by Peter Clines
“Two hundred twenty-one and a half centimeters,” called out Sasha.
“Right,” said Mike. “But why aren’t they three hundred or five hundred? Why not build one big enough to drive a truck through?”
She shrugged. “Because that’s how big the blueprints said to make them.”
“Olaf worked out the math for a larger Door,” said Neil. “This size was the most efficient for our work. It’s a balance of power requirements for the electromagnets and the size of the field they generate.”
Mike nodded. “And you’re sure it’s safe?”
“One hundred sixty-eight tests so far and not one problem.”
“How many jumps with people?”
“All of them. We started from zero again, once we began testing humans.”
“So how many tests altogether?”
“About four hundred with animals or people,” said Neil. “There were a bunch with test objects, too, and some dry runs. Olaf or Bob could tell you exactly.”
“Is it always one of you?”
“At first it was, yeah. As of late, we’ve been opening it up a bit.”
“Yesterday, Olaf said nine people had jumped.”
“That could be right.”
“The six of you, Reggie Magnus, his assistant.”
“Yup.”
“And then Ben Miles.”
“Yup.” Neil examined the floor. “Sad what happened to him.”
Mike let the words hang for a moment and gazed over at the big rings. “There’s no chance going through did it to him?”
“Going through…the Door?”
“Yeah.”
Neil shook his head. “No. None at all. It’s perfectly safe. Everyone has multiple exams after every crosswalk.”
“You’ve got a doctor on staff?”
“Local doctor,” said Neil. “Just down the hill from us. He doesn’t know what we’re doing, but he’s still signed a bunch of nondisclosure forms.”
“Did Ben get checked out?”
Neil nodded. “I drove him down there, in fact. Nice guy. His tests all came back good here. He had his second set done back in Washington just after his…” He searched for the right word. “His breakdown?”
“Yeah,” said Mike.
“He had a full physical done out there and all the results sent to us. I think they’ve done it two more times since he’s been in the…the hospital. All clean, all good, as I understand it.”
“Is that normal? That many tests.”
“They did an extra set because of the circumstances. Everyone gets checked out within six hours of going through, then two more times in the next two weeks and once more at two months. We had everyone under forty-eight-hour observation at first, but Arthur’s cut it back since we’ve had a hundred crosswalks with no side effects.” He gave Mike a pointed look. “Think he saved about four hundred thousand in the budget when he did.”
“As I understand it,” said Mike, “the amount of the budget isn’t the big issue they’re having back in Washington.”
“Well, you could still bring it up.”
Mike smiled as they circled back around the machine to Bob and Sasha. They’d disconnected one of the hoses running from the tanks and were working on the connector with a set of ratchets. “One other question, if you don’t mind?”
“Sure.”
“Why are you replacing that?”
“What?”
Mike pointed at the component in Sasha’s hand. “That connector. Socket. Whatever you call it. Why are you replacing it?”
“It’s on the list,” she said.
“But why?”
Sasha sighed and stepped away to pick up a clipboard. She skimmed through a few pages and then shrugged. “Reason’s left blank,” she said. “It was probably leaking.”
Neil looked at Mike. “Is there a problem?”
He shook his head. “I’m just curious why you’re replacing it.”
Bob shrugged. “Things wear out. It was probably leaking.”
“It wasn’t leaking,” Mike said.
“No offense,” Sasha said, “but how would you know?”
He glanced up at the double rings. “Because I was watching when you turned it on yesterday. There wasn’t anything.”
“You might’ve missed it,” said Neil. “You were up in the booth.”
Bob glanced down at the coupling in his hand. Sasha shifted her feet and crossed her arms. Neil rolled his shoulders. The three of them exchanged looks.
Mike looked at the coupling for a minute. The ants churned in his brain, but he forced them apart. “Yeah, sorry,” he said. “Sorry. You guys know this stuff better than me.”
Bob smiled. “Well, I don’t know about that.”
Sasha tapped him on the back of the head. “Speak for yourself.”
THIRTEEN
Jamie unlocked the deadbolt, then swiped her key card. The door clicked and she swung it open. A gust of cold air rolled out and chilled Mike’s legs. “Meet Johnny,” she said.
The room was eight feet on a side. The walls were lined with industrial shelves, the Erector-set looking ones from stores like Home Depot. Computer towers filled each shelf. Cables ran back and forth behind each one. The air in the room shivered from the constant hum of fans and the buzz of the air conditioner.
“Six units on each shelf,” said Jamie. “Twelve shelves total. They’re all overclocked, so we’re effectively running at ten trillion operations per second.”
“Why Johnny?”
“Johnny Mnemonic,” she said. “Old Keanu Reeves movie I saw in high school. It doesn’t hold up well at all, but I loved the name.”
“TriStar Pictures, nineteen ninety-five. Based off the William Gibson novella. Didn’t do well at the box office, or with most critics, but I thought Dina Meyer was pretty hot in it.”
“Whatever. Anyway, the system was designed to run at eight hundred teraFLOPS, but I’ve made some tweaks over the past three years so I think we’re actually closer to one petaFLOP. I wanted to submit it for the Linpack Benchmark Top500, just to get a solid measurement, but Arthur didn’t want the publicity.”
“Must’ve been a little frustrating.”
She shrugged. “He pointed out that once we go public, Johnny’s going to become the most well-known computer on Earth anyway.”
Mike looked around the room. Most of the towers were the standard flat white, but a few tan and black ones were scattered through the room. He resisted the urge to find a pattern in their placement. He asked Jamie instead.
“We had to do this on the cheap,” she said. “It was just whatever housings I could find.” She watched his eyes. “Are you memorizing all of this?”
He glanced at her. “I can’t switch it on and off. It’s just the way my brain works.”
Her lips tightened. “So you can’t help spying on us?”
“I’m not here to spy on you,” he said.
She looked away. “Any other questions?”
Mike gestured at the shelves. “So all this runs all of the Albuquerque Door?”
Jamie shook her head. “No, all it does is the math for each trip.”
“That’s it?”
“The Door program is over two million lines of code. The folding equations alone are over a thousand pages if you printed them out. Over five hundred thousand lines of math, most of them depending on a number of variables in the system.”
He smiled. “Are you supposed to tell me all that?”
“If you can figure out our code from the page lengths, you deserve to bust us.”
“Bust you?”
“Find out our secrets,” she said. “Steal our tech. However you want to put it.”
“I’m not going to steal anything. Honest.”
She waved him out of the room. They stepped back into the hall and she locked the deadbolt behind them. “Can I get back to work now?”
“Why the extra lock if it’s already got the key card?”
“To keep
out government guys who might want to look at our code,” she said. “Also because Bob plays too many practical jokes for his own good. Every day he can’t get at Johnny is a day I don’t need to beat him to death.”
“So, what’s the answer?”
She blinked. “What do you mean? Answer to what?”
“The answer to the equation,” he said. “Is it forty-two? Is it four-eight-fifteen-sixteen-twenty—”
Jamie cut him off with a wave of her hand. “We never see the answer. Even if we did, it’s just another equation about a hundred pages long. That’s what gets fed into the Door.”
“But what is it?”
She stared at him for a moment. “In simple layman’s terms,” she said, “it’s a mathematical representation of an alternate quantum state or ‘dimension’ that meets our requirements.”
“And in non-layman’s terms?”
“You’d need to ask Arthur or Olaf. I’m just the computer chick.” She turned and walked down the hall.
He stepped quick to catch up. “If you’ve never seen it, though,” he asked, “how do you know it’s solving the equation?”
“Because the Door opens. Are you always this difficult?”
Mike shrugged. “Only when I’m trying to get answers.”
“Well you’re not getting any more from me,” she said.
“Actually, Arthur said you had copies of the trial reports.”
She sighed. “Yeah, he did, didn’t he?” She veered into a side hall, not asking him to follow and not looking to see if he did.
They headed out of the main building and down to the trailer park. “So,” he said to her back, “how’d you get involved with this?”
She glanced back. “Huh?”
“The Albuquerque Door. Did you answer an ad or did you know someone or what?”
“Arthur recruited me. Which you know from my files.”
“You like working with him and Olaf?”
“Beats working at a bank.”
“Do you guys all tend to eat lunch together, or do you—”
Jamie stopped and turned on him. Mike tipped forward but stopped himself before he ran into her. “What’s this about?”
“What’s what about?”
“All the questions you already know the answers to.”
“I’m trying—”
Her eyes flashed. “Are you trying to get me to implicate Arthur or something, because I won’t—”
“I’m just trying to make small talk,” he said. He gave her the Look. It almost faltered when he realized he was using teacher-student tactics on a woman only three years younger than him.
Jamie fought the Look, but it hit a nerve somewhere. She seethed, but she backed down. “Sorry,” she said, not sounding that sorry.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I’m sorry if you thought I was questioning your loyalty or something. I was just trying to be friendly. And find somewhere to have lunch. That’s all.”
They stood there for a minute.
“We’re not doing anything wrong,” she said.
Mike considered a few possible ways to respond. He weighed them against what he knew so far about her. It felt lame, but the best he could come up with was, “I know.”
“Don’t screw us over.”
“I’m on your side, remember? I’m here to make sure you get funding.”
“Then make them understand that this is going to change everything,” she said. “We know it. Magnus knows it. You know it. That’s why it has to be perfect.”
“I get that. I’m just trying to…”
Jamie turned and continued down the path past Tramp’s grave. Their feet crunched on the gravel, rustled against the fake grass, and led them to her trailer.
“More locks,” he said as she unlocked the door.
“Yeah, I’m old-fashioned that way.”
“No, I mean…” He paused. “I get the security up in the lab, but why lock up down here?”
“I know you probably leave everything unlocked back in New Hampshire, but this is a city.”
“Maine. And this isn’t really a city. It’s a fenced-off government facility with guards. It’s not like random muggers or thieves are going to get in here.”
“It’s my home,” she said. “Why wouldn’t I lock up my home?”
“I…never mind. Sorry.”
She turned her back to him and vanished inside the trailer. He took the open door as an invitation.
The small space was a flurry of paperwork and technology. Notes, memos, and reports rested in great dunes across her desktop, spilled off the two large, flanking corkboards to cover the walls, and formed small drifts across the floor. She’d hung a few curtains to separate her bed from the rest of the room, but he could see more loose papers scattered there as well. The pressboard bookshelves were stacked haphazardly, with only the barest attempts at organization. Random sheets of paper were sandwiched between the various volumes. A hardcover copy of The History of What We Know was flanked by Douglas Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies and a sun-faded Machine Man graphic novel. An old book with gold print on a leather binding was wedged into the shelf on top of them, Electric Currents—Their Generation and Use.
Mike glanced at the two computer towers lying half-autopsied on her kitchen table. One had a bag of chips in it, the top held shut with a binder clip. A stack of motherboards rested on the chair in Mylar bags.
“Maid’s been on vacation, I see,” said Mike.
“Yeah. She ran off with the guy who writes your jokes.”
“Ouch.”
“There’s a postcard from them here somewhere. Want me to look for that instead?”
“No, no. Just the logs will be fine.”
Something twitched and stretched on top of the bookshelf. A white paw reached out and spread, flexing an array of sharp, untrimmed claws.
“Glitch,” said Jamie, following Mike’s gaze. “He was here when I moved in, and he decided I could stay after his first can of tuna.”
“Glitch?”
“Second day I was here, he ran across my keyboard and ruined forty-two lines of code.”
Mike nodded. “Glitch it is.”
The cat blinked at him, focusing its bright green eyes for a moment, and then went back to sleep.
Jamie yanked a dozen sheets of paper from her desk, then a few more from the walls. She thumbed through them, marched back to her bed, and crouched down to dig through the papers there. Her jeans slid down a few inches in the back, revealing a skintight pair of high-waisted blue bicycle shorts. Her backside was nothing but glossy blue spandex.
She glanced over her shoulder. “You want animal tests and simulations, too?”
He shrugged and tried not to look at her ass. “I’ll take whatever you’re allowed to give me.”
She straightened up and returned with two dictionary-sized bundles, adding them to the pile. “I think that’s everything except Olaf’s trip yesterday. That one’s still up in the lab or in Arthur’s office.” She half-shoved, half-dropped the lot into his arms.
“Thanks.” He stood there for a beat and the ants catalogued the files. “I’m surprised how much paperwork you use here. I mean,” he hefted the logs, “actual paper.”
“It’s a security thing,” said Jamie. “People can’t hack a manila folder.”
“No, I get that, it just seems a little…I don’t know, inefficient? Especially with the size of some of the stuff you’re talking about.”
“It is what it is. Did you need something else?”
“No, this should do it.”
“Okay. You can go now.” Her arm swept toward the door.
“Right. Sure. Thanks for the files.”
Jamie closed her eyes. “Sorry. Again.”
“Don’t worry about it. Again.”
“I know this is your job, and I’m sure you’re a nice guy—”
“You know, those words always hurt.”
She smirked. “—but we don�
�t need this right now. We don’t deserve it. We haven’t done anything wrong. The Door works. We just need more time for testing.”
“So everyone keeps telling me,” he said.
FOURTEEN
Mike stepped into his trailer and realized he had nowhere to put the armload of reports. He’d assumed he’d be able to rough it in the Spartan apartment for a few weeks, but that wasn’t going to be possible. If nothing else, his back wasn’t going to take more than two or three nights on the cot.
He set the stack of files on the thin mattress and made a quick mental list. Table. Two chairs. Small bookshelf. Small refrigerator. Toaster. Microwave. A small bed or maybe a futon that could double for a couch. Sheets and maybe a blanket. He could fit some of it in his rental car, but not all of it. He’d have to hope for delivery.
Mike turned his attention back to the files. The red ants and black ants were swarming in his mind. They’d been scratching since the meeting in Washington, since they’d heard the first theories and ideas. Seeing the machine and the blueprints had only excited them more.
It could wait. He could go find a store, get some dinner, and spend the evening setting up his temporary home. Dive into the files in the morning.
The ants itched at the inside of his head.
He headed back out and up to the parking lot. Bob had mentioned some shops in the area, and he’d passed a few on his way in from the airport. He was sure he could find something.
The redhead was standing by the front gate talking with the guards. He gave Mike a half wave, finished up with the uniformed men, and sauntered over. “Olaf drive you away already?”
“Haven’t dealt with him one-on-one yet.”
“So it was Jamie, then.”
“Actually, it was you,” said Mike. “You were right. I need some furniture if I’m going to live back there for a few weeks.”
“Need some help?”
Mike raised an eyebrow. “Are you offering?”
“Nah. I just like to ask people if they need help and then watch their hopes get crushed.”
“Thanks.”
“I kid, I kid,” Bob said. “Did you want to get something big, like a couch or a bed? I could check out the pickup we use for hauling stuff between the main building and Site B.”
“That would be fantastic. Thank you.”