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Analog Time, Part Two "The Island" by Sandy Man The black wall separating me from the world slowly broke away, and light was pouring in through the cracks. I had reached the end of the filmstrip, and after a few flutters and flickers, the dark gave way to pure white, and I could no longer keep my eyes shut. My lids flickered open and I started to lift my heavy, cotton-filled skull. In front of me was a blur of grey that gradually came into focus, but remained stubbornly grey. I was in a large grey room, with walls of grey brick and a floor of grey cement. High above my head a single lamp hung, casting an interrogation light down upon my shoulders like a scene from a bad noir film. Next to it I could hear a faint hum coming from a ventilation grate. In one corner of the room was a large grey metal door, and in the center of the room was a heavy metal table. In the center of the table was a wooden box. It was connected to a smaller box sat in front of it with some switches. My eyes followed the cable leading out of the little box and into some sort of black display device on the wall behind it. I looked down. I was naked, sitting in a wooden chair much too big for me, and beside me stood an unmarked IV bag on a pole, with a tube leading into my right arm. I reached over and yanked the tube free from the needle in my arm, then pulled the needle out as well. Through a numb haze I could tell that my senses were starting to come back to me, and in a minute I tried to stand on wobbly feet. As soon as my ass left contact with the seat, something clicked in the chair and I heard the familiar hiss of a tape recorder coming from the loudspeaker in the corner behind me. The quiet hiss was immediately broken by a man's voice. Calm, monotone, and slightly British, by the sound of it. "Good morning," said the tape. "Before you is a wooden box. Inside the box is a light bulb, which is connected to three switches on the adjacent panel. One of those switches is the correct switch, and it controls the flow of electricity to the light bulb; the remaining two do not. Also, next to each switch is a red button." I stumbled over to the table and leaned heavily on it to examine the equipment. The switches were tiny stainless steel, and on either side a little plus or minus had been neatly painted onto the wooden panel. The buttons were round plastic, resembling the big buttons one would see on a control box for factory equipment. Contrary to the recording, one of them was green. "Pushing one of these buttons indicates that you have selected which switch is the correct one. You may only choose once, and an incorrect choice will trigger the explosive device underneath the table, from which there is no escape. You may open the box to take a peek at the bulb, but once you do so, the switches will be locked into position and cannot be changed." "One more thing," added the voice, as the black screen on the wall came to life and revealed itself as a seven-segment LED display. "You will have thirty seconds to make a selection, after which you will die. "Good luck." The tape clicked off and the red numbers of LED display read thirty, twenty-nine, twenty-eight. I solved the problem before I was consciously aware of it, and my left hand reached out and flicked the first switch automatically. By the time my hand had returned to the edge of the table, I had checked and rechecked the solution. It would work unless the tape was lying or the equipment was faultly. Both of these circumstances were doubtful, considering the trouble someone had gone through to put me to this test, and in any event if either was true, then the problem was no longer in my control, and not worth worrying about. I was confident in my solution, but doubts as to the wisdom of executing it began to nag at me. What if the whole thing was a bluff? Was it better to simply sit and let the counter run out? Perhaps it was better I looked down at my left arm. Don't Panic, it told me. Very well. Twelve, eleven, ten, nine... I flicked the first switched to a negative position, then turned the middle switch positive, and opened the box. Seven, six, five. The bulb was dark. I reached out and put my left hand on it, held my fingers on the glass as my right hand sat lightly on the third button, ready to pounce. Three, two. The bulb was cold. I hit the button. There was a loud clicking, and no explosion. I looked up. The counter was frozen at the one second mark. I exhaled, not realizing that I had been holding my breath, and stumbled back to the chair, certain that the open box would prevent a reset of the mechanism. As I moved to sit my toe hit something metal under the chair. It was a large metal bucket, slightly rusty but clean. I dragged it to a corner of the room and squatted over it to piss. In my groggy state I started to lose my balance as I urinated, and had to lean against the wall to support myself. This made a bit of a mess. "You gotta stop waking up like this, babe," I whispered, as if Josie was a seperate person who needed some advice. Not having anything to blot myself with, I wiped myself dry with my fingers as best I could and then dragged my hand on the wall to clean it. "Fuck 'em. Let 'em send me a bill." I plopped myself back into the chair and closed my eyes. I felt myself drifting back behind the velvet curtain; either solving the little deathtrap had tuckered me out, or the IV did not contain tranquilizers, but rather vitamins and/or caffeine. Suspecting that I'd had enough sleep, I forced myself to stand and get to work. Underneath the table there was indeed plastic explosive, a thick row around the edge. The off-white color and slight tar smell identified it as Composition 4. I could better see how the death part of the trap worked, now. The metal of the table was thick enough to direct much of the blast horizontally. Anyone standing next to the table when the explosive was triggered by a wrong selection would be cut in half. If the subject instead made no choice and tried to brace for the impact, the natural thing would be to crouch down and cover up. Down near the floor would be the worst place to be in the event of this explosion. Even the heavy wooden chair would probably be terrible cover; the blast would chomp it to bits and it would become wooden shrapnel. Trying to escape the blast by hopping on top of the table would smash the victim against the ceiling as the explosion forced the table itself upwards, to say nothing of the shrapnel that might come flying apart from the explosive being in such close proximity. Probably enough to slice my body to ribbons. I spent the next hour carefully digging four cap primary detonators out of the Composition Four. The "tamper and it will explode" jazz wasn't a bluff; there was an independent battery backup hidden inside the material that took some finesse to disarm. It didn't help that I was without tools, but I managed. The battery was a compact twelve volt job. Good. With some effort and time I then managed to yank the power cable free from the LED panel on the wall, at which point the frozen display went dark and the bomb was disarmed. For shits and giggles I now tried the knob of the heavy door. Locked, of course. I molded about a few ounces of the plastic around the knob and shoved what I could into the gap between the door and the frame, which wasn't much. This got a detonator. For good measure I lined the entire edge of the opposite side with more plastic and inserted a second detonator. If the door had swung into the room, I would have access to those hinges. I wasn't complaining. Out was better; this way the blast would force the door away from the room, and from me. Better than the frame absorbing most of the energy of the blast and possibly warping the door into a shape that might become an obstacle. The table was a problem. It wasn't bolted to the floor, but it was so heavy that it might as well have been. Once I took all the gear off of it, including the plastic, I estimated that it weighed at least two hundred fifty pounds. I was hovering around a hundred, and my arms felt like twigs. I found that it was easier to lean against it and push with my legs. With a slow, titanic effort, I moved it inch by inch until it was nearly against the wall. Crouching underneath it, I applied enough upward force to flip the table on its side, and then it was a matter of pulling the legs up against the wall, which was probably the hardest part of the entire ordeal. It took some patience to set the rest up; stripping the insulation off of wires is a tedious process when you need to use your teeth. The wiring from the monitor would be the least reliable, and was therefore what I used to hook up the door. There was enough for three main lines back to the table. Good. This is what I would use first; if it didn't work, I'd want to know it right away. It should work, since I didn't find a timer in the table or inside any of the Composition Four. I hooked two of the wires up to the detonators imbedded in the Composition Four on the door and set one aside behind the table, along with the battery. I wrapped the remaining copper from the table apparatus around my wrist as a large bracelet, and got to work on the rest of my materials. First there was the light bulb. As carefully as I could, I smashed it against the inside of the wooden box, tried to keep as much of the mess inside as possible, and closed the lid. I took three ounces of Composition Four and flattened it into a pancake, then hooked a detonator to my remaining insulated cable and put this inside the box with the glass, along with the remaining detonator. When this was all done I had about four ounces of Composition Four remaining.I rolled this into a ball and, not having a better place for it, held it in my fist. I'd have pockets soon enough. I slid the flat pancake under my feet, checked my position behind the table, and twisted the two wire ends of the cable together. "Well," I whispered as I held the wire over the battery, "here we go." The two ends of the wire made contact with the electrodes, and there was a momentary spark, followed by a short thunderclap. Dust created by the explosion filled the room, and the force of the blast knocked my forehead against one of the legs of the table. But the legs had held, and the top of the table absorbed most of the force. I hadn't been blown apart by shrapnel from the door, nor had the legs crumpled to leave me flattened against the wall like the pancake between my feet. I opened my eyes and started blinking dust out of them. Daylight had filled the room. I checked my supplies. The box hadn't been blown apart; the detonators were intact. I snapped the box shut and peeled the pancake off the floor, then dipped my head around the table for a second. The door had indeed been blown clear of its hinges and out of sight. The open doorway now lay open to the outside world. I heard the wind rustling through trees; my momentary glance had been a flash of green palm trees and grass. The exit of this room, however, was a clearing, and the treeline was dozens of paces away, with no cover visible from this vantage point. Other than the concrete bunker that they had locked me in, of course. I tentatively poked the wooden box around the edge of the table, away from the door. If anyone with a sniper scope could see it, they didn't fire. I carefully crept out from behind the table and made my way to the door, sticking to the wall and keeping my head down. The pancake was flopped onto the ground next to the door, and a detonator was planted in the middle of it. I slid this into the bright light of the open doorway without exposing even a fingernail to the sunshine. The detonator was underneath the grey plastic and wouldn't easily be spotted. I opened up the box and put the remaining detonator between my teeth while I sprinkled the glass into the doorway, then made my way back behind the table, snaking the cable around one of the legs of the table as I got back into position. **** I looped the bare wire at the end of the cable into a little round noose, wide enough to touch between the two electrodes, and waited for the crunch of boots in the doorway. And waited. And waited. Nothing. I waited a full ninety minutes, crouched behind the table, flexing and relaxing various muscle groups in my legs and back to keep them from cramping up. While I waited, the wildlife outside, which had silenced itself after the explosive thunderclap that had blown apart the door, slowly began to At the end of that ninety minutes I made my way back to the doorway and risked a momentary glance outside, half expecting my face to be blown off by a sniper rifle. I didn't see the glint of a scope, didn't hear the crackle of a walkie talkie. Cautiously I walked outside. If this was October, it was certainly warm for it. Despite being completely naked the humidity and sunlight conspired to make me break into a sweat in less than a minute. There were palm trees, ferns, cacti. Overhead I saw a flock of black and white seabirds letting out an incessant squawk. Memories of nature documentaries on Public Broadcasting bubbled up in my brain, and I identified the species as the Sooty Tern. The building I had been in was a small bunker on a large hill, jutting like an obscene grey digit atop a mound of green. I circled the little grey block, which wasn't much larger than the room I'd been trapped in, and didn't find much other than an air conditioning unit, a power line that stretched downhill to the north, and a second door. The hillsides sloped down to a thin strip of beach on three sides; beyond that, on all three sides, were the blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean, stretching into the distant horizon. Judging by the heat and the high position of the noonday October sun, it appeared that I was on the southern tip of an island somewhere close to the equator. The other door was open, and led to a small utility room which contained a control console for the death chamber in which I had awoken. Beside the microphone were controls for the ventilation system, including heat and air conditioning, an eight-track tape player, on which my message had been played, and a black telephone. All of it was completely dead. Apparently everything except the lights had automatically short ciruited when I pulled the cables out of the monitor. There was a fuse box on the wall by the door; flipping the breakers brought everything back to life, but the phone was still dead. On the other side of the door was a single locker, and it contained a dark blue jumpsuit. On the shoulder was a patch of the American flag, and on one of the front pockets the words U.S. Navy. On the opposite shoulder was a rank insignia that I couldn't fathom. It was entirely too large for me, most likely sized for a six foot man of considerably more girth than my rather slight frame. I put it on anyway, and used a knife from the locker to cut the legs and sleeves to a more or less appropriate length. The locker also yielded a black belt with a sheath for the knife. I had to poke a new hole in the belt before it would fit around me. I strapped it on underneath the jumpsuit, then cut open the bottom of the right pocket to allow for quick access to the blade. I returned to the interrogation room, stepping carefully over the broken shards of glass with my bare feet, and collected the remaining plastic explosive, as well as the two remaining detonators. These went in my pockets and I left the little grey bunker behind, searching for water and the whereabouts of my curiously absent abductors. The bunker got its electricity from power lines strung along wooden poles along a grassy path that ran down the hill; this was the only evidence of civilization I could see once I left the bunker behind. Before long, though, I found a muddy puddle with the telltale tracks of an all-terrain vehicle. Someone from the twentieth century had been here not too long ago. "The twenty-first century," I had to remind myself. "The twentieth ended nine years ago." The IV that I'd been hooked up to must have kept me hydrated, because as thirsty as I was, it wasn't hard to pass up a muddy puddle. I pressed on. On either side of the path was a rainforest that teeming with life. I didn't feel the need to worry about making too much noise; the forest made plenty to cover it up. Less than an hour into my hike, I found a wild banana tree and had a little feast. The fruit wasn't quite ripe, but was certainly edible, and tasted at least as good as a fine cr?me brulee cooked up by expert Parisian chef on the banks of the Seine. The first two went down like greased lightning; I savored the third leaning up against the trunk of a banana tree. The broad leaves made an unbrella shade that felt like a blessed relief after the combination of blazing sun furnace and steambath humidity. I closed my eyes as I nibbled the banana and thought about the Motel Six on Interstate 81, and the gas station across the street where I was sent to forage for supplies. I set the bag of junk food down outside the door to our room, number seven, and fish around in my pocket for the hotel key with the big plastic tag. In a second I have it and slide the key into the knob. I stop when I hear the jingling of nearby coins. "Shit!" I pause and look around. The source of the cursing is a woman's ass, which is wiggling next to a Coke machine as the owner bends over to collect the change she's just dropped. She gets to her knees to hunt for the coins that have rolled underneath the machine, and assumes a pose very like the Yoga position called the Child's Pose. I know this because Cassie likes to show me what she's learned in class. A pair of tight cutoff jeans, made even tighter by the position that she's in, is all that stands between the naked skin of her buttocks and the night. I know because there is no visible panty line. I find myself wondering what her ass would look like without the shorts, on a bed in her motel room, with myself positioned directly behind it in a similar state of undress. Blood starts to find its way to my penis. For a moment I'm torn between the temptation to turn away and enter the room, having gotten away with the perfect crime, and to stay and keep watch until she turns and I have a face to match with her lower portions. This would, unfortunately, expose me to cross examination by her accusing stare, but since when did lust ever follow the whims of logic? The spell is broken by Cassie. "Joe?" It seems as if she heard the grocery bag, footsteps, and key, and is now concerned that I haven't entered. Perhaps it isn't her boyfriend, but a stranger that means to do her harm. We can't have that. No reason that she should be kept in a state of uncertainty just so that I can indulge in idle sexual fantasies. "Yeah babe," I answer as I open wide the door, scoop up the groceries, and enter without another sidelong glance at the Coke machine beauty. *** My reverie was broken by a hundred tiny stings on my ass and legs. "Fuck!" I shot up as if goosed by an electric buzzer and began hopping around and frantically stripping off the jumpsuit. The cause of the problem was black ants. An intruder had practically sat upon their mound, and they had infiltrated the enemy camp via pant legs and a pocket hole to attack the intruder with bites to the lower torso. I spent the next twenty minutes scraping and picking as many off of my skin as I could, then turned the jumpsuit inside out and cleaned it off as best I could be scraping it on the bark of a rubber tree. This wouldn't take care of all of the ants in the jumpsuit, but I would be better off taking a few more bites than to surrender to the sun, which would crisp me to a deep red if I were to walk around naked for the rest of the day. I sighed as I hung the suit on a branch to shake out a few more bugs. A competent jungle explorer I was not. "You might try burning it, dearie. I know I wouldn't mind the view." I spun around. He was standing in the middle of the path, holding a colorful tattered umbrella and wearing a grey bearded, toothy grin. His free hand was abstent mindedly scratching the fabric of his blue Hawaiian shirt against the bottom of his round belly. "Who the fuck are you?" I asked politely, as I pulled the knife from its sheath. He seemed to ignore the blade completely. "I am merely a casual observer of the human form," he said, and I could now place a hint of a British accent, though it was difficult to place. "Pay me no more mind than a chimp would Goodall, Tulip. Consider me a fly on your proverbial wall." The loose hand had drifted downward an inch or so and was now stroking the belt of his bermuda shorts. Without taking my eyes off of him, I reached behind me and pulled the jumpsuit off the tree, then put the knife between my teeth as I put it back on. Ants or no ants, I wasn't going to let some old pervert stand here and jack off to my naked self. The change in wardrobe disappointed him, but only a little. His free hand now put itself in a pocket. "Who are you and what are you doing here?" I asked again. "Tell me before I stab a fucking hole in your throat, old man." He held up his hand in submission. "No need for hostile words, Tulip. We're all friends here." "Say one more word without identifying yourself, fucker, and see what happens to you." The teeth went away, but the smile grew broader as he nodded his head. "Men call me Thomas Frederick Teller. My friends know me as Freddie, and I would be honored to count you among them." With that he dipped his head in a little bow. The knife stayed out. "What are you doing here?" "Well, I am out for my midday constitutional, which I take every day to whet the appetite before tea. What are you doing here?" "What... what tea? Where am I? What is this place?" "Ah." The smile slowly faded from his lips, and instead took on a pouting, concerned expression. I couldn't tell whether or not he was making fun of me. "Well, this is the island of Lost Souls." "What does that mean? Be clear." He was a bit flustered. "Well, I'm afraid I can't be of more help to you than that. I don't know our longitude or latitude, if that's what you're after. And I know very little about the people who run this place. They rather keep to themselves, you know." At this the grin reappeared, a bit more sly than before. "You're a prisoner here?" "I suppose you could call us that?" "Us? How many others like you?" "Well, they come and go, here and there and by and by, but if I had to put a number to it..." He trailed off, counting on his fingers, and finally came up with, "Forty-seven, maybe." "And how did you get here?" He gave me a deadpan stare. "How did you get here?" "Alright. Fair enough. Where do you... live?" "I am the proud owner of a modest little bungalow on the edge of the village." "Village?" God, don't let me have woken up inside an episode of The Prisoner. I couldn't take being smothered alive by bubble gum. "By no means could I refer to it as a thriving metropolis. The art district has much to be desired, you know." He let out a snort as he looked up and down the hillside. It seemed like he was growing bored of the exchange and was seeking a fresh distraction. "Will you take me to it?" He looked at the blade. "I'm not in the habit of inviting hostile elements into my domicile, you know." Why was the knife still out? He hadn't made any threatening gestures, not really. But I had seen in his remarks and wandering hand a potential sexual assault, ignoring the possibility that he was more likely just a lonely old hippie type who hand't seen a woman in some time. And I was keenly aware of the fact that he could easily overpower me out here in the jungle - an environment in which I was new and unfamiliar, but that he had probably spent some time in. And there was obviously something between my legs that he wanted. I couldn't ignore these facts and relax any more than I could avoiding look at a small fire on the living room carpet to kick back to watch a Phillies game. Being a girl was weird, and I was starting to resent it. The knife went back into its sheath, though I kept my hand on it, ready to draw it at a moment's notice. I joined him on the path, and my eyes flicked to the canteen slung across his shoulder. "Thirsty, my dear? Does my Tulip require water?" "Yes, please," I hissed through gritted my teeth. The nickname was getting old real fast. He handed me the canteen and I drank deeply, emptying half of the contents before I realized that I was being rude. I wiped my mouth with a sleeve as I handed it back to him. "Thanks. Okay, lead on, MacDuff." "Shakespeare? I'm quite impressed, Tulip." He offered the crook of his arm, which I was obviously supposed to snake my hand around. "I'm cool. Just lead the way and I'll walk behind you." "Are we operating under Sharia law, my dear? I think not. It would be ungentlemanly of me to-" "Humor me, will you?" "As you desire, Tulip, as you desire. I shall walk the plank for you with a smile." He started off down the path, and I followed a few paces behind, keeping a close eye on him for sudden movements. "How long have you been here?" I asked. "Well, now, let me see. What is the current year?" "Really. It's uh, it's two thousand nine." He stopped to look at me. "Truly? Well, in that case, I believe that I've been here since just you were a little girl. Since the time of Barbie's Doll's dream house, at least." "Yeah, yeah. Does 'Barbie Doll's dream house' have a year?" "Hmm. The last time I looked at a copy of the times, June 7, 1998 was on the letterhead." "Okay. How young do you think I am?" "You don't look a day under fifteen, dearest." "No, seriously, what year do you think I was born?" "I couldn't hazard a guess, Tulip." "Nineteen sixty-eight." He paused and turned to look me up and down. "Well, you're remarkably well preserved for a forty-one year old." "You don't believe me." "No." We reached a small stream that trickled down along the path. I drank until I was full, and Freddie filled his canteen. We continued on. "Tell me, does her majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second still sit on the throne." I didn't know what to say. "Uh, I'm sorry, Freddie, I don't know." "Pity." "So uh, what do you do here, Freddie?" "You might better ask what I don't do." "Okay, what don't you do?" "I don't do what everyone else here does, which is to watch television and wait for death." I was dubious. "There's television here?" "Indeed there is. In every room of every home." "Weird. What did you do before you came here?" He took a little time to answer. I got the feeling that I was broaching subjects that he avoided thinking about. "I was in the emply of her Majesty's Royal Air Force." "And, uh, what did you do for them?" "Crash investigation." The clipped, terse tone of his response told me that there would be no more information forthcoming on the subject. I switched gears. "You have a wife back home? Any kids?" He didn't answer. I let it go. In due time we came to his bungalow, a modest bamboo hut nestled in the shade of trees that Freddie identified as Norfolk Pines. The inside was no less modest; Freddie lacked electrical appliances and even a stove. A small, warped cot was his bed, and besides that he had a table, chair, small shelf with about a dozen paperback sci-fi novels from the seventies, and a broom. On the floor next to the bed was a small basket full of clothes, and in one corner leaned a broom. "What do you eat? Do you just pick fruit from the jungle?" I asked Freddie as he slumped onto his cot. Freddie didn't respond. His eyes had had a distant look ever since I brought up the subject of family, and he now collapsed like a balloon with a slow leak. "Where do you go to the bathroom, Freddie?" "Outside," he said quietly, and then he laid down on his cot and rolled over. "Freddie? Hellooo." No response. I went outside and found some bushes to urinate and push out some banana. Speaking of banana, I found another tree and used the broad leaves to wipe my ass, then filled up with some more of the sweet fruit. I was careful to keep an eye out for more painful, territorial insects. By the time I got back to Freddie's bungalow, he was snoring. I left his shack behind and got back on the path, intending to follow the power lines until I encountered something resembling civilization. In less than an hour I reached the village proper, which was quite a fanciful name for a row of small houses strung together by power line, with about half an acre between each. There was still no paved streets or sidewalks, but here the grass gave way to the familiar dirt ruts of a country road. Whatever vehicle drove through here did it rather often. The buildings themselves were identical postwar prefab units, and very small. Little boxes on the hillside. The residents weren't much more interesting. The first door I approached to three minutes of knocking to produce a person, even though I could hear one of the televisions sets that Freddie was talking about. Finally it spit up a grey haired woman with a wide stare that eyed me up suspiciously, as if I was selling dead cats door to door. She wore no makeup and her hair was ragged and unkempt. It looked as if she hadn't had any social contact for years. In the background the tv was on, some sort of police procedural. The inside of her house was filthy. "It's not time for dinner yet," she barked. "Dinner's not until Perry Mason." "Uh, okay, well I was wondering if I could ask you about-" "What do you want?" "Can I just talk to you? Do I need a pretext?" She slammed the door in my face and went back to her stories. Great. Chalk one up for the mental institution. I tried the next door over. This time it was a man in his mid forties, a red t-shirt stained with food stains stretched tight over a gut. He opened the door a crack at first. After he'd had a peek at who was knocking, he opened up a little wider and gave me a once over. "Yeah? "Hello. I need some water. Can you help me?" He stared at me for a full ten seconds before the answer came to him. "Um, yeah. Yeah, why don't you, uh, yeah, come in." He managed a weak smile and beckoned for me to enter his domicile. His television was also on, some sort of talk show where a disc jockey made porn stars take their tops off for the amusement of his morning zoo entourage. "What's your name?" I asked as he went to the small kitchenette and poured me a glass of water. "Brian." He didn't bother asking mine. "Brian, how long have you been here?" He struggled with the answer, as if the thought had never before occurred to him in his life. "Uh... I don't know." "You don't know? What do you mean? You weren't born in this little one-room house in the middle of a tropical island, were you? What happened to you before you came here?" "Before?" He looked at me as if I was speaking in hieroglyphs. He squinted one eye shut and cocked his head at me. Obviously the effort was making his brain hurt. Eventually he changed the subject to more familiar territory. "Do you wanna watch some tv? I'm gonna watch some tv." He sat and patted the couch next to him, still holding the glass of water. I sighed and sat. "May I have the water now?" "Huh? Oh, sure." I drank it dry as the top heavy model on the screen argued with her host about the authenticity of her mammary glands. My own host made a grunting sound that was probably supposed to be a laugh. He stroked his crotch as one of the sidekicks fondled the pornstar's tits. I tried not to look and gestured to pile of empty tinfoil plates next to the couch. "Where do you get your food?" "It comes here." "When?" "Dinnertime." "When is dinnertime?" "That's, uh, Happy Days." "Okay, when is Happy Days on?" "Right after Golden Girls." I sighed, frustrated. "What's after Happy Days?" "The movie." "What movie?" "We get to pick." He produced a small pamphlet with film selections that had been stuffed into the couch. "You wanna pick the movie tonight?" "That sounds awesome. That sounds like an awesome night." Apparently he had no capacity for sarcasm, because he smiled as he turned and put a hand behind my neck to bring me in for a kiss. "Aw, shit!" I pushed against his chest as he grunted and tried to shove my face into his. His empathy was about as together as his sarcasm. He was at least twice my size, maybe more, but apparently lifting tv dinners to your face doesn't give your muscles a lot of staying power. I managed to bring one of my feet up to his chest and shoved off of him. His head hit the wall with a cracking sound. "Ow," moaned Brian as he clutched at his bruised scalp, his face full of pain, like a child. "Go away!" He started to cry. I left. **** I kept following the power lines, strung like garland from one house to another, leading me to the ultimate source of this little island world. Not every house was occupied, but every one had a television. After the twelfth house, the power line stopped going in a straight line and instead curved off to the left and right. I picked right and followed until I came to another green path, another series of houses. I began to see the shape of so-called civilization here, and the shape was a great hub with spokes poking out of it like the legs of a starfish. The legs were rows of houses, each with a television and most with a braindead zombie to watch it. At the center of the hub was a dense cluster of forest with no obvious paths or access points. I walked the perimeter of that central hub until I came to a large electrical shack on the edge of the jungle. It was sealed with a padlock. I considered using my plastic explosive, but it had taken hours to walk the perimeter. Now it was late and I was exhausted and weak with hunger. Man cannot live on bananas alone. Nor woman, it seemed. I followed the nearest row of homes until I found a vacant one, then claimed it as my own. It was empty, clean, and smelled slightly of disinfectant, but in every other way it was identical to the other houses I'd seen. There were no dishes, but the water worked, and I drank from the spigot until I'd had my fill. I left the light off but clicked on the television, muting the sound. There were only three channels, and they seemed to be programmed for men, women, and children. The Man channel had a documentary about guns. The children's channel had a cartoon about two stupid dogs. The Woman channel was showing the Golden Girls. I turned off the set and kept a sharp eye out the window. The sun gradually went down, and in less than an hour a large jeep came rolling slowly down the road from the direction of the central hub. It stopped at the house before mine, and a man dressed in camo fatigues stepped out and delivered a small tray on the doorstep, then knocked. He didn't wait for a response, but stepped back into the jeep and continued on. The jeep then rolled by my house and onto the next. The man delivered another meal and continued on. I couldn't be sure, but from a distance he appeared to be an exact clone of the one who choked me in the alley. Who in turn looked like the one who'd been fried at the beach. How many of these guys were there, anyway? I went out the back door, crept around to the front of my neighbor's house, and stole the bounty off of her front porch. With a lifestyle as active as hers, she didn't need the calories as badly a I did. I snuck back to my stolen house to examine my stolen meal. Space age tinfoil covered a rather modest meal of asparagus, applesauce, and some kind of mystery soy protein product. The asparagus was watery and overboiled, the applesauce bland, and the protein tasted like cardboard. This was clearly supposed to be mitigated by the little section of orange sauce, but that tasted like sugar with a hint of mustard. The food was unceremoniously shoved into my mouth. I didn't exactly feel safe spending the night, but it seemed infinitely safer than the jungle and I knew I wouldn't get any sleep on the dirt floor of Freddie's hut. There was no bed here - these probably weren't provided until the unit had a confirmed resident. Bedbugs, maybe. I laid on the couch and tried to get comfortable, which was surprisingly easy given my small frame. In my old body, my broad shoulders would have forced one arm to dangle onto the floor on a piece of furniture of this size. Here, the cushions seemed to swallow me up. I couldn't sleep. At first I lay there wondering what had happened to the house's previous occupant. This was just to occupy my mind, though, to keep me from revisiting my encounter with Keith. Eventually, though, the memories took over, and I discovered the downside to having a perfect memory. Every kiss, every soft caress, every thrust was available in exquisite detail. I sobbed for hours, and eventually cried myself to sleep. I was awake and out with the dawn. The forest was generous and I found another banana tree to provide me with breakfast. I was tempted to head back to the electrical shack again, but I was woefully unprepared to penetrate whatever was at the center of the hub. I needed more information. I needed to talk to Freddie. This time I would make an effort to be... charming. It took me about an hour to find my way back to his hut. As it happened, Freddie was an early riser as well, and I was met with a familiar grin when I showed my face at his door. "Tulip!" he said as he rose and beckoned me in. "You have returned to me. I didn't think I would ever see you again." "Call me Josie." I gave him a smile and a hug and apologized for having left without saying goodbye. Then I let him babble about the novel he was engrossed in, a paperback fantasy called The Eyes of the Overworld. When he was done telling me all about Cugel's adventures in the Mountains of Magnatz, he got up and we took a walk through a little path in the jungle. "You didn't come visit me to hear the adventures of Cugel the Clever," said Freddie. "I can see that you want to ask me something, but are afraid of how I'll react." I bit my lip and didn't answer. "It's alright, Tulip. I'm a grownup. You may ask away." "Well, okay... why do you think we're here?" He took a deep breath and sat upon a log, beckoning me to join him. "You are here because you know something. Something that you aren't supposed to know. They are in the habit of collecting people who know things that shouldn't be known, and for whatever reason They are forbidden to simply have those people destroyed. So they're brought to this island - that's the people who know things, Tulip, not the abductors - and made comfortable and silent." "Okay. But what's wrong with everybody here? They seem like they have brain damage or something." "I'm not exactly sure, but... I believe that they've been, for lack of a better term, mentally castrated. A sort of electrical lobotomy without surgery. It affects their ability to make new memories beyond that which they are shown on Television." "Why?" "I actually don't think it's intentional, but rather a side effect of the interrogation that they undergo when they first arrive." "So... why aren't you like them?" "Hrnh." He smiled uncomfortably and got up to walk again. "To tell you that, I need first tell you about why I am here." "Are you sure, Freddie?" I looked around. I saw no one, but I had no idea of the capabilities of the enemy. For all I knew, there were cameras and listening devices implanted in the trees themselves. I didn't want Freddie to tell me something that might get him killed. He sensed what I was thinking. "I doubt They're listening. It simply isn't worth Their time to spy on the likes of us. We're not important enough to Them and Their plans." He cleared his throat. "My division was a first responder investigation team for plane crashes. Our specific focus was enemy planes and our range was all of Western Europe and most of Africa. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was significantly less work for us, so the division was merged with another, and we dealt with any sort of - crash, commercial, civil, foreign domestic - for most of the nineties. Nevertheless, the core unit were Cold War veterans trained to deal with enemy aircraft." The Soviet Union collapsed? This was certainly interesting news, but I didn't want to interrupt him. "We received a call about a downed aircraft of unknown origin, on a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Iceland called Surtsy. Because of certain details from the initial report, I was keen to arrive before the Americans." "Certain details?" "The wreckage, you see, was metallic. Without wings. Roughly circular in shape." "Freddie, are you telling me -" "Men from Mars? It was a possibility, albeit a remote one. More likely it was an experimental spacecraft from China, or possibly a fallen satellite that had somehow miraculously survived the heat of re-entry. Also, the Americans might have something close to the vest that they weren't sharing with their allies across the pond. What we found fit the description of none of those things. "The craft was first reported by an Icelandic fisherman on the afternoon of June the Sixth. The FAA - that's the Fleet Air Arm, Tulip - sent a Sea King helicopter from one of our carriers in the North Atlantic to investigate on the morning of the Seventh, and that initial report was unusual enough to involve my crew. Within the hour I was on a transport plane bound for the carrier, and by teatime I was on the Sea King myself, approaching the southern end of Surtsy to see the thing for myself. "There was something very unusual about this craft even before we set down. For one thing, geiger counter readings were abnormal. Our counters were state-of-the-art, you see, and capable of detecting the full spectrum of virtually every radiation we could think of - x-ray, gamma ray, alpha and beta particles, and neutrons. It wasn't that the things wasn't giving off radiation, it's that there wasn't any at all. Within half a mile of the crash site, background radiation was absolutely nil. It was as if the thing absorbed radiation. Even the daylight seemed dimmer as we approached it. This made it devilishly hard to photograph as well, but we did our best. "Next was the nature of the crash itself. There was no smoking crater, no trail of wreckage or debris. No evidence that it had had anything but a soft landing. My assistant, a chap named Palmer, even questioned why we were there. The thing appeared to be completely intact. More than that, part it seemed to actually merge itself with the rock formation that it had landed on. As if it had swallowed the rocks up, or it had simply materialized where rocks were supposed to be. And somehow it had not distubed the surrounding area at all, not displaced so much as a pebble, as near as we could tell. "It was metallic, a dull grey, about forty feet across. Completely round, except where the rock seemed to interfere with its shape. It was difficult to make out the specific details of the ship beyond its basic shape, and I believe that this is because it was either absorbing light to some extent or bending light around it. It was difficult to put your finger on exactly why it looked wrong, but it did. Certain parts of it were transparent, and yet they were not. I don't know how else to describe it. "Palmer was the first one that had worked up the nerve to actually touch the thing. When he didn't immediately burst into flames, I did as well. It was completely smooth. Frictionless, almost like a liquid, but smoother. Knocking on it didn't produce a hollow ring, like you would expect metal to. Rather, it didn't even give off a thud. It was absorbing sound and vibration energy as well. The skin of the craft was completely seamless; there didn't seem to be any way in or out. "We studied it for the better part of two hours, and word came down that more teams were on their way to study it. The Americans, as well; couldn't keep them out of the picture for very long. I wasn't dismayed; I knew that I wouldn't be in charge of this discovery for more than a few hours, but I had seen it firsthand, and no one could take that away. **** "And then... something even more incredible happened." He leaned against the trunk of a palm tree and stared off into the distance. Finally I said, "What, Freddie?" He looked at me, as if hearing me for the first time. "The pilot of the craft emerged." "You actually met-" "Yes." "Well, what did he look like?" His eyes trailed off into the woods again. "It was difficult to tell, because he was wearing some sort of protective suit, made of some silvery material which looked not unlike the aluminized nylon suits developed for the Mercury Program, and this bent or absorbed light in much the same way as the skin of the ship itself. The head, though, that was a different story. "The head was solid, almost as if it were made out of a chitinous exoskeleton, more like an insect. The tough skin of the head was hairless and grey, and it was quite large. The eyes were black as coal, and they had no pupils. It had no nose, although there was a small slit where the nostrils would be. And it had no mouth. No mouth." He was trailing off again, lost deep inside the memory. "And? You can't leave me hanging, Freddie." "Yes, well, he materialized in the middle of our little group as we were taking measurements. Nobody saw how this happened; he just sort of appeared while no one was looking." "How do you know that he was male?" "Well, to be sure, he was smaller than a man. Closer to your size, Tulip, or perhaps a bit taller. I got the sense, when he spoke, that gender had ceased to have any real meaning for his people. Nevertheless, it felt like a male." "Hold on. He spoke? What did it say?" "Well he didn't use words, you know. There wasn't even a voice in our minds. There were just... thoughts." "Okay, what did it- what did he say?" He looked me in the eye as he searched for the words, and his eyes had a frightened, almost embarassed look to them, as if he were a small child ashamed to admit that he had wet himself. "He... asked me for a soda." I shook my head, trying to deal with the absurdity of it. To travel from a distant star all the way to earth, and then... "He asked you for a soda?" "Not just any soda. Coca-cola." "Are you kidding me? First contact and the alien had brand loyalty?" "Oh, not just any Coca-Cola, either. He wanted one without High Fructose Corn Syrup, and wanted to know if we'd brought any with us." I was flabbergasted. "So what did you tell it?" Now he looked even more ashamed. "I looked him in the eyes, or at least in what appeared to be his eyes, and I said, 'We haven't got any.'" "So then what happened?" "Well, he didn't like this answer very much, you know. Not very much at all. He stood there, hanging his head in sorrow, as if I had told a child that Father Christmas was dead. None of us knew what to say or do. But it didn't matter, because he made the next move." "Yeah?" "He looked at me, and his mind, it... merged with mine." "How do you mean?" "Well, it's difficult to put into words, but... alright. The initial communication was an implanted notion. We were standing there, and suddenly we were all struck by the same thought, which was that the stranger wanted a Coca-Cola, made with cane sugar. We all knew where the thought had come from, of course; he hadn't tried to hide the fact that he was implanting little notions in our minds. "This was different. It was as if our two minds began to overlap. I was sharing a part of his memory, and he a part of mine. In part he was scanning me for information, but also I was scanning him, gathering knowledge from his mind. This only lasted for a few moments, and then his mind separated from mine, and we were two beings again." "So what did you see?" He sighed, and slumped down on the log again. "I honestly can't remember most of it. I don't think I was meant to. What I did get was impressionistic. He had come a long way, and was quite exhausted mentally at the end of such a long trip. This is why he wanted the Cola, I suspect - for the caffeine. "And there was something else. He was here on some sort of rescue mission. Here to save the entire world from... something. I honestly can't remember." "It's okay, Freddie." These vague descriptions were making me almost ready to start doubting his story at the vague nature of this contact, except that he was so earnest about it. I knew at least with complete certainty that he believed it. He saw the skepticism on my face and scoffed. "You don't believe me, do you?" "It's not that, Freddie -" "It's alright, Tulip. I don't blame you. It's quite a fantastic story." "Is that the end? I mean, what happened next?" "We heard the UH-1s closing in, bringing their American cleanup crews. They meant to construct a building around the thing. Around that they would most likely build a top secret air base on Surtsy, even though the place is dreadfully unstable, and devote massive resources to studying the thing. None of my crew wanted that, of course. He looked around at all of us, and I could see that he was reading our thoughts. "And then the ship simply faded away. He turned around to look at it as this happened, and then he touched something on his belt and disappeared." "Wow." "Indeed." He stood up, started to make his way back to his hut. I followed. "So wait, how did you end up here?" "Oh, that happened the following day. Those chaps who deliver my supper every night, one of their number appeared at my door and gave me an injection of something, probably pentobarbital. Then I woke up here." "What about the rest of your team?" "Oh, they're here somewhere. As dull-eyed and dead inside as the poor souls that you've undoubtedly encountered in your walk-around. I don't know why I wasn't subjected to the same treatment. I suspect it has something to do with my encounter." "Your encounter? What do you mean?" "Just that I am somehow infected by the very fact that the alien touched my mind. I suspect that it makes me dangerous, somehow. There was something else, too." "Something else? What was it?" "You don't believe that it happened, Tulip. Why does it matter?" "Freddie, stop!" He stopped and turned to look at me, his face a mask of pained frustration. I could see that it was a hard thing for him to open up about the encounter after so long, and it occurred to me that I was probably the first person he had ever shared this with. "Freddie-" I was ready to say something along the lines of as a nineteen year old male who woke up a twenty-one year old female twenty two years into the future, I'm ready to believe almost anything. But then it would be me trying to convince him that I wasn't crazy. What actually came out was, "I believe you." He searched my face for deception. Finding none, his frustration melted into relief. "He had a message. Something that I was supposed to tell all of mankind, a message for humanity." "And what was that?" He cleared his throat and licked his lips. "Don't go into the green box. Pull red instead." I waited for something more. Nothing came. He stared at me. "What does that mean?" He turned once more, and headed back towards the hut. "How should I know? I'm just the messenger." It had taken a lot out of him to relate the story to me, and by the time we got back to his little hut, he went immediately to sleep. I spent much of the rest of the day walking the perimeter of the central hub again, looking for a path. Blasting open the electrical shack no longer seemed like such a hot idea; the power cables most likely went underground to whatever power source fed them on the inside, and this was likely to be guarded by cameras, at the very least. At one point I even tried to plow through the pathless forest to get to the center of the hub, but my lack of experience and shoes left me ill equipped for a jungle trek. By dinnertime I was no closer to finding out what was in the center or where the mysterious black trucks came from. I made a plan to hide in the trees and do my best to follow one of the food trucks - there had to be more than one - when it departed at the end of a delivery. Unfortunately, I found myself completely exhausted after my trek around the perimeter. And more bananas didn't help at all. Maybe I was dehydrated? After a little search I found a new empty house and drank my fill. Still tired. Worse, my stomach was twisting itself into knots of tension, and there was a ripping sensation in my sides, like a bad side stitch that wouldn't go away. I plopped on the couch, and looked out the window as the day slowly turned into night. I was determined not to spend my time watching tv. Gradually an intense nausea began to fill up the twisting stomach. I started to regret all the bananas. When it got bad enough that I realized I wouldn't be able to eat anything, I turned on the television, eager to get my mind off whatever was ailing me. The program that appeared was a children's cartoon about a demented sponge and his idiotic starfish friend. This made me angry, and I switched over to an old PBS documentary about an expedition into the Congo in search of grey apes or something. One of the documentary crew came down with Malaria, and so there was a whole section on trying to get him treatment so far away from civilization. Could I have Malaria? Certainly my symptoms fit - nausea, fatigue, muscle pains. And certainly I had been bitten by plenty of mosquitoes. But Malaria was supposed to take at least eight days before the patient showed any symptoms, and I had been here two. I doubted that the bugs on the Jersey shore would carry Malaria. Then again... The documentary was freaking me out, so I switched to the women's channel, which was a show about an obese white trash mother and her obese white trash husband, who lived with two children played by teen fashion models. And also a cute little boy. The cute little boy was running out of the living room, screaming like a maniac. The obese father grabbed him. "Now, there's no reason to run around, screaming like a maniac!" "Mom's talking about her period!" The father paused for comic effect, before releasing the boy. "As you were." Oh. Ohhhhhhh. I turned off the set and sat up, frightened and relieved at the same time. I didn't have Malaria. At least not yet. This certainly put to bed any sneaking suspicion that I had undergone a sex change operation and some really radical plastic surgery. I needed some supplies. Where would I find them on a mysterious tropical island? I got up and left the house out the back door, cramps be damned. I had peeked into a lot of windows and knew that many of the inmates here were women. Hopefully one of them would have what I needed. If They just avoided the issue by sterilizing the inmates before releasing them to their quarters, or put medication in the food that suppressed menstruation altogether... The third house I came to contained an overweight woman in her mid thirties. She was watching tv. What else? I pounded on the door a full five minutes before she answered it. "Yeah?" she asked, her eyes glazed over. "I need to borrow something." "What?" "I need," I began, but couldn't get the words out. I felt my face getting flushed. This was a lot harder than I thought it would be. After a few false starts, "I need some tampons," finally came tumbling out. She looked confused, as if she didn't understand why I would be asking her for this boon. "Why don't you-" "I'm new here," I snapped, trying to be as restrained and polite as possible. "Do you have some?" "Yeah," she responded. "But I don't understand-" I pushed past her and went directly to the little kitcheonette at the back of the one-room domicile. "Hey, you can't just-" "Is this the one where she talks about her period?" I gestured to the television as I began systematically searching through her cabinets. She snorted out a laugh. "Yeah, this is the one where DJ won't go to the blackboard because he keeps getting a boner." "Fucking hilarious. Excuse me for a minute." I went into the bathroom, closed the door, and continued my search. Underneath the sink I found the treasure I'd been seeking. I grabbed a handful and exited the bathroom. "Thanks a lot, have a great night!" And with that I retreated back to my own dwelling, quarry in hand. So, yeah. That night was a barrel of laughs. I even threw up at one point, but not much. By the next morning the cat that was clawing at my insides settled down somewhat. Also, the dam had burst, so to speak. I took it easy in the morning and visited Freddie again in the afternoon, grilling him for information about our captors. He had almost none. I got the sense that he had made some trouble when he first arrived, and was forcibly corrected. Ever since then he'd learned to keep out of the way, off of the grid. "I can tell you that this place has been here for some considerable length of time," he said in the middle of a protracted game of chess, which came much easier for me than any game of chess I had ever played before in my life. "This is not the first version of this place, either. I found older structures in the jungle, most of them completely burned down. Before television the opiate that the Minions used was pulp novels, and before that games and poetry." "Minions?" "It's my little pet name for the identical twins you see driving in the black cars. They're the ones who carry out the Master's bidding, whoever that may be. I think it's likely a position passed down from one to another, for well over two centuries. Possibly much longer, if everything I found in the woods is connected." "What was it you found? Check." "Oh, dear. Er, I found evidence of periodical purges going back more than five hundred years. Some of them much more. I'm afraid my archaeological training was rather limited, and happened several lifetimes ago, so I couldn't date most of what I found with any accuracy. But there are remains of stone structures in some of the deeper parts of the jungle that indicate bronze age technology. Here and there I found bits of straw huts and some simple tools that may have been from earlier. Clay pots and things. Impossible to date. Anyhow, the jungle's reclaimed most of that stuff, and I haven't the proper tools for a more thorough search, you know." "What did you learn about those earlier civilizations? Check." "You've always got a quick response, haven't you? You know, I was ranked number seven at University. That was over forty-five years ago, I'm sorry to say. "What I learned about the earlier peoples here wasn't much. But I did recover this-" He got up from the game and shuffled around under his cot. *** "Ah! Here we are." What he emerged with was a small orange pot made out of clay, which he handed to me. "Where did you get this?" "It doesn't matter. Now, see the representation along the edge here." He gestured to the black markings along the side. One side was a primitive painting of a black disk hovering in a white sky. Crudely drawn people bowed beneath it, and there was a withered look to them. "Now turn it," said Freddie. I slowly spun the bowl around. On the opposite side was a white disk of similar size and shape as the black, floating in a dark sky speckled with stars. Standing beneath it was a small figure sporting the large egg-shaped head and large almond eyes of a Grey Alien. The creature lacked a mouth, just like Freddie's description. It held up one hand, at the center of which was a gem of some sort, giving off its own energy. "Note how the natives around the central figure can stand on their feet around him. They have no need to cower, no compulsion to grovel at the visitor's feet. This is a friend and a teacher, not a conquerer god or a harbinger of doom." I committed the image to memory and set the bowl aside. "What do you think it means? Check." "Damn. Well, this is a rather basic depiction of good and evil. Whoever runs this place is depicted as the force of evil. An awful black circle that blots out the sun. Notice the beams of sunlight emerging from the edges of the black circle; this is a perversion of the natural order. Night when there should be day. "On the other hand there is my friend the visitor - or someone very like him, possibly an ancestor - and he is the bringer of the white disk. Sunlight in the dark, a miracle." "What's he supposed to be holding there?" "I'm not sure. Whatever it is, it's supposed to be red." "Why is that? Check." "I'm fairly certain that it's painted with blood." "Blood in the palm of the sky visitor. Stigmata, perhaps?" "Perhaps, but I don't think it's intended to be quite as complicated as that. If it is blood, the visitor is sharing it with the people as a sort of miraculous gift, which has more in common with the Last Supper or the Holy Communion than with Stigmata. But blood is only one interpretation, mind you. I think that the Visitor has more in common with Prometheus than with Christ." He focused on the chess board. I understood, but wanted Freddie to follow through. "Prometheus?" "Yes, the glow of the red light is the Visitor giving Man to the gift of fire. Only in this manner may Man bring light to the darkness." "I get it." "I know. Ah." A broad smile spread across his lips. "Check." I made a hissing sound through my teeth, moved my pawn aside to open up a path between my rook and his king. "Checkmate." **** After the game he brewed some tea and asked her, "Why do you suppose you were not immediately processed, like those poor zombies in the houses?" "Freddie, I honestly don't know. I've been struggling with that one myself." "What do you remember from your journey here?" "Nothing. They kept me drugged until I woke up in some sort of trap room on top of the southern hill." I told him about waking up in the chair and the deathtrap message that was waiting for me. He was impressed with my solution and the speed with which I arrived at it. "Are you keen on puzzles? Have you been doing them your entire life?" "No, not really. I've always been stupid when it came to riddles and things. I was always more of a song and dance man." He cocked his head curiously at the slip. "Song and dance?" I wasn't ready to start going into detail about my gender status. "Yeah, man. I mean, I was never a good dancer, but stringed instruments always came naturally. Bass guitar, especially. Man." His face was confused, trying to process the information. "Were you a good student in school? How were your maths?" "Math? I was terrible at it, except maybe geometry. English was more my thing, but my grades were never great." "Hmm. Did you attend University?" "No." "Why not?" I sighed. "I don't know. Too many distractions, I guess." "Distractions?" "Yeah. TV, for one. And girls. And... drugs." "Heroin? Cocaine?" "No, I wasn't... no. But pot and LSD, sometimes. I guess I had a problem, for a while." "Hmm." He looked me in the eye. "Were you really born in nineteen sixty- eight?" I gave him the stare right back. "Yes I was. But- I have no memories between eighty-seven and two thousand nine." "Really? How do you mean?" "I mean one day it was October in the twentieth century, and the next it was October in the twenty-first, and I was hung over on a beach with no memory of where I was or how I'd gotten there." I came close to telling him the rest, but something held me back. Fear of being viewed as a freak, maybe. "How curious. Do you feel as if more than twenty years had passed?" "I