Offworld

by Robin Parrish

  "But even with its unparalleled technological muscle," said Rowley, "in the last year it has become drastically more than the sum of its parts-for reasons we don't fully understand."

  "Speaking of not understanding," said Chris, "I still don't get what a gigantic machine that predicts the future has to do with everyone in the world disappearing."

  "Well then," said Rowley, stretching to his full height, which was still rather short, "now we come to it. This is where our story takes a radical left turn. The thing is ... for most of its existence, the machine didn't work. For decades, our scientists believed we were right on the cusp of victory, but it never produced a viable forecast. Which is why we kept adding to it we were still trying to get the thing functional."

  As your mission approached," Parks picked up the story, "we knew we were closer than ever to success. Our ambition was to get it up and running in time for the Mars mission, especially since your mission was going to be long term. And just like the original scientists that first envisioned the machine, we intended to offer it to NASA for use in predicting any disasters that might befall the four of you while you were so far from home."

  Rowley spoke again, looking directly at Chris. "Our first successful use of the machine occurred the day you fell into that lava tube on the Martian surface. But and this is the crucial bit though it was finally working, the machine was not doing what it was designed to do. It was doing something monumentally more profound. Imagine our astonishment when we realized the Waveform Device wasn't forecasting probable events-it was adjusting theprobability of events so that not only were they likely to happen ... they did happen."

  A very long moment of silence fell over their little corner of the room. Glances were exchanged between Chris and his friends. Chris kept thinking that he must have heard Rowley wrong. He could tell that his friends were having just as hard a time as he was with swallowing what they'd just been told.

  It was Owen who found his voice first. `Are you saying what it sounds like ... ? That this machine can alter reality?"

  Rowley looked him dead in the eye. "That is exactly what we're saying."

  "So .. " Terry surmised with no attempt to hide his cynicism, "that crazy stuff that happened while we were away the moon, the T-Rex, the flying dolphins ... That was you, then, was it?"

  Parks nodded. "We were perhaps not as cautious as we should have been, in light of our extraordinary discovery. Those strange events were us testing the limits of the machine, over several months' time. We nearly caused a worldwide panic! The media went nuts over the amateur footage and eyewitness accounts, playing them again and again. But for the most part, they avoided drawing conclusions. Though there was that one guy ... "

  "Who?" asked Chris.

  Parks shook his head, frowning. "His website was run anonymously. Whoever he was, he pieced together all the evidence and started drawing conclusions. I think Roston had him killed to silence him. Anyway, it was during these early tests of the quantum machine that we first grasped the profound strain that altering reality puts on the machine, which led us to realize-"

  Trisha shook her head, not buying it. "No way. I'm sorry, but there is absolutely no way a man-made machine can just suddenly have access to the kind of power it would take to alter reality. If such power even exists."

  "You're right," Parks admitted, unshaken. "We thought the same thing when the machine began to cause these incredible things to happen. It didn't take us long to realize that something deep inside the machine-one of the thousands of pieces of experimental equipment we mentioned earlier-is the key to what the machine was doing."

  "There are all sorts of strange bits of technology throughout the machine," explained Rowley, his voice slower and more reverential than before. `But one object in particular has been there since almost the very beginning, and it's been the source of endless debate and theorizing by all who've worked on the machine. We call this object `the Box.' "

  "What is it?" asked Chris.

  A container," replied Parks. "Obsidian black and a little smaller than a phone booth. What it contains-what's inside the Box-we don't know. There's no inventory of all the `stuff' that's been added to the machine over the years, so we have no way of knowing what it is. We don't know what's inside it, we don't know where it came from, and we've vowed never to open it and find out."

  "Why not?" asked Terry who, despite his earlier skepticism, was having a hard time hiding his curiosity. "How can you not want to know?"

  "About twenty-five years ago," said Rowley, "a scientist working on the Waveform Device came across the Box and, like everyone before him, wanted to know what was inside it. He was advised not to go near it by other members of the team, who believed it to be dangerous, but he didn't listen. His curiosity was too great. Late one night when he was alone in the Vault, he climbed down through the machinery and circuits to where he found the Box, and he opened it.

  "He was found dead two days later. His body was sprawled out on a catwalk next to the Box, which had somehow been closed after he opened it. But we know he opened it, because his eyeballs were missing from his head. Or not missing per se because an autopsy revealed that scar tissue left in the eye sockets was actually what was left of his eyes.

  "Whatever he saw inside the Box melted his eyes."

  That's ludicrous, Chris thought. But is it any crazier than every living creature vanishing from the face of the Earth?

  `And you really have no idea where this Box came from?" Chris asked.

  "No proof. Just theories," said Parks. "Some believe it to be an artifact from some lost ancient civilization. The man who recruited me to the project believed it was a piece torn free from the alien craft that supposedly crashed in Roswell. But truthfully, we don't know anything."

  "Well, mostly," Rowley corrected his friend. "We know one thing. A few weeks after 'D -Day,' as you call it, electrical power went out at the college, as it has throughout much of the world. But the Waveform Device-which we always assumed ran on the city power grid-kept running. It's running now, and electricity has not been restored to the college.

  "We traced the source of the machine's power back to the Box, or rather to whatever's inside it."

  "So," Terry said, trying to sum it up, "this Box thing is like a power generator for your machine? Is it the real reason the machine does what it can do?"

  Rowley frowned, reluctant to give this answer. "We believe it to be, at the very least, the foundation of the machine's capabilities."

  "Whatever is inside the Box," clarified Parks, "is somehow tapping into the fabric of reality. The quantum machine is allowing us to manipulate that fabric. For a while."

  Chris looked around the room at his friends.

  "Then that's how you did it," he guessed. "That's how you made the world's population disappear-or `stop existing,' as you put it. You used this quantum machine to change reality."

  Parks took a step backward, shaking his head. "It wasn't our idea."

  "Indeed not," Rowley agreed, though he maintained his businesslike tone. "That insane notion came from the mind of Mark Roston."

  "Who is Roston?" asked Chris. `And what's his part in this?"

  "Roston is career military, a veteran of several ground conflicts, and ... he's my brother-in-law. He found out about the machine, we assume through my wife, and cooked up this entire plot."

  "But why?" Chris was leaning forward now, desperate to understand this key fact. "What does the absence of everyone on Earth get him?"

  Parks shook his head, his ponytail flopping back and forth behind it. "He wouldn't tell us. But whatever he's up to, he's not finished. Far from it. Roston and his people, when they are done with whatever they're doing while everyone's gone, intend to bring everyone back."

  Chris blinked. It made no sense.

  Why would Roston remove the population of the planet, only to return them later?

  How does he benefit from that?

  Whatever it is, it can't be good for the world.r />
  "But he can't do it," Rowley spoke up. "He may plan to bring everyone back, hut it won't be possible for him to do so."

  "Why not?" asked Trisha.

  `Because the quantum machine is tearing itself apart. It's doing something exponentially bigger than it was ever meant to do, and the strain is too much for it to withstand"

  Parks added, "Imagine trying to channel a tornado through a drinking straw. Even for its tremendous size and all the working parts that are in there, the machine just can't handle the power being fed to it by the Box. And once the machine fails completely ... it's over."

  A note of finality hung in the air, and Chris was beginning to understand the burden being placed on their shoulders. "How long until the machine falls apart?"

  "A day at most," replied Rowley. "Likely far less."

  Chris let out a long, slow breath. He was starting to feel jittery, like they needed to move, to get out of there and back to Houston as fast as they could.

  "We can't be certain exactly when it will occur," Rowley went on. "It's already happening; it started a few days ago. You've seen it yourselves-when you find yourselves briefly in places that shouldn't exist, places that defy the laws of physics? That's the machine taking damage, and in turn damaging reality. And those flickers in reality are coming faster all the time."

  "There's also the spatial disturbance," added Parks. "I think you call it `the void.' It's the machine's event horizon-we don't completely understand the void, but the machine creates it, and it emerges whenever a change is made to reality. It's shrinking, getting smaller by the minute. When it shrinks down to nothing, the machine will be dead."

  Chris stood. "So if we get the two of you back inside the machine before it falls apart, then you can make it bring everyone back?"

  Parks and Rowley exchanged another look. Chris was starting to hate it when they did that.

  "The two of us," said Rowley, "will never be allowed to see the inside of the Vault again. Roston will kill us before that happens. But not you. He could have had us kill you anytime he wanted, and we almost did when we made your ship crash, but when you survived, he had a change of heart. He made us throw plenty of obstacles in your way the flooding, the grocery store that collapsed, the hospital that burned down-but his intention was to slow your progress, not kill you. I think he may actually respect you, and even hope to recruit you to his way of thinking. Particularly you, Commander Burke. He seems especially fixated on you-"

  "Back up for a second," said Terry. "You caused the Ares to crash? And every other bit of awfulness that's happened to us since we got back? The flood in Biloxi, the hurricane, the dams and levies and all that that was you and your machine?"

  , "Yes.,

  `And you saved me on Mars? Before Roston took control of the machine?" asked Chris. "So what was with the stroll down memory lane? And the ball of light? Why did you show me that stuff?"

  Parks looked confused. "We inadvertently caused the sandstorm that you got lost in. You fell into the tunnel on your own-that was real. Then we pulled you out of it and deposited you where one of your teammates would find you. And we added oxygen to your suit, so you could survive until you were rescued. But that's it. Anything else you saw or experienced during that time you can chalk up to hallucinations caused by oxygen deprivation."

  "But ... the strange things I saw ... they didn't happen? No basement? No ball of-George? It was all in my head?" Chris asked.

  "We were watching you inside that tunnel by looking through the spatial-by looking through the void," said Rowley. `And we never saw anything out of the ordinary."

  "But ... my memories came back. If you took them away, why did they return?"

  "The human mind is complex and unpredictable," replied Rowley, shaking his head. "We used the machine to wipe your memories, but the human body can find a way to compensate for almost anything given enough time."

  "What do we do now?" Trisha spoke up. "How do we get everyone back?"

  "Fortunately, it's quite easy," Parks explained. "Once you get to the machine. Of course, you'll have to get past Roston's people, but once you're inside the Vault, we built a fail-safe code into the machine's software."

  A fail-safe code," repeated Trisha. "One simple keystroke and everything's undone?"

  "Very nearly. Think of the disappearances like a program that's running on your laptop. As long as that program is open and running, the world's populace is rendered nonexistent. If the machine should come apart on its own, as we think it will ... What happens when your personal computer crashes? You lose whatever data you had open at the time, if it isn't saved. And that's exactly what'll happen to everyone that was erased. The `program' has to be closed, and the machine shut clown while it's still able to function properly.

  "The fail-safe code will do that. It will force every program currently running-and there are several, including one for the people, and another for the animals-it will force them to close and shut clown the machine. Bottom line: enter the code before the machine tears itself apart, and everyone comes back. If the machine's destroyed before you enter the code ... then the human race is lost forever."

  "What's the code?" Trisha asked.

  For the first time, Rowley hesitated. He opened his mouth, but then closed it, looking away.

  "You'll need to find the main data terminal-it's near the Vault's only exit," said Parks, covering for his friend. "Once there, bring up a command prompt and enter the three-letter code."

  "What are the letters?" asked Trisha.

  With a final nervous glance at Rowley, Parks replied, "M. A. E."

  EIGHTEEN

  Terry sprang from his seat, ignoring his injury, and launched himself at Rowley. He tackled the older man and pinned him to the ground.

  "What did you do?!" he screamed in Rowley's face. "Who is shed "

  "Terry!" shouted several voices at once, but Terry ignored them all, ready to choke the life out of this man.

  "She's my daughter," whispered Rowley, his face pained and not from Terry's hold. "She was my daughter."

  Chris and Owen together tried to pull Terry off of Rowley, but he was filled with so much righteous fury, he refused to let go.

  "Was?" he said.

  "She was never born. Her mother was murdered while pregnant."

  Terry froze, and finally allowed the others to pull him hack. He studied Rowley, who remained on the ground, but propped up on his elbows. "No, Mae told me about her mother. She died when Mae was seven. They were both living on the streets-"

  "Her mother was a prostitute," said Rowley. "I'm not proud of it. We met about a year before I joined the Waveform program. I lived in New Orleans at the time, and I was a very different person back then. Cold, selfish, disagreeable."

  "How is that different?" remarked Trisha.

  "When Mae's mother found out she was pregnant, months later," Rowley continued, ignoring Trisha, "she came to me and told me we were having a baby girl, and she wanted to name her Mae. I was so stunned, I just ... I ran away. I didn't look back. And I never saw her again. When she was killed, carrying my child, it ... I was devastated. Changed. I was invited to join the Waveform project a few months later, and decided to devote the rest of my life to making it happen, for the betterment of mankind"

  Until you decided to take a payout from a man who wanted to erase the world's entire population, Terry thought. It took every ounce of restraint he had not to spit on this man.

  "But Mae's mother was killed before she could give birth," Rowley said.

  "No, she wasn't," Terry protested.

  "She was," said Rowley. "In the original version of reality. In this new version we've created, where the world's population vanished into thin air two months ago ... this particular chapter from my own personal history somehow crept into the changes we made, and Mae's mother wasn't killed until several years after she gave birth."

  "You're saying the machine changed the past?" asked Chris.

  Rowley nodded, somber. `Jus
t this one specific event. Nothing else in the past was altered. All other changes were made to the present."

  "How is it possible that this one little bit of your past snuck into the machine?" asked Terry, studying Rowley bitterly.

  "I don't know, honestly I don't," Rowley replied. "I've been trying to figure that out since we realized just who your young companion was."

  "When was that?" asked Trisha.

  "Three days ago," said Parks. "We were already unhappy with how our deal with Roston had turned out, and fearing for our lives. But once Rowley figured out Mae's identity, he convinced me that we had to get out of there and find you."

  Rowley was still shaking his head in confusion. "The machine is not an artificial intelligence, so I can't explain how it did this. Maybe because I worked on the machine for so many years, I literally put some of myself into its wires and circuits.... Maybe my guilt made me subconsciously enter an equation into the D-Day program that allowed Mae to be born.... Maybe some obscure component of the machine made it happen because my personal password is the name of the daughter I never had. I don't know.

  "However it happened ... she's here now. And she can't be."

  Terry wasn't sure why, but Rowley's last words made him angry again. "What do you mean?"

  "Mae ... is a problem," said Parks.

  "She's an anomaly," Rowley stated, "and as I said, we can't explain her presence. Math does not easily give ground to the unexplained; it's absolute. It's perfect."

  "So she's an anomaly," said Chris. "So what? Aren't you glad she's alive?"

  "You're not hearing me," Rowley replied. "She absolutely cannot be here."

  "She was brought into existence by the machine," Parks put it more simply. "By the same process that erased everyone else from the world."