Ghost Country

by Patrick Lee

  “Why?” Travis said. “What’s filling it?”

  “Do you remember Heavy Rags?”

  He nodded. Heavy Rags were the most common type of entity to emerge from the Breach. They’d been coming through almost daily since 1978. Each one was dark green, about the size of a washcloth, and weighed over 2,800 pounds. The nature of the material had eluded all attempts at understanding, even after three decades of study by physicists within Tangent. The most they could say was that Heavy Rags weren’t made of atoms. They were dense sheets of some smaller kind of particle—maybe quarks, but that was a guess at best—that were somehow stabilized in that arrangement. Handling them was a logistical chore. There was a wheeled chainfall down on Level 51 with a specially made titanium claw, there for the sole purpose of moving the rags around. They couldn’t be stored anywhere in the complex but the bottom floor, and most of them weren’t even kept there. Over the years, Tangent personnel had bored dozens of foot-wide shafts into the concrete floor of Level 51, all the way to the granite bedrock that lay beneath Border Town. These shafts were the final resting place for nearly all of the roughly ten thousand Heavy Rags that’d come through the Breach over the years.

  “And you remember the Doubler,” Paige said, not asking.

  Travis nodded again. The Doubler had figured centrally in his dreams, at least one night in three, over the past two years. He often woke from those dreams pounding his knuckles bloody on the headboard, with fog-amplified voices still screaming in his head.

  “Heavy Rags are one of the very few entities that can be doubled,” Paige said. “In the future, the bottom three floors of Border Town have been filled solid with them, mixed with concrete to form a kind of mâché, though by volume it’s probably ninety-nine percent rags. We calculated that a cubic foot of the mâché would weigh about 250,000 pounds—almost twice as much as an M1 Abrams tank.”

  Travis pictured three stories of the stuff, compressed into every possible crevice, filling even the dome that surrounded the Breach. The ungodly weight of the substance pushing some distance into the Breach itself, bulging in against the resistance force that made the tunnel a one-way passage. Paige had told him once that in the first year of the Breach’s existence, some people had suggested filling the elevator shaft with concrete and leaving the Breach’s chamber sealed off. That would’ve been a bad idea: in the time since then, entities had emerged that would’ve done very bad things to the world had they been left alone—even in a sealed cavern five hundred feet underground. But what Paige was describing now was a much more aggressive move. It amounted to shoving a million-ton cork into the mouth of the Breach itself, maybe preventing anything from truly emerging from it afterward. What would happen to the entities that were trying to come through? Would they just clot in the tunnel? Would they back up like a reservoir behind a dam?

  He saw in Paige’s expression that all the same questions had been troubling her for days, and that she had no answers.

  “So at some point,” Travis said, “probably before the collapse of the world a few months from now, someone uses the Doubler to fill the bottom of the complex with that stuff?”

  Paige nodded. “It would go pretty quickly, once you had a big enough mass to double from. The Doubler could generate about a cubic yard every few seconds.”

  “But why the hell would someone do that?” Travis said.

  Paige was silent for a moment. “Because under bad enough circumstances it would make sense,” she said. “Which is why I thought of it.”

  Travis glanced at Bethany. She looked as uncertain as he felt. Then he understood.

  “The fallback option,” Travis said.

  Paige nodded again. “The Heavy Rag mâché idea is my own. I dreamed it up six months ago. One more dividend of the paranoia I’ve felt since everything came to a head with Pilgrim. I just imagined a scenario in which we were certain someone bad was about to get control of Border Town, and that our defenses would only buy us hours. I tried to think of what we’d do with those hours. How could we secure the most dangerous entities, and the Breach itself?” She shrugged. “The fallback option was all I could come up with. Put everything down on fifty-one, and flood the bottom three floors with that stuff. No one would ever get through it. You could chip at it for a month with an industrial steam shovel and not make a dent. I think you could even detonate an H-bomb down there and all you’d do is compress the stuff a little more. The density is just unimaginable. You can calculate it on paper, but you still can’t get your mind around it. Anyway, I wrote that up in a report, told a handful of people about it. Consensus was that it was risky as hell. No way to be sure it would work as intended, and no way to undo it if something went wrong. As a general means of just eliminating the Breach, nobody liked it. Neither did I. But everyone I talked to was in favor of doing it if desperate enough times came along someday.” She thought about it for a moment, then spoke softly. “I guess the end of the world would suffice.”

  The whine of another airliner filtered in from behind them. The sound rose to a scream and then a 747 slid overhead, big as the world, its jetwash ruffling the umbrellas over the tables.

  “That’s a hell of a thing to have learned,” Travis said. “That it actually works, I mean. That you can seal off the Breach, and that the seal would hold for several decades, at least. If we figure out what happens to the world a few months from now . . . if we learn how to prevent it . . . then you could choose to leave the Breach open, or go ahead and seal it anyway, just to get rid of it. It’s something to consider.”

  Paige nodded slowly, her eyes far away. No doubt she had considered it, and at length.

  “It would hold for decades,” she said. “That much we know for sure. But after that it’s still a guess. I imagine you could plug a small shield volcano, if you had enough concrete to dump in. And that might hold for decades, too. But the pressure would only keep building. And then what would happen? Nothing good, though at least with a volcano we understand the forces in play. With the Breach we understand almost nothing.” A little tremor went through her shoulders. “No, if we manage to keep the world on track, I have no intention of sealing the Breach off. Even after seeing that it works—especially after seeing that it works—it just feels too dangerous.”

  She stared off a few seconds longer, then refocused to her hands on the table, and shrugged. “So that’s what we found at the bottom of the elevator shaft. Then we climbed to the top and found that sealed too, though not as dramatically. There’s just a metal slab across the opening on the surface, and a couple inches of regular concrete poured over it. A stranger up top could walk right by it and think it was just an old footing pad for some shed that used to be there. We saw it from above, the next day, when we took the cylinders up into the desert. And it was up there that things started to get interesting.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The two of you probably guessed pretty quickly how far in the future it is, on the other side,” Paige said. “You probably got within ten years of the right number.”

  “Seventy years ahead, we figured,” Bethany said.

  Paige nodded. “There’s a lot that changes in a place like D.C. Nature reclaims its turf pretty fast, gives you evidence to base a guess on. But the desert above Border Town was always nature’s turf. Civilization never modified it, so there was nothing for it to change back to when civilization went away. When we took the cylinders up to the surface on Tuesday, and switched one of them on, the opening we looked through might as well have been a pane of glass. Other than the blank concrete slab where the elevator housing should’ve been, nothing in the desert looked different. Nothing at all. So we still had no idea how far in the future the other side was. Could’ve been twenty years. Could’ve been a few thousand.”

  She took a sip.

  “The fact was, we didn’t even know whether the world had ended, at that point. Border Town being abandoned wasn’t a good sign, but who knew for sure? We sure as hell didn’t. And seeing
the desert empty didn’t tell us much, either. It would be empty, under almost any circumstance. I stepped through the opening up there and the first thing I did was stare at the sky for over a minute, hoping to see a jet contrail. Imagine if I had.”

  The notion struck Travis hard, and he wondered why he hadn’t considered it until now: what if the future on the other side of the iris hadn’t been a ruined one? What if Paige and the others had encountered a thriving world instead, decades and decades ahead of the present day? What would they have learned from a world like that? What would they have gained?

  He saw in Paige’s eyes a ghost of the optimism she must’ve felt, standing there under the desert sky Tuesday morning.

  Then it faded.

  “We started running the obvious tests after that,” she said. “First an easy one: we switched on a handheld GPS unit, on the other side, and tried to pick up satellites with it. And we found some. But the position readings were a mess. The satellites were up there, but they weren’t where they were supposed to be. One of the four of us, Pilar Guitierrez, spent about twenty years with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. She knew everything about orbital dynamics, drift and decay rates, that kind of thing. Orbits are a lot more fragile than most people think. Satellites get tugged around by all kinds of things. The moon’s gravity. The sun’s gravity. The tilt of the Earth plays hell with their inclinations. All that stuff has to be dealt with, all the time, by a process called station-keeping. Satellites are equipped with small rockets for corrective burns, to nudge them back onto course once in a while, and the commands for those burns come from human operators on the ground. But given what we were seeing on the handheld unit, the GPS satellites hadn’t heard from anyone on the ground in a long, long time.”

  She exhaled slowly. “So that was that. We tried other things. We took radio equipment through. We listened to every frequency range with the most sensitive gear we had. Certain bandwidths, those that are popular with ham radio operators, we could’ve picked up from halfway around the world—if there were anyone out there transmitting on them. We didn’t hear anything.”

  She finished off the Pepsi and set it aside.

  “The only other thing we could do from a remote location like that was try to get through to a communication satellite. Our hope was that we might find one with some retrievable data on board. Something we could make sense of. Anything. But signals from those satellites are a lot harder to receive than GPS. You can’t pick them up with a handheld unit bouncing around in your pocket. You need a dish, and you need to know exactly where to point it. Engineers handle that problem by putting comm satellites in geostationary orbit, right above the equator and matched to the spin of the Earth. That way the satellite is always in the same place, relative to the ground. But that wasn’t going to help us: if those orbits had decayed much at all, the satellites would be lower, and orbiting faster. They wouldn’t be stationary anymore. So when it came to aiming the dish, we’d be shooting in the dark at moving targets.”

  Her eyebrows went up in a shrug. “We had to try, though. So we did. We picked a spot above the equator, well below geostationary altitude, and we transmitted a maintenance ping every thirty seconds. A universal signal most satellites would respond to, if they heard it. We did that for hours and hours, all through the afternoon and into the evening, but there was no reply. We kept it going anyway. There was reason to believe it could take a while. In the meantime we tested other things. We figured out the use of the delayed shutoff button. We also figured out what the sequence of tones had been all about, the first time we’d switched on one of the cylinders.”

  Paige looked past Travis to the backpack lying in the empty chair next to him. She stared at the shape of the cylinder inside.

  “It was locking out changes,” she said.

  Travis glanced at Bethany, then looked at Paige again. “Locking out changes?”

  Paige nodded. “It’s hard to explain. Hard to understand in the first place. In my case, I just saw it in action. While Pilar was working with the satellite gear, I had an idea I wanted to try. I took the second cylinder, and in the present time I drove one of the electric Jeeps to a little sandstone boulder about half a mile north of Border Town.”

  Travis recalled the rock she was talking about, though he’d only seen it a few times. It was about the size of a compact car, and it was the only thing larger than a scrub plant within miles of the elevator housing on the surface.

  “The idea was pretty simple,” Paige said. “I wanted to see an action in the present reflected in the future. I came up with one that should’ve been foolproof. I turned on the cylinder and positioned it facing the boulder. I looked at it in the present and in the future. The two versions of the rock were identical; whatever amount of erosion is going on out there, it doesn’t happen fast. Anyway, I got out the Jeep’s tire iron, and you can probably guess what I did with it.”

  Bethany’s face lit up as the idea came to her. “You scratched the rock in the present time, so you could see the same scratch appear in the future.”

  “You’d think it would show up there, wouldn’t you?” Paige said.

  “How could it not?” Bethany said.

  Paige shrugged. “I can only tell you that it didn’t. I scratched the hell out of the boulder in the present. I chipped a crevice two inches deep into its surface. But in the future, the scratch wasn’t there. It just wasn’t. The rock was as smooth as ever.”

  Bethany stared. Met Travis’s eyes. Looked at Paige again. She couldn’t seem to find the words for her level of disbelief.

  “Changes are locked out,” Paige said. “I think it’s that simple, however the hell it works. I think when those tones were sounding, the first time we switched these things on, the cylinders were locking onto whatever future we were on track toward at that moment. Independent of changes we’d make later on, once we could see the future for ourselves.”

  “Changes locked out . . .” Bethany said. “But you don’t mean our future is locked . . . do you?”

  Paige shook her head. “Just the future we see through the projected opening. Think of it this way. Suppose these cylinders only showed us a future ten days ahead of the present. You might look through and see yourself going about a normal day. You might also see a newspaper with next Saturday’s lotto numbers in it. Suppose you jot them down, and in the present time, you run to the store and buy a ticket. You win the lotto, and now your whole future is going to change. But when you look through the opening at your future self, the one ten days ahead of you, nothing has changed. She’s not celebrating. She hasn’t quit her day job. That future, on the other side of the opening, is still following the original track—the one in which you didn’t have the lotto numbers. It’s locked. That’s the only way I can put it. The future the cylinders show us is like a living snapshot of the future we were headed for, at the moment we first switched them on.”

  “So we can still save the world on our side of the opening,” Travis said. “But the future we see on the other side will always be in ruins. The way it would’ve originally turned out.”

  “Exactly.” Paige was quiet a moment. “Why the cylinders are designed to do that, I can only guess. It’s worth keeping in mind that these things are built for some purpose. Built to be useful. Maybe a future that reacts to present changes is too fluid to make sense of. Maybe it would flicker through alternate versions like some rapid-fire slideshow right before your eyes. Think about chaos theory. Sensitivity to initial conditions. Maybe it’s practical, or even necessary, to just lock these things onto one future and stick with it. That way, you can keep going back and forth between the two times, and never worry about the world transforming under your feet. And I’m sure the designers had some way to reset them, prep them to be locked again later on, whenever they wanted to, using equipment we obviously don’t have. We’ve got the iPods but not the docks.”

  Bethany gazed off at nothing, thinking it over. She seemed to be accepting it, whether or not it mad
e sense to her.

  Travis didn’t expect to fully understand it, but Paige’s reasoning sounded right. If the iris opened onto a future that did react to changes in the present, it was hard to believe they weren’t triggering at least some changes just by looking at it.

  “I’m sure my expression at the time looked like each of yours does now,” Paige said. “I stood there for probably half an hour trying to get a grasp on it. And then I heard Pilar and the others shouting, and waving at me to come back, because one of the satellite pings had finally gotten a response.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The satellite was called COMTEL–3,” Paige said. “In our present time it’s positioned over the Atlantic as a relay for news-wire services, bouncing article text between ground stations in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. On the other side of the opening, we picked it up over the Pacific, moving east toward Ecuador, two hundred miles below its intended orbit. It answered the ping with a status screen full of critical error messages. It also had the date and time, based on its own onboard clock, which is probably accurate to within a few seconds over a thousand years. Adjusting for local time, at that moment in the other desert it was 6:31 in the evening, October 14, 2084.”

  A relative silence came, beyond the ambient whine of a jet powering up somewhere across the airport.

  “Christ,” Bethany said.

  Travis felt something like a chill. They’d already known the kind of timeline they were dealing with, but to hear it specified to the minute made it real in a way he hadn’t expected. He did the math. Seventy-three years and not quite two months.

  “Having a known position for COMTEL–3 did a lot for us,” Paige said. “After that we could rotate the dish to follow it, and stay in contact. Which was good, because Pilar believed some of the satellite’s final transmissions—news stories—might still be stored in its memory buffer. She worked on it for a while, but she wasn’t optimistic about actually retrieving the information. The bird was in pretty bad shape. It’d gone into some kind of safe mode after enough time passed without contact from its human controllers. Its orientation was off; its solar panels weren’t angled to grab as much sunlight as it needed. It’s a wonder it still worked at all. But after about half an hour, she managed to pull a number of articles from the buffer. They were corrupted all to hell. They were like fill-in-the-blank puzzles, with more blanks than words. We sat out there the rest of the day and most of the night trying to make sense of them, while we kept pinging for more satellites. We didn’t find any more, but from the COMTEL–3 information we eventually narrowed down a few basic details of the event that ends the world.”