Scorpion

by Christian Cantrell

  First and foremost, no electronics of any kind are permitted inside. No phones or watches—smart or otherwise (some Europeans are mysteriously still given to the romantic notion of those hopelessly inaccurate mechanical timepieces). Certainly no metaspecs, which means Henrietta needs to be mindful of her eyes if she is to avoid manifesting annoying, floating ghosts. Even purely corrective lenses are forbidden, since photosensitive optics can be used to produce invisible images that can later be chemically developed. If you are so quaint as to require glasses to see, the BRGE will be happy to print you up a temporary pair in your exact prescription—for an additional fee.

  No jewelry or other accessories. No shoes, jackets, or jumpers (aka sweaters). No medical devices (internal or external, including hearing aids) or assistive technologies such as prostheses (wheelchairs provided upon request). And finally, no dental work more intricate than composite-resin fillings, which Henrietta suspects is in response to the Russian mole who stole plans for a new NATO-funded Joint Strike Fighter by using his tongue to tap Morse code against a fake molar housing an accelerometer, a solid-state drive, a Bluetooth transmitter, and a ten-year battery.

  The cleanroom itself is, in essence, a giant Faraday cage—a structure designed to block all types of electromagnetic signals—and it is not only “air-gapped” (disconnected from external networks), but also “light-gapped,” which Henrietta knows means that all incoming data passes through optical isolators, or chips containing plasma diodes on one end and photosensors on the other, separated by a one-hundred-micrometer gap. Incoming data is translated into light pulses on one side of the chip that are read by the optical sensor on the other side, ensuring that it is physically impossible for data to travel in the opposite direction no matter how much malware one somehow manages to accumulate.

  In short, information that enters the cleanroom stays in the cleanroom. Not at all the circumstances Henrietta had envisioned for studying a message that traveled through time just to find her, but it’s this or nothing.

  “Henrietta Yi,” the man at the front desk says. From the waist up, his uniform is identical to those worn by the women in the security room. “We are ready for you.”

  Henrietta stands, dries her palms on her dress, and checks to make sure she has her shoulder bag—which, of course, she does not. The clerk extends his hand, into which Henrietta places the only thing of which she is still in possession: the laminated information card. But the fair-skinned, sharp-featured young man does not appear satisfied.

  “Your number?” he prompts expectantly.

  Henrietta frowns. “I already gave it to you,” she tells him. “When I came in.”

  “I see,” the man says. He looks about him as though he might have inadvertently mislaid the code in question, then begins tapping keys on his terminal. “You don’t happen to remember it, do you?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t,” Henrietta says. “It was long.”

  “Perhaps just the first few digits? Otherwise, we will need to start the security procedure all over again.”

  “It might have started with a three,” Henrietta says. “But I don’t remember for sure. I just handed it to you five minutes ago. That’s when you gave me the card.”

  “Indeed,” the clerk agrees. One more tap, then the double doors in the front of the room slowly begin opening. “You may enter when ready.”

  It takes her a moment, but then Henrietta gets it. The entire number routine was pure pageantry. It seems obvious to her now that the declaration INFORMATION CANNOT BE STOLEN FROM THE CLEANROOM also relies on it not being memorized. If, under the threat of additional superfluous bureaucracy, she’d been able to recite a significant portion of the sixteen-digit number from memory, Henrietta imagines that either the double doors would not have opened, or another few keystrokes would have ensured that the information waiting for her on the other side would have been a cleverly contrived intelligence placebo.

  Probably a routine reserved for guests without French security clearance.

  As Henrietta starts toward the double doors, she sees that the stakes are being raised. Yet another beret awaits, but this one is wearing neither a skirt nor a blazer. She is in full fatigues, her sleeves cuffed tight around her dark, toned biceps, a sizable sidearm clipped into a molded thermoplastic holster strapped to her thigh, and heavy black boots laced up to her shin.

  “Bonjour,” Henrietta says with an uneasy smile. Any delusions she had of finding a way to defeat the cleanroom are now completely out of mind. The soldier replies with a curt nod, and Henrietta sees that her finely braided hair converges below her beret in a compact, orderly knot.

  Other than the business with the sixteen-digit number, so far, Henrietta’s cleanroom experience has been more or less what she was expecting—security and precautions that are table stakes for any facility housing highly sensitive, top secret information. But when the soldier steps aside and Henrietta gets an unobstructed view into the next room, she realizes that her expectations were off by at least an order of magnitude.

  What strikes her first is the incongruence of the whole thing. The space is a palatial, baroque, intricately gilded ballroom, the soft flooring giving way to rich, checkered marble, the floor-to-ceiling windows bricked up, and the ornate, prismatic, antique chandeliers still hanging like massive crystal bats. But in the middle of the room is what looks to Henrietta like a minimalist, cubic view into the future. Illuminated by a ring of tripod-mounted work lights is a single, elevated, pristinely transparent box with a single sheet of plasma glass suspended from the top. The diagonal, iridescent bars on the screen inside indicate harmonized polarization between it and the translucent walls so that the person inside can be surveilled while the information being displayed remains safe. There is no desk. No chair. No keyboard or other form of input whatsoever.

  As Henrietta is led farther into the ballroom, she sees that there are several more soldiers posted just outside the ring of twin, diamond-shaped lights. Her escort’s boots knock hollow against the solid cream and coffee marble while Henrietta’s bare feet pad along in perfect silence, leaving petite staggered sweat prints behind.

  As they step inside the circle of light, Henrietta infers the presence of a door by a seemingly disembodied handle opposite a cross section of a long, mechanically intricate hinge. As the soldier pulls, the door first slides out toward her on steel roller bearings the exact distance of its thickness before there is a reverberating click, and then its momentum transitions into a slow, heavy swing.

  “You will have two minutes from the moment the information appears,” the soldier explains. “Use the plasma glass to scroll or zoom as you need to. Slide one finger along the bottom edge for brightness. Two fingers for contrast. When your time is up, the screen will go blank, and you will be escorted back into the waiting room. Do you have any questions?”

  Henrietta had been trying to follow the soldier’s instructions, but she’d gotten stuck on the introduction: two minutes.

  “What if I need more time?” she asks. Allard had used the term “very briefly” in his message promising access to The Static, but two minutes is absurd. From everything she knows about its contents, she would need at least two hours to get through it—maybe longer to fully grasp its significance and to reverse engineer something as novel and exotic as The Antecedent.

  “No additional time will be permitted,” the soldier tells Henrietta. “If you need more time, all-new authorization must be obtained. Do you understand?”

  All-new authorization. Which she is sure she will not get, no matter how many forgeries of Simon she manifests. Henrietta considers protesting further but she already knows that no concessions or exceptions will be made. In fact, she suspects too much opposition will end in her being led right back out. The only choice Henrietta has in her current position is to optimize what little time she is being given.

  “Oui,” she
tells the soldier. “Je comprends.”

  “Bien. You may enter when ready.”

  Henrietta steps up into the box and is shocked to see, on the plasma glass screen, a line drawing of a wide-eyed great horned owl—until she figures out that the nocturnal bird of prey watching over the entirety of the globe is simply the BRGE’s not-so-subtle coat of arms.

  She is also surprised to find that her escort has entered the box with her. The soldier steps around Henrietta, reaches up to the top of the plasma glass, and uses gentle downward pressure to trigger the electronic telescoping of the mount so that the screen is more easily within Henrietta’s reach.

  “Merci,” Henrietta says.

  The soldier smiles in acknowledgment of the discrepancy in their heights, then steps down out of the box, turns, and, with the slow-motion double action of the thick plastic door, seals Henrietta inside.

  The air pressure in the room changes, and although she was not aware of it being especially noisy before, she is now hyperaware of the complete absence of sound. Her own breathing startles her, and she can even detect her quickening heartbeat. The metal grating in the floor is warm from what Henrietta suspects is a layer of hardworking, signal-suppressing electronics.

  When she turns back to the screen, the insignia has already been replaced with what she came here to see. In the top left-hand corner is a digital clock, the first few precious seconds of her extremely limited time already ticked off.

  Henrietta directs herself to remain calm; wills herself to focus; refuses to allow her breathing and heartbeat to become a positive feedback loop propelling her toward panic. This could prove the most important two minutes of her life, and she knows that she will not get a second chance.

  The prologue of The Static is pure text, and she begins skimming and scrolling, spending just enough time to grasp the gist.

  …ability to send messages across time…critical this technology does not fall into the hands of authoritarian regimes…must be brought to the attention of the United States government…perform a live demonstration…possibly the most significant experiment in history….

  The language here is very clearly meant to attract the CIA. Henrietta thinks back to Allard’s various theories. If the motive were simply the destruction of intellectual property or a test run for a much larger attack, there would be no need to have federal officers in the vicinity. In fact, drawing a task force would be a reckless liability. The only theory left that makes any sense is an incredibly elaborate assassination attempt. Of course, definitively identifying the target is key. But Henrietta knows something Allard doesn’t: Moretti would have sent Quinn Mitchell to Station F instead of her husband had she not been on medical leave.

  Ninety seconds left.

  The next section contains the schematics for the device. Henrietta can see that it is not all that complicated—that it could probably be assembled in a garage by any competent undergrad out of readily available parts and materials. A few diode arrays and optical elements removed from laser cutting machines or electron beam welders. The insides from about a half dozen discarded microwaves. A handful of rare-earth minerals easily extracted from any number of recycled electronics, melted, compressed, and then fired into ceramic superconductors. Anything that can create and maintain a reasonable partial vacuum, and a way to generate a moderately strong electromagnetic field. A small amount of liquid hydrogen. A couple of aluminum plates, some copper refrigeration tubing, and a handful of valves, couplings, and seals available from any hardware store.

  But Henrietta knows that it is not the device itself that matters. It is the equation of the reaction the device catalyzes. If she can understand the fundamental nature of The Antecedent, she is confident that she can train any number of neural networks to rapidly and elegantly reverse engineer it.

  So she blots her palms on her dress once again and rapidly flings the last of the schematics off the screen. And then, right before the end, there it is. The entire equation. Expressed in dense and elegantly reduced-function notation. Everything she needs to understand The Antecedent. To reverse engineer it. To figure out how to build devices that leave massive divots in spacetime. All mocking her because it is impossible to memorize in the fleeting time she has remaining.

  But there is something about the final section of the document that instantly changes the game. It is rendered in colors that Henrietta has instinctively learned to avoid—magenta text on a bright-green background—the exact combination that triggers her chromatic illusory palinopsia. Without her metaspecs to continuously shift the spectrum through more neutral tones, she is susceptible to irritating and persistent afterimages being burned into her retinas. Which, for the very first time in her life, is exactly what she needs. So instead of squinting or blinking or avoiding the glare of the plasma glass, Henrietta cranks up the brightness and contrast, centers and zooms, then stares.

  She does not want to risk interrupting the process by glancing at the clock, so she remains fixated until the document is gone and the owl is back. And now a new countdown begins. Afterimages caused by her CIP can persist for as long as twenty-four hours, but text stays sharp enough to be legible for only a matter of minutes.

  The key will be to move quickly and blink as little as possible. As soon as the door has been swung back on its hinge, Henrietta steps down out of the box and keeps walking. It is comparatively loud on the outside—air blowing through overhead vents, the cumulative din of the offices around them—and the soldier says something behind her that Henrietta cannot hear. The double doors are already opening into the waiting room, and she steps from hard marble onto soft silicone tile without breaking her stride.

  “I need to go,” she says without looking at the clerk.

  The door to the security room is unlocked, and the two guards watch as she presses her thumb against the black glass pad, pops the locker, swings the door back, and hangs her bag across her body.

  “Où sont les toilettes?” she asks as she shimmies a dainty foot into a white, self-cinching sneaker. She knows she must look distraught and wild-eyed.

  “Straight down the hall,” the woman replies. “On your left.”

  “Merci,” Henrietta says without looking back.

  The men’s room is first, and Henrietta sees that the ladies’ room is still several paces away, so she decides to take a chance. When she pushes through the heavy wooden door, she stops as she meets the eyes of a handsome, well-dressed, middle-aged man in the mirror. He pauses for a moment, then continues flicking water off the tips of his fingers.

  “Bonjour, madame,” he says. “Est-ce que tout va bien?”

  Henrietta inspects the space. The bathroom is otherwise empty, the urinals unoccupied, all the stall doors ajar. There is a collapsed plastic sign behind the trash can—TOILETTES FERMÉES POUR NETTOYAGE—which she picks up, snaps open, and sets outside.

  The man uses a towel to dry his hands, and the way he smiles at Henrietta tells her that he believes he is being propositioned. And that whatever is next on the day’s agenda can wait.

  “Je suis désolé,” Henrietta says apologetically, opening the door still farther in the universal gesture of inviting someone to leave. “C’est une urgence.”

  As the man compresses the wet towel into a tight ball, he smiles in a way that attempts to convey Your loss.

  “Bonne journée,” he says, dropping the wad into the trash on his way past.

  “Au revoir, monsieur.”

  Three sinks and plenty of mirror. As she approaches the first one in line, she wonders how long it will take to generate enough steam that she can start writing. But as she reaches for the hot water, she stops. Automatic faucets.

  “Putain,” she says to herself. For some reason, Henrietta reserves most of her cursing for French—even back home—since, to her ears, it sounds much less vulgar.

  She could probably plaster wet p
aper towels around the ultrasonic sensors to keep the faucets running, but the water wouldn’t be nearly hot enough to produce the amount of steam she needs. This time she screams.

  “Putain!” The anger somehow feels good even though the reverberation in the closed brick and metal space hurts her ears. “Merde-putain-merde-putain-merde-putain!”

  A moment of defeat, then a forced refocus. A frantic inventory of what else she could use. Soap. She cups her hand beneath the dispenser and waits for a miserable, watery dribble that drains straight through her fingers.

  Henrietta closes her eyes to check the legibility of the afterimage. The numbers and symbols are still very much there, but they are already less crisp. She has maybe two, three minutes left before she will be taunted for the next twenty-four hours by useless patterns of indistinct blobs. And then for the rest of her life for letting such a unique and transformative opportunity evaporate right in front of her eyes.

  Lipstick! But all she has is pink lip gloss. And the soft doe-foot applicator would be like painting with a tiny limp brush when what she really needs is…

  Chalk!

  Instantly, Henrietta connects the dots between her metaspecs and the Fulltouch Virtual Blackboard app on her phone. But she needs it to be dark. She turns and checks the wall by the door, and is relieved to see a switch.

  This might actually work.

  She waits until she has her specs on and the app open before she turns out the lights. While the Fulltouch Virtual Blackboard app uses the time-of-flight sensors embedded in her glasses to build a volumetric model of her surroundings, Henrietta takes several blind steps toward the middle of the men’s room. When the scan is complete, the app renders the default virtual surface: a full-sized, aluminum-framed, clean and reversible blackboard. And right in front of her face, in the dark, Henrietta’s misfiring retinas project the secrets of The Antecedent. All she has to do now is trace.

  She does the exercise twice—once on each side of the board, flipping it over with a dramatic, full-body gesture—just in case she has made any mistakes. But even if she has, the Fulltouch computer vision algorithms will almost certainly work them out. As she transcribes, Henrietta finds it sublime that she is currently manifesting the world’s deadliest weapon. That the physics for The Antecedent had existed since the moment of the Big Bang, but that nobody had thought to arrange and manipulate energy and matter in precisely this way. Henrietta is literally plucking the potential to rewrite the entire future of humanity right out of thin air.