The Future Next Door Boxed Set, page 64
“Hm?” Tamsin turned and looked behind, at the wall above the sofa. “Oh, that.” She reached down and picked up one of the books she had pushed onto the floor. It was a thick, heavy hardback. She handed it to Eddie.
“I’ve been studying,” Tamsin continued. “Writing everything down helps me.”
She turned back again to look at the dusty white chalk marks covering the pale blue walls. “Huh,” she said to Caitlin. “It does make me look kind of crazy, doesn’t it? Made sense while I was doing it.”
“It’s an introductory physics textbook,” Eddie said to Caitlin. He crouched down and pushed through the pile of books. “Quantum physics, string theory, advanced calculus...these are all science and math books.”
“Oh, fuck,” Caitlin said. She sat down on the couch next to her friend. “Tamsin, how much do you remember about what happened to us last January? In the basement of the theater? With Lidia and Doctor Cheek?”
Tamsin looked at Caitlin. She squinted, as if she didn’t quite recognize her friend, then smiled. “You are so pretty. You look just like my...” She paused. She put her head in her hands. “Sorry, my head is hurting. What did you ask me? About the books?”
“No...”
She looked up, a manic smile on her face. “It’s coming so easy to me, Caitlin! I’ve never been good at science before, you know that, but now I’m like a sponge, soaking it all in! That’s why I quit the show. There’s so much to learn and so little time. I understand so many things I didn’t before.” She frowned, and stared off into the distance. “Most of the time. Sometimes... Eddie! You’re smart! Take a look at this!”
She jumped up, grabbed Eddie by the hand, and pulled him over to the windows overlooking the back alley behind the apartment building. Written on them in grease pencil were more equations. She picked up a pencil from the ground and pointed at one section.
“This, here,” she said. “Something’s wrong. What am I missing?”
Eddie hesitated, then peered at the cluster of numbers and letters. “Nothing,” he said. He scratched at a stray grease mark with his index finger. “It’s fine. I think you just wrote one equation on top of another.”
“Oh! Duh!” Tamsin threw her arms around him. He stood there awkwardly, his arms pinned to his sides.
“You really are a genius,” she said. She kissed him on the cheek, then released him. “Chinese food! I’m starving and we should celebrate. I’ve got menus in the kitchen. Or the bathroom. I’ll find them. Make yourselves comfortable!”
She dashed off through the archway leading to the rest of the apartment.
Caitlin joined Eddie, who was peering at the equations under the window more closely.
“Does it make sense?” she asked quietly. “All these numbers?”
“Yes. It’s incredible. Some of this...I’d have to really study it to understand it properly.” He turned and looked at the walls. “This is very advanced work. You can’t learn this by reading a few textbooks.”
“I should have come to see her earlier. I knew that machine did something to her. I should have trusted my gut.”
“Stop.” He took her by the shoulders. “We’re not blaming ourselves for things other people did, remember? She seemed fine. Lidia’s machine only merged people’s bodies. You had no way of knowing.”
Caitlin shook her head. “Do you remember I told you about Aasim?”
“He was the last person to be sent through the matter transmitter before Tamsin, right? One of the teenagers Alan works with was on the other side, and they both died.”
Caitlin nodded. “Leelee, that was the kid’s name. Before Aasim died, he said some things to Alan. They were word for word things that Leelee had said. At the time we thought they had been kept prisoner together and Leelee had told Aasim those things, but maybe...”
“Maybe,” Eddie finished, “the machine didn’t just mash bodies together, but minds too.”
“And now Tamsin’s got Professor Lidia Piotrowski, mad scientist, inside her head trying to get out.”
“Lidia Piotrowski,” Tamsin said from behind them.
Caitlin spun around. Tamsin stood in the archway, a take-out menu crumpled in her hand.
“She wasn’t so mad,” Tamsin said. There was a tremor in her voice, and she looked past Caitlin and Eddie, staring at nothing. “She just wanted her daughter back.”
“She was going to kill us to bring her daughter back, Tamsin,” Caitlin said firmly. “Don’t feel sorry for her.”
Despite spending her life working on a matter transmitter, Lidia hadn’t been interested in teleportation at all. Her daughter Amanda had been killed in an experiment years earlier, when Lidia was first developing the technology. The scientist believed her daughter had been converted into information and stored on some kind of super hard drive, and had dedicated the rest of her life to bringing the girl back. Because of Amanda’s resemblance to Caitlin and Tamsin, Lidia had fixated on using one of them as the base material to rebuild her daughter’s body.
Tamsin rubbed the inside of her right arm. She let go of the menu and it dropped to the floor. “They took her from me,” she said calmly. “Thieves took her from me.”
“We need to get her help,” Eddie said.
Caitlin grabbed Tamsin’s hands. “Nobody took anyone from you, Tamsin.”
Tamsin met her eyes. She shook her head. “I had her in my arms...”
“No, Tamsin. You had the storage drive that Lidia believed her daughter was on,” Caitlin said. “The machine fused it to your arm and the doctors had to cut it off. Nobody stole it.”
“My daughter...”
“She wasn’t your daughter! You’re Tamsin Walker, do you hear me? Tamsin Walker!”
Tamsin tried to move away, but Caitlin wouldn’t let go. As her friend stepped back, Caitlin got a glimpse of her feet, and noticed something that had escaped her before.
“Tamsin, what’s wrong with your foot?”
The big toe on Tamsin’s right foot was all wrong. It was huge, twice as big as the one on the left foot, several shades darker than her natural skin tone, and topped with bristly black hairs.
It wasn’t Tamsin’s toe. It wasn’t even Lidia’s toe. It had to belong to Don, the homeless man, who had been the first person Tamsin had been scrambled up with.
Tamsin kept her head up. “I don’t like to look at it,” she said. “I don’t like to think about it. My shoes are all too tight now.”
Her eyes rolled up into her head. Caitlin managed to catch her as she collapsed, unconscious, and lowered her to the floor.
“Tamsin!” Caitlin shouted, holding her as she began to shake violently. “Tamsin!”
She looked up at Eddie, who had rushed to her side.
“Call an ambulance!”
Chapter Four
Dakota dining
Dakota Bell sighed in contentment. She gazed out at the panoramic view of New York City stretching before her. She was in an extremely expensive restaurant on the top floor of a hotel in Times Square, and she had just eaten one of the best meals of her life. Her girlfriend Tayisha, who was seated to one side of her, took her hand under the table and gave a contented sigh of her own.
“That was amazing,” Tayisha said. “Everything was so delicious. And the view!”
Tayisha’s smile lit up the restaurant better than the lights of the city at night, Dakota thought. She couldn’t imagine a better sight than her girlfriend’s beautiful face framed against the skyline. Her warm brown eyes, her adorably tiny nose, her clear dark skin, the dimples that formed in her full cheeks when she smiled that smile...
Tayisha looked away from Dakota’s stare, back out at the city. Dakota coughed, a little embarrassed. She wondered, sometimes, if Tayisha ever got lost in Dakota the way Dakota got lost in her.
“It really was wonderful,” Dakota said. “Thank you so much for this, Jack.”
Jack Keaka, their boss, had taken them out to dinner, along with their co-workers Janice and Troy, ostensibly as a token of his appreciation for their hard work. Jack was a strikingly handsome man in his early fifties. He was biracial, Caucasian on his mother’s side and native Hawaiian on his father’s, with salt and pepper temples adding a distinguishing touch to his neatly styled short black hair. Jack generally carried himself with an air of effortless confidence, but from the uncharacteristic sheen of nervous sweat on his forehead, Dakota suspected that he had something else planned for the evening besides a fancy meal.
“Yes, thank you,” Janice said. “This was a treat. I can’t wait for dessert.”
Janice was grinning at Jack. It was an odd look for her – the smile pushed her pinched, angular face in unaccustomed directions. Dakota had been on the receiving end of more smiles from Janice in the past few weeks than in all of the previous five months they had known each other. Tayisha’s theory was that their sharp-tongued co-worker must have finally found a girlfriend.
Janice took a big gulp of her wine, finishing off her third glass. “This wine is superb. Does anyone mind if I have another?”
Jack chuckled. “I have to say, Janice, you’ve really been grabbing life by the throat lately. Lunch from a different restaurant every day, a new wardrobe, a kind word for everyone. It’s great to see you enjoying yourself.”
“Yeah,” Troy said. He was seated next to Jack and had his arm draped casually over the back of their employer’s chair. The sleeves of his white Oxford shirt were pushed up, exposing his impressive biceps. “Everybody’s talking about the new Janice. Where’s that sarcastic sourpuss we all know and love?”
“Oh.” Janice’s face collapsed into a frown. “I’ve just been in a good mood, I suppose. I’m sure it won’t stick.”
Jack tossed the wine menu across the table to her. “It’s not a crime to be happy, Janice. Speaking of which, I have an announcement to make...”
Jack was cut off by their server bringing their desserts, and the requisite oohs and aahs.
“You’re helping me with this crème brûlée,” Dakota said to Tayisha. “I’m stuffed.”
“Twist my arm,” Tayisha said, already reaching for it with her fork.
“Not the first bite!”
Tayisha looked at her guiltily. “Sorry...” she mumbled through a mouthful of custard.
“I can’t believe you broke my crust. That the best part.”
Tayisha pushed her own dessert, a miniature molten chocolate cake, towards Dakota. “Here. Set my chocolate lava free.”
Dakota almost responded with an entirely inappropriate innuendo when loud laughter from Jack reminded her that, despite all the fun they were having, this was still a work function.
“I love you two together,” Jack said. “I’m taking full credit for it, of course.”
Jack now had his arm stretched around Troy’s chair, and was casually rubbing the back of his First Personal Assistant’s neck. They were an odd pair, Dakota thought. When she had first met them she had unfairly assumed they were a romantic cliché – Jack, the handsome rich older gay man, secretly dating his hot blond assistant. Over the past few months, though, Dakota had come to see how much the two men cared for each other. When they looked at each other, Jack had nothing but love in his eyes, while Troy’s attentions bordered on worshipful.
Jack never showed much physical affection towards Troy in front of anyone outside his inner circle. He wasn’t quite closeted, but he wasn’t quite out either. He seemed happy to keep his private life private, and if the semi-secrecy surrounding their relationship bothered Troy, the young man never showed it. Jack’s casual caress in this public place gave Dakota a clue as to what his announcement might be, and, if she were right, explained his anxiety. She put her fork down without piercing Tayisha’s cake.
“What were you about to tell us, Jack?” she asked.
He removed his arm from behind Troy’s chair, put both hands flat on the table in front of him, and took a deep breath.
“Well...”
“We’re getting married!” Troy shouted. He threw his arms up, fists clenched. “Wah-hoo!”
Most everyone in the restaurant turned to look. Those at the nearest tables, who had heard Troy’s announcement, applauded politely and murmured congratulations.
“Oh, you two!” Tayisha said. She clapped her hands together. “That’s wonderful! I’m so happy for you both!”
Jack was staring at Troy with an astonished half-smile. “You said I could tell them.”
Troy leaned in close and kissed him quickly. “Sorry, babe. I couldn’t keep it in.”
“You’re fired.”
Troy stuck out his tongue. “I was going to quit anyway. I run a successful business now, remember?”
“Troy!”
Dakota jumped at the sharpness of Janice’s tone. Janice noticed everyone’s startled expressions, and softened her glare.
“Sorry,” she said. “But we shouldn’t be talking business right now. This is a time for celebration.”
“Right,” Troy said. He shot Dakota and Tayisha an anxious glance. “Forget I said anything.”
“Well, I’m afraid I’ll have to differ, just for a moment,” Jack said. “There is one bit of business I wanted to handle tonight.”
“Babe, really?” Troy said. “It’s our night.”
Jack patted his hand. “It’s a night of celebration, like Janice said, and this is one more reason to celebrate.” He turned to look across the table. “Dakota, you’ve done excellent work these past few months, but we both know you’re meant for a loftier title than Second Personal Assistant.”
Dakota knew what was coming, and she hid the sinking in her heart with one of her stock professional business smiles. With Troy now Jack’s fiancé, his position would be open. Dakota currently handled any personal matters for Jack while he was at work, while Troy ran his household and non-work related tasks. Dakota was about to be “promoted” out of the office, where she was learning so much, and into Jack’s apartment, where she would supervise his cleaning staff and pick up his dry cleaning. Oh god, she thought. I’ll probably have to do chores for Troy too.
Smile, she reminded herself. At least the new title will look better on a résumé.
“Effective tomorrow,” Jack said, “you’re a Project Manager.”
Dakota blinked. “Excuse me?”
“We’re going to start you off with just one project, Eddie’s wormhole generator, since you already have the security clearance for that. It’ll be a little slow, we’re sort of in a holding pattern on that one, but you’ll be able to learn the ropes before we add to your workload.”
“I...Jack, I don’t know what to say.”
“Say thank you, Jack, you’re the best boss ever.”
“Thank you! Thank you so much!”
“Oh my goodness!” Tayisha turned sideways in her chair and threw her arms around Dakota. “Baby, I’m so proud of you! Congratulations!”
“Jack, that’s my project,” Janice said.
Tayisha let go of Dakota and they both turned to look at Janice. Under the table, out of Jack’s view, she was wringing the cloth napkin in her lap tightly with both hands.
“I don’t want to step on any toes...” Dakota said.
“Sorry, Janice, I should have told you about this ahead of time,” Jack said. “I have to take something off your plate, and the generator seemed like a good starting project for Dakota. Don’t worry, you’ll still be busy. I’m going to need you more and more at the...off-site project.”
“Off-site project?” Dakota asked.
“Pardon me for being cryptic but it’s a security clearance issue again. It’s nothing particularly exciting, believe me, but it’s coming to a head and I need the extra help.”
Janice was still tense. “I can do both, Jack,” she said. “I’d hate to lose the wormhole generator project.”
“This is a good thing, Janice,” Troy said. “The off-site project is a better project. You know? Chill out.”
“Excuse me.” A weathered man with silver hair, wearing an immaculate white suit, had come up behind Jack’s chair. “Sorry to interrupt, Jack, but I thought it would be rude not to say hello.”
Jack turned around, and Dakota thought she saw a hint of a scowl on his face before he covered it with a forced smile. “Pilgrim!” he said. “What a nice surprise. Do you know everyone?”
The man nodded at Dakota. “I don’t believe this young lady and I have had the pleasure.”
“This is Dakota Bell, one of my project managers. Dakota, this is...”
Dakota was on her feet with her hand extended in an instant. “Mr. Campion. It’s a pleasure.”
“My reputation precedes me, I see.” Campion took her hand and shook it firmly. “Nice to meet you, Miss Bell. I hope this scoundrel hasn’t been filling your head with tales of my misdeeds.”
“Not at all. I’m a big fan. The way you navigated Jensen-Keystone through the recession was nothing short of genius.”
“Why, thank you!” The executive puffed out his chest. “Time Magazine did a cover story on me, you know.”
“I know, I still have it,” Dakota said. “And your autobiography was inspiring. It’s no exaggeration to say your words of wisdom and encouragement helped me survive business school at a very difficult time in my life.” She felt herself getting flush and forced herself to take a breath. “And I have to say, thank you for expanding Jensen-Keystone’s marriage benefits to gay couples in states where gay marriage isn’t recognized. It meant a lot to a lot of people.”
“Well, it was that or a shareholder resolution, but I appreciate the thought. Watch yourself, Jack, I may steal this one away from you!”
Dakota giggled. “Oh, Mr. Campion!” She sat slowly back down, ignoring the bewildered stares from her co-workers.
“Who are you?” Troy whispered.
“How’s business, Jack?” Campion asked. “Anything good baking in those ovens of yours?”
“You’ll be the first to know, Pilgrim,” Jack said. “As always.”
“Good, good. I’ll leave you to enjoy your dessert in peace. Miss Farmer, Troy, a pleasure as always. Miss Cartwright, glad to see you’re doing better. Goodnight.”
