by LK Walker
“You’re right about that.” There’s that anger again. I haven’t seen it recently, not since arriving in Seattle, hadn’t needed it. Now it’s come out fighting, protecting. “How ‘bout you start talking?”
Zander grimaces. “We never thought you’d have any awareness in your waking life of what happens here—in your dreams. You were never supposed to know.” His face holds any amount of sorrow for one person. Whether he expects me to take it easy on him, I don’t know, but there is no way he’s going to manipulate me. Not anymore.
“Well, you obviously failed. Now, who the hell are you?” My voice is low and authoritative.
“What are your thoughts on time travel?” Zander asks as if it’s the most benign question, like asking what I had for breakfast.
“It’s an impossibility.” Did he seriously ask me that? Is he stalling for time? I turn and look at the other man in the room to gauge his reaction. He says nothing, not bothering to look up. He’s completely focused on whatever is on his screen.
“How do you know it’s impossible?” Zander draws my attention back.
“We would have seen it. People from the future would be taking historical holidays throughout time. They’d pepper the history books already.”
“What if there was such a thing but we couldn’t transport people back in time, so to speak. What if we could impact the past without needing a physical presence there. Such as, effectively communicating with historical brain waves, for example.”
It’s hard to give someone a dumb look when your face is scorched with anger. I can only guess that my expression isn’t pleasant as it gives Zander enough of a prompt to keep talking.
“When you’re dreaming, your brain spits out a unique set of brain waves. We’ve been able to manipulate these waves without needing to exist in the same time.”
“You’re telling me you’re from the future? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds?”
“I can imagine. Just because it’s hard to fathom, doesn’t make it any less true.”
His waffling is cultivating my frustration. “This isn’t real. You’re not real.” Is it my imagination or does he look hurt by that? I need to get a grip. I close my eyes, squeezing them tight, trying to understand what my brain is doing to me, or what someone might be doing to my brain.
“Right now, we can only meet like this, in the future…” Zander gives the word future way more emphasis than it deserves. “…when your mind is subjected to delta waves, when you would normally be in a deep sleep.”
“So, what you’re saying is you hijack my brain while I’m asleep.”
Zander looks as if he is choosing his next words carefully. He lets out a sigh. “Yes, a suppose you could say that.”
“But only when I go into deep sleep.”
“That’s the only time we can establish a link.”
“I’m not a computer. You can’t just plug into me.”
“Not entirely true. Your brain is merely an organic processing unit where electrical currents charge through your brain in pre-existing patterns to create a beautiful flourish of inspirations and emotions. You’re an organic computer.”
“That’s not endearing.”
“To be honest, they’re not my words. It’s the start of a commercial. If you think that’s bad, be glad I’m not subjecting you to the rest of advert.” The man behind me chuckles quietly to himself. It must be an ‘in’ joke that I don’t get. Zander notices I haven’t joined in with their laughter and shifts back to his serious face where his eyebrows take on a staunch quality, as they slide closer to one another.
“We can sustain your delta waves for a while, a few hours. The more often you are here, the longer we can push it, but inevitably you must wake and go back to your own time. And we become a dream.”
“Why do it? What do you want?”
“You. Here. We want to make this permanent.” Zander signals to my body. “Cara, we need your help.”
I’m out of my depth with this conversation. It’s gone in a direction I could never have anticipated. We may as well be arguing about the existence of zombies for all the plausibility it has. But Zander is patient, his face serious, as he waits for me to answer.
“To make it clear, what you’re saying is, you’re a real person,” I ask.
“Yes.”
“And you’re from the future?”
“Yes.”
“And you want my help.”
“Yes.”
I laugh manically. “What a croc. If the future needed help, I would be its last choice.”
“The future does and you’re not.” I can’t believe he’s still so serious.
“What could the future possibly want with me?” I can’t believe I’m even entertaining this.
“Let’s say you have unique talents that are needed,” Zander says.
Somehow, he’s pulling me in to this conversation. The part of me that wants answers is dragging me into this minefield. “For arguments sake, let’s agree that what you’re saying isn’t bordering on ludicrous.”
Zander mouth twitches in a smile and he gives me a small nod of agreement.
“You expect me to believe there is something special about me that the future can’t live without and as such I should leave my life behind for a bunch of dream-hijacking, lying strangers. Did I get the gist of it?”
My thoughts are thundering as I consider Zander’s explanation. After all, it does account for what I’ve seen—the impressive technology, the ability to breach my mind while I sleep, as well as the amount these people know about me. Other than an actual dream, I can’t think of anything that fits. As crazy as he sounds, Zander’s explanation is as good as any I’m able to come up with on my own.
“You won’t have to leave your life behind.” Zander tells me. “It will continue on as if we never met, as if we never hacked your dreams. Your consciousness, as it is now, would be pulled forward, to continue a life here too. Your memories, your abilities, your personality they would all be here, just as they will be in your own time.”
“So, a clone of me. You want to clone me and bring that forward in time.” My brain feels like it's reaching its limit for comprehension. It hurts, as if I’m physically fighting my beliefs about how the world works.
“You could look at it like that.” Zander sounds reluctant to agree with my comparison and, judging by his manner, he has instead decided to try to coddle me.
The man behind me, other than his interactions with the computer and his short trifle with amusement, has been sitting quietly. His constant keyboard taps have blended in as white noise. In my agitation, I’d forgotten he was even there. He takes this moment to invade our conversation with a snort of disagreement. Apparently, he takes exception to me using the term ‘clone’, like somehow I’ve insulted him. Zander gives him a dirty look and it silences the man again.
“Who are you?” I accusingly ask the stranger. He doesn’t look up. “Who is he?” I try to get the information from Zander, since the man doesn’t seem to be able to talk for himself.
“He’s the one who has brought you here. He’s keeping the program functioning at optimal. And right now, he’s doing his best to stop anyone else finding out where you are. If you want to get to know him better, you can talk to him later. Right now, you need to decide whether you want to make this arrangement permanent.”
“No.” I make it as blunt as I can. I shake my head like the movement is warding off evil. How can any of this be real. If it weren’t for JT’s shared experience, I could write it all off as my brains inability to keep up with reality. “Whoever you are,” I poke a finger at Zander, “You’ve weaseled your way into my dreams, without permission. How am I supposed to feel about that? And how am I supposed to swallow some line about time travel?”
“Forget about us for a minute. Forget about the lies we told you. Think about what you’ve seen and done. This is the future. Aren’t you even a little interested? Before you answer…” He holds up his hand and I
close my mouth again, the “no” I had on its way up doesn’t get to be vocalized. “... I want you to forget about everything that has happened. Imagine we’re meeting here for the first time and you’re certain every word coming out of my mouth is the truth.”
I’m tempted to explain why that isn’t possible.
“Please, try.” Zander is imploring me to make the effort. His hands are meshed together as if in prayer.
I express a dissatisfied grumble before considering what he has said.
“If, and that’s a big if, I believe all this and agree to come to the future, what happens to me, in my time?” I need this part crystal clear, not just ‘you’ll live a normal life’, without any further explanation.
“Back then, nothing will change, your life won’t change. It will proceed as it is supposed to. The memories you have of this place will be cemented in your personality here, but hopefully, without the link, it will mean that the memories you recall in your waking life, in the past, will effectively dissolve into your subconscious.”
“Hopefully?”
“You were never meant to have any recollections. All of this should have been nothing more than a dream. It appears to be an anomaly,” Zander say sarcastically. His gaze falls heavily on the man behind me. Turning around to look, I find the man has finished typing and is now leaning back on his chair, arms crossed, staring at his screen. He must feel Zander’s focus on him as he shifts uncomfortably in his seat. An anomaly would suggest I would be the only one to remember this place. But JT remembers as well. I think they’ve made a huge miscalculation—and the man behind the computer knows it.
“If you need me so badly, why didn’t you just do it—pull me through, or whatever it is you do to get my brain rewritten into the future?”
“For starters, it would be a huge waste of resources to bring you through if you didn’t want to be here. It also takes a while to configure the brain to get a clear cohesion between it and the one you have in the past. It has to be perfect, otherwise, we might lose pieces.”
I ignore the comment that makes my brain sound like a human jigsaw. “Why me? I’ve never done anything worth mentioning.”
“But you will, you have.”
It’s like being slapped across the face—hard, when you realize you exist alongside yourself.
“There are so many variables that went into your selection. For instance, to be able to find you in the past, we needed to have an exact time and date, to the second, where you were. Something to aim at. There are not many people who can do that twenty-something years on.”
“Mom’s death.” It was easy to work out what they’ve used to pinpoint me. I know that day is etched into my brain. I wouldn’t be able to forget it if I tried.
“After we got home from the hospital, I sat and watched the clock for so long, hoping that it would do something different.” The clock on our lounge wall had ticked away, it’s filigree hands slowly working their way around the face. I had watched it for hours before Eli told me to go to bed. A week after she had died I had taken the clock off the wall, taken it into the garage and beaten it with a hammer until it no longer resembled a clock. Doctor Abrams had suggested I’d projected a feeling of betrayal onto it for not reversing time or some such rubbish. All I know is I wanted to smash something and the ticking was starting to drive me nuts.
“Twenty-six years later you could still remember that day perfectly,” Zander tells me.
“It was only a few months ago for me and I can promise you there was nothing perfect about it.”
“I didn’t mean it like that. I sometimes forget where you are. It’s hard to think of you in the past when you’re right here.”
“None of that explains why you need me.” Oddly, the idea that this is the future is becoming more believable the longer this conversation lasts. I don’t know if it’s the conviction in Zander’s voice that’s selling me or how it neatly explains what they know about me.
“To help stop the deaths of thousands, maybe millions of innocent people.”
What do you say to something like that? My mouth is moving but nothing comes out. Zander is staring at me, no doubt waiting for me to speak.
“What the hell are you on about?” That’s the best I can do.
“There isn’t much I can tell you. I know that doesn’t help, but we can’t risk you trying to fix things in the past, or knowing more than you should. Consider for a moment, how many people are motivated by greed and power. They’re everywhere, leaders, business owners, and they are all people who shape society. In the future, that hasn’t changed.”
“You’re not selling this very well.”
“Okay. Put it this way, if you were the only person who could stop Hitler. Would you?”
“You want me to join a war?” Whatever this is, it’s escalating quickly.
“It’s not a war. That’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid. I wish I could tell you more, but you recall too much in your waking life. We don’t know the flow-on effect of misplaced knowledge. All I can tell you is that you believed in this very strongly.”
“You’ve met me—old me?”
“I have. Although she wouldn’t appreciate you calling her old. When I first arrived at the compound. She—you were very welcoming. It was the worst time of my life and you helped me through it.” He gives me a smile as if we share a secret. “I owe you a lot.”
“That wasn’t me.” Whoever he is talking about, we might have been at the same point in time once, but she’s not me. She has a lifetime of memories that make her who she is. “I’m the sucker you’ve spent hours with, I don’t even know how many, letting me believe that I was in a dream.”
“I know. I haven’t been honest with you. The lies were necessary. The truth so early on could have caused you to reject the connection and we needed it strengthened if we were to talk to you like we are now. Those first connections were very volatile.”
“When did you start plugging into my brain without permission?”
Zander hesitates. I wonder whether I’ve given consent in the future for all of this to happen. If I am such a believer in this cause, I’m guessing that I have. I’m starting to dislike future me.
“During the time you watched the clock, after your mother’s death, we made a preliminary link. We didn’t interact with you via your dreams until a few days later.”
“You gave me a mourning period. How very considerate,” I snark.
“I had nothing to do with you in the beginning. I hadn’t been assigned to oversee you. Hell, I wasn’t even part of the project. You’d been specifically given someone who had never been in the armed forces, to ease you in. A lady named Magda. She was gentle with you, tried to get you to talk about what you were going through, to help you out of your slump. It turned out to be a poor match. After three contact periods, you apparently decided you didn’t want to continue with her sessions. You managed to slip away from Magda without anyone knowing where you’d gone.”
“Sounds like they gave me a shrink. I already had one of those.”
“Hopefully, yours did better than the one we assigned.”
I snort in disgust but some of my anger slides away. Zander takes a seat next to me on the bed. He must consider me slightly more stable, to be in close proximity like this.
“When you came across me, I was out running the compound boundary for a bit of fresh air.” His eyes light up at the memory. “The compound was fully fenced, so you weren’t going to get out as easily as you thought. You ran up to me and you straight-out asked for the directions to the nearest exit. I thought you were going to rip my head off. You were fuming. I was tempted to tell you where the gate was, to get you out of my face. But I’d never seen you before and anyone on the base would know how to get in and out, so I was curious.”
“You didn’t recognize me? Have I changed that much?” Wondering what you look like twenty-six years into the future is a strange thing. My face should be the same, maybe some wrinkles and gr
ay hairs but, I would’ve thought, still distinguishable. Zander skips the question. Perhaps he doesn’t know future me that well after all.
“I asked you to join me for a drink,” Zander says instead. “You finally agreed, after a lot of persuasion, and only then if I promised not to talk. We couldn’t get a drink, the bar was closed, but we did spend a couple of hours playing cards. You probably said ten words the whole time.”
Sounds like me. I was so sick of sharing my feelings back then. Everyone wanted me to. You could always tell when someone was trying, the conversation would become calculated and false. They all tried, family, friends, workmates. It was as if they thought if they could unlock me it made them special, like there was a prize or a bounty on breaking me open.
“I don’t remember playing cards.”
“The longer you’re connected to our system, the more you can recall. Anyway, the next time you came here, you asked for me specifically. I didn’t want the job, I was dealing with my own stuff, but they talked me into it. They had an introductory plan all worked out that they believed was the best way for you to integrate into the system. That was the one rule I had to abide by. If I was to remain your liaison I had to stick to the plan.”
“And lying to me was part of the plan?”
“Not exactly. Whatever your mind decided this place was, I had to go along with it. You chose dreaming. They said it was easier for your brain to process if you thought of it that way.”
“So, to you, it was a role you played? To get me to stick around longer so I’d integrate? Enjoyed that, did you?”
Zander glances at me and snorts. “You know what—you were bloody unpleasant to be around to start with. I had to accompany you the entire time you were hooked in, without exception. Do you know how hard that was when you just wanted to be alone?”
“Why didn’t you palm me off to someone else?”
“Perhaps I should’ve, it might have worked out better for you, who knows? Instead, I chose not to engage with you, since that’s what you wanted.”