The Fold: A Novel (16 page)

“Well,” said Arthur. “This is quite interesting.”

He crouched at the top of the ramp in Site B and looked through the three rings at Mike and Olaf. He’d insisted on checking all the readings himself, in the control room and at each Door. Neil sat at one of the stations behind him. The one with Jamie’s sweatshirt on it.

On the floor by Neil were the ends of the power cables. He’d disconnected all five in each building and dragged the ends away. The bulky connectors looked like soup cans with spikes sticking out of the center. The Door hadn’t even flickered.

“You never thought something like this could happen?” asked Mike.

Arthur traded a quick look with Olaf. “Never.”

Mike closed his eyes and sighed.

“Sorry,” said Arthur. “It’s just force of habit. Anything that touches on our core research.”

“I think it’s time to forget about keeping secrets.”

“I’m not sure I agree.”

“In the past week, you’ve had one person die, one person risk her life, and I think it’s safe to say you’ve now messed with the structure of reality,” said Mike. “No more secrets.”

“Don’t be melodramatic,” Arthur said. “It doesn’t suit you.”

“He does have a point,” said Olaf. “Maybe it’s time we come—”

Arthur glared at him and raised a finger. “No.”

Mike looked between them. “Come…clean? About what?”

“A poor choice of words on Olaf’s part, I’m sure,” Arthur said.

Olaf pressed his lips together and nodded. He turned and walked back to his station.

Mike looked through the rings at Arthur. “So how do you want to do this? Olaf suggested going all the way back to basics, but I thought we should wait until we had more news about Ja—”

Arthur reached out and plucked the quarter from the walkway.

“Jesus,” said Mike.

“Is there a problem?” asked Arthur.

“Seriously, do you have any concept of safety at all?”

“It’s just a quarter.” He straightened up and held the coin between his finger and thumb. George Washington’s profile gleamed in the light. It was one of the old ones, before they were state themed.

“Which could be radioactive, for all you know.”

“Unlikely.”

“Not according to Bob’s autopsy.”

Arthur gave Mike a look.
The
Look. Mike used it as a teacher, but Arthur wielded it at professor-strength levels. He tossed the coin in his hand. “No burns,” he said. “No heat at all. It’s a bit cool, in fact.”

“We should still examine it.”

“We will.” Arthur glanced up. “How many other coins did you toss, Sasha?”

Her voice thundered down from the control room.
“I think there’s three or four more. Two dimes, a nickel, two or three pennies. Plus Mike threw one, too.
”

“Another quarter,” said Mike, rubbing his temple. “It should be against the far wall.”

“We’ll collect them all and check them for…well, everything. Olaf,” he called out, “we still have a Geiger counter somewhere, don’t we?”

“I think so.”

“I’ve got it,” Neil said. He pointed at the rings. “It’s in the supply closet back on the main floor. We were using it to check for leaks in the shielding after Bob’s…after the incident.”

Arthur nodded.

Mike looked around the platform. “Maybe we should establish a safe distance from the rings.”

“We’ve done that,” said Arthur. He closed his hand around the quarter and gestured at the white lines.

“Maybe we should establish a
new
safe distance,” Mike said, “while we figure out how this is happening.”

Arthur’s eyes flitted from the lines up to the rings and back. “You may be right,” he said.

“Thank you.” Mike turned to look at Olaf. “Do you think you could map a new safe zone?”

Olaf nodded without looking up from his station. “I’ll figure something out.”

Arthur traced the rings with his eyes. “Fantastic.”

Mike looked at him. “Sorry?”

Their eyes met across ten feet and half a mile. “Don’t misunderstand me,” said Arthur. “This is a crisis, and we need to understand what happened. And how. But at the same time…it is a fantastic sight. A stable gateway across space-time.”

“We don’t know that it’s stable.”

“We don’t know that it isn’t. Our power limitations meant we were able to keep the Door open for ninety-three seconds. This has been open for over two hours now.”

Mike took a breath and counted to three.

Arthur looked down at the white line again. “I wonder how safe it would be to examine the components. It’d be interesting to see if they’re still active, despite what the instruments say.”

Over Arthur’s shoulder, Mike saw Neil’s eyebrows go up. “We’d need to do a lot of tests before I’d be willing to risk that,” said the engineer.

“
Same here
,” said Sasha.

Arthur glanced back and up. “When did you become timid?”

Neil shook his head. “Since this all started going wrong.”

“What’s gone wrong?”

“Bob,” said Mike.

“That was a freak accident,” Arthur said. “I think we’ve proven that at this point.”

“Arthur, this isn’t right,” said Neil. “Even if you ignore what happened to Bob, there’s no way this should be happening. It
can’t
be happening.”

“It’s a new science,” said Arthur.

“Yes,” Olaf stated, “it is. And we shouldn’t assume we understand it.”

A few moments of silence stretched out. Arthur’s phone beeped. “It’s
Jamie,” he said, skimming the text. “Her first round of tests all came back with no problems. Physical, X-rays, CT scan. She looks fine. They should have basic blood work in the morning.”

“Good,” Mike said.

“Olaf,” said Arthur, “if you could join me in my office, we’ll start working on a testing routine. We can go over the originals, and between us I’m sure we can come up with an accelerated schedule.”

He waited to see if anyone else had a comment, then continued.

“For now, we should keep it under direct observation, even when we’re not testing it. We can work in, say, six-hour shifts. Mike, if you’re still willing to pitch in that would help.”

Mike nodded. “Of course. Someone on each side?”

“While the Door’s open, it’s effectively one room. We can probably make do with just one side. And Sasha?”

“Yes?
”

“You’re closest to a hard line. See if Anne can order us a late lunch. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I haven’t eaten in about seven or eight hours at this point.”

Neil’s shoulders relaxed in the background. “Probably dinner, too. It’ll be a long night.”

Arthur turned his back to Mike and walked down the ramp, away from the rings.

The morning pastries were still sealed in their box. Neil used his finger to break the tape and freed his banana-nut muffin. Mike glanced at the box. “Is it too soon for me to take Bob’s donut?”

“Probably,” said Neil, “but it’s not here anyway. I think Anne might’ve canceled it. She’s good about stuff like that.”

Mike bit back a sigh and nodded. “I thought Arthur didn’t have you on watch duty until tonight.”

“He doesn’t, but I still need to do my job. You taking a shift?”

“He paired me up with Jamie. Half because I don’t know enough about the project to be left alone, half so she can assure me she’s fine.”

“You don’t want the jelly donut?”

“Not really, no.”

“What about this chocolate thing?”

“What?”

Neil pulled on the back flap and tilted the box up.

Mike took two steps to the box and eyed the mixture of dark chocolate and flaky pastry. “I love chocolate croissants,” he said. “Does it belong to someone?”

“New to me,” said Neil. “I think it’s yours. I’ll back you up if anyone complains.” He sliced the top off his muffin and scooped up a blob of butter with the knife.

Anne walked in and headed for the coffee. “You,” said Mike, “are my new favorite person.”

“Thanks,” she said with a smile. “Why?”

He held up the croissant. “How’d you know I liked these?”

Anne shook her head. “Wasn’t me.”

“No?”

She shook her head again and filled her mug.

Neil let his knife clatter in the sink. “Could be a thank-you from Arthur for not saying anything to DARPA.”

“It’s not much of a thank-you. Plus, he and I talked to Reggie yesterday afternoon.”

“How’d that go?”

“He was right,” said Mike. “Not even a slap on the wrist for letting Jamie crosswalk.”

“Stop taking my name in vain,” said Jamie. She swung past them and around Anne to land in front of the coffee. Neil leaned out of the way as she reached back to grab her cruller and snatch up her oversized mug.

“Do you know anything about the croissant?” he asked.

“Chocolate croissant.” She glanced back in the box. “Yeah, it’s Mike’s. I added it to the order.”

“You did?”

“Told you it wasn’t me,” said Anne as she walked out the door.

Mike looked from the pastry to Jamie. “How did you know?”

She shrugged. “Magnus called about a report the other day and I asked him. He said it was all you ate for breakfast in college.”

“It was.”

“You added it to the order,” repeated Neil.

She nodded and ducked back out the door. Mike stared after her. “Is it just me,” he said, “or is she a lot more pleasant since her visit to the doctor?”

The engineer took in a slow breath. “Maybe they gave her a bunch of great painkillers.”

“For what? She didn’t have anything wrong with her.”

“You have a better idea?”

“Maybe she’s starting to like me.”

Neil bit back most of his laugh and pulled a cup out of the cabinet.

“It sounded better than suggesting brain damage.”

“Arthur said her CT scan was normal.”

“It was normal in the general, quick check sense,” said Mike. “The brain’s a very sensitive thing. One little tweak here or there, a few pathways realigned, and you get a different person.”

Neil reached for the coffee. “That’s not what the Door does, though.”

“Isn’t it?”

The other man glanced away from the coffee and furrowed his brow.

“No screwing around,” said Mike. “What are you all hiding? Did you all make a deal with the devil, and it runs on the blood of orphans or something like that?”

Neil laughed. “No,” he said. “No, of course not.”

“That wasn’t a very sincere laugh.”

“Well, I’m the one who has to kill all the orphans. It’s not a funny business.” He poured a quick shot of milk into his coffee. “Look,” he said, “have you ever kept a secret?”

“Yeah, of course.”

The engineer waved his free hand in front of him, trying to sweep the right words out of the air. “You know how, after a while, it just hits the point that you
have
to keep the secret? That you’ve been hiding it for so long the reason you were hiding it doesn’t matter anymore?”

The ants lunged at one another. It was a furious war of red versus black, thought and memory. The roar of noise in his head almost made him wince.

And when they were done, he was left with the image of a mousy, flat-chested girl with wire-rimmed glasses.

Cheryl Woodley. Class of 2012. Just a hair off being salutatorian. Mike had her in his class from 2010 to 2011, when college applications went out and came back. She’d been accepted to every school she tried for and offered enough financial aid to afford most of them. The PTA had her earmarked for their annual scholarship, too.

But as graduation came closer and closer, she’d become more and more skittish. In the teacher’s lounge there was talk of drugs or a bad home life. Possibly an abusive boyfriend. It was more common in high school than most people liked to think.

The Friday before Easter weekend, she’d come to Mike after school, close to a breakdown, and confessed. She’d screwed up. She was going to lose everything. Someone would trace her achievements back to a paper she’d written in sophomore year.

At least, one she said she’d written.

“Is this your work?” asked Mike.

“The coffee?”

“The Albuquerque Door. Did you…Did Arthur get this from someone else?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Am I? Being ridiculous?”

“Have you heard of anyone else ever working on a project like this?”

“No, but no one’s heard of this project, either.”

“It’s Arthur’s idea,” said Neil. “Arthur and Olaf.”

Mike studied the other man’s face. The ants were seething. “You said ‘ever.’ So it’s not something current.”

Neil shook his head. He made a point of staring into his mug while he stirred his coffee.

“Are you building off Nazi science or something? Something no one’s supposed to use?” The ants rushed past his eyes with memories of Arthur’s bookshelf, Jamie’s old electronics book, Olaf and
Physics in the Nineteenth Century.
“Is it something Arthur discovered for his book, something that no one uses anymore?”

Neil’s coffee spoon clattered in the sink. “Sorry,” he said. He didn’t look Mike in the eye. “You’re starting to sound like one of those conspiracy theorists.”

He walked out and Mike was left alone with his ants.

Mike leaned forward in his chair. “I had an interesting talk with Neil.”

“Yeah,” Jamie said, “I know.”

“You do?”

“Neil went right to Arthur. He was worried your nonsense about Nazis and Arthur’s book was some clever ruse, that you’d tricked him into saying something important.”

“I think I did.”

“So we’re all secretly Nazis?”

“I never said that.”

“Hail Hydra.”

“You seem pretty eager to turn it into a joke.”

“Or,” she said, “it
is
a joke and you’re the biggest part of it.” She flexed her fingers. The ones on her left hand crackled and popped.

“Are you sure you’re feeling okay?”

“I swear to God, if you ask me that one more time, I’m going to slap you.”

Mike shrugged and settled back in his chair. “I just want to be sure you—”

“I might slap you anyway, just as a preventive measure.” She stepped over the bundle of power cables and walked past his station to check the liquid nitrogen tanks. She’d checked them twice already, and they’d been checked yesterday.

He looked down at his tablet and flipped through the next ten pages of
The History of What We Know.
It walked the tightrope between informative and entertaining, and made that walk look easy. He was
halfway through the book and hadn’t seen a single thing that looked potentially Door-inspiring. It was doubtful Arthur would be so blatant about something he’d copied, but sometimes people did dumb things.

Jamie marched back to her workstation. She kicked one of the power connectors on the way and swore at it. She checked the monitor.

“Tanks the same?”

“Yes,” she sighed. “This makes no sense.”

“Yeah,” Mike said, “that’s what we all said yesterday while you were being checked out.”

Jamie walked past her station to his, elbowed him out of the way, and leaned over the terminal to double-check something. Her shirt drooped open to reveal a wide swath of cleavage. Mike was suddenly aware of how few buttons were done on her shirt.

She met his eyes and followed his glance down to her chest. “Don’t get any ideas.”

“What?”

“We’re not here for a nooner.”

He coughed. “I beg your pardon?”

She pulled the sides of the shirt together and fastened a button one-handed. “Don’t lie. You were thinking it.”

“I couldn’t’ve been. You told me the other night how unattractive you are.”

She gave him a thin smile. “All that brainpower and you can’t figure out when a girl’s playing hard to get?”

“No, usually I can. I can also tell when she’s close to demanding a restraining order. That’s more what I was leaning toward.”

She laughed.

“Since you brought it up, though,” he said. “About the other night. You mentioned something at the bar.”

“Ahhh,” she said. She walked back to the other station and dropped into her chair. “I was wondering when that was going to come up again.”

“You said you’d gone over all the lines of code looking for an error that could’ve caused Bob’s accident.”

She blinked. “What?”

“The code for the Door.” He gestured at the rings. “D’you remember saying that?”

“That’s what you want to talk about?”

“Was there something else?”

Her brow settled over her eyes. “I guess not.”

“So you’d gone over all the code at that point?”

“Yeah. That’s why I went to get a drink.”

“How?”

“I got in my car, drove to the bar—”

“How’d you go over two-million-plus lines of code in thirty-six hours?”

Jamie opened her mouth, then closed it and shook her head. “You must’ve heard me wrong,” she said.

“So you didn’t finish going over the code?”

“Of course I did.”

“When? Because I couldn’t’ve done it in that time, and I can pretty much guarantee my reading speed’s faster than anyone you know.”

She smirked. “Now you’re just trying to get me turned on.”

“Don’t dodge the question.”

“Seriously, all the things we talked about that night, and this is what sticks in your mind?”

“What are we supposed to talk about? Why you named your cat Spock when you were little?”

Jamie shook her head. “See, that’s how drunk I was. My cat’s name was Isis. My parents made fun of me because he was a boy cat and Isis was a girl’s name.”

“You’re still avoiding the question. Did you go through all the code or not?”

“You’re being a pain and you’re asking about things you’re not allowed to know about.”

“Technically, I’m just asking about your job performance.”

“That doesn’t mean you’re not being a pain.”

He put his hands up. “Just a guy trying to do his job.”

She leaned back in her chair and tapped her foot on the floor, swinging it side to side. “Okay,” she said. “What’s your deal?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why do you keep up this whole ‘just a normal guy’ thing? Between your memory and your IQ, you’re probably one of the most intelligent people on the planet.”

“Well, that’s up for debate.”

“See?” Jamie kicked at the floor and her chair rolled away from the workstation. She pointed at him. “That’s what I mean. You know you’re in the top point-zero-zero-one percent of humanity, but you laugh it off and try to ignore it. You’ve got more potential than anyone I’ve ever known, and you’re a small-town schoolteacher. Why haven’t you been working for Magnus all along? Hell, why aren’t you his boss or running NASA or JPL or something?”

He shrugged. “I’m not interested.”

“That’s not a real answer.”

“It’s real enough.”

She smirked. “Do you want real answers from me or answers that are real enough?”

Mike sighed. He turned away and made a point of studying the rings. The red lights on either side of the Door were still out of sync. He kept the monitor in his peripheral vision, but none of the numbers or readings even flickered.

“Okay,” she said. She tugged her chair back to the station and turned to her own terminal. “Just remember, I offered.”

“You ever met any high-IQ people, the ones with insanely high IQs? Or read interviews or articles about them?”

“My question first.”

“I’m trying to answer your question.”

She shrugged without looking up. “Counting you?”

“Sure.”

Jamie spun her chair toward him and swung one foot up onto her knee. “Four or five, I think. Olaf’s 165 or something like that.”

“What’s the one thing they all have in common?”

“Besides being really smart?”

Mike shook his head. “When I was thirteen,” he said, “when we got the results back from the IQ tests, I was excited as hell. It’s every kid’s dream, right? To find out you’re special? It’s Harry Potter and Spider-Man all wrapped up in one.”

“So what happened?”

“Everyone started treating me different. All the other kids already thought I was some kind of brainiac, and now they had proof I was strange. All my teachers were either second guessing themselves around
me or giving me extra work and getting annoyed that it didn’t slow me down.”

He looked through the rings at Site B. The red light flashed by again, like a fast wave of blood washing in across the beach. He remembered what Sasha said about a wound.

“I did my own study,” he said. “I reached out and found other high-IQ people online. It was just basic stuff back then. Bulletin boards. CompuServe.”

“I remember.”

“But I was smart and I found people. Little proto-web online communities. The Mega Society. I talked to people, asked questions, basically studied every person I could find with an IQ over 150. And you know what I found out?”

She shrugged.

“Almost all of them have some kind of social problems. Relationship issues, emotional issues, superiority complexes. The more I looked, the worse it got. Most of them are isolated and lonely. The divorce rate looks good until you realize how few of them ever get married. Pound for pound, it’s one of the unhappiest subsets of people you can find.”

“Why?”

“Because they know they’re different. They know they’re smarter than everyone around them, everyone in the building, usually everyone in a thirty- or forty-mile radius. It’s like spending your whole life as a doctoral student stuck in a kindergarten class, forced to do single-digit addition and writing the alphabet every day.”

She sat back and digested the idea.

“I already knew my memory made me different. Now I had pretty solid evidence I was going to be miserable for the rest of my life, and I wasn’t even old enough to shave yet. So I decided to be normal.”

“How?”

“By not feeding it. Until then, I’d read everything I could get my hands on. I watched tons of shows about history and science. And at thirteen I stopped. I didn’t give my brain more to work with.

“That’s why I never had another IQ test. It’s why I didn’t study physics or astrophysics or biochemistry or anything like that in college. It’s why I didn’t want to work for Reggie. I don’t want to know how much
smarter I am than everyone around me. I didn’t want to ‘expand my potential’ or use ‘the full scope of my phenomenal intellect.’ I wanted to teach high school English, help kids get into college, direct the fall musical, and live a normal, happy life like everyone else.”

Jamie’s lips curled into a smile. “So, basically, you’re telling me ignorance is bliss?”

“You have no idea.”

“There are just all kinds of levels to you, aren’t there?”

“Not by choice.”

“What’s the musical?”

“Little Mary Sunshine.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Is that a real thing or did you make it up?”

“It’s real and it’s cheap,” he said. “I wanted
The King and I,
but it’s crazy expensive.”

“I was in
West Side Story
when I was a sophomore. My mom thought it’d be good for me to try something new.”

“How’d that go over?”

“I hated it. I’m not good at pretending to be someone else.” She looked at him for a moment. “You’ve learned a lot here, haven’t you?”

He made a point of focusing on the rings again. “Yeah.”

“Lots of physics. Programming. Electronics.”

“Yep.”

Her smile dimmed. “You’re not going to be able to go back, are you? Back to being a teacher?”

Mike looked at the monitor. “I sent them my resignation two days ago. My contract was up for renewal anyway.”

“Just like that?”

“Feeding the ants is a one-way street. I can’t forget any of it, so I can’t stop myself from thinking about it. That’s why I kept turning Reggie down for years.”

“But you signed up for this.”

“He kind of tricked me into it, but how could I pass it up? Like you all said, it’s going to change the world.”

“So where do you go from here?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “Maybe I’ll try running NASA or JPL or something.”

The smile returned to her face. “I’m glad you came here.”

“Thanks. Have I answered your question?”

She straightened up in her chair. “I believe so,” she said.

“How did you go through all the code so fast?”

She studied his face for almost a minute. Once her eyes darted to the rings. Twice to the computer screen. She bit her lip, looked at the Door, and the lights flicked on in the control room. Her eyes widened, just for a moment, even as her shoulders relaxed. “I think that counts as another question you’re not supposed to ask,” she said.

Mike sighed.

“My turn,” she said a little louder. “Which one of us is paying for dinner?”

“What?”

“Dinner,” she said. “Someone has to pay. You or me?”

“Why don’t we just each pay for ourselves?”

Jamie shook her head. “You’re kind of missing the point,” she said. “If I don’t have to say ‘buy me dinner first,’ it’s your big chance to look like a gentleman.”

He stared at her for a minute.

“Okay, fine,” she said. She fished a quarter out of her jeans and flipped it into the air. “Call it.”

“Heads.”

Her fingers snatched the coin out of the air and slapped it onto the back of her palm. “It’s your lucky night,” she said. “You’re buying dinner.”

“Ahhh.” He looked away and bit his lip.

“Something wrong with that?”

Mike studied the rings. He watched the lights. He checked the readings on the screen. They still hadn’t changed.

“Well?”

“Did Arthur put you up to all this?”

“What?”

“You’ve become a lot more friendly toward me ever since I threatened him.” He ran through a list of potential words and phrases. “Some might say aggressively friendly.”

Jamie studied his face for a minute. “Are you politely asking if Arthur’s pimping me out to you in exchange for your cooperation?”

“I thought I’d done a fairly good job of not saying that.”

“Did it occur to you that this could just be a woman attracted to a coworker in a very normal part-admiration, part-lustful way?”

He shook his head. “I can honestly say it did not.”

“You weren’t kidding about the social problems and relationship issues, were you?”

“Apparently not.”

The control room light blinked out.

“No, Arthur did not put me up to this. I am asking you to take me to dinner all on my own.”

“Telling me to, really.”

“Well, clearly if I waited for you to ask, I’d starve to death.”

They both made a point of studying their monitors and checking the rings.

“Was there someplace you’d like to go?”

“Go?”

“For dinner.”

“Oh, gosh, I thought you’d never ask.”