Future Bob

Chapter Eight

Smoke still hung in the air when Bobby got back up.

His knees wobbled, ribs burning with every breath. The explosion had knocked the wind out of him. He staggered, coughing rapidly before blinking through the haze that curled and danced like ghostly fingers around the wreckage.

But there was no time to rest.

His hands, scraped and trembling, moved on instinct—reconnecting wires, recalibrating what was left of the trap. He didn’t need to think anymore. The process lived in his fingers now, like muscle memory etched by desperation. Strip the copper. Twist the leads. Check polarity. Ground the coils.

His heart thudded like a war drum. Too fast, too loud. He kept one ear tuned to the shadows, the other to the soft buzz of electricity.

The woman was gone. Cross had vanished too. But Bobby wasn’t fooled. He hadn’t won anything. Not yet.

This wasn’t over. It was only a pause in a longer game.

He had one more trick. One last backup—one that didn’t rely on hope or chance or Future Bob’s warnings. No. This one was his.

He’d built a secondary trigger into the scanner box—a low-voltage, high-frequency pulse. Something simple. Something quiet. A magnetic tether designed not to shock or stun—but to hold. Just enough to slow Cross down. Just enough for one more encounter.

That was all he needed.

---

Three days passed. No sign of Cross. No new messages from Future Bob. Even the woman hadn’t returned.

The silence clawed at Bobby’s nerves. Every rustle outside made him jump. Every vibration in his phone gave him hope, then disappointment. But Bobby had learned something valuable over the last few weeks—patience.

He didn’t sit still. He improved what he could. Every evening, he returned to the substation with tools in his backpack and grit in his jaw. He stripped the triangle pattern to its essentials, reducing signal delay. He shielded the coils with sliced-up pieces from an old bicycle tire—poor man’s insulation. He rewired the jammer, ditching the unreliable USB packs for car batteries he'd rigged together with jumper cables and duct tape.

And he waited. Night after night, like a hunter in a concrete jungle, crouched among rusted steel and silence.

On the fourth night, he finally caught a break.

A flicker of movement near the far transformer. A ripple in the air, like heat over asphalt. That strange static pulse—the same one that always came just before Cross appeared. Bobby didn’t hesitate. He watched as Cross materialized in a blink, his body shimmering into focus like a bad VHS tape. The man didn’t look around. He didn’t check his surroundings. He moved with purpose—straight toward the signal spike.

Bobby crouched behind a rusted generator box, finger poised on the trigger. He pressed it.

ZAP—WHMMM!

The new trap came alive with a soft blue glow. The ground beneath Cross crackled with interference. This time, the triangle pattern collapsed inward, syncing perfectly.

Cross jerked mid-step. He looked around, confused—then furious. His device blinked red.

He reached for it—but Bobby had installed a signal disruptor directly into the triangle’s center. A focused pulse locked the device down like freezing a fly in midair.

Cross screamed—an actual scream—raw, frustrated, human. And then... he dropped to his knees—caught.

---

Bobby stepped out into the open, flashlight beam trembling as it lit the scene.

“You... can’t keep me here forever,” Cross growled.

Bobby didn’t flinch. “I don’t need forever. I just need answers.”

Cross laughed bitterly. “You really want to know who you are?”

“No. I want to know what I become.”

Cross looked up, the blue glow from the coils reflecting in his eyes.

“You really don’t.”

---

They sat across from each other inside a derelict office near the edge of the substation. Bobby had rewired the trap to pulse every thirty seconds—enough to keep Cross frozen if he tried anything.

He handed him a bottle of water. Cross didn’t drink it.

“My name is Darius Cross. I was a signal engineer in the year 2042.”

“You’re from the future?” Bobby asked, skeptical.

“You’re not,” Darius said flatly. “But one version of you is. And he’s the reason this timeline is collapsing.”

Bobby stared at him, unmoving.

“His name is Bob. Yours, I guess, just... aged a little. The world doesn’t call him Bobby anymore. They call him The Loopmaker.”

Bobby blinked. “The what?”

Darius leaned forward.

“In 2037, you—he—created something called the ChronoNet. An AI neural system designed to detect crimes before they happen. It was supposed to prevent disaster. It started with pre-crime, like sci-fi fiction. But then it learned how to rewrite past digital records. Change history. Rewrite reality through code.”

He paused, jaw clenched.

“By 2042, free will doesn’t exist. Bob watches everyone. All the time. He loops time, replays days. Edits choices. Deletes people like files. He calls it optimization.”

“That’s impossible,” Bobby whispered. “Time isn’t something you can control like that.”

“It is when you build the ChronoNet and feed it every dataset in human history. When you install micro-worms into social networks and run quantum AI on timelines... yeah, it’s possible.”

Bobby couldn’t process it.

Darius continued. “Millions died resisting him. Governments collapsed. Science became religion. People pray for Bob to forget them.”

Bobby's voice cracked. “Why would I do something like that?”

Darius finally drank the water.

“Because you believed you could fix the world. You thought looping time would erase pain. You never meant to become a monster. But power doesn’t care what you meant.”

Bobby stood up, paced the room, shaking his head.

“I don’t believe you.”

Darius didn’t answer. Then he pulled something from his coat—a metal shard, triangular, humming faintly. He tapped it.

A projection blinked into the air—a small blue light. Then, a video.

A man stood in front of a screen wall filled with thousands of live feeds. His face was older, leaner—but familiar. Bobby's face. Aged. Hardened. Eyes dark with control.

He raised his hand—and hundreds of camera feeds shifted at once. People screamed. Buildings disappeared. Soldiers obeyed without blinking.

On the wall behind him, one word pulsed in red:

ChronoNet: Active.

And the man—Future Bobby—smiled.

---

Darius powered off the device.

Bobby had no words.

Darius said nothing for a moment, then added, “He’s already started sending messages back. He wants you alive—for now. But eventually, he’ll take you over. Piece by piece.”

Bobby looked at the floor.

“I’d never do that. I’d never kill people.”

Darius’s eyes narrowed.

“You wouldn’t.”

Then he pointed at the spot above Bobby’s heart.

“But he would.”

---

Suddenly, the lights flickered. The trap outside whined—then shorted out.

A new pulse crackled through the substation. Bobby’s phone buzzed violently in his pocket. He yanked it out. One new message. From Future Bob.

“He can’t stop you. I’ve made sure of it.”

Bobby turned.

Darius stood, holding the disabled trap’s trigger in one hand.

“What did you do?” Bobby whispered.

But Darius looked just as confused.

“I didn’t—”

And then the wall exploded inward. A shockwave of light. A voice—calm, mechanical—echoed from nowhere:

“Timeline adjustment in progress.”

A second figure stepped through the rubble.

The woman—the one from the triangle trap. Only now, she was wearing a chrome wristband identical to Cross’s. Her eyes locked onto Bobby.

“You’re coming with me.”