“I had a premonition,” he said skeptically. “I had this dream that you were dead.” He took a beat. “Are you okay?”
The lump in my throat swelled like a balloon. “Sort of,” I said, not mentioning the gaping wound in my leg, “but Remington’s not.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
I didn’t answer. It was all I could do to keep my back turned away from her body. I just didn’t want to believe that she could possibly be dead. “I’ll explain later,” I said. “I’m calling in my story.”
Like me, Romano didn’t say a word, and it was like his instincts were colliding with mine. “Whatever is wrong, Pappas, can you fix it?”
I finally looked at Remington. “I have to,” I replied. “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her.”
After some pause, Romano said, “Give me your story, Pappas. If we’re lucky, it’ll never go to print.”
“By Johnny Pappas,” I said, starting with the byline as I normally did when calling one in, then I said, “Wait boss, make that by Kelli Remington.” The story had Pulitzer written all over it.
* * * * *
I held my breath as Roy had once told me to do, and it still didn’t work. I woke up at the other end of the wormhole, gazing up at a young ICTO geek who told me his name was Landon. He couldn’t have been more than twenty. He started to put a beer-bong hat on me to do a memory scan, and I grabbed his wrist.
“Do you know Vishal Rawan?”
He perked up immediately, as I’m sure not a lot of people from the twenty-first century knew who Vishal Rawan was. “I have heard of him,” he replied cautiously.
Great. I was dealing with the bottom of the food chain. I pulled him real close so he couldn’t mistake what was in my eyes. “Find him, Landon, or find someone who can communicate with him, and tell him Johnny Pappas wants to see him.” I saw Landon hesitate, and I pulled him closer yet. “Tell Vishal that Roarke has the formulas.”
It didn’t take long. Vishal sauntered in minutes later, his casual body language a show for the troops. Behind the eyes, I sensed the man was a train wreck. “I received your message.”
I looked around, wondering where I was, but the room gave me no clue. “Am I still in Sea Beach?” I asked. Vishal nodded, and I held my tongue. He was eyeing me in return, his hand close to his weapon. Neither of us was willing to take the chance that we weren’t what we seemed to be. The seconds ticked by, tension laden. “Roarke has the formulas,” I said.
Vishal’s eyes narrowed. “We will have to go back again and prevent that from happening.”
I couldn’t help but think that Lost Friday was beyond control. “I don’t think you’re going anywhere,” I said, and Vishal’s eyes narrowed even more.
“I don’t think you’re in any position to—”
“It gets worse,” I said, not really interested in anything he could possible say. “Roarke’s got Anne Behari.” I waited for a reaction; there was none.
Vishal pulled his weapon and aimed it right between my eyes. “Tell me where he is,” he spat venomously, “or you die now.”
Well there was some gratitude for you. I walked right up to him. “Here, I’ll make it easy for you. Go ahead, then we all lose.” He put his weapon thingy to the base of my neck. I waited. If this was my time, well then, this was my time, but I could sense that he wasn’t going to zap me. “You’re safe until you walk into the open,” I said as he held there. “As soon as Roarke has a visual on you, Anne Behari is dead and you’ll disappear off the face of the Earth.” Again, I waited for a reaction, and again there was none. Vishal was still waiting for some clue, some inkling of whether or not I was a Synthetic.
“That tactic is risky for them,” he said calmly. “Depending on the linkages, it does not always work.”
Evidently it had been tried before. “Are you willing to take that chance?” I saw a twitch at the corner of his eye. “How about we go for a walk?”
“Stay where you are,” he said, putting a hand in my chest.
I slapped it away. “If I was one of them, I would have already killed Anne and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. At this point, my interest is in her; you I couldn’t care less about. She’s probably safe as long as you stay out of sight, but the second Roarke sees you, he’ll kill her, you’ll evaporate, and he’ll take the formulas to his scientists so they can finalize the ITD technology you’ve tried so desperately to keep from them. You see, Vishal baby, you zap me and you lose all the way around.”
Vishal took a moment. “How do you know he has the formulas?”
“I saw him take them. Whether he has all of them or not, I’m not sure. David split up….” I stopped there, thinking perhaps I’d already said too much. I mean, I really didn’t know who I was talking to either, right?
“If she dies and you don’t, then you’re an accomplice to murder,” I went on.
“In this day and age, one more murder will go totally unnoticed,” Vishal replied smartly.
“Oh, so no one will mind if it turns out to be you. I have a plan, Vishal. You want to listen to it?”
* * * * *
What did David tell me once about existing on only one point on the continuum? He said that when someone goes back, the future hasn’t happened yet. I remembered that as I found my way to my apartment where I took a shower and bandaged up my oozing leg with a towel and some duct tape. I stopped by Norm’s WaWa and bought a copy of the Asbury Park Press just to be sure of the date: March 24th, six months to the day before Lost Friday.
“Is Norm here?” I asked as I remembered Norm being one of the jurors taken for David’s trial.
“He left about an hour ago,” the plump cashier replied as she gave me my change. “Can I give him a message?”
“That’s okay. I’ll catch up to him later.”
How prophetic, I thought. Everything seemed pretty normal, and I hopped back into the ’Vette, choking down some emotion when Roy’s old F-150 pulled up three parking spaces over. Roy slid out, paying me no mind, and was in and out of the WaWa in less than a minute with a container of milk. I checked the time: 6:35, time for dinner. I speculated that it was probably time for dinner at the Robelles’ house too, which is where I was headed. My plan was to find David and force him to destroy the formulas, but there was one more stop I had to make. I mean, I just had to know.
I fired up the ’Vette and tooled onto the parkway. Luckily, everything was where I thought it was at that point on the continuum, which meant that I now had my cell phone as well as my car. I speed dialed the Press and punched in Remington’s extension, which she didn’t answer. I redialed and had the same result on Romano’s extension, so I dialed his cell phone.
“Yeah?” he answered gruffly.
“Have you seen Remington?” I asked quickly. I looked down, seeing that I was doing over eighty. Like I gave a shit. I held steady on the accelerator.
“Remington? Why do you need—”
“Listen boss, I don’t have time to play twenty questions. Just tell me if you’ve seen her in the last hour or two.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen her. What’s wrong?” he asked warily.
The man had incredible instincts. “Nothing’s wrong. It’s, ah… personal. You gonna tell me where she is, or not?”
“Personal, huh? You know, Pappas, I swear we’ve had this conversation before.” I waited. “She’s on her way to Toms River.”
“Where in Toms River?” Toms River wasn’t far away.
“Try a place called Cool Beans. She’s doing restaurant reviews for some Jersey Shore tourist mag that I’m not supposed to know about.”
So Romano knew she was moonlighting. Even in the past the man continued to impress me. Romano told me the place was on Main Street, and I pulled up in front twenty minutes later, spotting Remington through the window. I hobbled in. “Is this seat taken?”
She looked up from her notepa
d, and said, “What the hell happened to you?”
And I thought I cleaned up good. I just stood there not knowing what to say, but knowing that I had to see she was all right. I mean, I didn’t even have a wisecrack at the ready. “I just wanted to tell you that you’re a great reporter,” I said.
Those blue eyes of hers were holding me captive. “And now what?” she asked. “Are you going to ask to use my thong to floss your teeth?”
I smiled and made this kind of weird wave at her. I turned to go.
“Hey Pappas,” she called out when I was almost to the door. “Supposedly this place has the best Irish coffee around. Want some?”
I couldn’t tell if the electric sparkle I saw was coming from those mesmerizing eyes of hers, or that perfect smile. I repeated the awkward wave, and said, “Gotta go save the world, Remington. I’ll take a rain check.” She just watched me leave, and I’m sure she was thinking what a nimrod I was, but at least I knew she was all right.
I headed back to the ’Vette to resume my original plan and find David. I’d parked about a block away, and halfway there I stopped cold in my tracks. I sensed that someone was watching me, and I immediately scanned the landscape looking for Barbie boobs or Ken Doll hair. Did I really think I could just waltz right back in time and stop the whole phenomenon of Lost Friday from happening again? Did I really think that with forty-seven billion people on the planet, I was the only one who would think of this course of action? What an idiot I was. Who knew who, or what, was out there? I couldn’t trust anyone, or anything, Vishal included, despite the fact that he’d supplied me with an ITD to get back to this date. He’d proven his loyalty when he was on the verge of melting my brain stem. He and Roarke were one in the same to me now, and to either of them I was only as valuable as my last piece of information. The term dead meat suddenly had new meaning to me.
I wheeled quickly and headed away from the ’Vette, making quick work of weaving between the old buildings of downtown Toms River until I found an alleyway that led me back to Cool Beans. I popped in the back door and blew through the kitchen where some spike-haired chick with black lipstick was making goo-goo eyes at the bus boy, and found Remington still in her seat. She was making notes and the look on her face told me Cool Beans wasn’t getting a good review. She looked up, perplexed at my reappearance.
“Can we trade cars?” I asked, holding out the keys to the ’Vette. God, it was déjà vu all over again… and again… and again. Did anything ever change?
She said, “You want me to drive your car? Why?”
“Actually, I want to drive your car.”
“Again, why?”
“Ah, I think someone is following me.”
“Who?”
Damn it, I really didn’t have time for this… again, but if history was this stubborn, well then…. “I’m working on the biggest story of the century and I need some help. You want a piece of it or not? I need to know now.”
I waited through the, “You’re so full of shit,” comment, looked at my watch while she intimated that this was somehow another ploy for me to see her naked, and shifted my weight from foot to foot while she went on and on about how she was Summa Cum Laude at Columbia and was destined for better things than writing restaurant reviews. All I said was, “You’ll have your own byline,” and she was on me like a rash. The woman was a story hound—which I respected immensely—and ten minutes later we were blasting down the parkway in her blue Mitsubishi Eclipse, headed for the Robelles’ house. God, she smelled good.
* * * * *
This house was trouble, and my leg ached just thinking about it. Using her cell phone instead of mine, I had Remington call the house.
“Is David there?” she asked. She had the phone on speaker.
“Yes, who’s calling?” David’s mother asked.
I pointed to myself and Remington got the hint. “Tell him Johnny Pappas is calling.”
We could hear Jenna cup the phone and yell for David in the background. He picked up on another extension only a second later, but said nothing. I knew instantly.
“You’re a replica, aren’t you?” I asked.
David said, “If you can see the house, you’re in trouble.”
“So now what?”
“Meet me in half an hour.”
“Where?”
“Chief Mulroney’s house.”
* * * * *
I took one look at Roy, and said, “I thought maybe you were dead.”
“We all die sometime, Johnny.”
Which brought me back to the point of only being able to exist on one point on the continuum: did the fact that Roy, David, Remington, and I were all present together in the same room mean that we did not exist anywhere else in said continuum?
“What if I went back, or forward, for that matter, to another point in time? Would any of us be there?” The question was not aimed at anyone in particular, but clearly David was the only one who could answer it.
“We’re replicas,” he said simply. “Just think about it for a second.”
Remington, who had hardly said a word, said, “Wait a minute. Are you all telling me that you’ve traveled through time?” She looked from face to face. “Funny, none of you look like you’d be on PCP.”
Ignoring her, I thought: replicas. “That’s it,” I said. “When you said a person can’t go into the continuum and visit himself, you were talking about originals, right?” David nodded, and I detected a twinkle in his eye.
“Johnny, what the hell are you talking about?” Roy asked, to which Remington added, “Yeah, Pappas.”
I looked at Remington, and said, “Just note the events. I’ll explain what it all means later.” Then I turned to David. “If there is a later. You want to explain it?”
David took a deep breath. “An original can’t exist in the presence of itself due to the fact that it has been dismantled in the teleportation process. Hence, one can’t go back and visit oneself as an original. Once teleportation takes place, the original is gone and all the history that passes with the replica’s presence is altered… I think.”
I think? That wasn’t exactly convincing. “Altered how?” I asked.
“The replica is another being, and although it is made up of exactly the same kinds of atoms, in exactly the same configuration, has the same DNA, and the same memory, the history that passes during its existence can be different than the history that would have passed had the existence of the original not been terminated and the replica created.”
“Or recreated,” I added. “We can take the original’s place, but there can’t be two of same present because in actuality two can’t be present. It’s physically impossible.”
“You’re talking in circles,” Roy said.
“No, he’s not,” David replied. “Somehow, I think he understands it quite well.”
David’s use of the word somehow could have been meant as a put down, but I didn’t think so. “So what’s it all mean?” I asked.
“It means that your plan of coming back here in order to get me to destroy the formulas won’t work. That piece of history has already been written and rewritten so many times that the linkages are too big and too convoluted to control—and that includes going into the future to do away with Roarke. There would be countless others that would need to be terminated, or prevented from being born. You’d be just be making another attempt at something that’s been tried many times.”
I don’t know if anyone else saw the logic, but I certainly did. David suddenly got real serious-looking.
“There are only two ways to prevent any of this from ever happening. The first is for one or all of you to go back and terminate the original David, before I became a replica.”
“Right. Like that’s going to happen,” I said, noting Roy’s agreeing nod. “What’s the second way?”
“By preventing my original from ever being born.” David looked at all three of us an
d said, “I would much rather you take that route. It would be much easier on my parents.”
It was all getting too real, too close to home. “David, you know we can’t do that, and even if we could, we wouldn’t. There has to be another way.”
“I’m afraid there isn’t, but before you ask the question, let me give you an answer.”
“What answer?”
“This is not the same as doing away with ancestors.”
“How is it not?”
“Just take my word for it. It has to do with the fact that an ancestor is part of the natural linkage of events. Being a replica is not. Besides, the atoms of the ancestor are not the same as those of the replica.”
“Okay, I’m totally confused, but… so?”
So, once a replica is created, I’m not sure if it goes away if its original is somehow prevented. The replica’s atoms still exist on the continuum, you see. They are simply located somewhere else.”
Roy, Remington, and I all looked at each other. “Sure,” I said. “Simple for you.”
* * * * *
There was no choice, really, plus the fact that if David said that’s the way it was, who was going to argue with him? David wasn’t going to do this, so who was? And how? As soon as we decided that, David determined that he was going to go home and tell his parents what was happening in case he suddenly, like, went poof, or something. Not even David knew the probability of that happening.
Roy was a possibility, but although he was a replica several times over, he’d never operated an ITD, which was a convenient excuse for determining that Roy was most valuable where he was. I agreed with that. Sea Beach needed Roy, and there were many other lives at stake besides our own that Roy needed to protect. To make a long story short, after some discussion it came down to me as being the primary candidate, and I thought about the prospect of reliving eighteen years of my life. Going back that far would put me at about the same chronological age as Romano. Maybe I could be him. Maybe I could become the managing editor at the Press instead. Then, I thought, why bother? There were plenty of other things I could accomplish—because I knew a lot of what was going to happen. Would that be fair? I thought inexplicably, but before I could answer the question, I thought about my mom. What would it do to her, now, as well as then, or before, or however I termed it?
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