Burden of Proof Read online

  The truck had been crudely whitewashed. A faint impression of the grocery chain’s smiling-pig logo was still visible on the side. The paint was blistered by rust spots, but the engine rumbled smoothly, and the refrigeration unit hummed atop the rear hold.

  Delia’s speech became crisp, tight, faster. “Back to the matter at hand. Basically, we’ve created a warp in the quantum time field. This requires a focus of vibrational energies with a laser’s pinpoint accuracy. The end result is, we can shoot your consciousness back to a specific point in time. You need to understand, time is not linear. Our physical perception of time is. At the quantum level, time is a map. We have calculated the map coordinates of you eighteen days before Dad’s death.”

  Ethan tried to concentrate. He struggled to come up with a half-decent question or objection. But as they approached the truck’s open rear doors, his mind and heart were swamped by how much he wanted this to be real.

  Yet there was more at work here.

  The most vital part of his existence had been surfing big waves. A crucial element to killer surf was that the risk of injury or death was always present. Always. The tiniest error in judgment, the slightest shift in wind or current, and the finest wave could instantly become the final ride. Surfers who hunted the globe’s biggest waves did so for one simple reason.

  They lived for this.

  The risk was simply part of the ride.

  For Ethan, nothing in his entire life had ever compared to the thrill of standing on the shoreline and looking out, seeing those liquid mountains march invitingly toward him, knowing the best was yet to come.

  That was exactly how he felt now. For the first time in years.

  As he studied Delia’s excited, intelligent face, Ethan became filled with the single element of his past that he missed almost as much as his brother. The thrill of facing the impossible.

  Delia broke into his thoughts. “We know at least some key components of the subject’s current mental awareness and thought processes travel back. If we train the animals to do some highly complex task, they maintain this knowledge even when they have never seen the trial before.”

  Ethan stopped by the rear doors and forced himself to pay attention. “How is that even possible?”

  “We know they’re test subjects because they run the maze or perform the task the first time they see it. At first we couldn’t believe it. Test animals with no training whatsoever suddenly just danced their way through the most complex maze we could design.” Delia seemed delighted by the memory. “We had no idea what was happening. I mean, these were not actually registered as test subjects! So we would train them weeks or months later, then transit their consciousness back to the period before they ran the maze.” She gestured to the collapsible metal steps. “Climb in.”

  Ethan remained planted on the asphalt. “Why don’t you two go?”

  Sonya cackled. “Who calibrates the machines then? You?”

  “Mom, please.” Delia said to Ethan, “The simple reason is, forcing your consciousness to transit kills your physical body. What’s more, you’ll most likely expire in the past as well.”

  “Wait, what?”

  “All our test subjects perish twice. As far as the current physical body goes, the energy required to make the transit stops the subject’s heart. Plus our subjects have had a very short life span once the transition takes place. At first we thought it was due to how the trained subject couldn’t meet their untrained future self. But we separated them, and the pattern continued.” Delia might as well have been discussing the current heat wave. “Think of it as a rejection of a transplanted organ. Only in our case, it’s the individual’s future consciousness that is rejected.”

  “How can a past subject die and a future one still be taught?”

  “Good question. The answer is quantum logistics, which are totally wild. But they clearly govern the conscious mind and its temporal location. A longer answer would put you to sleep.”

  Her matter-of-fact tone helped Ethan mightily. “How long will I have?”

  “My best calculations suggest about a month. Six weeks tops.”

  “Long enough to save Adrian and rechart all our courses,” Sonya added.

  Ethan stared out over the dusty parking lot. A flock of pelicans drifted by, painting the sky with their graceful script. He had loved parts of his life, sure. The travel, dawns on the water, great waves, good friends. But how did that song go? Regrets, he had a few. That was the understatement of the century. The time since learning of his upcoming departure had been filled with the bitter longing to correct wrong moves, starting with his brother’s death. And a lot more besides.

  Sonya tapped the electronic timer set in the truck’s right-hand wall. “Will you please get in here so we can start? We have four minutes.”

  Delia remained unfazed. “Correction. We can’t do anything for another four minutes. And Ethan needs to understand.”

  Sonya went back to working the machinery. “Understand—him? Humph.”

  Delia told him, “We would have come sooner. But we only learned about your condition the night before last.”

  Sonya bristled. “Three minutes!”

  Her mother might as well have been in another room. “Plus the calculations require hours at a supercomputer, and we only accessed one last night. But the biggest reason is that you are here, we know you’re here, and Mom remembers you were precisely in this same spot eighteen days before Dad died. She and Adrian talked about it in their last conversation . . .” Delia waved that aside. “Positioning at the corresponding quantum point is crucial for this to work.”

  “Positioning is not nearly as crucial as timing!” Sonya pointed at the gurney occupying the center of the truck. “Which is why you need to get in here and lie down!”

  This time, when Delia offered her hand, Ethan started up the steps.

  She went on, “Establishing a precise physical location between present and past is utterly crucial. We know you were working here before Dad was murdered. And we know you come here every anniversary. So . . .”

  Ethan remained standing as Delia pulled the doors shut and locked them in place. The truck was wall-to-wall electronic equipment. A spiderweb of wiring was suspended from the roof directly above the gurney. It looked like something straight out of a B-grade horror flick.

  Ethan figured he probably should be afraid. Running away, or at least limping, was the logical next step. But the simple fact was, these two women were offering the first chance he’d had to make a decision about his own destiny since receiving the fatal diagnosis. He knew he should be terrified. Instead, though, Ethan felt as awake and hyper as a clown on a unicycle. He knew all this probably led to a spectacular failure. But just then, his only response was to silently shout, So what?

  “You really do need to step on it,” Delia said. “Else we’ll all miss the dance.”

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Delia kept talking as she strapped him to the gurney. “There will be two separate processes. They happen almost simultaneously, but not quite. First, a precise vibrational jolt will be applied to your frontal cortex, harmonizing your mental processes at the quantum level and preparing you for the transition.”

  Ethan’s attention gradually shifted away from her, the truck, Sonya, even the straps Delia fastened around his body. He had noticed this happening more often as the pain increased. As though part of him was already gone. As though there was some unseen door, and he had accepted that the only way to rid himself of the growing burden was to walk through.

  Only now, for the first time in what felt like years, the sense of disconnect was not driven by pain. Ethan was filled with the electric buzz of anticipation. The thrill of danger, the high of attempting the impossible—he had lived for this. The incredible moment when he was drenched in adrenaline and his heart grew wings and every second became split and parsed . . .

  He was back.

  The transition, Delia called it. The logical side
of his brain kept repeating the word. Like how doctors kept telling him to prepare himself for the inevitable, that his only choice was to get ready, because in a matter of days he was checking out. All options stripped away.

  Not anymore.

  “This will probably be painful,” Delia went on, fitting the padded strap across his chest. “I’ve not been able to discuss pain with our animal subjects, but they don’t appear all that happy. The good news is, it only lasts seven seconds.” She shifted down to his ankles. “The second stage compresses your consciousness through the quantum keyhole.” She looked up, her good humor gone now, her gaze somber. “Like I said, this jolt will stop your heart.”

  Ethan gave a mental shrug. For the first time since he’d received the news, his fear of death was balanced with the power of choice. Perhaps if he’d had more time to think things through, he would have gone with living out his few remaining days. But he doubted it. He could feel the cancer eating its way through his body, consuming in its path all the goodness he had known.

  Delia fit a final strap to his forehead and wrenched it tight. “Sorry. But we need to make sure you’re fully immobilized.”

  Ethan watched as Sonya took her daughter’s place and fit a plastic mesh helmet over his hair. “We should have shaved his head.”

  Delia was already standing by a bank of instruments. “The trial subjects’ fur made no difference.”

  Sonya buckled the strap under his jaw and told him, “Grit your teeth.” When he did so, she tightened this final strap until he could no longer open his mouth. The buckle dug into his right cheek, but there was no way of telling the ladies that it hurt. Nor, Ethan suspected, would he mind for much longer.

  Delia said, “Twenty seconds.”

  Sonya lowered her face to within inches of his own. For once, her constant irritation was gone. Instead, she looked at him with a yearning so deep the agony filled her eyes with tears. “Please, please, remember.”

  “Ten seconds,” Delia said.

  Sonya’s face disappeared, and all Ethan could see were the dangling cables and the ceiling lights and the truck’s rusty roof.

  “Eight, seven, six . . .”

  Ethan had no sensation of a life flashing in front of his eyes. Instead, he remembered just one event. The memory was so vivid he felt as though he was actually there once again. For three and a half years after Adrian’s death, Ethan had traveled the globe, surfing many of the finest breaks on earth. One day, on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, he’d slipped inside a tube twice his height. The day was windless, the waters so clear he could watch the sunrise through the wall of water. He was back there now, inside the tube, so deep the opening seemed a mile or so ahead of him. He could hear the thunderous roar, smell the salty air, feel the ocean spray cover him in a liquid blanket. It was . . .

  Bliss.

  Then the circular opening far ahead flashed a brilliant white. The light became so intense it compressed his brain. There was nothing anymore, no room even for thought. Just the light.

  Then the second jolt struck, so fierce he actually felt his heart freeze solid.

  And then he died.

  CHAPTER

  FOUR

  Ethan was staring at the moon.

  He sat up, gasping and choking. He rolled off the padding and clawed at the raw planks of the floor.

  Then he heard the water.

  A soft summer breeze blew up tiny waves. They splashed like cymbals against the pilings that rose to either side of where he lay. He gripped the nearest strut and forced himself to his feet. The night was utterly dark. He was dressed in a pair of raggedy cutoffs and a T-shirt. On his feet were leather sandals curled and cracked by salt and hard days. He was completely alone.

  Ethan cried out, a choking sound wrenched from the terror and confusion that filled him.

  He knew where he was.

  What was more, he knew when.

  The summer before his final year at the university, when he and his best friend had wrangled jobs at the Holiday Marina. The long pier ran back to the shore, every plank in place, the pilings straight as arrows. The marina’s unmistakable form was silhouetted by yellow streetlights. Four A-frames housed the sailing classes, the repair shop, the store, and the stockrooms.

  An old canvas inflatable raft lay on the pier, with a towel for a cover. The dockhands rotated the task of hanging around until sunset and bringing in the day’s last rentals and hosing them down. The marina’s sixteen daysailers formed a floating perimeter to him now. The boats ducked and weaved in the gentle breeze, lashed to safety pilings, dimly visible in the moonlight. Nights like this were one of the reasons he had loved the job so much. When the last craft was in place and the gear stowed, Ethan often blew up the inflatable and ate a solitary sandwich and watched the sun set. Then he stretched out here, alone, and fell asleep to the cry of gulls and the liquid cymbals.

  Back in a summer filled with impossible potential.

  Now, as Ethan walked the lonely road, he knew flashes of very real terror, fearing it all might vanish and he’d find himself trapped on the gurney with electrodes zapping his brain. One thing was certain. This was not a dream. The reality was too, well, real.

  The eighties version of Cocoa Beach was undergoing a drastic shift. The cheap motels thrown up in the early NASA heyday were being replaced by high-rise condos, luxury housing, elegant restaurants, and refined hotels. Here and there, however, a few remnants of the simpler world remained.

  The Holiday Marina lay at the end of a hard-packed clay road. To Ethan’s right stood one of the last remaining orange groves within the Cocoa Beach city limits. The blossoms opened fully at night, and the fragrance was as powerful a confirmation as the body he occupied.

  The year was 1985. Again.

  He was twenty years old, with a youth’s ability to shrug off the fact that he had worked a ten-hour shift in the hot August sun, had slept maybe six hours on the end of a pier, and had not consumed a cup of coffee in forever. Back in the day, Ethan’s only caffeine kick came from the occasional Coke.

  He arrived back at the rental cottage just as the first rose hues of dawn appeared in the east. He stood in the front yard, surrounded by everything he thought lost and gone forever. The unkempt yard was just as awful as he remembered. A line of surfboards flanked the cottage entrance. Leashes and board shorts and rash shirts littered the weeds and hung from the branches of two banana plants. Six plastic chairs stolen from some bar served as garden furniture. The house was squat and narrow and constructed of unpainted cinder blocks. There were no locks and nothing to steal inside.

  A cold nose poked Ethan’s ankle as he opened the front door. He bent over and lifted the whining pup. His best buddy, Sawyer, had rescued it from the pound because he had fallen for a girl who volunteered there. Ethan and his buddies had named the pup Banzai, after the North Shore surf break. He had not thought of the dog in years.

  He carried Banzai into the bathroom and shut the door. The house had a lot of serious flaws, but there were four closet-sized bedrooms and a huge screened rear porch that served as an indoor-outdoor kitchen. Ethan pulled the light cord, and there he was, staring back at himself from the cracked mirror over the sink.

  When he groaned, Banzai responded by licking his face. Ethan watched his hand stroke the pup. His skin was tanned almost black. White-blond hair contrasted with his pale blue eyes. Scared eyes. Still, the face was definitely his. Staring at himself, Ethan had no choice but to accept what his reflection truly meant.

  The transition, or whatever Delia and Sonya called it, had worked. He was four months from his twenty-first birthday. Again.

  Ethan let the dog out, then showered and dressed in fresh shorts and a T-shirt. He grabbed the all-too-familiar keys and surfer’s wallet from his dresser. As he started for the front door, a voice called from the next room, “Did you sleep on the dock again?”

  Sawyer had married his childhood sweetheart and moved to Oregon. Four years ago he had been d
iagnosed with adult-onset type 1 diabetes. Ethan had not spoken with him in months. Now his best friend sounded so young Ethan could have wept.

  “I did. Yeah.”

  “Not sure that was a good idea. Ready for your big day?”

  The question pushed Ethan faster out the door. He had no interest in staring any more mysteries in the face. “Absolutely not.”

  Ethan’s car was a cast-off Jeep Wagoneer, with rusty springs and a wobbly ride and no gas mileage to speak of. The Jeep had been his brother’s since college. Earlier that summer, Adrian’s boss had ordered him to sell it, junk it, do whatever necessary so it never again stained the firm’s parking lot. Adrian had sold it to Ethan for the whopping sum of twenty-five cents.

  Ethan drove the lonely dawn-streaked road on automatic pilot. He couldn’t listen to music because the radio had not worked in years. His two favorite boards were jammed between the seats. The smells assaulted him, ratty beach towels and melted surf wax and exhaust. Everything formed ingredients of a life he had assumed was lost and gone forever.

  His destination was the Cocoa Beach pier, whose restaurant served a fisherman’s breakfast twenty-four hours a day. His stomach growled in anticipation. That was good for another empty grin. He had not eaten breakfast in six months. Longer.

  Ethan pulled into the parking lot and braked hard. The lot was full for that time of day, and the reason shouted at him from three banners stretched above the pier’s main entrance. The top one read “Bash at the Beach.” Below that, the second banner read “Cocoa Beach O’Neill Pro-Am.” A third canvas standard had been lashed into place below the others. It had one word stamped in glittering letters: “FINALS!!”

  Ethan’s stomach growled a second time. But he was no longer paying attention.

  Bleachers rose on either side of the pier’s breakwater. Beside them loomed two walls of loudspeakers, ready to blare music and comments at a crowd that would eventually number over ten thousand.