Recursion (Book One of the Recursion Event Saga)

by Brian J. Walton

  She turns to the rest of the group. “We need to clean up the Station and prepare it to be closed. The fire has made us too vulnerable and leaving it open risks the integrity of this organization.”

  So that would be a no. The team nods. I can see exhaustion in their eyes. They know as well as I do that this means a long journey ahead for all of us.

  “But first, breakfast.”

  The others stand slowly, stretching out the kinks in their sore muscles.

  Leung walks over to Genevieve and me. “What about my training?” she asks.

  “We’ll have to reassign you to a new station,” I say.

  “How long?”

  “When we get back, it shouldn’t take long to find someone else.”

  Leung takes a step forward. Her dark eyes burn. “Shouldn’t we stay? Investigate?”

  I glance at Genevieve, trying to mask my own frustration. “If the building hadn’t burned, then maybe. But we’re unequipped now. We need to return home.”

  Leung lets out a breath. She regards us both for a moment, and then turns on her heel, retreating down the hallway to her room.

  “She reminds me of you,” Vic says, eyeing me over his coffee. I shake my head at him. He grins and turns away.

  I turn to Genevieve. “I heard you on the phone.”

  She nods, regarding me evenly. “It was the police. A tenant on the third floor was careless with a cigarette.”

  I nod. “That should work.”

  “Have some breakfast, Agent Gardner. We have a long day ahead of us. Peter and I are going to the Station now to start the cleanup. Bring your team and meet us there in an hour.”

  Peter offers me a mug. “Coffee?”

  I take a sip and grimace at the watery mixture. “What is this?”

  Peter frowns. “Nescafé, it’s the newest craze from Switzerland.”

  What I would give for a Starbucks latte in all of its frothy, overly-sweetened glory. Instead I am stuck with this bland-tasting concoction. Thanks mid-century Europe. I force a smile. “It’ll do.”

  * * *

  The sky is gray over the city, the morning sun hidden behind a thick layer of rain clouds. Vic, Leung, and I are driving Peter’s car, a 1952 Ford Prefect with a bad habit of slipping out of second gear. Genevieve and Peter are in the Renault. They left earlier to give us a little more time to eat and shower. The plan now is to clear any assets that survived the fire and then blow the building. The decision still burns at me, but I can understand Genevieve’s logic.

  We cross back over the Seine to the Right Bank, and I get a glimpse, as I drive, of the Eiffel Tower standing over the city, looking magisterial in the cold light. At this moment, it seems to be more than just a piece of architecture. It is a landmark across decades, anchoring me to something knowable. Something solid. I remember visiting Paris with James on our honeymoon. And here I am, back in Paris, fifty years before my first visit.

  How did I get here?

  The simple answer is that my husband and I, while being driven home after a campaign event in downtown New York, were pushed off the FDR and into the East River and I was sucked through an underwater tunnel into the small town of Three Hills, Alberta in the 1930s. The local police thought I was crazy and sent me to a hospital in Vancouver. The kind that has padded walls in certain rooms. That’s where Vic found me, posing as a doctor who specialized in my supposed condition—they called it a fugue state. It took me months to believe Vic’s story about a government agency controlling tunnels through space and time. But he convinced me, and he recruited me.

  I reach without thinking and touch the ring.

  “How do you know that James died?” I ask Vic.

  Vic leans back in his seat. “After I brought you in, the History Department made up a file on you. If they said he died, then he died.”

  Leung is visible in the rearview mirror. She cleans her gun. She didn’t even know what a gun was six months ago. “I always dream about it. I wish I could remember more.”

  Vic shakes his head. “Don’t start this again.”

  “Vic…”

  “No. You keep talking like this, and you’ll want to see him again. And maybe you’ll find a way. But even if you figured out a time, even if you managed to get there without the ISD knowing, it’s still a bad idea. Maybe you just want to say goodbye, but even that is dangerous. You know that.”

  “We take those kinds of risks all the time.”

  Vic shakes his head. “All I’m saying is you gotta be careful.”

  I pull the car over. The old hotel stands gray and charred in the daylight. Other than a few pedestrians and a handful of parked cars, there is no one in sight—it’s hardly the cordoned off scenes I am used to seeing back home.

  I drape my arm across the back of Vic’s seat and twist to see both him and Leung. “Let’s get to work.”

  * * *

  I climb out of the car and take the short flight of stairs up to the hotel’s front door. Vic and Leung follow. The first-floor hallway is scorched black. The narrow, wallpapered space has taken on an eerie, ashen gloom. The fire had spread well into the front rooms after we left, but the trucks had stopped the blaze before the hotel was reduced to rubble.

  I climb the stairs. One of the steps has burnt through, and I leap over it. Peter’s apartment is on the sixth floor, in the west-facing apartments, which would get plenty of sunlight if it weren’t for the false wall covering the windows. He is already inside when I open the door.

  “Welcome to my humble abode,” he says with a wry grin.

  “Charmed,” I say.

  I step into the apartment with Vic and Leung following me in. The fire damage is much the same as the rest of the building. To any casual observer, this apartment would be the same as the others. But I know about the additions.

  “Would you like a drink?” Peter asks Leung.

  She looks at the liquor cabinet and then back to me. It is scorched and the bottles are covered in ash. “I don’t think so,” Leung asks.

  “Go on. The bottle of Madeira. Top shelf, furthest to the left.”

  “I do not want a drink,” Leung insists.

  “Sorry, Leung. He’s insufferable.” I shake my head at Peter and walk to the liquor cabinet against the opposite wall. Finding the bottle of Madeira, I give it a twist. There is a click as a hidden lock disengages, and I step back as the whole cabinet glides out a few centimeters from the wall.

  “Come on,” I say.

  I swing the cabinet until there’s enough room to slide through the hidden doorway. Inside is a space only four-feet wide that runs the length of Peter’s living room. A narrow work station fills most of the space. Filing cabinets line the walls. Usually, this room is carefully organized, but now every single drawer is open with papers scattered everywhere. Ishimwe is in the middle of it all, busily pouring things into boxes.

  “How’s it going?” I ask.

  “I’m almost done with the files,” Ishimwe says.

  My attention is pulled to a large safe obscured by shadows in the back of the room. “What about the magnets?”

  Ishimwe nods. “We’ll do that last so you three can get some distance.”

  “It better be plenty of distance,” Vic says from behind me. “Those things can be a bitch.”

  The safe is shielded, but my back molar aches standing this close to it.

  “What’s in the safe?” Leung asks.

  “How does your mouth feel?” I say in response.

  She puts a hand to her jaw. “Sore,” she says.

  “And why is your mouth sore?” Peter asks.

  “You know about magnets?” I ask.

  Peter nods. “Of course. Any object that comes within the same time period as itself, a pair of glasses, pens, rings, even an amputated limb wants to be united with its double.”

  Ishimwe grimaces. Vic reaches into his pocket, pulling out a small metal object, and sets it on one of the filing cabinets. Leung picks it up, holding it to a lamp. I’v
e seen it many times. Two pennies seemingly fused together. Vic’s good-luck charm.

  Vic points at the pennies. “If two copies come too close, this happens.”

  “It literally acts as a magnet,” I say. “The ISD uses this to track their field agents. They take a core from one of our back molars, duplicate it, and then reinsert the original back into our tooth.”

  Leung rubs her jaw, staring at Vic’s fused pennies. “That will happen to my tooth?”

  I shake my head. “No. The sample we take is too small; the force increases with the size of the magnet. It’ll hurt like crazy, but your tooth won’t fly out of your mouth.”

  “That is good,” Leung says, still massaging her molar.

  “You’re damn right,” I say. Leung stares at me, confused. I had assumed she was being sarcastic, but I realize now that she is genuinely pleased that her tooth isn’t in danger of being yanked by some unseen force from her mouth.

  Peter picks up the coin from the top of the cabinet.

  “And how does that work, exactly?” Peter asks. “Making the copies? Because I’ve tried to muddle through it in my own head, but...” He shrugs.

  I nod at Peter’s question. “The tunnels actually drift in time. It’s why if you leave a few seconds apart from each other, you might arrive minutes or, in some cases, days apart. But they don’t always drift in the same direction. Some tunnels drift closer together, some farther apart. Picture two tunnels where the openings are drifting closer together in time, but share the same physical space. So if you left a coin,” I point to Vic’s coins, “on the ground in front of the first tunnel, you would see it when you come out the other end. But then, if you pick up that coin and travel backwards…”

  Peter nods. “It will still be where you left it. And now you will have two coins. Ingenious, really.”

  “Rinse and repeat,” I say.

  “Rinse what?” Leung asks.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say.

  “And the ISD has access to one of these tunnel configurations?” Peter asks.

  “That’s right,” Vic says. He reaches over and snatches the coins from Leung. She backs away from it, almost gratefully.

  “Could this happen to a—a person?” She asks.

  I shake my head. “The universe acts in confounding ways when we are in the wrong time. It’s what we call Recursion Events. Coming too close to yourself seems to be the worst kind of Recursion Event. Get too close to your double and… Let’s just say that it’s the only time the ISD has actually witnessed tunnels spontaneously forming.”

  “I see,” Leung says.

  I hear a noise. Genevieve has appeared in the doorway. She steps through the mess and presses a newspaper into my hands.

  “We need to hurry up,” she says. “This is more serious than I thought.”

  I check its headline. But it’s in French. “Read it for me.” I am passable with conversational French, but when it comes to reading a newspaper I’m hopeless.

  “There was a riot in the city last night. Over thirty arrested, several injuries, maybe one death.”

  “Why are you showing me this?”

  “Part of the problems in Algeria. Sympathizers protested and the police fought back,” She shakes her head. “But none of the unrest has been in Paris before now. People felt separate from it here. It’s… odd. I need you to check for me. If this is anomalous…”

  She doesn’t have to finish the thought. I shrug off my pack, taking out my tablet. “I’ll check.”

  * * *

  The tunnel hasn’t collapsed. I take the last step down the stairs and into the cellar, staring at the shadow on the back wall. Even in the dark of the cellar, the shadow seems unnatural, as if God had burned a hole through the fabric of reality.

  It looks just like it had, but still, its destination may have changed. Tunnels will drift naturally through time, but they can sometimes drift through space as well. The physical space around tunnels usually act as anchors, but if the space is altered in some way, the tunnel can move. This is why, when we discover a tunnel, we do as little to the area around it as possible.

  I feel a sudden urge to escape, to dive into the unknown, even if it could mean death.

  I thumb on the tablet and extend its antenna. I open up the secure network and wait for the signal to appear. This will tell us if the contact is still solid; that the tunnel hadn’t drifted on either end.

  There’s a trill from the tablet and a single bar appears. It’s weak, but it’s there. I log into the ISD’s databases and do a search for “Algerian revolt” along with today’s date. Nothing.

  I redo the search with a broader date range, and I get a ping. An article about the battle of Philippeville pops up. But that’s in Algeria, well over a thousand miles away and across the Mediterranean. The dates also don’t fit. The attack by the Algerian army is supposed to happen two days from now. But the events could still be connected. In a separate incident called the Paris Massacre of 1961. The French Police would attack a demonstration of over 30,000 pro-FLN Algerian demonstrators in Paris, killing, by some estimates, between one and three hundred. My chest tightens as I continue to read. This is supposed to happen almost seven years from now.

  Shit.

  Whoever this Interloper is, they are affecting things on a geopolitical level. Last night’s incident was not as large as the 1961 protests will be, but events are being pulled earlier. I’ve only ever seen this a few times, and one of those times was when we captured the Interloper named Phaedrus, which means that Genevieve could be right.

  I walk quickly behind the staircase, feeling the tunnel’s presence, huge and gaping, behind me. There’s a large piece of plywood set into the floor. It is charred and covered in soot, but intact. I pull it aside, revealing a pit dug into the ground, about three feet in diameter and six feet deep.

  Inside the hole is a thirty-gallon steel barrel filled with gasoline. Attached to the side of the barrel is an explosive with a radio detonator attached to it. If the Station is in jeopardy, then this is the final directive. I flip on both the receiver and transmitter. Both are working. I unclip the transmitter from the barrel and then cover the hole back up. I set the transmitter on the nearest shelf and take another look at the dark shadow on the back wall. Frustration fills me. Closing a tunnel is always the last solution an ISD agent takes, and I’ve heard of it happening a handful of other times, and then only because the tunnels had become a danger to nearby residents.

  Closing a tunnel because of an Interloper… It’s unthinkable, even if this so-called Order of the Perpetual Dawn is behind it. There has to be a way to keep it open, despite the danger. I set the transmitter on the nearest shelf and switch it off. Genevieve and I are going to have to talk about this first.

  I head back up the stairs, taking them two at a time.

  Vic is at the end of the first-floor hallway and hurries toward me as soon as I appear.

  “Are we closing the tunnel?” he asks.

  “Not if I can help it,” I say.

  “Well, they’re almost done clearing things out. Genevieve’s been shouting orders like a crazy person.”

  I lean in toward Vic, lowering my voice. “Maybe she’s been doing the Station Agent thing for too long,” I say. “We can talk to Command about getting her transferred.” But the words pain me even as I say them. Genevieve trained me, and that bond goes a long way.

  Vic nods. “That’s not a bad idea.”

  “Shame to see this go,” Peter says, descending the staircase. “For the last six months it’s been my home.”

  “Don’t worry,” Vic says. “I’m sure the ISD will find a new dark little hole for you to call home soon enough.”

  “Sounds simply charming,” Peter says.

  Genevieve appears behind Peter on the stairs. “Genevieve, we can’t do this,” I say.

  She stops and regards me evenly.

  “Even if it’s the Order, we need to stay and track them. Enough of our gear is intac
t, and the tunnel hasn’t collapsed. We can do this.”

  Vic looks at me. “What’s this about the Order?”

  “Genevieve believes they’re responsible for the fire.”

  “That’s enough,” Genevieve says, her voice harsh. “We spoke about this. It’s decided. We’re done. We can continue this discussion when we get back to Command.” She takes in a breath. “For now, I need to return to the police. They will need a story for the explosion. I’m thinking gas lines.”

  “I’m going—” I begin to say, and stop when pain shoots through my back molar.

  I double over in pain. “We’re moving them now?”

  Vic leans against the wall, holding the side of his head.

  Peter shakes his head in confusion. “I don’t know. I thought we were doing it last.”

  “Yeah, until the field agents here can get to a safe distance!” I shout.

  “Quiet!” Vic yells.

  I choke back another tongue-lashing. And then I hear it. Someone on an upper floor is screaming.

  * * *

  I half stumble, half run toward the staircase.

  “Agent Gardner!” Genevieve shouts.

  I look back at her, “If this is the Order, then now is our chance.”

  I turn back, running for the stairs. I can hear the others chasing after me.

  I shed my coat, tossing it behind me and hear a shout from Vic. I must have hit him. My shoes have low heels, but they’re still slowing me down, and I silently curse the decade for not embracing the running shoe yet as everyday wear. There’s another scream. Ishimwe and Leung were still up on the sixth floor. I reach the stairway and sprint upward, taking two at a time with Vic, Genevieve, and Peter following close behind me. Ash still hangs heavy in the air, choking my lungs. My back molar throbs, but my adrenaline has kicked in, dulling the pain.

  The stairwell curves upward, a landing between each level. I turn at the junction, passing a window blackened by ash. The stairs are wooden and the fire-scorched steps creak under my weight, but I can’t worry about them breaking beneath me. There’s no time.