Timecaster

THIRTY-SEVEN

The door was unlocked, as I’d left it. Neil was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a bag of chips. Apparently he hadn’t figured out that my Tesla account had been suspended, and that ergo his supplication collar no longer worked. If I’d been in a reflective mood, I might have quipped something about how the biggest boundaries people had to face were the ones they didn’t test. But I wasn’t feeling reflective. I was feeling tired and sore and mean.

Neil’s eyes bugged out when he saw me, and he made a choking sound.

“You… you…”

“Yes, Neil. I’m me. But the question is, who are you?”

“You killed half a million people.”

I sat down next to him, taking the TEV off my shoulder and setting it on the floor.

“So you know half a million and one is no big deal for me.” I tugged out my DT, put on the voice-stress analyzer. “State your full name, or I’ll do something horrible to you.”

“Neil Anders Winston,” he quickly said.

“Is Zelda your aunt, Neil? Tell the truth this time.”

“Yes.”

Untruth.

I took out my Nife, let him see the blade, then drove it through the table we were sitting at. He jumped about a foot. When I pulled the Nife toward me, cutting the tabletop in half, Neil lost all color in his face.

“No, she’s not my real aunt. Someone told me to tell you that.”

Truth.

“Who?”

“I don’t know. He never told me his name. He called me up, out of the blue.”

Truth.

“Do you normally follow orders from strangers?”

“No.”

“Did he have something on you? Blackmail? Extortion?”

“No.”

“Did he offer you credits?”

“No.”

“What did he offer you, Neil?”

Neil studied his lap. “He said he had a way to get you into trouble.”

“Why would you want to get me into trouble?”

“He said you’d go to prison. Then I could have Vicki for myself.”

My anger was tempered with a healthy dose of pity, so I didn’t smack him. Yet.

“Tell me everything he told you.”

Neil talked through the headphone call with the mystery man. He’d fixed it so Neil could get into the apartment using his chip. He made Neil type and memorize everything he needed to say, which Neil had done. He sent Neil the prism ball via UPS, no return address, along with several bugs, and told him to plant them in my house.

“Did you get the impression this man knew you?” I asked. I was looking at Neil’s DT, studying the instructions the mystery man had given him.

“Yes. But not because I knew him. He said he’d been spying on me for a while. Knew how I felt about Vicki. Wanted us to be together.”

“Did he say anything about himself?”

“Nothing.”

“What was his voice like?” I raised an eyebrow. “Did he sound like me?”

“He used a voice scrambler. He called me four times. Each time he sounded different.”

“Do you know what this is, Neil?” I took the prism ball from the pouch on my belt.

“No.”

“You don’t know, but you still hid it in my house?”

“He assured me it was safe.”

“The nameless, faceless stranger assured you it was safe? What if it wasn’t safe? What if it was a bomb?”

“I’m not an idiot, Talon. I scanned it, made sure it wasn’t explosive or poisonous. It’s just a bunch of electronics.”

I raised my fist. Neil cowered.

“Please don’t hurt me. Please.”

I was going to hurt him, all right. He’d lied to me, planted bugs in my house, and endangered my wife. But I wasn’t going to risk breaking my knuckles on his thick head.

I held up my DT, showing Neil it was recording. “You see this, asshole? I’m playing this for Vicki. After she hears it, she’s never going to speak to you again. And that’s the very least of what you deserve.”

Neil started to blubber. I left him to his pain and began to search the apartment. There had to be another prism ball in here, one that made me timecast the parallel earth where Alter-Talon killed Aunt Zelda. I assumed the balls had a limited range, which was why Alter-Talon disappeared near the elevator-it didn’t broadcast that far. That meant the ball had to be close.

There were hundreds of places a small object could hide. I began in the kitchen, going through the cabinets and drawers, opening containers. I also checked the refrigerator. Zelda’s backward head stared back at me, accusatory. Her open eyes had frosted over, becoming a dull white. Even more disconcerting was Zelda’s jaw, hanging wide open like she was about to eat me.

I snapped on a pair of latex gloves I keep in my utility belt for occasions such as this one, and reluctantly patted her down, feeling ghoulish. I flinched when I felt a lump under her dress, near her middle. I used the Nife to carefully cut away her clothing, and then paused.

The ball wasn’t on her stomach.

It was in her stomach.

I frowned. At least it explained the open jaw. The killer had stuffed the ball into her mouth. I momentarily wondered why that hadn’t been in the timecast transmission, then remembered the transmission was from a completely different murder. I hadn’t seen this Aunt Zelda killed.

Yet.

I stared at the bulge, knowing what needed to be done, not wanting to be the one to do it. Maybe I could have forced Neil to, but his caterwauling was so intense I feared he’d slit his own throat if I gave him the Nife.

Rather than dwell on the task, I went straight to it. A quick stroke of the Nife blade across the bump split the skin. The prism sphere pushed up through the viscera like a giant eye opening, congealed blood and bits of gore sticking to the surface. I plucked the ball out, got hit with the acrid stench of gastric juices bubbling up from the stomach, and quickly slammed the refrigerator door.

Neil had watched the spectacle, and had traded wailing for covering up his mouth with both hands. He’d gotten some color back, but unfortunately for him the color was sickly green.

I studied the sphere, which was identical to the one from my house. It was buzzing softly, the prism oscillating on the surface beneath the cold, gelatinous blood. This one had no PRESS ME inscription, but there was a button. I touched it, and the noise ceased.

I set the ball on the counter, stripped off my gloves, and washed my hands in the sink even though I hadn’t gotten any blood on them. I also splashed some water on my face. When I finished, I was energized. It was finally time to see who set me up.

I turned on Teague’s TEV and closed my eyes, allowing instinct to take over. My breathing slowed. My mind opened. I both focused and spaced out, quickly locating the eighth dimension. Once I did, it took only a minute to tune in to the octeract point. I mentally pet the bunny, giving the fabric of spacetime a little tickle between the ears, and then stared at the monitor. This time, the colors were correct. I was timecasting in our universe.

I panned around the kitchen, but the room was empty. A close-up of the countertop found it free of bloodstains, so I must have tuned in to before the murder. I began to wander the house, searching for Aunt Zelda. No one was home. I fast-forwarded, keeping the lens on the front door, letting it play normally when it opened.

Aunt Zelda came in, carrying a bag of groceries. She closed the door behind her, then glanced in the hallway mirror and checked her hair. It was such a candid, human gesture that I felt my heart sink. All I knew about this woman was that she used to be the man who invented uffsee, and she had a psychotic dissy nephew. Seeing her as a person was disconcerting, especially since I knew what was coming up.

She brought the bag to the kitchen, and loaded some fruit into the refrigerator. Then she opened the kitchen closet and a man stepped out and grabbed her throat.

The move was so sudden, so unexpected and violent, both Aunt Zelda and I gasped. The man was dressed head to toe in black, including gloves. Medium height, heavy build. His face was hidden behind a celebrity veil. These were a result of the Paparazzi Massacre of 2054, when a cadre of celebrities allegedly hired a hit squad to wipe out forty-seven known photographer-stalkers. The violence ended when an inventor released celebrity veils-one-way fabric that attached to a hat and draped over the face, completely obscuring identity. Celebrity invasion of privacy dwindled to zero, as paparazzi had no way of proving who was in their photos.

The celebrity veil this killer wore had a yellow circle on it, with an emoticon smiley:) printed on the fabric. There was no way to see his face.

I watched as he pulled Aunt Zelda to the sink, easily overpowering her. The rest of the scene played out as it had in the alternate universe. Aunt Zelda’s head was slammed into the sink three times, then twisted around 180 degrees.

I paused the action, noting that Neil was watching over my shoulder.

“I told you I didn’t do it,” I said.

He sniffled. “That’s you in a mask.”

I switched to electromagnetic radiation resolution, and zoomed in on the killer’s arm to read his chip ID.

His chip wasn’t there. Instead, there was a round black disk.

“WTF?”

He was hiding his chip somehow. Which was impossible. There was no technology able to do that.

But then, there was no technology able to allow timecasting in parallel universes, either.

I fast-forwarded, wincing as he jammed a prism ball down Aunt Zelda’s throat, cut out and nuked her chip, and stuffed her in the fridge. Then he did something odd. He took another celebrity veil out of his pocket and placed it on top of the refrigerator.

I paused the transmission and reached for the veil. It had an emoticon frowny face:(on the front. Why leave it there? I did a quick scan of it with my DT. No fingerprints. No DNA. It was just a normal mask. I shoved it into my utility belt.

I unpaused the TEV and followed the killer to the front door, where he rigged the lock mechanism, allowing Neil’s chip to open it. Then I tagged along as he walked into the hallway and caught the elevator. This time, he didn’t vanish into thin air. He hopped into the lift and went down.

I rewound, going back two hours, and found him when he arrived, still wearing the celebrity veil. I let it play, watching him walk to Aunt Zelda’s door, open it with a smart magnet, and then hide in the kitchen closet.

I had two courses of action. I could follow him to see where he went next, or I could follow him backward and see where he came from. He’d have to take off the veil eventually.

The problem was, I might have to track him for hours in either direction before he revealed his face.

I yawned, fatigue catching up with me. I needed food, and sleep. Much as I wanted to chase this bastard right now, my body was close to shutting down. I padded back into the apartment, and found my way into the bathroom. I located some sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet. I dumped three onto my hand, plus three Valium, some THC, and, just for fun, three Estrolux pills. The Estrolux temporarily increased breast size.

Neil was still in the kitchen, eyeing me like a cat when a dog came into the room. I walked past him, reaching into the cabinet, taking Aunt Zelda’s bottle of contraband rum.

I located a glass and filled it halfway. It smelled like biodiesel.

Without hesitating, I poured it down my throat.

It tasted awful, like some kind of antique medicine, and burned my throat going down. I’d never tried real liquor before, and couldn’t understand why anyone would do so willingly. Yuck. And people used to drink so much of this stuff it destroyed their livers? What the heck was wrong with them?

I spat into the sink, then turned to Neil.

“I need to sleep,” I said. “But I don’t trust you not to murder me. So I need you to take some pills.”

“I don’t want to take any pills.”

I unsheathed my Nife. “These are getting in your stomach, one way or another. Which way do you want to go?”

“Actually, some pills would hit the spot right about now.”

I handed them over, and he poured a glass of water and obediently swallowed the whole bunch. I made him open his mouth to show he wasn’t cheeking them, and sent him to go sleep on the sofa.

Then I sat down at the kitchen table and called my wife.

She didn’t answer her headphone, and I had an overwhelming feeling something was very wrong.