by Sam Hughes
Tanako looks up. "...What? No. You never told me that."
"He's called the Range Safety Officer. The Shuttle launches east, across the Atlantic Ocean. If it stays on course, it never crosses land until the Portuguese coast, by which time it's at orbital velocity. But there are two lines," - she points - "one following Atlantic coast of the US and one through the Caribbean, east of Cuba. The areas behind these lines are inhabited. So, for those people's safety, there are explosive charges on the solid rocket boosters and on the external tank. And there's a man whose job is to push the button that sets them off."
"You mean, if the Shuttle goes off course?" Tanako asks. He blinks. "Doesn't that kill the astronauts?"
"Of course it kills the astronauts. How could it not?"
Tanako stares at her for a while, his head on one side.
"On STS-77 his name was Norman Lederer," Laura adds. "He didn't need to push the button, though. It blew up all by itself."
"...Why are we on this?"
"I don't know," says Laura. "I think it's something to do with destroying big pieces of hardware."
"Yes." This snaps Tanako back into the moment. He claps. "You're right. Now. Questions continue. Where are we?"
"We're inside the listening post. It's real after all."
"Indeed. And where is the listening post?"
"Inside T-world."
"And what is T-world?"
"Memory. The listening post's own internal data bank."
"And how is that possible?"
Laura says, "Because it's a system. It's like any computer system. It's magical software. This is the place in memory where it stores its own code. We're walking around in it now."
"Good!"
The room is as silent as a crypt, and empty apart from the two of them and the 1:1 scale model of the complete history of the whole Earth. "How long do we have until they catch up with us again?" Laura asks.
With practiced movements, Tanako rolls the world map east to the United Kingdom, and then forwards in time to the present day. He narrows the focus to a flare in the remote hills of darkest Gloucestershire. "Do you remember this?"
"No."
"It's the facility where we're both asleep right now, in reality. These pinpricks are mages. These two are you and me. Look closely, get the out of body experience. You see? You understand?"
Laura squints. She sees hospital beds and drips. The familiar figures of herself and Nick Laughon, wrapped in white blankets and Dehlavi lightning at the core of a D, with watchful medical mages at the relevant nodes. "I don't remember," she says. "What are we doing there? Who's helping us with the experiment?"
"You'll remember when we wake up again," says Tanako. "All I need to tell you, for right now, is that this is the live copy. Call it 'production'. This is our rip-cord. If something goes awry like it did for me the first time, then exfiltration is simple: cast your mind back to this image, and to this moment in the real world. Then step into the illusion and wake up, snap."
"That'll work?" Laura asks. "How do you know that'll work?"
"I've done it before," says Tanako, adjusting the query parameters for the 4D world map a second time.
"What? How many times? When?"
"You thought my research ended just because I was killed?"
Laura stares at Tanako, or rather, at his faceless grey helmet. She's starting to put the information together, when something goes krung in her head. It feels like an anvil has fallen directly onto her deductive reasoning. She winces. The sensory overload symptoms are starting to come back: ringing noise, strobing light.
"You okay?" Tanako asks, taking one arm.
"Ow," Laura explains.
"The broad term for these things is 'intrusion countermeasures'," Tanako tells her. "We can stay ahead of them, up to a point. This is the last part of the journey, okay? This is the part where you need to pay attention. Look at the map."
Atlantic coast again. "New York City," Laura says.
"The year is 1969. And here we go."
*
Laura's thoughts flip texture yet again. She doesn't stumble this time, despite the new heels.
1969's recording is a vast skyscraper penthouse. It is ultra-modern and completely without dust or imperfection; habitable concept art in white, black and gold. Vatican City expensive, Mount Olympus expensive. Someone has spent a billion dollars on the most total imaginable luxury, then another half-billion just to have the gaudiness trimmed back to something tasteful.
It feels weirdly real. It's a whole different mental impression from T-world. No abstraction, no metaphor. It's a physical place that she's walking through.
Again, Kazuya Tanako catches up with her. This time he's wearing a tuxedo.
"You look different," Laura says. Nick Laughon's body has indeed been edited slightly. He's bulkier, and broader across the shoulders. His features have become artfully handsomer. His ears have shrunk. His hair is carved with product, in a way which the real Nick would never find time for. Bow tie, silver cufflinks. He still looks underdressed. Laura feels they should be in royal robes, or perhaps haloed entirely in light.
"That's the deal," says Tanako. "These guys look ideal at all times. They always look perfect. They never age, they never get ill. You should check yourself out, by the way," he adds, pointing out a mirror.
"Who are they?"
"These guys are the guys who built the system. They built the listening post, and then when it turned out that sleeping mages were able to wander right into their secure database they flooded it with monsters to scare people away. They monitor all magic usage, everywhere. And they meter it out."
Laura wishes she hadn't looked. She is unobtainable. The dress alone is unobtainable. If she spent two hours on her hair every morning and replaced every dessert with a marathon run, she could look half that good.
"Follow me," Tanako says.
"Wait. What was that last thing you said?"
Tanako opens the double doors. Noise floods out.
Laura's impression is that the next room could have been the size of a football pitch, and has only chosen to be a little smaller as a concession to practicality. Two entire walls and the ceiling are solid glass. The panorama behind the glass is unmistakeably the city of New York. They must be on the hundredth floor. About a hundred men and about twenty women are inside, most of them having to shout over one another. All of them are perfect twenty-somethings. Perfect suits, perfect teeth. Wine is flowing. There is string music of no clear origin. The atmosphere is celebratory and infectious.
"We'll get away without being noticed for a little while," Tanako murmurs. "We slipped out for a private conversation, you get me? Stay in character."
"You've dived into this memory before?"
"A couple of times."
Tanako takes two glasses of cava and hands one to Laura: camouflage. She drinks. Tanako steers her gently towards the window, avoiding eye contact with the party.
"Where are we?" he asks for the final time.
"New York city," Laura says.
"No. Look."
The window comes right down and meets the carpet. Of course, nobody can see the body of the building they're in, not without leaning out, but it doesn't matter. There can be no building. The penthouse is half a block out into the East River. They are dozens of storeys up in thin air.
Laura fights the shock. It's too obvious a reaction. She tries to hypothesise how the structure could ever exist, but she, like the building itself, has nowhere to start from.
"This place is real, by the way," says Tanako. "In the present day as well as here in 1969. It's completely invisible in every conventional spectrum I could try. But I used a deep scanning oracle, on a collection of chi wavelengths they obviously thought nobody could ever find. I have photographs. It looks like a UFO."
"When were you in New York? Who are these people?"
"Listen to the speech," Tanako says.
Laura's next word is cut off by the tinging of a glass.
She follows Tanako's gaze.
The man calling the party's attention looks— well, immaculate, like everybody there. But Laura thinks he might be a shade older. Perhaps a little middle age, a little wrinkle and shadow. Perhaps indicating seniority.
His name is King.
"I don't want to waste too much time," he says. "So I'll use as few words as I can.
"Thank God that we got there first.
"Magic is our victory. We have proved it to be perfect. It'll stand forever. I don't want to call our accomplishment - your accomplishment - a miracle, because that would deny you the credit that you deserve. It was work. Nothing but work.
"The world needed to be protected from itself. The problem, always, is trust. If and only if you're in this room, you deserve to be trusted with that power. As for the world, they'll manage just fine with what we give them. And who knows what they'll build on top of it? I, for one, can't wait to see.
"So thank God. And thank you all. And: to the beginning."
Laura is about to drink, but Tanako nudges her again. "Watch this," he hisses.
A gap clears down the centre of the room, and a dining table appears. It snaps into existence, building itself in a tenth of a second. It is laid with fine china, silver cutlery, limitless wine and a hundred and twenty unique dishes of every conceivable aroma.
It is as if the table was being held in some higher reality, separated from this one by a thin silk cloth, and then the cloth was ripped out from under it.
Click goes the final tumbler in Laura's head.
King takes his seat at the head of the table, and the others follow suit, picking up their conversations again, not perturbed in the slightest at the flatly impossible thing that has just happened. Laura and Tanako hang back. "They can create and destroy matter," Tanako says. "Do you get it? It was so easy, you can't even be sure which one of them did it. Look at their wrists, that's where their immortality comes from. Listen to what they're saying, really listen."
"Something wrong, you two?" asks a diner, looking around at them.
Tanako looks meaningfully at Laura. Laura heard the question in Urdu. She understood it in English. Everybody in the room is speaking a different language. Even Tanako has lapsed back into his native Japanese. She didn't realise.
"Is this the dream?" she asks.
"No. All of this happened. It's the recording," Tanako says. "I have all the hard proof you could ask for, once you wake up. I can tell you who all of these people are."
Several heads have now turned in their direction. A man on the far side of the table stands up. He matches Tanako's description of Alexander Watson.
"Excuse us," Tanako announces, ushering Laura back outside.
*
Too much information. Laura paces away across the enormous lounge, trying to unthread the words of the speech and the evidence of her eyes.
"Conclusions?" Tanako asks.
"It's 1969," Laura says. "Everybody knows that that year number has to be wrong. There is zero evidence, zero, that anybody had magic before Suravaram Vidyasagar discovered it in '72. That's not to say that nobody found it before he did, just that there's no proof. If anybody did get there first, either they didn't write it down, or couldn't duplicate it, or... kept it a secret. But these people— my God, based on what I just saw, and based on where we're standing right now - which is in thin air - they must have got there decades before anybody else. If not centuries."
Tanako shakes his head. "No. That was my first guess, but no."
"I just saw a council of wizards having dinner in the sky. I just saw how magic is supposed to work. How it works in lucid dreams. You just think of something and it happens. You don't even need to wave your hand. They must have limitless power. Absolutely limitless. They're the ones who built the recursion artifact?" She lowers her voice and mutters to herself. "'Magic is our victory.' No magic words. No gestures. No equipment."
"Call it deep magic. Call it wizardry, or māyā." Tanako's face is set. He stares at her across the room, willing her to come to his conclusion.
Laura says, "How many people could they feed? If they wanted to?"
"All of them."
"...Magic is the leak," Laura guesses. "The only part they couldn't hush up."
"Even that would be better than the truth," Tanako says.
Exa Watson kicks the double doors open, so hard that one of the doors breaks from its hinges and cartwheels into the room, leaving a trail of demolished furniture and decor.
Tanako shouts at Laura, "Eject!"
One pace over the threshold, Exa pulls a perfectly ordinary pistol out of his jacket and shoots Tanako in the heart. Tanako keels backwards, vanishing before he hits the ground. Exa turns the gun on Laura and fires again.
*
And where now?
Reality.
Reality is a cramped metal stairwell, entirely devoid of light, running up and down for kilometres. It is the darkest and least interesting location. Laura arrives standing normally, but one of her feet is on a stair and the other is in thin air, so she falls into a hand rail.
She's back in the grey ceramic armour, all except for the helmet. It weighs much more here. The darkness is thick as pitch. She follows the hand rail and descends the stairs gingerly, testing each step. Her boots clang. She waits for Kazuya to find her, as he did before.
"Kazuya? ...Nick?"
Her voice echoes, and doesn't seem to stop echoing.
After eight steps she reaches a landing. In total darkness, she explores carefully with her hands. She discovers cold concrete wall, more hand rails, and a cooling human body, wrapped in a wet dinner jacket. She immediately drops to her knees.
"Dulaku surutai jiha, seven hundred en em."
In the red light of her right hand it is plain to see that Nick Laughon is dead.
She hears a soft clacking coming from above her. Smart, hard-soled dress shoes on metal stairs.
Alexander Watson appears at the next landing, moving swiftly, leading with his gun. He sees she's weaponless, and visibly drops out of firefight mode, keeping the gun trained precisely on her right eye as he descends a few more steps.
"I don't understand," Laura says to him. "Why does this part have to be real? Nothing else is real. Magic isn't real."
Exa fires. She falls.
Protagonism
"I'm trying to find Laura Ferno. You're her emergency contact," is what the fellow on the phone leads with, Hollywood-style, no greeting.
"Is it an emergency?" Natalie Ferno asks, mildly refreshed to be getting to the point of the conversation so quickly. She keeps a thick pad of A4 next to the phone. It is measurably thicker with the weight of doodles. People, in Nat's experience, can lock themselves into a kind of verbal holding pattern, constantly emitting syllables while never advancing the conversation.
"It's two halves of an emergency," says the man.
"Who is this?"
"Anil Devi, I worked with your sister at Hatt Group."
"You fired her," Nat observes.
Anil Devi, personally, worked with Laura Ferno only for a few weeks altogether while she was still in gainful employment. The decision to fire her was made completely in his absence, for reasons completely unrelated to him. "No," he explains. On the other hand, Devi is contacting Natalie Ferno as a formal representative of Hatt Group with a view to reinstating Laura in some - any - professional capacity as soon as possible, which means he is Hatt Group's front end from Nat's perspective. So, "Yes," he adds. "It doesn't matter. We need her to come back."
"Why?"
"That's confidential."
"Is it," Nat asks again, "an emergency?"
"...I need to find her very urgently."
So, no. Nat hangs up.
*
Then she thinks again.
She hasn't heard from Laura in weeks. But Laura's like that. She is a low-maintenance relative.
Nat also hasn't heard from Nick in that amount of time. That's much less usual.
/>
If Hatt Group have been reduced to pursuing emergency contacts, then Laura's not responding to their phone calls or emails.
Laura loved that job. She saw a serious chance of becoming an astronaut in that job. Losing the chance devastated her. Laura would never pass up another chance at that chance. She would never ignore them if they reached out.
Nat calls Laura's mobile. The call goes straight to voicemail, as if the phone itself has ceased to exist.
She calls Laura and Nick's land line. Answering machine.
She calls Nick's mobile. Voicemail.
Neither are on IM. She emails them both, then drums her fingers for a while, not really expecting any response.
She calls Nick's school. Nick is AWOL, and has lost his job.
She calls Nick's friends, although she doesn't know many of their numbers. The story is consistent: Nick and Laura are travelling around the world. They're probably in Japan right now.
No contact information. No forwarding numbers. Not even a postcard.
It's an interesting combination of stories. Laura's the kind of person who could go off-grid for a month before anybody noticed. Nick Laughon isn't, but he's the primordial avatar of itchy feet, so if he needed to disappear, he could buy about the same amount of time with a quick one-liner like "I'm going around the world"...
Two half-emergencies. One: Hatt Group desperately, desperately need Laura Ferno back. Two: Laura and her boyfriend are missing. Missing, presumed...
At this point the possibilities become a forest.
No presumption. Nat needs more data.
*
She arrives at Laura's house not long before dusk. It's the greyish, coldish part of the British day where you squint a little and go to remove sunglasses that you aren't wearing.
There is a man at Laura's door. Facing the door, as if having just knocked. Natalie strides up behind him. "You must be Anil Devi," she announces, surprising him.
He turns. Spiky black hair, the kind of face which seems to be perpetually grinning regardless of mood. "Laura!"