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Kevin Wentworth’s fist crashed into Sam’s jaw with such force that the wood on the McBain’s gazebo gave way under his weight and he tumbled to the ground, pain shooting up his spine as he landed heavily on his back. His head spun and Al’s voice shouted out from where the Observer still stood, watching in anger and disbelief.
“Sam, get up!”
“You think what I did to you before was rape?” Kevin asked as he came to loom over Sam. “Wait until you see what I do to you now!” He unbuckled his belt, the buckle chiming against the fly, and something like a camera flash went off in Sam’s head, a memory pushing its way to the forefront.
Some college frat house at one of the universities Sam attended, not MIT but a smaller school, a jumping-off place for one of his degrees. Barely 18, he’d gone to a party out of sheer curiosity, where he’d been handed a drink in a red plastic cup. After that, time became unimportant and he remembered a coaxing voice and being pressed down against a mattress face first, hands tugging his jeans and boxers down, that same metallic noise as someone unbuckled their belt and the buckle rang against a bedpost. Someone—an older student, maybe a campus security guard—Sam couldn’t remember who—came into the room and prevented the rape, and at that moment, past and future blended together and all of Sam’s anger and shame over the memory came to the surface.
“No!” He shouted, pistoning his feet outward and catching Kevin in the groin. He doubled over in agony and Sam got to his feet to pull him upright, punching him in the jaw with a left-right combo. He saw Al watching out of the corner of his eye but his friend didn’t speak; instead, he watched with what looked to Sam like approval. Encouraged, Sam struck Kevin again.
“Never again, do you hear me? Not me, not anyone else!” Sam punctuated the final word with a roundhouse that knocked Kevin off his feet and into the bushes, where he sprawled, unconscious. Ziggy gave a squawk and Al glanced down at the readout.
“You changed history, Sam! This nozzle doesn’t get away with trying again and gets five years for sexual assault! He goes to prison instead of Yale and Katie doesn’t leave town! She even starts a group to help rape victims and becomes a therapist herself! Sam, you did it!”
Sam looked up from the supine figure in the bushes as snatches of his own near-rape came back to him. The body pressing against him, the helpless feeling of being drugged, and the gruff, angry whipcrack of a voice that had interrupted Sam’s assailant.
“Hey! Get offa him, you nozzle, or I’ll rip you apart!”
Sam blinked.
“Al, I remember—”
The words become thin and meaningless and the memory he grasped for fell away as a white-blue light filled his vision. Sam Leaped away to another time, another place, another someone who needed his help. In the imaging chamber, Al watched the past fade away. He knew Sam would likely lose that memory again, but the Observer held it close to his heart. As the imaging door opened and let Al out into his own present, Ziggy spoke all around him.
“That was admirable, Admiral. You could have told Dr. Beckett the story of how you truly met.”
Al shook his head.
“The vending machine tale is much more colorful. Besides, Zigg, as long as one of us remembers, well . . . that’s the important thing.”
The super-computer sighed to herself as Al left the room, puzzling, as she always did, over the lies humans told themselves and the pain they were willing to feel to bear them.
THE END