Resonance

by Chris Dolley

  Graham let it all flow over his head. They were only words. Words chasing names. No substance.

  "Quiet!" shouted Annalise. "I've talked to the girls. One of the Kevins says he makes it seventy-one projects closed down. Probably more. He says that none of the RPs access current logs from every world."

  Gary and Howard nodded in agreement.

  "He says the only thing they know for certain is that it's increasing. Fast."

  "It's got to be an insider," said Howard, continuing his earlier argument. "Someone who benefits or thinks they can benefit from a society in upheaval."

  "But no one benefits. We've been through all that!" said Gary.

  "Can't you list all personnel with access to the ParaDim database for the worlds that have stopped reporting?" asked Annalise.

  "Do we have such a list?" Howard asked Gary. "We might be able to cross-check all ParaDim employees but how could you tell which of them had access to the database."

  "The number of staff who actually know about the parallel worlds is very small," Gary explained to Annalise. "Most employees think they're analyzing data from the AI engine."

  "Or are working in the Admin or Finance divisions."

  "Or manufacturing," added Gary. "ParaDim employs tens of thousands of people but only about thirty or forty know the truth."

  Howard agreed. "Maybe more, maybe less on other worlds. Plus people at the periphery, people we've never heard of—consultants, assistants, IT personnel who might have put two and two together."

  Annalise shook her head. "How do you keep the parallel worlds a secret when so many people know what's happening?"

  Graham wondered that too. People loved to gossip. The greater the secret, the greater the compulsion to say something.

  "Because working for ParaDim is infinitely better than not working for them," said Gary. "It's like going to work every day knowing that the Holy Grail is not only out there, but its location could be in the very next file you read. You don't get opportunities like that anywhere else."

  "Plus the money," said Howard. "ParaDim pays double the going rate. Whatever the job."

  "Okay," said Annalise, holding up her hands. "Why not cross-check all ParaDim employees and see who exists on all sixty-three worlds? Then you can haggle over which of them has access."

  "Works for me," said Howard. "Is there one employee file or is it split by country?" he asked Gary.

  The two men conferred and typed. Annalise joined Graham by the window.

  "I won't let anything happen to you," she said. "None of us will."

  Graham didn't know what to say. So many people risking their lives to protect him and for what? A possibility? A dream that maybe he was some sort of key who could unlock the secret of the resonance wave? What if he wasn't? What if all those people had died for no reason at all. Yes, there were sixty-three Graham Smiths lying in comas but what about the missing Resonance project members? The Kevins and the Howards and the Tamishas who were being hunted and tortured and killed at this very moment. Who was going to save them?

  Several minutes passed. Graham watched the river flow slowly by, counted the boats and watched them fight against the tide. Annalise stood alongside, silent and supportive.

  "The scan's running now," said Howard. "The hits should appear any second."

  "It has to be someone with power," said Gary. "Someone who can close a project down without anyone questioning them."

  Graham and Annalise walked over to stand behind Howard. A cursor flashed hypnotically, counting down the seconds.

  And then a name appeared.

  Just the one.

  Adam Sylvestrus.

  * * *

  Graham should have guessed. He would have if his mind hadn't been elsewhere.

  "What about external consultants?" Gary asked Howard. "Are they included in the employee files or are they logged somewhere else?"

  Howard wasn't sure. He pulled up one file after another.

  "What are you doing?" asked Graham. "You've got your answer. It's Adam Sylvestrus."

  Gary shook his head. "Sylvestrus is head of ParaDim on two-thirds of all worlds. You'd expect his name to be flagged."

  "Sixty-eight percent of all worlds," added Howard, tapping on the keyboard. "I read it in an RP log this morning. Which," he paused and pulled down another screen, "if you bear with me for a few seconds, computes to a probability of . . ." He paused again and read the numbers off the screen. "Thirty-five billion to one." He turned to Gary. "I'd call that significant."

  Gary shook his head again. "Did you find the external consultant files?"

  "I'm adding them to the scan now," said Howard. He pressed "enter" and sat back.

  Graham couldn't understand what was happening. How much more proof did anyone need?

  A thought which ended abruptly when two names flashed on the screen.

  Adam Sylvestrus and Maria Totorikaguena.

  "Who's she?" asked Annalise.

  "The name's familiar," said Gary, "Try . . ."

  "Already doing it," interrupted Howard, clicking and tapping furiously on the keyboard.

  Maria Totorikaguena's personnel file appeared on the screen. She was a theoretical physicist attached to the Resonance project.

  "She's part of the RP?" said Annalise incredulously.

  "Not on this world," said Howard. "I picked the first personnel record I could find."

  "What does she do on the other sixty-two worlds?" asked Gary.

  Howard flicked through file after file. Sometimes she was an employee of ParaDim, sometimes a consultant attached to the Resonance project.

  "Pull down a bio," said Gary. "What's her area of expertise?"

  Howard pulled down another screen and copied data across from the personnel file.

  A profile came back. Maria Totorikaguena—25, Spanish, quiet, quirky sense of humor, child prodigy—gained her first degree at the age of twelve. The first of many. Published fourteen papers—including "The Twelve-Dimensional Universe" and "Schenck Revisited."

  "I thought I recognized the name," said Gary, pointing at the first of her publishing credits. "Interesting theory but flawed. She proposed an extra dimension to solve anomalies with the eleven-dimensional model of the universe. But it wasn't necessary. One of the advanced worlds had already shown that the anomalies didn't really exist."

  Howard accessed bios and personnel records from other worlds. The same picture emerged. Quiet, quirky, brilliant. Someone who liked to work by herself and avoided positions of responsibility.

  "Not exactly the profile of someone who could close down sixty-three Resonance projects," said Howard.

  "On how many other worlds does she work for ParaDim?" asked Annalise.

  "I'll check on the other terminal," said Gary. "Howard, you check to see if she's working for us on this world."

  Graham watched as the two men tapped and clicked through a series of screens and menus.

  "She's not on any of the ParaDim files here," said Howard. "And . . ." he paused while he waited for a search to finish, "I can't find any record of her birth. Not in Spain. Not anywhere." He turned to Gary. "She doesn't exist on this world."

  Gary didn't say a thing. He stared at the screen in front of him, slowly shaking his head.

  "What's the matter?" asked Annalise, peering over his shoulder.

  "How many RPs did Kevin say had closed?" he asked her.

  "Seventy-one. Why?" She stopped, the last word trailing off on her lips. Graham followed her gaze towards the bottom left-hand corner of the screen and the two numbers that flashed.

  Maria Totorikaguena only worked for ParaDim on sixty-five worlds.

  Thirty-Nine

  There had to be some mistake. Maybe she'd joined the RPs in the last few days and her details hadn't reached the employee files. Maybe Kevin was wrong. Maybe . . .

  Gary and Howard argued at speed while Graham listened, waiting for an opening that never came—by the time he'd thought of something constructive to add, s
omeone had either said it, refuted it or the argument had moved elsewhere.

  "Quiet!" shouted Annalise. "Kevin's double-checked. She doesn't even exist on six of the seventy-one worlds."

  Gary shook his head. "It's too much of a coincidence. She works for ParaDim on only sixty-five worlds and on sixty-one of them the RP is closed down."

  "Sixty-five," said Annalise. "Kevin checked. Every time she works for ParaDim, the RP closes."

  "She must have stumbled upon something," said Gary. "Something to do with Graham and the resonance wave."

  "If she did, she never wrote it down," said Howard. "I've been all over the closed Resonance logs. They're interested in Graham Smith but they never say why."

  "We'll check again," said Gary. "There's another forty-six logs to look through."

  They checked and sifted, the two men scrolling and searching for anything written by or mentioning Maria Totorikaguena. They found nothing. All sixty-three logs ended with a note saying they were downloading every file they could find on Graham Smith but none of them gave a reason.

  "Maybe she didn't write anything down," said Annalise. "If she liked to work on her own, maybe she kept her ideas to herself."

  "Until someone found out what she was doing," added Howard.

  "Like Adam Sylvestrus," said Graham.

  "It makes sense," said Howard, nodding in agreement. "Sylvestrus has to be involved. He must have seen something in Maria's work that forced him to take drastic action."

  Graham could see how that could explain the sixty-five closures where Maria and Sylvestrus worked together, but the other six? Could the same action repeated in quick succession across sixty-five worlds resonate so powerfully that it influenced the decisions of the other Adam Sylvestruses? Was sixty-five enough? Wouldn't you need more?

  "It's not Sylvestrus," said Gary, raising his voice. "If he is involved, it's as an unwitting agency. Maybe he told the wrong person about Maria's discovery."

  "Who?" said Howard. "We've been through the ParaDim files. There's no one else."

  "Then it's someone outside ParaDim," snapped Gary. He was becoming increasingly agitated. Graham couldn't understand his continued defense of Sylvestrus. Even Annalise looked surprised.

  "Someone in government," continued Gary. "Or the intelligence community. Maybe they were bugging his office."

  "Why do you keep defending Sylvestrus?" asked Graham. "You said yourself it had to be someone with power, someone who could close you down without questions being asked. Who better than Sylvestrus?"

  Gary sighed and shook his head. "This is getting us nowhere. It can't be Sylvestrus."

  "Why not?" asked Graham. "I've met him. He's creepy—the way he looks at you. And I saw him on TV during the middle of the London riots. He wasn't trying to stop weapons proliferation, he was defending it."

  Gary still wouldn't have it. "Trust me, it won't be Adam Sylvestrus."

  "Then explain it to us," said Annalise.

  Gary activated his monitor and called up a search. He clicked through several pages until he came to the one he wanted.

  "Because of this," he said.

  The front page of the New York Times appeared on the screen. It was dated several months earlier. Sylvestrus Assassinated. Stark headlines besides an even starker picture. A man lay slumped on the pavement, a coat thrown over his head, a dark pool of liquid seeped out from under the coat.

  "It's the same on every world," said Gary. "Within six months of the trade talks collapsing, the Americans move against ParaDim. Sylvestrus is the first to go. The Americans throw their hands up and deny everything, no one believes them, one of the Asian countries retaliates and suddenly everyone's mobilizing and pressing buttons."

  "We call it 'the Chaos,'" said Howard.

  "Now you see why Sylvestrus has to be the last person who'd want the resonance wave to proceed unchecked. It brings about his death."

  Graham was unconvinced. He'd met the man. The others hadn't.

  "Besides," continued Gary. "He's the one who initiated the Resonance projects. Why start something you want to close down?"

  "Maybe it took a path he wasn't expecting?" said Graham.

  "You?" said Annalise, looking worried.

  Graham didn't reply. Sylvestrus had been strangely interested in him that time they'd met. And why had they met? What was the CEO of a huge company like ParaDim doing trying to persuade lowly Graham Smith to take a medical. Why hadn't he left that to his Resonance team?

  "Someone has to benefit from all this," said Gary. "There has to be a motive. Who gains from the resonance wave?"

  "I'll set up a series of scans this afternoon on all the Chaos worlds," said Howard. "Off the top of my head, I'd say everyone loses. No one stays in power long enough to benefit. But we might have missed something."

  * * *

  Graham and Shikha left at one-thirty. He felt strange walking through the revolving doors of the Cavendish Clinic. He half expected the receptionist to leap up and shout "Stop!" the moment he saw him. But he didn't. Everyone smiled and nodded and couldn't be more polite.

  The medical took the rest of the afternoon. He was scanned from all angles, poked and prodded. But he didn't try to escape. He didn't even complain when they asked him to remove his clothes. For some reason he felt he deserved the indignity. It was his small sacrifice in the war against resonance.

  And besides, Adam Sylvestrus didn't exist on this world.

  Forty

  It was three o'clock. Annalise Fifteen picked up the phone and tapped in the numbers.

  A male voice answered. "Tracey Minton Information Line, how can I help?"

  "I called earlier," said Annalise. "I gave you three names. Have the police come back to you?"

  "You're the American girl?"

  "That's me. Do we have a deal?"

  "I'm switching you through to Jenny Wilson. She wants to talk to you urgently."

  Annalise waited, tapping her feet impatiently. Were they stalling? Trying to trace the call?

  A woman's voice broke the silence. "Hi, my name's Jenny Wilson. I'm the senior reporter on the Tracey Minton story. Can we meet?"

  "You got the money?"

  "Possibly. The hundred grand's dependent on a conviction but I can authorize money for a story. Do you have a story?"

  "How much money are you talking about?"

  "Depends on the story. Do you know the gang? Did they talk about what happened?"

  "What if I give you an even bigger story?"

  "The bigger the better. Look, where are you now? I can send a car."

  Annalise hesitated. She hadn't said anything to remotely interest ParaDim but did they voice-match calls?

  "If I leave here I'm gonna need protection. Somewhere safe to stay for two people. Can you arrange that?"

  "I can arrange that for tonight. Longer depends on the story."

  Annalise closed her eyes. Once she gave their location away that was it. No going back.

  "I'm in Brighton," she said. "When can you get here?"

  The line went silent. Annalise held her breath. She could hear a muted conversation on the other end of the line.

  "We can get a car to you in ten minutes. Where are you?"

  Annalise glanced at the line of hotels across the road and picked the name of the nearest. "The Esplanade Hotel. We'll be waiting outside. The name's . . ." she paused, plucking a name out of her subconscious. "Phoenix," she said. "Tell the driver my name's Phoenix."

  * * *

  Annalise Fifteen rushed back to her hotel. She had five minutes to persuade Graham to accompany her back to London.

  She needed less than one. She watched—amazed—as he gathered his playing cards together. He hadn't asked a single question. Never even raised an eyebrow.

  The taxi was waiting for them outside the Esplanade Hotel.

  "Phoenix?" said the driver. "Party of two for London?"

  "That's right," said Annalise, smiling with relief. She called Graham over and they climbe
d in.

  The journey dragged. Sixty miles of Graham staring out of the window and Annalise trying to convince herself that she hadn't made a terrible mistake.

  She had a plan—of sorts—but it was more framework than fleshed out. She was going to light a fire and pray the wind was blowing in the right direction.

  * * *

  Jenny Wilson sat on her desk, legs crossed and cigarette in hand. Mid-thirties, thought Annalise, mid-thirties, too much makeup and eyes that said, "try to bullshit me and you're out the door."

  Annalise glanced sideways at Graham. He was looking down at the floor—probably tracing patterns in the carpet. Jenny hadn't asked who he was. Not yet anyway. And Annalise hadn't ventured anything other than his name. Hopefully, that would be enough until she could think of something plausible.

  Annalise passed a slip of paper to Jenny. She'd written everything down. The names of the gang, the fence, the guy who'd planned it all, a list of addresses they'd used in the past. Everything.

  Jenny read it as she shuffled off the front of her desk and walked round to her chair. She stubbed out her cigarette, picked up the phone and waited as it rang.

  "Dave, Jenny here. I have more info on the Tracey murder." She looked at Annalise. "That's right, two more names and," she paused while she checked the list, "five addresses."

  She passed on the information, stopping every now and again to nod and smile and twine the phone cord around her fingers.

  "I don't think she's ready to see you yet." She looked towards Annalise and raised an eyebrow. Annalise shook her head. "No, she's not ready." She laughed. "And you," she said and then replaced the receiver.

  "You'll have to see them sometime. We can delay them for a while but not indefinitely. Now," she paused, "you said you had a story."

  Annalise took a deep breath. "Have you heard of a company called ParaDim?"

  "Of course," said Jenny, narrowing her eyes.