by Patrick Lee
Yet this function was still not what made it special—or difficult to accept as possible. Not by a country mile on either score.
Paige let the image freeze again.
Five seconds from the open doorway. Out of sight beyond it, her father was staring at Carrie Holden and the map, unaware of Paige’s approach in the corridor.
Perfect.
To use the Tap’s real selling point, all she had to do now was wait. The controls were simple and intuitive. A few seconds passed, the memory still frozen, and then she began to feel her feet beneath her. She was hovering in the void, but her feet tingled as if they could sense the ground half an inch below them.
She willed herself to drop, and felt her shoes connect solidly with the surface.
In that instant the memory came to life. It was no longer an image in front of her—it was a world around her: the hallway and the fluorescent lights and the hum of air exchangers and the trace smell of cleaning solution on the floor. Her body was there too, propelled forward by its own momentum—she’d been mid-stride at this point in the memory. The movement almost threw her off balance as she came to a stop. She put out one hand and caught the wall, and silently halted herself two feet short of the doorway.
To all of her senses she was really standing here, in this moment that was five years gone. Her father was really in the next room, just beyond the edge of this doorway. The Tap let you relive memories exactly as they’d been—but that still wasn’t what made it special.
What made it special was that it let you relive them as they hadn’t been.
Paige moved forward into the doorway.
She took care not to let her shoe scuff the floor.
She saw her father seated at the desk, staring at the map and the picture of Carrie. He had no idea Paige was there.
She took a step into the room. Then another.
He sat there, adrift in his thoughts, eyes fixed on the screen.
Another step, and another.
She could see the map more clearly now than before. She was closer to it than she’d gotten in real life.
Another step.
Still not close enough to resolve the words on the screen.
But almost.
When she’d heard the early accounts from those who’d first used the Tap, she hadn’t believed them. It just couldn’t be true; how could you remember details you hadn’t actually seen the first time around? Then she’d tried it herself, and there’d been no more denying it. In fact the Tap’s power was far greater than she’d supposed in the beginning. You could do more than just cross a room you hadn’t crossed and read words you hadn’t been close enough to read. You could pick up a book you hadn’t opened at the time—or ever—and flip to page 241. You’d see the words on that page as they existed in real life, and you could verify it for yourself after snapping out of the memory and finding a copy. If she wanted to, Paige knew she could back out of her father’s office right now and, in the middle of this memory, go upstairs and schedule a flight to Paris. She could take that flight and walk the Champs-Élysées, and it would be swarming with the very same tourists who’d been there on this day five years ago. The scene would be accurate to the last detail. Every lock of hair brushed from a forehead. Every smile.
As with all entities, there were only guesses as to how it worked. The technician who’d spent the most time testing it, a man named Jhalani who’d once been a colleague of Stephen Hawking’s at Cambridge, imagined the Tap to be a kind of antenna. Clearly it did more than just draw information from the user’s brain—Jhalani believed it drew from something quite a bit grander: the set of all possible universes. Paige had heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but only as an interesting hypothetical notion. She’d been surprised to learn from Jhalani that it was actually a mainstream idea in modern physics. The thrust of it was that every event that could go one way or another actually went both. Every time you looked at wheat bread and white bread and chose white, some other version of you, out there in the great who-the-hell-knows, chose wheat. Physicists mainly talked about it happening at the level of subatomic particles, but if it applied down at that scale, then it certainly applied to loaves of bread and flights to Paris and shoe scuffs on tiled floors. In the end, Paige thought Travis had summed the Tap up best: it let you remember not just everything you’d done, but everything you could have done. A hell of a thing.
She took another step toward her father’s desk. She’d be in his peripheral vision soon—right about at the point where she could read the map. The margin would come down to inches at best.
It was critical that she get this right the first time—the first time would be the only time. The Tap’s one limit was that you couldn’t revisit the same memory twice. The techs liked to say that a memory was burned after you relived it. Not only couldn’t you drop into it again, you couldn’t even remember it the old-fashioned way afterward. The original would be forever replaced by the revision. Therefore an especially cherished moment—a first kiss, say—was better left alone.
Another step.
If it came down to it, she had options. This was, for all its considerable bells and whistles, only a memory. Nothing she did here would be of consequence in the real world after she woke up. Which meant she could leap at her father, shove him away from the computer, and read the map before he had time to react. At that point she could simply be done with the whole thing—to end this memory she needed only to concentrate hard on her last glimpse of reality: she and Travis sitting in the deserted corridor on B42. A good ten seconds of that image would take her right back to it.
But she hoped to avoid attacking her father. Doing so would preclude the other move she planned to make here. The more obvious move, by far, though she wished she could forgo it.
Another step. And another.
The labels on the map were right at the brink of her discernment now.
Another step.
She could see the number on the big road running north and south. U.S. 550, it looked like. She thought that was somewhere in Colorado. Just above and to the left of the grid of streets was a word—almost certainly the town’s name. A short word.
She squinted.
Ouray.
Ouray, Colorado. She’d heard of it. Some friends in college had stayed there when they went skiing at Telluride.
Good enough. If she really wanted to, she could end the memory now.
A big part of her did want to. The same part that hated the second move.
Which was simply to talk to her father.
It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to him. Quite the opposite. She’d been very close to him, especially in their last years together, and then she’d lost him in the worst imaginable way. When she’d first learned what the Tap could do, she’d considered reliving a moment with him. Something happy and good and warm, to replace the ending life had given them.
But she’d resisted. Always. As real as it would feel, the moment would be fake. And desecratory, somehow. The whole notion had seemed wrong from the beginning.
It still did.
She watched him sitting there, unaware of her. She took a breath and smelled his aftershave. She couldn’t remember smelling it on anyone since she’d lost him. All those years, that scent had just been part of the background. A thing to hardly notice, if at all. It could make her cry right now, if she wasn’t careful. She let the emotions swim a few seconds longer, then shoved them all down into the deep.
Time to do this.
She backed away from the desk, turned and left the room without a sound. She walked to a spot in the hallway ten feet from the door, pivoted and faced it again.
And cleared her throat loudly.
She heard her father’s chair squeak at once, and heard the mouse scrape on his desktop.
She walked to the doorway and leaned in, and found him staring at a file directory. She knocked on the frame and he looked up at her.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
Her throat constricted; she couldn’t help it. Jesus, even a random moment like this. Especially a random moment like this. The kind they’d had a million of—should’ve had a million more of.
She swallowed the tightness and stepped into the room. “I have a question.”
“Shoot.”
No reason to drag things out: “What was Scalar?”
He didn’t quite flinch. It was more subtle than that—all in the eyes. A flicker of fear and then perfect calm. He tilted his chair back and appeared to search his thoughts.
“Rings a bell,” he said. “Where’d you come across it?”
“In the archives. There’s an index page for it, but all the entries are crossed out.”
“Oh—I remember. Let me guess, the entries went from the early to late eighties.”
Paige nodded.
“It was a clerical thing,” her father said. “Had to do with videotape formats, way back. We used to shoot everything on standard VHS, and then we switched over to VHS-C—digital was still a ways off. Anyway, when we made the switch we decided to transfer all the old stuff too, for shelf-life. Huge pain in the ass. Couple thousand hours of stock. Probably took us six years or more, on and off.”
He shrugged, waiting for her to let it go.
She returned his gaze and wondered if he’d ever lied to her before this. Sure, he’d kept his work with Tangent secret from her, all through her childhood, but what choice had he had? This was different. And harder to stomach than she’d have guessed.
“That all you wanted to know?” he said.
Only a memory. She held onto that idea like it was a handrail at the edge of a cliff. If she called him on his lie, she wouldn’t actually be hurting him. He wasn’t real.
“Honey?” he said. “Everything okay?”
“I’ve already asked some of the others about Scalar,” she said. “No one wants to say much, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t about transferring videotapes.”
His expression went cold.
“There was government involvement,” she said. “And it cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I want to know what it was.”
He stared. He seemed to be coming to some careful decision. When he finally spoke, it was in a calming tone, but one full of fear—for her. As if she were standing there with a gun to her head.
“Paige, you don’t want to get into this.”
“I have a right to know. And I don’t appreciate being lied to.”
“You’re right—I lied about the VHS stuff. But you lied too. No one here in Border Town told you a thing about Scalar. There are maybe half a dozen who know the parts you just described, and none of them would’ve said anything without coming to me first. Which means you talked to someone on the outside. And that scares the hell out of me.”
She couldn’t think of what to say to that. Almost every word had caught her off guard.
Her father stood from his desk and crossed to her. He stared at her with that strange, minefield caution still in his eyes.
“Who have you spoken to?” he said.
“First tell me what Scalar is.”
“Paige, this is more serious than you can know. If you’ve talked to the wrong people, you may have already triggered things we can’t stop.”
“Then tell me. Everything.”
He shook his head. “Knowing about Scalar puts a person at risk. I wouldn’t tell you a word of it to save my life. Now I need to know exactly who you spoke to. I’m not kidding.”
“If others here know about this, then I should know too—”
He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him—she had to step fast to stay balanced—and shouted into her face. “Who did you talk to?”
She pulled her arm away, turned and ran. Through the doorway, along the corridor, the lights sliding by and her father’s footsteps coming fast behind her. She shut her eyes as she ran. Pictured the deserted B42, where she and Travis were sitting. It was hard to focus on it now.
“Paige!”
Running. Eyes shut tight. Only a memory.
Travis held on to Paige and waited. Three minutes, sixteen seconds. It always took that long, no matter how much time someone spent inside a memory. During his own use of the Tap, Travis had revisited a random night of his stretch in Atlanta. He’d dropped into the middle of a long shift at the warehouse, then just walked out of the place and got in his Explorer. He drove west all that night and all the next day, stopping only for gas, food, and a couple naps, and reached the Pacific in about thirty-six hours.
Had he wanted to, he could’ve stayed in the memory for months—probably even years. Techs had remained under for as long as six weeks without encountering trouble. They’d even tried staying under while catching up to the present time and surpassing it; had it worked they would’ve found themselves remembering their own futures, a trick with all kinds of fun potential. But all attempts to do that had failed—even the Tap had its boundaries. Subjects hit the present and saw their vision start flashing green and blue like some system-crash warning, and then they involuntarily emerged from the memory—three minutes and sixteen seconds after going under, as always.
Only one person had ever come back sooner. Gina Murphy. Her eyes had popped open at around two minutes and thirty-five seconds, and she’d screamed and held her head as if it were being pried apart. The screaming had lasted for over a minute, while Travis and others carried her to the medical quarters. Along the way Gina managed to evict the Tap from her head—another intuitive control, you got it out by simply wanting it out—but that didn’t end the pain. Her death ended it, around the time they set her on a bed in medical. By then she was bleeding from every opening in her face, including her eyes. An Army medical examiner, off-site, did the autopsy the following day. The results, understandably, were unprecedented in medical literature. Gina had died from laceration and hemorrhaging of the brain, confined to a narrow pathway atop the neocortex. In the doctor’s words, it looked like someone had taken a radial saw to the contents of her head, but had managed to do it without cutting the skull.
More disturbing than those answers were the questions that didn’t have any. Above all, what had gone wrong? Had something about Gina’s biochemistry triggered the problem? Had she used the Tap in some incorrect way? What would that even mean? She’d gone under to relive a memory, like everyone else had done—some sibling’s birthday party she’d missed years ago. The fact was that the questions weren’t just unanswered. They were unanswerable. As with all entities, Tangent was simply out of its depth. There was a way to get yourself killed using the Tap, and no victim would ever live to say what it was.
Travis watched the time on his phone.
Two minutes and thirty-five came and went.
He relaxed only by a degree.
Three minutes.
Three minutes and ten.
Fifteen.
Sixteen.
Paige jerked against him and took a hard breath.
“Fuck,” she whispered.
She raised her head from his shoulder.
“One for two,” she said. She rubbed her forehead, looking badly rattled by something. “I’ll explain while we wait for the plane.”
Chapter Six
Before they’d even returned to their residence, Paige called Bethany Stewart—one of the youngest people in Tangent, at twenty-five, and very likely the smartest. Bethany answered on the second ring with no edge of sleep in her voice, despite it being four in the morning.
“I need DMV files, with photos, for everyone in Ouray, Colorado,” Paige said. She spelled out the town’s name. “Narrow the results to females in their sixties, and send them to my computer.”
“Take five minutes,” Bethany said.
It took three—and less than another two for Travis and Paige to spot Carrie Holden among the candidates. She’d dyed her hair dark brown, but nothing else had changed except her age. Her name in Ouray was Rebecca Hunter.
&nb
sp; They were in the air by 4:20. Though Tangent kept no aircraft on-site at Border Town, it had a small fleet stationed at Browning Air National Guard Base in Casper, ten minutes’ flight time away.
The jet, a Gulfstream V with seating for eighteen, felt enormous with only the two of them in the cabin. The pilots’ voices up front were lost under the drone of the engines. Travis looked out as the aircraft climbed, but there was only unbroken darkness below. The nearest towns were faint pinpricks of light, far out on the plain beyond the limits of the Border Town Exclusion Zone.
For a few minutes neither spoke. The jet’s turbofans throttled back an octave as the aircraft reached altitude and leveled off.
“You’re thinking about it,” Paige said.
She didn’t have to frame it as a question any more than she had to specify what it was.
It was almost all Travis thought about these days.
He nodded without meeting her eyes.
Fourteen months ago Travis had rejoined Tangent after two years of self-imposed exile. He’d spent the fourteen months doing the same kind of work as everyone else in Border Town—helping to study Breach entities, both new and old—while also cramming for hours a day to give himself the underpinning of scientific literacy that every other Tangent recruit had come prepackaged with. He’d taken to it surprisingly well. At ten months he’d passed the equivalent of MIT’s Calculus 4 exam, and had at least a solid undergrad-level hold on physics, chemistry, and biology. The joke was that none of it really mattered where entities were concerned: the smartest people in the world were probably about as qualified as sparrows to study the objects that emerged from the Breach. Still it was nice to speak the same technical language as everyone else, and Travis had found his awe of the Breach only deepening as his intellect grew. Like staring at the night sky through increasingly sharp eyes.