The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

by Patrick Lee

  Paige shook her head. “There wasn’t time to see it, even if I’d wanted to. I was way across the room, and it was gone by the time I’d taken a few steps.”

  She went quiet again. The only sound was the soft drone of the computer’s cooling fan.

  Travis met her stare.

  He knew what she was about to say.

  She said it.

  “We’ve both been thinking the same thing for the last ten minutes: there’s a way I can find out exactly what my father knew about Scalar, and failing that, I can certainly learn what location that map was showing. The same approach works for both problems.”

  Travis nodded. “I’ve been trying to think of an alternative.”

  “Me too. But there isn’t one. We could rack our brains all day and it’d be for nothing.” She looked at him. “You hate that I’m the one who has to do it. If you were the one, I’d hate it too. But I wouldn’t try to stop you. Okay?”

  Travis exhaled. He thought about it for another five seconds. Finally he nodded again. “Let’s go.”

  Chapter Five

  Level B42. The Primary Lab. Other than the chamber that held the Breach itself, this was the most important place in Border Town. All entities that were unique or nearly so, sufficiently powerful, and still being studied on a regular basis were stored on this level, behind blast doors as heavy as those at NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain. Travis and Paige passed through them into a long central corridor with extensions branching away left and right. B42 was one of the few levels with a distinct layout—it was more than twice the size of any other floor, its boundaries having been expanded over the years by excavation of the surrounding deep soil.

  The place was deserted. Their footsteps echoed strangely in the silence.

  They came to the door they needed within a minute. It was standard sized but heavy duty, with a palm scanner beside the lock. Paige put her hand to it and a moment later they were through into the space beyond, a room the size of a walk-in closet with a bank of small vault doors on the opposite wall. One bore a magnetic placard with crisp black lettering:

  ENTITY 0728—TAP

  Travis felt his jaw tighten at the sight of the name. Paige looked at him and noticed.

  “I’m not a fan either,” she said. “Let’s get it over with.”

  She crossed to the vault, turned the dial back and forth in sequence, heard the lock disengage, and hauled the door open. Inside was a single tiny object: a rich green translucent cube half an inch across. It might have been a blank die cut from emerald. But it wasn’t.

  Paige stared at it a moment, then picked it up and turned from the vault. Her movements were casual in a way that seemed deliberate to Travis. A forced calm. He didn’t blame her. She crossed the small room, stepped back out through the heavy door, and stopped in the middle of the corridor.

  “Right here is as good as anywhere,” she said.

  Travis joined her in the hallway. For a second her calm facade slipped. Then she discarded it altogether and sat down at the base of the wall. She leaned her back against it and drew her knees close to her body. Travis sat beside her.

  “Deep, slow breaths,” he said.

  “I know.”

  “Give anything to trade places with you.”

  “I know.”

  She had the Tap lying on her open palm, eye level in front of her. Travis watched how the light played over and through it. Strange, silvery shapes in its depths. Tiny swirls and arcs, like scimitar blades.

  Then in one fluid move Paige took the cube between two fingertips and put it to her temple. She pressed it against her skin, and Travis saw the thing’s edges blur as it vibrated.

  Paige’s breathing accelerated in spite of her efforts. She reached across her midsection with her other arm and took hold of Travis’s hand.

  “You’re okay,” he whispered.

  She nodded quickly, probably not even processing the words.

  Then it happened. The little cube liquefied in the span of a second, and collapsed to what looked like a thick drop of aloe gel between Paige’s fingertips. In almost the same instant the top of the gel rose and formed a point—and then a filament. A wirelike structure maybe a centimeter tall, thin as fine guitar string. It stood there swaying to the tremor of Paige’s body. Then it pointed itself inward and plunged through the skin and bone of her temple.

  Her hand spasmed and gripped Travis’s tightly. Her breaths turned into little cries, betraying the pain but only just. Travis knew how much it hurt. He’d experienced it himself. The Tap had emerged from the Breach during the two years he’d been away, but had still been in frequent testing when he’d returned. Like many others he’d volunteered to have a go at it, and his single use had gone as smoothly as he could’ve hoped. Despite the pain involved, he’d intended to use it again.

  Then a woman named Gina Murphy had taken a turn with it, and everything had changed. In the six months since, not a single person had used the Tap.

  Travis watched as the gel drop shrank by the second. The thing was feeding itself into Paige’s skull through the tiny hole made by the filament. Though Travis couldn’t see what was happening inside, he could easily recall how it felt: like a living thread, ever lengthening, darting and slipping among the deep folds of the brain’s surface. Flitting and hunting and finding its way like a snake’s tongue. Every second of it agony.

  But that was normal for the Tap. So far, everything was going well.

  Paige’s cries intensified. Her eyes were screwed shut.

  “I’m right here,” Travis whispered.

  Five seconds had passed since the lead end had gone in. The gel mass on her fingertips was half spent. The insertion never took longer than ten or twelve seconds.

  Paige got control of her breathing just before the end. She went quiet and let her face relax. The last trace of gel shrank to wire thickness and slipped in, leaving nothing but a tiny drop of blood at the entry point.

  Paige opened her eyes.

  “Better?” Travis said.

  She nodded.

  The tendril always stopped moving once it was fully inside; the pain stopped with it, for the most part.

  She was still gripping his hand. With his fingertip against her wrist, he could feel her pulse pushing three beats per second, though it was slowing by the moment.

  “I’m ready,” Paige said. “Catch me if I start to tip over.”

  “Wait.” He repositioned himself so that he was seated facing her. She got the idea and scooted forward from the wall, until their chests were touching and their legs were around each other’s hips. He hugged her close to him, and she rested her head on his shoulder.

  “No worries about falling over,” he said.

  She nodded against him and let her body relax, her breathing now almost back to normal.

  “See you in three minutes and sixteen seconds,” she said.

  She felt the effect begin as soon as she closed her eyes. One moment there was a floor beneath her and Travis’s arms were around her, and the next she was gone, floating in some neural equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber. She felt the Tap vibrating softly inside her head, its pathway wandering from her temple across the underside of her skull, to the parietal lobe on the opposite rear side. No sense of her limbs. No sense of anything but her thoughts.

  And her memories.

  She focused on the one she wanted. Envisioned her father’s office—her office, now—on that day five years ago. He’d been sitting with his back to her, the map on one half of his monitor and Carrie Holden’s face on the other.

  The image came to her almost at once—much more easily and vividly than it normally could have. She saw it from her own point of view as it’d been in that moment, just passing through the office doorway, her shoe scuffing the tile and making her father flinch. She froze the image just like that, in the instant before he closed the map.

  The Tap was a hell of a thing. The memory image hovered in front of her like a projection, as com
plete and accurate as a highres photo of that moment would’ve been.

  But this capability wasn’t what made the Tap special. If it had been, she would’ve come up empty: at this range she couldn’t read any of the map’s labels. Not the street names. Certainly not the town’s name, if one was there. She could resolve only a road running north and south, and a modest grid of streets clumped along the middle of its length. A few lesser roads strayed off left and right from the bunch. It could’ve been any of a hundred thousand small towns in the world. The image told her nothing.

  She allowed the memory to slip forward in time. The desk and computer began to grow in her field of view as she advanced into the room.

  Then her father’s hand moved on the mouse, and the map vanished—its clarity had improved hardly at all.

  She froze the image again, then let it begin to run backward. Her viewpoint drifted away toward the door behind her. The map popped onto the screen again. Now came the doorway’s edge, sliding into her view from the side. With it came the scuff of her foot, sounding eerie in both reverse and slow motion. She pulled back all the way into the corridor and kept going, retreating to maybe five seconds before she’d entered the room. She knew from experience that if she wanted to, she could play the memory stream forward or backward at just about any speed she could make sense of. It was scarcely different from rewinding or fast-forwarding a video file. She could plunge back through a spastic wash of images at an hour per second, skim through a day in less than half a minute, then slow down and dial in on anything she wanted to see. Every split second of it would be rich with photo-accurate detail. Every moment of her life was there to be revisited and studied. It should’ve been impossible—with even her passing grasp of neuroscience she knew that. Human memory was good, but not this good. However adept the Tap was at pulling information from her brain, this much information shouldn’t have been there to begin with. The Tap was a hell of a thing.

  Yet this function was still not what made it special—or difficult to accept as possible. Not by a country mile on either score.

  Paige let the image freeze again.

  Five seconds from the open doorway. Out of sight beyond it, her father was staring at Carrie Holden and the map, unaware of Paige’s approach in the corridor.

  Perfect.

  To use the Tap’s real selling point, all she had to do now was wait. The controls were simple and intuitive. A few seconds passed, the memory still frozen, and then she began to feel her feet beneath her. She was hovering in the void, but her feet tingled as if they could sense the ground half an inch below them.

  She willed herself to drop, and felt her shoes connect solidly with the surface.

  In that instant the memory came to life. It was no longer an image in front of her—it was a world around her: the hallway and the fluorescent lights and the hum of air exchangers and the trace smell of cleaning solution on the floor. Her body was there too, propelled forward by its own momentum—she’d been mid-stride at this point in the memory. The movement almost threw her off balance as she came to a stop. She put out one hand and caught the wall, and silently halted herself two feet short of the doorway.

  To all of her senses she was really standing here, in this moment that was five years gone. Her father was really in the next room, just beyond the edge of this doorway. The Tap let you relive memories exactly as they’d been—but that still wasn’t what made it special.

  What made it special was that it let you relive them as they hadn’t been.

  Paige moved forward into the doorway.

  She took care not to let her shoe scuff the floor.

  She saw her father seated at the desk, staring at the map and the picture of Carrie. He had no idea Paige was there.

  She took a step into the room. Then another.

  He sat there, adrift in his thoughts, eyes fixed on the screen.

  Another step, and another.

  She could see the map more clearly now than before. She was closer to it than she’d gotten in real life.

  Another step.

  Still not close enough to resolve the words on the screen.

  But almost.

  When she’d heard the early accounts from those who’d first used the Tap, she hadn’t believed them. It just couldn’t be true; how could you remember details you hadn’t actually seen the first time around? Then she’d tried it herself, and there’d been no more denying it. In fact the Tap’s power was far greater than she’d supposed in the beginning. You could do more than just cross a room you hadn’t crossed and read words you hadn’t been close enough to read. You could pick up a book you hadn’t opened at the time—or ever—and flip to page 241. You’d see the words on that page as they existed in real life, and you could verify it for yourself after snapping out of the memory and finding a copy. If she wanted to, Paige knew she could back out of her father’s office right now and, in the middle of this memory, go upstairs and schedule a flight to Paris. She could take that flight and walk the Champs-Élysées, and it would be swarming with the very same tourists who’d been there on this day five years ago. The scene would be accurate to the last detail. Every lock of hair brushed from a forehead. Every smile.

  As with all entities, there were only guesses as to how it worked. The technician who’d spent the most time testing it, a man named Jhalani who’d once been a colleague of Stephen Hawking’s at Cambridge, imagined the Tap to be a kind of antenna. Clearly it did more than just draw information from the user’s brain—Jhalani believed it drew from something quite a bit grander: the set of all possible universes. Paige had heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but only as an interesting hypothetical notion. She’d been surprised to learn from Jhalani that it was actually a mainstream idea in modern physics. The thrust of it was that every event that could go one way or another actually went both. Every time you looked at wheat bread and white bread and chose white, some other version of you, out there in the great who-the-hell-knows, chose wheat. Physicists mainly talked about it happening at the level of subatomic particles, but if it applied down at that scale, then it certainly applied to loaves of bread and flights to Paris and shoe scuffs on tiled floors. In the end, Paige thought Travis had summed the Tap up best: it let you remember not just everything you’d done, but everything you could have done. A hell of a thing.

  She took another step toward her father’s desk. She’d be in his peripheral vision soon—right about at the point where she could read the map. The margin would come down to inches at best.

  It was critical that she get this right the first time—the first time would be the only time. The Tap’s one limit was that you couldn’t revisit the same memory twice. The techs liked to say that a memory was burned after you relived it. Not only couldn’t you drop into it again, you couldn’t even remember it the old-fashioned way afterward. The original would be forever replaced by the revision. Therefore an especially cherished moment—a first kiss, say—was better left alone.

  Another step.

  If it came down to it, she had options. This was, for all its considerable bells and whistles, only a memory. Nothing she did here would be of consequence in the real world after she woke up. Which meant she could leap at her father, shove him away from the computer, and read the map before he had time to react. At that point she could simply be done with the whole thing—to end this memory she needed only to concentrate hard on her last glimpse of reality: she and Travis sitting in the deserted corridor on B42. A good ten seconds of that image would take her right back to it.

  But she hoped to avoid attacking her father. Doing so would preclude the other move she planned to make here. The more obvious move, by far, though she wished she could forgo it.

  Another step. And another.

  The labels on the map were right at the brink of her discernment now.

  Another step.

  She could see the number on the big road running north and south. U.S. 550, it looked like. She thought that w
as somewhere in Colorado. Just above and to the left of the grid of streets was a word—almost certainly the town’s name. A short word.

  She squinted.

  Ouray.

  Ouray, Colorado. She’d heard of it. Some friends in college had stayed there when they went skiing at Telluride.

  Good enough. If she really wanted to, she could end the memory now.

  A big part of her did want to. The same part that hated the second move.

  Which was simply to talk to her father.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to him. Quite the opposite. She’d been very close to him, especially in their last years together, and then she’d lost him in the worst imaginable way. When she’d first learned what the Tap could do, she’d considered reliving a moment with him. Something happy and good and warm, to replace the ending life had given them.

  But she’d resisted. Always. As real as it would feel, the moment would be fake. And desecratory, somehow. The whole notion had seemed wrong from the beginning.

  It still did.

  She watched him sitting there, unaware of her. She took a breath and smelled his aftershave. She couldn’t remember smelling it on anyone since she’d lost him. All those years, that scent had just been part of the background. A thing to hardly notice, if at all. It could make her cry right now, if she wasn’t careful. She let the emotions swim a few seconds longer, then shoved them all down into the deep.

  Time to do this.

  She backed away from the desk, turned and left the room without a sound. She walked to a spot in the hallway ten feet from the door, pivoted and faced it again.

  And cleared her throat loudly.

  She heard her father’s chair squeak at once, and heard the mouse scrape on his desktop.

  She walked to the doorway and leaned in, and found him staring at a file directory. She knocked on the frame and he looked up at her.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Hey.”

  Her throat constricted; she couldn’t help it. Jesus, even a random moment like this. Especially a random moment like this. The kind they’d had a million of—should’ve had a million more of.