by George Lazăr
Bolden looked at the scene in disbelief. “You’re joking.”
“I assure you I’m not.”
“All these people... didn’t you say there was a sort of device?”
“There is the Device, but this Device needs to be synchronized, it needs to be fed data, the data needs to be correlated. These are the analysts, but there are field teams that follow you, a medical unit that stays close enough to respond to an emergency in about two minutes. We staff around the clock, every day of the year. You’re looking at a command center, and it happens to be the current one. But sometimes a situation requires that we improvise a command center on the move, so we maintain a portable unit, inside a truck. Like I said: keeping you alive is neither easy nor cheap.”
Bolden shook his head and began counting off his points dramatically on his fingers.
“So allow me to review. One, you insist someone out there wants to kill me. Two, you people appear just in time to save my life because some sort of machine, apparatus, device or whatever it is foresees it. Three, you tell me you’ve been doing this on my behalf for almost my entire life, all on the assumption that I’ll someday pay for your services. But what if I don’t sign? What will you do with all these people? Will you assign them to other cases? And what will you want from me?”
Folder’s perceptive gaze settled on Bolden.
“From you? Nothing. If you reject our offer we’ll disappear from your life as if we never existed. None of the people assigned to your case will attempt to contact you.”
“Will they be reassigned to someone else?”
“Some will. Others, like me, have been here from the beginning. We’re not likely to be used again in our current roles on another case. Your core team, myself included, has been trained to deal exclusively with you. If you turn us down, I’ll likely retire, and our salaries and other expenses will simply become an accounting write-off to the business office of The Guardian Angel.”
None of the workers seemed to pay any attention to them. Bolden watched them with a sense of admiration. It wasn’t like watching servants work. He’d viewed the household staff since boyhood as little more than animated objects. If the colonel was telling the truth, then these people were acting on their own initiative to keep him alive. He liked the idea.
“Do they know we are here?”
“Of course.”
He tapped another code into the keypad and a red light started flashing. Everyone inside left what they were doing to don gloves and military-style chemical protection masks. When they were done, one of the masked figures pressed a key on his desk and a door opened in the glass wall. Folder walked in and beckoned Bolden to follow him.
“Why the masks? Bolden asked.
“For your own safety. If any of them ever need to intervene in an emergency and you were to recognize them, the entire operation – and your life – could be put at risk.”
“And the gloves?”
“We’re a bit obsessive when it comes to the prospect of one of our clients picking up a germ from the protective team. I’m not quite sure why. Call it an organizational quirk.”
Bolden thought back and realized that older man hadn’t yet shaken hands with him, even though he’d instinctively thrust his own hand toward the colonel when they met.
They paused to examine one of the console desks. A few diagrams appeared on the desk’s main screen, while an endless ticker of letters and figures flowed across the lower portion of the screen.
“This is one of the medical desks. We’re able to monitor some of your physiological functions from afar, but we’ve also been clandestinely collecting samples for years.”
“Samples?”
“A hair here, a drop of urine there, epithelial skin bits every now and then. Both from public places and your various residences, whenever opportunities present themselves.”
“That’s disgusting,” Bolden said.
“Obviously, once you sign the contract, all of that sneaking around behind you comes to an end. The medical monitoring becomes routine.”
“So that’s what these ‘field teams’ you talk about actual do? Swab-up behind me in public restrooms? How glamorous.”
“We analyze what you eat, what you drink and even the air you breathe,” the colonel went on, undisturbed. “That’s our job. We track how angry you get, who you meet for dinner, who you sleep with. These variables become markers for The Device.”
The masked console desk operators retreated every time Bolden and the colonel approached their stations.
“Even who I sleep with...” Bolden whispered, impressed.
“It’s not something you should worry about. Reliable discretion is essential to The Guardian Angel. Regardless of whether you sign the protection contract, the details of your intimate life are completely secure. We’re in the protection business, not the blackmail business. Although quite frankly, blackmail would be a lot cheaper.”
Folder gave him a wink.
When they reached the next of the console stations, the colonel took the place of the operator without sitting in the ergonomic chair. He tapped in a few commands and a video of Bolden and Danielle having dinner in a restaurant started playing.
“Essentially, we’ve recorded your life in our archive, Ian,” Folder said, pausing the video. “If you sign your contract, we’ll expect your full cooperation. You’ll have to give us certain things. You’ll have to adapt to the idea that you’re living your life in front of our eyes. At all times.”
Bolden looked Danielle’s smiling face, frozen on the screen. As much as he tried, he couldn’t remember the circumstances in which they had been filmed.
“So is this standard? You bring prospects here, explain everything, convince them to sign the contract?”
They approached another console.
“After forty years of surveillance? Yes, we want you to sign with us. Just like all the potential customers we show through our facilities. But I can’t stress this enough: we won’t force you in any way.”
“Is it expensive?” Bolden inquired calmly.
“Extremely,” the colonel replied. “And it doesn’t get cheaper over time, either. The higher the level, the more complex the protection strategies become.”
“And you said I’m on level...”
“Two, which means we’ve saved your life twice now. As the level increases, our costs increase exponentially.”
“And there are how many levels?”
“Well, I can tell you there are seven categories. Like the Seven Deadly Sins. I can’t remember who decided to divide them up that way.”
The colonel tapped in a few more commands, and a video of his near-death experience as a child began loading on the screen. It took Bolden a moment to process the implications of what he was watching. One of the greatest mysteries of his life was being revealed before his eyes. Who was the stranger who had noticed his tumble into the pool, pulled him out, revived him and disappeared into the night? There was the outdoor pool at his childhood home, his parents’ adult guests woozy, boozy and distracted, and there was young Ian, trotting quietly along in the demi-darkness, in the moments before he slipped on something innocuous. There was the fall, his head bouncing on the cement lip of the pool, his tiny body slipping quietly into the water. None of the guests moved for a moment, but then the mysterious man in black emerged from the grainy, low-light tape and dove into the pool after the boy. The recording clearly captured Folder’s surprisingly young face in the light cast by the illuminated pool. Bolden had suspected as much.
“Is the person who filmed this also here?” he asked.
The colonel nodded as he tapped another set of commands.
“You must be paying them well,” Bolden noted.
“Apart from money, we offer them something quite special,” the colonel replied as he checked the modifications he was applying to the image on the console screen. It displayed the broken line of a graph with years plotted on the horizontal axis on a scale from
one to fifty. The vertical scale measured percentages. Usually the graphed line remained within a consistent range that varied no more than about 5 to 10 percent, but a few times it jumped to 20 percent and on two occasions spiked past 50.
“As you’ve likely surmised, we’re looking at the machine that measures your likelihood of survival. The thing we call ‘The Device.’”
“Poetic. How does it work?”
“How versed are you in quantum physics?”
“I’m not. So if you’re planning to hit me with a bunch of technical talk, forget it.”
“I’m a layman myself when it comes to the science, so I’m going to give you the basic principles the way I understand them. Ever heard of something called the neuroprotective cerebral field?”
“No.”
“The pharmaceutical industry has been marketing a class of drugs based on the neuroprotectors vinpocetine and memantine for some time now, but that’s neither here nor there. Those are just chemicals. The truly valuable thing from our perspective is the neuroprotective field. The hypothalamus generates it, we can measure it, and it features a particularly interesting trait: right before an accident or a significant injury, activity in the field increases. The more serious the incident, the greater the increase. Which means that when a person is about to die, the neuroprotective field spikes dramatically, as if the brain somehow anticipates what is about to happen and is conditioning itself and the body for what is about to take place.”
“How do you measure it?”
“It’s weak, so the most accurate measurement comes from inside he hypothalamus.”
“But the hypothalamus is inside the skull...”
Bolden fell silent and touched his head where he had injured himself after falling off his bike when he was eleven years old. The injury had required surgery. His eyes asked Folder the question. The colonel nodded.
“Measuring the neuroprotective field gives us a foundation, but the Device doesn’t rely solely on that measurement. We also use probabilistic calculus to calculate the risks in your personal environment. If, for instance, you meet a violent person, the risk of you getting involved in a fight go up. Or if you come into contact with a woman with a high number of sexual partners, your risk of disease increases. Get it?”
“Seems like common sense.”
“It is. But the final component of the Device – the part that actually probes the future – remains secret, even to employees of The Guardian Angel. It has something to do with tachyons, quantum particles that travel faster than light.”
“So you can see the future?”
“It’s more like the way a blind man perceives the sidewalk ahead of him with the aid of his cane.”
“So what’s ahead for me?”
Folder pointed at the first two anomalies on the graph. “These spikes mark the first two serious threats to your life.” He pointed ahead to the right, where the line ended. “This is the present.”
He paused to key-in new commands, and the screen zoomed in on the present, with a red line indicating the near future. Ominously, the future line was already repeating the shape formed by the previous threats on his life.
“That doesn’t look promising,” Bolden said uneasily.
“Our horizon for a threat like this one is typically about three days. The actually probability becomes clearer as we get closer, but as you can see, this one is going to be significant.”
“Three days is a lot of warning, though.”
“That’s the typical forecast interval,” Folder said. “Emphasis on ‘typical.’ Doesn’t mean we always have that much time. The truth is, we often have far less warning of an impending threat.”
“That’s not exactly comforting.”
“It’s why we need to be close to you at all times. The Device has no way of predicting where the threat will manifest itself, so we keep a large staff in order to be able to respond quickly and efficiently.
“If we do our jobs and anticipate almost everything that can happen, then in the end, within a finite space, with a finite number of beings and objects, only a finite number of events can occur. We just keep making that finite number smaller, until the threat presents itself. Of course, if you’d like a more detailed explanation of the mathematical theory that explains all this, I’ll have to arrange for that. ”
Bolden shook his head, perplexed.
“Ultimately, it’s really no more or no less credible than the idea that my chance of survival fluctuates based on ‘markers’ like the women I bed or the guy I pick for my doubles partner at the tennis club.”
“I can speak from experience on this, Ian, so trust me when I say there’s something of an art to it. Individual markers must be chosen correctly, but the Device operates on cumulative inputs. A marker generates a probability factor; two well-chosen markers narrow that probability range. And so on.
“At least that’s what’s we think happens. Even the scientists aren’t exactly sure how the Device works. Some say the Device does the whole job by itself, with or without markers, with or without additional information.”
Bolden eyed his host, weighing his next words carefully. “You make it all sound almost reasonable. Brainwaves, neuroprotective fields, markers. Sounds scientific and rational. But here’s the problem, Folder: when it’s all said, and it’s all done, I’m just not buying it.”
The colonel looked confused.
“Maybe I’m just not communicating it properly,” Bolden went on. “What the Device does, how it makes measurements, is far more sophisticated and complex than I can understand. Any existence plots multiple vectors into the future. Your life influences other lives, your body interacts with the environment. The Device identifies and correlates this data, alongside the information received from markers and from the neuroprotective cerebral field and...”
“...And add it all up and it equals the day that I’m going to die. Look, colonel, it’s not that I don’t appreciate what you’ve done for me – if, in fact, none of this is a scam and you’ve actually done for me what you say you’ve done for me – but the simple truth is I can’t accept your evidence. I don’t believe in a machine that can aggregate a prediction of the future.”
“That isn’t how it works, Ian. In quantum reality, we’re always in communication with the past and future. We’re always detecting multiple possible futures for you. So if all the future traces of your present life, including your influence on your markers, disappears simultaneously, that can mean just one thing.”
Bolden pondered the implications tentatively. “That’s a paradox.”
“It is a paradox. You cannot speak about the future in past tense. But logic, or, to be more precise, the Cartesian interpretation of events, doesn’t work in this case.”
Bolden stroked his chin and concentrated. His eyes sparkled when he concluded that he had finally found a way to stump the colonel.
“Let’s assume that you find out about an event that is going to occur in the future and you prevent it from happening. That means that it never comes about. Therefore your Device couldn’t have foreseen it because, it never happened. Explain that!” Bolden demanded.
Folder eyed him with a look that seemed almost weary. “Ah. A time paradox. Like, ‘If a person goes back in time and kills his father, then the former wouldn’t be born and there would be no one to come back in time to kill his parent who, by surviving, would have a son.’ Something like that?”
“Yes.”
“Wow. Here we are, working day-in and day-out with the implications of the science of post-temporal reality for more than four decades, and you know what? I don’t think any of us ever thought to ponder that particular question.”
“Are you kidding me?”
Folder’s eyes probed him. “Am I kidding you? Of course I’m kidding you. Did you really think none of this ever occurred to anyone on the project? Jesus.”
“I’m just saying that...”
“Look, time paradoxes fold in on themselves in
finitely, but in the case of the Device, our scientists have a much simpler explanation. It detects only the variant in which an extreme event, namely death, is most likely to occur. It focuses on this variant and holds on to it until the critical moment passes. Got it? The Device takes a peek at a blurry snapshot of the future, but it’s just an estimate. For lack of a better word, we refer to it in terms of probabilities.”
“But don’t you see that if you change the future...”
“Yes, Mr. Bolden, I do see that. If we prevent the fatal event that would have happened without our intervention, we’ve changed the future that we glimpsed through the Device.”
“For the sake of the argument, let’s assume that I believe you, which I don’t,” Bolden said. “If you have all these people on staff here just to save my life in some critical moment, then why do you think another such moment is bound to occur? In the end, how many times can a human being be in mortal danger? Why do you need to keep all these people here? Seems like you’re padding the bill.”
The colonel smiled casually.
“I’m sure our business office would love an excuse to get rid of all this,” he said, sweeping his arm around the room. “It is, after all, a business. Do you think we go to this expense because we just like spending money?”
“It could be nothing more than marketing. Tell me a scary story. Convince me that signing with you is a matter of life and death.”
“Sure,” Folder conceded. “It could be that. Only it isn’t.”
“And you still refuse to acknowledge my central point. It just doesn’t stand to reason that a person would need that many people on standby to prevent dangerous situations, when the billions of people on this planet go through life every day without your protection, and the vast majority of them come out unscathed. The probabilities of daily life just don’t support the level of threat that you’ve built into your operations.”
“That would be true for most people, Ian. But it’s not true for people like you.”
“You mean rich people?”
“No. I mean people who are supposed to be dead.”
“What do you mean, I’m ‘supposed to be dead?’”
