Quantum Entanglement

by Liesel K. Hill

  Despite the hum, the vehicle moved more smoothly than any car she’d ever been in. Two men sat in front of her, occupying what should be the driver’s and passenger’s seat, though Maggie couldn’t see a steering wheel. The whole front of the car looked like a computer console and the two men murmured quietly to one another.

  David sat beside her, both of them in bucket seats, with wrists and ankles suctioned to the chairs, as if by magnet. It felt like she was cemented in; she couldn’t move at all.

  The two men weren’t paying enough attention to her to realize she’d awakened, so she let her eyes roam to what lay beyond the vehicle. The landscape spun by faster than she could take it in, and darkness made it impossible to see any details of what passed outside the windows. Maggie chewed her lip. With each passing second, they got farther from where they needed to meet Jonah and Lila.

  The greens and browns of nature visible in the headlights faded to more synthetic colors as they re-entered the city. Narrow streets between close buildings forced the car to decelerate. Unlike the part of the city Maggie and David explored earlier in the day, this was much more congested. The buildings appeared older and grubbier, the streets less clean.

  “She’s awake, Simmons.” Maggie’s head jerked toward the man in the seat that should be the driver’s. Too late to feign sleep again, she glared at him instead.

  “Strong abilities and she came out of the sedative quickly,” Simmons said. “We’ll have to keep an eye on this one.” Simmons had medium-brown hair and a strong jaw. He would have been cute if not for his bulbous nose. The other one, whose name she didn’t know, was homely with dark, thinning hair and crooked teeth.

  “Where are you taking us?” Maggie demanded.

  Simmons glanced back at her as if she’d asked whether there were fish in the sea. “The Institute. Where else?”

  Maggie glanced at David. His chin rested on his chest. It rose and fell with his breaths. “Is my friend okay?”

  “It’s just a sedative, lady,” Simmons’ companion said over his shoulder. “It won’t do any damage.”

  They neared a sprawling building that looked like part of a campus. Despite the darkness of all the buildings around it, its bright lighting cast illumination on the entire neighborhood. This was the skyscraper she’d seen from atop the mountain earlier in the day. Looking at it up close, she could see it was newer than most of the buildings in the area. The architecture looked cutting edge—aerodynamic and structurally pristine. The central hub of the building was circular, like the center of the capital building, only there wasn’t a dome. Rather, glass and steel floors reached to the sky, tiers getting smaller and smaller. Maggie couldn’t see the top. Entire wings of buildings reached out from the glass cylinder like spokes on a wagon wheel, each the size of a football field.

  Over the front doors hung a symbol vaguely familiar to Maggie. A simple, oblong whirl, framed by an oval. Where had she seen that before?

  When the vehicle pulled up in front of the main entrance, four men in forest green uniforms appeared to greet them. They looked like marines—thickly muscled with a lithe confidence that bespoke danger.

  Maggie and David weren’t taken from their chairs. Rather, the chairs were pulled from the van. They didn’t have wheels, but hovered six inches from the ground as though they sat atop some invisible, mobile carriage. Maggie could feel the energy being used to keep them above the ground.

  Two guards pushed each of their chairs through the building. The inside reminded Maggie of a science museum. Models of spaceships that didn’t exist in her time hung suspended from the ceiling, and countless exhibits filled every niche of open space. The whirl symbol—probably a logo for the institute—was ubiquitous inside, making appearances on walls, ceilings, plaques, even floor tiles.

  They passed a few people, most of whom looked like night watchmen and janitors. A few glanced up as Maggie and David were pushed past, but didn’t seem concerned.

  The green-clad guards pushed Maggie and David toward an elevator and stopped in front of it. A huge TV screen comprised one entire wall of the lobby and showed the clearest picture Maggie had ever seen. The program broadcasted news stories on a continuous loop and sounded suspiciously like the Nightly News of her time. Maggie paid no attention to it, preferring instead to observe the building around her. A familiar term caught her attention.

  “...calling themselves BCOs or Brain Chemistry Optimists.”

  Maggie craned her neck around to stare at the screen. The guard beside her gave her an annoyed look but didn’t block her view.

  “This doctor,” the female news anchor continued, “who is responsible for first mapping the human brain, is dissatisfied with the ways in which psychologists are using his findings.”

  A man who appeared to be in his mid to late thirties appeared on the screen. Wispy blond hair blustered around his face, setting off pale blue eyes. He must be the doctor the program mentioned, though he looked much younger than Maggie would have expected.

  “I mapped the human brain so our society could reach an age of peace and health and enlightenment,” the blond doctor said to the camera, “not so we could use it as an excuse to release criminals. Don’t you see that they’ll only change if they want to change? All we’re doing is giving them an easy way out of the consequences of their actions. They’ll only learn that consequences aren’t so bad, so they might as well re-offend.”

  The screen cut to a man who, like the blond doctor was light of skin and blue of eye, but this man had dark, close-cropped hair and a broad, jutting forehead.

  “Others take a different view,” the too-professional voice of the female newscaster intoned.

  “These criminals aren’t responsible for their actions,” the dark-haired man said. “We’ve proven it by mapping their brain chemistry. It’s abnormal, which means they’re sick. They need psychological help, which is what we’re trying to give them. They aren’t capable of changing on their own, yet the BCO wants us to punish them for something they can’t help. And they’re entirely unscientific about the whole thing. Where’s their proof?”

  The screen cut back to the blond-haired doctor, who shook his head. “Anyone who truly wants to change can change.” He gazed dead into the camera. “You want science? Here it is: we have it within us to become whatever we wish. The human body is the tool. When we try to do or think of or become something positive, we’re manipulating positive energy. The molecules making up positive energy are inherently more powerful than those that make up negative energy, so the good will always win out. But we must believe it will.”

  Maggie frowned as the screen returned to the female news anchor with a caption reading, ‘The Great Pedophilia Debate.’

  “Some call him a quack doctor. Others call him a prophet,” the female news anchor said through a frozen, white-toothed smile. “Please link up with our interactive bot and tell us what you think.”

  Something about the blond doctor seemed so familiar to Maggie that, for a moment, she was sure she’d met him before. But how could she? He lived long after her. The next moment, the elevator arrived and the guards pushed Maggie in beside a still-sleeping David. She had the distinct sensation of going down.

  The two of them were left in a small, square room with one door, no windows, and a mirror on one wall. By then, David was stirring. Maggie struggled against her bonds to no avail. She reached out with her mind, but obviously they’d given her a neurological sedative as well as a physical one. When she tried to use her abilities, a wave of paralyzing nausea spread over her, so she stopped trying.

  “David, you all right?”

  David blinked and jerked his head back and forth, trying to wake up all the way. “Where are we?” he finally managed.

  “I’m not sure what this place is. Remember the building we saw when we first got here, when we looked out from the ridge? It was near the college buildings, bigger than everything else?”

  David raised his head and let his eyes wander aro
und the shoebox of a room. “That’s where we are?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “They’re scientists, but I think they’re also the government. David, I watched a news story out there. When I first got to Interchron, Doc gave me a history of the rise of the collectives. He told me about the doctor who first mapped the human brain and how the psychologists of the time became the most powerful people in the world. They used it to heal all kinds of conditions and change mindsets. They also said the evils of society weren’t anyone’s fault—only faulty brain chemistry. I just saw that debate raging on the news story.”

  David nodded as she spoke. “That gives us a good idea of when we are.”

  “Yeah. On the cusp of the society’s downfall. You can almost feel it in the air, can’t you? It’s like waiting for lightning to strike; like the world is waiting for something to happen, and not something good.”

  David gazed at her, frowning, until she dropped her eyes.

  “Do you know how long from now you were born?” she asked him.

  “I’m not sure of the exact length of time,” he shook his head. “I think it’s about fifty years, give or take.”

  “Fifty years,” Maggie murmured. David was in his twenties, which meant it took less than seventy-five years for the world to go from this, a highly functioning, technological society, albeit with a few problems, to the future in which the team lived at Interchron. A downright post-apocalyptic time period. Even Rome took longer than that to fall. She sighed, and glanced up to find David staring at her again.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Did they hurt you?”

  She shook her head and related what little she’d observed on the journey from where they’d been arrested.

  “They didn’t say anything about what they meant to do with us?”

  She shook her head, glancing at the mirror. “Maybe we shouldn’t be talking, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’d bet my life that’s a two-way mirror.”

  David glanced at the mirror, brows crunched together. “A what?”

  Maggie sighed. Then chuckled. She supposed the technology didn’t exist in David’s time. And why should it? The point of two-way glass was to observe without being observed. In a future where neurological abilities could tell you almost everything about a person, such a trite means of gathering information became obsolete.

  “It means they’re watching and listening to us.”

  “I doubt they’ll understand anything we’re talking about.”

  “True,” Maggie admitted. “They’ll think we’re stark raving mad.”

  “Maybe that can work to our advantage.”

  Maggie raised an eyebrow, but David looked completely serious. After a moment, Maggie nodded. “Maybe. Jonah’s gonna have a coronary,” she murmured.

  “These neurological sedatives will make it hard to get back to him,” David said. “You broke through the sedative once, on the island.”

  “That was different, David. The gold ring magnified my abilities. I don’t have anything like it now.”

  “True, but conduit stones do exactly that: magnify existing abilities. The ability is in you somewhere, Maggie. You just have to tap into it.”

  “Without the ring, I may not have the strength.”

  “That may be true,” David nodded, “or it may not be.”

  Maggie glared at her knees to keep from glaring at David. She loved the team but they always pushed her to do things she didn’t know how to do. They always told her she did, even when she didn’t, and insisted that if she could only figure it out...She’d never figured out how to hit a softball or slide into third without skinning her knees. But transcending a neurological sedative? Yeah, she’d get right on that.

  As if sensing her frustration, David changed the subject. “Will you tell me about your flashes?”

  “Flashes?”

  “The ones you keep dreaming about. We may be here for hours and I’d like to know what you see in detail. Maybe I can help you wade through them.”

  He had a point, and Maggie didn’t particularly want to push through oceans of nausea in the hope of reaching her abilities. She didn’t see any harm in talking to David about the flashes, though she still felt self-conscious about them.

  A flash of purple light. A rock formation. Brown boots walking across a room at eye level. Two large hands covering hers. A hand with an ugly black burn on the back. A woman standing in front of a broken lighthouse. Blood on her hands. A whisper of a voice. The one called B cornering her in a glass room. Karl washed up on some jagged rocks, bleeding from the neck. Joan holding a baby. Clay on his knees, mouth open in a silent scream. Lila curled up in a ball, crying. Doc burning parchment by candlelight. Gasping, clawing for breath...

  “I always see a flash of purple light first. I don’t know what it is. Then a rock formation. It’s one of the entrances to Interchron. In the flash it’s dark and there are people standing on top of the rock.”

  “Who are they?”

  “I can’t see their faces. That image makes me afraid.”

  He nodded and her face grew warm. “There are a pair of brown boots walking across the room at eye level. I figured that one out. They were Marcus’s boots. He and Joan were searching for me on the ship. I was lying on the ground, which is why I saw his boots at eye level. I’d already left the ship and found the Remembrancer. I’d made it back, but by the time Marcus found me I was paralyzed. I couldn’t tell him what I’d done or why. All of my memories just...seeped away.”

  The sadness that stole over Maggie when she spoke of it surprised her. She’d known this for months, but it still disturbed her as much as the day she’d first learned it.

  David watched her, his eyes discerning. “That must have been frightening.” He said softly.

  “Terrifying,” she sighed. “Everything I was—my entire identity—drained away, and I couldn’t stop it.”

  David’s look changed. He still frowned at her, looking disturbed, but not in the same way. He seemed lost in his own thoughts, now. “It was something you chose.”

  She shrugged. “That’s what the Remembrancer said. She believed I’d stumbled across something that frightened me; something so dangerous. I wanted to get rid of the knowledge, so I dumped my memories.” She hadn’t meant for the last part to come out so forcefully. Even she could hear the bitterness in her voice.

  David frowned. “You don’t think that’s true?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think she lied. I just can’t imagine making such a selfish decision. I didn’t only get rid of whatever I was afraid of, I got rid of everything: my emotions, knowledge of my abilities, my relationship with Marcus. I can’t imagine a scenario bad enough to make a choice like that.”

  “But you did, Maggie. You must have.”

  Maggie swallowed. She would have wrapped her arms around herself if she could have moved them. She had no words to argue. The fear that thought filled her stomach with was more than she could handle without trembling. David watched her hands. He could probably see them shaking.

  “After that, I see two hands covering mine. They’re Marcus’s, I think.”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “They’re obviously a man’s. They’re covering mine in a comforting way, so I assumed it was him. I suppose Doc might do that, or Clay, though I don’t think Clay’s hands were big enough to be these.”

  “What about Karl?”

  “Karl’s hands are definitely big enough—bigger—but these are Caucasian hands, not black. And—not that I’ve spent much time scrutinizing Doc’s hands—but it seems to me his have more wrinkles and age spots than these do. They’re strong, masculine hands. I suppose I don’t know for sure they’re Marcus’s.”

  “Try to see the hands before you, Maggie,” David said. “Are there any other identifying marks?”

  Maggie shut her eyes and called up the flash. In it, she was looking down at her
hands, clasped together against her stomach. A pair of large hands appeared and covered hers gently. The owner rubbed his thumbs softly over her thumbs. Nothing more.

  She focused harder. The hands didn’t have any particular identifying marks on them. She could also see the wrists and an inch or so of the forearms. A bruise marred the skin of the left one above the wrist. She could make out a faded purple circle on the top of the forearm. It might have been much bigger, but she couldn’t say for sure because she couldn’t see any more of the arm.

  She huffed in frustration and opened her eyes.

  “What is it?” David asked.

  She told him what she’d seen. “It’s not very helpful,” she muttered.

  “It’s more than you remembered a moment ago, right? So at least you’re making progress.”

  “I suppose. I’ve asked the team about these flashes and they don’t remember them. If the bruise came from, you know, wacking his arm on a door or something, he’s not going to remember it.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Maggie. All you can do is keep trying. What other flashes are there?”

  “Another hand that’s burned. It’s shriveled and I can’t tell whether it’s a man’s or a woman’s hand, but no one at Interchron remembers anyone’s hand being burned like that. Next I see blood on my hands.”

  “Are you sure they’re yours?”

  “Yes, I’m looking down on them. Next I hear a voice whispering something, though I can never make out what it is.”

  “Is that all of them?”

  Maggie hesitated. “It’s all I’d seen the last time I was with you. When my memories returned, more flashes came with them.”

  “Go on.”

  “The first one is strange. I have a memory of being trapped in a round room with the man who calls himself B. Do you know what happened to Lila right before you came to Interchron? A man who gave his name as B invaded her mind.”

  “Yes, I’ve been told. What did he look like in the memory? Can you see him?”

  “That’s what’s strange. I can’t actually see him. I’m in a circular room with no windows and no doors—although maybe I came through the door and it’s behind me—and I feel a presence with me. In the memory, I’m positive it’s him. I don’t know why or how I know that. I just do.”