by Scott Baker
‘Father Giovanni?’ he asked. ‘But you were … you’re dead. The bomb … I saw you!’
Giovanni allowed himself a smile.
‘It seems, Mr Black, that it takes more than fire and brimstone to keep this old man down. I seem to, how you say, keep on keeping on?’
David appreciated the man’s humour, and for that matter, simply seeing a familiar face. Then his eyes drifted over Giovanni’s shoulder.
‘Don’t tell me …’ He let it hang. Lauren, however, stared up at her husband. He seemed to be ill. His eyes looked to the back of a long passageway between buildings, where the elevator door opened and a figure emerged. Lauren, David and Giovanni could not see that figure from where they stood, but Giovanni had also recognised the voice – it was the voice he had spoken to for years at The Society. His contact.
Shaun could see him, or at least, his silhouette. The man stepped out of the elevator and walked towards the base of the platform, where Lauren, David and Giovanni were assembled.
‘But I just found her!’ Shaun protested.
‘And it’s the only way you can keep her,’ Landus said as he continued to walk forward.
Shaun’s eyes lowered as tears began to run down his cheeks. ‘But I just found her,’ he repeated quietly.
‘I’m sorry.’
Shaun knew what he had to do. He knew the way this went now. He finally understood.
‘My parents?’ Shaun asked then, the slightest glimmer of hope creeping into his voice.
Landus continued to walk. ‘You cannot save them. You cannot change anything, not a single thing.’
Tears flowed freely now, running over Shaun’s clenched jaw.
‘You can see them, and say goodbye, though they will not know you,’ Landus continued. Shaun smiled a little through his tears, then looked down at Lauren.
‘Shaun! What’s going on?’ Lauren screamed, on the verge of hysteria.
‘I love you so much, baby,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so, so sorry.’
‘Shaun! What the fuck is going on?’ Lauren demanded.
Shaun continued to smile down at her.
‘Now,’ Landus continued, ‘if you would be so kind … the diary?’ Shaun looked at the brown, animal-skin-bound book in his hands, then looked out at the approaching figure. He tossed it.
‘No!’ Giovanni called as the diary flew through the air. ‘Shaun, the map!’
Shaun looked down at the old priest and breathed deeply.
‘It’s okay, Father.’ He looked back up. ‘It’s taken me a long time to understand it, but now I do. The map has been with the diary the whole time, just as it was written.’ He paused.
‘What do you mean? I do not understand,’ the priest said as the diary landed somewhere beyond his vision.
Shaun took a deep breath. He understood everything. He finally understood. He closed his eyes and, shaking his head, he spoke: ‘I am the map.’
Silence.
No one else understood.
‘The Rule of Knowledge. The translation document. Everything. I understand now. I understand why this happened to me … Even why I got that book instead of a basketball as a child. It couldn’t have happened any other way, could it?’
‘No,’ Landus said, coming around from the last building and holding the precious diary. ‘It couldn’t have happened any other way.’
‘What do you mean, man? I don’t get it!’ David said, racking his brain.
‘I had to see everything I saw. I had to read everything I read. I had to know all that I have come to know. I had to experience everything exactly as it happened, because it was the way it had happened. It was the only way I would believe. I had to believe. I didn’t believe for the longest time, but I had to. The map isn’t in the diary. It’s not a code or a drawing. It’s not a piece of parchment hidden in a cave. All of that was far too dangerous, too much of a risk. I am the map. The disc will be wherever I decide it will be. It’s wherever I tell Fontéyne to put it. Isn’t that right, Professor?’
‘That’s right,’ said the man stepping forward into the light. He did not look like Lauren or David had expected him to look. He was taller and leaner. His hair was a salt-and-pepper grey, with flecks of what had once been sandy brown. He was dressed in a grey suit with a tweed jacket, and looked every inch the English professor. From his hand the light glinted off an intricately carved golden ring, the top etched with the crest of a Roman eagle. David had seen that ring before, in the video of Napoleon’s escape, worn by the man called Fontéyne.
The professor watched them as the guards around the trio parted to allow him through. Lauren studied the man who now carried the diary. The man responsible for it all, for setting it up. He was handsome for his age, which she placed at around forty. He looked physically fit. He looked strong and determined. And he looked … familiar.
The man looked at her with eyes of crystal blue and a blank expression. The man was Shaun.
CHAPTER 75
‘Oh my God!’ Lauren gasped.
‘Holy shit, man’ David said.
Giovanni smiled.
‘Welcome to The Facility,’ Landus said. ‘I’ll be right with you.’
He turned back to Shaun up on the dais. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘you know it happens, you know it’s worth it. The Rule of Knowledge is unbroken. It is absolute. Don’t change a thing, not a single thing.’
‘But so many people die,’ Shaun began, shaking his head.
‘It is out of your hands. You must not prevent it,’ Landus said sternly. ‘You do not prevent it.’
It was only then that Lauren noticed that the accent was gone. No longer was this the refined speech of a British university professor, but the relaxed and slightly less dramatic accent of a school teacher from North Carolina.
‘Shaun,’ Landus said reassuringly, ‘it’ll be okay.’
Shaun was silent. Then: ‘How long?’
‘Fifteen years, give or take,’ Landus said flatly.
‘Give or take how much?’ Shaun asked without a hint of trust in his voice.
‘Ah … give or take a bit,’ Landus said, then shot a sideways wink at Lauren. ‘Don’t want to give away all our secrets now, do we?’
Landus turned away. ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, seemingly to the air. At once the lights in The Facility flicked from blue to red, and the whole scene was once again bathed in an eerie, otherworldly glow.
‘Wait!’ Shaun called from the platform.
‘No, I’ve waited long enough!’ Landus shot back. ‘You can’t imagine how I have waited, Shaun, but you will. You will more than imagine. You will know. You will experience every second of my painstaking wait, and when you are me, you will understand. You will do the same.’
Landus began to walk forward but then stopped. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I nearly forgot. David, if you will. Do you still have that specification you wrote on the plane? About the encryption?’
David looked confused, but then remembered the pages he had shoved into his pockets shortly before he had wiped himself out on the free alcohol service offered by the international carrier. He searched his body, and pulled out the pages. He stared at them for a moment, then smoothed them over before handing them to Landus. Landus took them with a smile and folded them into a fine, tight roll. Then, from his pocket, he pulled out a large, beige walnut. He flipped the casing open and closed it again around the papers.
‘SEQUENCE INITIATED,’ a woman’s voice came over the speakers.
‘There’s no carrot cake this time, sorry, but you’ll need this.’ Landus turned and, in one motion, threw the walnut baseball style the one hundred and fifty feet up to the platform where Shaun stood. David looked at him. Shaun was moving backwards away from the edge. Slowly. Unnaturally slowly. The intense gravitational field being created on the dais caused time to slow down relative to the outside world. To Shaun, the outside world was happening all too fast.
‘COORDINATES CONFIRMED,’ the woman said, her voice filling the ca
vern. Landus walked over to the panel David had so fatefully examined a few minutes earlier and punched in a series of numbers.
The walnut travelled upwards to the platform but looked as if it would sail right past Shaun before he had a chance to grab it. A bad throw.
‘SECONDARY CONFIRMATION AUTHORISED,’ the voice came again.
Then a funny thing happened.
The instant the walnut passed the perimeter of the arches, it slowed dramatically, moving through the air like a child’s balloon. Shaun rushed to catch it, and was thankful that it seemed to slow to a normal speed after the bullet-like projectile it had been from his perspective when Landus had thrown it. He heard the woman’s voice. She had already started her twenty-second countdown and reached fifteen by the time Shaun had put the walnut in his mouth, slapped his chest and sent the smooth container sliding down his throat. His brain was trying to tell him something else, and he made a vow to himself to listen to it from now on. Of course – the memory loss. Shaun looked around frantically and saw, sitting conveniently near the centre of the platform, a small razor blade. Every detail planned.
‘TEN … NINE … EIGHT …’ She was speeding up. He raced over and grabbed the blade, then, without hesitating, began to carve into his arm. From the outside his scream was low and drawn out.
‘What’s he doing?’ asked Lauren in a panic.
It was David who answered. ‘He’s writing. He’s cutting the word VOMIT into his arm so he knows what to do when he wakes up. The pain will draw his attention to it, and after he hurls, he’ll see the walnut and the papers inside it.’
‘It will bring back his memory?’ Giovanni asked.
‘Yeah. I’m not sure how it works, but yeah.’
‘It works,’ Landus said from over at the console, ‘by forcing him to come into conscious contact with some element from his own time. The human brain is a delicate thing, and it adapts to whatever reality it is presented with. It needs to be shocked into waking up from the belief that it belongs in the past.’
‘SEVEN … SIX … FIVE … FOUR …’
‘Lauren!’ Shaun cried again and ran towards the outside of the platform, or tried to. He felt so heavy.
‘THREE … TWO …’ He saw her standing there in the centre of the circle. Everything was moving so fast. He did not want this, he did not want to miss her again, he did not want to not be able to see her, to touch her, to kiss her for another fifteen years. It was worse than a prison term, it was Hell. As the countdown reached zero and the chipmunk voice said, ‘INITIATE COMPRESSION TRANSMIT,’ Shaun reached out for her with all his strength.
Frozen. That was the last moment Lauren saw her husband as she knew him. Frozen in mid-air, reaching for her with desperation in his eyes. Then, as they had seen only moments before, the man’s molecules separated from each other. Then the atoms within the molecules separated, then the vibrating strings.
The cloud spun and swirled in a vortex, but Lauren could not look. She buried her head in Giovanni’s chest and squeezed her eyes tight. It was over.
When she opened her eyes again, The Facility was bathed in a blue glow once more. Lauren looked up. Giovanni released the arm he had around her shoulders and looked past her.
She turned to David, whose attention was also focused behind her. Slowly, tentatively, she turned around.
Landus had taken off his tweed jacket and wore a blue collared shirt underneath. The sleeves were rolled up to just below his elbows, and Lauren noticed the hint of a scar on his inner forearm. It was a word: VOMIT.
She scanned the man in front of her, raising her eyes to finally rest on his face. She breathed. Just breathed. There was no sound but her breath.
‘It’s me, baby,’ Shaun said.
Lauren just breathed.
Shaun walked forward slowly. Lauren backed up. Shaun stopped. ‘Lauren. It’s me.’
She stared at him, quivering. ‘I … I … just … I just don’t know …’
He strode forward and stopped just short of her. Their eyes met. She studied his face.
For the first time in twenty-one years, Professor Maxwell S Landus, Shaun Strickland, began to cry. Slowly, deliberately, he looked deep into Lauren’s eyes and spoke.
‘That’s it. It’s done. Everything I know is done. I don’t know what happens now, after this. All I know is … God, I’ve missed you—’
Lauren’s lips were on his. Her mouth was warm, her taste was sweet. In that moment, more than two decades of planning, waiting, sacrifice, torture and hell, were worth it. The moment lasted an eternity, and Shaun drank every instant with all of his being. He was free.
An uncomfortably long time later, David cleared his throat. ‘Ahem … ah … sorry to … well, you know … but I just wondered what happens to us now? Are we going to be killed?’ he asked.
Landus pulled away. Looking at David, he grinned.
‘Kill you? Why then, how would we ever educate you about our compression technology?’
David’s puffy eye went wide.
‘You mean it?’ he said, sounding like a kid who had just been told he could go for a ride in Santa’s sleigh.
‘Well, first we have to start you off on something small, like virtual stereoscopic codec development.’ He motioned down to the briefcase in Giovanni’s hand. ‘I see you’ve already played with that a little, though. You like Napoleon on the TV? You should see it in our theatre!’
David went ashen white.
‘You have a cinema,’ he asked, ‘that displays the disc like my player does?’
‘Well, there’s been a few improvements on your design – no glasses, for one,’ Shaun said.
‘Improvements? That codec was great, but my playback design is flawless! Who could improve on that?’
‘I could.’ It was a voice from behind David that answered. No one had seen him approach, all the focus being on the professor whom Shaun had become. David turned to look at the man. He had short, closely trimmed hair, and the same trim and healthy-looking physique the new version of Shaun possessed. There were no glasses on his face, but the enhanced brown of his iris gave a hint to the contact lenses he wore. David Black looked at the man who had posed the challenge, and saw what he would look like in fifteen years’ time.
‘My my, would you look at that gut?’ the newcomer said. ‘Really, David, the first thing you gotta do to get these abs is cut out all that high-sugar soft drink and maybe do a knee bend once in a while.’
David just stared. He had not been prepared for this. The man in front of him was definitely himself, but a shiny, polished version. He was what David imagined he would look like if he could win one of those extreme makeovers they have on television.
‘I … er … well …’
‘Oh, here it comes,’ the man said.
‘It’s a … I … umm …’ Instead of completing a coherent sentence, David wet his pants. The senior version rolled his eyes.
‘Don’t worry, both Shaun and I have gone through a lot of the training we put the agents through. One of the great scripts I had written into the subneural programming takes care of your little problem. Yes, it really does smell as bad as you think it does.’
David blushed bright red.
‘But don’t worry. You’re about to have the best mind-screw of your life, man. Everyone here even calls me Dr Black,’ the older version of David said with the same enthusiasm David had displayed when he talked about his work, but Dr Black was tempered, more measured.
Without knowing what to do, David held out his hand, as if to introduce himself. The doctor stepped back with his palms up in a surrender.
‘Hey, man, you can keep that to yourself. I don’t want any of those freakin’ headaches Shaun was complaining about all the time. Rule number one: we can never touch. The fact that I know that we never do doesn’t mean that it can’t happen … I think. We’re actually still working on that one.’
‘What happens if you touch?’ Giovanni said, caught up in the show.
&n
bsp; Dr Black turned to him. ‘Well, let’s just say that there’s a Doppler effect. Waves of space–time fuck up, ah … sorry, Father … ripples in space–time, which manifest themselves as God-almighty explosions of head pain, leading up to and away from the event. The only experience we’ve really had with it was Max’s … ah … I mean Shaun’s experience when he checked his future version’s pulse when he was hit by the car.’
Lauren squinted, remembering. ‘You said something about that …’
Shaun smiled and held up his three fingers. ‘The blisters I thought I had on my fingertips here. When I checked the hobo’s pulse, I touched skin. A part of my future version’s matter transferred over to me. Miraculously, the lumps went away after I was hit by the car when I had the diary. When I had my pulse checked, the matter transferred back.’
‘This is incredible!’ the priest said, his accent growing thicker in his excitement.
‘Coooooool!’ was all David could string together, still looking at the man in front of him.
‘So, rule number one: we don’t touch,’ Dr Black continued. ‘Rule number two: I’m always right. Whatever original thought you think you’ve come up with, I had it first, literally. There is nothing you can think, or know, that I don’t know or haven’t thought first.’
‘But I—’
‘David, listen, because I only say this once: get over your arrogance, and absorb. You have to accept what I tell you because you have so much to learn, you cannot imagine. Luckily for you, the first thing you will learn is all about our accelerated learning and neural programming technology. But first …’ Dr Black turned to one of the guards who stood in the circle around them. ‘Eric, take our friend here back to get a shower and a new set of pants.’
David started to protest, but then realised he was in no state to have the conversations he wanted to have right now, to ask the questions he was dying to ask. As he walked off, he looked around and remembered that it had been his ambition over the past six years to meet the man who developed the codec he had spent his recent life cracking. He felt an overwhelming sense of something he had not allowed himself to feel many times before. A rare feeling, a warm feeling, washed over him when he realised that he was responsible for it all. He had invented the codec that had so amazed him. The feeling he had was one of unadulterated pride. His mind filled with awe and wonder and he swelled at the thought that he had had a hand in it all. Then he remembered that he had just wet his pants.
