transparent walls.
For Warren the past was a vast sheet of darkness, mired in crimes immemorial, each horror like a shining, vibrant, blood-red bonfire in the gloom, calling to him.
He began to see that at school. History instruction then was a multishow of images, sounds, scents and touches. The past came to the schoolboys as a sensory immersion. Social adjustment policy in those times was clear: only by deep sensing of what the past world was truly like could moral understanding occur. The technologies gave a reasonable immersion in eras, conveying why people thought or did things back then. So he saw the dirty wars, the horrifying ideas, the tragedies and comedies of those eras … and longed for them.
They seemed somehow more real. The smart world everyone knew had embedded intelligences throughout, which made it dull, predictable. Warren was always the brightest in his classes, and he got bored.
He was fifteen when he learned of serial killers.
The teacher—Ms. Sheila Weiss, lounged back on her desk with legs crossed, her slanted red mouth and lifted black eyebrows conveying her humour—said that quite precisely, “serials” were those who murdered three or more people over a period of more than thirty days, with a “cooling off” period between each murder. The pattern was quite old, not a mere manifestation of their times, Ms. Weiss said. Some sources suggested that legends such as werewolves and vampires were inspired by medieval serial killers. Through all that history, their motivation for killing was the lure of “psychological gratification”—whatever that meant, Warren thought.
Ms. Weiss went on: Some transfixed by the power of life and death were attracted to medical professions. These “angels of death”—or as they self-described, angels of mercy—were the worst, for they killed so many. One Harold Shipman, an English family doctor, made it seem as though his victims had died of natural causes. Between 1975 and 1998, he murdered at least two hundred and fifteen patients. Ms. Weiss added that he might have murdered two hundred and fifty or more.
The girl in the next seat giggled nervously at all this, and Warren frowned at her. Gratification resonated in him, and he struggled with his own strange excitement. Somehow, he realized as the discussion went on around him, the horror of death coupled with his own desire. This came surging up in him as an inevitable, vibrant truth.
Hesitantly he asked Ms. Weiss, “Do we have them … serial killers … now?”
She beamed, as she always did when he saw which way her lecture was going. “No, and that is the point. Good for you! Because we have neuro methods, you see. All such symptoms are detected early—the misaligned patterns of mind, the urges outside the norm envelope—and extinguished. They use electro and pharma, too.” She paused, eyelids fluttering in a way he found enchanting.
Warren could not take his eyes off her legs as he said, “Does that … harm?”
Ms. Weiss eyed him oddly and said, “The procedure—that is, a normalization of character before the fact of any, ah, bad acts—occurs without damage or limitation of freedom of the, um, patient, you understand.”
“So we don’t have serial killers anymore?”
Ms. Weiss’s broad mouth twisted a bit. “No methods are perfect. But our homicide rates from these people are far lower now.”
Boyd Carlos said from the back of the class, “Why not just kill ’em?” and got a big laugh.
Warren reddened. Ms. Weiss’s beautiful, warm eyes flared with anger, eyebrows arched. “That is the sort of crime our society seeks to avoid,” she said primly. “We gave up capital punishment ages ago. It’s uncivilized.”
Boyd made a clown face at this, and got another laugh. Even the girls joined in this time, the chorus of their high giggles echoing in Warren’s ears.
Sweat broke out all over Warren’s forehead and he hoped no one would notice. But the girl in the seat across the aisle did, the pretty blonde one named Nancy, whom he had been planning for weeks to approach. She rolled her eyes, gestured to friends. Which made him sweat more.
His chest tightened and he thought furiously, eyes averted from the blonde. Warren ventured, “How about the victims who might die? Killing killers saves lives.”
Ms. Weiss frowned. “You mean that executing them prevents murders later?”
Warren spread his hands. “If you imprison them, can’t they murder other prisoners?”
Ms. Weiss blinked. “That’s a very good argument, Warren, but can you back it up?”
“Uh, I don’t—”
“You could research this idea. Look up the death rate in prisons due to murderers serving life sentences. Discover for yourself what fraction of prison murders they cause.”
“I’ll … see.” Warren kept his eyes on hers.
Averting her eyes, blinking, Ms. Weiss seemed pleased, bit her lip and moved on to the next study subject.
That ended the argument, but Warren thought about it all through the rest of class. Boyd even came over to him later and said, with the usual shrugs and muttering, “Thanks for backin’ me up, man.”
Then he sauntered off with Nancy on his arm. A bit later Warren saw Boyd holding forth to his pals, mouth big and grinning, pointing toward Warren and getting more hooting from the crowd. Nancy guffawed too, lips lurid, eyes on Boyd.
That was Warren’s sole triumph among the cool set, who afterward went back to ignoring him. But he felt the sting of the class laughing all the same. His talents lay in careful work, not in the zing of classroom jokes. He was methodical, so he should use that.
So he did the research Ms. Weiss had suggested. Indeed, convicted murderers committed the majority of murders in prison. What did they have to lose? Once a killer personality had jumped the bounds of society, what held them back? They were going to serve out their life sentences anyway. And a reputation for settling scores helped them in prison, even gave them weird prestige and power.
These facts simmered in him for decades. He had never forgotten that moment—the lurid lurch of Ms. Sheila Weiss’s mouth, the rushing terror and desire lacing through him, the horrible high, shrill giggle from that girl in the next seat. Or the history of humanity’s horror, and the strange ideas it summoned up within him.
His next jogg took him further backward in time, as it had to, for reasons he had not bothered to learn. Something about the second law of thermodynamics, he gathered.
He slid sideways in space-time, following the arc of Earth’s orbit around the galaxy—this he knew, but it was just more incomprehensible technical detail that was beside his point entirely. He simply commanded the money and influence to make it happen. How it happened was someone else’s detail.
Just as was the diagnosis, which he could barely follow, four months before. Useless details. Only the destination mattered; he had three months left now, at best. His stomach spiked with growling aches and he took more of the pills to suppress his symptoms.
In that moment months before, listening to the doctor drone on, he had decided to spend his last days in a long space-time jogg. He could fulfil his dream, sliding backward into eras “nested,” as the specialists said, close to his own. Places where he could understand the past, act upon it, and bring about good. The benefits of his actions would come to others, but that was the definition of goodness, wasn’t it—to bring joy and life to others.
As he decided this, the vision coming sharp and true, he had felt a surge of purpose. He sensed vaguely that this glorious campaign of his was in some way redemption for his career, far from the rough rub of the world. But he did not inspect his impulses, for that would blunt his impact, diffuse his righteous energies.
He had to keep on.
He came out of the transflux cage in a city park. It was the mid-1970s, before Warren had been born.
His head spun sickly from the flexing gravity of the jogg. Twilight gathered in inky shadows and a recent rain flavoured the air. Warren carefully noted the nearby landmarks. As he walked away through a dense stand of scraggly trees, he turned and looked back at each change of direction. This cemented the return route in his mind.
He saw no one as night fell. With a map he found the cross street he had expected. His clothing was jeans and a light brown jacket, not out of place here in Danville, a small Oklahoma town, although brown mud now spattered his tennis shoes. He wiped them off on grass as he made his way into the street where Frank Clifford lived. The home was an artful Craftsman design, two windows glowing with light. He searched for a sure sign that Clifford lived here. The deviations from his home timeline might be minor, and his prey might have lived somewhere else. But the mailbox had no name on it, just the address. He had to be sure.
He was far enough before Clifford’s first known killing, as calculated by his team. Clifford had lived here for over a month, the spotty property tax records said, and his pattern of killings, specializing in nurses, had not emerged in
