by Patrick Lee
They were back in their residence on B16, in the living room. Travis was sitting in a chair by the couch. Paige was pacing a few feet away. The LCD screen was on, tuned to CNN. The coverage was the same as when they’d left the conference room upstairs; all that’d changed was that the damage to the Oval Office was now concealed by a giant white tarp, pulled tight and square over a framework of scaffolding. It looked sharp and clean and dignified. Like a flag on a coffin.
For the past few minutes the commentary had focused on Garner’s legacy, including measures he’d supported and signed into law. An extension of the tax credit for electric vehicles. An aggressive education reform bill. Additional funding for a much-derided research program at Harvard and MIT called the Methuselah Project, aimed at learning how to counter—and even reverse—human aging by the middle of the century. It’d never sounded all that crazy to Travis; no crazier, at least, than sending a person to the moon or plugging most of the world’s computers into one another.
There was no mention of the message the assassin had left behind.
“The top people at the FBI have already called the best sources they can think of,” Travis said, “including the new president, and they’ve turned up almost nothing. Our safest assumption is that they’re done making progress—that no one in power knows anything about Scalar. No one who wants to help, anyway.”
“Which means Nellis is probably right: whoever did this left the message just for us, no doubt assuming we’d know what the hell it meant.”
Travis considered the strangeness of their situation. “Not only don’t we know who we’re playing against, we don’t even know what the game is. We better find out on our terms before we find out on theirs.”
Paige sank into the couch. “I don’t understand why my father never told me about Scalar.”
That would be a tricky question to answer. Paige’s father was dead, along with nearly every member of Tangent who’d known him. Paige herself, though only thirty-two years old, was by far the most senior member of the organization, with just over a decade’s involvement. There was a reason for that. Three years ago, the chain of events that’d originally brought Travis to Border Town had also, in the end, brought about the deaths of all but a handful of its inhabitants. The cataclysmic violence responsible still visited Travis’s dreams. Paige’s, too. He woke her from them a few times a month.
In time new members had been recruited, as quickly as caution afforded. Within a couple years the ranks had been essentially refilled. Then, while Paige and most of the senior personnel were on business in Washington, D.C., they’d come under attack by heavily armed assailants—the opening salvo of a new conflict. Paige alone had survived. From that moment on she’d been the only person in the world capable of leading Tangent. The strongest of the few threads tying its present form to its past.
“I worked here alongside my father for the bulk of the last decade,” she said. “Him and a hundred others. And most of them had been here since the beginning, which means Scalar happened on their watch. Why wouldn’t a single person have ever spoken of it?”
“Can’t have been a trust issue,” Travis said.
“Not a chance. We all trusted each other with everything. With our lives.”
“What other reason, then?” Travis said. “Embarrassment?”
Paige glanced at him, visibly uncomfortable at the thought. She shook her head, but Travis thought he saw more uncertainty than refutation in the gesture.
For thirty seconds neither of them spoke. The just-audible television took the edge off the silence.
Then Paige’s eyes widened a little and she said, “Blue.”
The word seemed to surprise her even as it came out. She stood from the couch and crossed to the short hallway leading to the bedroom. Travis stood and followed.
She had the computer’s monitor switched on by the time he entered the room. The computer itself had already been running.
“Blue status,” Paige said. She clicked open the file manager and navigated through a series of folders. Travis didn’t even try to keep track of them. “It’s a set of security measures we use for people who retire from Tangent.”
“I didn’t know anyone ever had retired from Tangent,” Travis said. “Except me, for the time I was gone.”
“It almost never happens,” Paige said. Her attention stayed with the computer as she spoke. “Three times, total, in thirty-four years. Not counting you.”
She reached the end of a directory tree, and Travis saw a folder icon that looked identical to all the rest, except that it was tinted blue. Paige clicked it. An input field opened, calling for two distinct passwords. Paige typed them quickly; only the second required any thought.
A personnel file opened on the screen. The format was familiar enough to Travis. He’d seen his own file and several others during his time here.
But he’d never seen any of the three names that now appeared on the monitor.
Rika Sengupta.
Carrie Holden.
Bartolo Conti.
“All three were here from the early days,” Paige said. “My father probably recruited them himself.”
Within seconds Paige clicked open each of their files and arranged them in three separate windows, visible at the same time.
All three had joined Tangent between the summer of 1978—the year the organization was formed—and the end of 1979. Original cast members, so to speak. Travis scanned the retirement dates for each file. Sengupta, Holden, and Conti had resigned in 1989, 1994, and 1997, respectively. All three had been with Tangent for the entire time Scalar was under way.
“Sengupta and Conti left for health reasons,” Paige said. “Both were very old when they retired—they wanted to spend time with their families while they could. Neither made it to the new millennium.”
“And Carrie Holden?”
“I only know a little about her. She was young when Tangent formed—early thirties. So, mid to late forties when she retired in ninety-four. She’d be into her sixties now.”
“Why did she retire?”
“I don’t know. I remember my father talking about her, sometimes. She was pretty important around here, in her day. But he never said why she left.”
She clicked to expand Holden’s file, filling the screen with it. There was a thumbnail photo that probably dated to the late seventies: a young woman with blond hair and green or hazel eyes. The file’s text dealt mostly with her pre-Tangent background—she had degrees in chemical and physical engineering from Caltech. There was nothing about her retirement, neither the reason for it nor the identity she’d assumed upon leaving.
“She’d have to know something about Scalar,” Paige said. “Certainly more than anyone else we’re going to find.”
“Can we find her? If she’s hidden as well as I was, her new name won’t be in the computer. Only the person who created the identity would know it—someone with Tangent in 1994—and that person has to be dead by now.”
Paige nodded. “That person was my father.”
“I don’t suppose he randomly let the information slip.”
“No. Not directly.”
Paige swiveled her chair to the side. She traced a path on the carpet with her foot, back and forth.
“I think they had a history,” she said. “She and my father. Some connection during the time they both lived here. He never said so, but that was the impression I got. The way he spoke when her name came up. Things other people said, and stopped short of saying.” Her foot slowed and came to rest. She looked at the computer but made no move to use it. “There was this strange little moment, one time. One of those things you end up filing away and never really thinking about, because it’s awkward. It was probably five years ago. I walked into my father’s office in the Primary Lab, and he had two things on his computer screen: a picture of Carrie Holden, and a Google satellite map. When he heard me come in, he flinched and closed them both, the map first and then the picture. It was very out
of character for him—hiding something, being jumpy. But a second later when he turned to me, it was like nothing had happened. Totally casual—he ignored the moment entirely. So did I. I pretty much had to. And later on, when I had time to think about it, I was glad I’d done that, because I was pretty sure of what I’d walked in on. I think the map must’ve been the place Carrie relocated to, and my father was just . . . thinking about her. No special reason. You know what I mean?”
Travis nodded. He thought of the two years he’d worked in a shipping warehouse in Atlanta before coming back to Tangent. On occasion he’d found himself slapping a label onto a box of brake pads bound for Casper, Wyoming, less than eighty miles from Border Town. He’d stare at the box for a few seconds, dwelling on the fact that in a day or two it would be much closer to Paige Campbell than he himself would probably ever be again. Irrational as hell, but he’d done it all the time. It wasn’t hard to imagine Peter Campbell, in a private moment, gazing at a map of the place where Carrie Holden had ended up.
“You didn’t see the map clearly enough to get the location,” Travis said.
Paige shook her head. “There wasn’t time to see it, even if I’d wanted to. I was way across the room, and it was gone by the time I’d taken a few steps.”
She went quiet again. The only sound was the soft drone of the computer’s cooling fan.
Travis met her stare.
He knew what she was about to say.
She said it.
“We’ve both been thinking the same thing for the last ten minutes: there’s a way I can find out exactly what my father knew about Scalar, and failing that, I can certainly learn what location that map was showing. The same approach works for both problems.”
Travis nodded. “I’ve been trying to think of an alternative.”
“Me too. But there isn’t one. We could rack our brains all day and it’d be for nothing.” She looked at him. “You hate that I’m the one who has to do it. If you were the one, I’d hate it too. But I wouldn’t try to stop you. Okay?”
Travis exhaled. He thought about it for another five seconds. Finally he nodded again. “Let’s go.”
Chapter Five
Level B42. The Primary Lab. Other than the chamber that held the Breach itself, this was the most important place in Border Town. All entities that were unique or nearly so, sufficiently powerful, and still being studied on a regular basis were stored on this level, behind blast doors as heavy as those at NORAD’s Cheyenne Mountain. Travis and Paige passed through them into a long central corridor with extensions branching away left and right. B42 was one of the few levels with a distinct layout—it was more than twice the size of any other floor, its boundaries having been expanded over the years by excavation of the surrounding deep soil.
The place was deserted. Their footsteps echoed strangely in the silence.
They came to the door they needed within a minute. It was standard sized but heavy duty, with a palm scanner beside the lock. Paige put her hand to it and a moment later they were through into the space beyond, a room the size of a walk-in closet with a bank of small vault doors on the opposite wall. One bore a magnetic placard with crisp black lettering:
ENTITY 0728—TAP
Travis felt his jaw tighten at the sight of the name. Paige looked at him and noticed.
“I’m not a fan either,” she said. “Let’s get it over with.”
She crossed to the vault, turned the dial back and forth in sequence, heard the lock disengage, and hauled the door open. Inside was a single tiny object: a rich green translucent cube half an inch across. It might have been a blank die cut from emerald. But it wasn’t.
Paige stared at it a moment, then picked it up and turned from the vault. Her movements were casual in a way that seemed deliberate to Travis. A forced calm. He didn’t blame her. She crossed the small room, stepped back out through the heavy door, and stopped in the middle of the corridor.
“Right here is as good as anywhere,” she said.
Travis joined her in the hallway. For a second her calm facade slipped. Then she discarded it altogether and sat down at the base of the wall. She leaned her back against it and drew her knees close to her body. Travis sat beside her.
“Deep, slow breaths,” he said.
“I know.”
“Give anything to trade places with you.”
“I know.”
She had the Tap lying on her open palm, eye level in front of her. Travis watched how the light played over and through it. Strange, silvery shapes in its depths. Tiny swirls and arcs, like scimitar blades.
Then in one fluid move Paige took the cube between two fingertips and put it to her temple. She pressed it against her skin, and Travis saw the thing’s edges blur as it vibrated.
Paige’s breathing accelerated in spite of her efforts. She reached across her midsection with her other arm and took hold of Travis’s hand.
“You’re okay,” he whispered.
She nodded quickly, probably not even processing the words.
Then it happened. The little cube liquefied in the span of a second, and collapsed to what looked like a thick drop of aloe gel between Paige’s fingertips. In almost the same instant the top of the gel rose and formed a point—and then a filament. A wirelike structure maybe a centimeter tall, thin as fine guitar string. It stood there swaying to the tremor of Paige’s body. Then it pointed itself inward and plunged through the skin and bone of her temple.
Her hand spasmed and gripped Travis’s tightly. Her breaths turned into little cries, betraying the pain but only just. Travis knew how much it hurt. He’d experienced it himself. The Tap had emerged from the Breach during the two years he’d been away, but had still been in frequent testing when he’d returned. Like many others he’d volunteered to have a go at it, and his single use had gone as smoothly as he could’ve hoped. Despite the pain involved, he’d intended to use it again.
Then a woman named Gina Murphy had taken a turn with it, and everything had changed. In the six months since, not a single person had used the Tap.
Travis watched as the gel drop shrank by the second. The thing was feeding itself into Paige’s skull through the tiny hole made by the filament. Though Travis couldn’t see what was happening inside, he could easily recall how it felt: like a living thread, ever lengthening, darting and slipping among the deep folds of the brain’s surface. Flitting and hunting and finding its way like a snake’s tongue. Every second of it agony.
But that was normal for the Tap. So far, everything was going well.
Paige’s cries intensified. Her eyes were screwed shut.
“I’m right here,” Travis whispered.
Five seconds had passed since the lead end had gone in. The gel mass on her fingertips was half spent. The insertion never took longer than ten or twelve seconds.
Paige got control of her breathing just before the end. She went quiet and let her face relax. The last trace of gel shrank to wire thickness and slipped in, leaving nothing but a tiny drop of blood at the entry point.
Paige opened her eyes.
“Better?” Travis said.
She nodded.
The tendril always stopped moving once it was fully inside; the pain stopped with it, for the most part.
She was still gripping his hand. With his fingertip against her wrist, he could feel her pulse pushing three beats per second, though it was slowing by the moment.
“I’m ready,” Paige said. “Catch me if I start to tip over.”
“Wait.” He repositioned himself so that he was seated facing her. She got the idea and scooted forward from the wall, until their chests were touching and their legs were around each other’s hips. He hugged her close to him, and she rested her head on his shoulder.
“No worries about falling over,” he said.
She nodded against him and let her body relax, her breathing now almost back to normal.
“See you in three minutes and sixteen seconds,” she said.
; She felt the effect begin as soon as she closed her eyes. One moment there was a floor beneath her and Travis’s arms were around her, and the next she was gone, floating in some neural equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber. She felt the Tap vibrating softly inside her head, its pathway wandering from her temple across the underside of her skull, to the parietal lobe on the opposite rear side. No sense of her limbs. No sense of anything but her thoughts.
And her memories.
She focused on the one she wanted. Envisioned her father’s office—her office, now—on that day five years ago. He’d been sitting with his back to her, the map on one half of his monitor and Carrie Holden’s face on the other.
The image came to her almost at once—much more easily and vividly than it normally could have. She saw it from her own point of view as it’d been in that moment, just passing through the office doorway, her shoe scuffing the tile and making her father flinch. She froze the image just like that, in the instant before he closed the map.
The Tap was a hell of a thing. The memory image hovered in front of her like a projection, as complete and accurate as a high-res photo of that moment would’ve been.
But this capability wasn’t what made the Tap special. If it had been, she would’ve come up empty: at this range she couldn’t read any of the map’s labels. Not the street names. Certainly not the town’s name, if one was there. She could resolve only a road running north and south, and a modest grid of streets clumped along the middle of its length. A few lesser roads strayed off left and right from the bunch. It could’ve been any of a hundred thousand small towns in the world. The image told her nothing.
She allowed the memory to slip forward in time. The desk and computer began to grow in her field of view as she advanced into the room.
Then her father’s hand moved on the mouse, and the map vanished—its clarity had improved hardly at all.
She froze the image again, then let it begin to run backward. Her viewpoint drifted away toward the door behind her. The map popped onto the screen again. Now came the doorway’s edge, sliding into her view from the side. With it came the scuff of her foot, sounding eerie in both reverse and slow motion. She pulled back all the way into the corridor and kept going, retreating to maybe five seconds before she’d entered the room. She knew from experience that if she wanted to, she could play the memory stream forward or backward at just about any speed she could make sense of. It was scarcely different from rewinding or fast-forwarding a video file. She could plunge back through a spastic wash of images at an hour per second, skim through a day in less than half a minute, then slow down and dial in on anything she wanted to see. Every split second of it would be rich with photo-accurate detail. Every moment of her life was there to be revisited and studied. It should’ve been impossible—with even her passing grasp of neuroscience she knew that. Human memory was good, but not this good. However adept the Tap was at pulling information from her brain, this much information shouldn’t have been there to begin with. The Tap was a hell of a thing.
