The Traveler's Companion

by Chater, Christopher John

  Iverson pointed at what he hoped was a vegetable plate. She served it to him and left.

  “Let me have your phone, Iverson. I don’t have mine on me,” Gibbons said. He pushed the plate aside in disgust.

  Iverson took out his cellular phone and put it on the center of the table. Gibbons snatched it and flipped it open. “You got service.”

  “Good.”

  Gibbons put the phone in his pocket and asked, “Is he looking over here?”

  “What are you going to do, Mark? Are you going to make a break for it? I have to say that would really be a stupid thing to do. First of all, if he were holding us hostage, he wouldn’t be sitting on the other side of a crowded restaurant. Secondly, you can’t survive out there. This is China.” He made a gesture with his hand, suggesting he stay put. “Just wait. I have a plan.”

  “This is what we call field work, Ryan. Get with the program. First rule of war: if you’re captured, attempt to escape.”

  “This isn’t war. It’s dim sum,” Iverson said.

  “This kid is going to publish a book that will obliterate our way of life. The Internet was a problem; this is a catastrophe. A man can travel across the globe in a matter of seconds. Think of the economic repercussions. The threat to national security. How the hell would we secure our borders against something like this? The Zone is a menace to our way of life, Iverson. We need to stop it,” Gibbons said.

  Iverson leaned forward and said in a whisper, “He keeps one of those remotes in his jacket pocket. Have you seen it?”

  “The one with the red button on it?” Gibbons asked.

  “That’s right. My guess is that a signal is being transmitted from a source somewhere, giving him access to the Zone. He mentioned that tomorrow morning the devices that come with the books will be activated. He must have one that works,” Iverson said.

  “We need to get that remote,” Gibbons said.

  “Better yet, we need to locate the source. If we can find the source, we can shut down the whole operation. Let Angela do her work. We’ll find it.”

  “She takes too long. His book hits stores tomorrow. We need a more aggressive strategy. And since neither of us is trained for that type of engagement, we need to find the type of people who are. I’m going to go make a call.” Gibbons turned in the booth and asked, “Is he looking?”

  “He’s coming over here,” Iverson said.

  Gibbons quickly put his legs back under the table and sat up straight.

  “How’s the food?” Go asked.

  “Terrific,” Gibbons said, smiling nervously.

  “Dim sum is an art form rarely taken seriously anymore. Think of all the possible arrangements one could have. It takes an enormous amount of imagination. Dim sum means food of the heart, and anything dealing with the heart deserves care and attention. Don’t you agree?”

  Gibbons wasn’t really listening, but he nodded along.

  “You decided to try the fried chicken feet. I’m impressed, Director. Bold choice,” Go said.

  “It wasn’t exactly by choice,” Gibbons said.

  “Your taste buds have probably been put to sleep by the CIA commissary. Time to revive them,” Go said.

  “Why not?” Gibbons said, pulling the plate back in front of him.

  “The food here is totally fresh. Freshest food in Hong Kong. Try it,” Go said.

  “I’m curious, Mister Go. Earlier you said the Zone proves God exists. Would you mind explaining that to me?” Iverson asked.

  “After lunch, Doctor Iverson. For now, enjoy. And don’t worry about the check. I took care of it,” Go said.

  “Very generous of you, C.C. Thank you,” Gibbons said, forcing a smile.

  Go went back to join Angela.

  As soon as Go was out of sight, Gibbons swung his legs out from under the table, leapt out of the booth, and sprinted for the exit. He threw open the front door and bolted through the pedestrians on the street like a running back. He pushed some people aside and slammed into others, but eventually he was forced off the sidewalk and straight into traffic. He was vertical for a second longer, just before the screech of tires and the screams of onlookers.

  * * * * *

  A small crowd had gathered around the fallen American. C.C. Go was speaking to them in Cantonese. Iverson hoped he was instructing them to call for an ambulance. Gibbons was in bad shape. He lay in the middle of the street unconscious, scrapes on his face and head, his left leg definitely broken. Angela had scanned Gibbons’s body and reported to Iverson that he had six broken ribs and a ruptured spleen.

  Iverson retrieved his cell phone from Gibbons’s pocket. When he flipped it open the number keys fell out as if they were broken teeth. The LCD screen was now a smoky gray color with a jagged line through it. Definitely no power.

  Go knelt beside Gibbons and asked, “Is he still breathing?”

  “Yes,” Angela said. “But he has some internal bleed—”

  “You told them to call for an ambulance, right?” Iverson asked, intentionally interrupting Angela.

  “No,” Go said.

  “No? Then what were you saying to them?” Iverson asked.

  “Don’t worry, Doctor. The director’s going to be fine,” Go told him. He reached into his blazer and retrieved the remote from the inside pocket. When he depressed the red button affixed to the center, everything went black. The city was gone. They were in total silence.

  A spotlight came from above, from nowhere, lighting up Go kneeling before Gibbons. Like a magician on stage, he was waving his hands over Gibbons’s motionless body. Within seconds Gibbons regained consciousness.

  * * * * *

  They were now in what appeared to be the infirmary at Langley headquarters, where only a few hours earlier Melissa Fleming had been convalescing. But this was not the CIA’s infirmary. This was a very close imitation. In this place, small objects vanished before Iverson’s eyes; a clipboard, some tissue paper, and a wall clock were stationary decor in the infirmary of reality, but not here.

  Iverson’s primary concern was Gibbons’s health, but C.C. Go seemed to have some type of handle on that. Gibbons was conscious and in good spirits. Evidently, he was fully recuperated. “I feel fine. Never felt better in my life,” he had said over and over.

  His injuries had been substantial. His pants were torn at the thighs with bloody scraps highlighting the torn fabric, the work of the truck bumper that had hit him. His left leg was broken. He had organ failure, substantial internal bleeding, and a skull fracture that looked like a brick had hit a shatter-proof windshield.

  “Take a deep breath,” Iverson instructed him, poking an index finger into various parts of his abdomen.

  Gibbons’s breathing was deep and without obstruction.

  Iverson shook his head and said, “I can’t believe it.”

  “It’s not really that hard to believe when you think about it. You should know that, Doctor Iverson. You understand physics,” Go said.

  “This breaks every law of physics I can think of,” Iverson said, shaking his head.

  “Not really. The subatomic realm resembles energy more than it does matter. Wave and particle. Wave is the Zone. Particle, culminating into what we call reality, is the Zone’s illusory manifestation. Here, that matter is malleable.”

  “You’re suggesting that the Zone is a sort of factory that created our existence, and when we return to the factory, we can reshape matter at a subatomic level?”

  “Nicely put,” Go said.

  “And you think that a god of some sort used this place to conjure up humans and the universe?”

  “Obviously,” Go said.

  “I suppose you have proof for all this?”

  “I can cite about a dozen philosophers.”

  Iverson looked at him with one eye squinted and asked, “Your scientific team? They agree with you?”

  “My scientists don’t understand this place any better than I. In fact, finding it was no more than a fluke. Someday I’ll te
ll you the story. A lot of brilliant discoveries have come about by accident, haven’t they?”

  Iverson sighed. “It always bothers me when scientific lore becomes popular perception. You’re no doubt referring to the discovery of penicillin, often written about as being discovered by accident. According to legend, Sir Alexander Fleming returns from a trip and finds mold in a plate culture, which eventually leads to the production of the drug. But it’s rarely reported that Clorito Picado Twight had made note of the mold to the Paris Academy of Sciences years before. Not to mention Ernest Duchesne’s paper to the Institut Pasteur, rejected only because they thought him too young to make such a discovery. People like to mystify what is often simple science. It’s an insult to the scientists who come by discoveries because of years of hard work.”

  “But that’s not the whole story, Doctor,” Go said. “I’m sure the scientific community enjoys many triumphs through hard work, but in the case of Ernest Duchesne, one needs to understand the entire account. While at an army hospital, he noticed Arab stable hands were leaving their saddles in a dark and damp part of the room so mold would grow on them. When he asked them about it, they said that the mold helped heal the horses’ saddle sores. This prompted Duchesne to run a few tests with which he proved the mold had legitimate medicinal applications. As far as I’m concerned, the credit belongs to the stable boys. And I think in their case the discovery was more happy accident than scientific struggle.”

  Iverson rolled his eyes.

  “I can assure you, Doctor, the Zone proves there was a creative force responsible for our existence and I personally have no problem calling that force God,” Go said.

  “I see,” Iverson said, suddenly losing interest. His brain was too rattled for a theological debate.

  Go continued despite Iverson’s obvious capitulation, “Imagine you’re walking along the beach one day and you run into a woman with a young boy. For the sake of this analogy, let’s say you’ve never seen a woman or a child before. In the interests of science, you decide to conduct a few experiments on them. Your analysis of the woman proves that she is capable of reproduction. This suggests, with a small margin of error, that, if the child is not hers, then he is probably another woman’s. Now think of the Zone. If it’s capable of creating us and our reality, should we not conclude that this was where we came from?”

  “You can create a universe from here?” Iverson asked.

  “Yes and no. Anything we create here dissolves after a short time. We don’t know why. There are no natural elements here. How can decay exist without natural elements? Things should last forever, right? But to create a lasting manifestation here, even something small and seemingly insignificant, one would have to conceive of an entire system to support it, a self-renewing and self-regulating system. One would have to begin at the beginning, a big bang, a single-celled organism, unity and duality, yin and yang. But in order to do that, one would have to be able to create something from nothing. Creatio ex nihilo. But try as we may, it’s impossible for us humans to do that. Science has failed miserably with this simple task. Science tinkers with things, plays a game of three-card monte with the available deck of cards, but at best it only enhances what already exists. As a species, we have never actually created anything. The pioneer of genetic research, Eugene Bataillon, spoke for the whole scientific community when he stated simply: ‘Really, we create nothing.’”

  “Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem,” Angela said.

  Go nodded and said, “I’ve heard a lot about Gödel from my scientists.”

  “Someone want to clue me in?” Gibbons asked, twiddling his thumbs.

  Angela ignored him and asked C.C, “Is it possible to create human life here?”

  “Yes. But as Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem points out, no system can totally explain or understand its own workings. That means, basically, you could only create a human being here if you understood everything about humanity, body, mind and soul. An impossible feat, even for the greatest scientist. It would be like trying to see your own face. It’s beyond the limits of our understanding. We can come close. . . .”

  “How do you mean?” Iverson asked, waving a penlight before Gibbons’s eyes. His pupils responded.

  “I mean, I could create a facsimile of a human being from my imagination and you wouldn’t be able to tell the real from the fake. Well, until it dissolved,” Go said.

  Gibbons turned and put his feet on the floor. He stood slowly, but then quickly sat back down.

  “Any pain?” Iverson asked.

  “No. Just a little dizzy,” Gibbons said.

  “Could someone change our reality from the Zone? Make adjustments to things?” Angela asked.

  “No,” Go said. “Whoever created our reality put in a fail-safe. We cannot change the universe from the Zone, nor can we take a manifestation back to reality. One can, however, return something to its natural state . . . remove certain impurities, such as an infection. In the Zone, I can cure a man of cancer by returning his body back to its natural healthy state. He would be able to return to reality completely cured. But I cannot return him to reality after altering his natural physiology, such as making him more attractive, or younger, or taller. I could dress a Nazi like a peace-loving hippie, but I couldn’t return him to reality that way. I once created a wooden box and when I tried to cross over with it, it was destroyed in a display of static and sparks. It’s better that way, I think. I have too much respect for creation for it to be littered with inconsistencies or capricious alterations. Some punk would paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa, given the opportunity.”

  “You could cure cancer here?” Gibbons asked.

  “Yes. In the Zone you can remove a tumor or accelerate healing. Perfect health is just a thought away.”

  Overcome with sudden fatigue, Iverson went to sit in a chair in the corner of the room. For a moment he just stared out into nothing, absorbed in thought. Gibbons’s miraculous recovery was gone from his mind. He was consumed by a mood.

  “Are you okay, Doctor Iverson?” Angela asked.

  Iverson sighed. There was no hiding it from her. She would have detected the mood from his brain scans. “I’ll be okay in a minute.”

  “He’s thinking about his wife,” Gibbons said, laying back down on the bed and putting his feet up. “This place could’ve cured her.”

  “Your wife passed away, Doctor Iverson?” Go asked.

  Iverson detected a shocking hint of excitability in Go’s voice. Was the asshole happy she had died? He had gotten used to false sympathy from strangers, but this was blatant insouciance.

  Angela crossed over to him and placed a hand on his shoulder affectionately.

  “He doesn’t like to talk about it,” Gibbons said, now suddenly protective of him. “Leave him be.”

  “The Zone is overwhelming for some, Doctor. If you like I can show you how to return home,” Go said.

  “You can?” the scientist asked.

  “It involves some marshaling of your thoughts, but it’s not difficult. Simply imagine a door leading to your destination and wait for it to appear. As long as you can see the place in your mind, you can go there.”

  Go closed his eyes and suddenly a door appeared in the middle of the room. He opened it, revealing what looked like the research room at CIA headquarters. Iverson immediately recognized some of the staff. Gibbons gasped an expletive.

  Go offered the door with a wave of his hand.

  Iverson’s instincts were urging him to take the exit, but he resisted. Leaving the Zone might only involve a thought, but getting back would be impossible. He would not abandon Angela and the director.

  “You’re sure?” Go asked.

  “Positive,” Iverson said reluctantly.

  The door to reality dissolved.

  Overwhelmed by being the center of attention, Iverson escaped to the hallway. Once there, he almost felt brave enough to head for the staircase and make his way up to the smoking section, but he couldn’t be
sure it would be there. This wasn’t the actual CIA building. Also, he didn’t have a lighter. He resigned himself to where he was, leaned against the wall, and extracted a cigarette from the pack in his lab coat pocket. The taste of the filter offered little satisfaction.

  A clicking sound got his attention. C.C. Go had activated the flame of an old, gold-colored Zippo lighter.

  “My dad had a lighter just like that one,” Iverson said. He leaned toward the flame and sucked on the filter until the cigarette was lit. Though he knew this wasn’t the real CIA, there was a sense of wonderful rebellion in blowing smoke into the corridor.

  Go handed him the lighter. “It’s yours.”

  Iverson accepted the gift, but before he could put it in his pocket, it vanished. He stared at an empty palm and said, “Nothing lasts here.”

  “Not yet,” Go said.

  “Not yet?”

  “Some things seem to last longer than others,” Go said.

  “Any idea why?” Iverson asked.

  “Not yet. May I ask: when did your wife die, Doctor?”

  “No offense, but I don’t really like to talk about it.”

  “Understandable,” Go said, “To tell you the truth, I’m not really good with the whole sympathy thing. No offense.”

  “You’re not good with the whole science thing, and now not good with the whole sympathy thing. What exactly, Mister Go, are you good at?”

  “Creativity,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  Iverson blew smoke through his nostrils like a dragon.

  “It must bother you that a little shit like me has made probably the most important scientific discovery in history.”

  “I just hope you know what you have. And I hope no one gets hurt.”

  “I have more trust in the universe than you do, Doctor Iverson. In fact, I trust the universe completely, whereas you probably don’t even trust your best friend.”

  Angela was Iverson’s staunchest friend, but Director Mark Gibbons was the only human he was in regular contact with. If that meant Gibbons became his best friend by default, then C.C. Go was correct; Iverson did not have a trustworthy friend in the world.