by Scott Meyer
Jimmy looked through the telescope.
At the table, Agent Miller had his ear to the can. Agent Murphy asked, “So does he know the password, or not?”
Miller shushed his partner and listened intently to the can. Finally, Miller said, “He says you must have opened the wrong file.”
“There’s only one file in the directory.”
“I know. He says he’s watching this time, and you should close it and try again.”
Murphy closed the password window and left the screen displaying the directory for a moment, so Jimmy could get a good look through his telescope. Then Murphy typed in the command to open the file, and the password dialog box opened, just as it had before.
Agent Miller put his ear to the can. Even without the can, Murphy could hear that Jimmy was speaking, and that he did not sound happy. A smile slowly spread across Agent Miller’s lips.
“What’s he saying?” Agent Murphy asked.
Miller shushed Murphy again. He continued listening, his smile growing wider.
When he couldn’t stand it anymore, Murphy asked again, “What’s he saying?”
Miller smiled and said, “Nothing useful.” He kept his ear rooted firmly to the can.
“Then why are you listening to him?” Murphy asked.
Agent Miller said, “It’s not often I get to listen to somebody else get this angry.”
20.
Phillip paced around their quarters in Atlantis. Martin watched Phillip pace.
The day had started with an attempt on Brit’s life and had managed to go downhill from there.
They had apprehended a suspect, but he was unconscious, so they took him to the doctor, a sorceress named Louiza from 2011 who had found the file hiding in her hospital’s database.
Louiza woke the man up with some smelling salts, but he was no help. He claimed that he had simply been spending some time on the roof, taking an unsanctioned break from his duties as a masseur, when he saw the arrow materialize out of nowhere and zip away at high speed. He went to the edge of the roof to see where it went, and that’s when everyone saw him.
It wasn’t really a surprise. The arrow had been enchanted (a.k.a., programmed) to home in on Brit the Younger, and the man who had fled in a panic from Martin then been beaten senseless by Nilo clearly couldn’t have done that. Also, the fact that he’d had no bow had puzzled Martin, though he chose not to dwell on it at the time.
It was frustrating. They had captured the suspect and he not only couldn’t give them any answers, he had provided them with more questions.
The day’s summit meetings were largely a discussion of the treatment of non-time travelers, the centerpiece of which was a lengthy presentation by Gwen, detailing the abuses Jimmy had perpetrated on the people of Medieval England in an effort to turn it into some sort of enchanted wonderland. That should have interested Phillip, since Jimmy had then moved on to trying to abuse Phillip and everyone Phillip cared about, but he’d been far too preoccupied to pay attention. He was worried about Brit the Younger’s safety. It wouldn’t have been so bad if everyone else had been as concerned as he was, but he knew they weren’t; they didn’t totally believe that whoever was trying to kill her could possibly succeed. Gwen was concerned mostly because the attempts were upsetting her friend. Martin was not convinced that there was any danger, but was helping just in case, and because he was Martin and liked some action. Even Brit the Younger hadn’t totally bought into his reasoning that she was truly in danger. That left Phillip sitting in a huge room full of bored people, slowly going out of his mind.
At one of the recesses, Martin and Phillip had attempted to confront the president’s servant, Nilo. They chose to wait until President Ida was not around. They approached him in the hallway.
They decided to start gently. Martin said, “Hey, Nilo. I just wanted to say that it was really impressive how you ran that guy down today.”
Nilo nodded. Martin wasn’t sure if he was acknowledging the compliment, or simply agreeing with it.
Martin continued. “When you caught him, did you have to be so violent about it?”
“Yes.”
Phillip said, “You nearly beat the guy to death.”
“You’re welcome.”
Martin and Phillip gaped at him, but before they could formulate a response, Ida joined the conversation. “Hello, gentlemen. What are we talking about?”
Nilo smiled and said, “Nothing. These two sorcerers were thanking me for helping them catch the man who tried to kill Brit the Younger.”
“That’s very nice,” Ida said, “but really, you helped them? It seems to me it was more the other way around.”
Nilo said, “True. They were helpful. If . . .” he looked at Martin. “I’m sorry, what was your name again?”
“Martin.”
“If Martin hadn’t stepped in, I probably would have had to chase the man quite a bit farther before I caught him.”
For Phillip, the afternoon passed in a paranoid blur, followed by dinner with Martin and Gwen. They discussed their ideas about who was behind it all, which would have been great if the discussion had consisted of something more that all three of them repeatedly announcing that they had no idea.
Now Phillip was in his quarters pacing, running out the clock on a profoundly unsatisfying day, and Martin was watching him do it. Whether or not Martin found that at all satisfying, Phillip couldn’t say.
Phillip walked to one end of the room and examined the arrow that had been fired at Brit. She hadn’t wanted it, so Martin had grabbed it, explaining that it was cool. As soon as they got it back to their quarters, Martin tried to put it on the table, and predictably it slid off the table, across the floor, to the wall, and into the corner, where it sat now, presumably pointing toward Brit’s the Younger’s apartment.
Phillip tried to put the arrow out of his mind. He turned around and walked to the far side of the room. He looked out into the ocean, which was hard to avoid, as one entire wall of the room was a window directly into the sea. He looked out into what would have been a mass of solid black at this time of night if not for a school of fish that swam by, visible in the light from their room.
Phillip thought back to the day before, when he and Brit had gone out in that submersible and nearly been killed. He remembered how he had put off leaving until the last second in hopes of saving her life, just to have her save his instead. He grimaced and turned around, walking back to the far end of the room. The arrow was still there, pointing to wherever Brit was. He pictured her in danger, then quickly tried to put the image out of his mind. He replaced it with the image of Brit safe in her bed. He quickly tried to put that image out of his mind. Finally he announced that he was going to go check on Brit.
Martin offered to come along, but Phillip didn’t hear him, since the door was already swinging shut behind him.
Phillip rang Brit’s doorbell. After a moment, Nik opened the door, smiling.
“Hello, Phillip,” Nik said. “I expected we’d see you this evening. Please come in.”
Phillip entered and found Brit’s living room empty. Nik explained, “Brit’s had a rough few days. She decided to go to bed early.”
“Oh,” Phillip said, “look, I don’t want to disturb her. If you’d told me I’d have just left a message. You said she was expecting me.”
Nik said, “I said I was expecting you. Don’t worry. She’s still reading. I’ll go get her. Please make yourself comfortable.”
Phillip sat uncomfortably on the front edge of a chair. He heard Nik walk down the hall and knock on a door. Brit said, “What do you need, Nik?”
“Phillip’s here.” Phillip could hear the smile in Nik’s voice.
Brit said, “Oh! Oh, um . . . tell him I’ll be right there.”
Nik leaned around the corner from the hall, smiled at Phillip for a long moment,
the said, “She’ll be right out.” Almost that instant, Phillip heard a door open, and Brit the Younger emerged around the corner.
“Here she is now,” Nik said. “Before I go, can I get either of you a drink?”
Brit and Phillip both said no. Phillip feared that if Nik smiled any harder his face would fold in half. Nik excused himself. The door to his room closed with a purposeful click.
Brit stepped from the entryway out into the room. She was dressed for comfort, not for having people see her. She wore a sweatshirt that had a drawing of an attractive woman in a skintight red and black court jester costume and clown makeup. Lettering beneath the drawing identified the clown as Harley Quinn, which meant nothing to Phillip. The fact that the sweatshirt was oversized and hung off of her left shoulder meant quite a bit to him. Beneath the sweatshirt she wore a pair of cotton shorts and heavy wool socks, pushed down around the ankles. She took a couple of steps forward into the room and stopped when Phillip met her halfway.
Phillip said, “I just wanted to check up on you. You know, see how you’re doing.”
Brit chuckled lightly and looked away. “That’s sweet. Thank you, Phillip. Please, sit.” She motioned toward the couch. Phillip sat as directed, and she sat next to him.
“I’m glad you came by,” she said. “You never really told me what happened in your meeting with the Elder.”
“There was nothing to tell. I didn’t have anything to say that she didn’t already know, and she didn’t have anything to tell me at all, or at least that she was willing to tell me.” Phillip chose not to share Brit the Elder’s comments about the Younger’s attitude and future.
Brit said, “So she knows that someone’s trying to kill me.”
“Yes.”
“And she knows who it is and how they’re going to try in the future.”
“So she says.”
“And, of course, she’s not going to tell us any of it.”
Phillip shook his head. “She won’t. She says she can’t now, because she didn’t before.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that song and dance. It doesn’t seem to occur to her that maybe she didn’t before because she won’t now.”
Phillip said, “I can see why you find her so aggravating.”
Brit put a hand on Phillip’s shoulder. “Thanks. I’m glad someone does. Everyone else loves her.”
“You too,” Phillip blurted.
Brit looked at him sideways. “You think I love her too?”
Phillip did think that, just a bit, but he was not nearly dumb enough to say so. “No, I’m saying that they love you too. They all believe that you’re the same person, so, yes, they do love her, but they love you too.”
“What do you think of her?” Brit asked, looking intently at Phillip, waiting for his answer.
Phillip said, “Free will is a really big deal to me, Brit. When I was a child, my parents tried to raise me in the church like they’d been raised, but it didn’t work out. I could never accept the idea that God was all-knowing, all-powerful, had created us, and yet sent us tests. I couldn’t see a logical way for him not to already know how we’d react, and when I asked the priests and my parents to explain it, all I ever got was, ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ So I couldn’t embrace their faith, and instead I embraced free will. I fell in love with the idea that nobody knows what anybody’s going to do next, not even God. I’m the captain of my own destiny, and while I can’t control what happens to me, I’m in total control of how I react to what happens to me.”
Brit said, “And then you found the file.”
“Then I found the file,” Phillip said, “and it said that I was just a subroutine in a larger program. It bothered me at first, but then I realized that it changed nothing. As long as a certain amount of randomness and self-determination are built into the Phillip subroutine, I still have free will. Then I went back in time, and found that nothing I did had any effect on the future. Some took that to mean that everything we did had already been done before we were born, but I took it as proof that we had been forked off into a new branch of the program.”
“A whole new future, there for you to create,” Brit said. She instantly saw the appeal.
“Exactly. The ultimate expression of free will. A future that is ours to mess up. Of course, I won’t be able to prove this until I live to see the year 1985 again. If it’s different from the 1985 I came from and can now visit, it’ll prove what Martin calls my ‘Big Fork Theory.’ Until then, it’s a matter of faith. And that’s how things stood for many years. I’d gotten pretty secure in my beliefs. Then I came here.”
“And you met me.”
Phillip smiled. “Yes, I met you.” His voice lowered, his eyes narrowed, and he said, “And I met her. To everyone else she’s just you, many years later. To you, she’s a constant thorn in your side. To me, she is a living, breathing refutation of my most cherished beliefs. It would be one thing to take a committed atheist and tell him that there is a God, but imagine if you could introduce him to God, and they drank Hi-C together. Would the atheist find religion, or would he find reasons to disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes? And which of those reactions would be correct?”
“You must hate her.”
Quickly and emphatically, Phillip said, “No. I don’t hate her. I can’t. She didn’t do anything to me. She just exists. I’m the one torturing myself, not her. Other people can just accept that they don’t know things and get on with their lives, and I can too, about a lot of things, but not this.”
Brit squeezed Phillip’s hand.
Phillip said, “Besides, I couldn’t hate her. When I look at her, I see you.” There was a long pause, then Phillip added, “There’s a bit of a resemblance.”
They both laughed, harder than the joke really deserved. They went on to discuss many things—their childhoods, their families, their taste in music. All the things people discuss when they’re saying anything but what’s actually on their minds. The hour got late. Phillip did not go back to his and Martin’s quarters that night.
Despite physical appearances, Brit and Phillip were both middle-aged mentally, and this was not the first time either of them had slept over with someone. It was the first time they had slept over with each other, and later they’d both remember it the way most people remember a first of this type: as having been absolutely wonderful, and technically, not that great.
21.
For practical reasons, prisons are often built in areas that will naturally discourage escape. Some prisons are too far from civilization for inmates to realistically ever return from, like Devil’s Island. Some are close to civilization, but located in a place that makes attempts at escape a form of suicide, like Alcatraz. Some of the most feared prisons are located both far from civilization and in a life-threatening environment.
After a long conversation followed by a long flight followed by a long drive, Agent Murphy parked his rental car in the parking lot of the most secret prison on U.S. soil, near the southern tip of Florida.
To many it would seem counterintuitive to place an ultra-high-security secret prison in Florida. After all, the two impressions most people share of Florida is that it is a palm tree-infested family vacation destination and that it is the criminal’s natural habitat. Murphy himself had expressed surprise when he was told where he was going and why.
After Jimmy’s attempts to direct Agents Miller and Murphy into the mysterious file that was now mysteriously password protected, Jimmy had scoured his notes trying to recall everything he knew about how every other person who had accessed the file had done it. It seems that a popular pastime amongst those who found the file was sharing stories about how they found the file. Jimmy said that during his time in exile he had written down what he remembered, and using his notes and his increasingly hazy memories, they had managed to find twelve more copies of the file, all of which were password
protected.
After they had followed every lead in his notes, Jimmy lapsed into a deep funk, sullenly pacing around the warehouse for two days, muttering to himself. Miller and Murphy had decided that Jimmy had been a costly and embarrassing dead end, and were about to pull the plug when Jimmy ran into the camper shouting like a crazy person. He said that someone they’d never heard of, named Phillip, had clearly put up the passwords on every copy of the file he knew about to keep him out. At first, Murphy thought this was just more reason to give up, but then Jimmy said that there was one person who had never told anyone where he found the file, another person they’d never heard of named Todd Douglas. Jimmy said Todd should be easy to find, as he was fairly certain that Todd would be in prison.
They searched for a prisoner named Todd Douglas and hit a brick wall. They learned that Douglas existed, and was “in the system,” so to speak, but they didn’t have high enough security clearance for any information beyond that. Murphy had to kiss a lot of backsides and Miller had to yell a lot of threats. On a few occasions, they had to do both at the same time, to the same person, but after three days of sustained phone action they finally got clearance for one of them to come to this secret federal facility and meet with the infamous Todd Douglas.
The phone call came in the middle of the night. It was Murphy’s turn to sleep at home in his own bed while Miller guarded Jimmy, so it was Murphy whose phone worked. The voice on the other end of the line said that he was a high-ranking official in the federal corrections system, and would give Murphy the clearance to meet with Todd at a top-secret federal prison in Florida.
Murphy expressed surprise that there was a secret prison in such a popular and populous state, but the mysterious voice explained that Florida was the perfect location for a secret prison. “You might think that out in the desert in Nevada or New Mexico would be better, but the problem with putting a prison in the middle of nowhere is that you then have to ship the prisoners, the guards, and their supplies out to the middle of nowhere. That costs money. The beauty of Florida is that it’s a thoroughly hostile environment with well-established supply routes and a surplus of people for whom prison guard sounds like an attractive career opportunity.”
