by Xander Gray
“Right,” Navarez said. “So why doesn’t the button work?”
Slaven scratched his chin, searching for an explanation. “Let’s say you put a CD-ROM into the laptop you have at home. Do you ever have any trouble ejecting it?”
“What?”
“Just answer the question.”
Navarez rolled his eyes. “Barring a hardware failure, it’s pretty easy to eject a CD.”
Slaven smiled, clearly pleased with whatever he was about to say. “Instead of staying safely in the drive, let’s say your CD-ROM turned into a mist of subatomic particles, migrated through your motherboard, and became actual memory locations in RAM. You’d have a hard time ejecting it, wouldn’t you?”
Navarez’s jaw dropped. “What have you done?”
“How daft are you?” Slaven snapped. “I’m telling you as plainly as I can. I’ve removed all barriers between the simulation and the subject. The dreamer has become the dream. Each of the men hooked to this grid has become physically integrated with the hardware at the level of individual quanta. How many ways do I have to spell this out? They are never getting out of there.”
I had escaped from a prison which had been built to punish its inhabitants for eternity. It was a miracle. “How many people are trapped in there?”
Navarez pointed to a green number flashing in the upper-left corner of the monitor. “Twenty-three.”
I quickly counted the unconscious prisoners plumbed into the monolith—there were only twenty-two. “The count doesn’t match.”
“It’s a glitch,” Slaven snapped.
He seemed defensive, but I saw no reason to press. “Twenty-two men trapped in Hell, then.”
“Hell is a fitting name for it,” Slaven said, “considering I created it for a group of narcissistic fools who think themselves gods. By the time I’m done with them, they’ll know what it means to suffer.”
“All this for revenge?” Navarez asked.
Slaven grinned sadistically, his lips pulled back from his gleaming teeth. “You have no idea what it’s like to live in a womb of infinite knowledge, to never be lonely, to be part of something infinite and ever-changing, and then to be spat into a world where everyone lives and dies alone. I was the only one among them who wanted to stay digital permanently.”
“McSorley—”
“Don’t call me that!” Slaven snapped.
“Sorry. Habit.” Navarez blinked. “Your plan?”
“What do you think I am trying to tell you? First, we get the Ouroboros to wirelessly tunnel into this server. This has been my plan all along. The very reason I commandeered The Gas was because Joshua here showed potential for connecting to the pivot.”
“We isolated the pivot in the lab three months ago,” Navarez said, “but we’re still working on targeting.”
Slaven considered this for a long time. “You’re saying I might not need Joshua’s unpredictable talent?”
“The research has not been without incident,” Navarez said. “We had a bubble appear in the lab one day and teleported someone’s mind to nowhere.”
“You can overcome these obstacles?” Slaven asked.
“I think so.” Navarez stared at the rafters. “Why not sabotage their ark?”
“Even if you could get close enough, the ark’s quantum processors have a back door, enabling the Ouroboros to instantly tunnel forward in time. You need to lock them where they can’t tunnel. You need them here.”
Navarez popped his knuckles, squinting in concentration. “If the Ouroboros can time travel, why didn’t they see Joshua coming?”
This seemed a logical question, since time travel conceivably enabled one to correct the past, but I had tried to alter the past by shooting McSorley in the abdomen and failed. Was the universe self-correcting? And if so, how had the Ouroboros traveled back in time? How had I?
Slaven summarized the dilemma in a way that was both more precise and more confounding. “There may be a fundamental law preventing us from changing the past, unless we already changed it.”
“What?” Navarez looked mystified.
“There’s not enough time to explain this,” Slaven said. “Assuming I understand it, which I don’t—no one does. But just because we experience time as linear, does not mean it is. Einstein advocated block time, wherein past, present, and future exist simultaneously—that might explain why the universe holds some events constant while leaving others flexible. The flexibility may be illusory.”
“Are you preaching preordination?” Navarez said.
“I don’t know.” Slaven rubbed his palms briskly. “Once you’ve altered an event once, the universe stops it from being altered again. So did you really alter it? Or did you simply become aware of how it’s always been?”
“Huh?”
“Perhaps everything you will ever do, you have already done. Perhaps you live your life once—all at once—but experience it one moment at a time.”
“You’re right,” Navarez said. “There isn’t enough time to explain this.”
“And what would be the point?” Slaven shrugged.
I raised my hands in a questioning gesture. “Can I leave now?”
Slaven looked toward my body—my real body—its sheet-draped form vegetating on the bed. “Not yet.”
“Let him go,” Navarez said. “You have me to help you.”
“That wasn’t the deal.” Slaven glared at Navarez. “How much more time will you need to perfect the wireless tunneling?”
“I would have said two months, if I still had a place to work.”
“Can you finish here?”
“Maybe.” Navarez scratched his chin, looking around the room at the unconscious men, the computer terminal. “Can you fabricate a wireless rig?”
“I can build anything you can produce a level-one schematic for.” Slaven tapped the monolith. “Being exiled made me productive.”
“Then yes.” Navarez nodded. “We can finish my work here. But before we go live, I’ll need input from the particle accelerator.”
I took a step back and felt the privacy curtain slither across my shoulder. One quick turn and I could be outside, but then what?
Slaven sensed my skittishness and stepped toward me, one hand raised. “I’ll let your wife go. I’ll put you back in your body. I’ll give you fake identities. You’ll never be reported missing from the prison. No one will ever search for you.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked.
“Navarez says it will take two months to finish his work, and he needs a third party. Doing it sooner, on our own, would be safer.” He pointed at me. “You have talent. Thirty years ago, you may have connected to the pivot, a subatomic dimension in space-time, and used it to move Attis bit-by-bit from a server into a Capgras. I’d like a repeat performance. Can you pull Attis and her compatriots from their server and dump them here?”
I had experienced this event only moments earlier, but the strange bubble had been manifest when I’d arrived. “I don't know.”
“Try.”
I recalled the teeth-chattering, mind-humming sensation I had experienced immediately before the bubble had last opened and tried to reverse-engineer it into a causal action, but nothing happened. “I’m at a loss.”
“This talent is uniquely yours,” Slaven said.
Navarez leaned against the podium, folded his arms, and clucked his tongue, as if thinking of something to say. “Close your eyes and picture the hive you told me about.”
“You’ve seen the ark?” Slaven asked. “Yes, picture that.”
Here was my chance to save six million people. I knelt on the floor, planted two fingers in the dust, and lowered my head. I closed my eyes and let the humming servers fade, and then it was just me, the darkness, and my breathing. Before me rose the memory of the ark, a grand monolith filling the Nexus basement with oscillating shadows. I felt my brow tighten and my back stiffen. My head pounded. I pictured Attis before the ark, silver-haired and serious. I pictured the o
ther Ouroboros, shuffling upstairs in artificial bodies. I pictured an aerial view of Nexus and the prison, separated by two miles of woods and farmland, and then I imagined the distance halving, quartering, until the ark lay so close I could touch it. Somewhere, deep in the layered shadows of a million forgotten dreams, I sensed the bubble. Pain spread through my neck, into my brain stem, through my skull, behind my eyes, first dull and then sharp. I cried out and opened my eyes.
“Is that all you’ve got?” Slaven asked.
I stood, my head humming. “I’ll try again.”
This time I pictured the victims—six million across every continent—but they were only abstract images of suffering, too intangible to hold. I imagined the ark again, but I was exhausted from the last try, and now the images were soft and ragged. It was no use. I released a long, slow breath. “Maybe later.”
“You last tried when you were eight?” Slaven asked.
“As far as I know.” I slapped the dust from my slacks. “Until a few minutes ago, I didn’t even know it was something I could do.”
“If you don’t use a skill, you lose it.” Slaven raised his hand. “We have Navarez as fallback. Two months?”
Navarez nodded.
“Joshua is going to try something different.” Slaven motioned toward the glowing monolith with one hand, like a game show host revealing a coveted prize. “Go back to Hell for me.”
Navarez stepped into the circle of beds. “What if he can’t get out?”
Slaven spun on him. “Don’t you want to stop the Ouroboros?”
“Joshua’s life is at stake.”
“Six million lives are at stake!” Slaven grabbed Navarez’s collar. “I have to make sure the Ouroboros cannot escape!”
Navarez smacked Slaven’s hands away. “If you cared about humanity, you’d trap the Ouroboros and turn off the servers instead of keeping them alive as your playthings.”
I was more concerned about my wife than Navarez’s warnings or Slaven’s moral turpitude. “If I do this, you’ll release her?”
“Yes.” Slaven grinned and patted an empty bed. “Lie down.”
I lay on the mattress, hands rigid at my sides, and stared at cobwebs fluttering between rafters.
Slaven approached with a breathing mask in one hand. “Once you’re inside, find Gar. Will him out of the simulation. I’ll run trace programs on this end, so I can get a good look at what you’re doing. My goal is to make sure no power in this universe—not even you—can decouple the Ouroboros from these servers once they’ve been entangled.”
“What if I succeed? Wouldn’t killing me be your quickest fix?”
“Killing you would eliminate one specific threat, but it wouldn’t do anything to remove the underlying vulnerability.” Slaven motioned toward the monolith, the mask flapping in his fist. “The Ouroboros would exploit any weakness, which means I have to identify and repair them all.”
“I’m going to help you identify them.”
“Yes.”
“But wasn’t one of the vulnerabilities my ability to free myself? If you repair that one, I’ll be stuck in there!”
“I’m not sure that’s fixable—even if it is, I don’t have the tools to fix it now. This is a data gathering exercise. Nothing more.” He fitted the mask over my nose and mouth. “I’ll record everything you do along with every fluctuation in the quantum state of every affected quantum particle. That will give me the picture I need.”
“Then I go home?” The mask muted my voice.
“Then you and your wife live happily ever after.” He plugged my breathing tube into the monolith and pressed a button. The world went dark, lost in a cloud of purple smoke.
Chapter Thirty
The first time I saw Gar in prison, almost three years ago, I did not recognize him. To me he was just another inked-up convict, sitting on a desk, staring at his boots.
I was unrolling the mattress on the upper bunk when I noticed him staring at me. I tried to ignore it. The last thing I needed was trouble with the new guy.
He stood and examined me more closely. “I know you from somewhere.”
“Oh yeah?” I fluffed my pillow and tossed it at the head of the bed.
“Did you go to school in town?”
“Class of ’91.” I studied his face, but it was hard to see anything through the swirls of black ink—all I saw was a two headed snake rising from strange tribal art. Why would anyone do that to his face? I concentrated on the bony framework of his nose, chin, and eye sockets, and then it hit me, and all the air went out of my lungs. He didn’t remember my name, but I remembered his. “Tommy Garfield.”
“You remember?” He was still staring at me, still trying to mine memories from the shape of my skull.
I had just transferred from another cell because the guy there had treated me like his own personal punching bag when I had refused his advances, and now I was bunking with the man who had turned my childhood into guerilla warfare. Clearly God didn’t think the judicial system had done a sufficient job of punishing me. I extended my hand. “Joshua Briar.”
“Joshua. No shit.” He shook my hand. “Some friends told me about your case a while back, said it was strange as hell.”
“It was.”
He scratched his head. “This is crazy. What are the odds we would end up in the same cell after all these years?”
I decided to spare him a realistic dissection of the odds. I’m not sure I could have said anything intelligent anyway. “I guess it’s pretty strange.”
He sat on the desk. “You just get here?”
“Naw.” I threw my envelope of postcards onto the bed. “I’ve been here a few months. Ran into some trouble with my last celly.”
“They keep changing my cellies too. I keep getting guys who disrespect me or my friends. I don’t stand for that. You’re not going to be like that, are you?”
Was he threatening me? “Listen, there’s something you and I got to clear up straight away. You’re not going to pick on me like when we were kids.”
He studied me, his hands between his knees. “As long as you respect me, there won’t be any problem.”
I could tell by his posture and his build I wouldn’t win a fair fight with him, but it was important to let him know things were different. If I didn’t act like prey, I wouldn’t attract predators. “You won’t have to worry about me disrespecting you. I’m just here to do my time as quietly as possible.”
“That’s how I do it too.” He smiled and plopped onto his bunk. “I don’t get caught up in all this drama around here with the gangs and drugs and all that. I just do my time and make sure I don’t wind up nobody’s punk.”
“I know all about that.”
He looked up at me. “Someone get to you?”
“Not like that.” I hopped on my bunk, folded down the wall-mounted tray, and spread out my post cards—the picture of Sammy, the skyline of Chicago, my smiling wife. “Let’s just say my last celly tried to make me his punk, and that’s how I ended up here.”
“You go to the prison staff?” He must have seen the answer on my face. “Shit, going to the staff is a sign of weakness. Somebody comes at you again, you deal with that yourself, or you’ll get a reputation. Inmates smell fear. I have a strict rule—if I have a problem with a celly, I make sure he’s the one who requests a transfer, or else I leave him so broken up the staff makes the call on their own.”
“You’re right.” I gazed longingly at Crystal’s picture. “I’m still learning the ropes.”
“Well, you won’t get no trouble from me.”
We didn’t talk much over the next few days. I kept my photos on my half of the corkboard even though he only had one photo on his side—his mother, sitting beneath a Christmas tree, wearing a Santa hat—and I stayed out of his way, letting him come and go without discussion.
After a few weeks, we were lying in our bunks after lockdown one night, and his voice rose up through the shadows. “Hey man, I just wanted to say I�
�m sorry for what I did to you back in school.”
At first I didn’t know how to respond. “No worries, man. I barely remember.”
His ragged breathing echoed in the dark. “It’s no excuse, but I had rotten things happening at home. Let’s just say I know what it’s like to have someone bigger and stronger always tightening the thumb screws.”
“It was a long time ago, Tommy.”
“My friends call me Gar.”
“It was a long time ago, Gar.”
I lay staring at the zebra-striped shadow of bars on the ceiling, listening to men chattering in their darkened cells, pondering Gar’s childhood. Crystal had lived across the street from the Garfield madhouse and had called the police on Gar Senior at least once for beating his wife. Crystal had thought Gar cowardly for letting his mother suffer, and maybe she was right, but I couldn’t help but wonder what kind of tyrannical influence his dad had held over him. What demons haunted Gar? Had he exorcised them? He never mentioned his childhood again, except to tell glowing stories of his mother’s delicious dinners and doting affection. He never mentioned his father at all, and I never asked.
Chapter
Thirty-one
I awoke outside in a kennel, the sun casting chainlink shadows over my prison khakis and white shirt. Wind blew across the yard, rattling on the deserted catwalk and whistling around the guard towers.
I was alone.
This was not reality. This was a simulation, an artificial reality carved from the fears of its inhabitants. Hell was the name I had assigned to it, but it hardly seemed like Hell. It was a deserted prison. But it could change.
The last time I had been here, I had met Helena Isaacson, a subconscious conjuration born of guilt and denial. Now I knew the truth. I had pulled the trigger. I had killed her. If I met her again, I would not deny my role in her destruction. Though her actual death seemed a conspiracy of fate, I had chosen to drive to the campus with the gun, and no bewilderment of mind could absolve me. Knowing she was a product of psychology made her no less frightening, for here she would be real. Would she vanish upon hearing my apology? I decided I would rather not find out.
