Authors: Patrick Lee
She nodded at the notebook. “What followed is what you imagine. The next team that roped in had guns.” She was quiet for a moment, then said, “The Breach Voices are just one of a thousand things we’re completely in the dark about. Their origin, their meaning, the reason for their effect on people. We just don’t know, probably never will. I think about David Bryce often. Top of his class at MIT, father of four, respected by everyone who ever met him. He couldn’t see the danger, even sitting in front of it with his eyes wide open. I sometimes worry that’s the only story the Breach knows how to tell.”
She led him back into the hall, and toward the open space at the end. The darkness there looked wrong: given what Travis had read, the Breach should be visible from right here. A few steps later he saw why it wasn’t. They entered the cavernous chamber to find a hulking black shape nearly filling it, a dome the height of a three-story building.
To the right along the dome’s base was an entry channel like that of an igloo. As they approached it, Travis saw the ghostly blue and purple light Bryce had described, projected through the entry onto the concrete wall of the chamber. Ten feet shy of it stood a simple metal table. Paige left her phone and watch there. Travis followed suit with his own watch.
He thought she’d head for the entry then, but she stopped, stared at him, her eyes working something out.
“You were a cop,” she said. “A detective.”
He nodded.
“Were you good?”
He breathed a laugh. “By no stretch was I a good cop.”
“I know you were corrupt. I meant good
at
it. Were you good at detective work? Did figuring things out come naturally to you?”
He didn’t hear judgment in her voice. Something else. Contemplation, he thought. He wondered why.
“Yeah. I was good at it.”
Her eyes on him, unblinking. Then narrowing in thought.
“That might end up being useful,” she said. “It’s not often we get fresh eyes around here. I’ll explain a lot more on the plane. For now I just need you to know what’s at stake.”
With that, she led him to the dome’s entry, and through its heavy glass door.
Like looking into a depth. Into a furnace. As Bryce had written. The Breach was an oval ripped open across thin air, ten feet wide by three high. Blue and violet tendrils of light, flamelike in their substance but not in their shape, capered along the length of the tunnel, which was three feet in diameter and receded to infinity. Only in the nearest yard did the tunnel flare out to the wide oval.
Within the giant dome that shielded the rest of the building from who knew what, a much smaller containment system encased the Breach to protect anyone who entered this space. This smaller enclosure was a rectangle made of more thick glass, with an airtight door at the front. The glass cage’s purpose was as obvious as the library silence of the room. Travis watched his faint reflection blurring rhythmically on the vibrating glass, and imagined the malignant Breach Voices encased within it, just a few feet away.
He refocused beyond the glass to the Breach itself, the tunnel stretching away to a vanishing point. He felt his perception bend toward it like a row of iron filings to a magnet.
“There’s only so much to say about it,” Paige said. “It leads somewhere. We don’t even try to guess where. Nothing can go through from our side. And no living thing has come through from the other side. But objects do. Three or four a day, on average, for over three decades now. Entities.”
Directly beneath the Breach stood something like an industrial-strength trampoline. It was square, five by five feet. Its fabric looked both flexible and strong, and its legs were wrapped with shock springs. It was positioned to soften the fall for anything that came out of the opening, whether it weighed an ounce or a ton.
Cameras just inside the glass casing covered the Breach from two angles. No doubt someone watched their feeds day and night, from somewhere in the floors above B51. It would only be necessary to come into this space when things actually emerged from the Breach.
“Certain entities we see all the time,” Paige said. “The twenty most common probably make up ninety-nine percent of the traffic. A few of them are behind you.”
Travis drew his eyes from the Breach and turned around. A dry-erase board on the wall proclaimed,
NEXT UNIQUE ENTITY WILL BE DESIGNATED 0697
.
Below the board and to the left was a set of steel shelves. Arrayed along them were a few duplicates of three separate items. One was a kind of string, bright white and a little thicker than floss. Each strand, about a foot long, had been trapped on one end by a paperweight. They’d have floated away otherwise. The strings trailed lazily in space, neither heavier nor lighter than the air. Gravity seemed to just not affect them. On the next level down were a few pink crystals, the length and width of fingers. Travis could see nothing special about them. Beneath those, on the lowest shelf, were two examples of what Bryce had described. Green rags. Travis dropped to a crouch and studied them. They were lying mostly flat. The few wrinkles in the fabric were tight and sharp, like hardened veins. Like the material had been drawn to the surface by vacuum pressure.
“Try to lift one,” Paige said.
Travis tried. He grabbed for the nearest as if it were a washcloth, palming it in the middle to gather it in a handful. It was like trying to grab a handful of the shelf surface itself. The cloth didn’t budge. He took the corner of the rag between his thumb and forefinger and found he could lift the first inch. Beyond that, it was just too heavy. He wondered for a moment how the technicians moved these things around, and then he noticed a wheeled chainfall a few feet away, with a vise-grip claw hanging from a cantilevered arm. Built to hoist engines out of cars, it was probably just about suited to lifting these rags.
“Bryce wasn’t crazy,” Travis said.
“Not about that.”
She picked up one of the pink crystals from the middle shelf.
“For all that we don’t know about the Breach,” she said, “this much is certain: in terms of technology, whoever’s on the other side is as far ahead of us as we are ahead of Java man.”
She let go of the crystal, shoulder height above the floor. It plummeted. Then, in the last foot of its fall, it slowed and came to a stop a quarter inch above the concrete. Sharp little beams of light shot from it, projecting onto the floor. The object seemed to be measuring its own position and rotation. After a second the beams switched off, and the thing set down with a
ting
that reverberated through the room.
“Everything that comes through is baffling to us,” Paige said. She nodded at the green rags. “The best materials scientists in the world have studied that fabric using our most advanced tools, scanning-tunneling microscopes that can isolate atoms. They’ve learned nothing. Not a single thing, in over thirty years of study. They tell us the material doesn’t even seem to be
made of
atoms. They nicknamed it a quark-lattice, but that’s a wild guess, not a testable theory, and it’s almost certainly wrong.”
Travis found his eyes drawn back to the Breach.
“Once or twice a month,” Paige said, “things come through that are either rare or unique. Things like the Whisper. We never understand how they work, but we can usually get a sense of their purpose. Not always, but usually. Some of them have good applications, like the medical tools that were used on me over the past several hours. Others are so dangerous, we just focus on keeping them safe, keeping them dormant and locked away. And that’s more or less what Tangent was created for. To shepherd what comes out of the Breach. To distinguish the good from the bad, find uses for the former, and contain the latter.”
She paused and turned to him. He looked at her and saw in her eyes the same vague trance effect he felt in his own. In the Breach’s presence there was no avoiding it.
“In the first year after March 7, 1978,” she said, “when the government was trying to figure out what to do with this place, there were proposals to fill the elevator shaft with concrete and leave this chamber sealed forever. Whatever showed up could just stay down here, however helpful or dangerous, and we could simply not tinker with any of it. At the time, those proposals were thought to be the most prudent. My father didn’t think so. He argued that eventually something might come out of the Breach that was effectively a ticking bomb. Something that if left alone would be so destructive that five hundred feet of dirt wouldn’t protect the world from it. He was right. In the time since then, at least three entities have arrived that fulfilled that criteria. The point is obvious enough. It takes the smartest and best people in the world, working as hard as they can, just to prevent the Breach from triggering a nightmare. Imagine what the worst people could do with it, and you understand what’s on the line here.” Her eyes went back to the Breach. “This building is the most secure site on Earth. It protects the Breach and all that’s ever come out of it. All that ever will come out of it too. And right now, it’s all in play. The security isn’t enough. The people who tortured me and killed my father, the people who now have the Whisper in their arsenal, want control of this place, and if things go wrong for us in the next day or so, they’ll have it.”
On the surface—literally—Border Town was not an impressive place. It was a faded red pole barn with a pile of rusted automobile parts drifted against its back wall, the property bounded at the perimeter by a few cracked and leaning posts that had once been a split-rail fence. Just visible against the flatlands that planed to the horizon on all sides, a gravel track wandered southwest across fifty miles of nothing.
Nothing that could be seen, at least. The barren landscape probably concealed enough firepower to repel a military assault. Even American military.
Travis stood at an open bay door of the barn, alongside Paige and fifteen others who made up a larger version of the teams he’d met in Alaska. He’d heard the proper terms for them now: the units were called detachments, and their members were known as operators. At the moment, each of the fifteen was dressed casually, weapons and armor stowed in green plastic carrying cases, though their bodies and expressions marked them as hardened, well trained. Paige had the same look. No doubt she’d come up through their ranks, though it was obvious now that she outranked everyone present.
Something glinted in the washed-out blue sky to the west. It resolved into what Travis expected: a blank, white 747.
Two F–16s accompanied it. As it began its final approach, they broke away and went into a circling pattern high above the desert. Travis had an idea that such escorts would be standard procedure for Tangent flights from now on, after what’d happened to Box Kite.
A minute later the 747 landed a quarter mile away on what looked like unmarked scrubland. Travis and the others drove to it in three electric vehicles with all-terrain wheels, the same sort of vehicle he’d ridden in earlier, while hooded. Only as they closed the last fifty feet to the aircraft, and the ground beneath the carts smoothed out to unnatural perfection, did Travis realize he’d been staring at a runway all along. The tarmac had been mixed with an additive so that it matched the landscape perfectly, and even landform shadows and patches of vegetation had been painted onto it. To any aircraft or satellite, it would be invisible, day or night. He wondered how the pilots who landed here lined up on it, and then saw the answer: tiny lights lined the edge, their plastic casings roughened and browned like their surroundings. They weren’t shining. Hadn’t been a moment ago, either. They were probably ultraviolet, visible only with the right gear.
In the deep shadow of the 747’s wing, a door opened, pulled in by a crewman standing in what should have been the luggage hold. Travis could see an interior staircase behind the man, leading up to the main level. Had he investigated further aboard Box Kite, no doubt he would have found an identical setup.
Paige and the others began unloading their gear and taking it to the plane. Travis helped. Among the carrying cases he saw two that were different: black instead of green. He didn’t need to ask their significance.
A few minutes later they were climbing, the F–16s falling in at the 747’s wingtips again. The aircraft banked into a northeast line, bound for Switzerland by the shortest route, across the top of the world.
The plane’s floor plan was the same as Box Kite’s. Travis sat in a large chair, facing Paige, in the counterpart to the room where he’d found Ellen Garner wide-eyed and dead. Out the window, Wyoming stretched east toward Nebraska, vast and brown and empty.
“You really never wonder?” Travis said.
Paige looked up at him. “I’m sorry?”
“The Breach. You said you don’t even try to guess what’s on the other side. That’s hard to believe.”
She thought for a moment, then said, “We all wonder. But if there’s no way to test any one guess, no way to measure them against each other, it all comes to the same thing. We just don’t know.”
“Whoever’s on the other side,” Travis said, “the tunnel would’ve had to open on their end too, right? You’d think they’d notice. And how are these objects coming through it? Is someone over there feeding them in, three or four times a day?”
“The popular guess is that we tapped into an existing network of tunnels. Some alien equivalent of those pneumatic tubes they use at the bank. Could be a delivery system limited to non-living objects. Maybe, right? Maybe not.
Maybe
’s a common word in Border Town.”
“Maybe you tapped into a garbage chute,” Travis said. “Maybe all this amazing stuff is just their trash.”
She smiled, seeming to surprise herself as she did. It was the first smile Travis had seen from her, and he thought it made the entire flight worthwhile.
“Haven’t heard that one before,” she said.
“Fresh eyes,” Travis said.
They were quiet for a moment. Then he said, “Why can’t someone go through from this end?”
“There’s a resistance, right at the mouth of the tunnel. When you try to push something through, the resistance pushes back with something close to gravity force at first. But the force doubles about every three centimeters the further you go, so you don’t get very far. The woman we passed in the hallway, with the red hair, is Dr. Fagan. She’s done the most work studying the resistance force. She wants to break through it, find a way to contact whoever’s on the other side of the Breach.”
Somehow that notion affected Travis more deeply than anything they’d spoken of yet. Real contact with whoever—with whatever—was on the other end.
He saw recognition in Paige’s eyes, like it was obvious what he was thinking. Maybe it was. Maybe that idea struck everyone the same way, the first time they heard it.
“It’s not likely to work,” she said. “Even Fagan accepts that. If you could get past the initial barrier, the math would still be stacked against you. It gets into really strange stuff—Einstein, general relativity, time dilation—things we can calculate but not actually understand. Anyway, it all points to the same conclusion: whatever you sent through the Breach would just come back before it reached the far end. It might return months or years later, or—and this is more of a guess—it could actually come back
before
you sent it. Maybe long before.”
She watched Travis’s expression, then added, “Like I said, lots of
maybes
in Border Town.”
Travis nodded, then stared out at the country falling farther and farther below. A freeway crept by, running east to west, all but devoid of traffic.
“So, what exactly is at Seven Theaterstrasse?” he said at last.
Paige was quiet a moment before replying. “It’s not so much what’s there, as what the building itself
is
.”
“Which is?”
Another silence. Then: “A weapon.”
He turned from the window and looked at her. Waited for her to go on.
“Seven Theaterstrasse is where it’s all going to be decided,” she said. “It’s the choke point at the center of everything our enemy is planning. If we win there, everyone wins. And if we lose there—” She cut herself off, unwilling to say the rest, or maybe even think it.
After a moment she said, “None of this will make sense unless I start with the beginning. The essentials, at least.”
She thought about how best to get into it, and then began the story.
Two strange things happened in the spring of 1978: the first occurred five hundred feet beneath Wyoming, the second, five hundred feet south of Pennsylvania Avenue. The most powerful bureaucracy in the world, presented with the most important asset in history, chose to limit its own influence.
Over the weeks following the catastrophic failure of the Very Large Ion Collider facility at Wind Creek, the president of the United States and most of his cabinet were briefed on the details as they came in from inspectors on site. The trapped DOE personnel had all been hospitalized and released; along with thick nondisclosure agreements, they’d been provided with trauma counseling, some of which would probably be long-term. Ruben Ward remained in a coma; he’d been flown to Johns Hopkins, where so far there’d been no change in his condition.
On April 3, the first scientific inspection team entered the VLIC site. They found that more than ninety objects had accumulated beneath the Breach—that term was well cemented even by then. If it hadn’t already been clear to everyone involved that this situation would call for delicate handling, the team’s findings brought the picture into razor-edged focus. In the eighty-seven-page report they filed after that first object survey, the word
dangerous
appeared more than two hundred times.
Upon receipt of the report, the president’s most senior advisors settled into discussion along predictable lines. How tight a stranglehold should be kept on this project? How limited should Congress’s awareness be? Which defense contractors should be brought on board, and how central a role should they play in making use of this strange new resource? Obviously those that had been the most generous during the election would have to be first in line, but how far back did the line go? Two companies? Maybe three?
Several hours into the first such meeting, the president turned to a man who’d said almost nothing so far: Peter Campbell, an MIT professor and, at thirty-three, the youngest member of the Science Council.
“You don’t appear to agree,” the president said.
“I don’t.”
“Then say what you’re thinking.”
Campbell chose his words carefully before he began.
“Does anyone in this room really believe we can keep this secret?” He allowed a few seconds of silence for an answer. None came. “Consider the spec data on the Manhattan Project. If there was ever a secret we needed to keep, that was it. How long did we manage? Two years. The Russian bomb program was under way within two years, at the latest. Think of the amount of knowledge they had to obtain from us to make their project work, and then consider that they need only learn two facts this time: that the Breach exists, and that the VLIC created it. After that, all the information they need is there for the taking. The specs on the VLIC were published in
Scientific American
five years before we finished building it.”
The vice president spoke up. “Russia developing its own Breach is problematic, but—”
“Russia, China, India, North and South Korea, Israel, Germany, France, Britain, Japan, Saudi Arabia,” Campbell said. “Probably a few more I’m leaving out. Count on each of them to have it up and running inside of ten years. Our VLIC took a decade to build with Department of Energy funding. DOD would’ve gotten it done in half that time, and we should expect the same urgency in all of these countries.” He waved his own copy of the object report in front of him. “You want all
their
most generous defense contractors fucking around with this kind of stuff?”
Even years later, Campbell would lie awake wondering if one calculated use of the word
fuck
had saved the world. Certainly something in those few hundred words had struck a nerve, because the conversation tipped at that fulcrum and never managed to tip back. He’d aimed for their fears, that was all. He’d aimed for their fears and hit.
In the end, the president turned the inevitable question back to Campbell. What alternative approach did he propose?
Campbell had an answer. Take away the incentive for any other country to waste resources creating its own Breach. Share this one with all of them. Hold a secret summit with the leaders of these nations and their most respected scientists—but not their military-industrial tycoons. Be straight with them. Be upfront. Set in stone the only policy with a chance of avoiding chaos: the Breach should be overseen by a single organization loyal to the world as a whole and to no nation in particular. Let this group be composed of people with impeccable backgrounds in science and ethics—real ethics of human needs and liabilities, not the limited scope of any one culture’s religious morality. Let no one actively seek to join; anyone craving that much responsibility should never be trusted with it. Instead identify excellent candidates and recruit them. The member nations should protect and finance this group, but none should control it. Not even America.
“But the Breach is on our soil,” the defense secretary said. “We paid for what created it.”
“All the more legitimate our stance will be,” Campbell said. “Look, to whatever extent we flex our egos over this thing, we increase the chance of some other superpower saying, ‘Forget it, we’ll make our own.’ Once one of them does that, others will follow. The only way to prevent it is to be evenhanded. Think about it: wouldn’t we be grateful if one of them did the same, if one of their research facilities had accidentally generated this thing?”
“I don’t believe any other country would do that,” the president said.