The Model Universe And Other Stories

by Christopher Bunn

  Despite this, Flavin moved carefully down the hallway. A penlight in his hand sketched light into the darkness. Even though he had never been anywhere in the clinic other than the reception area and the few front rooms where his office and the records storage were located, he knew the layout of the building. One glance at the architectural plans had been enough for his memory.

  A windowed door revealed a procedural room. His penlight fell on the stirrup table, the cabinets and skeletal outlines of the anesthesia rig. The door opened and he stood there for a while, uneasy in the silence. The room smelled of disinfectant and something else. Something slightly out of place. Ozone? Perhaps. Something electrical.

  A door on the far side of the procedural room opened into a prep area that joined the first room with the second procedural room that the clinic operated. The walls of the prep area were lined with glass cabinets full of pharmaceuticals and the various steel and rubber of equipment. The smell of ozone was stronger in this room. There were no windows, so he flipped on the light switch. Fluorescents hummed into life. He looked around. Something was out of place. Did not fit.

  Perhaps if he had had another minute to look about and think, he might have noticed what it was. But he did not have another minute.

  His hand flashed out and turned off the light switch. Flavin stood in silence, listening. There, a sound. A light step behind the door. He tiptoed away. He slipped through the other procedural room and out into another hall. A bit of starlight shone in through a window, but the light was distant and far and it only served to show how dark the shadows were in that place. He fled through the shadows as facts and numbers from his previous week of investigation turned in his mind like the cogs of a clock. An idea clicked into place. The back of his neck prickled.

  He stood at the back door, breathing shallowly and listening for one last time to the building. It was silent. No footsteps behind him. He reactivated the alarm and let himself out through the door.

  “Mr. Flavin.”

  His heart jumped and hammered against his chest. Julia Reilly stood in the middle of the alley. Moonshadows slid across her face.

  “How do you know my name?” he stammered. The Glock felt heavy in the holster under his arm.

  She smiled, placid and serene. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Oh, but I think you did. You found the answer in your mind. At least, the beginning of the answer. You’re an intelligent man. It was only a matter of time before we were discovered. By you, by someone else. It was bound to happen. We factored that into our projections.”

  He could not answer, but could only stare at her. Lynn had looked like that. Peaceful. When she was dying, when the baby inside her had been dying too. They slipped away from him. Perhaps some things did disappear.

  “What are you going to do, Mr. Flavin?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  For the first time, the serenity of her face wavered.

  “Give us at least ten hours,” she said. “Ten hours, and we’ll be gone.”

  “Ten hours?”

  She smiled, her eyes gleaming with moonlight, or perhaps it was starlight. She took a deep breath and then nodded, as if a question in her mind had just been answered. Then, she explained. She told him what he had guessed. And she told him more.

  Flavin drove home in the night and the glow of his dashboard lights, his mind returning again and again to her explanation. It made no sense. It made perfect sense. It was what he had already been starting to think. It was the only possibility he had been left to think. He let himself into this apartment and sprawled on the bed, asleep before he had even pulled up the blankets.

  The phone woke him. He opened one eye and looked at the clock. Ten am. Ten hours. Ten hours to one pm. She had three hours left. He picked up the phone.

  “Flavin? You there?” Vernon’s voice shrilled down the line.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I need you in my office. Right away.”

  “I’m busy,” said Flavin, despising Vernon, wondering why he had spent so many years working for the firm.

  There was a brief scuffle on the other end of the line, and then another voice spoke, deeper and harder. “Get down here, now, Flavin. I’m paying the bills. I read your initial report. The electricity issue was intriguing. It lined up with something an earlier investigator theorized. But he disappeared. Three men disappeared. My men. I’ve had that place watched around the clock, since October. You didn’t think you were the only set of eyes there, did you? Nothing ever comes out, except people. Living people. I don’t need to hear your conclusions, because I’m coming up with some of my own.”

  “What do you mean?” said Flavin.

  The voice chuckled. The sound wasn’t pretty. “I didn’t like losing all that money last year, but now I’m thinking it might have been worth it. I might just have something here worth all the money in the world.”

  Flavin clung to the phone, knowing that what he said wouldn’t matter.

  “I guess it’s time to pay a visit to the clinic,” said the voice. “Me and my boys. My patience has run out. Unless you want to tell me what you might be guessing. Eh, Flavin? Patients walk in, and patients walk out. But nothing else ever leaves! What happens to the by-product? What happens to it?!” The voice suddenly roared down the line. “Tell me, dammit!”

  “It disappears,” said Flavin.

  “Nothing disappears!” roared the voice, and the line went dead.

  Flavin grabbed his gun and his keys and ran out the door. He didn’t even stop to lock it. He drove into the city, running red lights and stop signs. The roads were slick and misting with rain. The truck skidded to a stop, right in front of the clinic, wheels half on the curb. He jumped out and ran up the steps. Ran up the steps, through the door. Faces turned, startled, at his entrance. Vernon and three other men he did not recognize. But he recognized the authority and arrogance in the face of one of the men. Iron-grey hair and a face shaped like a hatchet. The two others were just muscle, guns in hand and waiting for that final order. He had dealt with their kind before. Julia Reilly sat in a chair in the waiting area. Her hands were folded in her lap. The serenity on her face looked tired and fragile.

  “Flavin!” said Vernon. “What are you doing here?”

  “Just let her go,” said Flavin.

  “Not a chance,” said the other man, the man with the iron-grey hair. He sneered at Flavin. “Being around her does something to your mind, doesn’t it?”

  “No,” said Flavin. “My mind was already made up.”

  His gun was out before he even thought of it. The nearest gunman fired and he felt the bullet whip the cloth of his jacket. The other one’s gun was coming up too, steel and that dark, final hole leveling at him, but then he was firing too, diving for the dubious safety of the reception desk. Bullets slammed into solid oak. Splinters flew through the air. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Julia Reilly dart through the hallway door. Something hit him in the leg, hard, and he found he could not stand. He tumbled to the ground. Vernon was nowhere to be seen. One of the gunmen lay in a silent sprawl of limbs. He shot the other one, knew the man was dead before he even fell to the floor. He crashed a fresh magazine into the Glock.

  “Poorly chosen, Flavin.”

  The man with the iron-grey hair was on the far side of the room, just on the edge of his vision. He could sense, rather than see the gun in the man’s hand. He came about, desperate and too late. The bullets hit him in the chest. A first, a second, and then a final third. They left him breathless. Darkness swam into his eyes. Above him, a face wavered. The man with the iron-grey hair.

  “I always get what I want, Flavin. Time for you to go.”

  “You were right,” said Flavin. He could taste blood in his mouth.

  “Right about what?”

  “Nothing disappears.” And the gun in his hand hammered bullets up at the ceiling, up toward the sky, up at everything he co
uld still see, which was pretty much nothing except that face fading in his sight.

  He came to with the floor hard under the back of his head. A hand touched him.

  “Mr. Flavin,” said Julia Reilly. The receptionist and Dr. Harris were standing beside her.

  He could barely focus on Julia. He blinked. Her face shifted until he thought Lynn was looking down at him. Lynn. She touched his face and he seemed to feel better, somehow, despite the pain deadening his body.

  “Mr. Flavin, would you like to come with us?”

  He could not answer. He didn’t have the strength for it.

  “We came to your world because we wanted the castoffs, the by-products of places like this. We are not thieves. We have only taken what no one else wants. Our civilization is dying, we’ve lived for too long, but we hope to preserve the memory of who we are, who we once were, in the little ones brought to die here. We will pass on our knowledge to them. No one wanted them, so we took them. We will give them the stars in return. We do well with dying people, Mr. Flavin. We would be honored to have you.”

  He still could not speak, but perhaps something in his eyes spoke for him. Hands lifted him. His body was carried down the hallway, into the procedure room, into the pre-op room. Electricity rippled in the air. A great arc of current danced from floor to ceiling. Molecules shimmered and spread from side to side to form a door hanging in mid-air. He thought he could somehow see through into a vast night sky. Starlight shone on a strange sea and there were tall, white buildings rising up from the water’s edge.

  “The others have gone through, Mr. Flavin,” said Julia Reilly. “Now, it is our turn.”

  When the police arrived at the clinic six minutes later, they found Vernon hiding in the bushes outside. Inside, they found the dead bodies of three men, riddled with bullets. In another room, in the operating wing of the clinic, the walls of the room were scorched black and a great deal of melted electrical cable sagged from the ruined walls. The oddest thing of all was in the basement. An immense walk-in freezer had been built against one wall. To the police’s initial horror, they found seven apparently dead bodies in the freezer. However, while the coroner’s team was transporting the bodies to the city morgue, they began to wake as their flesh warmed. One of them, a pretty but hard-faced woman named Julia Reilly, immediately threatened the coroner with a lawsuit. She was later diagnosed insane and committed to a mental institution.

  Flavin was never seen again.

  THE SATISFACTORY COMPLETION OF MR. JANKLOW

  “Finished, Mr. Janklow?

  “Yes, thank you.”

  The steward whisked the plate away. Janklow poured the last of the wine into his glass and took a sip. Outside the windows, one hundred thousand kilometers below, the surface of the Earth suddenly erupted in dirty grey clouds that expanded in flashes of hot, white light and then rose like grotesque mushrooms. It was quite a sight from so high up. Within minutes, the surface of the planet was obscured.

  Janklow checked his watch. Right on time. He tapped the face of the watch. The screen blinked as it processed a burst download, then indicated eleven messages waiting. He opened the statement from his bank and noted that his account currently stood at around two hundred billion credits. Destroying worlds was, if anything, profitable. He frowned, though. The amount should have been higher. Considerably higher.

  The steward reappeared and removed the bottle and glass with silent metal hands.

  “Thirty seconds to exit, sir,” announced the autopilot.

  Janklow settled back in his seat and closed his eyes. A hum filled the ship as the heat sink engaged. The autopilot opaqued the windows. Then, with a slight shudder, the sideslip engines kicked in. Matter ceased to exist as the ship exited the universe. Outside the universe, there was only light, something brighter and faster than light that even the opacity of the windows and the meter-thick skin of the ship could not defeat. The ship melted into light. Janklow’s body shimmered. The robot steward standing deferentially in the service pantry seemed carved out of crystal. And the universe passed them by.

  “Acquiring the Centaurus system,” murmured the autopilot in tones of liquid light. “Prepare for re-entry.”

  And the universe suddenly plunged back into being around them. The windows went transparent. Stars shone in their places. All was where it should be. The steward approached with another bottle of Clos Jeunet ‘03. Janklow took a sip. There never would be another vintage just like it. Not ever. Thankfully, he had provisioned in Los Angeles. The few things that were good about the planet. Caviar, wine, several cases of Scotch. And a dozen crates of fruit. Bananas, tangerines, mangoes. He dearly loved fruit from Earth. It was a pity there’d be no more, but business was business.

  “Autopilot,” said Janklow, “contact the Syndicate.”

  “Syndicate contacted, sir,” said the autopilot.

  The air in front of Janklow coalesced into a screen. It shimmered, blinked, and then a face appeared. It was vaguely humanoid in shape. The eyes were blue, the hair blond and the nose perfectly formed. Janklow knew it was only a construct designed to put him at ease. He wasn’t sure what race the Syndicate were. He only knew they were well financed.

  “I seem to remember we agreed on fifteen billion,” he said. “Where’s the rest of my money?”

  “Certainly,” said the face. “When the job is satisfactorily completed.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” said Janklow. “Earth is incinerated. Transformed into radioactive slag. What more can you want? Two thousand and eighty-three intercontinental ballistic missiles can’t go wrong. Launch software hacked in order to compensate for every square mile of the planet. I spent decades nudging their diplomacy off-balance for this moment.”

  “We realize that, and we appreciate your diligence, but there was one survivor. Our probability modeling calculated even a single survivor’s future as high risk for us, let alone the entire population of the planet. We’ve not been able to determine why. However, our modeling is never wrong. Your job is not done. We look forward to satisfactory completion.”

  The face vanished and the screen blinked out.

  “Transmission terminated,” said the autopilot.

  “One survivor?” muttered Janklow.

  “Thirty-seven minutes to planetfall, sir,” said the autopilot.

  Janklow snapped his fingers. The steward rolled up on silent servos. “A light breakfast before we land. Poached eggs, toast, and a fruit salad. Fresh fruit.”

  “Yes, sir,” said the steward. It rolled away.

  One survivor. It didn’t make sense. He had even blown up that ridiculous little international space station on his way up through the atmosphere. The Syndicate was meticulous about its jobs. If he didn’t finish it to their satisfaction, it wasn’t simply that they wouldn’t pay him the money. He would never get another job from them again. Jankow sighed. He would have to refuel on Centaurus Prime, acquire some sort of armament suitable to finishing the job on Earth – perhaps a biological agent? – and then return to finish the job. Irritating, but necessary if he wanted to stay in the good graces of the Syndicate.

  “Sir,” said the steward, reappearing.

  “What is it?”

  “One crate of bananas contains a foreign contaminant. My routines are not adequate to determine your desired outcome in this scenario.”

  Janklow nodded. Probably one of those spiders. A tarantula, that was what they were called. It was high time he upgraded the steward’s processor. Several years overdue, if he could remember. He got up from his seat. The lift hissed down to the cargo hold. The door slid open.

  “This one, sir.” The steward rolled over to a large wooden crate. The lid was half open. “If you care to look inside.”

  Janklow looked inside. His stomach clenched. There, nestled between two clusters of bananas, was a girl. She was asleep. Curly black hair spilled around her slender face. He judged her to be about sixteen years old in Earth reckoning. Her clothing was tattere
d.

  A stowaway.

  One survivor.

  “What do you suggest, sir?” said the steward.

  Janklow hesitated. Satisfactory completion of the job. He stared down at the girl. Probably Ecuadorian or Costa Rican. Smuggled on a freighter heading to the United States. Instead, her banana crate ended up in his cargo hold.

  “Set another place for breakfast,” he said.

  “Very good, sir,” said the steward.

  He waited until the steward rolled away, and then reached down and gently shook the girl’s shoulder. Her eyes snapped open. She did not move, but he could see the instant tension in her body.

  “Had a good sleep, kid?” he said.

  “Quien está?” she said.

  Janklow touched the face of his watch. “Universal translation,” he muttered. The underside of the watch buzzed. An electric impulse tickled up his arm and fluttered in his brain.

  “Who are you?” she said again.

  “My name’s Janklow. Would you like some breakfast?”

  The girl sat silent across from him. She picked at her toast, even though he knew she was hungry. Her eyes darted to the windows time and time again. The stars slid by outside. She reminded Janklow of a cat. A gaunt alley cat either about to run or explode into hissing ferocity.

  “Are we in California?” she finally whispered.

  “Not exactly.” Janklow set down his coffee. “I’m afraid you’re in the Centaurus system, about 11 million light years from California.”

  She stared at him blankly.

  “Do you have a name?” he said.

  “Francesca Teresa Morales.” Her chin went up. “When do we get to California?”

  He sighed. It was then that the alarm went off. It was not a loud alarm, just a quiet beeping. But it was the alarm.

  “Status!” he snapped.

  “Five inbound M-23 missiles, sir,” said the autopilot calmly. “ETA one hundred and thirty-seven seconds.”

  “Can we side-slip in time?”