by Patrick Lee
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 made 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.”
She looked down at the table.
“The media gives it a name,” she said. “They call it Bleak December. Whatever it is, it starts on December fourth of this year, and unfolds over the following weeks. We know that Yuma, Arizona, plays a key role in the event. Even a central role. But we don’t know why. The city was mentioned in every article, numerous times, but the context was never intact. We also know that in the weeks before the event there’s a major buildup of petroleum supplies in large metro areas. Gas stations with three or four tanker trucks parked outside as reserve stores. So whatever the event is, apparently people see it coming. Or at least those in power see it coming, and make preparations for some potential crisis. If that sounds vague, it is. There was just so little text to go on. We assumed they wanted the gas for electric generators, if power grids failed, but that was only a guess.”
Bethany turned to Travis. “The cars,” she said.
He nodded. There had to be a connection.
“What cars?” Paige said.
“All the cars in D.C. were gone,” Travis said. “Everyone left at the end, but not in any kind of panic. There was no gridlock, as far as we could see. They left with cool heads.”
Paige stared at the runway and tried to tie that fact in with everything else she knew. Travis watched her eyes. He saw only an echo of his own bafflement. Finally she shook her head.
“Doesn’t make the image any sharper,” she said. “Maybe they wanted the gas to evacuate the cities, but there was nothing in the articles to suggest why they’d need to do that.”
“What did the articles suggest?” Bethany said. “I mean… beyond what you were sure of, was there anything in them that offered even a hint of what the hell happened?”
Paige thought about it for a long moment. On the far side of the airport, a 737 accelerated and lifted off.
“We had the sense that it wasn’t a natural phenomenon,” she said at last. “A sense that it was… a failure of something. Like a plan. Like a very big, very secret plan, that went very fucking wrong in every possible way. We couldn’t pin down any one passage of text that said so… but it was there in general. It was sort of everywhere. And toward the end, the articles were fewer and farther between, and very short, leaving almost no text to go on. And then they just ended. The last thing anyone ever bounced through that satellite was dated December 28. Whatever the hell Bleak December is… was… will be … it takes about twenty-four days from start to finish. And then people stop writing newspaper articles, and correcting satellite orbits. And at some point, apparently, they stop doing everything.”
She stared off. Shook her head. “That’s why we went to the president first. If there was anyone to talk to about secret, dangerous shit that might get out of hand in the next few months, we figured it’d be him. I half expected him to just have the answer for us, once we’d shown him the cylinder and told him what we knew. Like there’d be some high-risk, black-budget program in the Defense Department, just about to go live, and he’d connect the dots just like that. And then he’d shut it down. Simple.”
“Sounds like he did connect the dots,” Travis said. “It’s just the next part that didn’t work out.”
“But why wouldn’t he shut it down?” Bethany said. “Why the hell would he want the world to end?”
“He probably thinks the danger can still be avoided, without stopping whatever this thing is,” Paige said. “I overheard a conversation to that effect last night, tied up in that building in D.C. The project, or whatever it is, is called Umbra. But beyond the name, I still don’t know a damn thing about it.”
For almost a minute nobody spoke. Another airliner rumbled down out of the sky and landed.
“So our best move is to get to Yuma,” Travis said, “and use the cylinder to investigate the ruins there. See what we can learn from it, if it’s such an important place at the end.”
“We were on our way to do that last night,” Paige said, “after we left the White House. Obviously, President Currey didn’t want us to get there.”
“I don’t imagine he’s had a change of heart since then,” Bethany said. “And as of an hour ago, these people know we have our own cylinder.”
Paige nodded. “And since they don’t have to sneak around and take out-of-the-way flights—hell, they could take military flights—they may already be in Yuma with their cylinder by the time we arrive. Even if they burn some time keeping their resources here on the East Coast, waiting for us to make a mistake, we should expect them to be no more than a few hours behind us.”
“And we can assume they outnumber and outgun us by a wide margin,” Travis said.
“Probably wider than we want to think about.”
Travis leaned back in his chair. Stared at the heat shimmers rising from the runway. Breathed a laugh. “What the hell. We’ve gone up against worse.”
He didn’t mention the fact that, strictly speaking, the worse they’d gone up against had won.
Chapter Twenty-Three
The jet was the same type Travis and Bethany had flown in from Atlanta. Its rear four seats faced each other like those of a restaurant
booth, without the table. They set their bags in one of them, occupied the other three, and fell asleep within the first five minutes of the flight.
When Travis opened his eyes again, he saw mountains passing below, high and glacier-capped, with vacant desert land to the east and west. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Paige was still asleep, but Bethany was awake, working on her phone. Travis glanced at the display and saw that she was compiling information on the two names they’d gleaned from the building. One was Isaac Finn, the man whose office Paige had been taken to on the sixteenth floor. The other was the man Travis had dropped from the ninth floor, whose wallet had yielded the name Raymond Muller. Bethany appeared to be amassing a good deal of info on each of them.
Travis stared out the window again. He thought of the cylinder. Thought of the future it opened, with all changes locked out. In a very real way, that meant it wasn’t their future anymore. If they figured out how to stop Umbra, then the world would live on, but the place on the other side of the iris wouldn’t change to reflect that fact. It would never be anything but ghost country, the long echo of some terrible and all-too-human mistake.
He looked at Paige again. Watched her bangs playing on her forehead in the airstream from an A/C nozzle above.
“She’d find you, you know,” Bethany said. She spoke softly, just above the drone of the jet engines.
Travis glanced at her. Waited for her to go on.
“If the world was ending, however it happens,” she said, “if people were evacuating cities, if Tangent was scared enough to seal the Breach… if everything was coming undone… Paige would find you. She’d do it just to be with you at the end.”