by Bob Proehl
Emmeline reaches out and touches Carrie’s shoulder. She shakes her gently, trying to wake her without waking Hayden. Carrie’s eyes flutter open.
“Hey,” Emmeline says. “Sorry to wake you. Can you—” She mimes parting clothes in a closet, but Carrie understands and extricates herself from under Hayden’s arm. Hayden mumbles something, then rolls over to face the back of the couch.
“Come on,” Emmeline says, gesturing toward the kitchen. Carrie follows and takes a seat at the counter. Emmeline turns on the light over the stove.
“What are you doing here?” Carrie asks.
“This is my house,” Emmeline says. “It’s where I grew up before I came to Bishop.”
“Are you serious?” Carrie asks. She looks around as if she might find a picture of Emmeline somewhere she hadn’t noticed, then turns back to Emmeline. “Wait, but why are you here? You’re supposed to be in Phoenix.”
“I’ve been away,” Emmeline says.
“Did Fahima send you to help?”
“I haven’t gone to see Fahima,” Emmeline says. “She doesn’t know I’m back.”
“Emmeline, I don’t understand what you’re saying,” Carrie says. “Where are you back from?”
Emmeline wants to tell her that where is the wrong word, but she also feels the need to speed everything up, to get them all where they’re going faster.
“Do you have the picture?” she asks. “The one you showed me before you left?”
Carrie takes the picture out of her wallet and holds it out, not like the last time, when it was an accusation. “You said you didn’t know what it was.”
“I didn’t,” Emmeline says. She takes the picture and lets her fingers drift over it. “Their names are Lynette and Shane. They’re nine, and they’re the sweetest kids I’ve ever met. I am so glad I got to meet them. Out of all of this, it’s the best thing that’s happened. The last few months, with them.”
“I don’t understand,” Carrie says.
“They’re yours,” Emmeline says. “I took that picture yesterday. It was the last thing I did before I left. It won’t happen for you for ten more years. I think I understand now how it fits together. I think I know how we win.”
When Fahima gave the government inhibitor tech, she told them that she built in a back door they’d never find, to access the tech if they used it in ways she didn’t like.
The trouble was, inhibitors were as technologically complex as a tanning bed crossed with a transistor radio. Exploits become easier to build as complexity increases—software and electronics offer thousands of hiding holes, but hacking a lawn mower by remote is next to impossible even for Fahima. There was no back door on the inhibitors. They were weaponized, used to keep thousands of her people in camps, and there was fuck all Fahima could do about it.
She likes to think she’s a person who makes one kind of mistake only once. She finds unique ways to fuck up, but she’s not much for repeats. Everything she’s invented since the inhibitor has a peephole she can peer through, including systems at Project Tuning Fork and the Ruse.
During the war, she learned about spycraft and skullduggery. People think they’re smart and accept evidence that confirms that without examination. To hide an exploit in tech handed off to someone suspicious, tuck it behind a dummy exploit that’s easier to find. Within the Ruse’s systems, Fahima built a series of back doors that were increasingly well hidden.
The first is a command-line sequence that can be used onsite. It’s what Fahima used to fudge the Tuning Fork data, keying in from the lab bays and moving numbers around. The second is a data leak to a server farm in Alaska that sent the data to random ISP addresses at irregular intervals. Cedric dispatched agents to the server farm two weeks ago, and they’ve been tracking down the ISPs, accosting confused Resonants about why their phones and laptops downloaded gigs of secured data.
She hoped after finding that one, Cedric would laugh at how he outsmarted the great Fahima Deeb and call it a day. Unfortunately, like any man who lands a job by luck rather than skill, Cedric was paranoid and kept digging until he found her third: a fully remote back door into all the Ruse’s systems. It was a labyrinth through the architecture, winding its way toward the middle before pulling all data paths into one straight shot. It would let Fahima commandeer all systems at the Ruse, wiping data and fucking up electrical grids to short out the Chairs. It would have been beautiful, and she was heartbroken when pieces were sniffed out and deleted.
Convinced of his cleverness, Cedric stopped looking. A full remote back door with fragments tucked away across all systems was such a massive undertaking, it had to be her big play.
He never found the fourth door.
It’s read-only access to data associated with Project Tuning Fork. It lacks the scope of the third, but by being so small, it’s virtually untraceable. It’s how she knew the Berlin Pulse was expected to result in a 30 percent casualty rate and how she examined the data stating that other than a handful of accidental deaths caused by the onset of new abilities—comparable to what happened after the first Pulse—there were no fatalities.
It’s also how she knows where to find Thao Bui, the operator who caused the Berlin Pulse, now Project Tuning Fork’s most valuable asset. He’s moved every two days while assembly is completed on six other Chairs. His biometrics are monitored, and his every whim catered to. Catering turns out to be Fahima’s fifth and final back door into Project Tuning Fork.
The Omars handled or subcontracted food service needs for the Ruse. When Fahima ran, no one bothered to weed through contracts looking for sympathizers. Phone calls from Omar to friends and former lovers get Fahima a room service shift at the James Hotel on Thompson and Grand, the safe house for Thao Bui before he flies out to Tokyo. Thao survives on well-done steaks and french fries, and Fahima, sans hijab, is delivering his dinner.
She flashes credentials at the Faction agent guarding the door. She considered the risk that Glover might be looking out of the eyes of the agent on the door, but Kimani convinced her it was unlikely. He can’t pay attention everywhere at once, she said. Unless he can, in which case we’re all fucked. The agent glances at the pass and opens the door to let Fahima and her cart through. The room brings back a visceral memory of the day she helped capture a murderous kid named Owen Curry in a shitty motel outside Chicago. The air has the same meaty fug to it, the stale masculine smell of someone who’s given up on hygiene, and the room is littered with empty bottles of beer and vitamin water, clothes strewn everywhere, bed unmade. She hears Thao pissing in the bathroom, and when she glances over, she gets a quick glimpse of his ass through the open door.
“Sir, room service,” she calls, jumping her voice up half an octave.
“Cool, leave it,” Thao shouts from the bathroom.
“I need you to sign for it,” Fahima says. The sound of his pissing peters out.
“The guy out front does that,” he says.
“He said you’d do it.”
After a moment that notably does not include flushing, Thao emerges from the bathroom in boxers and a ketchup-stained T-shirt. “I don’t tip or anything,” he says. “My shit is all comped.”
“I need to talk to you,” Fahima says in her normal voice, hoping he might recognize it from the handful of times they’ve talked. He doesn’t. “It’s Fahima Deeb,” she says.
“Holy shit,” Thao says. “Where’s your—” He swirls his finger over the top of his head to indicate her missing hijab.
“Doesn’t matter,” she says. “I need to know how you did it.”
Thao crosses his arms petulantly. “I just did it,” he says. “You didn’t think I could. Cedric said you were fucking up my numbers to make it look like—”
“I made your numbers worse, but they were bad,” Fahima says. “Berlin was zero casualties. You topped out at a 30 percent fatality rate. Ho
w did it happen?”
Thao eyes her warily, and Fahima wishes she’d taken the time to make friends with him when he worked for her, or at least conceal her dislike of his bro-dawg approach to the project. “I could knock on that door and the dude would come in and arrest you,” he says.
If she challenges him, he’ll do it. She hears Ruth asking her what the escape plan will be. There are no escape plans, Fahima told her. Not anymore. Fahima has nothing left but all-in attempts. She’s relying on the commitment that comes when she doesn’t leave herself a way out.
“You fly to Tokyo tomorrow to get strapped into another Chair,” she says. “Maybe you’d like to know how come you didn’t kill a couple million people the first time so you don’t kill a couple million people this time. I’m not saying I’m going to know. But I’m the last person you have who’s willing to try.”
Thao’s lack of self-reflectiveness made him the most effective operator she had at Tuning Fork. He wasn’t burdened by doubts about his ability. It also formed the upper limit of what he could do. Operators like Roxane and Clay assessed and adjusted the way they used their abilities with the Chairs; Thao stepped into Lab Bay Beta every day and did the same thing he’d done before but harder. She bets that when Cedric told him they were going ahead despite the risks, Thao was thrilled. Now everything rides on her hope that in the moment before he activated the Chair, he was horrified at what he was about to do.
“There was a girl,” he says. “A teenager, black girl. I even thought it was—”
“Emmeline Hirsch,” Fahima says. It’s impossible but very much like Emmeline to disappear and show up again at the last possible moment. Emmeline and her impossible possibility.
“It was like she came out of nowhere,” Thao says. “We were a minute from go. I was about to tell them we needed to abort, but there was this voice.” He taps his temple, a gesture Fahima is too used to seeing. “He put something in my head. He said it was a tracker, but it wasn’t. I could feel it all the time. I wanted to stop, but it wasn’t going to let me. Then she was there, and I couldn’t hear it anymore. She took my seat, and she…” Thao’s face quivers with a mix of fear and rapture, the look of someone saved by a miracle. “It wasn’t me; it was her. If it was me, all those people would have died. And now I have to do it tomorrow, and if she doesn’t show up, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“It’s okay,” Fahima says. She reaches into her pocket and takes out a bottle of pills. She’s about to hand it to Thao when there’s a knock on the door. Startled, Fahima drops the bottle onto the carpet, the soft rattle of the pills like a klaxon in her head.
“Everything okay in there?” calls the Faction agent.
Fahima looks at Thao, sure he’s about to give her up. “We’re good,” he shouts.
Fahima kneels and retrieves the pill bottle from the floor. From a posture of genuflection, she offers it up to him. “I’ve been looking over your data,” she says. “It’s why I went away. All the other shit they had me working on, I couldn’t see the numbers anymore. I knew you were going to be the one to crack this.” Thao doesn’t smile, but he’s buying what she’s selling. “I needed time to figure out what I was missing. Patrick took it the wrong way. He thought I was moving away from the project, but I was finishing it.” She gives the bottle a suggestive shake. “These will modulate your ability enough to prevent fatality. The problem is, you’re too strong. You’re blowing people’s minds, and the Chair can’t compensate without wiping out the benefits. This will help you meet it in the middle. All your power in a shape the Chair can handle.”
Thao reaches for the bottle, and Fahima hesitates, pulling it back. The pills are a mix of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride, the latter two coated in time-release gel. It’s the cocktail used for lethal injection. The sodium thiopental knocks him out, the pancuronium bromide paralyzes his lungs, and the potassium chloride stops his heart. It won’t be painless, but it’s what she could throw together, and it prevents millions from dying screaming, clearing her schedule to deal with whatever horror is next.
Her wrist tips forward, offering the pill bottle, but Thao sees her hesitation and the bottle hangs between them, unclaimed. A hand closes over Fahima’s. Her gaze follows the fingers up to the hand, the smooth skin of the forearm, the bare shoulders, and finally the haunted eyes of Emmeline Hirsch.
“Not like this,” Emmeline says quietly. Fahima feels herself tugged out of the world as Emmeline folds them upward.
They fold back down into Fahima’s office in Phoenix, startling Ruth, who’s sipping coffee on the small couch. On the wall, there are sketches of a machine, one more ridiculous Rube Goldberg device Fahima might chuck at the universe in the hope of changing its course. Like several before it, this diagram has a single uppercase letter at its center:
E.
“I thought we were picking you up at the—” She stops as she registers Emmeline’s presence. “Hi.”
“Hi, Ruth,” Emmeline says. “It’s nice to see you.”
“I need to talk to Emmeline privately,” Fahima says, speaking to the room rather than directly to Ruth, who speeds out.
“Where in the name of fuck have you been?” Fahima says, rounding on Emmeline.
“I don’t think I should tell you,” Emmeline says.
“You’re back two minutes and I already have a headache from this shit.” Fahima goes around her desk and takes two bottles out of the bottom drawer: one clear, one green. She brings out a metal flask that’s wide at the base with a thin neck. The silvery metal surface moves like oil on water. Fahima starts pouring gin into the metal flask, and Emmeline interrupts her. “Can you make me one of those?” she asks. “They always look good, like the idea of cold.”
“They look better than they taste,” Fahima says. She pours another helping into the flask, then finds two less than clean glasses on a bookshelf. She sets them on the desk and fills them until they’re brimming.
“How do you not spill it?” Emmeline asks.
“Bishop said the key was not to look at it,” Fahima says. “But I’m sure he used telekinesis or some shit.” She leans over and slurps from the surface of one of the glasses like a bird drinking from a pool. Emmeline follows suit. She winces and shivers.
“So you’re not going to tell me anything,” Fahima says.
Emmeline smiles at her. “You have a plan,” she says, pointing to the diagram on the wall. “You modeled it on the gun assembly bomb.”
“Little Boy,” Fahima says.
“You were going to shoot me at Raymond Glover and hope something exploded.”
“It is a shitty plan,” Fahima says.
“The bomb I saw when I started the first Pulse, it wasn’t a gun assembly bomb.”
“You saw the Gadget,” Fahima says. Emmeline doesn’t remember much about what happened when she created the Pulse, but Fahima, ever the data collector, recorded everything Emmeline said that day. There’s a candle in the desert, she’d said. Mr. Bishop is watching it from a hill. Emmeline reached out her finger after she said that, toward a light only she could see, more than a half century away. She changed something. “If you saw the Trinity test with Bishop and Glover, the one Bishop told us about, what you saw was an implosion bomb.”
Emmeline makes her right hand into a fist. “Take a core of subcritical material,” she says. She hovers her left hand, open, over her fist. “Surround it, then compress it all at once.” She grips her fist with her hand. “It happens in an instant.”
“There’s more to it than that, but basically,” Fahima says. “There’s also something embedded in the center of the core called a neutron initiator. It’s two elements that get pressed together by the compression wave.”
Emmeline nods. “That’s the plan.”
“That’s not a plan; it’s a description,” Fahima says. “We can’t
go up against him with a Wikipedia entry on the Trinity bomb.”
“External compression from all possible angles,” Emmeline says. “Two elements, embedded in the center, combined at the exact moment. The bomb can be a metaphor, but a metaphor can also be a bomb.”
Fahima looks at her like Emmeline’s stopped speaking English.
“How sick is Kimani?” Emmeline asks. She sips her drink in a way that ought to look sophisticated but results in a loud, childish slurp.
“She’s not sick,” Fahima says. “She’s exhausted. She’s holding this whole building in her head.”
“We have to save her, and we have to stop him,” Emmeline says. “We need everybody, all at once.”
Something in the phrase all at once opens up the divide between them. All this time, Fahima has thought in terms of inputs and outputs—causality, whether as a chain or a web. Emmeline is thinking in terms of simultaneity, and Emmeline might be the one who’s right.
Everyone Emmeline visits, she tells the same thing: It’s going to happen very fast. She says it to communicate across two systems of thinking. From her point of view, it’s taking forever. When she was little, her dad took her to see a domino run at the Chicago Children’s Museum. He was stressed because the Red Line was slow and they were running late. We have to be there at three o’clock, he said, tugging her arm as he wove through people on East Grand. They got there in time for Emmeline to take in the whole setup from a spot on the balcony. The museum had cleared all the exhibits on the ground floor, covering it in dominoes along with a collection of bits and bobs: a Hot Wheels loop-the-loop, a xylophone, a miniature Ferris wheel, an oversized pachinko board. With her father short of breath, a scoreboard clock counted down from ten, the crowd counting along. The first domino tipped, and within a minute the whole thing was over.
