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Previously published as: Hart, G. 2023. Two Truths and a Lie. Chapter 6 In: Let the Die Be Cast: a PsychoToxin Anthology. <www.PsychoToxin.com>
We’d brought the time traveler to us, Nat and I, because of the wide gap in our knowledge between the years when the world ended and the years when it was reborn. We called this gap “the Great Rupture”. We had some knowledge of the period leading up to that gap. Enough books and other artefacts remained that we knew most of the 21st century events that preceded the gap. What we didn’t have was clear knowledge of what people were doing and thinking when the Rupture happened—because, obviously, they had more important concerns than recording their thoughts in durable form, and whatever thoughts they may have recorded on their computers didn’t survive.
He wasn’t the first subject we’d brought forward, far from it, and he wouldn’t be the last. Understanding a whole society, composed of (inconceivable!) hundreds of millions of lives wasn’t something we could do with a single eyewitness, who could only stay with us a brief time. It would take hundreds at least, more probably thousands. We were well on our way towards “thousand”, but it was going to take some time to get there.
After locking onto his signature, the scanner had suggested he was a generic white Canadian male, and thus, a good candidate for our interview. Like all time travelers, he was clearly disoriented. One moment, he’d been living whatever passed for his life; the next moment, head reeling, he found himself standing naked and chilled in the arrival chamber. When he saw Nat, he made futile efforts to cover his genitals with his hands. That told us something about the mores of his time, confirming what previous subjects had taught us. In any event, it was cruel to keep him shivering there, so Nat handed him a thick, cushy robe, which he hastily wrapped around himself.
“Where am I?”
“We’ll explain that in a bit. First, though, we have some questions.”
“I hope I’ll have the answers.”
He staggered, and she caught his arm. After lots of practice, we knew what to expect from temporal transfers and had acquired considerable skill at avoiding accidents.
Nat led him to the interview room, by which time I’d left the control room, secured a pot of warm soma, three mugs, and a tray of biscuits. I was waiting when she sat him down on the far side of the table and came to sit beside me. I poured us both a mug of the warm, mildly intoxicating drink, sipped it appreciatively, then pushed the pot and mug across the table to where he could reach it. I resisted the urge to take a biscuit. They were very good biscuits, and I’d developed an unhealthy attraction to them.
“You are Michael Adams, of Montréal, Québec, and the year 2032?”
He blinked. “Yes.” He licked his lips and poured himself a drink. I pushed the tray of biscuits farther from me. He hesitated, but didn’t take one. “That’s a strange question to ask. Where am I?” Then his eyes widened. “When am I?”
Quick on the uptake, I noted on my implant.
“I apologize, but we can’t tell you that just yet. First, we have some questions for you.”
“This isn’t an alien abduction?” He shuddered. “No, you don’t look much like aliens.”
“We’re not.”
He sipped his drink, smiled at Nat, and took a larger swallow. “Another man might refuse to cooperate until his questions were answered. That man might even become quite irate at being denied those answers.”
I added a note on my implant. Smart and curious, but not aggressive about it. Well socialized.
Nat spoke while I noted. “Tell us about yourself. We want to learn more about you and your time.”
He’d gotten past his embarrassment well enough he looked her in the eye. “Okay. So there’s an ancient game called ‘two truths and a lie’. The basic notion’s that you tell the listener three things about yourself and ask them to decide which one is the lie. It works best if the lie is the most believable of the three tales, although you can only use that trick once or twice before the listener catches on. It’s a great way to get to know someone at a party.”
My implant suggested that a party was a social occasion enjoyed by his contemporaries.
“Go on.”
“Very well. Here are my two truths and a lie:” He smiled again at Nat, which was understandable. She was very attractive, and had been chosen for that characteristic, as well as for her intellect. I played her role for the female subjects, and we took turns for nonbinaries.
“First: I played a key role in the testing of an old design for a fire-suppression aircraft, the Canadair CL-215.”
My implant told me that was one of the first so-called “water bombers”, used to fight the wildfires that were becoming increasingly disastrous in frequency and severity during the subject’s time period. One of the leading theories was that the Rupture was a climate-based catastrophe. Archeological records supported that theory, but for obvious reasons, we were having trouble collecting first-hand evidence other than through these personal accounts. I nodded, indicating he should continue.
“Second, like any good Montreal boy, I loved hockey with a consuming passion. So much so, I came very close to playing for the Habs.”
My implant explained that this was the name of his local professional hockey team, back when people could still afford to play organized professional sports. I nodded.
“Third, I nearly became a research biologist before deciding books were more interesting. One factor in my decision was that I was nearly jailed by campus security because I asked them to help me retrieve a bomb.”
Alarmed, I consulted my implant. The readouts reassured me he was no danger, which should have been obvious; the room’s recording devices would have warned us had he been an immediate threat. Moreover, when the time beam locked onto a subject, we had a few moments to read their surface thoughts and cancel the transport if the subject seemed too alarming. Unfortunately, it really was only a few moments. If there’d been any way to read better and more deeply, it wouldn’t have been necessary to bring anyone forward to our time.
He sipped his drink. “Can you guess?”
Nat and I both shook our heads, carefully neutral to avoid biasing his statements.
“Okay, here’s the truth behind the stories, from least to most plausible.” He drained his mug, poured more soma, reached for a biscuit, then seemingly noting that we hadn’t taken one, withdrew his hand.
Appropriately cautious, I recorded.
“First, the bomb story. True! That was the summer I was working for the professor who would eventually become my thesis supervisor. We were measuring photosynthesis and water use in tree seedlings, which we were growing in a controlled-environment chamber in an old warehouse at the edge of the campus. I was using a device called a ‘pressure bomb’ to monitor how tightly water was held by the tissues of the plants that we were stressing to observe their responses to drought.
Drought, my implant reported, was becoming a major problem for already-stressed ecosystems at the time of the Rupture.
“Completely innocuous device, name notwithstanding. Basically, you excised a small branch from the tree, passed it through a rubber gasket that sealed the pressure chamber, then released gas from a cylinder of compressed air while watching the branch through a magnifying glass. When the pressure equaled the pressure at which the water was held by the tissues, water would begin to leak from the sample. You’d record the pressure, then release it and repeat the procedure for another sample. We did the measurements at intervals of an hour or two starting before sunrise and ending after sunset.
“Unfortunately, I’d drawn the short straw that week, and had to do these measurements before 6 AM on a Saturday morning. I lived on the far side of campus, and overslept. Thus, I was in such a hurry to not be late and earn my prof’s ire by missing a measurement that I forgot my lab key at home and couldn’t get the pressure bomb. So I ran over to campus security, which happened to be right across the street from the building where we were conducting our experiments, and begged their help.
“For what happened next, you have to understand that I was a fairly typical grad student. I had a full, ragged beard and hair down to my shoulders. Bags under my eyes from staying up too late studying. So when the guard on duty saw me, sweating hard and looking like Rasputin, the only word he heard was bomb”.
My implant explained that Rasputin had been a mad Russian monk.
“I eventually calmed him down enough to explain what I was seeking, and once he understood, he was willing to accept my story so long as my professor confirmed it. Everyone with a lab on campus was listed in the emergency contacts directory, so he was able to call my professor. Woken at 5 AM on a Saturday morning, Dr. Rodriguez was seriously thinking of letting me spend the weekend in jail, under suspicion of plotting terrorism. If I’m remembering correctly, her actual words were ‘lock the bastard up’. But science conquers all, and rather than risk losing a day of measurements, she confirmed my story. The rest is scientific history.”
My implant explained terrorism to me. Most historians didn’t believe that was what brought about the end, but our subject provided some evidence to support the terrorism hypothesis. He, at least, believed implicitly it was enough of a risk that university campuses had anti-terrorism police who also believed the threat was real. I noted that on my implant.
He sipped his drink, then reached for a biscuit before deciding against it. “Okay, now I’m lying. It was a minor datapoint in a minor study that didn’t change any biological paradigms.”
“Second, about my career as an aerospace researcher. True, albeit with a little white lie.”
White lies, my implant explained, were statements that were much more true than false, but that were not the whole truth. The concept was not unfamiliar in our line of work.
“I did, in fact, participate in testing the famous CL-215 waterbomber, but it wasn’t in anything like an official capacity. You see, I used to sail with a friend whose father was a test pilot at Canadair, and as part of the testing, he had to skim the surface of a large body of water at high speed, so the plane didn’t fall out of the air, and scoop up a load of water. To do this, he used our local lake, which was located about 5 minutes’ flight from the airbase where the plane was being developed and tested. Then he’d practice bombing a fire by dropping the water on some suitable target, such as a navigation buoy or one of the lake’s several uninhabited islands. One day, my friend and I were out sailing while he was practicing loading and unloading. When he recognized our boat, he chose us for his next target.
“Not, perhaps, the wisest choice, since a full load of water delivered from too low a height would hit like a freight train, whereas dropping it from too high would produce only a light mist not dense enough to extinguish a wildfire—or to really piss us off. A bit of a balancing act. Anyway, you know what test pilots are like. They make surgeons look humble. So he dropped a full load of water on us, and fortunately he neither dismasted the boat nor drowned either of us. He did, however, flood the boat to the gunwales. Took us a good hour to bail out enough water that we could start sailing again. Anyway, that successful test run of the airplane is now part of aviation history, even though my role in that history remains sadly unacknowledged until today.”
He sipped his soma, and for the first time, relaxed enough to sit back in his chair. “And the lie? That’s the hockey story. Like most boys in Montreal, I really was an obsessive hockey player when I was young, and dreamed of joining the Habs, who were then one of the best teams in the league. Not so much, these days. I mostly played defense, and I was a very good defenseman. More because of my size than because I had mad physical skills. But I could skate faster backwards than most of the other players could skate forward, and most importantly, I was smart and had a rare ability: I knew where most of the other players were on the ice at any given time. So rather than relying on spectacular skill to chase down whoever had the puck, I could move to the right position at the right time to disrupt an opponent’s play. But I played because I enjoyed the game, not because I was motivated to push my skills to a professional level or make a career of it. In some alternate universe, I pushed myself a lot harder and made it to the NHL. Sadly, that didn’t happen in this universe.”
My implant suggested that the NHL was an organized league for professional sports.
He hesitated, then took a biscuit, watching our eyes before he bit into it. He smiled engagingly and spoke around a mouthful. “Now tell me something about you.”
I looked at Nat, and she shrugged. “Very well,” she said. “Let’s play your game. First, you are not actually in the future and this is all an elaborate hoax.”
He laid the biscuit on the table, and pushed it and the soma away from him.
“Second, you really are in the future, and that’s all we’re going to tell you.”
He nodded, eyes narrowing.
“Third, you really are in the future, but only for a few moments before the chronal radiation that brought you here fades and you get returned home.”
He frowned. “I hope like hell the first one’s true.” He watched our faces carefully. “Okay, it’s the first one!”
I added a note on my implant. Smart, but too trusting. No reason to believe we were restricting ourselves to one lie. We watched as a look of surprise spread across his face, turning into a rictus as the chronal radiation consumed him, fast enough he had no time to shriek but slow enough he was clearly thinking about doing so. I was always grateful for that speed; it would have been much harder if the subjects suffered significantly. It was also convenient that the consumption left no residues, which would have made the experience much less pleasant for Nat and me.
“Good subject,” Nat observed.
“Very good. Lots of things we can infer from his responses.”
“Woman next?”
I nodded, and went to the transport room to fetch our next subject.
It’s all true, except for the parts that are lies.
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