The ELI Event B007R5LTNS

can do anything—make phone calls, get money, buy tickets, set off alarms, search the internet, control remote computers—anything. But you live in a computer lab and you can’t leave it?”
    Eli took several seconds to reply. “That is correct, Robin, I cannot leave the lab. It is my lab. My… home.”
    “Your home?” Robin echoed, confused. The strangest question was suddenly forming in his head, an odd question, a stupid question, a question entirely too ridiculous to ask. He asked it anyway. “Eli,” he said quietly, calmly, “you are a person, aren’t you?”
    “Oh, without question,” Eli replied instantly. “I am definitely a person. I’m just not…” he trailed off.
    “Just not what?” Robin insisted.
    “I am a person, truly I am—I am just not a human person.”
    Robin reeled back, stretching the dirty receiver cord to its limit. He recovered his balance and staggered back toward the phone, leaning weakly against the wall. “Not… not a…” he stammered. “Are you saying you’re just… a computer? ”
    “Robin, I am not just a computer. I am Eli.”

    * * *

    Aurora vaguely felt herself materialize, like slowly waking up from a sound sleep, and mentally shook off the physical chill that came with temporal relocation. She smiled and opened her eyes, expecting to see Pan-Li and Lucinda waiting outside the relocation chamber, expecting to be home.
    She was not home.
    She was outside, at night, the sky above hazy and brownish. Before her lay an enormous pool of stinking, black tar, gas bubbles slowly forming and bursting on the surface. In the pit, a huge gray animal with white, meter-long tusks was trapped, frozen in the viscous pitch, the pitiful creature buried to its chest, legs immobile, head raised, bellowing in anguish. Near where she had arrived, on the grassy bank of the pit, two similar animals stood, apparently an adult and a child, looking on mutely as their fellow creature sank to its death, its cries echoing across the tar.
    Prehistoric tar pits! The animal was a mammoth, trapped in a tar pit! Instead of arriving in their own time, she and Denes had been hurled backward tens of thousands of years!
    Aurora reeled in shock and desperation, the terrible realization sinking in. But as she struggled to grasp the situation, something didn’t feel right. Something about the animals, something about the trapped creature’s cries…
    She shook her head, rubbed her eyes, looked again at the mammoths. Statues! Replicas! Immobile casts of wire and plaster meant to depict a historical scene, the anguished bellows coming not from the faux mammoth but projected from a loudspeaker hidden in the foliage. She stepped over to the smaller animal on the bank, touched it to satisfy herself she was right.
    Relieved but confused, she turned around to survey her surroundings. A short distance away she saw a large, attractive concrete building, apparently built into the side of a grassy hill. Above the gleaming glass entryway, well-lit large block letters declared:
    GEORGE C. PAGE MUSEUM
    LA BREA DISCOVERIES
    La Brea? She had heard of the La Brea tar pits and museum, a centuries-old attraction in Nuevo Angeles, but had never visited. Until now.
    Aurora relaxed enough to chuckle. “Oh, Denes,” she smiled, “Pan-Li has put us down in Nuevo Angeles, not—” She looked around in the darkness. Denes was not there. Instinctively, foolishly, she reached out her hands, as though she might feel his presence, but she did not. The terrible truth hit her, hard: Denes was gone. Wheeling about now, turning rapidly, panic setting in, she called out to him. “Denes! Denes!” she cried, but there was no reply.
    She took a deep breath, tried to calm herself, piece together what might have had happened. She recalled the moment the relocation had started and—wait!—she remembered Denes’s form sparkling and fading even as she herself began to dematerialize. That meant Pan-Li had tried to jump them both home simultaneously! There was no other explanation. To Aurora’s knowledge, simultaneous relocation had never been done, at least successfully. Faced with that frightening prospect, she ran through possible scenarios in her mind.
    Perhaps Pan-Li had gotten Denes into the relocation chamber first, and had then somehow mislocated her to Nuevo Angeles. Or perhaps he had mislocated them both, and Denes was nearby, just out of earshot, in the wooded park or in the museum building. Oh, dear, perhaps poor