by David Walton
I couldn’t argue with her—I had the same fears for myself. Time in prison had changed the other Jacob, had made him a different person than I was. How much of me would be left when we joined back up again? Was I defined by my memories, or by something else?
In a sense, none of us was ever the same person we’d been a year ago, or even an hour ago. We were more like a long chain of different people, each connected to the others by a memory of what had gone before and an expectation of what was to come. What defined Jacob Kelley, if it wasn’t my connection to previous versions of myself made possible by my memories? What if someone swapped my memories wholesale for another person’s—would I still be myself? Or would I be him?
Disturbing thoughts, but thoughts that were hard to dismiss, given the forking of my personality and memories in two directions. If I split again at this very moment, and one of me turned left and the other right, which path would I follow? The real me who was thinking these thoughts right now? Both of us would remember thinking these thoughts, but we couldn’t both be Jacob Kelley, could we? It was a tangle, and one with no way out that I could see. I wanted to encourage my daughter, but I had no true encouragement to give.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m scared of what will happen myself. I don’t have all the answers.” I shrugged. “In fact, I probably don’t have any of them.”
Her face softened, and she leaned over and kissed me lightly on the cheek. “Now you’re being honest,” she said. “What’s your plan?”
“To find out what happened to them. After that, who knows?”
The days were warmer now. Leaves had returned to the trees, and flowers were in bloom, but the long trek through the Jersey Pine Barrens looked more or less the same as it had the morning I drove out with Marek to find Brian dead on the bunker floor. My thoughts kept going round and round about waveform collapse and what it meant, hoping Elena and the kids might still be alive somewhere, but trying not to hope too much.
We arrived, and I parked in the visitors’ lot. Sheila Singer was still back in Philadelphia at that moment, giving testimony, so we wouldn’t be able to question her. That was for the best, since she would also recognize me as the accused and probably call the police rather than talk. Now we just had to hope that no one else recognized me, though I thought our chances were pretty good in the visitors’ center. The real scientists rarely came here.
The atrium of the visitors’ center was cathedral-large, with high glass windows and a hanging model of the super collider hanging above our heads. Displays with names like The Quest For Unification and Baby Black Holes stood against the walls, with interactive models of atoms and informational touch screens. The young Asian woman behind the central desk was attractive in a studious way, with a pageboy haircut, large glasses, and a man’s button-down shirt. I approached her while Alessandra drifted off to look around the room.
“Hello,” the receptionist said with a bright smile, “How can I help you?”
“Do you know Sheila Singer, by any chance?”
“Sure, I do.” The smile faltered. “But she’s not here today. I’m sorry . . .”
“No, I know that. Do you work with her often?”
“Most days. We flip coins for the tours, because, to tell you the truth”—she lowered her voice—“it’s a bit boring sitting at the desk all day.”
I tried to sound conversational. “I’m sure it is. How long have you been working here?”
“Since nine o’clock.”
“No, I mean—”
“Oh! Sorry. A little more than a year.” Her forehead wrinkled. “Why do you want to know?”
“See, I work with the district attorney’s office,” I said. “Ms. Singer is testifying today about something she saw here several months ago, and we like to double-check our facts.” This claim seemed unlikely to me for several reasons, but I hoped she wouldn’t question it.
“Oh, this is about the case!” she said. “I was jealous that Sheila got to testify and I didn’t. It’s so exciting, you know?”
“Then you were here that day? When the woman came asking about Jacob Kelley?”
“I certainly was. It was right at the end of the day, and the woman looked frantic, and the oldest girl looked like she might have been crying.” She crossed her arms. “But Sheila was the one who actually talked to them, so she gets the court appearance and interviews with all the reporters.”
“And did Sheila tell the woman where she could find her husband?”
“Well, she didn’t know, did she? I think she just offered to call our manager. Then the woman asked about Dr. Vanderhall, and sure, Sheila knew him all right.”
“She did?”
“Oh, sure. They had a bit of a fling a ways back. Dr. Vanderhall has a bit of a reputation—I mean had a reputation. I probably shouldn’t say that about him when he’s dead, but you know, I told her it wouldn’t turn out well, and of course it didn’t.”
“What did Sheila say then?”
“She told the woman where to find Dr. Vanderhall’s office, and she said thank you and left.”
“Do you know where she went after that?”
The receptionist gave an odd shrug and looked out the window. “Well, I assume she went to Dr. Vanderhall’s office. Where else would she have gone?”
“That was the day they found Dr. Vanderhall dead,” I said.
“Well, yes, it was, wasn’t it? And her husband was the murderer,” she said, still not making eye contact.
“Suspected murderer,” I said.
“What?”
“He hasn’t been convicted. He might not have done it.”
“Yeah.” She waved a dismissive hand. “But they wouldn’t have arrested him if they weren’t pretty sure.”
“I see what you mean. Thanks for your time.”
I found Alessandra sitting on a bench near a display called Supersymmetry: The Thrilling Story of How the Universe’s Most Elusive Particles Were Found. Her unfocused expression told me she was eyejacked again. “What are you looking at?” I asked.
“Sheila Singer’s eyejack viewfeed history.”
“Really? You can do that?” I asked.
“It wasn’t that hard. I jumped down a chain of friends until I found a circle that included her. Most people aren’t that careful when it comes to security, or they just don’t care who sees their stuff. They just leave the default privacy settings, which supposedly limits access to your circle of friends, but really leaves it open to your friends’ circles, etc. Somebody who works at the same place my father used to work isn’t that many jumps away from me.”
“Well, what did you find? Can you see what she saw last December third?”
“There are thousands of hours of viewfeeds here. Looks like she’s a Lifer.”
“A what?”
Alessandra rolled her eyes. “A Life Logger. She keeps her eyejacks recording twenty-four/seven, so it’s a full record of her life. The viewfeeds aren’t very well organized or titled, though.” She paused a moment, and her eyes flicked from side to side. “Wow. I wonder if she knows that viewfeed can be publicly accessed.” Alessandra cocked her head and squinted. “I didn’t know anybody could be that flexible.”
I cleared my throat loudly.
“It’s an aerobics class, Dad.”
“Right,” I said. “Moving on.”
“It might take me awhile to go through all this,” Alessandra said.
“You should be able to narrow down the time pretty well,” I said. “She said she saw Elena just before five o’clock on December third.”
“The problem is, she didn’t index by time.”
“Okay, I get it. I’ll leave you alone.”
I wandered the displays for a while to let her search in peace. Most of them exaggerated the NJSC’s accomplishments in overblown and misleading language, sometimes claiming what seemed like outright falsehoods to me, but which might simply have been attempts to express the truth in simple enough language for the average t
ourist to understand. I kept glancing over my shoulder, nervous that someone would come in who would recognize me, and I finally suggested to Alessandra that we go out for lunch, and she could continue the search there. I found a soup and sandwich shop I used to frequent, but fortunately I realized my mistake before actually going inside. I was bound to be recognized, if not by the staff, then by former coworkers on their lunch break. I chose a diner instead, and ordered chicken sandwiches for both of us.
The food had arrived by the time Alessandra found the right viewfeeds in Sheila’s library. I still had my lenses, so I synched to Alessandra’s phone, and we watched together.
We saw the Feynman Center’s atrium from a view behind the desk, and there, as Sheila had described, were Elena, Claire, Alessandra, and Sean, looking lost and upset. I heard Alessandra—the Alessandra next to me in the seat—gasp as she saw herself. It was one thing to know you had a double; it was another to see it with your own eyes. I just watched Elena. At the same time that I had been finding her dead on the living room floor, she’d been out there, alive, and looking for me.
Elena met my eyes—Sheila’s eyes, really—and said, “I’m looking for my husband, Jacob Kelley. Do you know where he is?”
Sheila checked her screen. “I’m sorry, I don’t know who that is,” she said. “Kelley? Does he work here, or is he a guest?”
“He used to work here, a few years ago,” Elena said.
“I’m sorry,” Sheila said. “I don’t know where he would be. Do you want me to get my manager?”
“No,” Elena said. “He was here to see Brian Vanderhall. Can you tell me where his office is?”
“Oh, yes. We know who he is.” The view shifted, and Sheila traded looks with the other receptionist—the young Asian woman I had just spoken to at the NJSC. I realized I hadn’t thought to get her name. “His office is in the Dirac building. Go out these doors and take a right . . .”
“I’ll take her there,” the Asian receptionist said.
“Are you sure? I thought you never wanted to see him again,” Sheila said.
“I’ll just show them where the building is. It’ll give me an excuse to cut out of here a few minutes early.”
“Oh, so you’ll leave me to close up,” Sheila said.
“That’s the basic idea,” the other one said. She winked. “Come on,” she said to Elena, “I’ll take you.”
As they walked out, Elena dialed a number on her phone and listened. Now it was my turn to gasp. She was calling me. That call, the one that had come just in time to distract the policeman before I hit him—it hadn’t been Alessandra calling with Elena’s phone. It had been Elena, calling to see where I was. If she had called five minutes earlier or five minutes later, I would have answered the phone. I would have talked to her. I would have known she was alive right from the beginning.
Sheila watched long enough that we saw them head out the door in a little train, Claire following the Asian woman in the front, and Elena taking the rear. When it was clear there was nothing more to see, I blinked furiously to shut off the viewfeed.
The chicken sandwich was growing cold on my plate. It took me a moment to remember where I was.
“She lied,” I said. “They both lied. Sheila didn’t mention the Asian woman at all in her testimony, and they both said it was Sheila who told them where to find Brian. Neither of them said anything about actually leading them to Brian’s office.” I pounded the steering wheel. “I didn’t even get her name.”
“That’s not much of a lie,” Alessandra said. “What does it matter?”
“Sheila referred to the other woman never wanting to see Brian again. That implies a past relationship, and given Brian’s reputation, probably a romantic one.”
“So? From what you’ve said, there are probably a lot of young women there with a former romantic relationship with him.”
“The question is, why are they lying at all? What are they hiding?”
On the drive back to the NJSC facility, Alessandra eyejacked again to track down the name of the woman who had lied to us. It didn’t take her long.
“Lily Lin,” she said. “Right off of Sheila’s friend list.”
“Lin?”
“That’s what it says. She works at the Center, lives nearby. Looks like a lot of her family’s in law enforcement.”
“Wasn’t there a Lin who was a police investigator, who testified at the trial?”
“Brittany Lin. Looks like it’s her sister.”
“You’re kidding me. So Brittany could have doctored the evidence to protect her sister. An actual police cover-up?”
“I guess.”
“Great job, Alessandra.”
She smiled, a genuine smile of pleasure. “Alex,” she said.
“What?”
“I know you and Mom like to use my full name, but call me Alex. That’s what my friends call me.”
My first thought was to say that I didn’t realize she had any friends, but I managed to swallow that thought before it came out. I knew she was talking about friends online. “Alex,” I said. I rolled it around in my mouth. I didn’t like it. It completely lost the old Italian beauty of her given name. But it meant she was including me in her list of friends. I decided not to complain. “Alex it is. Do you think you can find Lily’s viewfeed of that day?”
“Looking. We got pretty lucky with Sheila. Not everybody’s a Lifer, you know. “
“I can’t imagine why anyone would be,” I said. “What’s the point of recording your whole life? Most of it’s pretty dull. Special occasions, okay, I get it, but—”
“Some Lifers are extremely popular,” Alessandra said. “They have thousands of people watching them, all the time.”
“So people with no life of their own spend their time immersed in someone else’s? That’s a pretty sad—”
“I’ve had mine recording for over a year.” Her tone was belligerent, challenging me to object.
I closed my mouth. A year? Everything that she saw in our home, available online? I almost made a sharp comment, something to the effect of airing our family’s dirty laundry in public, but I stopped myself in time. She was talking to me. She had just volunteered information about herself. I would be a fool to shut her down.
Instead, I just said, “Why?”
She rolled her eyes. “Welcome to the twenty-first century, Dad.”
“I mean it,” I said. “I don’t get it. Why share video feed of every second of your life with complete strangers?”
My sincerity must have come through, because she answered seriously. “It makes me feel connected. People comment on my life, people across the world sometimes. They understand what I feel, cheer me on, give me advice sometimes. Not a lot. I don’t have a big following.”
“But . . . what about privacy?”
She shrugged, a barely discernible twitch of one shoulder. “Not a big deal, Dad. To your generation, maybe. Not to me.”
“Do you watch other people’s?”
“Sure. My friends, a little. Mostly strangers. I find people I like and follow them for a while.”
“But . . . why? Isn’t it boring just watching somebody else’s life? I mean, it’s not like a movie. Nothing much happens to people most of the time.”
She sighed, as if forced to explain something obvious to an idiot. “There are apps that cut through the chatter. They key off of statistically uncommon visual patterns, raised voices, rapid eye movement—stuff like that. If you just want to see the highlights, you can. Sometimes it’s pretty interesting just to watch the raw feed, though.”
“Really? People tune in and just watch you do your homework or eat dinner?”
Alessandra—Alex—threw up her hands. “Haven’t you ever read a blog?”
“Sure, I just—” A little pop of understanding stopped me. I actually got it, a little bit. “You’re saying the appeal is similar to a personal blog. Someone talks about the ups and downs of his or her life; others tune in to the drama.”
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“Exactly like. Viewers leave comments, get worked up, have little flame wars sometimes. The most popular personalities become super-celebrities. They live their whole lives in front of millions of people.”
I was silent for a bit, digesting this. The pine trees kept coming. When I was young, my mother had been suspicious of my Facebook account and had no clue how widespread or popular a phenomenon it was. I was starting to realize that the tide had turned and what I dismissed as a teenage game was, in fact, a serious cultural force.
I stole a sideways glance at her. “Is that what you want to be? A super-celebrity?”
Another minimalist shrug. She looked out her side window and didn’t answer. I took this to mean that yes, at least at some level, she did want that, but she didn’t want to open herself up to mockery or admit to longing for unlikely stardom. I could think of a dozen reasons why living your whole life in front of millions of people was a terrible idea, destructive to relationships, certain to cause an identity crisis, but I knew a turning point in our relationship when I heard one. Either I could tell Alex my mind, and she would never tell me hers again, or I could show myself willing to listen without judgment—something I wasn’t sure I’d actually done with Alex, ever.
“That would be pretty cool,” I said. “To have a celebrity in the family.”
She shot me a look, afraid that I was making fun of her. Then she smirked. “Pretty cool?”
“What, people don’t say ‘cool’ anymore?”
“Not in this decade.”
Alex was able to discover that Lily Lin did indeed have a viewfeed covering the time when she had walked Elena and the kids to Brian’s office, but the file was locked and not open to the public. With a little stretching of the speed limit, Alex and I arrived back at the Feynman Center before closing time. Lily Lin was no longer behind the desk. Instead, a thick-set man with an even thicker mustache stood in her place and scowled.
“Excuse me,” I said. “We’re looking for Lily Lin.”
“I am looking for her, too,” the man said, his irritation plain in his accented voice. He sounded a bit like Marek, so I guessed an Eastern European country. “She has been gone forty-five minutes and no notice.”
