by Patrick Lee
On the table beside him lay the backpack, which he'd worn under the suit, and the top half of the suit itself, which he'd taken off a moment earlier.
At last Paige let go of him and met his eyes. She had only a little difficulty finding her voice. "It's against the rules to double human bodies, you know."
"I'm new here," he said. "Gimme a break."
He glanced at his corpse on the floor. Christ, it was a sight.
Behind Paige, the last of the survivors had been freed. Some were looking at Travis, but most were watching the doorway warily.
Travis turned to the backpack, unzipped it, and took out the Doubler. "You guys can make enough weapons to protect yourselves, if anyone else shows up here. But I think all the rest are working on the blast doors on B42."
He picked up the top half of the transparency suit again. "I'll go take care of them now."
He saw Paige's eyes after he said that. Saw that she wanted to go with him, her instinct compelling her to put herself in harm's way before others, or at least share the danger. But the obvious didn't need stating: the suit's advantage only worked if he went alone.
So instead she only nodded. "They'll be on a maintenance rig suspended in the elevator shaft from the floor above. It's the only way to access those doors."
He nodded, kissed her, then pulled on the suit top.
It was strange, watching her eyes lose him. She was still looking at where his face had been.
He turned toward the three guards he'd killed a moment before. Two of them wore holstered pistols in addition to the rifles they'd carried. The advantage of a pistol, small enough to conceal beneath the transparency suit, was obvious. Travis had seen that advantage annihilate a team of heavily armed men in Alaska, and had come within a second or two of falling prey to it himself. It didn't escape him that the tables were now precisely turned. He was the one in the suit this time, going up against the Whisper. If he made the slightest mistake, and allowed Pilgrim time to take it out of its box, the suit would be of no help at all. It hadn't been for its last owner.
But he didn't think it would happen that way. It would be nothing so simple. Not after all this. Not after reading the message on Ellis Cook's painting.
He was resigned now to whatever fate the Whisper had mapped out for him, and for the world. There was simply no avoiding it. There was only hitting it head-on and finding out what the hell it was.
He took the nearest guard's pistol-a.45-and the two spare clips in the man's pocket, and started for the door.
Then he stopped. And though no one could see it, he smiled.
"The elevator is three stories below us," he said. "The cables are broken, so its brakes against the shaft wall must've stopped it."
"Yeah," Paige said, looking toward the sound of his voice.
"Anyone know how to override them?"
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
Pilgrim stood at the wedged-open shaft doors and stared down into the semi-darkness. Ten feet below, his fat-ass second in command, Jackley, with the help of three others, was making good progress on the blast doors. It was tedious work. The hanging platform-its suspension cables came up through the open doors to anchor blocks bolted into the corridor floor-made a terrible base from which to drill. The harder Jackley pushed the carbide bit against the steel, the more the platform itself moved. To cope with this long-foreseen problem, the others on the platform had two-by-fours that they propped against the shaft wall, opposite the drilling focus. The nearer end of each two-by-four had a flat board tacked onto it, and Jackley braced his back against these as he drilled. It was a tricky solution that required a lot of hands and attention, but it did the job.
Pilgrim wasn't stressed about it. In truth, he couldn't remember the last time he'd felt stress of any kind. How could he, with the Whisper in his service, leading him all these years to the goal he'd demanded of it?
Control of Border Town.
Control of all the powerful things that lay inside the Primary Lab, just beyond the blast doors below. So many of the wonders in there, Tangent had never fully understood. Entities that were obviously built for great and terrible purposes, but which the researchers had never learned how to operate. How to even switch on, in some cases.
The Whisper would know, though. Once he was in there, he'd have everything he needed.
Over the years, he'd learned not to question the snaking course it had charted for him. It was a great big thing that he'd asked of it. A thing he'd have never accomplished on his own. So of course the plan would be puzzling to him. Of course it would be elaborate and confusing. That was part of its power. And now it'd worked. He was here because he'd trusted the Whisper and followed its plotted track exactly.
Even keeping the survivors alive upstairs. Including Chase. Chase, whose importance the Whisper had emphasized above all others. Pilgrim had only vaguely wondered why. Maybe the guy would turn out to be an exceptionally useful subordinate for him, given time enough, and pressure. Who knew? Who cared? If the Whisper wanted him here, that was enough.
Below, Jackley was using the carbide bit as more of a blade than a drill, cutting a manhole-sized circle into the foot-thick blast door. Now he hooted excitedly, because he'd come back around to where he'd started. The drill bit met the beginning of its own circular track, and the excised plug of steel dropped an inch, settling on the bottom of the widened opening with a heavy thud.
"Magnet," Jackley said.
The man behind him lifted the battery-powered workhorse magnet from the platform and handed it to him. Jackley held the magnet's base against the steel plug, and switched it on. With a bass hum, it drew itself against the metal hard enough to pull Jackley off balance. Now each man on the platform took hold of the magnet's broad handle and leaned back, drawing on it.
"Careful now," Jackley said. "Closer she gets, the softer we pull."
The plug slid outward, two inches, then four, then six. At eight inches it began to tilt, and Jackley stopped the others with a gesture.
"Pull us away," he said.
The others gripped the beams on the shaft wall and pulled the hanging platform back from the blast door, allowing the plug plenty of room to fall without landing on the platform itself. Jackley leaned forward carefully, his stomach braced against the platform's safety rail, and gave the magnet one last tug.
The plug tipped out of the opening and tumbled away into the pitch blackness below. Silence as it plummeted nine stories. Then, impact. Like a battleship's deck gun going off. Pilgrim felt the reverb in his bones. He loved it. Loved everything about this moment. Jackley and the others looked up at him, grinning like idiot kids. It made him laugh.
Only one thing left. Jackley just had to wriggle his body through the hole in the blast door and hit the override, ten feet inside the lab. Then the doors would open wide. The men let go of the shaft wall, and the platform swung to the center again. Jackley grabbed hold of the opening, steadied his footing, and shoved his head and upper body through. In a few seconds he was halfway in, his legs kicking comically in space as the men laughed and pushed on his feet to help him.
Then came a scream from overhead, somewhere in the inky darkness of the shaft, high above. Not a human scream. A metal scream. Some mechanism protesting with a squeal of friction. And then surrendering. Silence.
The men stopped laughing, and looked up.
Jackley stopped kicking. "Fuck was that?" he said, his voice muffled through the opening, which was mostly filled with his ass now.
For another second, nothing happened. Then Pilgrim felt a breeze. Gentle as a sigh, it blew straight down the elevator shaft and through the open doorway around him. The men down on the platform reacted to it as well; it tousled their hair about in little whipping motions.
Then one of them flinched hard, and screamed like a ten-year-old girl. A second later the world in front of Pilgrim's face filled with blurring metal, there and gone in the same half second, and the support lines for the maintenance rig snapped with gu
itar-string twangs, just audible over the sickening crash from right below. Pilgrim staggered back from the open doors, and two seconds later, down at the bottom of the shaft, came an impact that dwarfed that of the steel plug a minute earlier.
The echoes took forever to fade. When they did, Pilgrim heard against the silence a high, keening cry. He returned to the open doors and gazed down on the blank darkness where, seconds before, the rig had hung. Now there was only empty space. It took him a moment longer to process what else he was staring at, and then he understood where the cry was coming from.
Jackley. Guillotined neatly through, where the elevator had scraped past the opening in the blast doors. Sliced like a cross-section in an anatomy textbook, right through his ass, blood pumping from his severed body like water from a compressed sponge. He was still alive. His upper half still hung there inside the lab, out of Pilgrim's sight. But not out of his hearing. The crying went on and on, high-pitched and incoherent.
This could not be part of the fucking plan. How the hell had the Whisper let it happen?
Pilgrim turned. His eyes went to the hinged steel box five feet away, blue light flaring from the seam.
But he didn't move toward it. His eyes locked onto something else, which stopped him in his tracks.
A.45. Hanging in thin air. Three feet away. Aimed at his face.
The hallway fell silent. Even Jackley's cries had stopped. The gun hovered, granite steady.
"But I did everything it told me to do," Pilgrim said at last, hearing a tremor in his speech. "Right to the end."
"And that's where you are," a man's voice said.
Pilgrim saw the gun's muzzle flash, but didn't live long enough to hear the shot.
CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
He could let it be over now.
Pilgrim was dead. The Whisper was in its box. He could wait for Paige and the others to come down. They were sprinting down through the stairwell right now, from thirty stories above. They'd be here in a couple minutes.
He could let it end just like this.
Only he couldn't.
Because the Whisper had been out there all these years, seeding the world with vines that all converged on this moment. Something very big was about to happen, whether or not he left the Whisper in its box. He could feel it. All that this thing had ever done, in its twenty years on Earth, had been to place Travis in this corridor, at this moment, alone.
For a reason.
Time to find out what it was.
He crouched, set the gun aside, unlatched the steel box and opened it. Blue light blazed. He pulled off the top of the transparency suit and dropped it against the wall, and with his bare hand, he lifted the Whisper from the box.
There was no trance effect this time. No erotic intensity pushing his logic and willpower aside. Just Emily Price's voice, steady and even.
"Hello, Travis."
"Hello," he said.
"All appearances to the contrary, I really have no tendency toward screwing around. Let's get right to it, shall we?"
"Let's," Travis said.
"There's something very important coming out of the Breach, just over three minutes from now. Entity 0697. It's critical that you be there to receive it. You alone."
"What is Entity 0697?"
"You'll see. It's time to make your way down now, Travis. While you do that, I'll tell you as much as I'm sanctioned to tell you."
Travis looked at the stairwell door, through which Paige and the others would arrive in the next minute or so. Then he went past it, to the elevator shaft, and stepped onto the inset ladder inside. Only the elevator shaft went all the way to B51.
He descended, unhindered by the Whisper in his hand; he freed two fingers from around it to grip the rungs. The blue light settled into the rhythm of his pulse, flaring over and over on the dull walls of the shaft.
"I'll tell you the story of your life," the Whisper said, "the way it would've gone if I hadn't come along and started changing things. Fifteen years in prison. You get out. You do not move to Alaska. You join your brother's software business in Minneapolis. He shows you the ropes. You learn very quickly. Programming, it turns out, is only another species of detective work, at which you're a natural. It's all about cause-and-effect logic, if/then reasoning, shot through a prism of creativity. Your insight greatly enhances the development of your brother's fledgling artificial intelligence system, Whitebird. Over the years it progresses through iterative leaps, the major upgrades corresponding to the belt-color rankings of martial arts, in reference to the old eight-bit Karate games it was once tested on. First iteration, Whitebird. Second iteration, Yellowbird. Third, Greenbird. By April of 2014 your brother has put the project entirely under your control. You create Bluebird, which Sony purchases for two hundred forty million dollars. It becomes a standard bearer for video-game intelligence. Tangent takes notice of you. In October of that same year they recruit you to live at Border Town and design specialized software and hardware for them, based on the Bluebird architecture. You rise to prominence within Tangent in short order. At some point after that-here I'm limited in what exactly I can tell you-things begin to go badly."
"Badly how?"
He passed B48, the numbers stenciled on the inside of the shaft doors.
"It's better if I don't say any more about it," the Whisper said, "until you see Entity 0697 for yourself."
The Whisper fell silent. Travis didn't bother to question it further.
The shaft brightened as he descended. He looked down and saw light streaming in at the bottom, illuminating the pancaked wreck of the elevator cab. The impact had blown out the shaft doors on B51. The light was shining in from the concrete corridor on that level. The elevator had compressed so much that it only blocked the bottom half of the opening. There would be room to slide through easily.
Travis reached the rung above the elevator. The roof was bent and canted to the side but looked sturdy enough. He stepped onto it, and a moment later he was in the corridor, staring toward the dark shell that enclosed the Breach. Around his feet, blood soaked the concrete, pooling in every imperfection in its surface.
"Travis?" It was Paige's voice, coming down to him from high above. "Travis, where are you?" Her tone, confused and unnerved, made him want to answer. Made him want to call up the shaft, tell her it was all okay, he'd be right with her.
"You need to receive it alone," the Whisper said.
It wasn't forcing his mind. Only telling him. He nodded, and set off down the corridor, Paige's voice calling again behind him, over and over.
To the end of the corridor. To the giant black dome. To the igloo entrance, and through its glass door.
The Breach waited in its little soundproof cage. Purple and blue, its depth receding to a vanishing point.
He could already see the entity coming. A shape against the dazzle of the tunnel's colored light. Something white, and nearly weightless, wafting along the passageway like a feather through an air duct. But it wasn't a feather. Not quite. Maybe thirty yards away down the tunnel now. Twenty. Ten.
Travis opened the door, and the Breach Voices pierced him at once, like scalpel tips into his eardrums. He thought of Dave Bryce, stuck down here with this sound until it drove him mad.
Entity 0697 emerged from the Breach and drifted down onto the receiving platform. It was a single sheet of paper, with writing on it.
Travis stooped to pick it up, expecting the Whisper's scratch language, or maybe some alien script he wouldn't recognize at all.
Instead it was neatly handwritten English.
He stepped back from the glass door and let it fall shut again, mercifully silencing the Breach Voices. But by that time he'd forgotten all about them. He'd forgotten everything else in the world, except what was written on the paper in his hands. THIS IS A MESSAGE FROM PAIGE CAMPBELL TO PAIGE CAMPBELL. I AM SENDING IT FROM A POINT IN THE FUTURE WHICH I WILL NOT DISCLOSE. AS VERIFICATION THAT THIS IS REALLY PAIGE, MY FAVORITE PASSAGE OF ANY NOVEL IS THE LAST P
ARAGRAPH BEFORE THE EPILOGUE OF WATERSHIP DOWN BY RICHARD ADAMS, A FACT I HAVE NEVER SHARED WITH ANYONE. AS VERIFICATION OF TIME, HERE ARE THE DETAILS OF A MINOR EARTHQUAKE THAT WILL OCCUR BENEATH THE MOJAVE DESERT THREE DAYS AFTER THIS MESSAGE ARRIVES. MAG 2.35, DATE JULY 3, 2009, 10:48 UTC, LAT 34.915, LON -118.072, DEPTH 14.32KM. THIS MESSAGE IS AN INSTRUCTION REGARDING A MAN NAMED TRAVIS CHASE. IN 2009 HE IS A SOFTWARE ENGINEER WHO LIVES IN MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, AT 4161 KALMACH ST. FIND TRAVIS CHASE AND KILL HIM. MORE THAN 20 MILLION LIVES ARE AT STAKE.
Travis saw that the Whisper's light was strobing faster than before. A lot faster. It was still matched to his pulse.
His eyes went back to the message. "This can't be," he said.
"It is," the Whisper said. "She really wrote that, and really sent it, using technology that will eventually be developed by Dr. Fagan. Fagan's theory turns out to be correct: objects can be sent into the Breach from this side, but they return without reaching the far end, and depending on their velocity, they can return before they were sent in. Even years and years before."
Travis shook his head. Behind his disbelief, uncountable questions churned. His eyes tracked over the words on the paper again. Paige. Hating him. Wanting him dead.
"What am I, in the future?" he said. "Am I a monster?"
"Monster is a human label. It's subjective. I could argue that you were a monster twenty minutes ago when you murdered four men with a crowbar and enjoyed it."
"They deserved it."
"Deserve is a human label too. It changes depending on who's saying it." The Whisper paused, its light reflecting off the glass of the Breach's enclosure, and then said, "I can tell you this, objectively. The Travis Chase who joined Tangent by way of being a software engineer eventually became someone Paige Campbell wanted dead. Wanted it badly enough to send that note, to make it happen retroactively. That same Travis Chase found out about what she'd done, and in turn found a way to counteract her move. He had, by this time, developed his AI architecture to a system called Brownbird, which was radically advanced. But there was a way to improve its performance beyond what humans had ever thought was possible-beyond what even a quantum computer could do-by upgrading the hardware with Breach technology. It would be very difficult to describe for you how it works. Even the Travis Chase who built it didn't fully understand its operation. The quick version is that it uses matter outside of itself for calculation, connecting to it by way of particles very close to what physicists in 2009 call gravitons. The system can set up spin computation in every elementary particle of a nearby lump of material-the planet Earth, for example. Yesterday, Paige told you how powerful a quantum computer with one hundred qubits would be. Imagine one with as many qubits as the Earth has quarks. That system is called Blackbird. Didn't I promise to tell you my real name someday?"
