by Tim Lees
He pulled a swipe card, led me through a heavy door marked Authorized Personnel Only.
“That’s the gods,” I said. “Can’t live with ’em, can’t live . . . well. You know the rest.”
The hallway looked like something in a cheap hotel. There were doors on either side, a couple of 40-watt bulbs. A noticeboard was tacked onto the wall. It had theater listings—two years old—the menus for a couple of fast-food joints, and a faded sign that read, Smile More, Worry Less.
“None of those things say, ‘Work harder,’ ” I said.
Nickols giggled awkwardly. He stopped. He had a piece of paper in his hand and he was studying it carefully. There were rows and columns of letters and numbers.
“This—no.” He glanced around. “This way.”
Two minutes later, though, he stopped again.
“What’s up? You lost?”
“No . . .”
“ ’Cause it’s taking us a long, long time to get there. And the place isn’t that big.”
“It’s—” There was a low-grade panic in his eyes. I could see him grasping after something—an excuse, or an explanation. “Paperwork,” he said at last. “I think there’s—I’m sorry. I forgot it. There’s another form to fill out. We’ll have to go back to the lobby, you can sign it, then we’ll—”
“I can sign it when I leave.”
“No! Oh no! There’s protocol, there’s—”
“There’s no more forms.”
“It’s special,” he said. His voice was very small. “For this facility. Only for this . . .”
I moved in close. I didn’t touch him—HR tends to frown on that—but I let him know I could do, if I chose. I just bulked over him a moment. It was decent bit of bluff. Things went much faster after that.
Assur was in the low level. The basement labs.
Assur wasn’t alone.
Three people waited in the hallway. They sat on hard plastic chairs and didn’t seem to have a lot to occupy themselves. One was a large man with heavy, sullen brows. There was a woman, cheekbones jutting, eyes too large. She scratched at the same spot on her thigh repeatedly. Her jeans had been worn pale there.
The third, not much more than a boy, had a cut on his cheek, a long, thin slice, reminding me too much of the young man in Dayling’s room. I stared at him, even while Nickols fudged and prevaricated, pretending not to know which room we wanted.
“The Assur flask—left five, or . . . ?”
“You guys work here?” I said.
Their eyes moved. The woman stopped her scratching.
The big man said, “We’re . . .” he seemed to yawn the word, then drawled at me, “on a break.” He leaned back, watching me with quiet insolence.
My gaze went back to the boy. “Nasty cut.”
“It’s OK.” He raised a hand as if to hide it.
“I hope so. Let’s get on with this, shall we? This room? Or that one?”
Nickols opened his mouth, said nothing.
“That one, then.”
Nickols nodded. He gave a glance to the big man I could only call apologetic. The woman glared at him.
I’ve seen some weird things in my time, but these three, sitting in the corridor, just sitting there, doing nothing—they gave me a chill.
There was another door, unlocked with a very conventional key, which he took from his pocket. It gave into a cold, brick-lined room, a bare lightbulb hanging on a cord from the high ceiling. The flask stood in the middle of the floor, resting in a rubber-tipped wire cradle. It had been cleaned up since I’d last seen it; the blood and hair were gone.
“It’s isolated,” he said. “We do that to all of them. Keep them off the floor . . .”
Some tools were lying in the corner. They looked like they’d been lying there for quite a while: a wrench, a sledgehammer, a thing that might have been a water pump. The plastic shield from something—a lathe, perhaps? Several wooden pallets had been stood on end and leaned against the wall. There were strings of dust and cobwebs hanging from them. It looked like the whole place had been abandoned. There was graffiti on the wall, mostly names and tags in marker pen, and some bigger, spray-painted items. One was all jagged lettering, incomprehensible to me. Another said:
EACH MOMENT
OPENING AND OPENING
INFINITE
FOREVER
The letters were in white with a blue border and about half of them had a black shadow drawn around them. They were familiar to me. What I didn’t see was how they’d wound up scribbled here.
I went over to the flask and inspected it, eyes only. Then I put down my carry-all, unzipped it, opened it. Gently, I took the flask from its cradle, powered it up, and checked the readings. Hello, Assur. Powered it off again. I placed it in the bag, fastened the straps to hold it, zipped up, and slung the bag over my shoulder.
I looked back at the wall.
“So who’s the poet?”
He shrugged.
“I’m serious,” I said. “I want to know. Especially that one.”
He held his hands out. “It could be ten years old. There’s no way—”
“No, that’s recent. Look at it, compared to the other stuff. Weeks, months at most. One of the guys outside? You didn’t introduce us, by the way. Is it one of them?”
“I, I—”
“All right, forget it. Probably not important anyway . . .”
“I’ve got a theory,” he said. “I think the gods are memory. Not memories, but Memory itself, condensed out of our—our thoughts and feelings, our parents’ thoughts and feelings, back and back. They’re how the universe recalls itself. The memory of the world . . .”
“OK,” I said. “I get any insights into that, I’ll let you know . . .”
When I left the room, the three sentinels were on their feet. They were looking at the hold-all on my shoulder. It was a subtle thing, but for a moment they seemed to block my exit, all staring, filling the corridor in front of me. It wasn’t quite a confrontation, but it had that kind of feel to it. I said, “Excuse me,” and the boy stepped back. The other two did likewise. Nickols, his head down, led me through, shut the door behind us.
“Memory,” I said.
“I was planning—that is, I was going to write a paper, explaining . . .”
He pulled a face. The swollen dummy hand twitched slightly.
He said, “You’re taking something from us. Something we all valued. Perhaps it’s just as well.”
There was no more paperwork. Of course not.
As we drove away, I noticed a couple of figures standing on the street outside the wire. In their hoodies and their baggy pants I couldn’t tell their age, but they didn’t look like kids to me. They had been watching the facility, but as we drove out, one tugged the other’s sleeve, and they watched us, glaring with a fierce intensity. One took a quick step forwards and then stopped, mid-stride, swaying for a moment, off balance.
“It’s drugs,” my driver said. “Look at their eyes. It’s obvious.”
“Ah.” I nodded. “Thanks for the enlightenment.”
I took the next plane west, the flask there on the floor between my feet. Tucked in its stylish leather carry-all. I thought of it as like a neutered atom bomb, a tamed eruption. I preferred, just for the moment, not to think of it at all. I drank champagne because it was offered and ate an indifferent meal for much the same reason, and fell asleep to dream of falling, falling through infinity: each moment different, each the same, till by the time I woke, we’d already begun our real-life drop towards Chicago, where my next car, and my next driver, were already waiting.
Chapter 30
Let Me Introduce Myself
Chicago styles itself the most American of cities. The city that works. They’ve got a big
thing about work. “Work hard, play hard, go in next morning,” as someone put it to me. In summer, temperatures can go up to a hundred degrees. In winter: twenty below, when you factor in the wind chill—which is considerable. This vast and sometimes daunting metropolis also has the distinction of being named after a particularly smelly kind of onion.
The work began next day, and I began to get a sense of what, and who, I would be working with.
There were a dozen of them. Not the full team. It was like the first day in school. I should have had them all lined up in front of me, only I didn’t. We squeezed into the cramped control room of the Beach House, a place already dubbed the “Cockpit,” and I worked hard, trying to remember people’s names, faces, who they were and what they did, and not succeeding very well with any of it.
So I talked about myself, instead.
“Some of you I’ve met before,” I said. “Some of you are new to me. My name is Copeland. Call me Chris. I’m Field Ops,” I said. That caused a little shuffling of feet, among those I hadn’t come across before; some glances, back and forth. I let that die down. I said, “I’m here—just in case. My experience is with the kind of thing we all hope doesn’t happen in the Beach House. And in the meantime, there’s this.”
And I did my own little reveal: unzipped the bag, took out the flask.
“Everybody, meet Assur. He’s very happy to be here with you, and hopes you’ll all be happy working with him.”
They crowded around. Farnham Kuehl, the site director, was there, and I noticed that already there was a certain deference to him from the rest of the team. He was a big man, physically imposing, tending to place himself at the front and center of the group. The cuffs of an expensive suit peeped from the sleeves of his lab coat, the latter as pristine white as if it were straight off the shelf. He stepped forward, elbowing his way in front of everyone, took the flask in his big hands, and then, I think to show me who was boss, without so much as asking my OK, powered it up, and read the numbers on the screen.
“Impressive,” he announced.
I stood back, folded my arms. He gave me a look, a long look, and I met it, steadily, my head on one side, weighing him up.
He threw me a bone.
“Well done, Chris,” he said.
I stood there, like a bored teacher with unruly students. I suppose I could have made a fuss—there were probably a half a dozen regulations he was contravening, but I thought, no, not this time. You get one chance, and this is it.
A short, stocky guy said, “From Iraq, yeah?”
“That’s right.”
“Question, then.” I could see his mouth starting to crinkle up. “Does it speak English? ’Cause my Iraqi sucks, man . . .”
He got a laugh for that. It broke the tension. And I got a lead-in to my own little speech about the gods. Let Shailer boast the benefits. Let Kuehl act like he was plugging in some kind of kitchen appliance. My line was different. I was hellfire and damnation. I was telling them exactly what would happen if they got it wrong, and what I’d seen, out in the field.
And what I’d seen at GH9, in Indiana.
I got some raised brows over that, some muttering among the back rows.
What I’d told them—edited a bit—was something like the truth.
Interesting, I thought, that no one would admit to hearing it before.
The Beach House changed. It grew busy. A crane was brought in, anchored on immense steel crab legs, and the last equipment lowered through the roof. The glass panels were put in place. The inner rooms, its former kitchens, were crowded with equipment, with Registry technicians running through the systems time and time again. There were people being flown in from all over; there was a Lithuanian who had to have his own translator with him for the nontechnical stuff. I could have done with the same kind of assistance. I asked people about their lives, their families, trying to play the nice guy. I asked them what TV they watched. I tried to join their sports talk, but even in England I’d hardly known one team from another. Out here, it was impossible.
On the official side, though, I was busy. I had changes made. I had policies reviewed. I had temperatures monitored, and air pressure, and umpteen other things. I had these allocated in the daily duty roster. I was a martinet, a micromanager.
I was the kind of guy I would have hated.
I was a total, absolute pain in the arse.
And I was proud of it.
I walked to work along the beach. The waves threw debris on the shore—driftwood, ship’s rope, sometimes bottles, shoes, once an old clock face that had somehow found its way to land—and then the sand came up and piled around them, only to be swept away again during the next storm. The smell was fresh and clean and nothing like the sea.
One morning—it was overcast, the lake itself appearing thick and milky, slow with silt—I noticed someone on the sand close by the Beach House. He was too far off for me to see his features, but his clothes were dark, and nothing in his manner suggested he was working. He bent and picked some item from the sand. I assumed he was attached to us in some way, to the project, and the fact I didn’t recognize him didn’t bother me; it was par for the course just then.
But a second later, I was sure that I heard thunder. I looked around. And when I looked back, he was gone.
He’d been standing on a flat expanse of sand, close to the water, with no cover, no intervening objects, and, as I could see it, no time to get out of sight.
This puzzled me so much I actually walked out to the spot where he’d been standing. The gulls screamed overhead. I looked about me, tried to calculate the distances. I searched for anywhere he might have fled, any way he might have seemed to disappear. I searched among the stippling of footprints, but I could make out nothing there even the least unusual.
Dayling texted.
Chris he wrote.
Chris
Chris
Chris
Chris
He could go on for hours like that. Hours and hours. From time to time I’d wipe them and from time to time he’d stop. Four, five, six hours. Nothing. Then he’d start again.
Chris
Chris
Chris
Chris
Shailer’s secretary phoned me from New York.
“He’d like you to meet him tomorrow for breakfast at his hotel. Is 8:15 acceptable?” she said.
I was going to ask her why he couldn’t call himself, rather than relay the message half way across the continent and back, and then it struck me: because if he had, there’s a fair chance I’d have told him to fuck off.
Chapter 31
The View from a Window
“I wouldn’t say they’re friendly, no. Polite, perhaps. Not friendly.”
“But cooperative?”
“Hard to tell. They look it. They act it. But frankly . . .” I was at the window, face against the glass. “And Newark—Newark was just weird.”
“Weird, Chris?” Seddon’s voice was slow and tired. I could almost hear him breathing, there on the far end of the line. For him, it was a very early morning. Or a late, late night.
“That’s not a very clear term, Chris.”
“Yeah. Well, that’s good, then, because nothing’s very clear right now.”
I had a six-month lease on the twelfth floor of a Hyde Park apartment block. It was a sublet—tenant studying abroad—and every room was stuffed with bits of someone else’s life. I didn’t mind the boxes and the bags of clothes, but there were ugly, “arty” sculptures on the walls—a sun with rays made out of knives and forks, and little statues on the dresser: trolls built out of household waste. I stood there with the phone on one ear, the other ear pressed to the windowpane. I had to angle myself just right to get a view into the street.
I said, “It’s like this. I go down to the
Beach House, they tell me, look around, ask questions. And I do. I’ve been round everybody twice at least, what do you do, how does this work, what if it goes wrong? All that stuff. They tell me. Half the time I’m none the wiser. We’re not doing a retrieval here. It’s new tech, or it’s tech I’ve never seen before. And it looks great. It sounds great. But, but . . .”
That piqued his interest. “But,” he said.
I didn’t answer him.
He said, “You think they’re lying to you?”
“No, I don’t. Or . . . not exactly. It’s what Shailer said. If something’s going wrong, then maybe they won’t even see. But maybe I won’t, either.”
“Hm. And Mr. Shailer. Gone now?”
“Tomorrow, back to L.A. Wants to see me first. I know how that’ll go. I’m leaving everything with you, Chris, where I know it’ll be safe. Except he’s not. They’ve got a site director, bloke named Kuehl, Farnham Kuehl. Now he’s—on the one side, he’s very co-operative. Big handshake, big, big smile. On the other, makes it very plain who he thinks is in charge. I’ve not quite sussed him yet. Could be cultural differences, but if you asked me now, I’d say the bugger’s just a bit too full of himself for my liking. You know?”
“Americans,” said Seddon, “in my personal experience . . .”
So he offered me the bounty of his wisdom, while I let my gaze roam up and down the street. Not many cities have an architecture like Chicago’s. Budapest, maybe, or Prague. From up here I could see these great old houses, with their ornate façades and plain brick backs, like sets for some immense theatrical display that never quite took place. A string of little restaurants lit the sidewalks. I could see the beggar on his milk crate where he always sat, and, further down, the woman cadging change outside the dollar store. A bunch of students passed by, heading out to eat. A cop car idled, double-parked . . .
I let Seddon say his piece. Then I said, “I think they’re happy Shailer’s going. Remains to be seen how that affects me.”
“All you can do,” he said, “is keep an eye on things.”
“You know I’m not cut out for that.”
