Future Shock (13 page)

11:14

After some debate, we decide to get fake IDs first, like Future-Adam suggested. That way we can buy things without having to rely on Adam’s fingerprints, which might send the police after us again. This time I sit in the front of the car with Chris, after practically shoving Trent out of the way. I can’t sit next to Adam again. I can’t even look at him. Not after our near-kiss.

Chris enters the name Future-Adam gave us—Wombat—into the car’s navigation system, and we take off. The car heads north over the hill into the Valley, and the homes of the rich and famous soon give way to busy shopping areas and rows of nearly identical homes, and then to seedier parts of town.

It’s dark by the time the car stops outside a rundown house with peeling paint and a broken window. A rusted old trailer with no wheels sits smack-dab in the middle of the front lawn, with weeds growing over the front bumper.

“Future-Adam knows someone who lives here?” Zoe asks. Her sketchbook is out, but she doesn’t bother to draw this place in it.

Chris checks the car’s navigation. “It’s the right address.”

“What kind of name is ‘Wombat’ anyway?” Trent asks.

Adam tugs his baseball cap on. “Maybe it’s a code name like ‘Wolverine.’”

I get out of the car and scan the road for cops. I don’t really expect them to show up, but it can’t hurt to be careful. Now that we’re out of the safety and comfort of Future-Adam’s house I’m back on alert.

My gaze flicks to Adam for a second. Yeah, I definitely got
way
too relaxed at that house.

Chris knocks on the front door and the rest of us crowd behind him. A large woman in a floral dress opens the door and grunts. No words, just a grunt.

“We’re looking for Wombat.” Chris says. “He here?”

“Around the back.” She slams the door in his face.

Chris raises his hand like he’s about to pound on the door again, but then drops it. “Nice. Real nice, lady.”

“I feel better about this place already,” I mutter.

We kick through weeds and past mounds of trash piled along the side of the house, almost to the roof. The woman must be a hoarder or something. Everything reeks of garbage and cat piss. Or at least I hope it’s cat piss.

Music blasts from an open garage door, like heavy metal but with a pop vibe to it. Inside, tables and desks that look like they were scavenged from different garage sales fill every open space. Each one is stacked high with electronic equipment and pieces of hardware I couldn’t even begin to guess at. Some of it looks futuristic; some looks like it’s from our time or even earlier.

A guy around our age with an unshaved face glances up from a toolbox, and the music switches off. He wears a blue T-shirt with the Superman logo, and his flexi has a green-and-yellow pattern that looks like a circuit board. He wipes his hands on his jeans and steps around his desk. “Looking for someone?”

“You Wombat?” Chris asks.

“That’s me.”

“Adam O’Neill sent us. He said you can get us some fake IDs.”

“Hmm.” Wombat checks us out, but when he sees Zoe his eyes widen. “Yeah, I might be able to help you out.”

Zoe shoots me a “What’s happening?” look and I shrug. He probably thinks she’s cute or something. Seems funny, since this guy probably isn’t even alive yet back in the present.

“I can do it, but five IDs…That won’t be cheap.”

“We got cash,” Chris says.

“Cash? Seriously?” The guy laughs. “How long you been hanging on to
that
?”

“About thirty years.”

“Thirty years?” Wombat keeps laughing, doubling over like this is the funniest thing he’s heard all day.

I should have known cash wouldn’t work here after the salespeople at Smartgear turned it down. We might have to use Future-Adam’s account one last time, but then the police might be able to trace us here.

Trent lights up a cigarette. “Whatever, will you take it or not?”

Wombat stops laughing and stares at Trent. “Whoa, is that a cigarette?”

Trent flicks his lighter back and forth. “Yeah, why?”

“Do you have more?”

Trent arches an eyebrow and brings the cigarette slowly to his mouth. “I might.”

“Whoa, okay, wow. Cigarettes.” Wombat rubs his scruffy dark beard. “I’ll do the IDs for a pack.”

Saved by Trent’s nasty habit. Who knew cigarettes would be worth more in thirty years than thousands of dollars in cash?

Trent pulls a new pack out of his backpack and tosses it to the guy. “Done.”

“Sweet. Step into my office and I’ll sort you out.”

We move into the garage, although there’s barely enough room for all of us to stand in it. Tools and equipment are scattered across the tables between plates with crumbs and pizza crusts. A movie plays on the wall with Batman rappelling down a wall, but I don’t recognize the scene. Another remake?

Wombat pulls out a chair for Zoe and gestures for her to sit down but doesn’t give the rest of us the same courtesy. He grins the entire time, making puppy-dog eyes at her. The boy’s got it bad, and she has no idea.

“We need some money on our IDs too,” I say.

Wombat holds up a hand. “Hey now, no one said anything about making fake accounts too. That’s a whole ’nother deal.” He glances at Trent. “Unless you have another pack…”

“Nope, that was it,” Trent says.

Looks like cigarettes can only get us so far. And he won’t take our money…but I might have an idea.

“We only need one account,” Chris says. “We can share it.”

“And it only has to last until tomorrow,” Trent adds.

They argue with Wombat, while I slide up beside Zoe. She’s sketching everything in the garage with meticulous detail, the scene practically popping off the page.

I lean close enough to whisper, “He likes you. Go see if you can get him to help us.”

“What?” Zoe clutches her sketchbook to her chest. “He’s kind of cute, but I have a girlfriend.”

“He doesn’t need to know that.” I nudge her with my elbow. “And you’ll never see him again after this anyway.”

She nods slowly, then pats down her short blue hair. “Wombat?”

“Yeah?” He practically leaps over to her. I move aside to give them some space and watch as she shows him her sketchbook.

“What’s going on?” Adam asks me. His cap is pulled low over his face, but I can see his frown.

“Just wait.”
C’mon Zoe
, I think.
You can do this.

Wombat’s head is bent low near hers, and she places a hand on his arm. The guy’s face turns the shade of a lobster. He probably hasn’t been touched much by a girl. Or ever. She whispers something in his ear, and he laughs. Zoe is better at this than I expected.

After a minute, he straightens up and clears his throat. He turns to the rest of us with a little lovesick smile on his face. “Okay, I’ll set up the account for you. Just leave the cash here. I’ll find someone who can do something with it.”

Score one for Zoe. She winks at me, and there’s a confidence in her eyes I haven’t seen before.

Wombat weaves through the maze to get to a table in the corner. He leans over it and pokes at a smooth, black screen. “See this scanner here? I need you to each put your hand on it, one at a time.”

I’m the closest, so I step up and put my hand on the screen. It makes a little beep and lights up as it scans my palm.

“All right, hang on.” He touches something on the screen and then stares off into space. After a moment I realize he must be doing something on his flexi. It’s creepy because he looks like he’s concentrating, but it’s impossible to tell what he’s really doing. I hope we can trust this guy. For all we know, he could be scamming us. We don’t have any proof he can actually supply us with real fake IDs. We just have Future-Adam’s word to go on.

Wombat turns to something that looks like a computer printer, and a second later a thin, clear sheet of plastic slides out.

“Here you go,” he says, handing it to me. There’s a barely visible cutout of a thumbprint for each finger. “Put these on. They should have your new identity all set up. And whatever you do, don’t lose them.”

While he scans Zoe’s hand, I peel off the prints, which are vaguely sticky, and put them on each fingertip. They seem to be made of the same material as the flexis and sink into my skin, almost undetectable.

He repeats the process, making IDs for the rest of the team, and then creates our fake bank account. The whole thing takes way too long, and I pace back and forth outside the garage, checking my watch every two minutes. Our time in the future is dwindling, and we still don’t have any answers.

“How much longer?” I ask.

Wombat grins at me. “Hey, you can’t rush genius.”

I roll my eyes and turn away, practically running right into Adam. There’s an awkward pause as he opens his mouth like he wants to say something, and I dodge his gaze, hoping to avoid any conversation.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I push my hair out of my face, needing to do something with my hands. “Just ready to get going.”

He continues to watch me, confusion written all over his face. But I’m saved from any more discussion when the others finally emerge from the garage. We thank Wombat for his help, and Zoe gives him a quick hug.

As we walk back to the car, I ask her, “What did you say to him?”

“I invited him to dinner tomorrow,” she says and then sighs. “He’s a nice guy. I feel bad I lied to him.”

“You did the right thing. We had to get those IDs.” But I feel a little guilty about it too.

When we came to the future and started looking into our pasts, I had no idea our actions would affect the people living now. We were supposed to be ghosts of time, flitting in and out of the future without leaving a trace. Now the police are after us and Wombat’s waiting for a date that will never happen. What other echoes will we leave behind in the future?

12:02

Dr. Walters’s retirement home looks more like a five-star hotel than a place for old people to live out the rest of their days. Automatic doors slide open to marble floors, potted plants, and chandeliers. A nurse pushes an older woman past a sign that points to different rooms: cafeteria, library, game room, media room, exercise room, and medical center. Basically, everything you’d need so you never have to leave the building again.

I head to the front desk, anxious to talk to Dr. Walters and get some answers. The others crowd behind me, and a man with curly red hair smiles from behind the counter.

“Hi, we’re here to see Dr.—I mean, uh, Bob Walters,” I say. I wonder if his name is actually Robert and if I should have said that instead.

But the guy just nods. “Are you on the list?”

“The list?” I shoot a look at the others. Future-Adam didn’t say anything about a list.

“The list of approved visitors.” The guy’s smile drops, and he taps the edge of a fingerprint scanner. “I’ll need you to sign in here.”

So much for our fake IDs. “Um, one sec,” I say. The five of us retreat to the corner to talk.

“What do we do?” Zoe whispers.

Adam removes his baseball cap and runs a hand through his hair. “I’ll have to scan in.”

“No way,” I say. “The police will be able to trace us here.”

“What other choice do we have?”

“How do we know you’re even on the list?” Trent asks.

“My older self told us to come here,” Adam says. “He wouldn’t have sent us if we couldn’t get in. And I can use the device he gave us to knock out the security cameras.”

Trent eyes the guy at the front desk, then checks out the doors. “I don’t know. Maybe we can sneak in somehow.”

Chris shakes his head. “Too risky.”

I weigh all our options but don’t see any other way in. And our trail ends here. Future-Adam gave us no other clues or leads after this. We have to find out what Dr. Walters knows. But I can’t shake the feeling this is a really bad idea. “No, Adam’s right. He’s the only one who can get us in.”

“What about the police?” Chris asks.

“We’ll have to be fast.”

Chris swears under his breath, but the others agree this is the only way in. Adam flips on the jammer and hides it in his pocket.

The guy at the front desk eyes us suspiciously as we return.

“I’m on the list,” Adam says and places his palm on the scanner.

I check my watch, debating how many minutes it will take the police to get here. Ten? Fifteen? Can we get the information we need and get out in time?

The guy’s head jerks up. “Oh, Mr. O’Neill! I’m so sorry. I didn’t recognize you with the baseball cap on. I
just
watched your episode of
Celebrity Profiles
.”

“Uh, great,” Adam says. “These people are with me too.”

“No problem. Go on up.”

“Thanks. Um…remind me. Which room is he in?”

“Three-oh-four.”

We rush into the elevator and breathe a collective sigh of relief, even though the elevator reeks of bad perfume. We find room 304 and Adam knocks. A nurse with fluffy, brown hair and blue scrubs opens the door. She peers out at us but doesn’t seem to recognize Adam. Maybe she’s new or not the regular nurse. “Yes?”

“Hi, we’re here to talk to…Bob,” Adam says.

She nods and lets us in, leading us past a living room with floral furniture and into a small bedroom. Dr. Walters lies in a hospital bed, his eyes closed. He’s a frail version of his former self. His gray hair is now all white and wispy, and his wrinkled skin is paper-thin.

The nurse walks over to him and bends down close to his ear. “Bob,” she says, and he blinks and looks up at her. “These kids want to talk to you. Is that okay?”

His face changes when he spots us. His eyes widen, his lips part, and his hands clutch the sheets at his waist. “You…you…”

I tense up—he must know I’m the murderer—but then I realize he’s not looking at me but at all of us. Still, he probably blames me for their deaths. I have to make sure he doesn’t say anything to the others about it.

“Do you want me to send them away?” the nurse asks, touching his arm.

“No.” He tries to sit up. “Leave us.”

The nurse props a pillow behind him. “Are you sure?”

“Go!”

She huffs and adjusts his pillow again but leaves the room with one last warning look to us. The door shuts behind her, and we all crowd around his bed. He can barely move, but seeing him like this is a painful reminder that I’ll never grow old myself.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, his eyes focusing on each of us in turn. His voice is raspier now, much weaker than I remember. “This isn’t the right year…”

I exchange a glance with Adam. Dr. Walters doesn’t know. Maybe the accelerator
did
malfunction.

“So you remember?” Chris asks. “You know what happened to us?”

“Project Chronos. Wish I could forget.”

“We were sent forward thirty years instead of ten,” Adam explains.

Dr. Walters closes his eyes for a brief moment. “No wonder…I waited for you at that building twenty years ago, but you never appeared.”

Adam moves closer to Dr. Walters. “The older me, the one from this time, said we should ask you about the people who went to the future before us.”

Dr. Walters starts coughing, big, racking coughs that shake his entire body. He grabs a tissue and holds it to his mouth, his eyes watering. Poor guy. I briefly debate if we should get the nurse again, but he told her to leave and we don’t have time to mess around.

He holds up a hand, asking us to wait, and his coughing finally settles down. “We never should have done it. All those people…and what happened to you…”

“What happened to the others?” I ask him, stepping closer to the bed.

“I guess there’s no point keeping it from you now.” He stares at the crumpled tissue in his wrinkled hands. “They all came back broken. Paranoia, memory loss, madness…future shock, we called it.”

“Future shock?” Adam asks.

“Yes, shock from the time dilation. It proved too be too much for the human brain to handle.” He shakes his head, his eyes lost in his memories. “We made changes. We warned them not to look into their own fates, which we thought might make it worse. We reduced the hours spent in the future. We sent people only ten years forward instead of thirty. The damage was lessened each time, but not enough. Dr. Kapur thought if we used teenagers, whose brains were still developing, they might be able to withstand it better.”

Everything clicks into place. The conversation they had in the hallway. The reason they sent foster kids to the future instead of scientists. We were disposable.

“Did we…” I stop to take a breath, afraid to ask the question. “Did we come back broken too?”

Dr. Walters stares up at me with pale eyes. “I’m sorry.”

“What does that mean, old man?” Chris asks. “Are we going to go crazy?”

“It was all my fault,” the old man mutters, his eyes unfocused. “I built the accelerator…I never should have listened to Kapur.”

Chris grabs on to the edge of the hospital bed. “Answer the question!”

“Yes. You were all suffering from future shock. You had no memories of your time in the future.”

My heart falls to the ground and shatters. If we won’t remember anything that happens in these twenty-four hours, how will I be able to save us?

Does this explain why I kill the others and then myself? Maybe Aether tricks me somehow, or I’m confused after we get back…

“How can we stop from being brain damaged?” Trent asks.

Dr. Walters shakes his head. “I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

“How could you do this to us?” Chris yells. “You knew this would happen, and you sent us to the future anyway?”

“We thought we were gods, trying to control time.” He lets out a bitter laugh. “So arrogant. So stupid. After your mission failed, Kapur wanted to try again with younger kids. But I couldn’t let him do that. I destroyed the accelerator.”

“You destroyed it?” Adam asks.

“I had to. I couldn’t let them hurt anyone else.” He starts coughing again, his back bouncing off the pillow. When his cough settles down, he continues. “Aether couldn’t build it again without me. They threatened me, but I didn’t care. I was done trying to be a god.”

Zoe kneels beside the bed, almost like she’s begging. Or praying. “Dr. Walters, please. We need to know how to stop this. What about Dr. Kapur? Where is he?”

Dr. Walters scrunches up the sheets in his hands. “That bastard. After I quit, Aether put him on another project. Something involving memory. I didn’t want to know. But karma found him, and he died in a car accident not long after.”

“What about Lynne?” Trent asks. “Future-Adam said she helped him bury the project.”

“She might be able to help you, although I haven’t seen her in years. Adam is the only one who visits me.” His gaze rests on Adam and he smiles sadly. “Such a nice boy.”

“This is bullshit.” Chris paces back and forth, smoke practically steaming out of his ears. “We’re going crazy and we’re all gonna die and there’s nothing we can do? No, screw that.”

“I don’t feel like I’m going crazy…” Trent says.

“But would you know?” Zoe asks.

Trent shrugs. “I don’t think I’m forgetting anything. And hey, what about Adam? His future self said he lied to Aether about having future shock. And he seemed to remember everything, like when we’d be at the library.”

“True, and he cured cancer and all that,” Zoe adds. “He can’t be
too
brain damaged.”

Chris steps toward Adam, his hands in fists. “Yeah, why aren’t
you
going to suffer future shock like the rest of us?”

I stand up straighter, wanting to defend Adam again, even though all their words make sense. Throughout all of this, Adam has always been the odd one out. The only one not in foster care. The only one not disposable. The only one alive in the future. And now the only one who isn’t going to lose his mind.

“Is it possible we were all just faking it?” I ask.

“I suppose it’s possible, but…” Dr. Walters doesn’t sound hopeful.

“It can’t be a coincidence that the four of us who suffer future shock end up dead,” Chris says. “Adam has to be involved somehow. He must have lied to us about what really happened.”

“Why would he do that?” Trent asks.

“If he’s working for them—”

“Guys, I’m standing right here,” Adam says.

As they argue, I rub my palms against my eyes and try to think. As much as I sometimes hate my perfect memory, I can’t imagine not remembering these hours of my life. I catch Adam watching me and realize that if Dr. Walters is right, I won’t remember Adam either. Probably for the best, really.

“I’m sorry I can’t help you more,” Dr. Walters says. “You seem like good kids. Very sad how it all turned out.”

Trent pulls back a curtain and peers out the window. “We should go. The police could be here any second.”

“Yeah,” Adam says. “Lynne’s address is probably in the car. Maybe she can help us.”

“Wait.” I know we need to hurry, but there’s one last thing I have to ask Dr. Walters. “Can the future be changed? Or is everything we’ve seen going to happen?”

“Somehow I’m not surprised
you
asked me this,” he says. I hold my breath, fearing he’ll blow my cover, but he relaxes back on his pillow and continues. “That’s one thing I hoped to study with the accelerator, but I was never able to prove anything one way or another.” His voice grows stronger as he slips back into the scientist role.

“One theory says everything is predetermined, which means everything you do once you return to the present will lead up to this future. Even if you
think
you’re changing something, you won’t be. But another theory says if you change something when you get back, the moment will split off and create an alternate timeline with a new future.”

“So if we go back and change something in the present, this future might be different?” I can’t even think about the other possibility—that nothing we do matters.

“Maybe. This future might still exist, but you would be living in another parallel timeline, based on the changes you made. Or maybe the future you went to, including this moment right now, would vanish entirely. It’s impossible to know.”

Everything we’ve heard from Future-Adam suggests that we’re living in a predetermined loop where it’s impossible to change the future. Otherwise, how would he know so much about what we’re going to do? But maybe we’re only visiting the timeline he’s lived through, the one in which we all die. If we go back now and change something in the present, maybe our future will be different.

I know the chance is slim, but if I don’t hold on to this one shred of hope, I might as well give up right now. We
have
to be able to change our fate.

We say good-bye to Dr. Walters. There’s so much more I want to ask him—like if he knows why I killed the others or if he thinks Aether murdered us—but there’s no time. We rush back to the lobby, and as the automatic doors slide open, I see it’s pitch-black outside and raining again. Of course. If I was smart, I would have grabbed an umbrella at Future-Adam’s house, but it never rains this much in LA.

As we step into the downpour, a police car pulls up to the curb, lights flashing. A voice booms, “
Freeze!
”