by Alton Gansky
“It’s not real water, remember?”
“That’s what concerns me. You inhale that stuff, you die just as surely as if you had drowned.”
“I won’t inhale it.”
“Look out,” Grant said. “He’s on the move.”
Henry snapped his head around. The McDermott look-alike was moving toward them. They moved back. Henry, still clutching the door, pressed his back to the wall. The doppelgänger walked through the door and onto the water. He took several strides, following the path of the real McDermott’s body. He stopped ten paces later and turned toward the crowded doorway.
“Do not fit. Do not belong.”
“I think he wants us to follow him,” Henry said.
“On the water?” Grant exclaimed. “Not likely.”
The entity continued to stare at them, and then he looked down. Water exploded upward, then fell back as sand. The ocean was gone, replaced by a sea of sand. Not desert sand this time, just a flat field devoid of Joshua trees or any other plant life. The dome overhead no longer held stars, just a high, arched surface of brown.
“I think he’s showing us the door,” Sanders said. “We’re being booted out.”
Henry knew Sanders was right. He stepped through the doorway and onto the sand. The Victorian facade was gone. All that remained was a large square box on the outside and curved walls on the inside. The others followed. Soon they marched forward just a few paces behind the body of McDermott as it scooted along the sand as if carried by a million invisible ants.
The McDermott twin dissolved into the sand base, only to appear a hundred yards down the path, guiding them. Each time they reached him, he would again melt into the ground and appear another hundred yards ahead.
No one spoke. No one argued. Ten minutes later, Nash and Sanders jogged ahead to walk alongside McDermott’s body. They would not leave their fallen comrade.
Time seemed irrelevant. One moment Henry felt as if he had been walking for hours, the next as if he had just started. He had no idea how much time had passed when they crossed the threshold at the point where their journey began. They had to help lift McDermott’s body from the chamber floor into the tunnel. Once everyone was in, Henry tried something. He tried to push his hand through the image of the stone wall, what someone had called a hologram. It was solid.
It was just one other thing they had been wrong about.
Chapter28
Perry walked around the room, considering all that Zeisler had told them. The story was beyond credible. Had he not seen the image of a man who could appear and disappear, he would have dismissed the story as the result of too much imagination or a touch of mental illness.
“All of that happened in this room?” Gleason asked.
“Much of it,” Zeisler replied.
“If everything you said is true,” Jack said, “then it’s a wonder you were ever able to go to sleep again.” Jack moved toward the four-foot-high ring.
“I still don’t sleep well,” Zeisler said.
Perry saw in the pit the sand that Zeisler had described, although it appeared whiter and more mottled than he imagined. “You’ve been thinking about this for over thirty years. Have you come to any conclusions?”
“Yes, but I’d rather hear your ideas.”
Perry turned to Gleason and saw in the head techie’s eyes what he had expected. “I’ve got a feeling that this is more up your alley, Gleason. What do you think?”
“My first thought is moletronics and nanotechnology but at a grander scale than anything we can do.”
“Mole what?” Janet asked.
“Moletronics,” Gleason replied. “It’s a tech word. It comes from molecular electronics and deals with nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is the science of working with materials at very small scales.”
“How small?” Carl asked.
“At the molecular level; even at the atomic level,” Gleason answered. “A few years back—I think it was 1999—the computer giant Hewlett-Packard and the University of California at Los Angeles created the smallest computer circuits ever made. They were on a silicon wafer just one molecule thick. It was an enormous breakthrough in computer science. Some, like the UCLA chemist James Heath, think that the day will come when industry will be able to put the equivalent of one hundred computer workstations on something as small as a grain of rice.
“Elements of such devices are so small,” Gleason continued, “they have to be measured in nanometers.” He must have seen the same look of confusion on Janet’s and Carl’s faces as Perry did because he explained, “A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter. A strand of your hair is about ten thousand nanometers.”
“Oh,” Janet said. “What’s that got to do with what we’ve seen and what Zeisler has told us?”
“Gleason is suggesting,” Perry explained, “that the powder that Dr. Zeisler said covered the exterior of the house and almost everything else wasn’t dust. It was a compilation of billions of tiny computers and machines. If each one had the power of one hundred computers, imagine what a million of them could do.”
“They could change reality,” Zeisler said. “Of course, thirty years ago we couldn’t know that. Personal computers were just getting underway. I wish I had known then what I know now. I wouldn’t be living in a little house in Carson City.”
“Moletronics and nanotechnology is only a partial answer,” Gleason said. “It’s one thing to make microscopic machines and circuits; it’s quite another to get them all to function in unison and to a single purpose.”
Gleason began pacing. Perry had seen him do this before. Even at executive meetings, Perry had seen him leave the conference table to stroll around the room, thinking.
“There’s been talk of self-building nanobots that can replicate by constructing their clones. All the big universities and tech companies are investigating possibilities. Imagine nano-tubules capable of carrying medication directly to the site of infection or a cancerous tumor. Imagine glass not made with silicate but with aluminum. Imagine aircraft with fuselages that change according to speed and atmospheric conditions. Imagine walls that change color without paint, or artwork that refigures itself to meet the desire of its owner. Imagine—”
“So these things Zeisler saw and what we’ve seen are the result of tiny machines?” Carl asked.
“Maybe. We can’t know until we put them under an electron microscope,” Gleason said. “Machine may not be the right word. Their ability to bind together to form shapes, create illusions, change colors, move, discriminate, all imply that they possess some level of mechanical or chemical intelligence—or are controlled by a greater intelligence. Of course, we’re dealing with billions, maybe multiple trillions, in this place.”
“So the moon, the stars, the desert, even the ocean Zeisler saw are all creations of this sand?” Jack asked. “The sand we’ve been walking on?”
“Don’t think of it as sand, Jack,” Gleason said. “That’s too large by a factor of . . . I don’t know . . . maybe thousands. Think of the finest powder imaginable; a powder so fine that you need the world’s most powerful microscope to see it. I think the sand is its natural state of rest. Maybe they repair each other by gathering in groups of a few thousand or millions. These little clumps would appear to us as sand.”
“So everything around us is made of these things?” Janet said.
“Probably.” Gleason paced off a few more steps. “Don’t take all of this as fact. I have more questions than answers.”
“Welcome to my world,” Zeisler said. “I’ve been living with those questions for three decades. So has Perry’s father.”
“What I want to know,” Jack asked, “is why everything is so sedate. Zeisler told tales of deserts, jungles, and oceans. All I’ve seen is sand and a half-finished Victorian façade.”
“I can’t answer that,” Gleason said.
“I can,” Zeisler said with confidence. “It’s the reason we’re here.”
“You had better explain th
at,” Perry said.
“You’re here because your father is dying, and you hope to find a way to save his life. Your dad gave those names and that combination to his safe because he knew what was happening. He’s probably the only other one who does.” Zeisler looked around the room, then said, “He’s dying, because this place is dying.”
Jack’s jaw dropped. “Come again?”
“One thing Gleason hasn’t hit on yet—although he would, given enough time—is that this place is alive. Mishmar is intelligent.”
The words hit Perry hard. He wasn’t sure he understood, but somehow it seemed right. “Explain yourself, Dr. Zeisler.”
“It took a long time to put it together. We arrived here and saw things. We saw a desert, we saw a house, and we saw it all change. We realized that this place was somehow tied to our thoughts. The desert we assumed came about because your father had just read one of your school reports. Sanders and Nash saw landscapes from their past.”
“And we saw Barrett because he’s the one I came up here looking for?” Carl suggested.
“Very likely.” Zeisler nodded. “You see stuff like that, and the first thing you think is that you’re part of some kind of mass delusion. We think in terms of things: this house, that ring, the ground beneath our feet—things. It occurred to me that this place is more than just a place. It is alive. When the McDermott entity came to run us off, it referred to this place as Mishmar. Of course, I thought it was a place-name, you know, like New York or Seattle. I imagine that is a large part of its meaning.”
“But you think it’s more?” Perry prompted.
Zeisler nodded. “I do now. Mishmar is alive, and now it’s dying. When the pseudo Barrett met us at the entrance, what were his first words?”
“Help me,” Jack said. “I thought it was Barrett who needed help.”
“Me, too,” Carl said. “If he’s really down here, he would have suffered almost a week without food and water.”
“I don’t think he’s alive,” Zeisler observed. “I think he’s an unfortunate bystander.”
“I’m not giving up yet,” Carl said.
“What do you mean, ‘alive’?” Janet asked. “How can a big cave be alive?”
“Maybe alive is the wrong word,” Zeisler replied. “I mean this place is sentient. It thinks, it reasons, it makes choices.”
“Like a huge computer?” Carl said.
“No, Deputy, not like a huge computer,” Zeisler answered. “A computer processes information. It can be made to make choices if programmed with certain criteria. It can analyze situations and make choices based on best-case scenarios, but that isn’t sentience.”
“I don’t follow.”
“Let me try,” Gleason said. “Computers are not self-aware. You can program a computer to play chess and play it well enough to beat a grand master like Garry Kasparov. In 1997, and in a later rematch, IBM put up a computer called Deep Blue that could calculate one hundred million chess positions in seconds. Later improvements to the computer doubled that. For the first time a machine beat a grand master. While a computer can calculate all the possible positions and choose the best next move, it can’t sit opposite its human opponent and say, ‘I’m going to throw him a curve and make an unexpected move.’ In other words, true artificial intelligence is still in the future. At least, I thought it was.”
Perry studied Zeisler. No wonder he didn’t want to talk about his experiences. Who would believe him? “You think this place is dying?”
“I do. The color of the sand is different and inconsistent. I assume that’s because some of the—for lack of a better term—colony have died. The house facade is incomplete because the system is too weak to complete its construction. The light in the corridor is dim for the same reason.”
“What does all this have to do with Perry’s father?” Jack asked. It was the same question Perry was about to pose.
Zeisler explained. “You remember that I told you how the light column in the ring expanded until it filled the room and how we all did our best to duck and cover. I also told you that we were covered in dust?”
“Yes,” Perry said.
“We all must have inhaled some of it. The little buggers have been living inside us ever since.” He paused and focused on the floor. A minute later, he raised his head. “Here’s my theory: When this place—Mishmar—reached a critical stage, it called for help. It did so by expelling some of its material into the air. My guess is that it did so by sending some of the stuff we’ve been calling ‘sand’ up the flue in the ceiling that is situated over the ring. Perhaps your missing Mr. Barrett had the misfortune to be on the lake at the time. There’s no way to know what happened to him.”
“Are you saying that it was asking for help from the people who had been here thirty years before?” Perry asked. “How is that possible?”
“How is any of this possible? Think, man. This isn’t a normal situation. I think that it called for us because we were the only humans that it had truly interacted with. Remember, we were covered in that dust, but then that dust—or at least some of it—pulled from our bodies and formed ghostly images of ourselves before going back to the sand. I believe that it was gathering information. This thing has been here a very long time. Maybe thousands of years; maybe tens of thousands. I have no way of knowing. Perhaps it thinks humans live as long as it does.”
“But it killed those it was calling,” Gleason said.
Zeisler nodded. “I doubt it was intentional. Why wait thirty-plus years to murder us? No, I’m certain that it was reaching out to seek our help.”
“And that call for help killed Monte Grant, Cynthia Wagner, and put my father on death’s doorstep.”
“Yes. Again, I’m guessing, but the most likely scenario is this: Mishmar sends intelligent particles into the air to cry for help. Somehow, maybe by an electromagnetic burst or some other means, the signal touches the things living inside us. They reactivate and multiply.”
“But that would be the same as murder,” Janet said.
“No, it wouldn’t,” Zeisler fired back. “Remember, this place is losing control. If it is having trouble controlling what is close, imagine the difficulty in controlling something as far away as San Diego and Seattle. The material in Cynthia, Monte, and your dad multiplied until their host died or was incapacitated.”
“What about Nash and Sanders?” Jack asked. “You haven’t talked about them.”
“Sanders died in an auto accident three years after the mission. Nash died on some secret overseas mission. I know that because for the first few years afterward, we all used to meet for a short reunion. That died soon enough. We all became too busy. It’s a shame.”
Perry stepped to the ring and looked at the sand again. He tried to imagine what it must have been like for his father to stand in this place and watch the impossible unfold before his eyes . . . .
My father. Perry wondered if he was still alive.
“Wait a sec,” Carl said. “If this stuff got into you guys thirty years ago, what’s to keep it from getting into us now? Am I breathing these biotronic things right now?”
“Maybe,” Zeisler said, “But I think we inhaled them when we were covered in the dust.”
“Somehow that doesn’t comfort me,” the deputy snapped.
“You’re the one who insisted on coming,” Zeisler shot back.
“You could have given us a heads-up,” Janet said.
Zeisler didn’t mince words. “If you’re frightened, then leave.”
“Knock it off!” Perry shouted. His voice rebounded off the round walls. “Arguing changes nothing.” He stared at the white brown sand. A dark spot was in the center. That’s where Perry felt he was—in the dark spot of his life. He had traveled hundreds of miles in a desperate attempt to save his father, and all he had to show for it was conjecture.
“Why not you, Dr. Zeisler?” Perry asked. “Why did the others die, and you’re in good health?”
“I was thinking
about that on the drive down. I think I may have come up with something, but first—”
“I would love to hear it sometime,” a voice said.
Perry spun at the sound of the new voice. Standing in the doorway were three men. He knew them. He also knew the guns they held.
“Sorry to crash the party, folks,” Finn MacCumhail said. He wore a slight smile, but his eyes were cold. “I thought I sent you folks home.”
“We heard this place had a great restaurant,” Jack said. He stepped forward. “Ease up, big man. A bullet will stop a man your size as fast as it will short stuff over there.” He nodded at Carl.
Janet reached for her gun. The man who had identified himself as Colonel Lloyd fired a single round. It struck her in the chest. She backpedaled and fell.
Perry was on the move, but not toward Finn and his men. He charged Carl, who was reaching for his 9 mm. Perry hit him high, wrapping his arms around the deputy’s arms and torso-driving him to the ground. He heard another shot but felt no pain. It had missed.
“What are you doing?” Carl shouted.
“Saving your life. Stay put.” Perry crawled on hands and knees to Janet. She lay unmoving, eyes closed. He saw on her uniform shirt a small hole, just over her right breast. For a moment, Perry’s heart stopped beating.
Chapter29
Perry took Janet’s uniform blouse in his hands and pulled just as Carl arrived. Buttons flew into the air.
“Janet. Janet!” Carl whispered. “Stay with me, baby. Stay with me.”
Perry opened the uniform top and saw what he was hoping to see—a black bulletproof vest. He could see where the round had hit her. By his knee, resting on the floor, was the smashed remains of the bullet. Placing two fingers to Janet’s throat, he felt for a pulse and found it. Relieved, he let out a sigh.
“She hates wearing these things,” Carl said. “I’m glad they’re mandatory.” He started to say something else when someone forced him to the ground. A second later, Perry was facedown. Hands patted his body. He saw Lloyd remove Carl’s gun. The other man took Janet’s weapon. The men retreated to the door.