The Day Before

by Liana Brooks

  She would have tried looking impressed, but it would have been faked. It didn’t matter since Dr. Emir was racing out of the door toward her when she turned. “Agent Rose! Agent Rose! Yes. Yes, of course, the paladin rushing to the rescue. It makes perfect sense. You will help me.” He grabbed her hand with sweaty palms.

  The little man who looked like a skinny Santa was thinner than she remembered, disheveled, shaking. “Dr. Emir, are you hurt?”

  “No. No. Not yet. I haven’t been hurt yet.” His eyes darted left and right, as if he expected someone to grab him at any moment. With a startled jump, he dragged her back to his lab. “Not safe. Not safe out there. Someone might see me.”

  “That’s what security guards are for.” Sam tugged her hand, ineffectually trying to break free. “Don’t you like the security guards, Dr. Emir? They keep you safe. Keep your work safe.”

  Dr. Emir let out a manic sound. After a minute, Sam realized he was laughing. “They don’t protect me. They watch me. For him. This is my prison.” He rubbed a gnarled brown hand along the door lintel. “This is my prison of my own making,” he said sadly, almost as if he were speaking to himself. “I will die here.”

  Sam frowned in worry. “Dr. Emir, are you not feeling well? Were you threatened?”

  “Threatened?” His head snapped up. For a moment, his eyes were distant and disoriented, then he shook himself back to the present. “Threatened, dear me, no. Why would you ask, Agent Rose?”

  “You just said this was a prison, and you were going to die here.” And because I want to kill you, so I’m just assuming others do, too.

  “Oh.” He gave a light laugh, and it sounded forced. The smile on his lips never touched his eyes. “A figure of speech. I was being metaphorical. I meant I devoted my life to this work. Everything I do must be done. I must go forward with it. I have gone forward with it.” Mania gripped his expression again, then slipped away.

  Sam waited cautiously by the door. If he lunged, she was running, high heels or no.

  Dr. Emir gave her a tight smile. “Why are you here, Agent Rose?”

  “You wanted to see someone from the bureau.”

  “Yes, but why you? Agent Marrins is handling this case. I am well aware of this fact. He has impressed that on me several times.”

  Really? When? “Agent Marrins was busy, so he sent me.”

  “To speak for him?”

  Sam shrugged. “I suppose. We work for the same ­people.”

  “Oh.” For some reason, that seemed to disappoint Emir. His shoulders drooped, and he looked at the floor. “Very well. I will explain. Marrins understands the importance of my work better than you, I expect.”

  “I’m sure,” Sam murmured, keeping the sarcasm out of her voice.

  Dr. Emir wrung his hands in worry. “It is critical, what I do. It will save lives. I don’t agree with what your senior agent thinks. I don’t think the machine can be made to bend the way he suggests. But it will save lives.”

  “That’s the important thing.” Stating platitudes sounded good right now.

  Emir nodded. “That is the most important thing. But, here.” He pointed at the strange black box he’d shown her on the previous visit. “You see what is wrong, obviously.”

  Sam raised her eyebrows. “Oh. Golly. You’re right. Look at that.” She looked over at Emir for a clue.

  Strutting like a gamecock, the doctor pointed at a dial on his bulky machine. “You see this? You see? Right here?” A scowl etched itself on his face.

  She inspected the little dial, green on a field of black. “Yes.”

  “What color is it?” Emir demanded, as if the color weren’t blindingly obvious.

  “Green.”

  “Yes!” he yelled.

  “Is it not supposed to be green?”

  “Ah.” Emir rocked back on his heels, thumbs hooked through his red suspenders. “So good to meet a halfway-­intelligent bureau agent. So very pleasing. So very rare. No. This dial is meant to be blue. I made it blue. My mother’s favorite color. It was blue three days ago. Now, it is green.” He laid the information out with solemn dignity.

  Sam shook her head. “Is the dial important? Rare? Expensive? I don’t understand why the color change matters, Doctor.”

  “Someone has touched my research!” he shrieked.

  “Did you talk to the graduate students? Perhaps one of them knocked the dial loose and replaced it with a new one. Maybe they painted it. A practical joke, perhaps?”

  Emir pursed his lips, fuming. “This is no joke. I have told the detective time and time again. I am being threatened. This is a subtle and diabolical reminder that I am being pursued. The dial should be blue!”

  “Fine.” Sam stepped away from the machine before whatever leaking radiation from the box that had permeated Dr. Emir’s brain cells affected her. “Change the dial. It shouldn’t be that hard.”

  “It’s evidence!”

  “Yes—­of a green dial. To be anything more, I need records, proof the original dial was blue, video from security.” She didn’t really, but she hoped he’d think that to be too much and drop this ridiculousness. Who cares about a stupid dial?

  Emir stared up at the video monitor as if he’d never seen it before. “Video, of course. I had not thought of that.”

  Sam nodded. “If security will release the video—­”

  “No, no,” Emir said abruptly. He waved her request away. His face suddenly took on a paternal smile full of goodwill. “My mind, it’s not what it was. The dreams become reality, the reality becomes dreams. I forget myself. So sorry to take your time. May I show you out? Buy you lunch? A T-­shirt from the gift shop?”

  “There isn’t a gift shop, Dr. Emir.”

  “No? That must have been my dream then. Silly me. Perhaps we should build one, then I can buy you a T-­shirt.”

  “That’s too kind.” Sam danced out of his reach before he could infect her with the crazy virus. “Is your intern around? I’d like to have a word with him if he’s free.”

  “Henry?” Emir frowned. “Yes, he should be arriving at the lab shortly.”

  “Great, I’ll just wait then. Have the security guards tell Henry I’m looking for him as soon as he checks in.”

  Sam waited in an empty conference room for Henry Troom to arrive. Her gut instinct said there was something wrong here. Not the color of the dial per se, but the whole feel of the lab. Something was ever so subtly wrong.

  There was a knock on the door, and Henry walked in, hair mussed and tie askew. “Agent Rose? The security guard said you needed me for something urgent.”

  “Not urgent, just a few questions to clarify what’s happening.” She took a seat and smiled sweetly. “Dr. Emir called me in this morning because he was worried that something had been tampered with in his lab.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Henry said. “I told him the balloons weren’t my fault. Nate did that.”

  “Dr. Emir didn’t mention balloons. He was concerned because the dial on his machine was a different color. You helped construct the machine, didn’t you?”

  “Oh.” Henry pulled a chair out and sat down. “No, I didn’t work on the original prototype. The one we have in the lab is a fourth working model that Dr. Emir has made.”

  “Do you know what color the dial on the machine is?”

  “Green.”

  “Has it always been green?”

  “Ever since I started working here. Green for go.” Henry shrugged. “Why?”

  “Dr. Emir insists the dial was blue three days ago.”

  Henry sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Was he talking really fast? Did he mention dreams or anything bizarre?”

  “As a matter of fact, yes. He offered to buy me a T-­shirt from a nonexistent gift shop.”

  “Are you taking notes on this?” Henry a
sked.

  “Not yet, should I be?”

  “It’s just . . . I don’t want to get Dr. Emir in trouble. Government grants are hard to get, and . . .” He frowned and looked away.

  “You don’t want my report to strip Dr. Emir of his grants or you of your education funding. I got it. Is Dr. Emir doing anything that would make him lose his grants?”

  “No!” Henry squirmed in his seat, obviously uncomfortable with sharing his information.

  Sam sighed. “I’m good at keeping secrets, Henry.”

  He rested his elbows on the table and leaned forward. “Have you ever been to Dr. Emir’s house?”

  “No.”

  “It’s covered in surreal paintings.”

  “Like, Picasso? His big secret is he collects stolen art?”

  “Nothing like that, he paints them. Huge canvases filled with the most otherworldly spaztastic stuff you’ve ever seen. Cities straight out of a bad B-­movie. Science-­fiction stuff I can’t even explain. It’s unreal. And it’s all in the wrong colors.”

  “How do you mean wrong?”

  He shrugged. “Green skies. Blue grass. Yellow buildings with silver lights. Dr. Emir is color-­blind. He has to be.”

  “Okay.” Sam tilted her head. “Why is this a deep, dark secret no one should share?”

  “The color-­blind thing isn’t an issue. It’s the manic rages that worry me. Dr. Emir is a genius, but he is truly one of the great tortured geniuses of our age. He’ll go for days, sometimes weeks without sleep. I’ve seen him take a catnap at the lab, then run home and lock himself in there for three days because he had a dream and couldn’t rest until he’d put it on canvas.”

  Sam connected the dots and relaxed. “So he called me during one of these manic phases?”

  “We try to keep him calm and make sure he gets the downtime he needs, but with everything that’s happened . . .” He held his hands up in a gesture of futility. “I’m sorry he bothered you.”

  “Don’t apologize. This is my job. I just needed to know what help Dr. Emir needed.”

  “He needs some melatonin and a good night’s rest without any of his weird dreams. He talks about them a lot, and they’re very vivid. It’s one of the signs of high intelligence, vivid, nearly lucid dreams. After everything’s settled, you should come to one of our lab parties when he gets talking. It’s mind-­blowing some of the stuff he comes up with.”

  Sam chuckled. “I’ll take your word for it.” She stood up. “Thank you for talking with me, Mr. Troom. If you do see any anomalies in the lab, please call me. And please assure Dr. Emir that the bureau is doing everything it can to keep him safe.”

  Putting all the pieces in place painted a better picture of the lab. Dr. Emir was a distracted genius who couldn’t tell reality from dreams. It happened. Some of the world’s best inventions had come from similar minds. She walked to the car, trying to shake off the unsettled feeling. The shadows of the lab followed her home.

  CHAPTER 16

  When an iteration of reality collapses what happens? Some would imagine that the ­people populating the alternate timeline die. That theory defies the basic laws of the conservation of energy. Recall what I have said about the wave: everything must come back to the prime iteration when we hit the event horizon. During past decoherence events, everyone has experienced the dissonance of two realities colliding. A dying node briefly inherits the conscience of the dominant iteration, recalling things that are to come. The memories of our shadow selves become dreams and nothing more.

  ~ Student notes from the class Physics and Space-­Time I1–2071

  Thursday June 13, 2069

  Alabama District 3

  Commonwealth of North America

  Mac chewed his nails as his chair swiveled back and forth in front of the dim computer screen. Damn her for putting him in this situation. He looked plaintively at the ceiling. “God—­if there is a God—­I could use some help here. A sign. Something to tell me that helping her isn’t the worst thing I could do.”

  No choir of angels or neon flashing sign manifested a divine will of any kind.

  Sighing, he picked up the efile with the report on Jane Doe . . . aka, Samantha Lynn Rose the second. A clone working for the bureau was an even bigger security threat than a clone working for N-­V Nova Labs.

  Sam needed to be dealt with.

  A rapid clone test would work if she were an age-­advanced clone, but a good black-­market-­clone operation would have ways around that. Getting the lab in Atlanta to do a test for Verville traces meant getting a second signature. If Rose was a clone, getting her signature was the next best thing to committing suicide. If he went to Marrins, the test would never happen. The senior agent would accept the computer search and turn Sam over to bureau.

  They’d would kill her.

  He dropped the efile on his desk again and went back to chewing his nails. The bureau would euthanize Agent Rose after interrogating her with techniques that would make old Guantanamo look like a spa in comparison. She wasn’t human, but she looked human. She sounded human.

  The memory of her stripping off a wet shirt made him feel all too human. She was nice to him, but nice wasn’t an excuse. He swore again.

  There had to be another way.

  “MacKenzie?” Harley leaned around the corner, a cloud of cheap cologne following him. “I’m going to lunch, you want anything?”

  “No, thanks.” Mac shook his head and avoided eye contact with the older man.

  “Okay. I’m going to the grill. Be back in an hour or so, cover for me if someone calls. You know what traffic is like on that end of town.”

  “Yes, sir,” Mac said, as the senior coroner shuffled off to the Bon Temps Grill . . . and golf course. The morgue doors slammed shut with a leaden thud. With one final curse for God, the universe, and everything else that had conspired to bring him to this point, he grabbed his dissection equipment and went to find Melody Doe.

  There were two interns sitting in the small break room between his office and the bodies he wanted to inspect. He shoved his efile into his lab-­coat pocket and faked a smile. “Hey, what are you guys doing?” Keeping to his normal pattern of behavior and ignoring them would have been safer, but Mac doubted they’d had enough experience with espionage to be concerned.

  They still looked at him bug-­eyed, as if they couldn’t believe Mac could form full sentences. One said, “Eating lunch.”

  “Coroner Harley just left,” he said in a casual, hinting tone that would have worked on any military recruit. The interns just stared. “We’re getting another busload of bodies from the coast tonight. Since we’re going to work after hours, why don’t you boys go take a long lunch?”

  That did it. Their eyes lit up at the promise of sunshine. “Can we?”

  “Just be back before three. Harley keeps a one o’clock tee time on Thursdays.”

  “Right,” one of the interns said. “But he’ll be back once he realizes the course is flooded.”

  “There’s a TV and alcohol. He’ll be gone for at least two hours.”

  The interns looked at each other and shrugged. “This is real chill of you.” The younger man patted Mac on the back as he hustled out.

  Mac leaned his head against the cold walls of the morgue as the interns ran off. He was going to get court-­martialed for this. Lose his citizenship. All for a pretty pair of brown eyes.

  And amazing legs. Truly stellar stems. Can’t forget those.

  “I’m hopeless,” he muttered, walking into the cold room. The smell of chilled antiseptic wash hid the odor of delayed decay as he rolled out the remains of Mordicai Robbins and plugged his data pad into the scanner to download. Then he went searching for Melody Doe and found her in the walk-­in freezer with a dozen bodies that had washed out of their graves during the storm.

  Melody had been pretty in l
ife, he knew that from the pictures, but looking at her now . . . He shivered and reached for a pill bottle that wasn’t there. His hand clenched into a fist.

  He should have just handed Marrins the evidence. Called it a day. Gone home, or gone house hunting. Anything but this. Memories of the desert, heat, and blood blurred into reality as he looked at Melody Doe’s fractured skull. With shaking hands, he wheeled her gurney into the scanner box, hit the right buttons, and hurried down the hall to dry heave in the comfort of his office.

  Eyes watering, throat burning, he frantically pushed aside piles of junk to find his pills. There had to be one somewhere.

  The morgue door slammed. A belch echoed through the halls. Harley couldn’t be back already, could he? Maybe the golf course was flooded.

  Pushing unsteadily to his feet, Mac dropped the search for pills and stumbled toward the cold room. He’d have to make do with incomplete scans or call the whole thing off.

  Harley’s footsteps echoed behind him.

  Mac sped up, barreling into the cold room with a controlled skid.

  Mordicai Robbins was unhooked and halfway to his storage spot when the heavy doors swung open. Warm air from the hall swept into the room, with the scent of Harley’s cheap cologne.

  Mac slammed Mordicai into place and wrenched open the walk-­in freezer. Grabbing hold of the nearest gurney, he pushed it in front of him as if he were merely checking the graveyard rejects and not digging into a case that wasn’t his.

  Harley stood by the door, arms crossed. “Whatcha doing?”

  “Ah, just making sure we send the right bodies back. I thought you, um, wanted them checked?” His tongue deserted him as memories of Afghanistan assailed him. There was blood. So. Much. Blood.

  Harley eyed Mordicai’s locker for a moment, then grunted. “Right. You get lunch yet?”

  “Um, n-­not yet.” He slid the gurney he’d grabbed into the scanner next to Melody Doe and took the efile from its dock. Scan complete. “I, um, sent the interns to lunch just now,” he added. Mac hesitated in front of Melody’s body, unsure if he should pull her out of the machine for the coroner to see.