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October 4th, 2012.

Matthew Lyman stepped outside of the Quik-N'-Easy where he had so disgracefully worked for the last two-and-a-half years. It was early evening, and he was halfway through his afternoon shift. He absentmindedly reached into the pocket of his red and yellow jacket, searching fruitlessly for a pack of cigarettes that were not there. Confused, he scowled and began chastising himself for his forgetfulness. He turned to reenter the dingy, poorly-lit convenience store; running his left hand through his short, dark, unkempt hair; before remembering that he had not forgotten his cigarettes — he had quit two weeks ago, and indeed he had stepped outside for some fresh air and a quick jog around the block during his break.

"Right, I'm being healthy now," he quipped to himself, as he set off; slowly easing into a less-than-vigourous pace.

He quickly approached the nearby street corner, and as he rounded it, he could not help but notice a conspicuous red soda can on the road ahead, rolling in circles. No, not quite circles... there's an incline here, he noted mentally. As he continued along, he noticed that he had made a note of its periodicity as it swung, pendulum-like, in a ponderous path toward the low point of the road just ahead of him. He flicked his eyes toward the oncoming traffic and quickly estimated the speeds of the three cars. Extrapolating, he determined that the first two cars would miss the can, but the third would crush it — with its left rear wheel, just a few feet short of the low point of the road.

That's a shame, he thought, frowning. "Might as well watch," he mumbled aloud as he came to a stop on the sidewalk. As he waited through the intervening handful of seconds, it occurred to him that he was far more upset about the can than he ought to have been.

As he predicted, the first car passed him as the can reached the apex of one of its swings, missing it by a good six inches. Well, I guess that three quarters of a Physics degree wasn't useless after all, he reflected, mildly amused. The second car rumbled by, this time with the can safely between its wheels.

"Bye, little buddy," he said, melancholic, as the third car approached.

◆ ◆ ◆

A thunderous sound accompanied the flattening of the soda can, startling Matthew. He reflexively spun on his heel to pinpoint the source of the noise. It became immediately apparent to him as he saw the body of a small, bespectacled, middle-aged man crumple, lifeless, to the ground only a few feet behind him. Rapid footfalls alerted him to the fact that the gunman was already running away, disappearing into the dark parking lot behind him; but Matthew's gaze immediately became fixed on the dead man's lifeless eyes. He had been shot in the head, point blank — killed instantly. Fighting the urge to flee, Matthew realized he needed to call 911. He scoured his pockets for his smartphone. Finding it, he dialed the number and proceeded to explain to the dispatcher what had just happened, trying not to let his voice shake too much as he did.

"Try to stay calm, we'll have a unit there in a few minutes, Mr. Lyman. Please stay where you are," said the dispatcher, her urgent tone betraying her words.

"O-Ok," Matthew stuttered, as the reality of what had just happened set in. He noticed a small slip of paper on the ground beside the man's hand. He picked it up. It read:

NEW YORK STATE LOTTERY. 440 MILLION. FEBRUARY 12TH, 2013. 32, 46, 3, 12, 28, 26, 37.

◆ ◆ ◆

Matthew had pocketed the slip of paper, on the off chance that it was correct, and had promptly forgotten about it. He had been questioned by the police several times following the incident, but they had never come up with anything substantial to tie anyone to the murder. They thanked him for his help, meagre as it was, and told him to come in if he remembered anything else. The gun and bullet were completely untraceable; utterly unrecognizable to all the ballistics experts that the NYPD had thought to call on. The man had had no ID, no dental records, no fingerprint records. Even the lenses of his glasses were made of an unfamiliar material which could not be identified; let alone traced to a manufacturer. By all rights, the man didn't exist. Within a month, the case had been shelved.

February 1st, 2013

Matthew was in a laundromat, lazily stuffing his clothes into the massive washing machines. As he was going through the pockets of a pair of jeans, he happened upon a lump of paper. Figuring it must have been a receipt that he had forgotten to throw out, he lobbed it into the nearby trashbin. He finished loading his clothes, and inserted the coins to activate the washer. He stepped back and leaned on the back of the bench facing opposite him, and watched his clothes spin in the machine; the tiny, muted maelstrom mesmerized him, lulling him into a nearly trance-like state.

He heard the soft dinging of the electronic bell on the door as another customer entered the laundromat, and he disinterestedly looked to see whom it was. They were, of course, unfamiliar to him. As he turned to look back at the swirling of jeans that had so entranced him, he briefly looked out the window beside the door. As he did, a teen outside the laundromat tried — and failed — to toss a soda can into the trashcan outside. A car backfired somewhere nearby.

Matthew fell away from reality and suddenly he was back on that street, on that night, with the dead man laying beside him, his blood staining the concrete. Someone coughed in the laundromat, and Matthew snapped back to reality.

The note! Matthew realized, and he scrambled to the bin and rifled through it, drawing amused — or perhaps, annoyed — looks from the other patrons. He finally found it, and upon unraveling it, he was surprised and relieved to find that the ink had not faded to the point of illegibility.

◆ ◆ ◆

August 19th, 2056.

Matthew stood with his hands clasped behind his back and looked out from the large window of his office, on the 68th floor of the Lyman Industries building in downtown Manhattan. The skyline had changed quite significantly since he was a young man — many of the ugly, old skyscrapers had been rebuilt or refurbished with carbon nanotube facades, and indeed many of them were now connected with pedestrian bridges and bicycle paths. Nanotubes were among the earlier of the many technologies that Lyman Industries had helped to bring to commercial success, and they remained one of the more profitable ones. More impressive, however, to Matthew's mind, were the transparent aluminum windows inset in every building. While not quite as versatile as the nanotubes, Matthew had had a more direct hand in bringing the technology to the fore — and he often made a note of the fact that he had facilitated the most revolutionary change in window-making since the advent of glass itself. He chuckled to himself, remembering some of the headlines of the early 2030s that lauded him as a visionary, for those and other innovations that had shaped the world over the past 4 decades. A swell of pride came over him briefly before he remembered to humble himself.

Best not to get caught up in my own hype, he thought, bemused. He heard the muted beep of a keycard being scanned, and he slowly turned to see his assistant Mara enter the room. "Yes, Mara? What is it?" he said, a soft smile dawning over his face.

"Mr. Lyman, sir, there's been an... incident... in the grav lab," said Mara, sheepishly.

"Oh?" Matthew responded, knowingly, before grinning widely.

"It's Aaron Dolman, sir. He brought the device from the high-energy lab with him and he —"

Matthew cut her off, saying "Yes, Mara, I know. This is the moment I've waited for since I started this company all those years ago," suddenly solemn. Calmly, he walked to his desk and waved his hand over the portion of the inbuilt console that controlled the building-wide intercom. Putting on a stern face, he spoke; his likeness appearing on all the screens in the building. "Sorry to interrupt your work, everyone, but I have just been informed that there has been a serious incident in the grav lab," he paused, and looked to Mara, before continuing: "I've decided to implement a Level 3 Quarantine on the whole floor, as well as those immediately above and below. I would ask that everyone on those floors head to one of the break rooms until we can sort this all out. You have fifteen minutes to get things in order before the quarantine comes into effect." He waved his hand over the console again, ending the broadcast. He walked to the door and opened it, waiting for Mara to finish implementing the timer for the activation of the quarantine.

"All done, sir." she said, and hurriedly walked out the door.

Not just yet, he thought to himself, closing the door behind him.

◆ ◆ ◆

Matthew led the way down the hallway to the elevator that would take them to the 34th floor, the floor directly above the grav lab. As he did, he could not help but ask: "Mara, do you know why I started this company?"

Mara cleared her throat hesitantly before replying. "No, sir."

"Have you ever wondered why we do so many seemingly unrelated things here at Lyman?" he queried, glancing at her, mentally noting how odd it still was to refer to a trillion dollar company by his surname.

"I had assumed that it was just a result of where your interests fell, sir."

"I suppose that's true, in a way. But it is not simply the case that it was all merely an intellectual exercise," Matthew said, stepping into the empty elevator. "All things have their purpose."

"What might that purpose be, sir?" Mara said, following him, the doors sliding shut behind her.

"Confluence, Mara. Our company's motto is no mere wishful thinking," he answered, as the elevator began to descend. Putting on his best corporate voice, he said it aloud: "All paths lead to progress." He chuckled, before continuing in his normal tone, "What it really means is all paths must lead to progress. And now they finally have."

◆ ◆ ◆

They arrived at the 34th floor. To their great credit, the scientists who had been working on this floor had already completely cleared out, their work areas tidy and safed, despite the fact that it had only been some 11 minutes since the announcement. Good, Matthew thought, I'll have to commend them, once this is over with. He led Mara across the brightly lit hallway to an alcove on the northeast side of the floor that was hidden behind a nanotube fairing. He pulled it back.

"Sir?" Mara said, confused as to why she had been led there. "The grav lab is the next floor down, shouldn't we be heading there?"

Matthew smiled a sad smile. "I will be, shortly," he said. Mara had a puzzled expression on her face, and opened her mouth to speak. Before she could, Matthew said "Activate subroutine 248F." Mara's posture became unnaturally straight, and her face blanked. She quickly stepped into the alcove and stood on the transparent aluminum pane that was inset inside. Below lay the main gravitonic concentrator of the grav lab on a short, raised platform.

Matthew turned from Mara, a stern expression taking hold of his thin features. Dolman. Of course. It was always going to be him, Matthew reflected. He had known from the second he had seen him, on his first day on the job eight years ago. He had looked a little younger than Matthew remembered, but that was to be expected. He always was a bit of an arrogant prick. Matthew walked purposefully toward the elevator once again.

◆ ◆ ◆

The elevator doors opened on the 33rd floor, and Matthew saw the aftermath of Dolman's handiwork. Three other scientists had been knocked out, blood dripping from gashes on the side or back of their heads. Their hands and feet had been bound together with nanotube ropes, and they had been unceremoniously heaped in the corner of the room. Dolman was busily typing at the console, inputting the coordinates for his forthcoming journey. Above him, the negative mass generator that he had stolen from the high-energy lab was jerry-rigged to the concentrator, feeding it negative energy. He had no sooner finished dialing in the spacetime location of the earth in early October, 2012, than he had noticed Matthew walking towards him. Suddenly panicked, he input the reference longitude and latitude coordinates in downtown Manhattan that he had intended to use to contextualize the finer calibration of the destination, and locked them in. He ran from the console to the concentrator and hastily threw open the capacitor, opening a wormhole. He climbed the side of the concentrator, and unlatched the cover over the viewing well before flinging it open and jumping inside, straight through the wormhole. Matthew finally reached the console. He input the command to open the emergency exhaust valve, and looked up at Mara through the pane of transparent aluminum. He smiled, then executed the command. Mara fell as the pane retracted from beneath her, disappearing into the wormhole below.

◆ ◆ ◆

October 4th, 2012

Mara awoke on the cold pavement, her left arm and leg pinned under her body awkwardly. She rolled onto her back and sat up, and her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the parking lot. She didn't recognize where she was. She saw Dolman struggling to stand up, and immediately, the subroutine which had immobilized her some forty years in the future reasserted itself. Dolman noticed her and took off at a sprint towards the sidewalk. Mara sprung to her feet and dashed towards him, easily making up the distance between herself and the older man. She caught him just as he reached the sidewalk. She grabbed his shoulder with her right hand and spun him with an uncanny strength to face her. The skin of her left hand peeled back, as did the muscle underneath, followed quickly by the bones of her hand, revealing a metallic protrusion from her wrist. She placed it against Dolman's forehead. A car approached them on the road. As it passed, it crushed a red soda can. Her wrist clicked, and she fired. Dolman crumpled, and nearby a man in a red and yellow jacket spun on his heels, startled by the gunshot. Mara was already running back toward the wormhole, which hovered several feet off the ground at a 45-degree-angle. She leapt with eerie agility into the wormhole.

◆ ◆ ◆
August 19th, 2056.

Mara burst forth from the wormhole, arcing her way gracefully through the air before landing lightly on her feet. She raised her left arm, watching with fascination the reconstruction of her hand around the metallic stump embedded into which was a standard 2050s police-issue pistol. She flexed her now-restored left hand once, and then promptly fainted. Matthew caught her before she could hit the floor.

"You've done well, Mara. Very well," he said softly. He placed her gingerly on the dais, and standing, he turned to face the graviton concentrator. He carefully extricated the negative matter generator before lobbing it into the now-unstable, collapsing wormhole inside the concentrator. He turned again to the console and began the automatic shut-down process. Stepping away, he sat beside Mara on the dais. She began to stir.

She sharply inhaled, then sat up quickly, and faced Matthew. "Sir?!" she gasped, eminently confused. She had flashes of Old New York in her mind, more vivid than any dream she had ever had. "I... I think I must have blacked out. What happened?" she asked, "How did I get to the grav lab?"

"We came to investigate the incident you reported to me earlier, Mara. There was a small coolant out-gassing that briefly overwhelmed the closed-circuit venting system. You inhaled some of the coolant and passed out. I overrode the quarantine to allow the emergency vents to flush out the gas, and I've waited here for you to wake up." He glanced at the corner of the room where the other scientists had been, before he had moved them outside and had them escorted to the triage room and then to the hospital.

Concern sprung across Mara's face. "What happened to... W-where's Dolman?" she stuttered, confused.

"He went through the wormhole, Mara. That's what caused the coolant leak. The negative matter generator got sucked in, too, since he didn't have it attached to anything substantial," Matthew said, "It became unstable. It's highly unlikely he would have survived the journey to wherever it was he was trying to go."

"You mean...?"

"Yes, Mara. He's dead," said Matthew, as he wrapped his arm around her shoulders.