The Chaos Function

by Jack Skillingstead

  Olivia knew the man with the scar. He had been kind to her one time when she was embedded with a group of rebel fighters. But in a nearer memory, he had intervened outside the madrassa, saved her life. And here he was again, intervening on behalf of the captive laid out on the table: Jacob, the previous Shepherd. The scarred man was the key—the linchpin. The difference between life and death in the torture cell. Olivia was certain of it.

  I won’t allow this.

  The halo had brought her to the moment prior to Jacob’s choosing of a new probability—one that had cost Jacob and Brian their lives, but somehow prevented the release of weaponized variola.

  Olivia reached out. If she could trace the scarred man back, find some way of positioning his choices so that the variola release was prevented and Brian lived . . .

  But like a wheel stuck in a deep rut, Olivia found she could only travel the scarred man’s route to the destination that saved Brian. Something inside her, something fearful and desperate, wouldn’t let her kill Brian, no matter what the greater good. There had to be a way of achieving both outcomes. There had to be.

  Jacob’s eyes slipped side to side and started to roll back. At this moment in the halo, the old man controlled the link. Olivia felt the shift coming through her. In the next moment, if she allowed it, a new probability stream would take over, the flow altering around the man with the scar, changing the fate of millions.

  And, of course, killing Brian, Jodee, and Jacob.

  Olivia wrenched herself away before it could happen.

  Inside the halo, the spokes became like sharp needles, jabbing her, trying to force her back to the torture cell and Jacob’s choice. Olivia endured the pain and turned deliberately away, seeking another point of influence.

  Variola.

  From a high perspective: An SUV—a tan Jeep Cherokee—pulled away from a checkpoint on Aleppo’s outskirts and headed into the desert, wheels spinning up yellow dust. Behind it, a line of vehicles advanced and soldiers approached with weapons while whisper drones hovered like prehistoric insects.

  Olivia didn’t understand. What was she supposed to look at? Where was the scarred man? Had she been wrong about him?

  It was becoming difficult to concentrate. Leaving the torture cell, rejecting the solution to the crisis point presented by the probability machines, looking for another way—it all created a tremendous strain.

  Something pulled at her like a weak magnetic attraction. Olivia turned her full attention on the Jeep speeding away into the desert. She remembered crossing the city to Brian’s hospital on the state-controlled side of Aleppo. It had taken forever because of all the checkpoints. At first she had assumed the extra level of security was the result of the brief, disorganized uprising. But those soldiers had been searching for something specific. Probably, she now knew, a hot biological.

  Through increasing pain, Olivia rewound the probability. Back in line, the Jeep rolled forward. Soldiers on either side held their hands out: HALT. The kid behind the wheel braked. And he was a kid, no older than the boy with the amputated leg who had shared Brian’s hospital room and offered Olivia his mother’s chair. The driver used the back of his hand to wipe sweat off his forehead. He looked guilty as hell.

  Olivia concentrated. Where was it? Where was the smuggled variola? Or was it some kind of key to access the biological? Was the boy himself the key? Whatever it was, it had to be in this vehicle. But she couldn’t see it. And if she couldn’t see it, how could she manipulate the probability choices of the soldiers searching for it?

  She could practically feel the waves of fear and anxiety wafting off the boy.  The soldiers had to pick up on it, she thought. But if they did, it wasn’t enough to encourage them to aggressively dismantle the Jeep. Probably they had been here all day in the hot sun, inspecting hundreds of cars and trucks. She could see the boredom written on their faces. The soldier in charge, a middle-aged guy wearing a side-slanted military beret and a thick mustache, directed his men to search the Jeep in the usual manner, inspect the cargo hold, look under the seats, open any containers. But it wasn’t enough. He was about to pass the Cherokee through.

  The driver looked desperately nervous. He wanted to get away from the checkpoint—that was Olivia’s point of influence. As the checkpoint commander approached the Jeep, Olivia pushed the boy toward a reckless probability end point. He panicked, keyed the ignition, and flattened the accelerator. The Cherokee jerked forward, sending one of the soldiers to the ground. The others shouldered their rifles and opened fire.

  Whisper drones swarmed after the Jeep, pursued on the ground by their own shadows. One of the drones launched a miniature rocket. The rocket streaked over the vehicle and exploded directly in front of it, forcing the driver to swerve wildly.  The right wheels canted off the road. The Jeep teetered and went over, sliding onto its side.

  The soldiers double-timed out to it, weapons raised. The driver climbed out of the passenger window, his face bloody, and held his hands up. Gunfire ripped across his chest, and he fell forward, arms hanging down.

  Olivia snapped out of the halo and came up gasping on the motel bed, her head throbbing. The lamplight spiked into her eyes and she rolled away, hiding her face. She could still see the boy’s body jumping with the impact of automatic weapon fire and falling forward. Dead, where before he had lived.

  Olivia had done that.

  But if the boy had something to do with smuggling variola out of Aleppo, didn’t that make him complicit in a crime against humanity? So why should it bother her? Because the truth was, she didn’t know what the boy was doing, or indeed if he was doing anything. Olivia felt nauseated. She sat on the edge of the bed, her eyes barely open, and hung her head between her knees. “Bri,” she said, before realizing she was alone in the room.

  And that wasn’t the only wrong thing.

  She raised her head and looked around. The light hurt, but she forced herself to keep her eyes open. The standard motel two-beds-and-a-TV arrangement was the same, but it was as if elves had arrived while she was gone in the halo and . . . spruced things up. The furniture was better quality. Not a lot better, but better. There were no stains on the bedspreads. Maybe because they were different bedspreads. An art deco depiction of the Sears Tower replaced the plastic-framed photograph of old-time Chicago. A cork stuck out of a bottle of Chablis on the nightstand. Hadn’t it been a screw cap, and hadn’t the wine been Chardonnay? Olivia’s head swam with nausea and a sense of dislocation.

  She got up and stumbled to the bathroom, shielding her eyes from the lamp, her vision fragmented in a migraine shimmer. Dimly, she was aware that the bathroom was different, the shower curtain replaced with frosted glass. Where was Brian? She went to her knees and vomited into the toilet. Distantly, she heard the outside door open. She pushed herself up, feeling muzzy. Voices spoke in the next room.

  Voices. Plural.

  “Bri—” She came through the door and stopped.

  Looking sullen, Brian stood between Alvaro and Dee. The Society apostates wore hospital-blue filter masks. N-95s, Olivia suddenly knew—an info fragment out of the new probability stream tumbling to the surface of her conscious awareness. N-95s offered ninety-five percent protection from airborne viruses and were the filter mask of choice for anyone who could get their hands on one.

  She had failed. The epidemic wasn’t over.

  Nineteen

  “I’m sorry,” Brian said. “It looked like you fell asleep. I didn’t want to wake you, so I went outside to call my mom and dad.” He shrugged. “These guys came out of nowhere.”

  Olivia tried to focus through the pain. “Are you all right?”

  “He’s fine,” Dee said. The mask partially muffled her voice. Besides the mask, she still wore her Castro cap, and she still held her chin up, as if daring anyone or anything to take a poke at her and see where it got them.

  Olivia leaned heavily on the bathroom door frame. A new memory scaffold had begun to rise around the old one. The ro
om looked different because it was a different room in a different motel. Somehow the change she made at the Aleppo checkpoint caused a ripple (butterfly effect?) across the new probability stream.

  “Hey—” Brian came across the room, and she sagged into his arms.

  “What’s wrong with her?” Alvaro said.

  “How should I know? She was napping when I left the room.”

  “Wasn’t napping,” Olivia said. “I told you what I was going to do. Bri, I have to sit down. And either turn that lamp off or put something over it.”

  “She used the link,” Alvaro said to Dee. “I told you she was reckless. It was a mistake to wait.”

  “You said we shouldn’t spook them,” Dee said.

  The pain spiked. Olivia closed her eyes and pressed the heels of her hands against her temples.

  Brian helped her to the only chair. She opened her eyes to slits, shaded them with her hand. Brian retrieved a bath towel and draped it over the bedside lamp. “Better?” he said.

  Olivia made an unhelpful, noncommittal noise.

  “What did you change?” Alvaro asked.

  Dee nudged him. “Give her a minute. She looks sick.”

  “Some water?” Olivia said. “I need water.”

  Alvaro moved closer. “Tell me.”

  “Back off,” Brian said.

  Alvaro turned on him. “Do you even understand what’s happening?”

  “Yeah, I do. You’re trying to bully my girlfriend. And I’m telling you to back off.”

  Olivia held her hand up. “It’s all right, Bri.” She looked at Alvaro and Dee. “I tried to fix it. I really did.”

  Alvaro craned his head back, his lower lip curled between his teeth, then looked at Olivia. “I know you probably tried, but you don’t know what you’re doing. Tell me what you changed, what you did in the halo.”

  “Brian,” Olivia said, “I really need that water.”

  Brian disappeared into the bathroom and came back with a plastic cup of water.

  “Thanks.” Olivia drank the whole cup without pause. It hurt just to tilt her head back. “I didn’t screw around this time.”

  “But you didn’t stop the outbreak,” Alvaro said.

  She stared at Alvaro’s filter mask. “I guess not.”

  “So you didn’t go to the crisis point.”

  “I did.”

  “The crisis point is the torture cell. Jacob told me about it.”

  “I found a different way,” Olivia said.

  “It’s not possible.”

  Olivia tried to stand. A wave of nausea rolled through her, and she fell back into the chair. Brian crouched beside her, worried.

  “I need to know what’s going on out there,” she said. “I need the goddamn news.”

  But as she said it, the news rose inside her, part of the fresh memory scaffold lifting out of her brain fog, like the eternal haze of dust in Aleppo, to lie over the more present memory of a mostly uneventful cross-country drive from Seattle. The new memory presented a harrowing journey through a nation under martial law, a violation of travel restrictions that could have landed them in jail, or worse. Military-imposed curfews kept major population centers locked down.

  Behind it all, a giant number, an almost unfathomable number: twenty-three million.

  Olivia slumped. Her lips moved. “Twenty-three million infected.”  That was in the United States alone.

  “Everybody knows the CDC lowballed that estimate.” Dee sounded disgusted.

  “It’s probably that many dead,” Alvaro said, “and twice as many infected. The weaponized smallpox develops fast. And there’s no vaccine.”

  “I’m going to be sick again.” Olivia leaned over, head between her knees. What had she done? Brian put his hand on her back. Bile percolated up her throat. She swallowed it back, sat up slowly, her head throbbing, and looked at Alvaro and Dee. “You followed us all the way from Seattle?”

  “With a GPS tracker I attached to his car.” Alvaro nodded at Brian. “We lost you a few times when the satellite connection dropped. But it always found you again.”

  Dee said, “We got to Seattle way ahead of you, Olivia. We knew where you would go. Eventually the Society would have figured that out, too. You’re lucky Emilio didn’t arrive before we did.”

  Olivia stood up, moving with the delicacy of someone balancing a bowl of hot soup on her head. “I want to look outside.”

  Alvaro made room for her to pass. At the window, she gripped the plastic pull-rod of the curtain and racked it aside. In addition to Brian’s hybrid and Alvaro’s ramshackle pickup, only a half-dozen vehicles occupied the parking lot. A fully lit declaration of VACANCY shone beneath the Skyline Motel sign, but the closed blinds in the office windows sent a mixed message. An overturned garbage can scattered trash across the walkway. No traffic moved on the main road. The lights of Chicago in the distance made the night sky glow. On the other side of the road stood a diner. In her mind, Olivia could still see the ghost of Big Jones Tires.

  More memories of Olivia’s disastrous probability surfaced. She and Brian trading turns behind the wheel while the other hunted for internet connections on the secondary roads they had resorted to using the nearer they approached populated areas and state borders. Variola attacks had plunged the world into barely restrained chaos. Almost as frightening as the millions dead were the reports out of Moscow indicating a much lower incidence of infection. A statistically impossible lower number. India and Pakistan, two of the less stable nuclear powers, openly hurled threats—India at Russia, Pakistan at India. How long would it be until they hurled something more lethal than threats? Russia, meanwhile, denied reports suggesting Russian immunity from the virus. A flat-out lie, easily contradicted by independent observations. Meanwhile, North Korea, always the wild card, had gone ominously silent.

  “You made it all worse,” Alvaro said. “I can see it in your face. What was it like before you manipulated the probability stream?”

  “Bad, but not this bad. The mass deaths hadn’t happened, at least not in the United States. And I don’t think anyone was talking about Russian immunity.” Olivia shook her head. “I screwed up, but I can still fix this.”

  Alvaro crowded her, his eyes flashing with anger. He looked road-tired and nerve-frayed, and not a little threatening.

  Dee said, not to Alvaro, “You’re good right there, partner.”

  Brian grunted. Dee had his arm turned up behind his back.

  “Hey, let him go.” Olivia tried to push past Alvaro, but he blocked her.

  “Calm down,” he said. “Both of you. We’re on the same side. Listen to me: Olivia, Jacob’s probability choice is still there. You can go back into the halo. You can choose it.”

  “I know that.”

  He gripped her shoulder and squeezed hard. “Then you have to do it.”

  “Hey.” Olivia pulled away.

  “Let go,” Brian said, and Dee pushed him into the wall face-first and levered his arm. Brian made a weird, gasping scream that went right to Olivia’s heart.

  “Settle down,” Dee said. “We aren’t here to hurt anybody.”

  “You’re hurting me right now,” Brian said through gritted teeth.

  “Leave him alone,” Olivia said. “I’ll do it, for Christ’s sake.”

  Alvaro, who hadn’t shifted his attention off Olivia by a single millimeter, said, “You can’t enter the halo again for at least a day.  That’s under normal circumstances. We know from past experience that the farther you veer from the crisis point, the more dangerous it becomes for the Shepherd. It’s built in, like a fail-safe. If you go back in too soon, the link will fry your brain. It’s happened before.”

  “She needs time,” Dee said, “and we’re not safe here.”

  Olivia took a deep breath. “I know where there’s vaccine. Vaccine that’s effective against this weaponized strain of variola. And it’s not far from here.”

  Alvaro’s eyes said it first. “Bullshit.”

&n
bsp; “She’s telling the truth,” Brian said.

  “I am,” Olivia said. “There’s a house in Elmhurst.”

  “We tracked them to Elmhurst,” Dee said. “That much is true.”

  Alvaro said, “When the right probability takes over, nobody will need vaccine.”

  “If it takes over,” Olivia said. “What if I can’t do what you want me to do? What if the link’s already damaged and no good to anybody, including you? We might all have to survive in this probability.”

  “Only the Russians have vaccine,” Alvaro said. “That’s what everybody’s saying.”

  “There’s a guy hiding out in a bunker only a few miles from here. He worked in a government bioresearch lab where a test vaccine was developed. He stole some.”

  “How do you know about him?”

  Olivia told him about Helen and Javadi. She found it increasingly difficult to concentrate. Her stomach roiled with fresh nausea. The aura effect intensified. It splintered light and created blank spots. Her head pulsing with the post-halo migraine, she gave up trying to read Alvaro’s eyes. The room tilted, and she swayed forward. Brian yelled, and Olivia fell against Alvaro and into darkness.

  Twenty

  Olivia emerged gradually from a swamp of surrealistic dreams: Jacob was nailed to a table in a stone room beneath the earth, a room ankle-deep in blood. Brian’s face floated on the blood, a flimsy skin mask, eyeless, with straps attached to its ears like the straps on an N-95 filter mask. A starving child held a granola bar in one fist and a lantern in the other, while a cat slopped around her legs in the syrup-thick blood. “Qetta, qetta,” the cat said.

  Someone touched Olivia’s shoulder. “Hey, how you doing?”

  She tried to reply. But her lips and tongue had temporarily forgotten how to make meaningful noise together. She blinked. The migraine aura was gone. Brian’s face hovered, a big white planet.

  “You fainted.” Planet Bri put his glasses back on.

  “Uh-huh.” Her head hurt, but not murderously so. She sniffed at a very bad smell and touched the front of her shirt, which was damp.