The Traveler's Companion

by Chater, Christopher John

  “I’ll manifest you a good lawyer.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Today, I’ll be shopping. Would you make sure there’s a sale at Macy’s? I hate paying full price.”

  “Of course. I should also think you’ll require a driver to take you to the salon and to the spa.”

  She sighed and said, “So much to do today.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Teleportation had its perils. Iverson arrived in what looked like an airplane hangar, amid the sound of gunshots. He quickly ducked behind a nearby tank. Another bang. He went to all fours like a dog and crawled toward the front of the tank to get a look around. There were three submarines, a stealth bomber, and rows of nuclear warheads that went on for miles.

  “Show yourself, you bastard!” Gibbons’s words echoed through the hangar, followed by an absurd succession of automatic gunfire.

  “Mark!” Iverson shouted.

  A ceasefire.

  “Iverson, is that you?”

  “Yes, damn it! What’s going on?”

  “Be careful! Bin Laden’s in here somewhere!”

  “The real one?”

  “No, no. I manifested the fucker. Don’t worry, I don’t think he’s armed.”

  Iverson was worried. He had been mugged by his own manifestation and he wasn’t about to underestimate a re-creation of the world’s most wanted terrorist.

  A few feet away, Iverson spotted a man sprawled out on the floor. He was wearing military patent leather black boots with khaki pants tucked inside them and a red armband with a Nazi swastika on it. It was Adolf Hitler. Gibbons had laid him out. Was Mussolini also stretched out somewhere, or was he still alive, hiding behind one of Saddam Hussein’s Scud missiles?

  “Get rid of him!” Iverson shouted.

  “Damn it, I wanted to put a round between his eyes!” Gibbons said.

  “You might hit me!”

  “All right, all right!”

  An arm suddenly wrapped around Iverson’s neck and he was yanked up to his feet. Something sharp was pressed against his throat.

  “Don’t move,” a voice said into his ear.

  Had Iverson’s mind not gone blank from fear, he could have easily manifested his way out of the situation.

  Gibbons appeared from behind a tank, a 9mm pistol aimed at them. “Stay calm, Ryan.”

  Iverson couldn’t stay calm. He could only hope Gibbons wasn’t seriously considering taking the shot.

  “Just stay still, Ryan,” Gibbons said, closing one eye.

  “No, don’t shoot!” Iverson pleaded.

  “Get back or he dies!” Bin Laden said.

  “Don’t worry, Ryan! All he has is a broken computer board,” Gibbons shouted.

  “He has it against my jugular vein!”

  A shot rang out. Iverson didn’t feel any pain at first, but there was some pressure in his right shoulder and a total loss of power to the right side of his body. Gibbons had shot him. Had Bin Laden not been holding him up, Iverson would have collapsed to the floor.

  “Bastard!” Bin Laden shouted. He dragged the plastic computer board across Iverson’s neck and let him drop to the floor.

  Several shots rang out. Bin Laden fell to the floor next to Iverson, his eyes open but lifeless.

  Iverson’s mind was a scrambled mess. Although he applied as much pressure as he could to his neck, nothing would stop the bleeding.

  “Don’t worry, Ryan. I gotcha.”

  * * * * *

  Gibbons’s young face, with smears of black paint on his cheeks and forehead, was peering down at Iverson. He adjusted the strap of the MP5 over his shoulder and said in a barely recognizable youthful voice, “Cleaned you up good, Ryan. Good as new.”

  Iverson no longer felt any pain. He sat up, rubbing his neck. His skin was dry.

  “In real life you would’ve been dead,” Gibbons said, extending a hand to help his friend up.

  Iverson rejected the assistance. He wasn’t ready to stand up just yet. He wrapped his arms around his shins and took in some deep breaths. Physically, he felt fine. If anything his senses had been heightened by the near-death experience, but he needed a minute to collect himself.

  Gibbons asked him, “So how do you like the place?”

  Iverson stood up and brushed himself off. Luckily, Gibbons had cleaned up all the blood. “I fail to see the gamesmanship in hunting unarmed enemies of America in a stockpile of nuclear missiles.”

  “This is all real, Ryan. The missiles, the tanks, the stealth bomber. One hundred percent organic. Up until now, Russia has had a hard time managing the arsenal of their previous government. Over 40,000 tons of chemical weapons, 6,681 nuclear warheads, 12 submarines with 609 warheads, and 237 bombers with 884 cruise missiles. I figured it was time to rid the world of the constant threat,” Gibbons said.

  “These are real?!”

  “Of course. Why would I manifest warheads?” Gibbons asked.

  “What do you think is going to happen when it gets out that these weapons are missing? It’s going to create a global panic!”

  “I’m the Director of National Intelligence, Iverson. People panic when I tell them to panic.”

  Iverson was panicking anyway.

  “At the very least I thought you’d be happy,” Gibbons said. “You’re the one who hates death so much. With these missiles out of circulation, we don’t have to worry about our enemies getting a hold of them.”

  “And you think manifesting Osama Bin Laden in a hangar full of real weapons is a good idea?”

  “For fuck’s sake, Iverson, it wasn’t the real Bin Laden. He couldn’t take the missiles back with him.”

  “What if he sets one of them off here?”

  Gibbons seemed to casually consider the idea before saying, “He’d need the codes. You don’t just push play on a nuclear missile.”

  Iverson shook his head. He had anticipated these types of problems. If and when the Zone reached the public, who could keep track of who had what?

  They threaded their way between two trident missiles en route to a staircase that led underground.

  “My lair,” Gibbons said. “There’s something I want to show you. Sort of the coup de grace.”

  “Can’t wait,” Iverson said, terrified.

  They descended the metal spiral staircase and arrived in an underground command center. A wall contained a dozen dimensional rifts the size and shape of common flat screen monitors, each of which had a view into reality. There were views inside homes and apartments, Middle Eastern terrorist training camps, and various offices inside a Chinese government building. All of them violated international laws and treaties.

  “From the Zone, I can probe a communist’s colon,” Gibbons said.

  If anything, this reinforced Iverson’s belief that peace could never exist without respect for privacy. The Zone had to be shut down.

  Angela entered the room, scantily clad. She was wearing a black leather miniskirt, fishnet stockings, and a top that offered less concealment than a bra. She was holding an opened manila folder.

  “What are you doing here, Angela?” Iverson asked her.

  She smiled at him, but didn’t respond.

  “That’s not Angela,” Gibbons said. “An ephemera.”

  “This is highly irregular, Director. What if C.C. Go sees this? He could get the wrong idea. This could jeopardize the mission,” Iverson said.

  “She’s my secretary. Who else could handle all the red tape? I’m starting a new branch of intelligence gathering. This is DIS, the Department of Inter-dimensional Security. Our goal is to eradicate potential threats to the United States and its allies, both extra-dimensional and domestic.”

  “Director Gibbons, I need your signature,” Angela said.

  The director signed without looking at the document. Angela turned and left without saying goodbye. When she opened the door, another Angela was in the next room typing at a desk. An Angela was passing out interoffice memos.

  “Great thing about the Zone,” Gi
bbons said, “No labor costs. Workforce dissolves after an eight hour shift. Taxpayers are going to love that. The office supplies are real, though. Can’t have documents disappearing. That reminds me.” He turned to the Angelas. “Angela, make sure to send Office Mart payment for the supplies. Bill it to the CIA account.”

  “Yes, sir,” they said.

  “You can manifest any secretary you want, Mark. I think in the interests of this mission, it might be better—”

  “Don’t nag, Iverson. She’s fine. We’ve got bigger fish to fry, anyway. I need your help with something. Come with me.”

  Gibbons led him to a twenty-four-inch-thick steel door. To open it, Gibbons provided a retinal scan, EEG scan, and voice recognition.

  “These can all be circumvented in the Zone,” Iverson said.

  “That’s why I put in this last security measure,” Gibbons said. They entered the vault, but nothing was inside.

  “This is your security measure? Having nothing in here?” Iverson asked.

  “Oh, there’s something in here. You just can’t see it. Try and find it,” Gibbons said.

  Iverson walked around the room and felt along the walls, but he couldn’t find anything. “Okay, I’m stumped. Where is it?”

  Gibbons placed his hands on the wall and leaned in to whisper to it. A secret compartment reacted to his command and a drawer came out from the wall. Inside was a spherical object about the size of a basketball. Affixed to one side was a keypad with two LED lights, one red and one green. The green one was lit. Gibbons took it out and tossed it to Iverson.

  “Think fast,” Gibbons said.

  Iverson caught it as carefully as he could. He manifested a table to put it on. As he examined it, he could hear Gibbons smiling.

  “Since you probably won’t ask for another hour or so, I’ll just tell you what it is. I found it while snooping around a weapons research lab in China. According to the data I retrieved from their computers, it’s what they’re calling a proton bomb.”

  Iverson’s head turned so fast it nearly gave him whiplash. “Proton bomb!”

  “According to their data, it’s potentially powerful enough to make the planet look like Fidel Castro’s face. There’s also a chapter on black hole physics I didn’t totally understand, but I think it was a lot of nonsense about the explosion creating a black hole that grows and grows until it devours the entire solar system. Bullshit, really. They thought the same thing about the atomic bomb.”

  Iverson was too shocked to speak. He manifested a chair and sat in it. Part of him was glad the Chinese no longer had the bomb, but if they had devised the technology once, they could probably do it again. The world was going to be a different place now. Humankind could not only destroy their own planet, they could annihilate the entire solar system.

  Gibbons took the bomb off the table and put it back in the drawer.

  “It’s a good thing I got it out of the hands of the Chinese. We’d be fucked otherwise. This is why DIS has to continue. This is why the Zone has to remain exclusively in the hands of America. Democracy must prevail,” Gibbons said.

  “Democracy? When the Zone gets out, which it inevitably will, you can forget about government altogether. Forget about science, politics, medicine—it’ll all be gone. The Zone will be an extinction-level event, erasing life as we know it in the blink of an eye.”

  “Come on, Iverson. They said the same thing about the Internet. We survived it, we’ll survive this. It just makes the game that much more interesting.” Gibbons’s smile made him look like the Cheshire Cat.

  “The Zone is not an example of technological evolution. The Zone will make technology obsolete. Innovation and advancements in technology allow society to grow its infrastructure, but the Zone will make commerce unnecessary. How will we have an economy if all of man’s needs are met with a mere thought?”

  “For now we’ll still need food and shelter because nothing lasts here. But I bet, sooner or later, someone will come up with a solution for that problem. We’ll have a world without hunger, disease, or boredom. Doesn’t sound like such a bad thing to me.”

  “The Zone isn’t stable. As human beings, we need stability.”

  “You’re threatened by the Zone, aren’t you? That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why you’re so negative. Is it because you don’t think science will be necessary anymore? Don’t worry. I’m sure there’s a place for science in all this . . . somewhere.”

  Iverson hid his shock and suppressed the desire to argue. It wouldn’t help. Why would Gibbons give up being the most powerful man in the universe just because of a few technical details?

  “Come check out my office,” Gibbons said.

  A hidden staircase went down to another level. This room had cathedral ceilings, a wooden desk, and a spectacular view. Outside a viewport was Earth, looking as if it were floating on a black canvas. Pictures of it hadn’t done it justice. It was breathtaking. Now nighttime in Europe, Italy looked like an electric boot. He wanted to be in Naples, drinking wine on a moonlit beach and watching the sea wash into the natural grottoes.

  “That’s the real Earth,” Gibbons said.

  “The real Earth? You mean on the other side of that window is space?”

  Was DIS a space station?

  “That’s right. Oh, don’t worry,” Gibbons said crossing over to the window. He began pounding on it with his fist. “Strong as steel. Manifested it myself.”

  “What happens when it degrades?”

  “Well, I won’t be sucked out into space, Iverson, that’s for sure. Come on. You know that reality can’t come into the Zone. For fuck’s sake, man, have you been paying attention this whole time or what?” he said, chuckling. “I’d have to walk through the rift. But that would be a pretty stupid thing to do, now wouldn’t it? Well, I guess I could find a space suit in reality . . . could be fun . . . ah, maybe latter,” he said, finally dismissing the idea. “Well, what do you think?”

  “Impressively premature.”

  “Security for our dimension isn’t premature. It’s better to get a jump on it before everyone else gets here.”

  “If anyone else gets here. Hopefully not. But I suppose security is something to consider. I don’t know how it will work, though. If Go has his druthers, we won’t be able to stop people from coming into the Zone. We can’t put up a fence like at the American-Mexican border.”

  “A fence . . . interesting idea. We’ll get illegal aliens to make it. Be cheaper.”

  Iverson sighed, knowing Gibbons was only joking.

  “What we need is people, Iverson,” he said, more serious now. “Men, women, maybe even ephemera who can monitor any and all activity in the Zone. If we have a big enough staff, keeping an eye on anyone who enters the Zone may not be as difficult as it sounds.”

  Another Gibbons came down the stairs. “How many of me can I make? Thousands? Billions?” It asked. It went over and stood next to Gibbons. They looked like twins.

  “How will I know which one to take orders from?” Iverson asked.

  “You’ll take orders from all of us,” it said.

  “Wonderful,” Iverson said.

  “Eventually one of us will dissolve,” Gibbons said, looking to his counterpart.

  “Unless, of course, I want the Zone for myself.” It grabbed Gibbons by the arm and twisted it behind his back.

  “Ryan, help,” Gibbons cried out.

  Iverson wasn’t sure what do. Were they joking around?

  “Manifest a gun and shoot him, Ryan! Hurry!”

  “What the hell’s going on?” Iverson asked.

  The ephemera took out the 9mm from its holster and put it to Gibbons’s head.

  “Iverson! Do something!”

  “What do I do?” Iverson asked, panicked.

  The ephemera then let the gun fall to its side. It started laughing hysterically. Gibbons quickly joined it.

  “ ‘What do I do?’ ” the ephemera mocked, laughing harder. The doppelganger then vanished, the e
choes of its laughter still audible long after it was gone.

  “Very funny. But have you considered that you may not be able to control the ephemera?” Iverson asked. “How do you know they won’t revolt against you for real?”

  “Life insurance,” Gibbons said. “We hold the key to their existence. To their longevity. We are their gods. They have to do what we say.”

  “No,” Iverson said. “I don’t think they do.”

  “Having trouble at home, are we?” Gibbons asked, going over to sit behind his desk. He leaned back in the chair and put his feet up. His head blocked out most of Iverson’s view of Europe.

  Iverson went to sit in one of two chairs in front of the desk.

  “The woman I manifested is Beth, or rather I should say, a clone of her. Not only is she biologically the same, but she has the exact same personality.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “So? If it quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck.”

  “You think she’s the real Beth?”

  “No. What I mean is that she’s a human being, or close to it.”

  “I don’t get your beef, Iverson. You manifested your wife. That was the point.”

  “Mister Go is laboring under the idea that the ephemera are just mental projections, like three dimensional paintings. But what’s actually happening is that we’re producing biological life forces with personalities. They have free will.”

  Gibbons interlaced his fingers and put his hands on his stomach. “You’re saying they’re not just imaginary. They’re real people?”

  “Yes. Like clones. But we’re cloning the personality, as well.”

  “What about the Angelas I’m creating? Angela doesn’t have a real personality.”

  “She has whatever personality you give her. Maybe yours. Maybe your wife’s. Who knows? Who does she remind you of?”

  “No one. That’s why I like her.”

  “The point is that these are copies of human beings, very close copies. Homo simulacra ephemera.”

  “Then why can’t they manifest things in the Zone? Why can’t they be creative?”