The Flight of the Silvers (18 page)

“Does it come with audio?” Mia wondered. “Or are these all silent ghosts?”

“As we have yet to discover a way to restore sound waves through temporis, ghostboxes are forced to rely on standard digital recorders. This machine is currently muted.”

“But David’s ghosts come with sound.”

Quint nodded. “Yes. I was surprised to learn that myself. Obviously his abilities go well beyond the current technology. Perhaps with his help, we’ll be able to catch up.”

David leaned back in his seat, releasing a grin that was smarmy enough to make his friends chuckle. Theo wasn’t as amused. He’d noticed the boy earlier and felt a strange sense of outrage, as if David were mocking everyone in the room. He figured the mistrust was his own personal hang-up. Theo knew a prodigy when he saw one, and he had very strong opinions about prodigies.

Quint moved on to a large steel apparatus that resembled an empty doorframe. As he turned a key at the base, the metal hummed with power. Amanda jumped in her seat.

The machine suddenly turned opaque with a waxy white substance that by now was familiar to everyone but Theo. He cocked his head in puzzlement.

“Tempis,” said Quint. “First discovered in 1984. Made commercially available in 1990. Some people refer to it as solid time, but that’s a misnomer. It’s merely air molecules, temporally manipulated into a uniquely solid state.”

David leered suspiciously at the bright white plane. “How can you adjust the speed of air molecules without creating a temperature shift? I mean we should be feeling it from here.”

Quint beamed. If he’d had more students like David, he wouldn’t have hated teaching.

“I’d love nothing more than to discuss it with you, one-on-one. For now, I’ll just say that tempis is one of the most perplexing substances known to man. It has the atomic structure of a hard transition metal but the weight of a noble gas. Somehow it exists in a paradoxical state in which it can be both airy and dense.”

“Huh. Just like Hannah.”

More people laughed as the actress irreverently narrowed her eyes at Zack. He shined her a preening smirk.

“Don’t start a battle you can’t finish, honey.”

“Oh, I’ll finish it.”

Determined to ignore them, Quint looked to Amanda. “I noticed you reacted to the energy before the barrier was even activated.”

“Yeah. It felt like someone tapping my shoulder from twenty feet away. What does that mean?”

“It suggests you have an innate sensitivity to all tempis. That’s fascinating.”

“Is it safe to touch?” Mia asked.

Quint thumped his fist against the surface. “Perfectly safe. Many specialized workers wear it as protective gear.”

“How?” David asked. “It’s a flat pane.”

“Tempis can either be projected through lenses, as it is with this barrier, or generated along conductive metal wires. Using a flexible mesh, the substance can be molded into virtually any shape.”

Zack noticed a thermos-size generator at the base of the frame. “So this runs on electricity.”

“No. Most temporic devices are powered by something called solis. That’s for another session.”

Amanda studied the barrier with heavy eyes. Now that she knew the name of the force inside her, she rolled it around her thoughts like a boulder. 
Tempis, tempis, tempis.
She squeezed her golden cross, praying for the day this beast, this madness, this tempis-tempis-tempis stopped scaring the hell out of her. It didn’t help that her sister seemed equally frightened by it.

Quint peered at the clock on the wall. “Does anyone have any questions?”

“Yes,” said Zack and Hannah, in synch.

David raised a hand. “Me too.”

“Okay. Hannah first.”

“I once asked Martin Salgado what makes all the cars and ambulances fly, and he said ‘aeris.’ Where does that fit in?”

“I was going to save that for next time,” Quint said. “But since you asked, aeris is just an altered form of tempis, one that can be molecularly compelled to move in a specific direction, even up. With enough aeris, you can lift entire buildings. Since its introduction twenty years ago, aeris has replaced jet propulsion as the primary means of commercial flight. It can be found in roughly a third of all automobiles. I imagine in another twenty years, ground cars will be an antiquity. Zack?”

“Have there been any other cataclysms since 1912? And has anyone developed a weapon that more or less does the same thing?”

“Mercifully, no to both. The Cataclysm has been a one-time occurrence. And though temporis has certainly been weaponized in various ways, no one’s invented the means to re-create an event of that scale. If anyone does develop the technology, it’ll be either England or China.”

“Why not the U.S.?”

“America hasn’t been involved in war since 1898.”

Quint wasn’t surprised to see six hanging jaws in response. He sighed patiently.

“Again, a broader topic for another day. I’ll just say for now that among its many other effects, the Cataclysm drove us inward as a nation. David, you have a question?”

“Yes, I gather from your omission that there isn’t a device that does what Mia does. Correct?”

Quint emitted a smile that made Mia want to hide under her chair. “That is indeed the case. For all our advances, the act of time travel itself remains purely hypothetical. At least it did until our lovely young Mia came along. As far as science is concerned, she’s the first person in history to transport physical matter from one point in time to another.”

While Quint spoke, Zack furtively edged his sketchbook into Theo’s view. Among all the notes and doodles was a large query, circled twice.

What’s your weirdness?

Zack had left his pencil out for Theo’s use, but after five seconds of addled silence, he took it back to add a postscript.

Just being nosy. Forget I asked.

A few moments later, Theo commandeered the pad and wrote his reply. Zack eyed him in blinking turmoil. “Are you kidding?”

“Afraid not.”

“Wow. I don’t even know how to react to that.”

“Guess I don’t either.”

“Is everything all right?” Quint asked them.

“Yeah,” Zack replied. “Just a lot to absorb. I think our heads are about to spin off.”

“Well, why don’t we stop here then?”

Theo fled the room as fast as politeness would allow. Hannah watched him exit, then cautiously approached Zack.

“Is he okay?”

“I don’t know,” the cartoonist replied, still vexed. When he asked Theo about his weirdness, he’d steeled his mind for yet another metaphysical brain-bender. But Theo’s answer truly threw him. A four-word deposition, delivered straight from right field.

I don’t have one.

—

That night, Theo ate his first dinner with the group. He kept a tense gaze at his food, forcing his eyes away from all the notable distractions—Amanda’s cast, Hannah’s chest, David’s teeming pile of raw sliced carrots. Even worse were Zack’s sporadic displays of time-twisting madness. He undid Theo’s bracelet with a tap of the finger, then proceeded on two separate requests to freshen up breads and vegetables. No one else seemed bothered by the sheer insanity of his table trick. And these were supposedly the people from Theo’s world.

Though he tried to stay quiet through the course of the meal, he was dragged through a gauntlet of idle queries by David.
Maranan. Is that a Thai name?
Filipino.
Did you grow up in the Philippines?
Nope. I was born and raised in San Francisco.
How old are you?
I’m twenty-three.
Do you have any siblings?
No. Just a whole mess of cousins.

“What made you decide on law school?” Zack asked.

Theo massaged his liberated wrist while he danced through the minefield of his past.

“Honestly, I don’t know. I’m from a big clan of overachievers. There was a lot of pressure to be someone. I think the plan was to get my JD, then a few years of public crusading, then local politics, then national politics, and then . . . I don’t know. My own monument, I guess. Something in a nice onyx.”

Zack smiled. He knew he liked Theo for a reason. “What did you do after you left?”

Theo’s dark chuckle was enough to make Zack regret the question. “Let’s just say I bummed around for a while.”

Hannah stroked her lip as she recalled their first conversation. He’d called himself a rehab washout, a blight on the family tree who’d tried to hang himself at least once. She didn’t think a lousy time at law school would be enough to send him on such a spiral.

David stirred his carrots with an idle fork. “How long have you been an alcoholic?”

“David!”

He looked to Amanda in surprise. “What? We’re all friends here. Must we pretend?”

In the wake of Mia’s stern glare, David sighed at Theo with grudging reproach. “If I crossed any lines of decorum, I sincerely apologize.”

Theo grinned softly. If anything, the faux pas made him appreciate David now. The kid was a fellow misfit, all brains and no wisdom. He reminded Theo of himself, in better days.

“It’s okay, David. You’re not the first one to bring it up. And you’re right. I’ve had a problem for . . . shit, it started about two years after law school, so it’s been at least five years.”

“That’s a long time,” David said.

“You’re telling me.”

Zack furrowed his brow. “Wait. You said you’re twenty-three.”

“I am,” Theo responded, with a weary exhale.
Here we go again.

“And yet you dropped out of law school seven years ago.”

“I did.”

Hannah shook her head in amazement. “Holy crap. You were
sixteen
?”

Theo shrugged nonchalantly. “I told you I came from a clan of overachievers.”

“That goes beyond overachieving,” Amanda remarked. “You’re a full-on prodigy.”

He shrugged again. “Well, that’s what they called me, but I never thought I was particularly brilliant. Just good at tests. In any case, I did a fine job squandering any promise I might have had. I flamed out early, then went on to do very stupid things. I won’t bother you with details. I’ll just say that when my karma finally comes rolling around, you’re not going to want to be anywhere near me. You’re going to want to find another planet.”

Upon seeing the heavy sets of eyes around the table, Theo felt a pang of guilt for darkening their day. His inner demon wanted to keep on pushing, to list his crimes and grievances in such exquisite detail that none of them would speak to him again. He’d become quite adept at burning bridges, and there was a certain comfort in setting these five flames in advance.

Indeed, just twelve hours later, Mia received a rolled-up warning from future times.

Don’t let Theo push you away. He’s a good man who’s hanging by a thread. He needs you all. The time will come when everyone will need him.

And I mean everyone.

—

Three days after the presentation, Quint finally agreed to remove the clamp from the lumivision. Czerny unlocked the console to the whole broadcast spectrum—thirty-nine channels, no waiting.

“Just thirty-nine?” Zack asked.

Czerny assumed Zack was joking. To Europeans like himself, even thirty-nine channels smacked of American overindulgence.

Despite the simple geographical hierarchy, the Silvers had an impossible time telling the stations apart by content. Whether it was National-1, Southwest-6, or San Diego-13, it was all the same archaic tripe. The sitcoms were filled with pratfalls and slide whistles. The dramas were as bland as meringue. Even the advertisements were blunt, unsophisticated objects—suit-clad spokesmen delivering the joys of soapsheets to fluffy-haired housewives.

Soon only Zack had the stomach to watch live programs. He lingered mostly on newscasts, and ran to Czerny whenever he encountered some impenetrable word or phrase.

“The reporters keep referring to some people as Deps. What are those?”

“Nickname for Domestic Protections agents,” Czerny replied. “They’re our federal law enforcers. Our FBI, as you call them.”

“What are predictives?”

“Predictives are illegal pills that supposedly allow people to channel their ‘inner temporis’ and see the future. It’s all bunk. Most are just cheap hallucinogens.”

“Why does the anchorman close out each newscast by telling me to ‘keep walking’?”

“It’s just an American way of saying ‘Be well.’ Dates back to a famous Roosevelt speech. I mean Teddy Roosevelt. I keep forgetting your history has two.”

One news report shook Zack to the core, a nostalgic look at the reconstruction of Manhattan. In the wake of the Cataclysm, the world’s greatest engineers came together to design a second-draft city, one that would carry the island into the next century and beyond. The present-day New York was a marvel to look at, with brilliant glass spires of all shapes and colors, tempic tubes that connected buildings at the highest floors, ethereal ghost billboards, and ten different levels of aer traffic. The images reduced Zack to wet-eyed wonder.

As August turned to September, the others began to notice a change in Zack’s behavior. His once relentless wit died down to the occasional lazy quip. He spent more time alone in his room. When asked if he was okay, he merely replied with one-word answers.
Sure. Yup. Spiffy.

On September 3, David and Mia played an impromptu game of “red hands” in the lobby, giggling as they attempted to thwart each other’s palm slaps. Zack watched from his drawing chair, stone-faced, until he suddenly dropped his sketchbook and marched upstairs to Quint’s office. For once the cartoonist met him with a serious face.

“You remember our deal, Sterling? About the money?”

“Of course. A thousand dollars for each of you. For each week of your continued cooperation.”

“Right. Tomorrow it’ll be six weeks.”

Quint’s stomach lurched. “And your point in bringing this up?”

“You know why,” Zack replied. “Get your cash together. I’m leaving.”

—

The Silvers’ next meal was a loud one.

“For God’s sake, Zack! Why?”

He’d announced his upcoming departure with drab triviality, as if he were merely changing e-mail addresses. The others weren’t so blasé.