08 Illusion

by Frank Peretti

  Parmenter produced a laptop computer from his briefcase, set it on the table, and flipped it open. He reached for a child’s wooden block and set it on the table as well.

  Dane recognized the computer. “You were there at McCaffee’s.”

  “Oh, you bet I was.” He pulled a small device that resembled a GPS from the briefcase and set it atop the toy block. He switched the device on, then tapped at the computer keys, apparently responding to whatever information the device was sending. “And I’m going to answer all your questions if I can, but I suggest we cover things in order, and in small doses. You’ll understand once we get into it.”

  A few more taps on the computer, and then he took the block and held it out. “Here. Hold this in your hand.” Dane extended his palm, and Parmenter set the block on it. “To get through the introductions, I know who you are and where you live and what you do for a living, so there’s no need for you to tell me. As for who I am, you obviously know or you wouldn’t have made such a lasting impression on Dr. Kessler. I can tell you my age—I’m fifty-seven—and I could list my credentials and diplomas and bore you to death or I could get right to the important stuff. So hold the block up so you see where it is and also”—he indicated the block’s former location on the table—“where it came from.”

  Dane felt like a volunteer in one of his stage routines, but he was not expecting a magic trick.

  “Lucky for us,” said Parmenter, eyeing the computer screen, “Mandy Whitacre is inactive at the moment, probably asleep in bed, so we’ll be able to squeeze in and do this. Don’t blink. You ready?”

  Dane’s eyes were open.

  Parmenter tapped the enter key on the computer.

  The block vanished from Dane’s hand and instantly reappeared in its former location on the table.

  Dane was impressed but not surprised. He’d already seen this phenomenon several times.

  Parmenter looked at the block on the table, then at Dane. “Okay, you saw what happened?”

  Dane nodded. “Interdimensional displacement?”

  The scientist lit up. “You’ve been reading about me!”

  “And this is how she does it.”

  “Fundamentally, yes. To qualify myself in your eyes, I have just shown you the core explanation for Mandy Whitacre’s magic, and I’m not betraying a confidence. I invented it. Shall I break it down for you?”

  “You have my undivided attention.”

  “To put it simply, I set the block on the table, then determined the exact spatial coordinates, exactly where it was, at”—he consulted his computer—“eleven thirty-eight P.M., January thirtieth, 2011. I then moved it to another location, your hand, at approximately eleven thirty-nine. Then the fun part: I sent it back to where it was and how it was at eleven thirty-eight. Where it was and how it was, the exact state it was in a minute earlier. It’s crucial to understand that.”

  “And how did you do it?”

  Parmenter sucked in a whistle, then sighed it out, trying to come up with an answer, Dane figured. “It’s a combination of time and space travel, although the crucial difference is, the block didn’t travel through time, time traveled through the block.”

  Dane had read the articles Preston’s people had found. He vaguely understood. “The parallel railroad tracks.”

  “Yes, yes! And here’s a practical way of looking at it: I suppose you’re familiar with how to restore a computer to a prior state? Your computer gets snarled up or crashes because you’ve hit the wrong key at the wrong time, and the only way to fix it is to have it revert to exactly the way it was a day ago or a week ago, or whenever it was still working, before whatever went wrong went wrong.”

  “Right.”

  “Ever done that?”

  “Yeah. A few times.”

  “Well, that’s similar to what we just did with the block. It was on the table for a moment, then, in the course of time, about a minute, I put it in your hand. Now … the key difference here between reversion—that’s what I call it, reversion—and time travel like you see in the movies, is that the block didn’t travel back in time. What happened was”—he searched the ceiling for how to explain it—“this computer is linked with our Machine. I fed the Machine the data from the block, the Machine replicated a secondary timeline”—he gave his hands an erasing wiggle, frustrated—“well, we put the block on a parallel timeline …”

  “The other railroad track.”

  “Yes! Right! Then, without shifting the block itself in relation to our timeline, I shifted the secondary timeline it was on backward by one minute. So even though the block is still here with us, in our present, in our space”—he reached over and flicked the block with his finger just to make the point—“it is actually existing in a timeline that is one minute behind ours. The block is, and always will be, one minute younger in relation to us. If the block were a conscious entity, it would think it never left the table, but it would be wondering where that last minute went. Very simple.”

  “Oh, yeah. Very simple.”

  “So, to recount the story that goes with this”—he put the block back with its friends in a toy box—“I got to thinking about the practical, humanitarian use for such a discovery. Imagine someone getting cancer or being injured, and medical science having the ability to place them on a new timeline and revert them to a point and place in time before they got sick or before they had the accident. They could continue their life from that point and bypass the illness or injury.”

  “Bypass the illness or injury? Not just go through it all over again?”

  Parmenter drew an extra breath before answering, “That’s why we put them on a secondary timeline, a whole new route through time so they don’t retrace the old one.” Dane was figuring it out and Parmenter could see it in his face. “Yes, you see where this is going.”

  Dane had been preparing himself, trying to imagine such a possibility while trying not to hope. Even now, he dared not speak it.

  “It’s not all roses, I’ll tell you that now, but to continue the story, some friends and I managed to build a small machine that could revert things and we experimented with blocks of wood like this one and other small objects. We stepped on a toy car, then put the broken pieces in the Machine and watched the car put itself together again. We crushed a can and then reverted it to an uncrushed can. That was exciting. We thought, Wow, with a big enough machine we could take an old car and erase all the miles off it, or a wrecked car and unwreck it. Great in theory, a little shaky in the practical application.

  “But anyway, we got around to reverting rats—hope you won’t find this offensive, but we injured the rats in various ways and then put them in the Machine, and voilà! The rats went back to the way they were before we hurt them. We went bigger and tried monkeys. Same thing.

  “But”—he waved his finger in the air, signaling an important point—“we also did maze and memory tests on the lab animals, and sure enough, their brains also reverted. The rats learned a maze right before we injured them, and then we reverted them and they weren’t injured anymore, but they couldn’t remember their way through the maze either. The monkeys could perform tasks, but when we reverted them to a condition prior to learning the tasks, they didn’t remember what they’d learned. They were younger, too, because reversion means everything reverts: any injuries, any bodily changes—haircuts, nail trimmings, weight loss or gain—and memory. So for all practical purposes, the rat, the monkey, the human subject wakes up behind the times. It’s kind of a Rip Van Winkle effect: they’ve lost a minute, an hour, a few days, depending on how far they were reverted.”

  “How about forty years?”

  Parmenter hesitated to answer.

  Dane calmly asked again, “How about forty years? Can you revert someone forty years?”

  Parmenter thought for a moment, then nodded his head with chagrin. “Now we’re getting to it. Somehow we did, but we don’t know how it happened, so at this point we can’t repeat it and, on the downside,
we don’t know how to fix it.”

  Dane’s mind was racing, only beginning to process what little he had heard to this point. A mountain of memories, events, and questions waited to be reworked into an entirely new schematic by which all the impossibilities would be possible. It was more than he could handle in days, much less minutes.

  Parmenter could read all this in his face and chuckled nervously. “This is why I said we’d have to cover this in small doses.”

  But Dane wanted it all, as long as that might take. “Please continue.”

  “All right. Anyway, picking up where I left off”—Parmenter was delighted with himself—“not a bad play on words! That’s what we’ve done with objects, with lab animals, and with … well, you see the similarity. They go back to a particular point and pick up where they left off.”

  “Yeah, right, so … ?”

  “Right, right, to get to the bottom line, or near bottom line … we secured government funding, and let me tell you, that was the beginning of sorrows right there. The military people leaped at the prospects—I mean, they were frothing at the mouth. Think of being able to uninjure soldiers and send them back into battle perfectly fit and with no memory of ever being shot. You could recycle the majority of your casualties and just keep them rolling through your war over and over again and then, of course, the boys and girls could all come home as fit as when they shipped out. What a dream, a compelling dream! We couldn’t turn away, we couldn’t slow down, we had to achieve that—which meant we had to ignore … tromp on … certain moral issues. But isn’t that the way it goes?”

  Dane kept telling himself it was all important and he should hear it. But he couldn’t keep his impatience from showing.

  “Sorry,” said Parmenter. “There’s just so much … but getting to it: we procured government funding, which enabled us to build a full-size Machine that could revert human subjects, and our first was a soldier, a volunteer who’d been wounded in Afghanistan. It worked. More on that later, I know you’re impatient to hear… . Anyway, we did have a few other human subjects with various injuries and”—he searched the ceiling for his thoughts, wiggled his fingers nervously—“the secrecy of the whole thing, that’s what made it all so difficult. The experimental subjects couldn’t know what we were doing or, of course, the word would get out, and we were advised, we all knew, that a—well, the military referred to it as a strategic asset, and a strategic asset like this would only be an asset as long as only one nation—ours, obviously—had it. There was no way on earth or in hell that we could let any other government find out we even had such a thing.

  “But that’s why we’re in such a pickle now, why everything is so complex and tangled up… . I’m sorry, I know I’m going on and on.”

  Dane drew a breath and said, “I have all the time you do.”

  Parmenter looked about the room, trying to find the next point to launch from. “So, I’ll say it, I’ll admit it, we were hasty. Pressure from the military, pressure from the government, all sorts of hassles over funding and who was in charge and … and there were the moral aspects we could never agree on, still can’t agree on, but that’s a matter to discuss later.

  “But we did have human subjects, civilian as well as military, which brings me to our mutual acquaintance, Dr. Margo Kessler. I won’t say it was her exclusive territory, the whole thing has just grown so large and so unmanageable, but … we needed human subjects who’d been injured and could conceivably be reverted in such a way that they wouldn’t know they’d been reverted. I know, it sounds so impossible, and I think we’re finally accepting the fact that it is. But can you imagine, we actually had the first few sign consent forms, and then, after reversion, they had no memory of giving consent to anything or even experiencing anything and we, we just decided to leave it at that. Why tell them? Secrecy was the priority, right, and now we had human subjects who had no idea what we’d done to them. It was a gift, it was perfect.

  “And Kessler was one of our … scouts. She saw injured people every day, she had the means to check their backgrounds, family ties, suitability, and when she found someone we could revert without a high risk of discovery, she forwarded them down to us. To put it succinctly, they came into the emergency room injured, we took them down the hall, down an elevator into our own version of an ICU, reverted them, they woke up with no injuries and no memory of an accident, and we sent them home after a day’s observation, just telling them how lucky they were to escape without a scratch. And they bought it. All they knew was what we told them.” He took a breath. He was getting visibly nervous. “You see where this is going… .”

  Dane was there. It could take him days to accept and believe it, but he was there. He laid himself open for one more dose, and it wouldn’t be small. “She wasn’t dead.”

  Parmenter came right back with a disclaimer, “She would have been, in just a matter of minutes. The outcome was inevitable, as determined by Kessler and the ER staff. You were at a wake, a death watch, but”—he thought for a moment but apparently found no better way to say it, so he kept going—“we had yet to revert burn injuries, to see if destroyed tissue would actually return given the fact that such vast chemical changes had occurred, that so many atoms and molecules were lost in combustion and just weren’t there anymore. It was an unresolvable question, like life itself. We found repeatedly that life couldn’t be restored to anything dead—so God still has control over that and isn’t about to share it. But your wife …”

  Dane delivered a subtle look of permission to continue—please.

  “Kessler had already notified us and we were so in need of a living experimental subject… . We actually expected her to die, that was the most likely outcome according to all our computer models, all the data we had at the time, so we didn’t think we were risking that much. She would die, we’d take her to the morgue, the normal unfolding of the tragedy would remain the same, and in the meantime, we would have some data for whatever it was worth. It, it was a snap decision. We had to get her in the Machine and just, just see what might happen, whether moments before death or after death, either way, because we didn’t know if the length of time before or after death might also have a bearing on it, or to what extent reversion, maybe resuscitation, might still be possible.”

  “So … you faked her death?”

  He smiled grimly. “As I’m sure you know, we humans can rewrite anything, we can redefine our way through any moral conundrum. We didn’t ‘fake’ her death, no, we anticipated it and brought it about as it would eventually occur anyway, then deferred it until we could make use of her body for scientific purposes. Well, after all, she was an organ donor, so … if the use of her entire body might lead us to discoveries that could save lives in the future …”

  Dane understood. It turned his stomach, but he understood. “Beautifully done,” he said with a cutting edge.

  “Uh, yeah. We found a way to justify”—Parmenter actually showed a pang of conscience and seemed to be confessing as he said it—“we … the nurse … well, under Kessler’s orders, under our orders … disconnected the wires to the heart monitor so your wife would go flatline. She would appear dead so we could get her body down to the Machine before she really was dead. We barely made it.”

  He paused for a break they both needed. They sat in silence, Dane looking at Parmenter, Parmenter looking at the floor.

  As if it might moderate the impact, Parmenter recalled, “They replaced the tracheal tube and ventilated her, one hundred percent oxygen, all the way down the elevator, all the way into the Machine.” Then he repeated, “We barely made it.”

  Dane had the thought, so he spoke it. “What about the ashes from the funeral home, the whole cremation?”

  “A cadaver. I don’t know the legal, procedural details. Somehow they pulled it off.”

  “But it wasn’t Mandy.”

  “Ohhh, no. No, it wasn’t.”

  “What happened to her?”

  Parmenter actually laughed. �
��We’re all wondering that. That was the question right after the reversion started. We had her in the Machine, her vitals were dropping right off, we started the sequence”—he sighed and searched the ceiling again—“it had to be a faulty computer model or an error in the power calculations, or … we still don’t know. But … here’s how it’s supposed to work: we lay the subject in a hospital bed just as I laid the block on the table, right? Then we sedate them so they don’t know what we’re up to and transport them downstairs into the Machine. When we revert, we send them to a point on their new timeline prior to their injury and relocate them in the hospital bed so that, to them, they were in the bed, fell asleep in the bed, and then woke up in the bed a few hours, a few days later, whatever the case may be. With just a small amount of time lost, it looks normal enough. ‘Wow,’ we tell them, ‘you were out for a while but you’re all right now and very, very lucky!’

  “But in Mandy’s case, there was a power surge, a time surge, an overcompensation. We didn’t expect her to live, but we did have a hospital bed prepared, we were planning to relocate her to that bed in case, just in case, she might survive. We dressed her in a hospital gown … just threw it on her as quickly as we could, it was almost an afterthought. But anyway, we’d just begun the sequence when … POOF! She vanished! Completely, totally, without a trace, and until recently we had no idea how far back she’d reverted, whether years or seconds or a fraction of a second. Worse yet, we had no idea where. She didn’t relocate to the hospital bed, or to that room, or the hallway, or anywhere on that floor or the floor above. We—can you imagine trying to check through an entire medical center to see whether an experimental subject now of younger age and disoriented, or … pardon me … a, uh, a body in such ghastly condition might have cropped up unexpectedly? Can you imagine sitting helplessly, waiting for a report to come in of a deceased or dying individual suddenly appearing in the middle of a street or someone’s yard or living room or …” Parmenter stopped to look at him, apparently to assess his reaction. “I can’t imagine how you must feel hearing all this.”