minds of Gaia’s creation.”

Mercury pointed to some dull-olive-brown threads, dropping away from the weave, going somewhere else, bound with a too-bright acid yellow rope. “Tartarus, bound by Zeus’ will and power, welded into his thunderbolts.” It hurt to look at.

He pointed to the shredded hole in the tapestry. “Chicxulub.” And then a blur, and we were at the far end of the hole, where the sparkles were now clearer, obviously gathered together, neatly combed. The order coming out of the chaos. A selvage so strong to make up for the weakness behind. “The K-T barrier, a firm reminder of what was suffered. Never again.”

I shivered.

“Now, the reason why.” More blurring; I was almost getting used to this type of travel. This time, when I could see, we were in the center of a bunch of activity. There was no tapestry, but I was completely surrounded by a web of glittering threads. I felt like I was traveling at warp speed, all those threads aimed off at a point somewhere “behind” me, but the movement of life and transition thrummed around me.

“Technically, this is the future. These are the threads of those alive, but where we are hasn’t happened yet. Where they go, that point behind us, is where they enter the great Loom, the planet. There, they interact, and what is left as Gaia spins herself through space and time, is the tapestry. This is as close as you can get to being back within time, here in this space, being a part of it still. Here you are.” And there I was, and I was quite pleased to be my favorite color, and glowing brightly.

“Now, look down.” I did, and there were the same dull threads from before! “The Titans. The dinosaurs. Potentially brought back to terrorize the world again, because of your meddling in the lab.” The strands were oily, gleaming, twitching with jealous desire. “If your experiment succeeds, Gaia will be wounded in the coming war, and likely die.”

But…

SNAP.

And I was awake.

I was in my safe room at work, and the sirens were going off.

We rushed to the lab, but it was too late. The incubator machines were broken beyond repair. Our computers were wiped! Everything, everything, gone.

I was done, and so were my co-workers. We quit in disgust even as security was trying to figure out what happened, but the cameras showed we were sleeping whenever – well, whatever happened, happened. We got sweet severance packages, but enough was enough. I was out.

Besides, I had a sudden urge to study time travel. I’d gotten a few ideas, and I wanted to try them out. I have contacts in other think tanks, and one seemed like a perfect fit for me.

Mark, surprisingly, came with me. “I love you,” he said quietly, when I told him I’d quit and was moving. “I love the way your mind works. You have an amazing special spark, and you are freaking brilliant, and I want to see what you can do when you put your mind to it. Your old project was killing you, and I was scared for your sanity. Let’s go make a fun, special life. Somewhere else. Where are we going?”

I love this guy.

I can see a future with him.