End of the Century

by Chris Roberson

  That was the plan, at least.

  The fire door on the thirty-fifth floor was locked, which was surely a violation of safety regulations. Stillman identified it as a UL 437 rated high-security cylinder lock. He then took a bump key from his pocket. Specially cut, the key slid right into the lock. Then Stillman tapped it, just hard enough, and the pins inside the lock popped apart and the door opened.

  “Okay, love,” Stillman whispered, pocketing the bump key. “Here's where it gets a bit tricky, right?”

  The routine that Stillman had planted in the security servers had taken care of the security cameras in the hallway downstairs and allowed them to climb the fire stairs without tripping any alarms, but now that they had reached the penthouse level, they would have to tread more carefully. This floor was largely given over to Temple's gallery, if the architectural plans were any indication, and the motion detectors in the gallery were on a separate system to the rest of the building.

  Fortunately, there were no security guards patrolling the upper floors. Only Temple and his personal guests were allowed access. So long as they didn't run into Temple himself, and managed to avoid setting off the motion detectors, they had better than even odds of making it out unscathed. And if the popular press was to be believed, Temple was still out of the country at the moment, so there was little chance of that.

  The problem was getting around the motion detectors, of course.

  Stillman had explained that it wasn't like Alice had seen in the movies. There was nothing to duck or slide under, no handy infrared beams to illuminate with a quick spray from an aerosol can, nothing to bounce back with mirrors. The upper floors of the Glasshouse instead used volumetric motion detectors, which saturated the space with microwaves, leaving virtually no dead spaces behind.

  That was where a little bit of MI8 spy science came into play. It wasn't magic, but might as well have been.

  From Alice's backpack they withdrew two bundles of a flexible, clothlike material. They looked to be nothing more unusual than raincoats, which is what the security guards downstairs had taken them for on visual inspection. But they were so thin that, unfolded, they were larger than their small size when packed would suggest. And they were not raincoats, and hardly usual.

  “Zip it up tight, love. Don't leave any wrinkles, or it'll spoil the effect.”

  The cloaks were slightly elastic, and selected for fit, so that when unrolled and pulled over arms and legs, they fit snugly. Light and flexible like rubberized fabric, the cloaks were constructed of electromagnetic metamaterials. Only partially opaque to visible light, when Alice had the hood closed over her face, she could still see reasonably well, her vision only slightly obscured, like looking through thin gauze.

  “Ready to go?” Stillman checked the seams on her cloak, gave her a thumbs up, and then began to move slowly through the corridor towards the gallery, right into the space saturated by microwave motion detectors. “Remember, love,” he whispered, “slow and steady wins the race.”

  Alice nodded and started after him.

  The cloaks were designed so that microwaves could flow around them with scarcely any distortion, or so Stillman had said. It was all to do with the electromagnetic properties of the metamaterials used in their construction. When Alice asked where MI8 had come up with such futuristic gear, years ago, Stillman had casually explained that a sample had been found at the site of an “incursion,” and that the “boffins” at the Tower of London Station had managed to reverse-engineer it after a few years. It didn't have much application—an invisibility cloak that only made the wearer invisible to microwaves—until the widescale implementation of microwave-based motion detectors, at which point it had become very useful.

  They had to move as slowly as possible to keep from tripping the vibration sensors in the walls, but after a quarter of an hour or so they'd crossed the corridor and reached the entrance to the gallery.

  This door was even more heavily fortified than the one leading to the fire stairs. Titanium-reinforced steel, biometric identification pad, deadbolts as big around and as long as Alice's leg. No bump key would get them past it. This called for some more MI8 gadgetry.

  On Stillman's wrist, beneath the fabric of his cloak, was a metal wristwatch, its outline clearly visible. He held his wrist up to the biometric identification pad, depressed a button on the side of the watch through the cloak, and waited.

  “More technology from another universe, I take it?” Alice whispered.

  “No.” Stillman shook his head, the movement masked by the opaque fabric of the cloak. “It's from this one, I'm afraid. Just from quite a ways in the future, is all.”

  The pad bleeped, and the heavy deadbolts slid back.

  “After you,” Stillman said with a bow, as the steel door swung open, soundlessly.

  Alice wasn't sure what she was expecting. It wasn't this.

  This wasn't a couple of paintings and a sculpture or two. This was a full-on museum. Alice wondered how one person, even a billionaire, could have gotten hold of so much stuff. Then, remembering the means he'd used to get the Vanishing Gem, she realized there weren't really many limits to what Temple might have gotten, or from where.

  Aside from a central column, which contained the elevator shaft, conduits for water and power, the fire stairs, and the service corridor through which Alice and Stillman had just passed, the rest of the thirty-fifth floor was a large open space, bounded only by the outer walls of glass and steel. The floors underfoot were marble, the high ceiling tiled. The immense space, which could have housed a dozens offices, was filled with Temple's personal gallery.

  Paintings hung on nearly invisible wires from the ceiling. Statues and pottery and weapons and books and parchments were displayed on waist-high plinths that dotted the floor every few feet. It was like a forest or a garden arranged by an insane gardener.

  Some of the displays were under glass, but most were open to the air. None of the displays were labeled. Presumably, their owner knew what everything was. And, based on his reading of the architectural schematics and security logs, Stillman had deduced that Temple was the only person who ever came into the gallery. That was why the motion detection stopped at the steel door they'd just passed through. The logs showed no record of Temple ever bringing a guest to this floor, and no one from the security department or cleaning staff had entered the gallery since construction on the building was completed. There were no cameras, no motion detectors, no vibration sensors. Nothing but a lifetime of plunder, it seemed, all for the amusement of one man.

  Alice and Stillman shucked out of their cloaks, carefully wrapping them up for the return trip, removing them to reduce the chance that they might get ripped unnecessarily. Alice's backpack was still back in the stairwell, hidden as best as they were able to manage, and so when the cloaks were wrapped, they set them down on the safe side of the steel door, ready for their eventual exit. Then they had a chance to look around them a bit, their vision unobstructed.

  Stillman, a man who casually talked about communication with other universes and technology from the future, who lived in a secret underground base and had a lifetime of memories of the dark corners of reality where most never tread, nodded, appreciatively. “Now this is impressive…”

  It took them so long to find the Vanishing Gem that Alice began to worry it wasn't there after all. Stillman didn't seem much to mind, though. He kept lingering by displays that were obviously not the Vanishing Gem like a kid with a gift certificate bouncing around the aisles of a toy store, trying to decide what to buy.

  “Oh, look at this!” Stillman pointed at what looked at first glance to be a fat robot snake, or a beetlelike sculpture. It was constructed of a stainless, glimmering silvery metal, segmented like an armadillo, and was one foot long and several inches in diameter, with four pinchers a few inches long on either end. “I've heard about this but never thought I'd see it.”

  “What is it?”

  “A Roman named Niveus that…wel
l, that I've read about, said that he saw something just like it in fourth-century Britain. An Irish Celt was using it as a prosthetic arm, if you can believe it, though it was clearly repurposed. The Celt was an ancient old man, but talked about having come from somewhere else, somewhen else, when he was a younger man. He'd made a new life in his new home but still talked about his former existence, especially when in his cups. If not for the silver arm and certain details about future events in his stories, Niveus would have dismissed him as a madman, unhinged by drink. Niveus wanted to make off with the prosthetic, but the Celt's grandchildren caught wind of it and secreted the old man away. Niveus never saw him again.”

  Alice shrugged and moved on.

  She passed what looked exactly like the Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones movie but which Alice was sure must have been a movie prop. Further along was a black stone, polished to a mirror sheen, held in a gold frame. Next to it was something Stillman called an astrolabe made of gold, covered in what Alice thought might be Persian writing. A few feet away stood a small model of the moon, carved of ivory, with the craters marked with Egyptian hieroglyphics.

  “Ah, a functioning Antikythera computer,” Stillman said, pointing to a box of brass and teak with a pair of dials on the front, centered on concentric metal rings. “Didn't think any of those survived.”

  Alice continued. Resting on a long display table was a sword in a sheath. It was white, almost translucent like porcelain, but looked blue when the light hit it at an angle, the scabbard and hilt made of the same material. The handle was a spiral, like a narwhale's tusk, like a unicorn's horn, coming to a blunted point. Only the faintest line was visible between hilt and scabbard.

  “My god…” Stillman said in a whisper, coming to stand beside her. He reached out his hand, tentatively, his fingers stopping just inches from the handle. Alice knew, from everything Stillman had learned, that the objects on display in the gallery were not wired to sensors or detectors; still, it was as though Stillman was afraid to touch the sword. “I…I never thought to see…”

  Stillman, holding his breath, wrapped one hand around the handle, put the other under the scabbard, and lifted the strange blue-white sword into the air.

  Alice opened her mouth to speak, to ask him what was so important about a sword made of porcelain or whatever, but then she caught a glimpse, out of the corner of her eye, of an unprepossessing smooth gem sitting on fabric under glass atop a nearby plinth. She turned her head, looking directly at it.

  It was exactly as she'd seen in her visions. This was the last piece of the puzzle.

  “I do hope you'll be careful with that. Unbreakable the sword may be, but devilishly hard to keep the fingerprints off.”

  Alice's heart leapt into her throat, and she spun around. Stillman, the sword still in one hand, was drawing his Hotspur from inside his jacket with the other.

  There, behind them, stood a young man in a plain white T-shirt and black slacks, his feet bare, standing before the elevator, the doors just now sliding shut. He was bald, and Alice couldn't be sure, but she got the impression that his eyebrows were more pencil than brow. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, the frames small and round. He smiled at them, quizzically, his hands on his hips.

  It was Iain Temple, naturally.

  “Don't look now, love,” Stillman said, casually, “but I think we've been rumbled.”

  Temple stepped forward, casually, making no threatening moves. If Alice hadn't known that he'd started releasing albums more than ten years before she was born, she'd have guessed he was only a few years her senior, at most. What was it with these British guys not aging, anyway?

  “Interesting, isn't it?” Temple indicated the blue-white sword with a nod, then held his hand out to Stillman. “May I?”

  Stillman narrowed his eyes, warily, and kept the barrel of his Hotspur trained on Temple's chest, but handed the sword over without objection.

  “It appears to be topologically flat, if you can believe it.” Temple had both hands around the handle, holding the point of the scabbard up before him. “A single, impossibly large molecule. Or perhaps, some of my researchers theorize, two macromolecules cohered by intermolecular forces.” He pointed to the faint seam where the handle met the scabbard. “Magnetic resonance imagining can't penetrate, but our models suggest a ‘blade’ within, a continuation of this spiraling grip. There's every possibility that, if there is such a blade within, and it is only a single molecule thick, that it would be capable of slicing through virtually any material. Only matter with incredibly strong bonds between the constituent molecules, whether covalent or intermolecular, would be proof against it. Like a monofilament, but rigid.” He shook his head, still smiling, and carefully placed the sword back on the display table. “But we've never been able to force the scabbard open, so we can't know for sure. Still, it's beyond the reach of any science I've every encountered, that's for certain. One of my teams unearthed it in Iceland years ago, and it's been a puzzle ever since.”

  Stillman had slowly worked his way around, his fletchette pistol still trained on Temple, until he stood beside Alice. “You won't be able to get it open, either.”

  Temple raised one of his drawn-on eyebrows, pursing his lips slightly. “Oh, really?”

  Stillman nodded. “That sword used to belong to a friend of mine. John Delamere. He was the only one who could ever draw the blade. He said it was because it was genetically coded to its owner.”

  Temple's brow remained raised, and he nodded, impressed. “I'll have to make a note of that. Perhaps it might open new avenues of exploration.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be out of the country,” Stillman said.

  Temple shook his head. “No, I've not left this building for years. I have doubles that travel, make personal appearances, such like. I conduct interviews via satellite from here, run my companies by telephone or telepresence, but I never leave the Glasshouse.”

  Stillman scowled.

  “Now you I recognize from our meeting years ago,” Temple said, pointing to Stillman. “And I've kept up with you, over the years. I have extensive intelligence on operations such as that which you used to head, Mr. Waters. But you?” He pointed to Alice. “I'm afraid I haven't had the pleasure.”

  Alice was in no mood even to pretend to be polite. She could feel anger welling up inside, a rage that was all too familiar.

  “Why'd you take it?!” Alice yelled, having to restrain herself from rushing the man. “What's this all about? What's this got to do with me?!”

  “I'm sure I have no idea, my dear.” Temple smiled, unctuous.

  “The gem!” Alice stabbed a finger at the jewel safely ensconced behind the glass case.

  “Ah, the so-called Vanishing Gem?” He looked from Alice to Stillman and back again. “Is that what this is about?”

  “What is it, anyway?” Stillman asked, his Hotspur unwavering.

  Temple shrugged and drifted over to the glass display containing the gem. “Well, that's the real question, isn't it? It appears to be some sort of opaque gem, nothing remarkable about it, except that it seems to be growing smaller, without measurably dissipating any energy or mass. It's vanishing, as the British Museum would have it. But where is it going?”

  He stopped and looked to Alice and Stillman, as if expecting an answer. When they remained unspeaking, he shrugged and went on.

  “One of my researchers was extremely bothered by all this, let me tell you. Kept banging on about the information paradox and such like. There was even the suggestion that the excess mass was bleeding as energy into another universe or continua altogether. But I've had some personal experience with such cross-continuum encounters—believe me—and this has none of the hallmarks. There is typically some residual Hawking radiation around such a fissure in space-time, particle-antiparticle pairs that are generated by vacuum fluctuations and then separated when one of the pair disappears into the fissure. There's no such radiation here. Nothing. So, again, what i
s it?”

  “Why don't you tell us, smart guy?” Alice snarled.

  Temple shrugged. “Very well.” He put his hands on his knees and leaned over to peer closely through the glass at the gem. “Our best guess, at this stage, is that the gem is an object from outside this universe entirely. It only appears to be shrinking because it is, in fact, moving backwards in time.”

  “What?” Alice said.

  “Which suggests, based on the current rate of decay,” Temple went on, as if she hadn't spoken, “that we'll be witnessing the initial ‘incursion’ any time now.” He straightened and smiled at them. “Exciting, isn't it?”

  Stillman had evidently had enough. He raised the Hotspur, thumbing the control for full automatic. “All right, this has been charming, but I don't think we've got anything to lose at this stage by abandoning subtlety. The young lady needs the gem, I believe, but for what reason I'm not sure. In for a penny, in for a pound. So open the case, give me the gem, and we'll be on our way.”

  Temple just smiled at them, maddeningly.

  “What if his guards are on their way?” Alice said, tugging Stillman's sleeve.

  Stillman shook his head. “No, if they were coming, they'd be here already. I don't think our friend here called them before finding us here.”

  Temple shook his head, apologetically. “Oh, no, I didn't find you here by chance. I received word from downstairs that there was a break-in and came here to check on my gallery.”

  Alice glared at Stillman. “I thought you said this was going to work.”

  Stillman was confused. “I don't understand. We shouldn't have tripped any alarm.”

  “Oh, it wasn't you, I shouldn't expect.” Temple put his hands in his pockets, casually. “You were already in the gallery when the break-in occurred, if I'm not mistaken.”

  Alice and Stillman exchanged glances.

  “So who was it, then?” Alice said.

  At that moment, the steel door through which they'd come, which now stood closed and locked again, suddenly tore in half, as a bright red line appeared, slicing from the top right to the bottom left, cleaving the door neatly in two.