Jonathan frowned as he turned back to Hayden and Collin. The three had been sitting in the living room when their conversation had come to an awkward stop. Paige had walked in, politely greeted everyone but Jonathan, then brushed past him on her way to her room.
“What did I do?” Jonathan asked. “I’ve hardly seen her the last few days.” When neither of his roommates immediately offered an explanation, he was forced to probe. “Collin, you two have been hanging out a lot,” Jonathan said. “She didn’t say anything?”
Collin grimaced slightly and turned his palms up. “Honestly, when I noticed that mentioning your name was followed by silence,” Collin said, “I stopped mentioning your name.”
“Great,” Jonathan said. “Thanks for the heads up.”
Collin shrugged apologetically. Meanwhile, Jonathan noticed that Hayden seemed to be trying a little too hard not to look at him. It wouldn’t have been telling, except the film they had been watching had been paused since Paige came home and now Hayden seemed unwilling to break eye contact with the still image on the screen.
“Hayden?” Jonathan asked.
The bearded man’s eyebrows lifted but he didn’t turn to look at Jonathan. Finally, the silence drew out as Jonathan patiently stared at him and Hayden’s face paled.
“Okay, I don’t actually know,” he said. “But she looked upset a few days ago, like she might have been crying. I asked her about it, but I think I just embarrassed her. She said it was nothing, went to her room, and closed the door.”
Jonathan tongued the side of his teeth while he thought. “Maybe I should go talk….” He trailed off as he saw both roommates shaking their heads, their faces pinched into sardonic lemon-faced smiles.
“Tibbs, I find that having to ask what it is you’re sorry about before apologizing has about a fifty-fifty chance of making things worse,” Collin said. “I’d figure it out first.”
Jonathan thought it over a bit longer before he nodded. “You’re probably right.”
With that behind them, Hayden unpaused the film, James Cameron’s The Terminator, and the three continued watching. For a while, Jonathan failed to pay much attention, preoccupied with trying to remember the last time he’d spoken to Paige but coming up empty.
Maybe something to do with Lincoln? he wondered.
Paige had asked him to have his personal trainer over, and he’d eventually done so. The trainer had hit it off better with his roommates than with Paige, but the two had met up together at least once afterward. That had seemed to be the end of it, neither mentioning anything about the date to him. Jonathan figured it simply hadn’t gone anywhere. He didn’t see how that could turn around and get Paige mad at him, but he was grasping at straws.
“I didn’t build the fucking thing,” said Michael Biehn, the actor playing the part of Sergeant Kyle Reese.
“And pause,” Collin said, pointing at the screen. “You see, there it is—so quick you hardly notice. They try to hide it in plain sight.”
“Hide what?” Jonathan asked.
Before Collin could answer for himself, Hayden chimed in with a loud sigh. “Every story with time travel has some lame concession to make the plot work,” Hayden said. “Collin here thinks it’s the dirty secret of all time travel movies. At some point, the story throws up its hands and says ‘because that’s how it works.’”
“You don’t agree?” Jonathan asked.
Hayden shrugged. “In the case of the Terminator movies,” Hayden said, “yeah, there are logic gaps you could drive a semi through. Doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done. Stories like Terminator struggle because most of their logic concessions are really excuses for better action scenes.”
Jonathan rubbed at his forehead with his index finger. Sadly, his roommates’ overzealous consumption of science fiction actually made them the best authorities on time travel he had. “What… paradox?” Jonathan guessed. In the past, whenever his roommates were upset with time travel logic, they indefinitely brought up time paradox.
Hayden chuckled. “We haven’t even gotten to that yet,” he said. “Take this scene: the police ask the time traveler, sent back to save Sarah Conner from a killer cyborg, why he hasn’t brought any weapons from the future along to help protect her.”
“Yeah,” Jonathan replied. “I’ve seen the movie.”
“Well, what does he say?” Hayden asked rhetorically. “‘Only living tissue can go.’ Makes no sense. I mean if you can send a robot with skin surrounding it back in time, why not wrap a plasma gun in a skin bag and take it along with you?”
“Ahh,” Jonathan nodded. “Because that would be a boring movie.”
“Hence the logic starts to unravel, and you have to tell your brain to butt out if you want to enjoy the movie,” Collin said. “When the rules are examined, the story has to admit it makes no sense, which is when lines like ‘I didn’t build the fucking thing’ rear their ugly head.”
Jonathan nodded his agreement, though he was really thinking that he wished he could bring these two along as consultants whenever Heyer showed up. Though the movie’s dialog was vulgar, it was almost precisely how the damn alien had replied when Jonathan asked him anything specific about how the device implanted in his chest worked.
“But back to what you said, ‘paradox’,” Hayden continued. “Say you send a machine back in time to kill someone. Okay, fine, but if the assassination is a success, then the future changes. So, when time catches up to the point you’d have hatched this master plan of yours, lo and behold, Sarah Connor was never around to motivate you to kill her in the first place.”
“Is this supposed to hurt my head?” Jonathan asked. “Because it’s working.”
Hayden sighed.
“There wouldn’t be a Sarah Conner to send a terminator back to kill,” Collin said. “So you wouldn’t send a terminator, so it wouldn’t have happened, so she would have never died. Now, if she didn’t die, then you do have a reason to send the terminator after her. Paradox. No matter how you try to kill her with time travel, it doesn’t work.”
“Right,” Jonathan said. “So there is no point in going back in time to change the future, because you’d inevitably get rid of your reason for going in the first place.”
Both roommates nodded.
Cautiously, Jonathan thought out a question for them to consider. “What about when you have a situation more like Groundhog Day?” Jonathan asked.
When he got empty expressions as a reply, he elaborated.
“Where one guy keeps experiencing certain portions of time twice. He goes through one version of events, but then gets sent back to the start, and experiences a completely different version.”
Hayden’s eyes twinkled before he grinned. “Tibbs, I honestly didn’t think you had enough nerd in your lineage to ask such a question.”
Jonathan shrugged. “I liked Groundhog Day.”
There was not much of a safety concern getting his roommates’ thoughts on the matter. Hayden loved having his expertise called on to answer questions that most would have thought of as mere mental masturbation. He enjoyed being the authority far too much to overthink Jonathan’s sudden interest.
“So,” Hayden said. “What exactly are you asking?
“If the first experiences on the first pass never actually occurred, how would it be possible that Bill Murray would remember what happened before starting his second pass?” Jonathan said. “I mean, if the first timeline no longer happened, how could he retain it?”
Hayden pondered this for a moment. “Technically, the movie wasn’t really about time travel, but something more like alternative realities with a peculiar footnote of time travel. The logic would be, uh… squishier… and consistency would depend on the rules. Honestly, though, I never thought about it. Groundhog Day is a comedy. They didn’t have to bother giving an explanation outside of ‘because magic.’”
Knowing how to get what he wanted out of Hayden was a subtle art, so Jonathan smiled patiently.
�
��Okay,” Jonathan said. “Let’s say the movie had been legitimate science fiction, with logical rules. Bill Murray keeps his memories from all his different experiences of the timeline, but everyone else only experiences one final version. Any alternate reality that only Bill remembers ceases to be when he goes back to the beginning.”
“The question is kind of a case in point with what Collin was saying,” Hayden said. “Why would the alternate reality cease to exist? What happens to this alternate reality so that only Bill and his memories are immune to its disappearing? You’re already making unexplained concessions.”
Jonathan fell into thought. It wasn’t that he didn’t understand what his roommate was getting at, but Hayden had unintentionally boxed him into a corner. Jonathan knew this was the rule, or at least, he thought he did. Unfortunately, Heyer had never explained why, an excuse Jonathan couldn’t feasibly bring up.
“Okay, so for the sake of discussion, can we assume there is a logical explanation? How would it be that everyone in the world experienced one reality,” Jonathan asked, “but Bill had memories from another?”
Hayden’s expression was growing slightly irritated. “I don’t know, Tibbs,” he said. “Let me write an email to Stephen Hawking and get his take on it.”
“Ahhh, sarcasm…” Collin said, nodding, his grin becoming the very definition of shit-eating. “Has the student stumped the professor?”
“No one said that,” Hayden replied. “Coming up with some explanation isn’t all that hard, but Jonathan said it had to be logical.”
Collin smiled. “Oh, my apologies, Jonathan. I jumped to conclusions. Apparently, he will be relying on semantics instead of sarcasm,” Collin said. “The lawyer’s escape route, then. I suspect that the defense will require a brief recess to review the case?”
Hayden chuckled. “Yeah,” he replied. “Ass-face.”
“Careful, Councilor,” Collin said. “Insults will land you in contempt.”
“My apologies,” Hayden said. “I meant to say Your Honorable Ass-face.”
CHAPTER FIVE
FRIDAY | OCTOBER 7, 2005 | 4:00 PM | SEATTLE
HE WAITED NEAR the opening of an alley, crouched in a corner between a wall and a dumpster. When folks on the sidewalk passed close enough to notice him, they faked polite smiles and held their noses.
Grant was young, healthy, and muscled. These things made the crazy homeless man costume he wore a challenge to pull off. He had on plastic sunglasses that may have been fashionable in the early nineties. His dirty blond hair was long enough to be hanging down from the sides of his baseball cap. He’d grown a month and a half of unkempt beard, and the rest of his face looked as if he’d washed it with gutter water. The layers of clothing on him grew exceedingly humbler the further away he’d placed them from his skin. A long, brown tweed coat that looked as if it had been used as a hand towel after an oil change hung off him. It all came together to make him invisible beside the dumpster.
From time to time, he took casual glances across the street. There was a car parked along the sidewalk next to his building. Two men sat inside, watching the entrance, waiting to follow when Grant left the building. Getting in and out of his downtown flat had been the first obstacle. It had taken patience and a perpetual changing of his routines. Regardless, it was a necessity, as he couldn’t see enough of what he was dealing with from inside. Today had been informative—these two in the car were new.
By his count, that brought the tally of men he’d seen assigned to him up to eight. It was flattering, the amount of resources Olivia used to keep tabs on him. These two would rotate out soon, replaced with some of her other peons, ready to follow should they see him exit the building. Nowadays, they only caught Grant leaving when he wanted them to know. These two were growing tired. They hadn’t noticed when he’d slipped out hours ago, but in their defense, he hadn’t used the entrance.
Grant watched as the peon in the passenger seat answered a cell phone. The call was brief, and when the man put the phone away, he nodded to his partner. The two stepped out of the vehicle and began walking down the street, their eyes still focused on the front entrance to his building. Grant rose then, walking across the street himself and into a small restaurant at the corner.
Quickly, he removed the tattered coat before the management’s attention was drawn to a dirty vagrant entering his establishment. Beneath the coat, Grant wore nondescript clothing, his appearance suddenly altered from that of a homeless man to merely a grungy one. He stuffed the coat into the backpack he’d hid beneath, removed his sunglasses and hat, and pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt.
When he’d first tried this, he was amazed how easily he’d managed to slip past the team watching him. Most of the trick to it was a matter of keeping Olivia’s people convinced he’d never left the building. It helped that she’d always seen him as simple. She had never imagined he might have the wherewithal to slip past a highly-trained surveillance team.
But we all get sleepy eventually, don’t we, Princess? He thought.
Still, their underestimation of him alone hadn’t been enough. He’d been careful picking his environment. After all, they’d given him the money to afford whatever he needed.
Grant sat down at a table in the back. There wasn’t any hurry, and he was hungry, so he ordered food and ate. He paid his bill in cash, then walked past the counter where, down a hallway and behind the kitchen, the restaurant provided restrooms. The woman who ran the register never said anything, as long as he’d paid for his food.
He kept walking past the restrooms, turned the corner, and made his way down a set of steps leading to a storage area. Awhile back, he’d found that the restaurant had a basement for shared storage connected to his own building. As far as he could tell, Olivia’s peons hadn’t become aware, and so, their eyes remained focused on the wrong entrance. He always took the stairs up to his loft on the ninth floor. When he reached the seventh floor of the stairwell, he removed what remained of his excess clothing and put each item into the backpack before stashing the bag in a maintenance closet. Then he continued up the last two flights.
It all might be overkill—it hadn’t been lost on him that Olivia might very well be watching every move he was making and letting him go about it to lull him into a false sense of security. There were degrees of paranoia he had to accept. Thing was, even if that were true, he had called her bluff. Grant had come plenty close to Jonathan and his roommates since she had forbidden him. So close there were times he could have reached out and touched them. Olivia had either not been aware or done nothing about it. This meant that, the day he made his move, Princess might show up knowing everything, but she would also know he had not been afraid to defy her either.
When he stepped inside his flat, Grant started looking for signs of disturbance, anything that would tell him that they had known he left and used the opportunity to enter his home. It had taken him a while to realize that it was a matter of surplus attention to detail that would eventually give him his edge. They had practically explained to him that he would be watched, then slapped a pile of money into his hands and told him to get lost. Again, their first mistake had been funding him.
His loft had been step one. There was no way that Grant, who currently worked a part-time job as a parking lot attendant, could afford to live on the ninth floor of a new building in the middle of downtown if his bank account had not been padded by the recent payoff. When he had decided to move into the city, he’d gone looking for just such a building. The lofts were bare open spaces, meant to be decorated by their owners. He hadn’t bothered adding pleasantries, and as a result, his home had the feeling of living in three interconnected cement rooms. This had been key. It didn’t make it impossible for her team to bug his house with cameras and listening devices, but forced them to get creative if they actually wanted to hide them from him.
From the doorway, the largest of the rooms was connected to the kitchen in an open floor plan. The room was furnished wit
h a wooden bench, two large flat screen TVs, a desk with two computers, a police scanner, and a weight bench. The TVs were both set to various news networks. One of the computers was attached to an internet line, the other completely removed from any external sources. He’d done away with plush furnishing; too many places to hide their devices in the fabric and cushions.
There was a cement room that made up his bathroom, and the third was a bedroom. His bed was the one luxury. He needed it, because he had to have a place to take the girls. No matter how cheap a prostitute she was, he didn’t want to be crawling around on cement floors while he relieved himself. At first, he thought that sheets, pillows, a mattress, and a bed frame would be a perpetual nuisance. Nothing more than things he would have to reexamine every time he came and went to make sure that a new bug had not been planted. Then he changed his thinking.
He had a drawer full of The Cell’s crap that he’d taken a hammer to since moving in. Small wireless microphones found sown into the mattress, GPS trackers in his bags and clothing, cameras in the ventilation, motion detectors in his hallway. When he’d first managed to give his tails the slip through a complicated series of clothing changes and overpopulated areas, he bought new clothes, leaving the trackers they’d hid on him in the back of a truck that was in line for a ferry crossing over The Puget Sound. He got a cheap chuckle imagining all the time and energy he had managed to waste of those keeping tabs on him, but never let it go to his head. He’d seen the extent Olivia had gone to watch Jonathan and he wasn’t about to believe the woman had shown him all their tricks.
He’d used that first opportunity to slip off and purchase equipment, the kind of devices owned most often by extremely paranoid hobbyists. Radio frequency and camera lens detectors. Not as hard to come by as he’d imagined. There were local businesses completely devoted to this type of equipment, usually attached to the same places that sold firearms.
He used these things, but never let himself get too comfortable. He doubted that the U.S. government couldn’t develop something that simple store-bought gear wouldn’t be able to find. In the end, he went over every inch of his place looking for anything they could slip in. When he wasn’t able to find anything new each day, he’d started to get more confident that he was giving her peons the slip.
The Never Paradox (Chronicles Of Jonathan Tibbs Book 2) Page 4