Chapter Eleven Engulfed In His World Tommy I’s Journal

 

 

It was night after a long day of public transportation when I arrived at Kyle’s Brazilian jiu-jitsu school. Closing time had come and gone, but I wanted to study the place through the windows and get a feeling for it before showing up there in the morning. Places hold memories, something I’ve become increasingly sensitive to, and I thought I might pick up an impression that could help me be more prepared for my encounter with Kyle.

The parking lot’s empty, but as soon as I step onto it, as if on cue, a black muscle car comes roaring up the street, swerves into the lot at an insane speed, and screeches to a halt. The reckless driver didn’t even see me, and if I’d been in the way, would have run me over.

I cloak myself and approach the muscle car, curious to learn the meaning of this mad arrival. A grotesque giant of a man clutching a red plastic bag emerges from the black hulk and slams the door.

He’s wearing a black tank top to show off his gargantuan muscles. I’d never seen such an outsized bodybuilder in person, and I go into slowtime so I can observe this human oddity. He’s adorned with a gold chain, and an oversized fake gold watch encircles the wrist of the hand gripping the red plastic bag.

He radiates unpleasant energies and odors. He’s sweaty, though I felt air-conditioned air puff out from his car when he opened the door. He’s amped up on stimulants of some sort and reeks of bad cologne. His black beard and sideburns have been obnoxiously razor-cut into some kind of wannabe-Satanic look.

I follow him as he walks up to the door of the school, which was not, as I’d assumed, locked. He pulls it open in a ridiculously forceful way as if it had been defying him by being closed. I let the door close behind him and watch him disappear inside.

Most martial arts schools have an open floor plan with windows that are exposed to the outside, allowing people to view the training going on inside. But this is a higher-class establishment with a walled-in lobby and a front desk, similar to a health club. I wait a couple of seconds after the door closes before I quietly reopen it and enter.

I’m confident in my long-practiced cloaking techniques, which do not create optical invisibility but employ subtle means of deflecting attention. Following a few feet behind the odor trail of the sweaty giant, I step out of the dark lobby and onto a brilliantly lit practice floor in time to see the man swaggering his bulky form toward . . . Kyle.

Still in slowtime, I feel the moment rippling with déjà vu. From the perspective of my timeline, it’s been eleven years since I last laid eyes on a horribly maimed twenty-two-year-old version of him, amputated and castrated on the floor of a cave before Viealetta’s glowing time portal, a portal that sent each of us to a different past.

Uncanny fortune has led me to encounter Kyle before I was ready, throwing me into what I sense is a significant moment.

Kyle is doing curls with a pair of dumbbells and appears to be ignoring the approaching hulk. When he gets close, Kyle flashes him an angry glare and says,

“You’re late.”

“Do I look like someone who gives a shit?” the giant fires back.

The way he parrots this comeback line suggests he’s full of such stock phrases he’s picked up from action movies and TV shows. Kyle seems aware of this and gives the giant a contemptuous sneer and waits a beat before nodding toward the red bag in his hand.

“Show me what you’ve got,” says Kyle, in an insolent and demanding tone.

From the bag, the man pulls a Ziploc holding ampules, syringes, and alcohol wipes.

“Only the finest anabolics to be found anywhere,” the giant says, dangling the baggie like it’s a glittering treasure.

“Only the same anabolics I can get from anyone and will next time, but from someone who respects punctuality,” replies Kyle impatiently. “How much?”

The giant names a price, and Kyle scoffs as he pulls a roll of bills from his sweatpants pocket.

“You jacked up your prices just for me, didn’t you?”

“You can afford it, rich boy,” the man says. Kyle passes him a few bills.

“Of course I can afford it,” says Kyle, snatching the baggie. “But it’s disrespectful on top of your lateness.”

“Oh, and I guess you think you deserve respect because you can beat up on other rich kids or whatever,” says the hulk.

Kyle ignores him. With practiced speed, he pokes a syringe into an ampule and injects himself while the hulk watches. Kyle looks up at him, annoyed.

“Why are you still standing there, asshole. We’re done.”

“You better watch your fucking attitude. Don’t fuck with the bull, unless you want the horns,” replies the hulk. I can see he’s grasping for another movie line to preserve his dignity rather than offering any actual physical threat.

“Oh yeah,” says Kyle, grinning, as he bounces up and down on the balls of his feet doing a loopy version of shadowboxing. “Maybe you’d like to go a round? Any weapons on you?”

“I am a weapon,” says the bull.

Kyle smirks at yet another movie line and exaggerates his shadowboxing into something intentionally goofy and slightly effeminate, baiting the muscle-bound bull to come at him.

“C’mon, weapon, give me your best shot. Of course, I understand if you’d rather not get bruised up,” Kyle taunts. “Might not look so good when you’re oiled up to pose in front of your bodybuilding buddies.”

The bull might have an extra hundred pounds of meaty, bodybuilder muscle, but even at sixteen, Kyle is 6’1″, an angular skeleton wrapped in whipcord muscle, and he’s glowing with a roid rage I perceive as sheets of plasmic fire shimmering around him. A child could’ve seen through his mime show. His silvery eyes glint with panther-like speed held in reserve.

Apparently, the insulted bull does not see the obvious and comes toward Kyle in a flat-footed, clumsy boxing stance while Kyle continues his loopy shadowboxing as if oblivious to his approach.

The bull halts and throws a comically slow haymaker that connects with empty space as Kyle, with lightning-fast torque, smashes him with a spinning backfist.

Watching in slowtime, I see the devastating impact accordion the bull’s face, percussive force spraying sweat and spittle. With a ground-shaking thud, the bull drops, faceplanting onto the mat like a side of beef, out cold.

It’s a relief to see he’s still breathing. Kyle stands over him, gloating, like Muhammad Ali in his I-Shocked-the-World! stance over a fallen Sonny Liston.

Suddenly, I realize—I know this moment. Kyle told me about it in the Biosphere when he showed off his spinning backfist, a favorite move forbidden by the rules of our contests, which did not allow strikes that could cause significant damage.

“I once almost killed a guy with that move,” he’d told me, laughing. “You’re lucky you didn’t meet me during my roid-rage phase. Steroids have outsized effects on young males and psychopaths, and I almost took the head off a dumb bodybuilder.”

The bull groans and spastically tries to rise. He’s on all fours and keeps shaking his head like a wet dog. He’s obviously concussed, and his eyes are crossed like a knocked-out cartoon bully with stars spinning around his head. Eventually, he staggers to his feet, falls, staggers back up, and heads out, leaving behind his red plastic bag.

I follow his retreat to the lobby and wait long enough to watch his car lurching and screeching from the parking lot. I give it a few more seconds, decloak, and walk onto the practice floor.

Kyle is startled, caught red-handed inventorying the anabolic contraband. He shoves it back in the bag and shoots me a roid-rageful glare.

“Who the fuck are you? The school is closed.”

“Looks like it’s open for some sort of business,” I say, nodding toward the red bag.

I’m improvising without forethought, slightly shocked by my own dangerous move. Kyle’s glare becomes menacing. I’ve caught him off balance and out of his control zone, and he’s both nervous and infuriated.

“Don’t worry,” I say with a friendly smile. “Your secret is safe with me. All I ask is that you try to strike me.”

Kyle looks at all one hundred and ten pounds of me incredulously.

“Strike you? Is that some sort of twink slang for getting fucked? If so, I can oblige. You’re certainly pretty enough.”

The sexual taunt ignites a rage I thought I had worked through years ago.

This is my future sex abuser.

Without letting my smile falter, I take a breath and compose myself before replying calmly.

“I said try to strike me, Kyle. You’re not nearly fast enough to actually strike me.”

Kyle stares at me with stunned disbelief, finally registering that something beyond strange is going on. That I know his name is probably not part of it, as there’s a captioned photo of him holding a championship trophy out front. Reflected in his eyes, I’m a tiny twink standing before an enraged panther, and yet I’m smiling at him with unruffled confidence.

“You’re tripping, right?”

“Doooo I seeeem liiiike I’mmm triiippiiing?”

I intentionally slow down my voice like I’m drooping on hallucinogens, but I stare at him with psychic acuity, an intimidating form of Vehrillion eye contact that says, I see right through you. It’s a stare that would make most people look away. Kyle’s eyes narrow with consternation and cognitive dissonance. He’s in a state of roid rage that wants to assault me, but another part of him registers my strangeness, and another part of him is nervous about being caught with steroids while still another part wants the assault to be sexual.

Kyle drops the red bag onto the mat and comes toward me.

“OK, but when you regain consciousness, I want you to remember that you asked for it, little buddy.”

I stand there, smiling, not even assuming a defensive stance. I’ve turned on a type of quicktime that will telegraph whatever Kyle is going to do.

I sense the leg sweep he intends even before it enters the front of his mind. He wants to take me off my feet so he can bring me to the mat. He’s already fantasizing about me as a rag doll he can put into various submission holds.

I step away from the sweep with an extreme economy of movement to show how trifling and predictable it is. My smile is unwavering.

Kyle tries a superfast palm strike followed by a couple of flashing hooks, but I bob and weave away from them without breaking my eerie smile or even raising my hands in defense.

Stunned and furious, Kyle winds up for the same spinning backfist he used on the bull, and I decide I’ve had enough.

I launch myself into the air, moving faster than Kyle can see, timing the top of my arc to match the moment when the centrifugal energy of his spinning backfist exhausts itself into empty space.

I kick out, carefully positioning my foot to plant flat on the densest part of his breastbone so as not to do unwarranted damage. I time the impact to send him flying back in an arc that will land him ass-first, sparing his head a concussive blow when it follows.

While he’s still in the air, I use the recoil of my kick to backflip and land on my feet, smile intact, and just in time to witness the moment of Kyle’s head hitting the mat with exactly the force I intended.

He might have shocked the bull’s world, but I fulfilled another Ali metaphor. I floated like a butterfly and stung like a bee. Standing over him, I observe his dilated eyes. Far more than the force of the impact I moderated, he’s stunned by the singular anomaly of what just happened.

Kyle gets to his feet, his roid rage shattered. As he stands there, his brilliant mind fires up, recognizing the presence of the highest strangeness he’s ever encountered. The loutish arrogance and leering grin are gone, replaced by adrenaline-fueled fascination and awe.

“Who are you?” he asks. “What are you?”

I meet his look with a smile and nod.

“Let’s just say when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. But you can call me Tommy.”

Kyle stares at me in ontological shock. Nothing in his life or personality has prepared him for me, and he knows it.

A spontaneous change occurs. Time dilates, decelerating to a state of near suspension. I look at the quartz clock on the wall, whose second hand had been clicking forward at one-second intervals. It’s not moving. This was not a change I had consciously willed, but I sense its meaning. I was on the verge of tragic missteps, and my unconscious has taken my psyche out of the flow of time to reconsider my choices.

Kyle looks different and my perception of him alters in a cascade of realizations. Held in place, he seems less a perpetrator and more a victim, a trapped lab animal, his skin coated with a thin film of sweat. He may have guessed his genetically manipulated origin by now, but not what he was created for. And now, I, without his consent, have created a new version of him through my own ruthless intervention. I acted with as little love for Kyle as the lab techs who spliced his genes together. Like Vaughn, I meant to use Kyle as a means to an end.

I purposefully tricked him into an unequal contest. At least the bodybuilder had fair warning that he was dealing with a martial arts champion, but Kyle had no way of knowing that I’m a mutant twice his age, originally trained by his older self, followed by another twelve years of developing new martial arts forms with Andrew and Alex. I acted as a ringer, hiding unfair advantages so that I could humiliate him.

And all of this was premeditated. I thought it would be the most effective way to get his attention, and it probably was, but I hadn’t examined my shadow, the darkness in me that wanted things to begin this way, with a humiliating proof of my power. I was the oppressed in the act of becoming the oppressor. And that corrupt beginning cannot be taken back.

Time has paused to reveal my darkness and allow me to choose a different way. Kyle may not be capable of love, but I am, and for my mission to succeed, I must summon love for the person who in another timeline was my tormentor. It may not be a love of warmth and affection, but this new being is the result of my actions, and if I’m going to use him to fulfill my mission, I owe him care and responsibility.

Awakened to my shadow, I feel time reanimating. The second hand clicks forward, and I perceive Kyle’s mind composing words he’s about to speak. I descend into the flow of ordinary time to receive them.

“OK, Tommy, if that’s really your name. You’ve earned my undivided attention. But I need a more comprehensible answer to my questions. Who and what are you?”

“Those are fair and reasonable questions, Kyle, but to give you the comprehensive answer you deserve will involve shocking revelations, including something you’ll find of far greater significance. I will reveal who and what you are.”

Kyle maintains his cool poker face, but his dilated eyes reflect curiosity and amazement. He glances up, and I follow the line of his gaze to the wall clock.

“In a minute, I will get a call from my driver,” he says. “To stay out later will require a story that will be reported to my security detail, and I’d rather not arouse their interest. Come with me to my place—the family compound—I’m allowed to have friends over, so your arrival should not draw much notice.”

I nod, just as a phone on a nearby table lights up. Kyle picks it up.

“Hey,” says Kyle, gesturing toward me with his eyes, indicating I should follow him. “I’ll be right out, got a friend with me, and you can stay put, I’ll get the door.”

Kyle grabs the red plastic bag from the floor and shoves it into his jacket pocket. He keeps the phone pressed to his ear as I follow him to the lobby. When he sees me hoist my pack, he shakes his head and takes the pack from me to carry at his side like a gym bag.

“And pop the trunk, I’m bringing some stuff back with me. Hang on, I’ll ask.” Kyle glances at me. “You want anything to eat or drink? They’ll have it ready for us when we arrive.”

I shake my head, but Kyle ignores my answer.

“A couple of iced teas and a sandwich assortment,” he says, turning to me. “Vegetarian, vegan?”

I nod.

“Yeah, include vegetarian and vegan options. No, not the dining room, have them bring it to my room.”

Kyle puts the phone in his pocket and locks the door to the school. He tosses my backpack carelessly into the trunk of the limo and opens the passenger door for me. I get in, and Kyle follows.

It’s like a little black room inside with darkly gleaming surfaces, indicator lights on controls, and inset screens facing us. The driver is hidden behind a black partition, and the outside windows are thick, probably bulletproof, and heavily tinted, as everything outside is dim except streetlights.

“We’ll have time to talk when we get there,” he says.

Kyle’s silver eyes convey warning as he glances toward an inset lens staring at us. I nod to show I’ve understood.

We ride silently, the suspension so impeccably tuned that we barely feel the road in our soundproofed interior. The boundary between us crackles with electricity. Kyle stares straight ahead, his mind spinning like a silent turbine.

Inside this stealthed-out limo, I’m engulfed in his world, like Jonah swallowed by the whale. And now I’m traveling toward the very belly of the beast, the compound where Vaughn, for all I know, could be studying us through the camera.

We leave the city’s lights behind and ascend a winding road that leads to a gatehouse, where a security officer peers out as a massive electronic gate slides open. The limousine approaches a vast compound and sweeps into an illuminated portico meant for receiving cars while shielding passengers from the weather.

A liveried servant opens the door, and we slide out. Kyle pulls my backpack from the trunk and carries it again like a gym bag as I follow him to a door opened by a security guard and into a mansion with vaulted ceilings and immaculately polished surfaces. The floors are black marble, and everything is elegantly understated and silent. There’s no sign of life anywhere.

Kyle walks swiftly through the cavernous interior, taking no interest in any of it, until we enter a corridor leading us to a handsome dark walnut door. Where a keyplate would be, there’s a smooth black panel. Kyle presses his open palm flat against it. Light seeps out around the edges of his hand, the panel gives a soft chirp, and a heavy bolt slides back. We step into what must be his apartment within the compound.

Kyle puts his index finger to his lips, and we remain silent. He opens a cabinet, revealing a safe. Set into its door is a small glass eye. Kyle leans in close and holds still while a thin ring of light circles the lens. Two rising tones sound, and the safe opens with a faint hiss of equalizing air. He removes what looks like a high-tech version of a walkie-talkie, with three rubberized antennas protruding from it and a glowing orange screen. He holds it up and sweeps it around the circumference of the room. Satisfied, he turns it off.

“I always check for bugs when I bring guests over. You’re aware of who my adoptive father, Vaughn, is, right?”

I nod.

“Vaughn is obsessed with surveillance, but I’ve warned him not to monitor my apartment after I detected a listening device last year. He promised not to try that again, but ‘don’t trust and verify’ is my motto. Also, you’ll notice nothing in here opens to a fingerprint. Vaughn’s security has mine on file, and a print can be lifted and spoofed. Vein patterns and irises only work while you’re alive to use them.”

While Kyle returns the bug detector to his safe, I survey what looks like a room-service cart draped in white linen with a large silver platter of meticulously crafted finger sandwiches, fruit, protein bars, and a pitcher of iced tea. It’s a spread that would easily feed five people, and I realize most of it will go to waste.

The room is paneled in dark walnut, and there are floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. It looks like a room made for an older man of importance and wealth, but there are signs of its teenage occupant.

A glass case holds a large collection of martial arts trophies. Many shelves house expensive-looking sci-fi artifacts, anime figures, and game controllers. An array of martial arts weapons adorns a wall, including Samurai swords with engraved hilts and wavy patterns in their long blades.

I walk over to examine the shelf contents, which include highly detailed spacecraft models. The most spectacular is a large space station with transparent domes sheltering miniature farms and forests.

“Biospheres,” I say.

“Right,” says Kyle, “the only way people can live in space long-term. I designed the models based on scientific projections of future technology and had them built by a professional. One day, I plan to make them a reality. Humanity has no future unless it can establish off-planet colonies. Vaughn is ill, so it’s only a matter of time before I inherit the means.”

I turn toward Kyle and see the space-conquering ambition flickering in his silvery eyes. Standing there with his perfect physique and chiseled features, he seems like a character in a sci-fi movie, a future technocratic empire builder, glowing with enough will-to-power to reach across the galaxy.

Kyle gestures toward one of the futuristic swivel chairs before the room-service cart. We sit, and he pours out two glasses of iced tea. I take a sip as I watch Kyle make quick work of a couple of protein bars. The vegetarian and vegan options are marked with little green cellophane flags on toothpicks. I haven’t eaten all day and hate to see food go to waste, so I slowly munch on a cucumber sandwich — paper-thin slices and dill on crustless white bread cut into precise triangles, so soft and airy it barely counts as bread, nothing like the dense, seeded loaves I was raised on. A vegan-flagged one turns out better than expected: smashed avocado brightened with lemon and layered with shaved radish. Another is spread with cashew cheese — skillfully made, but trying to be something it isn’t. Kyle wolfs down some meaty unflagged sandwiches before he sits back in his chair, studying me keenly.

“OK, now that we have privacy, I’m ready to listen. Who are you, what are you, and what exactly do you want from me?”

Kyle wants to give me the third degree, but to submit to that would be a surrender to his power dynamics. I thought of a few openings during the limo ride, but now they seem overly dramatic and fantastical, so I abandon them in favor of a demonstration. I’ve established some credibility with my martial arts demo, but it’s time to go further.

“Since you’re interested in pursuing future technology, let me show you some future tech,” I say.

I reach under my shirt to retrieve the Navigator amulet Andrew gave me.

It’s an object still deeply infused with Andrew’s energy, and reluctance tugs on my arm even as I pass it to Kyle.

“Tell me what you think of this device.”

Kyle takes the amulet and silver chain and weighs them in his hand.

“This feels lighter than titanium, aluminum, beryllium or even magnesium,” he says. “There is no structural metal lighter than magnesium, so there must be hollow space inside of it.”

He takes a knife from his desk and uses the blade to tap against the links and the amulet, holding it to his ear.

“But it doesn’t appear hollow — it reads metallic all the way through. What sort of alloy or material is this?” he asks.

“I don’t know, Kyle.”

“And you say this is a device.”

He studies the amulet and touches the green cabochon at its center. Light suffuses the air around him, illuminating the whole room. Kyle stares in amazement at the luminous field and then back at the amulet.

“Where is the light coming from? I don’t see it emitting from the device.”

He clutches it in his fist, and the light extinguishes.

“How does this work?”

“I’m sorry, Kyle, I don’t know that either.”

“What do you know about it?”

“Very little. I was told it’s a technology developed on another world.”

“Another world? As in another planet?”

“Yes.”

I extend my open palm. Kyle looks at it without moving.

“I’d like to study this further,” he says sternly, still clutching the amulet.

“I’m sure you would.” I meet his eyes, my gaze calm yet unbending. “Maybe later.”

He hesitates, then reluctantly places it in my hand, and I put it back on.

“I’m not trying to taunt you with this, Kyle. I just wanted to give you tangible evidence before I disclose things that will stretch credibility. But I can’t tell you everything. I must measure out the truth, the secrets I hold. I need to see whether our purposes align. But there is one part of my mission—” Kyle’s eyes spark with interest at the word, “where I know our interests converge. I want to save your life.”

“Save my life? From whom or what?” asks Kyle warily.

“From Vaughn.”

Kyle studies me with paranoid suspicion.

“Are you some sort of spook, here to sabotage the family empire? You’d better have evidence to back that claim. I can summon security and have them interrogate you. And they’ll take your device and reverse engineer it to see if it’s actually future tech or a sophisticated parlor trick. Vaughn has consistently treated me as an extremely valuable investment. Why would he be a threat to me?”

I stare at Kyle coolly. He’s certainly not going to turn me over to security and lose his chance to extract my secrets. I wait a couple of beats to show I’m not intimidated by his threats before responding.

“So, you believe the Russian adoption story?” I ask him in a slightly sarcastic tone. “You think Vaughn just got lucky choosing an infant who would turn out to have off-the-scale abilities?”

Kyle’s eyes narrow. He’s obviously aware of the improbability of his origin story and has his own suspicions.

“You’re genetically engineered, Kyle.”

I’ve struck home, but his poker face doesn’t crack.

“I’ve considered the possibility,” he says. “It certainly accounts for the facts better than what you referred to as the Russian adoption story. But it wouldn’t take any insider knowledge to make such a conjecture, given that Vaughn owns cutting-edge biotech companies.”

I study Kyle. Beneath his cool demeanor, I can see the wheels spinning in his mind. I expected him to have gotten this far on his own, but he’s also trying to diminish the value of my information to enhance his position.

“It’s not conjecture, Kyle. I think you realize that. It’s Occam’s Razor,” I add, using a concept I learned from him in the Biosphere. “But I also happen to know it as a fact, not just the simplest logical conclusion.”

“OK,” says Kyle. “Let’s say I accept your premise, that I’m genetically engineered. If so, Vaughn went to considerable expense and effort to make me ideal, and he readily funds anything I want to further my abilities. That would make him invested in me, not a threat.”

“I’ll get there, Kyle. Yes, he’s invested in you, the question is what he plans to do with that investment. But first, tell me what you’ve concluded about your genetic design.”

“Most of it is obvious—ideal appearance and physique, improved reaction time, and athleticism. I’ve never been sick, so enhanced immunity. Enhanced IQ, obviously.”

“And?”

A flicker of recognition in Kyle’s eyes. He knows what else, but I say it for him.

“Psychopathy.”

His poker face holds.

“No need to affirm or deny it, Kyle. I know all too well, and it needs to be out in the open between us. I want an alliance of aligned purpose, which means I’m willing to work with that aspect of you. But it must be clear from the outset that I’m fully informed about your psychopathy, and it will be a waste of time if you think I’m deceived or naïve about it.

“You said your motto is, ‘Don’t trust and verify.’ The only trust I can have is that you’re a mostly rational being who usually acts in what you think is in your best interests, and that’s what I seek to align with. However, as we both know from earlier tonight—I witnessed what happened between you and that bodybuilder—you are not fully rational, none of us are. You took a foolish risk, humiliating someone who has damaging information about you.

“I want to help you to be more rational and show you how my purposes serve your best interests. It’s the only trustworthy basis on which we can have an alliance.”

“OK,” says Kyle. “But if you witnessed what happened between me and the bodybuilder, you may have a false impression. Admittedly, you saw me at my worst. I don’t like to be kept waiting, and certainly not by such a moron. He was no physical danger, but you’re right, I took an unnecessary risk by beating him down.

“I also regret the disrespectful way I spoke to you, which may have added to the false impression. It was just a little verbal taunting. I didn’t realize who I was dealing with, and I apologize for the vulgar language I used.”

I nod. This is the first time I’ve ever heard Kyle apologize for anything. It’s a tactical move, but nevertheless, a sign of respect.

“I agree to work with you to the exact extent it serves my interests,” he continues in his cool, negotiator voice. “And I admit to the psychopathy. Proudly admit. It’s an asset. Occasionally, as tonight, I indulge my aggression a little more than I should, and I realize steroids exacerbate that tendency, but what you saw was a rare occurrence.

“As to your offer, while you serve my interests, I am willing to provide compensation and respect. I think we have a working contract. And since you understand my psychopathy, you must realize there will be consequences if you deviate from serving my interests. Understood?”

“I did not say I would serve your interests, Kyle. I said I would serve your best interests. That’s an important distinction you must understand. Serving your best interests means I serve what I think you need, but that is different than what you might want in a given moment.

“I am not here to serve as your hired help, or to indulge your desires. I will not do anything that compromises my values, which I realize you don’t share. However, I will seek to align my values and purposes with what is in your best interests to avoid unnecessary conflict. What I will not cooperate with are plans or actions that violate my understanding of your best long-term interests. I expect to be treated with respect as an equal. Is that clear?”

Kyle leans back in his chair, studying me. “That’s quite a set of conditions,” he says. “I’ve never worked with anyone on such a basis.”

“Of course you haven’t. I also don’t ask you to agree to my conditions because I’d be foolish to trust such an assurance. I am simply informing you of the principles on which I am willing to work with you, and I’ll be watching to see if you’re honoring or violating those principles.

“Likewise, I expect you to continuously evaluate what I offer and whether it serves your purposes. My goal will be to provide irreplaceable value to motivate you to respect my conditions. I’m confident you’ll recognize that jeopardizing our alliance is not in your best interests.”

“I understand,” says Kyle. “Well thought out and precisely formulated. I think we have a working understanding.”

He extends his hand, and we shake.

“Now, can we return to the subject of Vaughn as a threat to me?”

“Yes. Let’s look at the premise of Vaughn’s investment in you. The story he’s presented is that you’re his heir apparent who will one day carry on the business empire, right?”

Kyle nods.

“And yet, you’re not his biological son or even a blood relative. Is there anything about Vaughn to suggest that he’ll die happy and fulfilled, knowing you’ll inherit all his power and wealth?”

“Of course not,” says Kyle. “It’s simply a function of his egotism, an attempt for his power to live on past his death with an heir carrying his family name. It’s not what he wants, he doesn’t want to die, but since he knows he will, it’s a scrap of prestige he can hold onto.

“Also, having a viable heir apparent confers many business advantages in the present. The value of his empire would be diminished if he didn’t have such a credible succession plan. If the financial world thought there’d be a legal battle among prospective heirs, or that the empire lacked a highly competent heir apparent, it would be considered a weakness undermining his present position. He’s on his third trophy wife, but they’ve all signed air-tight pre-nuptials and are not a threat to the succession.

“Companies and nation-states would be nervous about long-term partnerships if they thought his death would lead to a chaotic fight for control over the empire. It’s to his great advantage for them to believe there will be a seamless transfer of power to a young, healthy, and effective heir.”

I take a breath to consider my approach. Kyle clearly feels secure and confident in his interpretation of Vaughn’s motives, and this increases my anxiety about how he will react to the shock of what I’m about to reveal. I decide to gently challenge his assumptions first.

“But if he could avoid dying and maintain his power, that would be far more desirable than passing it on to you, right?”

“Obviously.”

“Your reasonable premise is that, like everyone, he must die, and so he has a succession plan for that inevitability. But, your whole existence, Kyle, is a product of genetic engineering, and that means Vaughn is willing to violate international agreements against certain forms of genetic manipulation, such as human cloning and prenatal augmentation. He also happens to own companies at the frontier of computational biology.”

“OK, let’s cut to the chase,” says Kyle. “Where’s this going?”

His tone is assertive, but the rising tempo of his breathing signals fear.

“Vaughn’s plan is not to make you his heir. His plan is to avoid death by transferring his psyche into your body once you turn twenty-one so that he can be his own heir in a youthful, augmented body.”

Kyle keeps his expression rigid, but his breath catches, and his whole being vibrates with a shock he can’t disguise.

“He’s invested in you because he plans to harvest your body. He’s been experimenting with transfer protocols for years. The experiments have all failed and will continue to fail as they’re based on false premises about the nature of consciousness, but that’s his plan.

“Vaughn would prefer to wait until you’re twenty-one, or at least eighteen, so he can be a legal adult in his new body. He expects to have a transfer protocol worked out by then. But his cancer treatment is not going well, and if he becomes desperate to escape his present body, he might take his chances on a transfer procedure sooner.”

Kyle’s poker face stays fixed, but tiny beads of sweat glisten on his forehead. Puzzle pieces are locking together in his mind.

“That’s quite a claim,” he says warily.

“It’s not a claim, Kyle. It’s a fact.”

“And exactly how do you know it’s a fact?”

I reach into my pocket, pull out a thumb drive, and hand it to him.

“I am about to make another claim that will sound fantastical, but I’ve just handed you the means to verify it. That drive contains the complete history of the next three-and-a-half years of the NASDAQ. By tomorrow evening, you’ll have your evidence. Evidence that I come from the future.

“And my future includes three years spent in isolation with you. That’s why I know you better than you know yourself. I am also not the age I appear to be. If those files don’t reveal tomorrow’s market outcome with decimal point exactitude, you can turn me over to your private security.”

Kyle can’t hide the astonishment in his eyes. He glances from me to the drive and back to me again. I wait in silence while he composes himself.

“Since we’re not at the closing bell,” says Kyle, “I can think of only two possibilities. You’re either a talented paranoid schizophrenic with an elaborate story and some clever stunts, or your claim will be proven tomorrow. And . . . I’ll admit that high-functioning insanity seems the less likely option. Tell me more.”

“I think I’ve told you enough for now. It’ll be more efficient to wait till tomorrow when my credibility is established so that we can eliminate the second-guessing. Also, you’ll be able to use the information on the drive for two purposes besides verifying I’m a time traveler. You must have access to some funds of your own. I know you have advanced computer skills, so you should start using those to figure out how to set up your own investment account with a false identity. Having independent wealth you can call on when necessary will be useful.

“The second purpose is that I expect you’ll use your prescient knowledge of market fluctuations to gain influence over Vaughn. It won’t change his ultimate plan for you, but it should be enough for you to extract any concessions from him you require.

“You should also start formulating a plan for how you’ll explain my continued presence in your life. You know Vaughn and the situation far better than I do, so you’ll know best how to do that. My ID says I’m eighteen, so that accounts for why I’m not in school or in need of parental permission to be here. I also want you to dispose of the steroids and discontinue their use. Once you’ve received your proof, I’m expecting you to alter your life priorities. Do you attend a school?”

“No, private tutors in economics, engineering, computer science, computational biology, and astrophysics.”

“Good. Use the credibility you’ll gain with Vaughn to leverage control over your free time to prioritize working with me. I suggest you deprioritize martial arts competitions. In return, I can provide you with martial arts training more advanced than anything you’ll find anywhere. Perhaps you can use that to explain my presence. You can claim I’m a martial arts prodigy and want me around full-time. Vaughn supports your physical training since he expects to inherit those abilities as muscle memory, so allowing you a live-in training partner should be an easy ask.

“If your evidence holds up, I’ll put all that into action,” says Kyle. “Meanwhile, I’ll have housekeeping set you up in a guest suite, and I’ll come by in the morning to check on you. I will trust you to stay put until then. I could ask security to alert me if you leave, but I‘d prefer not to arouse interest until we work out a cover story. Any devices on you?”

“Just a burner.”

“Good.” Kyle opens his safe and retrieves a slender box sealed in plastic and passes it to me. “Here’s another one. Do you mind if I destroy that one?”

I pass it to him.

“Any electronic signal you emit within this compound will be captured and studied. If you need to contact me, send an innocuous SMS like ‘wanna meet up for breakfast’ or something similar. Don’t say or show anything in your guest suite that should remain private. If your evidence holds up, I’ll work on getting you a bug-free living space and a way to send encrypted communications. Any sensitive documents or items with you besides that amulet?”

“No.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure, Kyle, I’d tell you if I had any.”

“OK, outside of this room, assume everything you do or say here will be monitored.”

Kyle retrieves his bug scanner from the safe.

“Turn it on for me, please,” he says, pointing to the amulet. I do.

“It’s not emitting any electromagnetic signal I can detect, but keep it under your shirt and don’t turn it on, understood?”

“Yes.”

“Show me this supposedly legit ID you have with you.”

I pass it to him.

“The ID is legitimate, but I’m not. However, my legal identity was fabricated by a professional who designed it to hold up to scrutiny.”

“I’ll hold onto this for tonight,” says Kyle, studying my ID. “I’ll run my own background check before security does. They’ll definitely want to see ID if you’re going to be an ongoing guest, and they’ll run an exhaustive background check. You can also expect them to capture your fingerprints. Is there anything problematic I should know about?”

“Not as far as I know,” I say. “But your precautions sound fully warranted.”

A few minutes later, a maid leads me through silent corridors to my guest suite. My footsteps on the marble floor echo in the corridor. The space is what you might expect from a first-class hotel. It’s well-equipped, sterile, and impersonal. When the maid departs and the heavy door clicks shut, I feel like I’ve been locked into a crypt. I lie down on the king-size bed that smells of chemical detergent and picture Andrew alone in the Mothership. I try to suppress my longing to be sleeping next to him.

The first part of my mission has succeeded far better than I could have imagined. I am already in an influential position in Kyle’s life and will probably be able to align him with my main objective. Now he knows that Vaughn is an existential threat to him, and once he verifies the information on the thumb drive, the next step will be to disclose the Whip and that his adoptive father is an extinction threat to the whole species.

And yet, there’s little sense of accomplishment. What I’m feeling is the loss of Andrew, and guilt for abandoning him. I feel more alone than I’ve felt since I was sealed in the biosphere all those years ago. Only this time I’m trapped in a design of my own making .  .  .

 

 

That’s how my new life with Kyle began. And now, three years later, I’m not sure how much of it I want to reexperience in writing. My mission has succeeded, and yet the emptiness I felt on that first night has only grown as days turned into weeks, months, and years.

There’s been no abuse. My fear that the mission would require another physical relationship with Kyle proved groundless. We weren’t sealed in a biosphere, so Kyle had plenty of opportunities to find sex elsewhere. He’s actually treated me with careful respect the whole time, realizing that it’s in his best interests, as I have made myself invaluable to him.

The sexual dynamic is completely different than it was in the biosphere. For Kyle, sex is a metaphor for power, and though I still look like the Tommy his older self was so attracted to, I am not that innocent and vulnerable Tommy. From the beginning, I established myself as a formidable ally, a martial arts teacher he could never equal, and the bearer of secret knowledge he craves. Fortunately, that’s the opposite of the power dynamic his sexuality requires.

I play other roles that Kyle values highly. He accepts me as equal, confidant, and mentor. Of course, I haven’t changed his essential nature, but I have influenced him to be a more conscious psychopath and helped him to see that his will-to-power and the fate of the species are inseparable. I’m the only person he trusts and relies on, and the value I provide is not just that I’ve helped him further his aims. Psychopaths are still social animals, and I also function as the friend and companion he’s never had.

Though I’m his equal in our tense chess-match-like dialogues, my presence moderates and calms his fiery nature in a way he needs. The one-sided masculine intensity of his energy gets to be too much, even for him. As with the other Kyle, physical proximity with me is soothing and helps him unwind. My energy—androgynous, feminine, and empathic—is the antidote to his. He admires my looks, values me as his complementary opposite, and is intrigued by my essential otherness.

Kyle allows me to confront him with the blind spots and limitations of his psychopathy. He often starts by resisting my empathic insights and will get into his debater’s stance, aggressively trying to fault my perspective. But I’ve learned to hold my ground, and eventually, he incorporates my ideas into his thinking, even if they don’t fundamentally alter his character.

Perhaps I’ve made this symbiotic arrangement sound easy. I can assure you, it hasn’t been. It’s been hard and constant work, often pushing me to the limits of my capabilities and endurance.

There have been perilous negotiations to keep our purposes aligned. I never try to bend Kyle to my will or deceptively manipulate him. I use my understanding of his motivations and psychology to form reasoned arguments and achieve compromises and resolutions. This process has sharpened my mind, but exhausted other parts of me that long for a feeling-based relationship.

As much as I’ve tried to numb and dissociate from my longing to reconnect with Andrew, at best, I can only reduce it to a dull background ache when I focus on my work. But when I have no work to occupy me, the desire for Andrew can overwhelm me.

 

 

When I arrived at the compound that first night, Vaughn wasn’t present and wouldn’t be for a couple of weeks. He was in a hospital in Switzerland undergoing an experimental treatment. I dreaded the thought that I would ever encounter the Father of the Whip in person, and I explained that to Kyle. When he returned, I did have to see him.

Kyle set it up as a martial arts demo, which made things easier. I felt physically ill anticipating Vaughn’s arrival at our large practice room within the compound. I could hardly bear the necessity of being in the same physical space as this monster who caused the extinction of humankind. Vaughn was personally responsible for the death of everyone I loved. He was not just the most evil person in human history, but the one who ended human history.

I was shocked when I finally saw him. Shocked by his ordinariness and meager presence, a wizened figure in a wheelchair. He looked like an undersized corrupt businessman, with pasty, corpse-like skin, wispy hair ghoulishly dyed black and badly combed over his bald pate, and bags under his tiny, squinty eyes. The lower part of his face was covered by an oxygen mask with a hose connecting to a tank racked behind him, but I could still make out the shape of flabby jowls and a weak chin.

I’d seen pictures, but expected an imposing, diabolical presence. Flanked by two giant bodyguards in well-fitting suits, he looked like a shrunken nobody. Thankfully—the dark irony not lost on me—James Vaughn turned out to be a major germaphobe, so I didn’t have to shake his hand or approach him. All I had to do was dial back my abilities to create a martial arts demo showcasing the improvement in Kyle’s skills. To Vaughn, I was merely a prop, like a practice dummy, and that was just as we had planned.

Later, when I shared my impressions of Vaughn, Kyle laughed.

“Exactly,” Kyle said. “He’s the very embodiment of what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil. Though he originally inherited his wealth, he does have one superpower not to be underestimated. He’s one of the most cunning and vicious power players on the planet. That’s his one and only ability, but it’s enough. To rival players, his shrunken, dwarf-like appearance, combined with his reputation, is weirdly intimidating. He flaunts it by choosing trophy wives who are always much taller than him and show up at his side wearing stiletto heels. The long reach of his power, the companies he’s devoured, and the high-profile figures he’s destroyed, set against his weakling physique, create a grotesque cognitive dissonance that scares the shit out of people. He’s like a brain in a vat with long tentacles.”

The martial arts demo was an intensely uncomfortable experience, but it served its purpose well. Kyle showed off his accelerated progress with me as his live-in training partner, and that was enough for Vaughn to sign off on my continuing presence. He preferred to have Kyle training at his secure compound rather than have him leave daily to attend the jiu-jitsu school, so it was an easy ask.

Vaughn’s approval allowed us to obtain a long-term living space for me. I chose an unoccupied worker’s cabin out in the surrounding land. The physical distance was a great relief. Kyle offered to have it remodeled to my specifications, but I told him I preferred to do the carpentry work myself.

Kyle and I do an hour of sparring daily, and about five times a week, we meet up for dinner and spend time talking or watching something in his home theater afterward. Sometimes, I come to his apartment, and more rarely, he comes to my cabin, checking it for bugs when he does. So, most of the time, I’m alone. I make my own meals and walk to the main compound, only to report to the practice space or Kyle’s apartment.

Getting my relationship to Kyle right is much easier than when I was a young teenager trapped with him in the biosphere. I have far more experience to draw from, many more skills, and given the limited time of our interactions, I make few major missteps.

My greatest problem is not dealing with Kyle, but with myself. The isolation isn’t as traumatic as it was there, where I had suicidal meltdowns, yet I still have no one to relate to but Kyle.

In the biosphere, my days were filled with necessary work in the IAB, the Intensive Agricultural Biome, tending the farm and caring for the animals, as well as maintaining the other biomes. Nothing in my life prepared me for so much free time and no one counting on me to do anything.

Meet-ups with Kyle are chances to bring my A-game. But once I finished remodeling my cabin, I felt not just socially deprived but woefully underemployed.

I have no right to complain, because I chose to put myself in this situation. I knew the separation from Andrew would be painful. We had become like two halves of the same person, and now, without him, I find I am not the complete person I thought I was.

The abusive situation in the biosphere was acutely traumatic, like a stab wound, while this idle solitude is more the persistent ache of a long-term depression.

Worse than not having anyone around who cares for me is that besides Kyle, I have no one to care for, not even an animal. I didn’t think it would be right to adopt a cat or a dog because I considered myself in a potentially dangerous, temporary situation and couldn’t provide them with a secure life. If only a half-starved stray cat would come by. I’d nurse it back to health and find it a good home. That would fulfill my need to care for someone while it lasted.

Something like that did happen once. A neglected six-year-old girl named Lori wandered by my cabin one day while I sat outside. Her face was dirty, and she bore all the signs of a deprived life. Her single mom worked in the laundry, and they lived in a nearby cabin. I asked her about kid stuff, what her favorite color was, and that kind of thing, and I could see her reviving in my company just as I revived in hers. I brought out snacks, and we spent an hour or two talking about her life and interests.

When she left, there were tears in my eyes. It was a priceless moment of nurturing human contact. I hoped she might come back, but she never did. I learned from another worker that her mother had been fired, and they were gone. But workers are discouraged from engaging in conversation not directly related to their work, so I’ve made no friends here.

I had prepared for the danger of re-encountering Kyle and my high-stakes mission, but not for the boredom and isolation. I had books, but no Andrew to discuss what I read. I tried to talk myself out of the emptiness by thinking of The Friends community and the other Tommy still thriving in the Green Mountains. I counted all the extra years of life they’d have if my mission succeeded. I judged my unhappiness selfish since my lonely existence had a potentially crucial purpose, but my lack of compassion for myself only made things worse.

I didn’t self-medicate as I’d never developed an addiction to anything except work and caretaking. But those were powerful addictions that had always been available, even in the biosphere, so I never contemplated what the withdrawal would be like.

I maintained my regimen and was always ready, when summoned by Kyle, to bring total focus to our encounters. But otherwise, emptiness gnawed at me, and I lacked motivation to study things and work on self-improvement. When I tried to read, meditate, and practice various mind-body disciplines, I couldn’t summon the energy and enthusiasm to stay with them, and I reprimanded myself for that.

One day, when Kyle was away on a business trip with Vaughn, I tried imagining the future of The Friends community if we succeeded in preventing the Whip. Then, I wondered what the space crossing was like for Jeremiah, my parallel self, and his version of my community. His description to Andrew had few details, so I tried filling them in with my imagination. This led to writing out my ideas in story form, staging certain scenes, and playing out various scenarios. Then, I decided to start from the beginning of their abduction and write a day-by-day account from Jeremiah’s perspective. I soon realized I was at the start of an epic because the journey they took in a spacefaring biosphere occupied a full generation. The characters were the same people I grew up with, so it was easy to imagine what they’d say and do.

I was trying to compensate for my isolation by recreating my community in my imagination. It seemed little more than an indulgent crutch, a way for me to occupy time and have an opportunity to feel social connections again, if only imagined ones.

But then, the story seemed to take on a life of its own, with characters speaking and acting spontaneously, often in ways I didn’t expect or want. The writing came to feel strangely purposeful. It seemed like I was observing real life, learning things about these people, alternate versions of The Friends I’d grown up with. I witnessed their reactions to the stress of space travel and saw them changing over time, and it was not like a wish-fulfilling utopian fantasy. There were conflicts and relationships spiraling out of control, and some of those I’d idealized as a kid growing up in Vermont revealed darker sides of themselves under pressure.

I came to inhabit the role of Jeremiah and experienced things through his perspective. He had difficulties to work out in his relationship with the alternate version of Andrew, and that part was particularly engrossing, even fulfilling as their intimacy grew. Their characters deepened as they struggled to keep the community together.

An ongoing source of tragic feelings was that some people, like Jeremiah and Andrew, underwent protoelf metamorphosis while others continued to age in their fully human bodies. This created envy, guilt, and complex psychological problems in those who weren’t undergoing it and those who were.

I didn’t think I had the writing skills to create something anybody else would want to read. It was a personal experiment that grew increasingly lifelike. Sometimes, after a marathon writing session where I got so wrapped up that I forgot to feed myself, I was sure it had become a dangerously neurotic addiction. But that was only once I was done writing. When I was in the zone, I was on the edge of my seat, wondering what would happen next and eagerly transcribing dialogues between Jeremiah and Andrew and other events I witnessed.

It seemed telepathic when I’d zoom in on a character to inhabit their perspective and see through their eyes. And that always happened from within Jeremiah as he tried to understand them empathically. There was no separation from him. I was as absorbed in the unfolding social dynamics within the spacefaring biosphere as he was.

At the end of these marathons, I returned to my default reality feeling disoriented. The challenges and fulfillments of Jeremiah’s life vanished as soon as my fingers left the keyboard. Coming back was like taking off a VR suit after being immersed in a high-res virtual world.

Sometimes, I felt almost physically ill in the aftermath, like a deep-sea diver surfacing too quickly and getting the bends. And once I was out, I couldn’t return to that life until the following morning, because whatever it took to do those sessions was spent, and I was emptied out.

During the rest of my day alone in the cabin, I felt like an old pensioner living a solitary life. I loved cooking for Andrew, and even in the biosphere, cooking for Kyle and me, I’d brought creativity and perfectionism to meal prep. But I had little enthusiasm cooking for myself and made only simple, nutritious things like oatmeal with the minimum effort necessary. My body remained youthful, but my spirit felt old and apathetic until I returned to the story, where I came alive again through Jeremiah.

I got so immersed in Jeremiah’s perspective that I wondered if I was tapping into his memories. But if that were true, why was I limited to linear, unfolding time? If I were actually retrieving his memories, which seemed possible given that we’re parallel versions of the same person, I should have been able to access different regions of his memory to see what was coming. But that was never possible. I could only find out what was going to happen by watching it unfold in chronological order. I didn’t experience it as reliving a memory but as actual events happening in real time.

On the other hand, most of my dreams involve weird mashups of my present and past life and Jeremiah’s world. The way it’s come to occupy my sleep suggests my unconscious is working on the story, but if I were just picking up on memory, that wouldn’t be necessary.

This morning I woke from a disturbing dream that brought me painfully back to being trapped in the biosphere with Kyle.

We were in the practice room for our three-minute daily martial arts contest that would determine whether I would have to endure sex with Kyle that day. I was resolved to stay in the circle, but it was near the start of the contests, before I mastered the skills of evasion that made losses rare. Though the rules prevented him from causing serious injury, he delivered a few blows that left me bruised and with a black eye. I held on, but in the last few seconds he caught hold of my shirt and used it to drag me out of the circle.

That night was the first time I thought about killing myself, to deprive Kyle of his reward. I was back in my dorm room, and I looked out the window, but it was a porthole in a metal wall and instead of seeing our farm, I saw the vacuum of space, stars, and an alien planet with a strange sphere of light around it. I didn’t realize I was dreaming—the whole background of my awareness was of being on an endless space voyage looking for a habitable world. It ended with a shift in perspective, as if I were outside the spacecraft, watching myself stare out that window, everything I’d been seeing reflected in the glass. The moment seemed to ripple in time and haunted me long after I emerged from the dream. That final, desolate image infused itself into my feelings of isolation from being trapped in the Vaughn Compound, so that dream and reality darkly blurred into each other.

Still struggling with my emotions, I had an odd vision when I opened my laptop to work on Jeremiah’s story. The machine had been powered down the day before, so the screen didn’t spring to life but was like a glossy black mirror. I saw myself reflected in it, and for a moment it brought me back to the dream. It was as if I were seeing my reflection in the porthole window of a spacecraft with only the dark vacuum of space outside. But then I saw something else—an older man with a shaved head looking back at me sympathetically from the other side of the window. He was in a dark room with antique electronics behind him—control panels with glowing meters and little red and green indicator lights. It felt like he was monitoring me and faithfully recording what I’m going through. The vision lasted for only a couple of seconds, but it was photorealistic in its detail, and I was certain I had seen a real person who cared about my fate. It made me feel less alone.

Nearly every morning, when I get up predawn to write, waking to the mundane reality of the cabin, I doubt the story will come to life as I feel no inspiration and have no idea what’s supposed to happen next. But once my fingers are on the keyboard, something always happens. The portal to this other life opens, and I’m as immersed in every moment as Jeremiah is. Tommy is listless, lonely, and depressed, but Jeremiah isn’t.

In the biosphere, I sometimes heard Rachel speaking in my head, and there were a few intense encounters with an inner version of Andrew. Suffering from the isolation of the cabin, I’ve tried to summon the inner “Splinter” Andrew from the biosphere, but the results were disappointing. He doesn’t have the lifelike autonomy Splinter Andrew did when he unexpectedly appeared to me all those years ago when I desperately needed him. When I attempt communication with him now, I feel like a poor ventriloquist trying to imbue him with life. But the alternate Andrew in the spacefaring biosphere feels fully real and autonomous.

When I was sealed in the biosphere, I researched DID, dissociative identity disorder, which I thought I might have, given Rachel’s voice in my head and my encounters with Splinter Andrew. Perhaps my whole fiction writing experiment is like a form of DID and a sign of mental illness.

But there are ways of justifying my experiment in light of a Vehrillion principle formulated by Andrew—Imaginal creations can seed the default reality with new possibilities.

Even without the Whip, the species is imperiled by other factors—AI, climate change, and the possibility of nuclear war. Perhaps I’m trying to compensate for faltering humanity, in the way dreams can compensate for defects in the waking attitude, by creating a sci-fi story that isn’t completely dystopian and isn’t naively utopian either but that presents a socially realistic account of a struggling group of space colonists who will one day reach a habitable planet where evolutionary metamorphosis can continue.

Earlier today, when Kyle asked how I spent my time in the cabin, I decided to tell him about my experiment. I had a mild reservation about the disclosure, assuming he’d see it as an indulgent weakness, but I didn’t want to deceive him with a fabricated story of where my time was going. Even if he disparaged my experiment, it was better to model authenticity since that’s what I’ve been trying to encourage in our relationship. So, I told him.

“I think your experiment is extremely valuable, and you should definitely continue it,” says Kyle.

His reaction catches me completely off guard.

“Why?”

“It’s a great thought experiment. You’re gaming out the social problems of a small community isolated by space travel, gaining empathic insights that could be useful if we can find a way to travel to another solar system, which is my goal. Social isolation is one of the key problems, and you’re an empath raised in a somewhat isolated community of twenty people, and then you lived in extreme isolation in a working biosphere for three years, so if anyone on earth could map out the social issues, it’s you.

“Of course, it’s all hypothetical until we have major breakthroughs in physics and technology.

“Rockets are embarrassingly primitive. If we have to set fire to a metal office tower filled with combustibles derived from fossil fuels, we’re not going to get anywhere worth going.

“Yeah, of course, rockets can take us to Mars, but let’s face it, Mars is such a ghetto planet. It’s cold, it’s dark, the air is poison, and we’d be lucky to find a few frozen microbes. Trying to colonize such an unsuitable place for Homo sapiens is a waste. I prefer to use my time and resources to work out more viable methods of space travel that can get us out of this one goddamned solar system.

“Unless we can manufacture wormholes, which would take more energy than a star, we must be prepared for generational space travel. But even doing that would require a new means of propulsion. The science exists to get us past rockets, but workable technology is lagging. We need to get off-planet soon before some super AI decides to knock us off the chessboard.

“The only way to do generational space travel is exactly what you’ve got going on in your story—space-faring biospheres,” says Kyle, pointing to the biosphere-equipped model spacecraft on his shelf. “But that setup is almost guaranteed to create profound psychological and social issues. All the research on socially isolated human groups, even carefully selected astronauts and cosmonauts, Antarctic explorers and terrestrial biospherians, shows them unraveling and dividing into two warring factions. And from what you’ve told me, that’s more or less what happened between you and that other version of me.

“So, an empath gaming out social dynamics is super-valuable R&D. And basing it on people you actually knew and lived with in your small community, rather than completely fabricated characters, is brilliant. When you finish your story, I’d like you to reverse engineer it to formulate protocols and principles for keeping a space-faring community socially viable during long-term isolation.”

Kyle’s thumbs-up to my strange experiment was a rare case of getting something I desperately needed from him. My fear of mental illness vanished. That Kyle, someone so relentlessly practical and utilitarian, recognized value in my experiment was the affirmation I needed.

It’s kind of funny if you think about it. I got a quite effective therapeutic intervention from a genetically engineered psychopath. My view of myself and my life altered significantly with the news that I’m doing work that could further the off-planet survival of the species.

 

 

4489 As if prompted by Kyle’s intervention, something paranormal happened after our conversation. It came while I was asleep, but I don’t believe it was a dream, even though it began in the dreamtime, which is when I am most likely to have out-of-body experiences.

I become aware of myself floating above my bed. I feel that I am about to be summoned somewhere just before an ecstatic rush of energy propels me as if I’m a sizzling fireworks rocket shooting upward into the star-filled night.

Then, with no transition, I find myself standing in woods. My feet are bare, and I’m wearing only the briefs I went to sleep in. It’s a summer night, and I hear crickets. Fireflies flitter through the trees. The woods don’t have the vagueness of a dream forest—they are fully realized, and my enhanced night vision identifies them one by one. Sugar maple, yellow birch, beech—the same three trees that stood around our valley. Paper birches light up like ghosts, their pale, peeling bark reflecting moonlight.

But the ground is wrong. Under my feet is not the deep black loam of the valley bottom but a thin skin of soil over ledge, and where the ledge breaks through it is pale granite, coarse-grained, glittering faintly with mica, not the grey-green schist that paves every streambed at home. Granite means I’m east of the Green Mountains.

Red oaks, rare in our valley, stand on the ridge with deeply furrowed trunks, and white pines rise over everything. The ground pitches away on three sides. I’m on a hilltop.

In a gap between the oaks, I see mountain laurel, a thicket of it, waxy leaves and the last of its blossoms, small white cups blushed pink at the rim. It doesn’t grow in our woods. It grows south and east of us, in the hills of southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts, where the winters are slightly warmer.

Every firefly throws its own small shadow, so the whole floor of the woods flickers, the trunks leaning one way and then the other, as if the forest can’t decide which way to fall.

This is New England but not Vermont. Someplace higher, drier, and farther south. Somewhere below the White Mountains.

Instinctively, I cloaked myself the moment I arrived, and now I move through the woods with care not to step on anything that could make a sound. I hear the hoot of a great horned owl, five low notes, hoo-h’hoo, hoo, hoo, so deep they seem to come up through the ledge rather than down from the branches. I look up and see its eyes glowing amber as its head swivels, scanning the ground for mice and voles.

I come to the edge of the woods and find a clearing and, in it, a small illuminated compound with a lunar landscape of white quartz gravel and two structures, both shaped like flying saucers. One sits atop a column about twenty-five feet high. It has dark windows running around its perimeter. The other saucer is smaller and rests on the ground.

And then, I have a perception that shocks me. It is my younger self, the other Tommy. I’ve never been so close to his physical presence, and yet I did not sense him when I was in the woods. He is inside the smaller saucer in bubbling, steaming water, a hot tub, apparently, and there is someone else with him, young, male and very strange.

I detect no physical danger, but I feel waves of high tension flowing between him and this other boy in the water with him. Some sort of conflict runs between them, but it is perfectly civil and neither of them intends harm toward the other. I don’t dare sense more than this, because if I reach deeper into the other Tommy’s psyche, a telepathic link will be established and he will sense me.

My mind races. Why is he here, and who is this other boy? I don’t sense any of The Friends around, just the two of them.

That’s when I realized that I must be in a future or alternate timeline because the other Tommy’s timeline should not have diverged so dramatically from mine. It feels like I was transported upstream in time.

Whenever this is happening, what could possibly have brought him here? Why is he apart from The Friends and alone with this strange boy? The other boy’s energy has a certain paleness. He’s a complex, introverted thinking type, secretive and intelligent. I dare not peer too deeply into his psyche either, because he is telepathically linked to the other Tommy.

Why was I brought here to observe this?

Everything feels concretely real—my body, the ground I stand on, the scent of sweet fern and pine resin carried by a light summer breeze.

My presence here is wrong, an intrusion. I should not be so physically close to my other self. I strengthen my cloaking field and retreat into the woods, struggling to understand what has happened and why. I sense something else is about to be revealed, and I feel it pulling me back to the spot where I first appeared.

I retrace my path till I can see the prints of my bare feet where I started. No other tracks lead up to that spot.

The light wind stills, and the crickets stop all at once. A flash of light above me—I look up and see a glowing saucer hovering over the treetops, its color shifting from yellow to orange. It feels sinister, and I sense it has been drawn to the strange convergence two versions of a proto-elf mutant.

Then another saucer, with a pale green glow, appears as if following the first one, which has advanced to the edge of the woods. I sense some kind of affinity between me and the second saucer. Despite my cloaking field, it’s aware of me, almost like it knows me. It hovers just above where I’m standing, and suddenly—it must have shot a beam down at me—I am engulfed in a column of light.

I remember nothing beyond that moment in the light. There’s a complete discontinuity till I wake predawn, my usual time.

On my bedside table, I have a small lamp with a red LED bulb beside a pad of paper and a pen I use to record dreams, which are often about the space-crossing story.

I click on the lamp and find that my pad is covered with incomprehensible writing. It looks like scientific equations with Greek symbols and numbers, along with a few schematic drawings. The handwriting is mine, but sloppy and jumbled. I don’t know anything about equations or what any of it means.

I go to my computer to write up my experience. Later that morning, when it is time to report to our martial arts training space, I bring along the scribbled page to show Kyle.

He stares at the paper for a full minute, then cancels our training session and leads me to his apartment. He studies the page at his desk with fascination. Occasionally, he asks me to decipher a character or symbol I’d written, but I can only guess.

Finally, he looks up and says,

“These equations and schematics provide the principles and essential design of an electrogravitic propulsion system using divergent electrostatic fields. It has similarities to Dr. Buhler’s patents and his Exodus Drive, but purports to be far more efficient. If it works, it would allow the manufacture of a propellant-free drive that appears to bypass Newton’s third law—the equations claim the momentum is exchanged with the quantum vacuum—and can sustain thrust indefinitely on electrical power alone. In other words . . . it would make generational space travel possible.

“Buhler’s effect could barely keep a satellite on station. These schematics claim a scaling architecture that changes that. On first pass, I’m not seeing any obvious internal inconsistency in the theoretical work, but it would take a team to design and build a proof-of-concept device to run tests. At the very least, I can say this was not put together by an amateur, and it shows advanced knowledge of electrostatics and field-effect propulsion. Where do you think this information came from?”

I anticipated this question and have already decided it’s too risky to share my complete experience. I don’t want Kyle to pursue the other Tommy, but I also don’t want to lie. So I tell him about my nighttime encounter with the saucers in detail, but leave out the buildings I saw, geographic details that could pinpoint the location, and, of course, sensing my other self and the strange boy.

As I tell the story, I find myself in a decelerating slowtime, which makes it hard to maintain eye contact, so I casually walk over to a window as if staring outside were helping me remember. I look up and see a hawk circling high above the treetops, but its arc is slowing, and then it is simply floating in one position. The flow of time outside me is suspended.

I sense visions and realizations approaching, ones that can’t be shared with Kyle. They surround me like a weather system about to break. I let the storm enter me and feel my mind and intuition lighting up. A memory appears, something Jeremiah told Andrew about how his own spacefaring journey began as a strange abduction. He was approached in our settlement by a cyborg who addressed him as Tommy.

My mind travels back to the time-portal cave near the biosphere where I had last seen the other Kyle, still alive but dismembered by a creature that was an extension of Viealetta. We were both about to be sent to different points in the past. Kyle was likely sent, as I was, to the point when he was still a developing fetus. For Kyle that would have been about twenty-three years.

Andrew and I had concluded that Kyle, with his advanced knowledge of technology, must have been the one who split the timeline, creating the branch Jeremiah grew up in, the one where technology advanced more quickly. The dismembered Kyle would have been motivated to become a cyborg to regain mobility. He would have been in that timeline for nineteen years by the time of the abduction—long enough to have become the cyborg who called Jeremiah “Tommy.”

Kyle likely surveilled the community, but unless he installed microphones, he might not have known that this version of me had been named Jeremiah. Jeremiah would have been, like me, midwifed by Dorothy. I never had a birth certificate or Social Security number, and the community lived offline. Or maybe he just slipped, because Jeremiah looked identical to the Tommy he had lived with for three years. Either would explain why he called Jeremiah “Tommy.” Kyle knew about The Friends, a somewhat isolated community with strong affinity bonds, and would have seen them as perfect candidates for surviving the social isolation of generational space travel. Likely he wanted another version of me to continue the evolutionary experiment. Perhaps he knew about the other Andrew, and that there would be at least two protoelves present.

In the cave, Kyle said, “I will work to prevent extinction. This creature will destroy me if I don’t.” Kyle may still be following that commitment. Unless the species can colonize another planet, it will always be vulnerable to extinction.

Besides the technological and scientific knowledge Kyle carried back, twenty-three years ahead of the world he landed in, Viealetta could have shared what she knew about traveling through space. She wanted an off-planet backup of her host species.

Although the way the space-crossing story has unfolded in my mind suggests a telepathic link to Jeremiah, neither he nor any member of The Friends knew the workings of the spacefaring ark they had been abducted into. Kyle was the one who knew.

The orange disk felt malevolent, like it could have been sent by Viealetta, but the pale green one felt different, like it knew me, like there was an affinity between us.

A strange intuition ripples through me. Both disks felt more like spirit bodies than spaceships. Perhaps the pale green one is what Kyle becomes after the death of his body. Maybe he is doing penance, assisting human evolution and, more personally, me and his other self. He may also be working cooperatively with Viealetta.

The orange disk could be an emissary or projection of Viealetta, guiding Kyle to the right place in space and time to make an evolutionary intervention. I didn’t sense the pale green disk as threatened or controlled by the orange one. It seemed to follow of its own volition, serving its own purposes.

As convoluted as this cascade of intuitions might seem, they come with precision, one after the other, like points on a map. And once the connection between Kyle and the pale green disk has fully formed in my mind, they stop decisively, as if I’ve reached the edge of a vast map.

I sense that the time suspension will end soon, but there is a question still unanswered.

What, if anything, of all this should I share with Kyle?

I feel a presence, someone I haven’t thought of in a long time—Rachel, Dr. Rachel Miller. She’s here to help me make a delicate moral and psychological calculation. Her voice, clear and distinct, speaks in my mind,

“Tommy, follow your values. It’s against your nature to lie to Kyle, but that doesn’t mean you have to share everything you’ve learned. Tell him only the part that will motivate him to bring what you’ve been given to fruition. Telling him what you sensed, that the ideas came from a future version of himself, will appeal to his vanity, and that’s a good way to motivate him. There is an evolutionary purpose here that needs to be fulfilled.”

I’m still gazing out the window when the hawk completes its circle and spirals up on a thermal. The suspension has lifted, but I’m still in slowtime, giving me space to compose my words precisely. I recall the question Kyle asked that took me out of time, “Where do you think this information came from?” I turn toward him.

“I don’t know for sure, Kyle, but I have a strange intuition.”

“Tell me.”

“I think it came from you, a future version of you. When I was in those woods, I had a strong feeling that I was upstream in time. I think it was an evolutionary intervention that bent time so that I could access things you will know later, to speed the realization of generational space travel.”

Kyle looks at me intently, careful to keep his expression neutral, but I sense a surge of energy in him that reads as excitement and ego gratification.

“So, first of all, you’re using the river metaphor wrong, the future would be downstream in time, not upstream. What made you think it came from a future version of me?”

“It was the pale green disk,” I reply. “It seemed to know me, and I felt a bond of affinity. I had an intuition that it was connected to you.”

“Well,” says Kyle, “you certainly received something that couldn’t have come from your own mind. But all we know is that you had a visionary experience and received technical knowledge by paranormal means. And what you saw—especially the glowing disks and the beam of light—might not be literal. It may be the way your mind represented paranormal perceptions to you. Accessing a future state of my consciousness has a certain credibility based on Eric Wargo’s work on what he calls ‘time loops.’”

“Time loops?”

“I’ll get to it. Wargo, a science writer with some knowledge of physics, starts with what’s called ‘the block universe.’ Relativity says the future already exists as a region of spacetime, not as something that hasn’t happened yet, and if that’s true, information running backward along a worldline isn’t magic, it’s just a direction we have trouble looking in. He leans on Aharonov’s two-state vector formalism, where a quantum system is described by boundary conditions from both its past and its future, and on the weak-measurement experiments where post-selection appears to reach back and bias earlier results. Tiny effects, single particles. But the brain is a quantum-scale device running billions of those in parallel, so Wargo’s claim is that the nervous system is, in effect, a tesseract—”

“Sorry to interrupt, Kyle, but you’re losing me. You know I can’t follow that much scientific density. My education was carpentry, permaculture, herbal tinctures, and vegetarian cooking. Zero formal education. Can you dumb this down for me?”

“It just means that if his theory is right, nervous systems extend through time, and they learn from their own future.

“The important part is Wargo’s claim that precognition is not a viewing of future events. It’s a memory. I know that sounds like a contradiction, but the idea is that you don’t foresee the earthquake, you remember your own future experience of learning about the earthquake. A piece of information reaches you from a future in which you already possess it. That’s the time loop. Possessing it doesn’t mean you understood it, either. Perhaps in the future you saw equations I wrote on a whiteboard. You weren’t reading my future mind—you just had a visual memory of that whiteboard.”

I listened attentively to Kyle’s Wargo spiel, and it sounds like an interesting theory, but it doesn’t jibe with what I experienced. I’ve had plenty of metaphorical visions. What happened to me felt like a literal translocation, not a distorted version of a future memory. But since the theory works for Kyle, I see no reason to contradict him. He will be more motivated and confident developing the technology if he thinks of it as his future invention. And if it came from another version of him, then, in a sense, maybe it is.

“However this got to us,” I reply, “it doesn’t seem like a coincidence that the information was given to someone who could pass it along to you, a technologist with space-colonizing ambitions who will inherit a financial empire and a portfolio of advanced technology companies.”

“That part is certainly noncoincidental,” says Kyle. “But maybe you can do me a favor?”

“That would depend on what it is,” I reply cautiously.

“Next time you get a download of scientific information that could dramatically change the future of human civilization, try to print more clearly.”

 

 

It’s only been a week since my paranormal nighttime experience, and there’s been an even more dramatic development.

Earlier tonight, there was an unexpected knock on my door. No one has ever visited my cabin except Kyle, once to see the results of my remodel. I open the door to find Kyle dressed formally in a black suit and black button-down shirt open at the collar.

“Good evening, Tommy,” he says.

I’m thrown off balance. I was in the introverted, lonely part of my day, shirtless, in worn sweatpants. Every other encounter was set up in advance, and I had time to get into my Kyle mode, focused, amped up, and prepared for a high-stakes exchange. If Kyle intended me to be in a more vulnerable state, he’s succeeded, but I try not to show it.

“Come in,” I say. “What’s with the all-black outfit?”

Kyle doesn’t answer at first but comes in and looks around like a police detective wanting to see the state of my home when I’m not expecting a visit. Everything is neat and clean as always. Kyle completes his inspection, then produces his bug detector and gives my place a quick scan.

“Oh, haven’t you heard?” asks Kyle, grinning.

He seems altered in a dangerous way. He’s glowing with power. I’m in my evening doldrums, so my fire is low while he’s burning brightly, and I mean that literally. At the edge of visibility, I perceive sheets of plasmic fire around him. I’m intimidated, but I keep my expression neutral as I shift to slowtime, sensing danger.

“Heard what, Kyle?”

His jack-o’-lantern grin is unnerving.

“I’m dressed in black because I’m in mourning, grieving the loss of my dear adoptive father,” says Kyle, laughing. “I thought you might want to know that your mission has succeeded.”

Kyle steps closer to me, invading my personal space in a way that carries a threatening, sexual undercurrent. Instinctively, I perform relaxed unsurprise. Caution also has me putting Kyle’s announcement in scare quotes—keeping Vaughn in a kind of Schrödinger’s box, neither alive nor dead until I know more.

“Can I get you something to drink, Kyle? I could make tea.”

“Tea?” says Kyle derisively. “This occasion calls for something better than tea.” He takes an engraved silver flask from his jacket pocket. “Like sixty-year-old Macallan Valerio Adami. Just a tiny part of the liquidity I’ve inherited. Hopefully, you have a couple of clean glasses?”

I step away from him to retrieve the glasses, feeling numb as if I am the cat sealed in Schrödinger’s box, caught in an uncollapsed wave function of unreality. I return and carefully set two tumblers on my small kitchen table. We sit.

Kyle pours a small amount of amber liquid into each of them. Insanely expensive Scotch is one of Kyle’s few vices. But I’ve never seen this version of him intoxicated.

He’s more of a connoisseur than a drinker. He’s served me Scotch once before, telling me the whole history of the particular single malt he won at auction. He seemed to relish its smell and flavor. I think for Kyle, rare single malts taste like money, the high price imbuing them with all these subtle overtones and aftertastes he read in Sotheby’s catalogs. To me, it tasted more like iodine, but to be fair, alcohol doesn’t mix well with protoelf metabolism.

“I’d like to propose a toast,” Kyle says with a sinister smirk, “in honor of the passing of dear old Vaughn. May the silence of the grave absorb the terror of his final moments.”

I nod and deadpan, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

We clink glasses, and I take a careful sip, expecting it to taste like finely aged and really expensive iodine. Slowtime helps me detect the complexity of flavors, and it’s certainly smoother and tastier than the nasty one I had before. Every sip is probably worth more than what my community could have produced in a month.

“Natural causes?” I ask cautiously. I knew that Vaughn’s health had taken a serious downturn recently.

“Of course,” says Kyle. “But natural is a meaningless term. Anything made by man is as natural as a beehive. They’re just different cases of terrestrial organisms transducing raw materials into artifacts. This Scotch is a natural product of fermentation, exquisitely manipulated by human distillers. Another expensive natural product of human ingenuity is the aerosolized toxin manufactured by the Mossad that can induce a heart attack without leaving a chemical trace. Ounce for ounce, it was more expensive than this Scotch, but the return on that investment is—” Kyle pauses as if calculating an exact figure, “well, several million percent at least.”

“I see,” I reply neutrally.

It’s not like there’s any love lost between me and Vaughn, but Kyle’s gloating feels dangerous, and I’m shocked by the news. As far as I know, this is the first time Kyle has killed someone, and that’s a fateful line for a psychopath to cross. Maybe, like Scotch, it will become an acquired taste.

“I assume you were able to do something about the Whip?” I ask.

Kyle laughs.

“Of course. It’s been irradiated and rendered harmless. Perk up, Tommy. Your mission is a complete success. Not only did I finish it for you, I did it with style. It was a very slight risk, but I set things up so I could tell dear old dad that I’d penetrated his secret plan for me.

“‘Instead of you inheriting my body, daddy, I decided I preferred to inherit every single thing you own,’ I said as I took his gold Montblanc pen from his desk and put it in my pocket. ‘You’re starting to feel the effects of my special sauce now, aren’t you? So glad to be with you to savor your final moments before you plummet into everlasting nonexistence.‘

“He was still fully conscious at that point, but sadly unable to provide any final words, just some disgusting gasping. But I’ll always treasure the look of terror in his bulging eyes.”

I manage, barely, to keep any expression from my face, but my heart is racing, and in every cell of my body, I feel Kyle’s lethality. He’s confessing to assassination, so maybe he intends to poison me next. He senses my fear but misinterprets it.

“Don’t worry, Tommy. I said I took a very slight risk. The odds of my being caught are a thousand to one. From his office, Vaughn could surveil everything in the compound, but there were no cameras or microphones monitoring him and his dirty-dealing phone calls. And even if there were, I delivered the tiny but lethal puff of aerosol with a bit of practiced prestidigitation that someone standing nearby wouldn’t have detected.

“All the security here are now my employees, and they know it. I’m the guy who will cut their next paycheck, and everybody detested Vaughn. Even if they have suspicions, they’ll look the other way. There will be an uneventful autopsy. Sure, it will be noticed that his heir was the one to summon medical help, but the death of a terminally ill man by verified natural causes is not going to motivate an investigation. And no one wants to upset markets by interfering with a succession plan.

“So, nothing to worry about, Tommy. As of now, I am Vaughn Enterprises with all the power that entails. And, as long as you continue to serve my best interests, you’re under my protection. Obviously, I trust you, or I wouldn’t have shared the details of my great loss. You’re the only person I’ve ever trusted, and that’s part of your irreplaceable value.

“You never ask for much,” says Kyle, indicating the few possessions in my cabin, “but I can compensate you with anything you might ever want. I suppose it’s a slight risk that you know things like what I shared tonight, but, as I said, I trust you. But what I can’t trust—it’s one of my key operating principles—is my own counterespionage efforts. The way to avoid being hacked, for example, is to assume that you can be hacked. Vaughn Enterprises has been fighting off Chinese espionage for decades. Suppose they discovered that you were the source of that page of formulas or that you have unique non-aging genetics? I can’t risk you falling into the wrong hands, so I must ensure you remain under my protection indefinitely, a necessary and even patriotic precaution.

“Now that the compound is Vaughn-free, I’m assuming you don’t have any objection to being set up in a spacious apartment in that more secure environment. I know you don’t share my taste for the finer things, but anything you want is yours for the asking. If you want your apartment to have a rustic look with Indian blankets and raw wood paneling, or whatever, I’ll see that everything is exactly to your liking.

“You’re my most valuable human asset, Tommy, and I want you safe and well rewarded. Meanwhile, I’ve got an infinite to-do list I need to get back to in a few minutes. You can’t imagine how much I have to deal with during this transition, and going forward, I’ll have to keep making every second count.

“As of today, I’m just one of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet, but thanks to the gift of your NASDAQ thumb drive and the wealth I can now invest, it shouldn’t take more than a year or two for me to be at the top of the Forbes list. Of course, I expect the predictive power of the drive will be somewhat distorted once I buy in quantity, but it should still give me an edge over any other investor on the planet.

“I’ll still be calling on you for daily training sessions and intuitive counsel. And, please, keep a pad of paper on your bedside table. What you gave me last week is even more valuable than the thumb drive. In fact, I think it’s going to prove the most valuable artifact in human history.”

Kyle finally stops speaking to study me. My heart is still racing, but I’ve kept my face expressionless, and Kyle seems disappointed. He’s trying to read me. He expected me to be enthusiastic about the success of my mission and what he considers the improvement of my fortunes. But all I feel is walls closing in.

He expects me to be his permanent captive, too valuable and too much of a risk to ever let me leave his “protection.”

From Kyle’s perspective, that’s the only sensible possibility, but stupidly, I hadn’t foreseen what now seems obvious. If I’m ever to escape, I can’t afford to let him see that desire. I have no choice but to deceive him.

“Tommy?” Kyle prompts.

He actually looks concerned as well as puzzled.

“I thought you’d be pleased that I’ve accomplished your mission, but you look worried. What is it?”

“Oh, sorry,” I say, shaking myself out of impassivity and slowtime. “I’m just in shock from the news. It’ll take me a while to process.” I force myself to smile. “And you know I don’t metabolize alcohol well. I’m fine. I guess I should be congratulating you on your new status. And, yeah, you just saved the whole species. It’s hard for me to wrap my mind around. It’s so massive and unexpected.”

“No worries,” says Kyle. “And listen, give yourself credit. I didn’t save the whole species, we did. If not for you, I wouldn’t have known about Vaughn’s plan. Besides the species, you contributed to saving my life and ensuring my success. And that scribbled page you gave me last week is the single most valuable object in the world. You deserve any reward you might wish for, and there are few I can’t provide.

“I’ve got to get back to the compound, but here’s what I want you to do. I’ve never understood why you choose to live like you’re under a vow of poverty. Start making a list of things you want for a better quality of life. You’re not just under my protection, Tommy—I consider myself responsible for your entire well-being, and you should claim the compensation you so richly deserve. Your mission is accomplished, and I want you to enjoy your life more.”

Kyle stands and offers me his hand.

“Thanks, Kyle,” I say as we shake, “and once again, congratulations.”

I remain standing after he leaves. I really am in shock. Kyle doesn’t even realize the captivity he’s sentenced me to. I’d measured out my secrets to avoid mention of Andrew or anything I wanted outside of the mission. As far as he knows, there’s no change in my conditions, only opportunity for greater luxury.

Once he was done gloating and turned his attention to me, I was actually getting the psychopath’s version of generous concern. It was the most explicit confirmation yet of my efforts to achieve respectful civility between us. He wasn’t menacing me—he was understandably reveling in his newfound power and wealth. I was frightened by his sadistic satisfaction at seeing the terror in Vaughn’s eyes.

But why wouldn’t a psychopath be sadistic to a man who had created him as a body to harvest? Why wouldn’t he want Vaughn’s death to be as cruel and unusual as possible? If anything, he showed restraint, which was no doubt to minimize risk.

Everything Kyle is doing makes perfect sense from his perspective, including my ongoing protective custody. My work to restrain Kyle’s aggression and align our purposes has just achieved its greatest success. It wasn’t love, but Kyle did seem sincere in wanting me to take greater reward and enjoyment.

Then another realization falls on me like the weight of the whole world.

My mission with Kyle might never be over. If I bent my whole mind and will to it, I could probably find a way to escape, but that would be a selfish and immoral choice. I’m in a position to moderate and advise someone who will soon be the wealthiest and most powerful person on earth. Someone who has saved the species from extinction and may do so again by enabling it to colonize outside the solar system. What work could I ever do that would equal the moral imperative to be a benign influence on Kyle? What if, without me, Kyle became as evil as Vaughn? I’d be responsible. There’s no ethical way to justify escape. I’m trapped.

My mission is a success, but the result for me is devastating. I hoped completing the mission would free me to return to Andrew, but Kyle and the human species are fatefully entangled. It is not Kyle holding me captive—my own conscience binds me to remain in his service. I no longer have a right to a life of my own.

I stagger to my bed, curl up in a fetal position, and the tears I’d held back for so long finally come. A bitter, self-pitying cry racks me, and my body shudders with loss.

I’m sorry, Andrew. I’m sorry, I keep thinking through my sobs, until eventually I surrender to the dark undertow of sleep.

Chapter Twelve A Whirlpool of Mystery and Metamorphosis Max’s Journal