The Never Paradox (Chronicles Of Jonathan Tibbs Book 2)

by T. Ellery Hodges

  As getting into his head was her job, The Cell never thought twice about her repeatedly pouring through Jonathan’s footage. All they saw was the level of commitment to her task that was expected of her. What they didn’t see was the guilt—she’d slipped, she had been protecting Jonathan from the very purpose that had put her in his life. What weighed on her about this now was that she suspected that she’d missed the opportunity she had been hoping for, and feared she might not get another. The situation had rapidly changed.

  The Mark had not been spotted by any of the surveillance teams watching any of the subjects for over a month now. His last known sighting had been a conversation with Jonathan. That conversation had taken place before the cameras were in place, but The Cell kept detailed records of what was observed. The Mark had spoken with him, a discussion that had lasted for roughly forty-five minutes, before departing. After, Jonathan had sat, hardly moving, for hours.

  In the weeks following, it seemed that The Mark’s words had become a dark cloud around Jonathan. He was more withdrawn, seldom home during the day and always training if he was. When Leah had been able to force their paths to cross, she felt as though she were talking to a ghost. He seemed to play the part of Jonathan Tibbs, but nothing pulled the one she’d been watching for months beforehand back to the surface. His roommates hadn’t sensed the change—not like she had, at least. Though, in fairness, pinning down who Jonathan was from one day to the next had become a fruitless endeavor to them before she’d really managed to get herself into the picture.

  Studying him on the cameras, she’d begun to feel as though a different person was hiding under the same mask. The more confident she became that she wasn’t imagining the change, the more she wondered what The Mark could have possibly said to cause it. Jonathan had already been exhibiting the signs of immense stress before the conversation.

  When confronted with a burden one doesn’t believe oneself able to carry, the average person looks to others for help. Jonathan didn’t seem to see that as an option.

  In Leah’s experience, there were two types of people in these instances, but they only differed in the manner by which they gave up. The first type saw their limitations and admitted to themselves that they couldn’t carry the weight. They gave up by simply dropping the burden and accepting the consequences. The second type gave up in an opposite manner. They decided they could never put the weight down, even if it meant they would be crushed under it.

  There was never any doubt that Jonathan was the latter—everything she’d seen of him told her that his solution would be to “give up” on being a person who wasn’t able to carry the weight. And again, the more she suspected this, the more she regretted her momentary lapse in priorities. Perhaps it was all in her head, and nothing she said or did would have made a difference, but she had this feeling that there had been a moment—in those first days after The Mark had spoken to him—when Jonathan might have looked for help. A moment where maybe, just maybe, he might have been desperate enough to see her as a safe place to go.

  For a while, she feared that another opportunity wasn’t going to present itself, but then, Jonathan had turned a corner. The reasons for his sudden improvement weren’t completely clear to her, but when she studied the tapes for an explanation, only one other change was obvious. The fog had started lifting around Jonathan about the same time that Hayden started having symptoms of insomnia.

  Most of their interactions were taking place between two and four in the morning and she couldn’t listen in on what was said due to The Mark’s known audio block. What the lip readers transcribed of the discussions hadn’t given her much to go on, either, and frankly, they were pretty one sided, with Hayden doing the majority of the talking. Regardless, something far more useful had developed.

  Jonathan missed her. When Leah was present, he lingered on her, stole glances when he knew she couldn’t see him watching. He would stop sometimes, inside his garage, and peer through the window at her house. He wished her door was open to him.

  “Leah!” Paige said. “Are you even listening to me?”

  Leah looked up and found Paige’s annoyed expression. “Sorry,” She said, “I heard the motorcycle, thought it might….”

  Paige’s eyes fluttered almost mockingly, as though Leah’s apparent fence-sitting about Jonathan had become a topic of boredom. “Would you two stop acting like 3rd graders and get on with it?” she said. “Just make it happen already.”

  Leah smiled politely.

  Jonathan had never told anyone that she had already made it happen. Her smile turned to a grimace as she reflected on her first act after their one night of intimacy—discussing the matter with the head of The Cell. By now, every detail she’d shared had likely been repeatedly analyzed by Olivia’s team.

  Leah thought it was time to tell Paige that something had, in fact, happened between them, but then she heard his footsteps on the stairs.

  He’d come in through the garage, taken his practice staffs from the cabinet, and then pulled out the facade. He swapped out Excali-bar with the decoy, his original demolition bar that Heyer had modeled the weapon on, into the bike’s clips. Jonathan had no illusions that this was fooling any of the investigators who watched him. They could have inspected his cabinet every time the house was empty and there was nothing he could do about it. He only took the precaution to keep his roommates from ever picking up the bar and noticing that not only was it no standard piece of steel, but that it had a name engraved on one of its flat surfaces. He had no interest in inviting unwanted questions.

  Before he put the facade back in place, his eyes lingered on its backside. Shortly after his last visit from Heyer, he’d attached a chalk board. At the top of the board he’d written two names and then placed a dividing line between them down the center. On the left he’d written his initials, “J.T.,” and on the right, “Universe.”

  There had been a time when he didn’t expect to survive long enough to worry that he might lose track of the number of Ferox he’d dispatched. He’d been wrong. So he had started keeping a record. One night, on a whim, he had turned the tally into a scoreboard. The competition had become an ironic private joke—no matter how many points he scored, the Universe only needed one to win.

  There were red and green hash marks under his initials, depending on the type of Ferox he’d slain. Among them, there was one that wasn’t a simple tally mark, but a red “H.” Jonathan lingered on the letter until memories he didn’t want to revisit began to surface and he refocused himself. Picking up the red chalk, he added a question mark to his side of the scoreboard.

  He looked at the mark and sighed. Until he saw Heyer, all he could do about today was put a question mark on a chalkboard. He’d never returned to his body without killing—he hadn’t thought it possible to close the gates without destroying the stone the Ferox carried inside of them. Jonathan doubted that getting an explanation would mean anything good.

  He put the facade back, closed the cupboard, and entered the house. At the top of the stairs, he heard talking from inside Paige’s bedroom—Leah’s voice behind the closed door. He lingered in the hallway for a moment, looking at the door opposite his bedroom and wishing he had a reason to knock. Paige didn’t want to see him, though, and even if that weren’t the case, Leah had asked him not to get attached.

  More than anything, he wanted her to show up in his garage again, as she had before. Whenever he thought to approach her himself, he couldn’t shake the feeling that whatever he said would be an obvious excuse, that he’d be as transparent to her as he always felt.

  No matter what he said, his face would change the words into: Please, say it is okay to touch you. Put your hands on my skin again.

  Maybe, if he didn’t pursue her, if he did precisely what she had asked, then she would trust him. Maybe that trust would never extend more than to those moments she felt lonely and vulnerable. Still, if that was the most he could be to her, then he wouldn’t risk it by pushing. Even if it
had been a temporary escape, Leah was the only person he’d felt safe with since the night the device had been forced on him.

  He threw his coat on his bed when he entered his room, then noticed something was off. His computer was on, as though someone had woken it from sleep the moment he entered. What was odd was that it appeared to be booted into DOS. As he stepped closer, he saw that wasn’t the case—instead, a single line of white text was written at the top of a black screen.

  Jonathan, be discreet. Pick up the computer. Take your desk chair to the southwest corner of your room. Sit, wear headphones.

  For a moment, he figured he’d gotten a virus and reached out to press the escape key. That suspicion didn’t last more than a moment. The thought of a virus using his name made his hand go still over the keyboard.

  Would Heyer contact me this way? he wondered.

  His friend in the fedora usually favored appearing out of nowhere without any warning. Maybe he couldn’t risk being present, physically, with Leah and Paige in the house? Maybe he knew something had gone wrong today, and it was too important to wait for Jonathan to be alone? Why not? If he could jump through space and time, how much trouble could it be to bypass Windows security? Then again, what if it wasn’t the alien? Couldn’t The Cell be just as capable?

  He was still considering this when the screen suddenly flashed and his desktop showed up as though all was normal. He frowned, his hand reaching out again for the keyboard, when he heard a knock behind him.

  “Hi, Jonathan,” Leah said. She was standing in his doorway.

  “Hi,” he managed.

  With her eyes on his, Jonathan’s priorities became confused. Investigating the strange message was more important. He knew this, and wished that he didn’t, because he wanted to put it on hold for whatever had brought Leah to his bedroom.

  She was about to say something, but paused, studying him a second before her expression turned into a frown. “Is this a bad time?” she asked. “You look like you’re thinking of a polite way to ask me to leave.”

  “Yeah,” he sighed. “It’s not the best moment.”

  “It’s okay.” She shrugged. “I’ll catch you tomorrow.”

  He nodded and she turned to leave, but he stopped her. “Hey, Leah.”

  “Yeah,” she said, head leaning back into his doorway.

  “Was it important?” he asked.

  She grinned. “It can wait a day.”

  Then her face was gone, and he heard her footsteps receding down the hallway and the stairs. As he listened, watching the empty space where she had been, his laptop’s display flickered at the corner of his vision. He turned to see the same white message on a black screen again.

  The timing of it disturbed him. Whoever was manipulating his computer somehow knew when he wasn’t alone.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  HE LET OUT a sigh as he stared at the message. Ever since Heyer had come into his life, Jonathan was forced to make decisions with no idea of the consequences. The only choice he ever seemed to have was to go along and see where things took him. If he ignored the message, he’d never know what it meant.

  He locked his bedroom door, then shuffled through the drawers of his desk for a set of earbuds. Once he figured out which corner of the room was southwest, he took a seat. Shortly after, the black and white display flickered and an unexpected face looked back at him—an animated cartoon of a bald man with big white eyebrows, blue eyes, a plain white T-shirt, and a gold earring. Jonathan blinked, recognizing the iconic face immediately.

  “Mr. Clean?” he asked.

  “Do not speak,” said a masculine voice through the earbuds. “You will need to type your side of this conversation. I am monitoring the spyware installed on your computer and modifying the keystrokes it reports to your surveillance team.”

  Jonathan’s eyebrows drew in. Of course, he’d figured his computer was being monitored—what was baffling was why a TV mascot for cleaning supplies was suddenly telling him about it.

  “Heyer left instructions for me to contact you in the event that an unforeseen contingency occurred while he was off-world. I observed strange fluctuations within the gates today,” Mr. Clean said. “I am hoping that your experience of events might shed some light on the oddities.”

  Jonathan hesitated. A hundred questions crashed through his mind, but some of them needed immediate answers if he was going to tell this cartoon anything.

  Who are you? Jonathan typed.

  “I am an Artificial Intelligence designed by Heyer’s species.”

  Jonathan’s eyebrows lifted at the answer, processing it. Heyer had mentioned that a computer assisted him in the past. Jonathan hadn’t given it much thought—he never imagined he would find himself interacting with … it?

  How do I know that is the truth? he wrote. And why can’t I speak?

  “Jonathan, I assure you that there is no other entity on Earth capable of monitoring the fluctuations within the gates. Heyer’s own awareness requires my reporting of the activity,” Mr. Clean said, and then one of his big, white cartoon eyebrows raised. “As far as you speaking, it is my understanding that humans who witness a man talking to himself find the action suspicious.”

  Jonathan bit his lips and typed, I am still unsure.

  “A month and a half ago, Heyer noted that you requested a means to communicate with him when he could not be physically available. At that time, there was a question of where your loyalties ultimately stood. Within minutes of your last conversation, Heyer requested to be sent on an unscheduled trip to the Feroxian plane. He was in a rush, but before he left, Heyer activated certain fail-safes to ensure problems on Earth were not left unchecked, one of which was permission for me to contact you.”

  Why permission? Jonathan typed.

  “I am not allowed to make decisions regarding such things for logical reasons. Heyer, being a biological entity such as yourself, is better suited to the subtleties of human interactions.”

  Mr. Clean’s explanation fit with what Jonathan knew, enough that he felt he could trust this was not some clever ruse. He couldn’t imagine a human being spinning such a tale. It was too strange, yet too accurate to have been guessed.

  Why did he go to the Feroxian plane in such a hurry? he wrote.

  “He only said that there was an emergency, and that he needed to reach his destination as quickly as possible,” Mr. Clean said.

  I mentioned the name of a Ferox I had slain. He asked me if I was sure of the translation. He only became rushed after I confirmed the name,” Jonathan typed.

  “The boundaries of my permissions do not allow me to provide any information you may request, except in the contingency that Heyer is incapacitated. His health has not been compromised and therefore this requirement has not been met,” Mr. Clean said. “That said, I have detailed records on the Ferox who are permitted access to the gateways. If you provide the name, I will tell you what I can, provided the information is not off-limits.”

  Jonathan paused for a moment over the keyboard. If Heyer had wanted him to know, would he have left without telling him? He only hesitated over these thoughts for a moment. The time for wishing he’d remained in the dark was over—ignorance wasn’t his ally.

  Dams the Gate, Jonathan typed.

  “Peculiar. Not a common Feroxian name. I see why Heyer asked you to confirm your certainty of the translation,” the A.I. said. A moment passed. “I have no matching listing. However, we can make some assumptions based on the name’s absence in the registry.”

  Like what? Jonathan typed.

  “Malkier has not reported this Ferox as ever having been given authorization to access the gates,” Mr. Clean said. “Therefore, you are either mistaken about the name, or it would appear that Dams the Gate came to Earth without approval.”

  Jonathan sighed.

  He had a crude understanding of how the gateways functioned, but no real idea what entry looked like from the Ferox side. He’d only ever needed to know how to send the
m back, not through. It was news to him that only certain males were allowed entry.

  I need to know more. About the gates, the Ferox, he wrote, and then after a moment, he added, and Malkier.

  Slowly, the cartoon’s head nodded. “I can only tell you what I am permitted. However, this is not the best use of our time now. The team watching you will eventually grow suspicious of why you’ve been sitting in that corner for so long. For now, it’s best we focus on my inquiry. Specifically, what happened while the gates were open today?” Mr. Clean asked.

  He was about to answer the computer’s question, but something unspoken in Mr. Clean’s previous statement had given him a disturbing pause.

  Wait, Jonathan wrote after lingering over the keyboard. Why would they grow suspicious? I thought the point of sitting in the corner was to get out of my window’s line of site. How would they know I’m sitting in this corner?

  “The Cell was able to lock down the schedule of you and all the members of your household nearly four weeks ago. This allowed them to infiltrate your residence on a number of occasions. They now have a thorough network of surveillance cameras watching you at all times. Currently, you are sitting in the one corner of your bedroom where they do not have a camera facing the laptop display,” Mr. Clean said. “I will show you, but I advise you not to display any emotional reaction.”

  An array of camera feeds filled the screen. Jonathan saw himself from multiple angles, Paige now alone in her bedroom, his roommates watching television in the living room, and the garage with a shot focused directly on his weapons cupboard, among other things.