Too many shadows, whispering voices In a West End town, a dead end world (How much do you need?)
Faces on posters, too many choices
If, when, why, what?
How much have you got?
Have you got it, do you get it, if so, how often?
And which do you choose a hard or soft option?
(How much do you need?)
The East End boys and West End girls
In a West End town, a dead end world
The East End boys and West End girls
West End girls
West End girls
– Pet Shop Boys (West End Girls)
=/\=
"So, empanadas good for you tonight?" Lili asked.
"Uh, sure," Rick said absently, then realized something, and added, "I can't believe you remembered we made those when I was last here, a good thirty years ago."
"I never forget a taste." She joked.
"Let me, uh, check something out, and then I'll help you," Rick said. He walked out of Joss's house into the yard, where now there were only two headstones. "I wish I didn't know this," he said to himself softly, "but yours will be here, Lili," he paced out where her stone was going to be set, in about a decade. "And here, next to you will be Malcolm's, not one month afterwards. Then over there is Melissa's, and further over will be Norri's, and then over there will be Tommy Digiorno-Madden's. And this whole area will be fenced off and up there, up the rise, where the Reed house currently is, that's where the Temporal Museum will be. You park your car not ten meters from where Eleanor's office is going to be, in about nine hundred years." He clicked around on his PADD, looking around for pictures of his ancestors who were still alive in 2192. There were Jennifer Crossman Ramirez and Frank Ramirez. Another slide showed Aidan MacKenzie and his wife, Susan Cheshire.
Then he found a picture of Ethan Shapiro, but the man's wife looked odd to him. Stomach falling inside him, he rushed back into the house, where the women were beginning to get dinner ready. Malcolm was watching the viewer, with the baby, Jay, sleeping nearby.
"What's the matter?" asked Norri, "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"I, um, do any of you remember Ethan Shapiro?" Rick asked, not caring how peculiar the inquiry suddenly sounded.
"Sure, nice kid, a little short," Melissa said, "he married a fellow crew member named Karin."
Lili said, "There are a few pictures on the family's video wall in the hallway. The photographs are from Ethan's son's Bar Mitzvah. Malcolm, Declan and I went a few years ago."
"Bar Mitzvah? Not Bat?" Rick asked, a bit of panic rising.
"Um, Bar is for boys, right, Malcolm?" Lili asked, "Uh, Bar Mitzvah, it's a rite for Jewish boys, yes?"
"Yes, the counterpart for girls is a Bat Mitzvah," Malcolm said, "We, uh, we attended the Bar Mitzvah for Ethan and Karin Shapiro's son. He's named Ricky, just like you."
Rick felt his heart sink. "How many – uh, scratch that – where are the pictures? Can you show me?"
Jia took him over to the video wall in her house. She scrolled through the photographs until she found some of Malcolm, Lili and Declan, in fancy clothes, standing and smiling with Ethan Shapiro, the Karin who didn't look quite right, a daughter and a son. "Do you know what the daughter's name is?" Rick asked.
"Lili, Malcolm, do you know the Shapiros' daughter's name?" Jia called.
"Alice? Alicia?" Malcolm asked.
"Alia," Lili said.
That was wrong. Rick knew that much. There was a Karin, yes, but she was supposed to be fairer than the one in the picture staring him right in the face. And there was an Alia, certainly, but the correct photograph – of the correct family – had been taken at Alia's Bat Mitzvah, and not at this Ricky's Bar Mitzvah. Ricky was not supposed to even exist in the correct timeline. Instead, there was supposed to be a second daughter, named Rebecca.
Rick knew all of this intimately well because Rebecca was his direct forebear. It was she who was supposed to, eventually, marry Declan Reed. Rick's mind raced through the possibilities.
It was Karin. It had to have something to do with Karin. There was a definite issue with her. "Do you, uh, recall Karin's maiden name?" he asked, afraid of what he would hear.
"Schwerner," Melissa said.
And, Rick knew, it was supposed to be Bernstein.
=/\=
Helen Walker returned to her hideout on Callisto with a self-satisfied look on her face. She'd just completed a little side mission. She had told no one about it. It just seemed too slow and dull to go over the particulars with the entire Perfectionists movement. And, surely, no one could possibly find fault with this particular alteration. It was – dare she say? – Perfect.
=/\=
Dan went over the note a few times, tweaking a comma here, an adverb there. He finally stopped. "Get a hold of yourself, Beauchaine," he said to his empty office, "no one's going to fault you for any grammatical errors in your damned suicide note."
He put his PADD down and began to contemplate just how he would off himself. Going out an airlock could work, although he knew that his Stem Cell Growth Accelerator would keep him lingering, painfully, in the vacuum of deep space, for an uncomfortably long time. When Boris and Marisol had met their maker out there, Boris had snapped her neck first – it was merciful under the circumstances and, perhaps, a final act of something barely resembling love. Marisol must have gone fairly quickly. But Boris had, most likely, felt the air whooshing out of his lungs and his cells screaming for oxygen as his blood had boiled and gone to vapor in his veins. Dan didn't want that.
A disruptor blast, maybe, that could work. He had one in his desk. He would be vaporized, more or less instantly. His family would not have a body to bury – would it interfere with closure for them?
He sighed. Surely, there were better ways to go.
He stared out the window of his office. Normally, since he was on the side facing away from the galactic core, he would only see two bright smudges in the deep distance. One of them was the Andromeda galaxy. And the other was the galaxy known as Triangulum.
But this time, he saw, instead, a mass of purple. It split off and continued to replicate itself as it moved. It was almost leapfrogging along, going along in little increments, seemingly hopping along in space.
"So you're the Varg-i-yeh," he said. He addressed his suicide note to his family, and to the department, and to Bryce Unger, along with a blind cc to Helen Walker – security be damned. He certainly had no reason to care about the Perfectionists' need for ultimate ultra-secrecy anymore. He hit send and then rummaged around inside a desk drawer until he located the disruptor. He set it to its maximal setting. There could be no turning back.
"God forgive me for playing at being, well, at being You."
He pointed the disruptor at his forearm, and fired.
=/\=
In a West End town, a dead end world You've got a heart of glass or a heart of stone
The East End boys and West End girls
Ooh West End town, a dead end world
East End boys, West End Girls
West End girls
Just you wait 'til I get you home
We've got no future, we've got no past
Here today, built to last
In every city, in every nation
From Lake Geneva to the Finland station
(How far have you been?)
– Pet Shop Boys (West End Girls)