by Xander Gray
“What’s the point? You want to punish me? It’s over now. We can’t take it back.”
She wiped the tears from her eyes and straightened her lab coat. “I’m going to the police. The FBI. Anyone who will listen.”
“They’ll never believe you.”
“I won’t tell them about the Ouroboros or any of the science fiction bullshit, Edward. I’ll just tell them you are conducting illegal experiments on unwitting children. What do you think they’ll do when they find out you’ve been injecting children with a substance no present day doctor will be able to identify except as a potentially toxic metal? Even if the Ouroboros can erase the official record, they can’t erase the media coverage once it’s in the wild. This will be a big story. I have the names of dead kids.”
“Don’t do this.” He raised his hands pleadingly. “You’ll destroy me. There are things at stake you cannot understand. What we’re doing matters.”
She picked up her briefcase. “Out of my way.”
He stepped aside, but not enough to afford passage. “What if I promise to stop? What if I promise to blow the lid off the story myself?”
Her shoulders sagged, her head tilted. “Go on.”
“I’ll tell Attis we won’t do this anymore. We’ll promote you into a position where you can ensure I keep my word. It’s not about the money of course—it’s about oversight—but there will be money.”
She glanced around the room at the beds, the children, and then she looked toward the floor. “How much money?”
“Seven figures.”
She gasped. “And you’ll stop? You promise?”
“Of course.” A smile stretched across his face, and he stepped in front of the door, blocking her exit completely. “Let’s continue our working relationship. We can do so much good together, and no one else need suffer.”
I slipped into a dark tunnel and was gone.
#
When next I surfaced, McSorley was jamming a breathing mask over my face. I slapped at his hands, but I was too frail, too young. The mask smothered me. My breathing stuttered deep within my chest and a spinning sensation filled my skull. I felt myself being drawn from my body, through a corrugated tunnel, like I was a rush of air.
Then I was staring into a mirror, where I saw a Capgras. It was fully formed—legs and all—but no taller than five feet.
“You know why we put you in a fake body?” McSorley put one arm around my synthetic shoulder and smiled at me in the mirror. “If you can swarm, your real body can receive swarms. It’s a simple concept really. So here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to stay here while I load Attis into your real body.”
He was a sociopathic monster. He had just transferred an innocent child's mind into a faceless husk, with no thought for the trauma he might inflict. Now he was preparing to give my body to someone else.
I summoned my adult face.
McSorley stumbled back toward the entrance of the exam room. “How?”
My adult voice reverberated through the Capgras. “McSorley!”
His eyes widened.
I took a trembling step toward him. “If I can kill you before you build the tools of Armageddon, I can save the world.”
He felt his way along the rail of one of the beds. “Joshua, I want you to concentrate on a mental picture of your real face.”
My synthetic body bubbled and grew as I charged. I was six feet tall when I hit him, driving him onto the floor between two hospital beds. Muscles formed along my arms even as I wrapped my hands around his throat. I was going to end him.
He drove his knee into my belly, and I collapsed.
McSorley swung over me, landed on my chest. “I told Attis it was too dangerous to continue using you in these experiments, but she has some strange fascination with you.”
I felt the power cell in my abdomen pulsing and creaking, but couldn’t make a single move to protect myself. The room filled with impossible colors—I was time shifting.
Damn it. I had lost my chance to kill him during the infancy of his research, before the dangerous technology could be completed. My eight-year-old self would have no recollection of these events after my adult consciousness departed, and even if some memory of these events were retained, it would be processed through a child’s mind, subject to all manner of psychological frailties. As the realization dawned on me that these time slips were fragmenting my childhood, I dropped into a tunnel and plummeted past lights in colors I had never seen.
#
I emerged in my eight-year-old body, lying in a familiar hospital bed, holding hands with the little blonde girl one bed over. I recognized her immediately from the memory I’d had back at the hotel in Pine Bluff. Long loops of hair hung over the shoulders of her hospital gown, and she looked at me with wide, piercing eyes. The sticker on her gown had the number 58 scrawled on it in black magic marker. A number adorned the sticker on my gown as well: 49.
I released her hand and swung my feet to the floor. “Come with me.”
“Where are we going?” She looked at me with wonder.
I motioned to the sleeping children in the beds around us. “We have to get out of here before you become like them.”
“But I won’t become like them.” She leaned forward in her bed. “The doctor says I’m going to be the template.”
“Do you even know what that means?” I seized her wrist.
She pulled away. “I’m important.”
I shook my head. “It means you’re the first child to undergo a reproducible medical procedure for converting organic brain cells to synthetic brain cells, the key word being reproducible.”
“Huh?”
I would never be able to explain this to an eight-year-old. I briefly closed my eyes, collecting my thoughts. “Do you know what it means to be possessed?”
She shook her head.
I spoke with a child’s voice, but did not speak the language of children. “I’ll put this as plainly as I can. The doctor has modified your brain stem so he can put someone else’s forebrain inside your head. He conducted the same procedure on me, but he can’t use me. He can use you, which means you are in great danger.”
She climbed to the floor, her small hands clutching her gown, and stumbled after me to the door.
It opened onto a darkened room. A cube illuminated the tile and cabinets, and a thin blue light trembled on the ceiling above a hulking machine—the egg-shaped pod, barely identifiable in the dark. I took two cautious steps between the pod and the cube, trying to look everywhere at once.
Someone was standing directly in front of me.
My breath hitched, hands froze, before I recognized the half-constructed Capgras hanging from a metal hook.
The little girl trembled at my side, clutching my shoulder.
I patted her on the back. “It’s okay. I don’t think it can hurt us.”
“How do you know?”
“It doesn’t have legs.” I pulled her past the table, past the glowing cube. We gave the Capgras a wide berth, legs or no, and then I opened the door and we stumbled into the hallway. Moonlight shone through a window here. I bellied up to the sill and peered out at the top of a small tree. Beneath it, an empty parking lot glowed beneath incandescent lamps. I unlatched the window and pushed—it slid open with a horrible shriek. I spun around, heart hammering, but nothing moved in the dark hallway.
I turned back toward the window and punched the screen until it buckled and fell into the tree top. “Can you climb the branches down to the lot?”
“I’ll fall.” She placed her hands on the sill and peered out. “We’re too high.”
A door banged open behind me, cracking like a whip in the narrow hallway. I spun around, fists raised. McSorley sauntered toward us, his black coat a shadow trailing on the tile. “What do we have here?”
“What you’re doing to these children is wrong.” I backed up until the sill pressed the small of my back. “Let us go.”
He clutched my shou
lders and raised me in the air as if I were weightless. His face buzzed and rippled, an infinite array of demons. “I guess I’ll have to keep the doors locked from now on.”
The little girl yanked on my leg. “Save us, Joshua! Use your magic.”
But I didn’t have magic. As McSorley held me suspended above the floor, I kicked his chest and swung my small fists into his head. It didn't matter. He hurled me down the hallway. I slid over the tile and rolled to a stop in front of the pod room.
“Help!” The little girl screamed.
But it was too late—the portal was opening, dragging me into the vortex of colors. The last thing I saw before it swallowed me was the panic in her eyes, her lips mouthing help me as McSorley hauled her up and stuffed her under his arm.
#
I emerged into a bedroom. Sammy, our fat calico cat who had died more than three years ago, lay curled on the comforter at my feet. She felt me stir and nuzzled my face, her warmth radiating into my cheeks. I remembered the day I had found her, lifeless and stiff, behind the couch. Touching her then had been hideous. But now she was warm and alive, a purr thrumming in her chest. I scratched behind her ears, then gently pushed her aside and swung my legs onto the floor.
A picture of my wife sat on the bedside table. This was the bedroom I had shared with her before prison. I heard pots and pans clanking downstairs in the kitchen and knew she was down there making breakfast.
I found her at the stove, scraping eggs from a skillet onto a plate. She turned and smiled. “There are more eggs in the fridge if you want. I have to go.”
“Where are you going?” I felt lost.
“I’m flying out to my sister’s.” She forked egg into her mouth. “Remember?”
I pulled her close and held her for a long time, feeling the gentle rhythm of her breathing, smelling the clean scent of her shampoo. I looked into her eyes.
“Are you okay?” She turned away, stabbing egg with her fork.
“I… I don’t know.”
She looked concerned. “Need me to stay?”
I remembered the gun upstairs in the nightstand and suddenly knew how this day was meant to unfold. She would leave for the airport, and I would drive to Walton University to shoot McSorley. The trajectory of the bullet would be altered by an impossible ricochet, killing an innocent woman named Helena Isaacson.
She touched my cheek. “Hon?”
What if I could stay in this timeline forever? I wanted to ask her to stay, spend the day walking with her in autumn sunlight.
She pulled a chair over from the table and slid it in front of me. “Sit down. You look pale.”
I sat, resting my head against her hip. “You should go.”
“Are you sure?” She ran her hand through my hair.
“I am.” I wasn’t.
She put her plate and fork into the sink and double-checked the stove to make sure the electric burner had been turned off. “If I’m going to make this plane, I have to go.”
I might yet change the past—assuming it was possible—but my wife’s trip had not been the problem. Who knew what unforeseen consequences might result if she stayed? “I’m feeling under the weather. No big deal.”
She grabbed the suitcase by the door and placed her hand on my cheek. “I love you.”
I stood, holding her hand against my face. How strange it was to look into her eyes, knowing how her life—and mine—hung over a precipice, about to plunge into darkness. Here stood a woman whose husband had never been accused of murder, who had never received strange letters about futuristic technology, who had never been abducted and dragged to an old death row building in a maximum security prison. Here stood a woman with normal stressors—the job, the commute, the bills. Here stood a woman who would stay if I asked her to.
“I love you too.” I kissed her on the forehead.
She stepped into the garage and closed the door behind her, leaving me alone to architect a future which had previously been my past.
#
I ran through the options as I drove. I considered not going to the university at all. I didn't know what laws governed the paradoxes of time travel, but I knew I controlled my actions. And yet, try as I might to envision some alternate course of action, I kept steering the car toward Walt U.
I glanced occasionally at the gun on the passenger seat, deadly as a viper. Why had I brought it? I knew what damage it had caused. A sense of dreadful inevitability settled over me, but as I pulled the car into the campus lot and parked beneath the gnarled branches of a barren oak, I realized I might yet change my fate. I would shoot McSorley in the abdomen, sparing the innocent girl and saving the world from the horrible fate of his experiments.
Redman Hall sat at the top of the hill, a squat brick building with mirrored windows reflecting the sky. I tucked the gun into my waistband and trekked up the aggregate pathway, beneath the boughs of massive spruce trees.
The sky had darkened, and rain peppered my scalp. When I saw the pretzel cart, that sense of inevitability returned. I put my hand on the gun, concealed but ready. My heart hammered, surprising me—I had been living in a synthetic body for too long. I closed my eyes, concentrating on the way the wind felt on my arms, the way my fingers felt when I flexed them. But the real difference was in the way my mind operated. I felt human. It was true then—the Capgras had been affecting my thought processes, making me somehow less than human.
I glanced around the courtyard—no sign of McSorley. But I saw the woman whose life I had ended, standing between stone planters, shaded by an elm. She wore the pink dress I had seen in the crime photos. She was talking to a young man, smiling, a flush in her cheeks. She playfully touched his arm. I wondered if they had been lovers, and if so, why he hadn't testified at my trial.
I situated the gun more securely in my waistband, my resolved breaking. What if something went wrong and I killed her all over again? I couldn’t risk it. I would sit on one of the benches and wait. Surely there would be another chance to snag McSorley after she left.
But before I could find a suitable place to sit, I felt myself sliding down a tunnel of lights in unimaginable colors, and then I was someplace else.
#
The first thing I saw was a black snake with two heads. A drawing. No, a tattoo. I was staring at the tattoo on Gar’s face. Gar knelt between my feet, pinning my ankles against the concrete floor. His mouth moved, but I couldn’t hear anything except a high pitched hum. Behind him rose the barred wall of the holding cell.
Gar’s voice faded in: “Hold still, man. Hold still. This will be over soon.”
Another voice rose from inside the cell. “What’s wrong with him, Holmes?”
Gar turned toward the voice. “Seizure.”
I reached up and grabbed my wife’s collar, pulling her so close I could smell her makeup. “I have to go back. I have to make sure she doesn’t get shot.”
Crystal blinked down at me. “What are you talking about?”
I wanted to tell her that I had just come from a critical moment in my past, from a chance to change everything.. I wanted to stand up and rush Slaven, smash his head into the bars.
But my tongue had rolled to the back of my throat. Before I could respond, I fell, twisting through space and colors and time.
#
I was too late.
McSorley lay on the sidewalk, books scattered, eyeglasses broken. The shimmering metal plates of his Capgras head glinted from a bloodless wound on his forehead. Behind me, someone screamed.
I turned around.
Helena lay beneath the elm, her fingers curled around her floral notebook, her blank eyes staring into the rain. Fate had determined the hour of her death long before today, and I had been helpless to stop it. I went to her anyway. Kneeling in the rain, I placed the gun—still warm—on the sidewalk and took her hand.
“I’m sorry.” I pressed my fingers against her jugular, hoping for a pulse. I felt only the stillness of her cool skin. I grabbed the gun and bolted
to my feet.
McSorley was gone. He would be hidden now, tucked beneath a desk or in a supply closet. I heard yelling and knew I had missed my chance. I ran down the grassy hill, littered with yellow needles, and into the parking lot. Students walked between the cars, chatting amongst themselves, except for one teenager on a cell phone who stared at me with wide eyes and backpedaled toward the trees.
Why was I still holding the gun? I tucked it into my waistband.
And where were my keys? There, in my hip pocket. I climbed into my car, started the engine, and slammed the car into reverse. In the rearview mirror I could see people cresting the hill. The car squealed backward in a tight arc. I shifted into drive and pulled forward, reminding myself not to speed, not to attract attention.
I had tried to save her. I had tried to make things right. Somehow, impossibly, I had failed. How? What had happened?
Instinct commandeered my arms and legs as I pulled onto the highway, my heart thudding in my chest. My eyes darted between the rearview mirror and the speedometer. My only goal was to make it home.
#
Looking at the gun made me sick, so I stashed it in my wife’s nightstand. I trudged downstairs and sat at the dining table, watching the yard. Three potted Japanese maple saplings sat on the patio. Their delicate branches were lovely, loaded with yellow and red like living confetti. I had intended to plant them along the fence line, but knew I never would. The police would arrive once ballistics reported, and I would spend the rest of the autumn working with my wife to establish a criminal defense while the trees withered in the cold.
Perhaps one day, if I had the chance, I would plant one tree for each child who had died in McSorley’s experiments. I pictured the little boys and girls lying on hospital beds, breathing quietly in the dark. I had been subject 49. The little girl had been subject 58. If I had been the only survivor, at least 57 had died, and there might have been more.
How much suffering could the Ouroboros tolerate? How meaningless did they consider our lives? According to Navarez, wearing a Capgras had somehow purged McSorley's soul, but it seemed to me none of the monsters in the hive had a soul. Whatever affliction they feared from McSorley had already claimed them. They were mad, their entire lot.