DR. SCRANTON: I have some bad news for you gentlemen. We lost another drone to the anomalous time line yesterday. That’s time line 178. Situation’s escalating.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Fuck.
COL. SMITH: Louis, what can you tell us about it?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: Mission three was flown by an RQ-4 DarkStar. It departed from Wright-Patterson AFB at 1620 local time, then headed south until it crossed over water, topped up from an Air Force tanker, and climbed to flight level 700. Once at cruise altitude it triggered its ARMBAND unit to take it to the destination time line via time line one, and that’s all we know. It’s more than a day past its minimum fuel reserve time, so we’re calling it a definite hull loss.
COL. SMITH: Wait a minute. If this was mission three, what were the first two?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: We followed the usual protocol for newly opened indirect-access time lines: a ground-level atmospheric sample-return box to confirm the presence of air and gravity, then mapping using MQ-1 Predators. They fly in daylight at medium altitude, with cameras set up to perform a wide-area survey of the eastern seaboard area. They were expecting business as usual: an uninhabited wasteland or, at most, Paleolithic hunter-gatherers. But neither of them came back, and after two hull losses in a row, some bright spark decided to up the ante. The RQ-4 is a high-altitude stealth drone, sort of an unmanned U-2 analog. And it’s now overdue. Never showed up. Didn’t activate its DOOMWATCH device, either—
DR. SCRANTON: DOOMWATCH?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: It’s a special ARMBAND unit—a world-walking machine—with a flight data recorder attached. It’s switched on right before the drone transitions to its target time line and logs all the telemetry from the drone’s flight control system and instruments. If the drone does anything unpredictable, DOOMWATCH ejects and transitions back to the home time line immediately, then pops a parachute. That way, if there’s no breathable atmosphere or the UAV encounters a thunderstorm or some other irrecoverable situation, at least we get an idea of what happened.
DR. SCRANTON: So you got a positive for atmosphere and gravity using the preliminary sample return box, but then lost three drones in a row. The last of them a high-altitude stealth machine. But the Air Force aren’t totally stupid—
COL. SMITH: Thank you!
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: Indeed. So this morning we sent up a sacrificial Tier 1 UAV, a Gnat 750, programmed to bounce over to time line one, continue to time line 178, buzz around at five hundred feet for a while, then phone home. The first three drones were real aircraft, things that need a runway and ground crew; the Gnat is a toy with a ten-foot wingspan that you launch off the back of a jeep. Anyway, it came back bang on schedule. Its meteorology package said conditions over there were fine, too.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Shit.
COL. SMITH: The scatological commentary is getting old, Barney.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Sorry. It’s been a bad week.
DR. SCRANTON: If you’ve quite finished?
COL. SMITH: Sorry, sir. Please continue.
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: Well, we picked up something interesting from the Gnat. They sent it up from McGuire AFB in New Jersey, not Wright-Patterson, and it hedge-hopped around Pennsylvania for an hour, and here are some of its holiday snaps.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: Holy—sorry.
COL. SMITH: Well, isn’t that interesting.
DR. SCRANTON: The cat is out of the bag, gentlemen.
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: (pointing) That’s a railroad switchyard. And here’s some kind of industrial plant—a factory, we think, but this is preliminary. That definitely looks like an ore conveyor, though—
COL. SMITH: Yes. So we have heavy industry for sure, and we can infer the existence of air defenses. Possibly even defenses that can take out an RQ-4. (pause) Has anyone briefed NCA yet? NSC? The Joint Chiefs?
DR. SCRANTON: There’s worse to come.
COL. SMITH: Oh dear.
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: I hadn’t got to the air samples yet. They show a surprisingly low level of PM10 and PM50 particulates, which mostly come from diesel engines. This tends to suggest that they use all-electric traction on their railroads. But then there’s the radiation issue.
COL. SMITH: Radiation … What did you find, Louis?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: I’d like to remind everyone that you can get some radioactive isotopes in your air just from burning too much coal. We’re going to have to give the eggheads more time to chew it over, eliminate other possible causes … but we are seeing isotopes like Cesium-133 and Iodine-131, and the radioisotope mass/yield curve suggests they came from prompt—not thermal—fission of Plutonium-239, and a bunch of thermal-neutron-induced fission of Uranium-238—
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: What does that mean?
LIAISON, AIR FORCE: It’s fallout from an atmospheric H-bomb detonation. The Plutonium fission fragments came from the initiator and spark plug, the U-238 products come from the hohlraum. They—or someone on their time line—set off one or more thermonuclear devices quite recently. Less than a month ago, in fact, and it was probably in the hundred-kiloton-to-five-megaton range. This might indicate an active aboveground H-bomb test program. But the timing is right for them to have nuked our drones out of the sky.
DR. SCRANTON: We’re playing it close for now, gentlemen, but the White House is aware of the situation. A decision has been made, for better or worse. (pause) As of now, we’re treating this time line, time line 178, as a high-tech threat. It gets its own code name: BLACK RAIN, a hat tip to the fallout. While a National Security Order has been drafted and SAC are migrating a para-time-capable B-52 bomb wing armed with nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to Thule just in case, the President has made it abundantly clear that this is a defensive posture only, not preparation for a first strike. She’s been briefed on Camp Singularity and is fully aware of the implications. She wants to play this very low-key, until we can provide some intel context on what we’re dealing with in BLACK RAIN. She doesn’t want to risk whacking a hornet’s nest with a baseball bat unless there’s no alternative.
COL. SMITH: This is what you were priming us for, isn’t it?
DR. SCRANTON: Yes, Colonel. I’m afraid we’ve run out of time. We’re going to keep probing with Tier 1 drones and micro-UAVs, but they can only get us so far; we badly need human eyes at ground level.
LIAISON, CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: But she’s not ready to deploy yet!
COL. SMITH: Leave that to me.
END TRANSCRIPT
UPSTATE NEW YORK, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020
That afternoon, Rita flew into Rochester on a Delta connection via Minneapolis. She was as tired and irritated as usual on arrival (she had been mildly disappointed to discover that her DHS staff ID card didn’t give her the right to magically sidestep the airport security lines or the scrum at the checked baggage belt); all she wanted to do was rent a car and drive out to the transit facility for Camp Graceland. She was not expecting to find Colonel Smith waiting for her in Arrivals, looking impatient. “Your flight is late.”
“Tell me about it, sir.” She’d worked out early on that calling him “sir” put the Colonel in a more receptive frame of mind. “You aren’t here just for me, are you?”
“As a matter of fact, I am. Walk this way. We need to talk.”
Rita tried to keep up with him while wrestling with three months’ worth of baggage. It was a futile battle, adding extra stress on top of her irritation and the layer of stifling paranoia added by the Colonel’s arrival. What does he want now? she wondered. She knew she hadn’t done well on the FBI course, but surely it would take something more important to drag the Colonel out of his office for the day?
Smith headed straight for the drop-off lane in front of the terminal, then paused for her to catch up. A gray government car nosed into the curb beside him; the trunk and doors sprang open. “Let me help you with that,” he said, taking Rita’s suitcase to
her chagrin. “Get in—we’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”
It wasn’t exactly a luxury limo, but there was a privacy screen between the passengers and the driver up front. The Colonel climbed in beside her, fastened his seat belt, then rapped on the partition.
“You’re probably wondering if this is about the course,” he told her as the car moved off. “It’s not. What’s happened is—” He paused, then rummaged for a bottle of water in the storage bin the car featured in place of an armrest. “Want one? No? Okay. There’s been a major new development, and I’m rearranging your training and operational preparedness as a result.”
“New development?” Rita echoed.
“We thought we had a year to put you through the standard clandestine ops backgrounder. But events are outrunning us. The original plan was to certificate you for basic fieldwork, then assign you as a trainee analyst for a year or two, before looking into provisioning you for autonomous para-time deployment. Unfortunately”—he grimaced—“shit just got real. So we’re rescheduling everything.”
“What kind of shit? What rescheduling?”
Smith opened his water bottle and chugged it. “Sorry. You need to be able to world-walk. This may be a false alarm, in which case it’s back to training as usual. But we need you ready for deployment at short notice. You’re going to be in the clinic for a month—”
“Clinic? What clinic?” Rita realized her voice was shrill. “What does this involve?”
“No brain surgery.” Smith flashed her a nervous grin, evidently startled by her response. “No knives, nothing like that. Just a couple of injections. Hmm. Well, actually there is some surgery involved—on your left arm. I’m assuming you’re right-handed? It’s an implant to control the ability. But my understanding is that it’s pretty straightforward stuff, and once you’re in control you can take some leave, or go straight back to studying Spook 201. It’s just that it can take up to a month, and in a worst-case scenario we may not have a month in which to activate you when we need you.”
“Worst—” Rita stopped. “You’re going to turn me into a world-walker because you might need me at short notice?”
“Pretty much. Unfortunately I can’t tell you precisely why at this point. Let’s just say, we no longer have the luxury of giving you a lengthy training period. And for now let’s leave a big fat question mark over where and what it’s all about.”
Oh great. Rita tensed. Her head was beginning to ache. “Is this optional?”
The Colonel’s fey grin was equally tense: “Not really, no.”
“Okay. Sir.” She leaned back, closing her eyes. “Where are we going?”
“You don’t need to know. Let’s just say it’s a private clinic in Connecticut, within chopper range of a bunch of high-end hospitals for backup if we need specialized help. First, you’ll undergo a couple of brain scans, MRI and PET, and a lumbar puncture. Then you sit around for a couple of days; then there’ll be some injections. Next you go into a special isolation suite, which is locked down to prevent you triggering by accident. After a few days they’ll begin testing you with a particular trigger engram in a safe space: if you world-walk successfully, you’ll find yourself in a mirror installation in the destination time line we’re using for testing. Then, after a couple of weeks of tests and training so you know how to work your new ability, they’ll implant you with an emergency beacon, show you how to use it, and that’s it. Oh, except for the legal formalities, which we’ll run you through before we activate you.”
“Legal…”
“World-walking is illegal without a court order issued by a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court; they amended the law in 2004 … So before we switch you on, we have to haul you up in front of a judge, confirm you’re a DHS employee, and get you a shiny personalized certificate giving you carte blanche to commit a felony—as long as you do so on government business—that would normally carry up to twenty years in jail or an unlimited fine per occurrence.”
“Oh.” Rita fell quiet for a minute. “There’s a lot here that I don’t understand.” There’s a lot here I don’t want to ask you about, she added silently. Over the past few months a claustrophobic cynicism had settled deep into her bones: Trust no one, and verify everything, it prompted. She hated it, but—
“Don’t worry, I’ve got a classified background briefing document for you that goes into all the details in mind-numbing detail. You’re cleared for it: just remember it’s code-word-secret and not for public disclosure.”
“How routine is all this?” Rita opened her eyes.
“You’re the first,” said Smith, staring out the window at the passing traffic on the other side of the highway.
“I’m a guinea pig?” She stared at him.
“How many other Clan orphans do you think we have?”
“I don’t know, I—hell.”
“Listen, we have been manipulating this stuff in cell cultures for nearly two decades now. We know all about how the process works. Most of the stuff you need to world-walk is already inside you: we’re just going to repair the broken on/off switch. Yes, it’s an experimental process. But you’re valuable to us. You’re not the only one, but people like you don’t grow on trees. Professor Schwartz isn’t going to tell her team to do anything if she doesn’t think it’s safe to proceed. And on the other side of the coin, think what the benefits are: you’re going to gain a superpower and get an opportunity to use it to protect America. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
Sitting in the back of a government limo and listening to a highly persuasive secret police colonel, all Rita could do was nod, nervously: whether because she agreed with him or because it was the course of least resistance she herself could not have said. They ask you to do one more unforgivable thing and you cannot back out, Kurt had explained. At the time, she hadn’t really understood, but now …
“I can cope,” she lied.
SOMEWHERE IN CONNECTICUT, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020
The first week went exactly as Colonel Smith had told her it would, except for one significant deviation: he hadn’t mentioned the boredom. The clinic was located in woodland somewhere off a highway between Durham and New Haven, and there was sporadic cell service at best—and none in her room, which was underground. There was no cable TV, no high-speed Internet access, and if she wanted to update her phone or check her e-mail she had to go upstairs and hope for a signal. There was a small library of dog-eared books in the rec room, but it appeared to be policed by a member of the nursing staff who was both excessively friendly and claustrophobically evangelical. Consequently its contents were not to Rita’s taste.
She was the only patient, although there were half a dozen beds. The clinic’s main function, she gathered, was to perform surgery to change the biometrics of deep-cover DHS agents—bone-shim insertions to change gait and facial appearance, fingerprint and iris transplants, even experimental CRISPR genome editing of epithelial cells to spoof DNA sequencers. Rita spent her time in the break room, trying not to attract attention. Short of going for long walks inside the perimeter fence, it was the best entertainment on offer. Which was to say, very little.
“Good morning!” Dr. Jennifer Lane greeted her brightly on her first morning. “Call me Jenn? I work for Professor Schwartz, who runs the project here, and I’m responsible for your therapeutic regime. If you have any questions about the medical aspects of this procedure, I’m the person you need to talk to.” Rita smiled, taking an instant dislike to the doctor, whose bright-eyed chirpiness reminded her of early morning lectures suffered in silence after student drinking parties. Not her greatest moments, but nevertheless … “I guess you want to know all about how world-walking works for walkers of worlds! Isn’t that the case?”
Kill me now, Rita thought. “Yeah, but can I grab a coffee first?” She hadn’t slept well—or at all, if she was perfectly truthful with herself. She’d spent the night wired up to a mobile EEG and an ambulatory blood pressure monitor, which by 4 a.
m. had become an almost unendurable torture (for it woke her up with her arm in agony whenever it inflated, which was every half hour). “I’m not myself right now.”
“Absolutely! Caffeine is safe at this point, so I’ll just fetch one for you right now! How do you take it?”
“Flat white, extra shot, no sugar.”
Rita slumped into the patient’s chair in the doctor’s office as Jenn bounded away in the direction of the coffee robot by the nurses’ station. She yawned, scratched halfheartedly at the inflatable cuff around her arm, and tried not to doze off. The doctor returned regrettably rapidly, just as the blood pressure monitor ground its gears and the cuff began to inflate again, sending sparks of pain into her arm. “So!” Dr. Jenn bounced into her chair. “World-walking! Let’s skip the physics for now, it goes off into brane theory, which nobody understands without a PhD in pure mathematics. Let’s just say we live in a multiverse—a bundle of parallel universes branching off each other. The vast majority are identical but for some quantum uncertainty, and they keep merging and reemerging. But there are sheaves of parallels where the differences add up to something we can tell apart. A huge number of such sheaves exist, and we call them time lines.
“The world-walking mechanism uses some intracellular machinery, self-replicating wet-phase nanotechnology with embedded quantum dots to ensure coherence of the wave function, that can bounce you—and anything electrostatically earthed with you—into another time line, as long as the Q-machines are all triggered together. The trigger event is a bunch of them going into the same state transition more or less simultaneously, and the easiest way to get this to happen is by hitting a bunch of neurons in your brain that contain Q-machines with a signal that excites all of them at once. The easiest bunch to trigger are in your lateral occipital complex, where your vision system recognizes images. We hit them with a unique image—a complex knotwork—and as you recognize it the Q-machines in that part of your brain activate.
“You’re probably wondering how we control which time line you end up in. It’s all in the knot we use. Different knots have different dimensional parameters and so they trigger different recognition groups, and this causes differential ensemble excitation in the Q-network—”
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