Fixer (31 page)

“You think he’s going to stop?”

“He’ll just be done.” She took the deepest breath she could to keep her voice steady so that her next point was clearly understood. “I’m the only one left, Agent Trent.”

“But why?” Maggie asked. “Why you and the others? Why is he doing this?”

“Because you’re wrong. He’s not invisible,” Erica said. “We saw him. I think that’s why he’s killing us.”

*  *  *

Twenty Months Past

Erica Smalls was standing before two video monitors and holding her breath. It was something she tended to do when she was excited, a biological factoid that did not always work out all that well for her, especially when she was working on a calculation of some kind and had a need for a constant supply of air to keep her brain moving. In this case, her brain didn’t have to do anything except interpret the signals sent to it from her eyes, so she allowed it.

The monitors were being fed images from two very different devices. One was a standard video camera borrowed from the AV lab a couple of buildings away from where she was standing. The other was a bastardized mutation of a video camera. It had some of the component parts of a standard camera, but aside from the lenses, there was no telling where exactly those components were located. Also included in this apparatus were the heat coils from the back of a junkyard refrigerator and an ample supply of Freon—it took them months to get the proper permits for this—a dozen circuit boards that were built from scratch, a Pentium microprocessor ripped from a spare computer, three prisms, two low-grade industrial lasers, a dinner cart stolen from the Radisson, roughly two miles of cables and wires, and about fifty other random objects whose nature and purpose Erica only dimly understood. Which was okay. She only worked the theory and some of the math. Once she’d proven it was possible without invoking anything the engineers in the group couldn’t salvage or invent—a quantum singularity, say—she was done. Her responsibility to the project had thus been completed a few months ago, after a brutal two years that would have gone faster if it weren’t for all the damned infinities.

The twin video monitors showed the same event from slightly different angles—Kelsey and Dina walking from opposite ends of the camera’s optical range, meeting in the middle, shaking hands, and then walking off again. As events went, it was wholly unremarkable. Equally unremarkable was the fact that it appeared one video monitor was on a five-second delay. But that was misleading, because the monitor showing real time was the one that was five seconds behind. The other one had recorded the transaction before it had actually happened.

“It’s beautiful,” she gasped. 

Everyone else in the room—Doc Decaf, Saj, Jimmy, El, and Jamie—were too stunned to say anything at all. Maybe it was because after two years of work by the seven of them, and by at least fifty others who had contributed time and expertise, nobody truly believed it would ever work. Even Erica, who could recite the physics so well she sometimes caught herself singing the necessary equations in the shower to the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

“So?” Kelsey asked. He and Dina, having been the first two people to see their grand new toy work, were past the shocked-and-awed stage.

“Yeah,” Dina said. “What d’ya think?”

Doc Decaf, still unable to speak, started clapping. And then everyone was hugging and cheering. Someone pulled out champagne.

*  *  *

Their lab was one of four large private spaces in the applied sciences building. Like all of the labs, it looked to have been decorated by a psychotic junkyard man, with random tubes, semi-assembled computers, loose wires, circuit boards, and an entire wall devoted to Tinkertoys. It was also the place where the first successful Advance Temporal Segment Viewing—or simply ATSV—test was run and where its designers elected to stay in order to properly celebrate.

There were exactly eight people at MIT who had a complete understanding of the Advance Temporal Segmentation Project, and seven of them were in that room to see it pay off. The eighth, Professor Archibald Calvin, whom Erica had never even met, was the one who came up with the idea in the first place. It was rumored he had gotten the idea after meeting someone who could see the future, but none of them seriously believed that. They had each headed a team to work out various aspects of the problem, breaking it into small enough pieces so that no one student who wasn’t meant to see the whole picture would see the whole picture. This was Offey’s idea. Nobody expected that to work out either.

“To Archie Calvin,” toasted Doc Decaf, holding up one of the bottles of champagne.

“And his visitor from the future,” Jamie added—to much laughter. Erica grinned and drank straight from her own bottle. She was not one to drink in the middle of the afternoon, but this wasn’t a normal day. A niggling voice in her head—her mom’s voice, because the subject was alcohol—reminded her to be careful, as she tended to get a mite horny when drinking, and these were people she wanted to be able to look in the eye again tomorrow. Plus, she was bound to embarrass herself with Doc Decaf, who she’d only been crushing on for two solid years. She ignored this admonition and gulped some more of the champagne. This made her dizzy, so she found the nearest chair, which happened to be occupied by Jimmy Ho. Fortunately, Jimmy came equipped with a fully functional lap.

“So now what?” she asked, ignoring Jimmy’s hand around her waist. “I mean, are we rich yet?”

“Now we design a testing protocol,” Offey said mildly. “So we can show off our new toy without anybody thinking we’re pulling a stunt.”

“Wait,” Eleanor said. “Didn’t we just do that? With the walking?”

“So you say,” Offey countered. “But suppose Dina and Kel here secretly rigged it? They could have filmed themselves doing the exact same thing and put it on a loop to play before the live version.”

“Would we do that?” Dina asked Kelsey, who had his arm around her shoulder.

“We migh’. We’re a crafty pair.”

“So you are,” said Offey.

“C’mon,” Erica said. “They’re not
that
smart.”

Dina stuck a pierced tongue out at her.

Offey took another deep drink and then said, “So the question I want all of you to ask yourselves is how do you prove this to a skeptic? Assume we’re talking about someone who does not know what fine, honest, hardworking folks you happen to be. For while you may look at yourselves in the mirror and see Einstein, Bohr, and Feynman, keep in mind that there will be many who will see instead Pons and Fleischmann.”

A silence fell over all of them as this sank in.

“Wow,” Jimmy said eventually. “What a buzz kill.”

“Hey,” Dina said. “We have a window.”

“Don’t jump,” El said—to laughter.

“No,” Dina continued, “the optics aspect is actually pretty small. It’s not really portable, but—”

“We’re saving the portable one for the army contract,” Kelsey quipped.

Sajjan said, “Set it up at the window, film whoever’s out there.”

“Why not?” Dina asked. “We just have to extend a couple cables.”

“That might do it,” Offey said, smiling.

“Oh, guys, we totally have to do that right now,” Jimmy said.

“Absolutely,” Erica agreed. Because while it was cool to see Kel and Dina walking around the room, trying it out on an unsuspecting civilization would be—and this might have been the champagne talking—fucking awesome.

*  *  *

Two hours—and the purchase of a number of pizzas and sodas—later, the still pretty drunk ATSP team had gotten the delicate optical piece moved twenty-five feet across the room to the edge of the frosted-glass window. That window, when open, afforded them a view of a minor side street and a small park that was, fortuitously, around the corner from a Starbucks. So even though it was cold out, there were a half dozen people who had opted to stop and sit in the park while they drank their coffee. Between the people and the cars, the team had the makings of a perfect test sampling.

“We’re ready here,” Dina said, holding the ATSV’s optics steady. Jimmy stood next to her with the digital camera.

“Hold on,” Kelsey said from the control board. He finished off the last of his champagne bottle. “Okay, ready now.”

“Perhaps we should have done this before we started drinking,” Offey said paternally.

“I can work this blindfolded,” Kelsey said. “Now you have to keep in mind that the views are going to look a little different. Before, we had the camera and the ATSV showing almost the same angle. We haven’t done that here.”

“Why not?” Erica asked, standing next to Doc Decaf and bouncing on the balls of her feet from a combination of excitement, mild arousal, and a great need to pee.

“Takes too long,” Dina said. “We’re just doing this for fun, right?”

“Turn it on already,” Jamie said.

“Alrighty,” Kelsey said. 

He flipped the switch, and both monitors came to life. 

As before, the view from the ATSV showed events on the street happening before the regular camera did. Erica caught herself holding her breath again and wondering if there would ever come a day when she found this anything other than extraordinary.

The scene outside was that of a lightly populated public space. A mixture of students and employees of the office building down the street milled about, and occasionally a car drove by on its way to Mem Drive. It was, overall, only slightly more interesting than the handshake demonstration, except that there was no way to stage this sort of public interaction.

“There’s your test, Doc,” Kelsey said with a smile.

“We are so clever,” El said.

“Damn straight,” agreed Jamie.

They stood there and watched for what seemed like an hour. At one point Dina and Sajjan switched places so she could see the monitors, and then Jamie located a tripod to support the regular camera so Jimmy could join in with the staring.

“Hey,” Erica said. “That’s weird.”

“What is?” Dina asked.

Erica had seen something that could conservatively be considered anomalous. “Look over here,” she said, pointing to the ATSV monitor. “See the guy in orange?”

Dina said, “With the . . . what is that, a prison uniform? What about him?”

“He’s not on the other monitor.”

Offey leaned forward. “That’s strange.”

The man was sitting on one of the benches by himself, looking down at his own feet. He had a bald head and worn sneakers, and didn’t appear to be dressed well for the weather. The outfit he was wearing did indeed look a lot like a prison uniform, except it had no number or name insignia on it. Erica thought he looked eerily still—a poorly dressed statue.

“Are you recording this?” Offey asked.

“Yeah,” Kelsey said.

“Hey, Saj,” Erica said, “can you see a guy out there in a bright orange jumpsuit?”

Sajjan peered around the apparatus. “Where?”

“Second bench on the left.”

“There’s nobody there,” he said.

“According to our device, there is,” Offey said.

“Huh.”

On the ATSV screen a woman holding a large coffee walked up to the where the bald man sat. She was about to sit right down on his lap, then changed her mind and picked a different bench instead.

“Someone almost sat on him,” Erica said to Sajjan.

“I’m telling you, there isn’t anybody there,” he insisted.

“Well,” Doc Offey said, “we have a new problem. If this is showing imaginary people . . .” he trailed off, as there was really no adequate answer to what it was they were all witnessing.

“Maybe he’s really not there,” Kelsey suggested. “And this is just some sort of crazy glitch.”

“I can test for that,” Sajjan said.

“Could this be showing us a possible future instead of the actual one?” Erica asked.

“I don’t see how,” Eleanor, the other pure theoretician in the room, said. If such a thing were possible, it would probably be she and Erica who figured out how.

The bald anomaly’s head jerked upward, which caused Erica to gasp involuntarily. There was something deeply creepy about the way he did that. Like a bird almost, but more fundamentally predatory. He was looking right at the window—and at them. She was holding her breath again, but this time excitement had nothing to do with it.

“Why did he do that?” she asked quietly.

“Hey!” Sajjan shouted out the window. A few of the people on the street looked up at the sound. “You in the orange outfit!”

The man had a large, pointed nose, perfectly black eyes, a mouth that seemed to be much too big, and no eyebrows or other facial hair of any kind. His head tilted to one side, and an expression of commingled fear and curiosity passed across his face.

“He’s looking at you, Saj,” Kelsey said.

He looked up before Sajjan spoke,
Erica realized.
He heard the future.

“Yeah,” Sajjan said, still shouting out the window. “Yeah, we can see you.”

The man opened his mouth and seemed to articulate something none of them could hear. Erica was too busy staring at his teeth to read his lips because his teeth were huge and coated in a thin layer of reddish gore.
Shark’s teeth
.

“What did he say?” Dina asked, sounding very small and scared.

“Honestly?” Jamie said, “I thought I saw the word ‘kill’ in there.”

“Guys,” Jimmy said, “I think we should turn off the ATSV. Now.”

The bald thing had stopped speaking and had moved on to howling, his mouth open wide and head tilted upward like a baying hound.

“Yeah,” Jamie said. “Kel, turn it off.”

“But . . .”

“Maybe you should,” Offey agreed. “Until we figure out what’s gone wrong with . . .”

“
Turn it off
!” Eleanor screamed.

“Okay, okay.” Kelsey threw the necessary switches, and the ATSV image went dead.

At the window, Sajjan carefully lowered the optic piece to the floor, saying, “So what does this guy look like?”

“Close the window, Saj,” Dina said. “Quickly.”

“You afraid this boogeyman’s gonna climb the wall and slip in through the window?” he asked.

“Yes,” Dina said, completely serious. “That is exactly what I’m afraid of.”