The Chaos Function

by Jack Skillingstead

  La disaster. Baytayy.

  A couple of hours later, they piled into a junky fossil-burner and drove from the camp to the small border town of Karkamiş. The wing mirror’s plastic mounts had broken, and the mirror dangled by the cable meant to adjust the angle of view. It twisted and knocked against the door, like it wanted to get into the car with them. In Karkamiş the buildings stood dark in the moonlight.

  “Power rationing,” Jameel said. “The end of war has improved nothing.” He parked on a deserted street and killed the engine. “Payment now.”

  Olivia dug out the money and handed it over. American currency.

  Jameel pointed to the end of the street. The vague outlines of a gate were visible, and the tip of a cigarette glowed and dimmed periodically. “This crossing is no more official. Go on. The guard will let you through.”

  “You’re coming to the gate with us, right?” Dee said.

  “The guard has been paid.”

  “I don’t like it,” Dee said.

  “Come with us,” Olivia said.

  Jameel chuckled. “You Americans are babies.” He didn’t say it meanly, but like it was an amusing and universally acknowledged fact.

  They all got out of the car and walked to the gate. Olivia felt exposed on the open street, though there was no reason to think snipers might be lurking on the rooftops. It was the habit of fear; they weren’t even in Syria yet. A ten-foot-high border fence stretched for miles, interrupted here and there by other, active gates. The endless Syrian diaspora had forced Turkey to erect barriers. They opened gates like water taps to measure the flow of refugees, or to cut it off altogether.

  The guard dropped his cigarette and crushed it under the toe of his boot. A sidearm hung low on his hip, dragging his pants down and leaving his police tunic untucked on one side. Jameel embraced him. They slapped each other’s backs like fraternity brothers, stood apart, and spoke to each other in Arabic. Olivia caught only a few words. They seemed to be talking about their families.

  The guard turned to Olivia and Dee. In English, he said, “Welcome. Probably you think I am a corrupt official. You are right. But I am corrupt for the sake of the children. Not all foreign aid goes where it should. Yours will. Which of you is Dee?”

  Dee raised her hand.

  “Take this.”  The guard handed her an authentic-looking visa and passport, already stamped for Syria.

  “Thanks,” Dee said.

  “Hide your true credentials. Two passports are not good.”

  “We’ll handle it,” Olivia said.

  The guard nodded, opened the gate, and ushered them through.

  Olivia and Dee walked down the road, the moonlight making little pale shadows before them. The gate closed with an iron clank.

  “Give me your real passport,” Olivia said.

  Dee handed it over, and Olivia slipped it inside her boot sock. “Sorry, it’s going to smell like my foot when you get it back.”

  They walked for almost an hour. The stars were so thick they were like a diamond crust.

  “How far is it?” Dee asked.

  “I don’t know. Someone’s picking us up.”

  “Good. When?”

  A pair of headlights appeared in the distance. “Now, I think.”

  The women stopped walking. The lights drew closer. The sound of an engine became audible, along with muffled music. Soon a van stopped in front of them, road dust making a haze in the headlamps. Olivia blinked and waved her hand in front of her face. The headlamps shut off, leaving amber parking lights. Inside the van, the music stopped. Dee sneezed.

  One person sat behind the windshield, a woman, her red curls wild in the dashboard light. The window rolled down and the woman stuck her head out. In a British accent, she said, “You Nikitas?”

  “Yes,” Olivia said. “Dee, this is Toria Westby.”

  “Hey,” Dee said.

  “Hey yourself. Get in, you two. It’s better if we’re moving.”

  “Where’s your partner?” Olivia asked. “The guy who likes cigars.”

  Toria gave her an odd look. In the current probability, Olivia had never taken that first ride across Aleppo with Toria and her BBC cameraman, the cigar-chewing Cockney who sort of knew what a superposition was. As far as Toria was concerned, this was the first time she had ever laid eyes on Olivia in person. But Olivia remembered Toria, and it had been relatively easy to track down her number and arrange this pickup—once she identified herself, said Toria had come recommended by her editor, and promised a major lead on the rumored bioweapon story.

  “Mikey,” Toria said. “Mike’s dead.”

  Thirty-Two

  The van smelled like sunscreen, hot batteries, and sweat. Olivia took the shotgun seat and Dee clambered into the back, where she stumbled in the dark and banged against the wall.

  “What’s all this crap?”

  “That’s my gear,” Toria said. “Don’t step on it, please.”

  “Sorry.”

  Toria swung the van around and popped the headlights back on.

  “Thanks for picking us up,” Olivia said.

  Toria pushed the hair off her forehead. She smiled in the dash light. “You’re going to make it up to me, I hope, with information.”

  “Sorry about your partner,” Olivia said. “What happened?”

  Toria glanced at her. “Did you know Mike?”

  “In a way that’s too complicated to explain right now, yes. A little.”

  “Right. We all stray out of the pasture sometimes.”

  Stray out of the pasture?

  “Mikey was on his second marriage and it wasn’t going great.”

  Ah. “We didn’t have an affair. It’s not that kind of complicated.”

  “Your business, not mine.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “We were covering the mini-uprising. Mikey was getting some great footage, American gunships booming over the Old City. Real Apocalypse Now stuff. I’m in the frame, doing my thing, giving context, and a light tactical vehicle runs into Mikey. Camera goes flying. I’m standing there like a dummy.”

  “He got run over.”

  “Yeah. He was a good guy. Fuck. Such a stupid way to die, especially here. He could’ve got run over in Whitechapel, for fuck’s sake. Anyway, BBC coughed up a new cameraman. I left him in Aleppo for this taxi run.”  Toria un-Velcroed a pocket on her pants, slipped out her phone—a sturdy Nexus 2D model—and woke it up and handed it to Olivia. “First five faces in the gallery, one of them’s your guy.  Those are the checkpoint commanders on the western routes out of the city.”

  When Olivia had tried to use the probability machine to subvert the escape of weaponized variola out of Aleppo and still allow Brian to live, the halo had repeatedly presented the vision of a checkpoint on the western edge of the city: A kid in an ancient Jeep Cherokee approaches. The kid is nervous as hell. The checkpoint commander steps up. Repeat. The halo refused to pinpoint the key, and though Olivia had “seen” the boy in his mother’s kitchen and had manipulated the probability to prevent him from passing through the checkpoint, variola had nevertheless escaped—and the crisis had actually accelerated. The lesson? Good intentions aren’t good enough, and nobody should have this power. Not her, not Jacob, certainly not Emilio.

  Now, swiping through the pictures on Toria’s phone, Olivia recognized a face she had seen in the halo on two occasions: a middle-aged guy with a thick mustache, wearing a side-slanting beret—the checkpoint commander who stopped the kid in the Jeep.

  “This one, this is him.” She turned the phone to Toria.

  Toria glanced at it. “Baki Abboud. He’s corrupt as they come, which is saying something in this place.”

  “What about the kid?”

  Olivia had given Toria the Jeep’s license plate number. Even though preventing him from driving out of the city that day hadn’t forestalled the apocalypse, he was somehow a player. He had knowledge. Maybe something that connected him to Baki Abboud.
<
br />   “Yeah,” Toria said. “I’ve got his address. Lives with his mother. Father killed in the war. You want to talk to him first? He’ll be easier to approach than Abboud. I can take you to him tomorrow.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe?” Toria looked at her and back at the road. “You’ve got something more important to do?”

  “Yes. And we’re doing it tonight.” Olivia looked back at Dee, who was kneeling, with her hands on the backs of the driver and passenger seats. “Address.” Dee reached for a notepad and read off a street address.

  The Society maintained safe houses in the eastern, formerly rebel-contested, half of Aleppo. But this wasn’t one of them. This was a place only Jacob and Alvaro had known about. Per tradition, Jacob had arranged it for them privately, a place for them to stay before and after Jacob brought Alvaro to see the probability machine. Why not use one of the Society’s safe houses? Olivia had asked before they left the States. “It’s like a pilgrimage,” Dee had replied. “The Shepherd and his successor make their own way.  The old Shepherd reveals secret knowledge and then takes the new Shepherd to see the machine. After that there’s a period of fasting. The Society is full of rituals.”

  “Toria, can you find that address without GPS?” Eastern Aleppo was still largely an internet dead zone.

  “What’s there?” Toria said.

  “A man we have to talk to.”

  “Which man? And talk about what? He’s got something to do with the bioweapon?”

  “It’s all related,” Olivia said truthfully.

  An hour later, they rolled into the Salah ad-Deen neighborhood on the southwest outskirts of the city. Part of the 1070 Apartment Project, the residential area had been heavily pounded and fought over during the war. Blocks of five-story buildings, hollowed out and devastated, stood like vertically organized abstract sculptures. The BBC van jolted and rocked over debris-strewn streets and finally turned onto a cleared avenue. Construction lamps cabled to poles directed their harsh glare over the pocked faces of still-inhabited apartment structures. Civilians circulated among makeshift cafés. Multiple generators made a racket like lawnmowers.

  “Here,” Toria said, tucking the van into the curb in front of a bleak façade checkerboarded with candlelit windows. A couple of young men sat on the sidewalk, backs against the building, smoking and talking. They looked over when the van stopped.

  Dee pulled herself up between the seats. “I better go in alone.”

  “We go together,” Olivia said.

  “I’m staying with my stuff.”  Toria eyed the smoking men. “But you’re going to share whatever you get, right?”

  Olivia pushed open the passenger door. “Right.”

  On the sidewalk, Olivia found herself breathing the familiar dust-sifted air of Aleppo. This was, of course, only one Aleppo out of who knew how many possible iterations. She had seen how even tiny, localized shifts in the probability stream could have far-reaching influence. The González effect, for example. Had Dee been right when she suggested the probability machine could be used to arrange an improved world? Maybe in another timeline the Arab Spring uprising toppled Bashar al-Assad, as it did the leaders of Egypt and Tunisia. Or maybe an alternate probability existed where Assad was removed before his bloody war stretched into its second decade. Somewhere in the infinite probability choices could Aleppo have shone in the sun of art and culture and history, fulfilling its “shining city” parable? Or was its destruction inevitable, always arriving somewhere along the city’s timeline?

  Olivia shook off the doubt. That was just another danger of the power: It could seduce you into trying it again, with all good intentions. But if she knew anything about the probability machine, she knew intentions had nothing to do with outcomes.

  They entered the building. Oil lamps burned in the lobby, wearing dusty auras. Their boots crunched over fine grit. Part of a wall had caved in, exposing a tangle of rebar. The stairwell was dark. Olivia and Dee produced flashlights. They crossed hazy beams as they ascended to the second floor.

  “If only Jacob and Alvaro are supposed to know about this place, how’d you get the address?”

  “Alvaro called me the night before Jacob took him to see the machine. He was excited and wanted to talk.”

  “Didn’t that break tradition?”

  “Alvaro and I have our own traditions.”

  The hallway was surprisingly clean, the floor swept. The window at the end of the hall bore the streaks of a squeegee. Street light projected a distorted window frame on the ceiling.

  “This one,” Dee said, pointing at a door. She kept her voice low. “Maybe hang back? If he’s here, it’s because he doesn’t want to be found. Let’s not spook him.” Dee put her flashlight away. Olivia nodded and stepped back, extinguishing her own light, so she wouldn’t be immediately visible when the door opened.

  Dee knocked softly, waited, knocked again. “Alvaro?”

  Nothing.

  Down in the street, someone shouted angrily, then laughed.

  Dee reached for the doorknob. Before her fingers touched it, the knob rattled and turned. Olivia tensed. Dee stepped back.

  The door opened and a man said, “Who’s that?”

  Dee said, “Emilio?”

  The door opened wider. Emilio, in a black T-shirt and jeans, leaned into the hall, his right hand behind his back.

  “What are you doing here?” he said. “And who’s she?”

  “A friend who knows the country,” Dee said. “Emilio, what are you doing here? Nobody’s supposed to know this place.”

  “And yet you know it.”

  “I’m just trying to find Alvaro.”

  “We are all trying to do that.” Emilio’s hand came out from behind his back. It was holding a pistol. “You better come in here. Both of you.”

  He stepped fully into the hall, directed them through the door with his gun, and followed after them, pulling the door shut behind him. The room was small and smelled of tobacco and mildew. The furniture was old and lumpy, the sofa almost like the bloated carcass of an animal. The rug was threadbare, worn through to the floorboards in places. Many candles lighted the room.

  “I know about you,” Emilio said. “Andrew called and said you couldn’t be trusted anymore. You’re going to tell me what’s going on.”

  Olivia stepped forward. “There’s nothing going on. Why don’t you stop waving that gun around? We all want to find Alvaro. Why don’t we work together?” She barely knew what she was saying. Olivia just wanted Emilio to put the gun down, so they’d have a chance of getting out of this room.

  But Emilio was having none of it. “You sit in that chair. Do it.”

  Olivia turned her head to see what chair he meant—and Emilio gasped. “Now I see.”

  A scuffle started. Olivia turned. Dee had caught Emilio’s wrist and twisted it expertly.  The gun dropped to the floor. Dee kicked it away, at the same time pulling him down and around, following him like Muhammad Ali followed George Foreman to the mat. Olivia grabbed the gun.

  “We’re leaving,” Dee said.

  Emilio glared at her. “Traitor.” He spat on her shoe.

  Dee pushed him back on his ass and released his wrist. She stuck out her hand and said to Olivia, “Give me that.”

  Olivia handed over the gun.

  Dee pointed it at Emilio. “We’re leaving. Don’t try to follow us.”

  Sitting on the floor, massaging his wrist, Emilio sneered. “They should have kept you in the kitchen.”

  Dee snorted. “Let’s go.” In the hall she tucked the gun into the waist of her pants and covered it with her shirt.

  Outside, the smoking men were gone. Olivia said, “You’re handy to have around.”

  “Just tell me what plan B is.”

  “We’re still on plan A: Find Alvaro.”

  “That room up there? It’s all I had. So we need plan B.”

  “Then we have to find the probability machine ourselves.”

  “
How?”

  “I’ll figure something out.”

  “Well, you better figure it out quick. Emilio saw your scar,” Dee said, causing Olivia to immediately cup her hand over the back of her neck. “He knows you have the link.”

  Thirty-Three

  The next morning, after five hours of murderous jet lag and two of bad sleep, Olivia opened her eyes and still didn’t know how to find Alvaro or the probability machine. She quickly put herself together and headed downstairs. They had spent the night in the Beit Wakil. Before the war, it had been a four-star hotel in eastern Aleppo. Now the most you could say for it was that it was open and, for the most part, structurally sound, not to mention cheap. And they had coffee, strong coffee, which Dee was drinking in the dining room when Olivia walked in. Foreigners occupied about half the tables, a few men in suits, others in safari shirts. Olivia spotted Dee, sat down, and poured a cup of mud.

  Priority one was to find the probability machine, with or without Alvaro’s help. If that wasn’t possible, the backup plan was to track down the possible path of weaponized variola out of Aleppo. Jacob’s original probability had prevented the escape, but Olivia worried that it was a temporary measure. Variola was still here somewhere, a potential, maybe even an inevitable threat. And there’d be no magic halos this time. They had to be on top of it.

  “What’s the plan?” Dee looked as bleary-eyed as Olivia felt.

  “It’s still gelling.”

  Dee nodded, slurped her coffee.

  Olivia looked at her over the rim of her own coffee cup. “Look, I have some private business to take care of.”

  “You can do that while gelling?”

  “Yeah.” Olivia’s coffee was hot enough to burn her tongue, but she didn’t care.