The Chaos Function

by Jack Skillingstead

  “Wait.” Olivia stood. “I’m probably doing it wrong. Those blocks are heavy. It would take some serious leverage to move them. Some kind of mechanism.”

  “Okay. So how do you activate it?”

  Olivia turned back to the wall and started sliding her hands over the blocks, feeling for anything, a stud, a disguised pedal. Dee held her Maglite in her teeth and did the same. They moved in opposite directions, away from the dried puddle of blood. After a couple of minutes, Olivia stopped again.

  “It wouldn’t be so easy,” she said. “It wouldn’t be something you could stumble on accidentally.”

  She reached in her pocket and withdrew her cartridge light, twisted it on, and swept the beam over the wall. Dee did the same with her Maglite.

  “There’s nothing,” Dee said.

  “Wait.”

  Olivia craned her head back and pointed her light at the ceiling. It was low, but still too high for her to touch without something to stand on. Hundreds, if not thousands, of bricks, each roughly the size of a shoebox, comprised the ceiling. She crossed the room to the table, moving slowly, keeping her head back. Her light slid over the inverted terrain of rough bricks until it fell on a maroon handprint, barely visible, dried on a brick directly above the table.

  “Got it.”

  “What?” Dee said.

  “It’s there, right there.”

  Dee joined her and looked up. “What?”

  “The discoloration on that one brick—does that look like a handprint to you?”

  Dee stood on her toes, as if getting a couple of inches closer might make all the difference. “No way.”

  “You see it?”

  “Yeah.”

  Olivia put her light away and climbed onto the table. She reached up and put her hand on the brick, covering the handprint of the last person to touch it.

  She pushed.

  The brick did not move.

  She pushed harder. This time, the brick shifted slightly, and fine, powdery grit sifted onto her face. She spat, and blinked it out of her eyes, braced her legs, and shoved with all her strength. Suddenly the brick moved, retracting into the ceiling with an audible clunk. Across the room, behind the wall, something big and heavy started grinding. After a moment, the large block near the bloodstain scraped back—

  Revealing a tunnel.

  Dee said, “Holy shit.”

  “Un-fucking-believable.”

  After a few seconds, the grinding sound behind the wall resumed, and the block slowly scraped back into place, as if it had never moved. Olivia looked up. The brick, which had retracted into the ceiling, had now returned to its flush position with the others.

  “That was fast,” Dee said.

  “They wouldn’t want to leave the tunnel exposed,” Olivia said. “Alvaro must have moved the block from the other side. He comes into the chamber, and the passage closes behind him.”

  “Yeah. After the Marines took you out of here but before they came back for the bodies.”

  “He hears them upstairs and he doesn’t know what’s going on. Jacob is dead. Alvaro has to know if the link has migrated. Maybe he tries to move the body to the tunnel, but it’s tied down. Anyway, the block only stays open less than a minute. There isn’t time. Somebody could find him. So he uses something the torturers left behind. He cuts Jacob’s head off, climbs on the table, opens the passage.”

  “That sounds right.”

  A man’s voice. Both women turned, Olivia still standing on the table. Emilio, leveling a gun, stepped off the bottom step into the chamber. Two men followed. They looked vaguely familiar. Olivia had seen them at Sanctuary.

  “Neither one of you move,” Emilio said.

  Dee pulled the gun she’d taken off Emilio the night before and pointed it at him.

  “Drop your weapon,” she said.

  “We both want the same thing.” Emilio didn’t drop or lower his gun. “We want to protect the Society.”

  “I thought the goal was to save the future,” Dee said.

  The other men moved in opposite directions, away from Emilio, circling around, advancing on Olivia and Dee.

  Dee kept her gun trained on Emilio, who was the only other person armed. “You two stop. Douglas, Kevin. Don’t move.”

  They kept moving.

  “She has the link,” Emilio said. “You know it’s wrong for her to have it.”

  “Just back off,” Dee said.

  “There’s a new order of succession,” Emilio said.

  “According to you.”

  “Yes.”

  Emilio fired, the report painfully loud, banging off the walls and low ceiling. Even as she fell back, Dee returned fire, squeezing off three wild rounds. Emilio retreated up the stairs, and the other men froze.

  Dee staggered against the wall and slid down it. The gun dropped from her hand. For one suspended moment, time seemed to halt.

  Then Olivia jumped off the table and grabbed the gun. “You two get the hell out of here.” She waved the gun.

  The two men retreated to the stairs and stood there.

  “Out!” Olivia fired twice, aiming wide. She didn’t want to kill anyone; she just wanted them to leave.

  They ran up the stairs.

  Olivia dropped the clip and counted rounds. Seven left. She slapped the clip back in place, jacked a round into the chamber, put the gun down, and turned to Dee. Blood soaked through her shirt, high on the left side of her chest. “Oh, Jesus Christ.” Olivia pressed her hand to the wound, applying pressure. Add another victim to her personal accounts ledger.

  “Get out of here,” Dee said. “You were right. They’ll kill you to get the link.”

  “Hang on,” Olivia said.

  Dee clenched her teeth and nodded. “Just go.”

  Olivia picked up the gun. She returned to the table, climbed up.

  Dee shouted, “Look out.”

  Olivia turned.

  Emilio leaned out of the stairwell and fired. He was no marksman. Olivia shoved the pressure-switch brick into the ceiling and jumped off the table, and the stone block began to scrape back into the wall, revealing the passage. Olivia got off two more rounds, then dropped through the opening into the tunnel.

  Thirty-Six

  The air was dry and stiflingly hot. Niches in the walls held bowls of oil and floating wicks that fluttered when Olivia passed by. She wasn’t the only one down here. The tunnel wound unevenly through the earth, like the sinuously excavated route of a rock-and-earth-devouring creature. She listened for the sound of the stone block grinding and scraping aside. Had Emilio seen her push the pressure-switch brick into the ceiling? Did he know how to follow her? Eventually the tunnel split into branches. She paused, then followed the branch on her right.

  Her footfalls thudded. Her breath rasped, and sweat stung her eyes. Some of the oil lamps had gone out, leaving the path before her in darkness. She almost turned back but decided to press on a little farther. The heat and silence enclosed her like a fist. She tucked the pistol into the waist of her pants and dug out her cylinder light, twisting it in the middle. The light came on—and she caught her breath. Shadows slid in the gaping eye sockets of a human skull. She moved the light. An entire skeleton lay in a stone bed carved into the wall, the bones tangled with scraps of ancient leather. Latin words were chiseled into the rock above the bed. She stood on her toes, blew dust out of the letters. NOSTRUM PASTORIS. Her Latin was rusty, but she thought it could mean “Our Shepherd.”

  Olivia moved her light along the wall, revealing more remains, the leather scraps giving way to shreds of cloth. A catacomb, sealed off from the outside world for God knew how long, and that same phrase had been chiseled over every bed of bones.

  She continued down the narrow passageway. Olivia had visited catacombs in Paris and Rome; by comparison, this was tiny, the remains of just a dozen or so people. For a while, she kept her light on the floor, looking for tripping hazards. The next time she redirected her light it found, not a skeleton, bu
t the mummified remains of a man dressed in a robe similar to the ones she’d seen the Elders wearing at Sanctuary.  Tomb of the Shepherds. Is this where they would have laid Jacob? Would her bones eventually have been left here? Maybe, if they’d ever accepted her legitimacy.

  The next stone bed was empty. No, not empty. Her light discovered Jacob’s severed head—blood clotted in the beard, the top of the skull hacked off.

  “Fuck.” Olivia recoiled—but kept moving.

  At a sharp bend, the tunnel branched again. Across the passage, through a crude archway, wavering lamplight cast shadows on a fresco. Olivia turned her light off and, passing under the arch, entered a long, narrow chamber with stone benches raised on either side. A dozen oil lamps lined the benches, six to a side. The fresco was painted on the far wall, inside a recessed vault. She approached it.

  Time and streaks of soot had rendered the figures almost unrecognizable, but it seemed to depict three men enclosed by a ring of light. Olivia thought of the gallery of portraits in the conference room at Sanctuary. She wiped the sweat out of her eyes. On a step climbing into the vault, she saw Jacob’s scooped-out brains lying in a messy lump like oatmeal. She’d almost stepped in them. “Gah.” She stumbled back.

  A scuffing sound behind her. “Who are you?”

  Olivia whirled. Alvaro stood in the doorway, shirtless, his body glistening with sweat. He held a long-bladed weapon, something between a machete and a scimitar, and he looked gaunt, tired, hollow-eyed. Blotchy rust-colored stains covered his hands. Dried blood? How long had he been down here?

  “My name’s Olivia.” She kept her voice steady and backed up.

  “How did you get in here? You can’t be here.”

  She tried not to stare at the machete. “I came through the wall of the madrassa, from that room where Jacob died.”

  Alvaro’s eyes got wide. “You knew Jacob?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re lying. I’ve never seen you before.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  “Jacob would not have brought you here.”

  “Who said Jacob brought me?” Olivia met his defiant glare straight on. “I came on my own.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  “I’m a Shepherd,” Olivia said. “The last one.”

  She might as well have clouted him with a bag of rocks. His mouth opened, closed. “But you’re a woman.” Like he was saying But you’re a duck to one that happened to waddle into a shareholders’ meeting.

  “Right. And I knew Jacob and you. And Dee. I was in the torture cell when Jacob died. The link migrated to me. I didn’t know what was going on, but I accidentally created a probability that let Jacob and my friends live but killed the rest of the world. Eventually I fixed that by going back to Jacob’s original choice. That’s what we’re living in now.”

  Alvaro gaped at her. “Show me your neck.”

  “Put the machete down first.”

  He raised the blade, blinked innocently. “You think I’d hurt you?”

  Olivia waited.

  “I’m not a killer.”

  Olivia pulled the 9 mm from her waist and pointed it at him.

  He took a step back. “I wouldn’t hurt you. I’ve never hurt anybody in my life.”

  “That’s great. You’re not getting the link. Drop the machete. Now.”

  Alvaro laughed. “I never wanted the damn thing.” He tossed the machete aside. It clanged on the floor.

  “Oh?” She flicked her eyes to his bloodstained hands.

  “I needed to know if the link was still in Jacob,” he said. “That it hadn’t migrated to a civilian. I guess it did?”

  “Here.” Olivia turned aside and tucked her chin down, exposing the back her neck, awkwardly keeping the gun pointed at him. She could only see him in her periphery. Alvaro stepped nearer.

  “That’s close enough,” she said.

  After a few moments, he said, “My God, it’s true.”

  She faced him again. “You’ve been down here by yourself all this time?”

  “Since Jacob brought me, yes. It’s part of the ritual. In this chamber he revealed the true history of the probability machine. Then he left me, and I was supposed to follow his directions to the machine and witness it for myself, in solitude. But something went wrong. Jacob should have come back after a day, and then we’d complete a ten-day fast together before returning to the outside world.”

  “But he didn’t come back,” Olivia said.

  “I waited, but I was worried. What if Jacob had a heart attack or had gotten injured? Aleppo is unstable, dangerous. I had to be near him for the migration. So even though I wasn’t supposed to leave the tunnels until after the fasting period, I decided I had to. That’s when I found him. I . . . did what I had to do and came back to the Mithraeum. After that, I didn’t know what to do.”

  “So you did nothing.” Olivia felt agitated and impatient.

  Alvaro shrugged. “I completed my fast. I would have come out in another day or two. The water is almost gone. And I didn’t know who had the link—if anyone did. Nothing like this has ever happened before. Sorry, I have to sit. I haven’t eaten in a long time.” He settled on a stone bench. There was a pleading look in his eyes, or maybe it was simply hunger. “Please,” he said. “Tell me everything.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Show me the probability machine first. I’m a Shepherd. I have a right to see it.”

  She was worried about Emilio. He might already be in the tunnels.

  Alvaro hesitated. “If you’re a Shepherd, you do have that right.”

  “You just saw the scar.”

  “But I can’t show you the machine until you know what it is.”

  “I already know what it is.”

  “All you know is what you’ve experienced and what, if anything, you’ve been told. The Parable of Two Cities, how the Society exists to guarantee the future?”

  “You’re saying that isn’t true?”

  “It’s partly true. And this is the only place where you would hear the rest of it—just as I heard it from Jacob. There’s an order to follow. The ancient knowledge is passed to the new Shepherd. It’s done here, in the Mithraeum.”

  “Okay already.” She just wanted to get on with it, do what she came here to do. “What is it, then? What is the probability machine?”

  “It’s a weapon of war.”

  That stopped her. “What war?”

  “One that hasn’t happened yet. A war in the far future. The probability machine is the ultimate weapon. If you want to wipe your enemy off the face of the earth, go find crisis points that might result in that outcome, then push them hard. That’s why the machine is keyed to crisis points—not to avert them, but to make them worse. One side or the other decided to hide the machine in the deep past. A technician—or maybe it was a military man, someone linked to the machine—came with it. But something went wrong and he got stuck in the third century with the weapon.”

  “Time travel.” Olivia said. “You brought that up before, in a different probability.”

  “Even Einstein said time was an illusion,” Alvaro said, “that there wasn’t any real dividing line between the past, present, and future. The probability machine exists across all times and probabilities, from here to the ‘shining city’ of the parable.”

  “So it’s a weapon. Yet another fucking weapon.”

  Alvaro nodded. “Originally, yes. But the Society repurposed it. Back in 235 AD, a Roman soldier, a deserter named Decius, found the time traveler down here. Decius was the leader of a small cult that had broken away from Mithraism.”

  Olivia kept looking toward the archway out of the Mithraeum. Was Emilio out there in the tunnels right now? Even if he had seen how she entered, his own superstitions about the Society’s ritual order might stop him from entering a place only Shepherds were supposed to enter. No, she thought. She couldn’t count on that. Emilio considered himself h
eir to the power.

  “How far is it to the machine?”

  “It’s a ways.”

  “Come on,” she said. “We have to go.”

  Alvaro stood up slowly. “I’ve been down here more than a week. Can’t you tell me what’s happening out there?”

  “You’re stalling.” Olivia waved the gun. “We can talk on the way.”

  “That’s blood on your hands, your shirt. At least tell me whose it is.”

  She hesitated. “Emilio shot . . . somebody.”

  Alvaro looked shocked. “What? Why would he—?”

  “Later. Take me to the machine now.”

  It was time to turn it off.

  Thirty-Seven

  They followed a twisting tunnel that plunged them deeper and deeper into the earth. Oil lamps flickered in niches. With each step, the air became hotter. Frequently they had to duck to avoid hitting their heads on the low ceiling. The rising heat wanted to drive them back. Olivia used her sleeve to mop sweat off her forehead and clear her eyes.

  “These tunnels are Roman?” she asked.

  “They predate the empire.”

  “Tell me about that soldier, that deserter. Decius. You mentioned him once in another probability, too.”

  Olivia wanted to keep Alvaro talking, keep him distracted until they reached the machine.

  “We must have known each other pretty well in that other probability,” he said.

  “We did some traveling together.”

  “I see. All right.” Alvaro cleared his throat. “The man from the future befriended Decius, and when the man died, Decius was there. By then he knew about the probability machine and he knew the link would migrate. Of course, the scroll record isn’t so precise, and educated or not, Decius was a man of his century. In his writings he calls the man from the future Viatorem. The Traveler. And he refers to the halo as a ‘god power.’”

  “Which he immediately started using,” Olivia said. “Naturally. So it never was about protecting the future.”

  Alvaro stopped walking and leaned against the wall. He looked genuinely surprised at what she had said. “Of course it was. But Decius acted recklessly. His first time in the halo, he caused the emperor Severus to be assassinated by his own army. In history books the incident is actually called the Crisis of the Third Century.  That changed everything—accelerated the downfall of the Roman Empire. Think of the ripple effects. The Society grew from Decius’s own cult, as a corrective body.  The future isn’t guaranteed anymore, because it isn’t the same future that produced the probability machine.”