Reality Matrix Effect (9781310151330)

by Mitchell, Laura Remson

  She took a cup from Al’s hand.

  “Yuck!” she said rolling her eyes heavenward and reaching for the sugar. “I’ll find someplace else to save calories!”

  Their coffee prepared to their tastes, they seated themselves at a small table, each waiting for the other to say something.

  “So. What happened in the city room?” Vickie finally asked.

  “I...I’m not really sure,” he stammered. “I think I wished Roberts alive.”

  “What?” she responded with a laugh.

  He swallowed nervously. Then, striving for a matter-of-fact, journalistically objective tone, he recounted the events in the city room.

  Vickie listened attentively, measuring him, watching him as if she expected to learn more from what he did than from what he said. It unnerved him. He was telling her all this because he needed her support, but all he was getting right now was her professional skepticism. He had never felt more alone.

  “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

  “Not crazy, Al. Maybe a little confused, though.” She studied him for a few seconds. “When it comes to the news business, you’re one of the best. You know more about more people and things than just about anyone, and what you don’t already know, you know how to find out. But sometimes, well....”

  He clamped his teeth together and waited for her to continue.

  “Look,” she said, “I know how you get. Every once in a while, I feel that way, too. You just want to wish all the pain and suffering away. But life doesn’t work like that. You know it as well as I do. Better, in fact.”

  Al sipped his coffee, trying to soothe a suddenly dry throat.

  “It’s happened before,” she continued. “You pretend to be some kind of hard-headed cynic who doesn’t feel a thing, but then you get into these moods, like when you handled the story about the Nazi-hunters a few weeks ago.”

  “That doesn’t have anything to do with—”

  “With magically changing headlines? Maybe not. But the Nazi story sure set you off. For days, you kept talking about how you ought to be doing more than playing the professional observer.”

  She ran a finger over the hand he had wrapped around his coffee cup.

  “Vickie,” he began uncertainly, “you know that I was born in Berlin on the day Hitler became chancellor of Germany. That day was the beginning of the end for our family in Europe. Every year, on my birthday, my parents would take the time to remember relatives who didn’t see or couldn’t believe what was happening in Germany and paid for it in the death camps. That’s a memory I can’t just forget.”

  “And you shouldn’t forget it, Al. But that doesn’t mean you have to pay some sort of debt just for surviving. I’m glad your parents were smart enough to see what was coming and get to America before it was too late. I’m Jewish, too, and—”

  “You don’t understand!” Al exclaimed, nearly spilling his coffee as he jumped to his feet. “I survived! There must be a reason for that. I know I’m supposed to do...something! That’s one of the reasons I went into this business. I thought being a newspaperman would help me understand the world better, help me figure out what I’m supposed to do. Instead, I just sit at that desk day after day after day, and nothing changes. At least it didn’t until today.”

  Vickie blinked, as if shifting mental gears. “Listen,” she said as Al sank back into his chair. “You say you saved Roberts’ life more or less by wishing it, but you know that can’t be so. The first reports were wrong. You wanted Roberts to be alive, and then you found out he was alive. But it wasn’t a miracle. Roberts was never dead in the first place!”

  Al sighed and ran his fingers through his coarse brown hair. The soft ticking of the old-fashioned school clock on the wall resounded in his ears, and the air felt heavy and oppressive. Suddenly, he laughed. It was a bitter, ironic laugh. “You don’t understand,” he said quietly, shaking his head sadly.

  Vickie stood and leaned across the table to kiss him tenderly on the mouth. “Al, I love you. Maybe it’s the romantic idealist in you that I love most. But you’ve got to see that what you’ve told me doesn’t make any sense. It’s plain impossible.”

  With a considerable effort of will, Al hardened his features into what he hoped was a resolute expression. The less certain he felt, the more firmly he defended his version of what had happened—not only to Vickie, but also to himself.

  “There has to be a rational explanation,” Vickie said. “I know it seemed the way you described it, but—” He pressed his lips together and shook his head. “Look, Al, headlines just don’t change by themselves!”

  He took a deep breath and looked away. “E pur si muove,” he muttered.

  Vickie frowned in confusion. “Huh?”

  He gazed deeply into her dark-brown eyes.

  “This headline changed!”

  Chapter 1: What’s in the Box

  Sunday, May 16, 2021

  “Stop it!” Rayna Kingman begged the tall, muscular man at her side as she knuckled away tears of laughter and opened the door to her apartment. “Don’t be mean! I only did it once. Besides, I warned you that I wasn’t a particularly good tennis player.”

  “Yes,” Keith Daniels responded, “but you didn’t tell me you attack your doubles partners from the rear!” He bent forward, screwed his tanned face into an expression of mock agony and stumbled around the room, groaning and clutching first at his back, then at his head, then at his rump.

  “I guess your 37-year-old bones just can’t take it anymore!” she taunted.

  He straightened abruptly and turned toward Rayna, his deep-blue eyes tracing the contours of her slender body from head to toe and back again. “C’m’ere, Teach,” he said, as he took her in his arms.

  Their lips met in a kiss that melted away all pretense.

  Rayna’s long, thin fingers played with the curly locks of light-brown hair at the base of his neck. “I love you, Mr. Attorney,” she told him. “I don’t think I could have gotten through the last few days without you.”

  It was a magnificent spring day, and the morning’s tennis match had helped divert her thoughts, but she couldn’t put it off forever. Eventually, she was going to have to open that box.

  “How about getting a little light in here?” Keith suggested.

  The gloom inside the apartment reminded Rayna once again of the awful hole Al Frederick’s sudden death had left in her life. Wordlessly, she moved to the wall and activated an electronic circuit to countermand the “opaque” instruction she had last given to the sliding glass door that separated her living room from a small patio outside.

  “The permastore’s still on the coffee table, I see,” Keith noted, jerking his head toward the environmentally sealed container.

  “Right where I left it last week.”

  “Yeah,” Rayna nodded numbly. “I haven’t touched it. I was going to open it half a dozen times, but I—I....”

  He walked over to where she stood, still facing the wall, and put a comforting hand on her shoulder. “It’s been pretty rough on you, hasn’t it, babe? Especially yesterday—going through all his things like that.”

  Rayna grunted affirmatively and turned to face him.

  “That was the first time I’d been inside Al’s place since it happened. Even with most of his stuff sold off, it was eerie. There were just enough of his personal things to remind me of where I was. But it seemed so...so...so empty. I guess I still find it hard to believe he’s dead.”

  Keith nodded. “Yeah, well, you have to expect that sort of thing when somebody dies unexpectedly. It’s not like he’d been sick, so that you could have prepared yourself. Give yourself a chance.”

  “But it’s already been more than a month,” she said, exasperated with herself. At 34, she should be able to handle these things better. “Intellectually, I know Al’s dead, but until yesterday, I still had the crazy sense that he was in his apartment, just tending to whatever it is he’s been tending to all these years and waiting f
or me to visit him again.” She shook her head slowly from side to side and laughed bitterly. “Funny, isn’t it, this inclination to see the world as if it’s a piece of theater. I’m the star of this particular little drama, and I expect all the supporting players—including Al—to be there when I need them.”

  She shrugged her shoulders. “Sorry, Keith,” she said, offering a weak smile.

  He gave her a reassuring squeeze. “It’s all right, Ray. We went through almost everything in his apartment yesterday. I’ll just transfer the stuff you wanted to keep to a Trans-Mat storage vault in your name. You can get it anytime you want to.”

  Rayna gestured toward the permastore container. “Too bad you couldn’t do the same thing with that.”

  Keith pointed to a label on the box:

  To be delivered in person upon my death to

  MS. RAYNA KINGMAN

  LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA

  “Didn’t have much choice. Executors have an obligation to carry out the terms of a will, not argue with them. Even when the executor’s a lawyer...and special friend of the heir.”

  He winked at Rayna. “Maybe your friend Al just didn’t like Trans-Mat. Even these days, I guess there are still people who don’t much care for the idea of sending things from one place to another by dismantling them molecule by molecule and then putting them back together.”

  Rayna shook her head. “Al was fascinated by Trans-Mat. He wouldn’t use it to travel himself, but....” Suddenly, she chuckled.

  “Ah, the joyful sound of laughter once more pierces the oppressive bubble of sadness,” Keith said in pontifical tones. “Mind letting me in on the joke?”

  Rayna smiled and shook her head. “It’s nothing, really. Just...well, I was remembering my sixteenth birthday. Al wanted to surprise me with a birthday cake, only he was out of town. So he sent the cake by Trans-Mat. It was the first time I ever saw Trans-Mat in operation.”

  “Oh?”

  Rayna nodded as the happy memory lifted her spirits. “Our building’s system was installed just few days before that. I remember standing there with my parents and staring at the receiving pod while the shimmer solidified into the shape of a cake. I was absolutely fascinated. Oh, and there was a note, too. It said, ‘These are special good-luck candles. Blow them out, and all your wishes will come true.’”

  “So you blew out the candles and won your heart’s desire. Right?”

  Rayna laughed. “Not exactly. We didn’t see any candles. We joked about it and figured we would give Al a hard time about getting old and forgetful. He wasn’t even 70 yet—just middle aged, really—but he still thought about ages and life spans in old 20th-century terms.” She hesitated a beat before continuing. “Anyway, when we cut into the cake, we found out what really happened. There was a malfunction in the memory banks. You know. The ones that record the molecular configuration. So the candles materialized inside the cake!”

  “Jeez,” Keith breathed with exaggerated solemnity. “That’s enough to make any man’s red blood run cold. Cakes and candles are one thing, but I’d sure hate to have parts of me rematerializing in the wrong places!”

  They looked at each other silently for a moment. Then a lascivious smile brightened Keith’s face like a shaft of light spilling into a dark alley. Rayna laughed and pushed at him playfully.

  They both knew that a fail-safe mechanism now prevented anything more serious than a shut-down if the Trans-Mat system didn’t pass a pre-transmission power, circuitry and programming check, but Keith rarely passed up the chance for a little good-natured teasing.

  Rayna cocked an eyebrow and reflected for a moment. “I suppose the cake foul-up might have left its mark on Al. As I said, he never liked to travel by Trans-Mat himself.”

  “Maybe he thought the things in that package were just too important to take a chance,” Keith suggested.

  The corners of Rayna’s mouth drooped as she followed Keith’s glance in the direction of the permastore box. “Guess I might as well get this over with,” she sighed. With quiet resignation, she walked to the sofa and sat down on the edge of the cushion, back straight, eyes fixed on the coffee table before her. Moments ticked by.

  Keith dropped onto the sofa next to her and waited. “Well?” he said, his tone suddenly harsh and impatient. “You going to open that thing, or are you going to stare at it all day?”

  Rayna pressed her lips together and looked at him coldly. She knew her reaction to Al’s death was hard on Keith. He was the type who prided himself on being in total control of his emotions, and he expected the same of others. Sometimes, though, she wondered if that veneer of control wasn’t just his way ignoring things he didn’t want to see—the emotional equivalent of an ostrich sticking its head in the sand. It was his warm, gentle side that she’d fallen in love with, but every once in awhile....

  “Look Rayna,” Keith said uneasily, “I know you were close. Maybe the old guy left you something special in that permastore—something to remember him by.” He ran a hand lovingly along her bare forearm. “Why don’t we go through it together?”

  She brushed back a recalcitrant lock of the short, dark hair that framed her fair-skinned face. Pursing her lips, she glanced downward, nodded her head firmly and reached for the box.

  “How old was he, anyway?” Keith asked as he handed Rayna his pocket valence-shifter to unseal the bond of the permastore box. “Must have been pushing 80.”

  “More than that,” Rayna said as she fingered the valence-shifter distractedly. “He turned 88 on Jan. 30. Eighty-eight years old....”

  Her voice trailed off as she continued to toy with the small, rectangular object in her hand. “He was an unusual man, Keith. A caring man. It was as if he personally felt the pain of every hardship, every injustice, every evil he ever heard about. It got especially intense around his birthday.”

  “Strange way to celebrate a birthday,” Keith muttered.

  Rayna raised her eyebrows and nodded. “I always thought so, too. But that’s how he was. Some kind of personal ghosts seemed to drive him, to make him feel it was up to him to set things right in the world, but around his birthday, it all seemed to overwhelm him, and he’d get depressed.”

  Rayna inhaled deeply, then returned her attention to the box. She pressed a switch on the valence-shifter and ran it across the top of the permastore container. Suddenly, electrons that had been sharing the outermost shells of two different atoms retreated to independent paths around separate nuclei, thereby breaking the covalent bond that had sealed the container.

  “You must’ve known him a long time,” Keith said.

  “Hmmm. It’s funny. I don’t think I remember ever not knowing him. He was always at our family get-togethers. Holidays, birthdays—that sort of thing. Used to be engaged to my Aunt Vickie. You remember. My Dad’s older sister.”

  “Sure,” Keith said. “The one who died last year. I remember going to the funeral with you. You introduced me to Al Frederick there. It was a few days after that when he called and asked me to be executor of his will. I was surprised, but—”

  “The family scuttlebutt is that Al and Aunt Vickie lived together for awhile,” Rayna said. “Never married each other, though. Nobody ever talks about why.” She took a deep breath. “Anyway, Aunt Vickie married Uncle Ted, and Al stayed a bachelor. I always had the feeling that they still loved each other, but....”

  Rayna glanced away and began fidgeting with the valence-shifter again. After a moment, she turned back toward Keith. “I’m not sure just how it worked out that way, but Al was like another member of the family.”

  Keith cleared his throat, patted the smooth fabric of the rust-colored sofa, and then sniffed the still apartment air. “Kind of stuffy in here,” he said. “How about if I open the patio door?”

  Rayna nodded and returned her attention to the permastore box. Standing now, she pulled back the lid and began to shuffle the contents about.

  “What in the world is this?” she asked as she dug both hands
down toward the bottom of the box. “It looks like....”

  “Looks like some kind of scrapbook,” Keith put in, returning to Rayna’s side as the scent of jasmine drifted in on a light breeze from the open door.

  “Mmmmm,” she agreed as she extricated the album from beneath several of the other items in the box. She ran her fingers over the sunrise scene that decorated the latigo leather cover. “Looks hand-made,” she observed, leafing through the pages of faded construction paper, bound together by black leather thongs.

  “Careful,” Keith warned. “That paper looks pretty fragile. I’d say this thing was sitting around in the open for a long time before it was ever put in there. Otherwise, the preserving environment inside the permastore would have protected it. You never saw it before?”

  Rayna shook her head, settling onto the sofa as she opened the album: “Riots Threaten 10 Cities in Wake of Roberts Assassination Attempt” announced the bold, two-line heading of the newspaper clipping pasted on the scrapbook’s first pale sheet of construction paper. Puzzled, she turned the page. A related article caused her to draw in a sharp breath.

  “Look at the byline, Keith. My Aunt Vickie wrote this.”

  Keith sat down next to Rayna and peered over her shoulder as she continued to turn the pages, most of which contained other news clippings.

  There was a story on the first breakthrough with NGRM therapy in 1978, when scientists discovered how to stop cancer in its tracks by restoring and maintaining normal cell growth.

  There was a piece on the election of Edward Brooke as the country’s first black president in 1980, detailing Brooke’s amazing political comeback from a 1978 Senate defeat. Along the way, the news story explained, Brooke had to beat back a strong primary challenge from former actor and California Gov. Ronald Reagan. The momentum of that primary success carried Brooke to victory over the Democratic nominee, a former Georgia governor named Jimmy Carter.