Authors: Patrick Lee
ENTITY 0697
They flew west in a kind of perpetual daybreak, crossing the pinched tops of the time zones at the same speed as the Earth’s shadow.
Travis tried to sleep. He failed. In the calm hours after takeoff, as the night’s adrenaline faded, the events in Zurich caught up with him in full. In the midst of the violence he’d thought he appreciated its scale, but he’d been wrong. With each new hour’s hindsight his sense of it deepened, like the piles of bodies in the streets around 7 Theaterstrasse.
Twice during the flight he threw up, just reaching the lavatory both times. In each room he passed along the aircraft’s corridor, the operators—still wearing every piece of equipment except their rifles—sat wide awake. Some rested their heads in their hands; others stared out the windows at the black ocean and pastel sky. The view was beautiful, and maybe they needed to look at something beautiful for a while, for whatever help it might offer.
Paige didn’t sleep, either. She fell into a long silence over Europe and then the Atlantic. She didn’t cry, but Travis saw her hands shaking at times. After a while he found himself following the operators’ lead and staring out the window, letting his thoughts go silent. He was looking down at Greenland, the snow reflecting some of the faint pink of the sky, when Paige spoke.
“I was wrong, before.” Her voice sounded as strained as if she’d cried, after all. “What I said about the Breach, that we’re like Java man compared to whoever’s on the other side.” She paused again and chose her words carefully. “Really, we’re like ants. Ants that accidentally tunneled into a holding tank full of chlorine underneath some chemical factory. That’s how far out of our depth we are, dealing with this shit. That’s how dangerous it is. And it’s how little concern they have for us, whoever they are on the other side. As much concern as the owners of that factory would have for the ants. They probably don’t even know about us. Probably wouldn’t care if they did.”
They were over North Dakota now, the landscape shadowy under the same dawn they’d taken off into, in Switzerland. Neither Travis nor Paige had spoken in hours.
Paige’s cell rang. It was Crawford. Tangent had located Ellis Cook’s daughter, who’d been present at the time of his apparent suicide. The girl had been very close to her father. She might know something. She was on a flight to Border Town right now, landing an hour ahead of them.
Travis found himself thinking about the Whisper again. Unnerving as it was, it made a welcome distraction. Paige ended the call and glanced at him, and he thought he saw the same sentiment in her eyes.
She was quiet a moment, then said, “Have you ever heard of a story called ‘The Appointment in Samarra’?” She still sounded worn, depleted.
“No,” Travis said.
“I forget who wrote it. One of those things everyone reads in English 102. This servant goes to the marketplace, and he sees Death standing there, and Death makes a threatening face at him. The servant runs back to his master and says, ‘Let me borrow your horse, I’ll ride to Samarra so Death won’t find me.’ The master lets him go, then heads down to the market himself, sees Death and he says, ‘What are you doing making a threatening face at my servant?’And Death says, ‘Threatening? No, no, I was just surprised to see him here. I have an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.’ ”
She looked past him, out the window at the waking countryside.
“That’s what this feels like,” she said finally. “Like no matter what we do from this point on, no matter what path we take, the Whisper is waiting for us at the end of it. If it can guess lotto numbers, it can sure as hell guess our moves. Even if we say to ourselves, ‘Well, it would guess this, so let’s do the opposite,’ we have to assume it could guess
that
, too.”
Travis could only nod. Yeah. No reason to think otherwise.
“So what the hell are we supposed to do?” Paige said.
He thought for a moment. Only one avenue seemed to have any light shining onto it. The hit list carved into the floor at 7 Theaterstrasse.
“We need to know why Pilgrim had those thirty-seven people killed. Or why the Whisper had them killed. There has to be a reason, and it has to matter. And even if the damn thing expects us to find out, and expected it ten years ago, what else can we do? If there’s a way out, it’s by knowing what it’s afraid of.”
She nodded, more accepting than agreeing. Which was more or less how he felt himself.
He stared out at North Dakota. Little towns slid by far below, some of them not much more than a set of crossroads with a streetlight or two, still shining in the half-light.
A strange thought came to him. Actually, it wasn’t the thought that was strange. The thought was normal. All that was strange was that he hadn’t considered it until now.
His former life was over.
His apartment in Fairbanks. His job there. His pressing decision between staying or going home to Minneapolis, going to work with his brother. That life was gone, as if someone else had lived it. He was here now, part of Tangent whether he liked it or not. If he ever went home, there was no question that Pilgrim’s people would be waiting there for him. And given all the sensitive things he knew about the Breach now, Tangent would probably want to keep him among their own ranks after this was over, if only for their own security reasons.
If either he or Tangent still existed when this was over.
Her name was Lauren. She was sitting in Paige’s office, almost on the spot where Travis had been standing when his bonds were removed a day earlier. She was twenty-three, but looked a lot younger than that at the moment. She looked like a lost child.
Travis was standing with Paige. Crawford and a few others were in the room too. For half an hour they’d asked Lauren all the questions about her father that the computers hadn’t answered for them. So far, nothing useful had emerged.
There was something in the girl’s eyes that Travis recognized. He’d seen it in people before, during interrogations. An eagerness to reveal something, stifled by fear of doing so. Fear because she didn’t trust them.
Travis leaned close to Paige and whispered a question in her ear. She looked at him, understood his idea, and nodded. She stepped out of the room, taking out her cell as she went. Lauren’s dark eyes followed her out, then returned to Crawford as he asked her to clarify something she’d already clarified twice.
A few minutes later, Paige returned. She was carrying a black plastic case. An entity case.
Travis waited for another exchange between Crawford and Lauren to end, then said, “Can I speak to her?”
Crawford nodded. Travis took a step toward Lauren, met her eyes, and spoke softly but directly.
“You don’t believe your father killed himself, do you?”
She shook her head, her eyes never leaving his.
“There’s no way,” she said. She was quiet a moment. Then she looked at the floor, and continued. “Everyone’s been telling me I need to accept what happened, or else I won’t be able to deal with it. They said people always feel the way I do, when this happens. And they said it’s normal for there to be . . . no warning. They told me they reviewed the security footage from all over the estate grounds, before and after it happened, and nobody came or went. But my father didn’t kill himself. And I don’t care whether you people believe me—”
“We know he didn’t kill himself,” Travis said.
Her eyes came up again. Stared at him. He turned to Paige, and she handed him the black case. He set it on the table next to the door and opened it. It looked empty. Travis reached in and took hold of what he knew was inside it. He couldn’t be sure which part he was grabbing, but the effect was identical to picking up an article of clothing with his eyes closed. He felt something like a shirt sleeve at once, and a second later his hand found the hem at the shirt’s bottom.
He turned back to Lauren.
“The man who murdered your father was wearing this,” Travis said, and shoved his arm through the open bottom of the shirt, as far as it could go. He saw the arm and most of his shoulder vanish into nothingness.
Lauren’s body jerked. She stared at the empty space where Travis’s arm should have been, her eyes huge. Head shaking now, just noticeably. Her mouth formed a question, but it didn’t come out. She only stared. Five seconds passed. Then ten.
When she did speak, her voice was barely audible. “Where is he now?”
She was looking at Travis again by the time she said it. He met her gaze without blinking.
“Dead,” Travis said. “I killed him.”
He watched her reaction, and saw what he’d hoped for. She knew he was telling the truth.
“We’re not the bad guys, Lauren,” he said. “Whatever it is you’re afraid to talk about, you can tell us.”
She looked at him a moment longer, then turned her eyes to Paige and the others, one by one. Each nodded.
Her attention came back to Travis, and after another moment she returned to staring at her own knees.
“My father belonged to a group of people you’ve never heard of. You won’t find anything about them by looking at his tax records, or his phone logs. The other people who were killed, these past several years, were part of it too. I’ll tell you as much as I know.”
As much as she knew wasn’t a lot. Her father had sought to protect her from what he was involved in.
The group had no name, she told them. That was supposed to be a security measure. Among its members, it did have a nickname—something of a joke—which was never written down: The Order of the Qubit. Travis didn’t know that word. Everyone else in the room did.
Qubit
stood for “quantum bit.” A computing unit of a quantum computer. For the better part of the past decade, a few dozen governments and a few hundred companies had been trying like hell to develop quantum computers, which were expected to be dramatically more powerful than computers at present. But other than very limited proof-of-concept stuff in labs, no one had had any luck. It was one of those things everyone was sure would exist at some point. But whether that point was five years away, or fifty, was tough to pin down.
Lauren thought the Order of the Qubit dated to the early nineties. As she understood it, it was more or less a group of very rich people funding their own secret work toward building a viable quantum computer. Their motivation was simply fear: in the global race to make one of these machines, whoever crossed the finish line first would gain a great deal of power. As it happened, a lot of the institutions who were likely candidates to win the race couldn’t be expected to use that power for the world’s best interests. Many could be counted on to use it for nearly the opposite purpose. The Order of the Qubit wanted to win that race itself, then carefully select a few organizations that really did have the big human picture in mind, and simply give them the technology.
Good idea. Also a good way to get killed. Entrenched interests tended to dislike threats to their power, and to express that dislike violently.
As to whether the group had achieved its goal, or even gained any ground toward it, Lauren had no idea. She also had no idea where their work was conducted, where their meetings were held, or where Tangent could locate any other member of the organization.
She finished speaking, and looked at them each in turn again.
“Did I help?” she said.
Travis met Paige’s eyes. Saw that she was thinking exactly what he was thinking. He looked at Lauren again.
“You helped,” he said.
“They have one,” Travis said. “A working model.”
He and Paige were standing in the open doorway of the pole barn on the surface, watching the jet—a Gulfstream this time—take off with Lauren in it. She’d asked to stay in Border Town. She’d said she’d feel safer there. She wouldn’t have been. This was probably the least-safe place on Earth right now, lying in the Whisper’s gun sights. Lauren herself should be under no real threat elsewhere; she’d already given them all the information she had.
“I think they must,” Paige said.
Travis watched the plane diminish to a desktop model of itself. Then a speck. Then nothing.
“Is there any chance a computer like that could outthink the Whisper?” he said. “Is that why these people are a threat to it?”
“I only know a little about quantum computers. Stories about their potential show up in tech papers once in a while. I know their power grows exponentially the more qubits you add, but that in itself has been the trick. Adding more of them. There’s some kind of engineering limit, ten or twelve qubits, something like that. Not enough to do very much. But if someone built a quantum computer with fifty qubits, or a hundred, it’d be off the charts. Way, way off the charts. I think there are still limits to their use, even then—limits on the kind of math they can do—but there’d be creative ways to get around that. There’s no question it would be a big deal, if someone really had a scaled-up version working.”
Travis thought it over, watching empty sky now. Even if they were right, it didn’t fully make sense. If the thing was really a threat to the Whisper, then the Whisper should have seen that coming too. Should have directed Pilgrim to find and destroy the place where the thing would be built, long before it was completed.
That was just one of the things that made no sense to him. There were several others. He couldn’t help thinking that the confusion was part of the Whisper’s plan. Any good strategy should look like nonsense to those facing off against it.
What
was
the plan? What was the Whisper’s final goal? It was hard enough to figure out what a human being wanted. What the hell did this
thing
want? On that point, he couldn’t even form a guess.