Lois grimaced and wondered whether the thing sticking in her back was a blade or a gun. If it was a blade, she was probably fast enough to mostly get out of the way before getting a piece of metal in her kidney. The person behind her had to be hanging partially out the window of the car behind her, and their position couldn’t be good.
If it was a gun, chances are that she was dead if she tried to move.
“What do you want?” Lois said. “My wallet is in my purse in the car.”
She’d gladly give up her wallet and purse and she’d have her credit cards cancelled before he was even a mile away.
“Don’t look around.” The voice rasped. “If you do, I won’t give you anything.”
Lois frowned. “Give me what?”
“Information about your sister.”
“I already know about my sister,” Lois said slowly. “She’s dead.”
The nondisclosure contract she had signed required that she not admit to knowing anything different. If this person really had something she could use, they’d already know different.
“You’ve already seen the other one,” the voice said. “You know what’s being covered up.”
“If you are a source, why stick me in the back? Call me, send me an e-mail…”
“I don’t want to end up in jail for treason,” the voice said. “Or lose my job.”
Lois shook her head and began to turn, only to feel something jabbing her in the kidney even harder.
“Hey!” Lois said. “Why should I help you?”
“If you don’t care what happens to your sister, then we have nothing to say.”
Lois grimaced. “I don’t use unattributed sources.”
Given the nondisclosure contract she’d signed, she’d have to be able to prove every piece of evidence she supplied had come from a source other than what had been reveled by the government itself.
“As far as you are concerned, you never met me. This meeting never happened. Anything you learn here I’ll officially deny.”
“And I can’t see your face?”
“I’d feel safer knowing you didn’t know who I am. The government has a rather large bargaining chip locked up in a holding cell.”
Lois flushed. Would she give up a source to get her sister out of jail? She’d like to think she wouldn’t, but it was hard to tell until you were faced with the situation.
“Why now?” Lois asked, scanning the surrounding areas.
“Nobody is watching you right now. In a few minutes that might change. Do you want what I have or not?”
Resisting the urge to look behind her, Lois nodded.
It was going to be a long night.
*************
For someone who had seemed so levelheaded just a few minutes before, Cyrus had screamed like a girl once they were both in the air. He’d struggled and clung to Clark, which given his unique personal odor hadn’t been pleasant.
At least their journey hadn’t been interrupted by military jets. Clark had taken the flight low and slow, both for Cyrus’s safety and to avoid any possible detection. Flying over the major highways had long been one of Clark’s navigation tricks; the long lines of flowing headlines stretched off into the distance as bright as any visible trail.
They’d skirted the city of Houston, which was larger than it had been in his world, and they’d flown over the heads of casino bound Texas vehicles heading for Louisiana.
It wasn’t until they approached the crescent city that Clark realized that something was wrong. The city should have been awash with light, sprawled out over the swampland basin like a floating jewel.
Instead, entire sections of the city were dark, and in other parts lights were few and interspersed far from each other.
The city sounded wrong. Every city had it’s own sound, and it’s own smell, but New Orleans had always been unique even among those.
It had always been a place that echoed with the sounds of jazz music, music that never really died away. Clark remembered the first time he had come to the city when he was eighteen. He’d walked the streets at night listening to the sounds of jazz and blues being played through open windows at all hours of the night.
At this time of night the live bands should have been playing. The city should have smelled of gumbo and crawfish and jambalya, all overlaying the underlying smell of rot and decay.
Now the good smells were fewer, and the bad ones were laced with chemical smells Clark couldn’t identify.
Entire sections of the town had blue tarps placed on the roofs, and as he approached he could finally see the devastation. Even the richer areas were still being rebuilt, but entire neighborhoods had been washed away.
The city had less than two thirds of the people it had once had, and the sounds Clark heard from them lacked that certain sense he’d once had from the city.
This was a city whose heartbeat had stuttered and almost died.
“What happened here?” Clark asked.
“Big Hurricane,” Cyrus said, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. “The levee broke, flooded the whole city.”
As Clark flew closer, he was horrified by the extent of the destruction.
“When?” has asked simply.
“Maybe three years ago…I lose track.”
If the city still looked like this after three years, the destruction much have been horrific after the flooding.
Clark couldn’t even imagine where all the people had gone.
The frightening thing was that the levees in his own world weren’t any higher than the ones he could see now.
This could happen at home.
It was starting to look like he was going to need to keep a notebook of things he wanted his world to avoid.
Just what else had gone wrong? Had there been horrific new diseases? Nuclear attacks? Famines, floods? At this point he wasn’t ready to rule anything out.
The nation was in its second war with Iraq; he’d been able to pick up that much.
He was going to have to make some decisions before he went back. He wasn’t going to allow these things to happen again if he could help it. If he had to shore up levees with his own hands, he’d do it.
Was he willing to remove a dictator from power if it meant saving thousands of lives?
Just how involved should he be in politics, in matters of war and human suffering? Should he take a strictly humanitarian role, or should he be more proactive?
It was a disturbing thought, and something that he would have to consider long and hard.
Just how far should he go in trying to save his world the kind of grief and pain that this world had already experienced?
The one thing that was clear was that he was never going to be able to do enough if he tried to keep his involvement secret.
He was going to need a disguise and an identity.
That didn’t mean he had to choose this world’s version of a costume. He hated the idea of being shoehorned into a role, even if the costume wasn’t half bad.
**********
“This is how this is going to work, Ms. Lane. There’s only so much information that I can give you. If I give you anything that’s known by only a limited number of people, then they can use that to figure out where the leak came from.”
“Then why are you even here?” Lois asked. “And if we are going to do this, you are going to stop sticking me with that thing.”
“You won’t look?”
“You have a mask of some kind on,” Lois said. She’d managed to get a glimpse of it in the car’s rear view mirror. “You are wearing gloves, and that isn’t your car.”
“That’s precisely why I don’t want you looking back this way. You tend to notice small details, and I don’t need anything giving me away.”
“Fine,” Lois said irritably.
“This investigation is straining agency resources.” The voice said. “Housing and guarding one hundred and ninety five prisoners while conducting a massive investigation involving hundreds of agents…there are only three hundred fifty five detainees in Guantanomo.”
“I’m sure it’s a major inconvenience,” Lois said.
“It’s pulling agents from other important duties!” the voice said. “There are hundreds of people involved in this, so there is information I can share with you without jeopardizing my identity.”
“Why didn’t you just slip it under my door?” Lois asked. Getting a discreet envelope would have been much more pleasant than standing out in the open in a parking lot in the middle of the night.
“Your hallway is bugged,” the voice said, “and they have people watching the entrances and exits.”
Which begged the question of how Clark was getting in and out. Had he simply never left her building, or did he have some sort of sewer access that the others didn’t know about?
“Fine,” she said flatly. “What CAN you tell me then?”
“What do you think all this is, Ms. Lane?” the voice asked.
“It’s some kind of hoax, obviously. Maybe a cult related thing.”
“What would you say if I told you we’ve catalogued more than three thousand pieces of evidence that said these people were telling the truth?”
“I’d say they were a little obsessive about faking the evidence.” Lois said. “Did you know that a group of Star Trek fans rebuilt the bridge of the Enterprise with their own money?”
“Where do you think all the duplicates are coming from?” the voice said, challenging. “You were nosing around the genetics lab, so I know you have some knowledge of them.”
“They hired twins, surgically reconstructed people to look like other people…what else could it be?”
Lois already knew there was more to it, but she wanted to hear his explanation. With any luck he’d give her some information she didn’t know yet.
“Preliminary DNA tests show positive matches for all twenty duplicates.”
“So twins,” Lois said.
“With the same fingerprints and retinal scans.”
Retinal scans were much more reliable than fingerprints, and they couldn’t be surgically altered. Twins didn’t share the same retinal scans either, any more than they shared fingerprints.
“And everyone on the plane was a duplicate,” Lois said.
If true, it would be mind boggling.
“We only found about twenty percent who had analogues…but that was still about forty people.”
Forty exact duplicates of United States citizens.
“Maybe they had something done to them,” Lois said weakly. “Something to fool the tests.”
“That’s what the boys upstairs keep insisting. They won’t believe what the people on the scene are telling them…or the experts either.”
The voice continued. “Not all of them were the same age either.”
“What do you mean?” Lois asked.
“About half of the duplicates were fifteen years younger than their counterparts here.”
“Clones?” Lois asked.
“You watch too much science fiction, Ms. Lane.” The voice was silent for a moment then chuckled, “Clones only grow as fast as the organism they were cloned from. It takes fifteen years and some months to get a fifteen year old clone. Some of these people are in their sixties.”
“Gene therapy,” Lois said. “Somebody altered their DNA.”
“It’s not possible at the moment,” the voice said. “Even if it were, it’ll be decades before it’s remotely plausible.”
Lois was silent for a long moment. “So what else do you have, other than the passengers themselves?”
“Newspapers, magazines, books, credit cards, driver’s licenses, cassette players, clothing with labels that aren’t produced anywhere else, money that appears to be absolutely real but obviously isn’t…do you know how much luggage a hundred and ninety five people bring with them?”
Lois stared off toward the sea of light that was the military base. “Let me guess…every magazine and book and newspaper was is made in Metropolis, or Gotham or something.”
“No. Many of the novels were published in New York.” The voice sighed. “So far they haven’t found anything that was published after 1993, with the exception of books which don’t appear to have ever been published anywhere.”
“So someone had access to a printing press and a lot of time on their hands. I can get a fake magazine or newspaper at any novelty shop,” Lois said.
Of course, getting three thousand of them would be difficult , expensive and time consuming, but…
“There were two laptops on the airplane. Everyone on the plane claims to be from 1993, but the laptops are approximately ten years more advanced than that.”
“So they have a couple of five year old computers,” Lois said. “So what?”
She had to play the Devil’s advocate despite the growing sensation in her gut that she knew where all of this was leading.
“These computers don’t use Windows, Mac OS, Linux or Solaris. They use a kind of operating system than we’ve never seen before…and they are designed so that you don’t lose your work even if the power goes out. The power returns and your screen pops back up where you left it.”
“Ok…” Lois said.
That was a design feature that she could have wished for numerous times during her journalistic career. It wasn’t possible in modern computing either, as far as Lois knew.
“Apparently produced by a company called Nanosoft.” The voice paused. “The computers don’t use a single chip that we recognize. That’s true in the lap tops and in the 747.”
Building a factory to produce a new computer chip would cost more than a billion dollars. The thought of this being some hoax was rapidly growing less and less likely.
“So the 747 isn’t the same as one of our 747’s?” Lois asked.
“All of the planes are accounted for,” the voice said. “Mostly the plane is identical to a 747, although there are minor design changes. Some of these were changes that had been proposed during the design phase of the plane but rejected for reasons of cost or aesthetics.”
“So these were changes that almost happened,” Lois said quietly.
There was a sound from behind her than Lois didn’t recognize, and she heard a soft curse.
“You’ve been out here too long,” the voice said. “They’re on their way.”
She felt something shoved into the crook of her arm.
“Check the web address you’ll see written in on page three. It’s been verified as being true.”
The stranger had shoved a newspaper into her arm. Lois grimaced.
“Get out of here!”
“How will I contact you again?” Lois asked.
“You won’t. I’ll be watching.”
Lois sighed and slid into her car. She was getting too old for this sort of thing.
She allowed herself a moment to glance into the car next to her and saw that the shadowy figured had already disappeared, although whether it had simply sank into the floorboard she didn’t want to guess.
Pulling out of the parking spot, she tried not to think about the implications of what she’d heard.
Her hands were shaking on the steering wheel, and she tightened them as she fought to keep her expression calm.
If this was a hoax, it was the most elaborate, expensive hoax in human history.
Part of her wanted to cling to the idea, but deep down she no longer believed it. The truth, as unsettling as it was, was becoming horribly clear to her..
Lucy Lane wasn’t some deluded cultist, or even a dedicated terrorist and traitor. She was telling the truth, and the other people on the plane were telling the truth.
Which meant the sister she’d grown up with, the sister she’d practically raised, was really dead.
************
