BACKLASH
BY NANCY FULDA
Copyright 2010 Nancy Fulda
Smashwords Edition
Cover art by Jeliza Patterson.
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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This is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this story are either fictitious or used fictitiously.
Originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 2010
BACKLASH
BY NANCY FULDA
A quiet Chinese girl collected our plates after the meal. She placed a hand-wrapped fortune cookie at each setting, gave me a searching look, and vanished into the crowded restaurant.
Clarise nibbled the end off her cookie and withdrew the fortune with the same flamboyant grace she had shown as a child. “‘Time is a fickle ally’,” she read. “Confucius must know I turn twenty-three tomorrow.” She feigned indignation, but it couldn’t mask her natural poise. She was resplendent in a tailored business suit, her hair twining free of the twist she wore at the office.
I take Clarise out every year for Valentines’ Day. It started as a consolation prize, a sort of Daddy-daughter date to soothe the pain of her breakup with Billy Sanders. Clarise was thirteen at the time; bookish, awkward, painfully insecure. She had grown into her potential since then. The annual Valentines’ dinner had become the highlight of my year; a chance to snatch back fragments of a happier past, to banter with an exquisite woman as I once bantered with her mother.
Which made the interloper to her left all the less welcome. Sean, his name was. Hair too long, shirt too baggy. Decent posture, dreadful table manners. He reminded me of high school punks with big mouths and no sense of humor. But he was the first in a long string of short relationships who actually seemed to make my daughter happy. For that, I supposed, he deserved some respect.
Clarise leaned into her guest’s shoulder as he opened his fortune cookie. “Beware of beautiful women bearing gifts,” he read, and the two of them smiled as if at some private joke. Clarise glanced up and saw me watching them.
“What does yours say, Daddy?” she asked. I snapped my cookie in half and glanced at the paper.
It was covered with spidery lines that somehow seemed random and precisely geometric at the same time. A clear space in the middle hosted crisp black text: Eugene Gutierrez. Activation code: pupae.
My hand was shaking.
“Very funny,” I said, crumpling the message in my fist. “Clarise, if this low-brow prankster is the best you can do for a boyfriend, I suggest you stay single.” I threw the paper onto my plate and stalked away from the table, slapping two fifties on the cashier’s desk as I left. Through the glass fronting of the restaurant, I saw Clarise stretch across the table cloth to retrieve my fortune.
I was halfway down the block when Sean caught up with me.
“Mr. Gutierrez? Mr. Gutierrez, I didn’t, I wouldn’t — I mean, Clarise told me you worked in special ops, but she also told me about the nightmares, and I would never—”
“Go home, boy,” I said. Clarise had been telling him quite a bit, it seemed.
Sean’s mouth set in a hard line. I knew what he wanted to say: “You’re a paranoid old man, and an egotist, just like everyone says. Clarise is the only one who can’t see it.” But he just looked at me until the line of his mouth relaxed and his muscles unknotted. “Can I give you a lift anywhere?” he asked. “It’s lousy weather for a walk.”
“No,” I said as Clarise trotted up to join us, shoes clicking on the wet pavement. “I need the exercise.”
Clarise gave me that look, the one that meant she knew I was going to walk five kilometers in the rain then go home and lie dripping on my bed for the rest of the night. Come dawn I’d be at the gym, beating out the last of the adrenaline.
“Go on,” I said, holding my voice steady. “The night’s young. Go have fun.”
“Only if you promise to behave,” Clarise said, twisting around a phrase I’d used in her childhood. Her smile was coy.
“Get outta here,” I said. I waited until their backs were turned before letting the tension return to my jaw. Methodically, I flicked the last soggy crumbs of the fortune cookie from my sleeves.
It was not the first joke, the first game. Local kids used to snap twigs outside the window at night, hoping to goad me into a panic. I’d find myself pressed against the rough floorboards, fingers raw with splinters, cringing against shrapnel that I knew wasn’t there. Or I’d feel the cold edges of a pipe wrench in my hands and hear myself spewing curses and blustering with worthless overconfidence.
Ten years was plenty of time to practice discipline: the outward signs were gone now. But a noisily swerving car, the scent of sulfur — or an ill-conceived message in a fortune cookie — could still unleash that gasping feeling as the world spun out of control. It’s what I hate most about flashbacks: you can’t fight them, can’t run from them. Someone pops a firecracker and you’re back in South Africa, battered, shackled, praying to a God you don’t believe in that they don’t know where your family is.
I’d left my coat at the restaurant. I went back to get it, uncertain whether or not to trace the fortune cookie to its origins. If it was just a random prankster, some kid taunting the wacko for old times’ sake, it probably didn’t matter. But if it was Sean — and who else besides Clarise had known that we’d be eating here tonight? — If it was Sean, then my daughter was dating both a fool and a liar. I wasn’t willing to permit that.
The girl who’d brought the cookies watched me from behind a large bamboo plant as I entered. She looked fourteen, give or take two years, with dark eyes and an oval face. She was oddly still for a girl her age; no fidgeting, no slumping. My route to the coat rack took me within three feet of her, but I kept my eyes focused forward, unwilling to confront her just yet.
“Eugene,” she said.
I paused. I had not given my name at the restaurant. The table was reserved under “Gutierrez” and I had paid for our meal in cash. The girl fell into step beside me, and I noted that her movements were like her voice; controlled, efficient, yet still broadcasting urgency.
“We’ve got a problem,” she said softly. “Jo-jo says there was a leak downstream and—”
Click.
It was the sound of the internal lock on an M&P .40.
I almost moved too late. I thought my mind was playing tricks on me, that it was just the clank of some woman’s purse zipper, but then I heard the same weapon cock. I grabbed the girl and shoved us both to the floor.
A shot whizzed past my head. Someone screamed. I tightened my grip on the girl and rolled us both behind the cashier’s desk. Half the restaurant panicked — standing dumbfounded at their tables, running in hopelessly stupid directions — as the second shot fired. A corner of the cashier’s desk exploded; a chunk of wood hit my face. I dragged the girl into the kitchen.
It was a relief, almost, to be running from a tangible threat. My heart thudded as I pulled the dark-eyed teenager — stunned, shaky, but thankfully not hysterical — into a crevice between two shrimp vats and looked for a weapon. The knives were too far, the frying pans too unwieldy. I was rifling through a box of chopsticks when police sirens sounded outside the building, followed by the shatter of breaking glass and a general drop in tension throughout the restaurant. A few moments later the drawling prattle of the police officers confirmed that the gunman had fled.
The girl beside me looked relieved and placed a hand on my chest with disturbing familiarity. “Thank you,” she said. “I’m not trained for stuff like that. If you hadn’t been there I’d—”
She broke off mid-sentence when she felt the chopsticks pressing against her throat. I could kill her with just my body weight, and the look in my eyes must have warned her that I might really do it. She paled.
“Eugene,” she said. “What is this?”
“That’s what I’d like to know. That’s what you’re going to tell me. Why would a bogus note show up in an old vet’s fortune cookie, followed by a very non-bogus try on his life? Who are you, and how do you know my name? Talk.”
A complicated wash of emotions passed through her eyes. I couldn’t peg most of them — they fled too quickly — but I was certain the shock was real.
“You didn’t activate,” she said, aghast. She sounded like someone discovering that her best friend had just killed himself.
“No, I didn’t ‘activate’. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.” What was this? Hypnosis? Suppressed memories? I’d seen enough to know mental twiddling was possible, and I wouldn’t put tricks like that past any of the agencies I’d worked for. But why me? Why now?
The chopsticks were digging into the girl’s throat, but she didn’t seem to notice. “The fortune cookie,” she said. “You got a note with patterned lines?”
“Yes, damn it!”
“And you read it? I saw you read it.” Her voice was quavering now.
“Yes, I read it!” I said. The restaurant’s kitchen workers were slowly recovering from the shootout; standing up, gathering in clumps, talking. Soon someone would spot us huddled in our corner. “Now tell me what it was supposed to do. Besides trigger a flashback.” Which was threatening to manifest, now that the adrenaline of the past few minutes had worn off. My hands were shaking too badly to hold the chopsticks, so I dropped them. I was likely to pass out on the floor soon, but I didn’t know how to communicate that to my... captive? Partner? The roles were starting to blur.
“The flashbacks,” the girl breathed. “We didn’t compensate for the flashbacks. Degenerative psychological condition, powerful neurological triggers...” She stood and pulled me to my feet with impressive force. “Come on, we can’t stay here.”
That last part, at least, made sense. I let her tug me towards the back kitchen doorway, but our exit was blocked by a beefy Chinese man in a white apron. “Chen-chi,” he said. “Your shift’s not up yet. Who’s this?”
“A friend,” Chen-chi said. “I have to leave early today. I’ll make up the time tomorrow.”
“That’s what you said yesterday.”
Chen-chi shrugged and tried to push past him, but he stood his ground and spat something in Chinese. Chen-chi answered in the same language, and the exchange grew heated. Then Chen-chi punched him in the stomach.
It was the sorriest excuse for a hook I’d ever seen; no hip rotation, poor shoulder placement, lousy contact angle. But she made up in enthusiasm for what she lacked in technique, and her boss staggered back in surprise. She grabbed my arm and pulled me past him, away from the restaurant, into the gathering darkness.
We ran through rain, splashing past alleys and skidding at street corners. The past pressed like black smoke against my vision, threatening to overpower me. I held the memories back until we slipped through an unlocked basement window, down into a dusty room.
It was the worst attack I’d ever had. I shouted, I flailed. I cowered at ghostly tormentors and broke everything that could be broken in assaults on invisible enemies. Chen-chi weathered it all with remarkable aplomb, locking herself in an adjoining room during the violent parts, gently coaxing me closer to sanity when I needed to hear a human voice, sitting quietly when I needed peace. When I finally reached the crying stage she held me: arms wrapped around my chest from behind, head pressed against my back, as if we had done this a thousand times, as if she had walked me through a lifetime’s worth of flashbacks. We knelt like that for a long time, an island of warmth on a bare concrete floor spewed with wood fragments, shattered glass, and the remains of any furniture that human hands could splinter. When I was able, I lay down and slept.
Sometime after dawn, after I had watched Clarise’s mother die for the fiftieth time and the memories had finally begun to disperse, I lifted my head and saw Chen-chi across the room. She was kneeling in a streak of pale light from the window, face pressed against her hands, shoulders heaving. I thought, for an instant, that I should go to her, console her, lessen whatever burden could make a teenager weep like a saint mourning the sins of the world. But my limbs were too weak, or my soul was, and I returned my cheek to the concrete.
* * *
“It is possible to travel backwards through time,” Chen-chi said the next afternoon. We were sitting at a battered wooden table in the basement apartment she had brought me to, eating muffins from a nearby bakery.
“Through time,” I said warily.
“Yes, but only as a sentience net. You’ve heard of tachyons?”
Tachyons. Subatomic particles that travel faster than light. “Yes,” I said.
“It is possible to create a set of coherent relationships between individual tachyons, similar to quantum entanglement. And it is possible to initialize these connections based on the emissions of the human brain.”
I wondered where a girl her age had picked up that kind of vocabulary. “You’re telling me you can create a copy of the mind?”
“More like a snapshot. A sentience net can’t think, can’t act, can’t do anything really, because there’s no physical support structure.”
“But it can travel backwards in time, because it’s made of tachyons.”
A ghost of a smile crossed Chen-chi’s face. “You’re just as smart as you will be forty years from now. Yes. The tachyons travel faster than light: send them a far enough distance, and they’ll return to their point of origin before they left it. If conditions are favorable, the net can then induce a response in neural tissue.”
It wasn’t hard to see where this was going. Time-bandits. A mind from the future overlaying itself on a mind in the present. It explained... some things about the past twelve hours, I supposed, although it didn’t explain Chen-chi’s preoccupation with me. She was not overt about it. But those dark, expressionless eyes had followed me all morning, studying my face when she thought I wasn’t looking.
I gestured with my muffin. “And you’re one of these... these minds from the future?”
I didn’t realize how skeptical I sounded until Chen-chi grinned, the first truly human expression I’d seen from her. “I told you you wouldn’t want to hear my explanation on an empty stomach.”
“And I—” I had been intended as a target, clearly. A hapless victim for some rampaging mind from the future. Not hypnosis, not memory suppression. Usurpation. If Chen-chi could be believed.
Chen-chi’s smile had vanished. “We knew it was risky,” she said in a carefully uninflected tone. “Merging a sentience net with the upstream mind is a tricky business. The process requires emotional resonance between the host mind and the sentience net, as well as the visual stimulus patterns. The text in that fortune cookie was deliberately designed to anger you. But we only accounted for anger, not for the flashbacks. You’d resolved the last of those memories decades ago, you see, so it didn’t occur to any of us that—”
“And what would have happened to me? After you bastards were done hijacking my body?”
“Don’t act so huffy. You volunteered for this, you know.”
I opened my mouth to protest.
“Yes, you. Eugene Gutierrez. When the RCIA first planned this stunt, it was you they went to first, and it was you who agreed to take point on the mission. You ran the psych gauntlet. You initialized the sentience net, mimicked the emotional state, chose the trigger — the fortune cookie was your idea.”
I felt like the floor was spinning away from me. The rampaging mind from the future was... me? My future self, traveling back to pick up its own past body? My vision was blurring. I reacted the way I’ve trained myself to react to panic attacks; with iron control. If I snap on the façade fast enough, no one else can tell what’s happening to my heart rate. I modulated my indrawn breath to keep it from sounding ragged and willed my voice to hold steady.
“You must have me confused with some other Eugene from the future,” I said, pushing away from the table. “I don’t do undercover work anymore.”
Why on earth would my future self agree to this temporal jaunt? Was it some sort of glory game, challenging the past by plunging back into active duty? Was my future self insane?
“Eugene,” Chen-chi rose and followed me to the far corner of the room. She placed a hand on my back with disturbing familiarity. “I know how hard this is for you. But you had good reasons for your choice, and—”
The door exploded.
Fire, smoke and shrapnel sliced through the room, along with a spatter of wood fragments. The door hadn’t been locked, but I supposed the hazy figures in the hallway hadn’t wanted to tip us off by trying to open it. My ears rang with the echo of the explosion. I became aware of a knifing pain in my thigh.
I very much wanted to roll my eyes up into my head and spend the next two weeks in a coma, but my body was already pulling Chen-chi to the ground. Any decent field agent would have hit the floor ahead of me. Whatever her role in this mess was, it wasn’t as a combatant.
I sized up the playing field. Three spooks in the hallway. Likely a fourth posted at the window Chen-chi and I had entered through last night. Judging from the scene in the restaurant, their objective was to kill, not capture, which meant their next likely move was—
A hand grenade lobbed through the shattered door frame.
I rolled, pressed my shoulders into the cement, and swung my feet upward. I felt a satisfactory thud against the top of one shoe and the grenade arched back towards the doorway. It detonated as I finished rolling to the inside wall. Chen-chi had had the sense to scramble behind the overturned table. Chunks of shrapnel embedded themselves in the wood.
I charged the doorway. Granted, it was a risk, but the clumsy grenade attack hinted that these guys weren’t much better trained than Chen-chi. I caught two of them still pulling themselves up from the floor. The third had taken the brunt of the explosion; I gauged the amount of spatter and decided he was no longer a threat.
The spooks held guns, but moved like people who’d never been trained to use them. I took out the larger of the two, then turned to the final, smaller opponent, which turned out to be a woman. We wrestled in the smoke, but not for long. I twisted her arm behind her back and pinned her against the wall. My free hand was prepared to strike.
The smoke began to clear and I finally got a good look at my opponent. The clothes were unfamiliar—black jumpsuit and combat boots—and her auburn hair was pulled away from her face, but the teal blue eyes and the delicate jawline were unmistakable. I released her and stepped back, stunned.
“Clarise,” I said.
She stared at me, eyes wide, mouth half open in astonishment. Then she kicked me in the groin and pelted up the stairs.
I didn’t try to follow. I waited until the worst of the nausea faded and Chen-chi had moved to stand beside me. I turned my head and asked in carefully modulated tones: “Chen-chi, why is my daughter trying to kill me?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I’m a quick study.”
We weren’t glaring at each other. Not quite.
* * *
We scrambled out the basement window and sprinted down the alley. I’d taken a wound in my thigh during the assault, and every step was agony. We were only a few streets away — near enough to hear the sirens of police cars arriving to investigate the explosion — when the leg gave out entirely.
I tumbled against Chen-chi, and she helped lower me to the pavement. I pulled the ripped cloth of my pant leg aside to reveal a fist-sized chunk of wood wedged into my muscle tissue. It must have blown into the room when the door exploded; poor luck that it happened to strike my leg sharp end first. I leaned against the rough brick of a building and steadied my breathing. The wound was deep, but not life-threatening. Good. I’d be able to keep walking in a few minutes.
“I think,” I said to Chen-chi, “that you had better tell me more about this mission.”
She glanced uncertainly along the empty street. “I don’t think this is the place or time.”
“It’ll do.”
Chen-chi nodded and seemed to be searching for a place to begin. “We’re here for the same reason anyone travels through time: To change the past.
“This city is home to an underground mafia. Clarise has been a member for years, but you never guessed it. She’s helping the group develop some very dangerous technology: pinpoint singularities, experimental weapons. In a few days, one of those experiments will go terribly awry.”
Chen-chi paused. When she spoke again, her voice sounded hollow, as if all the emotion had been strangled out of it.
“My parents died in the explosion. Half of the city died with them. Clarise... lived, but she couldn’t forgive herself for her part in the accident. She, um... she committed suicide a few years later. I’m sorry.”
I stared. Chen-chi was speaking again, but I didn’t pay attention. All I could see was Clarise — Clarise dressed in black combat boots, teamed up with a gang of hoodlums. I didn’t know whether to be heartsick or enraged by her betrayal.
How long had it been going on? Since high school, probably. Back when she started going to “parties” but came home sober. Back when she started talking about her new friends, but never brought them by the house. She was good fodder for a group like that; idealistic, athletic, stubborn as hell. But why would she run with that crowd when she knew what kind of havoc they wreaked, when she’d seen herself what years of fighting terrorists had cost me?
“Why didn’t we go farther back?” I asked Chen-chi suddenly. Another fifteen years — what were fifteen more when you’d already traveled forty? I could still see those gorgeous eyes, teal blue like Clarise’s...
“And save Emmeline? You tried. You argued with the mission coordinator for weeks. I was afraid you’d kill him over it. But we were out of time, Eugene. We had weeks, perhaps only days, before our research location was compromised. And then there was the question of contamination. HQ was almost too hesitant to chance the intervention we’re trying now.
“But Eugene, you can’t imagine it. If you think the world’s ugly today, it’s even uglier forty years downstream. The gang lords gained leverage off the explosion. They kept learning, kept trying different things... In the end they took the White House, fractured the union. It’s been war on our own turf for decades now. If we can stop it, if it can be prevented...”
I waved my hand to shut her up. I didn’t want to hear any more. All I could think of was Emmeline, bleeding, those lovely eyes turned glassy — and those bastards laughing.
I gritted my teeth and used my pocket knife to cut away the lower leg of my trousers. The material was flimsy, but long enough to slice into rough bandages, and relatively clean. It would do until I could get back to the medical kit I kept under my bed.
I didn’t dare remove the impaled wood, not without the right equipment to stop the blood flow. The best I could do was secure it against jostling. Chen-chi’s voice cut across my thoughts as I struggled to loop the cloth around my thigh. “Eugene, we need to figure out what to do.”
I let go of the bandages. My hands were shaking too badly to tie them anyway.
“Figure out what to do?” The wall behind me felt reassuringly solid as I leaned my head against it and looked askance at the teenager. “What kind of half-baked, non-informed time traveler are you? No good in a firefight, no good finding a hideout, no clue what to do next—do we have an SOP or not?”
It was the first time I’d seen Chen-chi look hurt. “My job was to deliver the triggers and lay low until the work was done. I was the only one who had a past moment specific and traumatic enough to snare the sentience net without an external visual. Make it back, deliver the triggers, that’s all I was supposed to do. I’m doing the best I can, Eugene. I wasn’t cleared on the mission stats.”