Lost Friday

by Michael Bronte

  No wonder I smelled camel shit, I thought sarcastically. “What’s that odor?”

  “Just as we are bothered by the smell of burning fossil fuels that hang in the air in your time, so, too, are you bothered by the ever-present smell of our food production plants. We do not notice it, you see.”

  No, I didn’t see. I got into a sitting position, and suddenly I had a million questions. I started with, “Who the hell are you guys?” The smaller guy must not have liked my tone because his jaw muscles started working again. Yeah, well, I didn’t like getting snatched off the face of the Earth, I mean, snatched off the face of… whatever… without anyone asking me if I wanted to go, so fuck him.

  “My name is Vishal,” the dark-skinned one said. “Vishal Rawan. This is Aryeh Caleb.”

  I noticed that Vishal had a hand on Aryeh’s arm as if he was holding him back. I took a second to determine if I wanted to continue being an asshole with these guys, then I locked eyes with Aryeh. Not. “So are you guys, like, travel agents or something?” I couldn’t help it. I have this wise-ass gene that kicks in whenever I get really pissed off.

  “We are government agents,” Vishal replied.

  “Like, what, CIA?” Aryeh let out a disdainful little snort and took a seat, content to let Vishal deal with me, apparently.

  “I am with the ICTO. Aryeh is Mossad.”

  Mossad, I knew. Nasty little fuckers. I think their motto was: Fuck with us, and die. Then, I did the math. If the year was indeed 2194, they’d been nasty little fuckers for well over two hundred years now. I swung my eyes away from Aryeh, who was giving me the heebie-jeebies. “ICTO. What is that, American?”

  “ICTO is not affiliated with any particular government, Mister Pappas. It is the outgrowth of what was in your United States the Department of Homeland Security. You see, late in the twenty-first century, virtually paralyzed by bureaucratic in-fighting, the entire intelligence and security functions of the United States were reorganized into two agencies: the CIA, which retained its name, but changed its function, and the ICTO, International Counter Terrorist Organization.”

  “U-h-h-h-h-huh,” I said.

  “The CIA continued to exist, but strictly as a technical organization, doing exactly what its name implied: gathering and analyzing intelligence. The ICTO did everything else.”

  I took everything else to mean reducing the population of the planet. I got off the bed, finding that I had some trouble maintaining my balance. “Why international?” I asked as I walked around slowly.

  Vishal seemed to struggle with the thought. “We rented out,” he finally said.

  “Rented out, as in to other governments?”

  “Precisely. You see, by the end of the twenty-first century, the countries of the world could barely manage with simply keeping their populations fed. Luxuries like armies were for the wealthy countries, and, as such, those countries discovered they could outsource their services to raise money and help with their own population pressures. Now, almost at the end of the twenty-second century, the pressure is even worse. For most nations, the social costs of population maintenance such as food production, education, health care, and entertainment are so burdensome that many governmental and security functions have to be obtained from one of the six security organizations around the world.”

  Several thoughts were banging around inside my head. “Entertainment?”

  “A massive expense. Since most mundane tasks are automated, not everyone works, Mister Pappas. In many countries, almost half the population is unemployed. Something has to be done to keep the people occupied.”

  “What exactly is the population?” I asked. Aryeh was fidgeting, like he had an execution to go to, or something.

  “Of the world, approximately forty-seven billion, and it is increasing at the rate of about one billion per year despite our best efforts at controlling the numbers.”

  I stopped in my tracks, which wasn’t difficult seeing as my feet never broke contact with the floor. Forty-seven billion? Geez. What was it back in my time? Six billion? And more than two billion of that was in China and India. “I don’t understand. How can—”

  “Several reasons,” Vishal replied, anticipating my question. “Primarily, people are simply living longer. The average life span is now well over one hundred years.”

  “Even in the underdeveloped countries?”

  “There are no underdeveloped countries. Technology is instantaneous. Information spreads at an incredible rate. There are people in every country capable of understanding it, and using it, almost as soon as discoveries are made. Combined with even a controlled birth rate, our numbers continue to increase at a staggering pace. The physical, social, and economic strain on the planet is enormous.”

  “What about, like, colonizing other planets, or something.”

  Vishal chuckled, and I wondered if I’d said something funny. “An obvious solution, but not an easy one. There are several interplanetary colonies, but those can accommodate only about a hundred million people, nowhere near enough to relieve the pressure on the planet.”

  Okay, so the future was no bed of roses, but I started thinking about what all that had to do with David Robelle, the scientists, me, and all the other poor slobs who were joining this futuristic party without having RSVP’d. So, I asked.

  Trying to answer my question, Vishal said, “Perhaps the name of our organization has escaped you.”

  That was condescending. “No, Vishal, it hasn’t. I simply haven’t gotten around to asking about it yet.”

  “You’re a spirited fellow, aren’t you?”

  That was one way of putting it. I could see Aryeh still wasn’t buying my act. Yeah, well, they invited me to this shindig, which meant they wanted something. “You said something about security organizations. What is that, like rent-a-cop, or something?” Aryeh let out another scornful huff, and I figured I was getting to the end of my rope with him.

  Vishal said, “You should not insult the capability of these forces until you know something about them, Mister Pappas.”

  In other words: shut-the-fuck-up before Aryeh eats you. I continued, “So, essentially you’re talking about six armies that hire themselves out—”

  “As needed,” Vishal interjected. “They maintain constant overt and covert intelligence, protection, and combat units that can be brought in when called for by the client nation, enabling most governments on the planet to concentrate on their food and population issues.”

  Outsourced armies whose employees killed each other off? Hmmm. I guessed it could work. All I know is that the taxes that came out of my paycheck on a regular basis were enough to choke a horse, and unemployment was, what? Six percent, as opposed to fifty percent? Fathoming the cost of maintaining order and social welfare costs for forty-seven billion was not a concept that came to me right then. “What’s the population of the United States?” I asked.

  “Which part?”

  “What do you mean, which part? You know, the fifty states.”

  “There are fifty-seven states now, but to answer your question, there are a little over eleven billion people in the United States.”

  Eleven billion? Holy…. “How many people live in Sea Beach?” I asked tentatively, wondering if Vishal actually knew.

  Vishal walked to a panel on the wall that turned into a computer screen as he approached. There was no keyboard, or touch pad, of any sort. He simply spoke to the thing, and the answer appeared instantaneously, just like the words from David Robelle’s ransom note: 247,184. I noticed that the last digit changed to a 5 as he stood there.

  I about choked. In Sea Beach? Not possible. I mean, you could walk from one end of town to the other in less than an hour. “How many people live in Manhattan?” I asked. Answer: 22,985,221. In Manhattan alone? “How about all of New York City?” Vishal was only too happy to amuse me. Answer: 63,999,044. I sat down. There were almost sixty-four mi
llion people living in New York City. Goddamn. I bet the subways were really crowded.

  Vishal said, “It looks like you’re starting to get the picture.”

  Indeed, I was. To say that the implications were enormous would be like saying… what? I couldn’t even think of a comparison. “Okay boys,” I said, “Let’s cut to the chase. Why am I here? And no bullshit, okay? I’m good at bullshit.”

  Vishal cut a look at Aryeh, who decided to rejoin the conversation. He had to be almost a foot shorter than Vishal, but if he and Vishal were two dogs in a dogfight, my money would have been on him. Aryeh said, “My name is Aryeh Caleb. I am Mossad.”

  “Get to the point, Sparky.”

  “I am a terrorist killer, Mister Pappas, and I want you to be a terrorist killer, too.”

  All of a sudden, I wasn’t such a wise-ass.

  “David Robelle and the scientists who were abducted from your time are being held by the Red Diamond.”

  Hello, I thought.

  “The Red Diamond is one of the six security forces Vishal has described, but they go much further than protection.”

  Aryeh paused for a second, trying to see what was in my eyes. “Go on,” I said, hoping there wasn’t anything there besides curiosity. If I had a B.S. in detecting b-s, this guy must have had a Ph.D.

  “Part of their service is population control.”

  “Population control, how?”

  Aryeh’s eyes narrowed. “They don’t do it by prevention.”

  I think I was starting to get the picture. The swastika and a field of red—a Red Diamond. Ding-dong! “Genocide?”

  “In a big way, Mister Pappas. Millions and millions of people, most of them decreed to be of lesser social value.”

  “Decreed by whom?”

  “By them. They consider themselves superior.”

  Now I understood the Mossad connection. “What does that have to do with David Robelle and the others, or me?”

  “The ultimate goal of the Red Diamond is domination. In essence, the Red Diamond has taken over their client countries and is governing their affairs beyond the scope of law and order and national defense.”

  Okay, now I was hooked. “So?”

  Aryeh glanced at Vishal, who nodded. “Some time ago, the Red Diamond managed to steal one of our ITDs.”

  “What’s an ITD?”

  “Intertime Device, the very device that brought you here.”

  My eyebrows knitted. “A time machine.”

  “It’s not a machine, exactly, but that’s not important now. The point is that the Red Diamond managed to get hold of one of the devices, and has been using it to go back in time and affect history.” Aryeh let that sit for a second. “Going back in time and affecting history has been declared illegal, Mister Pappas, specifically for the reason that the Red Diamond is doing it. By intervening in past events, the course of history can be changed, much like changing the course of a river by putting up a dam, or destroying a dam, if you follow my meaning.”

  “But, you still use the devices,” I concluded.

  “In the past, we used them to control aggression. For many years in the middle of this century, we sent operatives back in time to spoil the efforts of despots and dictators around the world. We soon put a stop to that practice, however.”

  “You’re talking about assassination,” I said bluntly. Again, Aryeh’s eyes narrowed, and he bristled at what I said. I wasn’t good with this guy.

  “It wasn’t what you’re suggesting, Mister Pappas. Most often, we attempted to affect the early influences in a dictator’s life: teachers, schooling, friends, things that could have affected an outcome. It was seldom about death.”

  “You said you stopped. Why was that?”

  “Because the linkages were too hard to control. We had situations where entire generations disappeared from the present, where bloodlines ceased to exist. Sometimes situations were altered so that new situations appeared, situations we were totally unprepared to deal with so that we had to go back and try to re-affect history again. The lines between democracy and totalitarianism became blurred, and we had a hard time discerning which side of the line we were on. We discovered that history is a complicated phenomenon, one better left to develop on its own. Once tampered with, it is almost impossible to restore, and just as impossible to predict.”

  “So, you never controlled your enemies.”

  “Oh, many times we did, but new enemies were created. That lesson cost millions of lives, both in terms of current lives lost, or lives eliminated before even having had a chance to spawn. It’s a mistake we can’t let happen again.”

  Aryeh certainly seemed passionate, but that was no surprise. As an organization, Mossad was known for its fervor, even in my time. The way he’d just described things, the Holocaust was pep rally compared to what was happening now. “But you continued to hold on to the devices,” I surmised.

  “We felt we had to,” Vishal responded, getting back into the conversation. “It was too important a capability to destroy forever, and, properly controlled, we felt it could help prevent some catastrophic situation that could someday befall us.”

  “Can you go forward in time?” I asked curiously.

  “We haven’t yet, but we could if we had a DNA sample from the future to lock-on to. The devices are DNA-controlled and targeted, you see, as are many devices in this time. We lock-on to a preprogrammed DNA chip that we create from someone’s body, and reassemble that person’s atoms at the other end of the wormhole. If our targeted DNA—the person—was holding on to another person, both could travel the wormhole at the same time. We’ve had as many as a dozen people travel in one chain event.”

  “So, someone held on to me?” I asked, getting an impression of what happened during one of my previous trips.

  “Someone did,” Vishal answered, “although now you are equipped with a DNA chip that we can lock-on to.”

  Equipped? Like, equipped where? Probably somewhere where no one would find it, which meant that it was probably on my pecker, or something. I shot Vishal an angry glare, but it didn’t seem to bother him. Getting back to the Red Diamond, I said, “So these Red Diamond dudes snatched one of your time machines, and now they want to go back in time and screw around with history so they can, what, take over the world?”

  Vishal and Aryeh both smiled. “In a nutshell, yes,” said Vishal. “You have a way with words, Mister Pappas.”

  Yeah, tell that to Romano, I thought. “Why don’t these Red Diamond guys dismantle the one machine they have, and duplicate the technology?”

  “The ITDs are programmed to self-destruct if someone tampers with them,” Vishal answered. “That’s done specifically to prevent what we’re talking about. The Red Diamond abducted David Robelle and the scientists in order to gain the technology in that manner, without risking their only device.”

  “You mean, David Robelle invented time travel?” I asked incredulously.

  “David Robelle is the physicist who created the mathematical formulas that proved time travel was possible. Those proofs eventually led to other inventions, which in turn led to the invention of ITDs, but, in essence, it started with David Robelle and those scientists.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, thinking the phrase suddenly had new meaning to me. “David and the scientists were taken by the Red Diamond, and you guys…. What’s the name of your club again?”

  “The ICTO.”

  “Right. Do you have, like, a secret handshake or anything?” They didn’t laugh. “Anyway, you guys took me. Who took 3,000 people on Lost Friday?”

  “Actually, it’s 2,880,” Vishal replied, “and that was us, as well. It was quite a large operation, but one that we had to execute. Our mission was to do a memory scan on everyone to see if they knew of David’s work, or, if they knew about the Red Diamond. If anyone did, that would be the person we were looking for. You see, we were searching for the Red Diamond
operative who we knew was among you planning to kidnap David.”

  Right. The scientists had been taken before that, I remembered. “I assume by the fact that you returned everyone, that you didn’t find your man.”

  “Almost everyone,” Vishal replied. “The brain scans revealed psychopathic tendencies on three individuals that we didn’t return. In our time, it’s against the law to return individuals to society once homicidal memories are discovered.”

  The three missing prisoners, I concluded immediately. “So, they’re still here.”

  “We’re holding them until we can figure out what to do with them,” Vishal answered. “And, no, we didn’t find our woman. The Red Diamond infiltrator is female.”

  “What about the twelve other people who were taken again just the other day.”

  “They were taken by the Red Diamond.”

  “A jury, right? They are a jury of some type.”

  “Very good, Mister Pappas.”

  I smiled. I was a genius. “Who’s on trial?” I asked.

  Vishal said, “David Robelle. He’s not cooperating, and he’s about to be tried and convicted by a jury of his peers.”

  “On what charges?”

  “The Red Diamond is calling it crimes against humanity, but it doesn’t really matter. They’re trumped up charges, a practice the Red Diamond uses regularly to detain or eliminate individuals who won’t cooperate with them. It’s all a sham, of course, but in its own eyes it gives the Red Diamond a façade of legitimacy.”

  “What if the jury doesn’t convict him?”

  “That won’t happen. Jurors that don’t cooperate have been known to disappear after their trials have concluded.”

  I thought, fuckin’ A. This was all too unreal. But I still needed to know what this had to do with me.

  “You ask a lot of questions,” Vishal said when I asked.

  “Yeah, well, that’s my job.”

  “Get some sleep, if you can. We will talk again in the morning.”

  One question I didn’t ask was what that Red Diamond operative looked like. I bet I could describe her pretty well.

  Chapter 20… Through The Front Door