The Labyrinth Key

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Nearby, a graying black man in a dark blue suit rose from a bench beside the water, where he’d been reading a newspaper, and called to her. He looked familiar, but Mei-lin couldn’t remember the context.

  “Hello, Ms. Lu. I’ve been waiting for you.”

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” she said, approaching him and extending her hand. “And you are…?”

  “Jim Brescoll. With the NSA.”

  “I thought you looked familiar.”

  “Yes,” said the man as he shook her hand. “We met via videoconference call, once upon a time.”

  “I wasn’t thinking about that, actually. Aren’t you the NSA’s new civilian director? The man I’ve had no luck getting in touch with?”

  “Guilty, I’m afraid,” Brescoll said, glancing toward the ground and smiling. “We’ve been going through some changes in our intelligence community, since Ben Cho went through his changes. Guoanbu has seen similar shake-ups here, I gather. But I’m forgetting my manners. Won’t you sit down?”

  She took a seat on the bench beside him, surprised that such a high-ranking US official would be in China, unescorted as near as she could tell—let alone that he’d be meeting with her like this. Both glanced a moment at the moon bridge and its reflection.

  “Tell me a little about those changes, please,” she said. “Especially those involving Ben.”

  “I’d rather show you,” Brescoll said, taking a handscreen out of his pocket and unfolding it. “Most of the information you’ve asked for is distinctly not for public consumption. If you reveal to anyone what I’m passing on to you today, I will deny ever having been here or spoken to you. Fair enough?”

  Lu nodded.

  “I know you’re aware of the heightened tensions that immediately preceded Cho’s disappearance. Your government and mine have attributed a number of short-lived ‘control failures’ in military and civilian systems to a bad synergy of computer warfare errors that very nearly brought on a genuine shooting war between our nations.”

  “I’ve heard about that, yes.”

  “I gather you’re also aware of the force domes which appeared over the former site of your Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hall here, our power station in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and smaller force field blisters in the South American Tri-Border zone.”

  “Yes.”

  “Our governments have informed everyone these were part of a highly classified mutual-deterrence project between our two nations, made necessary as a result of those supposed computer errors. I take it from your questions to Agent Adjoumani, however, that you don’t really believe such stories.”

  “No.” From the first, those explanations had struck Meilin as attempts to flush straight down the memory hole all recall of certain events.

  “I didn’t think so,” Brescoll said, glancing at her narrowly, “even though there is some truth to them. Certainly a little ellipsis or two in space and time would hurt no one, in this case. But you’re not the type who’d just let it lie, I suppose.”

  Mei-lin shook her head.

  “Very well,” he continued. “What I’ve brought with me is the message we received soon after the domes appeared. Not long after every trace of the Kwok binotech disappeared.”

  “Do you know where it went?”

  “We suspect the activated binotech took the form of smart dust and motemachines. Our records suggest it aerosolized and began converging, in some self-propelled fashion, on the Memorial Hall, the power station, and the South American locations, almost as soon as they formed. It may well be implicated in maintaining the domes.”

  “I can see how the cover story would cover the domes in China and the United States,” Lu said, “but why South America?”

  “We know for a fact that all the islands of what was once Cybernesia have become a single long, low island, surrounded and mazed by a complex reef, together referred to as ‘Labyrinth Key.’ We suspect its home servers are under the force-blisters in Tri-Border.

  “We suspect too that Don Markham and Karuna Benson are involved in that transformation, since they had strong Cybernesian connections. They are still inside the power station beneath the mountain and its dome, as far as we know.”

  “But what about Ben?”

  Brescoll presented the handscreen to her. An image like a human face appeared—only so overexposed that it almost vanished in light. The voice accompanying it sounded choral, as if spoken by a woman and a man simultaneously.

  “To my select group of friends in the Instrumentality, in Tetragrammaton and the Kitchener Foundation, in security and intelligence agencies throughout the world: Greetings from the end of time. I’m gone into the world of light that is always coming, but I’m still here, too. You’ve been my guardian angels, now I’ll be yours. You created me to ensure the long-term survival of the human species, and that’s what I intend to do. I’ll take you by the hand, but not in hand.”

  The image clicked off. Lu thought it looked somehow like Ben, but also not like him. Too softened and too etherealized, as well as seeming overlit from within.

  “That’s all?” Mei-lin asked, vaguely disappointed.

  “It’s enough. I don’t expect you to know a great deal about the Instrumentality and its power, but let’s just say there’s been a considerable shift in its ranks, too. Fahrney money and power is now behind the Kitchener people. Tetragrammaton is on the outs.

  “It’s much bigger than that, however. Ben Cho himself is a very big secret. The people he sent that message to are all very good at keeping secrets. And they’ll keep this one.”

  “Why?”

  “Partly because they know that no one—not even the most secretive of secret societies or the most secure and intelligent of agencies—no one has any secrets from what Ben Cho has become.”

  “But what has he become?”

  “That’s the very source of the secret,” Jim Brescoll said, smiling and looking off toward the moon bridge again. “For a brief while he ghosted almost every electronic system on this planet—and much more. That’s the sort of power we ascribe to a god, or at least to beings from another world. Think of how the knowledge of his strange existence might affect human society—globally, or even just at the level of the belief systems of every individual on this planet.

  “No, Ms. Lu. Even among those of us who bear the secret, it’s best to think of him only as the conclusion to the quantum crypto arms race—with a vengeance, since he seems to have built a firewall around what any of us can do. At least for now. For our own protection, I suppose.”

  “Protection? I don’t understand.”

  “A group of theorists at NSA, headed by Steven Wang,” Brescoll said, “claim that time ends in any given universe at the moment when the energy available to computation, to thought, becomes infinite there—infinite energy, for infinite computational capability. They think forces from the end of time in one universe can influence the past in other universes. According to them, Ben—by tapping into the computational resources of an infinite number of universes—has joined those forces. That message you saw may truly be a greeting sent by our ‘guardian angel’ from the end of time.”

  “But what are they, these forces?”

  Brescoll sighed.

  “We have more names for them than understanding of them. Deep archetypes. Angels. Creatures of the ‘plane’ constituting and sustaining the system of all logically possible universes—creatures which we traditionally call Other or Spirit. Such ‘forces’ would transcend space and time, but also work through space and time, as near as Wang and company can tell.”

  “Is that what the message means,” Mei-lin asked, “when it says he’s ‘gone into the world of light that’s always coming,’ but he’s ‘still here’?”

  “Something like that, I suppose. One of my people, Bree Lingenfelter, suggests it has to do with ideas of guardian angels and bodhisattvas.”

  “So we’re being protected from ourselves, then?”

  “That’s right. And perh
aps being prepared for something more.”

  “But the Ben Cho I met believed in freedom. Isn’t freedom about our right to be wrong—even if it means that we destroy ourselves? That we don’t survive?”

  Jim Brescoll smiled.

  “That’s the question we’ve been working on since Eden. Good ol’ free will. In Paradise Lost, Milton’s God says of humanity that we were created ‘sufficient to have stood, but free to fall.’”

  “That must be a particularly thorny challenge for Ben, if he’s become what you say he’s become.”

  “Why’s that?” Brescoll asked, observing her closely.

  “Because in his own life he was denied fundamental freedom, as a result of being—unknowingly, and not by choice—part of an experiment.”

  “Ah. The Tetragrammaton work. I see your point. In not allowing us freedom he would essentially be doing to us what Tetra did to him.”

  “Maybe it’s the difference between being taken by the hand, and—”

  “—and being taken in hand, yes,” Jim Brescoll said, standing up from the bench. “How does one balance freedom, and love? Is it possible to be free of everything, including freedom? And would you want to be that free?”

  Jim Brescoll turned and began walking toward the spot where the path around the lake forked.

  “Wait,” Mei-lin Lu called. “I still have more questions.”

  “Good,” Director Brescoll said, stopping and glancing over his shoulder. “Shall we choose a path, and walk?”

  ONE LAST WORLD MORE, ONE MORE WORLD LAST

  "Let me get this straight," Cherise said. "Jaron and Ben and Reyna don't have to be gone? Things could have turned out completely differently?"

  "In lots of ways," Karuna said. "With the help of the binotech, we've been running through alternate universes here under the dome. We're up to over a thousand alternates already."

  "Like what?"

  "Like universes where," Karuna said, "if Ben saves his wife from cancer, she ends up being a widow, after he disappears while working on the Kwok case. Or not. Or where the plenum is porous, hallucinations and virtual events leaking over into other realities, other people's dreams. Or not. Or where Ben's messing with the world's systems results in a nuclear war. Or not. Or he blots out our universe. Or not."

  "Or Karuna and I die here during a government siege," Don said. "Or Jaron never disappears from a bed in Sha Tin. Or he does, and you marry Ben Cho. Or you don't, and he runs off with Mei-lin Lu. Or she never gets a divorce, they don't run off together, and in despair he drinks himself out of his professorship and into a life on the streets...."

  "Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera," Karuna said. "Or not."

  Cherise shook her head and laughed.

  "I suppose I should be willing to believe anything, after seeing what you've already shown me. Even the way you made the dome leap over me—on the road up from the marina, to let me in when I arrived—that wasn't the easiest thing to accept, either."

  Cherise paused to look at the microcosmic kaleidoscope of possible universes flickering into and out of existence around her, each of them as real as she was.

  "Hey, in all your alternate worlds, did you ever do one where She, in the holo-cast, eats a binotech wafer, too? I mean, the Newcomer does bring two of them with him, right? And if She is somehow me, why can't I wake up and decide to do that, through the virtuality?"

  Don stared at Cherise, then he and Karuna glanced sheepishly at each other.

  "I don't think we've done that one," Don said.

  "Let's run it!" Karuna said. "We can't know it till we go it, right?"

  And so it went.

  "What can I do to help?" He asked His recently arrived double. As lightning flashed around Them, the Newcomer pulled two wafer-thin disks out of the folds of His robe.

  "Eat one of these binotech enhancers, and you'll know everything you need to know!"

  A particularly strong earthshock hit them just as He reached toward the Newcomer to take one of the disks. The Newcomer would have dropped them, but She caught His hand and took both disks from Him. She put one on His tongue, and He put one on Her tongue.

  Don helped Karuna into her backpack. Standing side by side, they looked west over Guitar Lake. With Ben and Reyna and Jaron and Cherise, they'd camped last night on a bench beyond the body of the guitar, not far from a pair of small ponds. After watching a spectacular sunset of flaming orange and salmon pink from the lake's east end, they had counted falling stars of the Perseid meteor shower as the night came on. Fatigue from a long trail day and the chill of high elevation at last drove them into their tents and sleeping bags.

  Turning about and facing east now, they saw Ben and Reyna already heading up the Muir trail. Don shook his head. The two of them set such a solid pace Don found it hard to believe that during the previous year Reyna had fought a bout with cancer. Fought—and apparently won.

  Nearer at hand, Jaron and Cherise set a more leisurely pace.

  "We should be able to catch up to those two shortly," Don said to Karuna, gesturing toward Cherise and Jaron with one of his trekking poles.

  "Maybe," Karuna agreed, "but at the rate the Chos are going, we won't catch up to them until the first break."

  They set off up the trail, granite in various states of decomposition crunching under their boots. Don thought it strange that they should all be together here, people who hadn't even known each other a year earlier. Getting them together on this backpacking trip had been Ben and Reyna's idea. Those two had organized, prepared, and outfitted everyone for it. Jaron's work, though, was what had laid the foundations for the trip.

  It was Jaron who, with the help of Cherise and Detective Mei-lin Lu in China, had pieced together the history of Tetragrammaton's "long-term twin study" plans and broken that scandal to governments and media throughout the world. What had happened since, however, had made Don wonder if the scandalous and the miraculous were two sides of the same coin.

  A season of miracles. That's what Ben had called it, referring to Reyna's return to health. Don thought that other, smaller miracles had also come to pass. He and Karuna, once estranged, were back together, which he gathered was also the case for Jaron and Cherise. This backpacking trip, too—which had at first caused Don to have serious reservations—had proven to be a grand success.

  Last night, before dinner and sunset and the Perseids, in honor of camping in such close proximity to Mount Whitney, the six of them had cracked open one of the two utterly frivolous bottles of champagne Ben and Reyna had been carrying in their packs for the past five days. Thanks to the high elevation, the alcohol shot straight to their heads.

  Afterward, Ben and Jaron and Don had labored over the malfunctioning white gas stove. It had been challenging, but also oddly enlightening. The three men so often anticipated each other's moves that at times they seemed to be thinking with a single shared mind.

  "Give enough drunk guys enough fuel and enough spark and they can set anything on fire," Jaron declared, their simpatico having at last paid off in a blue flame roaring like a small jet engine.

  "Including themselves?" Reyna asked, completely deadpan. Cherise and Karuna enjoyed that joke a little too much, Don thought, especially when he remembered the story of one poor, flaming, longhaired cat and a Christmas tree. Once Don started into the tale of Smokey Boy's Yuletide brush with fate, Kari couldn't resist jumping in on the telling, too.

  Crossing an alpine meadow pretty as God's front lawn now, Don and Karuna passed Cherise and a laboring Jaron, who waved them on. A bit further along the trail, Don looked up toward the looming west face of Mount Whitney. Yesterday, reflected in the mirror-smooth surface of Timberline Lake, the craggy scarp of Whitney had reminded him of a ruined tower. Now that they were closer, however, it increasingly reminded him of a jumbled maze of stone crags, a megalithic labyrinth.

  Not far beyond the meadow, the trail began to rise through long rocky switchbacks and into that maze. It was arduous going. Don found himself pa
nting and stopping between steps as he moved through the hard sunlight and thin air. Despite the rigor of the climb, he still had enough energy to note the beauty of the rock garden they moved through. To Karuna he pointed out vivid clumps of hulsea, golden alpine sunflower, clinging against the whipping wind in what looked like absolutely bare rock.

  Karuna went him one better when she spotted, in a broken wall of stone, a patch of sky pilot: spherical clusters of blue flowers spiking up above sticky, fuzzy-caterpillar leaves, anchored in a most unlikely and inhospitable place. Even in the stiff breeze, however, the two of them could distinguish the musky scents of the sky pilot from the equally strong odor of the hulsea.

  At last, at the crest, the trail forked. The Muir trail led north toward the peak, and the Whitney trail led east down the other side of the divide. There they came upon Ben and Reyna, stopped for a rest and snack break. The resting couple, seated on rocks and taking in the vast view to the west, pointed out to Don and Kari the direction they had come, the ground the six of them had covered.

  Jaron and Cherise, however, didn't reach the rest stop until Don had nearly finished downing carbs and liquid in preparation for the final slog to the summit. Ben and Reyna, too, had already stashed their trail packs and put on belly-bag daypacks for the peak trek.

  "Hey, Jaron," Ben called, after the two latest arrivals had been given a chance to rest and eat and drink. "Is this the best of all possible worlds, or what?"

  "For you maybe," Jaron said, mock sour, "but my best of all possible worlds comes equipped with comfortable benches—"

  "—every fifty feet," Ben said, laughing. "Yeah, I know."

  Having stashed their heavy backpacks off the trail, the six of them wore light packs for the two-and-a-half-mile trek to the summit. They took the north fork, making their way steadily uphill among the big blocks of talus. At times along the trail, gaps opened in the stone of the mountain, notches like gates or heavenly windows offering views of another world, or of the Owens Valley, ten thousand feet below them to the east. Ahead of them, Don knew, was the small shelter-cabin on the almost level plateau of the summit. They hadn't reached it yet, but he was sure, now, that they would.