Fixer Redux

by Gene Doucette

  Did you act alone?

  What is your connection to Nick Borowitz and Sharon Ledo?

  What does the device we found you wearing do?

  How do you know Corrigan Bain?

  There were more. It went on like that for almost the whole hour, and included multiple visuals. They would slide a picture to him: the symbol on the bombs, which they asked him to explain the significance of, or a picture of the apparatus he was wearing, perp shots of Ledo and Borowitz, and so on. He’d look at each picture, consider whether or not to respond, and then lean back and look away. Every single time.

  Joe was ready to renegotiate the no-beating-the-shit-out-of-him rules. Instead, he closed up his folder, thanked Landon for his time, and told David it was time to go.

  “I have one more question,” David said. He’d been silent the entire time, so this was a treat. “Mr. Jenks: is it over?”

  Landon quietly advised Jenks not to answer. Jenks nodded. Then he answered.

  “No,” he said quietly.

  Joe nearly fell over.

  “Again,” his attorney said, louder now, “I’m advising my client not to answer.”

  “Oh, shut the hell up, Landon,” Joe said. “We know. It’s on tape. What did you say, Bernard?”

  Bernard had a certain expression he stuck to when declining to answer questions. It was kind of a middle-distance meditation look, like he was finishing up an especially relaxing yoga class or a really good bong hit. He looked different now. It was like David had unlocked him or something.

  “I said no, it isn’t over,” Bernard repeated. “And it’s Shiva.”

  “What is?” David asked.

  “Have you ever witnessed a miracle, detectives?”

  “What, like ever?” Joe asked. “What kind of miracle?”

  “Any kind. Have you seen the impossible and known what you were looking at was a miracle?”

  For some reason, the first thing Joe thought of was watching that surveillance tape of Corrigan Bain eluding an entire floor of cops to sneak out of the precinct. That seemed ages ago, so it was surprising to find it so readily available in his recall.

  “Have you?” David asked.

  “Yes, I have,” Bernard said. “I saw an act of God.”

  Joe and David shared an uncomfortable look.

  Joe wasn’t all that familiar with the terrorist cell David worked on with the FBI, but he didn’t think religious fanaticism was a component.

  “God, huh?” Joe said. “Which one?”

  “The only one that matters. I look forward to the day you witness your first miracle, Detective White.”

  “Okay, forget all that,” David said. “What do you mean when you say it isn’t over? Do you know about another attack?”

  But then Bernard had that unhelpful expression again, and Joe knew they’d gotten all they were getting out of him for that session. Their hour was up anyway, a point Landon emphasized by getting to his feet, and tapping his wristwatch.

  “Detectives, I’m afraid it’s time.”

  Joe thought the attorney probably wouldn’t have stood in the way of them getting more questions answered, had his client not returned to his prior reticence already. He was probably as curious as they were.

  “We’ll talk again soon,” Joe said, to Bernard, who ignored him. Then David tapped on the door, and they were being escorted all the way back out again.

  They didn’t speak about what had just happened until after they’d reclaimed their service weapons and made it all the way outside.

  “What the hell did that mean?” Joe asked.

  “I don’t know,” David said. He was lighting up another smoke. “But I’m going to be listening to that tape for the rest of the month until I figure it out.”

  “I’ll make you a copy. But this smells wrong. I never saw a religious angle before. Weren’t your guys anarchists?”

  David puffed and nodded. “Their politics were surprisingly scattered, to tell the truth. They were radicalized, but their philosophy wasn’t…I mean, maybe I’m not the one to say, because I don’t study these kinds of groups for a living, but I never heard anything from Borowitz or Ledo that sounded coherent enough to build a revolution on.”

  “Yeah, I get you,” Joe said. “You expect something interesting enough to worry about it getting onto the Internet. Something to keep the kids away from.”

  “Right. They had the words and all, but it never seemed like they believed them. I thought they mostly just wanted to blow shit up and needed help doing that. Borowitz has some charisma to him, so I thought of it as more of a Manson thing. What do you think Shiva was?”

  “Yeah, that was weird. I think he was talking about the symbol we showed him.”

  “You think?”

  “‘It’s Shiva’, he said. Doesn’t fit any other context that I can see.”

  “The Hindu destroyer-god,” David said. “A cool thing to put on your bombs, I guess. I mean, if you just got out of high school.”

  Joe was about to suggest they contact their various superiors and let them know that Bernard had begun talking, and what he had to say was kind of terrifying, when an alarm sounded.

  “What’s that?” Joe asked.

  It was coming from the jail.

  “I dunno,” David said. “Let’s go see.”

  Erica’s biggest fear was that Maggie was correct, and someone had duplicated the work of the MIT team with which she was most closely associated during her time there.

  They’d built something extraordinary. It should have been the most important discovery of the past fifty years, both for the technology they invented and the physics that made that technology possible.

  What happened instead was that they discovered a new life form, something that lived at the edge of time. Kilroys were what they called themselves.

  They didn’t appreciate being discovered, and so one of them took it upon itself to murder everybody connected with the project. All except Erica, although if the knife it plunged into her back landed an inch to the left, that wouldn’t have been the case. She ended up in a coma, not altogether unlike the state the man who ultimately saved her life was in now.

  Corrigan was the only one who could stop the rogue Kilroy, because he was the only one capable of seeing it without the aid of a machine.

  Considering all the damage done to her as a consequence of that project, nobody would have blamed her had she simply moved on, and never discussed it again. She actually did try this. The problem was that she’d spent two of her four years in graduate school solving a very specific, extremely complex problem, and now that it was solved, she couldn’t very well unsolve it, or somehow find a way to make it so it didn’t actually work out. The tools were all there; someone else would get to it one day. So, she decided she may as well get the credit for it.

  She used the work as the bases of her doctoral thesis, and then after graduation formally published it, in a series of three papers. The papers were a combination of her pure math, and theory, co-authored by her and a retired professor named Archibald Calvin. Calvin didn’t actually do any of the writing, but he did vet them, and received co-credit for the fact that it was sort of his theory in the first place.

  Carefully omitted from any of her papers, was a practical application of the theory. It didn’t lend itself to any practical application, in its native form, because the technological component sprang from the combined genius of Archie Calvin, and the long-departed professor Michael Offey. They were inspired by the existence (known only to Calvin at first) of Corrigan Bain. In other words, the two of them started by knowing a practical application existed in the form of a human being who could view the world in a particular way, and then worked out—in broad strokes—the physics that made such a thing possible.

  When Erica published, she started with the math and worked in the other direction, which was far more complicated. This accomplished two things: it erased the line between the theory and Corrigan Bain; it made it so anyone
looking for a practical application would have to first understand the math at least as well as Erica did. This was probably arrogance on her part, but she was pretty sure there were only about a dozen people in the world who could make that claim.

  Erica had no illusions that she’d managed to prevent anyone from reinventing their machine, ever, but hoped it would be at a time in the future when other advances would make it less likely for anyone to anger the aggressive lifeforms at the edge of the chronoton. And if she was wrong, maybe she would be in a position, at that future date, to offer advice to whoever was close.

  Don’t let them know you can see them, she thought.

  She was wrong, of course. About just about all of that.

  Erica received a number of offers from the private sector after graduation, all significantly more lucrative than the offers she was getting from the academic side. Money was something that had always been an issue for her—she attended MIT on scholarship, but that didn’t mean there weren’t bills facing her at graduation—so it wasn’t a trivial consideration. Still, she could survive just fine on the academic income, and that was where she was leaning.

  Then she met with a Japanese company called Takani-Ko. Their presentation included proprietary blueprints for a device so similar to the functional one she’d seen at MIT, she wondered if they’d happened upon the design somewhere.

  “How close are you?” she asked them.

  But they weren’t close at all. What she was looking at was an artistic rendering of an idea from a not-yet-funded project. Hiring Erica would get them a lot closer to that funding.

  “I’m going to tell you a story,” she said. “If you believe me, and still want to offer me a job, I’ll take it.”

  She told them about the Kilroys, and what they did to her classmates. She expected one of two outcomes. Either: they believed her, and decided to never build this machine because of the consequences, or; they didn’t believe her, wouldn’t hire her, and would still never build the machine because they lacked funding.

  But Erica was always better at equations not involving human beings, who often behaved irrationally. They made her an offer.

  For the first year, she was installed in a stateside think-tank the company co-financed, where she worked on aspects of their design and a few other things, like the theoretical existence of a species that lived in the future. (The think-tank was multi-discipline, so it was ideal.) Then the project got funding, and she was off to Japan.

  One of the goals of the project was to solve for the Kilroys, which the Japanese were taking very seriously. The short-term solution—the part of the pitch dealing with them that was approved—was to build in a filter. The reasoning was, if the Kilroys became murderous when observed, they could build a filter into the device to ignore them. Users wouldn’t have to pretend they didn’t see the Kilroys; they literally wouldn’t see them. It was risky, because in order to design a filter like that, the team would have to first use it to observe the species, so that the machine could learn to ignore them. If that wasn’t handled well, they’d be right where they were at MIT.

  But that was a concern for the future. The new device hadn’t been built yet. It wasn’t even in a prototype stage yet.

  That obviated Erica’s second-biggest concern, which was that if somebody was copying the MIT project, they were doing it using tech stolen from her Japanese company. But once she was left alone in the room with Bernard’s device, it became clear that this was a different design altogether.

  None of this was why she’d told Maggie that the portable device Erica had been told to expect was impossible. She knew before she even laid hands on it that it didn’t do what Maggie thought it did. But it took her most of the morning to work out what it did do.

  It was well past Noon by the time she called Maggie in to discuss what she’d found. Erica knew this more by the fact that she’d been brought both breakfast and lunch during her time in the conference room.

  Maggie arrived to discover Erica had claimed almost every corner of the room, with two open laptops, a marker-board, and pieces of the device scattered across the table.

  “Okay,” Maggie said, rubbing her eyes. Erica thought Maggie had probably just finished a nap in her office across the hall. “What do you have?”

  “Let’s start with this,” Erica said.

  On one of the laptops, she hit play, and they both watched—for the thousandth time—Corrigan tackling Maggie and Deputy Duplass off the stage.

  “You said before, that you were surprised I hadn’t worked out that there was a mobile ATSV out there—”

  “ATSV?” Maggie interrupted.

  “Advanced Temporal Segment Viewing. It’s what we called our machine.”

  “Right. Go on.”

  “I didn’t assume that, because nobody using an ATSV could have done this to Corrigan. This was an explicit alteration of the near-future. We couldn’t do that.”

  “Why not? You see something that hasn’t happened yet, you can just make sure something else happens. What’s the big deal? Corrigan does it.”

  “Corrigan is different,” Erica said. “He exists across the timeline. As a person who is also in his own future, he can act to change it. We were just viewing. This is complicated, and a little hard to get your mind around, but the very fact that the future happened the way we saw it happen was what made it possible to for us to view it in the first place. The last word in ATSV is viewing for exactly that reason.”

  “So this isn’t a portable ATSV.”

  “It isn’t. But that doesn’t mean it’s not pretty advanced tech. At first, I thought it was just a kind of broadcast camera or something. The optical part’s shattered, so it’s hard to tell. But the parts of it that go down the arms and legs…here, do you see this? This is hydraulics. Starts at the base here, where there’s a transmitter/receiver device, and it’s powered by a battery, down there. This is the kind of thing you’d give to someone who had limited use of their limbs. I assume Jenks isn’t a cripple?”

  “No, he’s not.”

  “I didn’t think so. Look, I’m not an expert in this kind of tech, but I think what we’re looking at is a rejiggered virtual reality rig, only there’s no video game involved.”

  “Yeah, nope, I don’t get it.”

  “Okay. Bernard puts on this headset, right? He sees through the goggles, or whatever. Someone somewhere else has a matching rig, and they put on theirs, and now they can see what he sees. Go a little further, line up the arm attachments and the leg attachments. Now, the other person, who can see what Bernard sees, can also move Bernard’s arms and legs for him.”

  “What you’re saying is, the person on the other end of this suit can see the future, and manipulate Bernard into changing it.”

  “Basically. I mean, this is still incredibly advanced. And I haven’t figured out how they resolved the video feed problem yet. Corrigan can’t look at a live video feed and see the future on it—I asked him, once, because we were never sure—so whoever designed this bridged that gap. I think it was with this right-eye optical thing. It’s the part that’s broken, of course. But if you want I can reach out to a couple of people and try to get the tech sourced.”

  Maggie was lost in thought.

  “Maggie,” Erica said.

  “Sorry, what?”

  “I said I can try to get the tech sourced, if you think that will help.”

  “Yes. Yes, sure, whatever you need. Keep it on the down-low but…sorry, so, the person on the other end of this rig, they couldn’t be using one of your ATSV’s there either, right? Because they still wouldn’t be able to alter the future.”

  “Yeah, that’s right.”

  “The bomber is a fixer,” Maggie said.

  “What?”

  “Corrigan sent me a note before everything went down at the Pru. The bomber is a fixer. I assumed it meant this device here gave Bernard Jenks the ability to do what Corrigan does, but I was wrong. Whoever was manipulating Bernard is als
o a fixer, and they’re still out there somewhere, which means we’re in a whole lot of trouble.”

  12

  I think he IS dead, and I think nobody’s talking about all he did to save the city because of that. Because of the next time, when he could have saved us but didn’t, because the police killed him, because they didn’t know better. They’re saving face ahead of time, you know?

  —anonymous comment to

  “Rumors Continue to Swirl Around Reported Death”

  The Boston Globe

  There should have been someone at the front desk. Joe and David were at the desk not ten minutes earlier, when they were checked out by a uniformed corrections officer named Janice Chapman. Janice smelled like wintergreen and looked like someone’s grandmother, and would probably be the last person Joe might consider deputizing in the event a fugitive needed hunting down, but such was the nature of public service. She looked fine for manning an open-area desk, as the first of many bulwarks against proceeding into the county jail.

  In that, Janice was not alone. The desk area was a small bullpen space, on a raised platform, such that all entrants had to look up, as if beseeching the mighty Oz for a favor.

  Janice was no longer there. Neither was anybody else.

  The alarms they heard going off from the outside were much louder in the lobby. Joe could scarcely imagine a scenario in which Janice might, on hearing the alarm (which perhaps meant a prisoner was attempting to escape?) grab her service revolver, and race inside to cut off the breakout.

  “What do you think?” he asked.

  “Prison break?” Dave suggested.

  Joe took the three steps leading up to the platform, and looked around the desk.

  “Shit,” he said. “Yeah, but from the outside in. Call an ambulance.”

  Janice was lying in a heap on the floor under the desk. Someone had cold-cocked her, but it looked like she was breathing.

  Dave got a look for himself.

  “Jesus,” he muttered, pulling out his phone. “Who does this?”