Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille (19 page)

His throat throbbed. The glands in his neck were swollen again, and so were the ones in his groin. He shifted uncomfortably in the office chair, trying to relieve the pressure.

If he could see Annie again, explain why he’d left, he could tolerate the discomfort. He thought, I made a bad decision, coming here.

Rye hadn’t really believed that a secret, government project existed that needed his expertise in virtual reality, until at the end of the long plane trip and even longer car ride the soldier in the prefab opened the elevator door without comment. Sunburn marked his cheeks, and after a while Rye wondered if it hurt him to speak. The soldier hadn’t said a word since Rye and the unnamed NSA agent had entered. Silently, he checked their I.D.’s, then handed Rye a clipboard with a clearance form already filled out. Rye signed it.

“Do you bring a lot of people out here?” Rye asked.

“That’s on a needs to know basis,” said the agent.

“Oh.”

The agent said, “God-awful hot. You’d think they’d pop for some air conditioning.” He loosened his tie. Sweat darkened his collar. “Lucky dog, it’s cooler down there I’ll bet.”

The soldier took the clipboard and gave it to the agent to sign.

“Did they get all my bags?” asked Rye. “There are a couple of blue cases for my medications.”

The agent shrugged. He was younger than the one who’d accompanied him on the plane and more bored. “Everything’s there that went in the car.”

“I really need those cases.”

Handing the clipboard back to the soldier, the agent said, “I’m sure they’re around. If not, we’ll find them and send them to you right away.”

“I won’t be coming back up, you know,” said Rye. He remembered the briefing at the hospital. They’d found him just as he was checking out, and he was so tired and discouraged that a job offer from the National Security Agency that involved, among other things, a guarantee for paid medical treatments, sounded too good to believe. The catch was, they said, that he’d have to disappear, at least for a while. He’d get more explanations later, but once he took the job, he would vanish. His family would be told that he’d died.

Rye wondered if NSA hung out at hospitals recruiting people with death sentences, or if it were just a lucky coincidence for them.

“No one comes up,” said the agent. He smiled, not unkindly. “I hear it’s pretty cushy down there.”

“I’ll need my medicine.” A black spot drifted across the room, across the agent’s face, distracting Rye. He worried that he looked twitchy, always trying to see things no one else noticed.

“Let’s get you in the elevator,” the agent said, picking up two duffel bags.

Rye bent to pick up another, but suddenly grew dizzy, and he stood until the room quit spinning. He rubbed the spot on his chest where the catheter had been for ten days in the hospital. They’d infused him with medication to combat the CMV, but now he felt weaker than ever.

“You’re not well?” said the agent, grabbing another bag. The blue medical cases were behind it.

“They didn’t tell you?” said Rye. He felt steady enough now, but the black spot seemed to have paused in the upper right corner of his vision, and he couldn’t ignore it.

“Sorry to hear it. But it is cooler in the silo. What are you doing down there? Special hospital?”

Rye crouched carefully and picked up the blue cases. “That’s on a needs to know basis.”

“The rules. First,” said Dr. Martin, “we
must
remain in a closed loop. It’s the butterfly effect: You know, how the flap of a butterfly wing in China might result in a hurricane in Florida. Our smallest information leak could change everything.”

“Okay,” said Rye. His stomach hurt. Fourteen pills each morning. Different meds through the day. Random specks drifting through his vision. Between disease and side effects from the medicine, it was all he could do to keep from grimacing. He concentrated on ignoring his symptoms.

“Second, no fraternizing with each other.”

“I’m not gay,” said Rye.

“Neither am I,” replied Dr. Martin without blinking. “I meant Gretta.”

“Gretta?”

“She’s the other member of our team. Top-notch programmer. A graduate student from a class I taught last year. By the way, she might be a bit hostile. She’s not convinced a man whose computer background is all in 3D gaming is the right person for the job.”

“No problem.”

“Third, we have to work fast. Time is ticking on this.”

“I know about limited time.”

“Lastly, we can change the future. You must believe that or there’s no reason to be here. I can send you topside right now if you think you won’t have the attitude for the work.”

Rye glanced around the room. His bags were piled by the elevator door; the blue cases sat prominently in front. “Sure.”

“I know your prognosis,” said Dr. Martin. “We have a schedule for blood work-ups and medications from above. They tell me there’s lots of hope with the transcriptase inhibitors. You could do better than they think.”

“That was explained to me.”

“It’s tough, I know, but we’re working to save everyone. We all have a poor prognosis now.”

Rye thought, yeah, but your end will be quick. You’ll get to make your goodbyes. Then he decided that was bitter and said, “I’ll do what I can to help.”

A bare-footed woman dressed in black shorts and a
Star Wars
T-shirt walked across the room, barely noticing Rye. Her straight, blonde hair was tied back and looked like it needed washing. She took a pile of papers off the desk, turned and walked from the room. She paused at the door and said, “Is that our terminal game boy? We don’t need him.”

“I told you, Gretta, he’s a VR expert.” Dr. Martin sounded exasperated, but she was already gone.

Later the first day, under the headset for an orientation, Rye waited for the images to form in the two small screens that hung in front of his eyes, blocking his view of the room. Most of the equipment looked military. Drab green or gray, heavier electrical connections than he was used to seeing, a real sense of solidity in the construction. Different from the light plastics he worked with at LivingSim, a 3D simulation and game company in Salt Lake City.

“Go ahead,” said Rye. The darkness in the headset gave Rye a claustrophobic itch.

“Almost there,” said Dr. Martin.

Then the display flickered and the VR room focused. Dr. Martin sat at the console, typing in instructions.

He waved at Rye. “Can you see me?”

“Got it.” Rye made a thumbs up fist. It blurred through the bottom part of the display. “Pretty crummy resolution. Your reality would make a shabby game world. How many frames per second?”

“Yes, resolution is the problem we need you to work on. Information comes too fast for our system to handle. Anything that moves we lose.”

Rye looked to his right, then his left. The images streaked until his head stopped. “Where’s the camera?”

“No camera,” said Dr. Martin. “This is concurrent visual data from your point of view. We’re running chronologically constant with immediate updating, all gathered and synchronized through the power of four Cray computers in parallel alignment. From this room I can take you any place on Earth, and any time within 6,000 years or so. Here, I’ll put you on the surface. You can control physical position with the joystick, just like flying a jet, and chronological position with the keyboard, but until you get used to the controls let me show you what it can do.”

Dr. Martin typed in more instruction, and the VR room vanished, replaced by the inside of the metal shed above the silo. The silent soldier sat behind a desk, his feet up, reading a hunting magazine. Below the edge of the display, Rye saw his own hands resting on his thighs. That’s the problem with VR so far, he thought, you still can tell it’s simulated.

“This is the same spot a hundred years ago,” said Dr. Martin. The display fuzzed out, and now a meadow of lanky grass stretched in front of Rye to the edge of a forest and a low series of hills that looked vaguely like the ones they had driven through to get to the silo.

The rest of the tour included several stops in Des Moines at different times in history while Rye played with the joystick to control his movements. He didn’t find it difficult. No harder than maneuvering in a 3D game environment.

Finally, Martin took him to the end of the world. Even with the terrible resolution, which Rye had several strategies to improve already, the wall of flame and destruction afterwards stole the breath from him.

Rye watched it three times before taking the headset off.

“That’s our future, seven years from today.”

“Are the images real?” Rye said.

Martin inserted his finger into the file of computer printouts he’d been searching through, then brushed a strand of gray hair that had fallen across his forehead.

“I don’t know that I can explain this to you in terms you understand. Or, at least, not using the terms the way you use them. ‘Real,’ for example, isn’t a solidly defined word in physics.”

He talked for another fifteen minutes, and all Rye remembered was that at one point Martin had said, “The energy required to retrieve the future’s signature seemed so small to me, that for an instant after I worked out the math I worried that if I just
thought
the equations, that my consciousness would cut loose from our place in time, and I might never find my way back. Fortunately I’d made a small computational error, and it takes somewhat more energy than that.”

“So it is real?” Rye said.

Dr. Martin sighed and opened the pile of papers where he’d left off.

Rye thought about listening to his doctor a month earlier while Annie had held his hand, before he’d ever met Dr. Martin or known anything about the secret project buried in an Iowa missile silo. The doctor blathered about T-cells and opportunistic infections, about AZT and aerosolized pentamidine. In the vocabulary of it, Rye couldn’t see the disease. It sounded like bad poetry in a foreign language: host-cell receptors, monocyte, macrophage, Pneumocystic carinii, toxoplasmosis and candidiasis. Finally Annie had blurted out, “This is Voodoo medicine! Give us words we can understand.” And the doctor had tried. He talked for an hour, but the plainness of the talk didn’t change the mystery of the end. Rye had squeezed his sister’s hand while looking out the doctor’s window. The words rolled by, and they filled the air so heavily, that after a bit, Rye felt like he was under water, so he rushed from the office. Annie had found him hours later, his back against the base of a sculpture in the park.

“It’s Voodoo physics, isn’t it?” said Rye.

“You can think of it that way,” said Dr. Martin. “But it works.”

“What was that?” said Gretta.

They were in the VR room, the largest room other than the silo itself, which they couldn’t go into—Dr. Martin had warned them of the repercussions of seeing themselves in the future; Gretta had argued that they hadn’t seen themselves, so going in now wouldn’t make a difference. “We see into the future, but we drag the present with us.” Dr. Martin had looked at her oddly, then changed the lock on the silo door.

“I dropped my pencil,” said Rye. He bent to pick it up.

“Declining motor skills,” she said. “Difficulty with gait, balance, coordination, clumsiness and deteriorating handwriting. Here, write a sentence for me.”

“I dropped a pencil, for crying out loud,” said Rye.

“It was only a slip,” said Martin without looking up from his papers.

“Early manifestations of dementia can’t be ignored,” she said. “He’s not going to be able to help if he loses his mind. Dementia is common with his condition.”

“I’m not losing my mind,” snapped Rye.

“Mood changes. Irritability.”

Martin said, “Keep it up, Gretta, and I’ll show you some irritability.”

“I don’t know why you can’t be more helpful with this. Why do I have to be the vigilant one?”

“He’s not losing his mind. He solved the problem with the head-set display in four days. We couldn’t make a dent after a month.”

“I just dropped my pencil.”

“He’s said that three times now. Trouble keeping track of conversations is another symptom. So is forgetfulness.”

“It’s also a sign of depression or stress, Gretta.”

“I’m not depressed,” said Rye, but neither seemed to be listening to him.

Gretta said, “You watch him for awhile, and you’ll see what I mean. He needs neuro-psychological evaluation.”

She stomped out of the room. A few seconds later, the door to her cubicle slammed shut. Martin shuffled through his papers. Rye rolled the pencil between his palms.

“Sometimes,” Martin said, “I think
she
needs an evaluation.”

Rye sighed. “It’s possible she’s right, or she will be right someday. How can you tell if you’re losing it?”

Martin looked up. His eyes watery but sympathetic. “I’ll let you know if I notice signs of dementia. In the meantime, just for fun, read up on the symptoms and demonstrate a few of them whenever Gretta’s around. It’ll get her goat.”

Despite the floaters that drifted through his vision as thick as moths around a porch light, Rye chuckled.

Gretta’s voice came muffled through the wall, “I heard that.”

Two weeks later, Gretta began sharing her rest time with Martin. Rye heard them talking. He heard their mumbling echoes in the hallway behind the thin door, the creak of the bed moving beneath them.

Dr. Martin was fifty-two, face as gray as his hair. Eyes constantly tearing, as if he’d just read a tragic novel. Very unattractive, really, Rye had thought. He couldn’t see what Gretta saw in him. She was only twenty-three.

It seemed the bed squeaked for an hour. What am I doing here? he thought.

It struck him as such an optimistic thing to do for both of them. Or desperate.

Either way, he decided, the rules were off.

The last security screen cleared, and Rye was into the e-mail program. He’d thought it through. His message had to convince her that he was alive, and that she shouldn’t be on her flight. She couldn’t toss it away as some sort of crank mailing. He typed:

Annie,

It’s me, Rye. I’m not dead, and I have a vital message for you. Don’t take your flight tomorrow. I can’t really explain how I know, but it’s connected to the reason I’ve had to disappear. I’m all right. I’m asymptomatic, and have never felt better. I know I was pretty depressed about it before I vanished, but I’ve figured out how to live with it.