We climbed in the back. Delia turned around in the front seat and gave me a sad smile. I started to cry. As we drove away, all I could do was sit with my head in my hands and the water dripping from my clothes to pool at my feet and ask them why they had come, why they hadn’t run as soon as we went missing. We could have been questioned; we might have given them up. It was stupid and I loved them for it.
“But Jeremiah is dead,” I said. “I saw it, they shot him.” Mickey closed his eyes. No one said anything. I thought of something else. “Where did all the explosives come from?”
The driver cleared his throat and I looked at him more carefully, surprised to see he was no one I recognized, not one of our group. Just an ancient man with tanned skin and short white hair. “The weapons were my doing,” he said, and he stuck one hand back over his bony shoulder and held it out for me. “I’m Victor.”
I turned to Mickey. “Who is this guy?”
“This whole jailbreak was his idea.” Mickey forced a laugh. “He’s a mad scientist.”
“And a spy,” Delia added. “With guns.”
I shook my head. “I don’t get it. Where did you find him?”
“He found us,” Mickey answered. “And he offered to help get you back.”
“What are you saying? He showed up out of nowhere and told you to risk your lives on some rescue mission, and you just went along with it?” I was starting to panic. “Are you stupid? You do realize he’s just taking us back to prison, right?” I was looking out the windows of the van to see if we could make it if we jumped, but we were on the freeway. We were going too fast and there were no other cars around.
With no real plan in mind, I made a lunge for the steering wheel. The van veered, but then Mickey grabbed me and hauled me back, and Delia climbed over the back of her seat to take me by the shoulders and say, “Trust us. Wait. Trust us. We trust him.”
The old man said, “I think you’d better tell the whole story. From the beginning.”
Mickey started. “When you didn’t come back, we knew something was wrong. Like you said, they could have questioned you about us. So we left as soon as it was dark, we found another empty building, and we waited. We kept a watch on the old place to see if you came back, but there was nothing. Obviously. Then the Professor showed up at our door one day.”
“What professor?” I asked.
“The mad scientist,” Delia answered, and she jerked her head toward the driver.
“Right,” said Mickey. “He showed up and said he knew who we were, he knew what we were trying to do, and he wanted to help.”
“And it never occurred to you that he might be one of them? That he might be trying to get everyone out in the open so they could round you up?”
Delia nodded. “That’s what I said. One quick blow with a blunt object and let’s get the hell out of here was my advice.”
“But he said we should look at his death first,” Mickey continued. “It said PNEUMONIA. We double-checked it on the handheld machine. So that ruled out homicide.”
I still wasn’t convinced. “That’s no reason to trust him.”
Mickey leaned forward. “Here’s the thing, though. When we looked at his reading, we saw the serial number. They count up from one, right? Maxwell and Joyce themselves had one and two. I never got tested until they passed the law, so mine has ten digits. The professor’s is eight.”
“Eight digits?”
“The number eight,” said the old man. He smiled at me in the mirror. “I knew Maxwell back in the day. We used to work together, in fact.”
“Work together on what?”
The Professor asked if I knew anything about the Cold War. I shrugged. It was before I was born. “Well,” he continued, “back then, before you were born, our government and all its intelligence agencies were busy looking for any kind of advantage, any kind of weapon, against our enemies. The research took some, ah, imaginative directions. Mind control, telepathy, astrology, that sort of thing. People such as Dr. Maxwell and myself ran experiments, caused a few casualties among our test subjects, and generally got nowhere.”
“So you are a spy. You do work for them.”
He shook his head. “I was. I did. I got out of that line of work a long time before any of you were born. Before the Speaker himself was born, as a matter of fact.”
“That was sixty years ago,” I objected.
“It was,” he agreed, “and a date that changed history. Listen, do you know anything about the NOT APPLICABLE readings?”
“What is there to know? Almost everyone gets NA these days.” I thought of Jeremiah and the woman in the scarf. “People with deaths generally don’t last long.”
“But in the early days everyone drew a death. There were no NAs at first.”
“It’s just an age thing. Old people always get deaths. The inventors were old men in lab coats, and they tested it on themselves first.”
When the Professor smiled I could see his white teeth in the mirror. “We weren’t old men at the time, you understand. But it’s true that no one older than the Speaker ever got an NA. Everyone had deaths. That was always one of the great mysteries.”
I quoted the billboards: “The Speaker brought an end to death.”
“Which is nonsense, of course. Plenty of people have died since he took power.”
“He’s responsible for a lot of those deaths.”
The Professor nodded and said, “Naturally. But it is a strange coincidence, don’t you think? Billions of people have been tested, and nobody born before a certain moment draws NOT APPLICABLE. Do you know how much confusion those NAs caused at first? It’s quite the riddle.”
I glanced at Mickey. “We used to have long talks about it.”
With a smile, Mickey said, “Because everyone dies.”
“And the machines are always right,” I finished.
The Professor went on. “Exactly! If the machines say death doesn’t apply to you, then it doesn’t. But death applies to everyone. When the first few NAs appeared, most of us just wrote them off as some kind of occasional malfunction in the machines.”
“Mickey used to think the machines made some people immortal.”
But Mickey shook his head so that his hair fell back over his forehead. “I only speculated. Nobody knows how they make the predictions, right? So maybe they aren’t predicting anything. Maybe they’re causing these deaths. And if they could do that, maybe they could make exceptions. Exemptions. Anyways, I was just speculating.”
“The Speaker used to think something like that himself,” said the Professor. “This was still years and years ago, and he wasn’t the Speaker yet, just an obnoxious politician with some strange ideas. But he started recruiting NAs to his cause. He had some ideas of an invincible army, I suppose.”
I frowned at this. “I thought the Fulfillment Bureau used to round up NAs and try to kill them.”
The Professor answered, “That was later, when there were too many of them for the Speaker to control. And I’m sure at some point it must have occurred to him that his army of immortals was going to outlive him. That was when they started putting them in villages. The Speaker got paranoid. As he tends to do.”
“We used to say that every time the Speaker had a bad dream, a million people died.” The rain was falling steadily now, and the wipers were snicking back and forth. We were back on city streets, bouncing over the splitting asphalt.
After a moment the Professor went on. “I wouldn’t necessarily believe all the stories, though. The ones about NAs lined up in front of firing squads just to experiment, the guns misfiring every time. Remember who we’re talking about. The Fulfillment Bureau are the specialists in creative death enforcement. They may be cruel—”
“They’re monsters.”
“But they play by the rules. They interpret deaths freely, but they always keep it literally true. I don’t think they would touch someone without a death. They’re believers, like the Speaker is. Believers don’t experim
ent.”
I thought about the ones who questioned us. “They let the NAs go. But they killed a woman with CANCER.”
Delia said gently, “You know what that means. The one who killed her was born in July. They hire people for that reason alone. This is what happens when sadists discover the pun.”
“At any rate,” said the Professor, “everyone who ever drew NA is still alive today. They must be. And now the Bureau doesn’t think twice about them. These days they’re only interested in the handful of people left who still have deaths. Particularly the ones who aren’t already terminally ill.” He looked at me again in the mirror. “Such as yourself, as I understand.” He waited, but I didn’t say anything. He pulled the van into an alley between two buildings of grimy brick and stopped the engine. “So we have a start date for NAs, some sixty years ago. And the last people are dying as we speak, which suggests that we are quickly approaching an end date. That’s how I finally figured it out. The NAs won’t die, because they were never born.”
“What are you talking about?”
The old man had his keys in one hand. The other was resting on the door handle. Grinning over his shoulder, he exclaimed, “Time travel!” Then he jumped out into the rain.
I looked at the other two. Delia rolled her eyes and said, “You’d better let him explain. He loves the drama.”
We followed him down a flight of steps into a concrete-paved basement. There were no windows, but a buzzing dim light hung from the middle of the ceiling. “You have electricity here,” I said. “That’s good. I forgot to pick up the batteries.” I got a sideways look from Delia and half a smile from Mickey.
The Professor had arranged himself at a seat at a card table, with the electric light throwing deep shadows on his face. He seemed eager to explain his theories, but I asked, “Where is everybody?” We were alone in the empty space.
Delia looked away. Mickey cleared his throat and said, “We always knew they were going to die fighting.”
The old man was looking at me carefully. “We needed a diversion. They gave us a chance.”
“They were the ones with the guns,” I said slowly. “Your guns. Why? None of us ever used a gun. And you sent them to fight the Speaker’s soldiers? Immortals and the Bureau.” I couldn’t look at any of them. “First Jeremiah. Now Paul, Lawrence, Kim. Everyone. You should have left me in there.”
Leaning back in his chair, the old man said, “Well. When I found your friends here I was under the impression that you all wanted to fight. That you believed in the struggle.”
I slumped into a chair, shaking my head and blinking. “What struggle? We’re just the only ones left. We’re orphans.”
The Professor opened his mouth, but Mickey waved him quiet and reached across the table to touch my arm. “Listen. I know how bad it is. But we can fix it. Just hear what he has to say. He convinced Delia and me. That must mean something, right?” Delia had her arms folded across her chest. She didn’t look convinced.
Still I listened as the Professor told his story. He and Maxwell had worked on time travel together. They thought they had something, but it never worked like they hoped. Then the money dried up and the two of them were out of a job. Maxwell applied some of their ideas to his work with Joyce and made a killing predicting people’s deaths. Victor became a professor. But he kept coming back to time travel. Once he thought he had it figured out, he built a prototype on his own, but there was always some malfunction. So he gave it up and forgot about it for sixty years.
But he realized that the last deaths made up a kind of countdown. When everyone left had NA, something had to happen. Something had to intervene before anyone else met their fate. And we knew something happened not long after the Speaker was born, something that caused people to draw NOT APPLICABLE in the first place. “So,” he finished, “why couldn’t the beginning and the end happen in one moment? In one act. Go back in time, kill the Speaker before he gets started, and in the process replace this whole suffering world with a better one. But one where none of the NAs were ever born.”
I looked at the other two and said, “You bought this?”
Mickey shook his head. “Of course not, not at first. It’s impossible, right? What about the paradoxes? If none of us was ever born, then there was never anyone to go back, no one to kill the Speaker, no one to change the world in the first place. And if it is possible, why hasn’t someone already done it? Why aren’t there whole armies of assassins from the future hunting him? And why stop with the Speaker when we could erase every bad guy from history?”
“Kill the serpent in the garden,” Delia added, “and none of the rest of it matters.”
But the Professor waved his hands. “All reasonable concerns, but not relevant. No one else has tried this because no one else knows it’s possible. I built the prototype in my free time, with spare parts and elbow grease. And I didn’t go public with it. All I had was a time machine that didn’t work. It wasn’t something to brag about.
“As for going farther back, that really is impossible. The prototype has to exist at both ends. And it seems clear that the assassin, whoever it is, doesn’t disappear along with everyone they leave behind. Once they’re in the past, they’re there to stay, and their actions are real. And permanent. It’s the only way the whole thing fits together.”
His voice grew quiet as he said, “That’s why I needed to find someone with a death. Someone young and in good health. No sudden deaths, no violent deaths. Someone who is going to be around for a while. That will be our assassin.”
I was staring at the wall behind him. The others were staring at me. “That’s why you rescued me? My death.”
“I’m told yours is unusually cryptic. Even for the machines.”
“LAST,” I said. “They were going to keep me around until the end, while they killed everyone else. I know they were.”
Nodding, the Professor went on. “Of course it could be last of a group, but I think it means last of all. That’s why I contacted your friends.”
“How did you find them? How did you find out about me?”
“I did this for a living once, a lifetime ago. And I have old friends who made new friends. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re here, and you have the chance to change the world.”
We argued. I didn’t give in without a fight. The Professor had a death, so why couldn’t he do it himself? Or find someone else. I wasn’t a killer. But Victor had all the answers. He couldn’t go back because he was already there, in the past. Existing twice at the same time caused all kinds of logical problems, and he thought it was flat impossible. That was why the prototype never worked for him. Anyone else who was alive sixty years ago was out for the same reason. As for younger people, my friends who had died that day were among the last. In a matter of days the countdown would tick to zero and there would be no one left. There was no time to search for someone else.
Besides, he said, there was my own death to consider. I was in good health, I was safe now from the Fulfillment Bureau, and my reading suggested I wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. My death was in the future, and this world apparently didn’t have a future. It had to be me.
Still I argued for a long time. Whoever reads this should know I didn’t want to do it. If the Speaker had walked in on us while we sat at that table, I would have killed him gladly. Easily. And it isn’t that I worried about killing someone who hadn’t done anything yet, because I know what he would do. Has done. But when I kill him, Mickey and Delia and everyone I’ve ever known will vanish. They’ll all be forgotten, and they deserve to be remembered.
I’m writing this so that someone might know why I eventually gave up arguing and agreed to do it. I’m writing because every word of this is treason and it feels like spitting in the Speaker’s face. Mostly, though, I’m writing to remember everyone who deserves to be remembered. Mickey and Delia. Jeremiah and the woman in the red scarf. All of the victims, all of the orphans.
Late that night,
after the arguments and the persuasion, I went to bed. I had my own room there, my own bed and my own lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. It was nicer than a lot of the places we’ve stayed. I was sitting there, staring up at the lightbulb and the paint chipping from the ceiling, when Mickey knocked on the door.
He had his reading in his hand, one of the new ones printed in the official passbooks with the seal pressed into the cover. “Can I come in?” I nodded. He sat on the edge of the bed and thumbed open the little book, but he didn’t look at it or at me. He was staring at the wall.
After a moment, he said, “Do you know why I never wanted to get this?” He waved the passbook absently. “I felt like it took something from us. Like there was something we used to have. Free will, I guess. Maybe it’s stupid, but I felt like fate was something the machines created, because knowing made it real. So I didn’t want to know. I didn’t want to make it real.
“But then they started pulling people off the street to check their readings, so I went in. I was all set to walk out again without ever looking, but I think they could tell. They gathered around, three of them, and read it out as soon as it printed. NOT APPLICABLE. And I felt like I dodged a bullet.”
He looked at me for the first time, and then looked down at the book in his hand. “And now—” he started.
I think I know what he meant. It was bad enough to face your death. Never living was much worse. But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to tell him.
Suddenly he smiled and he was Mickey again. He ran his hand through his hair and said, “I have a theory. All of the last sixty years is going to get cut off, right? It’ll be like a closed loop, and you’ll be outside it. So you’ll be free again. What could the machines know about someone in another universe? That’s probably why they were so vague about you. Maybe no one will ever invent a machine to predict deaths. It’ll probably be impossible in the normal flow of time. So everyone will be free!” He was grinning.
This Is How You Die Page 40
