Soul Source: Back and There Again Read online

  Soul Source

  or Back and There Again

  BY

  CHARLES VELLA

  Copyright © 2017 by Charles Vella

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission of the author.

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious, or at least haven't been born yet. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

  To read more by Charles Vella click here

  To my family

  Table of Contents

  Who's there?

  Effect and cause (and effect?)

  What the world needs is a reset icon

  Heroine addiction

  The end?

  That's the question

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Not to be?

  12

  11

  10

  9

  8

  7

  6

  5

  4

  3

  2

  1

  Or to be?

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  Or not to be?

  8

  7

  6

  5

  4

  3

  2

  1

  Knock knock

  What window through yon light breaks?

  Confession (if that's the word) is good for the soul

  To err is so human

  What's undone is done

  (Almost) The beginning

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  Who's there?

  Effect and cause (and effect?)

  Time Travel Protocol 1-11-2012* (Sole Source):

  The logical nature of time travel precludes the possibility of the type of balance of power that exists with nuclear weapons. The program will therefore use any means necessary to ensure that it is the only entity to achieve the capability.

  *(Highly Confidential: Paper Copies Only)

  "So the bartender says..."

  "I've heard it."

  Dr. Ted stopped. "I haven't..." Shook his head with a frown and stared at Tomas with intelligent, beady eyes. Einstein reincarnated as a gerbil. Not for the first time Tomas wondered what the world looked like to someone that smart. "So the bartender says," he evidently decided to soldier on. " 'Sorry. We don't serve faster than light neutrinos here.' A faster than light neutrino walks into a bar." Dr. Ted leaned back, pointed a finger at Tomas, a wide grin splitting his skinny face.

  "I've heard it." Tomas repeated without taking his eyes off the plasma television hung like a painting on the wall at the end of his conference table. The TV, an office the size of a two-car garage and decorated like a layout in an interior design magazine, the cars that brought him and this over-educated pinhead back and forth every day, all of it paid for by the project. Tomas'd worked with venture capitalists his entire career but'd never seen anything like the guys funding this project. They saw the possibilities and didn't mind footing the bill to be first, not so far anyway. When questions about funding arose Dr. Ted reminded them, Tomas, and anyone else with whom he was allowed to talk about it, there wouldn't be any second place in this race. The venture capitalists didn't disagree with that, but Tomas wondered how long the spigot would keep spewing money.

  Dr. Ted's grin faded with a parting chuckle and he turned toward the television. The time and date, June 7, 2012, ran continuously across the bottom of the screen. The supporting cast of the press conference milled around in a large room, reporters, aides of one sort or another trying to look as if they're in the know. The voice-over killed time by running an endless loop of background, a political science major smugly explaining faster than light neutrinos in case someone with a sixth grade education happened onto the channel while surfing for a football game. The wait'd prompted Dr. Ted to reach into his small bag of lame jokes.

  "As a matter of fact," Tomas said to the screen. "I think it was you that told me."

  "Me?" Dr. Ted said. What kind of a grown man referred to himself as Dr. Ted? Bottle-thick glasses, a grin, and a splayed hand at the end of a skinny arm extending from a skinny body. "Call me Dr. Ted." An Asian Gumby. One of the youngest Ph.D.'s in physics ever turned out by Cal Tech, standing on a pile of academic articles that made him look tall enough to be whispered about as a potential Nobel prize winner but not tall enough to get a date. What was he? Twenty-nine? Thirty? The brain of a computer, but not quite that much personality. And one day, one day soon, this over-educated pencil neck would run the entire project. If they did it. If it really were possible. Was it? Possible? Tomas doubted it. But hoped the gravy train would run until the chateau he was renovating in the south of France was paid for. Once long-term funding was locked in Ted would run the whole thing. Tomas could stay on as Chief Financial Officer, but preferred to live out his remaining years puttering around his vineyards in an old hat, waiting for what they were doing to destroy the world.

  "I did? When? When did I tell you?"

  "Tomorrow."

  Dr. Ted actually stopped fidgeting, which was as if a clock ticking in the background all day, every day suddenly went quiet. His skinny body moved constantly, as if it needed to work off the excess energy generated by the over-charged brain God'd jammed into his head. He went through an office chair a week. If you didn't replace them they started squeaking every time he moved. And if that weren't enough he'd jump up and start playing medleys of American standards on the xylophones and glockenspiels he'd started to collect. Even the crew of misfits and flakes that constituted the staff had complained until Tomas'd had his office soundproofed.

  He turned to Tomas with a frown. How could someone so smart be so stupid? The scientific committee constantly told Tomas that the project wouldn't have a chance without Ted Huang. Good thing. Otherwise Tomas might give in to the constant urge to shove him into a drawer and close it.

  "Haaaaa." The grin split his face again and he jabbed a finger back and forth in Tomas's direction. Does Cal Tech have a remedial class on normal human reactions for propeller heads? Today's lesson: how to laugh at a bad joke.

  "Quiet." Tomas held out a hand like a traffic cop as the buzzing conversation on the screen died and all faces turned toward the line of somber-faced men filing onto the stage. "Here they come," he said, surprised at the tension in his voice. "Let's see what they have to say."

  Hopefully something positive, but not too positive. They needed some sign that it was possible but not so much that it provided evidence that they were behind. They had to brief the venture capitalists tomorrow and Tomas had a bad feeling about it. He never enjoyed those meetings, facing thirty year olds in five thousand dollar suits, looking at him across the table as if he were picking their pockets. No, he never enjoyed them, but lately there'd been dangerous rumblings that the gravy train might stop, or at least slow down. They still had faith in Ted, but it was all so theoretical. They needed something real. Something tangible. The background noise on the screen died down as someone stepped to the microphone. Tomas turned his attention to the screen with something that felt like hope, but could've been fear wearing a thin disguise.

  What the world needs is a reset icon

  "Clive?"

  Nothing friendly in the way he st
ared at them over the array of weaponry arranged on the table in front of him, hands jammed into the pockets of his old jeans. Middle aged and not proud of it or trying to hide it, as indifferent to his own growing waist and thinning hair as he was to foreign-looking characters asking about Clive. His display would've been enough to take over a small country a hundred years ago but was on the smallish side at this gun show. He looked the boy up and down, working his jaw as if chewing on whether to answer or pick up one of his deadly wares and start blasting. The boy could feel the brothers crowding behind him, the three of them trying to blend into the crowd like raisins on a snow bank, trying not to let on to the people around them looking at guns, handling guns, pointing guns, staring down the barrels of guns, that they were scared to death. The guy behind the table finally shrugged and tilted his head toward a door off to the left of the airplane hangar or whatever the huge, drafty structure housing the gun show was originally intended to be.

  The boy started to thank him but he'd already looked pointedly away, so the boy gave him a nod and a weak smile as he turned and shuffled off. The brothers moved to his side, like bookends, trying to look tough. The metallic clang of weapons being opened and slammed shut and the clicking of triggers being pulled echoed off the cement floor into the cavernous space above along with the roar of a thousand conversations. Where'd they all come from? It was like everyone in the city'd come out here to look at guns. The boy couldn't see the other one who'd come with them. He must be hovering somewhere behind, admiring all the weapons. He wouldn't worry about not fitting in. He probably hadn't fit in anywhere since kindergarten. If someone picked up a weapon and started firing it was more likely to be him than that old white guy. The thought sent a shiver down the boy's spine.

  The boy was sure he'd asked the right person about Clive. Just as he'd been told. The boy was very good at following instructions. So why'd the guy looked at them like that? No doubt the same reason every eye in the huge space followed them as they walked toward the door. The clamor of conversation and metallic clacking of weapons died in front of them like a wave as they passed, then slowly rose again in their wake. The boy could feel the sweat on his back in the still, heavy air of the building. He could feel the tension from the brothers, scared shitless but strutting as if they were the ones all the heavily armed people should be afraid of.

  The boy felt a wave of panic as he saw the sign on the door, EMERGENCY EXIT ONLY. He stopped and one of the brothers bumped into him, shoved him out of the way in disgust, and pushed the bar in the middle of the door. The boy cringed but no alarm sounded. He felt himself pushed through the door by the second brother. The door closed behind them. Where's the other one? Maybe he'd left. Disappeared. Something to hope for anyway. They walked out to a dirt field with a scattered crop of weeds, half filled with cars. A weak sun shone on them as if God couldn't be bothered. OK. What now? As if in answer, a car door opened and a head popped up to their right like a prairie dog coming out of its hole.

  The brothers lost interest in being in front again and the boy felt himself shoved in the direction of the face watching them.

  "Clive?" he said, or tried to say as they approached, but it came out a squeak. He cleared his throat but the man had already moved toward the back of his Volkswagen minivan, ancient but pristine, as incongruous among the pick up trucks and SUV's as Clive's name. Not that he looked like a Clive. A greasy one-piece jump suit like mechanics wear. A gray ponytail hanging down his back. He greeted them with bared yellowed teeth like some kind of snarling animal and stared at them with red eyes as he jammed a key into the trunk of the van and looked around.

  "Where's your car?"

  The three of them looked at each other, panicked.

  "Oh for Chrissake," Clive muttered as one of the brothers ran off, slapping his pockets. Clive held a hand on the minivan and looked at them with disgust, then his eyes slid past them and the boy knew by the sudden nervousness in Clive's face that the other one, the one they called the killer, had caught up with them.

  A month ago the boy'd been washing dishes and busing tables at the diner in upstate New York where he'd landed after wandering out of school. His family'd died halfway through his freshman year. A drone'd found them as they'd stood smiling for his sister's wedding picture. The American government had apologized. Not to the boy directly, left staring in wide-eyed shock at the email from a family friend who'd been late for the wedding, but to the world at large. The boy'd drifted around this foreign shore, the bridge to his childhood and all the happiness he'd known burned behind him by a flying bomb. His family victims of a passionless war fought by faceless young people in anonymous bunkers. Their bodies flying through the air like a scene from a video game. Reset. But there was no reset button.

  The boy didn't blame Americans. He walked their gray, dirty streets, hands shoved in his pockets, a student visa he wouldn't be able to renew even if he'd had the money and interest to stay in school jammed into his pocket. Shivering in an alien cold, reading graffiti in what still felt like a foreign language. He wasn't an abstract thinker in the best of times. After the email he'd drifted off campus and into a series of dead end jobs and rented rooms that'd brought survival for his body but left his mind undisturbed to wander its long, dark corridors of grief unmolested. And then he'd met the leader.

  The young man with the intense, pale blue eyes that always seemed to stare off into the distance wasn't much older than the boy. And somewhere in the recesses of his mind the boy'd realized this wasn't a chance meeting. That he'd been watched, followed, for days. Maybe weeks. The boy's brain played flashes of his new companion that he'd never realized he'd seen, at the takeout line of the diner, standing on a street corner, going into a building when the boy was coming out. Flashes he'd never put together because he hadn't had a known quantity to focus them on.

  The leader'd gotten the boy's story out of him without even asking. He'd never offered the boy a chance to get even. Didn't try to make him a religious fanatic. The boy'd've shrugged, stared blankly. There wasn't anything smoldering inside him wanting revenge. Whatever it was inside him was inert. Cold and dead. The leader'd just stood there, resting his broad hands, the knuckles dusted with downy hair, on the rickety Formica table, and nodded as if what the boy'd said had confirmed what he'd needed to know. He'd never given his name or asked the boy's.

  "No names. Call me the leader." Leader? Leading what? Where? But the boy hadn't asked the question. Hadn't asked any questions. Somehow the young man with the piercing eyes had known that inert mass inside the boy wasn't quite dead. It stirred and the boy'd suddenly known that he'd been looking for something. Something he couldn't live without. The leader'd offered him what he couldn't resist, a future to replace the one he'd lost. And he'd offered the boy something else he couldn't resist, her.

  The boy didn't know her name either. The first time he saw her was when he'd walked out of the kitchen at the diner and suddenly recognized the young man who'd been a presence at the edges of his consciousness. The leader'd stood at the counter and stared the boy into a stool she'd just gotten off of.

  Her eyes'd caught the boy's before darting away. A split second encounter that reached into the pain that'd lain dormant in the boy's soul and sent something coursing through his body that felt dangerously like hope. She'd turned and slipped out the door without a word. The boy watched her hurry past the dingy window without a backward glance. Cars and people moving beyond her out of focus until she'd disappeared. The end of a movie that left the boy desperate for more. How long had he stood there, frozen to the spot, before he'd finally looked into those intense eyes drilling into him? Drawing the boy onto her empty stool without a word. The stool was still warm and the boy felt the heat from her body radiate through him as he talked. By the time the leader left they'd both known the boy'd follow.

  He'd met the brothers that same night. Two serial losers playing the role of thugs. Where the boy'd been chased from college to the streets by t
ragedy, the brothers were nudged along by shiftlessness. Their accents placed their origins in a country near the boy's. Then a few nights later the boy'd met the last one. The one they called the killer. The one that sent a chill of fear down the boy's spine. A ragtag, Moorish army behind a Christian Cid. And like most armies, they were entrusted with the where and when, but not the what. Certainly not the why.

  But the boy'd let himself go along without knowing or caring about the why. He didn't care about the leader's motives and even less about the brothers'. He didn't let himself think about the killer. Every time a shadow filled the door of Callaghan's, the dump where they sometimes met, the boy's eyes darted up. But it was never her. Only big, vacant men came into Callaghan's. The same ones every time they met there? Who knew? They all looked the same. Lumbering in the door and leaning at some spot at the bar predetermined by long habit. Ignoring each other, ignoring the plotters, and ignoring Callaghan, if that was who stood behind the bar. He refilled their smudged glasses without a word. The boy never saw money change hands.

  Other times they met at an apartment, a woman's apartment. You could tell by how neat it was. And the boy would listen intently for sounds coming from the back. But she never appeared. Was she part of it? Or just the leader's girl? The boy replayed the scene with that slight figure hurrying past a dirty window over and over and over again when he should've been listening, forcing the leader to repeat while the brothers rolled their eyes and elbowed each other in the ribs and the killer stared at him with the indifference of an undertaker sizing up a customer for the economy casket. Then the leader gave their assignments, like sending them to meet Clive, and paid them. The boy suspected that was the brothers' motivation, the money. It wasn't much, but it no doubt paid for video games and movies and whatever else the brothers used to fill their days. The killer? Fear kept the boy from speculating on the killer's motivations. The boy dropped his money into a trashcan as he left. He didn't know why.