by Scott Meyer
Brit the Elder disappeared before Phillip’s eyes, but he barely noticed. The sound of the weather and the forest outside rose sharply in pitch, climbing out of audible range and into a zone on the edge of his perception, where he experienced them as a sort of tickling deep in his ear canals instead of as sounds.
The light coming in through the windows stuttered and strobed, almost like a steady beat, but with flashes of differing intensities and durations. They came so quickly, almost heaping on top of each other in an unpredictable manner, that Phillip feared they might cause some sort of seizure, if he wasn’t having one already.
Every inch of Phillip’s skin tingled. He felt as if he was burning, or freezing, or both, in rapid succession, over and over again. The feeling would have been overwhelming on its own, blotting out all capacity for thought. When combined with the assaults on his eyes and ears as well, it was a set of sensations that went beyond the mere pleasant or unpleasant. He was incapable of processing the experience. His brain could only note it, and hope to make sense of it at some other time. Later, he would describe it as being like the stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey, only much faster and not stupefyingly boring.
The entire ordeal took ten seconds, then it was over. Phillip blinked at the steady stream of grayish light coming in the window. He noted that the wind seemed quieter than it had before. He removed his hands from his ears, and the sound grew a bit louder.
He became aware that he was standing on his left foot with his right leg drawn up toward his chest. Both of his arms were pulled in to his sides, and his shoulders were hunched over in a sort of full-body cringe.
Phillip was most grateful that his skin seemed back to normal. He looked at the backs of his hands and found them obscured by a thick layer of dust, and draped with multiple layers of cobwebs.
Phillip shrieked, jumped, flapped his arms, and hopped around the room, flailing his every extremity in an attempt to shake off as much of the dust and as many of the spiderwebs as possible. After two high-speed laps of the room, he stopped, instead hopping in place and brushing the mess off of his limbs as fast as he could until he finally stood, panting and still filthy, in a cloud of the discarded debris that floated in the still air, much of which just settled back on him anyway.
Brit the Elder appeared in the center of the room, where she’d been before Phillip’s brief ordeal. “Welcome to the year 2018. As you may have figured out, I slowed down your perception of time so that thirty-four years passed in what felt to you like ten seconds.”
Phillip looked at her with an expression of mingled anger and betrayal, but he could only manage to make a sort of plaintive moan.
Brit the Elder nodded and looked at the floor. “Yes, I know. The experience is surprisingly traumatic, isn’t it? I’m sorry about that. I went through the same thing when I had to leap from my time, 1996, to now. Lord knows what all I missed. I can tell you, jumping from 1984 like you did, you missed Tiny Toons, Animaniacs, and Freakazoid.”
“Coulda warned me,” Phillip grunted.
“Phillip, dear, do you really think anticipating that would have made it any more pleasant?”
“You could have sent me in my sleep.”
“And you really believe you would have slept through it? You’d have woken up, terrified. No, this was the best way. And it’s over now. You’re in the future. We can move on to our actual destination.” She reached out to take Phillip’s arm, then, looking at the dust and tattered cobwebs covering his sleeve, thought better of it. She touched him gingerly with one finger and initiated another teleport.
The flat, gray light and musty air of the hunting shack gave way to the fluorescent light and overly conditioned air of a public servant’s office. Phillip blinked repeatedly as he saw Brit the Elder, still standing beside him, and another Brit standing in front of the desk in a sharp, exquisitely tailored black pants suit.
“Phillip,” Brit the Much Elder said. “Hey! Welcome! Good to see you!” She took a moment to look Phillip over from head to toe, then turned to Brit the Elder and said, “Though I wish I were seeing him a little cleaner.”
“He was much dirtier than this before,” Brit the Elder said. “He was literally standing in a cloud, like Pigpen.”
Phillip said, “I’m sorry. I don’t think we’ve been introduced. I mean, I know we’ve met, in a sense. You’re Brit, obviously, but you’re not Brit the Elder, and you’re not Brit the Younger.”
Brit the Much Elder’s smile recharged, but she shook her head. “I am Brit the Younger. And I’m Brit the Elder. We’re all the same, like, you know, the same person, even if you don’t want to admit it. But in a way, you’re right. I’m not your Brit the Younger. I can’t be. She doesn’t know anything about any of this. Does she? Phillip, please tell me you haven’t told her about any of this!”
“I haven’t! I promise. But, I have to say, I wasn’t happy about it before, and I’m even less so now that I see you both. I mean, you tell me that I can’t tell her because she’s another you, and it turns out you already told another you.”
Brit the Elder said, “Yes, but that just makes it all the more dangerous for you to tell a third of me.”
Phillip shook his head. “I don’t like lying to her.”
“We know,” Brit the Much Elder said. “And we don’t like the idea of you lying to her either. We are both her, after all. But, if it’s any consolation, we’ve forgiven you.”
“Yes,” Brit the Elder said. “Now, I think it’d be a good idea if we showed Phillip to our workspace.”
“Yeah, I think so,” Brit the Much Elder said. “See you there.”
Brit the Elder disappeared.
Brit the Much Elder started for the door, then paused, looking at Phillip. “We’re about to go out in front of people from the twenty-first century. The wizard getup might freak them out a bit.”
Phillip removed his dusty, cobweb-covered robe and hat, and draped them over the back of a chair. He leaned his staff against the side of the desk as well, and turned to face Brit the Much Elder in what he usually wore under his robe: his Union Jack sneakers, a pair of jeans, and a black T-shirt bearing a picture of a dark red customized hot-rod and the words ZZ Top, Eliminator. He looked down at himself and asked, “Will this work?”
Brit the Much Elder smiled. “Sure. Every girl’s crazy about a sharp-dressed man. Shall we?” She opened the door and beckoned Phillip to follow her.
The instant they left her office and entered the view of her underlings, Brit the Much Elder’s entire demeanor changed. She took on an air of frosty competence, as if she would judge you for the slightest error, and would do a much more professional, efficient job of judging you than anyone else could.
They walked past a desk where a man in his late twenties wearing an inexpensive suit that fit poorly in all the wrong places said, “Director Ryan, you have an appointment in ten minutes. Should I tell them you’ll be delayed?”
She didn’t bother to look back as she answered. “No, Robbins. I should be back well before then.”
They entered a large rectangular room with a small forest of pillars seemingly supporting the low acoustic-tile ceiling and fluorescent lights. Cubicle walls chopped the space up into a grid. The communal sound of people shuffling papers, muttering softly, and generally trying to be quiet filled the air.
“What do you do here?” Phillip asked.
“I run a task force for the Department of Justice. We monitor and investigate all of the various cases that the FBI, the CIA, and various state and local law enforcement agencies deem too inexplicable, unlikely, or just plain stupid for them to sully their hands with. Aliens, Bigfoot sightings,” she turned and arched an eyebrow at Phillip, “reports of people with magical powers, claims of time travelers, that sort of thing.”
“How’d you get this job?” Phillip asked, tryi
ng to hide the genuine interest and enthusiasm in his voice. As the person in charge of investigating magic and time travel, she was in a perfect position to prevent the exposure of people like her.
“I worked my way up, then volunteered for this posting. Most of the other bureaucrats at my level consider this place career suicide. They don’t like the idea of having their résumé include several years spent trying to prove the unprovable. I wanted the job, though. I have an affinity for this stuff, as you might imagine. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to come up with any concrete evidence to prove anything, because, as we know, magic and time travel don’t exist.” She turned and winked at Phillip.
Before Phillip could respond, a woman in a beige business suit approached and matched speed with Brit the Much Elder. “Director Ryan, thank you for talking to them personally, but my field team still wants to move on their target.”
Brit the Much Elder shook her head. “I know they do. I’ve spoken to them personally about it.”
“Sorry, ma’am.”
“Not your fault, Saunders. You tell them that we’ll contact them if their orders change. Until that happens, they’re to hold tight and just observe. I know that the subject played them for fools, and they want payback, but just because they made a mistake before, that doesn’t mean they should be hasty and make another mistake now.”
“Yes, ma’am. Do you want me to tell them the part about them getting played for fools and making mistakes?”
“If you’re talking to Miller, yes. If it’s Murphy, be kinder about it. That poor man puts up with enough as it is.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The woman in the beige suit sped away.
Brit the Much Elder glanced back at Phillip again. “Sorry about that. Business. You understand. Anyway, I’ve set you up a workspace in a vacant office right over here.” She held a door open and directed Phillip to enter.
Inside, Phillip found two desks, two beat-up rolling office chairs, and two equally beat-up office-grade PC workstations.
Brit the Much Elder closed and locked the office door behind herself. A few seconds later Brit the Elder materialized, wearing her UGG boots and the same crisp black suit Brit the Much Elder had on.
“You look very nice,” Brit the Much Elder said.
“I’m not surprised you think so,” Brit the Elder replied.
“When did you borrow my suit?”
“Yesterday.”
“Of course . . . wait, I had it laundered last week. That means . . . Ew! I’m wearing your dirty clothes.”
“That’s right.”
Brit the Much Elder shuddered in revulsion. “I know we’re the same person, but still, ew.”
Brit the Elder said, “Yeah, I feel the same way.”
“Yeah, I know. Okay, I’ve got a meeting in five, then I’m going home to take a long bath. You two should be fine here. I’m locking the door and I have the only key, so you won’t be disturbed. Brit, if someone does get a glimpse of you, just snarl at them until they run for it.” With that, Brit the Much Elder disappeared.
“So,” Phillip asked. “What are we going to do?”
“Exactly what she said. Research, to start with. The Atlantis Interface keeps a record of any time someone uses it to perform magic. I’ve downloaded the last twenty years’ worth of logs. Millions of lines of it. The task force has access to some advanced search tools. You are going to use those tools to look for anything that might be an anomaly, anything that looks like part of the glitch, or might have caused it.”
“Okay. And you?”
Brit the Elder said, “I’ll be going through every daily journal entry Brit the Younger has written up until this point, looking for any clues as to what went wrong and when.”
Phillip blinked at Brit the Elder. “Brit the Younger keeps a journal?”
“Religiously.”
“Is it . . . detailed?”
“Obsessively.”
“She never told me.”
“Obviously.”
“Does she talk about me in them?”
“Extensively.”
Well then, if, uh, if there are that many journal entries, maybe it would be faster if we both go through the journals. Then if we don’t find anything, we can move on to the logs.”
“No, I’ll handle the journals. You’ll stick to the logs. When you’re done with the last twenty years, I’ll give you the twenty before.”
“But, I just think it’d be better if we both look through the journals. I might see something you don’t.”
“Maybe,” Brit the Elder said, “but you’d see everything that’s written in the journals, and none of us want that.”
“I do.”
“I wasn’t talking about you. When I said us, I meant me and the other two Brits.”
13.
Miller sat in a different rental car, parked in the same parking spot, glaring sideways at the entrance of the Luxurious Rothschild Building across the street.
The building was directly in front of him. He needed to look at it sideways because he’d resorted to exhaling directly out of the open driver’s-side window to keep the windshield from completely fogging over. The plan worked, in that the driver’s side of the windshield had only partially fogged over.
The passenger-side door opened, and his partner Murphy slid into the car, shaking his head. He tossed a banana back over his shoulder. It landed on a pile of bananas that covered most of the back seat. Swapping out the rental agency’s cheapest, most run-down car for their second cheapest, second most run-down car did nothing to stem the banana tide. Murphy had started checking the exhaust pipe every ten minutes or so, and found a new one there every time he checked. Miller suspected that the bananas replaced themselves a minute or two after one was removed, and told Murphy as much, but Murphy still insisted on checking, trying to see how many bananas he could collect by the end of the day.
Murphy said, “At least we won’t be hurting for snacks.”
Miller glared at him.
“Seriously, though,” Murphy said, picking his laptop up from the car’s floor and placing it in his lap. “We should swing by a homeless shelter at some point and donate all these bananas. Some good might as well come of this.”
“Really? You think anybody’d want to eat our magic tailpipe bananas?”
“Not if we call them that.”
Miller shook his head. “Why won’t they let us move in? Sadler’s a known fugitive. It’s not like we’re going to learn anything from watching him. He’s obviously onto us. He’s not going to show us anything he doesn’t want us to see. This is pointless.”
“Probably they figure that if we move in, he’ll just get away, and then we’ll have to track him down again. But if you and I keep watching him, and he keeps messing with us, at least we still know where he is.”
“Yeah,” Miller said. “That’s probably it.”
“I think so.”
“It’s completely unfair to us. And insulting.”
“That’s why it rings so true.”
Miller leaned forward, his eyes wide and his mouth contorted into what an observer might have mistaken for a smile. In fact, he was baring his teeth. “He’s on the move.”
Murphy squinted through the windshield, but his side was fogged in completely. He gave up, said, “Fine, I’ll go get the banana,” and again stepped out of the car.
Miller watched, almost salivating, as Jimmy Sadler made small talk with the doorman. Instead of his usual dark sport coat and khakis, Jimmy wore a red nylon windbreaker with an ad for someplace called Sporto’s Tavern and Slot Emporium silk-screened on the back. He and the doorman shared a laugh, then Jimmy stepped out onto the sidewalk, and instead of turning left to go to the parking lot, turned right and started walking down the street.
Mur
phy stepped back into the car. “There wasn’t a new one yet. We’re good to go, if we must.”
“We must,” Miller said, starting the car. He turned on the left-turn indicator and started frantically head checking, looking for any opportunity to get across the near lane of traffic and into the far lane, in the same direction as Jimmy.
“What are you doing?” Murphy asked, peering through a clear spot he’d wiped in the condensation on the windshield. “Why the left?”
“He didn’t go to his car. I think he’s trying to throw us off. That’s why he’s dressed so weird.”
“I see what you mean about the outfit, but we don’t know yet if he’s going to the car or not.”
“What, you think he’s going to walk all the way around the block?”
“Miller, what are you talking about? He’s walking toward his car.”
Miller kept his eyes glued to Jimmy, who was still walking away from the building in the opposite direction from the parking lot. “I’m looking at him right here, and he’s not anywhere near his car.”
“No,” Murphy said, “you’re looking at the wrong guy. I’ve got him, and he’s not walking very fast, but he’s headed toward the parking lot. Here, look.”
Miller whipped his head to the left and the right, looking for holes in the traffic in both directions and trying to keep an eye on Jimmy. “No, Murph, I gotta drive the car and keep track of Sadler. Will you please get with the program? He’s almost to the corner.”
“No, he’s almost to the parking lot, and he’s acting weird. I’m not taking my eyes off of him.”
Miller thought he saw a hole in the far lane. As he swiveled his head to look at the oncoming traffic, his eyes cast over a figure wearing a denim jacket, flannel shirt, and skinny jeans in a slightly different shade of denim than the jacket. Miller did a double take, but on the second look he couldn’t deny it was Jimmy.
He looked back to the first person he’d thought was Jimmy, and saw Jimmy, wearing his tavern jacket and lighting a cigarette as he waited for the light to change. He was sure it was Jimmy. He looked back to the guy in the Canadian tuxedo, and was convinced that it was also Jimmy.
