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gathered to protest the Knights’ break with the National Superhuman Professionals Union over its support of the Domestic Security Act, threw bricks and even improvised incendiaries at the gates. Baldur, the team’s photokinetic , flash-blinded the crowd, making it easier for police with eye-protection to remove the rioters.
     
    LA Evening News
     
    ----
     
    Flying is without a doubt the coolest part of my breakthrough.   I always loved stargazing, and the night sky high over Chicago had become my sanctuary.   There are few things as beautiful as a full moon over a sea of clouds, and tonight I needed it to get the image of the box out of my head.
     
    “Shelly?” I called. “You can come out now.”
     
    She floated beside me, looking down at the gossamer white clouds below us. The wind ruffled her unruly red hair.   A dream in my head, a future-tech cyber-neural projection onto my senses, she was real to me.
     
    “Thanks for keeping me out down there,” she said, hugging herself though she didn’t really need the 501 jacket she wore.
     
    I smiled.   A tired smile, but I could make it a real one.   “I told you so.”
     
    “Bite me.”
     
    She sighed dramatically.   “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.”
     
    A commuter jet roared by far below us, flying out of O’Hare.
     
    “No,” I agreed. “We never played at ‘crime-scene examiner.’ But the dress-up was fun.”
     
    Tucking my legs up into lotus position, I watched her play with her hair.
     
    “Shelly? I’ve been thinking.   Why didn’t you warn us about the godzilla ?   With all those future-files in your head, a historical event like a godzilla attack on Navy Pier would be hard to miss.” Certainly nobody had really expected a godzilla attack to come out the Great Lakes; Lei Zi still had Riptide, Galatea, and a scratch-team from the other Crisis Aid and Intervention teams searching the lakes for eggs and godzilla -young.
     
    Shelly sighed again.
     
    “I was wondering when you’d ask me that.   She wasn’t due for another two years.”
     
    “Hey what?”
     
    She scowled, looking worried.
     
    “The Teatime Anarchist’s files are all history files he collected on his trips to the 22 nd Century, right?   And every time he came back knowing what was going to happen, he’d change things just by knowing?   Same for his quantum-twin, and their little games could change things big-time, right?”
     
    I nodded.   “But you told me there’s a kind of inertia—like time is a river.   Whichever way it goes, it’s still headed for the sea.”
     
    “Yeah.   The Anarchist told me once it’s like, if you could go back to 1914 and keep those Serbian goofs from assassinating Archduke Ferdinand, World War One would still have happened, because Germany and France would have just found some other reason to fight.   Probably over the African colonies.”   She snickered at my look.   “Hey, all of the world’s history right here in my head, remember?”
     
    “Brag brag brag .”
     
    “But the war would have happened later, right?   Maybe a lot later,” She chewed her lip.   “So stuff changes, but it’s still kinda the same.   Whoever’s behind the Godzilla Plague, I think the Big One, or maybe the Whittier Base Attack, made them move up their timetable.”
     
    “Oh.”
     
    Well, that made sense; in another history the Whittier Base Attack had been the White House Attack. The Ring had used the opportunity created by the Big One to take their shot ahead of schedule.   And Atlas died instead of me.
     
    “So you’re saying the Big One sped things up?”
     
    She shrugged, frustrated.   “Some things.   And long term it’s got to be changing lots of things; over fifty thousand people died—that’s a lot of rocks thrown in the river.   So far sixteen high-tech companies that would have started up this year, haven’t.   And one big political scandal never happened now.   And this year’s mid-term