by Scott Meyer
Phillip reran the conversation in his mind. He remembered Brit asking him where he had been, and he replied that they were making a spectacle of themselves, not that he would say in private. Phillip said, “Technically, I said—” but the look on Brit’s face after he said technically stunned him back into silence.
“Please don’t make me ask you again, Phillip.”
Phillip sagged. “Brit, I hope you know how important you are to me, and that I always have your best interests at heart.”
“I liked to think so.”
Phillip tried his best to speak clearly while wincing. “Then I hope you’ll understand when I tell you that, for your own good, I can’t tell you where I went.”
For a full ten seconds, the only sound in the apartment was the faint rustling noise caused by the scraping of Nik’s tunic against his neck as he shook his head in disgust.
Brit said, “You won’t tell me.”
“I can’t.”
“Fine, I didn’t want to have to do this, but I’ll just go ask Brit the Elder. She’ll remember what this was all about.”
“No,” Phillip blurted. “Don’t go ask Brit the Elder! I mean, you shouldn’t. Um, What I’m saying is, she won’t be able, uh. Hmm.”
“You were with Brit the Elder, weren’t you?”
“You . . . would probably be unhappy about that, if it were the case, wouldn’t you?” Phillip asked.
“Phillip, are you having an affair with Brit the Elder?”
“What?! No! I could never! The idea wouldn’t even occur to me! Brit, how can you ask me that?”
“I should be enough for you, Phillip.”
“You are.”
“One of me.”
“One is!”
“Which one?”
“Wha . . . Oh, come on! You are. You.” He pointed at her. “This you. You you. The only you.”
Brit the Younger remained motionless, studying Phillip. “It wouldn’t even occur to you to have an affair with Brit the Elder?”
“No! Not in a million years!”
“Why not? Do you find her unattractive?”
Phillip gaped at Brit. He turned to Nik and saw no support, just genuine interest in Phillip’s answer on his face. Phillip thought furiously for several seconds before finally saying, “There’s no right answer to that question.”
Brit the Younger said, “That was the wrong answer.”
“Brit, you’re asking me if I find a person who you believe is you attractive.”
“Yes, Phillip, she is me, but she’s also my worst enemy.”
“I know the feeling.”
“This isn’t funny, Phillip! If I can’t trust you then this relationship is over.”
“Apparently not,” Phillip said, “since you seem to believe I’m having some sort of relationship with you in your future, which, by the way, I’m not, so perhaps we are through after all, for, I might add, no reason!”
“So you admit she’s me!”
“No! Never. Which is why it would be cheating if I got involved with her, and that’s why I would never, ever, even consider it. That’s all I’m saying. I would never cheat on you with anybody, even someone you think is you.”
“I want to believe you, Phillip.”
“I want you to believe me, too!”
“So where were you?”
“I want desperately to tell you, I really do, but I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Phillip looked at the floor. “Brit the Elder thinks it would be dangerous for you to know.”
“Not as dangerous as it is to not tell me.”
Phillip said, “Look, I want to tell you. Now that you know I’ve been sneaking away, I can go to Brit the Elder and make the case that it’s impossible to keep this from you anymore. I’ll go talk to her, and I’ll figure out a safe way to tell you what’s going on.”
Brit said, “Fine, but the fact that you need help thinking of a way to tell me without endangering yourself doesn’t give me confidence.”
Phillip said, “Not safe for me. I’m afraid that ship has sailed. Safe for you, and her, and everybody else. Okay?”
Brit the Younger stared at Phillip for a moment and let out a disgusted grunt. “Fine. Go talk to Brit the Elder. I have to go look over my notes and memorize my lines so I can jump back in time and go confront you in the alley again.”
She stormed off to her bedroom and slammed the door behind her.
Phillip turned to Nik, hoping to see or hear something, anything, that might make it better.
Nik asked, “Phillip, did you get me the salt I asked for?”
Phillip grimaced.
Nik shook his head and walked out without saying another word.
22.
Martin sat on the couch in the converted warehouse he called home, brooding on the confusing problem it seemed only he could solve. Across the room, an episode of the early 2000s reboot of Battlestar Galactica played on the TV. In this episode, Edward James Olmos, as Commander Adama, was brooding on a confusing problem that it seemed only he could solve. The show fit Martin’s mood perfectly.
Sensing motion out of the corner of his eye, Martin turned his head and watched as Gwen materialized.
The two of them looked at each other for a moment, waiting for the other to speak so they could get an idea of the overall tone of the coming conversation. After several seconds of silent staring, they both had all too clear a picture of the tone, so Martin just went ahead and spoke up.
“Hey.”
“Hey.”
“Have a seat.”
Gwen sat at the other end of the couch, as far away from Martin as she could possibly be while still sitting on the same piece of furniture. They both watched the TV long enough to see Colonel Tigh tell Commander Adama that they were in a terrible mess this time.
Gwen asked, “Okay, Martin, what’s up with you?”
“What’s up with me is that I’ve repeatedly asked you, and all of our friends, for help, and you all treated me like I was crazy, or stupid, or maybe both.”
“I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about you and me. You haven’t called me in days, Martin. Why not?”
“I have called you, repeatedly, to ask you for help. Remember? You treated me like I was crazy, or stupid, or both.”
“No, you didn’t call me, you called everybody. I want to know why you haven’t called just me.”
“Why, so you can mock me solo, without all the competition?”
“No, so we can talk about how we left things.”
“Oh. That.”
“Yeah. That. So, why haven’t you contacted me?”
“Probably the same reason you haven’t contacted me.”
“That’s . . .” Gwen paused a moment before continuing, relaxed, and in a softer voice, “a good point. You’re right. I could have called you just as easily.”
Martin nodded.
“Okay,” Gwen said, “so, I’m calling you now, in person. Let’s talk about it.”
“I’m happy to, but I don’t know that there’s much more for me to say. I told you that I’m not proposing to you yet, but that I do expect to propose to you. You didn’t say one way or the other how you felt about that, which sort of told me where you stand anyway.”
“See that, Martin? There’s part of the problem. You’re making an assumption. You assume that me not saying anything means I don’t want to marry you.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“It doesn’t mean that you don’t want to marry me?”
“No.”
Martin squinted. “If I’m counting all the don’ts, doesn’ts, and nos correctly, you’re saying that you do want to marry me
, or at least you’re not against marrying me, someday.”
“That’s right. Maybe. Someday.”
“Thank you, Gwen. At some point in the future, you might make me the happiest man in the world.”
“Martin. I like the idea of marrying you, but before we get serious about that, there’s another conversation we need to have, and I’m not looking forward to it.”
“Well, let’s have it now, because if we don’t, I’ll live my life dreading that conversation, and I don’t know what it is.”
“Okay.” Gwen pulled her feet up onto the couch, then turned to face Martin. “I want to have kids.”
Martin smiled. “So do I! No more than three, though.”
“Agreed, totally. I was thinking two.”
“Cool. I’m fine with that. There, that wasn’t so bad.”
“That wasn’t the conversation, Martin. That was just the lead-up to the conversation.”
“Oh. Okay.” Martin swallowed hard and asked, “What else?”
Gwen said, “I want us to be good parents.”
“I’m not against that. So far so good.”
“That means doing what’s best for the kids even if it’s not what I personally want.”
“I understand.”
“I’ve thought about it, and I don’t want to raise our kids in Medieval England.”
“Oh. Okay. I see why you were nervous about this. Asking someone to move is a big deal. But, Gwen, I think I could be happy living in Atlantis.”
“I don’t think we should raise them in Atlantis either. It’s just . . . I want our kids to be normal, happy children. If we raise them in Leadchurch, Camelot, or Atlantis, they won’t be normal. I don’t want to raise all-powerful God children. Star Trek has shown us how that works out, and it isn’t good.”
“We wouldn’t give them powers until they were old enough to handle it, Gwen.”
“But we’d still have ours. Instead of being able to create anything they want for themselves, they can get their parents to give them anything they want. Reality TV has shown us how that works out, and, again, it isn’t good either.”
“What are you saying, Gwen?”
“I’m saying that I think the only way for us to raise well-adjusted children would be to move back to our original time, and not use our powers.”
“You’re asking me to choose either a package deal of magic, time travel, unlimited wealth, and immortality, or you?”
“Yes, but only for a while. We could limit ourselves while we’re raising them, then tell them the deal when they turn twenty-one. Look, Martin, it’s a big decision, and I don’t want you to rush into it. You think about it for a while, and get back to me. Okay?”
Before Martin could respond, Gwen disappeared.
A thousand thoughts swirled in Martin’s head at once, but he was certain of one thing: he needed to go to the bathroom. He stood up, stepped around the edge of the couch, stopped, shouted several very loud obscenities, then asked, “You heard all of that, didn’t you?”
In the corner of the room, sitting in his invisible prison, Future Phillip smiled and nodded vigorously.
* * *
Phillip materialized in Brit the Elder’s home. Brit the Elder had instructed him to teleport directly into the house for the time being to avoid suspicion, for all the good it had done them. Still, he felt self-conscious about barging into her domain in this manner, and made a point of appearing right by the entrance, as it felt to him like the closest thing to being outside he could manage while still, technically, being inside.
He called out, “Hello?”
He heard no answer, just a strange, distant, wavering, high-pitched whine he couldn’t quite identify.
“Hello?”
Still no response. Normally, Phillip would have simply assumed that she was somewhere else, or didn’t want to be disturbed, but something made him uneasy. It may well have been the weird noise. The more he heard it, the less he liked it. Focusing on the sound for even a second caused the hairs on the back of his neck to stand up.
Phillip walked slowly toward Brit’s office. One could have described what he was doing as sneaking, if he hadn’t continued shouting friendly-sounding greetings as he went.
“Hello? Brit? It’s me, Phillip. Are you home?”
Through the partially open office door, Phillip could see that the office lights were off, but the room was illuminated in the bluish glow that in real life told one that a TV or computer monitor was on, and in films meant that something awful was about to happen.
Phillip gently pushed the door open. The high, keening noise got slightly louder. Brit the Elder’s classic Macintosh sat on the desk, its monitor casting light on the empty space where her office chair usually sat. The volume of light and the direction of the shadows told Phillip that the Mac was not the only source of light in the room. He craned his neck to the right, and saw a second computer, a more modern desktop PC with a flat-panel monitor and cheap, factory-furnished keyboard and mouse set up on a small table in the corner. Brit the Elder sat at that keyboard in her office chair, staring into the monitor, motionless, her right hand resting on the mouse.
“Hello. There you are,” Phillip said.
Brit the Elder didn’t move. Now that he was in the room with the source of the high-pitched whine, Phillip could tell that it was coming from the general area of the computer.
Phillip took a step closer. “Um, hello?” Brit the Elder said nothing and remained perfectly still.
Half of Phillip wanted to grab Brit the Elder by the shoulders and force her to acknowledge him. The other half wanted to teleport out of there, move to some Island in the Caribbean, change his name, and never find out if what he suspected was true.
He took another step. In the back of his head he pictured a beach, a grass shack that didn’t conform to standard building codes, and a closet full of Hawaiian shirts with laundry tags that read John Smith.
He said, “Brit!” His increasingly panicky-sounding inner voice said, Maybe she’s on to something and doesn’t want to break her concentration to talk. In his mind’s eye, he saw the ignorant and happy Mr. Smith, hard at work at his new job teaching tourists how to operate snorkels. He was standing waist-deep in the cool blue ocean, saying “That’s it, folks, the secret is to breathe only when the end of the tube is sticking up in the air.”
Phillip reached out and gently grasped Brit the Elder’s shoulder. She remained perfectly still. He saw that while it appeared that her right hand was hovering a fraction of an inch above the mouse, the only part of her hand making contact was the tip of her index finger touching the mouse’s right button. Phillip exerted the slightest bit of force into Brit the Elder’s shoulder. Her body was rigid, as if carved from stone.
On the screen, he noticed that next to the text window in which the file was displayed, there was a smaller window labeled “Untitled – Notepad.” One of the three-number sequences Jimmy had spoken at length about earlier was copied into the Notepad window. Brit’s left hand hung in space above the keyboard, her pinkie and index fingers resting on the control key and the letter V.
Brit the Elder had wanted to copy a section of Brit the Younger’s memories over her own. Phillip thought they had talked her into taking a day to think it over. Clearly, they’d just given her time to do it anyway, without any interference.
As he watched, the computer flickered, its entire flat-screen monitor briefly turning into a smooth black rectangle with a blurry, large-print approximation of the display plastered onto its front like a sticker.
As the computer shifted back and forth between its normal and low-res states a few more times, Phillip noticed that the keyboard, mouse, desk beneath it, wall behind it, and Brit’s entire body were flickering as well.
Phillip pulled on Brit’s shoulde
r. As her entire body tilted back, her hands and feet all lifted without even the slightest muscle moving. Phillip spun the chair. Brit the Elder’s left eye was three-quarters open. Her right eye was three-quarters shut. Her mouth hung open, her lips curled into an odd shape. She looked like she’d been frozen midword, making a face no human being would ever make deliberately for more than a fraction of a second. The computer and wall behind her shifted states again, and Brit did as well, briefly taking on the appearance of a character from a late-nineties video game.
As she regained her normal appearance, for just a moment, quick enough that Phillip wasn’t sure he’d seen it, her facial expression changed, her features twisting into a picture of pure agony, then blinked back to look as she had before.
Phillip leaned in and turned his head away so that his ear was closer to Brit the Elder’s mouth. The noise he’d been hearing was coming from her.
He cringed and recoiled in horror, flexing his right hand as if he’d caught a fast-moving baseball without a glove. Brit the Elder sat, motionless, randomly leaping between looking frozen, poorly rendered, and wracked with anguish and pain, all the while emitting a sound that could be a small fraction of a word, or the beginning of a shriek of agony.
Phillip rubbed his hands together and bit his lower lip. He didn’t know what to do.
I have to do something, he thought. I can’t just stand here, rubbing my hands together.
He looked down at his hands. His left felt normal, but the right felt odd. The palm was slightly numb, but also slightly itchy. At first both hands looked fine, but then, at the exact moment that the wall, the computer, and Brit the Elder all flickered, the palm of his right hand where he’d grasped Brit the Elder’s shoulder also transformed, losing all texture and variation in its coloring before immediately changing back.
23.
Fifteen minutes later, Brit the Elder’s main room was full of concerned wizards and a constant high-pitched tone coming from Brit the Elder in the next room.
Brit the Younger muttered, “How could she be so dumb?”
