Greek Key

by Spangler, K. B.

  Santino sighed, deep and long. “Okay,” he said, poking the table next to the fragment in its box. “Do I have to remind you guys that people do really, really shitty things to get their hands on advanced technology?”

  Sparky’s and Rachel’s eyes went cold, and maybe a little dangerous.

  “Didn’t think so,” Santino said. “What’s known about the Mechanism is incomplete. There are pieces missing. If this fragment is part of the clock, there’s enough writing on it to help fill in those blanks.

  “The Mechanism was unique to its era,” he continued. “It might—might!—still contain information that we don’t have today. Celestial events that were written into the calendar, for example. Maybe even mathematical formulae we’ve never seen in practice. This fragment could answer a lot of questions.”

  “All right,” Sparky said. He was already in risk management mode. Santino must have convinced him when Rachel and I were out of the room. “What can we do to help?”

  “Get the word out,” Santino said. “OACET has connections. We need to learn if any private collectors have requested detailed information of the Mechanism over the last five years.”

  “I’ll put someone on it,” Sparky said, holding out his hand. “Thanks for bringing this to our attention.”

  Sparky is a master at throwing people out. He and Santino shook hands, and he even gave Rachel a brief no-hard-feelings hug.

  Rachel winked at me on her way out.

  Rachel and Santino took a moment to tape up the plastic tarp over the hole where our front door used to be. They did a much better job of it than I would have—being married to the Cyborg King does have its perks. Or maybe they did it just because they needed to see themselves succeed at something, and securing a piece of plastic in place was about as good as it was going to get for them today.

  It’s sort of heartbreaking how everybody’s just trying to do the best they can.

  Sparky waited until they were in Santino’s car before he sighed and dropped his head into his hands. “What did you and Rachel talk about?”

  “I guess she’s decided to treat it like a game,” I said. “She’s got Army DNA, Sparky. You’ve told her she doesn’t need to know, so she won’t force the issue. But if she can figure it out on her own from the clues we leave lying around…”

  “Great,” he muttered. “Just great. She already sees too much as it is.”

  “Yup,” I said, as I reclaimed my coffee cup. “We’re generally screwed. She’s trustworthy, though. Maybe we should just tell her and get it over with.”

  He shook his head, his dark blond hair sliding back and forth between his fingers. “Not with this,” he said. “It’s too big. Not unless we don’t have a choice.”

  “Right.” It came out a little on the sarcastic side, and Sparky pulled his head out of his hands.

  “What?” he asked.

  “It’s starting to blend together again,” I told him. “OACET and…and everything. That old clock is proof.”

  “Yeah. We might not know where Rachel’s case is going,” he muttered. “But I have a good idea where it started.”

  “I’m way ahead of you,” I replied. “Do you have an early day tomorrow?”

  “Always,” he groaned, scrubbing his forehead with his fingertips again.

  “Okay,” I said as I stood, and gave him a quick kiss on the crown of his head. “Go get some sleep. I’ll make the call.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Let’s start with time travel.

  (I know, I know, most people tell stories from beginning to end. I can’t do that. I need to start with the fundamentals, because when time travel is involved, you cannot pick a single beginning without going screaming bonkers.)

  Time’s elemental. The idea we have any control over time itself is insane. We might as well try to control the ocean. We build docks and clocks, sure, but those are just us thumping our chests at the infinite.

  We like the idea of time travel because time is possibilities decanted. If we could move through time, we tell ourselves, we could change the past, control the present, manipulate the future…

  Nope.

  The idea of time travel is great. Actual time travel, however, is bullshit, and when I say that time travel is bullshit, you should listen. I’m something of an authority on this subject. I can’t travel through time myself, but I know a bunch of people who can. And do.

  Well, not so often anymore (although when you’re talking about time travel, words like “often” and “anymore” get a little clunky). Not after (clunk-clunk) Sparky and I had a long sit-down with them and made them tell us the rules.

  There are only three rules for time travel, and they’re fairly simple.

  First, there’s no such thing as paradox. Time doesn’t allow itself to be treated like a toy. There is no possible way you can change events. You aren’t that powerful. Nothing within the scope of human influence is that powerful. When you play with time, you play by its rules. Ask your grandmother for a picture of how she looked back in high school before you debate this point with me.

  Second, you can only go forward. The past is fixed. Since going back in time would change history due to observer effect, it simply cannot happen.

  Third, you can go forward and return to the present at the same moment you left it. You can spend as much time in the future as you want, but you shouldn’t count on that particular future coming to pass. Everything is possible, and everything is in a constant state of change. You have a one hundred percent chance of traveling to what could happen, and an almost zero percent chance of landing in the future that will be.

  So, why bother to time travel at all?

  The trick, my time-traveling friends told us, is to follow probabilities. If you track something that exists right this moment forward in time, you’ll see the possible futures for that specific object. The longer you follow it forward, the more possibilities you’ll encounter. Stretch the trip into months or years or decades or centuries, and there’ll be too many possible futures to find the one which will come to pass.

  But if you keep your trips short—say, an hour or two at most— then you’re much more likely to see realistic probabilities. Think of it as bristles on a broom. The closer you are to the shaft, the tighter the bristles are bound. Move away from that tight center line, and the bristles may travel in the same general direction, but there’s a lot more space between them. By staying close to your point of origin, and by following one specific object, you’re limiting deviations.

  There’s also an important corollary.

  Pay attention.

  Ready?

  If that object is significant—seriously significant!—within history, then it’s more likely that following it forward won’t have the same degree of uncertainty. Things like volcanoes. Massive dinosaur-ending asteroids…

  The Gutenberg Bible.

  If you follow these significant objects forward through time, you’ll be able to trace their paths in history. They’ll still be multiple futures, there’s no escaping that, but you’re likely to see outcomes that will come to pass as a direct result of that object. Significant objects are bound into the human experience; they’ve defined it, and once they pop up, you’ll never see one without the other.

  Imagine you’re a time traveler, and you follow the Gutenberg Bible forward. You’d see massive societal shifts. Literacy, communications, information… All of this evolves from something as stupidly simple as movable type.

  Now, imagine it’s six hundred years later and you want to see what’s going to happen to all of these new cyborgs walking around. Our buddies followed Sparky’s implant forward. They did this a lot, by the way, both before and after we went public. They wanted to know what types of new technology might evolve from this first generation. What they found…ugh.

  They found the impact of the implant everywhere. Ev-er-y-where. They were ubiquitous as cell phones and computers. As was the peripheral equipment. You know, embedded hard dr
ives which could be coded to a specific person and whatever.

  And the changes to society…?

  As I said…ugh.

  Sparky and I decided we needed to call quits on getting our information from time travel. Not that the technique doesn’t work! It does. It absolutely does. Trust me on this. I made a fortune on day-trading this way, before Sparky and I decided that having access to infinite futures was far more dangerous than having no access at all. But time travel is not a sure thing: no matter how close to the present you stay, no matter how carefully and cautiously you follow that one object forward, you’re still going to trip over different possibilities. I’ve taken a lot of tumbles in the market on stocks that seemed like sure things. Once Sparky and I started playing on a level where lives were at stake, we asked our time-traveling buddies to stop. We didn’t want to hear about the mights and coulds and maybes when the only certainty was that the other OACET Agents were counting on us to keep them alive.

  Our buddies didn’t like it when we told them to stop. Power’s fun, and knowing pieces of the future is about as powerful as you can get. We couldn’t just ask them to not tell us what they saw, either. No, they needed to stop. Our buddies give us a shit-ton of good advice and we want to hear what they have to say, but if they’re still poking around the future, this advice would be tainted by what they’ve seen.

  Well, maybe.

  This whole scenario is tripping dangerously close to paradox, so maybe it wouldn’t have mattered at all…or maybe it would’ve changed the outcome completely.

  Let me walk you through the problem. If Sparky and I made decisions based on advice that was informed by what our friends had observed, then we would be making decisions which would affirm the future as they had seen it. It’s like hearing that your dining room will be such a nice color of blue once you paint it, and then deciding to buy cerulean paint. Ipso facto paradox. Since time doesn’t tolerate paradox, we’re pretty sure there are two outcomes: one, this decision would be one we would have arrived at on our own, without help, or two, the decision is completely the reverse of what we would have decided. We don’t know which of these is accurate—or if they’re both accurate at different points in time—but in either case, it’s a good enough reason to not bother with advice from the future.

  See what I mean? Bullshit, all of it, and distracting bullshit at that. It’s hard to live in the moment when you’re dealing with endless possibilities and second-guessing your own thoughts. Not to mention that if you invest your energy in a possible future that doesn’t come to pass, it’s a hard knock to your confidence. Sparky and me, we weighed the pros and cons. Then we weighed them again. And again. And at the end of a lot of talking and arguing and actual fist-swinging fighting, we decided time travel was the equivalent of snake oil: total bullshit, except when you have a squeaky snake.

  Time travel is nonsense for so many reasons, and the lack of opportunity to apply common sense is a big one. Instead of relying on the dubious outcomes of time travel, we just made sure our snakes don’t squeak. We told all of our time-traveling buddies to knock it off. We said that if they wanted to play in our reality, then they should stay in our reality, and no more gallivanting off to hypothetical quasi-potential futures or whatever.

  They…

  Well.

  They weren’t happy about it. Giving these guys an ultimatum is like shoving your hand into a garbage disposal and hoping they aren’t in the mood to flick the switch. But they agreed to stop. We had to spell it out for them using tiny words and motherfuckin’ flowcharts, but they did agree.

  (Between you and me, I’m sure they still slip through time, but at least it’s mostly on beer runs. Future booze is a-maz-ing! Alcohol is one of those universal constants. The way our friends tell it, humanity’s historical record is defined by the set evolution of alcoholic beverages. And yes, this is sort of paradox-y, because no matter what the future holds, I know it’ll involve distilleries and a barley-centric civilization, but it gives me a headache when I think about it.)

  Now.

  Ancient out-of-place mechanisms, time travel…

  I hope you see where I’m going with this. A couple millennia ago, someone decided that gears were pretty nifty and wanted to see what would become of them. And they either got really lucky with picking the right future, or gears are like the Gutenberg Bible.

  I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.

  As I mentioned, I’m the world’s second-worst psychic. I know the world’s worst psychic, and he’s awful on principle. If he ever decides to develop his abilities, I’d immediately be bumped down to the bottom of the psychic roster.

  I do have one specialty, though. I’m great with the dead.

  This is mostly accidental. For the longest time, I didn’t think I was actually talking to ghosts. I sort of…

  Look, shit happens. Back in college, some asshole slipped me extra-strength LSD instead of a roofie.

  Then, suddenly? A dormant part of my brain flipped on, and I could see ghosts.

  Not just ghosts, but the ghosts of really famous dead Americans.

  It worked out okay, I guess, except my best friend and surrogate dad has been dead for more than two hundred years.

  Or, another way to think of it is that I can summon the ghost of Benjamin Franklin whenever I damn well please.

  I hope my rambling about time travel makes more sense now. You and me, we can’t hop into multiple potential futures whenever we please. A ghost, though? The image of a person made from powerful purposeful energy?

  Not such a big deal for them.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The floor was icy under my bare feet as I walked towards the construction zone. The home invasion dudes with their assorted hardware had cut a giant hole in the plastic separating the main house from the site of the future greenhouse, and the cold had settled in. I taped it closed as best I could; I was a lot sloppier about it than Rachel and Santino had been with the hole in the front door, but I was mostly killing time.

  I thought about Ben while I ripped tiny slabs of tape from the roll with my teeth. He usually comes when I call, but I try to avoid that unless it’s an emergency. Ben has a life (haha) of his own, and it’s rude to yank him away from it. But if I’m alone, and if he’s occupying a large space in my thoughts, he’ll usually pop in on his own.

  He says we’re linked. An interesting word, linked. It’s what Sparky and the other Agents call their networked connections. Sparky says that if another Agent is thinking about him, he can feel it. It’s got to be sustained thinking, though. He says that back when they were new, he used to feel it when another Agent thought about his name, or his eye color, or some other trivial detail that came up a zillion times a minute. These days, they’ve gotten better at keeping each other out, and now they have to concentrate to make contact.

  I’m not quite sure what it means to be linked to Ben. He almost never talks about what happens in the Afterlife. Most of the ghostly factoids I’ve learned about death and dying have been assembled over my years with him, a puzzle made up of pieces from a million conversations. I do know that while the link between Sparky and the Agents goes both ways, it’s not like that with me and Ben. He might be able to feel me, or hear me when I call, but I have no clue what’s going on with him unless he tells me.

  I’m pretty sure he can’t read my mind, though. Even the best psychics in the world can’t pick up much more than emotion, and for all that Benjamin Franklin was in life, he was never psychic.

  All of this was running through my head when Ben popped into our dimension. The sky didn’t split open or anything nearly as dramatic. There was a quick puff of wind, and he was just there.

  “Dearest,” he said.

  If you need to know what he looks like, do a Google search and check out a portrait or two. He hasn’t changed much. Hasn’t changed at all, really. Same receding hairline, same tiny wire-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. Same clothes, too, except for the sneakers. He discovered
Chucks in the 1940s, and never went back to hard leather shoes.

  Oh, and like all ghosts, he’s bright blue.

  “Hey, Ben.” I dropped the spool of tape and moved in for a hug. It doesn’t matter if he’s mostly made of light and the occasional stray molecule; when I get a hug from him, it’s always warm and solid. When I broke away, he took a look at my face, and knew.

  “Not a social call, then,” he said quietly. “What has happened?”

  “C’mon,” I said, waving for him to follow me as I headed for the nearest heating vent. “Us fleshy folk are freezing.”

  The air around me grew thick and comfortable, as if a wool blanket had been wrapped around me. I grinned up at him. “I’d forgotten about that trick.”

  “We are a long way from your college drinking days.”

  “Everyone used to wonder why I never froze to death during bar crawls,” I said, remembering how he used to shape the air around me, a bubble of protection from the elements. Nobody was ever the wiser. Ben was one of the most powerful ghosts around, but he was almost always invisible to everyone except psychics. It made him a handy guardian angel, especially if you were the type of college kid who was prone to acting without thinking…

  Ahem.

  We snuggled together against a stack of lumber, me curled within the crook of his arm. Ben waved a hand, and two cups of coffee appeared. Mine was light and sweet, and the mug fit my hand like it had been made for me.

  (By the way, if you’re wondering what it’s like to have a best friend who’s a ghost, let me assure you that it’s flippin’ fantastic!)

  “What’s troubling you?” he asked after a few minutes of catchup chatter.

  “The Antikythera Mechanism,” I said. “Out-of-place artifacts in general, I guess.”

  “Ah, yes,” he said, nodding. “God save the living from dead men with a sense of humor.”

  “I thought that was you.”

  He laughed. “That shipwreck was long before even my time, Dearest. But yes, my people have been known to seed the imagination.”