Chapter 7

Peter and I spoke until it was very late, and then we spoke until it was very early. It hadn't surprised me that he saw through the deception; in fact if I had been given the choice I would not have tried to fool him at all this way. There can be things you don't tell a good friend... but once you lie to them you are on dangerous ground. If they are really a friend they will most likely know you well enough to see through the lies.

He forgave me, understanding that the situations I had been going through were extreme. Sure, he doubted my story to some extent, but he accepted my word for it until further proof was in, and that was all it took. A lie turned truth became the turning point of my entire adventure. Peter, just a friend, was now a friend of Nemo; an important piece of the puzzle. I had Tina, the financial advisor... Sonya, the lawyer... Liz, if she was still involved, who could take care of the medical needs to some extent... And now Peter, the great organizer and logical mind, the cool head when I myself just became more and more confused. He mercilessly pointed out the weak spots of the story.

Why a briefcase? Why not just hand over a numbered account or the ownership of a dozen companies? Obviously this family of mine was already operating, and with the power to change the past they might as well give me a huge inheritance or lottery winnings or whatever was needed. I could have unlimited access to money, but instead for some reason I limited myself to start out with one briefcase.

And that's another thing he pointed out. I was still thinking about time as now and then and a linear trip from one day to the next. If this story was true I had access to unlimited supplies of time just by stepping back again from the future to fix a tricky situation I was in. I could have decided and memorized the date time and location of right now and then from the future gone back myself to explain it all to me... why didn't I?

By the time the conversation ended the sun was rising, and we both had serious headaches trying to wrap our heads around the inconsistencies of what we knew, and maybe understanding a little of what we didn't know. Janine had excused herself, at first to take up guard duty and checking the perimeter, or in this case looking over the windows, and then to exercise some in the gym we kept in the basement. Maybe she understood we needed some male bonding time, maybe she just did what she was trained to do - be a guard, be an operative... and as such free time meant time to practice.

Peter and I were fixing up the fold out beds when she came back up. Peter didn't want to drop the thought of deciding to come back and tell myself.

"Just memorize the date and time. You already know exactly where you live. Then sometime after you send the briefcase back, jump in the timeship or whatever you do, and go back here to tell us all about it." He argued.

"Sure, I'll do that."

"No you won't."

"Yes I will."

"If you would, you would be here already. What's the reason you don't?"

"I don't know... Maybe I already fixed something else."

"Like what?"

Janine interrupted mumbling, "the basement." We stared at her for a while and she looked back. She looked pretty good, sweating up after an exercise and on her way to a hot shower. She motioned for us to follow her and we did, down the stairs and down into the training room. Treadmill, weights, sparring mat, and some punching bags, simple equipment.

Janine pointed at a painting on the far wall. "In my fathers office at the training facilities there is a painting just like that one on the back wall." She looked around a bit and paced the floor from wall to wall as if measuring up.

"In fact, this entire room is an almost exact replica of the standard quarter at our training facilities, if only you were to replace that painting with a door to the bathrooms it would be... a match. I should know, I spent eleven years there."

Eleven years, I thought... At her age... At what age did I start to train my family for war? What the heck was I thinking? Still, her revelations were more important than considerations like that, or at least more intriguing. I wasn't sure I wanted to consider who I was to become in the future any more.

The painting was easy to remove, and the wall was flat behind it, the only mark on it being the screw that held the painting up. The entire concrete surface was unblemished aside from that little thing. A hunch had me fetching the screwdriver, but the screw just came loose in my hand, showing the ugly red plug behind it. I used some pliers to pull out the plastic tube and looked into the empty hole, aided by a flashlight.

It was barely visible, but I knew it was the right thing. I pushed the screwdriver into the hole and closed my eyes hard feeling my way through as I slowly twisted it until I felt the screwdriver head slip into the groove deep in the wall. I didn't have to use much force at all, just a gentle twist to the right and a snap was heard, the unlocking of hidden secrets...

Or so it was expected. But where? The wall was still smooth, and as far as we could see nothing else in the room had changed. I looked over at the others.

"Did you guys hear the click?" They nodded. "So where did it come from?"

They looked hesitant, but their gestures were all against the wall I was standing next to. Yeah, that's what I thought as well, but what? It wasn't like the entire wall was going to just slide away?

I grumbled a bit and gave it a shove anyways, and it didn't slide... it folded. Like an ancient drawbridge it just slowly tilted down, reaching the floor with a heavy thud. Some dust rose into the air and we all coughed a little before somewhere in the distance large fans started to whirl and the dust was sucked out through a small vent on the wall.

I would have expected a room, with a little door, possibly a vault of some sort with a little door, or maybe two rooms... with a little door... but this door wasn't little and behind it hid only a room large enough for the prone wall and behind that a stairwell that would be right at home in some ancient stone castle. As we carefully stepped up on the wall and slowly moved forward I saw patches of the roof started glowing. Janine saw my glances.

"Electro-fluorescent paint. It reacts to the presence of electric fields like those in the human body by lighting up. It can be made transparent and it is the major source of lighting in the future... although we usually paint entire roofs in it and not just patches."

That made sense. Future technology in a secret hideout made in the past that looked medieval in construction. Of course. I figured I would have to get used to having headaches. The switch next to the stairs looked more at home in the fifties or sixties, and simply read open and close. Once we were all safe on the top landing of the stairs I flicked it to closed, and the wall silently rose behind us, closing with a loud click.

I figured my father must have found the hole in the wall and smashed a plug in it and put up a screw for the painting. It was an easy way to cover up a blemish on an otherwise nice wall. Janine insisted she go first, and I don't know from where she had managed to retrieve her gun, but she looked to mean all business. I felt pretty secure that this was a safe place, but still I pulled my gun, and after a pointed look from Peter he got to carry my backup. Just in case.

Just in case we were attacked. Come to think of it, I almost wish we had been. The stairs were long, winding around themselves going down, and as we went down the lights behind us slowly went out and the ones ahead turned on. It felt a bit spooky, and then when we turned that final corner, took that last step down, fanning out covering each direction with our guns... All the lights went on, and this wasn't some future paint crap but old fashioned fluorescent tubes flashing to life...

It was like a place from some scary comic book. A mad scientists crazy lab, but empty thankfully. Glass windows overlooked a medical table and some monitors and crap that looked at home in any modern medical facility. On the other side of us there was chemical beakers and burners and anything needed to cook up some nasty biochem stuff... or so I guessed, it wasn't really my subject. And then there were the computers. Racks of them stacked against the far wall, blinking away, working on something... I approached them slowly, walking towards the station with a monitor and keyboard. I put my hand on the chair when the voice came out, like a young girl voice.