I turned off the rockets and let my anti-gravity take to the ground near Ray. Colette, I noticed, was nowhere to be seen and my implant showed footage of her running off into the room’s general lee around the point where Magnus transford into the next stage of an Artificer’s life.
Ray turned toward , the flat stone in his right hand.
“Hey,” he said, “we’re not done. You got what you want. Magnus is dead. Now, I need to get what I want.”
“And what’s that?”
Ray smiled. “You don’t need to ask, do you?”
I hadn’t, replying with, “Survival.”
He grinned. “Bingo. From what I’ve been able to gather, you kill sohow. I want to change that. I know that’s in your past and you’re not going to want to change that, but I also know a lot of other things now.”
“Yeah?” I thought through how I was going to handle this. In theory, I should be able to just tackle him, take the stone and it would be over.
The problem was that I knew Ray could take out supers. What’s more, I’d seen him touch Magnus. Knowing that Ray had Artificer potential, that he could copy powers, and that he was holding an object that might give him power over the entire device, I thought it might be wise to see what he knew before going straight to violence.
With my HUD, I checked the situation around , discovering that everyone else was still fighting.
Continuing, I asked, “What do you know?”
“Well,” he said, “I know you have to keep alive or it sses with your past in ways that you’ll find unpredictable when you get out of here. I also know that I’m not in the sa situation. If I were to kill you, nothing changes for . If I were to kill the first Rocket, maybe nothing changes for , but I bet a lot changes for you.”
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Trying not to sound nervous, I said, “You’re right about that, but the original team left a pretty big footprint. It might be pretty bad for you too.”
Ray nodded, holding up his right hand, index finger raised to say, “You have point there. I saw all the Back to the Futuremovies. You don’t want to ss with that, but you know what?”
He snapped his fingers and everything around stopped, all of my friends, the original team, and everyone Magnus called in, from his team to the Abominators to monstrous things I didn’t recognize. “I know that Magnus was a fucking idiot. The guy had all the power I now have and I’m pretty sure it never occurred to him that he could do this.”
I glanced at my HUD, noticing a frozen tornado and Vaughn floating in the air nearby. As tornados went, it wasn’t large or close, but holy crap, Vaughn…
To Ray, I said, “He probably didn’t watch any of the Back to the Future films.”
Ray laughed. “Exactly. You and I understand each other. But that’s not the only thing. I don’t think he asked the right questions. I asked the machine how I can survive, and you know what? It’s you. You can keep alive.”
“I don’t know how,” I said. “That’s going to be a big paradox, the kind of thing that sets off waves in my life and a lot of others. Frankly, you heard Magnus talk. The whole bit about creatures coming from beyond the stars to destroy the world? That’s true and changing things on that scale attracts their attention. I know the one that created this thing and she was careful not to do it in a way that could be detected.”
Ray shook his head. “That answer’s not good enough. The machine here said you can, so figure it out. It’s possible. Oh, and if you’re thinking about knocking out or sothing, I can do to you what I did to them, okay? Not only that, I can send everyone in here sowhere else. So it’s not going to be easy even if you do take out.”
Aware of my heartbeat, I found myself talking already, “If you’ve got all of that going, what do you even need for?”
Even as I said it, I knew I needed to calm down. Giving a sociopath a reason to dispose of didn’t even seem like a good idea at the ti.
Ray laughed, “Give ti and a lot of it. Look, you know stuff. Maybe I’ll figure it out soday, but not soon and maybe I’ll end the world by accident while doing it. I want to survive and I’m not going to manage it on my own.
“The way I see it, we both want to go ho and neither of us are going to get to until you figure out sothing that works for both of us.”
Could I? Did I want even want to? A world without Ray was a better world. On the other hand, if I could figure out a way to do it, he might be useful against the Destroy faction.
Well, assuming he didn’t kill during the 10,000 year wait for them to show up.
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