The Savior's Game (The Daniel Byrne Trilogy Book 3)

by Sean Chercover

  Daniel shook his head. “When you said it gets crazier, you were not lying.”

  “A lot to wrap your head around. If you chase the metaphysics of it too hard, it’ll drive you mad. And that’s not a figure of speech. I’ve seen it happen.”

  “People have been tying themselves in knots over the nature of reality since Plato,” said Daniel.

  “Still, in order to navigate it without freaking out completely, you need a mental construct for it. A way to plug the experiential evidence into your reality tunnel. We all do. I can’t predict what metaphor will work for you, all I can offer you is a look through my reality tunnel.”

  13

  Pull up over here.” Dana Cameron pointed and Pat guided the rental across two lanes and stopped at the curb.

  Daniel followed Cameron’s gaze to the storefront on their right. The sign in the window read:

  LA TERAPIA DE FLOTACIÓN.

  “Wait a second,” he said. “Sensory deprivation?”

  Cameron said, “That’s the old term. Now it’s called float therapy.”

  “Changing the name doesn’t change what it is.”

  “Don’t worry, it’s fun. Anyway, it’s the fastest way to get where we need to go.”

  Daniel looked at Pat.

  Pat shrugged. “I hear it’s the new yoga.”

  Cameron checked them into the luxury float spa and bought Daniel swim trunks. The young man at the counter wore a skintight FC Barcelona jersey and his hair tied up in a man-bun. In another life, he might’ve been a fashion model.

  Cameron handed Daniel the trunks, dug into her briefcase, and pulled out a red one-piece. “Let’s take room three,” she said. “It’s a double.”

  The swim trunks were a little loose at the waist and didn’t have a string, so in the interest of modesty, Daniel kept a thumb hooked in the waistband. The twin fiberglass float tanks were white and windowless, with a hatch door at the foot end. They looked like twin cocoons.

  Or caskets.

  Cameron had paid cash at the front desk, no plastic. No one knew Daniel was here. They’d left her cell phone back in her office. If Lucien Drapeau happened to be in town and decided to track her down, the phone would lead him to the university. Still . . .

  As if reading Daniel’s mind, Pat said, “I’ll be standing watch.” He clasped Daniel on the shoulder. “Got your six.”

  Cameron entered from the changing room, wearing the red one-piece. At the center of her chest was the Flash’s lightning-bolt logo.

  She said, “Inside the tank is water so salty you float on top, can’t sink. Even unconscious, you just lie on your back and float. The water and air inside are both set for body temperature. And of course there’s no light at all, not a single photon. After a few minutes, you can’t even feel your body.” She smiled at the thought. “You become just a mind, floating in space. It’s really cool.”

  “What if I have one of those adrenaline rushes in there?”

  “There’s a big red button on the inside wall, opens the door. But you won’t. The adrenaline rush only happens when part of your mind doesn’t want to go, or doesn’t want to come back. Indecision, or outright resistance, will trigger a rush, but if you go and return intentionally, you get a smooth ride, no jet lag. Just quiet your mind, feel your body fade, and then decide to go. It’s really that simple.”

  “Okay. Then what happens?”

  “You’ll wake up standing on the beach where you saw me before. I’ll be there with you. I’ll look just like I did last time. Expect to see me, and you will. Remember, everything runs on intention and attention.” Daniel started to speak but she cut him off, gesturing to the float tank on the right. “I’ll explain there, just get in.”

  Pat opened the hatch. “Your chariot awaits.”

  Daniel climbed into the tank. The chamber was about seven feet long, four feet wide, and tall enough to sit up in, but just. The warm water came up to his ribs, and the equally warm air smelled clean and slightly salty. There was a blue LED strip set into the ceiling just above Daniel’s head, and the water glowed blue.

  Daniel gave Pat a thumbs-up and Pat closed the hatch, and he was alone in his blue cocoon. Next to the hatch there was the red button and a light switch. Daniel flipped the switch, plunging himself into absolute blackness.

  He lay on his back, weightless. After a few minutes, he could no longer feel any line of demarcation between his skin and the air and water surrounding him. He could almost feel the boundary of what was him and what was not him melting away, until there was none. There was no meaningful difference between up and down, no difference between eyes open and closed.

  Daniel didn’t feel deprived of sensory input, but freed from its constant nattering. Free of gravity, free of sight. And in this freedom, he pictured himself standing on the beach of that seaside town. He visualized Dana Cameron standing before him until he expected to see her there.

  “Open your eyes.”

  14

  Daniel let out the breath he was holding and filled his lungs again. He was standing barefoot on the beach, the seaside town to his right, sun hanging in the western sky over the ocean to his left. Dana Cameron stood facing him. Purple glasses, red T-shirt, blue beach wrap.

  Just like last time.

  She pointed at his feet. “Wiggle your toes.”

  “What?”

  “For a soft landing, you want to focus on a specific sensory stimulus as soon as you arrive. Feel the sand between your toes.”

  Daniel wiggled his toes, feeling both the grit and warmth of the sand.

  “Feels real, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does. But I know my body’s in a float tank in Barcelona right now.”

  Cameron shook her head. “This is your body, right here.”

  Daniel pinched the skin of his forearm. Felt real, but the notion was simply impossible. “I don’t—then what’s in the float tank in Barcelona?”

  “Your secondary body, at best. Probably not even that.”

  “Wait, no, no, no . . . It’s one thing to say this is a real place, but you expect me to believe this place supersedes what I, perhaps quaintly, call real life? Because—”

  Cameron clapped her hands together. “Stop talking. Just stop.” She shook her head. “God, men. Now shut up and let me lead, or this isn’t gonna work.”

  “Fine,” said Daniel, forcing a long breath. “Mea culpa.”

  She pointed at his feet again. “Feel the sand with your feet. Don’t think. Just observe. Put your attention on it.”

  Daniel made arches with his feet, fists with his toes, feeling the texture of the sand as it came into detail, then sharper still—impossibly sharp—until he could feel each individual grain of sand, distinct from the others. A hyper-detailed version of sand.

  “Incredible,” he said. “I can almost count them.”

  “Never has there been sand so real,” Cameron said with a smile. “Now. Move through your body and observe what your senses are telling you.”

  Daniel wrestled his attention from the sand under his feet to the warm breeze caressing his face and arms and hands. He found he could track the path of the air as it pushed its way through the hair on his forearms. The breeze smelled like the ocean, and while the float tank could’ve provided the salt, there was also a subtle vegetal smell. Seaweed perhaps, or the nearby aloe plants. In addition to the sound of the wind, Daniel heard every detail of the sea lapping on the beach, hissing into the sand and rolling back out.

  He watched Dana Cameron’s hair dance in the breeze, then turned his gaze to the sloped street rising into town. The same houses and low-rise, white stucco apartments with terra-cotta roofs, and cars parked at the curb here and there. Far in the distance, the gleaming white tower rose into the sky, to a height never seen in what Daniel still wanted to think of as real life.

  A thought returned to him. A thought he’d had on a previous visit, shortly after leaving the apartment up the hill. But now it had context.

 
This moment—in this place—feels more real than any moment I’ve ever experienced in that other place.

  Not a dream, not a vision, not any creation of Daniel’s mind. It was a place, as real—maybe more real—than the place from which he’d come.

  Daniel tried the thought out several times, wording it in different ways. But however he put it, he couldn’t make it sound like a lie. He turned back to face Dana Cameron, realized his mouth was open, and closed it.

  She spread her arms out to her sides. “And the scales fell from the eyes of the blind man.”

  They walked side by side along the beach, ocean on their left and town to the right, Daniel soaking in the sights, sounds, smells—all the physical sensations. There was no dodging it—this was some sort of reality. Strange compared with the one he’d known all his life, but an actual place, strangeness notwithstanding.

  “Okay, Dr. Cameron,” said Daniel, “hit me with your reality tunnel. How the hell do you make sense of this place?”

  Cameron said, “Are you familiar with the idea of the holographic universe?”

  Daniel nodded. He’d spent a decade working as a Vatican investigator, testing and debunking miracle claims. Until Tim Trinity, he’d never found one that made the grade, but he’d come across a few anomalies that resisted conventional explanation, and he’d read up on quantum mechanics in search of answers, finding only more questions.

  He said, “In physics, the holographic principle says the universe we experience in 3-D is actually just a hologram.”

  “Some would say a consciousness hologram.” She waved that away. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. Thanks to quantum physics, we know the universe is virtually non-material. The solidity of matter is an illusion.”

  “Not if you fall down the stairs and crack your head,” said Daniel.

  “Don’t be a smartass. If even one subatomic particle of your body made contact with one particle of the stairs, you’d explode. You don’t crack your head on the stairs; you crack the idea of your head on the idea of the stairs. Because you never actually touch anything. Not falling down, not making love. There is no actual contact between things. Things, including our bodies, are made almost entirely of nothingness.”

  “Okay,” said Daniel, “but people have been saying reality is an illusion since long before Plato. How does this help us?”

  “I warned you about chasing the metaphysics too hard. Back in the so-called ‘real world,’ we don’t have any idea what consciousness is, metaphysically, much less what reality is. It’s the reality we’ve known since birth, so most of us can be reasonably comfortable in it as long as we pretend we know these things. But through science and mathematics and technology, we developed the ability to measure beyond our physical senses, and one thing we know for sure: The universe is fundamentally different than what our senses tell us. You want to know the mind of God? Or if there even is one? Ultimate reality? You’re shit out of luck. Coming here doesn’t give you that.”

  Daniel sat on the beach, marveling at the ocean’s surface as it rippled and glittered beneath the sun. He sifted handfuls of sand through his fingers, enjoying its intensely detailed texture. He couldn’t avoid the sense that he was feeling sand—real sand—for the very first time.

  Absurd.

  Cameron found a stick under a nearby tree, brought it back, and stood at Daniel’s feet. “For our purposes, the holographic metaphor works like this.” She used the stick to draw a large circle in the sand. “This is the known universe.” She began stabbing the sand inside the circle, making dozens of little depressions. “Now imagine this entire circle covered in dots—hundreds of billions of them—and each is a galaxy. Some of the larger dots are superclusters—tens of millions of galaxies grouped together into massive structures. And each galaxy has maybe a hundred billion stars, with God knows how many planets, moons, asteroids, comets. And we keep on zooming in closer, until we’re standing on Earth, looking up at the sky. We have no idea what the hell all this is, but we look up at countless points of light and we know there’s a lot of stuff in the universe. Another thing our senses tell us is that this stuff is solid. We know because we fall down and crack our heads. But that’s not reality. Our senses lie. Really, all the stuff in the universe isn’t stuff at all. It’s all just a swirling dance of energy and information. Physically, that’s virtually all there is, but when we observe it, it presents itself in a way that appears to us as a universe made of solid, material stuff.”

  She drew a happy face outside the large circle. “Some people think there’s a god who thought the physical universe into existence and then put us here to experience it. Some say we’re just a dream God is having.”

  She scratched out God’s happy face and drew a big happy face in the big circle. “Others think the very universe, this dance of energy and information, is itself a living consciousness, that we’re like nerve endings of a sentient universe, a way for the universe to observe itself.” She used the stick to scratch out the universe. “Of course these are only metaphors, to reassure us about what we don’t know. The truth, if we ever learn it, will be none of those things. It’ll probably be something we’ve not even imagined.” Her expression darkened as she tossed the stick aside. “Meanwhile, humans seem incapable of accepting metaphysical uncertainty, and we’re perfectly willing to kill each other over whose metaphor is ‘real.’”

  Cameron sat on the beach beside Daniel and looked out to sea. She let out a dry laugh. “At first we were like explorers, those of us who crossed over. We’d just discovered a new land—only it was a new reality. We’d gather together at the end of the day and share our experiences, teach each other what we’d learned. And we’d discuss and debate the big, unanswerable What’s it all about, Alfie? questions. None of us were dead on Earth, so it stood to reason this wasn’t any kind of afterlife—more like a parallel life. But what kind of parallel life, and how did it relate to the reality we came here from and returned to? Asking the big questions was both frightening and exciting, and it became the official party game around here. The one thing we all agreed on was that none of us knew the answers. We used to welcome newcomers with parties on the beach. They’d go all night long sometimes. Music, dancing, champagne. It was beautiful, then.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Time doesn’t really mean the same thing here, but the first time I crossed over completely was almost nine months ago, in Earth time. There were a few hundred already here when I arrived.”

  “Earth time?”

  “At first, we just called the place we came from ‘back home.’ Earth became the more formal term. Not to suggest we’re on another planet—we had no idea where we were, we just knew we weren’t in Kansas anymore. Many of us suspected that our consciousnesses—our awareness—had crossed over into a parallel universe with slightly different physical rules. You know, maybe we’d popped into the universe next door, our minds now in a collapsed-dimension universe, in the dark energy/dark matter universe, or whatever. But as we learned more about how this place works, we realized this place is fundamental to that place, if you will. So the holographic metaphor became our working hypothesis. The place we came from—the universe that contains Earth—is a hologram. And this place is like the universal hologram projector. So we named this place Source. We still call the other place Earth, but very few still call it home.”

  Daniel said, “Given that humans like to believe they’re at the center of everything—”

  “Yes, I know. But we don’t call this Source because of our ego. We call it Source because that metaphor fits the evidence. It’s not just that our senses pick up more detail here. Here, we’re like minor gods. We can manipulate reality.” She shifted her position to sit cross-legged, facing Daniel. “Do like this,” she said, and Daniel mirrored her. “Now look behind you.”

  Daniel twisted his torso and looked down the beach. “What am I—”

  “Okay, turn back.”

  He did. Cameron sat as before,
but the red Flash T-shirt was gone, replaced by the black Wake Up! T-shirt.

  He heard himself laugh. “That was incredibly cool.”

  “I know, right? And it’s easy, too. I’ll show you how to do it. Close your eyes.”

  Daniel did.

  “Open them.”

  Cameron hadn’t changed, but a hand-carved wooden box now sat between them on the sand.

  “Look in the box.”

  Daniel opened the hinged lid and looked inside.

  “It’s empty.”

  “Close the lid. Good. Now I want you to name something you saw in my office or at the float spa, something I would be familiar with and that could fit in the box.” She closed her eyes.

  Daniel said, “Your highlighter, the one you were using when I came to your office.”

  After a moment, she opened her eyes and gave Daniel a cocky grin. “Open the box.”

  He flipped the lid and reached in, pulled out the green highlighter. He turned it over in his hands, pulled the cap off, and dragged a green line on the back of his hand.

  “Schrödinger’s highlighter,” he said. “Amazing. So Drapeau really did manifest dumpsters into existence.”

  “He’s very powerful,” said Cameron. “I don’t think I could do dumpsters, no matter how long I practiced.” She reached forward and closed the lid on the empty box. “FYI, Drapeau goes by Elias here. No one in Source knows him as Drapeau.”

  Daniel said, “What do they call you in Source?”

  “They call me Digger.”

  “Seriously?”

  She laughed. “As I said, we were like explorers. I’m an archeologist, so I manifested a trowel and started digging. The name began as a joke, but I liked it, so it stuck.” The breeze blew and she brushed some hair from her face. “Call me Digger, at least while we’re here. We’ll come up with a Source name for you later.”

  Daniel caught some movement in the corner of his eye, but it was just a tree branch swaying slightly in the breeze. He said, “Are we safe? Is there some possibility that Drap—Elias, whatever—could just show up and start hurling heavy things at us?”