The Blue Light Project

by Timothy Taylor

  He was off the phone less than a minute when he witnessed the beating. Firelight flickering on all of their faces. Three men with black masks grabbed another and ripped off his woolen hat. He fought back, make no mistake. But when they slammed him down to the concrete stairs he curled into a ball and tried only to survive the kicking. Dismal business, the street fight. It lasted thirty seconds, but Loftin didn’t make a move. Special Forces tattoo, the men who had done the beating said afterwards. Dude’s a spy. A fucking rat. There were fucking rats everywhere.

  “This is terrible,” Loftin said, to nobody in particular. “Did anyone even see the tattoo?”

  The beaten man staggered away, disappearing into a side street, leaving a treacly spatter of blood on the pavement behind him.

  The man next to Loftin turned to look him over. He didn’t say a word.

  “I’m a journalist,” Loftin told him. “I have a press card.”

  There were more men around him now. There were hands feeling in his pockets, hands holding him. Notebooks out. They were leafing through the pages. #35 Man, 26 yrs. of age. Left of center politics . . . #43 Female, 53 yrs. . . .

  Helicopters in the lower air. Someone was yelling at the top of the plaza. Loftin could hear the words very distinctly: It’s happening. It’s happening.

  So fast. So quickly. Loftin might have missed it even if the beating hadn’t begun at that same moment. Fists and elbows, knees and boots. Something crushed and cracked in his central regions. His bowels released. He was falling down through plate-glass windows of pain. While up top of the plaza, the business had begun. One helicopter. One armored personnel carrier. The simplest of maneuvers. The helicopter landed on top of the complex. The armored personnel carrier backed up at high speed and smashed into the lobby of the theater.

  There was nothing to see after that. No movement. No shapes visible. No formation. No plan unfurling. There was only an instant of pause, and then something like a pulse. It was barely visible. People experienced it as a sense on the skin, or at the inner ear. The building pulsed and then the plaza did too.

  Loftin felt it. He couldn’t be sure exactly what it was. His eyes were pinched shut and they were beating him methodically, paying much more attention to him than they had to the first man. Face and knees. Groin. Face again, this time with kicks. But something came in through his eyelids and rippled through him.

  Voices all around them: It’s happening. It’s happening. It’s happening.

  The last one to kick Loftin had no idea that as his boot went home, there was in fact no Loftin left to kick. That was because the one who had kicked him just prior had done so artfully to the side of his head and killed him. That man was nineteen years old and was never charged. And he might have continued kicking Loftin, in his turn, were it not for that strange pulse. It seemed to come from within the theater and spread outwards invisibly. Everybody turned to look. Some people would say later that they saw the walls of the building physically move, puff outwards a fraction. That’s not how Loftin would have described it, however. Had he survived to describe the last experience of his senses, he would have said that a seam of white seemed to blink out of every crack and crevice in the Meme complex at once, a glow of spotless white, the structure humming suddenly with a new and total energy. And that energy, which all those present in the plaza had collectively brought to life, then burst outwards, back through the crowd, penetrating and transforming them all, dissolving whatever order he’d observed there previously, making chaos into larger chaos. Had he lived, those are the things that Loftin would have said.

  Twenty seconds, no more. And then everybody was poised, everybody waiting, everybody holding their collective breath.

  PEGG

  IT WAS LIGHT.

  They did it with light. In the end, that was the trick they saved for timely use. They would have had other options. There were ways they could make your bones vibrate or blenderize your inner ear, fiddle with the knobs on your stability and balance systems, make you fall over, wet your pants, liquefy your entire intestinal tract. They could project a voice into your head and make you insane. They could do that kind of thing.

  Only, key point, they weren’t going to use any of those techniques on someone with his fist clamped around the trigger of what might be a radiological dispersion device, a so-called dirty bomb. True, these weapons were not considered potent enough to kill a lot of people. But a nuke was a nuke, in the public eye. And the authorities would be evacuating a city if that word got out, which would surely be the black outcome, the major domo downside.

  Pegg was in an ambulance, fading slowly from consciousness by the time he got around to thinking this through. They were heading somewhere, although not quickly. In fact, they were stopping and starting now through crowds that plugged every street around the plaza. Honking and wailing and welping their way through. Even strapped to a gurney, though, Pegg was able to appreciate the genius of what had been unleashed. The genius of that otherworldly light. And he, Thom Pegg, had called it forth.

  “Bring me a beer,” said his boy. His own lost boy. “And a mop.”

  And there was Pegg laughing somewhere in the deep and forgotten recesses of history.

  They didn’t come immediately. Pegg waited after the tape played with his eyes pinched shut, unable to imagine what Haden had in store. He listened for sounds in the ceiling, in the sewers below. He listened for explosions, soldiers breaching the walls, storming through. None of it came. And as Pegg counted off seconds, then what he assumed to be minutes, it occurred to him that he could leave the theater. Everybody was through with Thom Pegg now. He’d listened to Mov’s madness from beginning to end. He’d pressed the button on his tape recorder at the moment that seemed right, just as Haden had requested. Haden hadn’t sent men in to kill him immediately, so he was free to go. Free to be free. Free to live unless they were planning to sniper him down on the lobby steps in front of five hundred television cameras.

  But he didn’t leave. He went back to sit with the kids instead. Gerry and Hyacinth still next to one another. Roshawn. Laisha, Reebo, Metric. Pegg flashed on an image of what lay outside the theater doors, the agitated crowds there, the press and lights. And it seemed quite clear that he and these kids had more important things to discuss. The first thing on that list, naturally, was what they were going to eat when they got out. Pegg had them all hold hands sitting there in row 14. Hyacinth suggested fries. Everyone agreed. So it was unanimous. They were all going to eat french fries when they were freed. Not a long time afterwards. Immediately afterwards. And tears were streaming down Pegg’s cheeks.

  Gerry said: “You okay?”

  I’m good. I’m good.

  And then the kid said this. He actually did. “Would you like a hug?”

  Pegg embraced the boy and wept onto the top of his head. Gerry gave him a squeeze. He said, “I know we’re not going to die.”

  Pegg wasn’t an adult. That’s the thought he had. He couldn’t possibly be an adult, because he was unable to suppress the following question: “How do you know?”

  “Because I choose to believe in life,” Gerry said. “I believe in all of our lives.”

  The boy said that too. He actually said that.

  Mov had disappeared, although Pegg could still feel him in the darkness, somewhere close. Sitting on the edge of the stage, head lowered. Leaning against a nearby wall, exhausted from the effort of bringing everything to these last moments. Pegg found that even fear was hard to shape in the darkness.

  As it was, they all sat tightly together in the sweating blackness. Everything suspended. Everything in that darkness having now taken on a temporary tone. They heard Mov move towards the front. Pegg thought it had been fifteen minutes since his tape played, since he’d held his breath and depressed that key. He wondered if there were any traces yet of morning light outside. Predawn. Then he heard Mov in sudden motion.

  Pegg said: “On the floor, now. Everybody.”

  And they al
l wriggled their way to the sticky, stinking carpet. They all tucked their heads in under the seats. Except Pegg, who stood uselessly, stupidly.

  “Is it over?” Gerry asked him from the floor.

  “Right now,” Pegg said.

  That was the moment. Is it over? Right now. But Pegg could not have known the way in which it would arrive. Nobody could have seen that coming, because there was, literally, nothing to see.

  Light. Unexpected and enormous. They came with light. How do the tough guys say it? Bring it. These were tough guys. They brought the light. Soundless and endless light, a celestial explosion of luminance. It gauzed the room. If Pegg were still seeing—if that’s technically what he was doing through his clenched-shut eyes—then it was white and blue filaments that could be seen. White, blue, and the veins in his own eyelids. Pegg thought he could see his own platelets moving, shivering there in the incandescence. Not illumination, note. This sort of light didn’t throw itself onto anything. It didn’t reveal. It only obliterated the darkness in favor of itself. Suddenly and violently. Pegg felt it like a physical assault on his skin. The crush of a new atmosphere, a deeper pressure. The thing fisted his optic nerves and tossed him. Pegg was on his feet one second, then blown over the next. Something seemed to hammer both his temples at once, and down he went. Blinded twice in two very different ways. Maybe something the size of the universe really was fucking with him.

  I’ve been hit, he thought. Just like in the movies. His face contorted, twisting into itself. He felt penetrated and afraid. His body coursing with electrical currents. He thought a spill of thoughts, like fever dreams at an accelerated pace. He thought: They’re using electricity. He thought: I’m going to die. He thought: This is the light I’ve heard about, the one at the moment of death. He thought: My body is disappearing.

  He curled shut, his fists and toes painfully cramping.

  Then, the voices. And here Pegg registered something with chilling certainty: the men were not shouting. He wanted them to shout. He wanted to hear them yell. Down! Clear! Secure! He wanted martial action of the extreme and definitive kind. Lock down! Stack up! Close! Whatever the words were. He wanted the safety of the good guys’ violent program. But he heard none of it. They spoke with bureaucratic, death-industry calm. Most unsettling. They moved into the room, ghosted into this inhospitable light. Pegg could feel them all around, not shadows or shapes, barely outlines. They were force fields, linked together, and they spidered through the room in programmed sequence. They seized space and held it. Hands on them all. The children were screaming. Gerry was screaming. Pegg himself might have been screaming, he couldn’t have been sure. He was listening for Mov, though. Listening for the sound. And then he heard it, or he thought he heard it. The last sounds of Mov were a cadenza like this: pop, pop, pop.

  Pegg was being handcuffed but something like vision was creeping back to life behind his eyes. There was a voice above him, distant at the command end of two hands that vised him into immobility. That voice said: “I have the second man.”

  This crackled through the airwaves. Man two. Man two. And then he saw them. The children. Six of them, Gerry in the lead. Hyacinth behind him. Then Roshawn, Laisha, Reebo, Metric. No more screaming. They were up in the dazzling, spotted brilliance, they seemed to be floating. Drifting towards the door.

  “Micah,” Pegg said. And then he was up himself and being carried. Dragged, really. There was a hand on either side, his legs banging painfully across a sill, a step. He smelled street air, alley air, sweet garbage, sweet urban rot. His vision returning in layers. He could see black and chrome now. The sheen of running water. He saw a sewer drain and an ambulance. He was in an ambulance. This was news. It rooted him. He was in a vehicle, in a bed. He was strapped to the gurney. Somebody was working his arm, rubbing his skin with a cold swab. He felt the needle go home and the wave of something moving inside him, not unpleasant.

  “Micah,” Pegg said again.

  And then a familiar voice from very close. “Man two. We’re mobile. Please move now, driver. Thank you.” The lurch and the rattle of things in cases. Sutures and swabs, scalpels and injector pens. They were going somewhere in an ambulance.

  “What happened?” Pegg asked. More vision. Haden here, creased brow, black turtleneck under a jacket with a familiar frog lapel pin. The frog winked at Pegg, as if it recognized him.

  “All good,” Haden said. He was leaned in very close to Pegg, their faces almost touching. Pegg realized that Haden was going through his pockets. His tape recorder. Haden was taking his tape recorder. Under normal circumstances, Pegg would have objected loudly. But it didn’t really bother or surprise him at the moment.

  “Tell me,” Pegg said. “The light.”

  “Super-halogen tissue convulsant,” Haden said. “Get some rest, you got dosed good. It puts you out for a minute or two, but nothing long term. You’re going home.”

  “The kids?”

  “Safe and sound. All six. Nice work, by the way. Night-vision, check. Once we knew that, the guy was fucked. A burst of super-halogen into infrared filters means your brain is never the same again.” And Pegg was swept with emotion hearing all this. He had most certainly been expendable to Haden, or at least his brain had been. But he’d pulled off his night-vision and the children were alive. They were all breathing, with a future ahead and plans to eat french fries. And with this thought the ambulance seemed to swerve hard right. Gravity went sideways and stayed sideways for so long that Pegg began to wonder if it was perhaps only his own gravity. Haden looked like he was comfortably centered. He looked like he was going straight.

  “What about the bomb?” Pegg asked.

  Haden was staring forward now, past Pegg to the road ahead, a seam of concern working itself into place across his forehead. The ambulance was slowing, horns sounding. Haden said: “Fuck.” Then glanced down at Pegg and did something unexpected. He put his hand on Pegg’s arm. He said: “The briefcase. The bomb. Once you were all down and convulsing, our guys went over and cut off his hand.”

  Pegg was full of wonder. He thought: The hand. My God. What genius. How simple and efficient. They couldn’t have him letting go of the handle, so they cut off his hand. “With an axe,” Haden was now saying. And he offered a thin smile.

  Pegg was slammed up against one side of the gurney, on this crazy journey going somewhere around a never-ending hard right turn. Somewhere else in the city, Mov’s case with his hand attached was going somewhere too. The GPS trigger had been a bit more of a challenge, Haden continued, but there was always a way with technology. “Thanks also on that score,” he said to Pegg.

  “For what?”

  Haden’s hand was still resting on Pegg’s forearm. Thanks, he explained, because Pegg’s tape recorder had a GPS jammer in it. It activated when Pegg played the clip of his son and blocked the transmitter in Mov’s case.

  Haden hummed between the bits of information he was choosing to share.

  After that, they just turned the whole system off briefly. Winked out the satellites for a few minutes and deactivated the trigger. A bit hairy. They had to let the airlines know. They had a couple wobbles up there, but things came out all right.

  “Now relax,” he said. That was why Pegg had been given a muscle relaxant in the first place. Because there was going to be some pain and possible side effects later.

  “Side effects like what?”

  Haden said: “Cranial. Don’t worry, it’s all short-term stuff.”

  “Memory,” Pegg said. “You’re saying I’m going to lose my memory.”

  “Parts of it, temporarily. It’s normally bits and details, recent and older stuff. But don’t worry, it comes back.”

  “I won’t forget Mov,” Pegg said. “I won’t forget who he was. Mov was from your world. One of your kind.”

  Haden looked at Pegg with a sad smile. “I know. And now you know. But nobody else will ever know, and that’s for the best.”

  “I could write the story,” Pegg sai
d. “I took off my night-vision, Haden. I’m alive and my brain is fine. I can still tell the story.”

  But Haden just shook his head, without saying a word. He didn’t even have to make the point that so obviously came next. Pegg could write the story, sure. He could tell the world about Mov and who he was. The source of our guilty conscience. The poison in our cultural water table. Pegg could write about how Mov cracked and went primitive, tried to induce the sacrifice by which his sins might be cleansed and peace restored. Homo paenitentia. Maybe even a tabloid hack could have written that story and maybe he could even have done it without his tape-recorded copy of the interview. Maybe people would have even believed him.

  But not if he’d written the story once before and made it up that time. Who would believe him on the second try?

  Precisely, absolutely, squarely: no one.

  Pegg had to marvel at the design of his trap. Haden was very good. But now, Haden was also more seriously distracted. The ambulance had come to a standstill. And Pegg could now feel the bodies and hands pressed to the sides of the vehicle. He could hear the banging and feel the ripple of their thousandweight as they pressed against the sheet steel. Haden sat frozen, making calculations.

  Pegg was slipping away, down into sleep and peace, and making his own calculations too. There was only one mistake Haden had made, and Pegg was alive to it in those fading seconds. Haden did not appreciate how central Mov remained to events unfolding. Mov would have known it. Pegg knew it without question, without even thinking. It was bone knowledge. Mov was going to become more important than anybody could possibly imagine, because Mov—an escaped prisoner from Haden’s own world—well, because nobody was ever going to see Mov again. Nobody, ever. And the curiosity would gnaw at people. It would make them sick for answers.