by Robert Reed
It was Timothy who proposed using the venerable news service and Hawthorne.
“What matters,” he had argued, “is that the world believes our story. Believes it the first time it sees it. Then the government is on the defensive—not a role it relishes—and suddenly every news agency is going to chase the story. Particularly CNN, since they’re the ones who exposed the scandal.”
Cornell was heartened, but skeptical. “Suppose we make a genuine product. Okay. But how do we go about hijacking an entire news network?”
With the delight only known to the very clever, Timothy leaned forward in his chair, saying, “It’s almost easy, really.”
Since the Change, the earth had been throwing a portion of its own light back on itself. Light meant reflected sunlight, city lights, plus the rest of the EM spectrum, too. And over the last twenty years, as people grew more comfortable with the new sky, that curiosity of physics had been put to increasing good use.
A powerful burst of radio noise, directed straight overhead, would mostly escape from the earth, fanning across the old-fashioned universe. Yet at the same time, a diluted signal—a sliver of that radio shout—would rain down on wherever the antennae were pointed. The new sky allowed an alternative to communication satellites. To date, no corporation or government had sold its communication satellites as scrap, and probably none of them would ever take that chance. But the news agencies, fearing some great disaster that would cripple their satellites, decided to build emergency systems with earth-based antennae. For instance, CNN had a big automated station sleeping in northern Quebec. Given the proper commands, the station would awaken, and given more commands, it would begin transmitting, its signal pointed at each of the receiving stations visible in the everted sky.
“The system is intended for wars, comet impacts, and other bad days,” Timothy reported. “It’s a very durable system, and very adaptable, and if we can take control of it, I think we can make it obey only us for long enough.” He had grinned at the three of them, utterly proud of his ingenuity. “And if someone manages to pull the plug early, then what happens? It looks as if some dark force is responsible. Which only helps our credibility, at least with some part of our audience.”
There was a long, contemplative pause.
Behind three long fingers, Porsche was smiling. She already knew about the emergency system, but she was pleased—no, she was ecstatic—that Timothy had come up with this reasonable scheme on his own, free of her veiled suggestions.
“What we’re talking about is a significant federal offense,” Cornell had offered.
“On top of several other federal offenses,” Timothy added.
“In pursuit of the truth, there’s no genuine crime,” Nathan had reminded them, nodding at his own ironclad logic.
“Is that what we’re telling?” asked Timothy. “The truth?”
“Absolutely,” Nathan had chortled.
Then his son, possessing a more sagacious attitude, added, “With a mask of fiction, I hope. Because when this is done, I don’t want to be led off to prison. Please.”
With a touch of a button, the stew of truth and fiction began where it had paused.
Hawthorne Klay dissolved, replaced with a dead man who spoke to his audience.
In life, Jordick Tiller had had long raven-colored hair, typically dirty and uncombed, and his personality could have been charitably labeled “difficult”; but in death, facing a doubting public, his resurrectors had cleaned him up and given him new clothes, his posture and his sour, whining attitude improved enormously. With a quick, charmingly nervous voice, Jordick described his abbreviated life. He named his parents and birthplace, then with a hint of shame, mentioned that he wasn’t close to his family, and he had never married. If something happened to him, no one would notice. “Which,” he conceded, “is probably why they hired me in the first place.”
Hawthorne Klay’s voice, born inside a top-flight audio simulator, asked, “Who hired you?”
“Tangent, Inc.”
“The high-technology company?”
“No,” Jordick replied, a glint of fear in his eyes. “That’s a front, a fabrication. It was set up by the CEA. The corporate headquarters in California is where the agency does its special research. The agency hired me. It needed my help—”
“What kind of help?”
“You wouldn’t believe me.”
The artificial voice made a soft, understanding sound, then asked the dead man, “Are you talking about traveling to another world?”
Jordick nodded, muttering, “Maybe.”
“What sort of world?”
“High Desert, we called it.” The witness paused, his eyes losing their focus. “Very dry, very desolate. And lonely…beyond belief…”
“What were you doing on High Desert?”
“Searching. For intelligent life.” Jordick paused. “The CEA wants to find new technologies. Fancy sources of energy, strange materials. Anything that helps our country get a jump on our competition.”
“Did you find intelligent life?”
“Not at first…”
“But eventually?”
He nodded, sighed. “There was a place. The Breaks, we called it. Arroyos led into wet canyons, and as we moved deeper, we could feel something. A presence, I guess you’d call it. The flavor of an enormous intelligence.”
“It sounds like exciting work.”
“It wasn’t. Mostly, it was boring. And hard.”
“Was it dangerous?”
“Could be.” He licked his lips. “Friends of mine died. In dust storms, under rock slides. And some were murdered—”
“Murdered?”
“Going to another world…it changes people. In big ways, it changes them. Even the strongest person can get depressed, or worse.” He paused for a long moment, as if gathering himself. “Insanity is possible,” he whispered. “Murderous rages…well, I saw them happen more than once.”
“Did the agency know that?”
Jordick gave a nervous little laugh. “Oh, yeah.”
“But they must have taken precautions.”
“At first. They limited our shifts, gave us counseling. But when they thought we were closing in on a genuine alien, they began to push us. Longer shifts, less rest. We were deep in the canyons when a huge storm came up, and the floods trapped everyone who wasn’t killed outright.” He was breathing as if winded. “Remember that plane crash last summer? Out in the Pacific? Tangent, Inc. lost hundreds of employees, supposedly coming back from a vacation on Tahiti.”
The screen split in two, authentic video showing rescue planes circling above a seamless blue sea. Above the scene was a complete list of the missing, compiled by Timothy, including hometowns and next-of-kin.
“They weren’t on Tahiti,” Jordick continued, “or even on the earth. They were lost on High Desert. They died horribly, and the CEA covered it up.”
“You knew these people, didn’t you?”
“They were my best friends. Some of them.”
“Is that why you’ve decided to come forward, Mr. Tiller?”
“In part.”
“What else is there, sir?”
The faraway gaze returned, then Jordick spoke with a quiet, utterly sane voice. “In our base camp, we built a cage. Like a zoo cage. It was meant to hold an alien, in case we ever caught one.” He paused, then repeated, “Like a zoo cage.” Shaking his head, he said, “We weren’t there to make friends. We were hunting for knowledge. Methods didn’t matter. Only results. Even if it meant throwing helpless creatures behind bars!” He shook his head, telling his audience, “It’s not supposed to be that way. Maybe other nations can kidnap, can do anything they want, but not my country. Not my government.”
There was a long pause, the screen filled with an anguished face. Then Hawthorne’s voice said, “You are taking a risk, aren’t you? Coming forward like this?”
“When the CEA hired me,” Jordick confessed, “I signed away my free speech r
ights. I’m pledged to protect our nation’s security, whatever that means.”
“You’re risking prosecution…”
“Worse.” A watery smile collapsed into a sneer. Shaking his head, he said, “I heard rumors. From high-up people. If they even suspect that I’m talking to you, I’ll suffer some terrible accident.”
A disbelieving voice said, “You’re talking about murder.”
The witness stared out at the world, a subtle change in the light making his flesh appear ghostly. “In our world,” he warned his audience, “knowledge means wealth, and it brings power. And think of all the harm people have done, chasing those two horrible dreams.”
Jordick was hired and trained at the same time as Cornell. The men had crossed over to High Desert together, and Cornell had found the ill-fated man’s corpse. Using Jordick as their first witness seemed appropriate. Timothy had pulled his image and voice print from the files of a more benign employer. The driving hope was that after the world had seen Jordick’s interview, others would investigate him. They would learn that Jordick Tiller had been a genuine man and an employee of Tangent, Inc., and he had reportedly died in a remote area, in a vague accident, his body cremated and the anonymous ashes lost.
By contrast, the next witness was a living person.
A public spokeswoman for Tangent, Inc., Ms. Farrah Smith was an older, no-nonsense woman with a helmet of gray hair and a bulldog’s charmless face. They had replicated her exactly, hoping to cause her all sorts of hell.
“We found the intrusions by accident,” Ms. Smith reported. “At a weapons lab, as it happens. High-energy particles—I’m not privy to what kinds—were being disrupted at a single point. The disruption marked a flaw between the earth and a neighboring world. A quantum intrusion, we call it. Not a perfectly accurate name, but that’s one reason to select that name. We don’t want the competition learning anything easily.”
“In simple terms,” asked Hawthorne’s voice, “can you describe an intrusion?”
“Tiny, tiny, tiny,” she chanted. “Just about impossible to find, and that’s if you know what you’re doing.” The witness had a guarded quality, her face like weathered stone. “If that beam of ours had been moved half a nanometer in any direction—up or down, left or right—nobody would have noticed the intrusion. But having found one helped us find the others. There is a complex, very advanced branch of mathematics that predicts where to look. And the same mathematics showed us how to open the intrusions and cross to another world.”
“Which means what?”
“The CEA possesses an enormous new technology. And chances are, no one else is going to stumble across it soon. If ever.”
“That’s what we once thought about the atomic bomb, if I’m not mistaken. An assumed monopoly—”
“No,” Ms. Smith interrupted. “During World War Two, every physics student knew about nuclear energy. But this…this is something much larger, and much more surprising. And in the long run, infinitely more powerful.”
There was a pause; the audience asked to dwell on the idea of power.
“Your agency hires volunteers,” the interviewer mentioned. “You find talented people who can pass through these intrusions…somehow…”
“I won’t tell you how,” she warned.
“But is it true that some of these volunteers died while working for you?”
The stony face cracked, a wetness leaking into the unblinking eyes. “We have a saying at the agency: ‘Columbus didn’t come home with full crews.’” She gave that logic a moment to fester, then added, “Our people are told what to expect; they’re well-trained, and for their trouble, they’re paid handsomely.”
The interviewer waited for an instant, then observed, “You seem to accept the risks and the prize. Which makes me wonder: Why did you agree to speak to us?”
The face softened, finally. An expression of pure grief had been designed to take the audience by surprise. “Something else has happened. It’s not being done by my division, but the agency is responsible—”
“What is it?”
“Murder,” she reported. “Several murders, actually.”
“Who has been murdered?”
Silence.
“Can you name the victims, ma’am?”
“I will…yes…” The moment was as genuine as possible, down to the eyelid twitching above pooling tears. “This,” she reported, “is what happens to people who stand in the agency’s way.”
The image dissolved to black.
“And that’s as much as I’ve finished,” Timothy confessed. “So far.”
He wasn’t someone who apologized easily, but Porsche could see the frustration in his face, in the way he slapped his bony knees, and in the way his voice, like the digital image, dissolved to black.
Borrowing faces was an easy trick; what was difficult, they were learning, was to find genuine evidence of criminal acts.
On High Desert, Cornell’s team leader had told him about the arranged murders. But the man’s sanity was questionable at the time, and he had died shortly afterwards. What if the agency was innocent? It was a cynical fear, and nagging. Timothy dredged it up for the umpteenth time, retracing their investigations with a hypercritical tone that made everyone brittle.
“We’ve got two people with connections to Tangent, and they blew off their own heads,” he grumbled, passing hard copies of death certificates from one hand to the other and back again. “Plus, three known CEA employees picked the same fate, including two Ph.D.s. All were labeled suicides. Different caliber weapons, all traceable to the dead. No witnesses, but each left a suicide note.” He set down the certificates, nervous fingers moving to other stacks of data. “I’ve helped study a few apparent suicides that turned out to be murders. I know what I’m talking about. Honestly, I think we’re looking at self-inflicted wounds.”
Porsche knew better than to interrupt the monologue.
It was Nathan who broke in, assuming that Timothy was seeking advice or encouragement. “Suicide notes can be faked. Easier than faces and voices can be, I should think.”
The words brought no response.
Nathan turned to Porsche. “Was it last week? Someone suggested looking at the nearby motels, seeing if the killer had stayed there while committing the crime. And searching the phone records, in case the same numbers were called—”
“I mentioned those possibilities,” Timothy snapped, “and they didn’t lead anywhere. Which isn’t a big surprise, since we’re talking about elite assassins. Stupid mistakes aren’t very likely.”
“But everyone leaves traces of themselves,” Nathan promised. “And I know you’ll find them. Given time.”
Kind words infuriated Timothy. He shook his head, saying, “I’ve spent a hundred hours a week trying to find something…that may not be there…and I don’t know…”
“What don’t you know?” asked Cornell.
“If it’s worth the bother. Not to mention the danger.” Timothy shook his head, adding, “I’m getting really sick of this goddamn farm.”
Cornell’s temper flared. He hated the idea of being abandoned, and he said it by saying nothing, chewing on his cheek, his face growing more and more flushed.
Nathan was gentler and equally unpersuasive. “I know it’s difficult,” he allowed. “To be a person like you, living in this place—”
“Because I’m black, you mean.”
“No,” Nathan replied, oblivious to the man’s race. “I’m talking about your education, your worldliness.”
Timothy was momentarily surprised, and vulnerable.
But Nathan couldn’t see his advantage. Instead of more compliments, he changed tactics. “Besides,” he declared, “you’ve already committed terrible crimes. If you leave us, you’ll just place yourself more securely in their crosshairs.”
It was a paranoid, flaky moment.
Pure Nathan.
Porsche had to leap into the breach. She rose, announcing, “I have an idea.” Sh
e intended to recommend that everyone take a break. The rest of the day, or maybe the entire week. But as she began to frame her next sentence, a genuine idea came dribbling out, half-formed by some part of her unconscious mind.
“Three men,” she sputtered.
“What?” asked Timothy, and Nathan. No one had told them about their landlord’s ominous tale.
Cornell just stared at her, waiting.
She moved closer to Timothy, looking at the stacks of printouts. “We also talked, last week…about using security and traffic cameras…looking for anyone who was near two or more of the murder scenes.”
“I did that,” Timothy replied. “It was a long shot. The chance of two clear images is about as tiny as an intrusion—”
“How about one image?” Porsche asked.
Cornell understood. “We’re looking for three men riding together. Do you have anything like that on file?”
“Two young men,” Porsche added, “accompanied by someone older.”
Timothy almost asked, “Why?”
But he thought better of it, framing the question for the durable, semiportable computers that lined the back wall of the old utility building.
It was a dark, relentlessly damp building. Porsche glanced up at the cot that Timothy used on most nights, sleeping in little bites. A self-imposed prison, that’s what this place was. Clearly, she had to get him out more often, making the poor man enjoy himself, somehow…
The search for a threesome brought a quick answer.
Or, rather, ten possible answers. Timothy dispensed hard copies after a quick enhancement. Porsche looked them over, then made a guess. But she didn’t tell anyone her guess, putting all of the candidates into an envelope, then telling everyone, “Let’s go enjoy a little drive. Okay?”
“A drive where?” Timothy inquired.
“Not far,” Cornell promised, winking knowingly at the others.
Walking into the chill November air, Porsche whispered, checking with her Few-made eavesdroppers.
No one was within half a mile of the farmhouse.
As a precaution, she set the defensive systems to full alert. If there were trespassers, they would be eased into unconsciousness. She climbed aboard a long-bed Humvee-style truck that she’d bought third-hand, and with Cornell at her side and the other two men in the back seat, the group drove over graveled roads and up a short driveway, arriving at their landlord’s house for an impromptu visit.
