The Fold: A Novel (21 page)

The air spiraled into thin whirlwinds that vanished into the rings. Two cables popped loose on one workstation, then a third, and then the whole thing lifted into the air. On camera two, they could see the equipment piling up on the dusty surface. Another roof panel struck the steel ramp and tipped over into nothingness. A few moments later, a section of metal roofing sliced through the cables of the other station. It all slid forward and went in. The last piece of metal never even touched the ground. It curved in midair and swung into the rings.

Camera two died. No flicker or static. It just went black between digital frames.

Neil grabbed at one of the flailing cables from the workstation and missed. He slid another few feet and rolled over to claw at the concrete. At one quarter speed, his screams distorted his face.

His feet grew dark as they hit the bottom of the ramp. It was as if a shadow stretched over them in the bright room. On camera one, they just vanished into the void. He tried to pull them out of the darkness,
but the dragging winds forced him to keep them braced against the ramp. Neil screamed again. It lasted fifteen seconds in slow motion.

“His feet are in space,” said Mike.

Camera one flickered. There was one last image of Neil trying to turn, to find something to grab. And then the camera shut off.

They stared at the dark screens for a moment. Jamie wiped her cheeks. Sasha closed her eyes.

“It wasn’t that bad for him,” Arthur said without much conviction. He pulled off his glasses and cleaned them on his tie. A drop fell on the lenses while he did. “The slow speed made it seem worse. It was…I’m sure it was quick. That was barely thirty seconds.”

“Just shut up,” muttered Sasha.

They stopped looking at one another. Jamie spun her track ball and cleared all the monitors back to bare desktop. Sasha tapped her head against the window. Olaf stared down at the remaining set of rings.

A swarm of ants raced in Mike’s head. They brought out hundreds of images from the footage he’d just watched, and hundreds more from memory. He made comparison graphs and drew conclusions.

And then he reviewed the footage and drew new conclusions.

“That wasn’t the Moon,” he said.

They turned to look at him. Jamie smudged one last tear from her face. “What?”

“Where the Door opened up to. It wasn’t the Moon.”

“It sure the fuck looked like it,” said Sasha.

He shook his head. “The Moon’s our only reference for images like that—a world with no life and no atmosphere. But the gravity was wrong.”

Arthur wrinkled his brow for a moment. “On the Moon,” he said, “all those items should’ve gone for a hundred yards or so.”

Mike nodded. “The lighter ones at least, but even the heavier ones
should’ve gone farther than they did.” He pointed at the screen. “That was Earth gravity. One g. Everything was just moving a little strange because there was no air resistance.”

“So that was…what?” Sasha glanced from the screen to the rings. “A world where Earth was just some rock in space?”

He counted to three. The ants carried out numbers for him, like tiny ring girls at a sporting event. “No,” he said. “Well, sort of.”

Olaf frowned at him.

Mike turned to Jamie. “Can you bring the camera two footage back up. Time-stamp thirteen-eleven-twenty-three.”

She tapped the keyboard. “How fast do you want it?”

“Just freeze it there.”

The screen filled with the starry void. The dim image of the rings were visible behind it, and the gray horizon past that. The red fire extinguisher and the chair had both already come to rest. The first roof panel was a blur of motion, still up on its side like a wheel.

“Full screen?”

Two more clicks and the frozen image leaped to fill the flatscreen. Mike reached out and ran his fingers along an outcropping of rock on the left side of frame. “See that? How straight it is?”

Arthur squinted. Jamie pulled up the image on the screen in front of her and stared at it. “Okay,” said Sasha.

Mike traced a few faint vertical lines along the outcropping. They were straight and evenly spaced. “See these? This is the only point they really stand out. The light’s reflecting off the roof panel just right.”

“What’s your point?” asked Olaf.

“Those are cinder blocks,” said Mike. “That’s what’s left of the south wall of the main floor. Back there—” He pointed at a faint ripple in the gray sand past the fire extinguisher. “—that’s the west wall.”

Arthur pushed his glasses tighter against his head. “Are you sure?”

“Positive,” said Mike. He tapped the side of his head. “They all line up with the regular view through the Door. I even overlapped it with previous crosswalks to be sure.”

“Fuck me,” said Sasha. She glanced down at the main floor and shook her head.

“That doesn’t make sense,” said Olaf. “If the main floor’s there, and presumably a Door, that means we were there working on it.”

“Maybe you were,” Mike said.

Jamie leaned back in her chair, still staring at the smaller screen. “So what happened?”

Mike counted to four this time. “There’s nothing there. No old weeds or vines. No sign of life at all. Sometime between finishing the Door and now, maybe in the last year or two, something wiped out all life on the planet. It even sucked away the atmosphere. And it did it fast.”

“A war?” asked Jamie. “People always say we had enough nukes to destroy the world a hundred times over, or something like that.”

Sasha frowned. “Could that burn off all the air?”

Mike shrugged.

“It looks too complete,” said Arthur. “Unless a warhead struck the lab dead center, we should see more than this.”

“There’s also the bigger picture,” said Mike.

They all glanced at him, then back to the screen.

“Metaphorical picture this time.” He waved his hand at the rings outside the window. “When all this happened at Site B, nothing happened here. This mouth was normal. Which would mean the Door only opened on one side. Or, at least, the two sides were open to two different realities.”

Arthur’s mouth flattened into a line. Jamie’s eyes went wide.

“Which means,” Mike continued, “we still don’t know how it works.”

“Or it’s working differently now,” said Sasha.

Arthur shook his head. “Nothing else has changed. Why would it be working differently?”

“Why would it be open when there’s no power?” she asked. “How the fuck should I know?”

Olaf gazed at the rings below and stiffened. He took a step to the left, then back. “Jesus,” he muttered.

Sasha pressed her head against the glass. “What? What is it?”

“The Door,” he said. He glanced back at Arthur, then at Sasha, and then back down to the main floor. “The damned thing’s still open.”

“It can’t be,” said Arthur. “The other rings were destroyed.”

They all moved to the glass and craned their necks. Jamie and Arthur slid to the side, pressing against the others to get a better view.

The rings stood still and quiet. From the high angle, another two feet of the pathway could be seen continuing on through the Door. The
base and bottom section of a third ring could be seen curving up and around the pathway.

“Fuck me,” said Sasha. “Does this mean there’s another Site B over there? On the other side?”

Jamie lunged back to her chair and stabbed at keys. The monitors lit up with new camera feeds, showing the floor, the stations, and a high view from just below the window. The last monitor let them see another fifteen feet through the rings.

All three of the rings.

Through the open mouth, the red light flashed across the walkway and ramp of a whole, undamaged Site B, complete with a white paint line marking off the safe zone.

“If each set of rings opens to a different reality,” murmured Arthur, “it may have been doing this all along.”

“You might have something there,” Mike said. “I wonder how many discrepancies we’d find if we went back over the video logs and compared what one camera saw through the rings to what another camera saw directly. Things you might’ve written off as little glitches or time lags.”

“Your red hair,” Olaf said to Sasha.

She blinked twice and her eyes went wide. “Oh, fuck,” she said.

Mike looked back and forth between them. “You saw Sasha with red hair once?”

Olaf nodded. “About six months ago. We’d just changed out some of the overhead lights and were doing a random physics test. I was at Site B, she was over here. Her hair looked deep red. I remember saying something to her about it while we tossed the ball, how the lights made her hair look red, and she laughed it off.”

“But I didn’t remember it,” said Sasha. “The comments or anything. We talked later, face-to-face, and I just thought he’d been thinking of something else.” Her gaze drifted back to the rings.

“I thought you were being absentminded,” Olaf said.

“There are probably even more examples,” said Mike. “Times the difference was just too slight to notice.”

“So,” said Sasha, “what now? Do we go say hello to ourselves?”

“We have to shut this thing down,” said Mike. “If it’s opening onto random realities, it’s too dangerous to spend any more time trying to study it. It could flip back to the airless world again. Or worse.”

“It might not,” said Olaf. “In three years of operation, it’s the first time something like this has happened. I’d say the odds are low.”

“Three years of operation that don’t even add up to eleven hours altogether,” said Mike as the ants added up hundreds of timed reports. “The odds don’t seem so low when you look at it that way.”

They all looked at one another for a moment. They all looked at Arthur. And then, one by one, their gazes all slid to Mike. Jamie was first. Then Sasha. Then Arthur himself. Olaf was last.

“Well,” said Arthur, leaning forward on his cane, “what do you suggest we do?”

Mike counted to five while the ants carried out images, sounds, and predictions.

“The set of rings on Site B shut down after they were damaged,” he said. “We should try the same thing here.”

“But we don’t know why they shut down,” said Olaf. “We still don’t know how the Door is staying open.”

“I still don’t care about the why or how,” said Mike. “I just want to turn this thing off before someone else gets killed or hurt.”

Sasha cleared her throat and tapped two fingers on the window. “What if we just took it apart?”

Arthur blinked. “What?”

“Take it apart,” she said again. “Since we can’t shut it off.”

“Could we do that?” asked Mike.

“The actual construction took about two months once all the components were fabricated. We could have the rings disassembled in a day or two, tops.” She gestured at the rings down below. “Heck, we could break it down into larger components and drag them off the main floor one at a time. Then we can take ’em apart in the hallway or in here.”

“What if that makes it even bigger?” asked Olaf. “This area of…instability? Right now we’re relatively sure it’s still around the rings, but if we start spreading the ring components out, what then?”

“If it does that,” said Arthur, “then we should be able to go the other way. We can make a pile of everything and contract the area a bit. But I believe Sasha’s right. Based on the evidence, taking them apart seems like our best bet to collapse the fold.”

“How do we do that,” asked Jamie, “if it’s dangerous to have people near the rings?”

“We risk it,” said Mike. He looked at Arthur and was relieved when the older man gave a nod of agreement. “We’ll try to be quick, go in with specific goals, and get out.”

“We should go over the design specs,” Arthur said to Sasha. “Determine the fastest way to pull things apart.”

She was staring out at the rings again. She looked back at Arthur and took a breath. “Yeah,” she said. “Yeah, we should. I can do that.”

Mike looked out the window again. On the floor, the roaches were weaving back and forth. “How long, you think?”

Sasha and Arthur exchanged a look, then included Olaf. “A few hours,” said Arthur. “We didn’t design it with rapid disassembly in mind. There may be a few snags.” He tapped his cane twice on the floor. “I won’t be much good for the physical work, but I think we can come up with a few ways for the four of you to make some quick headway.”

“Five,” said Jamie. “We could bring Anne.”

“She’s not cleared for the main…” Arthur shook his head. “Sorry. Old habits. Still, we shouldn’t assume. She’s not paid for these kinds of risks.”

“None of us are, really,” said Sasha.

“Do you have everything?” Arthur asked.

“Yes,” snapped Olaf. “For the third time, we have everything.”

There wasn’t much to have. Mike was a bit surprised at how few tools they’d need to disassemble the rings. A few socket wrenches and screwdrivers. Sasha had outfitted each of them with a full set. They didn’t know if the tools on the main floor would still be there. Or if they’d still fit the hardware if they were.

Anne had offered to help while Arthur and Jamie were still explaining what was happening on the main floor and what they needed to do. Her offer didn’t change when they finished explaining. She’d shown up in heels and a dress, but it turned out she kept a pair of running shoes in one of her desk drawers. She’d copied Jamie and tied her hair back. Her dress didn’t have any pockets, so Sasha had strapped a tool belt on her.

Arthur went up to watch them from the booth. The five of them stood by the door beneath the flashing red light. “Everyone ready?” asked Mike.

They nodded. “Right side first,” said Sasha. Her T-shirt showed a group of zombies in Starfleet uniforms below the logo T
HE
W
ALKING
R
ED
. “We’re going to start with the bolts at points six, seven, and eight. I’ll get the ones at six. The four of you should be able to reach the others without getting up on the walkway. That’ll get those carapace sections off and let us get at the coils.”

“Do we need, I don’t know,” said Jamie, “a safe word?”

Anne laughed. Even Olaf smirked. “A what?”

She smiled herself. “Not like that, pervs. Some sort of code word or something that we can say in case…” She glanced at Mike. “So we can prove who we are.”

“I think if anything happens,” he said, “it’ll either be very obvious, or it won’t matter. Not for what we’re doing, anyway.”

“The safe word is Isis,” said Sasha. “Work for you?”

Jamie nodded.

Olaf peeled the homemade
DANGER
sign off the card reader, and waved his ID over the panel. Magnets clicked and the door lock thumped. Its pistons hissed as they dragged it open.

The only sound on the main floor was the low rasp of the warning lights as they spun in their housings. The ants scurried out with image after image, comparing them to the current room. He couldn’t see anything that had changed.

“I don’t see anything different,” said Jamie. She walked next to Mike, studying the room. Anne followed in their footsteps, looking at everything with her wide eyes.

“Me, neither,” he said.

Sasha waved them away from the door. They walked around a tool chest and onto the main floor. Something crunched under Jamie’s shoe. She glanced down and lifted her foot. One of the green cockroaches dragged itself away on its front legs.

“Hope nobody’s got a thing about bugs,” Mike said.

Roaches covered the main floor. A few hundred of them scurried back and forth. They darted out from under the workstations and toolboxes and the oversized resistors. Some of them crawled over the ramp and the platform. As the red light passed over them they turned black, then back to green.

“Fucking roaches,” said Sasha. “They’ll even survive a hole in reality.”

Anne raised an eyebrow.

“We should be grateful they’re not carnivorous or something,” said Jamie. “Zombie roaches.”

“Thanks for putting that out to the universe,” Olaf said.

“Multiverse,” said Mike.

“Even better.”

One of the roaches stopped in front of Mike and Anne. It wiggled its antennae in their direction. The tips seemed to glow, like fiber-optic threads. Then it dashed away.

They stepped over and around the roaches and moved toward the rings. Mike watched for any ripples in the air, but there was nothing.

He couldn’t shake the feeling that the rings were waiting for them to get closer.

THE RINGS LOOMED
over Sasha up on their platform. They’d never looked quite so big before. She thought about how they called them mouths, and then about how she was standing in front of a huge, open mouth of copper and steel.

She set one foot on the ramp and paused. Mike had offered to do the high bolts, but as the only engineer left, she’d insisted. She counted to three, hoped she wouldn’t end up like Bob, and took two quick steps up onto the platform.

Sasha stood there for a moment, feeling the dance of static electricity on her skin. The warning light from the other Site B flashed in her eyes and she stared through the Door at the other room. “So do you think…” She glanced down at the others. “Is Neil still alive over there?”

“Don’t get distracted,” Olaf said.

“He might be alive.”

“He might not be,” said Mike. “And it doesn’t matter, because he still wouldn’t be our Neil.”

“I don’t think any of us are ‘our’ people anymore,” said Jamie.

Sasha tore her eyes away from the sights on the other side of the rings. “Okay,” she said, “there and there.” She used her socket wrench to point at a hex nut for each of them. She settled her tool over a higher one and cranked it four-five-six times. The sound always made her think of New Year’s Eve noisemakers. Always. Even when she was little and her father worked on cars. He’d give her a small socket wrench and she’d spin it in the air.

That’s my memory,
she thought.
All mine. So I’m still me.

She spun the nut off the last half inch of threads with her fingertips. Then she popped the thick washer off and dropped both bits in her pocket. Odds were they’d never be reassembling the rings, but old habits were tough to break.

She glanced down. Mike and Jamie almost had bolt seven off. Olaf had eight, one of the tough ones that had to be wrenched off all the way to the end of the bolt. Anne was holding the other side of it still with her own ratchet.

Over on Site B, the sun moved out from a heavy cloud to a thinner one, brightening the room by a slight amount. Sasha’s eyes flicked up, and for a moment she thought someone had left the blinds open on a window, because she could see straight through the other building to the field of sand and scrub behind it. Although there were very few plants growing, and the few she saw were withered and gray. It looked like everything behind Site B had been dead for ages.

Then she realized that Site B didn’t have a window. Definitely not a panoramic one that gave the outside world a view of the rings. And it crossed her mind that the view had switched to the real Site B, a wreck of a building filled with gaping holes that was going to be condemned as soon as someone official saw it. But just as fast, she realized the rings on Site B no longer worked, and she was looking somewhere else. Somewhere where something else had destroyed the other building but left the rings standing.

And then something beyond the shattered wall moved. Something tall and lean, wrapped in a ragged cloak. There was a flash of eyes beneath a rough cowl.

Sasha took in all of it between two heartbeats.

Then she blinked, and when she opened her eyes Site B—the undamaged Site B—filled her view. She glanced down and saw Anne staring at the rings.
Through
the rings. Her eyes were wide, her lips hung open. “Did you see that?” Sasha asked.

Anne’s brow wrinkled. Her head went up and down once, as if she didn’t want to end the moment by speaking or looking away. She stared through the Door, willing the ruined world to appear again.

Sasha’s eyes drifted back to her own bolts and she blinked. The inside nut was still in place. She thought it had come off a little too easy. Her wrench had just been spinning air and she was too on edge to notice.

Or had it? The matching bolt on the other side of the plastic carapace was gone. Had she pulled that one and moved on without thinking? She didn’t think she’d done two already. But she patted her thigh and felt hardware.

She fitted the socket over the bolt, checked to make sure it was solid, and cranked the handle back and forth. The wrench clattered and pulled, clattered and pulled, and then the resistance faded and she tugged it free. She grabbed the nut between her thumb and two fingers, spun it off the threads, and dropped it in her pocket.

It slid against her thigh and clunked against the other bolt. They felt too heavy. Something wasn’t right. She scooped everything out of her pocket and looked at it.

She had three of the heavy silver hex nuts, even though she’d only taken off two of them. She looked at the bolt she’d just freed up. The one she thought she’d done before.

It had a silver nut on it, backed with a washer.

The air tingled and her pulse jumped in her chest, hard enough that she felt the shift. The hair on the back of her neck stood up.

Sasha set the wrench over the bolt. She tugged the lever, felt the nut loosen and give, heard the ratchet
click-click-click
as she swung it back to tug again. The wrench turned again and again, moving the nut along the threads toward the end of the bolt. She pulled the socket away and worked it off with her fingers. The washer bumped off, shaking along the threads.

Behind the washer was another silver nut. And another washer. She glanced over at the matching point. It was bolted again, too.

“
What’s taking so long?
” They all jumped at Arthur’s booming voice. Sasha glanced up at the booth.

Below her and to the left, Jamie coughed. “I don’t know about you guys,” she said, “but I think I’ve got a problem.”

Sasha looked down. “Fuck,” she said. “I think we do.”

Jamie looked up and their eyes met. “What’s wrong?”

“Your hair,” Sasha said. “It’s changed color.”

Olaf looked over at Jamie and frowned. Jamie grabbed a lock of hair and pulled it around in front of her face. She squinted. “It has?”

“Yeah,” said Sasha.

“No,” said Anne. “It hasn’t.”

“Yes, it has. It’s platinum blond.”

“It was always like that,” Jamie said. “Always has been.”

Sasha shook her head. “You just switched.” She glanced at Mike. “Tell her.”

Mike pressed his mouth into a line. “Jamie didn’t change,” he said.

“Yes, she did.” Sasha stopped and stared past Mike. The warning light was still spinning on the main floor. But it had changed color. Instead of a deep, orange-amber, it was fire engine red.

She looked at Jamie again. “The safe word,” she said. “It’s Spock, after your cat, right?”

Jamie didn’t answer. Neither did Mike or Olaf. Anne stared at her.

“Ahhh, fuck,” Sasha said.