The Fold: A Novel (19 page)

“Okay,” Jamie said. “I might regret this, but can I ask you a question about her?”

Mike looked away from his terminal. “Her?”

“The other me?”

They were watching the Door again. Olaf was at Site B. Sasha was with them, checking the cables and hoses for the ninth time, to make sure something hadn’t been left connected.

“You can ask,” said Mike, “but I don’t know if I can answer.”

“I might be able to,” Sasha said.

“Why would she name the cat after a doctor?”

“What?” Mike yawned. They were all working on five hours of sleep. He hadn’t been too surprised when Jamie spent it alone in her trailer.

“Spock,” she said. “Why would a kid name their cat Spock?”

“I thought it was the
Star Trek
character,” said Mike, “not the doctor.”

“Pretty sure it was,” said Sasha. “You…she was a fan of the original series.”

Jamie looked at Sasha, then over to Mike, and back. “What’s
Star Trek
?”

There was silence on the main floor.

“You are fucking kidding me,” said Sasha.

“What?”

“ ‘Space, the final frontier…’ ” said Mike. “Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, the
Enterprise.
”

Jamie shook her head.

“Okay,” he said, “where’d you come up with Isis?”

“
Assignment: Earth
,” she said. “I loved it when I was little. I named him after the cat on the show.”

“
Assignment: Earth
?”

“Yeah, you know. The old sci-fi show. Gary Seven. Isis.” She tilted her head to the left. “ ‘Our mission is to guide mankind into the twenty-first century….’ ”

It was Mike’s turn to shake his head.

She stared at him. “Robert Lansing, Teri Garr, Julie Newmar. It ran for six or seven years. They made movies out of it. And a spin-off series.”

“Wait.” Sasha furrowed her brow. “You’re talking about the old
Star Trek
episode, ‘Assignment: Earth’?”

“Yes!” Jamie snapped her fingers. “That’s right. I always forget it was a spin-off.”

“But you’ve never heard of
Star Trek
?”

“No, no, no,” she said. “I remember it now. It was that spaceship show Roddenberry did for two seasons before
Assignment: Earth
replaced it.”

“So no Captain Picard?” asked Sasha. “
Deep Space Nine
?
Wrath of Khan
?”

Jamie straightened up. “
The Wrath of Khan,
yeah, of course.”

Sasha put her fists on her hips. “How do you have
Wrath of Khan
but not
Star Trek
?”

“It was the second
Assignment: Earth
movie, when they tried to stop the Eugenic Wars. Ricardo Montalban came back and played the same character from that
Star Trek
show. They had to dye his hair black so it’d match the old episodes.”

Another moment of silence spread itself thin across the main floor.

“The universe you come from sucks,” said Sasha. “I’m going up to the booth to check the main readings again.”

Jamie settled back in her chair and sighed. She flipped a quarter off her thumb, caught it, and worked it back to her thumb again. It spun into the air two more times, and she blew air out of her nose.

Mike glanced at her. “Problem?”

“Well, yeah. Apparently I’m stuck in an alternate universe where there’s no
Assignment: Earth
.”

“That’s all?”

She looked at him. “What are we doing?”

He tilted his head. “Us?”

“It’s not on!” she said, waving a hand at the rings. “The power’s not on, the coils are cold, there’s no magnetic flux past the standard residual. We can’t shut the Door down when everything already says it’s shut off.”

Mike shrugged. “And yet…”

“It’s open,” she agreed. “We didn’t know why it opened at all, and now we’re trying to figure out why it’s staying open, even though we’ve got no idea what made it happen.” She waved a hand at the screen.

He studied her face. “And…?”

“And the only damn thing I can think of is that I’m not smart enough to figure this out, but she’d probably know the answer already.”

“She?”

Jamie smacked the quarter out of the air with two fingers, and it clattered onto her workstation. “The one who had a cat named Spock. The one who’s supposed to be here. The…the real one.”

He shrugged. “You’re not that different.”

“You’re not really good at this whole comforting thing, are you? You’re just supposed to hug me, maybe squeeze my butt, and—”

“Not different in the important ways,” said Mike. “The Jamie I met, the one who was here before you, she could be a little bitter. I think she thought that motorcycle crash was the defining moment in her life, that it was why she ended up working with computers rather than doing, I don’t know, something else. I think she regretted it sometimes. Like she’d been forced down a path instead of having a choice.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But you didn’t have the crash. And you still went into computers. You still decided using your mind was the best way to go in life. Because that’s who you are.”

She swept up the quarter and flipped it into the air again. “I take it back,” she said. “You’re better at this than I thought.”

“I have moments.”

“You do.”

“If it’s any consolation, I think you may be a bit smarter than her. You seem to get your mind around things a lot faster.”

“My ‘mind.’ How polite of you.” She took the quarter between two
fingers and flung it at him. It whizzed through the air, hit him in the arm, and chimed to the floor.

“Okay,” he said, “I deserved that.” He bent down, scooped the coin off the floor, and pushed it into his pants pocket.

“Hey,” she said. “Quarter. Mine. Give it.”

“You gave it to me.”

“I threw it at you.”

“Same thing,” he said.

“Not quite.”

“This is not the way to get your butt squeezed.”

“If I have to pay you to squeeze my butt we’re both doing something wrong.”

He slid the coin free and tossed it to her. She caught it one-handed, switched it to her thumb, launched it back into the air, and caught it again. “Is Mike sleeping alone tonight?” she asked the quarter. She glanced at him. “Call it.”

“There’s more to this than a coin toss, right?”

“I don’t know. We’ll see what the coin says.”

“In that case, tails.”

“An ass man. Good to know. Don’t get your hopes up.” She flicked the quarter into the air, snatched it as it dropped, and slapped it onto the back of her hand. “Tails?”

“Still, yes.”

“Are you using super-memory powers?”

“Yeah, they let me predict it before you tossed the coin.”

“Wiseass.” She looked at the coin. “And a thief. Give me my quarter back.”

“What?”

“You’re sleeping alone.” She held up the quarter. “Fake.”

He peered at it. “It is?”

“New Amsterdam?”

Mike frowned and held out his hand. She reached out and pressed the coin into his palm, letting her fingers glide back along his.

The quarter showed the familiar outline of New York and the Statue of Liberty. The curving text was identical to all the other state quarters he’d seen, except this said
NEW AMSTERDAM
.

“Where’d you get this?”

She smiled. “You just pulled it out of your pocket, Mister Photographic Memory.”

“Is this one of the quarters we threw through the Door?”

Jamie shook her head. “It’s just pocket change. I’ve been carrying it around for a couple days now.”

“Did it come through the Door with you when you crosswalked?”

Her brow furrowed. “I don’t think so. Pretty sure I got it over at 7-Eleven yesterday morning.”

He reran the past few minutes in his mind. The coin had been facedown on the floor when he’d picked it up. It had said
NEW YORK
then.

When he pulled it out to toss it to Jamie it had been in his peripheral vision. His fingers blocked some of the surface, and the diffuse light of the main floor made it hard to pick out details. But he could see enough.
NEW YO
was visible for almost a tenth of a second. The ants moved forward with a dozen slices of time until he caught a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty as the coin spun toward Jamie.

“This isn’t the coin I threw you,” he said.

“Yes it is.”

“No,” he shook his head, “it isn’t. I gave you a New York quarter.”

“That’s the coin you gave me.”

Mike frowned. He set the quarter down on the workstation. Tails up, so
NEW AMSTERDAM
was visible.

He looked up at the rings. The red lights were still out of sync. His eyes drifted down to the white lines painted around the platform. Olaf hadn’t been able to draw a new safe zone because there was no magnetic field to measure.

Jamie held her hands out, palms up. “I couldn’t’ve switched it. It was in plain sight the whole time.”

“I don’t think you did,” he said. He slid the coin back into his hand and stood up. “I think we need to get off the main floor.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“Because I’m nervous, and I think we need to get away from the rings right now.” He moved away from his workstation and tugged her out of her chair.

Her eyes went from the rings to the line and ended on his fingers wrapped around the quarter. “Oh, shit.”

“Yeah.”

Inside the rings, Site B flickered. Then the room beyond the Door went dim. Red light continued to pulse out from the other side of the rings.

They reached the big door. He pulled it open and pushed it shut behind them. “Is there a way to disable the card reader?”

“I don’t know.”

“Wait here. Don’t let anyone go in.”

Mike ran to the front desk. “Hey,” said Anne. Her hair was pulled back in a flawless braid today. “What can I do for—”

“We need to make a sign. Right now.”

Her mouth twitched. “I can make something up in Office and—”

“No. Right now.”

Her eyes brightened a bit. She tugged open two drawers. A collection of Sharpies came out of one, a cardboard envelope for Priority Mail came out of another.

“Tape?”

Anne reached back into the second drawer and came out with a heavy roll of packing tape on a red spindle.

Mike tore one of the envelopes open along its seams. He flattened it out on the desk, blank side up, and wrote
DANGER
with one of the markers. He underlined it three times and then added
DO NOT ENTER
. “Thank you.”

“No problem.”

He scooped up the sign and the tape and jogged back down the hall to Jamie. He covered the card reader with the sign and held it in place while she taped. She leaned back, took in a breath, and shouted “Arthur!”

He appeared out of the cross hallway as she finished taping. “What—” He paused to wheeze out a breath and suck in more air.

“Problems,” said Mike.

“It’s growing,” Jamie said.

“We need to seal off the other building,” said Mike.

“What do you mean? How are the rings growing?”

“Not the rings,” said Jamie. “The Door.”

“The Door,” said Arthur, “is inside the rings.”

“Not anymore,” she said. She stuck her hand through the packing tape and wore the roll like a bracelet.

Arthur shook his head. “That’s not possible. It has to be contained within the rings.”

“Why?”

“The field’s generated within the rings, so it can only…Ahhh.” Arthur bit down on his tongue.

“Yeah,” said Mike. “We need to find Olaf and Neil. We need to make sure all the doors onto the main floor and Site B are locked solid.”

“I think Olaf’s already over at Site B,” said Arthur. “He was going to check readings there.”

Jamie glanced at the stairs. “What about the control room?”

“I don’t know. It’s probably safe.” He looked at the big door. “If the field’s reaching the control room, it’s reaching out here into the hall.”

“How do we know it isn’t?”

Mike glanced at her. “For now we just have to hope.”

Arthur spread the blueprints across the conference room table.

Mike sifted through them. “This is for both sets of rings?”

“The two sets are identical,” said Sasha. “We used the same blueprints for each one.”

“Are they?” asked Mike. “No other little secrets or hidden changes?”

Arthur shook his head. “We might not know why the Door works on a scientific level,” he said, “but the engineering behind it is honest.”

He nodded. “Did Site B get locked up?”

“I thought Olaf did it,” said Neil. “He was over there, too.”

Olaf shook his head. “I didn’t.”

“Are we sure it’s dangerous?” asked Sasha. “I mean, swapping quarters, that’s more of a party trick, right?”

Mike looked at her. “You want to end up wherever radioactive Bob came from?”

“No.”

“Then it’s kind of dangerous.”

“How can it be growing bigger?” said Jamie. “I mean, it took me two days to wrap my head around the rings working without any power.”

“It can’t,” said Neil. “That’s the whole point of the rings. They focus the fields.”

“But the rings aren’t doing anything as it is,” said Jamie.

“Hang on,” said Mike. “Safety first, yes?”

“Yes,” said Arthur after a moment. “Of course.”

“Who wants to go make sure Site B’s locked up?”

“I’ll go,” said Sasha.

“No,” Neil said, “I’ll do it.”

“You should be part of this discussion,” Arthur said.

Neil shrugged. “Anything I know Sasha knows. Besides, I could use the fresh air.”

“Are you okay?”

“No. Not sick. Just…” He looked at the blueprints. “This is all making my head spin a bit. The fresh air will be good for me.”

“Okay, then.”

“I’ll take one of the bikes. I’ll be back in ten minutes, tops.” He stepped out into the hall. A moment later the sounds in the hallway shifted as the front door opened and drifted closed.

Mike closed his eyes. The large blueprints called the ants out like a picnic. They added the new design specs to the model of the rings he’d built in his mind, filling in final details and labels. “Let’s forget how,” he said. “For the moment I think we can all agree
how
is beyond us, yes?”

“We can figure it out,” said Arthur. “Nothing’s unknowable.”

“Except all those things men weren’t meant to know,” said Jamie.

Arthur glared at her. Mike held up his palm. “Forget how.
Why
is it growing bigger?”

“What’s the difference?” said Sasha. “We don’t know either.”

“How might be beyond us, but we should be able to come up with a why. Something’s changed. There’s a new variable that’s causing all this.”

“Weak logic,” said Olaf. “Whatever caused the Door to stay open this long could also be what’s causing the expansion.”

“They’re two different things, though,” said Jamie.

Olaf shook his head. “They appear different because they seem to be two separate effects, and we don’t know what’s causing either. It’s just as likely this is the same effect, building in force or intensity.”

Mike looked up and took in the room. The five of them were standing around the table. Him, Jamie, and Olaf on one side, Arthur and Sasha on the other. A chair lurked by each of them, plus the ones on either end. An image blossomed in his mind, his first time in the conference room, the Albuquerque Door team filling every chair except the one at the far end. The one beneath the clock with its ticking second hand.

There was only one spare chair.

Arthur had omitted Koturovic from his book because of the early scientist’s bizarre theories.

“How much time did Ben Miles spend here?” he asked.

Arthur and Olaf traded a look. “Four days,” said Arthur.

“But how much of it was
here
? Was he staying in one of the trailers?”

Sasha shook her head. “He had a room at a hotel down in Mission Valley. The Sheraton, I think.”

“So he wasn’t here a lot of the time?”

Olaf shook his head. “It was more like two days here, with a travel day on either end. On the first day he stopped by for about an hour, just to meet everyone.”

“The other days he spent maybe eight or nine hours on site,” said Jamie. She looked at Arthur. “I don’t think he actually came here on the last day.”

Arthur shook his head. “He and I had breakfast together at his hotel and talked a bit. He had a morning flight out of Lindbergh.”

“The guys at the gate would probably have his exact in and out times,” Sasha said, “if that’s important.”

The ants took note but he waved it away. “Who watched the timer tests?”

Arthur looked up from the blueprints. “Timer tests?”

“When you tried to run the Door on automatic,” Mike said, “was anyone watching?”

Arthur, Jamie, and Sasha passed a confused look back and forth among themselves.

“Simple question,” said Mike. “Was anyone on the main floor or Site B when you ran the tests?”

“No,” said Sasha. “We just watched the video logs the next morning.”

“We ran them at night so we could get more work done,” said Olaf. “The whole point was that it was an automatic test.”

“And you never found out why it didn’t work.” It wasn’t a question. He stared at the blueprints.

“To be fair,” Jamie said, “we didn’t try that hard.”

“I looked at your code for the timer,” Mike said. “There was nothing wrong with it.”

“Thanks.”

“It didn’t work,” said Arthur, “because of how it interacted with something else.”

Mike shook his head. “It wasn’t the timer. It was the Door itself. It was missing one key element.”

Sasha frowned and looked at the blueprints. “What?”

“People. The Albuquerque Door only works when there are people around it.”

“Again, weak logic,” Arthur said. “That’s like saying the refrigerator only works in the kitchen because you’ve never seen it work in my office.”

“Except we all know the refrigerator would work in your office,” said Mike, “and you can’t get the Door to open if there’s no one around.”

Sasha put her fists against her hips. “Are you trying to say it
knows
when there are people around it?”

“No,” said Mike, “no more than a flashlight knows it has batteries in it. But it still won’t work if they’re not there. It’s not a consciousness thing, it’s just mechanics. A boat doesn’t know it’s in the water, but it only works there, not on land.”

“That’s kind of a big leap,” said Jamie.

He looked at Sasha, then Arthur. “You said Aleksander Koturovic had a hypothesis about gestalt minds. That’s why you didn’t use him in your book, because his ideas sounded too crazy.”

“Not exactly a gestalt,” said Olaf. “More of a mental energy-critical mass issue. It was nonsense.”

“Did it relate to the equations you used for the Door?”

Olaf stared down at the blueprints. Another look passed between Jamie and Sasha. “Yes,” Arthur said. “All of his work was based around the same ideas.”

“So you got the Door working by programming it with equations that somehow involve levels of mental energy, and when there’s no one present, the Door won’t work.” He looked at each of them. “Does that still sound like much of a leap?”

Arthur’s eyes fell to the blueprint.

Mike waved his hands around the room. “There’s only one spare chair,” he said. “It’s just for visitors, right? You’ve been so secretive, you’d never have any sort of temps or extra personnel. Except for an
odd day now and then, like with Ben Miles, there’s never been more than the six of you around the Door for any length of time.”

“No, not until Magnus sent you,” Arthur said.

“It was me,” said Mike. “I was here long enough and helped the Door hit critical mass, or some level of it. Now there were seven people here all the time.” He glanced toward the front of the building. “Maybe eight if Anne’s desk was close enough to count.”

Olaf shook his head. “It’s nonsense,” he said again. “There’s no such thing as ‘mental energy.’ The brain gives off weak electrochemical signals that barely reach a few inches.”

“But you can build voltage by connecting weak sources in series,” said Sasha. “That’s basic electronics.”

“This is a bunch of unconnected guesses based off the ravings of a Victorian madman.”

“A madman who you proved right,” said Mike. He tapped the Door blueprints. “At least partly. We know there’s something to his ideas about other dimensions. And it would explain why you lost control of the Door after I arrived.”

A loud honk came from outside the conference room. It rose and faded, then rose again. If it had been from the other direction, Mike would’ve assumed it was passing cars blaring their horns out on the street.

Arthur’s brow wrinkled up. Then his eyes went wide. His eyes flitted from Jamie to Sasha.

“What?” asked Mike.

Arthur strode out into the hall, with Olaf a few feet behind him. Sasha followed, pushing past Mike. Jamie grabbed him by the arm and dragged him along.