Yesterday (30 page)

“It’s either us or the police,” the man says. “We can’t afford to let you go.”

“Why?” I lean over the railing and stare at the bustling levels of shopping mall beneath us.

The man stands next to me, his posture stiff. “Tell me, how did you remember?”

“Why should I tell you that? Why shouldn’t I just throw myself over the railing right now? That way no one gets me.

Not you and not the police.”

The man rests his arms on top of the railing, his chin drooping. “We’re not going to kill you, Freya. You just can’t continue to remember.” He raises a fi nger and points to the left and then the right. “They’re waiting for you in either direction. There’s no escaping this. But I need to know everything I can about how you remembered.”

“What happens if I don’t tell you?” I imagine the worst torture. Broken bones and severed limbs. My blood runs cold.

“Nothing as dramatic as what you’re probably thinking.

But we need to do the wipe and cover again and that will be dangerous in itself. We don’t have the proper equipment here to perform as thorough a job as they thought they’d done back in the U.N.A. It might be a bit rudimentary and leave you a different person than you could’ve been.” He sounds apologetic. “If you tell me what you know about how you remembered in the fi rst place it might help us to do a better job.”

“You’re going to butcher my mind.”
A
different
person
than
I
could’ve been.
That’s like a death of its own. I think of the wipe-and- cover victims I’ve seen on the Dailies, their personalities rubbed out and replaced with devotion to the state. That’s the kind of powerful result a W + C is capable of, when they can control it. Uncontrolled, it seems that anything could happen. At best, I’d forget the truth— have my brother, my father and my real past stolen from me a second time. At worst, I could come out of this a vegetable, forever damaged. And not just me … If they get Garren I’ll never forgive myself.

But I wouldn’t remember anyway. All of this would be gone.

That’s what I fi rst sensed at Henry’s but had no name for— the things they would take from me. My memories and maybe more, the very essence of who I am.

I gaze down at the miniature shoppers below me, going about their business, oblivious to the decision I’m facing. It would be worth it to jump and save Garren, save the person I am now.

“You don’t want to do that,” the man admonishes. “It’s not what we want either. We’re not the bad guys, Freya. We
wanted
to help. We’ve helped other people like you and your family but there’s a more important aim. Global survival.”

“What do you mean?” I lift my head. “How is any of this possible?”

“You know about the wipe and covers,” the man says quietly. “We’ve seen some that have taken quite a toll on young people— the neurological immaturity increases the risks— but I’ve only heard of one person who remembered his past after a wipe. He was a seventeen-year- old identical twin back in the U.N.A. and his twin hadn’t been wiped.”

“So I’m a scientifi c oddity.” If I can keep the man talking long enough maybe another vision will stream through my mind and help me decide what to do.

The man nods pensively. “You want to share your thoughts on that?”

“How about you tell me more fi rst. You’re the only person I’ve come across who hasn’t told me they can’t talk about it.”

“It’s true. The others can’t talk about it. It’s a programmed Bio-net fail-safe. The second they begin to transmit information about the future and what we’re doing here, a wipe sequence is triggered.”

“Why?” I glance to the left, at the Special Forces– type duo in the distance who are probably itching to charge over here and haul me away if only I wasn’t in such a public place. They’re as human as I am but I know they’ll do whatever they have to in order to take me, the same as the SecRos would’ve.

“Can you imagine the trouble it would cause in the present if it was known there were people who’d been sent back from the future living among the population? News of future environmental instability— and now the plague— could potentially be enough to signifi cantly destabilize this society.” The man looks at me from the corner of his eye. “It’s the guardians’ job, people like Nancy Bolton, to make sure those sent back settle in successfully. We couldn’t reasonably expect that everyone who has come across time would be capable of remaining quiet about their experiences. Besides, the wipe and cover makes the adjustment easier— for most people anyway.”

In the secret sliver of my mind’s eye that I suspect helped me remember in the fi rst place I see Garren and me running. Alive. Intact. Running scared through Toronto streets.

There’s still a chance for us. The vision proves there must be.

“What did you mean by a more important aim?” I ask, stalling. Garren must be waiting too. There are too many of them, too far apart. Five of them that I can see, including the man next to me. Even if I could get to my knife in time, there’s no chance I could escape them all.

“Environmental legislation,” he replies. “We waited too long last time. Global warming has been catastrophic for the entire planet. We have a chance to slow its pace. There are several other units like us in the United States, infi ltrating the political system there, poised to make the changes we need that hopefully will have a profound infl uence on policies worldwide.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“In the United States, ten years. We’ve had a few key people up here in Canada since then too, as support resources, but it wasn’t until the nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India that a select group of very important people in the U.N.A. who were aware of the project began to wonder if life, even in the U.N.A., would soon be doomed. So we began a second phase of the project, settling a limited number of well-connected U.N.A. civilians up here in southern Ontario.” The man strokes his nose and pauses. “With the plague outbreak there were requests for immediate resettle-ment, including that of you and your mother. I tell you all this so you know that none of this is being done with the intention of hurting you. We just have too much to protect.

If this plays out the way we hope, we’ll be changing history.

Everyone will be better off. Even you.”

Future
me.
The person who’ll be born sixty-two years from now.

“I’d like you to try to understand, Freya. And I’d like it if we could start walking now.”

I cast a look ahead of me. There are still two security types beyond us and two behind.

“You think I should understand?” I say as I take a series of snail-paced steps in the direction the man’s indicating.

“You think I should approve of the big picture enough that I won’t blame you for what you’re planning to do to me.”

“I’d like that,” he replies. “I realize it might not be realistic. Especially for someone your age.”

I bristle at the fact that generations before me ruined the planet but that I’m expected to willingly sacrifi ce myself. “I could’ve already told someone what I know if I’d wanted to.

You could let me go. I won’t say anything. I’ll just disappear.”

“That’s not going to happen, Freya, but I’m going to do everything I can to help you, I promise. I need to know anything you can tell me about remembering. It’s important.

Not just for you but for anyone else sent back.”

“Anyone else?” I’ve been walking as slowly as humanly possible and now I stop entirely. “You mean they’re still sending people back? The U.N.A. is still out there?”

“Some of it is.”

Some.
“My father?”

The man nods impatiently. “Last I heard, yes. The SecRos have helped slow the spread of Toxo but there’s still no cure. The survivors have been falling back to the north, your father and President Ortega with them.”

So there’s still hope, even for those left behind. My heart leaps at the knowledge that my father’s still alive. “Can we get back again? How did we get here?”

“Keep going, please.” The man cups my elbow and guides me forward. I wrench my arm away from him but continue to walk beside him. “There’s no returning to the future and you wouldn’t want to be there now even if it were possible, believe me. Tell me what you know about remembering and I’ll explain.”

I shoot him a look of angry disbelief.

“I’m not in the habit of lying,” the man says.

“I don’t even know who you are,” I snap.

“My name doesn’t matter but I’m a
director.
There are only a handful of us on either side of the border. I came here today to make sure this was handled properly. You’re important to us. I want you to know that. We want to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else. There’s also the matter of your friend Garren. Has he remembered too?”

I shake my head. “He doesn’t know what’s going on. I kept telling him that I felt like I knew him, even before my memories really returned. He thought I was crazy. I haven’t seen him in days. He thinks this is all some diplomatic conspiracy involving the murders of our fathers. You’ve scared him off. He’s gone.”

“We’ll fi nd him too,” the man says.

“But he doesn’t remember. He doesn’t
need
a wipe. You could just let him go. There’s nothing he could tell anyone, even if he wanted to.”

“So you say but you might lie for him,” the man declares.

“I might but I’m not. I don’t have to.” The gap between us and the director’s allies is shrinking. Two of them are standing in front of the Eaton’s department store at the north end of the shopping mall, eyeing us up. I’m running out of time and I stop again. “I’ll tell you why I think the W and C

didn’t work— I’m not your average person.”

The director’s so intent on what I’m about to say that he doesn’t berate me for stopping.

“I have a kind of second sight,” I admit. “Since I was very young.”

“That wasn’t in your fi le,” the director says.

“It wouldn’t be. I hid it from my parents. But it’s the only thing I can think of that would interfere with the wipe and cover. I sensed there was something wrong from the moment I started to physically recover from the journey here. The feeling got stronger when I ran into Garren but I didn’t have a real breakthrough until I went to a hypnotherapist.”

The director squints, unhappiness spreading across his face and creeping into the slope of his shoulders. “Hypnotherapy shouldn’t have had any impact. Your procedure was performed faster than usual because of the Toxo threat but the nanites neutralized the neurons associated with your old memories.” He straightens his spine, twin lines of concentration forming between his eyebrows. “You could be right about the link with your second sight. I don’t understand the nature of the relationship between the two offhand but we’ll investigate that.”

I keep my theory about the role grief played in remembering to myself. “You said you’d tell me how we got back here,” I prompt.

“So I did. We don’t have time to cover the extensive background information now. It will have to suffi ce for me to say that our presence here is thanks to a discovery we call the Nipigon Chute. In 2044 a U.N.A. archivist uncovered a case study about an American man named Victor Soto in an Australian mental hospital in 1963. The man claimed to have fallen out of a boat on Lake Nipigon in northwestern Ontario in 2041. His doctors performed electric shock therapy until they considered him cured and he’d come to look upon his experience as a delusion.”

My head’s reeling but I don’t have time for awe. I need to stay focused.

“But he knew too much about the future for it to be a fi ction,” the director continues. “And the U.N.A. began researching Lake Nipigon itself. Eventually we learned the exact location of the phenomenon. We’ve still barely scratched the surface in beginning to understand it but we believe the Nipigon phenomenon is as natural as gravity.

It’s possible there are more of its kind on the planet— so far undetected— and that others who were intellectually ahead of their time at various points in history may have traveled through similar chutes.

“That’s only theoretical as this point but one thing we do know is that the Nipigon Chute is strictly a one-way journey through time. A jump back seventy-eight years, seven months and eleven days into the past with the physical end point of the journey being a large salt lake in Western Australia, Lake Mackay. Victor Soto was lucky to have arrived in Lake Mackay after heavy rain; otherwise he would’ve suffocated in the salt and none of us would have been aware of the amazing opportunity nature seems to have bestowed on us.”

The director tilts his head, his eyes shining with rever-ence. “It’s incredible, isn’t it? A second chance for the entire world.”

It is incredible; there’s no denying it. The place and time I’m from desperately needs another chance. No wonder the director wants to make sure I forget. We thought there were no more real mysteries left on earth, that the only major changes we’d see would be made through our own technolo-gies. I’m speechless.

But if the director thinks this will be enough to make me give in and go with him, he’s wrong. I want my second chance in the here and now, not reserved for some future Freya that may never be born, depending on how history is rewritten. And I want a second chance for Garren too. I want us to stand on the shores of the Pacifi c Ocean and be free.

“How many of us are back here?” I ask, stalling again.

“I think I’ve satisfi ed enough of your curiosity,” the director replies. “We have to go, Freya.”

I can’t put him off a second longer. The future’s only steps away and I begin walking, closing the distance between us and the security men. My mind is absolutely clear. No new visions. I can’t wait anymore. I wasn’t a foot nearer than this when I heard the shot in my premonition.

I leap ahead of the director, my weight on my bent left leg to the rear of me. In one fl uid action I lift the knee of my right leg and whip out my right foot, kicking into the director’s abdomen with the ball of my Doc Martens boot.

I’ve never done anything like this outside of gushi. I’m stunned that in real life the action works almost as well.