The Breach

by Patrick Lee

  The master closet was filled with a wide array of clothing. He picked out some jeans and a T-shirt, and was in the kitchen thinking about a sandwich when he noticed the message button flashing on the wall phone. It hadn’t been flashing earlier. He pressed the button and heard Crawford’s voice, telling him that Tangent had retrieved two messages from his voice mail in Fairbanks, and routed them here.

  “Obviously there are security measures we take with outgoing calls,” Crawford’s recorded voice said. “If you need to contact anyone, speak to me and we’ll see what we can arrange.”

  The first message was a telemarketer’s robo-call trying to sell him an extended warranty on his Explorer. The second was from his brother, Jeff.

  “Hey, Travis. Give me a shout when you get this. Cool news. Whitebird’s almost official. It just beat Level One in Fog of War without my help. It’s still buggy, needs a shitload of work, but I’m geeked, man. You can still get in on this with me, if you want. Call me. Out.”

  Whitebird was a computer system, both hardware and software, that Jeff had been working on for years. It was a narrow form of artificial intelligence, meant to improve the performance of computer-driven enemies in video games. Jeff had been testing its capability by letting it take on the role of the human player in older, simpler games, mostly martial-arts stuff on 8-bit systems from the eighties and nineties. Now he was up to modern games like Fog of War. Pretty impressive. He probably stood to make millions selling the technology to a game developer, once he had all the wrinkles smoothed out. More to the point, though, he simply loved the work.

  Travis’s temptation to accept his offer, during the past year, had at times nearly swayed him all the way. Even now he felt some strain of remorse. Like he’d missed an exit from the freeway, one he’d been supposed to take, but that he’d never get back to now.

  It struck him that, of the two of them, if someone had been asked to guess which brother would end up in a place like Border Town, the smart money—the only money—would’ve been on Jeff. Tangent probably had an army of computer techs designing and running customized systems for their research.

  Travis turned away from the phone, and was heading for the refrigerator when someone knocked on the door.

  He crossed the living room, opened it, and found Paige standing there, also having just showered. Still looking keyed up. Looking like she wished she could relax.

  “Tell me you haven’t eaten,” she said.

  “I haven’t eaten.”

  An hour later they were sitting cross-legged on her bed, facing each other. Sometimes she looked down at her hands fidgeting in her lap, and her hair fell across her face in a way that Travis couldn’t stop staring at.

  They talked about random things. Paige had finished high school at sixteen and gone to Texas A&M. She’d set out to become a historian, but four years later had found herself going for a master’s in the new nanosystems engineering program there, working on the Model-T versions of what would someday, with any luck, be digital white blood cells, the cure for pretty much everything. When Travis asked her why she’d changed her major, she said she’d realized something: as much as she loved to understand where the human story had been, she was more interested in where it was going. Nothing excited her like the forward edge of technology, the best minds in the world building on one another’s work at an ever-increasing speed. By twenty-one she knew she wanted to spend her life in that world. And then, in one very surprising weekend, her father—her only living relative—had brought her to this place and shown her what he really did for a living. Quite the revelation, it’d been. With it had come another: there were grave security risks attendant to the loved ones of Tangent operators like Peter Campbell. Paige was in danger, just by living her life, just by being who she was. She would be safer here at Border Town, so long as the threat persisted.

  “Lived here ever since,” she said, glancing around at her apartment. Two levels below Travis’s, it was identical except for the touches her taste had brought to it.

  Her hands found their way into his. He held them, his thumbs tracing back and forth across her palms.

  She spoke softly. “Since prison, has there been anyone special?”

  “No one,” he said. A moment later he added, “No one special in prison, either.”

  Paige laughed, glancing up from their hands to meet his eyes.

  “After I got out,” he said, “part of me thought there was no point in trying. You can only get so far into a conversation before you run into the wall. ‘You’re from Minnesota? Oh, what did you do there?’ ”

  She laughed again, quietly. “What did the rest of you think?”

  He was silent a moment. “That this was my real punishment. The one I’d never get free of. And that I deserved it.”

  “For what happened to—” She paused, and Travis could see her parsing her memory of the police report she’d read. At last she said, “Emily. Emily Price.”

  Travis nodded. “She saved me from what I was. Saved my life, figuratively, even literally, I’m sure. And they killed her because of it. I should’ve known. I should’ve seen it coming, and I didn’t.”

  “It’s easy to underestimate the bad in people,” Paige said. “I don’t think it should carry a life sentence.”

  He managed something close to a smile, and held her hands a little tighter.

  In the darkness their clothes evaporated, and there was only her skin against his, so much warmer than he’d imagined, and her hair falling around him, scented sweet like apple trees in October. He tasted on her tongue the white wine they’d had with dinner. Tasted the soft skin below her jawline. Tasted everything.

  Later, holding her close, Travis felt the silence filling up with all the questions he knew they were both dwelling on. All the things that didn’t add up, no matter which way they were arranged.

  “Everything the Whisper’s ever done,” he said, “since the day it came out of the Breach in 1989, has been part of the act. Hasn’t it?”

  She nodded against his chest. “I think so.”

  “The notion that it’s compelled to help you at first, and then it tries to take over your will after that, it’s all bullshit. It can do anything it wants to do, anytime. Nothing compels it. Nothing limits it. All that stuff was just a smokescreen so it could control the way people handled it. Up in Alaska, when it used me to try setting off a nuclear war, it seemed to fail because Pilgrim’s people in the helicopter showed up too soon. Are you buying that for a second? The thing can predict a mega lotto outcome years in advance, but not the arrival of a helicopter a few minutes out? Something a radar tech with a stopwatch could probably figure out in his head?”

  “Strikes me as a little inconsistent,” Paige whispered.

  “It was keeping up appearances,” he said. “Playing the role a little longer. Every move it’s made, from the moment it arrived in this world, has been to steer things to exactly where they are right now. Do you see the problem with that?”

  “That twenty years is a long damn time for something that powerful to spend reaching its goal?”

  “Exactly,” he said. “If all it wants is control of Border Town and the Breach, it could’ve gotten it almost on day one. It could’ve just played nice, right from the beginning, won everybody over, and then as soon as the right person was holding it, someone with access to any of the really destructive shit locked away in this building, it could’ve used that person as a puppet to kill everyone here. Just like that. So what the hell is it really after? What’s far enough out of its reach, that it’s taken all these years, and all this elaborate planning?”

  For a moment she didn’t reply. Then her forehead furrowed against his skin.

  “What if it’s after something that wasn’t available until now?” she said.

  Travis thought about that. It sounded right. A hell of a lot better than what he had, which was nothing.

  “Like a new entity?” he said. “Something that would’ve just arrived?” />
  “I don’t know. None of the recent unique arrivals has been especially powerful or dangerous, as far as we know.”

  They fell silent again. Travis heard the building’s air exchange system kick on with a sigh. His face was resting against the top of Paige’s head. Every breath was rich with the scent of her hair.

  After a moment he said, “There’s something that bothers me more than all of this.” He considered how to begin. “We agree that Pilgrim isn’t really the enemy here, right? That’s not to say he’s blameless. The Whisper probably chose him because it knew the kind of things he was capable of. But whatever Pilgrim believes, the Whisper is the one calling the shots. So far, so good, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But the Whisper is still a machine. It’s a tool, and a tool doesn’t choose its own purpose. Someone else would have done that.”

  Paige was silent a long while before speaking. “You mean someone on the other side of the Breach,” she said.

  “Yeah.”

  With his arm, he felt a shiver climb the muscles of her back.

  “If that’s the case,” she said, “then we never had a prayer.”

  He tried to think of some reassuring reply to that, but came up empty. All he could do was pull her closer against himself. She responded, settling into him. He lay there listening to her breathing, feeling her limbs relax. Turning the questions over and over, and wondering who—or what—they were really up against, he faded out.

  Sometime later, he woke with the strangest feeling. Like he’d figured something out. Dreamed it, maybe. He tried to remember what it was, but could only push it away, like a child trying to palm a basketball. He relaxed and let it come back. For a moment, it seemed that it might. An impression of it swam into view: the video footage of the high-powered pump station at Cook’s house on Grand Cayman. It had something to do with that. Something about Cook’s need for it, in the first place. But that was all he could get. A moment later it was gone.

  Paige murmured, rising halfway out of sleep beside him. He kissed her forehead and she rolled into him, softly kissing his neck before drifting away in his arms. Feeling her heartbeat against him, he closed his eyes and followed her down.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  A phone began to ring. Somewhere in the dark. Travis felt Paige stir. She rolled toward the nightstand—the clock read just past four in the morning—switched on the light, and pressed a button for the speakerphone. Even as she answered with her name, she slipped under the covers again and hugged her body to his.

  The voice that issued from the phone sounded scared. “Paige, it’s Crawford. I’m at Secure Storage on B31. The attendants on duty called me down. There’s something going on. Maybe you should come down here.”

  Her eyes locked on Travis’s.

  “Paige?” Crawford said.

  “I’m here.” She let go of Travis, sat up and swung her feet to the floor, hunting for her clothes. “Describe what’s happening.”

  “We’re not really sure. It has to do with the object you brought back from Zurich. The black cube.”

  “The amplifier,” Paige said. She looked at Travis again.

  In the background over the speakerphone, they could hear some kind of droning sound. Like someone humming, from deep in the diaphragm. It was the sound they’d heard on the ninth floor of 7 Theaterstrasse, just before everything went to hell.

  “It’s locked inside one of the vaults,” Crawford said. “Where we put it yesterday morning. But it’s making the sound you’re probably hearing behind me. We haven’t opened the vault yet. Not sure we should.”

  At that moment they heard a quick gap of silence over the phone, and Crawford said, “Paige, hold on, I’ve got a call from Defense Control. I’ll put it on conference so I don’t lose you.” He clicked out for a second, and then they heard him say, “Defense go ahead.”

  A woman spoke. “Mr. Crawford, we have a situation up top. We’re not sure how this is happening, but there’s a radar contact directly above us, about forty thousand feet up, and falling. Computer says it’s human bodies.”

  “Divers?” Paige said.

  “We think so. They’re dropping at around two hundred miles per hour, consistent with terminal velocity for humans tucked into a bullet fall. Radar didn’t see a plane, so it was either an ultra-high-altitude bail-out from something like a U2, or a stealth, if that’s possible.”

  Travis saw Paige’s eyes narrow at that, but only slightly. Pilgrim had the Whisper; of course it was possible.

  “The diver formation went into a sparse pattern right after the first contact, and the radar lost them, but with the thermal cams on the chain guns, we should be able to track them manually when they get low enough. With your permission, sir, we’ll just kill everyone up there.”

  “Do it,” Crawford said. The bass-range hum continued on his end of the call.

  Sufficiently rattled by whatever the hell was going on down there, Paige stood, her clothes still balled up in her hand.

  “Did anything trigger the amplifier?” Paige said. “Any experiment going on nearby, anything like that?”

  “Nothing,” Crawford said. “It just came on. Like it was on a timer.”

  A thought hit Travis. Hit him hard enough to make him sit up and put his feet to the floor. Paige turned, seeing his expression.

  “Crawford, this is Travis Chase,” he said. “What entities are in the vaults closest to the amplifier?”

  There was a pause as Crawford processed the fact that Travis was speaking over Paige’s phone at four in the morning. Then he answered. “I don’t have that information in front of me. Hold on.” They heard him talking to one of the attendants in the background.

  But Travis already knew the answer. He stood from the bed and crossed to Paige’s desk, looking for a pencil and something to write on. Paige followed, dropping her clothes behind her.

  “What is it?” she said.

  Before he could answer, the woman at Defense Control spoke up again. “I see them on the thermals now. Barely. Initializing ground cannons for manual targeting.”

  “We need to write ourselves a message,” Travis said, “so we’ll know what happened.”

  He pulled open a drawer, found a dull pencil, and grabbed a printout of some kind, turning it over to write on the back.

  “What do you mean?” Paige said.

  Crawford spoke up over the phone. “Got the list. The vault nearest the amplifier contains Entity 0436, Jump Cut.”

  Just what Travis had expected. The thing Paige had told him about in Zurich. The thing that was exactly like the Ares, except for its effect. Which was that it killed the past three days’ memory, and left you feeling like you’d just blinked and missed that time.

  Paige’s mouth fell open slowly. Head shaking a little from side to side. Understanding. Unwanted understanding.

  “If the Whisper can predict the lotto,” Travis said, “it can predict which vault the amplifier would end up in.”

  “Oh my God,” Paige said.

  He returned his eyes to the paper, his mind laboring for what to write. Then Crawford screamed on the phone, and Travis knew it was too late. An instant later Paige’s bedroom flared with bright green light, like every room in Border Town, Travis was sure. On instinct he threw his arms around Paige, as if he could protect her from it. The light seemed to shine right through their bodies—

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  Travis had been lying awake in his tent, listening to wolves howling somewhere along the ridge. He’d read that wolf packs randomized the volume of their howling in order to confuse prey—and other wolves—as to their distance. It worked on humans, too. These sounded at least as close as—

  Suddenly he found his eyes shut, and a wild flash of light, like lightning but with a green cast to it, shone bright enough to be visible through his eyelids. It vanished almost at once, though he hardly noticed, because by then he’d realized someone was with him, holding on to him but at the sam
e time struggling—

  He opened his eyes to find himself standing in a room he’d never seen before. The struggling figure wrenched away from him.

  It was a very beautiful—and very naked—young woman.

  She was holding her right upper arm tightly, her face just now easing from what looked like a contortion of agony; Travis was sure he hadn’t grabbed that arm or even bumped it. He had only an instant to consider these things, and then she was screaming at him, her eyes as bewildered as his own must look.

  “What is this?” she shouted. “What the fuck is this? Where’s my father?”

  He reflexively stepped back from her, saying he didn’t know, then repeating it; it was the only answer he had for her questions—or his own.

  All at once she seemed to recognize the room, though that only confused her further, and then her eyes came to rest on a backpack and rifle leaning against the wall, and before Travis could register the danger, she’d lunged for the weapon, shouldered it and leveled it at his face.

  “What the fuck have you people done?”

  He had nothing he could say to her. He kept his eyes steady on hers, and shook his head, hands out from his sides to present no threat.

  She racked the rifle’s action and advanced a step, forcing him back against the wall. In the same moment her gaze dropped; Travis followed the look, and realized he was naked too. He met her eyes again, and saw them narrow as she looked around at the room once more, and then at herself—she noticed her own lack of clothing—as she struggled to piece the moment together. Her aggression faltered; the rifle didn’t.

  Somewhere nearby, agitated voices had been issuing from a speaker; now they stopped, and a single voice—an older man’s voice—said, “Did I hear Paige?”

  The woman—Paige, apparently—turned toward the sound, which Travis could now see came from a speakerphone. “Crawford?”