On-Screen

I didn’t have to record. We would be On-Screen anyway, and I was getting low on battery.

We stood in the faculty lounge, pleading our hearts out so that two scientists and one detective—of some kind—might try to help us. It was time for everything to fall into place.

“If a serial killer were traveling through time, I think our organization would have detected it by now,” Dr. Black said. She was a serious woman, but she held a spark of curiosity to her that made me think we might get through to her.

“You have,” I replied. Then I looked at Camden so he could take over with the explanation. I didn’t know how much of our journey to the Carousel Casino limbo timeline would end up in the final cut, and I wanted him to have some On-Screen time.

“Grant Leitner has come under KRSL scrutiny before,” Camden said, “in other timelines.”

“I love that excuse,” Dr. Garvin scoffed, clapping his hands together. He was young and cocky, with long blond hair—probably drove the secretarial pool wild. “If we ask for evidence, you can simply say, ‘We left our evidence in another universe.’”

He stood cross-armed at the front of the room, his every effort designed to display how skeptical he was.

“It’s true,” Camden replied. “KRSL started hunting them down, keeping an eye on the timeline. We’re not quite sure how it happened exactly, but we do know how Generation Killer solved that problem—the same way they solved every problem. They just started killing you. Eventually, they killed enough of you that every timeline where KRSL discovered them got culled. The killers themselves probably got dragged to the other side of time just for doing it, but they didn’t care. They’re terrified of you. And if they find out that you know about them, they’re going to do the same to your timeline.”

He was doing a good job, but I could tell he was at the end of his rope.

“That seems improbable,” Dr. Garvin said. “The way you describe it, there are a finite number of these serial killers, but there should, theoretically, be an infinite number of universes where we are capable of detecting their presence—assuming that we share a common history that they’ve traveled to.”

That was a good point—or at least, it would have been.

“Yes, an infinite number of universes—in theory,” Camden said. “But in practice, that’s not how it works.”

Dr. Garvin furrowed his brow. “Do explain,” he said.

Logan took over. While he didn’t have expertise in physics, he did have a more direct connection to the subplot regarding this particular topic.

“It’s what I’ve been telling you,” he said. “These meteor fragments—they each have a unique signature. We’re talking about not just a signature in this universe. You said it yourself—that these individual stones are unique on a multiversal scale. Your own math says that each stone has a unique arrangement of particles and that, theoretically, there is no fragment of a meteorite in any other universe with that exact same signature. You were so excited to tell me about it.”

He was very personable, as if he had gotten to know them well over the last few days.

“That was all in theory. We have not confirmed any of that,” Garvin said. “Our ability to detect anomalies across universes is impressive, but we haven’t proven it.”

“We are the proof,” I said. I pointed to the whiteboard where Camden had drawn out the diagram of the timeline—all the branching lines between Event A and Event B. He even drew a map of Carousel, with all the squiggly lines to help explain the serial killer phenomenon.

“We are inside a temporal anomaly,” I said, “but there aren’t infinite timelines inside here with us. There are only as many timelines as there are unique arrangements of fragments from the original meteorite.”

“That would be an unfathomably large number,” Dr. Garvin said.

“But not infinite,” Logan replied.

We had much of it figured out—Camden and I. It was a theory, but it started to make sense. Every unique timeline had at least one unique cutting of the meteorite within it. That was why timelines only diverged at huge, devastating events with lots of human casualties—because there simply wasn’t enough meteorite to go around if it diverged in the normal way with every decision anyone made.

We didn’t go into that, though—I figured we’d lose the audience, and frankly, we really just needed to move the plot forward.

“This is all very interesting,” Dr. Black said, unable to believe us, “and I really do want to help you. But you have not provided any proof.”

“Look,” I said. “I’m going to make a prediction, and I hope you’ll prove me wrong. My prediction is that we’ll give you all the evidence you need. We’ll do everything we can to convince you. And in the end, you still won’t help us—until the last minute. Why not just skip to the part where you are on board?”

It wasn’t the best prediction, but it might be just enough to trigger Cinema Seer. It wouldn’t be a huge buff, but, hey, telling people the future could get dangerous.

“All right. Let’s see if I understand this,” Dr. Garvin said. “We, and a finite number of other universes, are trapped within a temporal anomaly caused—presumably—by the collision of a meteorite into the Carousel River Valley. Due to the unique position in which the meteorite struck, a strange sort of trap formed that collected a massive amount of time-traveling serial killers within our group of timelines. And if we don’t help you by giving away our top-secret research, we are going to get killed as children. Have I successfully summarized your pitch?”

“That’s about it,” Logan said, “Though we said it with a tone of earnest desperation, not elitist condescension.”

“Thank you. That was a very helpful note,” Dr. Garvin replied. “But you cannot expect us to give away our life’s work for that story—as entertaining as it is.”

I was about to go off on them, but Logan wasn’t done yet.

“Have you never questioned how weird it is that you have this huge underground quasi-governmental facility—with six employees? Where is everyone? It seems like there are staffing issues. Heck, there are more guards outside than there are scientists in this building. Have you not noticed that?”

Dr. Garvin and Dr. Black looked around.

“This is an ordinary amount of staffing,” Dr. Black said, though she seemed confused now that it had been pointed out.

“Look at the mail slots,” Logan said. “There are like fifty of them—but only, what, ten are being used? Does that seem normal to you?”

That was a nice observation.

“It’s already started,” I said.

“What?” Dr. Garvin asked.

“They know we’re here,” I replied. I started looking around the room until I saw him. Of course, I already knew he was there—but I needed to be dramatic about it.

I scanned the room and then closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, I looked behind the row of couches where my friends were sitting.

“He’s there,” I said.

Kimberly, Anna, and Antoine jumped up and looked to where I was pointing. It took them a moment to see him.

“He’s filming us,” Kimberly said.

Of course, he was. It was a thankless job.

The doctors and the detective in the room were not so convinced.

“This is getting pathetic,” Dr. Garvin said. “I almost forgot there was a separate killer trapped on the other side of time who, for some reason, only cares to film you. So strange. You’d think he’d run out of tape.”

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That was a joke I should have made.

“All right, these guys are useless,” I said. “Maybe the only way forward is to go near Event B.”

“But there may not be a way back from that,” Camden warned.

“Wait—when is Event B supposed to occur? And what is it?” Kimberly asked.

Good questions. We didn’t even have to rehearse.

“We think it happens in 2025,” Camden said. “The killers were terrified of it—they would never travel that far. That’s the furthest date in the book. We don’t know what the event is, only that it has to happen.”

There was a brief pause in the conversation. We stared at each other.

“Did you say 2025?” Dr. Black asked.

“Yes, why?” Camden replied.

Dr. Black looked nervously at Dr. Garvin and then at the detective.

She shook her head.

Off-Screen

Well, there weren’t a lot of doctors in the house, but they still had security, and we were not equipped to fight them, so they led us to some cells similar to the ones we had seen used for the Mercers.

Nobody took our stuff, which felt like a huge oversight, but I supposed if they took it, we would just retrieve it, and none of that would end up in the final cut anyway.

Kimberly and Antoine were happy to finally have a moment to spend with Camden.

Meanwhile, Logan lamented that he felt he was about to convince them, but he just couldn’t.

“You never convince them. Even if we spend a lot more time going over everything again, it won’t work,” I said. “The fact is, this is a scene in every movie. The authorities aren’t going to believe us until it’s too late, and, well, we’re nearly there.”

“You’re sure?” Kimberly asked.

“Yep,” I said. “Besides, we got the message to the person that needed to hear it.”

She stared at me for a minute, as if pondering what I had said—or how I had said it—and then nodded.

The downside was that we really were trapped inside that cell.

The upside was that even the floor was padded, and because of the trope that allowed us to have an extended break, we knew that we had four hours uninterrupted, and personally, I could use the break.

I found a bunk with some shade from the light, curled up, and took a nap.

I didn’t need my Lights Out trope to fall asleep.

On screen

Dr. Black arrived at our cell just as our four-hour break timer ended. She had a stern but concerned look on her face.

“You said 2025 was the date of Event B, right?” she asked.

“Yes,” Camden said. “We think that’s the date. It’s our best guess.”

Dr. Black thought for a moment. “Can you explain to me what you meant when you said that it’s already starting? Are you really telling us that we had co-workers we don’t remember? How could that possibly be true? I keep thinking about it logically, and it makes sense that they would never develop a facility of this size for as few scientists as work here.”

I rolled out of bed and walked up to the door where she was standing. Behind her, I looked into my memory and saw the cameraman Generation Killer on the other side of time. He was talking on his radio, but I couldn’t hear what he was saying.

“They’re going back in time and killing all of your co-workers one by one. But those changes aren’t instant—it takes a while for time to fix things, for the changes to reverberate,” I said. “It’s possible that soon more scientists will start appearing—scientists who you will remember as always working here. Or not. I don’t know. But it’s also possible that Generation Killer is killing them so fast, cutting so many threads, that time can’t correct things quick enough, and we’re about to end up in a very messy situation.”

Dr. Black—whose actress was phenomenal—was doing an excellent job of fighting through her altered memories using stone-cold logic.

We were currently in the middle of a temporal makeover as time tried to set this timeline back on track on its way to Event B, while the Generation Killer tried to prevent that.

I had a fragile grasp on the complete ruleset of this story and I felt that if I scrutinized it too much, it would only confuse me.

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, she reached over, pressed a button, and opened the cell doors.

“Approximately eleven years ago,” she began, “upon experimenting with fragments of the meteorite, we began receiving a mysterious signal—using the fragments as a sort of antenna. We were able to translate the signal easily.”

“What did it say?” Anna asked.

That’s right—Anna was the main character. Oops, she hadn’t talked in a while.

“It was from us. From KRSL. We were receiving a message from the future. It was unbelievable, but there it was, plain as day. They claimed to be from the year 2025.”

After she said that, she started walking away—but she did it in a way that was pretty normal. It meant we were supposed to follow her. We were going to do a walk-and-talk.

More like a fast walk-and-talk because she was booking it.

“Look, they told us that over time, the quantity of available meteoric material diminished. They couldn’t explain it, but by the year 2025, they had less than a pound remaining. They believed it diminished naturally—that it was decaying, not just from radioactivity, but in some other manner.”

Interesting.

“Every time a timeline splits, the amount of material reduces by a small amount,” Camden said. So we were going to talk about that.

“Because there has to be at least one unique stone for every timeline,” Logan added.

He picked up on this very quickly, and it annoyed me because he didn’t even have to get tortured.

“That sounds right,” Dr. Black said. “They claimed they found a way to produce more of the material—or rather, to attract more of it—but they never explained how they were going to do it.”

Just as she said that, an alarm started going off, turning the white hallways of the facility red.

All of my teammates got a point buff in Savvy and Grit. Not the best showing of Cinema Seer, but I would take it.

“They’ve started the head-on assault,” I said.

“Look,” Kimberly asked, “is there anything you can do for us? Anything you can give us that might help?”

Dr. Black racked her brain as she led us into a room with a large antenna. I immediately understood that device to be their communication relay.

“I don’t know,” she said. “We were years away from the technology that our counterparts claim to have in the year 2025. But I do have a couple of things I can give you.”

She paused.

“There’s a man outside my house,” she said.

“What?” Kimberly asked.

Dr. Black looked forward, horrified. “When I was a girl, there was a man that would come and stare outside my house. He wore a hat and a long coat. I remember it.”

“Hurry,” I said. “It sounds like he’s about to take you out.”

Dr. Black looked very afraid, but logic prevailed.

“Here,” she said, handing a large rolled-up piece of paper to Logan. “These are the preliminary designs for the device they wanted us to construct across the multiverse. Trying to communicate schematics through time has been difficult. We don’t know its purpose yet, but I did take a guess.”

She walked up to a computer and started typing rapidly.

“Sometimes we have special guests from corporate—people whose names we are not meant to know. We don’t say anything because they fund our research, but they use these passes.” She pressed Enter, and a small device next to her computer started to slowly print out laminated badges with nothing on them but barcodes.

“I don’t know if they’ll work in the future. I don’t know if they’ll work in another universe, but—”

Dr. Black stopped speaking.

And then she just stopped existing.

“What just happened?” Kimberly asked.

“She died long before she got her job here,” I said.

Generation Killer really was scarier the less you saw of him.

“But why can we remember her?” Logan asked.

“Plot convenience,” I replied under my breath. “Maybe because we’re time travelers. We’re not from this timeline, so the reverberations haven’t caught up to us.”

The little device continued to print out six of the laminated badges.

“Looks like Bobby’s out of a job,” I muttered under my breath.

We were still On-Screen, so I knew we were still being followed by our phantom cameraman.

Just after we pocketed the badges, I heard a voice yelling at us from the hall.

“What are you doing here?” Dr. Garvin asked. “Why aren’t you in your cells?”

“Dr. Black brought us here,” Logan said.

“Who?” Garvin responded.

He looked very confused—not just because we were in the room, but because he was clearly under distress. He lifted up his right arm.

His hand was missing.

And he was still confused about it because his memory hadn’t caught up. Before he had a chance to react, he vanished, just like Dr. Black had.

I was going to let the others react emotionally—I had to look for a way out.

“We have to be quick here,” I said. “Pretty soon, this whole timeline is going to be broken. When that happens, there won’t be any more scheduled disasters for us to use as a jumping point.”

“What do we do?” Kimberly asked.

“We have to get out of here,” I said.

“What if they do that same thing to us?” she asked. “Go back and kill us as children?”

That wouldn’t be fair.

“I think it would be a lot harder to do to us,” I said. “We’ve traveled around quite a bit. I think we’re disconnected from our original timeline too much for it to hurt us. I don’t know—maybe if they went back and killed every version of us as children, if they made sure they found the right timeline, but I don’t think they have the time. Even if there are only finite timelines in this temporal anomaly.”

“So they can still do it?” she asked.

“I don’t think it would happen like that,” Camden said. “It’s more likely that if they manage to prevent us from existing, we wouldn’t die—we’d just get swept away to the shores of time.”

“Thank goodness,” Logan said. “I was worried we were going to get the bad ending.”

The truth was, we didn’t know exactly what would happen. And as much as we wanted to nail down and understand everything, we weren’t dealing with that type of time travel. We were dealing with cosmic entity time—not physics club time.

And I just knew that Carousel liked having a little wiggle room.

Still, we weren’t exactly helpless, because even if the math was hard to nail down for the rules of time travel, figuring out where the story was headed would be a bit more manageable.

“It looks like we need an injury,” I said. My ear ached as I said the words.

Right on time, I heard words come yet again from the hallway.

“Hey ya fellas,” came the common refrain from the emotionless, expressionless Generation Killer just outside.

“That’ll do,” Antoine said as he started walking toward the hallway.

Logan followed him.

“You know, we got a lot of smart people here, but there’s one thing I haven’t figured out,” Logan said. “Why do all of these adult men dress alike?”

As Logan was speaking, Antoine punched the Generation Killer in the mouth. Between Comedic Timing and Class Clown, Logan could basically paralyze an enemy while quipping.

“At first, I thought they were like clones or something—but they’re not. This is a choice they’re making,” he added. “They think their matching outfits look cool.”

Antoine grabbed the Generation Killer around the neck. “You all better get over here. I can only do this this once, and we have company.”

We all hurried over as I held out a copy of The Carousel Tragedy history book, open to the last page, making sure everyone knew where we were going.

There were dozens of Generation Killers coming.

“2025. Event B,” I said.

It was risky, but it was also the only way forward.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep