Том Светерлич - The Gone World

Iwoke in the hospital room.

“What year is it?” I asked the technician who came to take blood.

“2015,” she said.

“September?”

“You haven’t been asleep that long. Yeah, it’s still September.”

Bone-density tests, eyesight tests, MRIs. A physical-therapy regimen to recover from three months without gravity, but I’m a quick study, my body accomplished in adapting to new movement. The routine to manage the effects of gravity was not unlike the physical-therapy routine following my amputation, the hours of rehabilitation when teams of physical and occupational therapists taught me how to live with a missing limb. Severe weight loss aboard the Grey Dove —I hadn’t realized just how many pounds I’d shed , but my facial features were drawn, my ribs and the points of my hip bone visible, my figure diminished in the full-length mirror. An enormous appetite—daily protein shakes, sometimes twice daily, easy to exceed the recommended caloric intake, the past three months nothing but Protein Fillets, Russian Vita-Sticks, foil envelopes of fruit paste. I’d need to bulk up to endure the return trip home.

A soft knock at the room door the afternoon of my fifth day. I thought maybe one of the lab techs for another round of blood work, but when I opened the door, I found a hulking man, slightly stooped with age, bald except for a cottony tonsure and a flowing white beard. He wore a brown suit and a robin’s-egg pocket handkerchief that matched the vivid blue of his shirt. When he saw me, a grin spread warmly across his face, like the sun revealed from behind clouds.

“Ah, there you are,” he said. “I’ve been waiting nearly twenty years to meet you.”

I recognized him, remembered him when he was middle-aged, a six-and-a-half-foot physicist with a startling Mohawk, reed thin back then in a cardigan and large black-framed glasses, now hunched and thicker, the top of his head as smooth as a river stone. Dr. Njoku had already been a star investigator by the time I saw him speak at a training session in Savannah because of his work on the Faragher case, a policy setter for investigations involving echoes, those individuals brought from IFTs, doubling someone already living.

Cases of misconduct among NSC sailors were common, an epidemic of drugs and money stolen from IFTs and distributed in terra firma. While fallout from Tailhook reverberated through the Navy, however, NSC sailors went without reform because actions committed in Inadmissible Future Trajectories had always been considered inadmissible , as if those actions had never occurred. Njoku’s work had helped change the culture. He had spent years investigating Petty Officer Jack John Faragher, a sailor authorized to travel solo missions to Deep Waters but who had instead made several runs to near futures to kidnap the wives of friends, to bring these doubled women back to terra firma to defile and eventually murder. Faragher had pleaded innocent—but the court found, based on Njoku’s work, that echoes brought to terra firma should be considered “alive” in every sense, afforded the rights of nonresident aliens. The charges against Faragher stuck, resulting in court-martial—and, after a series of appeals, the death sentence.

“Dr. Njoku,” I said, shaking his hand. “I’m honored—I heard you speak in Savannah.”

A summery vitality percolated in his eyes even though he moved with difficulty. Stiff knees, orthopedic shoes. He held a slim silver laptop, manila envelopes.

“The honor’s mine,” he said. “You’re a bird in flight, a time traveler—the rest of us are just ghosts. Here, I brought you some housewarming gifts.” Njoku handed me an envelope. “O’Connor wanted to bring these to you himself, but he just couldn’t make the trip. Some health issues.”

Mortal revelations were common in IFTs, but always jarring. “I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else to say—I tried not to imagine O’Connor suffering, told myself that whatever the circumstances here, he was still healthy in 1997.

“He has his good days and his bad days,” said Njoku. “He lives out in Arizona, says the dry air helps. He so wanted to see you again, but some days he… he can’t even speak some days. He endured a series of heart attacks a few years back. He had to send me in his place.”

We were trained not to take personal revelations like these as fact, not to let ourselves be snagged with worry over the possibilities we see unspooled. O’Connor’s series of heart attacks might not ever occur. I opened the envelope he’d left for me: a Visa, a bank card, driver’s insurance, and a license. Five hundred dollars in twenties. A slim-profile cellular phone that looked like a handheld television.

“Ever use an ATM?” Njoku asked.

“Sure, but we travel with cash. I brought enough to last.”

“Use the debit card, you’ll have an endless supply—save you some paperwork when you return home. Your PIN is 1234. Everything’s registered under the name you provided us with.”

State of Virginia license, my photograph taken from my NCIS ID card, altered so that I was a brunette. Courtney Gimm. I’d asked O’Connor before I left to have this identification ready, knowing I’d be traveling under a different name. Almost twenty years after I’d filled out the paperwork, here it was.

“That one’s a burner phone,” said Njoku. “Disposable, biodegradable.”

“You don’t have Ambient Systems here?” I asked, thinking of other IFTs I’d visited, futures misty with nanotech, the air shimmering gold like fairy dust, hallucinatory images, illusions, voices that answered when you spoke their names. Cellular phones were obsolete in other futures.

“No, nothing like that here,” said Njoku.

We shared a pot of oolong tea, watched a video montage on his laptop of what I’d missed in the intervening years, Highlights of the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries , the death of Diana and the semen-stained dress, the thousand dead at the terror attack on the CJIS FBI facility—a bitter jolt seeing images of the office where I worked engulfed in flames, the dead draped in sheets. The election of Gore, the towers falling. An Iraq treaty, the invasions of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some of these images were familiar from other IFTs, but in other IFTs history had played out differently.

“What about the Terminus?” I asked.

“Recorded at the year 2067 by the crew of the USS James Garfield .”

Within a lifetime.

“Show me that part about CJIS again,” I said.

“The largest act of domestic terror since the Oklahoma City bombing,” said Njoku. “Over a thousand casualties. A sad, terrible day.”

Internet images of the immediate aftermath, the dead laid in the fields surrounding the CJIS facility and in the vast parking lot. I wondered who I’d known that would be among the dead. Rashonda Brock , it occurred to me, and the kids, Brianna and Jasmine— I wondered if they would have died in the CJIS attack, thought of Brock just before he’d opened the door to Courtney’s old bedroom. “I have two beautiful girls,” he’d said. His entire family might have been stricken from him in a single morning.

“My office is in one of the burning sections,” I said, my corner of the building obscured by smoke in nearly every image—the sensation was like seeing a house you’d once lived in burn to cinders. I thought of the faces I would have recognized. Rashonda Brock running through corridors opaque with smoke, searching for her children. “Was,” I corrected. “I might die in this attack. Or I might have died, except I know—”

“A suicide bomber, an individual who worked for the FBI, his office was in the CJIS building,” said Njoku. “He had security clearance.”