08 Illusion

by Frank Peretti

  This is death, where the story ends.

  But how else can I ever live as me?

  She made herself reach and touch. The metal was rough with paint blisters, rust, and corrosion. She felt like running but took hold of the doorframe so she would stay.

  “Careful,” said Mr. Jansen, pointing with his light. “That metal’s sharp.”

  She ran her light along the tear in the roof. It was jagged, like a bread knife. She placed her foot on the bottom of the doorframe, her hand on the frame of the seat back.

  “Whoa, here, wait a minute,” said Mr. Jansen. He dashed to the street rod and brought back an old seat cushion. While she waited, he set it on the frame of the driver’s seat and stepped away, holding his light for her.

  In a slow and careful process, placing a hand here, a foot there, watching for sharp edges, she settled into the creaking skeleton of the driver’s seat, into the center of the ashes and smell, steeling herself to look at the warped and bubbled instrument panel, the black crumbles of melted handles, buttons, and air vents on the seats and floor. In the beam of Mr. Jansen’s light, she placed her hands on each side of the out-of-round, skeletal steering wheel and looked into the dark through a misshapen void that used to be the windshield.

  A good space of time passed before Mr. Jansen said anything. “You all right?”

  She was, and it bothered her. She tried to imagine the hood and grille of another car plowing into her left side faster than she could react, the scream of tires, the slam of metal, the flying particles of glass and the brain-jarring impact, how it must have sounded and smelled, how it must have felt to be trapped in this crumpled cooker while the smoke and flames roasted her alive… .

  But she’d never been here. This was all part of another story she’d never lived.

  “Well,” she said at last, “it happened to somebody. That’s a fact.”

  She would have climbed out, but Mr. Jansen stood on the ground immediately to her left and didn’t move. He was shining his flashlight at the floor of the car, at the ashes and crumblings around her feet.

  “What?” she asked.

  He just wiggled the flashlight to draw her attention, so she looked.

  With each wave of his light, something amid the ashes sparkled. Something pretty in the middle of all this ugliness? She bent over, reached for the sparkle, and felt a small, crusty chain between her fingers. At first it was just another forlorn piece of someone else’s tragedy, but when she lifted it from the ashes and spread it across her palm …

  A silver chain, stained by ash and smoke, the tiny links wilted by the heat, the ends broken and burned away, and in the center of its length … one indistinguishable lump of silver, and one intact silver dove.

  “I saw it there when they first brought the car in,” said Mr. Jansen. “But Dr. Kessler said, ‘No, don’t touch it, leave it right where it is.’” He tilted his light to study her face. “Looks like it was this that she was keeping for you.”

  chapter

  * * *

  45

  Parmenter was driving the car. “Fortunately, it’s after eight. The main crew’s gone home and Moss is the only one there.”

  Dane was lying on the floor in the back. “What does he know about your contact with me?”

  “Just about everything. I had to contact you first. You had knowledge of the past forty years, you already knew who Mandy was, you know who she is—with a little explanation, of course …”

  “Of course.”

  “While Mandy is, or was, a young girl with no idea in the world that she’d been married to you for forty years, no way to fathom or believe what we would tell her. We needed you to help us contact and communicate with her, which meant contacting and communicating with you, which meant letting you in on all the pertinent details. That much he knows.”

  “Do you trust him?”

  “Well, I—”

  “Don’t.”

  “Right. Don’t. Okay, here we are.”

  “Just drive on in and act normal.”

  “Act normal. Riiight …”

  Dane felt the car slow, then turn, then roll to a stop. Parmenter rolled down his window, and Dane could hear the beep from the card reader as Parmenter swiped his card through it. A faint mechanical whir told him a gate was opening.

  They drove down a ramp to underground parking, the sound of the engine and tires reverberating off the concrete walls. Parmenter pulled into a parking lot and shut off the engine. He gave the area a quick 360-degree sweep, then said, “Okay. We’d better make it quick.”

  An entry door was only a few yards from where the car was parked. They ducked through, took an elevator up one floor, went down a bare hallway to a service door, stepped through that to another hallway that led to another door that Parmenter unlocked with his security card.

  Inside that door was a cluttered office: a desk piled with blue-penciled computer printouts, stacks of binders and manuals against the wall, two whiteboards filled with incomprehensible formulas, and a computer system with three monitors side by side, each one showing a fluctuating display of columns, numbers, graphs, and vaporous, undulating shapes.

  Parmenter rolled a chair from a corner. “Have a seat.”

  Dane settled in, appreciating all the scribblings on the whiteboard—even if Parmenter had faked all of it, it was still impressive.

  “That’s our bottom line, I suppose,” the scientist said, waving a felt tip marker at the whiteboard. “I reworked it several times, from several directions, and every time I landed on one conclusion.” He sighted down the marker at some scribblings in the lower right corner of the second whiteboard, some letters mixed with some numbers and a squiggle sitting on top of some other letters and numbers divided up with slashes and squiggles.

  Dane ventured a guess. “Mandy’s in deep soup.”

  “Well, we all are, but she is at the heart of the problem. Her reversion was so vast—forty years, several hundred miles!—that her gravitational leverage on the Machine is insurmountable. We can’t counter it. She’s controlling the Machine, using all its power and capability to perform her magic.” He scanned the scribblings for help, but then just said it. “And to maintain her secondary timeline, the very thing that keeps her forty years behind the rest of us. But it’s not without cost. The deflection necessary—”

  The other door to the office opened and a younger man, with black curly hair, stepped in. Parmenter rose to make the introduction. “Dane Collins, may I introduce my associate and project manager, Dr. Loren Moss.”

  Dane rose and shook the man’s hand. There were no smiles.

  “Loren, I was just about to tell Dane about the deflection debt, how it forced retracings of the other subjects.”

  Moss nodded and addressed Dane. “Every reversion, every time we shift a timeline or create a new one, we bend space just a little more. It’s like bending a spring; the more you bend it, the more it resists, until you just can’t add any more strain without removing some first. We call that deflection debt. We can’t place any more stress on the universe without relieving some first.”

  Parmenter continued, “The rats were so small and the reversion so brief, just a matter of minutes, that the deflection debt was negligible. Monkeys were larger and had greater mass, so they required a little more. The human subjects had far greater mass and required much longer reversions—some a day or two, the soldier—”

  “Seven days,” said Moss.

  “One of our own staff—”

  “Me,” Moss offered. “Fourteen months.”

  “Followed by Ernie Myers who only required a three-hour reversion; we reverted him back to the instant he fell from his ladder so he’d remember the fall but not remember being injured. It worked—the first time. Doris Branson, the same thing. We reverted her to the moment of her car accident so the last thing she remembered was losing control of the car. That was four hours. But it was adding up. Our readings indicated a building imposition on the space-time fab
ric and we were wondering how much more strain we could impose before we reached our limit.”

  “I think Mandy put us there.”

  “Absolutely,” said Parmenter, referring to the computer monitors. “Not that it’s her fault, of course, but the deflections she imposed were so severe that the space-time fabric began to cast off the earlier deflections. I imagine that little toy block has retraced by now …”

  “It’s like a ship that’s too heavy,” said Moss. “If you still want to load more cargo you have to unload something else first.”

  “So our little toy car broke into pieces again, our restored pop can squashed again, the rats all retraced, and then the monkeys—” Parmenter leaned toward the monitors. “Wait, hold on.”

  Hold on? Dane was about to pounce with a question and now Parmenter was saying “Hold on”? Dane held his peace; it looked serious.

  Parmenter tapped away at his keyboard, muttering computations to himself. Moss waited patiently, no doubt familiar with how Parmenter operated. At last, alarmed, Parmenter leaned back, blew out a breath, and said, “She’s coming here.”

  Moss looked incredulous. “Coming here? You mean … ?”

  Parmenter pointed to fields of numbers on the screen, explaining to Dane, “These are space-time axes with corresponding coefficients, designated Kiley, Baker, Delta, blah blah blah; anyway, by looking at the Machine’s readouts I can closely estimate the gravitational influence Mandy is exerting or will be exerting on the Machine over a given span of time, and from that I can calculate her distance from the Machine, and in … forty-three minutes, five seconds, she and the Machine will be no more than two meters apart, which means she’s going to be here in this lab, which means we—most especially you—are going to have some real convincing to do if we hope to save her life.”

  Those last three words! “I’m listening. You were talking about the monkeys.”

  “They retraced.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Parmenter looked at Moss, who just looked back at him. Parmenter took it. “Retrace, retrace, uh, it means … in order to revert someone, we have to reverse them on their own timeline—rewind their life, so to speak. But if that’s all we did, then they would simply retrace the same timeline and go through the same accident, injury, whatever, all over again. That’s why we create a secondary timeline, one with an open future that hasn’t been lived yet. When we place the subject on the new timeline, they effectively bypass whatever calamity befell them on their old timeline and continue living as if it never happened. That’s the whole object.”

  “But you had to burn the monkeys.”

  Parmenter was a little surprised. “I suppose Mandy told you about that.”

  “She did.”

  “They died. Their reversions failed because their secondary timelines failed and they fell back into their original timelines and retraced.”

  “And that was largely due to the load Mandy placed on the space-time fabric,” said Moss. “Any secondary timelines prior to her reversion became unstable.”

  Parmenter spoke for his associate. “Loren’s secondary timeline was disrupted when Mandy came through the lab on a tertiary corridor—”

  “We have less than forty minutes, Doctor,” Dane reminded him.

  “She’s been here before—well, not completely here, maybe half here and half wherever else she was. That’s how she knows about the monkeys.” Parmenter rolled his eyes at his own verbal morass.

  Moss stepped in. “Mandy can generate additional timelines and pass into and out of them. It’s how she can see and be in several different places at the same time. It’s how she levitates, how she moves from one place to another and makes objects move and multiplies objects, including herself. I’m sure she doesn’t know how she does it.”

  “She’s about to find out,” said Parmenter, watching the monitors.

  “But she does it. Anyway, she was riding a third timeline right through the hospital when she bumped into my secondary timeline and dissolved it. I fell back to my original timeline, retraced it, and now I’m dying of cancer again. But that’s the same thing that happened to our other experimental subjects, Corporal Dose, Doris Branson, Ernie Myers. Mandy’s built up such a load on the space-time fabric that she’s bumped the other subjects off their secondary timelines and they’ve retraced.”

  Parmenter jumped in, “Which made every one of them a security risk. They were starting to catch on, starting to ask questions, threatening legal action, and of course it was only a matter of time before they started talking to each other—Myers and Branson had Mandy in common, and all three had this hospital in common.”

  Dane put up a hand to stop them, then sat and processed, his fingers on his brow. “So … you’re saying that these other three were … eliminated? Rubbed out? Killed?”

  Moss and Parmenter looked at each other as if afraid to use the words. Parmenter finally offered, “It’s what I was saying about control and how the people now running this project will stop at nothing to retain it.”

  “You mean DuFresne, Carlson?”

  Parmenter nodded. “They’ve become the figureheads, top of the pecking order. DuFresne heads the medical interests, Carlson the technical, and both of them are answering to the military, who never show their faces at all.”

  “How much time?” Moss asked.

  Parmenter consulted the monitors. “Thirty-four minutes, thirty-six seconds.”

  And Dane sat there looking at them.

  “Are you … are you keeping up with all this?” Moss asked.

  “I can panic or I can think,” Dane said. “Question one: is Mandy a risk to this project and to the people running it?”

  Both nodded. “Absolutely,” said Parmenter. “She’s not only demonstrating the Machine’s capabilities before the public—thank God people think it’s trickery—she’s also controlling it.”

  “The Machine is like a computer that’s crashed,” said Moss. “We can monitor what’s happening, we can access limited capabilities—”

  “Like the toy block.”

  “But Mandy is essentially running away with our invention.”

  “All right,” said Dane, talking slowly, evenly. “Question two: do you believe your scientist friends and government people will try to kill Mandy the same as they killed the others?”

  That pained Parmenter. Moss took the question. “They would have killed her long before this, but that wouldn’t have fixed the crash.”

  “What if she quit performing her magic, quit using the Machine?”

  “That wouldn’t fix the crash either,” said Moss. “The Machine would still be down, inaccessible.”

  “So what if you just turned the Machine off, unplugged it?”

  They chuckled at some inside knowledge. Parmenter seemed sheepish as he said, “It’s not here in our time dimension so we can do that. The more it works for Mandy, the more it gets entangled in multiple dimensions.”

  Moss added, “Right now it’s sitting in our time dimension but drawing power—it’s plugged in—in another time about three and a half seconds behind ours and traveling close to the speed of light … somewhere.”

  Dane sighed in frustration.

  “We’ve worked through a lot of these questions already,” said Parmenter, pointing at the whiteboards.

  “But you’ve brought me into it and blathered about some theory of yours, so I gather you’ve thought of something.”

  Again, the two seemed reticent and looked at each other. Parmenter ventured an answer. “They—we—need to recalibrate the Machine, completely reset it, and the only way we can do that is to find out exactly what the Machine did on September 17 so we can work backward through that process and undo whatever it did.”

  Moss added, “And the only way we can do that is to find out exactly where and when Mandy arrived after her reversion, how far we sent her in space and how far back in time.”

  “And only Mandy can tell us that.”

  “
Which is the main reason she’s still alive.”

  Dane mused on that a moment.

  “Uh, twenty-nine minutes,” said Parmenter.

  “So you need me to persuade her to tell you?”

  They nodded yes but weren’t happy about it.

  “And say she does. What happens to her?” They hesitated, and Dane didn’t like the looks they gave each other. “You said you would have to work backward through the process and undo whatever the Machine did. Did I hear you correctly?”

  Parmenter finally said it. “If we—if they—expect to regain control of the Machine, they would have to undo all past actions and start afresh. They would have to retrace her.”

  Dane knew what that meant, and now he had to sort his thoughts and feelings enough to contain more than disdain for these men and their project, he also had to hold back an animal rage.

  Moss checked his watch. “Twenty-six minutes.”

  “She can …” Dane took a breath and controlled his tone. Even so, his voice was shaking. “She can walk in that door right now as far as I’m concerned. She can walk right up to you, and you can face her, and look her in the eye, and tell her yourself.”

  Parmenter spoke in gentle, perhaps timid tones, as if addressing a lion with bared claws. “Umm … we are hoping, of course, as you and I discussed, that we can find an alternative.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “Uh, we—”

  “Say it!”

  Moss and Parmenter exchanged another look. Parmenter faced up to it. “If we don’t find an alternative, then the only way to reset the Machine and clear the deflection debt is to retrace Mandy … and she will burn to death all over again.”

  There was nowhere else to go and, from some inkling of intuition she couldn’t explain but opted to trust, she knew something was brewing back at the hospital; she knew someone was there in that basement behind those big double doors who might not be glad to see her but was going to see her, like it or not, live or die.