by Peter Clines
“I’m happy here.”
“Great. If you decide to come work for me for the summer, you can make a pile of money and be even happier here.”
Mike looked at the parts of his phone. “Just a trip to Washington?”
“Yes. On my dime. I’ll pay you a grand out of the consulting fees up front, just for coming down. I’ll put you up in a real hotel even though we both know how much you love my couch. It’ll be a paid vacation.”
“And if I’m not interested, that’s it?”
“You’re going to be interested.”
“But if I’m not, that’s it.” Mike phrased it as a condition, not a question. “I get to come home with no guilt trips or tax audits or any other downsides.”
Reggie’s chin went up and down. “If you can look me in the eye after the panel and tell me you’re not interested, I’ll fly you home first class. I’ll even throw in a hundred bucks for drinks in the airport.”
Siobhan Emily Richmond appeared with a tray balanced on one hand. Mike swept the parts of his phone to the back of the table and she set down plates. She checked their drinks again, asked if they wanted more bread, and slipped away.
Reggie placed a piece of steak on his tongue. He closed his eyes, chewed four times, and a blissful look passed across his face. He swallowed and looked at Mike. “So,” he said, “do I have you at last?”
Mike used the edge of his fork to cut through a scallop. He speared it on the tines and sighed. “Maybe.”
Reggie smiled. “When can you leave?”
“I don’t know. A couple of days to finish up school stuff. What about the seventeenth?”
“Perfect. We can meet up in Washington and you can sit in on the panel, and then I’ll ship you out to San Diego.”
“If I decide to do it.”
“You will.”
“We’ll see.”
FOUR
Eight days, three security checks, and one plane ride later, Mike was in Washington, D.C., wearing his best suit. It was still the cheapest one in the room. Reggie had loaned him a silk tie after seeing the two polyester ones he’d brought from home. He adjusted the knot against his throat, glad he’d decided on the full-Windsor over his usual half.
The room was almost twice the size of Mike’s classroom back in South Berwick. There were no windows. Five people shifted and mumbled and found seats behind a row of tables at the front of the room, avoiding the collection of flags behind them. Ten feet away there was a mirroring row of tables, this one with two dozen chairs lined up behind it in four rows of six. Two other tables ran along the far side, facing the door. The walls were painted in warm colors, but the room felt stark.
It struck Mike that the setup was very similar to a courtroom. Judges up front. Defense and prosecution across from them. Jury off to the side. He was sure it was deliberate.
The five people at the front of the room—three men and two women—settled into their chairs. Mike glanced at each of them. A man in an Air Force uniform with silver eagles on his shoulders and seven rows of color on his chest. A younger man with dark hair and glasses. An older woman with a flag pin on her collar who the ants recognized as a senator. An Asian man with a white line on his finger where he normally wore a ring. A dark-eyed woman with long hair and an athlete’s body. Seven people sat back in the body of the room, scratching notes on identical pads with identical pens.
Reggie guided them to the jury tables. Each one had two pristine legal pads with a Department of Defense watermark stretching across the top of each sheet. A matching logo graced a pen placed precisely across the top of the notepad. A blue file folder lay next to each pad.
“What is this?” asked Mike. He adjusted his coat to display more of the borrowed tie.
“Budget review board,” murmured Reggie. He popped open his briefcase and pulled out a slim pad. “Standard stuff. It’s still DARPA territory, but a lot of departments have invested in the Albuquerque Door. All these folks have some say in what happens next. Some of them are tied to the agency, a few are from the DOD itself. The Air Force colonel over there? He loves this sort of stuff.”
Mike glanced across the half-dozen board members to the broad, square-jawed man with bristle-brush hair. “Really?”
“Oh, yeah. Forget anything you read in the papers about the Marines or the Army. The Air Force loves high tech more than any of them.”
“So it’s all about high tech, but everyone’s using notepads and ballpoint pens?”
“Remember how you had to turn in your phone at the desk?”
Mike nodded.
“They’re not big on laptops and tablets in these meetings. It’s a security thing.”
“Cool. Can I keep the pen?”
“Yes, you can keep the pen,” sighed Reggie. “It only cost the taxpayers seventeen dollars. Here, you can have mine, too.”
“What about the notepad?”
“Don’t be greedy.” He nodded to the front of the room. “Okay, pay attention. These are your new best friends.”
Two men and a woman came through the door. The leader, an older black man with a trimmed goatee and a circle of gray hair around his scalp, glanced around the room and up at the board members. He walked with a dark cane in his right hand. It had a silver derby-style handle. He wore silver-rimmed glasses that pulled attention to his eyes. He hadn’t changed much since the photo for his book jacket.
“Arthur Cross,” said Reggie, following Mike’s gaze. “He’s probably got the best idea of how this whole thing works, although they’ll all tell you it’s beyond any one person. That’s why you’re here.”
“I still don’t know what ‘this’ is.”
“Patience.”
Cross looked across the room at Reggie and nodded politely. The woman with him shot Mike and Reggie a look that was only a few degrees away from a glare. She, Cross, and the other man sat down across from the board.
“The blonde is Jamie Parker,” said Reggie. “Head programmer. She’s here today because their other physicist has the flu.”
Her eyes were hazel, like Mike’s, though much narrower than his. Her hair reached past her shoulders, but was bound up in a sensible ponytail. She had on a tight black turtleneck over an equally tight body, somewhat concealed by a gray blazer.
He realized he was staring because she was glaring back at him. Mike rubbed his temple and forced a few ants back behind their wall. “You said it wasn’t cryptography.”
“It’s not.”
“Or robots.”
“It’s the twenty-first century,” said Reggie. “I don’t think I’ve got any projects under my umbrella that don’t have at least two programmers.” He tipped his chin to the woman. “Parker was a black hat at MIT, got in trouble with the feds, but they couldn’t prove anything. After she graduated they tried to hire her, and she more or less spit in their faces. Dropped out of sight for two years, and then Arthur found her at a hacker con and recruited her. Major chip on her shoulder.”
Mike let his eyes drift to the other man. He had a long, weather-beaten face, and small eyes. His dyed-black hair was slicked back, and his face had a slack look to it that somehow seemed more practiced than genetic. He had lean limbs and perfect posture. It gave the impression of a tall man, even though he was only an inch over Parker. His suit was poorly fitting and almost definitely off-the-rack. It made Mike feel better about his own wardrobe.
Mike nodded at the man. “Olaf Johansson.”
“Olaf?”
“Hey, talk to his parents. He’s Arthur’s partner. Double doctorates in physics and mathematics. Number cruncher. Very little imagination or sense of humor. You two should butt heads nicely.”
“Is he related to Scarlett?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Has anyone told him he looks just like Humphrey Bogart?”
“I tried,” said Reggie. “He didn’t know who I was talking about.”
“How can he not know Bogart?”
“I don’t thi
nk he’s seen Casablanca.”
“You lie.”
“Shut up and play with your pen. They’re ready to get started.”
The dark-eyed, athletic woman started things. She had a pleasant voice. “So, Dr. Cross, perhaps you could give us a rundown on your project and where it currently stands?”
Arthur nodded. “Well, as our reports explain, the Albuquerque Door began as the SETH Project. It was an attempt to create a viable method of energetic matter transmission, the long-term goal being to create a practical IMT system.”
“Doctor?” The Asian man raised his hand. “Could we get that in layman’s terms, please?”
Olaf sighed and his brow furrowed for a moment.
“IMT,” said Arthur. “Instant matter transfer. We were trying to make a matter-projection system, one that wouldn’t be—”
“Teleportation?” interrupted the Asian again. “You were trying to make some sort of teleporter, like on Star Trek?”
“They call theirs a transporter, actually,” said Jamie Parker.
A faint chuckle rolled across the board’s tables.
Mike felt his eyes start to roll. He turned to Reggie. “I thought you brought me down here for something serious,” he whispered.
“I did,” murmured his friend.
“Physical teleportation’s impossible.”
The board plowed ahead. “And how much success have you had with your…matter-projection system?” asked the Asian man.
“Well,” said Arthur, “all things considered, we had a fair degree, sir. There are a number of ways to break something down to the atomic level using existing technology. The challenge, of course, has always been reintegration.” He paused to adjust his glasses. “Even a life form as small as a mouse contains billions of cells, each made up of hundreds of millions of molecules, each of which is also made up of possibly millions of atoms. Taking it apart is relatively easy, putting it back together, well…”
“I believe your earlier budgets accounted for that, yes?” asked the Air Force colonel. His precise voice echoed in the room. “Says here you built yourself a supercomputer.”
“To build a computer that could identify and track all those particles in real time would pretty much be impossible,” Jamie said. “It’d be beyond anything even theorized by modern engineers. The closest thing in existence is the Tianhe-2 in China, and that’s only a bare percentage of the calculating power we’d need for a single jump. We were trying to develop a program that worked off an idea similar to quantum entanglement, what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” We wouldn’t need to know where every particle was, so long as we knew where most of them were.”
The board members glanced at one another and the files. “And that worked?” asked the athletic woman.
Mike leaned in close to Reggie again. “I don’t even follow this stuff and I can tell you half a dozen reasons it wouldn’t work.”
“I’m sure you can.”
“I can name at least a dozen physicists who’ve played with this and moved on to easier things like antigravity or the Grand Unified Theory.”
“I told you to be patient already, yes?”
“Mr. Magnus,” asked the athletic woman, “did you have a comment?”
“No, ma’am,” he said. “Just clarifying a point for my colleague.”
Her gaze slid to Mike, then back to Arthur. “Doctor?”
“We had some success,” Arthur said, “and a few failures. The first few objects to HD didn’t tell us anything, but by the time we—”
“I’m sorry,” interrupted another one of the reviewers, the senator. “HD?”
“Oh, it’s…uhh.” Arthur examined the table. “Well, it’s an unofficial term we coined for when test objects dispersed rather than reintegrated.”
“What does it stand for?” This from the man with glasses.
“Well, it’s…” He glanced at Jamie.
“Humpty Dumpty,” muttered Olaf Johansson.
“What?”
Mike’s mind leaped ahead and found a childhood copy of the nursery rhyme. He looked at all six pages of the picture book at once and crossed it with the topic at hand. He winced.
“Humpty Dumpty,” the Bogart look-alike repeated. His faintly accented voice sounded wrong coming from that face. “You know, ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men…’ ”
“Oh,” said the Asian interviewer.
The man with the glasses dipped his chin. “A bit…macabre.”
“But pretty much dead on,” Olaf said. He almost sneered when he spoke.
“So, really,” said the Air Force colonel, “how many successes did you have?”
“In the first three years of the project, we managed to teleport two test blocks and a test animal,” said Arthur. “Both of the test blocks crumbled to dust a few moments after reintegration. Microscopic analysis revealed fundamental changes in their structure at the molecular level.”
The senator swallowed. “And…the animal?”
Arthur glanced at Jamie. The blonde examined her blank legal pad.
Olaf straightened up in his chair. “We’re pretty sure it was dead the moment we reintegrated it.”
“Pretty sure?”
“The autopsy was inconclusive,” he shrugged. “If it was alive, it couldn’t’ve been for more than a second or two.”
“Are you sure?”
“We’re sure,” muttered Jamie.
Mike picked up his pen and wrote TOLD YOU! on the pad. He angled it to Reggie. Reggie ignored him.
The Asian man tapped his report. “That was an unauthorized animal experiment, was it not?”
“Yes, sir, it was,” said Arthur. “And the reports from that hearing, the ethics committee, and the Humane Society should be included in the packets you have. We are…all of us on the Albuquerque Door Project are ashamed of what we let happen. Of what we did then. I can absolutely assure you it will never happen again.”
The Asian man nodded. “Please, go on.”
“As I was saying,” continued Arthur, “our second wave experiments forced us to agree with prevailing theories. Physical teleportation was simply not going to be possible at our current level of technology. Possibly not ever, as many noted quantum theorists have said.”
A low grumble started at one end of the board’s table and made its way across.
“I can’t believe you’re funding someone who told you they could build a teleporter,” whispered Mike.
“I’m not,” said Reggie. “I’m funding Cross because he’s done it.”
“However,” continued Arthur, “during our hiatus, Dr. Johansson and I had the idea that the secret to instant travel might not be trying to manipulate the traveler, but rather to manipulate the distance traveled.”
Mike’s ants paused in their endless movement, just for a moment.
FIVE
The athletic woman made a show of flipping her report open and referring to something. “And how would you manipulate distances, Dr. Cross?”
“Distance is a relative term,” said Arthur. “When you start applying the idea of additional dimensions, it can be manipulated very easily.”
Reggie cleared his throat for attention. Mike, the scientists, and the board members all turned to him. “Ummm…Just for the record,” Reggie said, “and, again, the benefit of our nonscientific members, could you explain that a little more?”
Arthur nodded. “Of course.” He ignored the pen in front of him and pulled one from inside his coat. The scientist made two exaggerated dots on opposite corners of the legal pad and stood up—without using his cane, Mike noticed. “For our purposes, let’s say these dots exist in a two-dimensional universe, the sheet of paper,” he said, adopting the tone of college lecturers across the globe. He displayed the sheet to the room. “Simple enough, yes?”
There were a few nods from the assembled board members.
“Mr. Magnus, since you suggested it, how far apart would you say these two dots are
?”
Reggie eyed the paper. “If I remember my geometry,” he said, “something like fourteen inches, right?”
“Close enough,” Arthur said with a nod. He tore the sheet off the notepad with a flourish, and folded it in half. “Now how far apart are they?”
“Eight inches, maybe.”
The physicist folded the paper the other way. “And now?”
“Less than half an inch, if that.”
“And yet,” said Arthur, “to any creatures in the paper’s two-dimensional world, nothing has changed. Their universe is unaltered, and the dots are still fourteen inches apart. But if they had the means to perceive our three-dimensional space, to cross through it, and reenter their own, they could go from point A to point B with just a single step.
“In a similar manner, we manipulate the distance the Albuquerque Door covers by creating a path across another dimension, an alternate quantum state, if you will. One in which our own dimension appears folded back on itself. Where A and B are one step apart.”
“The paper bit was your idea?” whispered Mike.
Reggie gave a small nod and lowered his voice. “It’s how he explained it to me the first time I asked him. It’s a nice visual for us little common folk.”
The buzz cut colonel tapped his pen on the end of his file. “So you’ve found another dimension that allows this?”
“That’s the whole crux of our project,” Olaf said. Mike found it amazing how much veiled condescension the man could work into his voice. “We don’t need to find it. We just tell our equipment we have and everything works accordingly.”
“And that works?”
“To date,” said Arthur with a cough, “it has worked over four hundred times without any side effects or consequences. One hundred sixty-seven times with human subjects. There has never been a failure in the system.”
“Never?”
“Never.” The older man sat down as he repeated the word. Olaf and Jamie both crossed their arms.
Mike frowned and glanced at Reggie. Reggie gave him a quick shake of the head. Mike snatched up his pen again and scribbled out IF NEVER—WHY ME? on the pad.