What Tomorrow May Bring

by Tony Bertauski

  “All right, well, let’s see.” Mr. Jackson executed a few commands, the screen went blank. More data came up. He leaned closer and squinted. “That’s strange. It’s been activated. How did you…”

  “What’s in there? Tell me what you see.”

  Mr. Jackson wasn’t aware that the Director couldn’t decipher the data.

  He used his good hand to peck out a few more commands to interpret what he was seeing. It didn’t seem possible, but there was an identity inside the Looping Program that was often used to mimic the illusion of Foreverland, but they didn’t use it that often. An identity could be damaged if it spent too much time solely in the artificial circuits of the network. That was why the Director had become the interface between the boys and the network, serving as an organic “computer” that became Foreverland.

  But now there was someone in there. Someone got left behind. Everyone should be out of the Haystack.

  Mr. Jackson leaned closer. He could see just fine, the monitor was six feet wide. He leaned closer because he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Couldn’t believe who it was that was inside the Looping Program.

  “Tell me what you see,” the Director said. “Tell me.”

  Mr. Jackson turned slowly. His lips were moving, finally uttered, “Password, Director. Give me the password.”

  The Director stared back.

  Mr. Jackson waited.

  And waited.

  He knew what he had seen inside the Looping Program. He saw the identity that was trapped inside it.

  And then he saw the Director put his hand inside his pocket.

  Mr. Jackson didn’t flinch. Didn’t try to escape. He just waited for the darkness of unconsciousness to arrive.

  It was painless, when it did.

  Mr. Jackson crumpled in the chair, falling to the floor in a heap.

  He didn’t see the Director watching him. Didn’t see the Director look at the meaningless data on the monitor. The Director couldn’t interpret it, but Mr. Jackson’s expression told him everything he needed to know. Asking him for the crossover password to confirm who the identity was inside the Director’s body.

  Mr. Jackson also didn’t see the Director go to the window and begin to weep.

  69

  “Something’s not right,” Zin said. “That guy has no mercy and he tells us to just hang out after we just brought the whole island down? No sense, Danny Boy. It makes no sense.”

  They leaned against the wall like they were told. They looked through the window at the Investors, still motionless. Some of them were breathing. Occasionally, they’d twitch like the tracker was still hitting them with a low dose of voltage to keep them out. Danny didn’t feel so sad about Mr. Jones, not after putting it all together. Maybe he did care about Danny, maybe he did want the best for him while he was here. It didn’t matter. In the end, the old bastard brought him here to steal his body.

  And that could not be forgotten.

  Zin was hunched over Sid, looking closely at his open eyes. Danny walked around the bed toward the back wall.

  “Where you going?” he asked.

  “I’m not waiting around to get zapped.” Danny put his hand on the doorknob.

  “Hell, if you’re going to do that, let’s just get out of here.”

  “And go where? We can’t outrun this.” Danny smacked the back of his neck. “Let’s see what else these old bastards are up to.”

  Zin thought for a second. He was right behind Danny.

  The room was fairly dark, lit only by a few backlights beaming up the wall near some of the desks and the faint glow of tiny lights flashing on computers and various machines.

  The room was dominated by a large stainless steel table in the center with a big lamp hanging from the ceiling. A number of shelves and steel carts held more computers or medical equipment.

  “Think they did surgery in here?” Zin asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  It didn’t look like surgery. There was just the one table and too many computers. If anything, it was an autopsy room.

  There were nine doors on the wall to the right arranged in three stacks of three. Like a tic-tac-toe board. The doors were only three feet by three feet. Danny had seen doors like that on TV. They were used to store bodies. Pull the handle and the bed would slide out just like a filing cabinet with a plastic bag and a body inside.

  He touched the handle on the one in the center. Did they deep freeze a new candidate until they were ready to suck out his memory and scramble his mind with random ones? It would be so claustrophobic inside. And what if they woke up?

  He yanked the handle. An empty slab rolled out with a cloud of frosty air. It was a freezer. They were storing bodies in sub-zero temperatures. Nobody would survive that. Did they just hold the old men in these things after they crossed over into the candidate’s body?

  He had his hand on another handle—

  “Danny Boy.”

  Danny jumped. Zin scared the hell out of him.

  “Come here.” He had his hands around a small window on the other wall. “You need to see this.”

  Zin stepped aside to let Danny have a look. The window was on a heavy-duty door. There was a slab inside but it wasn’t like the freezers on the opposite wall.

  “Watch this.” Zin punched a button next to the door.

  The interior lit up with blue flames. The room flickered with an eerie glow.

  “A crematorium,” Danny said. “They burn bodies in there.”

  “You thinking what I am?”

  Danny nodded.

  Once the Investor crossed over, their body was empty. They had no use for it. So they cremated it. That’s why the Chimney smoked whenever someone graduated. It was the Investor’s body they were destroying.

  “Boys.”

  They jumped back. The crematorium’s blue light illuminated the Director standing in the doorway. His eyes flickered with strangeness. Danny and Zin backed up.

  “I need to show you something.” He turned around and left.

  Danny and Zin waited for him to come back. After a minute or two, they found him across the hall in the network room. He offered the chair in front of a large monitor to Danny. They moved slowly, suspiciously. The Director stood several feet away from them, but distance didn’t matter. Not with the controller in his pocket.

  Danny sat down. The Director told him to tell them what he saw on the monitor.

  It took Danny a few minutes to understand what he was seeing. He was able to interpret the information and it became apparent who was standing next to him. The Director was inside the Looping Program, even though his body was standing next to him—

  “It’s me, Danny Boy.” The Director held out his arms, displaying his new body. Tears brimmed on his eyes. “I made it out.”

  Zin was a little shocked to watch Danny hug the Director.

  70

  Harold Ballard’s mother was a beautiful woman. She was tall and slender and – given the right breaks in life – could have had a career as a model. Instead, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital. She received electric shock therapy on three separate occasions. Each time she returned home, things were better before they got worse.

  Harold’s father was a genius. He was an unassuming fellow with glasses that sat crooked on his nose. He was nothing close to model-quality. Seeing him with his wife at a party, one would guess he had tons of money.

  He did.

  He was recruited by every computer manufacturer’s research and development department. He was, arguably, the most sought after man in the computer industry; that is, until he was fired for unethical practices. His crimes were never made public, but the word behind the scenes had tainted his reputation enough to make him untouchable.

  No matter. He didn’t need to make money, not with the number of patents that belonged to him. His basement had become his laboratory.

  Harold was their only son. He was not pretty, not ugly. Not brilliant, not stupid. What he
lacked in looks and raw intelligence, he made up for in cunning.

  He was never allowed in the basement. Instead, he spent his nights looking at the stars through his telescope. But during the day, he shot squirrels with a pellet gun. He’d put birdseed on a plate in the middle of the yard and hide in the bushes. He’d lie there sometimes for an hour, pretending the enemy was coming over the fence, and then he’d plug the first squirrel that dared to grab a sunflower seed right through the eyes. Sometimes he’d nail them to a tree, put them in poses of the crucifix. The yard stunk like death, but his parents never went back there.

  He was a loner at school. He was the weird kid with weird parents. His mom was crazy and his dad a nerd. The jocks put rotten food in his locker and the burnouts tripped him in the hallway. At the bus stop, Blake Masterson got on his hands and knees behind Harold and John Lively pushed him over. They laughed, all of them. Even the girls.

  That night, Harold climbed on the roof with his pellet gun and a high-powered scope. He was up there until his fingertips were numb from the cold. When John Lively – who lived two doors down – walked outside, Harold put a pellet in his left eye. It was an amazing shot.

  The doctors saved his eye. No one ever found out who did it. But John knew. Off the record, everyone knew.

  They caught him getting off the bus.

  Even though Harold wasn’t physically fit, he got away by swinging his book bag and losing his jacket when they grabbed it. He bound up the steps of his house and through the safety of the back door. But John and Blake didn’t stop there. They went inside after him. Harold threw the kitchen chair at them and ran through the basement door.

  He stumbled down the steps, falling all the way to the bottom. There was a sharp pain in his wrist. He rolled into the corner and watched John and Blake stalk him. But, halfway down the steps, they stopped.

  Across the room, there were two bodies lying side by side. One was his mother. The other, his father.

  Needles sticking out of their foreheads.

  Harold’s father was arrested after John and Blake told their parents what they saw and the FBI showed up with search warrants three days later. The computers were confiscated. The needles, too. Harold went to live with his grandparents. He rarely saw his parents after that.

  But he picked up where his father left off.

  Computer-Assisted Alternate Reality (CAAR) had been banned from all developed nations as cruel and destructive to all forms of life. No animal would be subjected to the debilitating effects that plagued the users of such technology, invented by his father.

  But a dictator will look the other way when the bribe is big enough.

  Harold used his trust fund to begin CAAR research. He set up labs in Mexico, Ethiopia, and Somalia. He went through thousands of unwilling subjects. None of them were healed in any way. They all died. All destroyed. Sometimes, tragically. Sometimes, horrifically.

  The body continued to live, even though the person – the identity – was destroyed.

  While some would view his research as a failure, as a crime against God, life and humanity, Harold saw it as an opportunity. The world was run by a small percentage of very wealthy people. The only thing these powerful men and women could not purchase was more life. Death was non-negotiable.

  Not any more.

  Harold found the island. He found the money.

  And he continued destroying.

  Eventually, he used his own technology to rewrite his life, erasing all his memories and the atrocities he’d committed. He came to know himself as a good-natured man that served the best interests of humanity. A man of God.

  He even shed his name.

  And became known as the Director.

  The Director knocked the book from the pedestal.

  His rage burst out like a telekinetic tidal wave, wrenching all the books from the walls and ripping out their pages and setting them on fire. The room shook and cracks opened on the ceiling, raining bits of concrete on the marble floor. He searched for an escape, a way to dissolve back into data and escape the library, to slip back into the network and find a way back into the world. He might even go back to his body and DESTROY THE BITCH THAT DID THIS TO HIM!

  But then he found himself standing in the library, again, the shelves reassembled, the cracks repaired, the books back in order. And a pedestal in the center with Harold Ballard’s book opening to play out his history.

  He experienced it again.

  And again.

  And again.

  71

  Lucinda laid the trap.

  The Director was right, she was getting smarter. His only mistake, he had no clue just how much she knew. In the end, she knew everything.

  When Danny was caught in the Looping Program, she knew he was not in the real world. But it gave her access to all of the Chimney’s data. Danny was only able to see a few of the records – his and Reed’s – before he returned to the Nowhere. But Lucinda absorbed it. She knew the real purpose of the island, she knew all the Investors, and she knew the Director’s true past.

  She knew everything.

  She also knew that the Director would eventually get Reed to go inside the needle. And when he did, she would cease to exist. She would return to being a memory. She was not sad about that. After all, it was her true identity. In fact, she yearned for it. Being away from Reed had been… difficult.

  But what she couldn’t accept was the future of Foreverland and all the boys it would continue to destroy to satisfy the gluttony of men.

  While the Director ruled Foreverland – he was Foreverland – Lucinda ruled the Nowhere. She knew all the random thoughts, all the lost boys. She knew, also, the Director’s thoughts and his desire to be free. She knew the Looping Program was a dead-end, a virtual cul-de-sac with only one way in, one way out.

  She laid the trap.

  He attempted to leave the island through the only data conduit to the outside world and, like Danny, mistook the path into the Looping Program as the way out. Before he recognized his mistake, the door closed behind him, trapping him inside. Lucinda had programmed the loop with the data of all the island’s records, most importantly that of Harold Ballard. He would see his true identity, his authentic past. He would exist in the loop until he knew what he had done. As long as there was power on the island, the Director would live in the hell he created.

  Lucinda also knew that Reed’s body was beyond repair, that he would likely be physically dead. With the Director’s identity in the Looping Program, his body would be abandoned and vacant. When they embraced, he absorbed her. No longer conscious, she was part of him. Her thoughts and memories of her time in the Nowhere became part of Reed.

  He knew everything, too.

  Including her best laid plans.

  When the Director exited Foreverland, Reed couldn’t go back to his dead body. But he made his exit, as well. And entered the Director’s body at the top of the Chimney.

  My body, now.

  72

  Danny was on one end of the bag. Zin on the other.

  They let it rest on the floor of the elevator until they reached ground level. Zin was blowing on his hands to warm them up. Ice crystals had formed on the bag.

  They managed to get it outside without dropping it. They slid it onto the bed of a cart. They both began blowing on their hands. Zin took the wheel. They drove away from the Chimney.

  The Yard was bustling.

  It was another day in paradise and all the boys were outside, playing cards, throwing discs and everything else. Not an Investor in sight.

  Danny checked the tablet. A few strokes of the finger told him the old men were all exactly where they were supposed to be. The Mansion.

  About half of them survived the prolonged blackout. Mr. Jones was not one of them. Most of their bodies were sick with disease or just broken down with age. They didn’t tolerate the voltage. They relocated the survivors to the Mansion and left them a note that the island was under new management and they
would be staying inside the Mansion until further notice. Then they locked the doors from the outside and had not heard from them since. Danny occasionally checked the location of their trackers, just to be sure.

  The only indication of the old men that was outside the Mansion was concentrated inside the Chimney. The Investors that died were put inside the freezers, some stacked two high. They could have cremated the bodies but it made sense to preserve as much evidence as possible. Someone would have to sort through everything.

  They drove the cart through the Yard. No one paid much attention to the body bag. The boys were told that the Haystack was closed until further notice. Until then, it was unlimited game room and no suffering.

  No one argued.

  They drove over the sand dune.

  A man was in a hole about waist deep, shoveling a pile of sand next to him. He had a round belly and shoulders red from the sun. His face was clean shaven.

  “Slow down there, old timer.” Zin pulled up behind the man. “You’re not a teenager anymore, you know that.”

  Reed tossed a shovel full of wet sand off to the side and leaned on the handle. He was breathing hard. His cheeks red with exhaustion.

  “Got to get this fat ass in shape,” he said.

  “You can’t do it in one week, son.”

  Reed rubbed his smooth chin. The beard was the first thing to go. It was smelly and itchy. How the hell the Director walked around with those long, curly hairs around his mouth Reed couldn’t understand.

  Danny and Zin pulled the body bag off the cart and dropped it next to the hole. Reed climbed out and pulled the zipper down. His former body was inside. Frost had accumulated on the eyelashes. The lips purple. He pulled the zipper to the bottom. The chest was bruised and bony.

  “You sure you want to bury yourself on the island?” Danny asked. “Not a lot of good times here.”

  “That’s not me,” Reed said.

  It made sense to put it on the beach. That’s where he spent most of his time while he was on the island. The body should remain part of it.