by Nels Wadycki
Nevertheless, she hustled back down the stairs and into the clean, hot sun just starting its arc down toward the western skies. Being out of the tiny rooms representing a shell of a life, Ana felt less fearful and more confident. More like a Valkyrie should. She strode away from the house, down the block to her car, not caring who the remote security on the terminal might summon. She could take all comers and she would not back down.
Of course, now she would have to face Malcolm, and probably members of the Agency higher up to tell them what she had found. How could the Agency fight a battle—let alone a war—against an enemy who could learn what they would do and then go back in time to counter?
Ana shoved the thought aside, it and many others that tried to invade her mind, and pulled her hovercar up into traffic to head back to the Agency.
--
"How much do you know about the Continuum?" Ana asked as the door to Malcolm's office hissed shut.
"What do you mean, Ana? I know what you know."
Ana shook her head.
"I'm sorry, I can't honestly convince myself of that."
"Ana, what are you talking about?"
"I'm talking about the shit that's down a few floors in this building. I'm talking about the agents with access to that information who know the Continuum has been around for over a decade!"
"Ana." His voice rose a few notes, but Ana cut him off.
"If you need a scrambler or a darkroom, let's do it. I need to know what else there is to know, because I've done some digging and I think I have something that no one else does."
Malcolm raised his eyebrows. "Sounds like a lot to keep track of."
"You're goddamn right it is. But I'm not the only one tracking it. I know there is more that I haven't been told."
His voice sank back to its normal pitch. "Ana, there are always things we don't know. Things we can't know."
"Don't patronize me with bogus fatherly advice nonsense." Ana's throat tightened around her vocal cords and she could feel warm saline trying to find its way around her eyes. "I'm supposed to trust you, Malcolm. And there are not a lot of people I can say that about."
Her words hurt Malcolm as much as they did her. And he knew it. His rock-hard eyes crumbled. Not all at once, but as the silence drew out between them, little pieces of rubble fell away, skittering into a ravine.
"Meet me in Useless in five." He used as little breath as possible in issuing the command.
The darkrooms on the floor that ran the Valkyrie Project derived their names from adjectives that described pretty much the opposite of sort of information that could be shared within them: Useless, Nameless, Quietude, Discontinuation—Ana nicknamed the latter 'Discon' because she felt it was inefficient to refer to it by its whole five-syllable name. And while the so-called White Ops unit never used them for the types of interrogation that one might reasonably assume occurred within the confines of the four windowless walls devoid of any monitoring or recording equipment, the need for private or classified or off-the-record conversations still existed.
Her tension stretched the five-minute wait at her desk like a rubber band, and when Aerin interrupted Ana almost snapped.
"Hey," he said, "you wanted to talk to me about something? Your message was pretty cryptic."
"Yeah, I, well, I'm not sure if… ah, well… I need to know if you know any good brain doctors." Then she added, "Under-the-radar brain doctors." She tried not to wink.
"Are you okay?"
"Me? Yeah, I'm fine. It's for a friend."
"Ana, really, if you think you need—"
"No, seriously, Aerin. It's for a friend."
"What kind of brain stuff are we talking about?"
"I'm not quite sure, but some sort of alteration of brain patterns and shunting of brain activity that results in insomnia and delusions."
Aerin was clearly trying not to look taken aback. He did a decent job for someone with his transparent, heart-on-sleeve personality.
Then he said in an overly conspiratorial tone, "Sure, I'll look into something like what you have suggested. That's a good lead."
If Ana hadn't known about his tendency to lapse into nonsense to cover his nervousness she might have asked him what the hell he meant. Instead she just nodded and he walked away. Then she resumed her countdown of the time until she could follow up on what was really important with Malcolm.
--
Ana entered the Darkroom, which despite the name was actually well lit, and waited for the door to shut before taking the seat opposite Malcolm. He sighed, grim, reluctant.
"It's not all untruths," he began, and Ana was surprised that he did not begin by asking what she knew. "They did come out of nowhere. No one—that we know of at least—has been able to determine how or where they formed."
Ana waited for the "but" that would contradict what the Valkyries had been told. There was always a "but."
"But their instantaneous appearance did not happen as recently as you've been told."
Ana nodded and waited, her arms crossed, the look of reproach carefully programmed onto her face.
"We first became aware of their presence fourteen years ago during the war. They had some impressive technology and made a few significant forays into the realm of international espionage. But their efforts fell off after that and while the name still popped up every once in a while, it was only in connection with minor events. They barely registered on the Agency's radar. Now, it seems that we should have paid closer attention. As you've seen, their tech and weapons development has outpaced ours and there are now groups in the Agency who are going over the records to see if they can figure out what happened."
Malcolm was finished. Ana tried to stifle the raise of her eyebrows but did not succeed. That's it? her expression said. She knew he could read her well enough to know she was underwhelmed. She waited another few moments, letting the silence settle on them like a fog.
"That's it?" Ana verbalized the question after he didn't respond, so there was no possibility of miscommunication. "That's so top secret we had to come in here?"
"I've tried to get the information declassified. I would like for this department to be able to work on the data-mining. But the people who control the access haven't been willing to do that."
"But you're telling me now."
"I'm not stupid, Ana. I can tell when you're bluffing and when you have a legitimate concern. We're in this room so there's plausible deniability about how you learned what you learned."
"Do you want to know what I actually did to learn what I learned?" Ana felt her mind about to explode through her tongue and was powerless to stop it. Not that she would have held back if she could. "I broke into a flip-circuit lab and I saw what you've just described: information on the Continuum going back over a decade. Your concern was ill-founded because I already knew all that. But you know what else I did? I found the address of a Continuum agent in there. And you know what else? I ran into him when I went there. It was the same guy Marisol and I fought with when we escorted Dr. Portofil. You know what? He didn't recognize me. That was odd considering I shot at him in broad daylight from less than ten meters away. So you know what? I broke into his apartment and I got into his terminal."
Malcolm straightened a bit at those last lines, and Ana knew she had gone farther than he'd expected. She hoped for a second that Malcolm had readied himself for the time bomb that was about to detonate. Then she took the thought back and told herself she was glad. She was extraordinary, not just for a Valkyrie, but for any member of the Agency, and she wanted it written all over his goddamn face.
"In his terminal I found documents from the future. It explains a lot about the Portofil mission as well as the dead Continuum agent I brought back from the Huang mission. Do you understand what I'm saying? The Continuum can travel through time, Malcolm. The Continuum can fucking travel through time. I haven't even begun to consider the ramifications, but it changes the whole fucking game."
Malcolm looked a b
it baffled. Ana realized she hadn't known what reaction to expect. Shock? Outrage? Incredulous disbelief?
Instead, he just sighed.
"How do you know there was information from the future?" he asked, his voice holding just a bit of anger.
"Timestamps on the files—"
"Could be forged."
"But also news articles for events dated in the future."
"Which also could be fabricated."
"But they weren't. Why would he do that? Why would he have hundreds of fake news articles on his secure terminal? Just in the off chance that someone did break in and go through his highly encrypted data? I don't buy it. I shot him in the face—"
"I know, Ana, I read the report."
"So you know it makes sense. The scar was gone, Malcolm. He's been going back and forth through time doing the Continuum's dirty work. He's probably off killing someone right now!"
"Do you have any other proof?"
"Other proof? I killed a man who was born three days later. Then I fought a man, and shot him in the face, saw his injury, and when I saw him today, he didn't have a scar and he didn't recognize me. He's got tons of information about the future on his terminal and you're asking me for more proof?"
"If I ask you for more proof, you'll find it?"
"Is this a mission?"
"No, it's a question. If I asked you to find more proof, do you think you could find it?"
It almost sounded like he would believe her if she did.
"I'll find it. And if I don't, I won't stop until I do."
"I know you won't."
There was a subtle conviction behind the words that made Ana ready to bolt from the room on her new assignment, but Malcolm sighed again, a common theme of this meeting. She waited.
He looked at her, then through her. Malcolm glanced around the room. Not a nervous glance, not trying to avoid her, just a slow survey of the dim, empty room. Then his focus returned to her.
"Ana," he began, the two syllables of her name coming further apart than he usually put them, "we already know this."
Ana sat for a moment as a shockwave of bewilderment rolled over her from the quiet little nuclear device that had dropped out of Malcolm's mouth. Then she was out of her chair, feeling almost out of her body as well, flinging obscenities that would have made her blush if she hadn't been so out of her mind with rage. She slammed random fists into the table that between them. Malcolm sat and took it.
After a minute the storm of fury worked its way through her and Ana realized what she'd been doing and saying. She pulled the chair off the floor and sat down at the table again.
"Explain."
"I'm not sure there's a lot I can say."
"Anything is better than nothing at this point."
"Okay. When the Continuum showed up on the Agency's radar, other departments did reconnaissance, fact-finding, and they managed to determine from the movements and actions that the Continuum had somehow come up with a way to move through time. Those departments have been working on ways to counteract the effect that it could have. There's obviously a lot of moving pieces, a lot of things that can happen when their agents from the future can have knowledge of events that have already occurred. Events that we don't know anything about. So far, they haven't come up with anything workable. Their efforts, of course, are highly classified."
"Classified. Yeah. But you just told me a bunch of classified information. How about you share a bit more? Maybe you can rebuild the trust that I thought we had."
Malcolm lowered his head. Ana knew she had hit below the belt with that one and hurt him on a personal level. Part of her still didn't care.
"Ana—"
"What, Malcolm? What are our friends in the other departments doing to try to fight terrorists who can go back in time? For all we know they can affect the events that have already happened in their future. You've known this, have you even tried to consider how many cans of worms this opens? It's not even cans of worms, it's more like a Pandora's Box of possibilities! What could we possibly be doing?"
"The Agency has tried to recreate the sorts of conditions that could be conducive to time travel, as well as helping certain agents to be more amenable to the process."
"Amenable to the process? Are you kidding me? That means they’re messing with people to try to stumble onto time travel!"
"It's nothing that drastic. There are controlled experiments."
"Controlled experiments? That's probably what they called the Sleepwalkers project!"
Any semblance of color in Malcolm's face left as though it had just received an urgent order to ship out. The sudden color drain caused a stirring in Ana's stomach and a buzzing in her head. The noise that had filled the room—her outburst—had faded and now she was left in total silence to look at Malcolm and dread what came next.
"Sleepwalkers project?" Malcolm asked, sounding as scared as Ana felt.
"Yeah, the one that seems to randomly turn off parts of Jrue's brain and turn him into a feeble, if not suicidal, imbecile."
"Ana, Sleepwalkers is the code name of one of the projects intended to give its participants the ability to travel through time."
Ana was again stunned into silence. This time, however, she did not follow it up with an atomic detonation. Instead, she remained calm. At least, as calm as she could.
"They're grooming Jrue to be a time traveler?"
"I don't know any of the agents who were involved in the Sleepwalkers project."
"Well, I do. And Jrue is in there. He's a Sleepwalker."
Ana put her head in her hands. She wanted to cry, but no tears came. Instead she sat shaking her head and feeling the peculiar sensation of her face rocking between alternating hands. She might have been murmuring something and if she was, it was nothing more than a monosyllabic obscenity repeated over and over.
Then a coherent thought made it through the gates that protected her brain: she had to save him. Jrue would not become a pawn of some twisted time game. She had to get him back to normal.
And then, as she had been ready before to jump from her seat, she found herself ready again. But this time, she acted, her legs pushing her up from the chair, her mouth speaking mixed words of gratitude and condolences and her body marching itself out of the Useless darkroom, back to the Valkyrie Project, and then out. Back to the real world, where nothing seemed real anymore, except Jrue.
--
"Jrue," Ana said, "you really think they're going to let you walk in there and say 'Hey, you know that secret experiment project thing where you've been messing with my brain, yeah, can you undo that for me? Thanks.'"
Jrue gave her a dour look.
"No," he said, "Of course not." But it was clear he imagined the scenario would go quite a bit differently than she described.
"So what do you think you're going to do?"
"I don't know, but they're the ones who did this, so they have to know how to fix it."
"We work for the same government organization, right? I think you're overestimating their ability to plan ahead or foresee the consequences of their actions. Need I remind you of the civil war that took place not even fifteen years ago?"
"Yes, Ana. But what other option do I have? You want me to stay awake until I hallucinate and then take some drugs so I fall asleep and recover from my crippling incompetence?"
"I think I've got something else figured out."
Jrue's eyes lit up, but his face quickly turned skeptical, bright eyes narrowing while his brow furrowed and his nose wrinkled.
"What are you thinking?"
"Aerin gave me an idea of someone I could see. Someone we could see. It's not going to be easy, and it might not be safe. But it might work. And it can't be any worse than going to the Agency and serving yourself up as a dead man walking."
"You really think they would just take me out? Cover this up by killing me? If we 'fix' this, it's going to come out eventually. When the project puts me and whoever else they're doing this to int
o play, they'll figure it out pretty quickly."
"What if that never happens? What if the project is a failure and you're stuck like this forever?"
"What if we do something and it makes things worse? What if I can't function at all anymore?"
"As opposed to living with the insomnia and hallucinations and ending up like Alando?"
"Okay." He shook his head, not wanting to accept it. "You do have a point there. So what's the deal with the person that Aerin recommended?"
"He's a doctor. In DC. Right on the border of the Greater States."
"DC? I didn't think there were any reputable doctors left there."
"Aerin didn't say he was reputable. He just said he would get the job done."
"What did you tell Aerin to get this recommendation?"
"I told him what was going on. Left it anonymous."
"And you don't think he could guess? You don't have that many friends, Ana."
The words stung a bit and Ana knew the pain showed on her face, but she pushed through.
"It doesn't matter. He does whatever he can to help me. He trusts me. And I trust him."
"You're not worried at all? That someone at the Agency will figure something's up and question him? He doesn't seem like the kind of guy who can stand up to a lot of interrogation."
"I agree that he wouldn't stand up to much interrogation, but he doesn't know enough to do anything more than maybe getting me kicked off the Project. And at this point, I'm not sure that's a totally terrible thing."
"If he told someone higher up what you'd asked him about, you don't think they would take you out too? Just like if I told them what I knew?"
"They probably would. That's a risk I've been willing to take for a long time, though. I know a lot more than you think I know, so let's just leave it at that."
Jrue looked at her, his eyes watering, but not with tears. A strange concern came over him. His lips turned down, and there was a pained expression on his face.
"Don't worry," Ana said. "I'm trained in this kind of stuff. It's my job."