Rift (21 page)

“You shouldn't have stayed on so long!” he yells.

I don't know what to say.

“Are you trying to get your wife killed?”

“But didn't you, I mean didn't you—”

“Hear your voice?” Crystal says, finishing my thought.

“How could they do that? Are there programs for that kind of voice emulation? And why? Why would they bother? Why the hell are they in my house? What have they done with my wife?”

Crystal puts up her hands. “Hold on just a minute. Before you lose it, let's go over what just happened.”

“You heard what just happened! Someone or some
thing
is at my house impersonating me!”

“No, it isn't.”

“Then who the hell was on the phone?”

“Who do you think it was?”

“Look, don't play any fucking games with me! This might be your crusade, but it's
my
fucking life!”

“Then why don't you pull your head out of the sand and look around? ‘Who the hell was on the phone?' you ask. Think about it, Cameron! If it quacks like a duck and it acts like a duck, then maybe, just maybe, it's a fucking duck!”

I sit there staring at her, still beautiful but no longer an angel, her chest heaving, her brow beading with sweat. For the first time I realize that I'm not the only one under pressure here. And maybe I'm not the only one about to crack.

“You know that guy I told you about,” Lee says to me, “the one who works with the Tempest equipment?”

“Yeah?”

“This guy's brother worked for NeuroStor for a little while. Client-server maintenance, that sort of thing.”

“Yeah?”

“They didn't let this guy near the transmission computers,” Lee continues. “But he got drunk one night with one of the other guys, the
real
IT guys, who let slip something about what they call the Central Bank. A mountain bunker in Wyoming he claimed was the largest memory storage facility in the world. And he talked about the latest memory technology you guys had come up with, shit with crystals that can store zettabytes of information in something the size of a three-and-a-half hard drive. Did you ever hear anything about that?”

“We have a distribution center in Denver,” I tell him. “That's the closest office I know of.”

“Well, this Central Bank, he said it's where they plan to store everyone. Every person who transmits.”

“Store us?” I ask. “What the hell does that mean?”

“Quantum teleportation assures the original, scanned information is disrupted, right? Essentially destroyed. You kill your body and then send it somewhere else to be reassembled.

“But really, disrupting the original information is a good thing. Otherwise, what you'd have is a human fax machine. If you put a person in, send a copy of him off to some other place, and then take the original person back out again, you're left with two people instead of one.”

Where they store us. Where they store US.

“Quantum mechanics says you can't do the fax machine bit,” he continues, “that you can't scan something closely enough to duplicate it. You disturb the information before you can extract everything you need to make the copy.”

“So what the hell did they do to me?”

“I don't know. They did something, because you're sitting right here in front of us. But just because you look like you, that doesn't mean you
are
you. Not exactly.”

Lee's earlier words, never really gone, now burn themselves into my consciousness.
In what sense are you here?
In what sense am I here, indeed?

The dread, the fear—it comes full on now, beginning in my neck as a physical sensation, almost as if someone has rubbed menthol cream on my skin. Hot and cold at the same time. The hairs there stand up like soldiers. A moment or two passes before my bowels begin to churn. My hands are shaking. My mouth tastes electric, as if I just stuck my tongue on the leads of a nine-volt battery. I think I'm going to faint.

“Cameron!”

I hear the voice, but my ears are roaring now. It sounds like someone calling my name from across a crowded football stadium. A stadium enshrouded by silvery fog.

Hands on my face, slapping me. Once. Twice. I smell her before I see her. Crystal. Her sweet smell.

“Cameron!” she says again.

“What?”

“Don't faint on us!”

“I'm not.”

She slaps me again.

“I'm
not
!”

I push myself upwards in the chair. Maybe if I'm sitting up straight she will believe me.

“I know this is hard to hear,” she says, kneeling in front of me. “But now is the time to be your strongest.”

“No! Don't try to force this bullshit on me!”

“But you heard him on the phone.”

“Do you think I'm an idiot? That I'm just going to throw up my hands and believe that a facsimile of me is living in my house?”

“We don't know that
he's
a copy,” Lee says.

“Of course you don't. It's bullshit.”

“No, I mean
you
would be the copy.”

When no response forms on my lips, I just glare at him.

“My best guess is they held your original while observing you, the simulacrum—”

“The what?”

“The facsimile. Whatever. They held him until they decided you weren't a good enough copy. Then they figured out some way to get the original back home, some kind of story both he and his wife would believe. That's why they're after you now. Two Camerons could present a few problems for them, if you know what I mean.”

“I am not a copy!”

“Then who was on the phone?” Crystal asks.

“I wish I knew.”

We all stare at each other, at full stalemate. What they've said makes sense, and I don't necessarily fault the logic they used to draw this conclusion. But something about it just doesn't feel right. Wouldn't I know if I wasn't really me?

“Let's assume for a moment that what we say is true,” Crystal offers. “Why do you think NeuroStor invented the machine? Surely they never planned to really go public with the thing. Not as a public transportation service anyway. If it really preserves the original, after all, I don't think there is any way they could keep that a secret. Not if they rolled out the machine on a national scale.”

“You guys have already told me they want to use it as a weapon. As a terror device against the U.S. government.”

“Yeah,” she agrees, “but how? Size constraints on the transmission portal make sending a large number of troops or significant military supplies unfeasible.”

“That's also why they might have trouble marketing the machine as a shipping carrier,” Lee adds.

Crystal nods. “But even that doesn't make sense. If they can fit a person in there, they can fit a lot of envelopes or boxes or whatever the hell someone wants delivered the same day.”

“But who would spend a thousand dollars to send a package today when they can spend fifteen dollars and get it there the next morning?”

“Someone would.”

It seems silly for us to debate such things when we really have no idea what the leaders of NeuroStor are plotting. Who are we to think we can somehow come up with the smoking-gun issue that will blow their covert plan wide open?

Crystal smiles, as if she's read my mind.

“You know what we think the machine really is, Cameron?”

“I can tell by the look on your face that you're about to tell me.”

“A cloning device. Only instead of placing both terminals beside each other like you would in a laboratory, you might have them separated by hundreds or thousands of miles. The information transmission poses problems, of course. Maybe they're using advanced compression algorithms, I don't know. Obviously they've figured something out, because here you are.”

“But that's where you're wrong,” I tell her. Something Lee said before finally makes sense to me now. “It can't be a cloning device because you can't create something out of nothing. That's some kind of physics law. If I'm really a copy, if the original Cameron Fisher is still in Houston, what did they use to construct me? Molecules don't just form from thin air.”

“No, but the molecules
in
air could be reconstructed,” Lee says. “When you break matter down into its constituent pieces, it's all basically the same stuff. What makes iron and gold and carbon different is, to simplify, just the organization of quarks and leptons. So if you had the ability to manipulate matter at such a level, you wouldn't necessarily need any special material.”

“But you said that sort of molecular assembly wasn't possible.”

“I know, but—”

“Besides, if you guys are right, then you could scan someone and reproduce them over and over.”

“You could build yourself a special forces unit,” Lee adds. “All you need is one sympathizer, some Green Beret or Army Ranger or whatever, and you could churn out a whole battalion of him. If you lose some, just make more.”

“That's nuts.”

Lee shrugs.

“NeuroStor put my original back because they think the transmission didn't work, that's what you're telling me?”

“As soon as you ran from them, the other guy had to go back. They couldn't let you blow their story.”

“And if they catch me, I'm dead.”

“They can't let you go back.”

“But something about this doesn't make sense. There were four other volunteers. Surely some or all of those were transmitted successfully. What does NeuroStor intend to do with the originals if their copies turn out fine?”

“They would have to kill them, don't you think?” she says matter-of-factly. “What else could they do?”

“
Kill
them?” I say to her. “Innocent volunteers?”

“They probably have themselves convinced it isn't murder,” Lee suggests. “Since the copy is still alive on the other side.”

Crystal stands quickly, as if remembering something. “This is how we'll bring them down, Cameron. The whole terrorism concept would be pretty hard to prove, but not what they're doing now. If we can make people understand that they are killing volunteers after the transmission—their very own employees—we can bring them down. But like I said, they aren't going to come to us. This is why we're going to Dallas. To—”

The computer beeps, and a window pops up with some sort of warning sign. Lee leaps in front of me before I even begin to read it.

“Someone's coming,” he says.

“Where?” Crystal asks. She runs out of the room without waiting for an answer.

“The front!” He reaches beneath his desk, into a maroon metal box, and pulls out a pistol of some kind.

“What's going on?” I ask.

“I've got infrared motion detectors installed around the perimeter of the house. Two of them just tripped.”

“You don't think it might be someone you know?”

“I'm not expecting anyone,” he says. “We'll know soon. Stay here and watch this screen.”

A new window on the screen displays what is obviously an outline drawing of a house floor plan.

“If any of the sensors in the backyard trip, tell us so we don't get surprised from behind.”

“Okay.”

He steps out of the room, and I sit there, staring at the screen. A bird sings a repetitive song from a nearby tree, and a frustrated dog farther away barks wildly.

Something solid shakes the house. Wood splinters and glass shatters. I whip around, watching the door, and then four sharp reports—muffled, but each succeedingly louder—split the air. Heavy whispering. Unintelligible. I'd feel better if I could get behind the desk or try to escape out a bathroom window, but my assignment is to watch the screen. In the corner I notice the baseball bat again, standing there innocently, waiting for a neighborhood game that is never going to come.

“Get your hands up!” I hear Crystal yell. “Drop the gun and show me your hands!”

“Fuck you,” a man's voice says. “Wait until—”

His voice is cut off by a single gunshot, this one decidedly louder than the previous silenced rounds.

“You fucking bitch!” the man yells. I know this voice. It's the man who left me to suffocate in the muddy riverbank. Ivan.

Another loud gunshot. Then more struggling. Crystal screams—in anger or pain, I'm not sure—and her distress galvanizes me. I rush forward, grab the baseball bat, and run for the living room.

Another muffled gunshot.

“Lee!” Crystal yells.

As I turn the corner with the bat raised, I find Crystal on the ground struggling with Ivan. She's on top of him, pressing his face against the floor with one hand and trying to reach for his gun with the other. The carpet beneath them is red and soaking and makes squishing sounds as they thrash against it.

Ivan is obviously shot; Crystal could not have wrestled him into this position if he wasn't injured. I stand there for a moment assessing the situation, and that's when Ivan uses a burst of energy to wrench his hand from beneath his body and smack Crystal in the face.

Reason abandons me.

I step forward and swing hard for Ivan's head, but the bat misses, slamming instead into the blood-soaked carpet, spraying droplets everywhere, against his face and my pants and into Crystal's hair. I pull back the bat and swing forward again, this time connecting solidly with Ivan's skull. The impact of aluminum slamming into bone sends electric vibrations into my arm, and the sound is sickening, but Ivan ceases to fight at once. Ceases to fight and in fact begins to bleed from a hairy, matted wound near the crown of his head. I stand there looking at him, picturing the way he struck Crystal, remembering how he left me for dead near the flash flood, remembering that Tom is dead. I swing quickly again with the bat. Hit him again in the head. This motherfucker deserves no sympathy, at least not from me.