Fixer

by Gene Doucette

  She was surprised to have woken up in a place other than a coffin.

  When she came to, her mom and dad and Tanya were all there, looking alternately excited and on the verge of tears. An Indian woman—her doctor, it turned out—who spoke to her as if they were old friends was by her side and asking her questions. Did she know where she was? Did she know who she was? She liked the sound of the doctor’s voice and wondered if maybe they did know each other. Later she realized hers was one of the voices she had been listening to while in the coma.

  After a question-and-answer session, in which it was established that Erica knew who she was and could infer that she was in a hospital, it was decided by all that it would be an excellent idea if she got some sleep. She had no objections to this decision, as breathing and talking turned out to be much harder than she remembered and besides, sleep was different from a coma, which she’d had quite enough of.

  She dreamed of the others. In a way, this was an indication that her brain was well, because that’s exactly what she did every night for a month leading up to the attack. It was a happy dream, with everybody celebrating again, except that each time she turned around to talk to one of her friends, they suddenly weren’t there anymore.

  When she woke up again a couple of hours later, she felt more like herself. Parts of her brain that had not been used for a long time stood up and stretched and began jogging lightly. As a test, she ran through a couple of differential equations she’d memorized long ago, by way of a mnemonic technique. The equations were put to nursery rhyme tunes. By the time she opened her eyes again, she’d been humming the nursery rhymes for several minutes, which made the only other occupant of the room curious. Tanya was sitting where she had been earlier, gripping Erica’s hand as if one of them was in danger of drowning.

  “Where . . .” Erica tried. Speaking was harder with only one fully functioning lung. She gave it another shot. “Where is everybody?”

  Tannie said, “Your mom and dad went back to their hotel. Something about Valium and mini-bars. It’s been a long few days for them.”

  Erica nodded and found that to be no treat either. Have all my muscles decided to quit on me?

  She wasn’t going to come out and say so, but she was glad her parents had left. Her father was a midlevel accountant who realized over a decade ago that his daughter was smarter than he was and had resented her for it ever since. Her mom, while being much more supportive in general, was your basic WASP nightmare who had a habit of lobbing backhanded criticisms at her only daughter without realizing it and then either claimed she meant no offense or insisted she’d never said such a thing. Erica loved them both and all of that, but it was hard sometimes to get past the hostility to unearth that love and doing so now would just require too much energy.

  Tanya caught the vibe from her friend. “Your parents are, um, interesting folks,” she said.

  “Spend a lot of time with them, did you?”

  “Just the past week.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry.”

  Tanya laughed. “S’all right. Hey, at least you had two of ‘em growing up. That’s hard to beat.”

  They smiled at one another for a time, and then Tanya turned serious on her. “Do you remember much?” she asked.

  Erica did, but didn’t really want to. “A little,” she said.

  “Any chance you’d want to . . . explain it? Because I gotta tell you, Rickie, I don’t understand. And I saw most of it.”

  “Another time,” Erica said.

  “Yeah. All right.”

  Light from the hallway crept across the room, and a woman Erica had never seen before poked her head in through the open doorway. The woman glanced at Tanya, who smiled and waved her in. “Hey, hey, Rickie,” Tanya said. “You should meet her. She’s a friend. Kept me out of jail.”

  “Excuse me?” Erica said. She tried to slide onto her elbows in an attempt to sit up, but the muscles in her arms weren’t responding well, either.

  “Lemme get that,” Tanya said. She fiddled with some buttons on a black remote and lifted the whole head of the bed.

  “Thanks,” Erica said. “Jail?”

  “It was a misunderstanding,” the woman said. She had long red hair and was wearing a fantastic black dress. Erica remembered coveting that very outfit in a downtown shop window not so long ago.

  “The cops thought I’d done this to you,” Tanya explained.

  “Oh,” Erica said. “Sure. That makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “Maggie Trent,” the woman said by way of introduction. “FBI. Can I . . .” She gestured at the chair on the near side of the bed.

  “Go ahead,” Erica said.

  “Thank you.” She sat down and then looked uncomfortably toward Tanya. “I was wondering if I could talk to Erica alone for a few minutes. Would that be all right?”

  “I could use some coffee,” Tanya said. “You okay?”

  “It’s fine,” Erica said, still looking at her new guest. Maggie Trent didn’t look anything like an FBI agent, and if Tanya hadn’t been there to confirm it, she’d be asking for credentials. She was also clearly worried about something.

  Tanya released Erica’s hand, patted it a couple of times, and then promised to be right back. As soon as the door was closed, Agent Trent leaned in.

  “I need you to tell me everything you can about who attacked you,” Maggie said, skipping the preamble. “And fast.”

  “I really don’t feel like talking about it right now, Agent,” she said, for essentially the same reason she wouldn’t answer Tanya’s questions. She wasn’t ready yet.

  “Yes, I’m sure you don’t, and I’m sorry, but this is terribly important.”

  “I . . . couldn’t see him,” Erica said, which was true, but didn’t sound as insane as it could have.

  “We know that. Listen, let’s skip ahead. He’s invisible. I don’t know how or why or if he’s even a he and not some sort of . . . thing. You don’t need to be worried about telling me something that sounds outlandish. We’re way past that. I need to know how to stop him.”

  Erica’s heart started to race, a fact that was betrayed by the heart monitor she was hooked up to. “Stop him?” she asked.

  “Here’s the thing. After the attack, I kept your survival out of the press. Or rather, I thought I did. But there are TV reporters downstairs, and in a little while the entire city is going to know you pulled through. I can’t stop them. I’ve tried. But maybe I can stop the one who did this to you before he shows up to finish the job.”

  Erica smiled, but it was a sad smile she didn’t really stand behind. “You can’t stop him,” she said. “But . . . oh God. Jamie. You should warn Jamie before he gets to him, too.”

  “Jamie Silverman?” Maggie asked. Just the way she said it sounded bad.

  “He’s not—”

  “More than two weeks ago.”

  “Oh . . .” Erica’s vision started to blur. She was crying. It would have been an all-out weep, but she was too spent to muster the energy for it. “Well, that’s it, then.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “In a little while he’ll take care of me, and then he’ll be finished, and you won’t have to worry about him any longer.”

  “You think he’s going to stop?”

  “He’ll just be done.” She took the deepest breath she could to keep her voice steady so that her next point was clearly understood. “I’m the only one left, Agent Trent.”

  “But why?” Maggie asked. “Why you and the others? Why is he doing this?”

  “Because you’re wrong. He’s not invisible,” Erica said. “We saw him. I think that’s why he’s killing us.”

  * * *

  Twenty Months Past

  Erica Smalls was standing before two video monitors and holding her breath. It was something she tended to do when she was excited, a biological factoid that did not always work out all that well for her, especially when she was working on a calculation of some kind and had a need fo
r a constant supply of air to keep her brain moving. In this case, her brain didn’t have to do anything except interpret the signals sent to it from her eyes, so she allowed it.

  The monitors were being fed images from two very different devices. One was a standard video camera borrowed from the AV lab a couple of buildings away from where she was standing. The other was a bastardized mutation of a video camera. It had some of the component parts of a standard camera, but aside from the lenses, there was no telling where exactly those components were located. Also included in this apparatus were the heat coils from the back of a junkyard refrigerator and an ample supply of Freon—it took them months to get the proper permits for this—a dozen circuit boards that were built from scratch, a Pentium microprocessor ripped from a spare computer, three prisms, two low-grade industrial lasers, a dinner cart stolen from the Radisson, roughly two miles of cables and wires, and about fifty other random objects whose nature and purpose Erica only dimly understood. Which was okay. She only worked the theory and some of the math. Once she’d proven it was possible without invoking anything the engineers in the group couldn’t salvage or invent—a quantum singularity, say—she was done. Her responsibility to the project had thus been completed a few months ago, after a brutal two years that would have gone faster if it weren’t for all the damned infinities.

  The twin video monitors showed the same event from slightly different angles—Kelsey and Dina walking from opposite ends of the camera’s optical range, meeting in the middle, shaking hands, and then walking off again. As events went, it was wholly unremarkable. Equally unremarkable was the fact that it appeared one video monitor was on a five-second delay. But that was misleading, because the monitor showing real time was the one that was five seconds behind. The other one had recorded the transaction before it had actually happened.

  “It’s beautiful,” she gasped.

  Everyone else in the room—Doc Decaf, Saj, Jimmy, El, and Jamie—were too stunned to say anything at all. Maybe it was because after two years of work by the seven of them, and by at least fifty others who had contributed time and expertise, nobody truly believed it would ever work. Even Erica, who could recite the physics so well she sometimes caught herself singing the necessary equations in the shower to the tune of “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

  “So?” Kelsey asked. He and Dina, having been the first two people to see their grand new toy work, were past the shocked-and-awed stage.

  “Yeah,” Dina said. “What d’ya think?”

  Doc Decaf, still unable to speak, started clapping. And then everyone was hugging and cheering. Someone pulled out champagne.

  * * *

  Their lab was one of four large private spaces in the applied sciences building. Like all of the labs, it looked to have been decorated by a psychotic junkyard man, with random tubes, semi-assembled computers, loose wires, circuit boards, and an entire wall devoted to Tinkertoys. It was also the place where the first successful Advance Temporal Segment Viewing—or simply ATSV—test was run and where its designers elected to stay in order to properly celebrate.

  There were exactly eight people at MIT who had a complete understanding of the Advance Temporal Segmentation Project, and seven of them were in that room to see it pay off. The eighth, Professor Archibald Calvin, whom Erica had never even met, was the one who came up with the idea in the first place. It was rumored he had gotten the idea after meeting someone who could see the future, but none of them seriously believed that. They had each headed a team to work out various aspects of the problem, breaking it into small enough pieces so that no one student who wasn’t meant to see the whole picture would see the whole picture. This was Offey’s idea. Nobody expected that to work out either.

  “To Archie Calvin,” toasted Doc Decaf, holding up one of the bottles of champagne.

  “And his visitor from the future,” Jamie added—to much laughter. Erica grinned and drank straight from her own bottle. She was not one to drink in the middle of the afternoon, but this wasn’t a normal day. A niggling voice in her head—her mom’s voice, because the subject was alcohol—reminded her to be careful, as she tended to get a mite horny when drinking, and these were people she wanted to be able to look in the eye again tomorrow. Plus, she was bound to embarrass herself with Doc Decaf, who she’d only been crushing on for two solid years. She ignored this admonition and gulped some more of the champagne. This made her dizzy, so she found the nearest chair, which happened to be occupied by Jimmy Ho. Fortunately, Jimmy came equipped with a fully functional lap.

  “So now what?” she asked, ignoring Jimmy’s hand around her waist. “I mean, are we rich yet?”

  “Now we design a testing protocol,” Offey said mildly. “So we can show off our new toy without anybody thinking we’re pulling a stunt.”

  “Wait,” Eleanor said. “Didn’t we just do that? With the walking?”

  “So you say,” Offey countered. “But suppose Dina and Kel here secretly rigged it? They could have filmed themselves doing the exact same thing and put it on a loop to play before the live version.”

  “Would we do that?” Dina asked Kelsey, who had his arm around her shoulder.

  “We migh’. We’re a crafty pair.”

  “So you are,” said Offey.

  “C’mon,” Erica said. “They’re not that smart.”

  Dina stuck a pierced tongue out at her.

  Offey took another deep drink and then said, “So the question I want all of you to ask yourselves is how do you prove this to a skeptic? Assume we’re talking about someone who does not know what fine, honest, hardworking folks you happen to be. For while you may look at yourselves in the mirror and see Einstein, Bohr, and Feynman, keep in mind that there will be many who will see instead Pons and Fleischmann.”

  A silence fell over all of them as this sank in.

  “Wow,” Jimmy said eventually. “What a buzz kill.”

  “Hey,” Dina said. “We have a window.”

  “Don’t jump,” El said—to laughter.

  “No,” Dina continued, “the optics aspect is actually pretty small. It’s not really portable, but—”

  “We’re saving the portable one for the army contract,” Kelsey quipped.

  Sajjan said, “Set it up at the window, film whoever’s out there.”

  “Why not?” Dina asked. “We just have to extend a couple cables.”

  “That might do it,” Offey said, smiling.

  “Oh, guys, we totally have to do that right now,” Jimmy said.

  “Absolutely,” Erica agreed. Because while it was cool to see Kel and Dina walking around the room, trying it out on an unsuspecting civilization would be—and this might have been the champagne talking—fucking awesome.

  * * *

  Two hours—and the purchase of a number of pizzas and sodas—later, the still pretty drunk ATSP team had gotten the delicate optical piece moved twenty-five feet across the room to the edge of the frosted-glass window. That window, when open, afforded them a view of a minor side street and a small park that was, fortuitously, around the corner from a Starbucks. So even though it was cold out, there were a half dozen people who had opted to stop and sit in the park while they drank their coffee. Between the people and the cars, the team had the makings of a perfect test sampling.

  “We’re ready here,” Dina said, holding the ATSV’s optics steady. Jimmy stood next to her with the digital camera.

  “Hold on,” Kelsey said from the control board. He finished off the last of his champagne bottle. “Okay, ready now.”

  “Perhaps we should have done this before we started drinking,” Offey said paternally.

  “I can work this blindfolded,” Kelsey said. “Now you have to keep in mind that the views are going to look a little different. Before, we had the camera and the ATSV showing almost the same angle. We haven’t done that here.”

  “Why not?” Erica asked, standing next to Doc Decaf and bouncing on the balls of her feet from a combination of excitement, mil
d arousal, and a great need to pee.

  “Takes too long,” Dina said. “We’re just doing this for fun, right?”

  “Turn it on already,” Jamie said.

  “Alrighty,” Kelsey said.

  He flipped the switch, and both monitors came to life.

  As before, the view from the ATSV showed events on the street happening before the regular camera did. Erica caught herself holding her breath again and wondering if there would ever come a day when she found this anything other than extraordinary.

  The scene outside was that of a lightly populated public space. A mixture of students and employees of the office building down the street milled about, and occasionally a car drove by on its way to Mem Drive. It was, overall, only slightly more interesting than the handshake demonstration, except that there was no way to stage this sort of public interaction.

  “There’s your test, Doc,” Kelsey said with a smile.

  “We are so clever,” El said.

  “Damn straight,” agreed Jamie.

  They stood there and watched for what seemed like an hour. At one point Dina and Sajjan switched places so she could see the monitors, and then Jamie located a tripod to support the regular camera so Jimmy could join in with the staring.

  “Hey,” Erica said. “That’s weird.”

  “What is?” Dina asked.

  Erica had seen something that could conservatively be considered anomalous. “Look over here,” she said, pointing to the ATSV monitor. “See the guy in orange?”

  Dina said, “With the . . . what is that, a prison uniform? What about him?”

  “He’s not on the other monitor.”

  Offey leaned forward. “That’s strange.”