Authors: Robert Kroese
Ah. Now we
’re getting somewhere. Tali had been abducted not for money, but for some other reason. And Heller’s response was to send me with a bomb to the Fairway Mall, where the kidnappers were watching, along with Tali. Maybe, it occurred to me, Heller wasn’t sending a bomb
instead
of the ransom: maybe the bomb
was
the ransom. Maybe the kidnappers had demanded that Heller blow up a bomb in the middle of Fairway Mall as the price of Tali’s freedom. It makes sense, in a twisted way. That is, detonating a bomb in a mall still seems pointless, but while this theory doesn’t provide a motive for the bombing, it does adequately explain Heller’s actions. And while I can’t see someone demanding that Heller hand over $50,000, I
can
see someone demanding that he make a bomb. A chemistry teacher might be a more sensible choice, but on the other hand, anyone who had seen Heller’s shop would know he was capable of making a bomb. He could probably build an atom smasher with all that crap.
I
’m still missing something, I know, but I’m starting to think that I’m going to have to pry the missing pieces out of Heller. I stand up and steady myself against the car. I’m still shaking a little, but as long as I keep shoving images of the dead and maimed at the mall out of my mind, I can manage all right. I get back in the Focus and head toward Heller’s house. I wonder if the cops have identified me yet. Probably not, but it won’t take them long. If they aren’t looking at the security footage yet, they soon will be. They’ll follow me out of the mall to my car and get my license plate number. Once they have that, I’m pretty much fucked. But hopefully I have an hour or two.
I stop at a McDonald
’s and get a Big Mac and a chocolate shake. I’m starving, and I figure there’s a good chance it may be the last chocolate shake I’ll have for a while. Once I have some food in my stomach, I take a few swigs from the bottle I keep under the front seat of the Focus. My hands are almost steady. I drive the rest of the way to Heller’s place and park down the street a bit. It’s getting dark now, which is good. I don’t want him to see me coming.
I avoid the driveway, making my way through the woods adjacent to his property. I circle around the back of the barn and wait there at the corner, where I can keep an eye on the path between the house and the shop. Lights are on in both places; Heller
’s got to be in one of them. I figure eventually he’ll walk from the shop to the house or vice versa. I’ll sneak up behind him and get him in a headlock. I’m about six one, almost two hundred pounds; I don’t see a little old guy like Heller giving me much trouble.
Anyway, that
’s what I’m thinking when something whacks me in the back of my head, knocking me unconscious.
I come to a few minutes later – if my internal clock is to be trusted – lying on my back on a cot in Heller
’s shop. Something cold is pressing against the back of my head. I try to sit up, am overcome with vertigo, and lie down again. Heller is standing about twenty feet away, bent over his workbench.
“
You son of a bitch,” I groan, feeling the back of my head. I’ve got a bad bump, and my hair is matted with sticky blood. My head is resting on a bloody towel on top of a bag of ice.
“
Sorry about that,” says Heller, not looking my way. “But I didn’t think you’d give me a chance to explain myself if I didn’t subdue you first.” I notice a revolver resting on the bench, maybe six inches from his right hand.
“
Explain yourself? You sent me into a crowded mall with a bomb!” It hurts when I yell.
He nods, turning to face me.
“I’m sorry about that too. It couldn’t be helped.”
I
’m starting to think Dr. Heller is the first truly evil person that I’ve ever met. He shows no remorse for what he’s done. He’s elevated this deterministic force, this thing he calls Ananke, to the point where it completely supplants his own sense of right and wrong. He truly believes that what’s going to happen is going to happen, and that there’s no moral difference between an earthquake and a mall bombing. Either way, it’s just cause-and-effect at work; whether he is somehow part of the chain of events – say, by building a bomb and sending me to a crowded mall – is irrelevant. Shit happens.
On the other hand, I still don
’t quite believe that bombing the mall was his idea. Even in a completely deterministic world where free will plays no part, an action still requires a cause, and there was simply no reason for him to want to kill a bunch of random strangers in a mall. It’s too random, too senseless even for a sociopath like Heller. After all, even someone like Ted Kaczynski, the Unibomber, didn’t kill people for no reason. His reasons might seem crazy to a normal person, but his motivations possessed a sort of internal logic: they made sense to
him
. I just can’t see how the mall bombing made sense to Heller, unless he had done it under duress. I decide to test my theory that the bombing had been a kind of ransom paid to Tali’s kidnappers.
“
You could have killed her, you know. Tali.”
He shakes his head again.
“I knew they’d keep her out of the probable range of the event.”
“
So you do care about her,” I say.
“
Of course,” he says, turning to face me. “Although my personal feelings are no more relevant than those of the friends and families of the people killed by that bomb.”
That bomb
. Not
the bomb I built and conned an innocent man into bringing to a crowded mall
. Just
that bomb
. I wonder if Heller’s mind exists in a sort of permanent dissociative state, watching himself commit horrific, unforgiveable crimes as if he were watching the villain in a movie.
“
You’re a fucking sociopath,” I say, managing to sit up slowly. “And if you don’t tell the cops that you lied to me about the ransom, I’m going to do everything I can to make sure you go to jail too.”
He laughs.
“Of course you will, Paul. Everything you do is completely predictable. It’s what makes you such an effective dupe.”
“
I may be a dupe,” I say, “but I’m not a murderer. I didn’t know what was in that briefcase. Those deaths at the mall were
your
doing. You used me.”
“
I used you,” he agreed, “and Ananke used me. Round and round we go.”
“
Fuck Ananke!” I yell. “Ananke didn’t do this, understand? You built a bomb and sent me to the Fairway Mall, knowing that it was going to explode and that people were going to die. That was a
choice you made
.”
He sighs.
“I did make a choice once,” he said. “It happened over two years ago. Everything that’s happened since …” He shakes his head.
“
You’re denying any responsibility for anything you’ve done in the past two years? You’re not a fucking child, Heller.”
“
Would you like to hear about the choice I made? It might help clarify things for you.”
I shrug.
“I’d rather hear you tell me you’re going to confess to the police that you lied to me about the briefcase.”
“
Would a written statement be acceptable?” he says. “I ask because I’m not expecting to live much longer.”
I nod dumbly. Could it really be that easy?
“All right, then. I’ll do my best to explain. At Stanford I had been working on ideas related to probabilistic futures. I had a colleague, Dr. Emil Jelinek, who had written quite a bit about his hypothesis regarding quantum minds – the idea I mentioned earlier that part of the brain is a kind of quantum computer. We used to go out drinking fairly often, and at one of these sessions, after about six or seven rounds, one of us – I don’t remember which – suggested the idea that we try to build a psionic field detector. The little black box I showed you earlier.” He points to the workbench.
I nod.
“It was a ridiculous idea; Emil and I both had a lot of theoretical work to do before trying any kind of field test. It was like the Wright brothers trying to build a space shuttle. But it was harmless fun, and it gave us something to do while we were drinking. We set up this workshop to work on it. Over the next several months we spent hundreds of hours working on the thing. We had virtually no data to work with, but we kept tinkering away, running on intuition and wild-assed guesses. And to our utter surprise, we started to see results. Nothing definitive, but we began to see correlations between the disturbances the detectors reported and future events. At this point, we only had a few of them set up, a mile or so apart in Oakland. We knew that violent deaths were the events most likely to cause quantum fluctuations, so Oakland seemed like a logical choice.”
I can
’t disagree with that.
“
We continued to fine-tune the detectors and we got them to the point where the correlations almost
had
to be the result of seemingly unpredictable future events. We assembled all the data and wrote up our results in a paper that we planned to submit to an academic journal. We knew there would be a lot of resistance in the physics community, so we went over everything a dozen times to make sure our data was good and that we weren’t making any unwarranted assumptions. Everything checked out. We were on the verge of making history.
“
We finished our final rounds of edits on the paper, and we were having a drink to celebrate. Emil was sitting right where you are now. You see those tanks over there? They hold gases like Argon and Helium. They’re under pressure, up to 230 PSI, so when they’re in the tank they’re actually in their liquid state. These are inert elements, completely harmless except for the fact that they’re under pressure. About as dangerous as a car tire sitting on the floor of your garage. Anyway, as we’re sitting here celebrating, the valve breaks off one of those tanks over there, shoots across the room and embeds itself three inches into Emil’s skull. He falls over dead. I could hardly believe it. I’ve worked with tanks like that for years and never heard of anything like that happening. The worst that’s ever happened is a valve that won’t shut all the way, and then you just open the windows and go for a walk. It was an absolutely freak occurrence.
“
I called the police and they came out and investigated. They agreed that it was a one in a million thing. They’d never heard of anything like it. I’m pretty sure that I was under suspicion for a while, but they couldn’t find any evidence the tank had been tampered with. Somehow it corroded just enough, in just the right way, that it happened to give way right when Emil was sitting in its path. Bizarre.
”Obviously I couldn’t publish the paper under the circumstances. Besides the fact that it was supposed to be a shared triumph, there was the very real possibility that people would think I killed Emil so I wouldn’t have to share the credit. The whole thing was so depressing that I shoved the paper in a drawer and tried not to think about it.
“
A few months later I finally forced myself to come back out here and look at the paper. I figured I might as well go over the data one more time to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. I logged into the server and out of habit I checked the latest data. I noticed there was a weird spike in the PDCs the day that Emil died. That is, it started to spike about an hour before he died, peaked with his death, and then fell off again. The disturbance was recorded by only one detector – one that was sitting right here on this bench. I was stunned. It was the strongest correlation I had ever seen. That one data point was better evidence than all the rest of the data we had collected combined. I decided to rewrite the paper to include the incident of Emil’s death. It would strengthen our case and in a weird way it would be a tribute to Emil. His own death had demonstrated our theory.
“
Then the server crashed, catastrophically. I couldn’t recover any of the data. I have backups, of course, but the backups were wiped too. Somehow, despite the fact that I use the same antivirus software used by the Defense Department, a virus got onto my network and wiped
everything
. I’d been meaning to upload the data to an offsite storage service, but I kept forgetting. Fortunately, I had most of the data on an optical disc. Always good to keep a copy of your data on non-magnetic media, in case of a major electromagnetic disturbance. I got the network up and running, made sure I cleared all traces of the virus, and put the disc in the drive. The damn thing wouldn’t read. Kept saying there was no disc in the drive. I was pretty furious at this point. I got in my car, determined to go to the electronics store and buy another disc reader. As soon as I got on the road, it started to rain like crazy. I was frustrated, not thinking clearly, and driving too fast. I lost control of the car and went into a ditch about two miles from here. Had to walk all the way back here. I got back inside the shop and realized that the disc, which I had slipped into my pocket, had broken in half. The seat belt must have hit it. In my other pocket was the only copy of the paper Emil and I had written. It had gotten soaked in the rain and the ink smeared. It was almost entirely illegible.
“
I could hardly believe my bad luck. At that point, that’s all I thought it was. Bad luck. I mean, what else could it be? Some supernatural being reaching down from the heavens to prevent me from publishing the paper? Well, I wasn’t going to let a string of bad luck stop me. I spent another six months assembling enough data that I could reconstruct the paper. I no longer had the data on Emil’s death, which was unfortunate, but I was confident I had enough proof to convince skeptics that Tyche worked. This time around, I kept a close eye on the data for the local receptors, so I wouldn’t be blindsided by another accident. I mean, I was fairly certain Emil’s death and my subsequent mishaps were accidents, but I didn’t want to take any chances. Nothing showed up in the data, so I assumed I was safe. I reconstructed the paper and was going to go over it one more time before I sent it to the
Journal of Theoretical Physics
. Guess what happened then?”