Chapter Ten

Riley was charged for the murder of Roe Bernard. When the detectives saw that Bernard was killed in the same way as Raphael Connell was, they charged Riley with Connell’s murder, too. Riley was defenseless; no lawyer took his case. Veronica Aster came to see him in prison, the day before his pointless trial. “Riley?” she said on entering his dim cell. “Riley, it’s me. I know you didn’t kill those men, Riley. I know who did it.”

Riley looked up at her. His eyes were bloodshot with confusion and his hair was unkempt. “Veronica,” he said, using her first name, “that’s hopeless.”

“Where is the Variance?” she asked. He shushed her.

“Don’t say that name so loudly. They’ll hear,” he said. There was a pause. “I killed it, Veronica,” he said, tears brimming in his red eyes. “Humanity isn’t ready. Before Mr. Bernard died he told me about how they were going to study it. It was horrible, Veronica. Things you wouldn’t wish on anyone.”

“Well, we can still tell the story, even if we don’t have evidence.”

“Don’t,” Riley said. “I thought about that, too. They’d think we’re insane. No; you live your life out as you are. Don’t let the asylum take you up, that wouldn’t do. Even Mr. Bernard said you were intelligent. Don’t let them think you’re insane.”

“Then what are we going to do?” she asked, showing vulnerability for the first time he’d known her.

“I’m going to stand up in that courtroom,” Riley said, staring listlessly into the air in front of him, “and plead guilty. And I’ll go to jail.”

“You’ll commit perjury when they ask you if you killed Connell and Bernard?”

“Why not?” Riley asked, looking up at her. “I’m a killer already.”

“You didn’t kill those men. You’re innocent.”

Riley buried his head in his hands. “No,” he said. “I am guilty of a murder. I have killed.”

She left soon afterward with a plane ticket to Japan. His family couldn’t afford to bail him out, so he did just as he planned. “Riley James Pennock,” said the judge, “what do you plead?”

“Guilty, your honor,” he replied evenly.

And the gavel came down on his sentence; a lifetime in jail for the violent assassinations of NASA officials Raphael Connell and Roe Bernard. His face and his story were plastered on every news webpage in the country, and he was added to the long list of public enemies, et cetera.

He lived out his days in the jail. The prison guards always found him to be polite and cooperative, if melancholy. The prison chaplain found him to be at great peace with himself. At first, his family visited him from time to time, but over the years he became ‘the brother they didn’t talk about.’ Marc climbed NASA’s employment ladder and, despite his brother’s crimes, sat at the top for twenty years. Genna did marry Greg, and they had three children after the couple moved to Missouri. The children hardly knew they had an uncle Riley. Riley’s parents lived out their days in another state, because they wanted to get away from the memories of their murdering youngest son.

Riley died at ninety-six years old, but before he died he wrote a letter to his youngest niece, addressed simply, ‘to the future.’ He put it in a tiny time-lock box; set the lock for fifty years. He placed that box in another one, and that box in another one, and so and so on, until his timed years reached 1,000 at twenty boxes. He spent years building a mechanism that would rig the time-locks to open consecutively. In his will, he ordered the box sent to his youngest niece, with instructions as to preserving the package and passing it down through generations.

Confused, she passed the box down to her youngest child, if only to honor her crazy uncle’s memory. He passed it down to his youngest, and by then it was tradition. It went on like that for fifty generations, more or less. Over time, some of the locks clicked open and the outer boxes were removed.

One thousand years later, the tiniest and innermost box, along with four of the others, was on display in a museum in New Dallas, Puerto Rico, one of the United States’ most thriving cities. A little girl was reading the computer display on the ancient metal box and its hypothesized origins when she heard a small ‘click.’ She looked up at the box; it was laying open, which it hadn’t been before.

Quick, as everything was in those days, the coordinators were summoned and they looked at the box. They sent it up to the research wing of the museum, where the contents of the box were carefully examined.

“I can’t believe it,” said one young, eager researcher. “This is incredible. It’s paper. And it looks hand written!”

“It does,” agreed his coworker. “Let’s see if we can get a translator in here. It doesn’t look like it’s in Basic English. This is a thousand-year-old manuscript.”

The translator arrived and he read the paper.

“ ‘To the future,’ it reads, ‘My name is Riley Pennock, and I was eighty-four years old exactly one thousand years ago. I placed this letter in boxes so that only people of your time could read it. I have something of utmost importance to tell you…’”

The End