Child of the Fall

by D Scott Johnson

  “Only in how weird you are.”

  Now that she was closer to him, Tonya could see he must’ve been examining a section of the room. The threads here collapsed inward into a white circle about the size of her thumb. Utter darkness spread out behind it, blotting out threads.

  “What’s going on there?” she asked.

  He turned, and his arms lowered a bit, doing a fair impression of a disappointed human. “Proof that my colleagues may have been right all along.”

  “About what?”

  “Who should be in charge of how things progress. We had a difference of opinion, but unless things change, I fear I will be proved conclusively wrong. Do you remember the last time you were here?”

  Only every time she had a dream about it. Which was most nights. “Yes.”

  “That represented a tangled causality involving a single individual. This,” he gestured to the white circle, “represents a tangled causality for your entire planet. Look closer.”

  As before, concentrating on a segment magnified it. Or maybe it did get closer. Or maybe the room moved her forward. It was hard to tell. Motion didn’t have rules that she knew about when you stood outside time.

  What seemed like thousands of threads turned out to be millions, maybe even billions. The circle was actually a spherical construct, sort of like a coin slowly spinning on its edge, except there were more than two sides to it. A lot more. On each one a sequence played out, a view high above a thick forest of trees, ending in a volcanic eruption. They always started from the same place—a place Tonya recognized.

  The power plant.

  “They were right. It’s a bomb,” she said.

  “You know about this?”

  “Well, yeah. See this one?” She instinctively knew which of these timelines was hers and brought it close. Like last time, the things she remembered happening were very clear. She pointed to the moment when Mike first discussed the plant with her and let it play forward. When it was done she asked, “How could you not know we knew about it?”

  Questions got tangled as easily as threads here.

  “One thread in all these billions, with that staring me in the face?” He nodded his head at the not-quite-coin. “I had other priorities.”

  “So why aren’t you doing anything about it?”

  “I am, right now.” He pointed at her like that explained everything.

  Tonya hated the mysterious master shtick. “You didn’t know I was coming.”

  “The universe didn’t know you were coming either, but now,” he pointed down the length of her still-close timeline, “things have changed.”

  Beyond the discussion they were having, her timeline extended to the doomsday construct. Before, no threads that went into the coin-thing reappeared. Now, some had, and the number was growing. But it wasn’t. And they were all gone, including Tonya’s. But hers extended. It wasn’t changing so much as having all those states at once. It made her head hurt.

  “What does it mean?” she asked.

  “We may now have a way forward.” He stared longer at her timeline. The silence bothered her, since he obviously knew a whole lot more about how it worked than she did. “Ah, I see. It’s a good thing I was here when you arrived.”

  More mystery. It made her want to hit him with a brick. “It is?”

  “Indeed. I don’t think you would know how to do this if you were here by yourself.”

  He touched her forehead.

  She should be alone. The drive from the hotel to a pull-off area wasn’t long or complicated. A dark forest lined the road she walked on, new asphalt that wound its way to a large metal door set into a hillside. She turned right and walked down a faint path. After exactly seventy-two steps, she pulled down on a tree limb, which caused a rock to slide away, revealing a ladder. The path to the portal was treacherous not because of obstacles but because of all the people. But they were busy, on specific missions, and then they left. She walked until she found an elevator. In a room very deep underground, she stood alone in front of the portal. It flashed to life.

  Cyril’s voice was inside her head. “Tell no one. Keep your secrets close, Tonya. Your thread is fragile and wasn’t built to bend the way it needs to. I will do what I can to prepare the way, but caution should be ever in your mind. When you arrive, you will need help. Be careful how you ask for it and ask only after you arrive.”

  Everything turned upside down again and stayed that way. Her face was mashed against cloth and it all bounced rhythmically. She lifted her head. Tonya was being carried at a quick jog slung over someone’s back. She recognized the shirt.

  “Mike?”

  He stopped and set her down. “Welcome back. How are you?”

  She did a quick self-check. “Fine, I think. Where am I?”

  “We’re almost to the Jeep. Kim’s never one for a small distraction when a big one will do. When I woke up, the camp had been flattened. The only people close by were already in a shelter. I don’t think anybody got hurt. You were unconscious and wouldn’t wake up, so I had to carry you.”

  Spencer must’ve told him that Kim had caused the explosion. “Is she okay?”

  “Sort of. When she does the transform thing her touch sensitivity ramps way up, but she’s alone right now, so that’s fine. Her arm’s worse though. She’s having to use neuro blockers otherwise she can’t move it at all. You’re sure you’re okay? Kim said you disappeared, but you were there when I woke up, and that was right after the explosion. You couldn’t have been gone for long. What happened?”

  She remembered Cyril’s warning. She didn’t want to lie, but what choice did she have? She’d work through it at her next confession. Father Fabre was a good listener. “I don’t remember anything.” She kept the lie simple, and it killed her. Mike accepted it with a shrug.

  They walked the rest of the way to the truck in silence.

  Chapter 18

  June

  People screamed around her, a human sound designed millions of years ago to get everyone in the group running for their lives. June turned to do exactly that when a light enveloped them. Everything lurched, and she fell to the floor. But it wasn’t the floor. It was grass. Tall grass like she had in her savannah realm, and back home on Oupa’s farm. Someone nearby groaned.

  The grass was not quite a meter tall, so naturally she was able to see over it, even sitting up. The ground was warm and dry; there was a scattering of trees around them. Heads started to pop up one by one. By the sound of it, someone lost their lunch. She looked for the device.

  It was there all right, but it wasn’t their device. It was heavily weathered and dirty, exactly as if it was very old and had sat outside all its life. The center was still alive with the glittering pond inside it. That much was the same.

  One of the board members, June thought his name was Max, said, “What the hell just happened? Where are we?”

  Anna sat up, but June could only see the top of her head. The whole thing reminded her of meercats after a hawk had flown overhead.

  Then she noticed the sky was the wrong color. If it’d been obviously wrong, say a shade of red, she would’ve noticed sooner. This sky was a little too blue.

  The air smelled wrong; it had a cardamom tinge to it, like strong masala chai.

  It wasn’t grass.

  June shot to her feet. It was so close to being what she was used to, but the details were all wrong. The air smelled funny. The grass felt odd. Now that she looked closer, the trees were wrong, too gnarled and…

  The trunks were blue.

  When June stood, it seemed to send a signal to everyone else. They also got to their feet, very loudly making the same observations.

  “Not even close to the right color.”

  “Did you notice the grass?”

  “Look at the trunks.”

  “I can’t pull it out of the ground. It won’t tear.”

  “PEOPLE!” Anna shouted, arms out and hands up, commanding them to stop. “Gather around. We ne
ed to talk.”

  June did a quick head count and got a slight bit of relief. Everyone was here.

  Max’s jaw hung open as he looked around. “Well if nobody else will say it, I will. We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

  Anna was all business, decisive. In spite of their situation, she was in charge. June relaxed at the thought.

  “I understand that,” Anna said. “But I don’t think we’re in Oz either.”

  “We had a network breach,” another board member said. Anya, that was her name. “This must be a realm.”

  June felt stupid for thinking anything else. She wasn’t the only one reassured. The whole group chuckled.

  But she wasn’t wearing a phone. The thought had barely formed when the device started spinning.

  Max found his voice before anyone else. “Oh shit!”

  Light flared again. The floor lurched, and she hit the ground. It hurt more landing this time on a floor that was solid and smooth. The stink of shorted electronics replaced the spice in the air. There was a fire somewhere.

  The light went from solid white to flashing. Strobes. The wailing claxons made her ears buzz painfully. She pushed off the floor and laughed. It was the floor of the lab.

  When she stood up, though, the good feeling went away. All the robots that had been at the consoles were burned out. Some were still smoking. That must’ve been what set off the alarms.

  June could barely hear it when Anna shouted, “Will someone please shut that off?”

  Everything went quiet, and the strobes quit flashing. The normal lights stayed off, though, leaving them with the backup lighting, which only illuminated parts of the room. The rest was left in gloomy darkness. A quick check brought more relief: everyone was also here.

  Inkanyamba’s voice came over the speakers, tentative like a child, not a fierce horse-snake. “Dr. Treacher? Is June with you? We can’t see anything.”

  “Yes, Inkanyamba,” June said, “I’m here. What happened?” People around her hugged and clapped each other on the back. June wanted to join in, but whatever happened had shaken her unduplicate badly.

  “I…don’t know. We were trying to chase down the network problem, and then there was a system crash. When the cameras came back you were all on the ground, and my robots were dead. The network is a mess now.” June walked around to see a monitor. It flickered to life, revealing a grievously concerned horse-snake. “I thought you were dead.”

  June had to lean down to make sure he could hear her. Everyone else was still whooping it up. “We’re fine, guys. We got sucked into a realm.”

  He pulled back, very confused. “But—”

  “Oh my God!” someone shouted.

  June looked up.

  As far as anyone could tell, when the device wasn’t in use it had the rubbery stuff in its center. Now she knew that was wrong. It had another state.

  It could be turned off.

  The hole in the center was exactly that: a simple opening no different than any other. It hadn’t occurred to her to check until now, but the doors to the Hellmouth were shut. That couldn’t have been what fried the bots, though. It would’ve slagged the whole room if they’d lost containment.

  Anna stomped up to her as the rest of the room went quiet. Their meter difference in height melted away under her glare. “What happened to it?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She went cold and still. “Fix it.”

  Maybe it was the adrenaline. Maybe it was being right about not screwing around with this before they understood it. Maybe it was her intuition that her unduplicate was about to tell her they’d been cut off and that hadn’t been a realm. Maybe it was all of that.

  Or maybe it was a South African farm girl who’d been frightened out of her life.

  There was only one thing June could say. “No.”

  That wasn’t the right answer. “Excuse me?”

  The rage made it easy to walk toward Anna, who backed away in turn. “First, I do not know what went wrong, because we do not know how it works. Second, we fried the control bots, and we don’t know why. Third, we all went to a realm, and nobody was wearing a phone.”

  Anna backed into Max, who stumbled.

  It was too far. June had gone too far again. She took a deep breath and made a tight fist. Her knuckles cracked, an embarrassing sound in the now silent room.

  June needed to make a connection to their goals. Anna always listened to that. “Finally, this could all have gone very wrong. I will not move forward until we understand what happened.” She looked at them all. “We could’ve lost the whole plant.”

  Anna got that inward look when someone else made a valid point. June knew then it would all be okay. “You’re right. We’ve had a genuine scare tonight. Whatever happened,” she pointed at the dead device, “we can fix it. Once we know what’s going on.” She reached up and put a hand on June’s shoulder. “Come on, we’ll have some dinner together and then rest. You can start on all this in the morning.” Her eyes flashed, and June’s heart soared. She wasn’t in trouble. “I expect a report this time tomorrow.”

  “Absolutely, ma’am.” That got some chuckles, which seemed to give everyone else permission to start talking.

  Anna moved closer and spoke quietly. “Can you at least tell us what that first alarm was about?”

  She went back to the console. “Is Yumbo there?”

  Yumbo’s face replaced Inkanyamba’s. “It came from the Trilogy pipe. I’ve never seen anything like it. The firewall called it a breach, but what happened is a mystery. Abada’s doing most of the work keeping our network functioning. He’s so busy he’s not responding to our messages.”

  “Call up Trilogy’s IT department,” Anna said as they headed for the exit. “I need some answers.”

  What made the most sense was that the device had been created to bring large groups of people into a realm at once, and probably get around the neural limitations that came with a phone connection. The power required to do that was staggering.

  ***

  The dinner Anna had invited June to was the first time June had been around the board members in a casual situation since discovering the device.

  They were often cryptic whenever the power plant came up in conversation. The code words and acronyms they spoke sometimes sounded like a different language. June had tried asking directly for explanations and been rebuffed. It was a civilian project, but it had a need-to-know culture that sometimes made her think she was working for the CIA. Every time June thought she’d figured out what the latest set of acronyms were, they’d change. People who ranked below June on the organizational chart typically didn’t know any of the code words at all.

  Now though, they were excited, referring often to the simulations Anna had mentioned earlier. Whatever GWRT and HAPE were, they’d been made significantly more powerful, and now Project Walden was much closer to reality than they’d ever dreamed possible. June supposed those were all good things. It certainly made the board happy when they discussed them. She couldn’t help but feel excluded by it all, though. Maybe once she figured out what had gone wrong with the ring, Anna would share some of this secret knowledge with her.

  The news about what came down the Trilogy pipe wasn’t good. It had done serious damage to control constructs in the plant’s realm. Abada had to dedicate one hundred percent of his cycles to keeping the lights on. Nothing worked right with any consistency. She’d never felt comfortable working with those fanatics, but Anna had insisted. Their unduplicate work was top-notch, but now that had a cost that might be too high. June dared not point that out at the moment, though.

  Sleep should’ve taken her as soon as she was back in her quarters, but it wouldn’t come. There were too many questions. It had to be a realm; she just missed the cues. Every time she rolled over another missed opportunity would come to her. It was an engine spinning in her head that wouldn’t switch off. When June checked the clock for a third time and saw that it had only moved five min
utes past two in the morning, she knew it was no use. June had to go back.

  The robots weren’t smoking anymore, but their charred remains still sat forlornly in their seats. Some of the robots were so badly melted there was no point in trying to separate them. It made her sick. This wasn’t a duct room anymore. It was a graveyard.

  June moved one of the crackly burned carcasses aside and slid a spare chair into its place. The consoles were all turned off, so someone from IT had already given it a once over. June stared at the device, now nothing more than a ring framing the Hellmouth passage behind it. A realm connection that powerful was unbelievable.

  A reedy, metallic voice came from behind her. “It is impressive in person, isn’t it?”

  June stood, toppling her chair over with a loud crash. Nobody should be in here. The doors had been locked. All the doors had been locked.

  There were two banks of consoles between her and the stranger at the back of the room. He didn’t have any weapons that she could see, so she was safe for the moment. He wore a costume that covered his entire body. The first thing she thought was Star Wars. Even though Oupa was a South African farmer to his very bones, he loved those old movies, so she grew up watching them. It even looked dirty and battered. The helmet had a mask that completely covered his face.

  “Who are you?” June asked. “How did you get in here?”

  He considered the question for a long moment and then bowed, a graceful move that made him seem not quite human.

  “My name is Cyril.”

  He’d gotten deep inside what was supposed to be a secure area. She stared at him, trying to think of a good move. The wireless network was down. With the consoles off, there was no way to contact her AIs. Cyril’s doing, certainly. She could shove her way past him—he wasn’t very big—but he still might be armed.

  And he hadn’t answered her question. “Telling me your name doesn’t tell me who you are. Or how you got in here.”

  He shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me. Besides, that doesn’t matter.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “No. I must convince you of a bigger problem, and I don’t have much time. You won’t like it, but if I don’t get your help, then the people coming after me won’t be able to stop it.”