“You might recall it, at times, depending on how strongly you held on to those memories, and that’s something we’ve worked hard to perfect here. Mental strategies for safekeeping our ‘selves’ and not losing our central identities, but we’re not sure it can be done.”
Caleb took a deep breath, trying to calm himself and focus, despite the weight of such a revelation. He studied the bell again, for want of anything else. “And you need me to find you the right door for you?”
“Not just for me. For the salvation of this world,” Boris corrected. “Or at least some part of it.”
“But it won’t be for all,” Caleb stated, without expecting any kind of argument. “It’s for you and your elite. For the conspirators and those who have forever kept the masses in the dark, in check. It’s for the Custodians who have done what for us exactly? And now they want to save their own skins?”
“I don’t know their motives,” Boris said. “But I do know they don’t need us for this. They want something else. I only work for them and—”
“And reap the results of a good benefit plan?”
His eyes flashed darkly, and in that glance Caleb’s earlier thought took a new light. A beginning of a plan. He didn’t have all the pieces, but this sudden connection and insight into his adversary, who had more layers to him than Caleb had originally credited, gave him a slight opening.
“Enough debate, theorizations and questions,” Boris snapped. “Time’s up and you have to do what you do best. See. Go searching and ask your questions, find the right one, get me the coordinates as I’m sure your little talent can come up with some cryptic glimpses that you’ll quickly decode and interpret.”
Boris was suddenly closer, right in front of him, eye to eye. “No games, no misdirection. I’ll know, we’ll all know. And especially, the one I work for…” He paused and glanced over his shoulder, toward the back of the chamber, beside a staircase where only now Caleb noticed a window partition in a second-level station. Dark behind there, but the sense of figures standing, waiting…
Was there one in a familiar hat, particularly interested in what was happening right here, and particularly immune to the visions Boris could create?
That was an important point, he suddenly realized, and had to know.
“Your woodpecker talent…?” Caleb leaned closer to Boris’s left ear. “Does it work on them?”
Boris recoiled, eyes narrowing. “That’s not your concern.”
Caleb turned his back on Boris, nodded as if in agreement, and focused on the bell. He thought about Boris’s response. There had to be a way. A glance back to the windows, and that dark silhouette, standing oddly powerful. A glowing tip of a cigarette appeared near the darkness at his face.
Was he one of them, a Custodian? One who had somehow defied the non-involvement directive? Or was he just a government spook, a Man in Black?
Caleb was going to find out. Soon.
He focused his attention on the bell and the shimmering waves of energy radiating from its spinning.
Or better yet, in the past.
23
“Ignorance is bliss,” Tesla said. “You do not understand how important that old saying is, and how much I understand that now. The curse of my life, and the benefit to so many who have not had to undergo the curse of wisdom.”
Phoebe continued staring at him. “You…can’t be Tesla. He died, oh I don’t know, in the 1940s. He was like almost ninety back then, so no…He’s long dead.”
“No.” A pained looks crossed his expression. “And yes. I can show you the truth, just tap your head there and you would see it alclass="underline" how they took me. The stand-in they buried in my place. I lived, a lot longer. Not my own choosing, at least after a while. They kept me alive, on life support the last five years, until this program was ready. By then…the pain I was in, wanting it all to end, of course I volunteered.”
“I don’t understand. I thought you said…”
“I was needed for an experiment.”
Phoebe frowned, looked behind her to the wall — which was starting to peel apart now like an old bumper sticker. “They’re going to come back and find us. And what if they see you? Or…” She backed away, looking at him differently. “Are you still with them?”
A laugh. “Oh no, they figured they were done a long time ago when they finally destroyed my body. Oh, and they will never see me. Only those…we wish to appear to can have that privilege.”
“It’s more like a curse,” Phoebe said, “unless you start doing something to help. Other than just giving me little pep talks about some great destiny.” Phoebe reached out to him, grabbed his arm but found it loose, yielding under the baggy coat sleeves. Almost like he wasn’t really there.
He barely reacted to her touch. His face was turned upwards now, squinting as if seeing something far off, way up beyond the sky. “Ah, they have found us, after all, but it’s not really them.” A smile emerged, then faded. “They are doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Your husband is in trouble.”
“Orlando?” She gasped. “What? What do you see?”
Not waiting for a reply, she dropped to one knee, closed her eyes and sought him out. Thought something was coming, but instead: a rushing sense of nothing but 1s and 0s whipped by in her vision.
“Do not waste your time on that now.”
“Where the hell is he? I can’t sense him, I can’t…”
“I am sorry for what is coming. For him, but…it might be a help.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” She was losing it, completely out of control as never before, trapped in an alley behind a fake wall, with enemies on the outside and this…unnatural exception on the inside.
“I was not going to come out of hiding. All this…these people, the city…We stay in isolation, as remote as possible, and coming out here…it disrupts things. Our essence, our very code.”
Phoebe stared at him, feeling more and more like she — and everyone she cared about — was slipping toward the abyss and this one hope she had sought out had turned out to be completely insane, and no help at all.
“Why did you come out then? Why send me that beacon, why pull me here? Tell me that much at least.”
Tesla held his head.
“Tell me something!”
“All right!” he yelled, at the same time flinching as a pigeon suddenly swooped down in a flash of white and grey and fluttered around his head. His face sparked suddenly, like giving off voltage, and sparks shot from his fingertips.
He followed its beating wings until it landed on his right shoulder, then he seemed to calm and looked back to her.
“You are here because I cannot do it anymore.”
“What?”
“Hide.”
Phoebe nodded. “Good, well that’s something. About time. Why not? Is it because…their side — the others, the bad ones — aren’t sitting on the sidelines any longer?”
Tesla closed his eyes, exhaled then opened them again. “A few of us, the seven, and then one more…gained their wits faster than the others. We figured out a way to consolidate all the information, filter it and choose to live in a smaller subset of the infinite, reducing the choices and destinations, contracting the quantum—”
“Enough.” Phoebe rubbed her forehead. “So, there are some Custodians who can intervene. You told me as much in the caverns. But what about these others?”
“I do not know. We were not friends or even colleagues, my other volunteers. And as I said, once we were…dismantled on a quantum…er subatomic level, well, the infinity of paths and experiences was such that our roads rarely crossed.”