If Alvaro had been right and the existence of the probability machine proved the human race survives, then why did anyone have to actually use the machine? In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, hadn’t probability manipulation become a zero-sum game? Drop ninety thousand tons of bombs on Iraq to prevent a suitcase nuke from exploding in the West?
In a crisis-point superposition any number of probability end points existed. The most likely one produced the humanity-threatening crisis. But it didn’t have to be the most likely one that collapsed the wave function. And there was always a cost. Ultimately, the probability machine was a cheat, a shortcut. Human beings had to learn to make better choices. And they would—
After Olivia destroyed the probability machine.
Olivia knew what she had to do, even if all she wanted to do was wallow in grief. Luckily, an old lesson, hard learned, reared up. This lesson was so fundamental, she had first learned it as a nine-year-old, then gradually forgot it in the new home diligently and lovingly reconstructed by her father and stepmother. When her father died, she learned the lesson all over again, and this time it had stuck.
Death + grief ÷ anger = relief.
Olivia needed that anger now. She needed it to help her focus.
In the street in front of the apartment, a motorcycle engine woke up with a window-rattling roar. Olivia crossed the room and looked out. A guy in leathers and black helmet goosed the throttle of a big Honda 750. A girl in blue jeans swung onto the saddle behind him, rapped her knuckles on the driver’s helmet. He kicked the bike into gear.
And Olivia remembered Stefan.
The dirt bike guy who had given her a ride into a town back in Idaho, when she ran into the woods to get away from Alvaro and Dee. Back in another probability.
And with Stefan’s name came a phone number. She had committed it to memory a probability or two ago. It was a habit, to automatically store away potentially useful information. The number bled across realities.
She returned to the bedroom and rummaged her phone out of her bag, pulled her thoughts together, and punched in the digits. Stefan wouldn’t remember her, of course. The events that threw them together hadn’t occurred in the present probability stream. This wasn’t going to be easy.
The call rang eight times, then stopped. No voicemail box. Olivia redialed, with the same result. She kept at it. On the fourth round, somebody answered: “Who the fuck is this?”
“Is this Stefan?”
“I know who I am. Who the fuck are you and why do you keep calling? You got a fucking wrong number, is that fucking clear?”
“This is Olivia Nikitas.”
Silence.
“I write for The Beat.”
More silence.
“What the fuck is this?” Stefan said.
“I’m a writer, a journalist, and—”
“I know who fucking Olivia Nikitas is. Why are you saying you’re her?”
“I am her. Me.”
“Fuck off.”
“Wait, don’t hang up. I can prove it. Google my picture, then accept my video request.”
Stefan went quiet for a few seconds. “Anybody can look like somebody else.”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “That’s idiotic. Just do it.”
“Why should I? What if this is some kind of hack?”
“Do it. I’m not trying to hack you. I promise. Besides, how does answering a video call make you any more vulnerable than a regular call?”
“Hold on.”
A minute later, Olivia’s phone started blinking at her with a video request. She accepted. Stefan’s face materialized in a chat bubble floating over her phone. She nodded to him.
“You look like shit,” he said.
“I’ve got reasons to look like shit. But I look like me, right?”
“I don’t get this. You can’t be her. It doesn’t make sense.”
Olivia clenched her teeth. “Okay. You know my Twitter handle?”
“Yeah. I follow her.”
Her. Cute.
“I’m going to post something. Go look.”
She swapped to her Twitter account, typed Stefan, get your head out of your ass, and swapped back to the call.
He was grinning.
“You believe now, right?”
“Is it because I commented? It’s because I commented. Wow.”
“What?”
“That story you did about rebels in Syria, that one where you were in bed with them? I posted a comment.”
“Embedded—not ‘in bed.’ Jesus.”
“Right, that’s what I meant.”
“Stefan? I need a favor.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want you to do something for me, something near where you live.”
“You know where I live?”
“Calm down. The, uh, The Beat sees where all the comments originate. It’s just a cookie thing. It tells us where our readership is. Yours stuck out, because we don’t have that many readers in Idaho.”
“Holy shit. Yeah, it’s the fucking wasteland out here, right?”
“Yeah.”
“But if I knew you guys spied on everybody, I wouldn’t have commented. I mean, that’s US government shit.”
“Stefan? Can I ask my favor now?”
“Whatever.”
“There’s a ranch outside of your town. It’s called Sanctuary. I can’t give you specific directions, but—”
“I know where it is.”
That stopped her. “You do?”
“Everybody knows. We call it the Kook Farm.”
“That sounds right.”
“What’s the favor?”
“I want you to go up to the Kook Farm and give a message to the woman at the gate. She’s the security person. Don’t give it to anybody else, just her. Her name’s Dee.”
“How do I know it’s her and not somebody else?”
“She’s the only woman guard.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
“Because I’m out of the country, and besides, I want a local person’s take on what you see when you go up there.”
“Like I’m a source?”
“Sure. Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”
Olivia closed her eyes briefly. “Stefan, this is so important. I really need you.”
“Yeah?” He grinned. “What’s the message?”
“Write this down. Ready?”
He looked down and away. She heard a drawer slide open. He was going to do it. Stefan held up a pen. “Go ahead.”
Thirty
A day later, Olivia sat behind the wheel of Brian’s Ford in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Idaho Falls. People wandered in and out of Sears. The lot was about half full. She sipped the coffee she’d bought at McDonald’s and waited. When a ramshackle pickup truck rattled into view, she put the coffee down in the cup holder. The pickup, very familiar to Olivia, crept around the parked cars. The driver wore a Castro cap, and she was alone. Of course, there could be others—Society security goons already positioned in the parking lot—watching and waiting. Olivia had taken a risk sending her message. Now it was time to find out if the risk had been worth it. She inhaled, opened the door, and climbed out.
The pickup stopped. Dee, behind the wheel, studied Olivia from two rows away. Olivia guessed she was making up her mind, weighing her own risk factors. After a minute, she swung the truck into a parking space, got out, and walked over.
“I don’t know you,” she said.
“No. Not this time.”
Dee narrowed her eyes. “Your message said not to tell Alvaro I was coming here. You know Alvaro?”
Olivia shook her head. “Again, not this time. But I know him. And you.”
“I don’t like games.” Dee looked uneasy.
“I’m not playing one,” Olivia said.
“Your message said, ‘A woman can link.’”
“Yes.”
“You’re saying you’ve done it?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You believed me enough to come here.”
Dee opened her mouth and closed it again. She removed her cap, scratched her scalp, and replaced the cap, tugging it smartly down by the bill. “Who was that kid, the one who brought your message to the gate?”
“In a different probability stream, he helped me get away from you and Alvaro.”
Dee chewed her lip, seemed to consider this. Olivia could see she wanted to believe—she was counting on Dee’s desire for a change in the Society. At Sanctuary, Dee had said more than once how excited she was that a woman had finally been given a chance at being a Shepherd, even if it did happen accidentally. It broke the Society’s tradition of male-only transference of power.
Dee looked directly into Olivia’s eyes. “Why would you need to get away from us?”
“You guys rescued me out of Sanctuary. Later on I tried to ditch you, and you tried to stop me. I don’t blame you. The link had migrated to me, and I was ignorant and might have done some real damage. Eventually that’s exactly what happened.”
“Back up. You were at the ranch?”
“Yeah. Andrew was going to kill me so the link would migrate to Emilio. It was some kind of power grab.”
“Andrew and Emilio. We’ve been worried about something like that happening.”
“Well, it did.”
Dee studied her. “Let me see the back of your neck.”
“I was wondering when you’d ask.” Olivia turned and lifted her hair, exposing the nape of her neck. She felt Dee’s finger trace the scar.
“Tell me,” Dee said. “All of it.”
They sat in the Ford and Olivia laid out the whole thing. The torture cell in Aleppo, the link, her accidental swapping of probability streams to save Brian, her kidnapping by the Society and the drama at Sanctuary, the variola and nuke attacks, and finally her decision to choose Jacob’s original probability end point.
“And your guy died.” Dee no longer sounded doubtful.
Olivia nodded.
“Jesus.”
“There wasn’t any other way. Somehow, saving Brian also saved Jacob. Their lives were connected by a common factor. It was the difference between variola escaping or not escaping.”
“And you did that, let your friend die. That’s strong.”
“Most people would say it was an easy decision. One person or the whole world. I almost blew everything, trying to save him.”
“But you didn’t.” Dee gave her a sideways look. “Most people wouldn’t think it was an easy decision. They’d think it was the hardest decision ever.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Olivia barely knew how she meant it. Her pre-Brian self, the way she had been before opening the door—that’s the self who would have regarded the decision as easy. Everything’s easier from a distance.
Olivia wanted to stop talking about Brian. With Dee, a relative stranger, she could appear dispassionate. It would be different if she ever told Rohana. Olivia couldn’t imagine it. Even telling Dee, there was a cost. A painful knot tightened under her breastbone. The only way to loosen the knot was to stop talking about Brian and stop thinking about him, too. She couldn’t do that second thing, of course. She doubted she would ever be able to do that. And it wasn’t only Brian. He was like the gateway drug to the heroin of empathy and its consequential pain. (And rewards, Brian would have said. People didn’t shoot heroin because they wanted to suffer.)
Dee touched her shoulder. “Are you all right?”
Olivia pulled back. “I’m fine.”
“This is so weird,” Dee said.
“Weird is putting it mildly.”
“I mean, we’re sitting here. I just met you. And all I know is what I remember. But you know all this other stuff. You’ve been in a different probability. You know two of me.”
“There’s only one of you,” Olivia said.
“Yeah, but you know me in a situation I’ve never been in. I mean, one that I won’t ever remember.”
“Yes.”
Dee obviously wanted to ask something, but she was hesitating.
“Go ahead,” Olivia said.
“Huh?”
“You want to know something.”
Dee straightened her shoulders. “How did I behave? When it was all coming down. Was I afraid?”
A black SUV pulled into a slot next to Dee’s pickup. The driver did not get out. Two more men, young and wearing jeans, polo shirts, and sunglasses, stood talking and smoking under a light standard. It was hard to tell, because of the glasses, but Olivia thought one of them kept looking over at the Ford. Welcome to Paranoidville.
“Everybody was afraid,” Olivia said. With the engine off, the August sun had really heated up the Ford’s interior. Even with the windows down, it was baking hot. Olivia wiped sweat from her upper lip.
“But did I act afraid?”
“You were steady.”
“How steady?”
“Listen,” Olivia said. “I’m a journalist. I cover war zones. Hurricane aftermaths. Ethnic cleansings. Famines. All the places in the world where the seams are coming apart. So I’ve hung with a lot of people in the worst situations. Other journalists, soldiers, rebel fighters, civilians caught in the middle. Everybody’s afraid. Some keep their equilibrium, some don’t. That’s what you did in the other probability. You kept your equilibrium. A lot of people didn’t, but you did.” And so did Brian.
Dee looked relieved. “That’s something.”
“It’s a lot. Trust me.”
The guy in the black SUV finally climbed out and walked toward Sears. The smoking men remained planted.
“You’re a Shepherd,” Dee said, shaking her head.
“Yeah.” Olivia pulled her blouse away from her bra, letting some air in.
“The Society, the Elders—all of them, except Jacob—they said a woman couldn’t do it,” Dee said. “Not that women weren’t allowed to do it, but couldn’t.”
“It’s a shit job anyway.”
Dee looked out the windshield a moment, then back at Olivia. “The whole reason for the Society is to preserve the future. That’s not a shit job.”
“Unless the way you preserve the future is by putting it in jeopardy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Ellis Beekman ring any bells?”
A car pulled in behind them. Olivia looked at the rearview mirror. A woman sat behind the wheel, rummaging through her purse.
“Let me guess,” Dee said. “We told you about Shepherd Beekman in the other probability.”
“Yes,” Olivia said.
“Then we must have also told you that Alvaro’s grandfather took over after Beekman died, and then Jacob after him. The Beekman situation was a tragedy. The Society won’t let something like that happen again.”
“Won’t they? What about the Andrew faction? What about Emilio? I just told you what happened in the other probability.”
“It’s not going to happen in this one.” Dee sounded less than positive about that.
“Why not?” Olivia said. “Besides, even a good Shepherd does almost as much harm as a bad one. Close your window. I’m going to run the AC.” Olivia started the engine and cranked the air conditioning. She adjusted the vents. Soon, cool air was blowing into her face. As soon as the engine started, one of the smoking men had dropped his cigarette and turned toward them, while the second man continued to smoke and barely glanced in their direction.
Dee shifted on her seat. “That’s ridiculous, what you just said about good Shepherds doing as much harm as a bad one.”
“Jacob was a good Shepherd?”
“Of course.”
“But he created the González effect.”
Dee looked uncomfortable, and it couldn’t be the heat. “There were reasons for that.”
“I know,” Olivia said. “Sometimes you need to rain down carnage in one place to prevent it from raining d
own in another. Right?”
“Something like that.” Dee sounded grumpy. “Look, I don’t completely disagree. But I think the problem isn’t that we use the machine too much. It’s that we don’t use it enough.”
“Beekman—”
“Was wrong. The other Shepherds before him who tried to use it for personal gain were wrong, too. That’s not what I’m talking about. What if a Shepherd found probabilities that improved the world for the sake of improving it? Eventually there might not be any more crisis points.”
Olivia sighed. “Won’t work.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know it.” Now it was too cold in the car. Olivia turned the blowers down. “I’ve been in the halo. It’s too complicated. All I did was try to save the life of one person, and I couldn’t do it without creating a catastrophe.”
“You didn’t know what you were doing. You could be trained. Shepherds are brought up in the Society. By the time the migration happens, they’re ready. You’re raw, but your heart is in the right place. I can see it is.”
Olivia raised her eyebrows. “In this probability, you’ve known me for, what, an hour?”
“I’m not naïve. You aren’t like the others. Your mind hasn’t been poisoned with tradition. I can see that much.”
“It’s not tradition that makes it impossible. It’s human limitations. Maybe the probability machine used to work before the twentieth century. Back when a wrong choice was unlikely to have global consequences. But I’ve been in the halo. It’s impossible for one mind to trace all the probability threads that result from even a benign choice. Did Beekman know he was going to create the Holocaust when he allowed Hitler’s rise to power? Did Jacob foresee the scope of the suffering his González effect would create?”
One of the men under the light standard wasn’t there anymore—the one who had dropped his cigarette. Olivia scanned the parking lot and didn’t see him. She twisted around and looked out the back window. The woman with the purse looked back at her, then dropped her gaze.
The Chaos Function Page 25
