The Legends of Forever by Barry Lyga (free children's ebooks online .TXT) 📗

from one side of his mouth. “It’s slow going, guys. The future is very resistant to change.”

“Winn, how are you even here?” Barry asked.

“I swapped places with Brainiac 5,” he explained. “There’s this killer virus that affects artificial intelligences here, so they asked me to—”

“No, I know that part,” Barry interrupted. “But you went into the future on Earth 38. And we’ve just traveled to the future of Earth 1.”

Winn seemed taken aback. “Really? I suspect time travel shenanigans. Let’s conference in an expert.” Before anyone could stop him, he whipped the tablet out from under his arm and spoke to it. “Get me Rond Vidar.”

An instant later, a hologram appeared in the center of the room—a lanky young man with black hair and skintight gray-and-white coveralls under a yellow jacket. The hologram was so perfect that it seemed less a hologram and more as though the man had simply spontaneously appeared there. Oliver actually reached out and brushed against it with the tips of his fingers to be sure—they passed right through the man’s shoulder.

“Rond!” Winn cried. “Buddy! Pal! I have a favor to ask of you!”

Rond Vidar pinched the bridge of his nose with the expression of a man who has been asked too many favors. “For the last time, Toy Boy, I will not adjust the Time Viewer so that you can watch the fourth season of Twin Peaks. Stop asking.”

“Toy Boy?” Barry laughed.

“That’s not my name!” Winn howled.

“It does make sense,” Superman said. “Your father was Toy Man, so . . .”

“Stop it!” Winn exclaimed. “I don’t want a code name. Especially Toy Boy. Anyway,” he said, turning back to Rond, “look—we have guests from the far-flung past!” He made a ta-da gesture at the threesome.

Vidar’s eyes tracked them quickly. “Good to see you again, Superboy. It’s been a while.”

Superman opened his mouth to speak, but Barry beat him to the punch. “See, this is the problem! Winn is here and you know Superman, but isn’t this Earth 1? How is it possible for two different Earths to share a future?”

“I don’t think they do,” Superman said. “I think when we traveled into the future, we somehow crossed over to Earth 38. You may have done the same when you traveled alone into the future, Flash.”

“But why?” Oliver asked. “Look, I don’t know much about quantum physics and time travel, but I know this: When you shoot an arrow, it follows a path. It doesn’t suddenly veer off for no reason. Something has to redirect it. If Barry ran straight into the future from Earth 1, why and how would he end up on Earth 38?”

“Pretty easy way to figure this out,” Winn said cheerfully. “Rond, are we on Earth 1 or Earth 38?”

Hesitating slightly, Vidar said, “This is actually considered Earth ∂. There’s a whole new nomenclature for describing the Multiverse that arose in the mid-twenty-first century.”

Which meant after Barry’s time.

“There was a crisis of some sort,” Vidar went on. “Historical records from so long ago are spotty and incomplete, but we know that the universes had been previously isolated and separate, for the most part. Then they experienced a . . . a . . .”

“Crossover effect,” Barry supplied.

“Yes. Timelines became entangled. There’s a whole theory of hyperstrings that indicates that it may be possible for two separate universes to share common timelines.”

Oliver shook his head. “Wait. Are you telling us that two completely different Earths could have the same future?”

Vidar shrugged as though this absolute impossibility bothered him not one whit. “All of the universes of the Multiverse are quantum-entangled to some degree. There are doppelgängers across the Multiverse. Similarities in history and in structure and in the very laws of physics. If matter and energy can cross over, why not time?”

Superman nodded slowly. “The greater the interaction between universes, the more they become entangled. To the point that they begin to share time itself. This all makes sense now.”

Oliver nudged Barry with his elbow. “I see they have a strange definition for makes sense in this century,” he whispered.

The time travel physics of it all were over Barry’s head, too, but he could grasp the basics of it. Would it really matter to him if, for example, it turned out that the tenth century was slightly different from what history books claimed? For Vidar to worry about which twenty-first century preceded his own was like Barry stressing over details of the Middle Ages.

“Maybe we can discuss the physics another time. Right now, we need your help,” Barry said. “We’re looking for—”

“Oh!” Winn shouted. “Oh! I know why you’re here! You came for the Legends!”

13

Joe Hustled back to the Bunker as quickly as possible, the bee rattling and buzzing in the plastic cup on the passenger seat next to him as he drove. Out of an abundance of caution, he’d borrowed some tape at the bodega and fastened the lid on, then covered the straw hole. He could think of murderers he’d taken less care with transporting.

“Joe, do you read me?” Dig’s voice came through loud and clear on Joe’s earbud. “Like you suggested, Lyla repurposed an A.R.G.U.S. satellite to scan for bees and, uh, we have a problem.”

Joe figured there was a pretty good joke about finding a bug in the system just waiting to be made, but Dig’s tone told him that now wasn’t the time for it.

“It seems there’s a massive swarm of bees gathering over Star City. And it’s growing.”

“What?” Joe pulled up to the curb and craned his neck to look out his window. As he did so, a man stumbled over to the car and bent over to speak.

“Excuse me, sir, I seem to be lost. Could you point the way to the Oliver Queen Memorial Library? My qPhone can’t find a broad-fi connection.”

Oliver Queen Memorial. . . As best Joe knew, Oliver wasn’t dead. Certainly not dead long enough to have a library built and named for him. He scanned the man again, this time noticing the odd plasticky sheen to his