The Gone World

by Tom Sweterlitsch

  PART FOUR

  2015–2016

  I will invite myself

  to this ghost supper.

  —AUGUST STRINDBERG, The Ghost Sonata

  ONE

  I launched in the Cormorant within a week of Brock’s death. Three months in solitude, the silence of the Grey Dove pierced by ringing in my ears, the lingering effects of Torgersen’s suicide blast. My memories were spotty, like there were gaps where the film had been cut. One moment I’d heard shouting, the next I woke in fire and remembered only scattered images, flashes of the gruesome spectacle of Brock’s body and Torgersen’s echo, the pieces of them scattered about the burning living room. Brock’s death wriggled wormlike in my heart. Why hadn’t I known what we were walking into?

  My life was telescoping. I had lived over a year since Nestor called in the early hours to tell me that a family had been murdered, but those murders were still raw, just a few weeks old. I had seen the future but didn’t understand the larger constellation of events around me. Nothing was clarified, and that future had already dissolved like dew.

  O’Connor visited me in Clarksburg, at my office in CJIS. We walked the corridors together, imagining this building’s fate in a future that would never be.

  “I spoke with one of the doctors who treated your smoke inhalation,” he said. “He told me you suffered a perforated eardrum in the explosion, but no other injuries. The hearing loss should be temporary. How are you?”

  “I can go,” I said, even though his voice seemed far away, too soft beneath the shrill ringing. He wasn’t asking about the smoke inhalation or the psychological trauma of the bombing. He was asking if my body could withstand the withering travel to a second IFT within a month. “I’m ready.”

  We spoke about Torgersen’s wife, how her husband had been brought through the woods and imagined the Vardogger as an intersection of paths, the hub of a wheel with several spokes, each spoke leading somehow to a different IFT. There were other echoes that had already been brought through, we knew, waiting like spiders in their funnels, tensed as Torgersen had been, for Hyldekrugger to pluck their webs and send them scurrying to the light. O’Connor studied the inventory of blueprints that Brock and I had recovered from Buckhannon, sites compromised by Hyldekrugger’s network. “Federal buildings,” O’Connor said, “NSC targets. Launch sites. Navy installations. These are all support beams protecting us from the Terminus, and Hyldekrugger is preparing to break them. Why?”

  I would travel to discover what terror might still occur, then trace it back to terra firma, so that we can anticipate Hyldekrugger here, now. Stop him.

  Before we parted, O’Connor told me that the Navy had secured the Vardogger. “A discreet presence, but they’ll have the area fenced off soon. Njoku is working with a team from the Naval Research Lab. They’ve rented most of the cabins there, out at the Blackwater Lodge. They’re going to study the thin space, unlock it. When you reach the future, check in with us. See what doorways through time and space we’ve managed to pry apart.”

  —

  The ping from the Black Vale’s AI roused me from dreams of Buckhannon, the lunar base confirming that my ship had emerged from the void. I glanced out the portal: gibbous moon, Earthshine. I checked with the Grey Dove’s autocommand: September 2015. Another IFT materialized, another future.

  A second ping from the Black Vale.

  “Black Vale Approach, Cormorant Seven Zero Seven Golf Delta,” I said, shaking away wisps of a dream, Nestor in fields of long grass, the night sky bleeding with stars.

  “State your name and place your eyes to the onboard retinal scanner for verification,” a sonorous voice, a computer’s, breaking hailing protocol. The Black Vale’s AI had locked into the Grey Dove’s computers as it should have, but NSC always manned the Lighthouse with sailors. Something was wrong.

  “Shannon Moss,” I said. The retinal scanner was a set of goggles built into the control panel, and I lowered my face against the rubber mask, kept my eyes wide for the dull sweep of light.

  “Welcome, Special Agent Shannon Moss. Downloading clearance code, contacting NETWARCOM.”

  “Wait. Black Vale Approach,” I said, “this is Grey Dove Actual. I need to speak with Black Vale Actual.”

  “The Lighthouse is dark, Shannon.”

  Which meant there was no Black Vale, not anymore, that there was no longer a lunar base, that I was speaking with a black-box computer buried deep beneath moon dust, or maybe a satellite circling the night. We were trained to remain dark in the event that NSC might no longer exist, to shut off all lights and nonessential computers, to wait in silence for the B-L to reboot. We were trained simply to return home, a six-month round trip that would have gained nothing. I flipped off the Dove’s interior lights, the situation sinking in, that if there was no Black Vale, then NSC had been compromised, or folded. Several minutes passed before I noticed that the Black Vale’s AI had sent a message. I tapped the digital display, and O’Connor’s face filled the screen, his skin mottled with liver spots and traced with veins, wizened, his eyebrows bushy white. He was in his office, in front of the customary “I Love Me” wall that special agents usually covered with certificates and awards but that he filled with framed photographs of his cocker spaniels.

  “Shannon,” he said, his voice dried with age, reedy, “if you’re watching this, then you are in an IFT and our nightmare doesn’t exist, and I don’t exist right now, which is a warm thought for me, like I might still wake up from so many terrible things. Return to terra firma, Shannon. Right now, don’t wait. As of this recording, July 2014, the Terminus is marked at December 2017, and it might have come closer still by the time you see this recording. The Earth, humanity—there is no hope. I wonder if you’ll see the White Hole. I wonder if you’re seeing it now. I wonder if you’ve arrived in the Terminus. I wonder if you’re alive. I wonder if I’m too late. Please go home, Shannon. Go home. The United States Navy has enacted Operation Saigon—we’ve evacuated, we will be gone. The entire NSC fleet will be gone, searching for other futures, other worlds. We will not return.

  “But I have a word of warning, about your time, about terra firma. The Vardogger, that thin space you discovered in the woods, is a dangerous place, extremely dangerous. Avoid it, please. We lost so many to that anomaly . . . almost thirty men. We lost Wally Njoku and the SEAL team that went in to retrieve him, we lost physicists who were studying that place. Show this video to me when you get home, and to Wally. Keep us out. They are all lost, no one returns.”

  O’Connor’s face disappeared, replaced by footage of Njoku in the forest, near the Vardogger, the pines and the earth around him bronzed with evening sunlight. Time- and date-stamped: 04/23/97, 6:03 p.m. He wore a white lab coverall and raised a hood over his head as he spoke. “Test, um . . . which number?”

  “This will be number seventeen,” said a voice, the cameraman.

  “Seventeen,” said Njoku, fitting a respirator over his mouth. “Can you hear me? Okay. The Vardogger opens, and . . . I believe it mimics quantum foam at the river boundary. I believe you can walk through it. This morning I threw a rock across the river and saw it land, somewhere deeper . . . We’re recording now. The Vardogger opens on a regular basis, but we haven’t determined its pattern . . . Approximately every twelve hours. If you’re paying attention, you can feel when it’s about to happen, like an electrical current creeping up your arms. I’m going to take a few steps into it, see if I can retrieve the rock I threw.”

  After a span of waiting, as he held one hand on the ashen tree’s smooth bark, I saw Njoku’s face brighten. “Can you feel it?” he shouted to the cameraman, smiling. “Goose bumps,” he said, running his gloves along his sleeves. “Ah, here we are. Are you recording this? I can see the paths—they’re everywhere.”

  I looked closely but found nothing remarkable in the footage. I wondered what Njoku was seeing, what he meant by “paths.” Njoku took tentative steps forward. “Set the timer,” he said, as he pushed thr
ough the boughs of dense pines and disappeared. The footage ran for several minutes, the cameraman eventually following where Njoku had walked, through the trees. He came out into the familiar clearing, near the Red Run, but there was no one.

  “Njoku.” The cameraman’s voice during the few final seconds of footage. “Njoku!”

  The Black Vale AI ticked through its programming while I replayed Njoku’s vanishing, the almost casual manner in which he’d seemed to slip away. When Njoku, O’Connor, and I had felt lost in the Vardogger, the area seemed to repeat, a recurrence of the white tree. And when we saw the Red Run, it seemed like we had flipped sides somehow, that we would need to cross the river to return to where we were. Marian had said something similar, I remembered—that she had crossed the river. I imagined Njoku wading into the water, reaching out to retrieve his stone. Where had he gone? The Black Vale AI had contacted Apollo Soucek’s computer system, had downloaded NETWARCOM clearance codes, it had contacted NCIS to establish custody for the Cormorant. I saw the crescent Earth emerge from the sea of night, stunning and fragile but left for dead here, discarded. Operation Saigon meant that only a few had been chosen for life, no more than a thousand, to grasp at extra years while the billions abandoned would die in the cold light of a second sun. The Terminus was an onrushing death, inevitable and near, but there was no White Hole here, not yet. O’Connor must have realized, even as he’d left his time-capsule warning, that I wouldn’t retreat from this forsaken Earth.

  —

  I took a room at the Virginia Beach Courtyard Marriott, an upper-level suite, the patio view an expanse of ocean, azure water melding into azure sky. Evenings on the patio with cinnamon-plum tea, scribbling notes, squiggly lines connecting one idea to the next, trying to visualize how all this death fit together, and why: Libra—Esperance—Terminus. I sketched what I imagined had happened on Esperance, Nicole’s story of the fauna and crystal-shaped leviathans, of men and women lifted and rent apart.

  Hyldekrugger’s network proved difficult to track. I contacted NCIS, but after nearly twenty years no one remembered my name or recognized my credentials, so I researched what I could on my own. Thousands of articles and longform available referencing domestic terrorism, terrorist activity during the past two decades, but most references to Buckhannon were historical, speculating on connections with the militia movement or Timothy McVeigh, and many articles repeated information written in 1997, in some cases lifting verbatim from earlier pieces.

  I was surprised to discover Phil Nestor still with the FBI here, a decorated career. Maybe I expected another version of the troubled man I once knew, but IFTs varied wildly in their particulars, in their individual fates. Whatever personal tragedies had pushed Nestor to live in Buckhannon hadn’t occurred in this future’s past. We had discovered the chemical-weapons lab, Nestor had been wounded in the ensuing firefight—those events alone might have driven his life in a different trajectory, a different life entirely. His career was easy to follow, his successes. Capsule biographies were readily available in the News-Share, and I found a portrait photograph of him, salt-and-pepper gray, handsome. SAC of the Pittsburgh office following Brock’s death, it looked like, and his investigations into domestic terrorism must have furthered his career, as he was part of the FBI’s Domestic Terrorism Executive Committee. Based near here, in Washington, D.C., I called his office, a calculated risk. He might know of Deep Waters here, just as Brock had known, and I worried that my name might appear on a list somewhere, might trigger my arrest, a butterfly in a bell jar. His secretaries wouldn’t connect me, though. I called his office several times, and they took my name and the room number for the hotel, but soon I wasn’t sure if he would even remember me. My memories of Nestor were still warm, only a few months since we were together in a different future from this—but those weren’t his memories. Here I was only a woman he had worked with once, a lifetime ago.

  —

  I ran in the mornings, an outdoor track at Kellam High School, my leg fitted with a Flex-Foot Cheetah, a curved prosthesis designed for sprints. The opposite of an out-of-body experience, running was body without mind, purely physical—step, breath, reach. Unassailable lightness.

  “Four-hundred-meter dash,” I said, “competition setting,” still self-conscious about speaking to the air, but I was familiar with Ambient Systems from other IFTs, atmospheric nanotech saturation by Phasal Systems, the air itself pervaded with microscopic tech that hung suspended like grains of pollen. Pixels of light and specks of sound, everywhere I looked was lit like an enveloping television. GNC ads and interactive blips for active wear at Dick’s Sporting Goods, every dull spot of the track flashing like Times Square. Images hovered: real-time heart rate, core temperature, calories burned during each of my runs. My personal assistant was a hologram who blurred out of resolution whenever the wind blew, yelling, “Another sprint! Another run!”

  A virtual gun crack, I ran. Gaining speed through the first turn, working to increase my speed, pushing, but the hovering stopwatch blinked green to yellow as I fell from my pace, and as I made my last turn, I slipped on gravel and the sky spun, the track rushing to meet me. Chest-first along the track, my elbow gashed, and my knee, and I bit the inside of my lip. Blood filled my mouth, and I spit, spit a second mouthful, fuck, fuck, fuck. Blood from my elbow to my wrist. My sock soaked with blood from my knee. I forced myself to sit up.

  Health Mode still timed the run, over three minutes now, flashing red. “Stop,” I said, but my personal trainer appeared beside me, “Faster! Faster!” My prosthesis wasn’t damaged, the knee joint looked fine, the Cheetah foot scraped but all right. I shook out my ponytail, tied it up tighter. Fatigue was settling over me. I hadn’t finished my laps, but my muscles felt like they’d lost their elasticity and my sweat cooled.

  “Someone else would quit,” I said, looking at the blood on my shin, the cut on my knee. “Come on, Shannon, get your ass up. Other people would quit. Someone else would quit.”

  A ripple of depression at falling, the failure of having lost my balance, the frustration similar to the pervasive, sponging depression that had blotted that first year after I lost my leg, at having to relearn how to walk, at the foreign movement, at the realization that a prosthetic leg was a bulky weight affixed to my thigh, a deadweight I’d have to lift with my hip and carry with every step. Adjustments, frequent trips to Union Orthotics & Prosthetics in Pittsburgh for resizing, to test different suspension devices, straps, suctions, choosing feet from a catalog like shopping for shoes. I’d met amputees who still ran, iron-willed, who refused to abdicate what amputation threatened to take from them.

  I stood up. I crossed the field, back to my starting line.

  “Reset the stopwatch,” I said.

  00:00.

  A throbbing knee and fresh blood trickling over my shin.

  “Someone else would quit,” I said.

  I ran.

  —

  I showered back at the hotel following the morning’s workout, spreading Neosporin Skin to cover the gash on my knee when I heard the persistent cooing of a mourning dove. I wondered if a bird might have flown in from the patio, through the suite’s open French doors. A dove trapped in my hotel room, cooing, until I realized the cooing was the repeating tone of a voice mail in my Ambience.

  “Courtney Gimm,” I said, engaging the voice mail with my assumed name.

  His voice filled the air like he was there in the room with me.

  “Special Agent Phil Nestor, FBI. It’s great to hear your voice, Shannon. I’m sorry it took so long to get back to you, but I was in Alabama, at a training seminar. I’d love to see you, catch up. And I can bring you up to speed with some of our investigations. Seven o’clock in the lobby of your hotel? Give a call if that won’t work. Otherwise I’ll see you tonight.”

  —

  Many special agents who investigated crimes in multiple IFTs swore by a technique called the Memory Palace. An individual imagines a palace and mentally places nam
es, faces, or events in its various chambers, the idea being that it’s possible to recall things forgotten or obscured if they’re organized spatially. Special agents used this technique to separate their impressions of differing futures, one IFT from another—some spent their entire three months in quantum foam meditating on these palaces, imagining new wings for each future they’d observe. I never found this method useful, or maybe I lacked the discipline to make it useful, but waiting for Nestor in the lobby of the Courtyard Marriott, nervous as a virgin on prom night, I regretted not having developed some sort of technique to help tease out my knots of emotion about him. He had lived in the Buckhannon death house, selling a killer’s stash of antique weapons, or he lived here, a decorated agent of the FBI—but I saw these discrepancies like an image refracted through different lenses, not as something essential about him. I had known Nestor; I could close my eyes and remember the feel of his body next to mine, the purr of his breathing as he slept, his habits and quirks of thought. That was Nestor to me, his core.

  “Shannon?”

  He wore faded jeans, a blazer. He smiled, shook my hand. “My God, it is you. You look . . . amazing,” he said, his eyes still an undimmed blue. “I don’t think you’ve aged a day. It’s been about twenty years?”

  “Far too long,” I said. He was weathered, but like soft leather—filled out through his chest, his shoulders. Weight rooms, I figured. “You look good, too,” remembering him in another time than this, how natural it would feel to lean into him, how familiar if he held me, but here we only shared crime scenes, decades ago. “I think we last saw each other maybe at Buckhannon.”

  “Right before Brock passed,” he said. “I was worried about you, the way you disappeared. I asked after you, for a long while, but no one would tell me anything.”