The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  “That’s not what’s going on here,” said Moss. “Let her sleep tonight, if she can sleep. But guard the room. Her life is still in danger, I think, if anyone learns that she’s here. No one can talk about this, Brock—what we’ve seen. I think we should push for WITSEC if we can. At least we should move her from here, and soon.”

  Moss tarried after Brock left, alone in the half-light of the closed cafeteria with her thoughts, drinking coffee and eating vanilla Oreos from the vending machine until Dr. Schroeder informed her that Marian had finally accepted a sedative, had fallen asleep. There were three special agents who would spell one another through the night, guarding Marian’s room. Before he left, Brock had told Moss he would broach the subject of witness protection with his supervisor, coordinate with NCIS and the U.S. Marshals. He would call Marian’s aunt and uncle, he would figure out a way to tell them that one of the children they’d buried had lived.

  Moss filled napkins with a blue ballpoint pen, at first just lines and shading until her thoughts untangled. A place in the woods, the Vardogger, she wrote, then wrote the word a second time, and wrote, One with wire, one with twine. Ten agents could travel to ten IFTs and report back different details from each. Existence was a matter of chance, of probability, as infinite futures became one observed present. Life and death often hung on details—in one existence Marian’s wrists had been tied with wire, but in another her wrists had been tied with twine. How had she echoed? Moss wrote, The mirror girl, and lost herself in thought.

  She shredded her notes and called O’Connor before she left the hospital—after midnight, but he was awake. He had seen the reports coming out of Buckhannon and had already spoken with his counterpart in the FBI, but the news concerning Marian’s echoing stunned him, and by the end of their conversation, he’d promised that he and another special agent would arrive in Clarksburg by the following day.

  “What’s your next move?” he had asked.

  “We have to find the Vardogger.”

  Nearing 1:00 a.m. when Moss left Preston Memorial, an hour’s drive home. The country roads she drove were twisting paths obscured by trees, pitch-black, but occasionally the view ahead cleared and she saw the moon and fiery pinpoints of stars and the silver of Hale-Bopp, its streaking tail like flowing locks of a woman’s hair.

  —

  She remembered the enclosing pines here, the canopy choking out light, but that had been with Nestor, years from now, when she’d been anxious over seeing the place where Marian’s bones were found. This morning, though, the Canaan Mountain bore little resemblance to her memories of the place, the approach serene glades and sods, spruce, balsam fir, hemlock doused in buttery sunlight. Rangers had marked the access route with an orange ribbon. She came to the clearing where the incline leveled and found O’Connor’s Subaru already nestled beneath an overhang of branches. Only a short hike from here. The path was cleaner than she remembered, after what would be twenty years of growth, when Nestor had pulled back branches for her, when he had stomped down weeds in her way. Much easier to find her footing now, a thin path simple to follow. She wore hiking boots this time, which helped, and made it to the dried runnel where just yesterday morning Brock had found Marian alive.

  “Shannon, over here.”

  Two men, a little ways off. O’Connor had driven overnight from D.C. to meet Marian for himself and to see this place in the woods, the Vardogger. An avid outdoorsman, he looked like an Edwardian painting of a gentleman hunter this morning, with a walking stick and rubber galoshes that reached to his knees. Moss would have recognized O’Connor’s partner by his height and bulk alone, she was sure, but otherwise the man bore little resemblance to the sage she had once met. Njoku was shaven bald, his beard a chiseled black strip. Golden hoops dangled from each of his earlobes. He smiled as O’Connor introduced him, was pleasantly bewildered when Moss said, “We were well met once before, Dr. Njoku.”

  “I asked Njoku to red-eye from Boston because of the developments with Marian,” said O’Connor. “He has experience with echoes, and his work at MIT focuses on thin spaces.”

  “Collapsibility of Everett space and Brandt-Lomonaco space-time knots,” said Njoku. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Shannon. Or I should say it’s a pleasure to meet you again for the first time.”

  She was delighted to see this man with years peeled from him, but Moss remembered there was a woman whose fingers made beautiful sounds on saxophone keys. She remembered when Njoku was to have met this woman. “Wally, you should be in Boston right now,” she said. “There is someone you were supposed to meet.”

  Doubt fluttered over his face, the shadow of a falling leaf, but soon he smiled. “There are many paths,” he said.

  O’Connor trudged ahead, pulling through long strides with his walking stick. Moss kept an easier pace with Njoku. Have you ever seen a falling star as it blooms? Easy to imagine Njoku lingering in a neighbor’s garden, philosophizing over the beauty of flowers. He paused frequently here in the woods, allowing Moss to catch up with him, running his fingers over the flesh of a petal, or crouching low to inspect an insect or remark on a spider’s funnel.

  “Here’s a cairn,” said O’Connor, ahead.

  The spot was marked by powdery orange spray paint, a cross on the ground that would wash away with the first rain. The cairn was what she imagined it would be, though more carefully constructed: it was a pyramidal stack of flat river stones, a foot and a half high. The cairn was balanced on a fallen log barnacled by plump fungus and carpeted with moss.

  “The FBI found four so far,” said O’Connor. “Two are on the far side of the river.”

  “I thought the cairns would have marked the location of Marian’s body,” said Moss. “I thought they would lead the way to the burial site.”

  “The cairns mark the location of Marian’s Vardogger tree,” said O’Connor.

  “Look at this,” said Njoku. He folded open a pocket notebook and showed Moss several pages of inky dots he’d connected with sketchy lines into various shapes, several-pointed stars. “The cairns are equidistant,” he said. “If you imagine each cairn as a point . . .”

  “We found a burnt tree at the center of the star,” said O’Connor.

  “I want to see it,” she said.

  Blueberry thickets, burs and thistles that clung to Moss’s sock. A meadow strewn with flattop boulders. The rush of a river as they neared the Vardogger, a swift sound as if the forest whispered where she should walk.

  “When O’Connor called about Marian, I thought her Vardogger might be something we call a ‘thin space,’” said Njoku. “The Naval Research Lab calls them Brandt-Lomonaco space-time knots.”

  “I’ve heard that term before,” said Moss. “We talked about them in training. B-L knots, the residue of quantum foam.”

  “You’re exactly right. Residue, almost like pollution. The B-L drives affect space-time,” said Njoku. “Knots are locations where an infinite-density singularity event breaks down effects of quantum gravity, allowing superposition. Wave-function collapse sometimes doesn’t occur. Simultaneous Everett spaces—”

  “Whoa, you’re losing me,” said Moss.

  “Echoes,” he said. “Here we are, here is the tree we found.”

  The husk of a pine, a stark white tower of ash surrounded by verdant evergreens. “Yes,” said Moss, recognizing this ashen tree, “here we are.” Lost in the Terminus when she had last seen this tree, she’d been confused by it then. It had seemed to repeat, recursively, like a mirror image of a mirror. She had searched for the tree in the years since but hadn’t been able to find it and had grown to think of it as a mistake of memory, a hallucination—seeing it now was a relief, a confirmation. There was nothing fearsome about this place, however, not with Njoku here, and O’Connor, the noon sun almost too warm for her jacket.

  Nothing fearsome, but still unnatural. The Vardogger was burnt, but not burned away. Moss had seen scorched woods before, the remains of forest fires, carpets of ash, charre
d trunks branchless and sooty like lines of spent matchsticks. The Vardogger looked preserved by fire rather than consumed. The trunk was barked with crackled ash so light gray it seemed luminous white, but when Moss touched the trunk, it felt more like petrified wood than seared wood. She touched the branches and was startled to find they felt as smooth and as brittle as glass.

  She was nearer the rush of the river now. “I’ll be back,” she said, leaving Njoku and O’Connor at the Vardogger. She hurried toward the sound of water and came through the tree line, emerging onto an outcropping of boulders. The Red Run was a turbulent set of rapids before her, twisting drops, whitewater crashing through gaps in the jagged stones. Where the river was calmer, the water was the color of tea, dyed by the tannin of the surrounding hemlocks. Moss recognized the future of this place. It was the winter of the Terminus then, and instead of the goldenrod and willows and bushes of flowering mountain laurel along the banks, there’d been pinions of ice that had seemed to impale her in the air. This is where she’d been crucified. Her reflection had been here, an echo. Moss glanced back toward the tree line, half expecting a woman in orange to reach for her, beseeching her, but there was no one.

  “I’ve been here,” said Moss, returning to Njoku and O’Connor. “This is the place where I had my accident,” she said. “I’m sure of it. I saw another version of myself here. I saw my echo.”

  “Thin spaces are unpredictable, unstable. Sometimes they’re inert, but sometimes they’re spooky as hell,” said Njoku. “Reflections, echoes, closed timelike curves.”

  “Wally’s explanations sometimes assume a Ph.D.-level understanding of quantum mechanics,” said O’Connor. “Maybe he can slow it down for us.”

  “I understand echoing,” said Moss. “But this whole place should repeat,” aware she wasn’t sure exactly how to describe her experience with this place. This was the same white tree, the same area of pines, the same river as she remembered, she was sure of it, but it was off somehow, as if she were looking at a stage set of a place she remembered rather than the place itself. “It was like I could see a hundred of these trees, thousands, in every way I looked, in every direction. Like the world receded from me—”

  But she was interrupted—by what first felt like the onset of a seizure or a stroke, some swift mental aberration, or a fault in her eyes as the forest changed around them. The pines were denser, the growth heavier. Njoku pushed through the branches, Moss and O’Connor following, and they came to the clearing, the Red Run—but they seemed to be on the wrong side of the river. The white Vardogger tree was visible on the far side rather than behind them.

  “Over there,” said Njoku. “We got turned around somehow. We have to cross.”

  Moss held him back. They trekked back the way they had come and passed the white tree. They tried to find the dry creek bed, to follow it back to their cars, but they were lost and passed the white tree again, Njoku chuckling in frustration. They broke through the surrounding pines and returned to the white tree.

  After a moment the sensation passed. They were again in the recognizable woods near a single white tree, as though the denser pines and repeating woods had only been a trick of the eye.

  Njoku’s laughter was like the clarion pealing of a bell. “Like I said, spooky as hell!”

  “Let’s go, away from here,” said O’Connor, leaning on his walking stick, dizzy or untrusting of the earth. “We shouldn’t be here.”

  Closer to what she remembered of her experience with this place, the disorientation, the repetition, Moss was eager to distance herself from it, and she hurried on ahead, almost running, her heart pumping fear of this place. O’Connor and Njoku caught up only once she had reached the cairn on the soft log, the Vardogger no longer visible.

  “It was like the moment when the B-L drive fires, as you travel to an IFT,” said Moss, “that moment you think you can feel every possibility at once.”

  “Wally thinks a B-L drive made this place,” said O’Connor. He was sweating, flushed.

  “I think a B-L drive might have made this extraordinary place,” said Njoku. “The tricky thing about Brandt-Lomonaco knots is that they exist outside of time. Almost a paradox! If we assume that a B-L drive created this thin space, the ‘Vardogger,’ then the B-L could have fired at any time, including at any time in the future or in the past. We think of time as set, but time is mutable, nonlinear. Imagine,” he said, “you see a burnt tree, coated in ash.”

  Moss nodded.

  “Now imagine that the forest fire that burned the tree won’t happen for another three hundred years or three thousand—you see? Things like that can happen in a thin space, quantum tricks. Time is like water here, water that sometimes flows uphill. This thin space might be a consequence of an action that hasn’t actually happened yet.”

  Nicole might have described this place, obliquely, Moss realized. She had described ghosts in the woods that preceded their bodies. Marian, thought Moss, and another Marian.

  “I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t understand what this place is,” said Moss.

  “Not what this place is, but what this place might be,” said Njoku.

  “Are you all right?” she asked O’Connor, who sat on the log wiping his face with a handkerchief.

  “I’m fine. It was just disorienting,” he said. “I’ll be all right.”

  “One Planck unit past now is the multiverse,” said Njoku. “Quantum gravity is like a zipper, pulling all those possibilities together into one, single, truth: terra firma. The thin space is like a moment when the zipper gets stuck a little.”

  “How large is this thin space?” asked Moss. “Just the tree? Or do you think it’s the entire forest?”

  “I don’t know! It’s marvelous, but I can’t even guess at the size,” said Njoku. “Most B-L knots are only hypothetical shapes, more like math problems than geolocations that you can measure. There are only a very few B-L knots that have actually been observed on Earth, and this one is very, incredibly unique.”

  “These things are pretty rare, then,” said Moss.

  “Rare on Earth, but our launch sites at the Black Vale are riddled with them. That’s one of the reasons NSC launches from space,” said O’Connor.

  “What’s the other reason?” she asked.

  Njoku laughed. “Oh! Well, you see,” he said, “back in the early eighties, the Naval Research Lab published a report proving that a B-L drive could spark the creation of a massive black hole. Theoretically, anyway. Our ships sail black holes in the quantum foam, but if something went wrong, frankly, the moon base wouldn’t be far enough away.”

  “You’re kidding me,” said Moss.

  Njoku shrugged, smiling. “Math problems,” he said.

  “We tend not to mention that fact in our annual reports to Congress,” said O’Connor. “I’m all right, we can keep going.”

  “Black holes, thin spaces,” said Moss, grabbing O’Connor’s hand, helping him up. “Where are the other thin spaces?”

  “One in Los Alamos, three in the Pacific—all at early B-L drive test sites,” said Njoku. “Most of these things only affect particles. The thin space out in the Pacific, though, that is an interesting one.”

  “Like this one?”

  “Nothing is like this one,” said Njoku. “The size of this one—we were inside this one. The space-time knot in the Pacific is considered very large, and that’s only a few feet in volume. Not like the Vardogger by any stretch, but large enough to echo fish as they swim through.”

  “Echoed fish?” she asked.

  “Pacific jack mackerel,” said Njoku. “You can catch a mackerel but still have it get away.”

  “The one that got away would always be bigger than the one you caught,” said O’Connor.

  “We’ve observed the Pacific thin space echoing fish, but it is also a ‘Gödel curve’—that is, a specific kind of closed timelike curve,” said Njoku. “It’s a very odd part of the ocean.”

  “You mentioned that
before. What is that?” asked Moss.

  “A four-dimensional Lorentzian manifold, it . . . well, listen, if you watch that particular thin space long enough, you will actually see the moment all the original fish in the system ‘reset’ to their start positions at the beginning of the cycle. Closed timelike curves are the closest we’ve come to traveling backward in time.”

  “The fish repeat?” she asked. “You mean they’re stuck in a loop?”

  “Looping is a good way to think of it,” said Njoku. “There are various types of closed timelike curves, ways information loops through wormholes, going forward in time but also backward, arriving at the moment it began. I’ve dipped my hand into the water, and when the water looped, it was like I held a fish inside my hand until it flopped and squirmed out, swimming away. It was a very strange sensation, slimy. You could cast your line into the water and catch the same fish over and over again.”

  “Or pick a piece of fruit and see it regrow the moment you pick it,” said Moss, remembering Nicole smoking her Parliament, describing something like a Gödel curve when she had reminisced about her childhood home. When was she a child? Moss wondered. When were miracles like Gödel curves practicable, common on orchards in Kenya, put to use for agriculture? Nicole had never been hungry as a child, the fields never fallow.

  “The Navy will want this place. I have to make arrangements,” said O’Connor. “They’ll need to fence this off, shut it down. The whole area. Let’s get going.”

  The stones were smooth along the dried creek, polished from the water that used to flow here—Moss stepped stone to stone as she walked back, following Njoku and O’Connor. Easy to dig out the flat stones for cairns, she thought—they were everywhere. Who had marked this place? The FBI had spotted the driver of the black van here, Richard Harrier, and had trailed him to Buckhannon. But he wouldn’t have been marking this place, she thought. It must have been the survivors of Libra. A B-L drive had made this place. She peered through the spaces between trees, wondering if she might see a ship here. Nothing but trees, and in the distance more trees.