Free Second Paradigm by Peter J. Wacks Page B

stomach. He didn’t know what he waited for, but he felt a weird certainty that until it happened, nothing could possibly happen to him. Anyway, he was restless.
    “I guess forty-one years of sleep will do that,” he said to no one as he locked his room door behind him. “Anyway, how bad could it be?”
    2873: James Garret’s Laboratory
    Garret put down the stolen file and rubbed his eyes, trying in vain to blink back the exhaustion. He caught a ragged breath. They had sent his wife single handedly up against the greatest paradox in history and expected her to win. In a lot of ways, it was murder.
    Expecting one person to be able to tip the balance of historical imperative by that much was beyond sheer stupidity. It bordered on willful blindness. James had a nagging suspicion that Director Warren, predecessor to the current Director Arbu, had known what he was doing. At least he had lost his job over it. But the trivial price that had been exacted was far from enough.
    Still, something about this did not add up correctly. The math worked well enough, but not perfectly. It was almost as though.… He scratched out the formulas on his relative paradox theory, inputting the data from Wanda’s file. And there it was. He could not build the relativity frame correctly for the information contained in the file. So, something was missing, something about the time frame she had been operating in.
    Regardless of that, the math said that she could not have survived, which meant someone in headquarters wanted her dead. Or possibly both. Garret couldn’t shake the belief that Ex-Director Warren had wanted Wanda dead. Perhaps the motive and the missing information were linked.
    He ran the math yet again, to be sure. Simple math showed that no single person could affect the catalyst actions needed to counterbalance a paradox above a class three magnitude. The computers could not have missed that little piece of this mission.
    Bloody thoughts of vengeance filled Garret’s head. Visions of storming into Warren’s house and killing him … but he shook those thoughts out, instead focusing on the more productive lines of how to save his wife’s life. Chief amongst those thoughts was how to create a secondary paradox that resulted in his wife’s survival without crashing the time stream.
    It was fairly obvious to him that walking in and trying to avert the events which led to her death would have much the same results as Wanda’s mission had ten years previously. Starting to see a path that would result in getting Wanda back, he got to work on the mathematics, cranking out possible solutions with temporal physics.
    Shadows grew longer and the air chilled as the sun made its journey over the horizon. Hours and hours of math had not yet revealed a simple solution to him, nor did he feel one would be found in the math alone. An elegant solution sat somewhere in this problem, he could sense that much—but where was it?
    Starting from scratch he listed out his tools. ‘Up’ nanos allowed access to the past. ‘Down’ nanos allowed him to stretch and manipulate the time flow. HUD contact lenses allowed him faster computational power than anyone in the world, except his dead wife—who would be active in the time frame. Any non-anachronistic appearing technology would be usable as well.
    But there were so many variables in accessing the paradox nexus and changing the outcome. Frustrated, he walked out of his laboratory and into the living room to attempt relaxing on the couch. And there, on the History Channel, came the solution. It took him a moment of watching the show about historical wars for it to click in his mind, but it finally did.
    If you spun a smaller paradox to brush the larger one, instead of amplification you would create a small shift in the large paradox’s spin. A smile spread across his face as he formulated the plan.
    Time: Classified
    Operation: Classified
    Lucille Frost shifted through the paperwork on her desk.