In Times Like These Boxed Set

by Nathan Van Coops

  She moved out of the kitchen, looking for the exit, but as she did so, the door to the patio slid open automatically for her, making enough noise to alert whoever was in the other room that she was awake. The voices stopped.

  She still hadn’t located the front door so she stepped onto the patio instead and backed away from the doorway, giving herself a little room to maneuver. She kept the knife gripped tightly in her fingers underneath the loose-fitting sweater.

  A jacket was laid over one of the patio chairs. The logo for the team mascot was green and gold. Carson’s jacket.

  When no one immediately appeared, she walked the edge of the walled patio. Far below her, tourists and office workers were going about their day. It was just another day in the city. She scanned left and looked north of downtown, her eyes searching for the usual landmark of her day, the Gammatech building. But when she located the building, she was surprised to see a different name on the top, Sunspire Lending. Emily frowned and studied the sign. Had someone else purchased the building overnight?

  That sign being up already was fast work by anyone’s standards.

  “How are you feeling?”

  Emily spun around to find Carson standing by the open sliding door holding a pair of coffee mugs.

  She tucked the hand with the knife behind her back. “Better. Thank you. Do I owe you for that?”

  “The least I could do. You had a rough night.”

  Emily nodded. Since it seemed, at least for the moment, that he wasn’t planning to assault her, she turned her attention back to the view. “Do you know anything about the Gammatech building? Did someone buy the sponsorship last night?”

  Carson looked north to the building she was referencing. “Yeah. Something like that. You want any coffee? I poured you a cup but I didn’t know if you wanted anything in it.”

  “Black is fine. Thanks.” Emily walked toward him and they met at the patio table. She took one of the mugs with her left hand and raised it toward him. Carson clinked his against it and smiled. He took a sip.

  “Where are you from?” Emily asked, eyeing the jacket draped over the chair. “Is that University of South Florida?”

  “Go Bulls.” Carson replied.

  “Is this your place?”

  “No. Just visiting,” Carson said. “Doing a favor for someone. Well, a job really.”

  Emily’s eyes drifted toward the interior of the condo where she had heard a woman’s voice. “Are you married?”

  “No. It’s just me at the moment,” Carson replied. His eyes lingered briefly on her engagement ring. “But I do have a friend inside that I’d like you to meet. She’s the reason I brought you here.”

  Emily stood up a little straighter. “Oh really. Why is that?”

  Carson sipped his coffee again. “You’ll see. I should probably let her explain it.” He walked back through the patio door into the kitchen. Emily followed.

  When Carson reached the door to the other bedroom, he paused and turned around. “It’s okay if this feels strange. It’s perfectly normal to feel that way at first.”

  Emily eyed the door cautiously. “Are they naked in there or something?”

  Carson smiled. “No. Nothing like that, it’s just . . . Well, I guess you’ll just have to see.”

  He opened the door for her. Emily tried to read his expression but couldn’t figure out what he was getting at. She kept the knife in her hand ready beneath her sleeve, but as she entered the room, a number of strange things caught her eye. For one, there was a framed photo of her parents sitting on the desk near the door. The dresser was one she had at home in her apartment, and there was a picture of the dog she had in college sitting atop it.

  What the hell?

  The bedspread was hers as well. But these things didn’t prepare her for the woman lying in the bed. Her hair was thin and her skin was pale, but the face looking back at her was immediately recognizable. She’d seen it looking back at her from mirrors her entire life.

  Emily dropped her coffee mug and it bounced off the knotted rug before spilling its contents all over the floor.

  “Hello, Emily. It’s good to see you.” The woman spoke softly, ignoring the mug. She was propped up in bed by a number of pillows and sunlight was streaming through the blinds to illuminate her face. She smiled.

  “You’re . . . you’re . . .” Emily stammered.

  “That’s right. I’m you,” the woman replied. “And we have a lot to talk about.”

  5

  “You might want to take a seat for this,” the Emily in the bed said. She gestured toward the armchair near the foot of the bed. Emily looked at the puddle of coffee she had created on the floor but the woman waved her hand. “Don’t worry about that. We can take care of it later.”

  Emily was still speechless. She sat down slowly, feeling vaguely awkward about how much she was staring, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t take her eyes off this woman in the bed. Her face. It was surreal and amazing and terrifying all at the same time. The woman’s reassuring smile helped. She waited patiently till Emily sat before speaking again.

  “I know you’ve had a very difficult day. Lots to take in. For what it’s worth, I think you’re handling it admirably well.”

  “I don’t think I even know where to start with this,” Emily replied. “With . . . you. It’s like I’m living in Wonderland or something.”

  “It is a bit of a temporal rabbit hole,” the other Emily said. “Do you know where you are?”

  “Downtown. Highland Park?”

  “No. I meant, do you know when you are?”

  Emily shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean. Isn’t it . . .Sunday?” The question sounded feeble coming out of her mouth. What had happened to her life that she was now so unsure of basic facts, like what day of the week it was? She felt completely ungrounded here.

  “It’s 2048,” the woman said. “It’s been five years since the night you got engaged.”

  “Five years?” Emily looked out the window at the distant skyline. She could see the Gammatech building. It wasn’t overnight. It was like Carson had said. Time Travel.

  The Emily in the bed shifted her weight to sit up a little straighter and grimaced a little as she did so.

  “Are you okay?” Emily asked. “Do you need help?”

  Her other self gave a wan smile and refolded her hands in her lap. “I need a lot of help. That’s actually why I asked Carson to bring you here.” She looked around the room and then finally her eyes came back to Emily. “There’s so much to say that I almost don’t know where to start, but I suppose it’s best to just tell you from the beginning. This has a lot to do with Dom.”

  “I thought it might,” Emily said. “He just went crazy tonight. Or . . . whenever.”

  “It wasn’t the same him you saw last night. The Dom who grabbed you from his apartment wasn’t your Dom. Not really. He was mine.”

  Emily tried to understand what she was saying. “What do you mean?”

  The other Emily sighed. “I’ll do my best to explain. If you recall, the night Dom left you to go to the plant, there was a problem with the reactor core at Gammatech. The board was called together and they discussed what to do about the situation. It seemed there was some issue with the cooling.”

  “Dom said something about cooling rods acting strangely.”

  “They were defective. Chinese imports that Dom had ordered in an attempt to save the company money.” The Emily in bed furrowed her brow. “Within a week after the night you were engaged, the reactor core went critical and suffered an explosion. It leaked radiation and caused a panic all over the plant. Luckily we were able to stop the leak before it affected the city. The safety team did an admirable job mopping up the mess and preventing a public catastrophe, but there were . . . casualties. As the new head of plant safety, I had been on scene everyday before the core went critical. And I was there the day the explosion happened. The radiation was significant. Enough to put me in the hospital for
more days than not for the last few years.”

  Emily considered her other self in the bed. Radiation poisoning would certainly explain the changes. Her thinner hair, the spots on her skin.

  “Dom blamed himself. He felt guilty for ordering the faulty rods, and he felt he never should have encouraged me to take the head of plant safety job. He believed that if I hadn’t been there that day things would have been different. He didn’t handle it well.

  “What happened to Dom?” Emily asked.

  “That’s a complicated part of the story,” the other Emily replied. “He hired the best doctors he could find. When it became apparent that I would need a kidney transplant, he volunteered immediately, but he wasn’t a donor match. I did get a transplant but it hasn’t solved my issues. My body rejected the new kidney. We even tried some of the new synthetic organs they’ve been experimenting with. But we had no luck. I have a kind of overactive immune system it seems, partly due to the radiation poisoning. The doctors say that my body doesn’t want to accept any tissue other than my own. And without additional transplants, there’s not much to be done.”

  Emily recalled the cooler full of ice that she knocked over in the medical facility. The doctors with the scalpel. Things were beginning to connect in her mind. “You couldn’t accept tissue other than your own . . .” Her fingers tightened on the knife hidden in her sleeve.

  The other Emily continued, undisturbed. “And that’s why Dom started looking at other options.” She brushed some hair away from her face. “There was a period of time when I was put into a medically induced coma. They thought it would do me some good, and I think it did, but it was a dark time for Dom. We had been arguing a lot about what to do about my treatment. He wanted me to keep fighting, but I was done with it all. I had already moved out of his place and came to live here to get some space from him. But while I was in the coma, Dom searched for alternative solutions.

  “I’m not sure what dark corners of the world he was looking in, but he heard rumor of a service. A service that could supply wealthy individuals with transplants. They claimed to be genetically identical tissue, guaranteed to be accepted. He liquidated almost all of his assets and paid these people to get me donor organs. He was convinced it would save me and we could still have a happy life together.”

  “They came for me.” Emily said.

  “Yes,” her other self said, leveling her gaze at Emily. “I never even knew time travel existed, but when I came out of the coma, Dom was there explaining his plan to save me. He kept talking about alternate realities and a fractal universe and said that these people would be able to save me.

  “At first I didn’t believe him, but when he refused to back down, I did some research of my own. Historical documents, scientific journals. I began to see what he was talking about might be real. But I also realized he was talking about murder. In order to live, I’d have to end someone else’s life. Your life.”

  Emily looked at the doorway. Carson was out of sight. Was he waiting around the corner with a weapon? Chloroform? She had been asleep in the other room. If they had meant to still harvest her organs they’d have attacked her then, wouldn’t they?

  She looked back to the woman in the bed.

  “So what are you planning to do?” Emily asked.

  “You tell me,” the other Emily said. “Do you think there is a future where I cut out your organs and use them to keep me alive? What would you do?”

  Emily considered the question. If roles were reversed, if she had been the one with the radiation poisoning, would she be willing to take a life? Her own life?

  The woman in the bed was watching her carefully. She stared back into her eyes.

  Emily relaxed her grip on the knife. She knew her answer.

  Whether it was searching in her older self’s eyes or somewhere in her own mind, she knew. There were things she was capable of and things she would never do. This was the latter.

  The Emily in the bed smiled. “I knew you’d understand.”

  “I do,” Emily replied.

  The Emily on the bed took one of her pillows into her lap and hugged it to her chest. “There was no way I was going to agree to harvest organs from some other version of myself, no matter what reality they lived in.”

  “So what will you do?” Emily asked.

  “I’d prefer to do nothing, and live what’s left of my life in peace,” the other Emily said. “But the problem is that Dom’s plan has already been set in motion. He’s already paid these guys to go find you. He said it was all being taken care of. I tried to convince him to cancel the deal, but he refused. He said healing me was worth every cent he had and that he would do anything to be with me forever. Even this.”

  Emily fidgeted with the diamond on her finger. “He’s always been one for grand gestures . . .”

  The door swung open and Carson came in with a tray laden with blueberry muffins and some juices. “Thought you might want a bite to eat.” He smiled and set the tray on the other Emily’s lap.

  “I didn’t know I was getting breakfast in bed with this arrangement,” she replied. “If I knew that I would have called you earlier.”

  Carson handed her a glass of juice. “Forgot to bring a knife for the butter.” He turned to Emily. “Don’t happen to have one on you, do you?”

  The Emily in the bed was watching her too, an amused smile playing at the corner of her mouth.

  Emily reached into her sleeve and removed the knife she’d been hiding. She held it aloft for Carson.

  “Thought that might have ended up in here.” He winked at her as he took it. He set the knife next to the muffins, then took a napkin from the tray and stepped over to the coffee puddle on the floor.

  “Oh no, let me do that!” Emily exclaimed, getting out of the chair and squatting next to him to help wipe up the spill. She rested her hand on his and he released his hold on the napkin.

  “I really don’t mind,” he said.

  “Yeah, but you weren’t the klutz that spilled it,” Emily replied. She couldn’t help but notice the way he was looking at her. She found herself smiling as she mopped up the spill. Carson picked up the mug and stood. I’ll get some cleaner for the rug if I can find some.”

  “There’s some under the kitchen sink,” the Emily in the bed replied. “But don’t feel you have to. I know it’s not part of your job description.”

  Emily stood and faced Carson. He took the soiled napkin from her hand.

  “What exactly is your job description?” she asked.

  Carson smiled and swung the napkin over his shoulder. “General knight-in-shining-armor stuff, plus occasional baking.” He gestured toward the muffins. “Oh, and rock guitar.” He strummed an air guitar with his right hand while fingering a chord on the coffee mug.

  “Man of many talents,” Emily replied.

  “I thought since Dom was hiring time travelers,” the other Emily said, “that I needed to go out and find one of my own. I found Carson.”

  Emily studied the two of them. An unusual pairing to say the least.

  “So what do we do now? Is Dom still out to get me and steal my organs?”

  Carson toyed with the mug. “Well, here’s the thing about time travel. Some things that happen, only happen once, but some things you have to repeat.”

  Emily raised an eyebrow. “Repeat?”

  “Sort of,” Carson said. “But we need your help.”

  Emily chimed in from the bed, “Since Dom didn’t successfully capture you for the transplant surgery, there’s a chance they may try somewhere else. Possibly a different version of us.”

  “What do you mean? How many versions of us are there?” Emily asked.

  Carson cleared his throat. “Okay, so things get a little interesting at this part, but basically time is a fractal. There can be any number of infinite timestreams to choose from. If Dom finds another version of you out there, he could potentially try again. It’s most likely that he’ll keep fishing around in your own collecti
ve past, because that’s when he knows where to find you, but if we don’t stop him, he might create another reality where you’re dead or missing—the victim of these time traveling organ harvesters. We’ve been trying to shut this group down for a while now, but with your help, we might be able to do it.”

  “We? Who’s we?”

  “The good guys,” Carson said. “People who don’t want to see the time travel community ruined by rogue agents like these harvesters.”

  “There’s a time travel community?” Emily asked.

  “Yeah. One you’re a part of now, even though your joining was involuntary. But with your help I think we might be able to shut these guys down.”

  Emily considered what he was asking. “What would I have to do?”

  “We need to stop Dom.”

  The Emily on the bed gestured for her to come closer. When she stepped to the bedside, her other self took her hand. “I know this is a lot to ask,” the other Emily said. “And I wouldn’t put this on you if I was in any condition to stop him myself, but the truth is, I’m dying.” She put a hand up. “I’m okay with that. I’ve been okay with it for quite some time. But what I’m not okay with is Dom killing someone else in my name in his misguided efforts to save me. If you can stop him, you’d be doing me a tremendous service. I think I could go peacefully if I knew that no one else had to suffer because of what happened to me. And I feel like I can ask you to do this because I know with certainty that if you were in my position, you’d feel the same way. That’s the one thing I’m sure of in all this. Because you’re me.”

  Emily rubbed a finger along the pale skin of her other self’s hand. “I’m sorry this happened to you.”

  “You too,” the other Emily replied.

  Emily gently laid the woman’s hand on the bed and straightened up. “Okay. I’ll do it. I don’t know where to start, but if it will keep more people—and more of us—from being hurt, I don’t see that I have much of a choice.”