The Chaos Function

by Jack Skillingstead

  Olivia looked deeper—deeper and farther back, following a line of probability choices like a single bright thread woven through an infinitely intricate pattern.

  Now the man is packing a bag in a different bedroom, with yellow walls and a vase of lilies on the dresser. He holds the revolver in his left hand, the one with the heavy gold wedding band, weighing it like a question. A middle-aged woman in wide-bottomed mom jeans says, “If you bring that thing, you’ll have to check the bag.”

  Olivia pushed at the man, and this time it worked.

  “Yeah, you’re right.” The man sighs, returns the gun to its box, and places it on a high shelf in the closet.

  A densely tangled road map of probability threads appeared before her.

  Because the man isn’t in the bag-check line at the airport, a woman who had been waiting behind him is able to make her flight on time instead of missing it and booking a later one. Her presence on her scheduled flight touches the lives of several others. And her absence on the rebooked flight changes yet more probability threads, more than Olivia can follow, each winding into a world altered by her seemingly inconsequential push in the yellow bedroom. It’s overwhelming. Olivia can follow any one of the threads, witness the consequences, lose herself in the altered lives of strangers. Instead, she slings herself out of the halo.

  “God.”  White stars whirled and pulsed before her eyes. Olivia moaned. A steel wedge split her head. She could still feel the power of the halo. She sat up and hung her head between her knees, sick to her stomach.

  Someone touched her back.

  “Are you okay?” Dee asked.

  “I don’t know. Those leaves. They did something to me.”

  “No,” Alvaro said. “They only relaxed the part of your brain that might have resisted the link.”

  Slowly, Olivia looked up. “I saw things.”

  “The halo.”

  “Things. People. People doing things. All of it through a ring of light. It was terrifying.”

  Alvaro licked his lips. He looked eager and . . . something else. Jealous? “Only Shepherds have taken the halo inside themselves and seen what you’ve seen.”

  “I never want to see it again.”

  “You have to rest,” Dee said.

  “I won’t do it again.” Olivia could still sense the causal effects, the untold consequences of one simple alteration. If it had been real—not simply a hallucination produced by the jai ba leaves—it was too much power, too much responsibility. How could anyone ever grasp it? It was like handing a hydrogen bomb to a toddler. Hallucination. It must have been. The leaves weren’t a mild opiate but a powerful hallucinogenic. The kind of godlike power she’d experienced inside the halo could not exist.

  “Here’s water.”

  Dee stooped over her, holding out a bottle of Aquafina. Olivia reached for it, and gasped when she realized what was wrong.

  Dee was standing on both feet.

  The bullet wounds were gone.

  Thirteen

  Dee pulled back. “What’s wrong?”

  “Your leg.”

  “What about her leg?” Alvaro glanced at Dee’s legs.

  “That man shot her when we were leaving the ranch.”

  “What man?” Dee looked confused.

  “Some guy that came out of the barn.”

  “Nobody fired a gun at us,” Dee said.

  “I saw the goddamn bullet holes in your leg. I bandaged you.”

  Dee and Alvaro looked at each other.

  Olivia got up. She felt shaky. Alvaro stood up as well. The tent was too low for him to stand upright without stooping.

  “He was heavyset,” Olivia said. “Maybe he’s one of those guys who’s afraid to go anywhere unarmed. He shot you when you were about to get in the truck.”

  They stared at her.

  “Come on.” Olivia backed away, rubbing her forehead where the steel wedge tapped in a little deeper. The lantern light hurt her eyes. “This is insane.”

  “You changed something,” Alvaro said.

  “How can you not remember the gun?” Olivia shook her head. “This can’t be happening.” But she knew it was. The same thing had happened in the torture cell in the Old City. Brian bleeding out, and then Brian not bleeding out, wounded but not as severely.

  Dead, not dead.

  “This is a new probability,” Alvaro said. “I told you not to change anything.”

  “Why can’t you guys see it?” Olivia said. “It happened.”

  “Only a Shepherd is aware of the changes, only someone who has hosted the link. That’s how Jacob knew you’d changed his probability choice.”

  “So Dee getting shot is one of your crisis points?”

  “No. It doesn’t have to be a crisis point. That’s just the discipline of the Society, to use the power only when it must be used.”

  “I can’t breathe,” Olivia said. “I need air.” She turned, ducked through the flap, and almost walked into a tree. The clearing was gone; the tent now stood in the thick of the forest. What the hell? Though she clearly remembered stepping into a grassy moonlit clearing, that clearing had vanished, and moonlight barely penetrated the canopy. Disoriented, Olivia held herself still, her hand pressed to the craggy bark of the tree trunk. The night air was cool and damp and heavily scented with pine. She worked her lips and tongue, still tasting the bitter jai ba leaves.

  Alvaro and Dee had followed her out of the tent. Dee set the lantern on a stump. Alvaro took Olivia’s arm. She shook him off. A new memory scaffold was rising around her existing memory. Cutting the chain and driving into Gooding State Park—that memory was still there. But now there was also a memory of parking alongside a rural two-lane and leaving the pickup to tramp directly into the forest.

  “You people are making me crazy.” She pointed at Dee. “You were hurting and I wanted to help you, and it started happening. I could see.”

  Alvaro turned to Dee. “She’s reckless.”

  “She doesn’t understand how to use it. You can teach her.”

  “No,” Olivia said. “No way. I want this thing out of my head.”  The thought of it squirming around like a grub in her brain intensified her nausea.

  “I told you,” Alvaro said. “There’s only one way that happens. You would have to die.”

  “You said Jacob had it before me, and he’s not dead.”

  “He was when the link migrated. Your probability choice brought him back along with your friend. From that point on, we’ve all been living in a different world. The wrong world.”

  Dee said, “Let Alvaro teach you.”

  “I don’t want any part of this.”

  Alvaro clenched his fists so hard the tendons stood out on his arms. “You are part of it. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t know what you were doing. Jacob made a choice that saved the world. You reversed the choice.”

  Olivia paced around, feeling trapped and crowded. “What are you even talking about? Save the world from what?”

  “The epidemic,” Alvaro said.

  Olivia stopped pacing. “The variola outbreaks?”

  “Yes.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “You brought your friend back to life in a new probability stream,” Dee said. “Something you changed had consequences.”

  Olivia couldn’t believe she was having this conversation. In her mind, she saw the infinite weave of probability threads. A man leaves his gun at home, and it alters the life paths of numberless strangers. There was a word for that, too. While gamely wading through articles about superpositions (a word that kept nagging at her even after she returned to the States), trying to get a clue as to what had happened to her in Aleppo, she had followed a hyperlink and arrived at a discussion of chaos theory.  There she encountered the butterfly effect—basically the idea that small changes can cause large-scale repercussions. Large and not so large, too—like pitching your tent in a different location. That she could deal with, but she couldn’t accep
t what Dee now seemed to be saying.

  “You’re pinning a fucking smallpox epidemic on me?” Olivia said.

  “There’s still time to choose Jacob’s probability and stop it,” Alvaro said. “I can teach you how to do it. But it has to be soon, before things spin out of control or something happens to you.”

  “The original probability, the one that means Brian and Jodee get killed?”

  “And Jacob,” Alvaro said.

  “Forget it.”

  “Three lives,” Alvaro said, “against millions. Perhaps billions.”

  “I don’t think so. We have vaccines, the World Health Organization. Every country affected will pitch in.”

  Alvaro folded his arms. “Listen to yourself!”

  “What?” she said, though she knew perfectly well that the WHO wasn’t capable of stopping the outbreak. They didn’t even have an effective vaccine.

  “The World Health Organization?” Alvaro said. “Not billions dying, maybe only millions, or a few hundred thousand. If we’re lucky. All that against three lives, and only one you really care about. People care about those other lives, too. But you’re still wrong. The epidemic is a crisis event. That means it threatens the continuation of the entire human race. But you don’t know what you’re doing. You wanted to ‘help’ Dee. So you fixed her leg, but you don’t have any idea what else you’ve done. Just like when you saved your friend in Aleppo.”

  Olivia rubbed her temples. “I just made it so she didn’t get shot. How could that be bad?”

  Alvaro shook his head. “You aren’t listening. Everything’s interconnected. Canceling the bullet wounds changed the world in a thousand ways we’ll never know. Do you remember Elián González?”

  Olivia sighed in exasperation. “What are you talking about?”

  “Elián González. The Cuban child who got deported to Cuba back in 2000. It was a custody battle between the parents.”

  “I know who Elián González is,” Olivia said.

  “When federal agents came to get him out of the house where he was staying, there was a photographer present. One of his pictures won the Pulitzer Prize. An agent in tactical military gear pointing a weapon as the crying child is being ripped out of the arms of the fisherman who’d rescued him at sea and had been caring for him.”

  “I’m not following you.” Olivia’s head throbbed. “What’s it got to do with Dee’s bullet wound getting healed? What’s it got to do with the epidemic?”

  “That was an election year. The Cuban community in Florida was already mad at the Democrat running. But Gore might have won anyway, except for that photograph. It angered people. Seeing it angered them. The Republican won, but just barely, and only because the Supreme Court halted the incredibly close recount. After that, 9/11 happened, and after that, Bush invaded Afghanistan and then Iraq, and hundreds of thousands of people died who would not have died otherwise. The unintended consequences of one photograph.”

  The road map of probability threads. Olivia could have followed any one of them through an infinite landscape of causal connections. She could have lost herself.

  “Every probability choice costs something,” Alvaro said. “Here’s what you don’t know about Elián González. He was a crisis point. There was a probability before the one you’re familiar with, one with a much higher likelihood of occurring. In that probability there was no photograph. Gore won the presidential election. And after 9/11 there was no invasion of Iraq.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “Strangely enough, yes. Because without the disruption caused by the invasion, something far worse would have happened.”

  “But there were no WMDs in Iraq.”

  “No. But the invasion threw the region into chaos, which disrupted a complicated terror network that was preparing for something horrific involving a nuclear weapon, a suitcase bomb. The Iraq War cost hundreds of thousands of lives, but it saved millions. What you did in Aleppo saved your friends and Jacob, but at the cost of a smallpox epidemic. How does that balance out for you?”

  Olivia turned away. “I need to think.”

  “Maybe you should lie down,” Dee said. “Come back in the tent.”

  “I don’t need to lie down.” She didn’t believe them. She couldn’t believe them. Surely what happened when she chewed the jai ba leaves had more to do with her brain chemistry than it did with probability streams.

  “You keep rubbing your temples,” Alvaro said.

  “My head hurts.”

  “It happens when a Shepherd chooses a lower probability end point over the highest. There’s always a cost. Every crisis-point decision takes its toll on the Shepherd, sometimes a massive toll. Your headache is just a sample.”

  “I have to go.” She backed away, stumbling in the undergrowth.

  Alvaro moved closer. “I’m sorry, but you can’t.”

  “Then we’re going to have a problem.”

  Dee also stepped closer. “The crisis point—”

  “I don’t believe you,” Olivia said.

  Alvaro was close enough to grab her, but he didn’t. Not yet. “You have to stay with us.” He looked pained. “We’re not your enemy.”

  Olivia bent over, holding her stomach. “Going to be sick.”

  Alvaro and Dee hesitated, and at that moment of hesitation—

  Olivia bolted.

  “Stop!” Alvaro yelled.

  She got only a few yards before he overtook her and wrapped her in his arms, his weight and momentum taking them both down to the ground. Olivia fought, thrashing and twisting against his superior strength.

  “Please,” he said, “stop fighting.”

  She got one knee planted and tried to push him off. “Help! Somebody help me!”

  Alvaro flipped her on her back and covered her mouth with his hand, pushed down hard. It was dark, but she could feel panic radiating off him, matching her own panic.

  “Nobody can hear you. We’re alone out here.”

  That was probably true, but Olivia screamed against his hand anyway. It forced him to keep one hand occupied. Even if there was no one to hear, her screaming obviously rattled him.

  Over his shoulder, Alvaro yelled at Dee, “Get the cuffs. In the tent. And something to gag her with.”

  Olivia fought harder. He had her right arm pinned, but her left was free. She flailed at him. He turned his face aside, came off her hips, and bore down harder on her face. Olivia had taken self-defense classes. She had always known that if she ever found herself in a situation like this—being forcibly held down by a man—she would not surrender passively. Now she brought her knee up hard into Alvaro’s groin. The angle wasn’t perfect, but the maneuver proved effective. He made a sound between a cough and a gasp. Before he could recover, she drove the heel of her hand upward into his nose. Blood spurted and he fell back, both hands covering his face. Olivia rolled free and scrambled to her feet.

  Dee stood in front of her, holding the flex cuffs. Olivia, panting, bared her teeth, ready to fight.

  Dee dropped the cuffs and showed her empty hands. “This isn’t what we want.”

  “I’m going home.”

  “If you do that, millions of people will die.”

  “I don’t believe you. It’s crazy!”

  Alvaro stood up, one hand covering his bloody face, the other cupped over his groin. She could outrun him in his present condition, but what about Dee?

  “Even if you make it home, the Society will catch up with you. With Andrew in charge, they won’t teach you to be a Shepherd. They’ll execute you.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  Olivia ran.

  Behind her, Dee crashed through the brush. It was too dark to run flat-out, but Olivia did it anyway. Branches and evergreen boughs whipped her. She ran with her arms raised, protecting her face. She fell, picked herself up, ran again—toward the sound of chattering water. Her feet tangled in dense brush and again she pitched onto the ground. Her stomach heaved. She threw up, her head pounding as
she gasped for breath.

  She listened.

  Dee must have stopped or slowed down, because Olivia couldn’t hear her anymore. She sat up, wiped her mouth, got on her feet. At the bottom of the slope, a creek glimmered in new moonlight. On the far side of the creek, the orange coal of a cigarette glowed bright, dimmed . . . then floated to the right. Probably not a cigarette but a joint. Now she could make out three dim figures. Olivia ran a hand through her hair, straightened her shirt, and walked down the slope.

  She splashed through the creek, icy water soaking her shoes and socks. Three heads turned toward her. Boys getting high in the park. “Hey,” one of them said when she stepped out of the creek and came toward them. Empty beer cans, some flattened, littered the ground. Three dirt bikes leaned on kickstands by a trail.

  “Hi,” Olivia said. “I got a little lost. Any of you guys have a phone I can use?”

  The kid who had said “hey” stood up, holding the joint with a roach clip. He wore a brush cut and a band shirt. Olivia knew the band: Desperate Freeloaders, an underground English-language group out of Berlin. Two bass guitars and one accordion. Their specialty was antifa politics. Desperate Freeloaders swam in the same alternative-media pond that The Beat occupied. Idaho was maybe the last place on earth Olivia would have expected to encounter a Desperate Freeloaders fan.

  “Phones don’t work out here,” he said.

  The guy sitting next to him, a teenager with big puffy hair, reached for the roach, and the Desperate Freeloaders guy held it away from him. “Don’t be a dick,” the third boy said. Only the third boy wasn’t a boy but a girl, probably a few years younger than the other two, which would make her fifteen or so. Her side-shaved head and baggy clothes had thrown Olivia off. Tattooed wings swept back from the girl’s ears. Desperate Freeloaders shrugged and passed the roach to the sitting boy.

  “How far is it to town?” Olivia asked.

  “Far enough.”

  Olivia sighed inwardly. “How about a lift?” She nodded at the dirt bikes. “I can pay.”

  “Why should you? We’re not bums. What are you doing here, anyway? This place is closed.”

  “I’m a journalist. I’m, uh, doing a piece about the, uh, resurgence of the wolf population.”