Plato's Cave During the Slicer Wars and other short stories by Terri Kouba
“Hey, Brad. Nice to see you again.”
Sereeta followed Brad through the hospital security checkpoint.
“Are you my timebroker today?” she asked.
Brad handed her the case file and pushed through the crowd in front of the hospital elevators. Sereeta scanned it while Brad whispered the highlights in her ear, quiet enough so no bystander could hear.
Daryl Carpenter. Twenty-nine. Born in the Bronx. Moved to the streets of Philadelphia at the age of fourteen after his mother died of AIDS. In and out of juvie halls. Busted for grand theft auto at the age of nineteen. Did four years upstate; extended sentence for bad behavior. He was released three months ago. That was when the little boys started to disappear.
The elevator door opened and she stepped out.
“Dad?” Sereeta was so surprised she almost dropped the case file.
The young man in the wheel chair looked up. His assistant pushed the wheelchair to the far wall, out of the hallway traffic, and politely stepped away to give them privacy.
“Pumpkin, is that you?”
“What are you doing here, Dad?” She bent down and kissed him on the check.
Brad nodded to the man in wheelchair and said, “Sereeta, we have to go.”
“Jesus, Sereeta. You look like hell. If you aren’t going to get plastic surgery, the least you could do is style your hair so it doesn’t look like someone set a dirty gray mop on your head.”
“Dad, are you sick? Why are you in a wheelchair?”
She knelt beside him and rested her hand on his arm. She felt his strong forearm muscles, honed from daily tennis games.
“Cancer. Can you believe it? I’m only thirty-two and I have prostate cancer. It’s completely curable, but, Christ, I’m only thirty-two.” He adjusted himself in the wheelchair.
Sereeta knew her father would be fine. Getting cancer these days was like catching a cold.
“You’re thirty-two only in adjusted-time, Dad. In real-time you’re fifty-nine years old.”
She laughed.
“I’m sixty-seven in adjusted-time. Hey, Dad! Your daughter is older than her father.” Her smile deepened the wrinkles on her face. She knew it would get under his skin.
“Sereeta, I’m sorry, but we really must go,” Brad interrupted. “We don’t have much time left. And you have to get Daryl to tell us where the boy is before he dies. Before they both die.”
Sereeta handed the timebroker the case file and her bag.
“You go ahead and get set up. I’ll be right there.”
“No wonder you look like a god dammed dried apple. Sixty-seven! You’re a fool, Sereeta, wasting your life on other people’s time. And you’re about to go off and do it again, I see.”
Brad hesitated, then shook his head. “Please hurry, Sereeta. Room 1126.” He rushed off with a sad look on his face.
“Why didn’t you tell me you had cancer, Dad?” She stroked the side of his smooth, unwrinkled face.
“It’s not serious. I’m having surgery tomorrow and then seven months of treatment after that. Not to worry, though. I’m going to spend all of it in fast-time so I can miss it all.” His eyes lit up in anticipation.
“Surgery!” The doctors almost never did surgery anymore. “Is it that serious? Do you think spending it in fast-time is wise then, Dad?”
Her mother had died in fast-time and Sereeta had always regretted that she hadn’t had the chance to really say goodbye. She had been thirteen when she had a fight with her mother and Sereeta had stormed off to the movies.
By the time the movie was over, her mother had already been dead for four days in fast-time. Her heart had spiked during fast-time and the shop at the mall didn’t have a doctor on staff to pull her out and revive her.
“Not to worry, babycakes. The time brokers tell me I’m not going to miss anything important.”
She lowered her voice. “They’ve been known to be wrong.”
“I haven’t missed anything important yet.”
“You missed my valedictorian speech at graduation, Dad.”
“OK. So they might have messed up once.”
“High school and college, Dad.”
“You always remember the things I wasn’t there for.”
He sighed deeply and motioned for his assistant to push the elevator button again. “Off you go, little pooh bear. You have an appointment to turn eighty before I turn forty, I’m sure.”
“Dad…” She jumped up, stood in front of the wheelchair and blocked his path.
“Go on, darling. I’m going into fast-time and I’ll be out in just a few days. A week, tops.”
Sereeta did the calculation in her head. The fast-time serum worked on a fixed ratio of one to thirty-nine. For every thirty-nine seconds in fast-time, one second passed in real-time.
The ratio in slow-time was more flexible, however. It was easier to stretch out time from the present to the past than it was to compress time from the present to the future.
“You mean nine-months, Dad.”
“Only in real-time, baby. For me, it’ll be less than a week.”
She bent down in front of him again. “Dad, I don’t think you should. I don’t want something to happen to you while you’re in fast-time.”
She almost added, ‘like Mom’, but she didn’t. Neither had mentioned her mother’s existence since that day when her father urged her mother to join him in fast-time while their daughter grew out of her rebellious stage.
“You worry too much, starling. Always have. Even as a little girl.” The elevator dinged.
She rose and crossed her arms in front of her. “How would you know? You spent every weekend and most week-nights in fast-time. You weren’t there when I was growing up.”
“Don’t use that tone with me, little girl.” He motioned for his assistant to push him into the elevator. “I don’t have time for this.”
“You never did, Dad. You never did,” Sereeta said to the closed elevator door.
“What’s he still doing in real-time?” Sereeta asked, throwing her coat across the chair in room 1126.
“You know the rules, Sereeta. I can’t put your client into slow-time without you going in at the same moment.”
Brad lowered his eyes and studied the monitor. “Just like I can’t tell you about your future or your father’s so don’t even ask. I’m not going to put my job on the line just because you’re having another family crisis.”
Sereeta pushed up her shirtsleeve. “I’m here now, Brad, so let’s get it on. How’s my client, as you so eloquently call him?”
A man burst into the room. “I’m Dr. Knowles and I’d like to voice my objection to Mr. Carpenter undergoing this type of interrogation. The man is about to die and needs medical attention. He doesn’t need the likes of you.”
“Have you filed your objection with the Time Broker Association and your hospital’s Patient Rights Administrator?” Sereeta asked without turning around.
“Yes, but I feel…”
Sereeta cut him off. “Has Daryl refused life saving treatment in slow-time?”
“Yes, but I’m sure if I go in with you I’d be able to…”
“You’ve done all you can, then, Dr. Knowles. It’s Daryl’s right to refuse treatment. You have to abide by his wishes.”
“And you don’t? You’re…”
Sereeta spun around and moved so close that her nose was less than an inch from the doctor’s. “Daryl is a suspect in a serial murder case.”
The doctor backed away.
“Twelve boys under the age of fourteen. He kidnaps them, beats them and then watches them while they die. He took his thirteenth boy two days ago. We think the body is still alive, but we don’t know where Daryl has hidden him. Only Daryl can tell us. But Daryl only has…” she looked at the time broker.
“You have seven minutes and twenty seconds,” Brad said, blanched and looked away. He ducked his chin and intently studied the monitor on his time-charting equipment.
“…Seven minutes,” Sereeta continued. “I’m going to take Daryl into slow time and stretch that seven minutes into seven hours. No, give me ten hours, Brad. And I’m going to make Daryl talk. He will tell me where that kid is buried and if we’re lucky, we’ll get to the child before he runs out of oxygen, or before the tank fills with water, or before the wick burns down to the TNT or whatever sick trap Daryl has staged for us this time.”
She moved closer as Dr. Knowles tried to back away.
“And you want me to let Daryl die in real-time with that secret locked in his pea-sized brain? All because you think I’m violating his rights?”
She took another step closer.
“If you want, I can arrange for you to be the doctor who has to examine the boy’s body if we ever find it. And you can look the boy’s parents in the eye and tell them their little boy is dead because you didn’t think it was right to stretch time. You tell them that you thought this sick bastard’s right to death was more important than their little boy’s right to life.” She reached for her phone. “Here, let me take the time to arrange that right now.”
“It’s not that, it’s just…”
”It’s just what?” Sereeta waved her hand in disdain.
“If you don’t like the law, then change it. Until then, get out of my way. I’ve got a little boy to save.”
She turned her back on Dr. Knowles. “Is everything ready?”
Brad double-checked the feed from the computer Sereeta would use in slow-time to the computer he used in real-time. She’d type in any information she obtained from Daryl and Brad would dispatch the officers to the little boy’s location.
The technicians were working on a machine where each side could talk to each other, but they still hadn’t figured out how to get a voice to transmit over the time-barrier without being distorted on the receiving end.
Brad set two syringes on a piece of felt. In them was enough serum for ten hours of time.
“Who’s the donor?” Sereeta asked. “Please tell me you got someone other than a prison inmate to donate his time.”
“These are from the minimum security county jail. I know how you dislike time serum from the max sec prisons.” He smiled into his shirt collar.
“It’s not just the residue, Brad, though that’s bad enough.” She shuddered as she remembered the time serum she received from a nutcase on appeal for death row. She couldn’t speak a sentence without using a swear word for a week after that case.
“It’s just that we catch criminals, the courts convict them and they get sentenced to twenty years. Then they go into fast-time and they really only spend five months behind bars, with sentence credits for donating their time, of course. Five months is a blink of an eye compared to what some of these assholes have done.”
“Maybe the Senate will pass the bill to change that. It’s coming up for vote next week.”
“And where will you get your time from then?” she asked.
“I believe there’s a cancer patient downstairs who is giving up nine months of his life. Maybe I should get you some of that time serum instead.” Brad smirked.
Sereeta grimaced. “Ha ha. I’d rather have a mass murder’s residue than my father’s, thank you very much.”
“Five minutes left. Ready to go into slow-time?” Brad asked. His hand shook as he handed a syringe to Sereeta.
“You OK today?” Sereeta asked, really looking at Brad for the first time. His eyes were sad.
“Yeah, I just…” Brad hesitated. “It’s nothing. I’m just glad you’re on this case with me.”
“Thinking of your own little boy?”
“Must be,” Brad agreed unconvincingly.
Sereeta injected herself at the same moment that Brad injected Daryl with the time-serum.
One moment she had been in a hospital room with three others and the next moment she was alone with Daryl and a curtain separated them from the rest of the room. She knew that if she pulled the curtain back she would see the Brad and the doctor, but their bodies would be a blur as their time moved so much faster than the time she was in. She had done it before, peeked around the curtain, and the headache it gave her hadn’t subsided for two weeks. Real-time.
“I’m not telling you anything, bitch.”
They always started slow-time in one of two ways: either promising not to spill the beans or calling her names that would make a drug dealer blush. It looked like Daryl was going for both.
But Sereeta had been at this for a long time. She might only be twenty-five in standard-years but she had spent a lot of time in slow-time and had over forty years of experience interrogating criminals. She didn’t think she would need the entire ten hours with Daryl.
She was surprised by Daryl’s condition. His face was ragged and his entire torso was covered in bandages, but the pained look on his face didn’t match that of her other clients who were close to death.
Daryl’s face held no fear.
“I hear gut-shots are the most painful,” she said. “Your stomach acid and toxins from your kidney and liver eat through your flesh and other organs, until the toxins build up in your bloodstream and eventually poison your heart. Is that true, Daryl? Do your wounds hurt?”
“I told you, I’m not telling you anything, bitch.”
With five minutes left in slow-time, Sereeta concentrated on typing the young boy’s location into her computer with a smile on her face. One of these days, as she had promised herself multiple times before, she’d learn how to touch-type.
She felt more than saw Daryl move. It must be the throes of death, she thought. She couldn’t pay attention to him now. She had to save the little boy. She hoped the kid was still alive in real-time – it depended on how fast the officers could get to the cave. The tide started rising forty minutes ago but if they were near, they could rescue the boy before the cave was entirely submerged.
Sereeta felt a blinding pain and then lost all feeling in her legs. They collapsed under her.
Daryl had stuck the needle from his IV into her central spinal nerve and temporarily paralyzed her from the shoulders down. Daryl straddled her and brought his hands to her throat.
It was then that she remembered what Brad had said.
The time broker had said “You have seven minutes and twenty seconds.”
She had dismissed it, assuming that it was Daryl who had only seven minutes.
But it wasn’t Daryl who was going to die in seven minutes; it was she who had only seven minutes, extended to ten hours, of life left. Her father had been wrong. She wasn’t going to live to see eighty years.
She blinked slowly and Daryl increased the pressure against her throat. Had Brad planned to have her bump into her father? She wondered if the time broker had told her father that she was going to die while he was in fast-time. Had her father thought that her death was one of those unimportant things that he could miss?
The End
Through the Terrace Doors