The Fold: A Novel (11 page)

His door clicked shut and Mike stood alone on the plastic grass.

“So it was a dead end?” Reggie asked.

“Pretty much,” said Mike. He tossed his towel over a chair and pulled on his shirt. “She was right. It should’ve worked.”

“You sure?”

“It’s a fifteen-page program. A little overcomplicated, really, for what it does. I’d think with her experience she could’ve pared it down to four or five with no problem.”

“Yeah?”

Mike nodded. “It’s all C++. And it’s a simple program.”

“You understand C++?”

“I learned it last night. It’s just another language. I found the basics on a few websites, figured out the syntax, grammar, vocabulary.” He shrugged.

On the tablet screen, Reggie shook his head and smiled. “Well, I haven’t seen any complaints, so I guess you weren’t too rough on her. Still wish I’d seen it.”

“I thought I was kind of gentle, all things considered.”

“So what do you think?”

“About her?”

“About all of it.”

Mike buttoned up his shirt. “How much of this have your people gone over? The basic ideas behind the Albuquerque Door?”

“None of it,” said Reggie. “There’s nothing to go over until Arthur releases it.”

“But he and Olaf and the others…They’ve talked about it in meetings and phone calls, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Have you gone over the transcripts?”

“We’ve had people diagram the sentences, just to see if we could squeeze a little extra out of their word choice. Nothing.”

“Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

“They don’t want to tell us anything. They haven’t.”

“Yeah, but to be able to have numerous conversations and let absolutely nothing slip. Doesn’t that seem unusual to you?”

Reggie rubbed his chin. “Maybe.”

“If you and I were talking with someone, how long do you think we could hide the fact that we knew each other?”

“How smart’s the other person?”

“As smart as you.”

“Not too long. I’d pick up on something.”

“Right. But you’ve been talking to these people for years now and you haven’t picked up any details about what they’re doing. This project is everything, and they’ve never let a single thing slip that you’ve been able to catch.”

On the tablet screen, Reggie’s face grew still. “Are you going somewhere with this?”

“I’m no expert,” said Mike, “but it feels like they’re playing fast and loose with a lot of their terminology. That might be why you can’t get anything from them.”

“How so?”

“A lot of the terms they’re throwing around—dimensions, quantum states, realities—they use them like they’re interchangeable, but I don’t think they are, scientifically speaking.” He shrugged. “Again, not my field of expertise. That’s why I was wondering if any of your people had seen any connections. Or lack of connections, I guess.”

Reggie nodded. “I’ll have my people check again. Anything else seem odd?”

Mike rolled his neck. “I don’t know. Everyone feels a little…rehearsed.”

“How so?”

“It’s like a kid who hasn’t done his homework, and he’s spent the whole school day planning out what he’s going to say as an excuse.”

“Canned responses are pretty normal,” said Reggie. “I get that a lot.”

“It’s more than that, though,” said Mike. “I had a professor in college who taught a course on the Brontës. He was talking one day about
Villette
and—”

“
Villette
?”

“It’s a novel by Charlotte Brontë. I’m making another analogy. Be patient for a minute.”

“Charlotte Brontë,” muttered Reggie.

“One of the characters in the book spends all her time saying ‘I’m fine, I’m just fine, I’m really fine, I’m fine.’ And the professor pointed out that anyone who says they’re fine that many times is probably really not fine.”

“Okay.”

“Everyone out here keeps telling me they’re not hiding anything,” said Mike. “All of them. The only person who didn’t try to tell me they’re not hiding anything was Anne.”

“Anne?”

“The receptionist.”

“Ahhhhh,” said Reggie. “Okay.”

“I think Bob was going to tell me something the other night at dinner, but he closed up when we ran into Olaf.”

“Any idea what he was going to say?”

“He asked if Arthur had talked to you about him.”

“To me?”

“Yeah.”

“No more than anyone else. Did he give you any sort of context?”

“It probably ties to something they were talking about a few weeks ago.”

“They meaning Bob and Arthur or meaning the whole staff?”

Mike replayed the conversation in his head. “I’m not sure,” he admitted.

Reggie shook his head. “Could be anything, then. Did it match anything in the records?”

“Nothing I’ve seen, but I haven’t gone through the maintenance logs yet.”

“Let me know what you find.”

“Yeah, of course. Question.”

“Shoot.”

“Why’d you pick me for this?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why am I here instead of someone else?” asked Mike. “I’m not a physicist or a rocket scientist.”

“Says the man who taught himself C++ in a few hours.”

“You’ve got at least eleven people on your staff who are security-cleared and fully qualified to be here. Why me and not one of them?”

Reggie’s face shifted. He leaned back in his chair. “Where’d you get that number from?”

“The reports you gave me have already been approved on your end. They’ve all been signed and half of them have e-mail addresses tagged onto them. Eleven distinct people. They wouldn’t get the reports if they didn’t have clearance and they wouldn’t be reviewing them if they didn’t have the background.”

“I thought we agreed you’d only use your powers for good?”

“You know the rules,” said Mike. “If you don’t want me to know something, don’t show it to me.”

“Fair enough.”

“So why me?”

Reggie stared at him through the monitor. “You alone there?”

“It’s six-thirty in the morning. Who else would be here?”

“I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt. Answer the damned question.”

“Yes, I’m alone.”

“You’re there because we couldn’t find anything.”

The ants scurried about with images of reports and memories of Reggie talking and arranged all of them in new patterns. “They’re not paranoid,” said Mike. “You
have
been trying to steal their tech.”

“I can’t
steal
it. I’m the one who paid for it. Besides, imagine if Arthur and Olaf died in a car crash or something? I would’ve been pouring hundreds of millions down a hole with nothing to show for it. Not to mention the greatest invention in human history—gone, just like that.”

“You wouldn’t get their work?”

Reggie shook his head. “Arthur’s contract is ironclad, legally. Nothing
about the Albuquerque Door can be released without his approval. That approval isn’t transferable or inheritable. An asteroid hits him tomorrow, the project is over.”

“How’d your people get into the computers? There’s no wireless in the main building.”

“They don’t have the wireless turned on,” corrected Reggie. “It doesn’t mean it’s not there if you know what you’re doing.”

“And you couldn’t find anything,” said Mike. It was a statement.

“Not a thing,” agreed Reggie. “No in-house files, no cloud backups, no e-mails, no Facebook posts. They’ve hidden everything. That’s high-level paranoia, even for government employees.”

“So I’m here to find a back door for you?”

Reggie shook his head. “You’re there to evaluate it, just like I said. And
if
you end up with three-quarters of the project in your head, and
if
something ever happened to Arthur and Olaf…then we might have another talk.”

“You’re going against the contract.”

Reggie bit down on a response and took a breath. “I’m not stealing anything,” he said, “and I don’t want you to steal anything. I’m not releasing anything to anyone, not even to my own staff. I’m bending the terms of the agreement, yes, but I need to know there’s a way to get at all this data in a worst-case scenario. That’s all. Even if you can just confirm he’s writing everything down somewhere and not doing it all in his head, that’d be fantastic.”

“Why is everyone against people doing stuff in their head?”

“Because you can’t share anything that way.”

“True,” said Mike. Neither of them spoke for a moment.

“Are we good?”

“Yeah. Sorry I doubted you.”

“I’m sorry I didn’t explain everything.”

“Well, I’m supposed to be the smart one.”

“True,” Reggie said.

“Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

“About?”

“About all of it. Anything else you’re keeping from me or forgot to mention or think you’re going to slip past me?”

Reggie smiled and settled back in his chair again. “I’ve known you too long to slip anything past you.”

“Not an answer.”

“No, there is nothing else I’m keeping from you. I want you to spend the month there and come back assuring me that I have nothing to worry about with the Albuquerque Door. Or its future.”

“Okay,” said Mike. “I don’t want to lie to anyone.”

“Your integrity’s safe,” Reggie said. “Or as safe as it can be for any government employee.”

“Good morning,” Arthur said, looking up from his desk. “I was about to call you.”

“Sorry,” Mike said. “Talking with Reggie. Mr. Magnus.”

“All good things, I hope.”

“Some good, some bad.”

Arthur waited a moment, and when Mike didn’t continue, he nodded. “We’re going to be up and running in about half an hour. Bob’s already over at Site B.”

“He’s coming through the other way?”

“There’s no difference. None we’ve ever been able to detect, anyway. It’s the same doorway either direction. We just change it up so we have records of all possibilities.”

“Ahhh.”

“I need to check in with Jamie in the control room and then we can head out onto the main floor.” Arthur locked the office door behind them and they headed down the hall toward the stairs.

“I’ve got a few questions,” said Mike, “if you don’t mind.”

“Go ahead.”

“You told the board the Albuquerque Door has never failed.”

“It hasn’t.”

“But what about—”

“You want to know about the one-nineties? Jamie mentioned you’d talked last night.”

Mike nodded. “It reads like seven failures to me.”

Arthur shook his head. “It didn’t fail. We couldn’t even get the system to activate.”

“Again, that sounds kind of like failure.”

“For the Door, failure is a collapse of the magnetic field or a technical glitch. You can’t lose a race if your horse was never on the track.”

“You can if it was supposed to be out there,” Mike said.

“Now you’re arguing semantics.”

“Pot, meet kettle.”

Arthur chuckled. “Point taken.” He swiped his keycard and the control room door buzzed open.

Jamie glanced over her shoulder at them, then turned back to her monitors. “I’m defragging some of Johnny’s drives,” she said. “We should be ready to go on schedule.”

“Excellent.” He handed her a flash drive. “The changes we talked about.”

“I’ll get them in as soon as I can.”

Mike looked down at the main floor. Olaf and Neil were discussing something in front of the mouth. The godmike wasn’t on, so he couldn’t hear them. Olaf threw back his head to growl at the ceiling and saw Mike watching. He muttered something to Neil, who looked up over his shoulder at the control booth. They split up. Olaf went to his station, Neil headed across the room to check the oversized resistors.

He turned back just as Jamie held up a finger for silence. “This is Jamie Parker, it’s June twenty-fifth, two thousand fifteen, and this is trial run one hundred sixty-nine. Traveler is Bob Hitchcock, which I’m sure comes as a complete surprise to everyone listening to these.” She tapped her keyboard.

“Are you good?” asked Arthur.

“Yeah,” she said, “I’ve got everything up here.”

He glanced at Mike and gestured at the door. “Shall we?”

“I’ll catch up with you,” said Mike. “I’ve got another question or two for Jamie.”

She glanced at him and sighed.

Arthur’s shoulders hunched a bit. Then he nodded and turned. The door thumped shut behind him.

She turned back to her screens. “What do you want now?”

He bit his lip. “Do you do all the hardware work on the computers here?”

“I work on Johnny, sometimes on the system up here. Sasha or Bob help sometimes, depending.”

“What about the office computers?”

She turned to him. “D’you have another problem with something?”

Mike took a slow breath. The ants scurried out with a collection of images and sounds. The student code of conduct. Lecturing his school’s quarterback about plagiarism. Slipping Reggie the answers for a pop science quiz junior year. Teachers in the staff room talking in an uninformed way about surveillance and phone lines.

“I think,” he said, “you should disable the Wi-Fi on all the computers here.”

“It’s already turned off.”

“Disable it,” he said. “Unplug the hardware. Physically remove it.”

Jamie studied his face. “Why?”

He pressed his lips together. They looked at each other for a moment. “You were right, by the way,” he added. “Your timer wasn’t the problem. It was fine.”

She furrowed her brows. “Thanks?”

He headed back out into the hall.

Arthur was waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. “That didn’t take long.”

“I didn’t have much to ask her.”

They headed out onto the main floor. The twin rings loomed in front of them. The large flatscreen was on, and showed Sasha and Bob over at Site B. It struck Mike that he still hadn’t gone over to examine the other space.

“Defrag’s done,”
boomed Jamie’s voice from a speaker.
“We’ll be up and ready to go in about five minutes.”

“Excellent,” said Arthur.

“Hey, Mike,” said Bob from the flatscreen. “This is your first time seeing the Door work up close, right?”

“Yep.”

“Arthur,” said the redhead, “can we do a physics test?”

“I think so.” He glanced at Olaf.

Olaf grunted and pitched it high enough to sound affirmative.

Mike looked from the screen to Arthur. “Physics test? I saw that on a few dozen reports.”

Arthur walked over to the other desk and tugged open the bottom drawer. He removed something and tossed it at Mike, who caught it one-handed. It was a baseball. Not a high-end one. It was dirty, but not scuffed. Dropped, but never hit with a bat.

“We are up and running
,” Jamie said.
“Ready in four.”

“It was Bob’s idea,” said Arthur. “One of those faster-cheaper-better things the government’s so fond of.”

Mike nodded. “Reggie mentioned this. Mass, acceleration, momentum, angle of descent. Tons of math in every throw and it’s apparent if any of it changes in midair.”

“Exactly.”

“Gauss field is steady,” Olaf told his microphone. “Power is good.”

“That ball’s gone through the Door more than anything or anyone else,” said Arthur. “Throw it back and forth with Bob a few times.”

“Yeah, c’mon, Dad,” Bob said from the flatscreen. “Let’s have us a catch before you go to work.”

Mike smiled. “So,” he asked, “whatever happened to all the test animals?”

Arthur blinked and Olaf looked up from his console. On the flatscreen, Bob’s smile cracked and he glanced back at Sasha. “What?”

“All the animals that went through the Door. Two hundred and sixteen rats, six cats, and a chimpanzee, yes?”

“Something like that,” said Arthur. “Why do you ask?”

“Just curious.”

They all looked at Mike.

“A third of the rats were dissected to check for any structural or anatomical issues,” Arthur said. “A third of the others were kept under observation for three months each before dissection. The remainder were allowed to live out their lives. None of them ever showed any signs of damage, even on a cellular level.”

“Who did the observations?”

“Graduate students at San Diego State. Double-blind observations. They knew nothing about the Albuquerque Door.”

“Statistically,” said Olaf, “the Door rats had lower cancer rates than the control group.”

“Not notably,” said Arthur. “It could’ve been a fluke. The cats went to a shelter after six months of observation.”

“I found homes for three of them,” Bob said. “People I knew, so we could check on them, if we ever needed to.”

“Ready in three.”

Mike glanced up at the booth. “Is Glitch one of them?”

“No.”
Olaf, Neil, and Bob all answered, but the speakers let Jamie’s voice dominate. They glanced at one another.

The hoses from the tanks hissed and frosted over. The temperature in the big room dropped by a few degrees. Mike wasn’t sure it was from the liquid nitrogen.

“And the chimpanzee?” he asked.

“Six months of observation,” said Olaf. “And then Magnus had him sent to a farm up north.”

Mike blinked.

“No, really,” said Neil, leaning back in his chair. “There’s a big wildlife farm for retired movie animals and some test animals up by Los Angeles. I’ve gone up to see Caesar twice.”

“Caesar?”

On the flatscreen, Bob smiled. “What else do you name a chimpanzee who changes the world?”

Olaf sent a stare at Mike. The temperature went down a few more degrees. “If that’s all, we’re trying to run an experiment.”

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to distract you.”

“Ready in two.”

“No worries,” said Sasha from the screen. “Everyone gets a little nervous first time they’re near it.”

Bob waved at Mike. “You still want to throw the baseball?”

“Yep.”

“They don’t talk about this part,” said Bob, “but I think there’s something very soothing about tossing a ball back and forth. I call it the Hitchcock Effect. I think it helps the brain cope with the idea of a fold in space, on a psychological level. That’s my opinion, anyway.”

“You’re not a psychologist,” said Olaf. “Your opinion’s worthless.”

“Olaf’s jealous because the effect won’t be named after him,” Bob said.

“Bob,” Olaf said without looking at the flatscreen, “how long has it been since I asked you to shut up?”

“A few hours, at least.”

“That explains why it’s worn off.”

Mike tossed the ball from hand to hand and took a few steps toward the mouth. The air around the rings seemed to waver and twist. Even though the room was cool, it still looked like heat haze. The rear wall blurred. It was still clear at the center of the rings, but the ripples were spreading inward.

“We’ve got a solution,”
boomed Jamie.
“Ready in one.”

“Mike,” called Neil, “watch the line.”

He glanced down at the white lines. “Am I safe here?”

“You can be standing up on the pathway when it opens, if you like. Just don’t cross the line.”

The circle of still air inside the ring shrunk more and more. Mike estimated it was two feet across at the most. Then eighteen inches. Then less than a foot. The faint hiss of carbonation began to grow. He couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

“Power is good,” said Olaf. “Flux density is at full. Opening the Door.” He tapped three buttons and the rings sparked and shimmered.

One moment the heat-haze view through the mouth was the back wall of the main floor, about twenty feet past the second ring. It was cinder blocks with at least two coats of white paint. He could see a few conduits running high along the wall and a fire extinguisher hanging on a square hook.

Then, like a television switching channels, a third ring appeared and Bob stood ten feet away, grinning. The pathway stretched back beneath his feet to another ramp. The wall behind him was almost fifty feet away, and now it was sky blue. Equipment and desks filled the space between them. Sasha sat at one of them, checking her own instruments.

“Field has cohesion,”
said Jamie. “
The Door is open.”

Bob waved to them from Site B. “Hey.”

Mike glanced down at the white lines, then leaned to the left.

“Careful,” said Neil.

“I see them.” Just past the rings Mike could see the rear wall of the
building, right where it was supposed to be. He looked the other way, through the metal and ceramic rings, and saw the wall of Site B twice as distant. “It’s amazing.”

“Yes it is,” said Arthur.

“Hey, rookie,” Bob said, smiling. He held up his hands and flexed his fingers. “This is the big leagues now. Show me what you got.”

Mike looked at the ball in his hand. “Just toss it?”

“Yep.”

He lobbed it through the rings. His eyes followed it through the air, watching for a waver to show him when it went through the Door. He couldn’t see anything.

Bob caught the ball with both hands. “Not bad,” he said. “Try this one.” He lifted the baseball for an overhand throw.

Mike studied its path through the air again. He waited for a glitch, for the arc to shift, for something to happen. Nothing did. The ball bounced off his fingertips and rolled across the floor.

Arthur and Bob chuckled. Olaf smirked. Neil scooped up the baseball and tossed it back to Mike.

“Don’t overthink it,” said Bob. “It’s just throwing a ball.”

Mike sent the ball through the rings again. Bob plucked it out of the air and threw it straight back. Mike caught it. It was just like catching a ball tossed across the room. A ball tossed a dozen feet at most. He lobbed it through again, and it slapped against Bob’s palm.

“Now you’re thinking with portals,” Bob said with a grin. “For the record, this ball’s going sixteen hundred feet every time we toss it. That’s about fifteen miles a minute, so you’re pitching a nine-hundred-mile-per-hour fastball.”

“What’s the world record?” asked Mike. He tried an underhand pitch and watched Bob catch it. Still nothing.

“Depends on how they measure it,” said Neil. “Nolan Ryan hit a hundred and eight back in the seventies, but most people say Chapman’s hundred and five is more accurate, so he’s got the current record.”

“Only until we go public,” said Bob. He tossed the baseball back to Mike.

“
We
have thirty-five seconds left
,” Jamie said from the booth.

“Copy that,” said Bob. He gestured to Mike and cupped his hands to catch the last throw. He raised his head as the ball smacked into his
hand. “For the record, this is now my eighty-fourth time through the Door. That means half of all the crosswalks made by human beings have been made by me, if you round up. I am guaranteed a place in every history book on Earth.”

“Are you coming through?” said Olaf. “If not, I’d like to close the Door so I don’t have to listen to you.”

“That’s your jealousy talking again,” said Bob as Mike glanced back at Olaf. “It really—”

Olaf’s face shifted. Neil screamed. So did Sasha. And Arthur. Mike spun back to the rings, bumped into the other man on the walkway, and stepped back in surprise. He didn’t compensate for the ramp and his foot found empty air. He fell back on his ass and slid to the floor, and the figure on the walkway stepped forward to loom over him.