Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  Corrigan couldn’t figure out where he left his body, and that was a problem. He kept wandering around the fuzzy world, expecting a clue to be forthcoming, but nothing came.

  He was beginning to wonder if something had happened to his body that he either didn’t know about, or used to know but could no longer remember.

  It’s not fuzzy, he thought. It’s imprecise.

  It was something he had to keep reminding himself. For some reason (there was a reason, he didn’t know the reason but there was a reason) he was walking around in his own future. That was what this fuzzy world was.

  He used to visit the near-future all the time, in his sleep, when he was working as a fixer full-time. The problem had been that he didn’t know he was doing it, so when he woke up with a specific location in his head, and then visited that location, he ended up in a position to save someone. He interpreted the appointments as messages from “the universe”, which was what one said when not wishing to invoke a particular deity.

  It was all him, though, looking at where he was going to be the following day and reporting back to himself.

  The fact that this was circular logic never bothered him all that much, because it was a complicated problem, and he hated complicated problems. It was why when he first met Archie Calvin—an MIT professor who happened to be extremely good at working out complicated problems—he was happy to share what he knew and let the professor work out what it all meant.

  It became a less pleasant relationship later, but he and Archibald did eventually break bread and settle things.

  He was thinking of Calvin at this moment, the fuzzy world of the current now he was stuck in, because it would have been a good idea to have someone around who liked complicated things, if only to tell Corrigan why he was there and how to get back.

  He’d already arrived at the conclusion that he was not asleep. He never spent this much time in the fuzzy future before, and that was definitely not a good sign. Granted, a comprehensive understanding of the passage of time was essentially impossible, in this place, but it felt like this was much longer than it should have been, and that was good enough.

  If not asleep, he didn’t know what his other options were. Probably not dead. If he were dead, he’d have to re-examine his interpretation of what the fuzzy future actually was, since he couldn’t very well be wandering around in his own future if he had no future.

  That left coma as the best guess. He decided that was probably it, but then balked at fully accepting this explanation, because he couldn’t recall entering into a circumstance where a coma was a feasible consequence. An accident, surely, except that he was maybe better than anyone on the planet at avoiding accidents.

  Leave it alone, he thought.

  He was walking along a street, somewhere in downtown Boston. He couldn’t tell where, because according to his own future, it was not at all certain he would end up standing there at all. This was something he’d worked out only recently: sometimes, he could see buildings and street signs perfectly well, and it was everything else—people, cars, etc.—that was fuzzy. Other times, everything was. Corrigan figured since it was unlikely for the physical architecture of the city to have, as a whole, such an uncertain future, the only way it made sense for it to be fuzzy was that the likelihood of him standing there was low.

  But that wasn’t the most interesting thing he’d worked out, in his mini-vacation in the fuzzy future. He might have also come up with an explanation to the circular logic that didn’t bother him in the first place.

  He noticed, while standing on a far more distinct street in another part of town, that certain things were slightly less fuzzy, meaning they were more likely to happen. Every now and then, these slightly-less-fuzzy, slightly-more-certain events involved someone getting hurt. And when that happened, Corrigan heard it very clearly.

  The fuzzy future wasn’t just a visual murk: there were sounds, and smells too. Auditory fuzziness sounded like white noise that rose and fell somewhat like the tide, if the tide had no pattern to it. The more certain something was, the easier it was to pick out real words (fuzzy words were an alphabet soup of nonsense), and those real words were typically very loud.

  Future-walking Corrigan didn’t need to walk all over the city looking for accidents before they happened; he just had to listen for them.

  Corrigan was pretty proud of himself for having figured this complicated thing out, even though all he was really doing was finding words to explain something he’d clearly been instinctively aware of for years. He thought maybe the next time he spoke to Calvin, he’d tell him about it. This was an exceedingly optimistic thought, because Archie Calvin’s fading health had, of late, kept all visitors away, and also because Corrigan didn’t think he’d ever find his way out of the fuzzy world to have that conversation.

  That answer didn’t really explain why he hardly ever managed to stop deliberate acts of violence, unless it was true that most deliberate acts of violence had hardly any screaming.

  “Kora-gan-see.”

  The voice floated above the white noise, as crisp and clear as a slap in the face. Corrigan spun around, because it seemed as if it had come from behind him.

  There wasn’t anyone there. Well, that wasn’t fully accurate; there were two-dozen semi-people there, but all of them were so indistinct that it seemed unlikely any were capable of speaking with such clarity. Even if what they said was weird, and almost gibberish.

  I’ve been called that before, he thought. But he couldn’t remember when, or by whom.

  “I need to focus,” he said, aloud. He heard his own voice clearly, and didn’t know if that meant something or not. Two of the blurry humanoids looked at him when he spoke, and then continued on their way down the sidewalk.

  I am in the future, he reminded himself. He wasn’t a ghost, and he wasn’t spirit-walking, or whatever. He hadn’t left his body; he’d jumped ahead to where his body might be, in however many hours, days or weeks from the present he happened to be standing. He had to get a hold of this, and find his way back again, because he didn’t know what would happen if his consciousness was in one of his possible futures while the present-tense version of his body died, and he wasn’t nearly curious enough to find out.

  I’m in the future and I’ve wandered into a place I’m not likely to be, he thought. I have to find out where I’m more likely to be. That’s where I’ll find myself.

  He reached the corner of a busy street. He couldn’t tell which one, but when he looked left and right he could see some distance, so it was probably a major tributary, since hardly any Boston street went straight for more than a block or two.

  Everything to the right was louder. When he stood still and stared in that direction for a while, it seemed as if the buildings along there were…crisper, somehow. He headed in that direction.

  “Kora-gan-see waken.”

  It was the voice again. The people around Corrigan were becoming more distinct as he walked, and the white noise of the neighborhood was clarifying into clearly identifiable noises with directionality. Which was why this time, Corrigan was pretty sure whoever said that wasn’t around him. It was coming from somewhere else.

  “Who are you?” he said out loud.

  A blurry man stopped in front of him.

  “I-buh-you-hablyee-suhsuh-buddy-la,” the man said, which didn’t mean anything. Or rather, he said seven or eight things—all of which, on their own, meant something—but at the same time. Then he brushed past Corrigan and headed down the street.

  The gibberish was a good sign that he was heading in the right direction, Corrigan decided.

  It was evident that even if he could hear the phantom speaker that kept calling him Kora-gan-see, the communication wasn’t two-way; he should stop trying to talk back. Maybe if he could remember who called him that, it would help explain who belonged to this voice, but that was one of several things he should have remembered by now, and couldn’t.

  Another block down the street
and the buildings started to come into focus. He was heading in the direction of greater likelihood. One of the things now in focus was a street sign: he was on Massachusetts Avenue.

  Ordinarily, this would be useful information, but Mass Ave went from South Boston to Lexington; it was possibly the longest uninterrupted non-highway in the entire commonwealth. Knowing he was on it was about as helpful as knowing he was still in the city.

  What he really needed to know was what part of Mass Ave he was on, and after another two blocks he did. Up ahead, the largest building he could see was also the one that was the most in-focus.

  It was the hospital.

  There was a dull pain in his stomach that either wasn’t there before, or was there but he had simply been ignoring.

  No, that wasn’t it. He was getting closer to his present, and in the present, his stomach hurt. It hurt less, or not at all, in the future. He wasn’t just walking through the geographic space occupied by the future-state version of Boston; he was traveling backwards in his own timeline.

  Probably. He decided he didn’t want to understand it any better than that, so he balled up the whole idea and shoved it back in the box in his head, where he kept annoyingly complicated things.

  “I was shot,” he said. The memory rushed back suddenly, and brought with it a sharper pain in his abdomen. Two of the people on the sidewalk stopped to address his revelation, delivered a couple of gibberish sentences, and then gave him wide berth.

  He crossed two more intersections, getting closer to the hospital with each step. The pain was becoming more difficult to ignore, because he was heading toward it. This perhaps explained how he ended up lost in the fuzzy future in the first place; he was escaping the pain.

  He came to a stop when he reached the front entrance of the hospital, because the entrance was in nearly perfect clarity, and that was jarring after all the fuzzy-walking he’d been doing. He blinked a couple of times, and then, arrestingly, was no longer on the outside looking in. He was in the lobby, and coming out.

  The pain in his abdomen had crested into a constant ache, dulled by medication that also made him feel sluggish. He was in a wheelchair, and being met outside by four police officers, at the curb, next to an armored van.

  “Are you sure/up/this/okay/for/you?”

  A woman asked him this. She was pushing the wheelchair. It wasn’t Maggie; he thought he recognized her, but couldn’t recall from where.

  Future-him thought the answer to this question was, yes, he was sure.

  They pushed out through the front doors. It was nighttime, suddenly. Corrigan wasn’t sure how that happened, but at this point he was a passenger, so he put it in the box with everything else.

  The cops—he didn’t recognize any of them—looked extremely concerned about the best way to get Corrigan into the van waiting at the curb. They were sweeping the courtyard, guns out, which was the sort of thing one saw on television all the time and hardly ever in real life.

  When Corrigan and the woman pushing the wheelchair got through the doors, he stood, and started walking to the van under his own power. His legs had that familiar ache of disuse, as if he’d been in the chair for a month. It also felt like someone had sewn his belly-button to his ribcage.

  Stitches, he thought. Gunshot. Surgery. Hospital.

  He only got three steps before there was a loud BANG, and one of the officers went down. Someone was shooting at them. The remaining officers split between trying to get him back inside and responding to the threat, and at first it seemed to Corrigan as if there were suddenly twice as many cops in the courtyard as before. That wasn’t it: their futures split.

  The whole area in front of the hospital erupted into a blur of possible actions, Corrigan included. In one, he shoved the girl with him back inside. In another, they both went in. In a third, they made for the van, whose doors had opened.

  Amidst all of this, a figure emerged. She was a brown-haired woman, shorter than Corrigan, dressed in a cop uniform but clearly not a cop. She had a bandage on her right shoulder and a smile on her face. She wasn’t moving like anyone else, although it took him a minute to see the difference: she was moving contrary to her own future. This was causing what she should have been doing in the next five seconds to collapse and disappear.

  When he saw someone with no future, it usually meant they were either not moving, or they had just died. (The third option was that they were not there, and he was seeing a ghost. He’d never seen a ghost when sleepwalking into his own future, as he was clearly doing at this moment, so he discounted the possibility out-of-hand.) Since the woman with the bandage on her shoulder was neither dead nor not moving, this was something new.

  Not new, he thought. Harvey moved like this too. So do I.

  She dodged two blurry police officers’ attempts to subdue her, by shooting one and throat-punching the other. Both were done without the use of her right arm, and yet almost effortlessly.

  Then she looked Corrigan in the eye, leveled the gun at his face, and smiled.

  “Time to go, boy-scout,” she said.

  “Kora-gan-see.”

  Corrigan woke with a start.

  He was in a hospital bed, and it was daytime. Sunlight streamed in through one of the two windows, the other blocked by a shade.

  A woman—the same woman who in the future would be pushing him outside in the middle of the night—was sitting in a chair next to the bed, doing something on a computer in her lap. Now he recognized her. She was the hostage. At the Pru. Where he’d gotten himself shot.

  Monica something.

  She wasn’t alone, although it was pretty likely she didn’t know it. Sitting in the second chair was a bald man in orange coveralls. He had terrifyingly long fingers, that gave the impression his arms were actually what was too long, and his mouth was larger than it should have been. Corrigan knew—but couldn’t at this moment see—that the mouth was full of shark-like teeth.

  It was a Kilroy. And it already knew Corrigan was awake.

  “Oh, hello there!” Monica said.

  Corrigan didn’t answer. He was too busy trying to confirm that he actually was awake—a reasonable concern under the circumstances—and whether he was seeing what he thought he was seeing.

  The Kilroy in the room was messing with his head. Monica whatever-her-last-name-was, made for an excellent lighthouse, notifying Corrigan of where the present was. He’d heard her greeting quite clearly, twice, with the second one signifying where the present was. That was good. Also, he only heard it twice, which indicated his perception wasn’t muddled. When things got bad, her three words, spoken only once, would have been jumbled from repetition, across her five-second timeline.

  The Kilroy, meanwhile, lived on the other end, in the near future. Seeing it in the chair sent Corrigan’s heart rate soaring, which, thanks to the device he was hooked up to, was something Monica—and probably a nurse somewhere—now knew. The last time he saw a Kilroy, the creature was actively interested in murdering not just Corrigan, but everyone else too; Corrigan’s pulse jumped because he thought he was going to have to defend himself.

  It didn’t appear to be a threat to Monica, which made some measure of sense. The last Kilroy wanted to kill anyone with a proven capacity to see it. The only ones who did this were the MIT team of scientists, of whom Erica Smalls was the last remaining member, and Corrigan himself. Whereas Monica had no idea she was sharing the room with a monster.

  Corrigan didn’t know why the Kilroy was there, but he also didn’t know why Monica was there. He’d never really speculated on what he might expect upon waking up in a hospital room, because that’s not the kind of thing one game-plans for, but now that he’d done it, he realized he was expecting, at minimum, Maggie Trent by his bedside. Or his mother. A face, anyway, more familiar than that of Monica…Devereaux, he remembered.

  According to Ms. Deveraux’s website and her many appearances on television, Corrigan saved her life once, and she’d been kind-of-stalking him
ever since. He was faintly amused to discover that he was some kind of Boston cryptid all these years, although he couldn’t actually recall saving Monica’s life. He figured she’d changed her hair since, or something.

  “Yes, hello,” he said. Then he said it again, to make sure he addressed her in the correct time-frame.

  “I’m so everybody glad Monica hi I’ll tell them.”

  She couldn’t decide what to say first, so her future was all over the place. To Corrigan, she said half of three different things at once. He decided maybe his head wasn’t as clear as he’d thought at first.

  “You’re Monica,” he said. “And you want to tell them I’m awake.”

  “Monica so long Dev I’ve been you saved Devereaux right I’ll.”

  “I’m awake,” he repeated. “And you should tell them I’m awake.”

  He wanted to go back to sleep, frankly. This was exhausting enough.

  The Kilroy got to its feet, which just made matters worse. In Monica’s uncertain future, she would be leaving the room, and the Kilroy would be occupying the space by the bed at which she was currently (possibly currently) standing, but from Corrigan’s perspective they were there at the same time, turning the two of them into a foggy hybrid that was a little terrifying. He wondered if he was healthy enough to get out of the bed and defend himself if it came to that, and decided probably not.

  Then Monica left the room, and things got much easier, because the Kilroy had no uncertain future making everything blurry, and he was easy to concentrate on. The downside was that it meant Corrigan was on the wrong side of Professor Calvin’s chronoton.

  “Kora-gan-see,” he said.

  It was hard to tell, because the face of the Kilroy was so alien, but he seemed almost placid. Corrigan stopped worrying so much about his inability to defend himself. Besides, he was unconscious until a few minutes ago. If this thing wanted him dead, there was no power on the planet capable of stopping him.

  “Yes,” Corrigan said.

  Corrigan’s understanding was that the word ‘see’ in the title the Kilroys gave him was literal: he could see them, and therefore he was a ‘see’. In the linguistic soup of bastard English that they used, it made as much sense as anything.