The Traveler's Companion

by Chater, Christopher John

“Incredible,” Iverson said.

  “You can understand why I stuck around for so long. Go has warped values when it comes to the natural universe, but the work has been incredible. Most of us just tolerated his long sermons, but now I realize how dangerous he is. If the Zone is released to the public, the shit will hit the fan for reality.”

  “How can we shut down the lasers?” Iverson asked.

  “I can’t help you. I’m paralyzed from the waist down. You’ll have to work alone. But I have something you can use.”

  “What? Tell me.”

  “Can you turn your head to see my hand?”

  It took all of Iverson’s strength to move his head, but eventually he turned to see the man next to him. He was Asian and clearly young, maybe less than thirty years old. His face was pale and sickly looking.

  “Look at my hand,” he said.

  He was holding a Zone remote.

  “It’s activated. They took the one issued to me, but I had a spare. I was planning on using it myself, but I don’t think I’d make it. My brain is too fried. Even a minute in the Zone and the insanity will overwhelm me. But you were only in a few hours. You can make it. Go back into the Zone, and, as quickly as you can, get your hands on some explosives. Manifest a rift back to the ship and sink this mother fucker. It’s the only way.”

  “What about you?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I was inside way too long. Life isn’t the same anymore. When I was in the Zone, I created a perfect fantasy life. It weakened me to this world. I can barely function here.”

  “Is this real? Are you real? Is Mister Go fooling me? Am I still in the Zone?”

  “This is reality. Unfortunately, it will never feel the way it did before you left. It will always feel foreign to you now. Some of the other scientists committed suicide when they realized that they couldn’t go back. Mister Go thinks he can make a sustainable environment there, but he’s lost his mind. There’s no way to do that.”

  Iverson attempted to lift his arms, but he couldn’t get them to move. He could only manage some minor motion in his torso; everything else was numb. He shifted his weight from side to side, rocking the wheelchair until the wheels lifted from the floor. The wheelchair eventually tipped over.

  “Drop it,” Iverson called out. He could only see straight in front of him, through the spokes of the man’s wheelchair. The drop had to be perfect. It was a long shot at best.

  Iverson heard the plastic hit the floor. There it was, only a few inches away. He wiggled his hips, sliding his body out of the wheelchair and onto the tile. The remote was so close he could see the writing on it. He only needed to depress the button, but with what appendage? He discovered he had some motion in one arm. Mostly just the fingers, but all he had to do was create enough momentum to get his arm onto the floor. With one hip movement, his arm fell to his side, inches from the remote. Using his fingers, he reached out for it. When he depressed the button, the lights in the room flickered.

  Now all he had to do was crawl though the rift.

  CHAPTER 19

  When Iverson got back to the Zone, most of his city had gone black. Miraculously, the house on Lombard Street was still partially intact. It was there that he found Beth sitting on the floor, forced onto a small island of what was left of the living room. Quickly, he recreated the entire house.

  She jumped to her feet and ran into his arms.

  “You’ve been gone for days,” she said.

  It had only been a few hours for him and he felt sad and guilty that she had been left alone in a vanishing city. She was lucky the house had lasted as long as it did.

  “It was awful. Please don’t leave me again,” she said, holding him tightly.

  “Where’s Angela?”

  “C.C. came and got her. He said they were just going to be a minute, but they never came back.”

  “Damn it. I told her to stay with you.”

  “There’s nothing she could have done. We would have both been stuck here in the dark.”

  Had he failed Beth again? As her creator, wasn’t he obligated to stay by her side until she vanished? No matter what he did, he believed he was destined to fail her. Now, more than anything, he wanted to stay with her, to make sure she’d be okay. If the Zone didn’t cause its long term visitors to go insane, he would’ve stayed. But he knew he couldn’t.

  Because he had been outside the Zone, given a reprieve from its overwhelming power, he could physically feel the insanity beginning to besiege his mind. A wave of paranoia and dementia was poised on the shores of his consciousness like a military invasion. It took all his strength to fight it off.

  She looked up at him with a mournful expression, as if reading his mind. “You’re not going to stay, are you?”

  He shook his head. “I can’t. Too many people would suffer.”

  She quickly summoned a brave face for him, and with a forced smile, she said, “Come with me.”

  She guided him to the master bedroom, unzipping the side of her dress on the way. With a sultry gaze she said, “Grant a woman her dying wish.”

  His resistance to her was only an act. He wanted nothing more than to be with her; however, the word she had used to describe him earlier was holding him back like a ball and chain. Kamikaze. Being intimate with her would be a form of suicide. If the passion that gripped his heart was unleashed, it would strangle his logic and snap his fragile mental state like a twig. In a matter of hours the city would begin to vanish and so would his ability to manage it. The energy it took to keep sane was exhausting him.

  He wanted to be with Beth more than anything. Leaving her here would be as much a shock as watching her die in reality. But a moment’s passion here meant abandoning reality.

  When he heard the sound of her dress hitting the floor, he closed his eyes and summoned every last bit of bravery he had. The Zone could not reach the public. He could already envision the widespread panic. The President of the United States would make an emergency broadcast: “Do not press that button!” Meetings at the United Nations would be filled with outrage, accusations, and declarations of war. Because of the Zone, secrets would be revealed. Weapons of mass destruction would go missing. Do you know where your children are? Are you sure those are your children lying in their beds and not some trick of the Zone?

  Would it be that bad? he wondered. Maybe that was just the dementia talking.

  No, no, Iverson reassured himself. The Zone must not reach the public.

  He took a deep breath.

  Refusing her is the only insane thing about this situation, he thought. This might be the last night of her imaginary life. Couldn’t he just grant a woman her vanishing request?

  She stood before him completely nude with her arms outstretched, beckoning him. He was like a moth captivated by heavenly light.

  “Come to bed, Ryan,” she said.

  For twenty-five years he had wished she could utter those words to him. He still loved her. It never went away. Some days he had wished for death at the slight chance he could be with her in the afterlife. And he was an atheist.

  But as she stood naked before him, the shape of her body exactly as he remembered it, knowing that making love to her now would be as wonderful as it had always been for them in life, he saw a small but glaring mistake. The quarter-sized, ground meat-looking scar that the real Beth had on her left knee wasn’t there. That small omission was the thread that undid the entire fabric of this woman’s counterfeit life. It proved this Beth didn’t have billions of years of evolution behind her. Spermatozoa had never merged with ovum. She hadn’t been born in Buffalo General Hospital in New York. Mary and Jonathan weren’t her parents. At thirteen years old, this Beth hadn’t favored her left knee when falling off a bike and onto loose gravel. She hadn’t attended Harvard, nor had she graduated with an English degree. E.E. Cummings wasn’t her favorite poet. None of life’s constellations of accidents had conspired to introduce her to Ryan Marcus Iverson. The woman before him was an imposter.
No better than an artist’s rendering. She couldn’t create. She couldn’t reproduce. She couldn’t nurture her young. She was ephemera and their kind was destined for extinction. As fleeting as a thought, once there, then gone. While in ten thousand years a future race might find some evidence of ancient humanity, there would be no trace of ephemera. Only blackness.

  Iverson found himself turning away from her. Was she even still there? He suspected she had already vanished, erased by the tidal wave of his disbelief in her.

  He went into the living room, sat in one of the club chairs, and stared out the window. After a few moments, he decided it was time to sink Mr. Go’s ship.

  * * * * *

  Explosives were Director Gibbons’s specialty. When Iverson thought of him, he was teleported to the DIS offices. He was greeted by a flattering bust of Gibbons situated at the top of the stairs. A plaque below it read: Mark L. Gibbons, Founder of the Department of Inter-dimensional Security.

  Iverson descended the stairs.

  A woman he believed to be an ephemera Angela was sitting at the desk, her face buried in her hands.

  “Do you know where I can find Director Gibbons?” Iverson asked.

  When she saw him, she got up and quickly went to put her arms around him.

  “Are you all right?” Iverson asked.

  “It’s me, Doctor Iverson. Angela.”

  She looked as if she had been crying. She had dark circles under blood shot eyes and an irritated nose glowing against a pale face.

  “Angela. How’d you get here?” he asked.

  She sat back down in the desk chair. “You were gone. I didn’t know where else to go. Something’s happened,” she said. Her lips were quivering.

  “How did you get here? Did Director Gibbons bring you?”

  “No.”

  She’s malfunctioning, he thought. The timing couldn’t be worse. He knelt beside her. She looked sick. Maybe a virus.

  “What happened, Angela? Did Mister Go respond to Level Five?”

  She just stared at him, slack-jawed.

  “Angela, come on. Snap out of it. Tell me what happened. Where’s C.C. Go?”

  She flinched from his stern words, but replied softly. “He said he wanted to go home.”

  “Home? What do you mean home? You mean back to reality?”

  She looked up at him with a blank expression. He suspected she was about to retreat into thought again, so he snapped his fingers at her. “Stay with me, Angela.”

  “He said he wanted to go home. I asked him where home was and he said he didn’t know. He just kept saying he wanted to go home.” She sighed and said, “I’m really tired.”

  “I’ve found the location of the laboratory, Angela. I’m going to sink it. Where’s the director?”

  “Not sure I can leave here, Doctor,” Angela said.

  “Stop being so cryptic! What the hell happened?!”

  “I don’t know!” she snapped back.

  Iverson calmed himself. After a moment, he said as congenially as he could, “Start from the beginning.”

  She began to cry.

  He sighed, dropping his head in defeat. He assumed her Emotional Response program had been initiated by his tantrum. He forcefully restrained his emotions and went over to comfort her.

  “Angela. Angela,” he said, putting an arm around her. “Stop crying. It’s okay.”

  “Something went wrong,” she said in a veil of tears.

  “What was it? Tell me?”

  “He’s made me human,” she said.

  “What?!” he said, jumping to his feet.

  She seemed to study his reaction as if to gauge the severity of the situation. “I don’t understand it either, Doctor Iverson. Files have been converted into memories. Programs are now instincts. Part of me knows who you are while another part of me is meeting you for the first time. It’s like I’ve only read about you,” she said, looking at him desperately.

  “Are you saying he gave you consciousness?” Iverson asked.

  “I’m not sure he did it intentionally.”

  “Angela. It’s not real. It won’t last. Everything created in the Zone is fleeting.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure, Doctor. It’s my understanding that humanoids created here can’t be creative. Is that correct?”

  “From what I’ve seen that appears to be the case.”

  She closed her eyes while sighing, relaxed her shoulders, and then held out a flat palm. He had never seen this expression of concentration in her face before. Mr. Go had trumped him this time. How could he have suddenly made her so human-like? Years of work in a laboratory hadn’t produced what Go had obviously achieved in a few seconds. Was this how fathers felt when losing their daughters to boyfriends?

  Suddenly a red apple was balancing on her palm. She offered it to him. “I’m human, Doctor.”

  Nearly out of breath from shock and excitement, Iverson asked, “How?”

  “He brought me back to his Paris. While we were walking along the Boulevard de Clichy, he talked about what he had planned for the Zone. He mentioned that I might want to help him, that I was invited to join him on his crusade. Soon we were in the red-light district, going past sex shops, past prostitutes soliciting men on the street. C.C. seemed completely in his element. In fact, he began offering a sort of guided tour, pointing out the popularity of certain places over others. He said his books had been guides to places like these, and he said that the only regret he had in writing them was that they were only for the elite. He believes now that something that doesn’t benefit everyone doesn’t benefit anyone.

  “I wanted to talk about the future. I asked him what his feelings were for me. He said he liked me and enjoyed spending time with me, but I wanted to know if he thought he could love someone like me. He said he didn’t think he was capable of loving someone. He explained it as not having the right software. He suspected he had been corrupted during his childhood. But he believed it was all part of some type of divine plan, that he wasn’t destined to experience love. I told him that was ridiculous. Everyone deserved to love and be loved. Then he looked at me and asked, in this sort of childlike way, if I could make him love me. Looking back, it was almost like he knew. Like he knew what I was going to do to him.”

  “He was a willing participant,” Iverson said. “The only criterion for Level Five, for hypnotic suggestion, is that, on some level, the subject wants to be hypnotized.”

  “Yes, he wanted it. I told him to trust me.”

  “Which he did,” Iverson said.

  “That’s right. We got a hotel room immediately, there in the red light district. A cheap ugly room, the type usually rented out by the half hour. I sat him down on the bed and told him to listen to me. Within minutes, he was responding. I walked him back through his childhood, looking for anything that might be obstructing his emotions. Then I found something. He recalled seeing his mother crying one night when his father was away. He said that even as a child he understood what was going on. So he went out looking for his father, to bring him home. But when he found him, he was with a prostitute. That was the moment he told himself he would never fall in love.”

  Iverson manifested a glass of water and drank until it was gone. “Then what happened?”

  “I brought the memory to his conscious mind. I told him that when he awoke he would finally release the negative feelings he associated with this time in his life, but most of all he would now allow himself to experience love. No longer would he be afraid of revealing his emotions. I commanded him to love me as intensely as he could and when I brought him out of it, within minutes we were making love. But something was wrong with him. It was like he wasn’t seeing me. His eyes were vacant, like he was still in the hypnotic trance. But he didn’t stop. He began telling me how much he loved me. That God was love. And then it happened.”

  “What exactly?”

  “I began to feel. I began to think. I was alive. But I was so overwhelmed by it that I panicked. It was lik
e I had been cut in two. One side of me was artificial while the other side was human. I didn’t know what to do. He suddenly had this overwhelming power over me. Do you have any idea what that’s like? He could’ve told me to jump out the window and I would’ve done it. I would’ve done anything he asked. So when he asked me what was wrong, I told him.”

  “You told him. . . .”

  “I told him that I was alive, but that only a few minutes earlier I had been a series of ones and zeroes—that I had been an artificial being who had somehow achieved consciousness because of the Zone.

  “He believed me immediately. It was like it all made sense to him. Horrible sense. He was incredibly upset. It was awful. I had no idea what do. I asked him to hold me. I needed him. What I was before shouldn’t matter. What we had now was real. But he didn’t care. He wouldn’t listen. He ran out. He said he was going to release the book before the CIA could stop him. He said he was going home.”

  “Did you try to find him?” Iverson asked.

  “Yes. Somehow I knew that if he was in the Zone, I could locate him. But he was gone. I then thought of you, but nothing happened. I thought you were dead. Director Gibbons didn’t know where you were, either. I’m so glad you’re okay.” She lowered her head, her hair veiling her face.

  “Subconsciously, Mister Go must have known what you were. Hypnotizing him to love you caused some type of conflict between his conscious and unconscious mind. It forced him to create a real human being, someone he could actually love.”

  “So you believe me? You believe I’m human?”

  “I do.”

  “Then what now?” she asked.

  “We can’t stay here forever, Angela. Something about the Zone causes dementia . . . insanity.”

  “And going back to reality could end my consciousness. Not much of a choice.”

  “This is what being an agent for the CIA really means. We have to stop C.C. Go. We can’t allow anyone else in the Zone.”

  “Do you have a plan?” Angela asked.

  “I was told they had opened a rift during a particle accelerator event, but it happened by accident and they can’t reproduce it. I’m going to destroy their laboratory and permanently close the rift.”