Out of Spite, Out of Mind

by Scott Meyer

  “Until I leave, so they’ll be quitting in a second.”

  Martin reached out blindly with his raven-covered hands. “No! Wait! Hold on!” He felt the birds start to let go, and within a few seconds he was completely unencumbered. The birds flocked around the goblin and flew in an ever-tightening spiral, their numbers diminishing until there were only a few birds, then only one, then none, and no goblin either.

  Martin looked at the empty space where the goblin had stood. He spun around, and saw the citizens, slowly emerging from their various hiding spots and bits of shelter. He noted that all of the apparatus from the full-sized re-creation of the game Mouse Trap had also disappeared.

  All of the evidence was gone.

  Not all of the evidence, he thought, looking down at his robe.

  Martin was impervious to damage, but his robe was not. The ravens had shredded the outer layer of fabric. The entire surface was in tatters, and every time he moved, sequins dropped to the ground.

  Normally, I’d just ask Gwen to repair it, or make me a new one. Right now, I think I’d rather go another round with the birds.

  7.

  Phillip materialized at the bottom of the city, on the terrace in front of Brit the Elder’s home. The great bowl of Atlantis rose on all sides, looming over him and framing the ragged-edged disk of blue sky above.

  Phillip looked toward the collection of smooth, opaque glass boxes that made up Brit the Elder’s home. A series of sliding glass doors led to the interior, but it was far too dark inside for Phillip to make out any details. Just outside the sliding doors, two Atlantean sentries guarded the entrance. Both stood a full head taller than Phillip and wore the Atlantean Guard’s official uniform: shirts of orange netting made with matching, surprisingly short orange kilts.

  Phillip waved at the guards and contorted his mouth into the insincere grin he employed to camouflage the displeasure he felt when talking to petty authority figures. “Hello. I’d like to speak to Brit the Elder.”

  The more senior guard contorted his mouth into the insincere grin he employed to camouflage the pleasure he felt when denying someone something they wanted. “That’s not possible, sir.”

  “I suspect she’d want to see me if she knew I was here.”

  “I know for a fact we were told not to let anyone disturb her.”

  The floor-to-ceiling glass doors slid open without warning, emitting a slight hissing sound that drew the attention of Phillip and the guards. Brit the Elder’s voice, amplified many times but still reproduced with perfect, ringing clarity, said, “Eh, let him in.”

  The guard nodded to Phillip, which was as close as Phillip would ever get to an apology. Phillip nodded back, which was as close as he would ever come to saying, “I told you so.”

  The guard made a point of not watching as Phillip walked across the patio and entered the house.

  The place had a genuine sense of disorder about it, but at first Phillip couldn’t put his finger on why. The furniture looked exactly as it had when he’d last visited. The carpet was spotless, marred only by a faint wear pattern that a quick vacuuming would erase. A couple of the end tables held empty glasses, and the dining table was strewn with books but, all in all, the place looked much like his own did after he’d tidied up. Yet this was Brit the Elder’s home, and Phillip found even the slightest detail being visibly out of place deeply unsettling.

  Brit the Elder’s voice called out from the deeper recesses of the house, “I’m back here, in the office. Last door on the left.”

  Phillip found Brit the Elder sitting behind her yellowed Macintosh. The only light in the room was the glow from the tiny CRT screen, shining up on her face from below and reflecting in her glasses, completely hiding her eyes.

  Phillip chuckled softly. “Of course, you have the same kind of computer as Brit the Younger.”

  Brit the Elder sat back in her chair and looked up at Phillip. Even the slightest movement of her head made the shadows shift wildly across her face. “It’s not the same kind of computer, Phillip. It’s the same computer. I’ve had this computer since I was in college, as well as when I was Brit the Younger.”

  “Oh,” Phillip said. “Of course.”

  “But then, you don’t really believe that, do you, Phillip? You think I’m some sort of a copy, or a projection of one possible future Brit, but not the literal continuation of the Brit you love, isn’t that right?”

  “I don’t pretend to understand the mechanism behind it, but I do believe that we all, Brit included, have free will. She can make her own decisions, and as such she’s not doomed to become anything she doesn’t want to be.”

  “Me, in this case.”

  “I’m afraid so. Although, I will say that I don’t quite understand why she finds the idea of being like you so hateful.”

  “You’re sweet.” The unflattering lighting made Brit the Elder’s smile look like an eerie grimace. “Have a seat. Sorry the place is such a mess.”

  Phillip found a chair against the wall and pulled it forward to sit opposite Brit the Elder, just to the side so that the ancient computer didn’t block his view of her face.

  “I don’t see any mess,” Phillip said, settling into the chair.

  Brit the Elder looked around the room as if she was just seeing it now for the first time. “What? . . . Oh, I see what you mean. It is pretty tidy in here. One of the benefits of the paperless office, I guess. I assure you, my desktop is a mess. So, Phillip, I’m glad you came by. I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask you.”

  “Anything.”

  “Good. When you went to Kludge and asked him and his gang to be sparring partners for your training fights, what did he say?”

  “He said yes.”

  Brit the Elder nodded. “Yeah, so I’ve heard. What did he say, exactly? Was he ambiguous at all? Was there any room for misinterpretation?”

  “At first he was dubious, but when I explained that we wizards would be pulling our punches, but that he and his lads were encouraged to do their best to kill us, he offered to start right then and there.”

  “Yeah, that’s pretty unambiguous.”

  “Look, I came here because I heard you’ve been going around asking weird questions, and people said you seemed out of sorts, like you weren’t really yourself. Now I’m here, and I see exactly what they meant. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on. That’s the problem. Phillip, I remember you asking Kludge and the Bastards to be your sparring partners, but the way I remember it, he told you to get stuffed, and it took another year of wooing him to get him to come around.”

  “So you misremembered something. It happens to everyone.”

  “Not to me, and I checked, never mind how. I didn’t misremember. When I was Brit the Younger, Kludge turned us down. Now he’s on board.”

  Phillip thought for a long moment. “Oh. I see. This . . . this is a big deal.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “The implications!”

  “I agree.”

  “This means that I’m right!”

  “I wouldn’t say that.”

  “I’ve been right all along!”

  “I certainly wouldn’t say that.”

  “This is great!”

  “No, Phillip, it’s a disaster.”

  “Really? Is it such a problem for me to be right?”

  “You’re not right, Phillip.”

  “But, surely, this proves that I am.”

  “No, you being right is just one possibility that this might suggest. For it to prove you right, it would have to outweigh my entire lifetime of experiences, all of which bolster the position that you’re wrong. That’s over a hundred years during which every single event I’ve witnessed, every prediction I’ve made, every memory I’ve had
, has unfolded exactly as I recalled it. In order for you to be right, all of those experiences would have to have been some sort of coincidence.”

  “So how do you explain it?”

  “Something’s gone wrong. An error got introduced into the system somehow. Maybe it was Kludge being agreeable, I don’t know. It’s hard to say. The point is, there’s a logical paradox. From the point where I remember you making your offer onward, I’ve lived my life as if he said no. But now, from the moment you made your offer on, the rest of the world, including Brit the Younger, has gone on as if he said yes. So far, I’m the only one who has felt any of the consequences, but it’s gonna be like ripples in a pond. They’ll only get larger, and reach further.”

  “What do you think will happen if you’re right?”

  “Eventually, there’ll be a logical paradox that the system can’t reconcile, followed by a crash.”

  “A crash? What do you think this crash would look like?”

  It wouldn’t look like anything. We wouldn’t even know it had happened.”

  “Oh. Good.”

  “No. Not good. Us, the world, the entire universe, and every living thing in it could freeze and then wink out of existence with absolutely no warning or way to escape.”

  “But when the program boots back up—”

  “There’s no guarantee that it would. If it did, there’s no reason to believe that the program would generate us again. Even if it did generate another Phillip McCall or Brittany Ryan, they wouldn’t be us. They’d be new versions. We would be gone.”

  “And you think this is likely?” Phillip asked.

  “No, not likely,” Brit the Elder said.

  “Good.”

  “Inevitable. I’d say that if we don’t do something, it’s inevitable, and every second that passes it gets closer.”

  Phillip started to speak, then stopped, and simply sat there with his head hung low and his shoulders slumped.

  “I know,” Brit the Elder said. “It’s terrible.”

  “I’ll say. I’ve always maintained that you and Brit the Younger are separate, distinct people, and everyone’s always laughed at me for it. Now the evidence finally seems to prove me right, and you see it as proof that the universe is fundamentally broken.”

  “I’m sorry, Phillip, but I’ll side with logic, reason, and a lifetime of experience over your opinion and a single anomaly every time. Besides, I have evidence that something’s gone wrong with the program.” She pointed downward, suggesting that Phillip look under her desk. Phillip looked confused, then smiled uncomfortably, shrugged, and leaned to the side, bending his neck and grasping the corner of the desk for support as he looked beneath it.

  It was difficult to see in the dim light, but he made out the hem of Brit the Elder’s floral dress, a bit of her exposed shins, and a pair of fur-lined taupe suede pull-on boots that reached clear up to the middle of her calves.

  Phillip shrugged. “The boots are odious, obviously, but I don’t know that you can blame the program for that.”

  “One of the sorceresses from the early two thousands gave them to me as a gift. I have to admit, they’re comfortable, but I put them on because I didn’t care if they got damaged.”

  “Damaged by what?”

  “Watch.”

  At first, Phillip saw nothing unusual, because nothing was unusual. For three seconds, Brit the Elder’s feet looked perfectly normal.

  Then they didn’t.

  The change happened so quickly, Phillip’s brain took a moment to register that anything had happened. He grabbed his staff and muttered a quick spell, making the staff act as a flashlight.

  With the area under the desk fully illuminated, he saw her boots shift from looking like real boots to resembling crude digital representations of boots. Brit the Elder kicked off the boots, exposing her bare feet, to drive her point home. As Phillip watched, her feet shifted from their normal form to the low-polygon version and back several times, seemingly at random.

  At that moment, a high-pitched keening noise rang in Phillip’s ears. He winced and looked down at his palm, where he saw the sparkling bust of Santo, and heard the eerie organ sting that signified Martin trying to call him. He kept his eyes on Brit the Elder’s glitching feet as he took the call.

  “Uh, Martin, there’s something I need to tell you.”

  Brit the Elder cleared her throat, and shook her head emphatically.

  “There’s something I need to tell you, which is that I can’t talk now.”

  “You answered the call to tell me you can’t talk?”

  “Yes. I didn’t want to be rude.”

  “Whatever. Fine. Don’t talk. Just listen. Phillip, someone attacked you.”

  “You mean someone’s going to attack me?”

  “No someone already has. That steel cage that fell on you, it wasn’t an accident.”

  “But that didn’t hurt me at all.”

  “It wasn’t meant to hurt you. It was part of a big, elaborate plan to get your attention.”

  “So you’re saying that someone is just trying to catch my eye, and they’ve failed so far.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s the least threatening thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “Phillip, you have to take this seriously. I don’t think he’s going to give up. He’s tried twice already.”

  “Twice?”

  “That package on your doorstep those kids stole was part of it, too.”

  “Oh, God, are you on that again? So it’s the Jawa who’s after me?”

  “He’s not a Jawa. I never said he was a Jawa. That was you.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “He’s a goblin.”

  “Martin, I’m sorry, but I have more important problems than your flights of fancy.”

  “Like what? You told me you weren’t going anywhere, and weren’t doing anything.”

  “Yeah, that’s right, and it’s still more important than your paranoid delusions.”

  Phillip hung up, then stared at Brit the Elder’s feet.

  Brit the Elder looked askance at Phillip. “What? Are they doing something new?”

  Phillip pointed to the area below the desk. Brit the Elder pushed her chair back and looked at the floor beneath her feet. Every time her feet shifted from one state to the other, the carpet beneath her feet changed as well. A circle a couple of feet across switched from carpet to a perfectly flat smooth surface the same color as the carpet.

  Brit the Elder said, “Huh. That’s new. Proves that the glitch is spreading to the world beyond me. I suppose it’s good to know for sure.”

  Phillip continued staring at the empty space where her foot had just been. “I, Brit, I . . . Why on earth did you show me this?”

  “Because I want your help.”

  “I don’t know how I can possibly help you.”

  “Neither do I, but together I’m sure we’ll think of something.”

  “But you think I’m wrong about everything.”

  “Not everything, Phillip. Just one thing. The fundamental mechanism underlying the entire universe. Aside from that, your instincts are usually pretty good. You’re a smart man, and a good man, and there’s nobody I trust more. Will you please help me?”

  “Of course! You don’t even have to ask. Of course I’ll help you.”

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “I think the first thing I should do is tell Brit, bring her in on this.”

  “No, I’m afraid the first thing you need to do is promise me that you will not tell Brit the Younger anything about any of this until I say it’s okay.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “Probably never.”

  “You can’t expect me to keep this a
secret from her?!”

  “That’s exactly what I expect.”

  “But, she’d want to know!”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. I mean sure, we can speculate that she’d probably want to know, but I can tell you for a fact that I don’t want you to tell her.”

  “But you claim to be her! You want me to keep this a secret from you?”

  “Yes! That’s exactly how you should look at this, Phillip. I am Brit—the older, wiser Brit—and I’m telling you not to tell the younger, more foolish me what’s going on. Besides, you can’t anyway, because I don’t remember you telling me when I was her, so you didn’t then, and you can’t now.”

  “But that doesn’t matter anymore! Your past and our present have diverged. All bets are off now!”

  “NO, the bets are still on, and the stakes are much higher. Think, Phillip! The timeline has split, but both paths are still right here next to each other, and she and I are on the two different paths. Any interaction between the two of us, even if it’s just her finding out what’s going on with me, could be the thing that crashes reality.”

  “Then why tell me at all?”

  “Because I trust you.”

  “So does she! I’m the person most likely to tell her.”

  “And the person most likely to keep my secret, for Brit the Younger’s own good and the continued survival of our entire reality. It won’t be easy, I know. Especially since you’ll have to find a way to keep sneaking away from her to come and help me get to the bottom of this and repair the damage.”

  “You’re asking a lot.”

  “I’m not, really.”

  “You don’t think sneaking around behind the back of the woman I love is a big deal?”

  “I know it is. What I meant is that I’m not asking. I’m not asking you to do something, I’m informing you that you’re going to. Logically, you were committed the moment I decided to tell you what was going on.”

  “You don’t remember any of this. How do you know I won’t tell her and keep it a secret from you?”

  “You’re far too smart to betray my trust and risk our continued existence, just to tell Brit the Younger something that’s going to make her angry at you anyway. I certainly don’t see any upside in that.”