The Beautiful Land

by Alan Averill

  When she turned twelve, her parents sent her to the Worthington-Kennedy Boarding School, a fortress of rich and powerful children for whom the word “elite” seemed woefully inadequate. Judith would have rather slept on a subway grate than been assigned to such a place, but sending their only daughter to a standard private school—or, God forbid, a public one—had simply been out of the question. Worthington was also located a good three hundred miles away, which had the added advantage of getting their daughter out of the public eye while hormones and time attempted to transform her from a gawky, long-limbed girl into something approaching the commonly accepted idea of beauty. You’ll love it, Buzz, her father had said as the family driver wheeled her bag down the stairs and into a waiting limousine. Gonna love it. They’ve got the best teachers there, and you’re gonna make a lot of friends. Now I gotta go, but we’ll call ya in a week or two, all right? That’s my girl.

  Despite her father’s words, she had not loved it. In fact, she hated it so much she often found herself sitting on a toilet with a razor blade in her hand trying to figure out if death would really be so bad. Near the end of her second semester, after seven months of teasing, taunting, and crushing loneliness, she’d actually drawn the blade across her wrist just to see what it felt like. When blood began to pour from the wound and pool on the floor, all she could think of was her parents’ anger that she had damaged the family name yet again. She managed to staunch the wound with a roll of wet paper towels before slinking back to the room she shared with the daughter of a national politician, where she crawled into bed and waited for sleep that never came.

  That moment, however, proved to be a changing point in her life. She’d redoubled her efforts in class, managed a transfer to a single-occupant dorm room, and altered her schedule so she would be forced to interact with other students as little as possible. Judith became a ghost that moved between classrooms, staying just long enough to absorb knowledge before vanishing once again.

  At the end of her freshman year, her mother called to inform her that she would be staying at Worthington over the summer while her parents jetted off to Spain. That gave Judith a chance to wander the empty campus and immerse herself in its massive library—which, her father had informed her at some point, was endowed by none other than the governor himself. Before long, she was practically living in the science stacks, where she quickly became enraptured by the world of theoretical physics. She began researching quantum mechanics, relativity, and every branch of high-level mathematics she could get her hands on, and within weeks found that she had a real knack for it.

  By summer’s end, she had the undivided attention of the science dean. By the end of her sophomore year, the quiet, skinny girl who had once pulled a razor across her skin sported a shiny 4.0 GPA, an authorship credit on a paper in the National Journal of Science, and a full-ride scholarship to MIT. When she’d called her parents to inform them she was leaving Worthington and heading off to college as a fifteen-year-old prodigy, her mother had simply said: Dear, that’s not one of those…science schools, is it? We were so hoping you would find a more appropriate career.

  Three years later, she graduated with honors, turned down offers from Oxford and Cambridge and various companies in national defense industries, and instead accepted a position at a tiny start-up called the Axon Corporation. Her friends—real friends this time—reacted with shock when they learned she was abandoning her brightly burning career for some tiny company based out of Australia, but she had smiled and hugged them and told them it was going to be fine. I want to work there, she’d said the night before she boarded a jet and left America forever. They have a machine they need me to build.

  • • •

  judith finds herself thinking about that decision as she waits for the elevator to bring her to the lower levels of the Axon Corporation. I should have taken the money and gone to Microsoft. Or maybe gone to CERN and worked on the Large Hadron Collider…. Hell, I should have stayed in New York and taught elementary physics to high-school kids. Because this thing has really gone off the goddamn rails.

  The elevator descends for nearly a minute, allowing Judith plenty of time to pace nervously across the slick, steel floor. Something had gone horribly wrong with the timeline swap, and the more she learned about it, the more frightened she became. All of her readings from the Machine came back inconclusive—even the most basic scientific tests were producing unexpected results. On the Internet, people were chattering about what was becoming known as Other Life, an inescapable sense that things were not how they were supposed to be. And, most disturbingly, reports were beginning to filter in about strange, feathered creatures that had been sighted in cities across the world.

  Judith’s immediate problem, however, was with her new boss. The entire board had vanished during the timeline swap, leaving behind a power vacuum Yates had gladly filled. The Axon Corporation now answered to him, which would make it much more difficult for Judith to push the reset button on his little experiment. The board had been easy to fool, but Yates was a different kind of operator altogether.

  Judith adjusts her laptop bag as the elevator doors open on a long white hallway that ends in a steel door. Taking a deep breath, she heads for it and keys in an entry code. She passes through three more doors with various security measures before finally emerging in a windowless changing area with an air lock on the far side. Etched upon the air-lock door, in large block letters, is a single word: CONDUITS.

  The room is silent save for the dull hum of machinery, but she knows that a handful of men—Yates’s men—will be waiting on the other side. Working quickly, she pulls on a bulky face mask and blue coverall suit over her black skirt and blouse. Snapping gloves over her hands and booties on her feet, she steps into the air lock, closes the door behind her, and waits for the cycle to complete.

  She emerges in a circular room of immense size, with a ceiling so high it seems not to exist at all. The chamber is filled with row upon row of beds, over a thousand in all, that stretch away as far as the eye can see. Next to every bed is a dialysis machine, a feeding tube, and an artificial breather connected to a person long since rendered comatose. All the patients have brightly colored wires implanted into their brains, and these stretch away from their heads and into a thick black cable, which connects to the Machine itself.

  A young soldier finally notices her arrival and strides over. He’s wearing the same blue coverall suit and air-filtration mask that Judith has, but he is also carrying an assault rifle wrapped in plastic. He examines her badge for a moment before taking a step backward. “Miss Halford,” he says, the surprise in his voice muffled by the mask. “We didn’t receive word you were coming.”

  Judith nods quickly. “Sorry for the last minute. Yates needs me to examine one of the conduits.”

  “Examine?”

  “Yes. As in, check in on.”

  Though she can only see the soldier’s eyes, Judith can tell that he’s not completely sold on her plan. He readjusts his grip on the gun and shuffles his shoulders back and forth. “Uh, Miss Halford, we’re under orders from Mr. Yates to shut down all of the conduits.”

  “I know that,” says Judith with more authority than she feels.

  “He was very specific.”

  “You can shut this one down when I’m done.”

  “I, uh…Okay, hold on. I need to check this.”

  The soldier hustles across the massive room to a small portable office, where he begins a heated conversation with another blue-clad figure. Judith leans back against the air-lock door and tries to look nonchalant, hoping that no one can see her knees knocking together. Additional soldiers, perhaps two dozen in all, are walking up and down the rows and turning off the machinery. Each time they flip a switch, she watches a person’s chest rise and fall, rise and fall, then stay still. They’re killing them, she thinks. Oh my God, they’re going to kill them all.

  She feels a brief, sudden urge to scream but manages to keep it in place. The so
ldier is running back to her, assault rifle at the ready. He skids into place a foot or so from her. “Miss Halford?” he asks, his voice trembling slightly.

  “Are we good here?” asks Judith. Somewhere nearby, one of the conduits makes a sputtering, gasping sound that she tries desperately to ignore.

  “We need a reason,” says the soldier.

  “A reason?”

  “We’re under orders to—”

  “I can see what you’re doing,” snaps Judith. “Look, what’s your name?”

  “Simmons.”

  “Simmons. Right. Okay, Simmons. Are you familiar with string theory?”

  The soldier raises his eyebrows. “No.”

  “Quantum mechanics?”

  “No.”

  “The laws of thermodynamics? Any of them?”

  “Uh…no?”

  “Then this is going to be a really long conversation. I don’t have time to give you an introduction to elementary particle physics, Simmons. The reason I need this man is because Yates needs this man, and that’s all you need to know. You want me to go find Yates and have him explain it to you? Because I can do that if you’d prefer.”

  Simmons dithers back and forth for a few seconds, then finally steps out of the way. “Okay, but look, I’m gonna have to get on the radio and—”

  “Call whoever you want,” says Judith as she brushes past him and walks away. “You know where to find me.”

  She expects to hear a shout from somewhere behind her, or worse yet, a gunshot, but there is nothing. She refuses to turn around, instead keeping her eyes focused on a single bed three-quarters of the way down the row. Each time she passes a soldier, he looks up from his task, glances sideways at her, then returns to shutting off the life-support systems. Keep it together, girl. Just a little farther. Just a few minutes, and it’s all over.

  After what seems an eternity, she stops next to a bed with the number 342 etched on the railing. The occupant is an older man with a thick grey beard and hair that flows down his shoulders. His face is a mess of scars, his nose bulbous and swollen. Glancing behind her to make sure she isn’t attracting more attention than necessary, she sets her laptop on his stomach, then runs her hand down the wires protruding from his skull. Working fast, she locates the point where they join the black cable and pulls them out, then connects the ends to a port on the back of her computer. When that is finished, she plugs a second set of wires into another port, leaving four male ends dangling down to the ground.

  The old man in the bed moans. One of the soldiers in the next row looks over, trying to decide if he should check it out. But then the woman he’s disconnecting reaches out and grabs his arm, and his attention is diverted once more.

  Judith picks up the loose bundle of wires and stares at them. Then, before she can lose her nerve, she pulls her hair aside, feels around at the base of her neck for a set of four small holes, and plugs the wires directly into her brain. A searing pain leaps up her spine and right into her eyes, and for a moment she thinks she’s going to pass out. But she manages to fight through it, pushing the pain down until it’s a dull roar in the back of her mind. Behind her, the woman who grabbed the soldier is trying to say something, but a year’s worth of forced sleep has made her speech incomprehensible. She mumbles a series of nonsense syllables before the soldier grabs a pillow and presses it firmly over her face. In a few moments, the arm drops limply to the side.

  Judith begins typing on her laptop, hoping that the soldier either doesn’t notice or doesn’t understand what she’s doing. But he seems more concerned about the woman he just smothered; he’s holding her wrist and looking at his watch in a bored, clinical way.

  You know, it’s possible that Yates knew about the fail-safe all along, thinks Judith as she types. If so, he may have replaced it. Or just deleted the thing…In which case, I guess we’re all fucked.

  When Judith first came up with the idea of a fail-safe, she chose to store it in the mind of an old homeless man named Vincent. He had always been one of the more frail conduits—a long-term alcoholic in the late stages of cirrhosis—and her hope was that Yates would never look for something so important inside the brain of someone who could die at any moment. It had been a calculated, dangerous risk, but somehow the old-timer had kept chugging along for four long years.

  “Thank you, Vincent,” whispers Judith in the old man’s ear as she finishes typing. “Thank you for everything.”

  She steps back and takes a deep breath. On her laptop screen, a single red light pulses slowly. Then she leans forward, grips the edge of the bed with her free hand, and presses the ENTER key.

  Pain floods her body, much worse than when she first plugged in the wires. She feels a scream leave her mouth but can’t figure out how to stop it. She sees a flood of seemingly random numbers and equations begin to stream across her laptop screen before her vision suddenly blacks out. She can hear a soldier yelling something, most likely at her, but she has no idea what he’s trying to say. Her entire world is a searing ball of agony, and for the first time since she was a young girl at a boarding school, she begins to wish she was dead.

  Her vision comes back suddenly. In front of her, the computer screen is a solid blur of numbers that race by so fast they seem at times not to be moving at all. The soldier has come around the now-dead woman in the bed and is making a beeline for her current position. This was a terrible idea, thinks Judith. He’s gonna kill me before I can finish. Ah God, I waited too long.

  Suddenly, the pain vanishes as her laptop makes a small, happy ding. Sitting on the screen, blinking slowly, are six digits:

  0 0 0 0 0 1

  She slams the laptop closed and yanks the wires out of her head, feeling a small trickle of blood leak down the back of her neck. As she drops the wires to the floor, the soldier steps around the bed and stares at her. “The fuck are you doing?” he asks, his gun pointing somewhere between the floor and Judith’s chest.

  “Research,” she croaks. She stands up and grabs the laptop, and is immediately hit by waves of dizziness.

  “Hold on. We were told—”

  “Talk to Simmons,” replies Judith as she turns around in a slow circle and tries to remember where the exit is. “He said it was fine.”

  “Oh he did, did he?”

  “…Yep.”

  She turns her back to the soldier and begins walking on unsteady feet. Out of the corner of her eye, she can see Simmons speaking to a group of four or five men and gesturing in her direction, but she keeps going. The soldier who killed the woman with the pillow begins walking toward his companions, but there’s no real hurry to his step. This is clearly just a job for him, and Judith another crazy scientist working with materials he can’t begin to understand.

  She reaches the exit, wobbles her way into the air lock, and waits for it to cycle. When the green light clicks on, she moves down the hall as fast as her legs will carry her, the laptop banging against her knees with each halting step. Her mind is a blur of random images and noise. Ghostly people seems to wander up and down the hall before flickering out in a burst of static electricity. She can hear the noise of a billion separate conversations from somewhere deep inside her mind; they mingle and blur together into an unpleasant white noise.

  “Damn,” says Judith to herself. “This is a lot worse than I imagined.”

  The elevator looms in front of her, but she ignores it. Instead, she heads for the staircase—which can’t be shut down if they figure out what she’s up to—and begins to climb. She continues to climb, step after uncountable step, until her feet begin to ache, and her legs cry out for rest. Not yet, she tells herself as she climbs. Not yet. No rest yet. Got to get out of here first.

  Slowly, things begin to improve. The ghostly images of people fade as her brain figures out how to deal with all the new information that’s been introduced. The white noise drops to a dull drone. And her legs begin to regain some strength. Soon, she’s taking the stairs two at a time, racing higher and highe
r until finally bursting through a door near the ground floor and into an underground parking garage. Moving quickly past rows of black SUVs, she finally stops in front of a battered four-wheel-drive jeep that appears to have come from the Second World War. She tosses her laptop in the back, then cranes her neck to peer under the driver’s seat. To her unending joy, the briefcase she stashed there some twenty hours ago has not been found.

  “All right,” she says quietly. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”

  The jeep roars to life, and soon Judith is speeding off across the hard-packed desert floor of the Australian Outback. She rolls down the window and enjoys the night air in her hair, feeling more alive than she has in years. And as the headquarters of the Axon Corporation fades into her rearview mirror, she can just hear an alarm begin to wail.

  chapter sixteen

  Tak watches the world rush past a smudged and dirty window and tries to think of something to say. He and Samira are curled up in the passenger seat of an eighteen-wheeler, where the constant, steady sound of the highway has lulled her to sleep. Tak is amazed at how quickly it happened: one minute they were scrambling into the cab, and the next she was conked out against the door with her mouth hanging open and a spot of drool forming on her cheek. The sleep seems troubled—she whimpers a lot and occasionally mutters something nonsensical—but Tak isn’t going to wake her unless it becomes absolutely necessary. They have a long and dangerous road ahead of them; sleep is likely to be a rare pleasure.

  The driver hasn’t said anything since he plucked them, wet and shivering, from the side of the road nearly fifty miles ago. It’s unfortunate, this silence, because Tak has a thousand questions spinning around in his head. What day is it? What year? Are we back in the solid timeline? Did the Machine actually work? So far, he’s discovered nothing to convince him that the timeline change even occurred. The driver’s hat has a Kansas City Royals logo, the coffee on the dashboard came from a Starbucks, and the radio is belting out a heartbreaker by Tammy Wynette. If the Axon Corporation actually overwrote the solid timeline, things should be very different. Granted, all he can see right now is one portly trucker and a moonless highway night, so it was hardly a reasonable sample size, but still…