The Flicker Men (24 page)

He leaned forward and rolled the seven-ball away from its resting place near the box. Then he picked up the bag of sand and poured it on the white plate. “This is called a tone vibration plate. An old device, perhaps you've heard of it?”

“No”

He reached toward the black box. “This is the frequency modulator.” He turned the knob until it clicked, and I could suddenly hear a soft hum. He turned the knob a little more, and the hum grew louder—the pitch higher. On the white plate, the sand began to vibrate and dance, shifting and flowing as the plate vibrated. Slowly a shape formed. A pattern. Like a child's rounded, looping scribble, an alien kaleidoscope. The sand gathered itself into curving black lines, while other parts of the plate were left pale and bare.

“The space around us seethes with waves,” Brighton said. “Around us, through us. Sound waves, radio waves, light waves. The waves of matter itself. They are mostly invisible to us, except where our consciousness pulls them into physical existence. Like the sand pulls the waves into physical existence.”

He turned the knob, and the hum grew higher. The sand on the plate responded to the new frequency by changing the pattern again, shifting from a child's scribble to a series of concentric circles. Black dots on a white surface. These were mathematical shapes. Fractal dream catchers. Mandalas. Shifting, roiling, like a living, animated thing. Phasing from one shape into another as Brighton slowly turned the knob—first a honeycomb, then a series of parallel, wavy lines, like an abstract hieroglyphic. “These wave patterns extend upward,” he said. “The sand only captures a planar slice.” He turned the knob further—a tone like wasp wings, and the pattern shifted into a series of circles—like the face of a revolver, six small rings held in array around a larger, central circle. The black eye of a gun barrel.

Brighton removed his hand from the knob and picked up the bag. He poured more sand onto the plate—too much—pouring until it overwhelmed the pattern, spilling over the sides, making a mess on the table. He tossed the empty bag to the floor. On the plate, the sand vibrated and roiled, interfering with itself, struggling to organize, but there was no pattern. Nor room for one. Only shifting, featureless black.

“It's all just waves and waveforms,” he said. “A vibrational tone—and it just takes a trick to see it. To cut that horizontal slice.” He straightened and looked at me. He wasn't talking about the plate anymore. “Not a certain kind of eye but a certain kind of heart. That strange spark in your chest that pins you to this reality. That's what makes all of this manifest. Everything around you. Are you a religious man, Eric?”

“I keep an open mind.”

“Have you ever wondered why the universe is constructed as it is? Gravity, electromagnetism, the various internucleic forces—their relative and absolute strengths and ranges, all balanced on a knife blade. Shift just a little, and all is vacuum.”

“The anthropic principle,” I said.

He nodded. “Those forces are as they are, or we wouldn't be here to calculate them, sure. But there's another way to look at it, subtly different; the universe must be just as it is, or it would remain unobserved.” He leaned over the table. “If unobserved, would it really exist at all?” He turned the knob on the box, and the tone rose in pitch, like a wasp near my ear. “Perhaps the universe needs us as much as we need it. A great collaboration. And without us”—he looked down at the plate of vibrating black particles—“it's just a churning, writhing mass.” Without warning, he slammed his hand down on the table, and the whole apparatus shook.

The sand bounced off the plate, spilling everywhere, and what remained settled slowly into a new pattern, now clear and sharp as the white plate showed through. A series of gentle curves, like the wings of a butterfly.

“Do you think the universe wants to be observed?” he asked.

“The universe can't want anything.”

“You're so sure?”

“If you're talking about some kind of awareness, then—”

“If the universe had awareness, it wouldn't need you. No,” Brighton said, “I'm talking about something more elegant than that.” He moved around the table and turned off the black box. The hum went quiet, and the sand stopped moving, the pattern now frozen in place. He seemed to contemplate the pattern. “Heisenberg spoke of particles as potentialities rather than fact, yet here they sit.” He picked up the cue ball again. “I've found that when physicists talk about reality with precision, they do it with formulas; when they discuss it in general, they sound like monks.”

He was silent for a moment and then placed the cue ball back on the felt. “There is rock art in Australia thirty-eight thousand years old. More in Europe, separated by thousands of years, and yet of a common theme. Like there was a template.”

“What's your point?” I didn't understand the shift in subject.

“There are single caves that show continuous habitation for twenty thousand years. Shell middens with twenty-seven feet of strata, built up generation after generation for longer than civilization has existed, without a single new kind of artifact, a single new innovation. Can you imagine it? An unchanged village like Plato's theory of Forms. Not just a village but the Platonic ideal of a village, with pictures on the wall no different in style from images painted eighteen thousand years earlier.”

He was losing me. “What does that have to do with any of this?”

“Things are moving more quickly now. Speeding up. There were people born into homes without electricity who had grandsons who walked on the moon. Now we have nuclear power, the microchip, wireless worldwide connectivity that fits into your pocket. So what's changed? Look around you, and you can see it. It's all broken open now. If you listen closely, you can almost hear it.” He closed his eyes, face serene.

“Hear what?”

He opened his eyes. “Gabriel's horn.” He stared at me, and his smile broadened. “You asked why you were here, Eric, and that is your answer. The time of the eberaxi is upon us.”

 

31

The guards led me down the hall. We passed the library where Satvik had been sitting, but now his chair was empty. In the front room, we crossed the white shag carpet again, and this time I noticed the red ball was missing. I glanced around, but it was nowhere. They led me down another hall and around the corner from the kitchen to a heavy wooden door with a steel latch. The taller guard used a key to unlock the door, and then he shoved me inside. Behind me, I heard the click. I turned and kicked the door hard enough to rattle its hinges.

“Eric” came a voice.

In the near darkness, I could only see a shape.

“Satvik?”

“Afraid so.” The shape moved. “This is where they keep me at night,” he said. “My room. Now yours, too. I knew you were coming.”

“How?”

“They put an extra mattress on the floor. Who else could it be for?”

I felt my way through the darkness until my foot hit something soft. I bent and felt the mattress with my hand, then took a seat. The only light came through a small brass grating in the base of the door. A vent for air flow, I assumed.

“What is this room?” I asked.

“It was a pantry, I think, before they took out the shelves.”

“Explains the lack of windows,” I said. “And it's in the center of the flat, so no one can hear us shout.”

“There was shouting last night,” Satvik said. His voice was low. “We're high enough, I don't think they care.”

“What shouting?”

“From the other room. I never saw him, though. They never brought him in here.”

I thought of the stains on the pool table. I decided not to mention it. “So what happens now?” I asked.

“We sleep.”

“No, I mean, what happens to us? What are they going to do with us?”

“I don't know. They don't tell me.”

The darkness felt suddenly claustrophobic. The air hot and stuffy. Even with the vent, I wondered if the air was enough for two, or would they find us blue and suffocated the next day. I pushed the thought away—useless paranoia. “How did they get you?” I asked.

“Off the street. I tried to run. They took my car, too.”

The car. That explained that night at the lab.

“And they used the boy,” he said.

“The boy from New York?”

“He's with them now. One of them all along, I think. Brighton had me test him; he wanted to see.”

“What happened?”

“The boy didn't collapse the wave, just like before. There have been others like him. I tested Brighton, too, though he didn't notice at first. I thought I was tricking him, but maybe he was tricking me.”

“Is he like the boy?”

“No,” Satvik said. “Brighton is something else.”

“What do you mean?”

Satvik paused. “It's hard to say. He only looked for a few moments, so I couldn't be sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“It was like he could choose,” Satvik said. “Like he could choose to collapse the wave or not.”

*   *   *

We were quiet after that, sitting in the darkness. Eventually, he told me of his trip across country, trying to understand what the two-slit was testing.

“But why go to High-throughput? I still don't understand.”

“It was a message,” he said. “A note on my car, along with the address. Google showed the connection to your old research.”

“A message from who?”

“Just a name. Vickers. I thought I would learn more, but I learned nothing. I think it was part of the trap. They caught me the next day.”

After another long silence, I spoke. “We have to find a way out of here.”

“The guards are fast,” he said. “That's what happened to my face.” I felt his body shift in the blackness. “Did you talk to my family?”

“No,” I said.

“I miss my daughter,” he said. “I worry what will happen if I don't come home.”

“It'll be okay, Satvik.”

“This is what I miss most—reading to her at night. When I was on the road, I did not do that.”

“You'll read to her again.”

“I hope you're right. She likes the stories. I tell stories, and she lies in bed and listens.”

“Did you ever tell her your story of the four princes?”

“She knows all the parts.”

“There's more than just what you told me?”

“Much more.”

“So the fourth prince, the one who shot the bird's eye, what happened to him at the end?”

“It is a long story.”

“And what happens?”

Satvik was quiet for a moment. “He dies.”

*   *   *

In the middle of the night, a sound woke me. For a moment I forgot where I was, and then it all came back. A sound like a bouncing ball. I put my face to the vent, and I could see into the kitchen. I saw short legs crossing the room. The red ball bouncing on the floor. It was the boy.

“Psst,” I called out.

The ball stopped bouncing. The boy turned. Ten years old maybe. Dark, curly hair. He bent into my field of vision, looking at me through the vent, and I could see his face. He stared at me, his face expressionless. Not the slightest surprise.

“Can you open the door?” I whispered.

The boy cocked his head slightly. His face never changed. A normal boy, a typical boy. A boy in blue jeans and T-shirt. No different from any other boy you might see in a park.

I waited, but he didn't respond. “Can you—”

He flung the ball, and it struck the vent in front of my face. I flinched back. I saw his legs walking away.

*   *   *

The next day the guards woke us with a bang on the door. I rolled out of bed and climbed to my feet as the door swung open. They let us take turns in the bathroom, while one of the guards waited outside the door.

“So where's Brighton?”

The guard just looked at me and said nothing. He wasn't one of the guards I'd seen the night before. He was tall, dark-skinned. Wore a thin sports jacket, open at the front. They must work in shifts, I realized. How many men did Brighton have working for him? The boy, if he was still around, was nowhere to be seen.

“Any chance of breakfast?”

“You can grab whatever you want.” The man pointed toward the kitchen. “You've got five minutes.” I crossed the suite and stepped onto the kitchen tile. It took me a moment to find the fridge, so perfectly hidden in a secret panel beside the six-burner stove. I scrounged inside the Sub-Zero and grabbed a carton of orange juice. Then I pulled out a drinking glass from one of the upper cabinets. The glass was heavy. I wrapped my fingers around it. Heavy enough to use as a weapon. If I broke it against the marble, I'd have an edge that could slice a jugular. The guard took a few steps into the kitchen, eyeing me closely. He put his hands on his hips, opening his jacket slightly, and I saw the gun holster. I filled the glass with orange juice, drank it down, and then put the glass in the sink.

A few moments later, Satvik came down the hall, Polo Shirt and another guard following close behind.

“Grab your shoes,” Polo said. “We're leaving.”

“Leaving for where?”

“The street. We're dropping you off in a park.”

“Dropping us off?”

“Yeah, letting you go.”

I blinked. Stared at him. It didn't make sense. Not after everything that had happened. “Just like that?”

“I'm not gonna repeat myself.”

Polo shoved me toward the room where I'd spent the night. I followed Satvik around the corner and inside the room. We stooped to pick up our shoes. Satvik looked dazed. His face unreadable.

I glanced behind me, and Polo was still around the corner.

I leaned close to Satvik and whispered, “I don't like this.”