by Xander Gray
I climbed the stairs and lay on the bed. Sammy jumped onto the mattress and curled in the crook of my elbow, nuzzling my face, purring. I scratched her head. I imagined my life as a Möbius strip stretching into the future and the past. It was lined with Japanese maples, flashing gold and red in fading autumn twilight.
Chapter Twenty-eight
I opened my eyes, disoriented. I was surrounded by books and magazine racks, sitting at a long table with other teenagers. A beautiful girl in a fuzzy pink sweater sat across from me. A white band swept auburn hair off her forehead.
She reminded me of my wife. I touched her hand. “Can you help me?”
Surprised, she looked into my eyes. “What did you say?”
I opened my mouth to speak, but made no sound. I pressed my hand to my Adam’s apple—it lay motionless in my throat. Something about this girl overwhelmed me with emotion.
“Are you okay?” the girl asked.
I climbed onto the table, trying to get closer to her, thinking I could whisper in her ear. I grabbed her sweater. “I’m lost. You have to help me. My time is a broken line.”
She pushed me away, her chair crashing to the floor behind her.
I knew her. Could she really be my wife? A girl of sixteen? Seeing her so young somehow made this seem more dangerous than all the previous time slips combined, and I fainted. When I came to, I was lying on the floor, staring up at her. She gazed down at me, fluorescent light glowing in her hair like a halo, then turned away. “We need help!”
“Crystal? Is that really you? You look so young.”
She knelt at my side and took my hand. “The librarian is coming. She’ll know what to do.”
My high school library, the haggard old lady who rushed to my side, and Crystal’s lovely face blurred into a finger painting of color and light.
Some time later, a nurse shined a pin light into my eyes. “Are you alright?”
The light shattered into millions of snowflakes and blew away on the wind.
#
I sat on the bluff overlooking the lake. The gnarled branches of bare sycamores and oaks curled above the ice, strokes of black against a swollen gray sky. The rope swing creaked in the wind, crusted with snow.
Crystal wore snow pants, her legs hanging over the bluff. She looked maybe sixteen. She pulled one mitten off with her teeth, flexed her fingers, and threw a stone over the lake—it thunked onto the ice and slid.
“Beat that,” she said.
I didn’t know how long I would be here. I didn’t want to waste time throwing stones. I could warn her about the future, but it seemed far too complicated to convey, and she would forget whatever I said before it mattered anyway.
“Joshua?” She leaned closer to me. “Why are you so quiet? Are you having one of your seizures?”
“I believe I am.” I smiled at her.
“Stop joking around.” She slapped me on the shoulder. “Throw the rock.”
I glanced at my hands. My gloves were leather, too sophisticated for someone barely old enough to shave. I must have been wearing them to impress her.
I hauled my arm back and threw my rock as hard as I could. This wasn’t wasted time; it was the only thing that mattered, an impossible gift. How many people had an opportunity to re-live their past? The crack of stone on ice echoed against the bluff.
Crystal laughed. “I beat you.”
I lay on the bluff and stared at the gray sky. The woods stood silent, the chill soaking into my bones. “I think you should be a lawyer.”
She blinked. “For real?”
“Yeah.” The future was set. There was no stopping it. “You might have to defend me one day.”
“Planning to rob a store?”
“You never know.” I flung a rock over the edge and heard it bounce. “And anyway, you’d make a great lawyer. Just don’t feel bad if you lose my case. The evidence may be stacked.”
“You’re going to leave fingerprints everywhere.” She sighed.
“I also think if some crackpot starts writing you weird letters about quantum mechanics and illegal human experiments, you should drive straight to Walton University and beat down Quentin Navarez’s door.”
She brushed snow off her shoulder. “You on drugs?”
“I probably should be.” No matter what I did or said, all those children would die. Helena would die. I would be convicted. McSorley would escape punishment.
She picked up a stone and turned back toward the lake.
I sat up and put my hand on her shoulder. “Hon?”
She turned toward me, flushed.
“Do me a favor.”
She tilted her head, watching me curiously. “Okay.”
“Buy me a book on particle physics for Christmas.” I figured as long as I couldn’t change the past, I might as well encourage the inevitable. During the coming Christmas, she would in fact buy me a book on quantum mechanics, which had started a lifelong obsession with the world of very small things. I could still remember asking why she had bought it, and she had insisted I’d told her I wanted it. I’d accused her of being crazy. How could I have known?
“Sure.” She frowned. “What’s particle physics?”
“How would I know? You haven’t bought me the book yet.”
She poked me in the chest with her finger. “Have I mentioned how interesting you are?”
“You have.”
“Good. Kiss me.”
I pulled her close, her hot breath on my lips, but before I could kiss her, I dropped into a spiral of colors.
#
I heard my ragged breathing and realized I was crying. Pain throbbed in my back.
I wiped my eyes and my sight sharpened. In the distance, children hung from monkey bars, kicking their legs and cackling. I grabbed a tether-ball pole and pulled myself to my feet.
A bomb of pain exploded between my shoulders. I staggered forward and cracked my chin on the pole. Laughter erupted behind me.
What was happening? I spun around, dazed, fists raised.
A tree branch whistled toward my head. Instinctively, I grabbed it and swung it back on my assailant. His expression morphed from glee to shock just before the branch clocked him.
He thudded onto the asphalt, one leg twitching, blood pooling from the ripped flesh of his temple. I knelt before him, peering at Tommy Garfield, sixth grade bully.
His friends stared in disbelief. I had half a mind to hit them too. How might my life have been different if they hadn’t selected this day to assault me? Might I have avoided McSorley? Time travel? Prison?
I stopped myself from swinging. They were kids. I pointed the stick at their chests. “Gar here had a rough childhood. Maybe you did too. I get it. But bullying weaker kids makes you a weak person.”
The bullies stared at me, dumbfounded.
“Don’t you have anything to say?” I asked.
They didn’t.
“Come on!” I screamed, waving the branch. “You little shits hang around Gar every day at recess, looking for littler kids to torture. Now that one of yours had his weapon turned on him, you just stand there?”
They stepped backward.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the teacher looking in our direction. Of course—now she showed interest. Where had she been when Gar had hit me? Where had she been during the hundreds of other times these punks had cornered me on the playground or in the bathroom and gleefully worked me over?
“You might as well shout for the teacher now.” I pointed the branch in her direction. “She’ll run over here and save your sorry sixth-grade asses from the lowly third grader.”
I hesitated, fighting with my own tongue, but I wouldn’t get this chance again. “You know, you’re a couple of bitches,” I said, and dropped into a tunnel of impossible lights.
#
I saw my mother sitting at the kitchen table in the house where I had grown up. She was teaching me to write my name. Before I could retrieve the pencil, I slipped through time.
/> When the colors faded I was still at the table, and she was still asking me to write my name. Somehow I held the pencil, and this time I managed to press the graphite to the construction paper. My adult consciousness was so confused I couldn’t imagine how my childhood mind would have been capable of comprehending any of this.
Then I was even younger, standing in front of the sofa, my mother looming over me like a god, her hand ruffling my hair. Can you say ball? I know you can. Before I could respond, the skipping started.
How many of my developmental years had I spent in a time-travel coma? No wonder I had suffered a learning disorder. Either I had missed important milestones or my mind had been so wrecked it had taken years to recover. The doctors had called it epilepsy, but there was a reason the medications had never worked.
I dropped into a vortex of impossible colors.
Chapter
Twenty-nine
I bolted upright. The circle of lights careened so close to my head I felt its wind in my hair. I dove to the floor and glanced back toward the pod, thankful I hadn’t been scalped.
I was back where this had started—the old death row building. Slaven and Navarez stood in front of the monolith, watching me intently.
Navarez knelt beside me. “You alright?”
Images bombarded my mind—a young McSorley darting around the pod, rows of children unconscious in hospital beds, endless expanses of data—and I became convinced my consciousness had jumped to various points within my personal timeline, switching places with whatever temporal version of myself had occupied each destination. The hallucinations I had suffered since childhood had been time slips, traceable to pod encounters.
I realized I had been placed on the pod twice, once as a child and once as an adult. In my mind, I saw time as a rectangular prism, continuous and unchanging, wherein my two pod encounters formed opposite poles, spreading lightning, bouncing the subatomic particles of my consciousness between them. “How long was I out?”
“Two hours.” Navarez extended his hand and pulled me to my feet. “We were beginning to think you weren’t coming back.”
Slaven strode across the room and pressed a button on the pod. The circle of lights emitted a high squeal and ground to a halt, leaving the room in silence. “Tell us, Time Boy. What did you see?”
What had I seen? I breathed deeply and summoned a memory, a bubble of clarity surrounded by fog, in which I had drifted alongside millions of minds in the hive, deriving their intentions from the raw data pulsing through their conjoined consciousness. “I saw enough to know Slaven was right.”
Navarez leveled his eyes with mine. “You saw the true motivation of the Ouroboros?”
I nodded. “There is no rogue planet. They travelled from the future for precisely the reasons Slaven indicated.”
“I told you.” Slaven stepped away from the pod and jabbed his finger at Navarez.
“He needed to be convinced.” Navarez motioned in my direction.
“And you didn’t?” Slaven asked him.
“You’ll have to forgive me,” Navarez said, “for being unsure of your trustworthiness after you stole half our computers.”
“I told you why.”
Navarez placed his hands on his hips. “You told me why you wanted to attack the Ouroboros. You never said it involved stealing half our stuff. I might have gone along if you’d given me time to think, but I show up one day and you’re gone. And then stuff starts disappearing. And who do you think was on the hook for that stuff? You used my ID! It got so bad I avoided the lab. And Christ, why did you need a second Capgras anyway?”
“To build this.” Slaven motioned to the monolith and the sleeping men. “I couldn’t be everywhere.”
Navarez took stock of the room, the beds and wires, the shadows crawling along the ceiling. “You ran a simcon?”
Slaven nodded. “Humans from your era would have been hard to train even if they had been trustworthy, so I had to use a simcon. Besides, a simcon was good enough for what I needed—help with injections, hooking up quantum computers, and configuring software.”
“Are you going to tell me what you’re talking about?” I asked.
Slaven strode toward me, his eyes burning blue-gray. “We’re talking about the body you stole from me. I had two of them for a reason. I was using the second to run a simulated consciousness so I could have my own dedicated personal assistant. I’d like it back.”
“Give me back my real body and we can do the trade now.”
“You can have your body when we’re finished.” He pointed to Crystal, who still lay on a bed. “You can have her too.”
I remembered the last time I had seen Crystal, a girl of sixteen wearing snow pants on the bluff overlooking the lake. I walked toward her and touched her chest, felt her breathing. “When is she going to wake up?”
“Soon.”
Navarez approached Slaven cautiously. “I’m sorry I doubted you about the Ouroboros. Tell me your plan, and I’ll help.”
Slaven pointed to a button on the monolith, near the entry port of Gar’s breathing tube. “You see this?”
“Of course,” Navarez said. “It’s an emergency return button.”
“A what?” I stepped between them.
Navarez scratched his head as if to coax forth some explanation and then waved his hand toward the monolith. “This glowing monstrosity is called a host grid. It’s a powerful array of quantum computers. This particular grid hosts a simulated reality, similar to one at the university. Anyone with a nanite brain can be loaded into the simulation. In case of emergency, this button immediately returns the subject’s nanite brain to his body via the attached breathing tube.”
So my intuition had been correct. The empty prison and all its horrors had been products of an incredibly realistic simulation. “Why did the Ouroboros send this technology back?”
“You’d have to ask them,” Navarez said.
“Or you could ask me.” Slaven sneered. “Everything they sent back is related to one of three things: prepping six million people for wireless swarms, enhancing hijacked bodies, or subjugating everyone else. You do the math.”
I stared at the monolith, envisioning all the ways an artificial reality might control a populace—prison, reward, education—and hoped this particular grid would be the only one used to punish people with their own demons.
Slaven pointed to the button. “Would you like to press it?”
“Will Gar wake up?” I asked.
“None of these buttons work.”
“You want me to press a button that doesn’t work?”
“I want you to see.”
With some apprehension, I pushed the button. A clunking sound echoed through the dark room. Startled, I released the button. Nothing happened.
Slaven sauntered to Gar’s bedside and ran his pale fingers over my sleeping cellmate’s breathing mask. “Ordinarily that button would have returned your friend’s consciousness to his body. He would have woken up frightened and disoriented, but unharmed.”
“So why did you break the button?” I asked.
“What makes you think I broke it?”
“These buttons worked before I escaped. I bumped one—your brain commandeered my body.”
Slaven shook his head. “I was able to leave the server because I loaded myself into the simulation via the usual, encapsulated chamber. Your friend, on the other hand, is trapped.”
Navarez’s brow furrowed. “You didn’t build an exit to your simulation?”
Slaven tapped the button three times. “You see?”
“Looks like a broken button,” Navarez said, deadpan.
“This isn’t a hardware malfunction!” Slaven threw his hands in the air and shook his head like a bull. “Ordinarily, pressing this button would decouple him from the simulation, but that’s not possible because he is the simulation. Don’t you get it? The subatomic particles of his subconscious have been interwoven into the hardware at the most base level.”
Navarez adjusted his belt, walked toward the dimly glowing screen of a monitor, and retracted a hidden keyboard. His finger hovered above the keys. “Why not purge?”
“Don’t you dare.” Slaven took one commanding step toward him, and Navarez stepped back.
Slaven, looking relieved, reached down and tugged on Gar’s breathing tube. “Pressing purge would end the simulation, but it would not return them to their bodies.”
“Purging would kill them?” Navarez’s eyes widened.
“If you consider what they are doing now living.” Slaven grabbed Gar’s foot, lifted it like a trophy, and let it drop back onto the mattress. “I only keep their bodies alive because they may prove handy. In a prison, one might think I have an endless supply of bodies, but disappearances arouse suspicion. I have this prison under my control, but not the prison system, not the legal system or family members, so I try to be inconspicuous.”
I remembered Gar telling me about myriad bodies in medical and decided Slaven’s definition of "inconspicuous" differed from mine.
Navarez pressed his fingers against his forehead, thinking. “In the reality simulations we’ve run in the lab, we’ve never had any problem returning subjects to their bodies.”
Slaven pushed the keyboard into its recess. “That’s because you always maintained a clear barrier between subject and simulation.”
Navarez shook his head. “I don’t follow.”
I just stood there, dumfounded, struggling to comprehend.
Slaven pointed toward the monolith. “In a normal VR grid, brains are loaded into a chamber where they are kept physically separate from the simulation, but are still able to receive sensory input from it. Visual signals are pumped directly into the occipital lobe, audio signals into the temporal lobe, and so forth. In this way, the subject can experience a simulated reality without becoming part of it.”
