Flip

by Christopher J Fox

  “What’s remarkable about this is the temporal and spatial resolution,” she continued lecturing to Redwood. “A normal EEG would have at most a few dozen leads taking readings across the skull. This device”—she waved her arm to the long open-ended tube suspended from the ceiling of the inner room—“has thousands, maybe tens of thousands.”

  Redwood watched silently from behind.

  “These waves, the patterns you’re seeing here, are all completely normal for an adult brain at rest with the eyes closed.”

  There was a subtle flicker in the rhythms, shorter than a heartbeat, and then image on the screen flared and, glowed for a moment. Then the light dimmed and contracted into flat gray nothingness. The playback stopped there.

  That’s when it happened! All the settings are here, captured in the system. I can fix it and do it again!

  “What was that?” Redwood asked.

  Michelson shrugged. “I don’t know. Looks like some sort of power surge burned out the sensors, like a light bulb burning out. With more time, I’m sure I could get a clearer outline of the events.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. We’re not doing an official investigation; we’re just confirming the reports.”

  “Excuse me, Dr. Michelson, Mr. Redwood, could you join us, please?” asked Kelley, who had stuck his head through the open door.

  Redwood swung around. “Sure, we’re all wrapped up here.”

  In that moment, Michelson deftly reached up and turned off the screen.

  “Dr. Michelson?”

  “Coming. Just locking the console.”

  Out in the lab proper, Redwood spoke to Kelley while the other auditor packed up a briefcase.

  “Thank you both for your time,” Redwood said. “Our official report will be released at the end of the month.”

  “Can you give me some indication…?” Kelley trailed off. He hoped the auditors were in a merciful mood.

  “Well, you can depend on our report to reflect the accidental nature of the events here. We’ll just consider the Doxiphuses’ disappearance as—”

  Kelley interrupted. “They haven’t disappeared. I’m sure they just went somewhere private. It’s only been two days. They’ll be in contact at any time.”

  “—a short-term medical emergency,” Redwood finished. “I’m sure your office will track them down.”

  Kelley breathed a mental sigh of relief.

  Later that night, over a large brandy, he would congratulate himself on a job well done and be grateful the research and scientific establishment in this country made frequent allowances for its members who sometimes went off on a wild bend. Brilliant minds, after all, he thought. We must make accommodations.

  25 Despair

  T he keening of her soul went on. Unable to bear the agony that was her existence, a fragment of her mind pulled away from the tortured whole and retreated into itself until it came to know that it existed separately from the pain. Its arm’s-length distance gave it perspective on the pain, and for a while it watched the pain happen and waited, but it didn’t feel. The pain was happening to someone else.

  It stirred when the experience of the pain began to recede, and it expanded to fill the empty space left by the diminishing sensation. Tentatively it grew, making sure it didn’t touch the agony. Slowly other things presented themselves for its consideration. Shapes—squares with jagged edges in brilliant orange, violet, blacks, and grays—slid over one another, folded, hid, and blossomed forth again. Indistinct amoebic blobs swam across her vision and joined with one another, trying to create something more, only to lose their grip and slip away.

  A new stimulus, a sound, came to it. Hesitant to touch, it examined the novelty from a distance. The sound evoked a dim, foreign memory of a whisper of self-identity.

  “Aida.”

  The strange sound repeated.

  “Aida.”

  “Aida, come back. Don’t be afraid.”

  Compassion illuminated her and coaxed it out into the full light.

  “Aida, it’s me, Max. You’re safe now. You’ve been hallucinating.”

  I’m Aida…he’s talking to me. She came around, slowly and dully, to detached reality. That’s Max.

  The Wave World oozed into flat, colorless focus. Aida recognized it now and remembered Max.

  “Max,” the alien voice that was hers said. “Max.”

  “I’m here, Aida. Can you see me? I’m right in front of you.” His strength, warmth, and compassion cradled her. She drew from that, and the world lost some of its unreality. She clung tighter to him. Memories came back.

  “My family?”

  “They’re all okay. You were almost back. You opened your eyes,” he said.

  That registered somewhere within her, and then the memory of the beach flooded forth.

  “I couldn’t save them, Max. No one listened. I tried. I screamed and yelled, but no one listened.” She started to relive her abject failure.

  “It’s okay now, you did try to…”

  “They all died, Max! Children! People with families! Everyone gone…just gone.”

  “I know. We saw; the whole world saw. Aida, you couldn’t stop it, but you did try to change it.”

  She collapsed back, mute, destitute of the willpower to act.

  “Aida, we were so close before. It would have worked, but then something happened and…and you went to try to help those people,” he stammered out.

  Another emotional spasm erupted in her, and she vomited out her next words. “I abandoned them. I abandoned my husband and my child…I’ll never get back.” Her guilt and sense of impotence crushed her.

  “Yes, yes, you will,” Max encouraged her. “We were so close. Everyone’s okay, and we can still do this.”

  His pearl was right in front of her. She tried to reach out to touch him but couldn’t; she didn’t have the strength.

  “I’m not going to leave you here, Aida. I’m not leaving, no matter what happens. Everyone needs to rest. We’ll try again in a little while. You just rest too.”

  Max’s pearl shone brightly in the darkness of the Wave World, bathing Aida in blissful relief. His warm energy trickled into her, and in a timeless moment, she rested and let go of the pain, the self-recrimination, and guilt.

  “You have to see how beautiful you are, Aida. You have to see the good in yourself. There will never be anyone like you, ever, in all time. Forgive yourself.”

  Her mind cleared, and she saw Max, seated, radiant, composed, giving freely of his own life-force.

  “Max…”

  “Shh, I’m okay. Just giving you a little help here. Honor the gift by accepting it graciously.”

  “Max, no. Look, he’s coming.”

  Behind Max, a blank momentum moved in the background, carrying a dozen or more pearls straight toward them. She knew one in particular as the cop. Reckless in his approach, his pearl was completely unguarded, and it throbbed with deep hatred and a need for vengeance. Clear, above all, was his murderous intent. Angus Baka would be there soon.

  ***

  “We’re gonna do what? Esta loca, tía? They’ll catch us in a minute! Then what do we do?” Miguel Sanchez thought this was the stupidest idea he’d ever heard in his life. He stood gaping at his aunt while he wiped gun oil from his hands. Their three hunting rifles and three semiautomatic pistols, all freshly cleaned, shone like new on the table under the workshop light.

  “Don’t you talk to me that way!” Mollie snapped back at him. “There’s more of them coming this time. Maybe a half dozen or more. There’s only one road in and out of here. They’ll block that off easy. No trucks!” Mollie’s steel, never far from the surface anyway, came through loud and clear. That was that.

  “Okay, so how are we gonna move her?” Miguel asked as he plopped the oilcloth on the table.

  “That poor lady is on a stretcher already. We’ll tie it between two of the horses and head into the hills to wait them out. If they decide to follow us, we’ll have the advantage there
.”

  “Is it just her, or are they all coming?” he asked, already knowing the answer but hoping for a different one.

  “All three of them. The medic was in the navy, so he should be able to handle himself.”

  Miguel grimaced. “What about the others?”

  “Matthew and the others are staying here, though I don’t know what the hell they think they can do.”

  “How long do we have?”

  “Twenty, maybe thirty minutes. Find your brother, and get the horses ready. I’ll grab the packs.”

  He made a last appeal. “This is gonna be a bitch to do at night, tía, que no?”

  “What? You think they’re gonna be friendly to us when they come back? Hell no, Miguel. We need to get out of here too.”

  That, at last, made sense to him. Twenty-five minutes later, a line of shadows slipped through the back gate of the Chama Valley Zen Center. A last-quarter moon hung low in the crystalline eastern sky and provided just enough light for them to pick out the faint trail that wound between the junipers and brush. Although the path steepened, the footing was sure, and soon they were looking down on the small square of buildings three hundred feet below. From this height, they saw a sweeping expanse of the Rio Chama glistening faintly in the moonlight as it ran through the valley. Around them the air was perfumed with the smoky-sweet smell of piñon fires.

  Soon the path leveled out and disappeared around the side of the hill, which towered another four hundred feet above them. They were well around the bulk of it and fully hidden from view when the headlights of the first Humvee came to rest on Mollie’s mudded-up wall.

  ***

  It had taken a joint effort of the FBI’s Operational Technology Division (OTD) and Criminal Justice Information Services Division (CJIS) fifteen years and hundreds of millions of dollars to realize this vision. It could have been done sooner if it hadn’t been for the politics involved in choosing the location. Both the OTD in Quantico and the CJIS in Clarksburg were in the running. Quantico won out in the end by virtue of its more convenient travel time from FBI headquarters and Capitol Hill. The FBI was rightfully proud of its state-of-the-art Crime Visualization Center (CVC), and there was no shortage of VIP tours in its first year and a half of operation.

  The CVC was the result of a massive upgrade in the 911 and crime-reporting systems of all the first- and second-tier cities across the United States. Considered the next step in the evolution of the Unified Crime Reports and the National Incident Based Reporting System, it was funded by a shining example of cooperation between the DOJ, DHS, NSA, and the 2R Corporation, a privately held technology and investment firm.

  It started with a simple software upgrade to the 911 call systems, provided at no cost by 2R, which labeled every 911 call that came in with a simple metadata tag. Once the call was classified as a robbery, assault, homicide, theft, domestic disturbance, or what have you, the system then sent data to a central database in a private cloud housed at the OTD. It was a routine big-data visualization exercise to compile and project it all on a massive screen here at the CVC.

  In a few months, with phase one a huge success, the Free America Bill passed, due in part to the strong support of a political action group called Main Street for a Peaceful America. If anyone had bothered to examine the financial statements of the Main Street group, they wouldn’t have been surprised to find it was generously funded by another offshore shell company that was in turn owned by 2R. The Free America Bill contained a deeply buried provision allowing the national law enforcement apparatus to legally collect recorded audio, video, and GPS data from mobile devices. Phase two of the CVC then took this data, analyzed it in near real time for violent criminal activity, applied filters, and correlated it in time and location. This citizen feed, as it was called, was then used to supplement the 911 feed. The result was the single most accurate projection of criminal activity in the world.

  ***

  Tejinder Johar glanced at the OTD’s motto, “Vigilance through Technology,” emblazoned above the big screen for the hundredth time this shift. He did it so frequently that it didn’t even register anymore. Color-coded symbols, each representing a different class of crime, continually bubbled up on the map. Vivid to start with, each would fade with time. The point of the visualization system was to see what was going on right now. As the data aged off the big screen, it was preserved for further analysis later if needed.

  Fascinated by the patterns in which certain crimes occurred, he could now predict where there might be outbreaks. For example, a heat dome over the New York City metropolitan area would spike assaults and burglaries, while nighttime in Los Angeles during the summer meant increased gang activity. Johar had a bet with his shift supervisor that during the next Super Bowl, everything would quiet down during the first half.

  He didn’t notice the red dot, indicating some type of personal assault, which had materialized in Olympia, Washington, nor the others that followed thirty seconds later in Seattle. The CVC system dutifully logged the activity, and when other incidents simultaneously rolled in from Portland and Spokane, some bit of logic flagged the activity for scrutiny by a higher-level process. The higher-level process started to get interested when Helena, Boise, and Eugene popped up within seconds of one another. The temporal-activity filter function got involved and crunched the pattern for a microsecond when Sacramento, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, Denver, and Cheyenne were added. It then calculated the correlation of events in time and location and posted a “significant event” alert on the big screen.

  “What’s this?” Johar watched the wave of red dots popping up in major cities and state capitals as they progressed from the northwest to the southeast across the continent. Assaults occurred across the country all the time in the expected locations, but these were all linked in time and by locations. He paused the live feed on his local monitor, allowing the incoming data to buffer while he slid the timer control back to the left. With this he could play events backward and forward in time while he watched. The epicenter seemed to be somewhere in Washington state.

  “This is very unusual,” he muttered.

  The shift supervisor’s voice came over the headset. “Johar, what do you make of this?”

  “It certainly looks real, but I can’t rule out anomalous behavior in the system.”

  All eyes in the CVC locked on the big screen as wave followed wave, about five minutes apart, rolling across the continent.

  “Zoom in on the origin,” said the shift supervisor

  Johar centered and magnified his map on the forested hills by the coast in southwestern Washington.

  Another analyst came on the loop. “The local authorities are all responding. They’re a little overtaxed. No one at a local level is reporting any connections between these events.”

  “They wouldn’t. They’re too close to it,” Johar offered.

  And then the events stopped.

  “Notifying response coordination,” the shift supervisor said. “They’ll get this to the Seattle field office.”

  ***

  For the third time in a day, the attention of Special Agent Dan Kozlowski was turned toward the lumber forests along Washington State 101.

  His first response of “What the hell?” was followed by a call to the Washington State Patrol. Something was going on down there, and they needed to find out what it was. His next call was to the US Attorney’s office to modify his warrant request to add suspected terrorism. The last step in the chain was to activate the incident response team. Nothing was obviously on fire, no bombs, active shooters, or crashing planes, which would have complicated the situation, but once WSP had a list of probable locations, they would need to act quickly.

  Another agent popped his head over Kozlowski’s cubicle wall.

  “PUSHH, the Puget Sound Homeless Haven, was handing out vouchers to the homeless for food, shelter, and medical.”

  “Where’s the medical facility?”

  “They don’t hav
e an exact location, but some of the homeless who came back from there say it’s in your hotspot by the coast.”

  “Let’s go. We’ll meet up with the response team on the way.”

  26 Max’s Gift

  “Q ian’s lost sight of her again. I want her here, in one piece, Baka, okay? We clear on that?” Gilden snarled into the secure phone. “I’ve approved everything you asked for. I expect this to be clean and quiet.”

  “Yessir, we’re ready. It’ll be a fast operation, in and out. Time on-site less than ten minutes.”

  “Just get it done.”

  Gilden did expect Baka to get the job done. Clean and quiet, well, that was another story.

  The man’s lost his head. This is a personal thing for him now. Baka’s use to Gilden–and, by extension, his life– was limited to the next few hours.

  Gilden summoned his personal assistant into his office. “Get ready to dump Baka.”

  “Even if he’s successful?”

  “Wait until after he hands the package off. Then dump him. No traces. I think one of the cartels is looking for the person who intercepted a shipment of theirs and got the money too. That’ll wrap things up nicely.”

  Nothing worse than a broken tool, Gilden thought.

  ***

  “Yessir, we’re ready. It’ll be a fast operation, in and out. Time on-site less than ten minutes.”

  You’re goddamn right I’ll get the job done.

  It was a matter of pride and professional reputation for Angus Baka now.

  “There. Set down between the headlights,” he told the helicopter pilot. The Humvees had taken up positions at the corners of the parking lot of the Chama Valley Zen Center with their headlights pointing inward, illuminating the landing zone.

  “I want the lights out and that gate open as soon as we set down unit one. These are a bunch of monks, so there won’t be any resistance. We go in, secure the package, get her on the chopper, and fly her out,” he ordered into the open comms channel.