Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille

by James Van Pelt

  “No problem.”

  “Third, we have to work fast. Time is ticking on this.”

  “I know about limited time.”

  “Lastly, we can change the future. You must believe that or there’s no reason to be here. I can send you topside right now if you think you won’t have the attitude for the work.”

  Rye glanced around the room. His bags were piled by the elevator door; the blue cases sat prominently in front. “Sure.”

  “I know your prognosis,” said Dr. Martin. “We have a schedule for blood work-ups and medications from above. They tell me there’s lots of hope with the transcriptase inhibitors. You could do better than they think.”

  “That was explained to me.”

  “It’s tough, I know, but we’re working to save everyone. We all have a poor prognosis now.”

  Rye thought, yeah, but your end will be quick. You’ll get to make your goodbyes. Then he decided that was bitter and said, “I’ll do what I can to help.”

  A bare-footed woman dressed in black shorts and a Star Wars T-shirt walked across the room, barely noticing Rye. Her straight, blonde hair was tied back and looked like it needed washing. She took a pile of papers off the desk, turned and walked from the room. She paused at the door and said, “Is that our terminal game boy? We don’t need him.”

  “I told you, Gretta, he’s a VR expert.” Dr. Martin sounded exasperated, but she was already gone.

  Later the first day, under the headset for an orientation, Rye waited for the images to form in the two small screens that hung in front of his eyes, blocking his view of the room. Most of the equipment looked military. Drab green or gray, heavier electrical connections than he was used to seeing, a real sense of solidity in the construction. Different from the light plastics he worked with at LivingSim, a 3D simulation and game company in Salt Lake City.

  “Go ahead,” said Rye. The darkness in the headset gave Rye a claustrophobic itch.

  “Almost there,” said Dr. Martin.

  Then the display flickered and the VR room focused. Dr. Martin sat at the console, typing in instructions.

  He waved at Rye. “Can you see me?”

  “Got it.” Rye made a thumbs up fist. It blurred through the bottom part of the display. “Pretty crummy resolution. Your reality would make a shabby game world. How many frames per second?”

  “Yes, resolution is the problem we need you to work on. Information comes too fast for our system to handle. Anything that moves we lose.”

  Rye looked to his right, then his left. The images streaked until his head stopped. “Where’s the camera?”

  “No camera,” said Dr. Martin. “This is concurrent visual data from your point of view. We’re running chronologically constant with immediate updating, all gathered and synchronized through the power of four Cray computers in parallel alignment. From this room I can take you any place on Earth, and any time within 6,000 years or so. Here, I’ll put you on the surface. You can control physical position with the joystick, just like flying a jet, and chronological position with the keyboard, but until you get used to the controls let me show you what it can do.”

  Dr. Martin typed in more instruction, and the VR room vanished, replaced by the inside of the metal shed above the silo. The silent soldier sat behind a desk, his feet up, reading a hunting magazine. Below the edge of the display, Rye saw his own hands resting on his thighs. That’s the problem with VR so far, he thought, you still can tell it’s simulated.

  “This is the same spot a hundred years ago,” said Dr. Martin. The display fuzzed out, and now a meadow of lanky grass stretched in front of Rye to the edge of a forest and a low series of hills that looked vaguely like the ones they had driven through to get to the silo.

  The rest of the tour included several stops in Des Moines at different times in history while Rye played with the joystick to control his movements. He didn’t find it difficult. No harder than maneuvering in a 3D game environment.

  Finally, Martin took him to the end of the world. Even with the terrible resolution, which Rye had several strategies to improve already, the wall of flame and destruction afterwards stole the breath from him.

  Rye watched it three times before taking the headset off.

  “That’s our future, seven years from today.”

  “Are the images real?” Rye said.

  Martin inserted his finger into the file of computer printouts he’d been searching through, then brushed a strand of gray hair that had fallen across his forehead.

  “I don’t know that I can explain this to you in terms you understand. Or, at least, not using the terms the way you use them. ‘Real,’ for example, isn’t a solidly defined word in physics.”

  He talked for another fifteen minutes, and all Rye remembered was that at one point Martin had said, “The energy required to retrieve the future’s signature seemed so small to me, that for an instant after I worked out the math I worried that if I just thought the equations, that my consciousness would cut loose from our place in time, and I might never find my way back. Fortunately I’d made a small computational error, and it takes somewhat more energy than that.”

  “So it is real?” Rye said.

  Dr. Martin sighed and opened the pile of papers where he’d left off.

  Rye thought about listening to his doctor a month earlier while Annie had held his hand, before he’d ever met Dr. Martin or known anything about the secret project buried in an Iowa missile silo. The doctor blathered about T-cells and opportunistic infections, about AZT and aerosolized pentamidine. In the vocabulary of it, Rye couldn’t see the disease. It sounded like bad poetry in a foreign language: host-cell receptors, monocyte, macrophage, Pneumocystic carinii, toxoplasmosis and candidiasis. Finally Annie had blurted out, “This is Voodoo medicine! Give us words we can understand.” And the doctor had tried. He talked for an hour, but the plainness of the talk didn’t change the mystery of the end. Rye had squeezed his sister’s hand while looking out the doctor’s window. The words rolled by, and they filled the air so heavily, that after a bit, Rye felt like he was under water, so he rushed from the office. Annie had found him hours later, his back against the base of a sculpture in the park.

  “It’s Voodoo physics, isn’t it?” said Rye.

  “You can think of it that way,” said Dr. Martin. “But it works.”

  “What was that?” said Gretta.

  They were in the VR room, the largest room other than the silo itself, which they couldn’t go into—Dr. Martin had warned them of the repercussions of seeing themselves in the future; Gretta had argued that they hadn’t seen themselves, so going in now wouldn’t make a difference. “We see into the future, but we drag the present with us.” Dr. Martin had looked at her oddly, then changed the lock on the silo door.

  “I dropped my pencil,” said Rye. He bent to pick it up.

  “Declining motor skills,” she said. “Difficulty with gait, balance, coordination, clumsiness and deteriorating handwriting. Here, write a sentence for me.”

  “I dropped a pencil, for crying out loud,” said Rye.

  “It was only a slip,” said Martin without looking up from his papers.

  “Early manifestations of dementia can’t be ignored,” she said. “He’s not going to be able to help if he loses his mind. Dementia is common with his condition.”

  “I’m not losing my mind,” snapped Rye.

  “Mood changes. Irritability.”

  Martin said, “Keep it up, Gretta, and I’ll show you some irritability.”

  “I don’t know why you can’t be more helpful with this. Why do I have to be the vigilant one?”

  “He’s not losing his mind. He solved the problem with the head-set display in four days. We couldn’t make a dent after a month.”

  “I just dropped my pencil.”

  “He’s said that three times now. Trouble keeping track of conversations is another symptom. So is forgetfulness.”

  “It’s also a sign of depression or
stress, Gretta.”

  “I’m not depressed,” said Rye, but neither seemed to be listening to him.

  Gretta said, “You watch him for awhile, and you’ll see what I mean. He needs neuro-psychological evaluation.”

  She stomped out of the room. A few seconds later, the door to her cubicle slammed shut. Martin shuffled through his papers. Rye rolled the pencil between his palms.

  “Sometimes,” Martin said, “I think she needs an evaluation.”

  Rye sighed. “It’s possible she’s right, or she will be right someday. How can you tell if you’re losing it?”

  Martin looked up. His eyes watery but sympathetic. “I’ll let you know if I notice signs of dementia. In the meantime, just for fun, read up on the symptoms and demonstrate a few of them whenever Gretta’s around. It’ll get her goat.”

  Despite the floaters that drifted through his vision as thick as moths around a porch light, Rye chuckled.

  Gretta’s voice came muffled through the wall, “I heard that.”

  Two weeks later, Gretta began sharing her rest time with Martin. Rye heard them talking. He heard their mumbling echoes in the hallway behind the thin door, the creak of the bed moving beneath them.

  Dr. Martin was fifty-two, face as gray as his hair. Eyes constantly tearing, as if he’d just read a tragic novel. Very unattractive, really, Rye had thought. He couldn’t see what Gretta saw in him. She was only twenty-three.

  It seemed the bed squeaked for an hour. What am I doing here? he thought.

  It struck him as such an optimistic thing to do for both of them. Or desperate.

  Either way, he decided, the rules were off.

  The last security screen cleared, and Rye was into the e-mail program. He’d thought it through. His message had to convince her that he was alive, and that she shouldn’t be on her flight. She couldn’t toss it away as some sort of crank mailing. He typed:

  Annie,

  It’s me, Rye. I’m not dead, and I have a vital message for you. Don’t take your flight tomorrow. I can’t really explain how I know, but it’s connected to the reason I’ve had to disappear. I’m all right. I’m asymptomatic, and have never felt better. I know I was pretty depressed about it before I vanished, but I’ve figured out how to live with it.

  I could go on for years and never get sick. No one knows for sure. When this is all over, I’ll come tell you all about it. But what’s important is that you stay off that plane. It will crash. No one will survive. Stay off the plane.

  It is me. I’m still alive, and you have to stay off the plane. Don’t take it! Call in sick. Do anything, but if you love me, if you love the memory of Mom and Dad, do me this one favor and stay off the plane.

  Don’t e-mail back. It will get me in trouble.

  Your brother,

  Rye.

  Rye typed the last word and sent the message. The mail service confirmed that it had been delivered.

  He erased the message in the “Sent Mail Queue,” then, quickly, he backed through the security screens, reapplying each one.

  Voices murmured behind him. Dr. Martin and Gretta were awake. Rye’s mouth went dry. The menu popped up, and he silently pushed away from the desk. In the all metal room, sounds echoed coldly. Even his breathing seemed to come back to him. His shoes squeaked as he tiptoed to the door. He surveyed the area. Old NORAD procedures covered one wall. The communications array glowed in readiness. Battleship gray storage lockers on the other wall were neatly closed. Nothing seemed out of order.

  He froze. The computer monitor still showed the opening menu, not the screen-saver, a hand-drawn image of H.G. Well’s time machine that Gretta had scanned in weeks ago. They’d know if they saw the menu that he’d been using the computer.

  Behind the thin panel that separated his room from the rest of the environment, Dr. Martin said something, and Gretta replied sleepily.

  Rye stepped across the hall into the VR room, but he could still see the menu. How long was the delay? How much time before it kicked in and erased any evidence that he’d been there?

  But Martin and Gretta didn’t come out for some time. The screen-saver blinked on, and all signs of his breach of security were erased. All except, of course, the ripples in the pond of time his message to Annie might cause. Those he couldn’t erase, but he didn’t care. The message was sent. Irretrievable. Irrevocable. He’d remade a tiny bit of the future, even if she didn’t read it. Even if she boarded the plane anyway and went down with the flight. His e-mail message hadn’t existed in their future—the one that ended in seven years and thirteen days in a resplendent wash of flame. And now it did.

  Later, Rye rested on his bed, breathing out disease and inhaling health. It was a visualization exercise one of the alternative treatment centers had suggested before he went underground. Breathe in the clean air, breathe out the disease. He imagined foul dust gathering in his lungs, catching in his mucous, turning it gray and thick. He coughed and tried to bring some up, but that made him think of pneumonia, so he huffed deep in his throat like a dragon’s growl and spit into the trash can by his bed. Nothing. The spittle ran down the metal side, foamy and clean.

  Exhausted, he flopped back on the bed and stared at the ceiling light. Breathe in the clean air, breathe out the disease. Send in the pristine troops on the inhalation; send out the camouflaged terrorists on the exhale. Every metaphor of light and dark, clean and unclean, pure and sullied he ran through, filling his lungs to nearly bursting, then releasing it all with a rush.

  Finally, he closed his eyes, and bright negatives of floaters drifted across the darkness of his eyelids. They paused at each pulse, then slid a little farther, leaving light trails, and he thought if he watched them long enough, the trails would intersect and spell out messages to him. But they never did. They just floated aimlessly about, never quite clear enough to focus on. Illusive and indistinct.

  He couldn’t breathe them out. With morbid curiosity, he’d read all he could find on CMV retinitis. What it all boiled down to was the results of a study from New York Hospital and Cornell University Medical College. The median survival from time of diagnosis was eight months. To combat it, he took daily doses of ganciclovir, which Cornell said would give him 12.4 months longer (on the average), assuming the drug didn’t destroy his kidneys.

  Without opening his eyes, he groped for the glass of water on the desk beside his head. Twenty ounces of liquid an hour on the minimum. It hurt to swallow.

  He imagined Annie checking her e-mail before going to bed. Would she be surprised? He pictured her rereading the message. She wouldn’t know the return address.

  Across the hall, Gretta said something to Dr. Martin. They were trolling through scientific journals four years up the line, looking for new studies, new technologies, anything that might be a precursor of the end to come. Martin was driven; they all were. Seven years and thirteen days away. What caused it? How could it be stopped? In all of the world and all of the remaining future, they had to find the apocalyptic needle in the haystack.

  Rye kept his eyes closed. In his memory, Annie was clear. No floaters between him and her in the remembered. Once, when he was eleven and she was eight, they’d been stranded at a movie theater that had sold out. Dad had dropped them off, but now they couldn’t get in. It was very cold. She leaned her dark-haired head against his chest and huddled closer for warmth. She’d kept crying quietly, holding onto his hand. He said, “Maybe Mom will take you to see it next week.” After a bit, between soft sobs she said, “I don’t want to go with Mom. I wanted to go with you.”

  He wished he could hold her now. Dr. Martin and Gretta didn’t need him anymore. The problems with the headset display were solved. They were looking for clues in the future that he couldn’t recognize. And it was clear Gretta thought Rye was a hindrance. He wondered if she was jealous of the time Dr. Martin spent with him.

  Rye could almost feel Annie’s weight against his chest when he was eleven. If he thought real hard, he could remember the feel
of his cheek against the top of her head and how she shivered.

  Did she get the message? Did she stay off the plane? There was no way for him to know until he could have a session in the apparatus alone again.

  Rye tinkered with the headset. It weighed more than the game equipment he was used to working with, almost fifteen pounds. Wearing it for more than ten minutes left him with a sore neck. Of course there was more in it and it did more than the VR stuff he was used to also.

  On the wall, the clock said 10:12 a.m. According to today’s news he’d seen yesterday, Annie’s plane went down forty-seven minutes ago. A scream rose in the back of Rye’s throat, but he bit it back and kept his face calm. Either she got the message, believed it and saved herself, or she didn’t. Finding out wouldn’t change whatever the outcome was.

  “A kind of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies to our work,” said Dr. Martin. He sat at a console, waiting for Rye to tell him when to send information to the headset. Gretta sat cross-legged on the floor, sorting through the hundreds of pages of screen shots they’d acquired in the last few days. Many were too blurry to use, which was why Rye needed to adjust the equipment.

  “How’s that?” said Rye, giving Dr. Martin the expected prompt. He was constantly trying out new explanations of what they were doing on Rye, as if he were working out different drafts of a paper on time travel. Rye’s hands moved steadily, and the profuse sweating fit he’d suffered from an hour earlier seemed to have passed.

  “We can’t look at the future without changing it. You see, our knowledge of what’s coming didn’t exist in the future we look at when we look at it. So after we’ve gained any information from the future, that future may not happen. We’ve altered the continuum.”

  Rye could see that the eye tracking sensors in the headset were the problem. The cone of focus needed to be widened, which would require more from the computers. “So what we’re doing is fruitless? Anything we learn will be about a future that doesn’t exist once we see it?”