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

by Sean Chercover

  She shook her head. “I’d feel his presence nearby. It’s a thing you can do here. Now look at the box. You’re about to make magic. I want you to think of an object without telling me, something that you know intimately, something I’ve never seen, that would fit in the box. Nod when you’ve got it.”

  “Do I close my eyes?”

  “I do, but not everyone does. Stare unfocused at the box, or close your eyes. Whatever feels comfortable.”

  Daniel stared at the box, focusing past it. He thought of his uncle’s switchblade, picturing the horn scales, chipped at the edge of the steel safety catch, bringing the knife into sharp focus. He nodded.

  “Now put your attention inside the box, and visualize the object in the box. See it in the box, expect it to be there, and open the box.”

  Daniel opened the box.

  Empty.

  She said, “That’s because you didn’t really expect it to be there. You wanted it to be there, but that’s not enough.” She reached forward and closed the lid. “I’ve done it hundreds of times, so don’t try to match my speed. To manipulate reality, you have to believe in the new reality you’re trying to manifest. You have to know it’s going to be there before you open the box.”

  Daniel stared at the box again, unfocused his eyes, visualized the switchblade inside the box. He took a couple of long decompression breaths, and he felt the subtle shift. He was no longer visualizing the knife; he was seeing it. It was in the box. He knew it like he knew his name.

  He lifted the lid, reached inside, curled his fingers around the familiar shape, and pulled the switchblade out of the box. He pressed the button, and the steel blade snapped to attention. He turned the knife and read the words he knew by heart, stamped at the base of the blade:

  ROMANELLI

  Import & Export Co.

  ITALY

  He held the knife in his right hand, gently pricked the index finger of his left with the blade’s sharp tip. He watched as a drop of blood rose, round and red, glistening in the sun. He dragged his finger against his tongue, and the coppery taste flooded his mouth. Like the Platonic form of the taste of blood.

  Then came a crazy urge. He said, “If I slashed my own throat right now, would I wake up in Barcelona?”

  Her eyes widened and she held up a hand. “No,” she said. “If you die here, you die. Same as back home. You think I saved your life because you had a warning when Elias came for you at your house, but I actually saved it here, in the alley. Don’t be casual about this place, Daniel, or you won’t live long.”

  15

  Remember when you said AIT waxes and wanes like ribbons moving closer together and farther apart?” said Digger as they walked up the road. “Think of Earth and Source as the ribbons, like membrane universes. When they get close, AIT spreads. If they get close enough, people start crossing over.”

  “What if they touch?”

  “If Source is fundamental, then if the ribbons touch, the universe containing Earth would . . . pop like a soap bubble. It would simply cease to exist.”

  She stopped walking and looked up at the apartment building to their left. Then she turned to face Daniel, the building behind her.

  “Okay, lesson number two might blow your mind a little,” she said. “You thought the box was fun, wait’ll you see this. Close your eyes for a few seconds. Then open them.”

  Daniel closed his eyes, counted three slow Mississippis, and opened them again.

  She was thirty feet away, waving down at him from a second-floor balcony.

  “No way,” he said.

  “Way,” she called back.

  He walked toward her. “You just freaking teleported yourself.”

  “It’s something we can do here in Source. Cool, huh? We call it spot-traveling.”

  Daniel stepped onto the sidewalk directly below her. “Teach me,” he said.

  Digger shook her head. “I’ll talk you through the steps, but it’s not like the highlighter trick. Took me twenty-three tries before I could even spot-travel a yard.” She leaned her elbows on the balcony wall. “You start with a few slow breaths, while looking at the space you want to occupy. You put your attention on that spot, knowing that if you can see a place, you can be there. Then you close your eyes, visualize yourself in the new space, and expect to be there when you open them again.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. But it’s harder than it sounds, so don’t get frustrated. Pick a spot about a foot in front of you.” She turned her back. “Whenever you’re ready.”

  Daniel started to focus on the space directly in front of him, but then, on sheer impulse, he shifted his gaze up to the space beside Dana Cameron—Digger here—on the balcony. He took a couple of decompression breaths, putting his attention on that space. If you can see a place, you can be there. He closed his eyes, pictured himself standing beside her, expecting to open them again up on the balcony.

  He opened his eyes.

  On the balcony.

  Facing Digger.

  She jumped at the sight of him. “Oh my god,” she said. “I can’t believe you just did that.”

  His heart pounded and his head started spinning and she went out of focus.

  She reached forward and grabbed his forearm. “Breathe.”

  He gasped out the breath he was holding and filled his lungs again, bracing his free hand on the balcony wall. Two more deep breaths, and the world stopped moving and she came back into focus.

  “Okay,” he said, straightening. “I’m all right.”

  She let go of his arm. “Pro tip: Breathing is important.”

  “Thanks, Coach,” he said. Another deep breath brought him back to normal. “Aside from the forgetting-to-breathe part, it was easier than you said.”

  “You’ve got mad skills, kiddo; don’t sell yourself short. I’ve never seen anything like that on the first attempt . . . or the hundredth, for that matter.”

  Daniel said, “In order for me to spot-travel, you turned your back. Same thing with the box and the T-shirt, right? You can’t manifest something while someone’s looking. Elias manifested the dumpsters behind me. When I spun around, he did the same with the gate. I never actually saw them come into existence.”

  She nodded. “Remember I said everything runs on intention and attention? I think of it like collapsing a probability wave by observation—by putting your attention on it. So, when you observe something, the ‘wavicle’ is a particle, but when you look away it’s freed to become a wave function, malleable by intention, until it’s observed again.”

  “Wow,” said Daniel. “That’s pretty out there.”

  She laughed. “Just a metaphor that helps me keep my reality tunnel from shattering so completely I lose my mind. Of course, I have no idea how it actually works.”

  Daniel leaned his forearms on the balcony wall, questions tumbling over each other in his mind. This was, indeed, a lot to wrap his head around.

  Over his shoulder, Digger said, “I’m gonna get a beer, you want one?”

  Daniel turned to face her. “How do you know—wait, you just put the beer in the fridge, didn’t you?”

  She smiled and tapped a finger against her temple. “Minor gods,” she said. “You try it. Pick a beer you know, close your eyes, see it in the fridge.” As she went inside, she called back, “Go.”

  Daniel closed his eyes and visualized a six-pack of Dragon Stout inside a closed refrigerator. It seemed to happen very fast, the switch from visualizing to seeing. So fast he doubted himself, didn’t open his eyes yet. He began again, but was interrupted by the feeling of a cold bottle being pressed into his hand. He opened his eyes. He was holding a bottle of Dragon Stout.

  “Cheers,” she said, clinking a Sam Adams against the bottle in his hand.

  Daniel laughed and took a long swallow of the stout. He felt the viscous texture of the brew as it coated his tongue and the roof of his mouth, slid down his throat. The taste sensation that came along with it was indescriba
bly rich.

  Like tasting the real thing for the very first time.

  “I love it here,” he said.

  Her smile fell as she turned slightly away, leaning on the wall beside him and looking down at the sea.

  “So did I,” she said.

  “You said you used to have beach parties that went all night long. But . . .” Daniel gestured to the sun, still hanging in the same spot above the sea. He felt a hint of vertigo and wondered if he would ever get used to a world where it was always magic hour.

  “It used to move,” she said. “Stopped just before . . . No one knows why.”

  “Before Noah arrived,” Daniel nudged.

  She almost winced at the name. Each time Daniel had asked about Noah in her office, she’d steered the conversation elsewhere, and she’d avoided saying Noah’s name. She’d tried to disguise it in her office, but here it was unavoidable. The topic of Noah clearly made her apprehensive. More than.

  “I need to know about him, Digger. I know I promised to let you lead—”

  “So let me,” she said. “I have to do this my way.” She took a deep breath, refocusing. “It was about five months ago, in Earth time, when everything changed. After the sun stopped, it was even harder to judge time here, because you don’t have to eat or sleep in Source unless you want to. Without physiological cues like hunger or fatigue, you come to rely on the celestial changes to track time. After all, you can’t go around counting breaths or Mississippis all day.”

  “Why not manifest a wristwatch, same as a switchblade or a highlighter?”

  “We tried that, even before the sun stopped,” said Digger. “Problem is, looking at a watch is just like the license plates and newspapers and street signs and a dozen other things. It just glims out.”

  “Glims.”

  She nodded. “We call it the glimmer—or the glim. Nobody understands it, either. My own way of looking at it is: Our previous reality on Earth can be described as a disguised hologram—the universe doesn’t appear to our senses as a hologram, but like we were saying before, when we measure down to the quantum realm, we see that what appears material is mostly non-material. Yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. But in Source, the universe appears to our senses as non-material, at least to the extent that we can manipulate reality by manifesting things into existence and manifesting ourselves in different locations. Yes?”

  “I’m following you,” said Daniel. “As crazy as it sounds.”

  “Good. So our brains—minds, whatever—perceive a truer version of reality here, and maybe they also don’t lie to us here. Newspapers, street signs, license plates—those details would establish Source as a specific place in the universe we’re familiar with, just as reading the time on a watch would tell us that this place works on conventional time. But here, our minds won’t fill in those details, because that would be false. We interpret this place as a seaside town, but really, we’re just swimming in the sea of energy and information. The metaphors we take as truth to calm ourselves back on Earth insist on remaining metaphors in Source. This whole place may be just a consciousness hologram—I mean, why even have street signs and license plates and newspaper boxes at all, right?”

  Daniel smiled. “Our minds expect them to exist, so they do. But if we try to examine them, we’re asking the universe to lie to us.”

  “And here, that makes us feel queasy,” she said.

  Even as a metaphor, it was beyond weird. But once again, weirdness notwithstanding, Daniel had to admit it felt . . . true.

  Digger said, “You’re wondering if I’ve dropped a lot of acid in my life. The answer is no, never.”

  Daniel laughed. “Not what I was thinking, I promise. When I lived in Barbados, I took up surfing. After some practice I could ride okay, but I couldn’t really carve the waves like I wanted to. My neighbor up the gap was a Rastaman named Natty B, the town’s root doctor. Natty B was a regular at the Soup Bowl, and I tell you, the man could surf. He made it look so easy, and I wanted to surf with that kind of grace. He sat me down one day, told me the secret I was missing. He said, ‘You’ll never achieve union with the wave while thinking about the properties of hydrodynamics.’ It was a revelation, and it changed me from a guy on a surfboard into a surfer.”

  “It’s beautiful,” said Digger. “Union with the wave—I love it. That’s very much like how this place was, before Noah. We didn’t get too caught up with trying to define our experience here. We stayed focused on learning to do stuff, how to surf the wave. I know I make us sound like some kind of hippie commune, but it wasn’t all beach parties. The freedom was exhilarating, but also frightening, and some found it more terrifying than they could bear.

  “In the months before the sun stopped, the population quadrupled, multiple newcomers every day. But over a hundred people took their own lives during that same span, and maybe two hundred more simply lost their minds. Drove themselves mad, trying to discover what this place is, instead of learning how to exist here. Ridiculous, since we don’t even know what the universe we came from is.”

  She allowed herself to ride a memory for a few moments, then came back. “And one afternoon, the sun stopped.” She turned and pointed to the white tower in the east. “And soon a small glimmer appeared on the eastern horizon. The glimmer started to rise, the tower manifesting beneath it, floor by floor. If you stared at it long enough, you could see it rising, it happened so fast.” She took a swig of beer. “We were all transfixed. This building was breaking the rules, appearing while we were looking at it, clearly being manifested by an intelligence of far greater power than us.

  “Three of our best spot-travelers volunteered to go on a reconnaissance mission, check it out. They could jump a few blocks at a time, so we expected them back by the time the tower grew another dozen floors, but they didn’t return and the building just kept rising, the glim like a penthouse floor on top. It got so tall you could see it from the beach at the bottom of the hill.

  “The beach was our usual meeting place, so we all gravitated there to watch it together. When the tower got to the height you see now, it just stopped. And a glimmer then appeared right among us on the beach—the air shimmered and brightened until I had to shield my eyes—and it disappeared just as fast. And . . . he stood in its place. He glimmed into existence right in front of our eyes.”

  “Nice trick,” said Daniel.

  “No doubt. People fell to their knees.”

  “They thought he was God.” Daniel was careful not to use Noah’s name.

  “Many did. And many more came to believe over time. Almost everyone. They abandoned the town, and they all live in that tower like it’s some kind of holy temple. They come out to greet newcomers, and they still try to recruit the stragglers. They’ve recruited most of us, there may be two hundred Independents left, maybe fewer. We have to keep our heads down these days. We can’t exactly gather for a head count.”

  “What happens when you gather?” said Daniel.

  “I’m getting to it. Anyway, they try to recruit us—they assure us they’re free to come and go as they please but insist that they’ve found the truth, and they invite us to come see for ourselves. It’s like a cult, I’m telling you. Every time they come out for the newcomers, they also try to recruit the remaining stragglers. And they don’t really let us greet the newcomers anymore. They always show up and butt in.”

  “Sure,” said Daniel. “He wants his perspective to be the first impression, so he sends the true believers out to start selling the con.”

  She said, “But in your case, it was different. Elias was sent out ahead of time to tell the Independents you were coming and to remind us that they run the intake program. That’s actually what Elias called it—the intake program. We used to just call it a welcome party on the beach.” She jutted her chin at the top of the tower. “He has ruined everything beautiful here.” Turning back to Daniel, she said, “That’s enough about him for now.”

  “Digge
r, I can’t help you unless I know what you know.”

  “I didn’t ask for your help,” she said. “I reached out to help you. I’m trying to stop you from destroying a city.”

  Daniel shook his head. “You said it yourself: They’re worried about me. As powerful as he is, they’re worried about me.” He sipped his stout. “Remember I told you there was a man named Jay Eckinsburger who’d been to Source? He told some people I was coming with enough power to stop something. To ‘save us’ he said. I don’t know if ‘us’ meant the people here, and I don’t know what that something is, but I have a pretty strong inkling it lives up in that tower. And you’re holding back information—you know far more than you’re saying.”

  Digger held his gaze. “If I told you everything you know now—not just that Source is a real place, but everything about manifesting and spot-traveling—if I told you all that when we first met, would you have believed me?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “So you’ll just have to trust me to pace it.”

  Daniel swallowed some beer as an ugly thought descended.

  He said, “Working his faith-healer act on the tent-revival circuit, my uncle always proclaimed himself one of God’s chosen messengers. And I believed it as a kid. Many years later, when he was struck with AIT and learned—along with the rest of the world—that he was predicting the future, he came to believe that his lie had become truth. That God had now chosen him to deliver a message to the world. He even foresaw his own death, and he still chose not to wear that damn vest. I wish he’d worn it.”

  He turned the cool bottle in his hands, grounding himself. “My uncle, having no way to understand AIT and the information flooding his head, was suffering a delusion. He wasn’t God’s chosen messenger, and his death served no cosmic purpose.”

  Daniel’s pulse quickened as he spoke, and his skin felt electric, and sweat broke out on his upper lip.