by Scott Meyer
“Quite right,” Jimmy said. “That’s why your powers were all reinstated, and mine were taken away, when I said, ‘I am sorry. I apologize’. That’s why I had to lower us back to the floor. If I didn’t, we’d have fallen.”
The wizards glanced around the circle at each other, then quickly let go of each other’s hands as if they’d all received a mild electric shock. Jeff produced his wand and tested it by levitating Jimmy, holding him helpless in the air. He started to put Jimmy back down, but Phillip stopped him.
“No, leave him up there. I have some questions to ask.”
Jimmy said, “That’s fine. Perfectly understandable. You have my permission to keep me suspended here if it makes you all more comfortable.”
“Shut up,” Phillip barked. “So you’re here to apologize, huh? And you expect us to just welcome you back with open arms?”
“That would be wonderful, but no, I don’t expect that. You can’t truly trust me now, but I hope you’ll give me the opportunity to earn your trust.”
“What if we don’t? What if we take your powers away again and send you back where you came from?”
“Then I’ve lost nothing. In fact, I’ve already gained the knowledge that I at least offered an apology.”
Tyler said, “Great! So either we send you back, and you win, or we welcome you back like nothing ever happened, and you win.”
Jimmy shook his head. “I don’t really win in either case. I either lose my powers again and get sent back to the future to die, or I stay here with thirty years’ worth of wear on my body and bad memories in my head, struggling to regain your trust and respect, which I probably will never get. I can’t really call either of those winning. They’re just better than where I was before.”
“There’s a third option you haven’t mentioned,” Martin said. “We decide not to forgive you, and you disappear with your powers intact. You may be sorry for what you did, but you’ve admitted that you’re willing to omit parts of the truth to get your way. Do you honestly expect us to believe that you don’t have an escape plan in place?”
“That’s a very good question, Martin, but I can’t answer it. If, hypothetically, I said ‘yes, I do have an escape plan,’ it would undo all of my arguments. If I say no, you won’t believe me anyway. What can I say?”
“Tell the truth,” Martin said. “Do you have an escape plan?”
Without any hesitation, Jimmy said, “No. I don’t. Now you tell the truth, Martin. Do you believe me?”
“No.”
“I don’t blame you.”
“I don’t care.”
Jimmy was left floating in the middle of the hall while the wizards huddled in the far corner and argued for a good long time. Jimmy could identify which wizard was speaking, and their general tone of voice, but he couldn’t make out what they were saying. There was almost always at least one wizard peering at Jimmy nervously. Occasionally, all debate would stop and all of the wizards would turn as a group to stare at him for a moment. The first time it happened, Jimmy smiled and waved. He could tell from the tone of the voices he heard immediately after that that it had been a bad move. He spent the rest of the time trying to convey a sense of nervous hopefulness with a slight note of desperation.
Finally he heard Phillip say something in that loud, stilted voice guys like Phillip use when they’re trying to sound like a leader. Then he saw the majority of the wizards raise their hands. Phillip said something in the tone of voice guys like him use when they’ve dropped something heavy on their foot, and Jimmy knew things had gone his way.
The wizards came back to where Jimmy floated, but they stayed grouped together, rather than reforming a ring around him. Phillip snarled with obvious distaste, “Okay, we’ve come to a decision, but before we tell you what that is, we have some questions.”
Jimmy said, “Ask me anything.”
“Why did you come back now? From our point of view you just tried to kill us all less than two months ago. Some of the guys are still having nightmares about it. Why not give us a year or two to calm down?”
“It’s almost always best to apologize as soon as possible after you’ve wronged someone. It shows more remorse, and while sometimes people do get less angry over time, just as often they actually get angrier. The more they remember what you did, the worse it can seem to them, until eventually they blame you for doing things that are much worse than what you actually did.”
Tyler asked, “What would be worse than ghosting me, killing an entire town, trying to murder all of us, and trying to kill Martin with your bare hands?”
Jimmy said, “I don’t know, and I didn’t want to find out.” The wizards grumbled, but nobody argued, so Jimmy continued. “I would have come back right after you banished me if I could, but I also needed a time when, well, I can’t think of a better way to put this. I needed the coast to be clear. I knew that you, Phillip, or Martin might just attack me at first sight, so I had to find a time when all three of you were scarce, and my informant told me that this week they were in Atlantis, which I can’t wait to hear about, by the way, and that you were away researching your next book, Dragon Wagon.”
“Dragon Wagon?” Jeff asked.
“Yeah,” Tyler said, “it’s an idea I have about a guy who hitches a wagon to a dragon, and uses it to haul freight. It’s sort of a sword and sorcery meets Smokey and the Bandit kinda thing.” Tyler’s curiosity overwhelmed his anger. He asked Jimmy, “How does it turn out?”
“My informant says it’s some of your best work, but it doesn’t sell very well.”
“Who’s your informant?”
“You are, Tyler. I visited you in the future and persuaded you to help me.”
“What could you possibly say to make me want to help you?”
Jimmy said, “I can’t tell you. The only reason you even talk to me in the future is to find out what I’m going to say to you to get you to help me. If I say it to you now, it won’t work then.”
“Tell me!” Tyler yelled.
“I will, just before you help me.”
Phillip put a hand on Tyler’s shoulder. “Okay, look, we’re getting sidetracked. Tyler, you two can discuss it later.”
Jimmy added, “And we do.”
“Shut up,” Phillip barked. “Next question; how’d you get access to the file? We fixed you so that no computer would work anywhere near you. How’d you get around that?”
“I found someone who would be motivated to help me.”
“Who?” Phillip asked.
“The federal agents who tried to arrest Martin. I figured since Martin had vanished right in front of them twice, they’d probably want to know how he’d done it.”
Martin asked, “How did you find them?”
Jimmy smiled. “Your parents gave me their number.”
“What?! You . . . what did you do to my parents?”
“I told them that you hadn’t hurt anybody, and that you hadn’t broken any laws that I knew of, and if they’d give me the number of the agents who’d been there, I could prove it. I told them the truth. They’re lovely people, by the way.”
“You told the feds about the file?” Phillip asked.
“Yes, and I understand your concern, Phillip, but think it through. If the men I worked with ever figure out how to use the file on their own, what are they going to do, come back here and arrest us? No, they’d join us if they could. Anyway, don’t worry. They’ll never find their way back to the file without my help, and even if they do, we’ll have password protected that instance of it just like you did all the others. How’d you do that, by the way?”
The wizards were confused by this. Phillip put up a hand to silence their muttering, and said, “All known copies of the file have been locked down, but we still have total access. It’ll be in the report.” He turned his attention back to Jimmy. “How’d you get into t
he file? I know the copy you found was locked down. It was the first one I told the Atlanteans about.”
“I know. I checked,” Jimmy said. “We hunted down every copy I knew of and they were all locked. Eventually I remembered that there was one wizard who’d never trusted any of us enough to tell us where he found the file.”
“Todd,” Phillip said. “You went to Todd.”
“I went to Todd.”
Todd was the one wizard nobody ever wanted to talk about. Martin didn’t know why, because nobody wanted to talk about it.
“How is he?” Phillip asked.
“In prison for life,” Jimmy answered.
“That’s good. Nice of you to point him out to the feds. I’m sure they have a lot to talk about. They’ll probably tell us all about it when he leads them here.”
“That’s not going to happen, Phillip. However your friends in Atlantis locked down all of our file instances, now they can do it to his as well. I can tell you exactly where it is.”
Tyler asked, “What did you tell him to get him to help you? You banished him. He must hate you nearly as much as I do.”
“He hates all of us,” Jimmy said. “So I told him that giving me the means to come back here would make the rest of you very angry. In essence, I am his revenge. You should be grateful. It could have been much worse.”
Phillip said, “I’ll be the judge of that.”
The wizards retreated back to their huddle. They had another hushed conversation. They took another vote. From the sound of it, Phillip suffered another disappointment.
When the wizards returned, Phillip spat his words at Jimmy. “You’ve got a choice. You can either go back to the time you came from, with your magnetic field restored and your access to the file cut off, for good this time. Or—”
Jimmy said, “I choose the second option.”
“Wait,” Phillip sputtered. “I haven’t even told you what it is!”
“It’ll be preferable to the first option. I’m sure of it.”
“It could be something awful. It could be that we’ll kill you.”
Jimmy laughed. “Phillip. You’d never be a party to that. As much as you hate me, you’d never kill me unless it was self-defense. You’re a good man, and we both know it.”
Phillip was disgusted. “You say ‘you’re a good man’ like it’s an insult.”
“No,” Jimmy protested, “I mean it as a high compliment. You just hear it as an insult when it comes from me. Honestly, I wish I were more like you, Phillip. The last thirty years of my life would have been very different if I were.”
“So you want to be good, for selfish reasons.”
Jimmy shrugged. “It doesn’t sound great when you put it that way, but you gotta admit, it’s progress.”
Phillip decided to just plow ahead as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “The second option is that you stay here where we can keep an eye on you, and that is exactly what we will do. Rest assured, we will all be watching, just waiting for you to do anything we don’t like. The file modifications that stop the aging process and make you impervious to physical damage and illness will be left in place for now, but at the first sign of anything we don’t like, you’re cut off and sent back to the future to die in squalor.”
“Or find my way back again,” Jimmy said, instantly regretting it.
“Oh, don’t worry about that!” Phillip said. “I intend to spend every moment between now and the day you step out of line thinking up new, awful ways to prevent that from happening.”
“What if I never step out of line?”
A bitter smile crossed Phillip’s lips. “Then I get to spend an eternity imagining demeaning things to do to you. Not a bad consolation prize.”
“I see,” Jimmy said.
“If you stay,” Phillip continued, “for a probationary period your access to the shell will be severely limited.”
Jimmy asked, “How limited?”
“Oh,” Phillip said, “look who has questions all of a sudden. Mister ‘I’ll take the second option’ wants some details.”
Jimmy said, “Make no mistake; I’ll take the second option. I just asked out of curiosity.”
“You can conjure up food and water. You can create money, but there will be limits on how much you can make per week. You can teleport, but only to certain defined geographic locations. If you want to go anywhere else, you need permission from at least two other wizards, or you can fly. By the way, your flight will be limited to an altitude of fifty feet above ground level and a speed of twenty-five miles per hour. We only gave you that so that the locals wouldn’t be able to beat you to death as soon as they see you. I lost that vote. You will have no access to edit the shell, which means no macros, and for the duration of your probation, every time you use magic it will automatically be logged in a document that any of us can read at any time. That way we can keep tabs on you.”
Jimmy nodded as if all of this were expected. After a moment, he asked, “How long is the probationary period?”
Phillip said, “Until we unanimously vote to lift it, so pretty much forever.”
Jimmy said, “Fair enough.”
Jimmy was allowed to touch the ground again, and was treated to a full round of mumbled greetings and suspicious looks. He graciously thanked everyone for this second chance, then had the good sense to keep his mouth shut and try to blend into the background. He figured he’d be doing a lot of that from now on.
Roy’s macro was quite impressive. With the clenching of his fist he caused a volcano to emerge from the ground spontaneously and erupt in a thick lava flow. It would certainly make an impression on any local who witnessed it, and it impressed the wizards even more so, since they could all instantly recognize that the volcano was papier-mâché and the lava flow was made up of baking soda and vinegar foam and food coloring.
The next morning, Martin called Phillip to discuss the Jimmy situation.
Martin said, “I don’t like it.”
“Then why’d you vote in favor of it?” Phillip asked.
“It’s like I said last night: he’s demonstrated that he’s not going to just slink away and leave us alone. We’re not going to kill him. At least this way we can keep an eye on him.”
“Yeah,” Phillip said. “If only there was a way to keep an eye on him without having to look at him all the time.”
“Well, I guess the good news is that he’ll probably avoid the two of us for the most part. And Tyler, I’d assume. Heck, especially Tyler.”
Phillip said. “I wish that made me feel better. That’s the worst thing about this. There’s no way to win. I don’t want him anywhere near me, but I’m uncomfortable having him out of my sight. There’s nothing he can do that will make me comfortable. He has my complete distrust.”
“But, to be fair, that’s nothing new. You never trusted him.”
“No,” Phillip said, “that’s not true. There are different kinds of trust, and up until yesterday, I knew in the bottom of my soul that I could count on Jimmy to do what was best for himself. Now, though, he’s trying to prove that he’s changed, and that means he’ll try to do the right thing for everyone.”
Martin said, “That sounds pretty good.”
“Yeah, but it isn’t, “Phillip said. “Because he’s got such a twisted view of morality, there’s no telling what he’ll think the right thing is.”
EPILOGUE
862 years later.
Agent Miller leaned against the wall. His hard-soled dress shoes were killing him, and the hard concrete floor wasn’t helping, but the warden had been adamant that nothing that could be used as a weapon could be allowed anywhere near the prisoner. Given the prisoner’s familiarity with professional wrestling, a folding chair definitely qualified as a potential weapon.
Miller asked, “What’s our next move, kid?”
“Uh-uh-uh,” Todd said, scolding Agent Miller. “That’s not how we do things. We have an agreement. I give you information, you answer a question. Squid pro quo.”
“I told you, kid, it’s ‘quid pro quo.’”
Todd rolled his eyes. “Yeah, and I told you, I’ve seen Silence of the Lambs like, three times, and it’s ‘squid pro quo.’”
“We’ve been through this, kid. ‘Squid pro quo’ makes no sense.”
Todd snorted. “Oh, and ‘quid pro quo’ makes all the sense in the world.” Todd crossed his eyes, made his teeth stick out of his mouth, and flapped his arms limply while repeating “Quid pro quo! Quid pro quo!” He laughed at how stupid Agent Miller was being, and said, “I told you, the hero, that Hanimal guy, was a fancy chef, and squid pro quo was like, the name of his favorite dish, or something.”
Miller growled. “‘Quid pro quo’ is Latin.”
“Oh yeah? Do you speak Latin?”
Agent Miller asked, “Is that your question?”
Todd stiffened. “No. I wouldn’t waste a question on something that stupid. Here is my question, Agent Miller. Have you ever shot a man in the face?”
“No,” Miller growled. “I have not.”
Todd chuckled as if he was disappointed, but not surprised. “Fine,” he said. “Your answer is satisfactory. The next step is to type in ‘dir.’”
“Dir?”
“Yes. Obviously. It stands for ‘directory.’ Tell your partner. Now.”
Miller said, “Don’t tell me what to do, kid.”
Todd snorted again. “Miller, the whole reason you’re here is so I can tell you what to do.”
Miller attempted to kill Todd with nothing more than prolonged furious eye-contact. When it became clear that it wasn’t working, he shouted, “Murph! Type ‘dir!’”
From around a corner, down a hall, through a locked gate, and well beyond the range of Todd’s magnetic field, Murphy yelled, “Dir?”
“Yes,” Miller shouted, without tearing his eyes away from Todd. “D-I-R! It means ‘directory’!”
