Bad Glass

by Richard E. Gropp

  “And you think they were in Spokane and never made it out?” Taylor asked. “You think your parents got stuck here, inside?”

  Charlie shrugged, and his brow wrinkled in pain. “I don’t know. I don’t know what happened.” He paused for a moment, and then, suddenly, he got angry. He shot an intense, venomous look at Taylor. “But that’s what I’m trying to figure out, okay? They stopped calling, and I needed to know what happened. So I came here. And now I’m getting all of these emails, and, and …” He trailed off, turning his eyes toward me. I knew what he was thinking; he didn’t want to tell her about the radio, about his father’s distant voice reaching out from the static, taking orders from Devon.

  Confused, Taylor looked back and forth between the two of us. Then she nodded, and after a moment, she gestured toward the front door.

  There was a blinding flash of light as soon as the door closed behind us. It was a vibrant, electric blue, brilliant and seemingly without source or direction. It dazzled my eyes, and as I stood there—blind—a loud, mechanical hum filled the lobby. The air around me grew pregnant with electricity; it felt like every molecule in the room was vibrating against my skin. Something was happening inside my body; I didn’t know what, but the hair on my arms was standing up straight.

  Then it stopped.

  “What the fuck was that?” Floyd asked as we exchanged confused glances, our eyesight slowly returning. “Was that some type of scanner? Were we just fucking scanned?”

  “Scanned?” Taylor repeated, a gruff, mocking tone to her voice. “What does that even mean, Floyd? Fucking scanned?”

  “I don’t know. X-rays? MRI? Something like that?”

  The thought gave me a jolt, and I shrugged out of my backpack to check on my camera. I scrolled through the last couple of images on my memory card, making sure that they hadn’t been erased by some strong magnetic field. They were still there. Pictures of the Poet’s latest work: “Above me, there is a face/Funny.” I didn’t remember taking these pictures, but they were there on the card, and they seemed completely unharmed.

  When I once again raised my eyes, I found Floyd nervously downing pills from his oxycodone stash. For a moment, I felt a reflexive itch to follow his lead—I still had an almost full bottle of Vicodin in my pocket—but I suppressed the urge. I was trying to be strong here, I reminded myself. I hung my camera around my neck and shrugged into my backpack.

  “Look,” Charlie said, pointing up into the corner of the room. There was a surveillance camera up there, and as I watched, it slowly swiveled my way. It paused for a moment, freezing with me in the center of its glass-eyed view, and then it continued on its circuit, turning to sweep back toward the other side of the room. “There’s still power! It’s still active!” I was surprised at the excitement in Charlie’s voice. I myself felt nothing but fear.

  What’s going on here? What have we found?

  “Is it some type of secret government installation?” Floyd asked, voicing my very next thought.

  Charlie just shrugged. He flashed us an indecipherable smile, then turned and headed toward a door on the far side of the room.

  The door opened up onto a long carpeted hallway. Charlie paused just inside the door and ran his fingers over the nearest wall. After a couple of seconds, the overhead fluorescents flickered on. The hallway was disconcertingly normal. It could have been any corridor in any office building in any city around the world—just minutes after closing time, maybe, with the workers all gone for the day. The heater kicked on as we were standing there, warm air blowing down from the overhead vents.

  Charlie headed toward the nearest room, and the rest of us followed.

  It was a small, windowless office, something for an assistant, maybe, or an administrator. Inside, there was nothing but a desk, a chair, a telephone, and a computer. While Charlie rummaged through the desk drawers, I picked up the telephone handset and listened to the sound of a dead line. The phone was getting power, but there was nothing on the wire, not even static. I replaced the handset just as Charlie lifted a thin sheaf of paper into the air.

  “Office directory,” he proclaimed triumphantly as he started flipping through the pages. “Biologists, physicists, psychologists, computer scientists … theologians. They certainly didn’t narrow it down any.” He paused halfway through the directory, his finger on a listing at the bottom of the page.

  “Did you find them?” I asked.

  He nodded, but there was no excited smile on his face, not anymore. Just a trace of confusion. He handed the pages to me and pointed to a pair of names near the bottom: Dr. Stephen Daltry and Dr. Cheryl Daltry. Instead of having a standard office number next to their names—112 or 315 or 423—they both had B13 listed as their location. A basement laboratory, I guessed. But that was not what had killed Charlie’s excitement.

  There was an unsteady line drawn through both of the names.

  Dr. Stephen Daltry.

  Dr. Cheryl Daltry.

  I scanned the rest of the page and saw that most of the names had been crossed out. “It could mean anything,” I said.

  Both Taylor and Floyd moved into place behind me, where they could study the document over my shoulder. “Maybe those are just the people who—I don’t know—people who completed security training,” Taylor offered, “or signed a nondisclosure agreement, or something.”

  “Or RSVPed for a lunch,” Floyd added, “or complained about their paltry-ass government pay.”

  Charlie nodded. But he didn’t look reassured.

  Since he had seen those names, his face had turned an ashen gray, drained of all blood and color. “Yeah, I know,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “But I have a bad feeling about this. Like I should know what that means.” His eyes darted from Floyd to Taylor and then to me. “Like I do know already. Something bad. Something very bad.”

  Floyd shook his head. “Fuck no, Charlie,” he said. “You don’t know what that means. Those are just lines on a piece of paper. What the four of us do know—about this place, about this situation—it couldn’t fill a motherfucking thimble.”

  Taylor nodded. “He’s right.” She reached out and grabbed Charlie’s hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “You can feel like shit, you can feel like the world is crashing down, but that doesn’t mean you know anything. It just means that you’re afraid. And you’re afraid because we’re getting close.”

  She met Charlie’s frantic eyes with a calm, reassuring smile.

  “So let’s go, okay?” she said. “Let’s go find your parents.”

  We took the elevator down to the basement.

  The lights in the main corridor were already on, bright and institutional, about as far from natural as you can get. The first couple of doors were closed, but the third—B6, actually—was standing wide open. It was dark inside, but in the middle of the room I could make out a worktable draped under a sheet of clear protective plastic. There were microscopes and Bunsen burners hidden beneath the sheet, shielded from the dust and mold floating thick in the uncirculated air.

  Charlie continued down the corridor ahead of us. He pulled to an abrupt stop in front of B13, and we all piled up behind him. The door here was open, and the lights were on.

  “What is it?” Floyd asked when he finally got a look inside the laboratory. “What exactly am I seeing?”

  Charlie shrugged, and we all filed into the room.

  The laboratory was large—at least twenty-five feet by twenty-five feet—and most of the floor was taken up by a single piece of makeshift machinery. There was a table with several computer terminals set against the wall just inside the door, but the majority of the apparatus was in the center of the room. It consisted of two parallel mirrors standing about fifteen feet apart. There were black boxes set against the near end of each sheet of silvered glass.

  The apparatus was running, and every five seconds the entire thing lit up with brilliant green light. It was very bright, and I had to narrow my eyes to get a good sense o
f what was happening. At first, it was all just flashes of light. Then, on about the fifth flash, I noticed a pattern in the apparatus, hundreds of lines of light—laser light—crisscrossing between the mirrors. Then, on perhaps the tenth flash, I realized what was happening. There was movement in the intricate weave—nothing I could actually see, but it was there. The line of light was shooting out of one of the black boxes and progressing down the length of the apparatus, bouncing back and forth between the two mirrors. At the far end, it ricocheted off a separate angled piece of glass and returned on a similarly sharp, crisscrossing trajectory, ending at the second black box.

  It was all happening so fast, it looked like nothing but a binary switch. Off and on. Light and dark. But there was movement in there, just too fast to see. The four of us stood silent for a time, watching the flow of traffic inside this miniature city of light and glass.

  Floyd was the one who finally broke the silence. “Whoa,” he muttered. “This thing … it’s better than any fucking lava lamp.” When I turned, I found him lighting up a new joint.

  With the silence broken, that initial period of awe left the room, and we all started moving once again. Charlie headed straight for the computer terminals, bending down to study the lit screens. Taylor moved forward and dropped into a crouch next to the apparatus. She held her eyes level with the laser and peered down the length of its path, across the field of crisscrossing lines as they blinked on and off.

  I, for my part, lifted my camera and popped off the lens cap. The laser was lit for only brief periods—a quarter of a second, maybe—and it took me about twenty shots before I managed to get a picture of the bright green pattern spread between those mirrors. I would have loved to have gotten a picture halting the light in motion—with the path half lit, a visible head or tail—but there was no shutter speed that fast, no way to halt the world and capture that shot. I stayed near the “head” of the apparatus, grabbing top-down views between the two mirrors.

  “Can I get a hit off that, Floyd?”

  At first, I didn’t notice anything strange about the voice—just words floating in the space behind me—and I kept taking pictures. Then it registered. It was Devon.

  By the time I turned, Taylor, Floyd, and Charlie were already facing the doorway. Devon was standing there with his arms crossed against his chest. He had an uncomfortable grin on his lips, expectant and wary.

  “It bounces over seven hundred times,” he said. “Over two miles in length. That’s what they said, Charlie. That’s what your parents told me.”

  Charlie and Floyd advanced at the same time. Only a couple of steps—Floyd angry, Charlie shocked, his hands out, imploring—before they both pulled to a stop. It was synchronized almost, and they both stood there for a prolonged beat, unsure of their next choreographed step.

  “Wait, wait!” Devon said, holding up his hands to ward them off. His attention mostly remained fixed on Floyd. Floyd was the angry one. Charlie was just confused and desperate.

  “You were spying on us!” Floyd barked. His voice was an angry growl at first; then it trailed off into weak confusion: “Pretending to be our friend, then watching us through binoculars. Staring at us through our windows! And then … the tunnels?”

  “I can explain. Just … just stay calm. All of you.” His eyes flickered from Floyd to Taylor, as if he were looking to her for help, an assurance that she’d keep us all in line.

  But Taylor just stared. I didn’t know what she was thinking. She hadn’t seen the radio, or the binoculars, or the wires beneath the house. It hadn’t been her father’s voice that had echoed out of Devon’s radio, reporting in and taking orders. But Devon had been spying for Terry. It was just a minor sin in my eyes, compared with the rest of the things he’d done, but Taylor didn’t give him any quarter. She remained ice cold.

  “Okay,” I said. “Everyone, let’s just be cool.”

  I took a step forward and made soothing motions with my hands, trying to keep Floyd and Charlie back. I wanted to keep the situation under control. I crossed to Floyd’s side and put a hand on his shoulder. “We can let him talk. Okay?”

  Floyd grunted, reluctantly acquiescing.

  Devon thanked me with an appreciative nod, but I just shook my head. I was not his friend. I wasn’t doing this for him.

  “I didn’t mean to cause you any harm—none of you, really—and I don’t think I did. I was just watching, making sure nothing bad happened.” He took a deep breath, bracing himself, then continued. “You see, I work for a group—” He paused for a moment, then came up with a new term. “—a consortium, I guess you could call it, with national and international business interests … and grand political schemes. Or maybe just grand political delusions—I’m not too sure about the reality on that one. My father got me the job; he’s pretty high up in the organization—sold his soul for that portfolio, right? Anyway, they placed me in the city. At first, I was an administrator in the investigative unit—” He gestured up toward the building above our heads. “—but I stayed on after it started falling apart, after the military took control. I wasn’t the only one. There were other moles, but most of them fled during the transition. And of the ones who stayed, I think I might be the last one left. At least, that’s the impression I get whenever they contact me. They’re getting desperate, you see. They lost their bead on the situation, and they’re not used to that. They’re not used to losing control.”

  “What did they have you do?” I asked.

  “Like I said, I was an administrator. It was my job to facilitate things, get the experts the gear and supplies they needed in order to do their research. I got them copy paper, I made sure their computers worked, I helped them organize their expeditions. I did anything and everything they asked me to do. That was my job. I’d get in tight, you see, and they’d tell me all of their theories, all of their hypotheses, and I’d relay it back out of the city.” He nodded toward Charlie. “That’s how I met your parents. That’s how I learned about this.” He gestured toward the laser apparatus in the middle of the room.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  I addressed the question to Devon, but Charlie was the one who answered. “It’s measuring the speed of light,” he said quietly.

  Devon nodded. He looked impressed. “It’s counting the length of time it takes for the laser beam to travel from one end of its path to the other.”

  “But why?” Taylor asked. “That’s a known constant.”

  “Not anymore,” Charlie answered. “At least, not here.” There was a terrified expression on his face as he turned and gestured toward one of the computer monitors. After a moment’s hesitation, Taylor, Floyd, and I approached. The screen was filled with lines of text, and each time the apparatus flashed, a new line appeared at the top of the screen. It was a time stamp, followed by a long string of digits.

  As we watched, the digits changed: 299,792,457.99999908 became 299,792,457.99999907.

  “Those are meters per second,” Charlie explained. “It’s getting slower. The speed of light … it’s changing.”

  “Your parents had a hypothesis,” Devon said. “They believed that the universe was slowing down. Maybe it’s just stopped expanding, or maybe it’s actively shrinking, but either way, physics has changed—time has changed—and it’s still changing.”

  “We wouldn’t be able to survive that,” Charlie said. “Even the slightest shift. The movement of atoms, neurons in the brain—it would all fail. If something like that happened, it’d be the end of everything! No life, no substance.”

  “Yeah,” Devon replied, smiling grimly. “That’s what they tell me.”

  “What are they doing now? My parents—are they here, are they trying to explain this?”

  “No,” Devon said. “They aren’t here. Not anymore.”

  “Then where? Where did they go?”

  Devon paused for a long moment, casting careful glances at each of us in turn. “They’re dead, Charlie,” he finally replied. “They’re
dead, and you know it.”

  “No,” Charlie said, his brow furrowing in confusion. “They aren’t dead. They sent me emails. I have pictures of them, in the city. I heard you talking to my father!”

  “No, Charlie. They’re dead,” Devon repeated. After a handful of seconds, he continued reluctantly: “Hell, you were there, at the funeral. September 15, just outside of Portland. I saw the pictures.”

  “No,” Charlie said, shaking his head in disbelief. Then his face crinkled up in a sudden moment of doubt—What is he thinking? I wondered. Right now, what does he remember?—and he took a tentative step back. The way he was moving, I was afraid his legs were going to collapse beneath him. “It’s not true. You’re lying.” But now there was a note of desperation in his voice.

  “Your parents ran tests. They confirmed—” He gestured toward the apparatus. “—they checked interference patterns or something. And then they took a car … I don’t think they could handle it anymore, watching the world fall apart—this was just after the mayor disappeared, when everyone in the building was starting to see things, starting to freak out. Your mother told me it was going to spread, it was going to infect the entire world. It was just a matter of time.” Devon paused. His voice turned soft, sympathetic. “The official reports—the police told you it was an accident, they told you that your father lost control of the car, but I think your parents just didn’t want to see what was coming. I don’t think they could handle it.”

  “No. It’s a lie. It’s impossible. I don’t remember … why wouldn’t I remember?” Charlie turned abruptly and kicked out at the laser apparatus, slamming his foot into the nearest mirror. The laser tipped off its axis, and the next time it fired, it bounced high off the far mirror and shot up into the ceiling. I glanced at the tracking monitor and saw the word ERROR repeated a half dozen times on the topmost line. “This whole thing is bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. The universe doesn’t work that way … my parents, they don’t work that way!”