by Thomas Locke
He had no trouble being alone. He played games inside his head, pulling up books he’d read or math puzzles he’d been working on, spreading them out until they blocked most of what was going down, out beyond his safety zone. The doctor said Trent had an eidetic memory. But Trent’s memory games vanished when the door across the dusty lane banged open, and his mother stumbled out, and there was blood everywhere.
The cat did a cat thing, there one moment, gone the next. Then the guy came out. Waving a gun in one hand, his knife in the other. He spotted Trent. And took aim.
Which was the point at which Trent always woke up.
Only not this time.
This time, the dream shifted.
Trent knew he was still dreaming. Instantly he recognized the setting. He was seated behind his desk at one corner of the podium in the lecture hall where he now taught two undergrad classes a week.
This new dream-image was crystal clear. In a way, the image seemed more vivid than reality. Because Trent was able to look at things inside himself from a dispassionate distance. He realized the Ojai nightmare had been growing in frequency, following a trend that he only now saw was logical. Strange how he needed to be inside yet another dream to perceive this. He was a scientist. He was a specialist at identifying trends. But he had remained blind to this one. Until now.
Which was when things grew seriously twisted.
Trent realized there was another guy standing in front of the blackboard. And this other guy was himself. Trent Major. Only older.
The older Trent turned toward him and said, “Pay attention.”
Trent did not think the voice. He heard it. The voice was not loud. But it held such power Trent’s entire body resonated from the force. Like a nuclear whisper.
He watched himself write a string of mathematical symbols on the board. Trent was captured by the idea of how vividly real this all appeared, sitting at his desk, feeling the scarred wood beneath his fingertips, watching an older version of himself write on his blackboard.
Then the older self was finished. He turned to Trent and said, “Check it out.”
Trent studied the symbols awhile and decided, “That is amazing.”
“You want amazing,” his older self replied, “get a load of this.”
Suddenly a computer screen floated in the air before Trent’s face. Only there was no computer attached to the picture. Applied physicists had been working on this for twenty years, how to do away with the need for a physical screen of any kind. The world was desperate for a way to project true three-dimensional images. In order to do this, the picture had to be separated from the current two-dimensional surface. Trent reached out and pushed his hand through the image. He felt a faint tingle run through his fingers. Which, given the fact that he knew he was still dreaming, defined bizarre.
“Stop fooling around,” his older self said. “This is important.”
Trent was carried through five scenes. With the appearance of each new image, he expelled a sudden breath. The pictures were so powerful they punched him straight in the soul.
Then the images were gone. Trent watched as the older version of himself crossed the dais. Trent heard the scrape of his shoes across the wooden floor, a sound he knew vividly from his classes.
The older Trent moved in so close he filled Trent’s field of vision entirely. His words now carried the same impact as the images. “Are you listening to me?”
Trent wanted to ask, “Like I have a choice?” But the older version of himself held such force, he couldn’t even nod his head. He just shivered. Or tried to.
The older Trent moved closer still, and rocked his world with the words, “What you just saw? Make this happen. Do it now.”
3
Charlie Hazard stood in the Lugano airport parking lot. Campione, the village where his team was now based, was a tiny Italian enclave surrounded by Switzerland. Milan was the closest major airport. The municipal airport was intended mostly for private jets. But four times a day, small regional carriers arrived from Zurich, Paris, Frankfurt, and Rome. The Lugano airport’s setting was idyllic, pristine, extremely Swiss. Snow-capped peaks clutched at passing clouds. The April wind was laced with glacial ice. The parking lot separated the airport from a five-star spa hotel. Even the trees bordering the hotel grounds looked manicured. The place was so quiet Charlie could hear a radio inside the hangar on the runway’s far end.
Charlie had worked in Switzerland any number of times. The orderliness had always struck him as artificial, a lid that could not quite seal the seething cauldron underneath. Ticino, the province of Switzerland where Italian was the principal language, was a haven for dirty money. Charlie’s memories of the place were filled with killers who assumed they could mask bloodstains with tailored suits and expensive cars and lakefront villas.
The flight from Rome descended from a deep-blue sky. Charlie waited by his Range Rover as the jet wheeled toward the miniature terminal and powered down. The Tibetan woman was the last to emerge. Her face was pinched, her look as resentful as her tone.
Dor Jen handed Charlie her lone bag and said, “I am not coming back, Charlie.”
“Thank you for making the trip.”
“I mean what I say.” She pulled herself up and into the Range Rover’s high seat. “It doesn’t matter what Gabriella feels like she needs to tell me.”
Dor Jen was a medical doctor who had formerly served as Gabriella’s chief scientist. Their team had been together almost two years before the split, which had been diplomatic and quiet and explosive. Dr. Gabriella Speciale was a psychoanalyst who had developed a concept so revolutionary they had hired Charlie Hazard to keep them alive. Dor Jen and her group had objected to Gabriella’s slow, measured approach to the process. Dor Jen was still concerned with survival. But she also wanted to complete her research before the enemy tracked them down.
Charlie shut her door and went around and slipped behind the wheel. As he started the car, Dor Jen told him, “We are doing important work. Vital.”
Charlie pulled out of the parking lot and took the highway south.
“I’ve talked it over with the others,” Dor Jen went on. “We all agree. We’re better off staying where we are.”
The highway skirted Lake Lugano. The still waters reflected a mirror image of the sky and mountains. The city was a jewel nestled in green and blue.
Dor Jen said, “We have established a very careful cover. We have told no one of our real purpose. This serves us well. We do not need to worry about impacting our research through the power of suggestion.”
Charlie did not respond. He figured it was better for Dor Jen to get the arguments out of the way before they arrived. She had obviously spent a lot of time practicing. Better she release them here and now.
“Even if Gabriella did manage to resolve the other issues, there is no Swiss clinic that would serve our needs. This region is simply too tightly controlled for us to do our work.” Dor Jen glared at him. “It doesn’t matter what Gabriella says. We are staying in Rome.”
The research team led by Gabriella Speciale had begun with trial subjects drawn from two neighboring universities. Within six weeks, their quiet little enclave was inundated. Word spread through the university systems of three countries. An invading army of eager students overwhelmed everything and everyone. They filled the local campsites. Their clamor alerted the enemy. Something Charlie had always assumed was inevitable. So they relocated to Switzerland, where the ultra-cautious Swiss police offered the hope of safety. At least for a little while.
Anyone who arrived without being invited would never be accepted as a trial subject. Strict protocols were set in place. But by then it was too late. Their work had come to the attention of the local authorities. Questions were asked, and asked again. The chance to work in relative secrecy was lost. Which meant moving beyond the most basic level of research was dangerous. The unwanted attention threatened their very existence. They felt eyes everywhere.
Dor Jen and
her small team found the atmosphere stifling. She was a medical doctor licensed to practice in Italy. She had been designing a series of experiments intended to apply their work in the field of holistic medicine. Holistic medicine was the point at which Western and Eastern medicines came closest to functioning in parallel.
But there were problems. What Dor Jen proposed was, to say the least, extremely controversial. Charlie doubted there was anything that might have raised the Swiss alarms any faster.
Gabriella ordered Dor Jen to hold off. She insisted the team maintain its cautious pace until, hopefully, the authorities turned their attention elsewhere. Dor Jen chafed for four months. Then she opted to move. She did so with silent efficiency. Taking six others with her. Including Julio, Charlie’s number two on the security detail. Charlie had no idea it was happening until the morning they left. So much for his powers of observation.
Dor Jen said, “If Gabriella starts arguing with me again, I will leave immediately for the airport.”
Charlie took the Campione turnoff and did not respond.
“I mean it, Charlie. You can’t keep me here against my will.”
Charlie drove through the village and climbed the winding road that rimmed the lakefront. He took the electronic control from the compartment between the seats, pointed it through the windscreen, and hit the button. The tall metal gates slid open. He drove around the front grounds and parked beside the ornamental pond.
Dor Jen stared at the villa’s blank exterior. “I should not have come.”
Charlie walked around and opened her door. He led her around to the side door. “You did right.”
Dor Jen entered, tasted the air, and sensed it immediately. “What’s the matter?”
“This way.”
“Where are the trial subjects?”
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
He pointed her down the hall. “Give me thirty seconds more and you’ll understand everything.”
The villa had been built in the late sixties. Downstairs, a central hall dissected the house into front public rooms and rear private chambers. The downstairs bedrooms had been turned into offices, technology support, and records. The remaining team ate and assembled around a long refectory table that dominated the living room. The formal dining room and smaller parlor now served as test chambers. These two rooms were connected by a narrow butler’s pantry. Charlie had stripped out the mahogany cabinets and installed monitoring equipment and one-way mirrors. Normally the kitchen and the front parlor were jammed with excited test subjects and bustling team members. By this time of day, the front porch and rear gardens contained the overflow. Today, however, the villa held an oppressive stillness.
“Charlie, what has happened?”
He knocked on the door leading from the hallway into the small parlor. At a sound from within, he opened it and said, “She’s here.”
Gabriella rushed out. She gave no sign she noticed how Dor Jen flinched away from her approach. She was too busy reaching for the Tibetan lady, embracing her, holding her with fierce desperation. Whispering, “Thank God. Oh, thank God. I was afraid you wouldn’t . . .”
Dor Jen’s remaining defiance vanished at the sight of Gabriella’s tears. “What is it?”
Even when caught in the vise of impossibilities, Gabriella had the power to light up the room. She had almond eyes tilted at an impossible angle. Dark hair. A body that turned jeans and a T-shirt into a magnet. Charlie had loved her from the very first breath. Maybe before.
Which made her professional distance a burden that grew heavier with every passing day.
Gabriella wiped her face, took hold of Dor Jen’s hand, and said, “Come with me.”
“How long has he been like this?”
Charlie checked his watch, did a rapid calculation. “Fifty-eight hours and counting.”
“Has a doctor seen him?”
“Impossible.” Gabriella resumed the position Charlie had drawn her from. She had scarcely moved from the chair pulled up beside the bed. She reattached herself to the hand lying limply upon the covers and addressed the figure lying in the narrow bed. “To make this public would ruin us and destroy everything.”
Charlie said, “One of our new team members is a nurse. She’s seen to him so far.”
Dor Jen leaned over the supine figure. She checked his pulse. “Slow but steady. I did not bring my instruments. I thought . . .”
“We’ve got the basics.” Charlie held up the nurse’s emergency kit. “Make a list of anything else you need.”
Dor Jen peeled back one eyelid. “Can you bring that lamp in closer, please. All right, that’s enough.” She checked the pulse in his neck. Then she unbuttoned his shirt and fitted the stethoscope into her ears. “Breathing steady, lungs apparently clear.” She rose and made a process of straightening his clothes. “Tell me what happened.”
“We’re not entirely sure,” Charlie said.
“We know enough.” Gabriella did not clear her face so much as smear the liquid. She had aged twenty years in two days. “Brett signed himself in for a trial.”
“Who counted him up?”
“Jorge. They’ve been working together. Brett has been trying to measure the difference between physical time and temporal observations made during a trial. He thought perhaps . . .” Gabriella stopped. “It’s all my fault.”
Charlie started to argue. As he had been for the past two days. Dor Jen watched him stifle his comments, then asked Gabriella, “How could this possibly be your fault?”
“I was supposed to record a series of controlled instructions for him. I let other things get in the way.”
Charlie said, “Brett gave her almost fifty pages. Detailed stuff, counting down at specific time points. It would have taken hours to record it all. Days. She’s been swamped. You know what the students have been like.”
“I know.” Dor Jen checked the leads attached to Brett’s head and chest. “Were the monitors running?”
“They’ve been on since he started.”
Dor Jen stepped into the former butler’s pantry. Charlie remained where he was, holding up the wall beside the door. He didn’t need to see the screens again.
Dor Jen emerged. “His vital signs have remained constant?”
“What you see is what you get,” Charlie replied. “The guy hasn’t changed since it happened.”
She checked the IV. Saline and glucose. Standard therapy for shock. Charlie remembered that much from his bad old days.
Gabriella looked at Dor Jen. “Is he dying?”
Dor Jen sat on the side of the bed. Her weight was scarcely enough to crease the covers they had laid over Brett. “Tell me what Jorge said.”
“They were trying out his new instructions. Jorge is very careful. He followed the clock, read out what was written. I know because I’ve listened to the tape. He hit the instructions Brett laid out as precisely as humanly possible. The trial lasted eighteen minutes. Jorge counted him back down.” Charlie pointed at the bed. “Brett never returned.”
Dor Jen said to Gabriella, “I know what you want. It could be very dangerous.”
Gabriella nodded. “Will you try and bring him around?”
Dor Jen studied the figure on the bed. “Of course.”
4
Shane Schearer came out of her final class at the University of California at Santa Barbara’s business school and steamed down the main hallway. Beyond the building’s entrance beckoned California’s idea of paradise. Palm trees lined the two-lane road that rimmed the UCSB’s inner campus. The road was jammed with two-wheeled traffic. Thousands of bicycles flashed in the sunlight. Cars were not allowed on these roads. The campus was as eco-friendly as an imperfect world permitted. Shane had no problem with the California lifestyle. Just the attitudes that came with it.
She checked the time on her cell phone. The only people on campus who still used watches were the older professors and the sorority queens who sought any reason to add more bling. Sh
ane pushed through the glass doors and parked herself in the shade. Ten minutes and the streets would empty out. Right now, at the end of classes, the bike traffic was borderline suicidal. UCSB undergrads cycled with the same self-centered blindness that they applied to most of life. The thousands of other bikes were inconsequential. Cyclists cut and swerved without a glance. The previous week Shane had seen an accident that took down over a hundred bikes, resulting in three broken arms and a chorus of bruised egos.
Shane had come to UCSB because the business school had offered her a free ride. Times like these, after she had coasted through another wasted day of classes she could do in her sleep, the admittance letter from Yale still branded her soul. But she had maxed out on her student loans. She had also received a truly nasty letter from the federal government after pretending she was a man by the same name and borrowing still more so as to attend Oxford’s international finance summer school. The feds’ letter had arrived the same week as Yale’s scholarship committee had turned her down. The feds had basically threatened her with public dismemberment if she took out a cent more in debt or even thought about skipping town.
These days, Shane didn’t like herself all that much. She remained trapped in one of two speeds. Either she coasted with everybody else, caught inside a world that lacked any hint of sharp-edged reality. Or she had her bumper shoved up tight against whoever was ahead in line, pushing and shoving and shouting at them to speed up. Seven months into her MBA, Shane moved around the university in her very own isolation bubble. UCSB’s business school was all about teamwork. The word had become a little poison pill shoved daily down her throat. Shane couldn’t decide which would kill her first, her inability to fit in or her loneliness.
Then the guy rose from the bench on the other side of the road.
She noticed him for two reasons. First, because he studied her with a gaze that could only be described as intense. Second, because of how he crossed the road as though the bikes were smoke. The cyclists shouted and braked and swerved and shouted some more. The guy didn’t even blink. He just kept watching her and walking.
