by Ian Rogers
THE RIFTS BETWEEN US
Stanton was almost out of air and the suns were coming up. He glanced down at his digital chronometer again, and the luminous red numerals seemed to scream at him.
“All right, boys. Pack it in.”
Fydenchuck was down on one knee, collecting a sample of the cobalt-coloured soil. He looked up and stared off at the horizon. “We’re gonna miss a real romantic moment here, bwana.”
“Oh, sure.” Klein came over, waving his telemetry wand through the air lackadaisically. He looked like a cut-rate magician bored with his craft. “If your idea of romance is getting chopped into coleslaw.”
Fydenchuck tilted his head in mock consideration. “Susan might be down with that. I have a theory she was raised by a pack of rabid wolverines.”
“Susan?” The wand dipped a bit in Klein’s hand. “What happened to Julia?”
“Julia . . .” Fydenchuck shuddered. “She belongs out here.”
Klein shook his head. “You’re sick.”
“Hey, she might survive. It’s entirely possible. I tell you, that girl is fierce.”
“Pack it up,” Stanton repeated, a bit more impatiently this time. He was referring to their equipment, but he also meant their shtick. As the team leader he tended to refrain from taking part in the banter and frivolty which was, he knew, really more of a defence mechanism than anything else. That aside, Stanton didn’t joke about the rifts. There was nothing funny about them. Not one little thing.
He checked his chronometer again. “The neural signal is breaking down. Get ready to shift. At five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .”
Klein and Fydenchuck disappeared. Not in a flash of light or a confluence of strange energies or even a theatrical cloud of stage smoke—they simply winked out of existence as though they were never there.
“This now concludes our broadcast day,” Stanton muttered as he depressed the button on the back of his glove, and then he was gone, too.
There was a brief sensation of displacement, like a tugging in the middle of his chest, and then he was back on the dais in the broadcasting chamber. Klein and Fydenchuck had stepped down to the main floor to make room for him. The small platform was barely big enough for two men, much less three. They would install a wider one for the next stage of the project, no doubt, after additional funding had been approved, after the board decided to send over bigger teams of explorers. Not that it would make any difference. They hadn’t found much of anything in the rifts, and Stanton didn’t think sending larger groups of people would change that.
Fydenchuck kicked the dust off the soles of his heavy boots, first one and then the other, while Klein took off his gloves, being mindful of the cords that fed power to the shifter buttons on the back of each one. They took off their masks in unison and breathed the cool air that was pumped into the chamber from the large industrial vents overhead. The chamber had an extremely high ceiling, with rows of windows set high up on either side, one row for the gallery, the other for the control room. Having so many people looking down on them always made Stanton think of the amphitheatres in hospital operating rooms. Except in here the patient never made it.
He tried to ignore the watchful eyes above him by looking around the rest of the room. Situated around the dais like pieces of absurdist art were a number of secondary experiments that were being run in conjunction with Project Seal.
There was an enormous aquarium filled with fish and underwater plant life that spanned one entire wall; a cage in which a pair of primates named Mickey and Minnie grunted and hooted and occasionally cavorted on a stainless-steel jungle gym; a crate housing a golden retriever named Rex, and another one with a grey tabby named Hobbes; glass containers stacked on metal shelving in which various species of insects creeped and crawled. And there were plants. Lots and lots of plants.
To Stanton, the room looked like a zoo exhibit designed by someone of the opinion that all God’s creatures should occupy the same space all of the time. Noah sans the ark.
The purpose of this motley crew was to determine the side effects of the neural transmissions that Stanton and his team used to access the rifts. So far—none.
The seal door opened with a hiss of escaping air and Dr. Finley, a harried-looking man in a lab coat, entered the chamber.
“She’s gone,” he said without preamble. He tugged at the knot of his tie with a hand that trembled slightly.
“We noticed,” Fydenchuck replied curtly, unslinging the oxygen tank strapped to his back.
“She held on a long time,” Stanton said. “We were going to have to come back anyway. We were almost out of air.”
Finley spared a quick look at his watch. “Yes. She was very strong, very . . . committed.”
Stanton stopped in the middle of coiling a rubber air hose. “She knew she was terminal.” He hesitated. “Didn’t she?”
“Yes, of course,” Finley said. “I meant she was committed to the project.”
Stanton stared at him a moment longer. “Yes,” he said, finally, “they all are.”
The seal door opened again and an intern came in, almost bouncing with excitement.
“Dr. Finley, we just came back online. We got video.” He gave a victorious grin which sagged into a pained grimace when he turned to Stanton.
Dr. Finley tugged at his tie again, but his hand was no longer trembling. “We’ve got video,” he repeated to himself. A small, satisfied smile rose on his face.
He left the room, chatting animatedly with the intern until the seal door clipped off the sound of their voices. Stanton, Klein, and Fydenchuck went back to removing their gear. They took their time, storing it neatly and securely in their lockers. The video feed didn’t interest them. They didn’t need to see it. They had been there.
Stanton sat on the edge of the dead woman’s bed, holding her hand. Cold and smooth as marble. Her face was serene, her wrinkles light pencil sketches on tissue paper. The neural net hung from its mobile over her head like a glittering golden spiderweb.
Her name was Abigail Brennan. She was sixty-four at the time of her death, which came as the result of colon cancer. Many of the project’s participants were cancer patients. Too many of them, in Stanton’s opinion. He had talked with Abigail on several occasions, had sat in this exact spot at her bedside, but this was the first time he had held her hand. Why was that? Because he didn’t want to get too close? Finley and the other project leaders didn’t like it, didn’t want them to have any contact with the participants at all, but that would have gone against the whole purpose of the project. If they were going to understand death, then they had to face it on every level, including the personal.
The sound of someone clearing his throat jerked Stanton out of his reverie. He turned and saw the intern standing in the doorway.
“What is it?”
“Dr. Finley has called an emergency meeting.”
“When?”
“Uh, right away, sir.”
“We haven’t held the service yet.”
The intern was silent for a moment, trying to pick his words carefully. “It’s . . . an emergency. Sir.”
Stanton turned his back on him.
The intern went on. “Dr. Finley feels . . .”
“Does he?” Stanton said in a low voice. “I have to wonder sometimes. Finley is familiar with the procedure—he should be, he helped write it—and procedure says we hold the service immediately after the rift closes. No exceptions.”
He took a deep steadying breath to stave off an impulse to reach across the room and grab the kid’s quavering throat and squeeze.
“But I don’t need to quote the scripture, do I? Because even if we didn’t have all these rules written down in our neat little handbook, there’s still this thing called respect. Are you familiar with it?”
He turned back around and fixed the intern with a firm, dark stare. The intern nodded furiously, his Adam’s apple bobbing up an
d down.
“Good. If Finley has any objections, maybe you can remind him.”
The intern left and Stanton turned back to the dead woman. He laid her hand next to her side and pulled the coverlet up over her head. Finley could wait. There would always be more rifts. Forever and ever. Amen.
After the service, the committee held their emergency meeting. It took place in the west wing conference room because it was on the side of the building that didn’t look out on the cemetery which occupied a large part of the institute grounds.
The dead are still with us, Stanton thought, even if we don’t want to be reminded of it.
The view from the conference room was infinitely less morbid. From here one could see the duck pond, the stables, and acres and acres of untouched woodland. All of it seeming to burst with life and all of its possibilities.
Stanton sat and waited for the others to show up. He looked at the somber portraits that lined the walls. Elderly men and women mostly, except for one of a young girl dressed in what were presumably her Sunday best. Klein’s sister. Eight years old. Leukemia.
All of the people in the portraits were dead now. Finley’s uncle had been the last to go. He had been a kind, gregarious man with a silver tongue able to make even the most stone-faced nurse flush bright red.
The project had continued after he died, although Stanton hadn’t been sure it would be possible. They started working with volunteers sent to the institute by special referral. Their arrival by air-lift helicopter was always an occasion of some ceremony. At first, Stanton thought it wouldn’t be the same, travelling to the rifts of people with whom he had no personal connection. But it turned out everyone was related in death.
The room began to fill up, and everyone rose when Rebecca Marcos, silver hair, grey eyes, Armani suit, swept in on a breeze of jasmine perfume. She took the chair at the head of the long gleaming table and everyone resumed their seats.
The meeting began, and during the course of it Rebecca Marcos asked Stanton in her sweetly assertive manner that if he intended to hold up another emergency session of the committee, then could he please do it at another company. Like Wal-Mart, perhaps.
Stanton replied that he would do everything in his power to keep from delaying another emergency meeting. He could tell it wasn’t the complete and total acquiescence that Rebecca Marcos wanted, but she smiled warmly just the same and the meeting continued.
He had no misconceptions or delusions about his position at the institute. He was a good man to send into the rifts, but he could be replaced—just as he himself had replaced the late Justin Cooper.
After the meeting, Stanton caught up with Finley as he slipped quickly out of the conference room and pulled him into an empty office.
“If you have a problem,” Stanton said, “take it up with me. Don’t cry to mommy.”
Finley blinked. “I have just as much to lose in this as you, Stanton.”
“Go behind my back again and you’ll lose a lot more. I promise you.”
“Don’t get sanctimonious with me. I came here with an Elder, just like you.”
“The Elders are dead, Finley—all of them—and it seems like your respect died with them.”
“I have respect for the dead,” Finley said hotly.
“But you don’t have any respect for the dying,” Stanton fired back. “That’s your problem, Finley. What do you think, it isn’t personal anymore so it’s okay to treat these people like lab rats?”
“You’re putting words in my mouth.”
“Words are all you’ve got.” Stanton’s voice vibrated with anger and disgust. “Do you even remember why we’re doing this?”
“We’re trying to bridge the gap between life and death. We’re . . .”
“Save me the metaphors and the euphemisms.”
“What do you want from me?”
“Tell me what we’re doing here!” Stanton screamed into his face.
“We’re pushing back death,” Finley said frantically. “We’re exploring the borderlands. We found a frequency that the brain gives off before it dies. We can ride that signal into the rifts, the veritable waiting room of death, and explore it.”
“We haven’t found out a thing.”
“Not yet, but we’ve only been transmitting for a year. We can build better neural nets, ones that can boost the signal even higher, show us more of what lies out there on Death’s doorstep.”
Stanton shook his head wearily. “Don’t read me the brochure.”
“We’re explorers, Stanton, as much you might not like to admit it. The final frontier isn’t space. It’s death and whatever lies beyond it.”
“Didn’t you hear me? We haven’t found anything. Just a lot of open real estate.”
“That’s still something,” Finley insisted.
“Did you ever stop to think that maybe we’re not supposed to know what happens after we die.”
“How can you say that after all the progress we’ve made? If we weren’t meant to explore the rifts, then why were we able to find them? Why were we able to develop the technology to piggyback on the death frequency and explore it? Why, if not to figure out the truth behind the eternal question: What happens after we die?”
“Maybe Cooper could tell you,” Stanton said.
Finley flinched. “I’m scheduling another trip tonight.”
Stanton felt his anger slip down a notch. “Who?”
“Bill X.”
Stanton’s gaze drifted away. “Bill . . .” Seventy-eight years old. Former insurance salesman. He was always telling elephant jokes. The only thing he had asked for in his room was the complete set of A.A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh books. Visitors weren’t permitted at the institute, but he had received dozens of letters from his daughter in Sarasota.
“The cancer’s spread into his lungs,” Finley went on. “It won’t be long now.”
“He’s fading?”
“Not yet,” Finley admitted. “But his signal is at low ebb. I don’t expect he’ll last the night.”
Stanton nodded absently. “I’ll put the team on standby.”
They went their separate ways, their argument forgotten in the rush to get back to work.
“You’re going to wear that tape out.”
Klein snapped his head around; his face stood out like a full moon in the darkened theatre.
“It’s on disc,” he said.
“I know,” Stanton said. He came down the aisle with its dim track lighting running along either side. “I was trying to get a laugh out of you.”
Klein turned back to the screen. “If I wanted a laugh, I wouldn’t be watching this.”
“True enough.”
He moved sideways along the row of seats and sat down next to Klein. “Why are you watching this?”
Klein shrugged. “I don’t know. Research, I guess.”
“Find anything?”
Even in the dark, Stanton could feel the look Klein was giving him. “Give me a break.”
From behind them a voice muttered: “Holy shit.”
They turned around and saw Fydenchuck’s unmistakable silhouette in the lighted doorway.
“Am I interrupting something?”
“We’re doing research,” Stanton said. He felt Klein giving him that look again.
“Is that what the kids are calling it these days? My, I am getting old.”
Fydenchuck sauntered down the aisle, hands in his pockets.
“I thought you had a date,” Klein said.
“You’re my date tonight, K-man.”
He slipped past Stanton and flopped down in the seat on Klein’s other side, propping his feet on the back of the seat in front of him.
“I like you better when you’re getting laid,” Klein said.
“And why is that, babyluv?”
“Because it usually means you’re somewhere else.”
Fydenchuck looked up at the screen. “I wish I was
, now,” he said. “Why in the hell are we watching this depressing shit?”
“I told you,” Stanton said. “It’s research.”
“Research?” Fydenchuck frowned. “We’ve watched this thing a thousand times. So have the geeks. They went over it with a microscope, frame by frame, and they didn’t find a thing.”
“There has to be something,” Klein said. “It’s the only footage we have of what happens after . . . afterwards.”
Fydenchuck turned and looked at both of them. “You want to know what happened?” He pointed at the screen. “That dipshit refused his call and decided to stick around to watch the suns rise. The patient died and Cooper got dragged along for the ride. Only it wasn’t his time, see, and whoever—or whatever—it is that governs death chewed him up and spit him out.”
“They say he had a brain tumour,” Stanton said in a low, ruminative voice.
“Oh, right,” Fydenchuck said with a derisive snort. “He wasn’t crazy, he was suicidal. He was a terminal case—just like all of the patients in our happy little project—and he decided to hitch a ride into the great beyond? I don’t buy it.”
“Why not?”
The death of Justin Cooper had become a part of the institute’s apocrypha. After receiving the call to transmit out of the rift he was exploring, Cooper, for reasons known only to himself, decided to stay. Or that’s what they think happened. It was possible his suit had malfunctioned, although it was extremely unlikely. Every suit was equipped with three return buttons, one primary and two back-ups, and the chances of one or two failing, much less all three, were infinitesimal. An equipment check had been done before he left and everything was in proper working order. The other two members of his team were completely perplexed. They reported no unusual behaviour on Cooper’s part and pleaded total ignorance of any plans he might have had to remain in the rift after the suns came up. It wasn’t long before stories began to circulate that Cooper had been diagnosed with a brain tumour prior to his trip. The reason for his staying behind was narrowed down to one of three possible scenarios. One: he wanted to confront his own mortality and felt the only way to do it properly was through experiencing death by proxy. Two: he was hoping to obtain some knowledge which would somehow stay his own death. Three: he simply wanted to commit suicide.