10. Like at Least High School, My Dear Watson

Mateo lay in his cell and tried to triangulate, or at least figure out something about this place. Or time, whatever. Thanks for the tip, Avi, times and places are basically the same difference, right? He was fairly sure he’d been here about a month, but his sense of time was pretty borked. Even aside from not knowing what century he was in. Jetlagged, too, maybe.

He knew he should be sleeping — Monocle Weirdo was apparently related to the Energizer Bunny and worked like sixteen-hour days and didn’t much care if it was snoozing time for regular freaking human beings — but not knowing WHY this whole country had basically dogpiled him on sight was driving him crazy. What had happened to England (assuming it was England) between 2005 and now? Peak oil? Didn’t explain the classic cars. Weird retro cult? That fit with the Murder Amish. And what was up with this Jerry guy?

The food sucked and there wasn’t enough of it, but it wasn’t like the half a bowl of gruel or whatever that you expected in some Dickens-ass dystopia. He wasn’t starving or anything. He got a cold on day one and it hadn’t gone away, but that made sense — he probably wasn’t immune to anything here. He was just lucky he didn’t land in the middle of a real plague.

They seemed to know what was going on and assume he did too. It would be great if he could just chat with someone, but no dice on that one, it was just him, the silent sneaker-soldiers, Monocle Man, the note takers, and a totally unused Good Cop.

Monocle Man pretty clearly hated his guts, too.

...which was weird. They all apparently thought — from the Murder Amish to the pros — that he was some kind of public enemy no. 1, and they didn’t have a problem with hauling a guy off to jail without even telling him what was what, but it was all ... weirdly G-rated. Like Monocle Man was a bad guy in a kids’ cartoon who wouldn’t scare the kiddos too much by doing anything too hardcore.

The whole thing felt ... fake. Like a movie set. Like they couldn’t even afford boots for the extras playing the soldiers and expected anybody to buy that they had a whole-ass mansion with a cell in it for one guy. And had a boss who dressed like a reject from the set of the first Star Wars movie. Like, a MONOCLE. And freaking old-timey horse riding pants. They were trying to pull something and he wanted to know what it was.

After all, they were definitely trying to mess with him, but that didn’t tell him how much was really fake. Maybe it was just that a different time always felt fake if you got dropped into it. Maybe he was just telling himself it felt fake and he would be ok so he wouldn’t freak out.

They made a big show of him being a bad guy who knew something important, but nobody had even shoved him, let alone beat him up. If they really thought he knew how a cell phone worked, they — not complaining, he added hastily to any Fates that were listening in — basically just asked him stuff and took notes. Which yeah right. This was a national security deal, apparently, not a bunch of teachers trying to figure out who graffitied the bathroom. You’d think if you hacked people off in some retro future dystopia, they’d feed you to the mutant hell-beasts or make you break rocks in the moon mines or whatever.

The door creaked. Oh great. Time to tell them again for hours that he had no idea how an Mp3 player worked and he was just a really lost tourist. Well, that part was true. He stood up.

Next