Lock & Key

by Gordon Bonnet

  A cartoon of a grinning, bespectacled man popped up. The words, “Welcome to Norton SuperBifurcator!” were in a speech bubble over his head. “Do you want to: (1) compare alternate and actual time tracks for points of divergence? (2) do backwards sequencing to locate points of divergence in the past? or (3) compare possible intersection points in the future? Select an option to continue.”

  Fischer clicked on option two.

  The bespectacled cartoon man popped up, in a different position this time, with one finger pointing to another speech bubble.

  “Excellent choice! That’s easy, with Norton SuperBifurcator! Do you want to find past divergences by: (1) name? (2) time? or (3) event? Select an option to continue.”

  Fischer clicked option one. “This program is so fucking cute it makes me want to throw up my breakfast.”

  “Cute sells,” Maggie said.

  Fischer typed the name “Katherine Jane Clevenger,” and hit enter.

  The cartoon man reappeared, a dismayed expression on his face, both of his palms pressed to his cheeks. This time his speech bubble said, “Uh-oh! There is more than one person by that name! Do you want to select by (1) birthdate, (2) birthplace, (3) death date, (4) death place, or (5) tracking code? Select an option to continue.”

  “What’s her birthdate again?” Fischer asked.

  “June 7, 1921.”

  Fischer selected option one, typed in her birthdate, and hit enter.

  “And last! What would you like to know? Do you want to know (1) intersection points with other individuals, (2) interactions between this individual’s timeline and specific events, (3) most recent intersection point between alternate and actual tracks, or (4) advanced options? Select an option to continue.”

  Fischer clicked on option three.

  The cartoon man appeared, seated in a chair, a broad grin on his face, his feet up on the desk. “Thanks! Sit back and relax! This should only take a minute!” A little hour glass appeared, its sand emptying downward. When it was done it flipped over, and began to empty again.

  “A minute. Yeah, right,” Fischer said. “Last time I had to do this, it tied up the computer for three hours.”

  “Well,” Maggie said, “let’s not sit here and wait. I suggest we go to the staff lounge, and spend some time bringing Mister Ault here up to speed on all of this.”

  Fischer started to object. “Look, Maggie, it’s not as if I don’t have work to do…”

  Her face eased into a faint trace of a smile. “I think we’ve established that whatever went wrong here, it’s not Mister Ault’s doing. I think we owe him as much of an explanation as we can give.” She looked over at him, and one eyebrow went up a little. Whether it was in humor or in pity was impossible to tell. “And after all, we have time. At this point, we have all the time in the world. If the entire human race doesn’t exist anymore, it rather puts us out of business for the moment, wouldn’t you say?”

  • • •

  The staff lounge looked like your average staff lounge. Darren wasn’t sure what to expect—perhaps something with a bit more gravitas, given the apparent function and scope of the Library. Some historical artifacts, possibly, tapestries on the wall, intricately carved wooden chairs. But it turned out to be a room that could have been in any of the corporate buildings in the world. Tile floor, a variety of mismatched metal-legged chairs with worn upholstery, a long folding table, a dented refrigerator, a coffee maker, a microwave that looked like it hadn’t been cleaned since it was installed, and a rather moth-eaten sofa. There was a large corkboard attached to one wall with a variety of notices affixed with pushpins—there was one that said,

  “ATTENTION ALL STAFF MEMBERS: All vacations to the past require WRITTEN APPLICATION WITH TWO WEEKS’ NOTICE. Approval is by the Librarian’s permission only. Upon return, YOU MUST CHECK IN THROUGH THE ARTIFACTS DEPARTMENT and declare and register any items you have brought back with you. NO EXCEPTIONS.”

  Fischer immediately went and flopped down onto the sofa, and covered both eyes with one arm, and lay there, totally motionless.

  Maggie poured herself a cup of coffee, and said, “Coffee, Mister Ault?”

  “Um, sure, thanks.”

  “Cream? Sugar?”

  “Two sugars, no cream.”

  She poured another cup, and while she was stirring in the sugar, half turned toward Darren.

  “Sit, please. Make yourself comfortable. We’ll be here for a while.”

  He settled in one of the metal-legged chairs, and she set his coffee in front of him, and then sat down across from him.

  “I’d imagine you have some questions,” she said.

  He stared at her, and then took a sip of his coffee. It was stronger than he liked it, but at this point any coffee was better than no coffee. His mind was so roiling with questions that he couldn’t settle on one.

  “It’s all pretty overwhelming,” he finally said.

  “I would expect so.”

  “So, this has never happened before?”

  “What, one of you showing up here? No, no, not to my recollection. And I’ve worked here for… well, for a long time. Fischer is the third Librarian I’ve worked for. Mister Furnival, and he just retired two years ago, and before him, Doctor Rounsaville. She was a grand old lady, my, yes.” The severe lines in her face softened a bit with the memory.

  “And this place really keeps track of every possibility? For everyone? Everywhere?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “The Library is much bigger than it appears.”

  “It appears pretty big to me already.”

  She nodded. “You’ve only seen the barest fraction of it.”

  He leaned back. “And you think what Lee did somehow changed the past?”

  “It would appear so. But I’m not prepared to put much weight behind that theory. Not yet, at least. The reverse bifurcation should give us a bit more information.”

  “What is that, the reverse bifurcation, um, thingy?”

  “Ah. Yes.” She set down her cup. “It’s simple enough in principle, but takes the computer a lot of time to do, because in practice it’s extraordinarily complex. What the process does is to start with one person, living or dead, actual or alternate, and works backwards from there to find out where particular events could have occurred that led to diverging timelines. In this case, we’re taking your grandmother, who didn’t exist for some reason, and we’re running her family tree and personal events—well, the ones she would have had, had she actually existed—backwards, and trying to find out how far back her family line never existed. Somewhere, an event occurred that stopped her from being born. Reverse bifurcation can pinpoint where that is.” She shrugged. “Theoretically. Sometimes there is more than one such event, or some confluence of particular events, that did it. We’ll hope it’s only one, because otherwise it can get confusing.”

  “More confusing than it already is.”

  “Oh, yes, indeed,” Maggie said. “You have no idea.”

  “So you think that somehow, what Lee did changed something in the past?” he asked again.

  She nodded. “The puzzling thing is, that isn’t supposed to be possible. As Fischer said, the past is fixed. Once a person dies, and the computer assigns him or her an end tracking code, that should be that.”

  “But…” he started, and then stopped. He frowned. “But there was a note on the wall in the office. Something about fixing a divergence in the First Battle of Bull Run. That’s in the past. So things can be changed.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “By us. Just not by you. We have to go back and fix things all the time. Small discrepancies, mostly, nothing that would concern anyone. We travel to the past, sometimes to work, sometimes for pleasure. But we are required to run a computer analysis before we go, to make certain that nothing we do will interfere substantively with anyone’s timeline, and run a second one when we return to make sure that we did, in fact, follow the rules of non-interference. We simply keep track of people’s choices.
We’re not supposed to influence them.”

  “So… you’re not one of us… you’re not…” He sputtered a little, and fell silent.

  “Human? Well, yes, Mister Ault, we are. But you are thinking rightly, to some extent. We’re different, I’ll grant. We’re the Monitors.” The corners of her mouth turned up slightly, which, he was learning, as close to a smile as she got. “We pass amongst you, and you never know. Some of your best friends could be Monitors, and you’d be none the wiser.”

  He opened his eyes a little wider. “Could… could Lee McCaskill be…?” He left the question unfinished.

  “A Monitor?”

  There was a snorting noise from the couch, but Fischer didn’t move.

  “No, Mister Ault, we would know that,” Maggie said. “He’s an ordinary human, like yourself.”

  “Could it be relevant that Lee is a physicist? He works on things like the arrow of time, and the mathematics of eight or nine dimensions, and that sort of stuff.”

  Fischer’s arm came up. He turned his head and scowled at Darren. “And it only now occurred to you to tell us this?”

  “Well, I didn’t know it was relevant.”

  Fischer snorted again, turned his head back, and put his arm back over his eyes.

  “It could be relevant,” Maggie said. “Do you know if he was researching time travel?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t really know. I don’t understand any of his research. He’s a physicist. I run a bookstore.”

  “And you have no idea why he wanted to kill you?”

  He shook his head. “No. None. We’ve been friends since elementary school. We’ve always gotten along fine. He’s been acting a little weird for about a month, but I thought it was because of his girlfriend.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  He nodded. “Sherry Christensen. He asked her out a few weeks ago. She seems nice. But Lee started acting really nervous after that, like something was on his mind.” He felt a little wistful. He had seen that sort of change in others, but had never had the opportunity to find out about such a phenomenon first-hand. His experience with women had been not so much unpleasant as non-existent.

  “And you don’t know what he was worried about?”

  “No idea. I figured either he’d work it out, or eventually he’d tell me about it.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Instead, he shot me in the head.”

  “So, it looks like whatever was bothering him must have involved you. Do you think he was concerned that you would go after his girlfriend?”

  “Me?” he said. “Oh, no, nothing like that. Lee knows me better than that. Besides, why would a woman go for me when she could have a tanned, athletic, handsome physicist instead?”

  “Don’t start with the self-pity or I’ll have to throttle you,” Fischer said.

  “Well, it’s true,” he shot back, a little defiantly. “Besides, I only met Sherry twice. And it was just to say hi to, nothing more. And Lee’s not the jealous type. He’s devoted, but not the kind who sees every man as a threat.”

  “I think,” Maggie said, “that the crux of the matter is to find out why Lee wanted to kill you. But that will be a little difficult to do directly, seeing that he doesn’t exist anymore. And we would have been able to try to ascertain some of it by looking up his records and seeing what chosen actual track he was on. But now that this event has happened, we have no way of knowing which that was, out of the hundreds of millions of possible tracks he could have taken. Whatever else it did, when he shot you, it simultaneously erased all of the records of everyone alive on earth. Trying to find out what his actual track was would be like searching for one particular grain of sand on a beach.”

  Fischer suddenly sat up. “I have a theory.”

  Maggie’s eyebrows raised in a silent question mark, and she and Darren both turned toward Fischer.

  “Darren said that Lee is a physicist, working on issues having to do with time.”

  “Was,” she corrected.

  Fischer waved a hand at her impatiently. “I don’t know what tense you’d use in this situation, and it doesn’t matter. But suppose he did find out a way to travel to the past, or at least influence the past.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “And, somehow, his shooting Darren will lead to a chain of circumstances in which he goes back into the past, and interferes with Darren’s birth. Not only Darren’s, but his distant ancestors’.” Fischer’s long, melancholy face grew animated. “Perhaps when he shot Darren, he escaped to the past to avoid being arrested. And his presence stops Darren’s great-great-great-grandpa from knocking up his great-great-great-grandma…”

  Darren recoiled a little, and said, “Do you have to put it that way?”

  Fischer ignored him. “… and so Darren’s ancestral line stops cold. He’s never born. But it creates a paradox, because if he’s never born, Lee never shoots him, and never escapes into the past… and so on, and so forth. Ergo, he’s generated an impossible situation, and it sends all of humanity into the logical void.”

  Maggie looked skeptical. “In the absence of further evidence…”

  “I know.” Fischer still looked excited. “But it’s the only thing I can think of that explains all of the evidence we’ve currently got. It’s like Sherlock Holmes said—when you have eliminated what is impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth.”

  “Well, far be it from me to argue with Sherlock Holmes,” she said. “But if it’s so, then how do we fix it?”

  “We?” Fischer’s mouth twisted in a little smile, and he looked at Darren. “Not we. I think we send Mister Ault here on a little adventure.”

  “Me?” he said, his heart giving a thud against his ribs.

  “Stands to reason,” Fischer said. “Neither I nor any of my staff know what Lee McCaskill looks like. You, on the other hand, would recognize him on sight.”

  “But…” he said, and then closed his mouth.

  “Honestly, Fischer, is this the wisest course of action?” Maggie said. “Sending an untrained young man… who only today found out about how all this works…”

  “… and who still doesn’t really understand anything that’s going on here,” he added.

  “… and expecting him to somehow fix the biggest divergence that’s happened since the Library was founded?”

  “I don’t know,” Fischer said. “I have a feeling there’s a reason he’s the only member of humanity that made it through this.”

  “Now, wait just a minute,” he said breathlessly.

  Both of them turned to him.

  “I am not some kind of adventure hero type. I’m a bookstore owner. This isn’t something that you can just… just do. How do you know I won’t screw it up worse?”

  Fischer frowned. “Things could be screwed up worse than the entire human race being wiped out of existence?”

  He sagged a little. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that things can always get worse.”

  “I don’t know,” Fischer said. “Look at it this way. You’re already dead, for all intents and purposes. You were shot in the head. What more can happen?”

  “You should never ask that question,” he said, his face drooping. “It never turns out well.”

  Fischer leaned back, and cupped his hands behind his head. “I don’t know. It sounds like a brilliant idea to me.”

  “Just because you don’t have to go.” He turned to Maggie for support. “You can’t think this is a good plan, Missus Carmichael,” he said.

  She shrugged. “I’ve learned from working with Fischer that his intuition is seldom wrong. He may not look like a typical Librarian. Even I was a tad skeptical when I met him first. His manner of dress, and his youth. But the Board was right to hire him, of course, I shouldn’t have doubted. He has brains, and more than that… he has a way about him. Uncanny. In another age, he’d be said to have the second sight.”

  He gazed at Fischer, who for the first time exhibited a genuine smile.
He looked like a self-satisfied cat.

  She gestured toward Fischer. “True, he can be overbearing, and a wee bit of an arrogant jackass at times…”

  “Hey now.” Fischer sat up straight, smile dimming a little.

  She turned toward him, her eyes wide and innocent. “Didn’t you say I had permission to speak freely? It is my job, I believe were your precise words.”

  “I said that an hour ago.”

  “I wasn’t aware of its expiration date,” she said. “My apologies, sir.”

  “Oh, knock it off,” Fischer said. “I’m right, you’ll see.”

  “Truthfully, I’ve no serious doubts of that.” She glanced at the clock above the corkboard. “How much longer, do you think?”

  “It’s only been forty minutes. I think the software will take at least another hour to run, maybe two.”

  “Perhaps I should take Mister Ault here on a tour of our facility. Whilst we’re waiting.”

  Fischer frowned. “Do you think we should? I doubt Security would approve.”

  “You can be assured I won’t let him cause any trouble. I’ll be watching him every minute.”

  “I won’t mess with anything.” He was beginning to like her, but still found her to belong to that group of people that he called “forceful personalities.” Causing trouble while under her supervision would be a seriously bad idea.

  “Fine,” Fischer said. “I’ll go up and talk to Fassbinder. I’m still wondering why Security didn’t even realize we had an intruder. If I hadn’t tripped over him, he might still be wandering around getting into god-knows-what.”

  • • •

  Maggie led Darren out into the hall, and they spent the next hour ambling about the place, with her giving little explanations such as, “Here is where the records are kept for prehistoric Sub-Saharan Africa,” and “If you have the leisure, once this situation is resolved, here is the wing for Medieval Central Europe. You should read the alternate track records that describe the outcome to history if Charlemagne had died as a child. Fascinating, truly fascinating.” She always referred to the current chaos as “this situation,” as if it were a minor inconvenience, on par with breaking a light bulb or getting caught in traffic.