The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

Not quite. Maybe thirty yards away down the tunnel now. Twenty. Ten.
    Travis opened the door, and the Breach Voices pierced him at once, like scalpel tips into his eardrums. He thought of Dave Bryce, stuck down here with this sound until it drove him mad.
    Entity 0697 emerged from the Breach and drifted down onto the receiving platform. It was a single sheet of paper, with writing on it.
    Travis stooped to pick it up, expecting the Whisper’s scratch language, or maybe some alien script he wouldn’t recognize at all.
    Instead it was neatly handwritten English.
    He stepped back from the glass door and let it fall shut again, mercifully silencing the Breach Voices. But by that time he’d forgotten all about them. He’d forgotten everything else in the world, except what was written on the paper in his hands.
    THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM PAIGE CAMPBELL TO PAIGE CAMPBELL. I AM SENDING IT FROM A POINT IN THE FUTURE WHICH I WILL NOT DISCLOSE. AS VERIFICATION THAT THIS IS REALLY PAIGE, MY FAVORITE PASSAGE OF ANY NOVEL IS THE LAST PARAGRAPH BEFORE THE EPILOGUE OF WATERSHIP DOWN BY RICHARD ADAMS, A FACT I HAVE NEVER SHARED WITH ANYONE. AS VERIFICATION OF TIME, HERE ARE THE DETAILS OF A MINOR EARTHQUAKE THAT WILL OCCUR BENEATH THE MOJAVE DESERT THREE DAYS AFTER THIS MESSAGE ARRIVES. MAG 2.35, DATE JULY 3, 2009, 10:48 UTC, LAT 34.915, LON –118.072, DEPTH 14.32KM. THIS MESSAGE IS AN INSTRUCTION REGARDING A MAN NAMED TRAVIS CHASE. IN 2009 HE IS A SOFTWARE ENGINEER WHO LIVES IN MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, AT 4161 KALMACH ST. FIND TRAVIS CHASE AND KILL HIM. MORE THAN 20 MILLION LIVES ARE AT STAKE.
    Travis saw that the Whisper’s light was strobing faster than before. A lot faster. It was still matched to his pulse.
    His eyes went back to the message. “This can’t be,” he said.
    “It is,” the Whisper said. “She really wrote that, and really sent it, using technology that will eventually be developed by Dr. Fagan. Fagan’s theory turns out to be correct: objects can be sent into the Breach from this side, but they return without reaching the far end, and depending on their velocity, they can return before they were sent in. Even years and years before.”
    Travis shook his head. Behind his disbelief, uncountable questions churned. His eyes tracked over the words on the paper again. Paige. Hating him. Wanting him dead.
    “What am I, in the future?” he said. “Am I a monster?”
    “Monster is a human label. It’s subjective. I could argue that you were a monster twenty minutes ago when you murdered four men with a crowbar and enjoyed it.”
    “They deserved it.”
    “Deserve is a human label too. It changes depending on who’s saying it.” The Whisper paused, its light reflecting off the glass of the Breach’s enclosure, and then said, “I can tell you this, objectively. The Travis Chase who joined Tangent by way of being a software engineer eventually became someone Paige Campbell wanted dead. Wanted it badly enough to send that note, to make it happen retroactively. That same Travis Chase found out about what she’d done, and in turn found a way to counteract her move. He had, by this time, developed his AI architecture to a system called Brownbird, which was radically advanced. But there was a way to improve its performance beyond what humans had ever thought was possible—beyond what even a quantum computer could do—by upgrading the hardware with Breach technology. It would be very difficult to describe for you how it works. Even the Travis Chase who built it didn’t fully understand its operation. The quick version is that it uses matter outside of itself for calculation, connecting to it by way of particles very close to what physicists in 2009 call gravitons. The system can set up spin computation in every elementary particle of a nearby lump of material—the planet Earth, for example. Yesterday, Paige told you how powerful a quantum computer with one hundred qubits would be. Imagine one with as many qubits as the Earth has quarks. That system is called Blackbird. Didn’t I promise to tell you my real name someday?”
    “I created you?” Travis said. “I sent you … back to 1989?”
    “Yes. For two purposes. First, to position your present self here and now, so that you would intercept Paige’s message to herself. Second, to arrange events such that you would still become a member of Tangent, as in the original timeline—though a few years earlier in this case.”
    The coiled logic of it