The Imagination Box

by Martyn Ford

  “You found it in a cupboard, I understand?”

  “That’s right. I imagined a tracking device inside it, then I knew it was here. Dee did the rest.”

  “Hmm,” she said, tapping her chin. “I wonder who hid it there, and why?”

  “Yes,” Tim added, with slight sarcasm. “It is a mystery.”

  “So you found it, but that doesn’t explain why you were in my office.”

  Discovering that you’re an unhinged nutbag, Tim thought.

  She sighed. “It’s fine, it doesn’t even matter. Because something else has come up. Listen, I need you to do something for me. Remember how I told you about the Mind Surfer?”

  Here we go, Tim thought. She was going to try to distract him, divert his attention elsewhere. He hoped, once again, that Dee had gotten that memory stick out of there. If it got to Fredric, it would only be a matter of time before someone arrived and blew this whole thing wide open, exposed Harriet for who she really was. A sad thought followed this….He just couldn’t comprehend what he’d read about Eisenstone.

  “Some of the more elaborate conspiracy theories about the elusive individual suggest he or she is controlling people on a huge scale. Nationally. Even internationally.”

  “Really?” Tim said, curious, despite knowing that this was just some yarn, another one of Harriet’s elaborate lies.

  “Anyway, Fredric, he…” She sat forward, throwing her long snake of blond hair over her shoulder, out of sight. “You’ve seen his facility—that’s where you’ve been, right? In Nevada? I need you—”

  The door swung open with a bang. A guard and a man wearing a dark suit with a black tie entered. Harriet turned in her chair to look at them. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”

  “You’re under arrest, Mrs. Goffe,” the suited man said. “You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defense if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court.”

  The guard snatched up the cuffs Tim had just been wearing, and firmly clicked them onto the wrists of his own boss. The teleportation sphere had worked. Dee had clearly gotten the memory stick to Fredric, who had, in turn, alerted these agents.

  “There must be some kind of mistake,” Harriet said, her eyes rolling and darting in what looked like genuine confusion.

  Tim smiled, awash with relief, seeing right through her crocodile tears, as they escorted TRAD’s director from the interrogation room.

  Tim looked up through the metal struts of the huge roller coaster he’d just created in front of his castle, his pretend sun casting its curled shadow across him. Beyond the twisting, undulating tracks, he saw the roof high above. Right in the center was the circular service hatch. For the briefest moment he felt an odd sense of sadness that the Imagination Space, despite its infinite variables, would always have a ceiling. He would never, unless of course he imagined them, be able to look at the stars from this place.

  Things had changed quickly at the Technology, Research, and Defense Agency following Harriet’s arrest. The emails Tim and Dee had discovered on her computer were just the tip of the iceberg. In fact, there were hundreds of incriminating documents on her hard drive—enough to send her away for a long time. They pinned the murder of the crossing guard on her, as well as a long list of charges Tim hadn’t even heard of. Despite all of this, she denied everything.

  TRAD itself was disbanded. Its employees were on the news, shown clearing their desks, as the Diamond Building was shut down. What struck Tim was how fast it all happened. By the end of that week, in fact, the organization was no longer operating. Even the prime minister took to television to explain that a previously secret department had “failed” in its job to protect the public from dangerous forces.

  The news said that Daniel Moore, a former TRAD agent who had exchanged those emails with Harriet, was the Mind Surfer. He too found himself behind bars.

  And, most incredibly of all, Professor Eisenstone was arrested. He protested his innocence, denying all knowledge of having been offered payment by Harriet. Both Tim and Dee had wanted to speak with him—to hear his side of the story—but they hadn’t been allowed. However, a few days later, the professor had phoned Tim directly to tell him that he had done nothing wrong.

  “I—I must be quick. They think I’m speaking to my lawyer,” Eisenstone had said. “I don’t know why but, indeed, someone wants me in prison.”

  The image of Eisenstone locked away did seem wrong. The professor was many things, but surely not a criminal.

  “But then what about the emails?” Tim asked.

  “It’s a frame-up. Listen, I don’t know how far…” There had been a noise in the background, someone telling Eisenstone to hurry up. “Please, Tim, you have to believe me. You have to find the truth.”

  The phone then went dead. Tim hadn’t been able to contact him after that.

  While all this was happening, Tim, Dee, and Phil were traveling between home and the Imagination Space, since Fredric wanted to do more experiments. At first they had to walk across town to a Wilde Tech office in Glassbridge, not far from school, where they teleported to Fredric’s London building and then, once again, to Nevada.

  However, after a few goes, Tim created a teleportation sphere, which he kept in his bedroom. This, in effect, meant that his closet opened directly to the top floor of his custom-made castle—endless wonders behind a thin wooden door.

  Despite this, however, Tim felt so lost and unsure that he just couldn’t enjoy his creations.

  “Do you think we’ve made a mistake?” Tim said to Dee, who was taking pictures of the latest addition to the Imagination Space on her phone.

  Another thing that had shocked him was her total acceptance of her grandfather’s imprisonment. When they had read those emails, Dee had looked as shocked as Tim. But over the past few days, she appeared to have come to terms with it all. Even by her standards, she seemed notably cold.

  “No way. This roller coaster was the best idea you’ve had,” Dee said, clicking away.

  “I mean with what happened at TRAD.”

  “This again? We’ve won,” Dee said, pocketing her cell phone. “Box is back, Harriet’s been arrested, Daniel too. Case closed. Victory dance.”

  “What about Eisenstone? In your heart, do you honestly believe he would do something like this? Work with people like that?”

  “In my heart? Maybe not. But in my head? You saw those emails, that evidence.” She shrugged. “I guess there will be a trial, and we’ll know why he did what he did then.”

  “Look, I know you don’t ‘do’ emotions, but come on.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t seem at all upset,” Tim said.

  “Yeah, it sucks, but Granddad has always been full of secrets—you know that.”

  “But why would they do all this?”

  “You said yourself, Granddad didn’t like you having the Imagination Box—especially not when you broke promises and took it out of your room. And TRAD knew it was dangerous. They knew all about Crowfield House. Maybe they just wanted the technology off the streets? As I said, we’ll know all the ins and outs soon enough….Anyway, we gonna ride this thing?” Dee looked up at the roller coaster’s bright, stripy blue-and-orange cart.

  Earlier that day, Tim had created another fortune cookie, just like the one with Harriet’s password. He imagined that the contents would say whether or not Eisenstone was really guilty. When he cracked it open, the piece of paper simply read “No.”

  Initially Tim thought that was definitive proof, but Dee explained, logically, that it was probably just what he wanted to believe.

  “Remember when I was doing my schoolwork in the Imagination Box?” Tim said. “I had this weird feeling the whole time. I felt as though I hadn’t earned it. As though I’d cut corners. As though I hadn’t…I dunno…I hadn’t done the job properly. That’s how I feel now.”

  “Oh,” Phil moaned from Tim’s top pocket. “It’s so simple for you two
. You have all these outlandish adventures and this fandangled technology to play with. But what about me? What is my purpose? Timothy, you cannot create sentient beings and relinquish all responsibility—these are not rhetorical questions.”

  The monkey’s identity crisis had gone from bad to worse since his near-death experience. Even when Tim created him a hovering “motor-bicycle,” he’d barely ridden it.

  Last year Eisenstone had told Tim that he really shouldn’t make any more living creatures in his Imagination Box. Apparently it was “unethical” and “risky.” Maybe it was exactly this kind of thing that he was wary of.

  “Perhaps you should do something creative,” Tim suggested. “Rechannel these insecurities.”

  They clambered up the narrow stairs—their feet clanging—and into the roller coaster’s metal cart. The cushioned, leather-covered safety pads came down over his shoulders.

  Right then Tim decided, for certain, that his heart was right. That fortune cookie was right. Eisenstone wouldn’t lie. Somewhere along the line, they’d made a terrible error. Now Tim had another tricky task ahead of him. Somehow, he had to prove the professor’s innocence.

  The cart ticked up the track—clunk, clunk, clunk—higher and higher.

  Still ascending, overlooking everything he’d created, Tim thought of the news they’d watched and of Samantha Locke’s unmistakable red hair. He recalled her vanilla perfume, remembered the jazzy music they’d whispered beneath in his room that day.

  There will come a time when you run out of answers, she had told him. The cart reached the highest point, then tilted, and, with a held breath, Tim waited for it to fall.

  —

  The following day, Tim, Dee, and Phil paid Samantha Locke a visit. Still filled with doubt about what had happened, Tim was keen to speak with her, whereas Dee was, for some reason, quite reluctant.

  However, she came round to the idea, and they hopped aboard a train. Elisa was still apathetic about Tim’s comings and goings and gave her permission without much thought. In fact, she didn’t even ask where they were going. Tim, as always, assumed she was simply busy, although it was decidedly strange how little she seemed to care.

  The journalist lived on the second floor of a gloomy block of flats. In the alleyway that led to the door, Tim looked up through the metal frames of the fire escapes. There was a thin strip of overcast charcoal sky above, between the close buildings.

  Inside, Samantha clicked, clunked, and slid open a series of locks.

  “Sorry about the mess,” she said.

  Tim paused in the doorway of the living room, taking in the walls of newspaper clippings, notes, photos, and hundreds of documents. There was no furniture besides a single desk, also covered in papers.

  “It’s, well…,” Samantha said, running her hand through her short rusty hair. “It’s not exactly the Ritz.” She seemed embarrassed. “I have beanbags we can sit on.”

  While she fetched them, Tim and Dee whispered to one another. “I think we should leave,” Dee said.

  “What? Why?”

  “This woman is clearly crazy. I bet she collects cats.”

  “No.”

  “Probably a bad egg. Dodgy. Getting vibes.”

  “Inclined to concur,” Phil added. “Monkey radar.”

  “Let’s just hear what she has to say. Besides, she’s on TV—they don’t let bad people on TV.”

  “Do either of you want a drink?” Samantha asked, returning and dropping three small fabric beanbags on the floor. “I’ve got water. Or…maybe you could create something for us, in your Imagination Box?”

  Tim frowned, defensively lifting his backpack up on his shoulder.

  “I told you,” she said. “I read TRAD’s files on you, front to back. I know everything.”

  It was actually refreshing to be able to be completely honest. Tim shrugged and got his Imagination Box out, and the three of them sat round it, as though it were a campfire. He created a small pot of tea and some (perhaps unduly civilized) cups and saucers, complete with little rings of gold around the rims. Phil too enjoyed a miniature version of everything they had—his littlest little finger jutted out as he sipped.

  Samantha asked about the box and about Phil, as people tended to. Then she asked how she could help them.

  “It’s about the Mind Surfer,” Tim said.

  “What do you want to know? Apparently they’ve caught him.”

  “You told me to come and see you when I ran out of answers. I just can’t believe that Professor Eisenstone would lie, would break the law. It doesn’t add up.”

  “Ah,” Samantha said. “Welcome to my world. Not adding up is the Mind Surfer’s thing. As you can see, I’ve been trying to crack this one for a long while.”

  She pointed their attention to the wall of newspaper clippings and documents. There was one picture that seemed to take center stage in all the evidence—it was of her and a man, standing in glossy, brightly colored jumpsuits. Behind them, in the background, was a small airplane covered in sunlight.

  “Joseph,” Samantha said, in a low tone. “That’s us in Australia. We’d been skydiving together. He was my…my husband.” She blew out some air, composed herself, and then nodded.

  “What happened to him?” Tim asked.

  “He was a reporter too. He worked for a couple of large newspapers in London, mostly freelance. It all started after the riots, which I’m sure you saw on TV?”

  Tim remembered the news—he had seen footage of riots, but he’d thought nothing of it at the time.

  “He interviewed some people involved,” Samantha went on. “What he found was very strange. You see, the riots in towns all across the UK, they started at exactly the same time.”

  “Could it not simply be that people heard about them, social media and all that,” Dee suggested, “then decided they might be able to loot a few shops themselves? Free sneakers are enticing.”

  “Yes,” Samantha said. “That was exactly what everyone believed. But, if you look at the CCTV footage, the incidents began at precisely the same time. As in, to the second.”

  “Do the police know this?” Tim asked.

  “Well, yes, but they haven’t given it any weight. They said that protests started the whole thing.”

  “That sounds more likely.” Dee placed her cup down, then checked the time on her phone, glancing at Tim. This was a hint to leave, but he ignored her.

  “You know, that’s what I said,” Samantha added. “I told Joseph he was crazy. But then there were the carrots. Did you see that on the news?”

  “Yes,” Dee said. “I understand that was an Internet thing—a viral stunt or whatever.”

  “Again, that’s what people thought. Everyone agreeing to buy carrots on the same day? Ha-ha, very funny. But there was no campaign, no group. The sharp rise in carrot sales occurred at precisely the same time—two p.m. It wasn’t until the following day that the media even took notice. It was as though everyone, at exactly the same moment, decided to buy carrots. When asked, the shoppers couldn’t explain their behavior. Joseph thought, like the riots, it was the work of the Mind Surfer. That he was testing how people could be controlled.”

  Dee coughed, slyly glaring, eyes wide with concern, at Tim. Samantha seemed to notice.

  “You think I’m insane,” she said. “That’s fine. When Joseph showed me everything he’d found, I thought that too.”

  “How did he die?” Tim asked.

  “He wrote up the story, but before he could file it….One quiet Sunday afternoon, he wandered from our house to a nearby building site, clambered through a fence, and then climbed up to the top of a crane. He walked calmly to the end. Without hesitation, he stepped off and fell to his death.”

  “That’s terrible,” Tim said.

  “He was under strain from work. But I don’t think it would have led him to do that. He wasn’t himself. It was as though he was…possessed.”

  Tim had read similar stories of “possession.” Over the
past week, he and Dee had Googled “the Mind Surfer” countless times, only to read countless posts on countless forums written by people Dee sensitively described as “absolute loons.” She had a point—conspiracy theorists did tend to be a certain type of person.

  Samantha stood and walked to the wall of evidence. “I think the Mind Surfer was experimenting with the technology and knew that in order to keep it under wraps he had to kill Joseph. Who knows how many other people have had to die to keep this secret?”

  Tim told her about the crossing guard who had stolen his box, and the man who had jumped into the water chasing him but then seemed to “snap out of it.”

  “Perhaps the shock of the cold brought him to his senses,” Samantha said. “That’s interesting….”

  “Having struggled with the many perils of being self-aware,” Phil added, “perhaps being controlled might not be such a bad thing.”

  “Ignore him,” Tim said. “He’s having a crisis.”

  Samantha smiled. “But, hey,” she said, shrugging. “At least I won’t have to spend any more time in jail at the hands of TRAD. They certainly didn’t like me snooping around. I guess now we know why. Anyway, it’s over, right? Daniel Moore, a rogue TRAD agent…done and dusted. Thanks to you guys, the Mind Surfer is behind bars.”

  Tim felt just as unsettled when they left—none of what Samantha had told them explained how or why Professor Eisenstone had ended up involved in all this. That part still didn’t fit.

  They headed to the station to get the train back to Glassbridge. Tim suggested a sneaky teleport to save time, but as it made Dee queasy, they decided to take the old-fashioned route.

  They waited on the platform, sitting on the cold metal bench. There wasn’t a single soul in sight—just the straight tracks disappearing off to the left and to the right. Dee was, as usual, engrossed in her phone. Tim, however, was still wondering how someone would be able to take over members of the public.

  “When the Mind Surfer took control, how come the signal didn’t affect everyone?” Tim said.