by Scott Meyer
Brit the Younger shook her head. “But it’s not all of your future, or all of your brains, we’re talking about. It’s mine. Your hand, and Atlantis would get fixed as a byproduct of dangerous experiments on my head. I would need to supervise everything, and in the end, I would end up doing most, if not all of the real work myself. We’re talking about me making the saving of Brit the Elder my life’s work while the rest of you help out on an occasional basis. I can see where this is an attractive plan for the rest of you, but I’m not buying it.”
“Okay,” Gary said. “You’re against it. Does that mean it’s off the table, really? Something this important, shouldn’t we put it to a vote?”
“A vote?” Brit the Younger asked. “We’re discussing my time and effort, put into performing a dangerous procedure that I’ve already said that I’m against, on me, and you think we should put it to a vote?”
“It just seems like the most democratic way,” Gary said, his voice growing quieter with each word.
“It would be, but I don’t remember ever making my personal life choices a democracy.”
Roy said, “Look, you’re right that this affects you more immediately than it does the rest of us, but we are all involved. If her glitch continues unchecked, it could crash the whole program, and then we’re all done.”
Brit the Younger said, “All the more reason to get this fixed fast.”
No,” Roy said. “All the more reason to get it fixed right.”
“Okay,” Brit the Younger said. “Think about this. The idea is that we, and by we, I mean me, we spend however many years fixing this mess Brit the Elder made, then, what, we, and again, I mean me, come back and fix her here, in our present, her—future me’s—past? If that’s what we end up doing, then where’s the future whoever with the solution they spent years on? Where are they? I mean, if it were me, you’d think they’d turn up right now, just to prove the point, wouldn’t you? So let’s wait a second and see if any more of me turn up.”
They all stood in silence for a moment, more out of awkwardness than any real expectation that visitors from the future would materialize. Nobody appeared.
Brit the Younger nodded. “Right. So, I guess that settles—”
She stopped abruptly as another iteration of Brit appeared, raised her hands in the air, and held that pose as a wave of energy emanated out from her, filling the room.
When the light had dissipated, all eyes turned to Brit the Elder, who still floated, frozen and unresponsive, flickering at random intervals. Phillip pulled the black glove off his hand. The entire front was still affected, with only a small patch on the back of his hand left unchanged.
Brit the Much Elder said, “It didn’t work. I hope you didn’t spend too much time on that.”
The Brit who had just appeared said, “I didn’t. I’m only from a couple of minutes in the future, and all I did was put everyone who isn’t a Brit into one of Martin’s mime boxes so they can’t keep us from handling this the way we want.” She disappeared as suddenly as she’d appeared.
The wizards all pressed their hands against the unseen barrier that held them in. They shouted magic spells meant to transport them out of their invisible prisons. When that failed, they shouted various things, first at the Brits, then at the mime box itself before they settled into shouting at Martin. He tried to tell them that he couldn’t hear them, but they couldn’t hear him and kept shouting.
26.
Brit the Much Elder shut her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Why did you do that?”
Brit the Younger smiled. “I didn’t, but I’m going to.”
She sat down at one of the computers and started moving and clicking the mouse with great purpose. “Let’s see. If the mime box is a macro, it should be available in the Leadchurch shell program.”
Brit the Much Elder looked at the other wizards, all of whom attempted fruitlessly to talk to her. She shrugged at them and turned back to Brit the Younger. “Why? Why are you doing this? Why are you trapping your friends? They’re just trying to help you.”
“How can you possibly ask me why I’m doing anything? You, of all people, know why I’m doing this, why I do everything! Because one of you future versions of me already did it, so now I have to. For once, one of you has done something I’m excited about, and I’m not letting you mess it up for me.”
“Just hold on a second and think.”
“No. Thinking’ll just make me angrier. I’ve spent years stuck in Brit the Elder’s freaky time wake. No matter what I do, it’s what she decided I’d do years before. Then, finally, a situation comes along where we’re in uncharted territory, and the very first thing she decides is that I can’t know. So she tells my boyfriend and convinces him to keep it from me. A future version of him remembers what a mistake that was, though he seems to have forgotten about bathing in the process, and instead of coming and telling me, he just starts messing with his former self. Martin sees that happening, and he tells literally everybody else but me. They discuss it several times, and the only thing they agree on is not letting me in on the secret. And now, when my future health and the next several years of my life are on the line, they all want to tell me what to do.”
Brit the Much Elder said, “I remember how much I resented . . . you resent Brit the Elder. And I don’t blame you at all for being mad at your friends.”
“Then you won’t get in my way.”
Brit the Much Elder shook her head. “I’m afraid I have to.”
Brit the Younger said, “And I’m afraid you can’t.”
Brit the Much Elder opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out.
Brit the Younger looked at her watch. “Note to self: set a timer to put Brit the Much Elder in a mime box eight seconds ago.”
Brit the Much Elder pressed her hands against the invisible barrier.
Brit the Younger turned to Martin. “That’s the first thing everybody does. Funny, isn’t it?”
Martin didn’t laugh.
Brit turned back to the computer and hunted and pecked a bit. “Okay, found it and copied it over the Atlantis interface. Be right back.” She swiped her index finger through a few menus only she could see floating in the air in front of her, then disappeared.
Everyone silently glared at Martin.
Martin held up his hands in an exaggerated shrug, then pointed at Brit the Elder, then Phillip, then Brit the Much Elder. Phillip looked angry, and Brit the Much Elder shook her head, but everyone else just sort of shrugged or nodded, as if to say, Yeah, you have a point.
Brit the Younger reappeared, looking pleased with herself. She sat down at one of the computers and started working without a word.
The wizards shouted and pounded on their invisible prison walls but made no sound. After a moment, Brit looked up and saw all of her friends freaking out.
“Look, calm down. I’m going to release you all in just a minute.”
The wizards relaxed a bit.
“Right after I’ve taken this piece of memory from my file and copied it over the chunk that’s slightly different in Brit the Elder’s.”
The wizards freaked out with renewed vigor.
“It’s going to work.” Brit the Younger pointed at Brit the Much Elder. “She’s the proof. I know, I know, possible glitch that negates all of that. Uncharted territory. Blah blah blah. I don’t buy it. All of this is preordained. It’s all happened before, and it’ll all happen again, like a reboot of Battlestar Galactica. The glitch was an excuse Brit the Elder used to keep anyone from involving me.”
Phillip threw a silent fit in his cell.
“I know. You disagree. And nobody wishes I was wrong more than I do. But I’m not. I’m going to fix her, and I’m going to do it in the next few minutes, with a simple cut-and-paste operation. Then we’ll move on to your hand an
d Atlantis. Just watch.”
Brit went back to working on the computer. The wizards gave up stopping her and just watched, experiencing a strange mix of being angry at Brit the Younger and horrified at what she was doing, but also hoping desperately that she was right.
“Okay,” Brit the Younger said. “Here we go. I’m going to make a change to the code in a later version of my file, which is my right, nobody else’s. Brit the Elder is going to spring right back to her old obnoxious, controlling self. Is everybody ready?”
Brit the Younger looked up and saw all of the wizards except for the Phillip from the future leaning against the fronts of their invisible prisons, watching with rapt attention. Future Phillip was sitting, looking at her, his face bland and unreadable, as if he were watching a movie he’d seen before and didn’t enjoy.
Brit the Younger moved the mouse around and clicked a few times. “Copied and pasted. All I have to do now is execute it, and she should be back to normal pretty much instantly.”
Brit the Younger hit the enter key.
Brit the Elder began moving, as Brit the Younger predicted, pretty much instantly. Brit the Elder’s entire body strobed between her normal self and a crude approximation of her shape made up of large triangles and solid colors. The two versions flickered back and forth for a few seconds. The pace of the transitions slowed and became irregular. Brit the Elder remained either her recognizable self or the low-polygon version for longer intervals, but switched unpredictably. Every time she regained her normal appearance, her arms and legs changed, moving instantly to new positions that made no sense with each other. Her face also contorted, changing instantly with no intermediate steps through various extreme expressions, none of which conveyed happiness.
Brit the Younger furiously worked the mouse and the keyboard, her eyes darting between the monitor and Brit the Elder’s body flailing and bucking in midair. The violence of her movements expelled the washcloth from her mouth. The single sustained tone she had been making was gone, replaced with a new sound, like a badly scratched CD of people screaming, skipping as the car in which it was playing drove over a bumpy road.
Brit the Younger pounded at the keyboard in a panic, ending with hitting the enter key much harder than was necessary and pushing back from the computer, standing to look over the table at Brit the Elder.
Brit the Elder hung in the air, motionless, her arms frozen mid-flail. Her body from the waist up was frozen in low-polygon form. Her hands looked like flesh-colored mittens. Her arms were each made up of two tapered cylinders with a rough joint at the elbow. Her torso looked like two pyramids glued to a trapezoid, the bodice of her dress just a pattern painted on the surface.
The most disturbing part was her face: a rough nose made of three triangles protruded from the front of an almost rectangular flesh-colored head. The rest of her features—hair, eyes, eyebrows, and mouth—looked printed on. Although there was no opening to her lungs or larynx, if she even had them at this point, a steady sound came out, similar to the high-pitched tone before but rougher, like it was made up of several notes that didn’t quite harmonize. Below her neck, some portions of her remained flesh and bone, covered with clothing, while others were simple primary shapes and colors. Her shoulder, for example, led to a flesh-toned cylinder, then a human elbow and forearm, ending in what looked like a small oven mitt.
Brit the Younger leaned forward, her elbows on the table, and rested her head in her hands. After several deep breaths, she used one hand to swipe through a floating menu to release her friends from their respective mime boxes.
Nobody said a word. Brit the Much Elder, looking shell-shocked, went to sit in front of her own computer and looked at the monitors. Phillip pulled up his sleeve. His wrist was perfectly rectangular. He slid the sleeve back down.
Tyler and Roy approached Brit the Elder. They looked at each other for a moment, then at the frozen face emitting its high-pitched whine. After a moment of thought, Roy said, “Can you hand me that washcloth? Maybe I can tie it on or something.”
Tyler bent down to the floor. “Yeah. One second.”
Phillip pulled up a chair on Brit the Younger’s other side. He put out a hand to touch her on the shoulder, but withdrew his hand before making contact.
Phillip glanced over at Brit the Elder as he heard the sound of duct tape ripping from the roll. In a moment the noise stopped, muffled by the washcloth now taped over what passed for her mouth. He turned back to Brit the Younger. “We all wanted it to work.”
Brit the Younger said, “And I want you to go away.”
Phillip stood up. As he turned to walk away, his eyes swept across the room. Everyone avoided eye contact with him except Future Phillip, who looked on the verge of tears.
Phillip walked over and looked down at him. “Hey, Martin.”
“Yeah?”
“Give him the ability to talk. I have some questions for me.”
Martin walked up beside Phillip, muttering, “Li parolu,” as he did.
Future Phillip remained seated on the floor, looking up at them, and said nothing.
Phillip said, “You’re from the future?”
Future Phillip laughed. “That’s your question? I think it’s already been pretty well established that I’m from the future. Furthermore, you could have simply asked Martin that. Or you could have asked me and had me nod. It’s a yes or no question, after all.”
Phillip turned to Martin. “Am I always this annoying?”
“Not always.”
Phillip looked back down at his bedraggled later self. “If you’re from the future, you know how this mess gets fixed.”
Future Phillip looked over at Brit the Younger, still sitting at the computer with her head in her hands. Gwen and Brit the Much Elder sat on either side, consoling her. “I wouldn’t say fixed. Resolved is closer. I know how it all works out.”
“Okay. So what do I do?”
Future Phillip smiled up at him. “What do you do? Well, first, you completely lose your faith in free will, from the looks of it, and start trying to use future events as a road map, just like everyone you’ve been arguing with.”
Martin said, “I take it back, Phillip. You’re never this annoying.”
“Yes, he is,” Future Phillip snapped. “You want to know what you do after that? After you give up your primary core belief in hopes of somehow undoing the damage that’s been done? Is that what you want to know?”
“You know it is.”
“Yes, I do. And the answer, Phillip, is nothing. You do nothing. This situation resolves itself, to the extent that it does, without any meaningful input from you.”
“But things will get back to normal?”
“No! Things are never the same!”
“There’s got to be some way to fix things.”
“Some things, yes, but not everything, and what does get fixed, you won’t be the one doing the fixing.”
“There’s got to be something I can do.”
Future Phillip leaned forward. “I do have one idea.”
“Yes?”
“Yes. You go back in time and try to distract yourself so that you won’t get mixed up in all of this in the first place.”
Phillip furrowed his brow at Future Phillip. “But that won’t stop Brit the Elder from having her glitch.”
Future Phillip laughed. “Oh yeah, that’s right. You still think Brit the Elder’s glitch is the terrible thing I’m trying to prevent.”
Martin and Phillip looked at each other, confused.
Future Phillip looked across the room at Brit the Younger, and said, “That’s it. I’m done talking to you two idiots.”
Phillip walked down into the conversation pit and plopped into one of the built-in sofas.
Martin sat opposite him. “He knows how to set this righ
t. We’ll get it out of him.”
Phillip shook his head. “Are you suggesting to me that we torture me, to get me to talk?”
“What?! No! Never! I was thinking we’d bribe him . . . you, with something you want.”
“Oh,” Phillip said. “Yeah. I don’t mind that plan. Won’t work though.”
“We have to try something.”
“I don’t know. Trying things hasn’t worked out well for me.”
“Oh, don’t be that way, Phillip. I know, it all looks bad, but things could always be worse.”
Phillip said, “The woman I love is furious with me, the woman I tried to help is worse off than when we started, and even I won’t help me. I really don’t see how it could get much worse.”
From across the room, Future Phillip said, “Just wait.”
Phillip had just enough time to register what Future Phillip had said, then a great many people and objects materialized.
27.
The cameras were the first to appear. Multiple identical video cameras set up on tripods in all four corners of the room.
The next thing Phillip saw materialize was Brit. Not Brit the Younger, or Brit the Much Elder, but another Brit. A new Brit. He made eye contact with her, noted the look on her face, and immediately christened her Angry Brit. She appeared in the corner, her skin pale from lack of sun, with deep bags under her eyes. She stood next to one of the cameras with a notebook and a pencil in hand. A large boom box sat at her feet.
Phillip had just enough time to moan before Martin—a second, presumably later Martin—appeared, standing in the conversation pit directly in front of where the current Martin sat. Across the way, later iterations of Tyler, Jeff, and Roy materialized, standing in front of, and looming menacingly over, their current copies. Up near the kitchen, a second Gary appeared directly behind the current Gary. The new Gary tapped the pre-existing Gary on the right shoulder. As Current Gary turned to see who it was, the new Gary ducked and sidestepped to the left, leaving the current Gary looking at an empty space with a confused look on his face.