Lost Friday

by Michael Bronte

  I was already awake when Vishal came for me. “For you,” he said, handing me a tray.

  It was eggs and toast. I took the fork—interesting, I thought, something that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years—and poked at the eggs. I decided to try the coffee first. Hmmm, not bad. “Real eggs?” I said.

  “I didn’t think you’d like our normal breakfast chow.”

  Breakfast chow? I wondered if Vishal was pulling my leg on that. I ate, and went into the bathroom for the first time, wondering, oddly, if anything would be different there. There was no toothpaste, I discovered, and Vishal had to explain how to put this probe thing into my mouth.

  “It loosens plaque with ultra sound,” he informed me.

  Okay. The shower was automatic and clicked off before I was finished washing my johnson. Admittedly, I spend a lot of time doing that in the shower, but hey, washing something that big takes some time. I dressed in my same clothes, and Vishal escorted me into what was Sea Beach, New Jersey, October 2nd, 2194. I remembered it was the same day Allison Kovar and Scott Reemer were supposed to show up. In this Sea Beach, there were no weather-beaten bungalows, no sleepy restaurants, or cluttered tackle shops, just building after building dominating the street I was on, which was… what? I didn’t see a sign. To say everything looked institutional would be putting it mildly, but how else could you jam a quarter-of-a-million people into a town the size of Sea Beach? Surprisingly, though, there weren’t many of them on the street, which didn’t look much like a street in the context of what I knew one to look like. The buildings had almost no windows, and the exteriors were some kind of gray composite stuff. I spotted a few vehicles, and they didn’t have any wheels, but skids, like those on a helicopter. There weren’t many of them either, considering the number of people that had to get around. I found out why a second later, when, from around the corner, a chain of other, much larger vehicles zoomed down the middle of the street, floating about six inches off the ground.

  “Magnetic force fields,” Vishal explained, sensing my curiosity. “One force field comes from the vehicle, the other from a track buried in the street. One track repels, and the other attracts in the opposite direction, keeping the vehicles from veering off line.”

  I guess that made sense. The train stopped, and what seemed like a thousand people got out and scooted into the buildings, while another thousand scooted out from the buildings and took their place. A second later the doors closed and, zoom, the train hauled off without a sound.

  “How come there are so few people out there?” I asked. “And why did everyone move so fast to and from the buildings.”

  Vishal pointed at the sky. “We have hardly any ozone layer. It can be very dangerous some days, and people move quickly to and from their living spaces unless they are protected. On days where we have some protection from the clouds, the hurried pace is mostly out of habit.

  No ozone layer: that also explained the lack of windows on the buildings.

  “I hope you don’t sunburn easily,” Vishal said.

  “I grew up on the Jersey Shore when it was really a shore. Suntan is my middle name.”

  “You should still be careful,” Vishal warned. “People have been known to end up in the hospital after only an hour of direct sunlight.” He went on to explain that transportation was provided free of charge by the government, and trains like the one I’d just seen ran constantly and connected to literally everywhere. In some places, they traveled hundreds of miles per hour, he said, along what had been the interstate highways of the twentieth century. Private vehicles like the one sitting nearby were for government officials, security, or law enforcement personnel.

  “Don’t people get run over with these trains moving so fast?”

  “Other force fields act as barriers and keep people away from the track,” Vishal explained. “Shall we?” He indicated our waiting ride. “The dome will filter any ultraviolet rays.”

  Moments later, we floated towards the middle of the street and waited until an on-board readout indicated an opening in the force field that guarded the magnetic track. We eased through the unseen opening, and, once positioned, the vehicle accelerated at an amazing pace. We sailed along, tilting to accommodate the centrifugal force, and Vishal described how all the buildings I was looking at were sealed residence buildings, where air and water were manufactured inside. Such was the case in most buildings; even the old ones were retrofitted.

  “Is there still a boardwalk?” I asked. I’d spent plenty of days under the sun and nights under the stars there, and what was such a simple pleasure suddenly became a nostalgic memory.

  Vishal said, “I will take you there.”

  We pulled off the track and made our way down a side street named Beach Street, a name I didn’t recognize from 190 years ago. It was hardly an apt description, however, because the beach was just another building—a food processing plant, which sucked in rivers of ocean water and plucked out sea life to be processed into protein for the masses. The oceans had been turned in to massive fish farms, I learned, with processed organic material—including human bodies—going in as fish food to support the stocks of fish needed to feed the incredible number of people that occupied the Earth. There was virtually no boardwalk, and not much of a beach, either. There was no use for one. Between the ozone problem, and the need to occupy every inch of open space with shelter, or a food production plant, humans got their leisure indoors through programmed simulators, the experience from which supposedly couldn’t be discerned from actually having lived the event, I was told. The air next to the processing plant stunk, and I felt sad.

  * * * * *

  “Let me get this straight. You have intelligence equipment that lets you know everything that’s going on, and you can’t stop them?”

  “The Red Diamond is very powerful. Thus far, we’ve not been able to convince any of the other five security organizations to take on the job of resisting them.”

  “Why not?”

  “It would bankrupt them.”

  This, I thought to myself, was hard to believe, as was the supposed ICTO division headquarters I was looking at. I mean, it was one room, and a couple of guys. “This is it?” I said.

  Vishal took my incredulity in stride. “Computers do most of the intelligence gathering and analysis. We have dozens of outposts like this one around the world that monitor the activities of the other five security agencies.”

  “Dozens? And that’s enough to tell you what everyone is doing?”

  “It is, but they are aware of our activities as well. All communications are eventually traced in this time, Mister Pappas. Remaining small is the only way we can stay ahead of them.”

  “They know you’re spying on them?”

  “Of course, but we have detection programs as well. Once we detect that their detection programs have detected us, we put another surveillance station online and destroy the one that’s been detected.”

  “So you’re like a bunny rabbit running from a grizzly.”

  Vishal shook his head. “What is a bunny rabbit?”

  I was starting to get the picture. No one could do anything without the other side, or sides, knowing all about it, so no one did anything. That, and morality had turned into a business, evidently. “What about the genocide thing?”

  “As awful as that is, no one is willing to sacrifice billions of lives to save a few million.”

  Well, that hadn’t changed. I remembered plenty of situations where oppressive governments killed off a few thousand at a time and no one did a damned thing to stop it except when George W. put his nuts on the line and took out Saddam, and even that was motivated by a lot more than simple humanitarianism. That move as well almost bankrupted the country, just like what Vishal was describing now, but the numbers were incredibly different. I still hadn’t found out what all this had to do with me, however. I mean, being kidnapped against my will, and getting zapped 190 year
s into the future wasn’t on my agenda, and I really didn’t like people fucking with my head. Just ask Romano.

  “How do you plan on stopping the Red Diamond?” I asked bluntly.

  “Ah. That’s where you come in.”

  * * * * *

  “Let me make sure I understand. You want me to go back to destroy the Red Diamond.”

  Vishal said, “Precisely.”

  All right, I was starting to get more than a little spooked out now. A week ago I was dreaming about the stripper from Murph’s bachelor party. Now, I had a futuristic James Bond trying to convince me to stop an army of millions, or possibly billions, of genocidal terrorists, and it was no dream. At least I didn’t think it was. I pinched myself to make sure.

  I said, “I think I could use some of Demetrius’s motor oil coffee.”

  “Let’s go, then,” Vishal responded. “It’s not far from here.”

  I thought: the diner is still here? We walked from the ICTO office into what was a combination of the Mall of America and Bourbon Street. The streets had gone underground, evidently, the buildings above ground connected to walkways that ran beneath them. Down here, the milling throngs more than made up for the people I’d not seen earlier. It was Sea Beach in July, with Jersey Shore party animals running wild. I mean, there were people everywhere, coming and going in endless groups, made up of every conceivable racial configuration. I saw black people with slanted eyes, white people that had to be seven feet tall, tiny Mexican-looking people with arms that hung down to their knees—and Barbies, all over the place, 38-18-34 Amazons whose boobs reached their destination a minute before the rest of their bodies did.

  I said, “This looks like the bar scene in Star Wars.”

  Vishal said, “Star Wars?”

  I just shook my head. “Why is everyone looking at me?” I asked as we traipsed along. I mean, I was really getting the evil eye. A couple of hairy albino-looking motherfuckers looked especially menacing.

  “It’s your clothes.”

  Undeniably, khaki pants and a button-down shirt in this environment might as well have been from Mars. I retracted the thought, thinking it probably wasn’t all that farfetched. “Hungry looking bastards,” I said to Vishal, wondering why I traveled through time with my clothes on as opposed to being naked.

  “You have good instincts, Mister Pappas. Street people, dangerous and aggressive; don’t get caught alone with them.”

  That’s the first time I noticed what was on Vishal’s hip when he made a show of parting his loose-fitting jacket and letting the grown-up white mice get a good look.

  “Is that a Glock?” I asked lowly as we passed a trio of young Barbies who looked like they were growing into their bras.

  “Indeed it is,” Vishal answered. “The actual weapon is only slightly more advanced than in your time; the difference is in the ammunition. It can fire anything from nerve bullets, to stun tablets, to rounds that can pierce an armored vehicle.” He indicated the albinos. “They now know you’re with me.”

  I took that to mean that getting Mirandized in this day and age meant: You have the right to remain the fuck away from me—or else. We came to a sleazy side street and took a left, moving along with the action on what could have been a street in any major city in America. Seedy shops lined the street, interspersed by stinky doorways that led to places I didn’t want to think about. I would never have imagined that the streets of Sea Beach at the end of the twenty-second century would smell like the bathrooms at the Vince Lombardi rest stop on the Jersey turnpike after a Giants game. Suddenly, it was there: Demetrius’s Diner. The similarity was only in the name, however—until we ordered the coffee. It still came in a big, heavy mug that looked like it had gotten caught in a sandstorm, and it could still make your pecker shrivel.

  “Living in the year 2194 sounds kind of dangerous,” I said, grimacing as I swallowed some bitter brew.

  “It can be,” Vishal replied. “A third of the people you saw out there have no regular home. With so many idle hands, you can imagine the crime rate.”

  “Drugs?”

  “A massive problem. The walled cities are overflowing.”

  “Walled cities?”

  “Drug users are sent there to fend for themselves. It’s usually a short stay.”

  I didn’t think I needed to know any more about the walled cities right then.

  Vishal stared blankly as he sipped his coffee. He detected my gaze, and said, “Life isn’t worth much here, Mister Pappas. It’s gotten to the point where many people feel sadness when a child is born because they know it will lead a long and miserable life.” He looked at me through glassy eyes, and added, “But there has to be a better way than genocide.”

  That brought me back to where we’d started the conversation. “If you need to stop the Red Diamond, why don’t you go back in time and do it yourself?”

  “As we explained, one reason is that it’s illegal. Another is that the Red Diamond has marked both Aryeh and myself for deletion. If we step outside Sea Beach, there’s a strong probability that we won’t come back. However, there’s another, more important reason why we think you’ll help us.”

  I sipped more coffee, and said, “I’m a reporter, not a terrorist fighter.”

  “Exactly, and it was two months to the day after Lost Friday that you broke the story that disgraced the government of the United States, and led to your own death.”

  Okay. That got my attention.

  “We figured you’d work with us if we could help you avoid that piece of history.”

  Chapter 21… A Second Chance At Life

  I put down my mug, and said, “You’re not kidding, are you?” Two months to the day, would have made it the day after Thanksgiving. “I must have broken one hell of a story.”

  “You revealed that officials of your own government were collaborating with the Red Diamond to alter historical events.”

  Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. “When did I… you know.”

  “You met your demise less than a month later.”

  Demise: what an ugly fucking word. “I need some air.”

  Outside, I mean, back in the underground, I found a bench, and tried a couple of deep breaths. I might as well have been sucking in flames. Klong… klong… klong: my heart was beating like a death knell at a funeral march. I tried to think things through, not weighing my options, but wondering if I had any.

  “How did it happen?” I asked as Vishal sat next to me.

  “The records show that you were coming back from a gathering sponsored by your work establishment….”

  Christmas party, I thought instantly.

  “… when your vehicle veered from its path and plummeted into deep water. Two of your associates perished with you.”

  Two of my associates. “That wouldn’t have been Paul Romano and Kelli Remington, would it?”

  “Yes, I believe it was,” Vishal verified.

  I stood and tried to ease the swirling sensation that had suddenly taken me over. “I assume it was no accident?”

  “Hardly. Your deaths were eventually traced to two government security agents.”

  Fuckin’ A. Bull Neck and Skin Head suddenly appeared in my mind’s eye.

  “They confessed to the crime, as well as revealing who gave the order to carry it out.”

  I could feel my fingers turning into icicles. “Dirty government agents confessing? What was that all about?”

  “I thought you’d ask,” Vishal replied. “The historical information shows that a police officer named Mulroney was instrumental in obtaining the confessions after your investigation incriminated certain government officials for cooperating with the Red Diamond. Those officials included the president himself, who eventually committed suicide before going on trial for having knowledge of the plan for your elimination, and doing nothing to stop it. Although it was never stated directly, the implication from other testimony, and other historica
l reports, are that the president may have issued the order himself.

  The visual played like a movie inside my head, and I pictured Roy in a dark room mashing fingers with a hammer until he got his confession. “Why did the president want me dead?”

  “As I said, you and your associates discovered that he’d been compromised, and he was trying to stop the story that implicated him from coming out.”

  Fuckin’ A. I could only imagine the headline. “How was he compromised?”

  “In exchange for making certain decisions, and allowing the Red Diamond to meddle in historical occurrences, the Red Diamond agreed to perpetuate his term of office.”

  “But, legally he could only be president for eight years.”

  “Unless the law was amended for special circumstances. It was part of the plan.”

  “How could that happen? Didn’t you say the Red Diamond only had one of those time travel things?”

  Vishal’s eyes darted past me and captured something there. He got up, and indicated we should walk as we talked. “You’re quite astute, Mister Pappas. Undeniably, one operative could not go back and have access to the highest office in the world, but one operative could certainly make the president aware of historical events before they happened.”

  Copies of future newspapers, I thought instantly. It was all starting to fall into place.

  “Surely, you can see the political, and economic, advantages of such knowledge,” Vishal added.

  “You mean like getting rid of political rivals before they had a chance to make their mark.”

  “Precisely.” Suddenly, Vishal took my arm and pulled me into a doorway. “It is not safe on the street, Mister Pappas. The Red Diamond is everywhere.”

  * * * * *

  I took me some time to collect my thoughts. “So, if I stop the invention of time travel from happening, what happens to David Robelle, the scientists, and all the other people who’ve already been abducted?”

  We were back inside ICTO headquarters, in an office this time—Vishal’s office, I assumed—which really didn’t look much different than any other office I’d ever seen, except that things like computers, and printers, and other office paraphernalia simply weren’t present. Control panels were built into the walls, and the only use for furniture was for sitting, and not as a place to put paper. There was no paper, or pencils, or pens, anywhere. Written information just appeared, like David Robelle’s ransom note, and then disappeared when no longer needed. Cool technology, I thought, except that newspapers had obviously seen their day. Reporters’ jobs in the year 2194 were probably way different, I thought.