Sprinting across the metallic cavern toward my multi-megaton mech, and the pilot buried inside it who wore my face and my name because in some alternate universe he was me, I wondered what had turned me into a traitor and a stupid one at that.

The mech saw me, and swooped me to the catwalk near the head with an automobile sized hand. I clambered in, and through the tunnel, and the last hatch did not open.

Instead I heard my voice over the loudspeaker in that claustrophic smooth walled esophagus.

“Who, what are you? Why are you here?”

I sounded frightened, yet determined. And I knew without a doubt that my other had a finger over some instant death device that would send me spinning out of this world faster than I could react.

Still, I spun up my Lekostian cyberware with a mental command.

“I’m …”

“Are you an alien from The Base?” He said “The Base” with audible caps interrupting me.

“No, I’m you.” I said flatly trying to calm the situation down. “Alternate timelines and weird stuff like that.”

“A warning from the future?” He asked hopefully. “Am I doing the right thing?” He, or I sounded pathetically needy, but then this was me in a lot of trouble, and not immortal and several centuries younger than me.

“What are you doing?” I shouted back. He opened the hatch, and I looked into a gun and a sweat-streaked face.

“Trying to save democracy.” He said with a ferocious exaltation, and a fluttering nerviness, and I noted the gun stayed on me rock steady. I think I’ve met one alternate me that was not an ice cold killer, but this was not the second pacifist alternate that was for sure.

“By betraying your unit to those yahoos?”

“I’m going to doublecross those yahoos, and take the mech from them after a suitable bit of embarrasment. Put these on.” He tossed me a pair of handcuffs which I slipped on. Too late, I realized they were not steel, but some odd metal.

“Mech armor metal. Strongest metal in all human space in the Year of Our Lord 2005.” He laughed a bit relaxing, and I got bound into the copilot’s chair.

“Where too? And 2005?”

“The Town, Landing Town where we are going to embarrass the Mechs out of existence. Of course its 2005; what would it be?”

“Thing is Tad Prime…”

“Call me Pilot.” He interrupted me with casual ease. I nodded.

“Pilot, and you can call me Verser as in multiversal traveller, I don’t remember my people having the tech to control black holes and build mechs and fly to the stars when I left.”

“Well, we didn’t either until we found the Alien Darkside Base in ‘68.”

He told me of the Apollo Moon Rocket program which had discovered a fully functional and abandoned alien mech factory on the dark side of the Moon. An emergency program put a moonbase up in ‘70, and American mechs landed in Red Square in ‘73. Opposition to the formation of the United Nations as a Western dominated world government with republican institutions ended except for diehards by ‘75. In ‘80, it was discovered that a mech could tow a ship through an artificial jumpgate. And there were terraformed worlds scattered all over the place empty of sentient life.

The only limit was that there was not enough mech pilots. It required years of training, and a mech tended to bond with its pilot, and the black holes needed as propulsion and power source for the heaviest weapons were only slowly produced, and the mech’s still cost an enormous amount of money. Then the aliens came, and the only truly effective force was the mechs at driving them back.

The whole thing started to sound vaguely familiar.

“I met the Nobel Prize mathematician, Isaac Asimov at a cafe’. Pure accident. He showed me his pschyohistory calculations and his prediction sphere. I’ll let you look in it in a moment. First, I want you to …” He released me into Landing with a list of experiments to run.

I had a mech pilot jacket on. I stole an apple from a vendor. Got obnoxious in a restauraunt, and forced myself to leer at a girl while her boyfriend fumed nearby, and stared down some local peaceforcers who came to investigate reports of problems. They got out of my way.

I also saw the janitor who I was supposed to be conspiring with to, I guess, steal a mech. He ran off quickly.

Ill at ease and unhappy, I got back into the mech.

“I did what you asked, and no, no one raised a finger. So?” I snapped.

He showed me the crystal ball which held a sophisticated computer and a vision screen. I saw a projected vision of the future.

I was old, and my grandson rode a mech down to Landing to get food for me. What I wanted was rare because the trade routes all over the galqaxy were uncertain, and I was part of the reason why. Because, I took whatever I wanted. My grandson did likewise, and people bowed to him calling him “Ser” and “Lord”.

The mech pilots had killed democracy, and replaced it with an interstellar feudalism.

Another vision followed, and in this one my grandson labored in the fields by hand while an arrogant twit walked a mech by without once considering how much sweat five minutes of that mech could save his “peasants”.

That one was even worse, and it made me grateful, I had no children in this world.

My alternate did.

“Okay, I understand, but its not as simple as that. There are a lot of factors that could intervene…”

“Really? Aren’t these overwhelming factors?”

“Keep the faith. Have faith. There’s always some threat…” But it was hopeless. My alternate had seen a very compelling vision of the future, and he lacked enough experience to realize how unstable such predictions were. And truth to tell, this looked like a remarkably stable prediction for one of its kind.

Arrgh.

He started shooting up the city being careful to miss people, but he shredded buildings rather thoroughly.

I could see in the long-range scanners a spaceship, and the janitor and some others across the town. He intended to walk it across town, and trade the mech for the ship, and get out of here. Probably the mech would have a self-destruct charge because he did not really want to give those idiots a mech for whatever their cause was.

And then the mechs came from the rest of the battalion, and he braced himself.

“I should, I should, but I can’t fight them.” He said with hands hovering over the weapons arming switches.

I had no clue what to do at this moment.

“Hey, Tad, you’re a little early, but ya’ got the right idea. Lets teach those idiots in the Planetary Congress who is number one around here.” His and my commander’s voice surged over the circuits, and my alternate and I shared a hopeless look. We had only managed to move the coup d’ etat up by a week or so.

He cried, and begged God for some way to stop this horror. No answer came, and I had no clue how to stop this train wreck.

“Time to leave. Tad, hey, Tad!! Pay attention. Get your wife and kid, and some friends together over the next few days.”

I explained and we made plans as the day went on and as we conducted our coup d’ etat near our comrades who despite their warm words did not completely trust us.

Three days later, he had gathered two mechs, and a half-dozen cargo ships, and a small horde of refugees. The mech pilots were enjoying their new status with wine, woman,and song, and doing a few good things, and mucking more things up in a ham-handed way as they tried to run a planet like a battalion. They particularly enjoyed the rescinding of low level flight restrictions. The city got buzzed very low at least once an hour.

We had picked a planet out, very far away and off the beaten track. I told him the cure for this disease. Riflemen. He needed to found a university nation which would eventually research the finest rifles ever built. Guns held by infantry that could shred a mech, and turn the mech from knights in shining armour and into big fat targets were what would save him.

The Asimovian crystal ball agreed which alternately worried and comforted me.

The only problem left was that he could not escape. So he left for the battalion hq with his entourage, and I called the commanders over for a visit to my ‘new’ house we’d stolen from some industrialist. Acting drunk, I tried to get on “my” mech, and “panicked” I forgot the code to get in. The mech killed me with gas, which I hated, and then the mech got melted since that was what my doppleganger’s will specified.

Meanwhile he snuck off planet with some old and balky mechs (but he was truly a gifted pilot), and fled the new tyranny for a new democracy farther among the stars.

I fell out of that world wishing I’d been more equal to the tasks before me, and that I could have done more than simply save a few people from such a disaster.

Tadeusz