FutureImperfect

by Stefan Petrucha

  Gronson rapped his fingers on his desk. “I’m not paying you to tell me what my son is. I’m paying you to make him the best. Are you saying you can’t do it?”

  Chabbers gave him that long-toothed smile. “Of course I can, but to meet his resistance, I need to be able to show the boy that I am the greater force. That I am the master. This requires, on occasion, corporal punishment, which in this state is technically illegal. But free my hands and I can assure you your child will become quite exceptional….”

  Gronson exhaled through his nostrils like a bull and rapped his fingers on the desk again, as if they were his hooves.

  “Just do it.”

  “As you like, sir. And trust me, you’re doing the right thing. When I’m done with him, he will not simply believe he cannot fail—he will be convinced he’s not allowed to.”

  “You think you can touch me? You think you can see my life? The joke’s on you, Keller. The joke is you, Keller. None of that matters. None of that is me!” Jeremy said.

  Dizzied by the visions, Harry didn’t even block as Jeremy punched him, he just fell. A flurry of hard kicks followed. The pain was so overwhelming, it made Harry want to give up. The only thing that kept him going was something the Fool had said: Asking questions in a way that got him beat up was part of Harry’s character. This just seemed like more of the same.

  The phantasms were fading, but Harry clearly witnessed Jeremy’s trip to France, saw him find the herbs, translate the strange instructions, and enter A-Time. There, he appeared as an indistinguishable blur, just as Harry had seen him when he called him the Daemon. But then, to Harry’s shock, the timeless football jock encountered not only Quirks and Timeflys, but a bunch of other blurs.

  Other blurs. Other A-Time travelers.

  He remembered what Jeremy had said about Masters, and realized he wasn’t talking about his sadistic tutor. Through the pain, Harry spoke out in surprise.

  “There’s…lots of us? A group? Obscure Masters?”

  Jeremy didn’t answer, he just sprang at him, full body, but he was tired, and Harry managed to roll out of the way and stumble to his feet.

  Having his past sucked from him drained him as much as it did me. Maybe if I let him kill me, he’ll get really tired.

  Harry wanted more answers. Realizing Jeremy wasn’t going to offer any, he parsed the shimmering, fading pictures that remained in his head, fast and furious. The Obscure Masters were an elite club, so naturally Jeremy felt he had to join. He was given a task to prove his worth. It centered on the quatrain by Nostradamus that he’d found in France:

  In the year 1999, in the seventh month, from the sky will come the great King of Terror, bringing back to life the great King of the Mongols. Before and after, Mars to reign by good fortune.

  From what Harry could gather, the quatrain was supposed to be about World War III. In the early nineties, a US general pushed a plan to capture the oil fields of Saudi Arabia, to secure the energy supply. The resulting rebellion in the Middle East would have led to Iran and Iraq not just developing nuclear bombs, but using them, leading to a war in 1999 that left many, many dead. Mars being the god of war.

  It was the stuff of a bad science-fiction movie, but Jeremy believed.

  There was a grunt behind him. Jeremy charged again, but Harry ducked him easily, and the tired alpha male found himself eating trail. The images were almost gone, but Harry was still able to make sense out of them.

  Something unexpected happened next, something good. Because of a breakthrough in fuel cell technology that opened the possibility for a new type of engine, the administration saw another way out. The invasion plan was scuttled. The future changed. WW III did not occur and Nostradamus, despite being dead for hundreds of years, was embarrassed. It became Jeremy’s initiation task, then, to make sure the prophecy occurred by somehow changing the past. Of course, they didn’t tell him how to do that.

  Even Harry could see the whole idea was totally, absolutely, completely, insane, a sick joke at best, but Jeremy threw himself at it with byzantine gusto, warping events in the intricate, callous ways only a genetically bred psychotic could.

  The images shrank into wisps. Harry struggled to snatch at them, straining to see Todd Penderwhistle sitting in the school auditorium. He raised his gun to fire at Jeremy, but here things happened the way Jeremy wanted. Todd fired. Jeremy ducked. Before he could drop the gun or run, Todd was rushed by Jeremy’s football pals. Panicked, he turned the weapon on them, firing, at one, two, three, marveling at how the muscular teens were dropped by the small pieces of lead. There were seven dead before Todd remembered they were people, then turned the gun on himself and made it an even eight.

  So Harry hadn’t saved Jeremy from Todd, he’d saved a bunch of other people, mostly Jeremy’s teammates. Next, Jeremy tried turning Melody into a random shooter. Finally, he tried frying the senior class in the warehouse fire.

  But somewhere along the way, from Quirk to Glitch to fire, Jeremy’s methods had drastically improved. When Harry tried to stop the fire before it happened, the future changed back on its own, as if it was inevitable. The last vision evaporated before Harry could see why.

  The images gone, he turned back to the red-faced, exhausted Jeremy.

  “A keystone? What the hell is that, Jeremy? Tell me!”

  Jeremy leveled his eyes at him, his chest heaving. “If I do, if I tell you, will you promise to just die right after that?”

  “Uh…no?”

  “Then forget it!” Jeremy growled, pulled back his strong arms, spread his fingers, and came forward. Anyone else might have tried to block the coming blows, but not Harry, not this time. Wanting the whole story, he came forward, too. Just before Jeremy reached him, Harry dug his fingers into the rugged flesh of Jeremy’s face. Though Harry’s fingers weren’t nearly as long or strong, Jeremy shrieked and his eyes went wide.

  Harry held tightly as the intense energy passed between them. In seconds, Jeremy maneuvered his arms between Harry’s and slammed him away, but not before Harry had found what he wanted.

  A keystone event.

  It was kind of like the butterfly effect, where the flapping wings of a butterfly can set in motion a chain of events that eventually cause a hurricane thousands of miles away. Sensitive dependence on initial conditions. A butterfly flaps its wings, changing the wind just slightly, so the next wind changes a little more, the next even more, and so on, until you have something being tracked by radar and named after a woman.

  In the time trails, the keystone could be anything—say, someone opening a page in a book—but at the warehouse, it had worked kinda like this:

  a. While two seniors painted a giant spider for the party, the paint spilled.

  b. One went to get more paint and wound up flirting with a cashier.

  c. His miffed pal left for the party without him.

  d. At the warehouse, said pal didn’t tie the rope that held the spider as tightly as his friend would have.

  e. During the party, the rope came lose and the arachnid swung into a light pole.

  f. The light pole fell, sending its sizzling wires flailing every which way.

  g. One wire hit the spare gasoline can being kept for the generator.

  h. Boom!

  Now, if (a.) is the keystone, you can stop the paint can from spilling easily; but if you don’t, and it spills, nothing on heaven or earth can stop (h.). That was why Harry couldn’t keep any students from attending the warehouse party, no matter how hard he tried.

  The events leading to the explosion at RAW had another keystone, but what was it? What simple, stupid little thing did Harry have to stop, to save Siara and the school? Should be easy enough to figure out…

  Wham!

  Though his eyesight was blurred, Harry saw that Jeremy, apparently not as dazed as he looked, had hit him in the side of the head with a piece of the terrain, sending him sideways and to the ground. The clunky club was so big, it nearly took Jeremy off his feet as he swung. A
s for Harry, it not only hurt, it also sent all those images swirling like white spots in a shaken snow globe. His arm looked as if portions of it had been torn away.

  “Touchdown for Gronson!” Jeremy howled. Then he stood, one foot on either side of Harry. He swung the terrain over his head. “And now I’m going to smash the old pigskin down…on your skull.”

  “You stupid jock!” Harry shouted. “It’s not a game! It’s people! How can you do all this just to join some stupid club?”

  Jeremy’s lips curled in disdain. “Siara? Why should that artsy-fartsy bitch be special? Think I love her? I’ll tell you something you’ll never understand. It’ll be like speaking Latin to a dog. If I did love her, it’d only make me enjoy her death more.”

  “You’re right. I don’t understand. For the first time, I don’t even think I want to.”

  “Told you.” He tightened his grip again.

  Harry tried to think of something to say or do that might delay the next blow, but as he did, before the blizzard of images in his head rushed off into oblivion, a final picture formed that made Jeremy’s attitude toward most human life seem like a minor sin.

  “You killed your own parents?”

  “Yes. Yes, I did.”

  He said it as if he were reminding himself, then stopped cold. He panted. He wavered on his feet. He even lowered the club a bit. His mouth was still grinning—leering, really—but his eyes looked scared, as if they were horrified by what the rest of his body had done.

  “Only it wasn’t killing. The self is an illusion. So they were illusions, illusions that held me back, tied me to a false world with masks. This, this is the real game, Keller, what you call A-Time. I needed to see that completely, sever all my ties, clear my path to success. Any attachment to that world only held me back.”

  For a moment, Jeremy looked sad, as if part of him had really wanted to be held back, just once. He let the club fall to the ground, held its tip loosely in one hand.

  “Jeremy, did the Obscure Masters tell you all that?” Harry asked.

  “Not in so many words. Mostly I figured it out myself. Just like I figured out the keystone, like I figured out how to change the past, like I’m going to figure out how to destroy you.”

  Seeing the pain still swimming in Jeremy’s eyes, realizing he was vulnerable, Harry tried another question.

  “How can killing all those people change the past?”

  Jeremy pounded his fist into his open hand and answered through clenched teeth. “I just told you! They’re not people! They’re energy, bound up in disgusting, fake little selves. Crack them and you can absorb it, direct it, channel it. My sculpture directs it into the past.”

  “And what happens then?” Harry asked. “What happens if you get your war, you win your last trophy, and you join your Masters?”

  “Then? I’ll be finished, Keller. Finally finished,” Jeremy said wistfully. Harry caught a glimpse of the deep exhaustion in the alpha boy’s eyes. “I’ll be able to do anything, even bring them all back, just as toys, while I live forever in the only real there is. No pain, no gain, no death…”

  Realizing something, Jeremy snapped his fingers. “That’s it! That’s it! You’re here. You know the trails. You live forever, too. Heh. Wait a minute, wait a minute. Oh, this is going to be good. I can feel it.”

  Jeremy scratched his chin and looked off. “Crack them. Crack them open. I’ve been going about it all wrong.” He wagged his finger. “But now I think I’ve finally figured out exactly how to kill you.”

  Harry watched aghast as Jeremy turned away and walked off.

  “Jeremy? Wait. Where are you going, Jeremy?”

  But Jeremy ignored him, chuckling as he marched. “Nothing dies here, Keller. Except maybe you…”

  13.

  The auditorium lights were low, casting the student body in shades of brown and gray so that the people, the chairs, and the carpet all melted together, a little like the A-Time rush Harry had once given Siara. Standing there, watching dully, she remembered how she’d once wondered if it was just that rush of transcending time that attracted her to Harry.

  Now that he was gone, though, she knew for certain that A-Time was still out there somewhere, and it was Harry alone she missed.

  “Honey?” Siara’s father said, waving his hands in front of her eyes. “Earth to Siara? Come in, Siara?”

  She pointed to the earbuds and waved her fingers, indicating she was pretending not to hear him.

  “You sure you’re all right?” he father asked. “Anything you want to talk about?”

  The auditorium clock was right above his head, looking like a black-and-white bubble rising from his shiny bald spot. It said, in its limited language of tick-tocks, lines, and numbers, 7:38. Only about twenty minutes to go before they started the engine.

  Dad sighed, mouthed, “Whatever,” and trudged to his reserved seat in the front row. She watched as he gracefully adjusted his favorite tie, wanting to look his best for his wife’s big night. As she did, Siara felt like she was staring at an old picture of something she’d been part of once, back when she was a child.

  Emotions, angry at being forgotten, welled like a tsunami, ready to wash her away. Like every time before, though, just as the feelings were about to crest, to speak, they receded, sucked back into themselves, into nothing.

  She watched her father waiting patiently with his hands folded on his lap and couldn’t find the part of herself that cared about him. Her mother was on stage, sitting in a folding chair along with about six suits from her company. She looked nervous. Siara briefly felt bad for her, but it passed, and she started seeming further and further away.

  When the clock hit 7:39, she pressed play on the iPod and let Jeremy’s music fill her ears.

  Forget about it

  Forget it all

  Just find the wheels

  And do as you were told

  The music was a bit too much like techno-pop for her tastes, but it had a steady beat. She gave herself over to it, embracing the distraction with her disaffection. Free from all her feelings, free to obey, she headed for the silver food cart her mother wanted her to push around.

  “Hey, Siara,” a rough voice said. A guy with curly red hair gave her a goofy smile. She knew him from math or someplace and should have said hello, but she just walked right past him. He mumbled some lame joke about her outfit as she passed. Or was it a compliment?

  The cart was in the corner, past the auditorium doors. She pulled it free, ready to forget about it all and do as she was told. It jostled as she pushed it over the rubber strips the AV kids used to cover the wires. Juice sloshed in bottles. The banana that topped the fruit bowl shifted slightly, curving across an apple. For a moment, she thought it might fall, like a pen off a desk, or a body from a building, but it didn’t. It somehow held on.

  Keep it up, keep it rolling

  Do as you were told

  As she reached the middle rows she saw Jasmine, Dree, and Hutch. As she watched them gabbing, laughing, checking out the hot boys, she felt another pang, a longing to go to them. The tsunami of disenfranchised feeling welled again, but the volume on the song rose to meet it, all on its own, like a great sandbag wall of sound. And though she’d known Jasmine, Hutch, and Dree since grade school, she soon couldn’t find the part of herself that cared about them, either. It was like they were all just…bad ideas she’d had once, ideas she hadn’t even bothered to write down.

  Ignore everything else

  It’s not important anymore

  Just do as you were told

  Sure, it was overproduced. The synthetic drums and strange trilling noises were annoying, and the lyrics were stupid and monotonous, but the melody was really working for her. Funny how it wasn’t like poetry. Poetry connected her to the world. This just yanked all the wires out.

  She rolled the cart down the aisle. Hands reached and grabbed at the free juice and fruit. Something inside her told her she should be mortified, at least embarra
ssed to be standing here in a corporate costume handing out fruit instead of being zombie Emily Dickinson. That was some other Siara, another bad idea she’d forgotten.

  The house lights went even dimmer and the stage lit up like the sun. Showtime. With fewer students grabbing from the cart, she easily pushed it toward the front row, near where her father sat. The floor dipped and rolled down there, so she had to pull back now and then to keep it from rolling off out of control, like it was a horse or something.

  Someone in a suit was talking, but she couldn’t make out what he was saying. The music in her ears had gotten louder, its beat infecting her blood, staining it:

  Get up on the stage, Siara

  Take the banana with you

  Do as you were told

  And you can see Harry again

  Ha. Music had spoken to her before, but this was ridiculous. Okay, lousy song. If that’s the case, Siara figured, I’d better get on with it.

  Wouldn’t want to keep Harry waiting.

  “Jeremy? Yo, Jeremy? Yo! Where are you going? What are doing? What’s up, dude?” Harry asked, scrambling after him.

  Jeremy trudged off along the terrain, happy and full of purpose.

  “You’ll see, Keller. It’s a surprise.”

  Feeling deeply worried but having no idea why, Harry debated trying to tackle him, but before he could, the ground wobbled beneath his feet.

  And what the hell is this?

  It was like he was standing on a water bed. The trails were trembling en masse, the disturbances centered on Jeremy’s thing. If that wasn’t enough, the event horizon, the sizzling line that phased future into past, was nearing the tower. It wouldn’t be long before it hit—and what would happen then? WW III?

  All the while, the snowballing changes in the landscape seemed to matter little to the Initiate as he continued on his path, still smiling.

  Flustered, out of ideas, Harry ran and jumped Jeremy from behind. Normally, he wouldn’t have been heavy enough to take down the quarterback, but as Harry hit Jeremy and wrapped his arms around his neck, the terrain shifted again and they both tumbled to the ground. No soonder did he land then Jeremy, almost calmly, kicked Harry with both feet, sending him scuttling across the landscape. By the time Harry skidded to a halt, Jeremy was standing again.