The Dispossession of Dylan Knox

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At first, Brooke suspected a trick. Within a day, she would wonder if her memory was starting to betray her. A week later, she would doubt her own sanity. And soon, she would come to question the sanity of the very universe itself.

Yet it all began so simply.

“Good Lord! Dylan Knox! I can’t believe it.”

“Have we ... met before?” His hand extended awkwardly in mid-air as her arms reached out for an embrace. She quickly drew them back to her side and tried to cover her discomfort with a laugh.

“Have we met? Dylan, it’s Brooke Chappelle ... from Larkmont High? I haven’t changed that much.”

His face remained blank.

Time lurched: a crystal-perfect memory overlaid with a jarring facade of present day that refused to fit.

She stared at him. “You really don’t remember? You went to Larkmont High School, right?”

“Yes.”

“We ... dated ... for quite a while.”

Dylan looked disconcerted, and there was something furtive in his eyes—it wasn’t recognition.

“I’m really sorry, but I honestly don’t remember you. It’s very nice to meet ... uh, to see you again, though. I ... hope our little factory has made an impression.” He was trying to change the subject gracefully, and she went along.

“Yes, absolutely. And the secretary-general is a big fan of space exploration—solar-power generation in particular. He’ll be thrilled to see all this. I hope you’ll be on hand next week because he’ll have lots of questions about your project.”

“That’s what I’m here for.” The restraint in his smile made her blink hard and turn away. As a trace of his scent caught her nostrils, her mind flashed with a memory of lips against lips, a warm palm on her breast, fingers trailing under the back waistband of her McGuire denims.

God, he couldn’t possibly fail to see her shiver and the flush on her face. How could she end this?

Hatfield and Brown were approaching, conspicuous in blue security-uniform suits. UN Public Affairs liaison Patrice Grayson was with them. This tour of Draconis Space Ventures was Brooke’s first time leading an advance party for an event on the West Coast, and Patrice had graciously offered to assist.

Brooke performed introductions, adding, “Dylan and I ... once knew each other.”

Dylan gave a stiff nod and Brooke caught a questioning look from Patrice as they all shook hands. He remained scrupulously professional but carefully detached as he described a few more details about the Draconis operation that their previous guide had glossed over. When the tour finally concluded, Brooke felt both relief and disappointment.

She didn’t get the chance to explain to Patrice until hours later in the hotel bar over pre-dinner drinks.

“He didn’t remember me at all,” Brooke said softly. “He wasn’t faking it.”

“Was he your first?” Patrice asked.

“No. No! In fact, we never did have s*x all the way. I was sure we would after the prom, but a friend of ours got so pissed we had to take him to the hospital. That kind of killed the mood.” She laughed. “But it was ... serious, you know? At least, to me. Except after the prom I guess life just got in the way. My parents took me to visit Mom’s family in New Orleans for the summer and Dylan’s English father helped get him into aerospace engineering at Cambridge. That was pretty much it. We emailed and Skyped for a while, but by the time work brought him back to the States years later, we’d completely lost touch.”

“Hard to keep a long-distance relationship going, even as an adult.” Patrice nodded. “With all the temptations of first year at university, it’s probably hopeless. I remember those days.” She raised her apple martini and Brooke did the same with her gin fizz.

“Life’s a b***h,” she said, staring hard at the bubbles. In her mind was a page of calculus homework, the margins embroidered with scribbled variations of her name entwined with Dylan’s: Brooke Knox and Brooke Chappelle Knox.

She’d been looking forward to the trip to California. Late May weather in New York had offered little more than cold drizzle with a strong wind up the Hudson that had forced her moto jacket back into her closet. Makeup was nearly pointless in the wet cold, and spray from passing traffic flattened her hair like grocery flyers in a puddle. West coast sunshine would be such a relief.

Was the promise of sunshine what had given the secretary-general of the United Nations the urge to visit California? Niels Van Valkenburg was a cold fish—she couldn’t picture him on a beach. Maybe it was all about California’s governor personally taking him on a Hollywood tour. She was glad that her boss, Raimunda Devlin, Van Valkenburg’s executive assistant, had chosen to look after those arrangements herself. Brooke would have enough on her hands to corral the media and keep things moving smoothly during the secretary-general’s later visit to Draconis, the rocket-manufacturing facility. She knew squat about rockets, but she’d done the research she’d thought the junket required. None of it had warned her that the Mission Manager of Draconis’s Solaria energy project was Dylan Knox.

She was glad that this had only been an advance trip in preparation for the SG’s actual in-person visit. Her encounter with Dylan would have been far more embarrassing if the Big Boss had been present to witness it.

Lying in bed with a serious Beefeater buzz, Brooke tried deliberately to relive moments with the Dylan of Larkmont High. She couldn’t—linear recall was completely elusive. Even an attempt to picture him in his favorite places—the soccer pitch, the swimming pool—failed miserably. A smell or a texture could summon memory images so vivid the real world paled in comparison, but sensory images weren’t available at will.

What did that say about memory, about consciousness, about time?

Was it true that time was an ever-present continuum—that the direction humans perceived, from past toward future, was only illusion?

Was there a world where Dylan Knox and Brooke Chappelle were still together, forever?

How much would she have to drink to get there?

Brooke awakened the next morning with a mild hangover of gin and regrets. The advance assessment phase of her task was done, and today she would head back to New York.

But Dylan’s face was still in her mind. She’d once known that face better than her own, and sixteen years later he’d hardly changed at all: hair so blond it was almost silver, and a tiny pucker of scar to the right of his mouth like a permanent dimple. She’d kissed that scar more than a few times.

Her mind could never have forgotten those things—images of such intensity that her very brain cells had formed around them like pearls around grains of gold. How could they not be the same for Dylan?

She couldn’t be that forgettable, could she?

It was as if the adolescent Dylan she had known was utterly gone, replaced by an adult Dylan who was someone else entirely. What could produce such complete transformation? Some terrible trauma? A medical condition? She’d heard of extreme personality changes triggered by brain tumors and other injuries.

Or was it possible that he’d only been pretending not to know her? If so, the confusion and discomfort she’d read on his face had been the work of a consummate actor.

What conceivable reason could he have for such a deception? Had his feelings for her grown so bitter that he would try any ruse to prevent her re-entering his life? Or did he have some secret agenda that could be put at risk by someone from his past?

She snorted softly. That was the stuff of spy novels!

Yet, as her first coffee of the day seeped into her synapses tugging them alert, she played with the idea, more seriously:

What if he wasn’t the Dylan Knox she knew? What if his memories had deliberately been altered. Or….

What if the Dylan Knox at Draconis was an impostor?

They’d spoken for less than five minutes. Maybe any good actor could impersonate someone for that long. It happened in the movies.

No, that was ridiculous.

Wasn’t it?

Surely not even the most confident of impostors would try to fool a former lover.

There’d been just the slightest trace of a British softness to his r’s and o’s and a crispness to his t’s. Less than she remembered, though that was understandable after an extra decade in the US. On the other hand, an accent made a person easier to imitate—it drew attention away from other characteristics.

But he’d smelled the same, hadn’t he? Or was that a trick of the mind? As scents so potently triggered memories, could a memory trigger a scent?

What possible motive could there be to impersonate him?

She’d kept tabs on Dylan through other classmates long enough to know about his engineering degrees. A job at Draconis would make perfect sense. Could an imposter have replaced him sometime afterward? For what purpose? Draconis Space Ventures built spacecraft under government and private contracts, but she didn’t know if it did other government work that might involve secrets worth stealing.

God knew, world tensions were high. Global politics was rife with flashpoints—most often disputed territory containing oil reserves. There was talk of a critical top-level summit being negotiated to take place in China within the year. Brook hoped to be there—the secretary-general certainly would be.

Corporate espionage was a possibility. Or an effort by some foreign country to discredit private American space interests.

Soon she’d be imagining Dylan with a vodka martini in his hand—shaken, not stirred.

The Solaria mission to launch big solar collectors into space and beam energy back to Earth didn’t seem the stuff of international intrigue.

Unless it was a sinister plot to create the ultimate space weapon.

She giggled out loud at that one. Then the giggle turned into a fit of laughter that swept away the worst of her hurt long enough for her to pack and catch her flight back to New York.

Perhaps it was the rain and soot that made her fears return. New York was a city of unflinching reality—it forced a person to confront truth.

The idea that an impostor would replace Dylan Knox for some kind of espionage was pure fancy, but the encounter with Brooke still might not have been coincidence.

She’d been there because of an upcoming visit by the secretary-general of the United Nations.

Maybe Dylan was, too.

That painted a whole different picture—one she could no longer ignore: an infiltrator at Draconis timed for the secretary-general’s tour. She’d have to report the possibility to Ron Hatfield in Security, but she wanted a lot more to go on before taking a step like that.

Jet lag had begun to hit as her cab wound its way through Queens and dropped her off in front of the modest brick house where her basement apartment awaited. It wasn’t fancy, but a couple of years of putting her stamp on it had made it feel like home, and the neighborhood was pretty quiet. After a quick trip to the Starbucks on the next block, she forced herself to unpack her bags then swapped her office pants for some grey leggings and slouched in her Ikea chair with her laptop.

Two hours of Google searching turned up a lot about Dylan Knox, none of it incriminating. The online trail left by her old flame was blandly innocent.

That didn’t mean a lot. Brooke knew that despite what most people thought, information on the internet didn’t all stay there forever. Servers were replaced and unimportant data left uncopied. URLs were abandoned and links broken. Trivial electronic traffic that ranged from weird “sexts” to “pick up some milk and eggs” messages flowed like silt in the Hudson River, but were filtered out within months, not worth long-term server space. Sometimes, specialized software could still find digital crumbs that fell by the wayside—people like her friend Ricardo trawled for that kind of thing out of boredom—but regular browsers and search engines were blind to them.

Dylan’s social media presence was almost non-existent: a few shares and retweets that were the stuff of millions of other users, but only the occasional personal item. The accounts of his friends offered more. A handful of old fraternity photos showed Dylan with a woman named Amanda during his last years at university—Brooke had known about that.

She hadn’t known about his fiancée, Rose Leforge, a pretty girl with a quintessential English complexion. Her throat tightened as she read.

The engagement announcement and Rose’s obituary were both online, along with some media reports about the boating accident that took her life two months before the wedding. The families had saved those to archives in the cloud.

It was after Rose’s death that Dylan had begun to look for work in the States; but if it was an attempt to escape the past, he hadn’t escaped in time to avoid the destruction of his parents’ marriage.

Brooke had fond memories of Dylan’s parents, Arthur Penfield Knox and Deirdre Patton Knox. In the eyes of an impressionable teenage girl, Arthur’s ties to the British diplomatic service had evoked an aura of sophistication, though his work was probably the kind of dull, bureaucratic stuff she now saw every day at the UN.

Dylan’s mother, Deirdre, had been a moderately successful actress and had the looks for it, with a presence that dominated any room and an artless grace that had made Brooke feel like an ox. Perhaps it was inevitable that such a woman would eventually yield to the relentless attentions of other men.

Or maybe Arthur had cheated first—both claimed to be the victim in the court transcripts of the divorce. Most hurtful was the fact that Arthur had facilitated his affair with the use of Dylan’s apartment and car. Dylan had denied any knowledge of that, but it was clear that his mother had never believed him. If that hadn’t been enough reason for him to leave the UK, the tabloid attention the divorce drama attracted had cost Dylan a high-profile job as the engineering spokesman for an aerospace firm.

He’d eventually landed at CruSys Corp., a small aerospace player in New Jersey, and alleviated his restlessness for a while by joining the staff of a tech blog, writing about engineering subjects. He wrote well—Brooke thought he might have made a career of it—but after three years in Jersey, he’d been lured to the west coast by Draconis.

None of this knowledge was helping Brooke to decide whether to mention Dylan to UN Security. By one o’clock in the morning, caffeine from her Starbucks run and several cups from the Keurig had left her with the jitters and she needed an antidote of mellow. Sipping a glass of merlot, she put her feet up again and closed her eyes to think.

One thing about Dylan’s social media activity was unquestionably odd. What little there was had come to a complete halt about eight months ago.

Maybe that was when he’d been promoted. Mission manager of a whole space project had to mean an awful lot of early mornings, late nights, and pizza-and-PowerPoint weekends.

She shut down the laptop and shuffled to bed without even brushing her teeth. Her last waking thought was a scanned newsprint photo of an engagement announcement.