Chapter 2: Façade
Felix took out a set of keys and walked to the back room, and unlocked it. I opened the door to find what looked like some kind of Great Room. A large TV was mounted to the wall, a few tables and chairs were set up, and along the side walls were shelves. There wasn’t anything too important. The shelves were mostly reference books and a couple assorted things (he had filed away a schedule for a train that went from St. Louis to Houston, Texas), but I did notice a door to his workshop. And with Felix busy fixing the town, I could figure out some more stuff about the guy down there. I pushed the door open quietly and hurried down the stairs.
The workshop had a total of four doors: A stairwell back up the lobby, a stairwell to the library, a stairwell I had just come from, and a locked and barred door of some sort. He actually kept very little down here aside from the shelves he apparently needed to line when I first stumbled down here with the Modifier. One thing I did notice was a set of probably a hundred papers hastily stapled together. A lot looked like it had been removed, changed around, or added, and the page numbers where nearly useless. I’m pretty sure it was just Felix’s documentation about the town. It was mostly typed, but there was a lot of stuff that had been crossed out with black marker, stuff added in with pencil or red pen (in a handwriting I would neither classify as very neat or very poor), and a few diagrams and charts drawn out in the margins. It was mostly technical stuff, nothing I could completely figure out.
On the other hand, there was a book on the table with a a symbol that appeared to be a square split into four small squares, with a C attached to it. It looked like the book I had at home for some reason; both locked and bound in dark leather. However, the symbol on the one I had looked… definitely different. The logo on mine was cryptic-looking, fractured, and ultimately wrong. The other thing I had noticed was a pamphlet for that database company I found online. Why would Felix have this? Maybe he hired them? I had no idea what was going on. I sifted through and still couldn’t find much else. As for the locked door, I couldn’t get that one to open. I had no way to easily open the lock, unless…
I rummaged through some boxes in hopes of finding a key, and eventually found a rusty keychain. I flipped through the keys, and after a few minutes, I finally heard a click and got the door to open. It was a fourth stairwell, dark and abandoned, that led further down beneath the capitol. I took out my phone and used the video camera flash to light a path into this new room. The room had long been abandoned, and contained relatively little. Hung up on a board were several pictures of some grim looking military base and a single clip from a newspaper from a long time ago, a brief mention that a young couple, Marie and Samuel, had died in a fatal collision in Boston. Why did Felix care about Boston if he lived in Oregon that long? And then I looked down and pieces started coming together.
On the ground was a photograph of a group of men from a computer company, taken sometime after 2000. There was a young boy, not even eighteen-looking yet, with blond hair and a white shirt with matching gloves on. He was just a cap and a vest away from being…
That was Felix. But why was he here with all of these other people? He looked like he was doing well enough here. Something else threw me off with this image. In the background was that symbol, the same one from Felix’s locked book. I looked around the room for anything else, but that seemed to be it. I headed back up, stuffing the old photo in my pocket. And that’s when I spotted that symbol again, this time on the pamphlet. So Felix worked for this database company, and ended up leaving them eventually, and this ties into Francisco’s research somehow. Felix clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, but he has a bunch of their stuff everywhere. I headed back up the stairs and sat in the Great Room for a moment.
Felix stepped into the room. “Alright, I found out what happened. Everything rolled back, and that was causing some instabilities. It also looks like someone else is on our network right now.”
“Like, they haven’t been paused?”
“No, they haven’t. I shut down the session, started it right back up, and patched it all again. It should be fine. Hopefully. I’ll quickly run a test session before I put it out.”
I didn’t mention to him what I had found about his work or anything. I could figure that out for myself as time passed. He returned to his computer, and suddenly it shifted from being midday to late in the evening. Felix clapped for himself. “It works!” He cried.
I didn’t quite know what he had done or how the time changing reflected any of this, but just had to accept that it worked. Before I knew it, it was Monday morning. The first thing I did was check my jacket. Sure enough, I still felt that familiar texture of Polaroid paper. However, I was frustrated to find that the image was that of Felix, at his current age, in front of the capitol in construction. I was certain the photo was something different prior. I groaned in exasperation and got ready for school.
There were two very important things I had to do at school today. The first was much less vital than the second. In our senior writing class, we have a week to write a short story. I already had a vague idea on what I’d do for that, but I don’t want to bring myself to write as much. I can’t really stand it. It’s just that I’d much rather have stuff to look at other than words on a screen. The second, more important, thing, was finding out who Felix really is. He clearly changed those files during the reset, but I didn’t know why.
I visited him at the capitol that afternoon to find him stocking the shelves of the library with new arrivals. I recognized a few of the names, but not necessarily any of the books. “Felix, I have a question.” I told him as I walked in.
“The answer is yes,” he said dutifully.
“What?” I asked.
“Yes, we do have new arrivals!”
“Wh—no, not that. It’s about Boston and some computer company.”
He gave me a blank look. “Allow me to elaborate,” I said, “you claim to be from out here in Oregon, but I found a bunch of information yesterday pointing to you working for some company in Boston back about 15 years ago. Care to explain?”
“Ash, I have no idea what you are talking about.”
“Don’t act dumb with me. I’ve seen the pictures.”
“Ash, I really have no idea what you are trying to say, honest.”
“Fine then. Do you have any concrete evidence of your past?”
“Of course,” he said, dropping the stack of books in his hands onto a table hastily.
He opened up his workshop and headed down the steps, and walked over to the barred door. He fit a key into the lock, turned, and pushed the bar open, and then unlocked a second lock behind that. The basement looked decidedly different. It was wood paneled, full of more workbenches and shelves. On the ground was a box full of books and photos. He picked up a Portland Elementary School 1993 yearbook and flipped to the fifth grade. Listed right at the top of the page was a young kid with blond hair, simply labeled Felix (he didn’t even have a last name). “Really?” I asked.
“Yep.”
He sifted through the box and found more yearbooks and photos. On one hand, they looked plausible. But on the other hand, I can’t help but feel that there is no way he couldn’t be making all this up. He has to have a last name, right? “So what’s up with the lack of a last name?”
“I never got to meet my parents. Spent most of my life in a foster home. And yeah, a bit of here or there contradicts itself, but the important thing to know is that regardless of my circumstance, here we are, in New Infinity. Any other questions?”
Well then. That was surprisingly up-front for someone who was previously so secretive. But part of me believed this was not the whole truth.
It couldn’t be the full truth.
ns 15.158.61.8da2
