“Yes, I am…old. Beyond even what these years suggest.” His eyes looked up for a moment, in calculation. “Oh, but I just choose to keep the appearance I once had.” He seemed to note his attire for the first time. “Except the old me never would have stomached a second of this…”
He glanced back to the dumpster, to the flies and the garbage and the stains. “Or, god forbid, that.”
“The old you?” Phoebe just stared, wide-eyed, then looked back to the wall. “Where are those agents? What are they seeing?”
The man waved a hand absently. “Oh, they’re right there. Take a look.”
He reached forward, fast, and touched her forehead with one finger.
The air fluttered and lightened slightly, and now wall turned transparent. The four agents were rushing about, guns drawn, urgently checking the area. Trying the door nearby, cursing and looking around in confusion.
The scene darkened just a touch, and they were gone — the wall back, and the finger withdrew from her temple.
“Just shifted us out of phase with them, in a temporal sense.” He shrugged. “It’s the most effective way of staying out of sight…but it takes a bit of energy and, I’m so tired.”
Phoebe frowned. “You’re a Custodian.” No question in her tone, just fact. “I…we need your help.”
The man lowered his eyes, staring at his boots. “I heard you searching for me. For us. And against my better judgment, and so many years of indifference, yes I answered.” His eyes sought her out — pained and weary.
“I know,” Phoebe said, “that we’re outside of time, however you want to call it, but I think you know too — we don’t have much of it left. Whatever’s happening, my brother — my husband and friends — all rounded up, and our enemies are attempting again to…”
What exactly were they trying to do? Phoebe wasn’t sure, only that it was certainly bad, on par with what they had just overcome in Alaska, with the destruction of the Emerald Tablet and the prevention of wholesale annihilation.
“I know what they are trying to do. We — my counterparts and I — have seen it. Lived it, been there and done that as they say — over and over.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No, and be thankful you do not.” He sighed. “When I first…” He stared at his ratty gloved palms. “Became like this, the word ‘overwhelming’ is too insignificant a description of what happened.”
“How did you…become?” Phoebe studied the wrinkled face some more. “I always assumed the Custodians were…I don’t know, ancients from a past civilization with incredible anti-aging pills or something. Or, I don’t know…aliens?”
The man chuckled in a wheezy, throaty sound. “Oh, that is rich. And in my former life, I actually believed in them, that aliens were what I was seeing.”
“Seeing?”
“Yes, I was…I had…talents like you.”
“A remote viewer?”
He nodded. “In trances, I would receive images and diagrams, advanced formulae and notions far beyond any scientific thinking at the time. What else could I fathom except that aliens were communicating with me, their vessel, and sending information they needed humanity to have? And I…I did my best to bring these things to fruition.”
Phoebe frowned. “Who are…?”
“But I was scorned. Mocked and later vilified. What I thought ‘they’ wanted was really nothing more than my seeing the objective I sought in the clear, timeless ether, transcending the barriers of the nineteenth century and accessing all future and past knowledge.”
“Shit, if you could do that, you were more powerful even than my brother. Than…”
He waved off the compliment. “It’s what made me an ideal candidate for the program.”
“What program?” Phoebe was getting antsy, looking again at the fake wall behind her, and the surroundings, expecting at any minute the time bubble would burst, and the agents would be upon them.
“I won’t bore you with all that. Psychics made the best choice, and it was believed someone like me could handle being thrust out of his body and thus, potentially existing outside of time itself.” He made a groaning noise and scratched at his nose. “Oh, they had no idea. The extent of it all.”
His eyes blinked at her, rapidly and he again touched her head. “Here’s a glimpse…”
Phoebe rocked back as soon as he touched her, separating the connection. But even that half a second contact had been enough to leave her gasping, heaving up air, dropping to her knees and rubbing the hard ground for some sort of solidity. Normalcy, something…
“Oh my God…”
“Exactly.”
She looked up finally, her breaths slowing but her heart still thundering. “I was everywhere, everywhen, I saw… Oh god, it’s starting to leave my head, I couldn’t contain…”
“Existence on an infinite scale? The mortal barrier lifted — that was only part of what the program did. The rest of it, part scientific, part philosophical, was to probe the idea, the notion really, that all this…”
He held out his arms and spun in a quick circle. “All this is just an incredible collection of intersection patterns of energy and light.”
Phoebe frowned, recalling something. “A hologram?”
The man smiled. “One of the fascinating aspects of holograms is that any individual cell contains all the information of the whole. Apply that concept now to reality and you have what I experience — my brothers and sisters and I — every moment of our existence since we stepped into those experimental pods. We had our consciousness — our souls, spirits or astral bodies, call them what you will — uploaded into the overall quantum level of reality…into the hologram itself.”
He leaned back against the dumpster, lowered his head and held it tight with both hands. “Imagine that…what you just felt…constantly, with no escape. We experience everything, everywhere, every when, all the time.”
He looked at her, at Phoebe still at a loss of anything to say, trying to comprehend, unable even to recall why she was here, what she was doing.
“Imagine all that if you can,” he said, “and then you realize, it’s not that we cannot for some high moral reason or internal code of behavior, help you. It’s that, with every possible scenario played out in an infinite number of universes, why does your plight, in the here and now of this one speck of a point in infinity, matter at all?”
Phoebe’s mouth just hung open. Her heart cracked with sympathy, shame, regret and most of all, hopelessness. But she held on to one trail of thought, from a few minutes back. A question she had meant to ask, something that might pull all of these notions back from the brink of the meaningless abyss, back to something like the filthy ground in this back alley, something that mattered.
“Who are you?”
“No one…” he started to say, but Phoebe stopped him.
“You’re wrong. I know you.”
She stepped forward, looked up into his eyes, seeing a familiar sparkle of electricity gleaming in their dark pupils as if seeing old, familiar sights that never left.
“Nikola Tesla.”
22
Caleb emerged into a hallway that looked like something from a Halloween movie, set in a hospital with dim, blinking overhead lights, and nothing else. After a descent that seemed more abrupt than most amusement park rides, his stomach still left far above, the elevator carried him here, with no other option, no other floors. If he had been expecting multiple levels and all sorts of options, none were found.
One way ticket to hell.
Careful to observe his surroundings thoroughly, he was nonetheless frustrated by the gloom and the lack of clarity. He couldn’t tell if this was real, couldn’t see anything about the edges, whether the telltale sign of a false vision was present, but he had the sense this was as real as it could get.