Ivy and I walked out of Armando’s rooms toward the steps.
“You armed?” J.C. asked, jogging up to us.
“Normal people don’t walk around their own homes with a gun strapped on, J.C.”
“They do if they want to live. Go get your gun.”
I hesitated, then sighed. “Let her in, Wilson!” I called, but redirected to my own rooms—the largest in the complex—and took my handgun out of my nightstand. I holstered it under my arm and put my jacket back on. It did feel good to be armed, but I’m a horrible shot.
By the time I was making my way down the steps to the front entryway, Wilson had answered the door. A dark-skinned woman in her thirties stood at the doorway, wearing a black jacket, a business suit, and short dreadlocks. She took off her sunglasses and nodded to me.
“The sitting room, Wilson,” I said, reaching the landing. He led her to it, and I entered after, waiting for J.C. and Ivy to pass. Tobias already sat inside, reading a history book.
“Lemonade?” Wilson asked.
“No, thank you,” I said, pulling the door closed, Wilson outside.
The woman strolled around the room, looking over the décor. “Fancy place,” she said. “You paid for all of this with money from people who ask you for help?”
“Most of it came from the government,” I said.
“Word on the street says you don’t work for them.”
“I don’t, but I used to. Anyway, a lot of this came from grant money. Professors who wanted to research me. I started charging enormous sums for the privilege, assuming it would put them off.”
“And it didn’t.”
“Nothing does,” I said, grimacing. “Have a seat.”
“I’ll stand,” she said, inspecting my Van Gogh. “The name is Monica, by the way.”
“Monica,” I said, taking out the two photographs. “I have to say, it seems remarkable that you’d expect me to believe your ridiculous story.”
“I haven’t told you a story yet.”
“You’re going to,” I said, tossing the photographs onto the table. “A story about time travel and, apparently, a photographer who doesn’t know how to use his flash properly.”
“You’re a genius, Mister Leeds,” she said, not turning. “By some certifications I’ve read, you’re the smartest man on the planet. If there had been an obvious flaw—or even one that wasn’t so obvious—in those photos, you’d have thrown them away. You certainly wouldn’t have called me.”
“They’re wrong.”
“They . . . ?”
“The people who call me a genius,” I said, sitting down in the chair next to Tobias’s. “I’m not a genius. I’m really quite average.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Believe what you will,” I said. “But I’m not a genius. My hallucinations are.”
“Thanks,” J.C. said.
“Some of my hallucinations are,” I corrected.
“You accept that the things you see aren’t real?” Monica said, turning to me.
“Yes.”
“Yet you talk to them.”
“I wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings. Besides, they can be useful.”
“Thanks,” J.C. said.
“Some of them can be useful,” I corrected. “Anyway, they’re the reason you’re here. You want their minds. Now, tell me your story, Monica, or stop wasting my time.”
She smiled, finally walking over to sit down. “It’s not what you think. There’s no time machine.”
“Oh?”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
“Time travel into the past is highly, highly implausible,” I said. “Even if it were to have occurred, I’d not know of it, as it would have created a branching path of reality of which I am not a part.”
“Unless this is the branched reality.”
“In which case,” I said, “time travel into the past is still functionally irrelevant to me, as someone who traveled back would create a branching path of which—again—I would not be part.”
“That’s one theory, at least,” she said. “But it’s meaningless. As I said, there is no time machine. Not in the conventional sense.”
“So these pictures are fakes?” I asked. “You’re starting to bore me very quickly, Monica.”
She slid three more pictures onto the table.
“Shakespeare,” Tobias said as I held them up one at a time. “The Colossus of Rhodes. Oh . . . now that’s clever.”
“Elvis?” I asked.
“Apparently the moment before death,” Tobias said, pointing to the picture of the waning pop icon sitting in his bathroom, head drooping.
J.C. sniffed. “As if there isn’t anyone around who looks like that guy.”
“These are from a camera,” Monica said, leaning forward, “that takes pictures of the past.”
She paused for dramatic effect. J.C. yawned.
“The problem with each of these,” I said, tossing the pictures onto the table, “is that they are fundamentally unverifiable. They are pictures of things that have no other visual record to prove them, so therefore small inaccuracies would be impossible to use in debunking.”
“I have seen the device work,” Monica replied. “It was proven in a rigorous testing environment. We stood in a clean room we had prepared, took cards and drew on the backs of them, and held them up. Then we burned the cards. The inventor of this device entered the room and took photos. Those pictures accurately displayed us standing there, with the cards and the patterns reproduced.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Now, if I only had any reason at all to trust your word.”
“You can test the device yourself,” she said. “Use it to answer any question from history you wish.”
“We could,” Ivy said, “if it hadn’t been stolen.”
“I could do that,” I repeated, trusting what Ivy said. She had good instincts for interrogation, and sometimes fed me lines. “Except the device has been stolen, hasn’t it?”
Monica leaned back in her chair, frowning.
“It wasn’t difficult to guess, Steve,” Ivy said. “She wouldn’t be here if everything were working properly, and she’d have brought the camera—to show it off—if she really wanted to prove it to us. I could believe it’s in a lab somewhere, too valuable to bring. Only in that case, she’d have invited us to her center of strength, instead of coming to ours.
“She’s desperate, despite her calm exterior. See how she keeps tapping the armrest of her chair? Also, notice how she tried to remain standing in the first part of the conversation, looming as if to prop up her authority? She only sat down when she felt awkward with you seeming so relaxed.”
Tobias nodded. “‘Never do anything standing that you can do sitting, or anything sitting that you can do lying down.’ A Chinese proverb, usually attributed to Confucius. Of course, no primary texts from Confucius remain in existence, so nearly everything we attribute to him is guesswork, to some extent or another. Ironically, one of the only things we are sure he taught is the Golden Rule—and his quote regarding it is often misattributed to Jesus of Nazareth, who worded the same concept a different way . . .”
I let him speak, the ebbs and flows of his calm voice washing across me like waves. What he was saying wasn’t important.
“Yes,” Monica finally said. “The device was stolen. And that is why I am here.”
“So we have a problem,” I said. “The only way to prove these pictures authentic for myself would be to have the device. And yet, I can’t have the device without doing the work you want me to do—meaning I could easily reach the end of this and discover you’ve been playing me.”
She dropped one more picture onto the table. A woman in sunglasses and a trench coat, standing in a train station. The picture had been taken from the side as she inspected a monitor above.
Sandra.
“Uh-oh,” J.C. said.
“Where did you get this?” I demanded, standing up.
“I’ve told you—”
“We’re not playing games anymore!” I slammed my hands down on the coffee table. “Where is she? What do you know?”