Pressure Suite - Digital Science Fiction Anthology 3

by Various Writers

  By the time I cleared immigration at Gothenburg International, I’d decided that it didn’t make much difference why he’d disappeared. All that mattered now was where he’d gone. I hired a Volvo S40 and drove north towards a town called Uddevalla. Though I’d never been in Sweden before, I found it easy to relax. If it wasn’t for the road signs and number plates, I could have been back home and heading out of Portland towards the coast on Route 26.

  Autumn was closing fast, and the mixed forests that lined the motorway were a blend of browns and reds while the pine trees stood dark and solemn as if hardening themselves for winter. I left the window open most of the way and allowed the chilly air to flush the tiredness from my mind.

  Two hours later, the Garmin GPS map led me onto a single lane road to a house that was so heavily shielded by pine trees that I drove past it.

  Twice. It was a small red house, built on a hill overlooking a fjord called Byfjorden.

  The view from the front was breathtaking. The steep wooded hills that channeled water towards the sea made the water look black and deep. A few miles east, there was a deep-water harbor and the beginnings of Uddevalla. To the west, a suspension bridge was visible in the distance, carrying the E6 motorway on towards Oslo. Beyond the bridge, the hills flattened out, and the fjord spilled onto an archipelago and on into the North Sea.

  There were a thousand islands in that archipelago—a thousand places to hide. Yet he’d chosen a place overlooking them all.

  After knocking twice and getting no response, I went in search of the keys that Carmody had hidden in the crack of an old tree and let myself in. The house had an open plan. A few stout wooden pillars separated the lounge, kitchen, and dining area. Two hallways branched off the lounge. One led to the sleeping quarters and the other emptied out into the garage.

  There was a car out there, a Ford Mondeo, the same kind of car Carmody drove back home. He wasn’t here, though, and hadn’t been for a while. A thin coat of dust covered the furniture, and when I opened the fridge, the stink of sour milk and rotten cheese hit me in the face like a slap.

  One side of the lounge was floor to ceiling glass, and I stood for a while watching the sunset turn the horizon a dizzying blend of oranges, reds, and pinks. I didn’t notice the front door opening until a gust of wind swept into the house and sent a shower of dead leaves skittering across the floor.

  “Doctor Carmody?”

  A woman was standing in the doorway. I guessed she was in her sixties, and she had a fresh, smooth look about her that suggested an active lifestyle. When she smiled, it took ten years from her face. Her gray Helly Hensen parka jacket perfectly matched her hair. It made me wonder if I’d brought the right clothes with me.

  “You’re not Doctor Carmody,” she said in perfect English, and closed the door.

  I shook my head. “Steven Huntley.” I thought about adding that I was Carmody’s brother or cousin, but I figured if she went to the police they’d have no trouble checking me out. I said, “Doctor Steven Huntley. I’m a friend of Doctor Carmody’s.”

  “Is he all right? I’ve been worried. I haven’t seen him for weeks.”

  I could see she was genuinely worried by the way she frowned, so I mumbled something about a research project in Stockholm that Carmody was involved in and that he wouldn’t be back for a few weeks. In the meantime, he’d offered me the house to vacation in. Though she seemed satisfied and smiled a lot as we made small talk, she kept glancing towards the door like she expected him to appear at any moment.

  Her name was Wilma Larsson. She was Carmody’s landlady, and she lived in the next house down the road. I was most welcome to stay, she said. The rent was paid six months in advance, and if I needed anything, all I had to do was ask.

  I waited a full ten minutes after she’d left before checking out the rest of the house. There were three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a storeroom stacked high with old furniture. But it was the first door down the hall on the left that interested me most. It was locked; when I peeped through the keyhole, everything was dark.

  Thoughts of The Room flooded back. Had Carmody constructed something similar here?

  The Room. The Room. The Room. I’d only ever asked him about it once. I’d called at his house to pick up some notes, and we were sitting on his porch watching the sunset. While Carmody sipped that noxious-smelling herbal tea he was so fond of, I sank a few Coors and grew brave.

  “I’m constructing a machine,” he told me.

  When I pushed him, he just laughed and said, “For the crossing, boy. For the crossing.”

  I’d laughed, too. I guess it was probably the beer that caused it, because deep inside he wasn’t laughing. In the twilight his eyes became black, deep, and personal, like he needed me to look into them and draw something out, something he didn’t have the words to explain.

  The eyes are the windows of the soul. Isn’t that what they say? Well, Carmody’s eyes were certainly windows to something that evening. Not his soul, though. Something deeper.

  I never asked him about The Room again—not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t want to see that look again. Something told me those windows were very close to shattering.

  As I stood outside that door, I wondered if those windows had finally broken and that I’d find the wreckage strewn about inside. Despite the fact that I knew Carmody wanted me to go in there, it didn’t make it any easier to unlock the door and pass inside.

  Half of the room was crammed floor to ceiling with a dizzying array of computers, monitors, and electronic equipment. I recognized a spectroscope, a rack of fusion splicers, and a PicoScope 9231A oscilloscope amid the chaos. Close to the door, two medium-sized Van De Graff generators sat on a table, their metal globes reflecting the room in a beautifully warped and surreal way. Beside them was a vacuum pump, but it didn’t appear to be connected to anything.

  Carmody’s aging Dell laptop sat on a table overlooking the fjord. A chunky metal chair was bolted to the floor on front of the table. In a morbid sort of way, it reminded me of Old Sparky, the infamous electric chair I saw on a visit to the Texas Prison Museum a few years ago.

  Cabling sprouted off from different sections of the chair and snaked into one end of a metal cylinder that ran the full length of the back wall. The cylinder was about two feet in diameter and sat on four metal support trestles. A keyboard and mini monitor were mounted on one end. A cable as thick as my arm dropped from the mid-section, ran across the floor, and disappeared behind the wall of equipment.

  Though much of the equipment was off, the purr of a few internal cooling fans gave the room a comfortable, familiar feel. The laptop was switched on, but I didn’t dare sit in the chair while I tapped a key and prompted the monitor to flicker to life. I smiled when a plain green screen with a password input box appeared. It made perfect sense that Carmody had protected his work using his own operating system. He’d often quipped it was easier to break a Windows password than it was to break a window with a stone.

  I knew his password, too: Challenger, after the shuttle. In the months leading up to his disappearance, he must have repeated that word to me at least a dozen times, saying it was important that I remembered it.

  When I typed it in, a message appeared on the screen.

  Steven, it’s good you’ve come. I couldn’t trust anyone else; this is too important. I’ve succeeded in building a desktop atom smasher, a mini hadron collider, and I’ve used it to open a traversable wormhole. I’ve harnessed exotic energy, Steven. The energy I created in a single meter of plasma was enough to transport me beyond our reality and into a different dimension.

  I stared out the window and was suddenly struck by how black and empty the water in the fjord looked in the twilight. It seemed almost like a vast gateway.

  Exotic matter!

  Was Carmody referring to dark matter? Surely not. A breakthrough in understanding dark matter—not to mention harnessing it—was years if not decades away. Supposedly.

 
Carmody’s message just got weirder.

  Everything—the flora, the fauna, the geology—is so wild here. Even the weather is so different it’s hard to believe it’s the same planet, but it is Earth. The moon and planets are clearly visible even by day and the oxygen to nitrogen ratio is precisely the same. There’s plenty of food and water, too. I’ve barely had to touch my supplies. The water’s drinkable, and I’ve been eating the local fruit for some time now without any side effects.

  In a state of shock, I read on while Carmody explained in fascinating detail how he left the States because TrentLabs was digging too deep into his research, and how he used his machine to transport everything out of The Room, and how the fjord was perfect to channel the energy and give him the final boost he needed for interdimensional travel.

  I read the last paragraphs three times before the information sank in.

  Steven, I’m in trouble. When calculating the coordinates, I didn’t take into account the tilt of the Earth. Or, should I say, the tilt of its axis relative to the plane of its revolution. It’s different at this end. Winter is coming. As the climate grows colder, the wormhole is stretching. I can’t return. Not in one piece anyway, not until I figure out the correct calculations.

  By the time I realized what was happening, this dimension was already claiming me. Every time I made the crossing back to the house, it siphoned off another little piece of my body mass. Once I realized what was happening, I wrote to you and telephoned Larsson to ask her to send the letter.

  At that stage, I couldn’t go out to mail it, you see. Panic would have ensued had I been spotted. It’s like this place, this beautiful place, has claimed me and only grants me brief visitation rights home. Every time I made the crossing, I was weaker; a ghost instead of a man. I’ll be lucky if I have enough time and energy to fully cross over and input fresh coordinates into the machine.

  Right now I need your help to destroy something. In the early days, I brought samples back with me. They’re outside in the shed. It was a mistake, and you must destroy them. They cannot be allowed to interact with the local environment. Destroy them quickly. There’s rat poison under the sink, and burn them to cinders when they’re dead.

  I felt a twinge of anger when I finished. Typical Carmody. No welcomes. No pleasantries. No appreciation or goodbyes…but at least I was certain he’d written the letter. That clinical coldness was as good as a code. Nobody else could have phrased such a discovery so calmly.

  Curiosity soon overcame my anger. I went outside to the shed, and found two plants sitting on a bench table in the corner. The stink of rotting vegetation was ripe on the air. It smelled different than compost—stronger. And it had a meaty tinge to it that made me wonder if some small animal might have died recently in there.

  Carmody had placed the plants inside separate fish tanks and stacked rocks on the lids. The main stems were flaky and withered, but when I peered closer at one, I noticed a few purple shoots pushing up through the soil at the back of the tank.

  The plant lunged for me the instant my fingers touched the glass. It moved so quickly and violently the entire table shook, and some of the rocks rolled off the lid and crashed to the floor. I toppled backwards onto the ground and lay there for what seemed like an eternity, just watching the tank, waiting for the glass to shatter and that thing to spring at me.

  By the time I got my breath back and struggled to my feet, the plant was still.

  I cursed Carmody with all my might. I couldn’t believe he wanted me to destroy these things. This wasn’t just a discovery—it was a monumental discovery, the implications of which might possibly redefine the course of humanity. No matter how threatening they might be, I couldn’t destroy them. I didn’t feel like I had the right.

  I returned to the house, opened the Bushmills I’d picked up coming through Duty Free, and spent the next hour trying to convince myself that Carmody had gone insane and that all this was some crazy joke.

  Deep down, I knew it wasn’t.

  The plants writhed and slapped against the glass when I doused them in rat poison and stood back to watch it work. At one point, I thought I heard a tiny, wheezy cry coming from one of the tanks. I didn’t dare investigate it. I waited a full hour after they wilted before carrying the tanks outside and burning the plants around the side of the house. There was no smoke. Not a single wisp. Once the fire died away, I scraped the ashes into a hole, and poured more rat poison over them for good measure, and filled it in.

  I didn’t sleep again that night, and by morning, the wind was back. I was standing by the lounge window, watching it whip up whitecaps on the water below, and thinking about Carmody and the plants when Wilma Larsson walked in the front door.

  I guess because I was a visitor she felt she had the right to just march in. I was still annoyed she hadn’t knocked the first time she stopped by. The leaves that blew in behind her annoyed me too. The way they sailed through the air reminded me of the way those plants had squirmed and trembled when the rat poison hit them.

  “Good morning.” She smiled and laid a fresh loaf of bread on the table. “Doctor Carmody liked my bread. I thought you might.”

  I guess I must have looked terrible because her eyes widened when she saw me. “Are you okay?”

  “Jetlag,” I said, and suddenly felt like blurting everything out to her. “I’ve been awake all night.”

  The lines on her face smoothed out. A thin, knowing smile crossed her face as she bustled into the kitchen and shoveled coffee into the percolator. And though every part of me wanted to show her the door, I listened while she told me about the fjord. You could skate on parts of it in winter, she said. A beaked whale had made its home there some years back, and a bus boat worked the shores in summer and made it easy to go to Uddevalla without worrying about finding a parking space.

  I was glad of her company that morning. Her advice and kind words took me back from Carmody’s place and grounded me in our reality for a while.

  But only for a while.

  I went to bed early that night. I’d planned to lie for a while, relax, and mull things over while listening to the wind. I sank into the confusion of jet lag within seconds. I awoke at exactly two AM. The wind had died away to a whine and there was a different sound in the house now, a tapping that seemed distant yet very close and personal at the same time.

  Instinct told me it was coming from the lab. Carmody! Had he returned?

  The moment I opened the bedroom door, I knew he hadn’t. The house was too dark, too empty. Apart from the tapping, there was nothing but the hum of the fridge. If Carmody had returned, he’d surely have seen my car and woken me. Besides, the tapping didn’t sound real. It sounded artificial, like it was coming over a radio or TV set.

  And it was coming from the lab.

  I crept up to the door and listened for a while. A keyboard. Yes. Someone was inside tapping away on the keyboard. Tap…tap…tap…The sound was as weak and erratic as the final beats of a tired old heart. When it stopped a few minutes later, I was filled with the urge to barge in there and demand that it start again. It wasn’t just a sound. It was a connection. Carmody was in there—I felt his presence as strongly as if I’d been sitting on his back porch, watching him drink that foul smelling tea of his.

  Yet that same instinct also told me the room was empty.

  When I finally plucked up the courage to go inside, I was trembling so much I thought the wind was back and shaking the house. A wave of static greeted me and made the hairs on my arm stand rigid when I passed inside. The blue power light on the laptop was blinking and tossing wild shadows about the room. There was a smell, too: the reek of stale sweat that reminded me of how Carmody smelled whenever he’d been working weekends.

  I didn’t bother searching the room or checking the windows. I already knew they were locked. I turned on the monitor and tapped in the password.

  Winter is closing fast, Steven. I’m close to finding the equation, but I doubt I’ll be able to make ano
ther crossing and have the energy left to input the coordinates into the machine. It’s hard even to type now without attempting to cross to the machine. You must do it. I’ll try and get them to you soon. Otherwise, I’ll be stranded here until spring.

  It will be a long winter, Steven. Seventeen years, by my calculations.

  A seventeen-year winter? It sounded so crazy that I found myself believing it. Yet there was a nagging doubt that someone other than Carmody had been in the room and typing away. As the night wore on, I became more and more paranoid that I wasn’t alone in the house. I began to wonder if perhaps something had followed him through that gateway and was there with me; watching, waiting, perhaps growing hungrier with every passing minute.

  As dawn broke, I went to the shed and swept up a pan full of dust. I sprinkled it in a thin layer across the lab floor and locked the door. I didn’t go back in there until the tapping started again two nights later. This time, it was so slow and weak; I thought at first that something outside was shifting about in the wind.

  It was the keyboard. When I crept out into the hall and eased the lab door open, I saw a misty outline of a hand hanging over the keyboard like a tiny cloud. If not for the ring on the index finger, I’d barely have recognized it as a hand at all. I knew that ring—Carmody’s parents had given it to him the day he’d graduated, and he’d never removed it since.

  The hand was having trouble working the keyboard. Every time it pressed a key, the fist clenched as if trying to focus enough weight to get the key down. When I stepped into the doorway, the hand kept typing, stubbornly pushing the keys so slowly it was agonizing to watch.

  It was a long time after the hand had faded to nothing before I found the courage to go inside. I examined the floor before I approached the monitor. There wasn’t so much as the footprints of a fly in the dust.

  Energy gone. Can type no mor. Equation nearly dun. Will get 2 u. A few lines below this, he’d written, U look gud.

  My pulse switched into overdrive. How had he seen me? Had some other part of him been sitting in that chair? Or had he been simply looking through his gateway, standing there as helpless as a prisoner looking out from his cell?