Free The God Mars Book Three: The Devil You Are by Michael Rizzo

depressing.”
    “Sounds like you remember it perfectly.” She doesn’t
sound like she’s joking.
    All the bizarre parallel world bullshit is giving me
a headache. Apparently I still get headaches.
    “Figured out all the upgrades, yet?” she tries to
cheer me up, or at least distract.
    “Getting there.”
    “Well, at least your formerly geriatric self should
get a kick out of them. You were sixty, and I wasn’t far behind,
when we took the first treatments. Being thirty again, being
totally perfectly healthy, I think that was the biggest thing for
me. For you, too. The super powers and the gadgets were icing. And
after a while, the new mods got almost silly. But I’ll never forget
waking up young. And knowing I could always be.”
    “You realize I’m on the run from my own people?” I
let her know whatever moment she thought I’d have is
well-ruined.
    “We saw the patrols, picked up on the chatter. Your
new leaders are in an amusing panic about you. And they haven’t
seen anything yet.”
    “’We’?” I pick up.
    “Back to my job. Speaking of: I’m out of time again.
TTFN. And Chang also has his eye on Tranquility. Thankfully, the
UNMAC agenda gives you a reason to be there, so he won’t get
suspicious when you show up. Love you. Still.”
    And she’s gone.
    She still hasn’t told me what the fucking plan is.
Did we just get dropped back through time to wing it, with the fate
of reality on the line?
    Stop Chang.
    It doesn’t even make sense.
    If I buy any of this, Chang’s plan was to use a
sub-atomic “splice” to back before the corporate boom to create
self-producing nanotech programmed to wreck the research, keep the
human race mortal for awhile longer. He sent seeds to make his
Discs, which he called simple self-managing drones. But he also
sent the tech to remake himself , so a version of himself
could oversee it, ensure it happened. (The rules of the paradox
should have forced that to fail.) And he apparently also seeded the
tech to make other things, or he’s got the skills to adapt what
he’s made out of and apply it to making ships, weapons, hybridizing
Bly and Nina Harper into monstrosities.
    But somebody dragged me—and Star—into some bizarre
plan to stop him, somehow inserting us into Chang’s seeding program
(supposedly because they couldn’t just stop him from doing it), so
we could be here to resist him.
    And too many things about that are eating at me.
    If whoever sent us could add that much into Chang’s
program, then why couldn’t they just sabotage it, change it so it
wouldn’t replicate anything?
    Unless that would reveal them, and they were
vulnerable to Chang (and whoever might have been with him). Or they
simply assumed Chang would just try again (after ensuring they were
shut out), or do something worse.
    But sending us… Chang sent drones. They replicated a
lot sooner than our complex bodies, and got to work (doing far more
damage than Chang intended, if I believe him). Sending us would be
too little, too late—Chang would already have changed the past.
Even if they didn’t believe he could succeed—that sending us was
just a failsafe on the outside chance he managed the impossible—the
plan was doomed to fail in design.
    Or maybe by design?
    If we had no real hope of stopping Chang before he
did his damage to the timeline, how exactly are we stopping
him?
    Running this through my head again—maybe because my
rage is making me go especially into darkness—I think I know: If
Chang could defeat the paradox, maybe that was to be our weapon as
well.
    Stop Chang.
    I think I’ve seen this movie: We find an earlier
version of him and kill him. None of this happens. Time resets
mostly the way it was.
    But that doesn’t work (and my headache is raging).
Chang’s already changed time. If there’s a younger Chang somewhere
in this time, it’s not the one who grows up to do this, not
anymore.
    Unless we were just too late.
    But Chang’s already overwritten all