Lock & Key

by Gordon Bonnet

  Darren stood for a few moments, silent, while Fischer pounded on the computer keys so hard that it appeared likely one of them would come flying off. He reached up absently, and touched his neck. It was a nervous habit of his to play with the necklace he always wore, a chain that had a little silver key hanging from it. It went to a wooden box, of uncertain but undoubtedly great age, that he’d inherited from his grandmother. The key had a filigreed, intricately carved head, and was a keepsake he valued, although it likely had little monetary value.

  But the key and chain were gone.

  He frowned, dismayed, wondering where in all of his mystifying day’s travels he could have lost it. But wherever it was, it was undoubtedly irretrievable at this point.

  There was no use fretting about it, although he knew he would anyway.

  The door opened and a woman came in carrying a cup of coffee. The woman was in that indeterminate age between fifty and sixty-five. Everything about her was round—her face, her body, the severe bun into which her hair was fixed, even her glasses. But far from seeming like a rotund Mrs. Claus figure, there was a grim cut to the lines of her face that gave her more the look of a guard from a women’s prison. Most people intimidated him, but this woman had a presence that radiated intimidation. It was hard to imagine not being intimidated by her.

  The ginger tom, on the other hand, seemed to immediately recognize a kindred spirit, and jumped down off the desk and twined around her legs.

  The woman gave a chilly little smile of recognition, and said in a voice with a rolling Scottish accent, “Now, don’t make me spill this coffee, Ivan, there’s a good puss.” She set the cup down on the desk.

  Fischer looked up, and gestured toward Darren.

  The woman turned, as if noticing his presence for the first time, and scanned him from head to toe.

  “See what I mean, Maggie?” Fischer said.

  “Where’d you find him?”

  “Nineteenth century Britain. He sort of appeared there, claiming he was dead.”

  “Curious. His appearance didn’t set off any of the security alarms?”

  “Not that I know of. Of course, they could all be napping up there, as usual. I haven’t checked it out yet. I blundered into him. I was heading to my office, saw the light was on, and went to investigate. He must have tripped the motion detectors. Lucky he appeared where he did. If he’d suddenly popped into existence over in the southeast corner of ancient Peru, or somewhere like that, he might have wandered for days before anyone knew he was here.”

  “And he simply materialized?” she said.

  “Actually,” Darren said, “I was shot in the head, and then I materialized.”

  The two of them simultaneously turned their heads and glared at him, but didn’t respond.

  His cheeks warmed, and he said, “Sorry,” in a small voice, and the two turned back toward each other.

  “Anyway,” Fischer said, “he says he doesn’t know how he got here. Either he doesn’t remember, or else he’s lying.”

  She gave him an appraising look, one thin eyebrow raised slightly. “He hasn’t the look of a spy.”

  “I’m not a spy!” He sat up straight, unable to keep himself from speaking. “Look, Maggie, I don’t care what he says, I wasn’t spying!”

  Now both of the woman’s eyebrows went up. “The Librarian calls me Maggie. You call me Missus Carmichael.”

  He said, “Sorry,” again, and subsided into silence.

  Fischer drummed his long fingers on the desk, and then took a sip of his coffee. “I think the problem here is threefold. First, how do we fix whatever monumental fuckup got him here in the first place? Second, how do we get him back where he belongs? And third, does he already know more than he should?”

  “The answer to the third question is probably yes, but I don’t know what we can do about it. And honestly, Fischer, maybe you should find out more of his story. It could be relevant that he seems so insistent that he’s dead.”

  “Maybe. If he’s telling the truth. I wonder if Fassbinder still has those torture devices he swiped when he took that vacation in fifteenth century Spain? They may come in handy.”

  Darren’s eyes widened. “Now, wait a minute.”

  They turned and looked at him.

  “I am telling the truth, I swear. My friend, Lee McCaskill, shot me in the forehead. I have no idea why. I was over at his apartment, having dinner, and he seemed upset about something. I asked what was wrong, and he said, ‘It’s nothing this won’t fix,’ and pulled out a pistol and shot me in the head. And I woke up here. That’s really all I know.”

  Maggie looked at Fischer. “Have you checked the database records?”

  “I was in the process of doing that when you got here.” Fischer turned to him. “Full name?”

  “Darren Michael Ault.”

  Fischer typed into the computer. Maggie went around the desk and peered over his shoulder, frowning through her thick glasses.

  With a little more trepidation, he rose, and joined them. He half expected them to order him to sit down again, but they didn’t, and when he looked at the screen, he saw a list of several entries for “Ault, Darren Michael,” followed by a string of numbers and letters, similar to what he’d seen in the books.

  “When and where were you born?”

  “Seattle, Washington, September 16, 1989.”

  Fischer typed that in. Within seconds, the screen blinked, and the message, “NO VALID ACTUAL TRACK CODE. ACCESS ALTERNATE TRACKS?” appeared.

  Both Maggie and Fischer made small noises of surprise.

  “What? What does that mean?”

  “Well, on its simplest level, it means that you don’t exist,” Fischer said. “Which makes it kind of perplexing that you’re here, ruining my morning.”

  “Try the murderer, his alleged friend,” Maggie said.

  “What was the name of the guy who shot you?” Fischer asked, without looking up.

  “Lee McCaskill.”

  “Middle name? Do you know birthplace or birthdate?”

  “I think his middle name is Allen. Not sure if it’s A-L-L-E-N or A-L-A-N. I don’t know his birthdate, but he was born in Spokane, Washington.”

  Fischer typed in the information. There were more entries for Lee Allen McCaskill than there had been for Darren Michael Ault, but the birthplace information narrowed it down to one. Fischer clicked on the entry.

  Once again, the message, “NO VALID ACTUAL TRACK CODE. ACCESS ALTERNATE TRACKS?”

  “Uh-oh,” Fischer said.

  Maggie looked over at him. “Who is the current president of the United States?” she asked.

  “Barack Obama.”

  “Of course,” Maggie said. “The gentleman with the two cute little girls. Middle name’s Hussein. I remember that horrid woman making such a big deal out of it, what’s her name? Oh, yes, Ann Coulter.”

  Fischer typed in the information.

  “NO VALID ACTUAL TRACK CODE. ACCESS ALTERNATE TRACKS?”

  “Okay, this is bad.” Fischer stared at Maggie, his large blue eyes wide. He looked back down, and typed in “Britney Spears,” and after a few clicks, once again got the same message.

  “Shit,” Fischer said, his voice awestruck, and, Darren thought, more than a little frightened.

  “What? What’s happened?” he said.

  Fischer swiveled his chair around, and for the first time, looked him in the face. “Well, it’s a bit premature to make this conclusion, only having a sample size of four, but given that it’s hard to imagine an event that would include yourself, your murderer friend, President Obama, and Britney Spears that didn’t include everyone else in the world, I’m going to hazard a guess. This McCaskill character who shot you seems to have generated some sort of temporal paradox.”

  “What’s that?”

  Fischer leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and didn’t respond.

  “It means,” Maggie said in a low voice, “that somehow what your friend did made
the entire population of the earth cease to exist.”

  He stared at them, and swallowed. “Um… How can that be possible?”

  Fischer opened one eye, and his mouth twisted into a sardonic grimace. “Well, now, if I knew that, I wouldn’t be sitting here trying to head off a migraine, would I?”

  “People get killed every day, and this doesn’t happen,” he said.

  “True,” Fischer said, still with only one eye open. He sounded like he was keeping his temper only with an effort.

  “And there’s nothing so special about me.”

  “Clearly also true.”

  “So why…?”

  “You know,” Fischer interrupted, opening both eyes, “you have this annoying habit of asking questions that it’s obvious no one in the room has the answers to.”

  “Well, perhaps,” Maggie said, “that is the place to start. What is special about him? See how deep the paradox went. Did it begin at the instant he was shot? Or did it erase actual tracks farther back in time?”

  Fischer’s nod appeared grudging. “Well, that’s easily enough done. I suppose it’s worth checking.”

  He leaned forward, and typed in a box marked “Command” the phrase, “access actual end track codes.”

  A screen appeared with a variety of options—“By Name?” “By Region?” “By Time?” “By Interlock With Code?”

  Fischer selected “By Time?” and another screen appeared. “Time range?” it asked, followed by a place for the minute and hour in Greenwich Mean Time, day, month, and year, and a pulldown menu that said, “Plus or minus how many minutes?”

  Fischer half turned toward him. “When did your alleged murder take place?”

  He thought for a moment. “It was around seven thirty PM. March 12, 2016.”

  “What time zone?”

  “Pacific. Pacific Standard Time.”

  Fischer sighed harshly. “Shit. How many hours different would that be from Greenwich? I can’t keep track of time zones to save my neck.”

  “It could be worse,” Maggie said. “He could live in China. Ever since the whole country went on to the same time zone, I’ve not been able to remember which it is.” She thought for a moment. “It would be two thirty AM, Greenwich Mean Time.”

  “We really need to have IT install an autoconverter on this thing.” He typed in the time and date, selected “Plus or Minus Ten Minutes,” and hit enter.

  There was a brief pause, and then a list of names began to appear. The first name—Wu, Li Feng, Guangzhou, China, 2:20:01 AM GMT—was quickly followed by others, all in chronological order, and the list zipped upwards almost too fast for the eye to follow.

  Then it hit 2:34:05 AM GMT, and the list stopped.

  “Whoa,” Fischer said. “Hello.”

  “What?” he said.

  “Looks like at two thirty-four and five seconds, Greenwich Mean Time, on March 12, 2016, people suddenly stopped dying.”

  “Those are death dates?”

  “Yes. At the point of death, a person’s actual track becomes fixed. All the other possible outcomes or paths they might have had become locked in as alternate tracks.”

  “So that’s what the books are…” he began.

  Fischer nodded. “They’re all the possible life tracks that anyone could have had. Taken as a whole, the library is a map of the potential lives of everyone in the history of the world. As people make choices, they are navigating through a field of possibilities, and selecting one path as their actual track. All of the others become alternate tracks. At death, of course, the power of choice immediately ceases. Death cancels all of the remaining alternate tracks. After that, neither they nor anyone else can do anything to change what happened.”

  This was the most forthcoming Fischer had been since they met, and Darren wanted it to continue. He chose his words carefully, and tried to use a soothing voice, such as you would use on a potentially vicious dog. “And at the moment Lee shot me, it stopped happening,” he said.

  Fischer nodded again. “It looks like no actual track locking took place after the event. Put simply, no one died after that moment. From what the computer told us earlier, it seems like at that moment, all of the actual tracks evaporated—as if the entire population of the earth simply vanished. They didn’t die. That would have made the computer simultaneously assign all of them actual end track codes. They simply ceased to be.”

  “What on earth could do that?” Maggie said.

  “Good question.” Fischer raised one hand in his direction without taking his eyes off the computer screen. “It looks like whatever your friend did somehow only affected people who were alive at the time of the event. It didn’t go back into history, and alter the past. People who died before the event still died.”

  She frowned. “Are you certain about that? It seems to me a little premature to make that conclusion. If I may be so forward as to say so.”

  “Of course you may,” Fischer said. “You’re my administrative assistant. It’s your job.”

  “Perhaps you should check a few people who should have actual end track codes, who are connected to Mister Ault here,” she said. “If he’s the pivot of this whole mess, perhaps it would be worth finding out if the phenomenon has had local effects, in addition to the global effect we’ve already noted.”

  Fischer looked up at her. “That’s an excellent suggestion. And if we find some, perhaps it would help to figure out how this happened.” He leaned back. “Do you have any near relatives who are deceased?”

  He nodded. “Of course.”

  “Pick one.”

  “My grandmother. Katherine Jane Ault.”

  “Is that her married name?”

  “Yes. Her maiden name was Clevenger.”

  “Birthdate and place?”

  He bit his lip. “Um. She was born June 7, let’s see…” He did some mental figuring. “1921. In Oskaloosa, Iowa.”

  Fischer shook his head. “Why do so many names of American cities sound like the punch line of a joke?” he said, as he entered the information. The now-familiar message, “NO VALID ACTUAL TRACK CODE. ACCESS ALTERNATE TRACKS?” appeared.

  “Well, well,” Fischer said. “The plot thickens. Seems like your grandma never existed.”

  “That’s ridiculous! My grandma only died a year ago. I used to spend Christmas vacation at her house every year. What do you mean, she never existed?”

  Fischer opened his eyes wide, and speaking very slowly, said, “What I mean is: Your. Grandma. Never. Existed.”

  “Maybe that…” he started, and then stopped.

  “Maybe that what?”

  “Maybe that explains why my key is gone. My grandma willed me a wooden box, and the key that goes to it. I always wear the key on a chain around my neck, and I noticed it was gone. I mean, if my grandma never existed, then she can’t have willed me anything, right?” He closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Man, this stuff makes my head hurt.”

  “You should complain,” Fischer said, a little bitterly. “You only have to keep track of yourself. I have to keep track of everybody who ever existed, and also all the ones who don’t. You want my job?”

  “No. But still… I mean, that doesn’t make sense.”

  “What doesn’t?”

  “If my grandma never existed, how can I be here?” he said. “I mean, it explains why my key is gone, but I think the bigger question is why I’m still here.”

  “Well, first of all,” Fischer said, leaning back and looking at him, “you’re not exactly anywhere at the moment. We had already established that you don’t exist, if you’ll recall. But if somehow, the event that dumped you into my lap not only erased the whole population of the earth, but also reached farther back, and erased someone who had existed, and had died, and should have had a locked actual end track code, this points to a more pervasive problem.”

  “I think that erasing the whole population of the earth is pervasive enough already,” D
arren observed.

  “I can’t argue with that,” Maggie said.

  “Yes, but is it a problem with only his family? Or have more people had their dead ancestors erased?”

  “That,” she said, “is an excellent question, but I haven’t the vaguest idea how we could find that out.”

  Fischer shrugged, and typed in “Nelson Mandela,” and after adding a few clicks selecting dates and places, got a screen that said, “Actual end track code FGO883671-0708: Access Files?” Fischer clicked “No,” and looked up.

  “Well, Mandela still existed,” he said.

  “That’s good,” Maggie said. “So, perhaps we should operate under the hypothesis that whatever it is that happened erased Darren’s family, and no one else.”

  “Yes, but how far back? And how could we find that out? The computer records are meant to be static after an actual track is selected. It’s unheard of to go back and change the past. We don’t have the software to track changes to the past. They’re not supposed to happen.”

  “Well,” she said, “I think we might be able to figure part of that out. I wonder how far back Darren’s grandmother’s family was erased? We can do a reverse bifurcation analysis. See how long ago it was before she had an ancestor who actually existed.”

  “I think my brain is going to explode,” Darren said. It came out sounding more pitiful than he intended.

  Fischer glanced up at him. “If you start whining, I’m going to kick you right the hell out of this office,” he said. “I’d think you’d be grateful that we’re spending our morning trying to bring your sorry ass back into existence.”

  “Well, I’m grateful,” he said. “I just don’t understand all this.”

  “Once he starts the reverse bifurcation,” Maggie said, “I’ll have time to explain it to you. It takes a couple of hours for that software to run.”

  Fischer clicked an icon on the screen that said “Norton SuperBifurcator!” and there was a whirring noise as the software booted up.