Lincoln, Fox and the Bad Dog

by D Roland Hess

  “Fox, can the gun project energy that would reinforce the pattern of magical energy in the body?”

  I already had a round that simply dissipated magical energy. It was fine for removing standing spells but didn’t do anything about a persistent organic structure with an energy source. In my dissection of the Zoro and subsequent work, I’d determined that something about the shape of the surface of the endoplasmic reticulum, an organelle associated with the synthesis of proteins, was able to cull the magical energy from the surrounding area and make it available to the body, in the same way that gills on a fish collect oxygen from water.

  “It can,” said Fox.

  “Any idea what would happen to a Praecant if you completely overloaded their magical energy?”

  “Three possibilities,” said Fox. “It could give them more available power. It could render them catatonic. It could temporarily or permanently remove their ability to use magic.”

  “That’s four possibilities,” I said.

  “You designed my speech heuristics,” said Fox. “You are disagreeing with yourself.”

  “But we can do this? This is a thing?” I said.

  What Fox and I were talking about was bullshit, but in light of Gwen’s opposition to what needed to be done, it was necessary bullshit.

  I’d actually already looked into this without Fox’s help, months ago, and wasn’t able to get it to work. Of course, I hadn’t had a lot of live experimental subjects, and I still didn’t. In theory, one could do something to temporarily or even permanently remove a Praecant’s ability to harvest magical energy from the environment, but it would most likely involve some kind of bioengineering, not an energy burst. A virus that either scarred or bound to the surface of the endoplasmic reticulum, disrupting its magical properties. And yes, I did have a degree in bioengineering. But no, I did not have the facilities or the resources to actually do it.

  On the other hand, if I had the right digital tools, I could engineer something and have Fox-the-gun synthesize it into some kind of viral payload. That made me really nervous. First, I had no idea exactly what the effect would be on a Praecant if it was successful. Genetic therapy had been mostly a failure in the non-magical world for a while. Sometimes it would look promising, and then people would just die. When you’re hacking biological hardware at that low of a level, the ability to foresee all possible side effects is basically zero.

  Maybe it would work, but the person would die or have some kind of other unpredictable reaction. Or maybe it would do exactly and only what I thought it would do. Or nothing at all. Without testing, which would be unethical, immoral and illegal, it would be impossible to tell.

  That was something I’d put in the back of the fridge for another day, and I’d hope that it didn’t get moldy in the interim.

  I had asked Fox a question, and I already knew the answer he was going to give me, out loud, in front of Gwen. He was going to give me the wrong answer, like I’d instructed him to do in the email I’d just sent.

  “It will require testing,” said Fox, “but with the correct frequencies, it should work.”

  “Great,” I said, “but I don’t know if we’ll have time for testing. Can you design it to be broad-spectrum? I’ll have to risk it and hope for the best.”

  I was a long time away from any kind of ability to perform a magicectomy on a Praecant, but no one but myself needed to know that.

  “Get to work on it,” I said.

  “I will text you when it is ready,” said Fox.

  “He’s amazing,” said Gwen.

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m pretty impressed too.”

  “What are you doing?” she said.

  “I’m standing here, talking to my magical computer?”

  “No, I mean, what are you doing? Why are you spending your time building guns and… slumming? Look at what you can do.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yeah, you do. You get your hands on a completely new form of technology, and in under a year, you build stuff that people have been working on for decades. By yourself.”

  “So?”

  “So don’t you think there’s some better stuff you could be doing with your life?”

  Not if Dan was still around and still out for our blood. Not if the larger Praecant community thought that I was violating some of their dearest and most secretest pinkie swears. Things needed to be taken care of. Maybe after all of that…

  But she made a good point. Good enough that I immediately began to wonder why I hadn’t thought of it myself. What was I doing? Now that she mentioned it, the question seemed kind of obvious. Just like back in the foyer of the building where I felt that some of my old faculties were coming back to me, I had the sense that something was happening in my head.

  Things were clearing. I felt like I was at the bottom of a well and had been for a while. But unlike yesterday, unlike two minutes ago, I actually knew that I was in one now and could see the sides arcing around me in the dimness, with the sky a little circle of light up above.

  Being in a well sucks, but what’s worse than that is being in a well and thinking you’re at the Four Seasons.

  “Tell me more about that,” I said, “after I get Dan off our backs.”

  “The last time you saw him, he blew a guy up, and it got all over you,” she said. “You’re really going to reason with him?”

  “I’m going to try,” I said. “And if it doesn’t work, I’ll pull the magic right out of him.”

  “Maybe you ought to just do that for starters,” she said.

  Maybe I should.

  “Okay,” I said, “I have to make a phone call and go meet someone. Babd has to go with me. You can go or not. It’s up to you.”

  “Does where you’re going involve danger?”

  “Nope,” I said. “We need to figure out where Dan is. If we were the police, we’d get a warrant to track his location through his phone. We’re not, so we have to be clever.”

  “I’ll stick with you then,” she said. “I like clever.”

  “Cool.”

  I dialed one of my contacts from my day job. Henri Sallain. Awesome dude, super tall, gangly, very very dorky. Works for a major wireless carrier and isn’t afraid to make some money on the side.

  I’d worked for him in the past, and he’d done work for me.

  Usually he required twenty-four hours notice, but he agreed to meet within the hour for triple the normal consultation fee. I grabbed $1,800 from the backpack, and the three of us headed out.

  * * *

  Babd and I sat in the outdoor cafe area of the Panera in East Liberty. Henri was distinctive looking, and I could tell it was him walking across the parking lot a mile away.

  “You’re a desperate man,” he said as he approached. “I like it!” His vague Euro-accent made it sound like something fun, as opposed to a jab. I think that Henri only thought that things were fun, regardless of the actual circumstance.

  “Hey doggy!” he said. Babd sat on the concrete patio beside me. She looked up at me, I gave her a nod, and she moved up toward him. He got down on one knee, reached both hands around the back of her head and dug his fingers in to scratch.

  “You’re a good girl,” he said finally, and she came back to sit beside me again. “I like it,” he said again. “You have a dog now. You’re branching out!”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m good like that.”

  I took a pile of papers out of my backpack and put them on the table. This is how we usually did stuff like this in public because it looked shady to be handing over chunky envelopes. We’d “review” some stuff in the packet, and then he’d take it when we were done. The money was in a folder in the middle of the stack.

  “So what you got?” he said, taking a seat.

  I turned a few of the papers over and pointed at random to somewhere on the page that ended up on top.

  “I need to locate someone using their phone.”

  “Okay. You know that requires a sea
rch warrant, no?”

  “Are you trying to raise the price?” I said. “And it doesn’t require a search warrant.”

  “Eh, sometimes it does,” he said.

  “If I give you the number, can you access the location logs?”

  He worked as a systems technician at the wireless carrier that Dan used. He should be able to get to that stuff.

  “Do you want real-time location logs or the historic ones?”

  “Real-time would be nice,” I said, “but a look at, say, the last week’s worth of locations would be perfect.”

  “I cannot get this for you myself.”

  “But you know where the log files are, don’t you?”

  He laughed. “Of course I do, but I’m not in a position to get them at this time.”

  “Can you get me remote access?”

  “No.”

  “Can’t or won’t?”

  “Can’t. There are too many safeguards, and I don’t have the right privileges to build you a bridge.”

  “Okay, is there anyone you know who could do this?”

  “Of course, but it will be expensive, and it won’t happen today.”

  That’s exactly what I’d expected him to say.

  I turned another page on the stack of papers.

  “So, give me a timeline and price. Ballpark it for me. I’ll take it back to my client and see if that even makes sense to them.”

  Henri thought for a moment. I’d done the same kind of calculus that he was doing now, balancing the actual cost he’d have to pay the person against what he thought he could get away with charging me. How desperate he thought I was. How much he thought he might need my help in the future.

  “I would guess,” he said, “around four thousand dollars, and let’s say one week.”

  “That seems reasonable,” I said. “I’ll take it back to the client. If you can get me more solid numbers by the end of the day, that would be great.”

  “Sure sure,” he said.

  I shuffled the papers back together and put them into the big folder.

  “You should probably keep these,” I said.

  “For reference,” he said.

  I stood up.

  “So,” I said, “you don’t just want to give me your username and password and let me handle it, do you?”

  “Hahaha,” he said. “You’re a funny man. Maybe next time I will do that.”

  “I figured.”

  He got up too, holding the folder. He waved to Babd.

  “Bye doggy.”

  Even though the parking lot was full of SUVs, he was tall enough that I could see his head bobbing above them as he walked off. I had my suspicions about what he’d told me, and I figured it would be easy enough to find out now.

  “What do you think, Babd? Was he telling the truth?”

  We headed toward the other side of the parking lot where Gwen was waiting with the car.

  “No,” she said. “He said many things which are not.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I said. I was pretty sure that Henri did in fact have the accesses needed to do the work, but he was stalling and acting like a broker so he could plausibly charge more. And also because he was a habitual con man, and it probably made him happy to do so.

  I didn’t begrudge him that though. Like I said, he was an awesome guy. You just had to be wary.

  “Did you get any of the technical stuff? The username and password?”

  “Those I could not see. They came as impressions and memories of human motor actions, not sounds that I could repeat. I could describe the visuals, but I believe that would be inefficient.”

  “It probably would,” I said. We hopped into the car, me in the front passenger seat, and Babd in the back.

  “Can you just, like, push them into my brain?” I said.

  “I cannot,” said Babd. “Not here. Were we in a different place, I could do this.”

  “You mean like with Brigit?” said Gwen.

  “Yes,” said Babd. “In that place, we could communicate properly.”

  “Okay,” said Gwen. “Then let’s head back to the hotel.”

  “And we would do that why?” I said.

  She smacked me.

  “Dumb ass,” she said. “I’m a super awesome hypnotist. Babd intruded on your session at least once already. Let’s make it happen again. Hashtag Astral Plane, bitches.”

  “You did not just say that.”

  “Say what?” she said, smirking.

  She put the gas down, and we headed out of the parking lot.

  Chapter 16

  I see Lincoln standing by a lake. No one is chasing him or trying to get him to do something. He’s just standing there.

  He’s not thinking anything.

  It’s nice.

  There is a movement in the trees, rustling underbrush. If you’re not used to it, even the smallest things sound large that way.

  He looks around, not worried, because this isn’t a place in which he needs to be frightened. A small red-furred dog emerges, spaniel-like.

  “Hey,” the dog says to him.

  I see them walk toward the lake together. There are other people now, sitting at a bistro table in the sand. It looks like a Panera bistro table. It feels familiar, but I can’t quite tell where I’ve seen it before.

  Lincoln and the dog join the people at the table. The people are Henri and Lincoln. So now I see two Lincolns. I suspect that I’m Lincoln too, so that makes three.

  “I can share him with you,” the dog says.

  As the Henri by the lake talks about accesses and passwords, I am inside his head. I feel his fingers typing his access credentials. I know what he knows about the log locations. I know what he thinks of me. This is… interesting.

  Useful.

  Also, disconcerting.

  Maybe not to be repeated.

  Lincoln and the dog stand by the lake. The others are gone now.

  It’s a beautiful day.

  “Will you walk me?” says the dog.

  “Of course,” says Lincoln.

  I follow behind them.

  As they walk, the lake changes, shrinking to a small pond. Although a light breeze has come up, the water is perfectly still. They walk onto a small, broken dock that I hadn’t noticed before. The dog jumps from the dock, and the water is no longer water but dark marble. Lincoln gently steps off to follow.

  The marble is transparent, and I can see that within the marble, fish are frozen. I see them in incredible detail and feel that they aren’t even real fish, just amazing mechanical representations, put there to appear as fish for some unknown purpose.

  The dog is explaining something to Lincoln about the fish, and I want to know what it is more than anything.

  The dog stops talking to Lincoln and notices me for the first time.

  She abandons Lincoln and comes to me.

  “Oh,” she says. “It’s you.”

  “Will you tell me about the fish?” I say.

  “I already did.”

  “No, you told Lincoln,” I say, but when I look up, Lincoln is gone, and it is just myself and the dog.

  “Exactly,” says the dog.

  “Well, I wouldn’t want you to repeat yourself.”

  “Let’s see something else,” she says, and trots off. The pond of marble is now a stream. It runs through a beautiful gorge but is still marble. It’s been carved to look like cascades and pools and even splashes. If you hold very still, you can pretend that it is water and you are seeing it frozen in time. We walk the length of the stream, deeper into the wilderness, and it seems that the artisans have cleverly concealed steps in the marble so that we never see them until exactly when we need them, and when we need them, they are always there.

  We come to a broad plain. In the distance is a single tree, green and lush. It is perfect. We cross the scrubby plain to it. When we come under its branches, the feeling of the air changes, and in fact what we can see on the plain changes as well. From under the branc
hes, we see that the plain is alive. Flowers, insects, the warm breath of millions of acres of grass. Step outside, and it is merely a dusty plain with sketchy bushes here and there forever.

  Back under then.

  The dog motions upward with her snout, and I turn my gaze. Children climb in the tree, ignoring us. They are playing chase. Or war. Or house. I’m not sure. But they are enjoying it. One child, whom I feel that I recognize, glances down at us. He locks eyes with me for a second, then gets a skeptical look on his face. He laughs, turns away and climbs out of sight.

  “Can we stay here?” I say.

  “You cannot,” says the dog.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  On the other side of the tree, leading off into the distance, are a series of flat rocks on the ground roughly the size of pillows.

  “Come on,” says the dog and walks into the plain, following the rocks.

  I step up on one of them. They are spaced closely enough together that I believe I can just make it if I jump from one to the other. I do it.

  “Ha,” says the dog. “That’s how you want to do it?”

  In answer, I take a huge leap onto the next rock.

  “Okay then,” she says and hops onto the rocks as well.

  We jump from rock to rock, never missing a step.

  Soon, the rocks are spaced even farther apart, but it seems that no matter how far apart they are, we can both just manage to cover the distance.

  We are laughing, and breathing hard.

  I look back, and the tree, the gorge, the lake are nowhere in sight.

  “Where are you headed?” I say.

  “We are not headed,” says the dog. “We are just doing this.”

  “Oh.”

  “Until we do not.”

  It makes sense, so we keep leaping from rock to rock, covering ridiculous distances. Sometimes I go first and marvel when she can manage to follow. Sometimes she goes first, and I think there is no way that I can jump to hit the receding speck in the distance. And yet I do.

  All this time, the plain flashes below us, dirt, rocks and dull plants.

  The dog has stopped on a rock that is considerably larger than the rest.

  “Take a look,” she says, peering over the edge.