by Peter Clines
Jamie glared at him. Then she turned and stalked out of his trailer. He waited for a moment and then followed. He stepped outside just in time to see her vanish into her own. She left the door hanging open.
A moment later she emerged holding a sheaf of papers. She slapped it against his chest, and one page flipped away and floated to the ground. “There,” she said. “Try to find a mistake.”
“I didn’t mean to—”
Jamie stalked back to her door. “Don’t call me after office hours again,” she growled over her shoulder as she stepped up into her trailer. “And if you want to play scientist while you’re here, at least write your goddamned work down to show people.”
Her door slammed behind her.
He heard a creak to his left and saw Neil peering out. Their eyes met. “Sorry,” said Mike.
The engineer nodded. “She’s going easy on you. It’s a good sign.” He waved. “G’night.”
His door clicked shut and Mike stood alone on the plastic grass.
EIGHTEEN
“So it was a dead end?” Reggie asked.
“Pretty much,” said Mike. He tossed his towel over a chair and pulled on his shirt. “She was right. It should’ve worked.”
“You sure?”
“It’s a fifteen-page program. A little overcomplicated, really, for what it does. I’d think with her experience she could’ve pared it down to four or five with no problem.”
“Yeah?”
Mike nodded. “It’s all C++. And it’s a simple program.”
“You understand C++?”
“I learned it last night. It’s just another language. I found the basics on a few websites, figured out the syntax, grammar, vocabulary.” He shrugged.
On the tablet screen, Reggie shook his head and smiled. “Well, I haven’t seen any complaints, so I guess you weren’t too rough on her. Still wish I’d seen it.”
“I thought I was kind of gentle, all things considered.”
“So what do you think?”
“About her?”
“About all of it.”
Mike buttoned up his shirt. “How much of this have your people gone over? The basic ideas behind the Albuquerque Door?”
“None of it,” said Reggie. “There’s nothing to go over until Arthur releases it.”
“But he and Olaf and the others…They’ve talked about it in meetings and phone calls, right?”
“Yes, of course.”
“Have you gone over the transcripts?”
“We’ve had people diagram the sentences, just to see if we could squeeze a little extra out of their word choice. Nothing.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
“They don’t want to tell us anything. They haven’t.”
“Yeah, but to be able to have numerous conversations and let absolutely nothing slip. Doesn’t that seem unusual to you?”
Reggie rubbed his chin. “Maybe.”
“If you and I were talking with someone, how long do you think we could hide the fact that we knew each other?”
“How smart’s the other person?”
“As smart as you.”
“Not too long. I’d pick up on something.”
“Right. But you’ve been talking to these people for years now and you haven’t picked up any details about what they’re doing. This project is everything, and they’ve never let a single thing slip that you’ve been able to catch.”
On the tablet screen, Reggie’s face grew still. “Are you going somewhere with this?”
“I’m no expert,” said Mike, “but it feels like they’re playing fast and loose with a lot of their terminology. That might be why you can’t get anything from them.”
“How so?”
“A lot of the terms they’re throwing around—dimensions, quantum states, realities—they use them like they’re interchangeable, but I don’t think they are, scientifically speaking.” He shrugged. “Again, not my field of expertise. That’s why I was wondering if any of your people had seen any connections. Or lack of connections, I guess.”
Reggie nodded. “I’ll have my people check again. Anything else seem odd?”
Mike rolled his neck. “I don’t know. Everyone feels a little…rehearsed.”
“How so?”
“It’s like a kid who hasn’t done his homework, and he’s spent the whole school day planning out what he’s going to say as an excuse.”
“Canned responses are pretty normal,” said Reggie. “I get that a lot.”
“It’s more than that, though,” said Mike. “I had a professor in college who taught a course on the Brontës. He was talking one day about Villette and—”
“Villette?”
“It’s a novel by Charlotte Brontë. I’m making another analogy. Be patient for a minute.”
“Charlotte Brontë,” muttered Reggie.
“One of the characters in the book spends all her time saying ‘I’m fine, I’m just fine, I’m really fine, I’m fine.’ And the professor pointed out that anyone who says they’re fine that many times is probably really not fine.”
“Okay.”
“Everyone out here keeps telling me they’re not hiding anything,” said Mike. “All of them. The only person who didn’t try to tell me they’re not hiding anything was Anne.”
“Anne?”
“The receptionist.”
“Ahhhhh,” said Reggie. “Okay.”
“I think Bob was going to tell me something the other night at dinner, but he closed up when we ran into Olaf.”
“Any idea what he was going to say?”
“He asked if Arthur had talked to you about him.”
“To me?”
“Yeah.”
“No more than anyone else. Did he give you any sort of context?”
“It probably ties to something they were talking about a few weeks ago.”
“They meaning Bob and Arthur or meaning the whole staff?”
Mike replayed the conversation in his head. “I’m not sure,” he admitted.
Reggie shook his head. “Could be anything, then. Did it match anything in the records?”
“Nothing I’ve seen, but I haven’t gone through the maintenance logs yet.”
“Let me know what you find.”
“Yeah, of course. Question.”
“Shoot.”
“Why’d you pick me for this?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why am I here instead of someone else?” asked Mike. “I’m not a physicist or a rocket scientist.”
“Says the man who taught himself C++ in a few hours.”
“You’ve got at least eleven people on your staff who are security-cleared and fully qualified to be here. Why me and not one of them?”
Reggie’s face shifted. He leaned back in his chair. “Where’d you get that number from?”
“The reports you gave me have already been approved on your end. They’ve all been signed and half of them have e-mail addresses tagged onto them. Eleven distinct people. They wouldn’t get the reports if they didn’t have clearance and they wouldn’t be reviewing them if they didn’t have the background.”
“I thought we agreed you’d only use your powers for good?”
“You know the rules,” said Mike. “If you don’t want me to know something, don’t show it to me.”
“Fair enough.”
“So why me?”
Reggie stared at him through the monitor. “You alone there?”
“It’s six-thirty in the morning. Who else would be here?”
“I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. Answer the damned question.”
“Yes, I’m alone.”
“You’re there because we couldn’t find anything.”
The ants scurried about with images of reports and memories of Reggie talking and arranged all of them in new patterns. “They’re not paranoid,” said Mike. “You have been trying to steal their tech.”
“I can’t steal it.
I’m the one who paid for it. Besides, imagine if Arthur and Olaf died in a car crash or something? I would’ve been pouring hundreds of millions down a hole with nothing to show for it. Not to mention the greatest invention in human history—gone, just like that.”
“You wouldn’t get their work?”
Reggie shook his head. “Arthur’s contract is ironclad, legally. Nothing about the Albuquerque Door can be released without his approval. That approval isn’t transferable or inheritable. An asteroid hits him tomorrow, the project is over.”
“How’d your people get into the computers? There’s no wireless in the main building.”
“They don’t have the wireless turned on,” corrected Reggie. “It doesn’t mean it’s not there if you know what you’re doing.”
“And you couldn’t find anything,” said Mike. It was a statement.
“Not a thing,” agreed Reggie. “No in-house files, no cloud backups, no e-mails, no Facebook posts. They’ve hidden everything. That’s high-level paranoia, even for government employees.”
“So I’m here to find a back door for you?”
Reggie shook his head. “You’re there to evaluate it, just like I said. And if you end up with three-quarters of the project in your head, and if something ever happened to Arthur and Olaf…then we might have another talk.”
“You’re going against the contract.”
Reggie bit down on a response and took a breath. “I’m not stealing anything,” he said, “and I don’t want you to steal anything. I’m not releasing anything to anyone, not even to my own staff. I’m bending the terms of the agreement, yes, but I need to know there’s a way to get at all this data in a worst-case scenario. That’s all. Even if you can just confirm he’s writing everything down somewhere and not doing it all in his head, that’d be fantastic.”
“Why is everyone against people doing stuff in their head?”
“Because you can’t share anything that way.”
“True,” said Mike. Neither of them spoke for a moment.
“Are we good?”
“Yeah. Sorry I doubted you.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t explain everything.”
“Well, I’m supposed to be the smart one.”
“True,” Reggie said.
“Is there anything else you need to tell me?”
“About?”
“About all of it. Anything else you’re keeping from me or forgot to mention or think you’re going to slip past me?”
Reggie smiled and settled back in his chair again. “I’ve known you too long to slip anything past you.”
“Not an answer.”
“No, there is nothing else I’m keeping from you. I want you to spend the month there and come back assuring me that I have nothing to worry about with the Albuquerque Door. Or its future.”
“Okay,” said Mike. “I don’t want to lie to anyone.”
“Your integrity’s safe,” Reggie said. “Or as safe as it can be for any government employee.”
NINETEEN
“Good morning,” Arthur said, looking up from his desk. “I was about to call you.”
“Sorry,” Mike said. “Talking with Reggie. Mr. Magnus.”
“All good things, I hope.”
“Some good, some bad.”
Arthur waited a moment, and when Mike didn’t continue, he nodded. “We’re going to be up and running in about half an hour. Bob’s already over at Site B.”
“He’s coming through the other way?”
“There’s no difference. None we’ve ever been able to detect, anyway. It’s the same doorway either direction. We just change it up so we have records of all possibilities.”
“Ahhh.”
“I need to check in with Jamie in the control room and then we can head out onto the main floor.” Arthur locked the office door behind them and they headed down the hall toward the stairs.
“I’ve got a few questions,” said Mike, “if you don’t mind.”
“Go ahead.”
“You told the board the Albuquerque Door has never failed.”
“It hasn’t.”
“But what about—”
“You want to know about the one-nineties? Jamie mentioned you’d talked last night.”
Mike nodded. “It reads like seven failures to me.”
Arthur shook his head. “It didn’t fail. We couldn’t even get the system to activate.”
“Again, that sounds kind of like failure.”
“For the Door, failure is a collapse of the magnetic field or a technical glitch. You can’t lose a race if your horse was never on the track.”
“You can if it was supposed to be out there,” Mike said.
“Now you’re arguing semantics.”
“Pot, meet kettle.”
Arthur chuckled. “Point taken.” He swiped his keycard and the control room door buzzed open.
Jamie glanced over her shoulder at them, then turned back to her monitors. “I’m defragging some of Johnny’s drives,” she said. “We should be ready to go on schedule.”
“Excellent.” He handed her a flash drive. “The changes we talked about.”
“I’ll get them in as soon as I can.”
Mike looked down at the main floor. Olaf and Neil were discussing something in front of the mouth. The godmike wasn’t on, so he couldn’t hear them. Olaf threw back his head to growl at the ceiling and saw Mike watching. He muttered something to Neil, who looked up over his shoulder at the control booth. They split up. Olaf went to his station, Neil headed across the room to check the oversized resistors.
He turned back just as Jamie held up a finger for silence. “This is Jamie Parker, it’s June twenty-fifth, two thousand fifteen, and this is trial run one hundred sixty-nine. Traveler is Bob Hitchcock, which I’m sure comes as a complete surprise to everyone listening to these.” She tapped her keyboard.
“Are you good?” asked Arthur.
“Yeah,” she said, “I’ve got everything up here.”
He glanced at Mike and gestured at the door. “Shall we?”
“I’ll catch up with you,” said Mike. “I’ve got another question or two for Jamie.”
She glanced at him and sighed.
Arthur’s shoulders hunched a bit. Then he nodded and turned. The door thumped shut behind him.
She turned back to her screens. “What do you want now?”
He bit his lip. “Do you do all the hardware work on the computers here?”
“I work on Johnny, sometimes on the system up here. Sasha or Bob help sometimes, depending.”
“What about the office computers?”
She turned to him. “D’you have another problem with something?”
Mike took a slow breath. The ants scurried out with a collection of images and sounds. The student code of conduct. Lecturing his school’s quarterback about plagiarism. Slipping Reggie the answers for a pop science quiz junior year. Teachers in the staff room talking in an uninformed way about surveillance and phone lines.
“I think,” he said, “you should disable the Wi-Fi on all the computers here.”
“It’s already turned off.”
“Disable it,” he said. “Unplug the hardware. Physically remove it.”
Jamie studied his face. “Why?”
He pressed his lips together. They looked at each other for a moment. “You were right, by the way,” he added. “Your timer wasn’t the problem. It was fine.”
She furrowed her brows. “Thanks?”
He headed back out into the hall.
Arthur was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. “That didn’t take long.”
“I didn’t have much to ask her.”
They headed out onto the main floor. The twin rings loomed in front of them. The large flatscreen was on, and showed Sasha and Bob over at Site B. It struck Mike that he still hadn’t gone over to examine the other space.
“Defrag’s done,” boomed Jamie’s voice from a speaker. “We’ll be u
p and ready to go in about five minutes.”
“Excellent,” said Arthur.
“Hey, Mike,” said Bob from the flatscreen. “This is your first time seeing the Door work up close, right?”
“Yep.”
“Arthur,” said the redhead, “can we do a physics test?”
“I think so.” He glanced at Olaf.
Olaf grunted and pitched it high enough to sound affirmative.
Mike looked from the screen to Arthur. “Physics test? I saw that on a few dozen reports.”
Arthur walked over to the other desk and tugged open the bottom drawer. He removed something and tossed it at Mike, who caught it one-handed. It was a baseball. Not a high-end one. It was dirty, but not scuffed. Dropped, but never hit with a bat.
“We are up and running,” Jamie said. “Ready in four.”
“It was Bob’s idea,” said Arthur. “One of those faster-cheaper-better things the government’s so fond of.”
Mike nodded. “Reggie mentioned this. Mass, acceleration, momentum, angle of descent. Tons of math in every throw and it’s apparent if any of it changes in midair.”
“Exactly.”
“Gauss field is steady,” Olaf told his microphone. “Power is good.”
“That ball’s gone through the Door more than anything or anyone else,” said Arthur. “Throw it back and forth with Bob a few times.”
“Yeah, c’mon, Dad,” Bob said from the flatscreen. “Let’s have us a catch before you go to work.”
Mike smiled. “So,” he asked, “whatever happened to all the test animals?”
Arthur blinked and Olaf looked up from his console. On the flatscreen, Bob’s smile cracked and he glanced back at Sasha. “What?”
“All the animals that went through the Door. Two hundred and sixteen rats, six cats, and a chimpanzee, yes?”
“Something like that,” said Arthur. “Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.”
They all looked at Mike.
“A third of the rats were dissected to check for any structural or anatomical issues,” Arthur said. “A third of the others were kept under observation for three months each before dissection. The remainder were allowed to live out their lives. None of them ever showed any signs of damage, even on a cellular level.”