Timecaster

FOURTEEN

The Mastermind muses on the absoluteness of uncertainty.

He wishes he knew more about what was happening. But his reach is limited. His ears are silent. His eyes restricted to newscasts.

What’s going on? Where is the mouse?

Better not to know, he muses. The mouse is both on course and off course. Dead and alive. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Once you measure it, wavefunction collapses.

Perhaps instead of referring to Talon as a mouse, he should think of him as Schrodinger’s cat. For the Mastermind, Talon is everything and nothing at the same time. Best of all, the math backed it up.

There’s much left to do. Calls. Travel. Meetings.

The search has run its course, but there are other searches to perform.

He reaches up, feels his own heart. It pounds with excitement, and some trepidation.

Killing the woman was necessary. The cheese to lure the mouse.

But it was more than that. She gave him a precious and unique gift. Her life, for his amusement. He respected her for that. Even honored her.

However, she was only a footnote in the eventual history of his endeavors. An insignificant warm-up act for the magnificence to come.

It isn’t like comparing walking to crawling.

It’s more like comparing walking to breaking the light-speed barrier.

There will be more deaths.

Many more deaths.

His heart beats faster at the thought, and he smiles.