Dueling Timelines

By Dean C. Moore

He's the perfect assassin. He's never failed. It doesn't matter what the resistance is; he cuts through it like Kerry Pure Irish butter. Some are saying he's enhanced; he's gotta be. Android maybe. Nano-enhanced maybe. Genetically altered possibly.

But Amy Farr, the trained assassin sent after him, and her partner, Trevor Hunter, former Navy SEAL, fear something far worse.

They fear he isn't enhanced at all.

So, either he's some super-powered Zen monk China flushed out of a monastery in Tibet when they should have had the good sense to leave those poor people alone. Or, he's an extraterrestrial. Those are about the only two options left.

It doesn't help that Agent X has a penchant for taking out the most politically corrupt, highest-ranking string pullers on the planet; people whose every decision affects billions of lives for the worse. He gives them a choice: confess your crimes on tape, or eat the bullet.

That creates a moral dilemma for Amy and Trent. They see themselves as the avengers. And he's definitely making them look like slackers on the subject of holding the really bad and entitled accountable to the really needy and disenfranchised.

But that's what romantic relationships are for, to drive each other absolutely crazy second-guessing their every decision, in between all the smooching and ripped-through Spandex.

As Agent X gets one deep state operative to confess after another, their shocking testimonials are broadcasted into another timeline as part of the experiment. Does the truth set us free, or is too much too soon too detrimental, if people are jumping out of windows out of the sense of horror?

Tired of an era of endless deep state overreach, of false flag events and psyops run against the many peoples of the world, Amy and Trevor are eager to prop up The Truth Shall Set You Free Timeline with the right strategic moves. But which timeline truly serves the greater good?

NOTE: THE 2ND INSTALLMENT OF THE IT TAKES TWO FRANCHISE, "DUELING TIMELINES", IS NOT A SEQUEL TO "MIND BENDER." I MAY YET WRITE SUCH A SEQUEL, BUT THIS IS NOT IT. IT IS AN ENTIRELY UNRELATED ADVENTURE. THE BOOKS, THEREFORE, CAN BE READ INDEPENDENTLY, AND IN ANY ORDER.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dean C. Moore
• Release date: Sep 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215213902

Book preview

Also by Dean C. Moore

Biohackers

Cybernetic Agents

Phantom Menace

Singularity News

Blood Brothers

Escape to Creeporia

Elektra

Printed People

Printed People - Part 1

Printed People - Part 2

Printed People - Part 3

Frankenstein

Reborn

Reviled

Reawakened

Futurescape

Terraforming Earth - Phase 1: The Plagues Era

Terraforming Earth - Phase 2: Humanoids in Sealed Habitats

Terraforming Earth - Phase 3: Out of the Darkness

Renaissance 2.0

The Entire Series

Sentience

Sentience

Space Cowboys

The Star Gate

Moving Earth

Spy, Inc.

Born F.R.E.E.

The Futurist

Unkillable

The Magnificent Seven

Endgame - Episode 1 - Inciting Incident

Endgame - Episode 2 - The Quickening

The Mind of God

The Mind of God

Episode 2

The Warlock's Friend

The Crystal Spears

Standalone

Escape From the Future

Love on the Run

Time Bandits

Sentient Serpents

The God Gene

Time Weavers

Android Assassins

Mind Bender

Nano Man 2

Dueling Timelines

Nano Man

IT TAKES TWO (BOOK 2)

DUELING TIMELINES

by

Dean C. Moore

This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2022 by Dean C. Moore.  All rights reserved.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.

Lewis B. Smedes

The stupid neither forgive nor forget; the naïve forgive and forget; the wise forgive but do not forget.

Thomas Szasz

There’s no revenge so complete as forgiveness.

Josh Billings

But when He comes, the Spirit of truth, He will guide you to all truth.

John 16:13a

ONE

A PRIVATE ISLAND

JUST OFF THE COAST OF NEW ZEALAND

Xavier, Agent X to the rest of the world, puttered his inflatable rubber dinghy toward the private island. Other than the ominous volcano, this particular patch of land rising out of the sea really did look like paradise.

But looks could be deceiving.

Drone subs patrolled the waters beneath. One had already targeted him.

He let the droid do its job, as it made it easier for Xavier to do his. The torpedo hit and Xavier went airborne. He rode the concussion wave all the way to the beach. When he landed, he didn’t have a scratch on him. That would put the fear of God into most people monitoring him over the security cameras. That and the fact that he’d landed on his feet like a man out for his nightly constitutional. But Soloros could afford the best security people. There was no time now for them to entertain fears. They knew it, just like Xavier knew it.

The panning security cameras, all sweeping over him from various perches across the compound, engaged their secondary feature—their onboard lasers.

Xavier should have been reduced to chunk meat. But the lasers hadn’t even cut through his wet suit. They targeted his eyes next.

His eyes reflected the lasers back at the cameras, blowing them off their perches.

By now, the ones watching him were thinking, he had to be an android—or an enhanced human with bionic eyes. Who else could pull off a stunt like that?

Who else, indeed.

So, Soloros, predictably, sent his androids and enhanced human soldiers-for-hire after Xavier.

He recalled his dobermans with a whistle. The dogs had been bolting toward Xavier from the time his feet hit beach sand, but they turned back to the house on a dime—whining from the frustration of having their blood stirred up for nothing.

Say one thing for Soloros, he thought of everything; prepared for every contingency—everything except for Xavier.

The androids reached the outer perimeter of Xavier’s aura, a good thirty feet out, part of his energy body they couldn’t see, unless their third-eye had been sufficiently opened. Being androids, it was doubtful they had a third eye, but maybe he was being elitist.

After pushing against the outer perimeter of the energy field without success, the androids started vibrating, and ultimately exploded. Their nuclear-powered battery packs, which could go a hundred years or more without a recharge, blew. That meant the island was pretty much a nuclear wasteland now.

Soloros, no doubt watching everything, would be headed underground. His complex there was even vaster than what was on the surface—and what was on the surface would have made an Arab sheikh blush. You had to hand it to the guys who designed the end of the world for everybody else, making sure they would be the only ones to survive; they were smart and cautious and not at all soft-minded.

Xavier let the nano-enhanced soldiers penetrate his aura so he could reprogram them. Their nanites, now pinching down on their every nerve, torture-walked them right into the sea. The nanites could probably keep the soldiers alive for hours underwater, even without the soldiers breathing, by taking over more and more of their bodies’ vital functions. Xavier saw no reason to get in the way of that. Maybe the soldiers-for-hire would hack their way free in time, if only to make things more interesting for Xavier. Right now, he was at risk of sleepwalking through the rest of this mission.

Xavier turned his third eye to what was going on with Soloros, and laughed. The guy didn’t have a safe room, per se. He had turned the underground complex into a safe-sanitarium for himself, all twenty-five thousand square feet of it, replete with tennis courts, swimming pools…He was in one of those pools now, floating on his back, watching Xavier on the tele.

What Xavier found curious was that Soloros still looked pretty calm—even after all he’d seen Xaiver do. Unless Soloros had a death wish, that didn’t make much sense.

Xavier continued his scans. He swept Soloros’s mind. He scoured the compound AI’s mind. He monitored encoded signals going and coming from the island. The guy has his own military-grade internet, quite separate from the regular internet regular humans used. Impressive.

So, that’s why Soloros was feeling so smug.

Soloros had called in an airstrike on him. The F17s were already on their way. He’d also ordered a Chinese carrier fleet to fire their missiles directly on his compound. Maybe he figured since it was irradiated anyway, what the hell? But it was more than that. He had nanobot assemblers in his employ that could rebuild his entire compound for him in under twenty-four hours, not even enough time to lose his suntan. And Soloros’s atmospheric nano-assemblers could also de-irradiate his island for him, working with the individual atoms in the air in a remedial capacity. 

Xavier didn’t know why he was acting surprised. The billionaire boys club had access to all sorts of tech that would seem far-fetched by even military standards. After all, deep state recluses had to prepare for global insurrection at any moment, after decades of squeezing everyone dry, and leaving the 99% all but penniless and homeless—and for many of those, there was no anything but about it. Allegedly 40 million plus humans roamed the U.S. alone in RVs, old cars, or backpacked their way through their homelessness, unable to afford what royalty could with their RVs. A good many voyagers didn’t have the backpack and sleeping bag. They made do with an old, mildewed blanket of synthetic wool, and were thankful for the handout. Nikki Haley, former South Carolina representative to the United Nations, resigned shortly after denying any of that was true.

When Xavier redirected the missiles fired from the F17s back at the fighter jets, with a wave of his hand, taking them out, Soloros didn’t flinch. When Xavier sent the missiles fired from the Chinese aircraft carrier back at the carrier, seriously crippling it, Soloros, bolting upright in surprise, fell off his flotation bed. He must have been thinking, who would go so far as to piss off all of China at once? Taking out an aircraft carrier called for some type of retaliation. And Soloros was wondering what made Xavier so confident he’d survive that too.

Soloros was still standing up in his swimming pool, staring up at the monitor in the corner of the room, squeegeeing his eyes and wiping back his thinning hair over his balding head with his hands; when Xavier beamed in to see him, dangling his legs in the water as he sat at the pool’s edge.

Soloros blanched white at the sight of him. My underground complex is built inside an amethyst geode three miles wide. There’s no way inside or out without a teleporter, and I disabled mine the instant I came down here. Around the geode is a forcefield that should you try and pass through would maroon you in another timeline altogether. It was designed for me by E.T.s over a thousand years more advanced than us humans.

Xavier nodded. I must remember not to damage the geode. Something that beautiful and rare in nature should be preserved.

But if you didn’t damage it to get in that way, and you didn’t pass through the energy shield, how…?

Xavier smiled ruefully at him. Those E.T.s that are a thousand or more years ahead of you, did you think they were the only E.T.s out there? Did you not think that it would make more sense to cut a deal with E.T.s say billions of years ahead of you? I mean, a guy like you can never have enough security, now, can he?

Soloros swallowed hard. What do you want with me? We humans are closer to sea slugs than you are.

Xavier laughed. Well, you are, certainly. I’ll make it easy on you, Soloros. Confess your sins to the world, and I’ll leave you alone. Your death doesn’t serve me nearly as well as your confession. It will of course go out live to the world. No tech on Earth will be able to stop the transmission.

I can’t. You know what they’ll do to me? Soloros’s squeal could compete with a beach siren warning of an incoming tsunami.

"You know what I’ll do to you? They haven’t had nearly enough time to evolve torture techniques, Soloros. Trust me, you’re far better off pissing off those relatively primitive E.T.s. I might even agree to protect you from them, if you behave yourself."

Those droplets of water on Soloros’s forehead now weren’t from the pool. He was perspiring profusely inside a fifty-degree room, likely kept that way for his Siberian huskies lining the water’s edges, their eyes as cold and as blue as their owner’s. The dogs were behaving themselves, responding to Xavier’s psychic directives.

Soloros swallowed hard a couple of times before he came up with the retort he needed. They won’t allow you to do this. We have contracts with hundreds of E.T. civilizations. The majority of bad actors, like myself, will be rounded up, face military tribunals, all televised to the world, to help the common people fathom all that we’ve done to them over the centuries. It’s not clear if they’ll be told the role of the dark E.T.s, the serpent people, we were taking our marching orders from. Might be too traumatizing to many. That’ll likely be leaked not through the mass media, but through fringe outlets, where the stories can be denied by detractors as so many conspiracy theories, to shelter more fragile minds from the truth. Look, however it plays out, you can’t go against galactic high command. These people represent many E.T. races, all far more advanced than ourselves, all on a time clock for how this information is to be released, when, in time for Earthlings to digest the pain, and reflect on the spiritual lessons involved. You go against Galactic High Command, and, well, I doubt even you will survive all that.

Xavier nodded soberly. You’re quite right, of course. And I know I really shouldn’t buck established wisdom, but I’ve always been a bit of a maverick. You see, they mean well, and they may even be right about the best way of handling this thorny situation. But I have some of my own ideas. I’m running an experiment of my own. And if it fails, then, I’ll back down. But it seems only fair that I run the experiment, don’t you think? Let time itself decide who’s correct. After all, the majority isn’t always right.

What experiment?

When your confession goes out live to the world, it will open another timeline. We’re going to see if the people on that timeline are as fragile as all that; or if the unvarnished truth shall set people free all the sooner. Will there be a carnival on earth a good hundred years ahead of time? Or will it be just another rung in Dante’s hell, filled with basket cases who couldn’t face the truth about how they’d been played?

"But you won’t have to wait a hundred years to see free energy on Earth, or a spaceship that can take each person to the stars! I have it on good authority that those ships are being built now and will start rolling off the assembly lines on a mass production basis in less than five years. The medical scanning beds we demonstrated in TV series like Terra Nova and in films like Elysium, that technology was leaked to the public sphere to private investors so they can build for civilians what our space militaries have had for decades. We couldn’t do it any other way. If we did it by coming clean with what the military had done, the lawsuits alone…But those scanning beds…They can regrow limbs, heal damaged spines, hell, clone your entire body and re-download you to it in the event of a fatal car crash that leaves you little more than a bowl of soup."

I think you’re off to a good start, Soloros.

Soloros groaned. What you’re trying to do isn’t necessary, I tell ya.

Let’s just file it then under keeping everybody honest. You know how these politicians are with their promises. They’ll tell you anything you want to hear so long as it gets them into office, then once they’re in, they politely forget all the promises they made. I can’t imagine it’s that different on a solar system, or even a galactic level.

Soloros sighed. I surrender. Where do you want me to start?

"How about the very first false flag event you were involved with? The first time you helped to pull the wool over the public’s eyes."

That would be the sinking of the Titanic. If you’re wondering how I could still be around…

Not me, Soloros. But it’s good you’re keeping your public in mind.

I go to New York once a year to sit in their energy healing room.

Whose energy healing room?

They’re Tesla’s lab assistants. They’re all alive and well and using the same technology Tesla invented to keep themselves going. Just one of his numerous patents kept from the public.

Go on about the Titanic’s true significance in history, Xavier prompted.

Soloros groaned. The big money people on the Titanic, lured into taking the trip, were the ones refusing to agree to the Central Bank proposition. Most people think the Central Bank’s a government office, but it’s actually a private corporation. They all are, every Central Bank in every government around the world. And their whole purpose for being was to allow the financial elite to print all the money they wanted, so they could collapse a country at will, anyone not playing the game, not dancing to their tune.

Soloros took a breath. "Of course, it was just one small aspect of a larger plan. We had to get Americans and everyone else off the gold standard, and off the silver standard for that matter. That took decades of pushing Adam Smith’s ideas—that so long as governments held on to gold, a physical asset that could be looted, it would cause wars, as other countries sought to get their hands on it—until the rhetoric started to sink in as so much logic. Nixon finally helped procure that for us with regard to the gold standard. Shifting to the silver standard, that was JFK’s idea. Kennedy thought it was madness to abandon real coins as a basis of value. He suggested the silver standard after it was too late to do anything about abandoning the gold standard. When he wouldn’t shut up about it, that’s what got him assassinated. Again, you play ball with these people, or you go bye bye."

Go on, Soloros. You’re doing just fine.

But don’t you want to set up some cameras first?

I’m using yours, Soloros, and you’re already going out live to the world—in my alternate timeline, at least. Who knows, with any luck, you may go from being one of the archvillains in this story to being a downright hero.

Soloros snorted. Wouldn’t that be a laugh?

TWO

LA JOLLA, CALIFORNIA

WHOLE FOODS STORE

Trevor Hunter, lacking only the tanned part of the Mediterranean good looks package, felt the tomato in his hand for firmness. Who are we killing today?

Keep your voice down. No one. Amy Farr, rubbing up against him in her one-piece bodysuit few could wear so well, and none so gracefully, took the tomato out of his hand and put it in the breathable green plastic bag.

You’re kidding? Is this what the afterlife feels like? Trevor assessed the bell peppers next.

We’re shooting two people tomorrow, if that makes you feel better. So it all evens out. Amy took the bell pepper out of his hand and added it to their cart’s collection.

We haven’t shot anyone in weeks! How does it all even out? Trevor handled the papaya like he would a grenade.

We’re doing a massacre on Monday.

Define massacre. He added some guavas to go with the papaya.

Five hundred plus.

You’re right. That does even out. They straight-lined it to the refrigerator section. Yogurt or Kefir?

Cottage cheese.

That’s got no probiotics.

I prefer to live dangerously. Losing all patience with him, she grabbed two containers of cottage cheese for herself.

"Then shoot the checkout guy. He’s got a scanner that tracks every item and