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SUMMARY: A cyborg attempts to escape his horrifying future by preventing the most momentous assassination of the twentieth century.

June 28, 1914. Sarajevo. Unit 51823 watched as the most pivotal moment of the twentieth century took shape before its artificial eyes. Franz Ferdinand, the Archduke of Austria-Hungary, was fleeing the city in his motorcade. Men were trying to kill him. Conspirators of the terrorist group the Black Hand had thrown a hand grenade at Ferdinand's motorcar as it moved from the railroad station to the town hall. The Archduke had knocked the grenade away with his own arm, and now fled a city seething with rebellion.

The cyborg moved stealthily through the crowd lining the street. The humans who jostled it flinched in surprise when they felt the hard angularity of its cold steel body beneath the supple leather of its black trenchcoat. Their jaws went slack and their eyes widened when they saw its pale human face. How frail and transient they seemed! Most of these peasants have never seen a light bulb. They could never understand Unit 51823's true nature.

What would they think of me, it thought, if they could see my whole body? This monstrous combination of flesh and machine? It felt strangely ashamed of itself at the thought, like a human afraid of its fellows seeing it naked, and suppressed an urge to gather its trenchcoat more tightly around it.

It was human once, before the Third Great War. Other humans had called it "he," instead of "it." Its limbs had been warm flesh instead of cold steel. And then the Middle Eastern Alliance had released clouds of nerve gas against the military forces of the old United States, Mexico, and Canada occupying key Alliance nations. The North American League had responded by creating whole armies of cyborg warriors, impervious to chemical or biological weapons.

Usually the neural implants erased the human memories from the new cyborg, taking away all that sentimentality to create an efficient killing machine, but with Unit 51823 something had gone wrong. It didn't know the reason, but it saw a series of memories in its mind, like images flickering in and out of static on a video screen.

The most vivid was in fact of a video screen, a picture on the evening news of a great mushroom cloud rising over the ruins of Paris, revenge for a Cyborg Front offensive that had massacred most of Tehran. But other memories haunted it.
It remembered standing in front of a chalkboard covered with equations, explaining to... a colleague? A friend? "You see it's all quantum physics. Empty space is filled with loops and whirls of energy we call the quantum foam, and tiny wormholes through it are constantly flickering in and out of existence. So for time travel one needs to isolate one of these wormholes and expand it so it's large enough for someone to pass through..."

Once its human self had stood before a crowd in Washington D.C., protesting the Cyborg Conscription Act and shouting, "I am a man and no one will take that away from me!" But they had. The secret police had come in the night, anesthetized him and dragged him away. The memories became fragmented after that.