Spotter

 

By David Grace

 

 

Dr. Phillip Winnick entered his cubbyhole office at eight-thirty Monday morning and struggled out of his coat. His "IN" basket was already half-filled, the topmost item being a file  grimy and smudged from rough handling, the manila corners rubbed raw. Across the center was a green band indicating that the patient had been discharged. Winnick slumped into his chair and read the note clipped to the cover.

 

 

 

Glenwood Psychiatric Center

 

From the desk of

Dr. Marlon Harnell, M.D., Attending

 

Dr. Winnick, due to Dr. Frankel's extended absence I need you to complete the pre-closing processing for this file. After reviewing the materials please call the patient for the post-discharge interview, then, unless you find some outstanding issues, complete the Final Review report and deliver this folder to the clerk at the Permanent Records office. -- MHMD.

 

 

 

A sour expression curled Winnick's lips as he flipped the pages from back to front. According to the police report the patient, Martin Kelly, and his wife and two-year old son had been accosted by several members of the Red Boys Gang in Aldon Park. For unknown reasons, possibly because they were wearing blue shirts, the color of the rival CQ Masters Gang, the wife and child had been murdered. Kelly was discovered unconscious with a bullet in his head.  He remained in a coma for three days before finally awakening. Soon thereafter his responses became increasingly disjointed and irrational and County had transferred him to Glenwood for a psyche evaluation.

"Mmmmmm, ummm, ummm," Winnick hummed as he hurriedly flipped pages and scanned the reports. Once he paused to pull out a cranial x-ray which he held up to the florescent ceiling light. Not good, but Winnick had seen people functional with worse trauma.

Two days after admission Kelly had undergone a sudden personality change, snapping open his eyes and sitting up in the middle of Dr. Frankel's daily exam.

Frankel quizzed him with the basic identity, time, and place questions and after significant pauses, Kelly answered each correctly. His name was Martin Kelly. He got the month and year right though, naturally, he didn't know the correct day of the week. He understood that he had been injured and that he was in a hospital, but he had no memory of the attack itself.

"How do you feel?" Dr. Frankel had asked him. Kelly gave him a twisted smile and replied, "Fine and dandy."

Fine and dandy? Winnick reread Frankel's notes. 'Twisted smile. . . . fine and dandy.'?

Winnick shrugged and moved on. Physical injuries healing satisfactorily. . . . No headaches or other complaints. . . . . Patient cooperative and lucid. . . . Discharged almost a month ago. A month? Winnick scowled. When the hell was Frankel coming back anyway?

Winnick had now worked his way to the top of the file. The last item was a thick number 10 envelope with two holes punched through the end securing it under the file's metal prongs. "Dr. Herbert Frankel" was printed in neat letters across the front.

Winnick unbent the tabs and slit the envelope with a four-inch miniature Samurai- sword letter opener he had bought on an expedition to China Town three years before. He extracted a sheaf of folded white pages covered with printing so fine, neat and regular that it might have been created by a computer instead of a human hand.

Winnick unfolded the sheets and began to read.

 

*     *     *

 

"Dear Dr. Frankel," it began, "You asked that I write down everything I could remember of recent events. Here is my account. Thank you for your kindness and concern."

Under a simple heading, neatly printed text flowed from page to page:

 

*     *     *

 

 

 

My Report

 

First of all, I am not Martin Kelly. Not any more. He went to sleep. If he had wanted to wake up they would have chosen someone else but all he wanted was not to exist any more so I borrowed his brain. He had no interest in using it himself any longer. Who am I? My assigned name is little more than a serial number. I have picked my own human name from a famous book. I have decided to call myself Ishmael. What am I? I am a Spotter. This is what I was built to do. I suppose I should explain.

I know that you, humans that is, are fascinated with the idea of time travel. But it's not possible, not the way you think. Of course you can always travel to the future. You just lock yourself in a box that will keep you asleep and alive and sooner or later you will arrive at whatever future date you want. No, it's traveling into the past that you can't do, not the way you think. You can't send a human or a flying car or a space ship or a rock or even one atom into the past. You just can't. But you can induce an intelligence into the past. Not send it, induce it.

If you put a capacitor between the two poles of a battery, no current flows. But if you apply an alternating current to one side of the capacitor you will induce an alternating current into the other side. The two sides of a capacitor are separated by an insulator called a dielectric. Think of time as a past-future dielectric. Consider a transformer. The alternating current flowing back and forth through one side induces an alternating current on the other side even though there isn't any physical connection between the two.

Well, time is like the metal in the center of the transformer. An intelligence can be built as a network of interlinked oscillating fields. You, well, not you but the people who made me, can create those fields in one location in time and induce the appearance of a mirroring field in another location in time. Of course, you still need a physical matrix in the past in which the induced field can reside, otherwise it would just be an energy signature floating around and what good would that be?

We, my creators that is, induce artificial minds like mine into the brains of people who aren't using them any more. It's easier that way. And more ethical. My creators, by and large, are a very ethical people. They allow us to only inhabit the brains of people whose personality has fled. Naturally, this severely limits the number of us who can be sent back. It's a limitation they live with. As I said, they are very ethical people.

When they determined that Martin Kelly had stopped using his brain, they sent me across. Once or twice right after I arrived I heard him faintly squeaking and crying like a lost child, afraid and far, far away, then everything went quiet and I knew that he'd gone back to sleep. His memories were still there, like crates stacked up on a warehouse. I could look at them if I wanted although sometimes it took a second or two to find the box I needed, like the PIN for his bank card or his social security number. I didn't think he would mind. He wasn't using them anymore. I think he was a very decent man and he would want me to have them, given the important work that I do. Spotting.

I suppose I should explain that too. As I said, only intelligences can be sent into the past. My creators, to you their name sounds like the Orlonians, invented the process as purely an intellectual exercise. They didn't have any specific plans for it beyond possibly some historical research. It turned out that they couldn't send one of their own personalities into their own past. Orlonian brains don't work the way yours do. It looked like the whole thing was going to be a big failure, a scientific dead end, until they ran into humans, future humans, of course, because all of this happened a long time from now. Then they discovered, it was an accident really, that they could induce a back-time Orlonian-style intelligence into a human brain.

Here's how that happened: an Orlonian ship happened across a human ship that had broken down so, of course, the Orlonians offered to help. They towed the humans to their planet, they call it Kewitt, and gave the humans a nice tour while the Orlonian technicians fixed the ship. After dinner one night while the humans were sampling some liquors the Orlonians had specially distilled for them and a couple of the Orlonian scientists were oscillating their brains with a particularly high frequency electric field, the subject of time travel came up.

"Impossible," the human First Mate insisted.

"Actually, we invented a machine to do it," the Orlornian scientist bragged.

"Go on!"

"No, really. The only problem is that we haven't found the right kind of brain to make it work."

"You should have asked us to help you with that," the First Mate replied in a gloating tone. "Humans have the best brains from here to Orion."

Out of politeness the Orlonian scientist resisted the urge to tell the First Mate that any ten year old Orlonian was probably half again as smart as the average human first mate, but then he got to thinking, What about using a human brain? The next morning he went back to his lab and switched the spatial coordinates for the output end of the Inducer to the planet earth, adjusting for its location at a date far in the past. Within ten minutes he had found dozens of brains suitable to receive an induced Orlonian intelligence transfer.

Hurriedly, he built and sent back an artificial matrix about as smart as a well-trained monkey and instructed it to write a report and leave it in a specified location. Finally, bearing an introduction from the Captain of the ship they had rescued, the scientist sent a small delegation to present-day earth to retrieve the report from where it had sat waiting for all those years. Everything would have been fine if he had stopped there but the scientist couldn't keep his mouth shut. He wrote up the whole thing and published it. It never occurred to him how his discovery might be misused.

Even a people as ethical as the Orlonians have a few criminals. The standard response to anti-social behavior is mental reorganization which is something the accused usually considers to be a fate worse than death, Orlonian criminals being the worst in the galaxy. Apparently when a really ethical person goes bad, he goes really bad.

Not long after publication of the scientist's time-travel report persons under sentence of reorganization began sending their personalities into the past, the human past. Thousands of them managed to time-escape into human brains before the time-inducing equipment could be secured against their use. Of course, my creators could have ignored the situation, but they are far too ethical for that. Instead they created artificial intelligences like me, Spotters, to go into the past and locate the criminals. We call them Escaped Personalities or EPs. My job is to note the identity of the miscreants and archive that information where it can be retrieved by future Orlonians.

Once the human identity and the temporal coordinates of the Escaped Personality are known, a cancellation matrix is targeted at the human brain in question, zeroing out the Orlonian matrix and returning the brain to its previous occupant, if any. Because once it's in a human host the Orlonian matrix can transfer itself from one brain to another, it's vital that the EP be located and disposed of. Otherwise the EP would be essentially immortal, jumping from brain to brain, surviving even until the time of my own creation, a slap in the face of justice that cannot be allowed.

Following standard protocol I began my search for EPs by frequenting public places and large gatherings and watching for the telltale blue-purple glow that surrounds their skulls. Naturally, this is easier in warm climates or in-doors. Very few EPs are sighted outdoors in Minneapolis in January.

I began my mission with a trip to an afternoon baseball game where I prowled the concourse and the concession areas. A red-faced man screaming at his child attracted my attention.

"What's the matter with you?" he shouted. "Can't you do anything right? You're useless, you know that, useless!"

The child, a nine year old boy in a faded Transformers t-shirt, stared at his feet and struggled not to cry. The man was exhibiting prime EP behavior but I found that his head was unmistakably free of any bluish glow.

"I don't know why I bother with you," I heard the father say as I dove back into the river of bodies milling toward the hamburger stand. At the end of the day, the Giants won four to two, I left the stadium without detecting a single EP. As I was carried along by the surging crowd I thought I heard a faint, distant voice -- "Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?" then it dimmed and faded away.

Even though my first foray was unsuccessful, I pressed on. In a large shopping mall I noticed a tattered man in a woolen cap hesitantly slip through the door of a Bonus Burger shop. I moved closer. He approached a table littered with paper cups and crumpled napkins, loaded them onto a tray and dumped them into the trash container near the door, pausing at the last minute to slip a half-eaten hamburger into his coat pocket. I moved closer trying to detect some evidence of EP habitation.

He turned and sidled to the edge of another table where he loaded a tray with paper refuse and a half-eaten taco. The taco disappeared into his capacious pocket, the litter into the can. In the background I noticed a thin, young man with a prominent Adam’s apple watching with slitted-eyes. Over his white shirt he wore a red and yellow striped plastic vest to which was pinned the plaque: Ed Glim, Assistant Manager.

The homeless man was just about to slip an uneaten Bongo Burger into his left pocket when Glim's hand fastened on his wrist from behind.

"What do you think you're doing?" Glim demanded, spinning the bum around.

"Nothin' nothin', just cleanin' up."

"Do you work here? . . . . Do you work here?"

"Uhh, no, I was just--"

"Stealing food. This is a family restaurant. We don't allow thieves here. Do you want to go to jail?"

The bum seemed to have lost his voice and his eyes skittered wildly around the room.

"You'd probably like that, wouldn't you? Free room and board at the taxpayers' expense. Well, not today. Gimme that!" Glim pointed at the Bongo Burger in the bum's right hand. Reluctantly, he held it out. Glim delicately grabbed the mashed sandwich between two fingers and dropped it on a plastic tray. The bum slumped and turned to leave. "Not so fast?" Glim ordered. "Where's the rest of it? Empty your pockets."

The bum hesitated a moment then extracted the remaining fragments of burgers, tacos and a handful of cold fries.

"Turn those pockets inside out!"

The bum paused a second then slowly pulled out the linings. A tarnished silver heart on a thin chain, a bottle opener, and a half-filled Desano water bottle joined the half-eaten food.

"Get out and don't come back," Glim ordered, pointing toward the door.

"That there is my stuff," the bum complained, pointing at the pile of trinkets.

"Stuff you stole, you mean," Glim snapped, then grabbed the tray and dumped it into the garbage bin next to the door.

The bum looked around the room but every eye turned away. Hunching his shoulders, he scuttled out the door. The kid noticed me watching.

"You gotta discourage those bums or they'll be in here all the time," he said, giving me a weak smile. "He won't come back here again," Glim said, glancing at the door, his lips drawn into a thin, satisfied smile.

This was prime EP behavior. I carefully checked Glim for a blue glow but he was clean and I slipped out the door.  No one watched me leave.

"Hello?" someone whispered from behind. I spun around but saw only a crowd of people flowing past me, each immersed in their own thoughts. "Where am I?" I jerked to my left. A group of children were pushing buttons on a rainbow of colored phones and giggling. Their laughter echoed through my head and, for a moment, the voice got louder. "Jon!" it shouted, then, like a fleeting storm, it drifted away.

For the next few weeks I prowled the stores and plazas of the city, the restaurants, clubs and even the churches but without success. Not once did I detect the telltale aura of a criminal refugee from the future. More and more often the voice returned, louder each time. I knew who it was. It was Martin Kelly, lost in the corners of his former brain. I ignored him and diligently pursued my mission.

A few days later I had an idea. Perhaps the EPs had not been content to join the ranks of the common man. Perhaps they had set their aim higher and picked hosts who were persons of power and authority.

I systematically worked my way through the courthouse, City Hall and police headquarters but detected not a trace of purple-blue fire. Was this good news or bad?

The television reported that the trial of a CEO accused of bankrupting his company and destroying the pensions and looting the life-savings of thousands of people was nearing completion in Federal Court. Surely the odds were good that his brain would be discovered to be stuffed-full with an alien, criminal personality.

But no.

When I took my seat in the courtroom on sentencing day all I saw at the defendant's table was a short, slightly pudgy man in a gray suit and red tie. His hair was cut short around a balding head. From time to time he scribbled notes and shoved them across the table to his attorney who briefly glanced at them then slipped them, largely unread, into a manila folder.

After the lawyers had had their say, the judge announced that before pronouncing sentence the Defendant could address the court. The accused, Eldridge Wrinkle, stood and strode ramrod straight to the lectern as if he were a soldier marching off to war.

"Your Honor," he began, glaring defiantly at the judge, "I am an innocent man. My company was destroyed by the meddlers in the government and ungrateful and disloyal employees who hid their actions from me. I never suspected what they were doing. I wanted to confront the lies told in this court and tell the true story of what happened but my lawyers insisted that I remain silent. But I am a Christian and I know that the Truth will be known.

'In spite of what has been reported in the media, I am the real victim here. My oldest son is still one year from completing college and my daughter is a year behind him. My fortune has gone to pay an army of lawyers and I am down to my last two or three million dollars, money that my poor wife and children will need desperately in order to survive. In determining my sentence I would ask that you keep in mind their plight and that I too am a victim in this tragedy."

The judge peered over his wire-rimmed spectacles, gave his head a slight shake of disbelief and announced: "Fourteen years in federal prison and a four million dollar fine. Take him away."

Wrinkle shook his head sadly at the injustice of it all and surrendered to the bailiff's embrace. I glance once more around the courtroom. Not a blue glimmer in sight.

At the back of my mind Kelly shrieked three times and then went silent.

I ended my third week as a Spotter with only one potential sighting. The newspapers reported that a former Vice President would be addressing the members of the Oil & Energy Trade Association at a $100,000 a plate dinner. Of course, I didn't have the $100,000 required to purchase a ticket, and even if I did, attendance was limited to one-hundred people and all the seats had been subscribed to within fifteen minutes of going on sale. I did manage to catch a glimpse of the Vice President's fringe of white hair and the back of his bald head as he and his circle of guards strode past a crowd of demonstrators dressed to resemble seagulls and pelicans coated with bunker oil.

There! Was that it? I was almost certain I had seen the purple haze of an EP personality glimmering around the Vice President's retreating skull. While I wasn't absolutely sure, better safe than sorry. If the Vice President was not really an EP a personality cancellation wave from the future would do him no permanent harm, probably nothing more than making him dizzy for a day or two.

I accessed my contact web site. My creators in the future had verified that this site was one of the longest-lasting domains in human history and was still going strong in my future time: Cute&CuddlyKittens.Org. I quickly navigated to the In Perpetual Memoriam section and logged in under my assigned code name. Under the Beloved's Name and Biography section I typed "Mr. Whiskers" followed by a canned tribute substituting the name of the Vice President for that of Mr. Whiskers' favorite toy. I listed today as the date of his passing and clicked SAVE.