by Scott Baker
Shaun smiled and kissed her again. After the longest time, he spoke. ‘I don’t know what happens now. I don’t know after this … but God, I missed you.’
‘I had no idea,’ Giovanni interrupted, looking back into the world beyond the doors. ‘None. I mean, I knew so many of the components, but this, this is … a miracle! Look, over there,’ he pointed. ‘There is grass growing. And there – so many buildings!’
‘Don’t get too close,’ Shaun warned, keeping his friend back from the doors. ‘In about five minutes I get trapped on that central dais and all hell breaks loose. Those quiet buildings and some of the passages around these railings are filled with guards.’
For minutes they watched David and Shaun explore The Facility. Shaun winced as he saw himself ascend the stairs to the central platform. Around and around he went, higher and higher, and all the while the two men spoke about relativity and worm holes. Shaun wanted more than anything to scream out, to warn himself that it was all a giant, waiting trap.
But he did not. He could not. He dared not.
He just watched in silent agony as he saw himself reach the top and walk out onto that ominous round platform.
What was it that his nagging brain was trying to say? What was he supposed to do? Slowly his eyes drifted upwards to the observation deck, hanging imposingly out from one of the far walls, as if to remind everyone that they were being watched. Shaun knew now that they were being watched.
‘WELCOME, DR BLACK,’ came the voice. Lauren jumped when she heard it.
‘What the?’
The screen that David had been poking around on now flashed and sprang to life.
‘David, what did you do?’ Shaun heard himself ask in his school-teacher tone. Did he really sound like that?
‘Nothing, I didn’t do anything!’ David said defensively, but a low whirring had begun.
‘SEQUENCE INITIATED,’ the voice spoke again.
‘David!’ Previous Shaun, red-time Shaun, called down. ‘What’s happening on that screen?’
Lauren hugged her husband tightly.
Shaun watched quietly, accepting.
Giovanni looked on in stunned silence.
David looked down at the screen to see a multitude of figures and graphics flashing by. Then, the beeps started.
‘Ah … I, um, I just touched the screen,’ David said, starting to panic as the lighting in the room suddenly changed from blue to red.
‘Shit! What’s happening?’ Shaun said as a low hum began in the arches above his head.
‘COORDINATES CONFIRMED. SECONDARY CONFIRMATION AUTHORISED,’ the woman’s voice spoke again.
Shaun looked up at the observation deck and this time he saw movement. Secondary confirmation authorised. This was no accident. You bastard! Shaun screamed with all his mental will at the figure in the observation deck, the figure who had hit the button to authorise the event. Was it Le Clerque?
Just then the sound of hydraulics filled the cavern, and Shaun pushed Lauren backwards as doors down on the ground level slid open. From recesses in the walls on all four levels of the catwalks encircling the perimeter, a stream of men in blue-and-grey uniforms moved out with weapons at the ready, raised and pointed towards the central platform.
‘David!’ Shaun heard himself scream from the platform.
‘Why are they pointing guns at you?’ Lauren hissed. Then, looking a little closer, she asked, ‘And why are you moving so slowly?’
Shaun followed the gun barrels of the guards who were no more than twenty feet from him, but looking the other way. They were all aimed at the platform where the other Shaun was trying to escape but seemed to be doing so at a leisurely pace. Another group of guards formed a circle around David, but none raised their weapons.
‘Shit, Shaun, get down from there! What are you doing?’ David screamed.
Then, an alarm shrieked, its ‘Whoop! Whoop!’ sounding throughout the city.
‘Shaun!’ David yelled again, but he was drowned out by the noise of the cavern.
‘THIRTY SECONDS TO TRANSMIT,’ came the same calm voice.
Lauren watched, frustrated and horrified as her husband moved as if he were on the moon. His hair seemed to bounce and fall more lightly, and his movements slowed with each step.
‘COMPRESSION SCAN COMPLETE.’ The voice came again, then almost without a pause it began to count. ‘TWENTY … NINETEEN … EIGHTEEN … SEVENTEEN … SIXTEEN …’
Shaun on the platform reached forward, but it was like he was under water, unable to fight through the density of the medium fast enough. David screamed and waved his arms helplessly.
‘TWELVE … ELEVEN … TEN …’
‘I don’t like it!’ Lauren shouted in Shaun’s ear. She gripped him tightly, like he might disappear at any moment. Shaun too felt uneasy. He looked from the dais up to the observation deck, imagining the smile, the evil, cruel, smug smile of the man whose shape he could just make out. Bastard!
Le Clerque, Shaun knew, was enjoying watching as the man on the platform struggled with the weight of his own movement, trying desperately to escape.
‘NINE … EIGHT … SEVEN … SIX …’
Shaun stood up and Lauren stood beside him. A strange distortion had appeared around the circumference of the dais, and the arches seemed to emit some kind of heatwave that rippled and warped the air. Through it all, the man on the platform tried to move. He turned his eyes upwards, and for a brief moment locked his gaze on Lauren and Shaun standing hand in hand in the doorway.
During the second or so that their eyes stayed fixed, Shaun noticed several things: the Shaun on the platform was not touching the ground; the sweat falling from his face seemed to drift like soap bubbles to the floor; and, most strikingly, his eyes were filled with desperate, uncomprehending fear. It brought the memory back with force and he felt sick. God, he had been so scared and confused. All because that bastard up there wanted to get the diary, for what? To use it to decipher the map and find the disc. To wipe out Islam. To kill millions.
Anger rose in Shaun’s chest.
‘FIVE … FOUR … THREE … TWO …’
No. No! They would not have it. No!
‘Protect her!’ Shaun spat as he threw his gun to Giovanni and launched forward unnoticed by the guards.
‘Shaun!’ Lauren cried as her husband sprang forward onto the metal catwalk.
‘Ground level!’ he said, and the platform instantly started to move downwards, even though his words could not actually be heard in the chaos of the cavern.
‘ONE … ZERO … INITIATE COMPRESSION TRANSMIT.’
As the catwalk section moved downwards, the guards barely noticed.
All eyes were fixed on the dais. The platform glowed with an intense blue light that fought to outshine the deep red the cavern had become.
The Shaun on the platform had stopped moving. Not only stopped moving; he had stopped in every sense of the word. He began to red-shift and grow dim as he froze in a silent scream.
Every particle that went into the making of Shaun Strickland separated. He became a cloud of himself and began to swirl. In the centre of his being, a black hole was forming, a black hole the size of an atom, contained within itself by all the power and design of the machine.
The particles spun, both individually and relative to one another, and then as each one was described by another, as the compression took place, the particle disappeared. Finally the last remaining particle, the one that represented Shaun Thomas Strickland, fell in through the event horizon of the microscopic black hole. It fell past its ultimate red shift to blink out of existence and disappear through the atomic-sized worm hole at the geometric centre of the platform.
Then, he was gone.
As the lights returned to blue and the siren ceased, Shaun charged screaming towards the central platform.
The first of the guards made to block his path but caught Shaun’s fist in the jaw and was sent sprawling back into the second guard. The third moved as if to h
old up his weapon, but Shaun, fuelled by rage and fear and adrenaline, grabbed its barrel and spun, pulling it free of the guard’s hands. He charged on.
The fourth guard held up a hand but was met with the arcing rifle butt as Shaun completed his spin. The blow made a sickening thud as he hurtled the man and charged on. He was only a hundred feet from David now, and the platform was ten feet beyond that. The fifth guard fell from a boot kicked into his stomach, and the sixth flew backwards from a shoulder charge.
David, traumatised by the sight of his friend obliterated to nothingness, barely noticed as the ring of men around him was punctured by a flailing, lashing Shaun. It was only as Shaun bumped David’s shoulder as he raced past that David noticed the screaming maniac at all.
Shaun took the stairs three at a time, using the railing to pull himself higher and faster. Forward and upward he sprang, not pausing when he heard David call out below him.
‘Shaun? Shaun is that—’
‘Not now David—’
‘Shaun! Don’t, it’s a trap!’
He knew it was, but now he understood: nothing mattered except getting the diary and keeping it out of the hands of the men who had killed Lauren, who had killed Giovanni and who would …
Neither of those two are dead, his brain politely interrupted. Shaun ignored it and began to scream again instead. He found a final burst of energy to carry him past the top step and out onto the platform.
There, in the centre of the large, circular floor were the clothes he had been wearing when the event had happened: his jeans, his shirt and his shoes. He skidded forward on his knees. Tangled up in his shirt was the diary. The Fontéyne diary. Graeme’s diary. His diary.
‘You didn’t need to beat my guards so badly, you know,’ said a voice that filled the cavern, coming from nowhere in particular but everywhere at the same time. Shaun looked up. He knew that voice. He rose slowly, calmed himself and surveyed the scene.
Everywhere, the blue light bathed the rock and buildings and pipes and screens. But unlike the last time he had looked out on the scene, this time it was not empty; far from it. He looked around at the catwalks encircling the whole place. Every twenty or so feet there stood the uniformed guards, but along the ground were hundreds of people. Many of them were guards, but many more now emerged wearing casual attire: trousers, jeans, coats.
All wore an overcoat of pale grey, mimicking the lab coat of the traditional scientist. Men and women, but no children. In fact, not a soul would have been under thirty. It was only then, seeing several of the guards still rolling on the floor nursing various injuries, that Shaun realised they had not put up much of a fight to stop him. The voice came again.
‘Thank you for coming to see us, Mr Strickland. And thank you for bringing your book; we’ve been waiting for it for a very long time.’
‘I know you!’ Shaun shouted accusingly at the tinted windows of the observation deck high above him. There was no mistaking the voice now; he had listened to it in his study through many long nights as he worked on his theories. The voice of someone who thought the way Shaun thought, who Shaun admired and mimicked when giving his mock presentations to Lauren.
His eyes flicked up towards the entrance. No sign of Lauren or Giovanni. Good. No news is good news.
‘You do? Well, how nice. I know you too,’ the voice replied, as if the very soul of The Facility itself were speaking.
‘You cannot have the diary, Landus!’
‘I think it’s Professor Landus to you!’ the English accent replied.
David looked around at the scientists and guards. Each was transfixed, as if they were watching the greatest show on earth.
‘I know you,’ Shaun repeated, this time quietly. ‘You … you sent me an invitation,’ he almost mumbled, his brain showing him the memory of the letter he had received in the mail from Cambridge. Suddenly, like a blurred picture coming into focus, it started to make sense.
‘I … I know you,’ Shaun said again. ‘You sent me, you … it was you who sent me a letter. You asked me to go to Cambridge.’
‘Your theories were impressive, I have to admit,’ the voice replied.
‘You made me leave home to go to England. You … I know you.’ He was almost babbling.
‘Listen to it for once, Strickland.’
Yes, listen to me.
‘You booked the tickets. They were already booked and paid for. From Charlotte. Why from Charlotte? Masonville has its own airport … but from Charlotte … too late to fly out … we had to drive.’
‘Shaun, what the hell’s going on here, man?’ David called up from below. He was still injured from the beating at the hands of the Pathans, and all the confusion was beginning to break him down again.
‘You wanted us to drive. You wanted us to drive that night. You made it happen! Why did I never get a response from any of the other letters I sent out? None of the emails. Why in years did I never get a response?’
‘No one else ever read your papers. No one could have, it was too dangerous. But I read them, Shaun. I read them, and what you see is the result of that. Your ideas, your own ideas made this possible.’
‘But I said that it was impossible!’ Shaun shot back, forgetting that he was speaking to a huge void, feeling more like his dialogue was internal.
‘The key, Shaun, the key! You’ve seen it work, you’ve even felt it. You know it works. You stopped your research because you couldn’t find the key. Your impasse.’
‘A way to hold it open …’ Shaun said, remembering the frustration he had felt. Getting to the very moment of triumph and realising that there was not enough collective power in all the universe to hold a worm hole open. Even when he had theorised that these worm holes could be created, they could not be held intact long enough for anything to pass through. They would crush into oblivion anything that tried.
‘You thought on the wrong scale, Shaun. You thought big when you should have thought small.’
Listen to me!
‘Tell me, what happens when pool balls collide?’ the voice asked like a school teacher.
‘Huh?’ Shaun said.
‘What happens? Why do they bounce off each other?’
‘Because …’ Shaun thought, ‘because the electrons in each of the pool balls are negatively charged and they repel each other,’ he yelled back up at the observation deck.
‘No need to shout, I can hear you. Gentlemen.’ On that word, movement filled The Facility. Everyone who was not a guard filed back into the buildings from which they had emerged. It was as if they were giving the two some privacy in this public arena.
‘And what’s really happening when you sit in an armchair?’
Shaun looked down and thought a moment. ‘You’re not touching it. You’re levitating at the height of one angstrom.’
‘What the hell is an angstrom?’ David muttered. To his astonishment, one of the guards next to him, without taking his eyes off the central dais, replied: ‘It’s a unit of length equal to one hundred-millionth of a centimetre’.
‘Oh,’ David said, and shut up.
‘That’s it. The charge of an electron. The very fabric of our being, the stuff it’s all made out of. You saw through your own calculations that time travel is possible on a microscopic scale.’
‘But it can’t be held open. There’s not enough energy.’
‘The key, Shaun: you thought of it once, you know what it is. Particles from what showed an inconsistency of energy? Why did you wake up naked? Whose numbers were out? Why are we unique in the universe?’
And then, unable to wait any longer, Shaun’s brain took control of his mouth and spoke up.
‘Life.’
‘Yes.’
‘Life!’
‘That unknowable quantity that makes one thing alive, and another thing not. It’s energy, Shaun. On a microscopic scale, nothing can crush it, not even a black hole. The particle integrity remains intact because the force is equal on all sides. Life, it’s the energy of
life. The breath of God.’
‘But how do you get a man through a microscopic worm hole?’ Shaun stammered.
David, whose own subconscious had been working away, popped the answer up like a light bulb. ‘Compression!’ he spat out.
Shaun looked down at him and frowned – this was not his conversation.
‘You know what has to be done,’ the voice said.
And at that moment, Shaun did know what had to be done, but he did not want to do it.
CHAPTER 74
The whir of the machine had stopped, and the guards made no sound. It was an eerie silence when compared to the chaos that had gone before.
Shaun stood silently. It had taken him so long to piece together, and now he had, he felt sick. All he wanted, more than anything, was to take Lauren back to North Carolina and live happily in their country home. He would not even mind teaching those tenth-graders; after all, they did not have guns.
Well, most of them didn’t.
The sound of an elevator broke the stillness. Landus was coming down. David made to run, but guards around him raised their weapons to change his mind. Shaun did not move. He could not; he was stunned. His brain laid it all out to him and he recoiled at the idea. He nearly fell forward off the platform, but caught himself on the low railing.
He looked down at the diary and traced the symbol once again with his finger. It travelled up to the cross-bar, then made a small loop down, travelled up to the same point again, then a big loop back down. His journey.
‘Shaun!’ a voice called. It was Lauren. She and Giovanni were being marched by guards towards the base of the platform. Giovanni looked up at him as if to apologise, but Shaun did not register. Giovanni had unloaded a full clip on the men who had approached them in their hiding spot, but it had had no effect; the bullets were blanks. It had been planned. It had all been planned, down to the very last detail. Giovanni walked forward sombrely, still clutching the briefcase Shaun had given him charge of.
‘Shaun, what’s happening?’ Lauren called up to him as she and Giovanni were forced into the ring of men who surrounded David. The engineer looked at the newcomers and his eyes grew wide with surprise.
