by Cam Rogers
“He wanted me to go straight to the house, but I figured I’d get more sense out of you.”
Paul chewed his lip for one thoughtful second, and then said: “It’s better that I show you. Fuck.” Paul’s eyes were locked on something over Jack’s shoulder: the security guard had come back, was talking into his radio, looking in their direction and nodding. “C’mon, walk fast.”
Walking away from a badge at 4:00 A.M. wasn’t something Jack questioned. He and Paul had started with egging houses on Halloween, graduated to breaking into junkyards to shoot zombie footage for high school film class, moved on to a short-lived flirtation with growing weed in his bedroom, and ended in that final scene with one of the state’s more serious killers. If Paul said turn away and fly casual, Jack didn’t overthink it.
“You mind telling me what’s going on?” They reached the end of Founders’ Way, turned right, and then: “You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
Paul Serene’s twenty-foot-high face smiled down. The videoboard was attached to the façade of the old university lab, preserved within the vision-challenging lattice of the new Quantum Physics Building dome. The view pulled back from Paul’s mug, revealing him holding a roiling ball of light in one palm, before a benevolent sweeping gesture invited the viewer into what was presumably a brighter future. This was signified by the light ball enveloping the screen and MONARCH INNOVATIONS sparkling into view.
“Before you say anything—”
“Ain’t you pretty!”
“Never mind.”
“So benevolent. So constipated.”
Paul fished out a transparent laminate and moved to a clear security door by the main entrance. “It wasn’t my idea. I just turned up for the shoot.”
“What is it you do here again?”
Paul swiped his card. Nothing happened. He swore softly, repositioned it, tried again. This time the card swipe was rewarded with one of the most satisfying clicks Jack had heard. The brushed-steel frame nudged open. Paul sighed with relief.
“Project coordinator,” Paul replied. “They recruited me out of college. I make sure things get done, effectively, on time, and in a way that gets people excited.” He held the door open. “After you.” The interior of the glassed atrium was warm, containing three stories of extravagantly empty space. “The dome is a double layer of 3-D-printed textured polycarbonate and reinforced glass. The air layer provides insulation. Depending on the position of the sun, the shadows cast by the canopy’s asymmetrical architecture take on different aspects: striations, crazed glass, shapes significant to people who know more about math than I do.”
“Neat trick.”
“On top of that they’ve got the glass doubling as solar panels, providing a marginally positive carbon footprint. For the administrative sections of the building at least. Some parts of the labs chew power like a motherfucker.”
Paul marched left toward the façade of one of the campus’s original brick buildings, now contained within the expensive geometric umbrella of the Quantum Physics Building’s dome.
“The architect spends every alternate month under a Shinto vow of non-communication in a compound outside Hokkaido. It made negotiations and milestones a total bitch. Dunno why they gave him that prize; it’ll only encourage him.” Paul glanced back the way they came. “Follow me, I’ll take you upstairs.”
Jack glanced back. “Are we allowed in here?” No sign of the guard, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t waiting for backup. “You’re not acting like we’re allowed to be here. Buildings this expensive usually have doors that work the first time.”
“Whose face is on that screen?”
“I don’t know, but he’s smiling like there’s a gun to his head.”
A hazard-striped security door opened onto a freight elevator, which was set into the façade of the old building. Paul waved his card through a scanner. “You’ve seen a lot of weirdness, yeah?” Paul wasn’t shooting the shit: he was double-checking.
A fifteen-inch screen on the elevator’s opposite wall flashed to life and provided a rundown of Paul’s appointments: none. It advised that he was five hours early for work and that Monarch Innovations does not approve of more than 10 percent employee overtime in a given month. An MIT-sourced graph appeared to support this philosophy, and the screen wished him a good morning.
“I have now,” Jack said.
Paul swiped the card again, tapped the top floor. Jack noticed the tension in his face.
“Hit me with the weirdest,” Paul said.
“So I was in Belize. That’s in South America.”
“I know where Belize is, Jack.”
“So I was in Belize and made friends with two lady pimps when I helped them save a horse from being beaten to death by some scumbag who owned a racetrack.”
“That’s—”
“The next morning I officiated when they fought an early-morning duel over the beautiful prostitute they had both fallen in love with.”
Paul eyeballed him.
“2011. Straight-up code duello.”
Paul considered. “How did it end?”
“Marriage. All three of them, quite happily.”
“Huh.”
“Life’s short. So, does that qualify?”
“Not even close. This is our floor.”
The doors shushed open onto a long, dark corridor. A single door was rim-lit at the end.
“This doesn’t feel like it fits inside that old building.”
“We added a couple of reinforced top floors to suit our needs. We’re above the canopy at this level.” Recess lighting kicked in at ankle height, following them toward the door. “Once we get inside I’ll need your help to set a few things up. How familiar are you with the theory of relativity?”
“I’m relatively familiar.”
“You still like sci-fi?”
“We prefer ‘speculative fiction.’”
“Well, I’d say you’re about to step into it.” Clinically white armored doors rumbled open at the final swipe. “Except this is anything but speculative.” Paul walked into darkness. Jack followed.
Lights clicked and thudded, revealing the chamber section by section.
Vertigo kicked in, Jack’s hands closing on the cold steel of the safety rail before him. He was looking down into an octagonal tech pit, NASA-white and hairy with red and blue cables snaking out of discrete access panels. Suspended at the center of the hollowed-out geometric sphere of a room was … another geometric sphere. Held atop a high-tech dais, the sphere was made of a dense-looking dull metal, each face of it jacked and wired with tons of heavy-gauge cabling. The cabling poured from the sphere and down into subfloor cavities, or was draped over and connected to a metal walkway that ringed the sphere. Jack might have thought the walkway might be for maintenance, if it wasn’t for the sealed-off airlock chamber sitting out of place on their side of it.
Paul didn’t waste time. After swipe-locking the door behind them, he leapt down the steps to the left and headed around the octagonal pit toward a glassed-in observation room.
“How much money did they give you? What am I even looking at?”
The in-room intercom piped Paul’s voice from four corners, weird acoustics making him sound like two people at once. He spoke absentmindedly, working a two-screen control panel.
“The beginning of a new age.” He stopped abruptly, clattering keys falling silent. When he spoke again his voice was flat with realization. “You’re looking at the death of regret.” He smiled. “Huh.”
Jack studied the construction, trying to make sense of it, and failing.
“Where have I seen this before?”
“Nowhere,” Paul said, busy with the monitors. “It’s proprietary.”
Something was off about this. “Paul, are you bullshitting me? This isn’t ‘proprietary.’” Jack pointed out the viewplate. “Tell me that thing isn’t based on Will’s work.”
Paul stopped what he was doing, formed a response, opened his
mouth, changed his mind, shut it again. “Okay,” he said, and went back to his keyboard. “I won’t.”
“That security guard told me Will used to work here.” Paul was the only person on Earth Jack trusted. If there was deception here, he would not be able to withstand it.
“I know you hate being lied to,” Paul said, reading his mind. “But I would point out that I didn’t lie to you; I just didn’t answer your question in a timely manner. So … we cool?”
“Why am I here?”
“I delayed explanations until you saw the Promenade for yourself. You have to understand everything in its proper context.”
“Don’t give me long answers to simple questions, Paul. What did Will do and how bad is it?” Paul was still tapping keys, dragging a finger across viewscreens. It didn’t look like he was getting anywhere. It kept reprimanding with error messages. “What are you doing? Do you even know what you’re doing?”
“Yes,” Paul said, exasperated, and produced a collection of Post-it notes from his pocket. Waved them as evidence. “I know what I’m doing.” The viewscreen barped again. “I’m just,” Paul said, calmly, “trying to work. Quickly. Because in less than five minutes your security guard buddy is going to come through that door with at least three friends and change the course of human progress forever.” Paul returned to what he was doing. “For the worse, just so we’re clear.”
4
Saturday, 8 October 2016. 4:07 A.M. Riverport University, Quantum Physics Building.
Jack had left behind the relative safety and calm of Thailand for this. Not only was he involved in the commission of at least one felony, his best friend was acting weird and Jack was already being dragged back into Will’s mess of a life. What’s more, he hadn’t even seen Will yet.
Something hard-kicked beneath the floor. As Jack backed away from the machine, the hair on his arms tickled. Thick cords of cabling spasmed, like living things.
“Paul—”
“Here’s the deal,” Paul’s tinny double voice piped over the intercom. “We hired Will as a consultant on this project. It’s supposed to do that, relax. So we hired Will. And things were going pretty great. He seemed stable, not too much of that muttering-to-himself stuff, kept a reasonable focus and he ironed out kinks like nobody else on the team.”
“But…”
“But he became erratic.”
“Define ‘erratic.’ Erratic like that time at Walmart, or erratic like that thing with the council planners?”
“More like that time he found us playing with his stuff in the barn.”
Jack closed his eyes and swore. That had been the bad one. It had been pre-medication and Will had really gone off the deep end: a daylong fit of rage, followed by an inability to process it. Will had disappeared into the barn for forty-eight hours, muttering and shouting. When Jack tried to make peace, Will had thrown a plate at him, mashed potatoes flying everywhere. It was the only time Jack hadn’t felt safe around his older brother.
“You could have told me that in an e-mail, Paul.”
If there was one thing he learned from the episode with the two women in Belize it was that nothing is more important in this life than happiness—whatever it looks like, wherever you find it. This was no way to live.
Paul leaned against the console. “What did we always say?”
“C’mon…”
“What did we say?”
“We stick together or the bastards win.”
“Right. Tonight is the most important moment of my life. I wouldn’t be here without you, so I couldn’t have done this without you.” He turned and popped the clear Perspex idiot shield from an oversized black punch-button. “I want you to be able to say you were in the room when the world changed.”
Paul’s palm came down, gently, and the room outside blasted to electric life. Mechanisms activated beneath the curved walkway that circled the core, and from beneath the walkway flat double-hinged sections swung up, opened, and clicked into place. In a single wave corridor sections unfurled around the circumference. In seconds the walkway had become a sealed corridor circling the crackling geometric sphere at the chamber’s heart.
Jack stepped back.
Paul said, “Put these on,” tossing him a pair of photoreactive goggles.
“Shouldn’t you have given me those before you hit that button?”
A monitor suspended from the roof flashed a green alert. “The ground security door’s been opened. We’ve got about three minutes.” Paul ran up the steel-mesh stairs to the entry door, slashed his card through the reader, and locked it down tight. “Call it five. Follow me.”
The machine was vibrating. The core threw off sparks. The air smelled like burned hair. A shimmering corona, like a heat mirage, rose from the corridor-ring.
“Will bulk e-mailed the entire project mailing list—investors included,” Paul shouted above the din, coming to a stop before the gangway. “He expressed his lack of confidence in the project in a very detailed manner. In short he freaked the investors right out. Funding was pulled, Jack. They shut the entire project down.”
Jack nodded, understanding, checked the door, glared at Paul. “They fired you. They fired you, and you’re in here with a hacked code key about to fire up a reactor that your only real expert thinks is massively dangerous. With me.”
“C’mon. We’ve done worse.”
“I don’t think we have, Paul.”
Something under the floor belted against itself, and the sphere at the center of the room started thrumming.
“This is six years of work, Jack! People trusted me to guide this to the finish line. People with families. Once administration sees that it works safely—”
“You’ll go to jail!”
“It’ll be worth it!”
Jack took that in. “This is just like that time with that girl from summer camp.”
“I don’t deny that Heather had a few problems—”
“You’re white knighting, man! Again! Let’s get the fuck out of here!”
“This is about families, Jack! And futures! The future! Lives will change if I can make this happen.”
Jack pointed straight at the machine. “This is based on Will’s work, isn’t it?” Jack insisted. “He knows what he’s talking about. I mean, before he went off the rails, before our parents were gone, he was doing good work, right? He might be nuts but he’s not an idiot.”
“The team’s been over it and over it and there is nothing, and I mean nothing to Will’s accusations.”
“Maybe so, but I didn’t come back to get arrested. Shut it down, okay? It sounds … really pissed off.”
Paul shook his head. “Too late. Once the core’s activated there’s no way to turn it off, short of finding some way to collapse the black hole.”
The machine stabilized, soothed; the vibration dropped to a low, comforting hum.
“‘Black hole’?”
Paul held up his damp fistful of Post-it notes. “I told the team: We’ve done good dev. We know it works. Show me how to start it and I’ll take the fall. I’m sure that once the committee—”
“‘Black hole’?”
A sharp quad-tone snap fired off as four safety clasps detached from the airlock, the sound finding a dozen flat surfaces to reverberate from. The airlock seal on the circular corridor cracked and heavy hydraulics hauled the blast door aside, venting atmosphere. The distortion around the core at the center of the machine dimmed.
“I should never have turned you on to The Smiths.”
Through the airlock door came a shape. A person.
Someone has been in the corridor the entire time.
The figure braced itself against the wide lip of the airlock’s seal before taking one trembling step onto the ramp and into the lab. It gasped, chest heaving, and exited the machine entirely.
“Hey me,” the figure said, to Jack. “It’s you.” Then shook his head. “Damn.”
Jack took off his goggles. There was no mistake: Jac
k was looking at himself.
“Holy shitballs,” Paul said.
Jack’s clone—all smiles—held his palms up good-naturedly. “Hey, it’s cool. This all works out. And Paul…” His expression darkened. “You still owe me a fucking explanation.”
Paul shook his head to clear it, checked his watch, now a man back on mission. To Jack: “Get in the machine.” He was at the L-console next to the gangway, making adjustments.
Jack didn’t hear him.
“Hey,” Jack’s clone said to Jack. “Want to see a trick? Watch this.” He directed Jack’s attention to Paul.
“Paul…,” Jack said, deeply unsettled yet unable to take his eyes off the doppelganger on the ramp.
“And go,” said Jack’s clone.
“What is it,” Paul and Jack’s clone said, together.
“Wait,” Paul and Jack’s clone said, simultaneously.
“We don’t have time for this,” Paul and Jack’s clone shouted.
“Knock it off,” they chorused.
Paul stepped forward, stabbing a finger at his watch.
“Security is on their…,” they yelled at each other. “Ah screw you.”
Jack’s clone spread his arms in a theatrical ta-da, utterly pleased with himself. “Huh? Yeah? How about that?”
“We’ve got two minutes,” Paul snapped.
Jack rounded on his clone, snapped his fingers. “Hey! Whoever you are. Inside pocket.” He snapped his fingers again, opened his palm.
“Way ahead of you,” his clone said, and handed over a key ring.
Jack stared at the key ring, familiar as his jacket, his bathroom mirror, his own bed. They were all there: the rusted old key to his cabin in Chiang Mai, the sixty-four-gig flash drive he used to back up his articles, his iPhone tool, the bottle-opener he picked up from an aeronautics plant outside of Oxford, Mississippi—all attached to a branded key ring that came with the last pair of shoes he bought new. By contrast the silver .38 slug was overdressed, thin leather strap threaded through the forty-eight-gauge hole at the base.
Jack looked at Paul, wanting confirmation. “This guy is me.”
Paul produced his own set of keys: Mercedes key ring, two keys, one silver bullet.