by John Scalzi
“You know Dave Boehm?” Alex said.
“He dated my niece about fifteen years back, back when the President was still a penny-ante Congressman,” White said, folding up his phone. “He was his Chief of Staff then, too. Got him elected then, got him elected now, which is probably unforgivable in the larger scheme of things. But he treated Patty well. Better than she treated him, anyway. I figure for that alone I owe him a favor. Now, we’ve got forty-five minutes. Let’s hit the Five Guys on H. I’m starving.”
“First off, that whole Roswell thing is bullshit,” General White said in the secure Executive Office Building meeting room, pointing with a Five Guys fry for emphasis.
“Told you,” Jefferson said to Alex, under his breath.
“What isn’t bullshit is the 1908 Tunguska Event,” White said.
“That thing in Russia,” Boehm said. The cheeseburger White had brought him from Five Guys lay in front of him on the table, untouched. Brad Stein, sitting next to him, was busy consuming his.
“Right,” White said.
“I thought that was an asteroid impact,” Boehm said.
“It was,” White said. “Or a comet impact, one of the two, take your pick. But that chunk of ice and rock didn’t just happen to fall out of the sky. We think it was aimed there to wipe something out.”
“What, aliens?” Boehm said.
“Aliens,” White agreed. “In 1927 a scientist named Leonid Kulik led an expedition to the area. Officially he didn’t find anything other than toppled over trees. Unofficially—secretly—what he found was evidence that someone or something was in the area, using technology well in advance of ours. After he returned to Leningrad he filed a report and then Stalin had his people crawling all over the place, digging everything out. When Kulik went back in ’39, it was all packed up and gone.”
“Why didn’t Stalin use it, then?” Stein asked. “Alien technology would have saved him a lot of trouble during the Great Patriotic War.”
“The comet turned everything that was mechanical into slag,” White said. “You could tell the stuff did something, but you couldn’t tell what that thing was. The real prize were the data storage units—hard drives, if you will. Stalin’s problem was that he and his scientists had no idea what they were.”
“How could they not know?” Boehm asked.
“How would they know?” White said. “Dave, if you gave a caveman a data disc, he wouldn’t know it had data on it. All he’d know was it was round and shiny. Stalin’s boys had the same problem; the data storage units looked like metal cubes to them. They destroyed a couple breaking them open, found nothing useful and then stored the rest.”
“So the Soviets had them, but now we do,” Boehm said.
“Yup. We bought them from Russia in the early ’90s,” White said. “Back when we were paying them to dismantle their nukes. They were hard up for cash and offered us a bunch of their crackpot science projects for dirt cheap. Most of it was the sort of pseudo-scientific crap that makes Lysenko look like a Nobel Prize winner, but this one panned out. We were finally able to get our way into the data drives about fifteen years ago and started working on some of the stuff we found there.”
“Like teleportation,” Stein said. He took Boehm’s abandoned burger and unwrapped it.
“It’s not exactly teleportation,” White said. “It’s more like creating static holes in timespace that you can pull or push things through.”
“Whatever,” Stein said. “The point is it’s something you could use to pluck someone’s brain out of their head, and still keep it connected somehow.”
“Theoretically,” White said.
Stein motioned to toward the X-Ray and MRI of the President’s head. “More than theoretically, I’d say,” he said, around his burger.
“I say theoretically because there are problems with the technology as we understand it,” White said.
“Like what?” Boehm asked.
“Like matter spontaneously reorganizing when it goes through the holes,” White said. “It’s bad enough with things like metal and plastics, but when we push something live through one of these holes they come out as disorganized chunks of meat.”
“Like in The Fly,” Alex said. “The scientist teleported a baboon and it wound up inside-out.”
Stein smiled at this. “Someone’s been in touch with his geek side today,” he said.
“It’s why we haven’t made this technology known,” White said. “It’s not ready or safe.”
“But that’s not happening with the President,” Boehm said. “He’s still walking and talking, so his brain hasn’t been turned to mush.”
There was a small pause which Alex recognized as General White making sure what came out of his mouth next was diplomatic. “It is still functioning as well as it ever did, as you say,” he said. “And this is where I’m no longer any help to you. One, because I know the whereabouts of every scientist the Air Force has working on teleportation and none of them have gone rogue. Two, because whoever is doing this knows more about it than we do.”
“Maybe one of the Russians,” Alex said.
White shook his head. “It’s like I told you,” he said. “The Russians hadn’t the slightest idea what they had. It took us years to figure it out ourselves. The only people who’ve worked on this stuff are Americans, and we know about every one of them.”
“Then one of your scientists has sprung a leak, General,” Boehm said.
“Dave, with all due respect, you have no idea what you’re talking about,” White said. “Even if one of them wanted to leak, we’ve got them under such tight surveillance that they don’t take a dump without us knowing what they had to eat twelve hours before.”
“You can’t keep track of them every minute of the day,” Boehm said.
“Sure I can,” White said. “Implanted GPS tags never sleep. Trust me, Dave. If I’m not watching one of my people, it’s because I know he’s already dead.”
“Would you give us a list of your scientists?” Boehm said.
“I’d rather not,” White said.
“I’m Chief of Staff for the President of the United States, General,” Boehm said. “I’ve got the security clearance.”
“If you get the President to ask for a list, I’ll give it to him,” White said. “You’ve told him about his situation yet?”
“We’re hoping not to trouble him with it,” Boehm said.
“I’ll bet,” White said, smirking.
“How about a list of your dead scientists?” Alex said.
White turned his attention to Alex, brows arched. “What good is that going to do you?”
“You just said they’re the only ones you’re not watching,” Alex said.
“We’ve been talking aliens, not zombies, son,” White said.
“It can’t hurt,” Alex said. “Even if one of them ever brought some work home on a flash drive, it might have been enough to slip out. We should check it out just to make sure we’re completely zipped up.”
“Fine. The dead scientists I’m willing to part with,” White said, and motioned to Jefferson. “I’ll have the Major here bring it over in the next couple of hours. As for the live scientists, I’ll have my own people retrace their steps. If any of them have leaked, you’ll know, about a minute before I have them shoved through one of our transporter holes and turned into a puddle of meat.”
There was a knock on Alex’s door. It was Stein.
“I can’t believe it,” Alex said, and rubbed his eyes. “You knocked.”
“Sun’s up,” Stein said. “You were here all night?”
Alex motioned to the thick stacks of paper on his desk. “You see what I had to go through last night. And this is just the dead guys. I hate to think what would have happened if Dave got General White to give him the files on the live guys, too. How about you? Up all night?”
“Of course not,” Stein said. “I’m keeping my regular schedule, remember.”
“That’s right,�
� Alex said. “Another reason to put you on the list of people I hate.”
“It might interest you to know that the President is back in action today,” Stein said. “By the end of the night last night he said he was feeling good as he ever has, and this morning he was back in the pool by six am. So it’s his full schedule and then off to Ohio for that stupid town hall speech of his.”
“Come on, Brad,” Alex said. “Town hall meetings are participatory democracy at its finest.”
“When it’s thirty people talking sewage issues in New Hampshire, maybe,” Stein said. “When the President is trying to explain why the country needs to temporarily raise the marginal tax rate on millionaires in front of screaming yahoos who think all taxes are treason, well. Let’s just say I get nervous.”
“That’s what the Secret Service is for,” Alex said. “Yahoo management is their specialty.”
“Let’s hope you’re right,” Stein said, and nodded at the piles. “You find anything interesting?”
“Yeah,” Alex said, rubbing his eyes again. “Yeah, I did. Not in the files, really, but around 3:00 A.M. I got a little loopy and decided to fire up the IRS database and look up some of these guys’ family members.”
“Why would you do that?” Stein said.
“Oh, you know,” Alex said. “See if any family members suddenly started paying taxes on millions of dollars of income, signifying ill-gotten gains.”
“Ill-gotten gains are not the sort of thing people usually pay taxes on,” Stein said. “Pretty much by definition.”
“Point,” Alex said. “Which is probably why I didn’t find anything. But then I found the opposite: The wife and adult child of one dead scientist stopped paying taxes entirely the year after he died. Here, look.” Alex plopped over a folder to give to Stein. “Louis Reynolds dies of a heart attack two years ago, right?” Alex then added some additional printouts to the pile. “The next year, his wife Lisa and kid Martha don’t pay any taxes at all. No reported income when both of them had jobs the year before. Lisa was an administrative assistant and Martha was a nurse practitioner. And no taxes filed this year, either.”
“And they’re not dead,” Stein said.
“Not that I can tell,” Alex said. “I didn’t call or anything, seeing as it was three in the morning.”
“If this Reynolds had life insurance and they were both beneficiaries, they could have lived off that money for a year or two and not had to pay taxes on any of that,” Stein said. “If you make no income in a year, you don’t have to file.”
“Maybe,” Alex said. “But I don’t know. It still feels weird to me. People don’t usually just fall completely out of the IRS database, even if they do get a life insurance payout. They still have mortgages and bank accounts and 401(k)s and charitable contributions. If you fall out that completely, there’s got to be a reason.”
“You think they’re on the run,” Stein said.
“Maybe,” Alex said. “Like I said, I don’t know. I’m not a forensic accountant, or an FBI agent, or spy. That’s your gig. You probably have people who could do this better than I could.”
“Is that a hint?” Stein said.
“It could be if you want it to be,” Alex said.
Stein smiled and held up the folder Alex gave him. “I’ll give this to some of my people and see what they come up with.”
“If you can have them do it quickly I would love you,” Alex said. “I have to give Dave my report in”—he glanced at his watch—“three and a half hours.”
“I’m surprised you haven’t told him this already,” Stein said.
“He’s apparently one of those people who thinks night is for sleeping,” Alex said, and yawned. “Speaking of which, I’m going to go grab a cab and crawl into my apartment and see if I can’t get a couple of hours before I have to get back here.”
“I’ll try to have something for you then,” Stein said.
“Thank you,” Alex said, and made his way out of the West Wing to the guard station, where the cab he’d ordered was there to take him to his apartment. He was enjoying that pleasantly light-headed feeling he got when he’d been up all night, right up until his cab drove away and a white panel van drove up in its place, the side door slid open, and someone from inside reached out and grabbed him.
Oh, shit, North Koreans, Alex thought, before something was shoved over his mouth and nostrils and he blacked out.
Alex woke up on a cot in a concrete room bare except for a man with a gun, the donut he was eating, the chair he was sitting in and a television set he was watching, apparently with the sound turned down.
“Who are you?” Alex asked the man.
“Your babysitter,” the man said, and then reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone without looking up from the television. “He’s awake,” then man said, after he had dialed a number.
“Can I get up?” Alex said, after the man had completed his call.
The man shrugged. “Do what you want. Commode is through that other door.”
“What if I want to leave?” Alex asked.
The man motioned to the door. “It’s locked from the outside. You can try it if you like.”
“Why am I here?” Alex asked.
The man finally looked over at Alex. “Relax, Mr. Lipsyte,” he said. “No one’s going to kill you.”
“You have a gun,” Alex said.
“I always have a gun,” the man said, turning back to the television. “I’m Secret Service.”
Ten minutes later the door opened and Brad Stein entered the room, holding a bag. “Hello, Alex,” he said, and walked over to the cot to hand Alex the bag. “I brought you dinner. Hope you like cheeseburgers.”
Alex took the bag. “Dinner,” he said.
“You’ve been asleep for a while,” Stein said. “Don’t worry. I saw Dave and told him how I sent you home after I came in at six and saw you throwing up into your wastebasket, the victim of some genuinely awful 24-hour flu bug. I also passed on your information to him, minus a few details.”
“Like about Lisa and Martha Reynolds,” Alex said.
“Yes, that,” Stein said, and leaned up against the wall of the room. “I have to say I was really rather annoyed when you asked to see the list of dead scientists,” he said. “I didn’t think that anyone would ask for something like that. You caught me with my pants down.”
“Louis Reynolds is alive,” Alex said.
“He is,” Stein said. “Faked his death and has been working in a NSA black ops lab ever since, with his wife and daughter attached to the lab staff. All under new names. Standard issue federal relocation.”
“And he’s solved that transporter thing,” Alex said. “The thing where living things get turned into meat.”
“No, actually, he hasn’t,” Stein said. “But we did the next best thing. Rather than trying to push the President’s brain through a spacetime hole, we wrapped a spacetime hole around the President’s brain. The President’s brain is still in his head. Always has been. There’s just no way to access it, except through the spinal cord and the arteries and veins in his neck. From any other angle, anything trying to get into the President’s brain crosses the hole’s frontier and comes out in a shut-down FBI indoor shooting range at Quantico.”
Alex stared at Brad Stein for several minutes, uncomprehending.
“I think the question you want to ask now is ‘why,’” Stein said.
“Yes, that’s it exactly,” Alex said.
Stein looked over to the Secret Service agent. “Turn that television set around, Jenkins,” he said. Jenkins obliged, and Alex saw that he was watching the news.
“Did you record it?” Stein asked.
“Yes,” Jenkins said.
“Then back it up to the event, please. And turn the volume up,” Stein said. Jenkins did, keeping the television on pause. The image on the screen was of the President, standing in front of a podium.
“As you know, the President was slated to give
that damn tax speech of his tonight at a Town Hall meeting in Ohio,” Stein said, walking over and taking the TV remote from Jenkins. “Because he’s a bit of a moron, that President of ours, he thought that it would be a fine idea to give that particular contentious speech in the open on a high school athletic field that the Secret Service could spend a year trying to cover and still miss an angle or two. So it was not exactly a surprise when the inevitable happened.” Stein pressed “Play” on the remote.
Alex watched as the President of the United States was assassinated. One moment the President was mouthing platitudes, the next there was a loud pop and a hole bloomed out of his left temple.
“Oh, my God,” Alex said, looking at Stein.
“Wait, it gets better,” Stein said, and motioned to the TV.
Alex turned back to the television to see the President, slightly stunned, bleeding from the hole in his head, arguing with Dave Boehm and the head of the Presidential Secret Service detail. Alex frowned. “What is he doing?”
“He’s telling them that he wants to keep doing his speech,” Stein said. “That dumb son of a bitch has just been shot in the head, and is bleeding out of a wound that would have been fatal if we hadn’t hidden his brain, and all he wants to do is keep reading off the Teleprompter. It’s admirable, in its own magnificently screwed up way.”
Alex kept watching as the President was finally dragged away from the podium, looking extraordinarily pissed. “Is he all right now?” he finally asked.
“No,” Stein said. “He’s got a bullet hole in his temple. He’s lost a fair amount of blood, some bone and other tissue, and the bullet caused a small amount of damage on the inside of his skull before it hit the edge of the timespace hole and exited out into that Quantico gun range. He’ll be out of commission for a week or so. The Vice President is currently acting with full Presidential authority. No more elementary school visits for him. But on the other hand the President’s brain is completely unscathed. He’ll survive, which he wouldn’t have done otherwise.”