Lilah took him by the hand, led him into his cubicle, and seated him in a chair. She positioned another chair so she sat facing him.
He’d been with enough women to recognize “the talk” while it was still incoming—a discussion of intentions or ground rules or some other heavy topic that too-often derailed any hope of sex.
Leaning forward in the chair, she rubbed her hands together in a nervous fashion as she composed her thoughts.
He waited. Now wasn’t the time to be flippant or clever.
“There are so many layers to this,” she began. “I’m going to mess it up, but please bear with me. So, I think it’s obvious how much I like you. I hope it is, anyway. And I admit that I’m attracted to your brothers.”
His mouth got the better of him. “You seem pretty flirty with them.”
She smiled. “Here’s the thing. When I flirt with them, I feel safe, emotionally that is, because they are leaving to be with their own lovers. I can be bold and silly with a real version of you without consequences. That makes it fun. But you don’t go away and you don’t have someone else waiting for you, so I’m much more cautious about how silly and flirty I am with you.”
Diesel had a thousand things he wanted to say but remained silent.
“So that’s one layer. Another one, the one messing with my mind more than anything right now, is my possible death in the next fifteen years. I don’t expect to live forever, but that seems really close.”
“It doesn’t have to happen,” said Diesel. “I’ll dedicate all my efforts to ensuring your safety.”
“What makes more sense to me is that I go away. If someone is doing something that leads to premature death—drugs, smoking, whatever—the accepted solution is to not do that thing anymore. If staying here causes me to die, then the obvious solution is not to stay.”
“No.” The vehemence in his voice reflected the personal distress her idea created. “I’ll follow you. You’re more important to me than this.” He gestured at the T-box.
“You’ve only known me for a few days, so cut the drama. And this is your destiny. You can’t just walk away from it.”
He stood and paced, anxious for a way to keep her with him. “Can we talk this through before you commit to any decision?” He didn’t wait for her to respond. “When a woman gets too serious too fast, I walk away feeling like I’ve dodged a bullet. But when you opened the front door that first day, it’s like your existence filled this void inside me. A switch flipped and I had this immediate connection with you.”
“That’s what Forty said happened to him.”
“It’s crazy for me to be confessing such a thing to you, but I do it because the affection you have for my brothers confirms that you’re already invested yourself.”
“I didn’t hear a solution.”
“First off, we have years to figure this out. The worst-case scenario is a decade out. Let’s spend a few years here building some serious wealth. Why leave today with a pittance, when in a few years we can go with twenty million squirreled away? With that kind of wealth, we can go anywhere in the world and enjoy our time together.”
“That doesn’t happen in the other timelines, so temporal constancy says it won’t happen to us, either.”
He’d known that was a weakness in his argument and hoped he could sneak it past her. Then he saw it. “Your leaving now doesn’t match the other timelines, either.”
He stopped pacing. “Bumping time means disrupting things enough that it breaks the temporal constancy, at least a little bit. Twenty-Six told me I was to figure out how to bump time because the oldest Diesel is disappearing at earlier ages. But screw that. I’m going to learn how to bump it so you and I grow old together.”
“Do you even know if it’s possible?”
He shrugged. “This place is called Bump Analytics for a reason. I’m sure the brothers can help. And as Ciopova advances, she can help, too.”
Something bothered him and he decided to say it aloud. “If the choices are to bump so I get an extra year or two when I’m sixty, or to bump so you get a few extra decades, the choice is obvious. I’m lost if the brothers reached a different conclusion.”
18. Twenty-Five and five days
Lilah descended the stairs feeling better about her situation, enough so that she looked forward to a day in Boston. She met Justus and Diesel on Bump’s main level, and they exited the unit together.
“I finally get to drive someplace more than ten minutes away,” said Diesel as they approached his car. “Lilah, why don’t you join me up front?”
“You can see better up there,” added Justus.
“You guys are kind, but the passenger seat means paying attention. It will be more relaxing in the back.”
Neither argued with her. Instead, Justus climbed in front with Diesel and assumed copilot duties for their journey.
They’d waited until midmorning to avoid rush-hour traffic, but it still took them over an hour to travel from Worcester into downtown Boston.
Lilah went for a walk while Diesel and Justus cashed the winning ticket and deposited the funds in the bank. In that time, she hiked the perimeter of Boston Common and through the public gardens, then over to the Faneuil Hall marketplace for window-shopping. Tired and hungry, she cheered when Diesel finally called to announce the completion of their mission.
They ended up at a waterfront seafood restaurant for lunch. “I’m famished,” she said, studying the menu.
Diesel and Justus dominated the conversation at the beginning, with Diesel quizzing Justus on the nuances of digital currency and offshore banking. Lilah was happy to listen with one ear while she focused on eating her salad, anxious to get her blood sugar stabilized.
There was a lull when the main meal arrived. That’s when Lilah asked Justus, “Why haven’t you asked for more details about the brothers? For an investigator, your acceptance of the unusual fascinates me.”
Justus had just taken a bite and sat back to chew before answering. “I can go into a place of business, run a quick review, and from that visit predict pretty accurately if what’s going on there is legal or illegal, if their practices hurt people, or if they threaten society at large.”
She waited while he took another bite. “I don’t know how my brain figures it out, but it does. And none of my alarms are going off over the things I’ve seen at Bump Analytics.”
“That’s good to know,” said Lilah.
“I’ve been vocal from the start about not tolerating illegal activity. The fact that you keep me employed supports my conclusion that the business is aboveboard. That means I can work there with a clear conscience, even if I can’t explain everything that’s happening.”
“Yet you haven’t asked.”
“Okay, how is it possible for a machine to predict the future so accurately that you’re willing to invest everything on the predictions, trade after trade? Your strategy has no hedging. You bet everything every time.”
Diesel sat forward. “It turns out that the designer of the universe made everything from a surprisingly small number of patterns—the normal distribution, the golden ratio, fractals. Predicting the future, at least for very pattern-oriented activities like the financial markets, becomes a matter of matching known shapes to actual events, then extrapolating them to divine the future.”
“Eloquent,” said Justus.
Lilah thought so too, and nodded.
“But it’s junk science,” said Justus. “I do believe many things follow a predictable pattern, but life has billions of patterns interacting with each other at any given moment. When you put it at that scale, with so many interactions interacting with other interactions, you get chaos. That means it’s unpredictable.”
“To you and me it may seem that way, but software loaded on a computer the size of a warehouse can tease all those interactions apart. You’ve seen the invoices. That Ciopova computer system cost two fortunes.”
Lilah chimed in to expand the fib. “We’ve been
testing the predictions using imaginary money for months. It works.”
“Past performance is no guarantee of future success.”
“Watch for as long as you like before you try it,” said Diesel.
Justus took a drink of water. “Here’s a good one. If a computer generated the investment schedule, why didn’t you just hand me a printout? Why did Twenty-Nine need a poem to remember it?”
Diesel caught Lilah’s eye. “That is a good one.”
“Don’t forget that the security system gets installed the day after tomorrow,” Justus continued. “I try not to snoop into your private affairs, but I can’t help but notice that your brothers seem to come and go without always using an exterior door. Once we have cameras in place, that lack of activity gets recorded.”
“You won’t believe the truth.”
“Try me.”
“That box sits over a tunnel that leads to a house on the street behind us. My brothers come in and out of that unit.”
“That explains it.” Justus turned in his chair. “By the way, Lilah, the power company called again about those huge power surges. You know, those massive, five-minute-long draws of electricity needed to power the exit tunnel? They say that in thirty days they’re adding a one hundred percent surcharge to our billing rate.”
“That’s doubling the price,” said Diesel.
“No way,” said Lilah. “We signed a fixed-rate contract. They can’t change the price.”
“I read the fine print,” said Justus. “They can’t change the price, but they can add a surcharge as long as they give us a thirty-day notice. They say the huge power draws are causing problems with other customers. Because of us, they have to add equipment to stabilize our branch of the grid.”
“Those creeps,” said Lilah. “Our electric bill was already a huge expense. Doubling it is a killer.”
“The good news,” said Diesel, a foot wiggling under the table as he spoke, “is that we have Justus to handle it for us.”
Lilah didn’t laugh, and as Diesel steered the talk to neutral subjects, she felt uncomfortable because she’d opened Pandora’s box with her question.
On the car ride back to Worcester, Diesel circled back to their uncomfortable conversation in a roundabout way. “In the next week or two, all my brothers in their twenties are coming for a day-long retreat. When I find out the date, we need to work together on a lunch and dinner feast.”
“That’s ten of you, Twenty through Twenty-Nine?”
“No, I’m the youngest of the group, so it’s me and Twenty-Six, Twenty-Seven, Twenty-Eight, and Twenty-Nine. Plus Lilah. And you for some part of it.” Diesel shifted in the car seat to make his body language more open to Justus. “I’m not sure what to tell you about what’s going on. I’m new to it myself. But when my brothers are here, I’ll ask them for guidance. Hell, maybe I’ll have one of them explain it to you. But for the next week or so, we’ll continue with discretion on your part.”
“You can count on it.”
Lilah didn’t think Justus sounded defensive when he spoke, and that made her believe him.
When they reached the row house, Lilah led Justus to her side of the basement. “We need a laundry area for Bunny, and I was thinking maybe over there.” She gestured to the back corner. “And we need shelves to fold and stack the clean items along here.”
“I don’t think I can get that done by Bunny’s first day. We need plumbing, electric, and carpentry trades on this, so we’re looking at a couple of weeks.”
She nodded. “We also need a cleaning closet on the different floors that includes a vacuum, mop, and supplies. I can’t see her lugging all that stuff down from my place and up to Diesel’s.”
Justus left to get started on the project, and Lilah sat with Diesel in his cubicle.
“I’ve been thinking about bumping time,” said Diesel. “It seems that at its most basic, there are three pieces. We have to know exactly what situation it is that we want to change. We have to have an understanding of what events led to that situation. And then we need to create enough of a change or disruption to those events so we trigger a different outcome.”
Lilah pressed her lips together in thought. “The details under those simple statements are the crux of it. How big a ripple do you need to make to cause a change? If you make your move too early, can temporal constancy smooth away whatever changes you made? And is it better to make one big ripple or run a bunch of small ones together?”
“We’re trying to logic through something we don’t even remotely understand,” said Diesel. “Like, how would it work if one timeline was different from the rest? Does a real bump need to somehow flip all the timelines so they remain parallel?”
“I’m getting that surreal feeling again.”
“You mean ‘still,’” said Diesel. “And speaking of surreal, I was followed by a Brown in Boston.”
“When?”
“There was one standing outside the lottery office when we got there. Later, he followed us over to the bank branch for the deposit.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
“This one stayed close on my heels, making me nervous as hell. But in the end, he just followed and watched. And thank God, because I didn’t want to try to explain the Browns to Justus, especially since I don’t really understand them myself.”
“Twenty-Six said that they preserve the integrity of the timeline by stopping us from bumping.”
“I heard him,” said Diesel, shaking his head. “But I find that my desire to change things increases where they are present, which is the opposite effect if that’s their purpose.”
19. Twenty-Five and eight days
Lilah and Justus were chatting in his office when she noticed movement on one of the new security monitors mounted on his wall. The middle display, which focused on the outside front entryway, showed a young woman climbing the steps. “Do you think that’s Bunny?”
Justus looked at the clock. “I’d say yes.”
“Is she wearing a bra?”
Justus leaned forward and watched for a moment. “I’d say no.”
The doorbell rang and Lilah hurried down the hall, muttering, “What did Twenty-Six get us into?” Reaching the door, she opened it with a smile.
“Hi. I’m Bunny,” said the woman, extending her hand.
“I’m Lilah.” Shaking the delicate hand, she discovered the sunflower tattooed on Bunny’s forearm. “Please, come in.”
Lilah saw more California than New England in Bunny. Early twenties, very pretty face, shoulder-length brown hair streaked with blonde highlights. Her light cotton shirt, cut at the midriff with the words “Hear Me Roar” printed across the front, hugged her full breasts, themselves bobbing free from the restraints of a bra. Shorts covered most of her bottom, and below that extended slim, tan legs that ran all the way to the ground.
“I applied for the job?” she said as Lilah closed the door.
“Of course. For some reason I’d imagined someone older.”
“No, it’s just me.” She gave a laugh that sounded manic.
Justus stepped out from his office and introduced himself. “So, Bunny, how did you get into the cleaning business?”
“My parole officer.” Her eyes flitted around the front reception area as if she were taking inventory.
“Your parole officer?” Lilah echoed.
“Yeah. He said I can’t dance anymore because the place is full of felons. Associating with them violates my parole.”
“Dance?” Lilah echoed again.
“Yeah. I’m an exotic dancer at the Drapes and Carpet. Well, not now because of parole and all.”
Lilah nodded, trying to hide her daze. When she gained enough of her senses, she gestured to the conference room. “Bunny, let’s sit in here for a moment and get to know each other. Justus, I know how busy you are, so we’ll let you go.”
Bunny sat at the table, arms resting on top, while Lilah stood.
“Have you ever c
leaned a house before for pay?”
Bunny shook her head. “But I never told you I had. I just called and said I’m applying for the job and you hired me. I didn’t lie.”
“Have you ever cleaned a kitchen or a bathroom?”
“Of course.”
“Run a vacuum?”
“Being a dancer doesn’t mean I’m helpless or hopeless.”
“Did your mom ever teach you how to do laundry?”
Bunny hesitated. “No.”
Lilah stared at her, trying to decide what to do.
“My grandma taught me. My mom lived on the street. She died of a drug overdose when I was eleven.”
Lilah felt a wash of shame at the hardened attitude she’d been projecting at the woman. Her view softened as she saw a young girl fighting for survival.
“How much did you make dancing?”
“A thou a week.”
Lilah raised her eyebrows. “A thousand dollars a week? Stripping?”
“I only worked three shifts a week, so it’s not as bad as it sounds.”
“What were you in jail for?”
“I wasn’t in jail.” Her tone became petulant.
“But you’re on probation.”
“You can get probation without going to jail. I was giving a guy a private dance in his car in the parking lot of the club when the cops busted him. Turns out he’s wanted in a bunch of states for some evil shit. They dragged me in when they cuffed him.”
“That’s rough.”
“Tell me about it.” Bunny nodded.
Lilah sat for several seconds, starting to see Bunny as a project. “You’ll have to dress more modestly if you’re to work here.”
“I understand. I figured there’d be a male involved in the hiring decision, and this is definitely the right outfit to wear for that. If it’s just you, though, I screwed up.”
She’d no sooner spoken when Diesel stomped down the stairs from his apartment. “Hey, Lilah,” he called. “I’m going to the grocery store. Do you want…hello.” His eyes widened when Bunny stood.
“I’m Bunny. I’m the new maid.” She put her hands behind her back, thrusting her perfect breasts out for him to admire.
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