The Fold: A Novel (10 page)

Arthur found Mike waiting outside his office door. “Good morning,” he said. “Waiting long?”

Mike shook his head.

“Good.”

“Sorry to ambush you like this,” Mike said, “but I had some questions for you.”

Arthur nodded and unlocked the door. “Of course. I’ll answer whatever I can, within the limits of our…”

Mike waved his hand in the air as they stepped into the office. “I know,” he said. “You have a contract with DARPA. I’m not asking about any of that.”

“What can I do for you, then?”

“Do you mind if I close the door?”

Arthur’s face hardened. It hadn’t been soft to begin with. “Why?”

“You’re the one who’s big on keeping secrets.”

He looked at Mike for a moment, then nodded at the door. Mike gave it a nudge and it swung shut, closing with a click.

“So,” Arthur said, “what’s this about? Another problem with the maintenance schedule?”

“Funny you should ask,” said Mike. “At first, I thought this was a big embezzlement scam.”

Arthur paused halfway down into his chair. He glared at Mike. “What?”

“Well, half embezzlement, half kickbacks. I’m not sure if there’s a legal distinction there.”

“You’d better have something to back up these accusations,” said Arthur, “because I can assure you being friends with the director won’t protect you from—”

“All the maintenance you’ve got them doing on the floor,” Mike said. “Changing tanks and couplings and everything else. But nothing needs to be replaced. You’re just switching out one set of working components for another one. Replacing gas tanks that are still three-quarters full.”

Arthur shook his head. “All this because they replaced a leaky coupling.”

“It wasn’t leaking,” Mike said.

“No offense,” Arthur said, “but how would you know?”

“Because I was watching when you turned it on the other day. There wasn’t a leak.”

“You might’ve missed it. We were both up—”

In Mike’s mind, yesterday’s experiment played out again frame by frame, a procession of black ants carrying pictures. He watched through the windows of the control room and in his peripheral vision he could see three different camera views of the main floor on monitors. Two cameras covered the coupling. He watched it play out again four times, focusing on a different part of the image with each repetition.

There was nothing coming from the connector.

“—in the booth.”

Mike tapped the side of his head. “If it happened, I couldn’t miss it.”

Arthur simmered in his chair.

Mike sat down in the chair across from the physicist. “In a way, the fact that you only use paper for your work would help out a lot in something like that. Everything gets entered piecemeal into a Washington computer, so no one’s ever seeing all of it at once, except a few interns who’ve probably gone numb from the mindless labor.”

They stared at each other for a moment.

“I think,” Arthur said, “I should have a talk with Mr. Magnus.” He reached for his desk phone.

Mike shook his head. “Don’t bother. I said I thought it was an embezzlement scam, but it’s not. I talked with Reggie first thing this morning, Washington time. I asked for copies of your budget for the past two years. It’s shrunk over the past six quarters.”

“I know, believe me.”

“I also went back over the budget, taking into account the idea that you’re just recycling the same components, and everything lines up.”

“That must’ve been some impressive math.”

Mike shrugged. “You also have an out-of-date laptop and you drive a cheap car.”

“It’s not that cheap.”

“It is for someone stealing tens of millions. Just the fact that you automatically think of a Dodge as a not-cheap car tells me you don’t have piles of cash in your mattress.”

“So you decided to dramatically announce that we’re
not
stealing millions from DARPA?”

“No. I wanted to make it clear to you that I’m not going to jump the gun and incriminate you or your work.”

“But you called Magnus.”

“I called him and asked for the budgets. He sent them. That’s all.”

Arthur leaned back in his chair. “You didn’t tell him why you wanted them?”

“No,” said Mike. “Here’s the catch, though. It’s not embezzlement, but it’s something. And unless your engineers are a lot dumber than they look, they’re all in on it, too. Which means there’s something going on here.”

Arthur’s face hardened again.

“I’m just trying to make a point. You need to start being honest with me, because I will figure out what’s going on. If it’s something harmless, fine. Reggie won’t care. Or maybe he doesn’t even need to know. But if it’s not…”

“Yes?”

Mike leaned back in his own chair.

“Thank you,” Arthur said after a moment, “for not running to Magnus with your initial theory.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I know he’s worried about things here, and the last thing we need is more suspicion.” He leaned forward and tapped his fingers on the desk. Then he leaned back again. “This project involves…well, a lot of math. Calculations. Code. Minor engineering tweaks. Most of the
people we’re reporting to are bureaucrats. Lawyers, businessmen, former military officers. Many of them don’t have an appreciation for how much work these things can be.”

“I can understand that.”

“So we do constant maintenance. Yes, about ninety percent of it is busy work at this point, but it gives us paperwork and material we can wave to prove we’ve been doing something. It also gives me a reason to keep most of the senior engineering staff on payroll.”

“Awfully generous of you.”

“The hell it is,” said Arthur. “They’ve signed nondisclosure forms, but people’s attitudes change a lot when they’re downsized. I don’t want to give them all a chance to rethink their loyalties.”

“Do you think they would? Rethink their loyalties?”

Arthur thought about it for a moment, then leaned forward again. “I don’t know,” he said. “A few years ago, I would’ve said not a chance. Olaf and I have known each other for almost fifteen years at this point. Jamie and Neil have been working with me for eight. But after all these…all this secrecy…” He looked past Mike to the diagram of the Albuquerque Door on the wall. “Half the time I feel like I’m surrounded by strangers.”

“The secrecy was your choice,” Mike said after a moment.

Arthur blinked and looked at him. “Not really,” he said. “Sometimes things just have to happen a certain way. You know that.”

“Maybe.”

Arthur shook off his mood. “So, if you’re convinced I’m not an embezzler, what can I do to get you out of my office so I can start my day?”

Mike stood up. “When you gave me access to the trial logs, Jamie said they were the basic reports. Are there more detailed versions?”

“Yes, the full travel reports. They cover everything except internal mechanics. Times, power usage, flux measurements. I think we even noted sunspot activity on some of them. There’s almost six hundred of them, going all the way back to the first runs with test objects and rats.” Arthur reached out and adjusted the plastic Wile E. Coyote on his desk, turning the carnivore’s head to the left. “I’ll make sure you get them as soon as you’re done with the human trials.”

“I finished them last night.”

Arthur raised an eyebrow. “All of them?”

Mike shifted his shoulders in a half shrug. “There were only a hundred and sixty-seven of them.”

“And you reviewed our budgets this morning?”

“Just back to two thousand eleven, but yeah.”

“If I didn’t know what you could do,” said Arthur, “I’d be tempted to call you a liar.”

“You still can, if you like. You wouldn’t be the first.” He shoved his hands in his pockets, then pulled them out. “It’s a memory thing. Once everything’s in my head, I don’t have to deal with any input or output limitations. No turning pages, no eye fatigue, I can just go through all of it as fast as I can think.”

“When you’re done with this assignment, I really might try to steal you away from Magnus.”

“Good luck with that.”

Arthur smirked. “I’ll ask Olaf to get you the travel reports. Anything else?”

“I think that’ll do it for today.”

“Good. We were going to run another trial tomorrow, if you’d like to watch.”

“Yeah, thanks. Who’s going through?”

“I think it’s going to be Bob.”

“Really?” said Mike. “Never?”

“No,” Olaf said. “I’ve never felt the need.”

The room was lined with file cabinets. Ten stood against the north wall, each one four drawers high, and another ten against the south. Three of them stood across from the door, placed not to interfere with the others. A clipboard with half a dozen dog-eared sheets of paper hung on the wall next to the door. A small table sat at the center of the room, but no chairs.

“Are you serious?”

“Yes.” Olaf flipped to the next key on the ring and tried it in the lock. The tumblers clicked inside the cabinet, and he slid the drawer out an inch to check. He nodded to himself, and inched the key back around until it popped free of the lock. It had
DO NOT DUPLICATE
stamped into it.

“You must’ve been tempted,” Mike said.

“Not really.”

“Not even
Casablanca
? It’s one of the greatest films of all time. It’s won piles of awards. Made it onto hundreds of lists.”

Olaf fit the key back onto a second ring with six others. “How high is your IQ? Supposedly?”

“Pretty high.”

“Then this shouldn’t be too hard to understand. I’ll even say it slowly for you.” He stared Mike in the eyes. “No.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. Just stop making all this wasted time even more irritating.” He slapped the smaller key ring into Mike’s hand. “These will
open the room and all the relevant cabinets. Files can’t leave campus. Log it if you take them out of this room.” He pointed at the clipboard.

“Thanks.”

“Don’t lose those keys.”

“I won’t.”

“You’d better not.”

“It’s really hard for me to lose things.”

Olaf shook his head and muttered something under his breath. He gathered up the small bundle of files he’d walked in with and set his Kindle on top of it. “If you need help, don’t hesitate to call someone else.”

“Okay,” said Mike. He pointed at the Kindle. “Reading anything interesting?”

“Physics in the Nineteenth Century,”
Olaf said. He stalked out of the room and back toward his office.

“Thanks again,” called Mike.

He looked at the wall of file cabinets. The ants paced back and forth in his mind. After setting them loose the other night, it was tough to keep them under control. Even more so, since he knew he’d just be setting them free again.

Despite Olaf clutching them for twenty minutes, the keys were cold in his hand.

The individual drawer labels were clear in his mind. The first one he wanted was second from the end on the far left of the east wall. The west wall had blueprints, design specs, and other schematics. It was off limits to him.

Mike sighed and unlocked the first file cabinet. He pulled out a half dozen folders and set them down on the desk. The ants teemed and swarmed out as he swung open the mental doors.

The travel logs were standard to the point of boring. Eleven pages of raw facts and numbers. Another seven or eight pages of written reports from every department followed. The early ones were loaded with a glut of detail, describing everything that went wrong, went better than hoped, or went exactly as expected. There were veterinary reports for all the animals, and doctors’ reports once human testing began.

Number 192 made him pause. He went over it three times before shifting focus to 193. Then he compared them. Several of the numbers
he’d grown used to were zeroed out. There was no test animal or object listed. Both tests had taken place at midnight. The same with 194.

But 195 was a normal one. Two of the rats had gone through side by side at ten-twenty in the morning. Then there were four more reports at midnight with no numbers. Then normal reports resumed.

Arthur had been the first person through the Door. Report 425/1. Report 426/2 was Olaf. Jamie was next. Hers was just marked 3.

The elaborate chart in his mind grew as he developed new methods of arranging the data. Symbols, colored bars, new axes. He expanded it into a series of three-dimensional graphs that he could cycle through, and overlap at will.

After four hundred and fifty reports, Mike’s stomach growled too loudly to ignore. He thought about going to get lunch, but the ants were making too much static. He settled for a walk down to the kitchenette. There was an apple and three cans of soda in the fridge. The pastry box was on the counter, emptied out except for the latest jelly donut. It sat alone in the crumb-filled box.

The ants urged him back to the files. There was still more for them to fight over. He sighed and grabbed the jelly donut with a paper towel. He took a tentative bite in the hallway and artificial raspberry syrup hit his tongue. He made himself take three more bites and felt the sugar buzzing between his teeth and gums. He shoved the last of it in his mouth, licked his fingers, and opened the next file.

As successful human jumps became the norm, the written reports became shorter and more casual. The recent ones were almost-blank pages with a few quick sentences. As far as Mike could tell, the last noteworthy thing had been a series of tests where the travelers carried different timepieces with them. That had been almost seven months ago.

Olaf had immaculate penmanship. Neil dotted his lowercase i’s with a horizontal dash. Bob kept a tally of the total distance he’d jumped in the margins of every report he wrote. He wrote it in pencil and then erased it, but the impressions were still there.

Mike closed the last file. His stomach growled again. It had been growling for almost an hour this time. The hallway outside the room was dark. No one had activated the energy-saving lights in a while.

He gathered up the folders on the table, put them back in the drawer, and locked the cabinet. The file room door locked behind him with a
thump of steel and magnets. He walked through the hall to the front of the building. The sun was low in the sky. Anne glanced up from the front desk. “All done?”

“I think so. Have you been waiting on me?”

She smiled and looked down at her desk.

“They don’t trust me at all, do they?”

Anne smiled again. This one didn’t feel as practiced. “If it makes you feel better,” she said, “I’ve been here for almost two years and they barely trust me.”

“Worlds better.”

She lifted a purse that had been ready to go for at least an hour up onto the desk. “Is there anything else you need?”

He shook his head. “I think I’ve got everything for the night.”

Anne tapped a few more keys. “Okay, then,” she said.

“Did you at least get overtime for being stuck here?”

“Of course,” she said. “One minute for the alarm.”

She waved him to the entrance. They stepped outside, and she locked the door behind them. “I’ll see you in the morning,” said Anne.

“Two years, and they don’t trust you, either?”

“I said they
barely
trust me,” she said. “I’ve got a general idea what’s going on here.”

“Really?”

She considered him for a moment as they walked down the steps. “There are some advantages to being the pretty woman,” she said. “Sasha and Bob come up with reasons to talk to me all the time.”

“Ahhhhh,” he said.

She smiled again. Another less-practiced one. “They haven’t told me anything important,” she assured him. “Or if they did, I didn’t realize it.”

They strolled across the small parking lot, and Mike realized he was walking her to her car. “So how’d you end up here?” he asked. “Did you know somebody or…?”

Anne shook her head. “Temp agency placed me,” she said. “I’d just moved down here from LA, and I’d done a lot of work for them up there. Data entry at a magazine, another receptionist gig, that sort of thing. So the local agency gave me this. I was here for about three months, and Dr. Cross hired me full time.”

“Los Angeles?”

“Yeah.”

“Why’d you move?”

She unlocked her car door and considered him again. Her dark eyes studied his face. “He said we should be careful if you start asking too many questions.”

“Sorry,” said Mike. “Was he worried I’d find out why you moved?”

She laughed. It was a perfect laugh. Quick, honest, full of life. It was easy to see why Sasha and Bob came up with reasons to talk to her. “I suppose not,” she said. She tossed her purse onto the passenger seat. “I lost my brother.”

“Oh,” he said. A dozen teacher-student protocols flooded his head. “I’m sorry.”

Anne saw it in his eyes. “We weren’t that close,” she said. “Hadn’t talked in years, to be honest, even though we lived in the same city. He called me that night, wanted me to join him for a family thing, and I kind of brushed him off. And then he was gone.”

There was more to it that that, he could tell, but he knew better than to push. “I’m sorry, again,” said Mike.

Her head went up and down once. The practiced nod of someone who’d told a story a few times. “I left LA about a week later. Didn’t want any reminders. It was kind of freeing, actually, just dumping half my stuff and moving to a new city.”

“I’ll have to try it some time.”

She glanced down the path toward the trailers and gifted him with one last smile. “Didn’t you?”

“I guess I did.”

“Good night, Mike.”

“G’night, Anne.”

She drove off with a wave, and he wandered down the path to the trailers.

He reviewed the logs again in his mind while he microwaved a Lean Cuisine sandwich. He summoned up his ant-constructed model of the Albuquerque Door and added seventy-six new labels. The microwave beeped at him.

He ate his chicken club panini as the trailer got dark. He didn’t bother turning the light on. He knew where everything was in the room. And it made it easier to concentrate.

He broke the data down into categories. Every scrap, no matter how mundane it seemed. He organized it in spreadsheets and graphs and columns.

There was a hole in the middle of his data with a spike in it. Three empty reports, one normal, four empty.

Jamie had signed off on all of the empty ones.

The gray phone was still on the floor in the far corner. A plastic menu slid out from beneath it with a list of extensions and names. He shoved the list back, picked up the receiver, and pressed three digits.

The line rang thrice. “Yeah?”

“Hi, Jamie, it’s Mike.”

“What do you want?”

“I’m fine, thanks. I was going over the logs and I noticed a discrepancy.”

“Where?”

“On one ninety-two through one ninety-nine. The numbers seem a bit…off.”

“Off how?” He could hear her frown.

“Well, they’re all blank. There are no numbers.”

“What the hell are…Where are you?”

“I’m over in my trailer. Are you—”

Jamie hung up. A moment later he heard the muffled crunch of gravel and a fist pounded on his door. He almost reached the door before she barged in. She was dressed in crimson sweatpants, despite the warm night, and wore a hooded MIT sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled down. “Why are your lights off?” She reached past him and flipped the switch. “I was thinking.”

“Think with the lights on, like a normal person. What do you mean, they’re wrong?”

“I didn’t say wrong. I said off. Aren’t you kind of warm in that?”

She ignored the question. “What reports are you talking about?”

“In the one-nineties. I saw them earlier. I was just charting all the data for the trials, and it stood out again, so I thought I’d—”

She glanced around the sparsely furnished trailer and focused on the tablet computer. “Where are those? Let me see it.”

“Those…”

“Your charts. Spreadsheets. Whatever you did. I need some context.”

“Oh,” said Mike. “Well, I just did it all in my head.”

Jamie’s brows relaxed, but her eyelids sank down. “In your head?”

“Yeah.”

“Are you fucking with me?”

“No.”

“You made charts for six hundred runs in your head?”

He shrugged.

She reached up and covered her eyes for a moment. “Wait.” Her hands dropped. “Three blank and then four blank? One in the middle?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s the timer experiments.”

“Okay.”

She shrugged. “We were testing a timed operation. It didn’t work.”

“Timed how?”

“On a timer. It was a dry run on automatic to see how stable the system was.”

“Dry run?”

She sighed. “We’d just open the Door. Nothing was going to go through.”

“Okay.”

“Anyway, whenever we tried to use the timer, we couldn’t get the Door to open.”

“Hardware or software issue?”

“Hardware.”

“What was it? Causing the problem.”

She shrugged. “We’d pulled the automatic tests forward. We had enough other work to do, so we just shelved the whole thing to deal with later. Never looked at it. Haven’t even thought about it in close to a year.”

“So it might be a software issue.”

“Noooo,” said the programmer, “it couldn’t.”

“But if no one looked at it—”

“You think I screwed up coding a timer?” Her chin went down.

“No, no, of course not,” said Mike. He took a half step back and bumped his new table. “But, no offense, if the Door worked the rest of the time, isn’t the timer program kind of the obvious place to start looking?”

Jamie glared at him. Then she turned and stalked out of his trailer. He waited for a moment and then followed. He stepped outside just in time to see her vanish into her own. She left the door hanging open.

A moment later she emerged holding a sheaf of papers. She slapped it against his chest, and one page flipped away and floated to the ground. “There,” she said. “Try to find a mistake.”

“I didn’t mean to—”

Jamie stalked back to her door. “Don’t call me after office hours again,” she growled over her shoulder as she stepped up into her trailer. “And if you want to play scientist while you’re here, at least write your goddamned work down to show people.”

Her door slammed behind her.

He heard a creak to his left and saw Neil peering out. Their eyes met. “Sorry,” said Mike.

The engineer nodded. “She’s going easy on you. It’s a good sign.” He waved. “G’night.”