Faith in eventually getting his hands on such capabilities kept Orion going, faith that he might open new avenues to deescalate Sharebox’s influence in society’s deterioration, faith that the dystopia that inevitably always took root in all his lifetimes might still be preventable.
But when Orion’s seventh life dawned, he awoke feeling bleary-eyed and more exhausted than ever, knowing that he could not continue to live all his lives so hopelessly alone, sharing his secrets with no one but Diana.
That’s when Orion got the idea to try again with Charlotte. It had been five lifetimes ago, after all. Sure, he could never try to have a kid again with her. Losing James was too painful. But she was the only woman he ever loved, and why not use the power to live forever to go back and fix his love life? Lack of honesty had sabotaged their marriage before, but he would tell her this time—tell her about everything.
So Orion started that seventh life following some of the same patterns. He connected with a group of resistance activists in San Francisco. He found the same yellow plane he sought out in every life and repaired its engine. Then he flew to Africa to find Charlotte, armed with the confidence of six lifetimes of learned charisma and the intimate knowledge of his former spouse.
He wanted to win her trust and love first, just as he had done before, and tell her the truth when the time was right. Surely there was no better way to spend his time while Diana crunched through her steady onslaught of a quadrillion pokes and probes into Sharebox security, getting closer with each iteration thanks to Orion improving her attack strategies. There was no telling how many more lifetimes it would take, but Orion, at least, could still fight for his own personal happy ending, couldn’t he?
All of this, his entire story, he laid out for Charlotte Boone as the sunlight began creeping into the cracks of their clay hut that morning. Or at least, Orion hit the key details. His seven lifetimes contained enough stories to take many nights to share. But nothing had gone according to his plan. He hadn’t wanted to tell her like this, she still didn’t trust him yet. But his options had run dry.
Charlotte’s face betrayed little emotion for much of the tale. Her eyebrow was raised throughout his explanation of the transmission relay, and the blood seemed to drain from her face as he spoke of their marriage and of James in his second life. But whether this was because she thought Orion a maniac or—quite justifiably—found the story unsettling, he could not guess. And when he stopped talking, she asked him only to confirm his story was done, then she rose from the bed, slipped on her clothes, and exited the hut without a word.
Now
The headmaster, Imani, laid out porridge in the cafeteria for Charlotte and Orion’s breakfast. The kids filled the room with chatter and laughter, but by the time Charlotte arrived, they were already bustling off to the first class of the day.
“Will you be leaving us today?” asked Imani.
“Yes,” replied Charlotte, as Orion walked into the room. “We need to get back to Malawi.”
“I thought you were heading on to Zanzibar?”
“No,” Charlotte said quickly, working to not meet Orion’s eyes. “I think we should be getting back.”
“Well, before you go, you should take a stroll this morning on the southward trail. There’s a five-minute walk to a beautiful waterfall and pool that the kids play and bring guests to. It’s worth a look.”
“That sounds lovely,” said Orion with a breathless smile, taking a seat across from Charlotte. “I’d love to do that.”
Charlotte’s brow furrowed in annoyance, but then she shrugged.
“Fine,” she said.
Imani smiled at them and departed for her class.
“Charlotte—” Orion began.
“If you force me to tell you what I think right now, I will tell you I think you’re a lunatic, and I’m not sure I even want to get in a plane with you. Just let me think in peace,” she snapped through gritted teeth.
Charlotte always had trust issues. Her parents gave her that. Her father was absent for most of her upbringing, and her mother was overbearing, coercive and, on several occasions, verbally abusive, particularly when she drank. Then Charlotte’s budding career in Hollywood forced her to think like a shark, to go beyond the passive role of an actress and take great care to keep a close rein on her agent, publicist and manager. In fact, she did most of those jobs herself.
No one else would do it right, she would tell herself. Everybody would inevitably let her down, she was quite certain of it.
She got a reputation as one of the most tenacious and hardest working young actresses in Hollywood. After her breakout performance in Ruins of Eden, she crafted a careful public persona. Whenever a new liberal cause was reverberating in Hollywood and her friends sought her public support, she refused to be coaxed into making any statement that could compromise her neutral, all-things-to-all-people image. She had worked too hard for that.
Now this story about transmitters and time travel—she didn’t take leaps on nonsense like that either.
Charlotte liked Orion. She hadn’t impulsively slept with anyone before. She rarely did anything impulsive at all. But after their time in bed that morning, last night already seemed like a mistake.
He knew things she couldn’t explain, sure. Throughout his story there were peppered proofs attesting to the veracity of his impossible life: the hidden facts about Charlotte and her family she had never told anyone. A bike accident she had when she was six. The donation to the Malawi conservation fund she made once she found out the timber in the ranch house came from Muljane trees.
The name “Michael Jacobs” was listed on some paperwork he had matching a high-level employee who left Sharebox shortly after the Diana crisis unfolded.
He knew intimate details about the work of Catalina Fernandez and appeared to have a personal copy of Diana rigged to a personal speaker. Thugs were apparently chasing him down for it.
Looking at the facts and appraising them at face value, she did admit something strange was happening. He was either a crazed lunatic, an extraordinarily clever liar seeking to manipulate her, or he was telling the truth. There was no middle ground.
More pressing was that somehow the story felt true. It explained the uncanny connection she often felt around him.
But accepting that kind of science fiction as true made her indignant. Already she had been forced to watch the country she grew up in, a place she perceived as safe and predictable, melt down into a tinpot dictatorship. Already she had watched the meticulous life trajectory she had designed for herself in Hollywood—a fulfilling career in acting and (eventually) producing, a husband and children perhaps in her early thirties—get pulled out from underneath her. She was exhausted from the lack of psychological safety, of being handed a life that was changing the rules on her faster than she could master them.
And here Orion was saying these were still the good times, saying that things were all going to get a lot worse, starting soon. Here was a man she just slept with suggesting that, by a ludicrous twist of cosmic fate, he alone was responsible for trying to save the human race from itself.
As for the parts of the story about their previous marriage and their son, well, she couldn’t even consider that just now.
After breakfast, they walked off on a small trail leading to an intimate swimming hole. Charlotte led the way with Orion pacing behind her. The path was encroached upon by thick green fronds, and sunlight darted through sparing gaps in the canopy above. The trees were alive with the chittering of birds. They heard the waterfall before they saw it. The water rushed out of a cleft in a twenty-foot rock wall. The children had made a rough path up the side where they would jump from the top into the pool.
They stopped there, Orion eyeing Charlotte frequently but saying nothing.
“Can you prove that your Diana computer thing can record your thoughts?” she asked abruptly. “C
an I see what that looks like on a computer?”
Orion shook his head, looking crestfallen.
“She’s not done with it yet. It always takes several years for her to complete that. She has to spend a lot of time analyzing my chip to put it together. My stream of neural activity actually teaches her how to do it while we’re in proximity, but it’s slow work.”
Charlotte said nothing in response but gazed at the fall-ing water.
“I’ll show you Diana though. She’s really great, and her personality always gets spunkier and more independent as she gets older.”
“Where is she now?’
“I have a compartment in the plane. It’s hard to find. She’s getting real close now to undermining Sharebox. I think that’s why they’re trying to find me all of a sudden. It could change things if she is successful. Maybe not in this life. Maybe it’s too late for this life. All the wheels are already in motion since the president died. The train has left the station. But in the next life, her hacking might be good enough to change things before they’re too far gone.”
“To change what things?”
“To prove some other bad actors might be responsible for what happened to the smoothie maker that drove everybody insane. Or maybe just to shut Sharebox down altogether before it turns everyone against one another.”
“And you’re just going to repeat your life over and over until you get it right?”
“It looks that way.” He shrugged.
This is absurd, she thought. Why was she even entertaining this conversation? And even if it were true, his story made her feel like she was just a pawn in his time travel expeditions.
“And I’m the way you want to spend your time in between your lives? Am I your consolation prize? Your diversion while you wait?”
Orion’s jaw moved wordlessly before he could respond.
“I’ve tried other lives. I’ve worked as a pilot, a schoolteacher, an activist. I’ve lived all over the world. I’ve been to every country save six, and I still plan to get them all. It was fun, at times. You see, I don’t have any bucket list items anymore. I’ve completed several lifetimes of them. I’ve climbed El Capitan, I’ve boxed competitively, I’ve found literally the best sushi ever made in a small town outside Kyoto. I’m the only person who can say all that. I wanted to come back here to Malawi because I can tell you what no other lover could ever tell you: I know there is no better life than one with you. It’s a fact for me. I tried. I’ve lived those other lives. I let you slip away once, and ever since then, I have tried to stay away, but it didn’t work. If I have to live on this earth a thousand more times, I want them all to be with you. And I would do anything to be worthy of that.”
Charlotte’s face softened, and she studied his face intently for a time. His brown eyes were earnest and fierce, his fingers clenched.
No, he was not a liar.
Then they both looked into the pool and let his words hang between them. She wouldn’t kiss him. No. Maybe that’s what the moment seemed to call for. But that wasn’t her. Some instinct in her stomach nearly compelled her to reach out for his hand, but she mastered it.
This wasn’t a love story, after all. Even if Orion’s tale was true, all it meant was that he felt connected to her, but she didn’t reciprocate that gravity of romance. That was a different life, a different couple. She was not his Charlie here. The beginning of relationships often hinged on small moments of spontaneity and discovery. Who was to say they could replicate that now? He was just a fling to her, and she was not moved by a notion that destiny demanded she give him more than that.
“Let’s go back,” she said. And she turned and walked off back down the trail to the orphanage.
When they arrived at their clay hut, they found their bedroom ransacked. Their sheets were on the floor, and their mattress was flipped against a wall. The drawers of the groundskeeper who lived there were pulled out and lying in disheveled heaps on the ground.
As Orion and Charlotte went to look for Imani, they found her standing in front of the firepit, a knife pressed to her throat. A slender man dressed in black was standing behind her. His head was shaved but for a wave of brown hair adorning the top. He was pale and sweating, but as he looked between Orion and Charlotte, he grinned triumphantly. It was the man from the parking garage roof.
“Good to see you again, Mister Michael Jacobs,” he called out. “Or is just Mike? Or Orion? You seem like a complica-ted man.”
Orion took a step forward, but the man put his free hand out to halt him.
“Ah, you stay right there this time. I won’t hesitate like I did last time,” he sneered, pressing his knife closer to Imani’s throat. “Besides, look around you. I have two more armed men this time, and they won’t hesitate this time either.”
Charlotte saw a square-faced man crouched in the brush at the edge of the compound pointing a rifle at Orion. Another armed man, with greasy hair and eyes set too closely together on his face, was on the opposite side.
“Did you find whatever you were looking for?” Orion asked with a smirk, motioning to the mess in the hut.
“Not quite. You cover your tracks pretty well. But as clever as you are, you didn’t find the homing beacon we placed on your plane. Now, at least, I have you to collect.”
“You have no legal power to extradite American citizens.” Orion looked towards the pressed faces of two dozen students peering out through a classroom window. Imani’s face was remarkably impassive, though Charlotte could see her free hand was trembling. “You also don’t have the power to terrorize citizens in their own country, Arlo Zimmer.”
The man blinked several times upon hearing his own name and his thin grin vanished briefly, but he regained himself, and his smile unfurled even wider.
“How did you recognize me?”
“You Zimmers all smell the same to me. And you Nazis don’t have very discrete tastes in fashion either.”
Arlo laughed.
“Well, we don’t like to call ourselves that. And you can’t choose your family,” he said with a shrug.
“Uncle Devon needed a lapdog to do his dirty work, I guess?”
“Yes, the work of looking for traitorous scum like you. And you’ve been very busy. We’re not sure how you’re doing what you’re doing, but you’ve assaulted our intellectual property. You’re now under the jurisdiction of the Sharesquare Industries Security Team, and we’ll want to know the details of how you’re running this hacking operation, you see. And if you’re not feeling cooperative, well, we have means of extracting that kind of information.”
“You’re going to try to publicly arrest me? Under what authority?”
Arlo took the knife from Imani’s throat and waved it around the compound.
“Take a look around the world you live in. Authority? What goddamn authority?” He laughed. “You think the American Consulate is going to care that a group of bush babies said they saw a white man get arrested by another white man? Do you think there is anyone left in America who will care that a couple security officers from the country’s most beloved social media company arrested some bitter ex-employee who was trying to ruin their national pastime? There are no adults here. There’s no one who cares. This is the world we live in.”
“They might care if Charlotte Boone holds a press conference about it,” said Charlotte, stepping up to stand beside Orion.
Arlo rolled his eyes, but the grin stayed inextricably plastered to his face. It was an unnerving gesture.
“Do you really want to come out to the world as some slut sleeping with a washed-up corporate saboteur? That’s your big comeback idea? Don’t make me laugh, Miss Boone. You cannot beat Sharesquare. They love us more than they ever loved you. I’ll make sure your reputation gets dragged through a hole even deeper than the one you’ve already dug for yourself for this.”
Arlo shot a glance t
o his armed compatriots.
“I’m tired of talking. Michael Jacobs is resisting arrest. Shoot him in his legs and let’s go.”
Dual gunshots rang out over the still air. Orion gasped and collapsed to the ground while Charlotte stumbled backwards and fell on her hands. The square-faced man ran to Orion and twisted his arms behind his back to wrap plastic flex cuffs around his wrists. Then a handkerchief was tied around Orion’s mouth while the greasy-haired assailant injected a syringe of clear fluid into Orion’s arm. Orion struggled for only a moment longer before his body went limp.
“Have you lost your minds?” shouted Charlotte, and she made to charge for the square-faced man. But he was at least seventy pounds her better, and he pushed her back to the ground with an open palm.
Arlo released Imani, who bolted back into the compound to reunite with the children, and he sheathed his knife.
“We’ll get out of your business for now,” he said, walking over to Charlotte and running his fingers through her auburn hair. She slapped his hand away and shuddered out of his reach.
“I always wanted to touch that hair,” he said, putting his fingers to his nose. “Smells like strawberries. What a waste you’ve become. You, the famous Miss Boone. Just another dumb celebrity not smart enough to sense that the winds have changed.”
The three men loaded Orion’s body onto a stretcher. They tied his bleeding leg up with a loose white shirt, already soaked through with blood. The other shot intended for his leg appeared to have missed.
She wanted to shout at him to wake up, to scream at him. Her heart pounded in her chest, her knees incapable of supporting her off the ground. The words were lost in her throat, and a feeling of helplessness crashed on her so heavily that the air felt squeezed from her lungs.
“We’re sorry for the hassle, everyone,” Arlo called out with mock courtesy to the faces of the students in the classroom windows. He took a short bow, and his two men began carrying the stretcher up the trail to the plateau.
The Echo Chamber Page 15