Authors: Peter Clines
The sun was peeking over the horizon when Mike went over to the main floor. He found half of the Albuquerque Door team there. Most of the panels had been pulled off the back ring. Neil and Sasha examined components and cables one by one. Neil’s eyes were puffy.
Olaf stood behind them and looked over their shoulders. He glanced over at Mike. “Do you need to be here?”
“Just doing my job,” said Mike. He looked up and saw Arthur speaking to someone just out of sight—Jamie—in the control booth. “I’m kind of surprised to see you all working.”
“We need to find out what went wrong,” said Sasha, “before those idiots in Washington decide to shut us down.”
“Then we’re all on the same page,” said Mike. He walked around the rings and studied the floor. There were still dark spots of blood on the pathway, caught in the corners of the expanded steel. There were thin swipes and trails in it where the puddle had been wiped up.
“Hey,” he said, “is it safe to get close?”
Neil looked up from the rings and nodded. “We’re powered down.” He pointed off to the side where five thick connectors had been pulled apart.
“Thanks.”
Mike crouched down to look under the ramp. Then he crawled forward. He reached out and swept his hand back and forth in the dim space under the walkway.
“Looking for something?” asked Olaf.
“Maybe,” said Mike. He straightened up and dusted his hands on his jeans. “Did you pick up in here at all?”
“What?”
“Did you move anything? Clean up anything?”
Sasha’s eyes dropped to the dark spots. “What are you looking for?”
He told them. Neil and Sasha traded a confused glance and both shook their heads. Olaf rolled his eyes. “Is that important?” asked Neil. He reached up to wipe his eyes with the heel of his hand.
“No,” muttered Olaf.
“I’m not sure yet,” Mike replied. “Has anyone else been down here since…well, since it happened?”
“Arthur and Jamie were both down here for a while,” said Sasha. “Did they move anything?”
“I don’t think so,” Neil said.
“No,” snapped Olaf.
Mike counted to four. “Do you have any idea what happened to Bob?”
Olaf flapped his lips for a moment. He tensed, and Mike was sure the other man was going to swing at him. Then his shoulders dropped—not quite a slump—and he shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “It…it makes no sense. It shouldn’t’ve happened.”
“He HD’d,” Neil said. “It’s the only answer. He got scrambled somehow. Just like Tramp.”
“You can’t HD in the Door,” said Olaf. “There’s no point when the traveler is broken down, so it can’t be a reintegration issue.”
“What about the magnetic field?” asked Mike. He tugged open a workstation drawer and peered inside. “Neil’s told me it can be pretty dangerous.”
Sasha nodded, but Olaf shook his head again. “Everything was balanced. There was no flux. And he never crossed the lines.”
“Besides, it wouldn’t mess him up like that,” said Sasha.
“What about his clothes?”
Olaf bit back another snide remark. “We don’t know,” he said. “Like I said, none of this should’ve happened.” He waved a hand back at the rings. “The levels were all good, power was steady, nothing’s misaligned. Everything checks out. It couldn’t’ve happened.”
“But it did,” said Mike. “So how?”
“It had to be a programming issue.” He jerked his chin toward the control booth. “The computer messed up one of the variables.”
“And that would…” Mike glanced at the Door.
“I don’t know!” Olaf threw his hands in the air. “All I know is we can’t find anything wrong with the tech.” He turned and half-stomped back up the ramp to loom over the two engineers.
Mike took a last look around the floor, then headed for the control room.
Jamie was hunched over a monitor, scrolling through lines of code. Arthur stood a few feet behind her, both hands on his cane. His eyes were red.
“Hey,” said Mike.
“How are you doing?” asked Arthur. “This whole thing must’ve been a shock for you.”
“I’m okay. Thanks for asking.”
Arthur looked at him for a moment. “Is there something we can do for you?”
Mike nodded at the screens. “Any idea yet what happened?”
“Hardware problem,” said Jamie. Her eyes never left the screen. More lines of code scrolled by.
“Olaf seems pretty sure it’s a computer problem,” said Mike.
She spun. Her eyes weren’t as red as Arthur’s, but they weren’t far from tears. “Did you just come up here to stir things up?”
“No,” he said. “Sorry. I was just trying to—”
“It’s hardware,” she said. “It has to be.”
“If it was the program or the equations,” said Arthur, “the Door couldn’t’ve opened.”
“Are you sure?” said Mike. “There’s no way it could’ve opened…wrong?”
Jamie made a noise that sounded like a snort cut off before it could get free. The corners of Arthur’s mouth trembled, as if his lips were fighting to form either a faint smile or frown and were too evenly matched. “No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”
“That doesn’t sound too certain.”
Jamie tapped a key, freezing the scroll. She looked up over her shoulder at Arthur.
“I…this is why I told Magnus we need more testing,” he said. “There are still a lot of things we don’t know.” Arthur hooked his cane on his pocket, pulled off his glasses, and pinched his nose. He took a few deep breaths. A few more moments passed before he pushed the eyeglasses back onto his face.
A moment passed.
“The day after I arrived,” said Mike, “Bob asked me if you’d been talking about him.”
Arthur blinked. “Me?”
“Yeah.”
“Talked about him how?”
Mike counted to three and then raised his shoulders in a casual shrug. “I don’t know. We were out having dinner, Olaf showed up, and he changed the subject.”
Arthur and Jamie traded a look. “To be honest,” he said, “we’d all noticed that Bob had been acting a little odd lately.”
“Odd how?”
“Just not like himself,” said Jamie. “Kind of…well, paranoid.”
Mike counted to three again. “Like Ben Miles?”
Arthur shook his head. “Nothing like that. He just seemed like he was hiding something.”
“Any idea what?”
“I couldn’t say.”
Another moment passed.
“Could the accident have anything to do with that flash drive you gave Jamie just before Bob went through?”
Arthur set his cane back down on the floor. “What are you implying?”
“I’m not implying anything,” said Mike. “I’m asking a question. You introduced a new element and something went wrong. I’m wondering if there’s a connection.”
“We didn’t introduce anything,” said Jamie. She reached across the desk and picked up the flash drive. “I haven’t even plugged it in yet.”
She and Arthur shot dark looks at Mike.
“So what’s on it?” he asked.
“Suggestions for an algorithm update,” Arthur said.
“What kind of update?”
“I’m afraid that falls under things we don’t have to share with you.”
“And it’s moot,” said Jamie, waving the drive, “because I never did anything with them.” She tossed it back onto the desk. It clattered against some equipment and fell to the floor. She didn’t move to pick it up.
Arthur tapped his fingers on the head of his cane. “Did you need anything else, Mike?”
Jamie looked back and forth between them.
He let a few moments of his own pass. “Yeah,” he said. “I was wondering if either of you took anything from the main floor.”
Her eyes focused on him. “What do you mean?”
“After Bob…after he came through the Door, did either of you pick up anything?”
Arthur peered over his glasses. “Like what?”
“The baseball.”
Jamie blinked. “The baseball?”
“The one Bob and I were tossing back and forth.”
“Yeah, I figured that’s the one,” said Jamie. “What about it?”
“It’s gone. Vanished.”
Arthur frowned. “Are you sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“Neil or Sasha probably picked it up,” said Jamie. She turned back to her screens and the text scrolled. “They probably don’t even remember doing it.”
“I asked,” said Mike. “Unless they picked it up and put it somewhere else altogether, it’s not down there.”
“You were right there,” said Arthur. “Didn’t you see where it went?”
“I wasn’t looking when he stepped through.”
Another moment passed.
“So?” asked Jamie.
“So,” said Mike, “maybe it’s a clue. Maybe if we can find it, it’ll help us figure out what happened.”
Arthur hooked his hands in his pockets again. “We already have a lot to do, Mike,” he said. “We’re stripping the Door down to the wires and going over every line of code.”
“It’ll just take a minute to look at the video, though.”
The older man cleared his throat. “We don’t have the time.”
“You don’t have the time to find out what went wrong?”
“We have an established method for hunting down problems. I’ll consider your idea and add it to the schedule.”
“So just let me look at the video. I won’t get in the way.”
“I’d rather you not look at something that may give away insights into the workings of the Albuquerque Door.”
“Are you serious?”
“Of course. That’s one of the conditions of your being here.”
“I was standing right there watching it,” Mike said, gesturing down at the main floor, “but you won’t let me watch the recordings?”
Arthur said nothing.
“It’d go ten times faster if you let me help.”
Jamie stabbed at her keyboard and stopped the scroll again. She glared at Mike. “You think you can go through this faster than me?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said. “I just meant—”
“No, please,” she said. She rolled her chair back a foot and opened a path to the monitors. “Tell me what I’m missing. Tell me how I screwed this up.”
“No one thinks you screwed up,” said Arthur.
“If he can do it so much faster, let him,” she said. “I’m halfway through, but God knows I don’t want to be doing this right now.”
Mike waited a moment, then stepped forward and bent to the screens. He set one hand on the back of Jamie’s chair. His fingertips brushed her shoulder and he felt her tense up.
Jamie twisted out of the chair and sucked a breath between her teeth. Her eyes flashed as she spat the air back at him. “Don’t!”
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Don’t you FUCKING
TOUCH
ME!” she roared, stalking past him and out of the control room.
The room settled and Arthur cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about that,” he said. “I don’t think Jamie’s personal space issues have come up before, have they?”
The bartender, a thick-armed woman with a dyed-black topknot and red lips, glanced up as light from the parking lot followed Mike inside. As promised, the place was narrow, with the actual bar itself running half the length. The stools were free standing, not bolted to the floor, and some of them formed small clusters and knots. A pool table and jukebox filled the back third, and a dart board was set up where it would be far too dangerous to use.
Two men watched ESPN with the volume at a murmur. An older woman drank at the bar with one hand up, holding the memory of a cigarette. A man in a business suit studied a whiskey. Jamie sat at the far end of the bar nursing a beer. Mike hesitated, three steps into the bar, still close to the door. Then she held up the beer bottle and gestured him closer with it.
He walked over but didn’t sit down. “How goes it?”
“Carly,” she called to the bartender, “give the government jerk a drink. On me.”
“You’re too kind,” he said.
“It’s a bar,” said Jamie. “People come here to drink, not to talk.”
“What’ll it be?” asked Carly.
“Rum and Coke.” He sat down next to Jamie. The stools had a good distance between them. “Can we talk at all,” he asked, “or do I have to have a drink in my hand?”
She killed her beer and let the bottle clunk on the bar. “Will the drink make you more bearable?”
“The first one won’t, but probably the second one.”
“Well,” she said, “that answers that, then.”
The topknotted bartender set down a large glass for Mike and another bottle for Jamie. She lifted the beer and held it out without looking at him. He tapped his drink against hers. She took three long swallows before setting the bottle back on the bar.
“Thanks for telling me about the wireless yesterday,” she said. “Stupid mistake. I should’ve done that a year ago.”
He pulled the straw out of his drink and had a sip. “You’re welcome.”
“Why’d you tell me?”
He shrugged. “Just the decent thing to do.”
Jamie coughed and took another hit off the bottle. She set it down. “His girlfriend called this afternoon, looking for him. No one had told her. Anne had to break the news.”
Mike decided to have another sip of his drink rather than say anything.
“I finished going through all the code,” she said, “and I’ve run fourteen different simulations. It couldn’t’ve happened. The accident.”
“It did.”
She shook her head. “Not because of me.”
He waited a few moments to see if she had more to say. “You’re sure?”
“Positive. Numbers don’t lie, and nothing was wrong with the numbers. If something went wrong, then it’s been going wrong every single time we’ve used the Door and nobody ever noticed anything.”
“Or something else failed somewhere in the calculations,” said Mike. “One of the science teachers at my school told me that on every test she usually has one or two kids who get an equation wrong but still get all the math right.”
“You think we’ve had the equations wrong all this time?”
Mike shrugged and had another drink.
She snorted. “There’s nothing wrong. Besides, the Door’s always worked.”
“Except when you tried to put it on a timer.”
“Yeah, whatever. Don’t nitpick. It works. The equations work. The math works. The Door opens. We go through it. It has to be something that went wrong with the hardware.”
“And Neil and Sasha say it’s not the hardware. So there has to be something else.”
She made a rude noise and drank half the remaining beer.
“Have you considered it might be something cumulative?”
“You better finish that,” she said to Mike, waving to the bartender. “You’re going to have another one in a minute.”
“You always drink this much?”
“Only when people I know die in front of me.” She finished the bottle and set it down on the counter.
He gave a slow nod and took another drink. “That’s kind of impressive.”
“What is?”
“Going through all the code already.”
“Y’know, for a supposedly decent guy, you’re kind of a cold bastard, aren’t you?”
“Me?”
“Bob’s been dead a day and a half, and you’re still talking about work.”
Mike downed the last of his drink in one swallow. “I don’t have anything to say.”
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “Cold bastard.”
Carly set down another glass and another bottle. She looked at Mike, then Jamie. “He still on your tab?”
Jamie nodded. She didn’t bother holding the beer out for a toast this time. She swallowed twice and set it down on the bar. “So,” she said, “why is Leland ‘Mike’ Erikson, sometime decent guy, such a bastard?”
“You really want to know?”
“No, but it beats anything else we could talk about.”
He took a hit off his drink. Then another. “Did you have a pet die when you were little?”
Jamie wrinkled her brow. “What?”
“A cat? A dog?”
“Are you comparing Bob to a cat?”
“I’m trying to make a point.”
“Yeah, of course I did.”
“You said cat. What was her name?”
“His. Spock.”
“Did you cry when he died?”
She tilted the bottle back. “What’s it to you?”
“Did you?”
“Yeah, okay, I was eight, and my cat died.”
He swallowed some more rum and Coke. “You’re not crying now.”
“It was almost thirty years ago.”
Mike nodded. “Lose any of your grandparents?”
“Both on my mom’s side,” said Jamie. “One on my dad’s.”
“You’re not crying for them, either.”
She banged the bottle down loud enough to draw attention. “Is this some super-genius analogy, where you try to prove I’m as big a bastard as you?”
“No,” he said, “just making a point.”
“Okay. What?”
“What I keep telling you. I remember everything. My memories never fade. They never get soft or blurry. Never.”
Jamie blinked.
“My dog, Batman, was hit by a car when I was six,” said Mike, “and I cried for four hours. I lost my granddad on my mom’s side when I was nine, and my nana on my dad’s when I was eleven. We had to put down our cat, Jake, the morning of my sixteenth birthday. My mom died my junior year of college, and I was there in the hospital with her. And every single one of them could’ve happened a minute ago. I can tell you what everyone around me said, every thought in my head, every sight and sound and smell. I remember every second of them all dying with perfect, crystal clarity. Everything’s always raw. It’s always ‘too soon.’ ”
She lowered the bottle. “That sounds like hell.”
“It’s not great,” he agreed. “And now I get to have Bob dying right in front of me every day for the rest of my life. I’d be lying if I said I haven’t had a few nights where I wished for early-onset Alzheimer’s, because I don’t want to think about how much’ll be in my head by the time I’m sixty or seventy.”
“That’s messed up.”
“Yeah,” he said.
Her chin dipped toward the bar. “I never thought of it like that.”
“No one ever does.” He tilted his glass back and swallowed twice.
“Did you really have a dog named Batman?”
“You had a cat named Spock.”
“Yep.”
Mike sketched lines around his eyes with his fingers. “He had black fur on his face like a mask. I thought he went out at night and fought crime.”
Jamie’s lips twitched into a faint smile. “So the whole super-brain thing didn’t kick in until later?”
“Batman was a great dog. He could’ve been fighting crime while I was asleep.”
Her lips got dangerously close to a smile again. A moment later she held up her half-empty bottle. A moment after that he tapped it with his glass.
“I’m sorry if it seemed like I didn’t care,” Mike said. “I liked Bob. He seemed like a decent guy.”
“He was,” she said. Her tongue slipped and it came out sounding like “wash.” She shook her head and rolled her shoulders. They popped twice.
He tapped his fingers on his glass and nodded at her shoulder. “Sorry about this morning.”
“About what?”
He gestured with his chin again. “Touching you.”
She frowned, then shook her head. “Don’t be. I was angry. I needed to blow off some steam. I overreacted.”
“It wasn’t appropriate.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” she said. “You touched my shoulder by accident. It’s not like you slapped my ass or something.”
“It bothered you.”
“Because I have issues. My issues aren’t your problem.” She raised her beer and tilted her head back.
He finished his own drink. His throat was warm, and a pleasant tingle ran from the back of his skull down into his chest. Jamie downed the last of her bottle and waved for the bartender. “How many is that for you?” he asked.
“Enough that this is her last one,” said the bartender.
“How many?” asked Mike.
“This one’s ten in about two hours.”
“Fuck,” Jamie said. “Bob’s dead, Carly.”
“I know,” said the topknotted woman. “Give me your keys and you can have two more for him before I call you a cab.”
Jamie dug in her coat pocket and slapped a mess of keys on the bar. “Give me three more, and the government jerk can walk me home.”
Mike raised his eyebrows.
“Oh, don’t get your hopes up,” she told him.
“D’you actually know this guy?” asked Carly. “He looks kind of…”
“Like a government jerk?”
“I was going to say kind of like Snape in
Harry Potter.
”
“Sitting right here,” said Mike.
“He’s fine,” Jamie said. She tapped the key ring. “Drinks.”
Carly gave Mike a look. He returned it. She sighed and scooped up the keys.
“I don’t usually drink this much,” Jamie told him.
“Well, you’re doing it like a pro.”
She snorted, but it turned into a chuckle at the end. “Bob was always telling me to loosen up. I never listened.”
“Issues?”
“Yeah.”
Carly returned. She set a fresh glass in front of Mike and put a beer in Jamie’s hand. A third of the bottle was already empty. Jamie didn’t seem to notice.
He slid the straw out of his drink and dropped it on the bar. “Anything you want to talk about?”
“What?”
“Your issues?”
She straightened up and stared at him. “Are you serious?”
Mike shrugged. “Part of the teacher thing.”
She shook her head. “I’d think it’d all be in those great personnel files you saw.”
“Believe it or not, even these days, government files aren’t as in-depth as most people think,” he said. “I did some stuff as a kid that I was sure would be in mine. It was a bit disappointing.”
She smirked. “Not that special after all. Must’ve been a blow.”
“I’ve had worse.”
Jamie took a quick drink. “You know I’m a speed junkie, right?”
“Yeah, that’s in there.” The ants carried out her dossier pages. “Twenty-three speeding tickets in four states over five years. Eight driving to endanger. It raised a lot of flags when you were vetted for the
SETH project, even after Arthur vouched for you and got them to overlook your hacker history. It’s a miracle you’ve still got a license.”
“Traffic school. It doesn’t mention the crash?”
Mike shook his head. “Crash?”
She sighed. “All that brain power and it never occurred to you why a cheerleader turned into a computer geek?”
“I just figured you were some Internet male fantasy come to life.”
She made an unpleasant sound and hefted her bottle again. “I was sixteen,” she said. “Dating this guy from the next town over. Kevin Ulinn. Kev. He only had two things going for him. He was a college freshman, and he had a motorcycle. Drove my parents nuts. I’d sneak out at night and we’d drive around. Get out on the highway and push it up to one-ten or so, then fuck wherever we ended up. Perfect high school summer relationship.”
“I’ve seen a few like that.”
Jamie nodded. “I bet you have, Mister I’m-just-a-high-school-teacher.” She swallowed two mouthfuls of beer, then raised an eyebrow at the mostly empty bottle. She made two attempts to line it up with the wet ring on the bar napkin, then gave up and set it down. Her eyes were glassy.
“One night he hit a wet spot, lost it, and dropped the bike. We were going about ninety-five. They said he died instantly. Hit the ground just right and snapped his neck, even with the helmet. I got thrown off and skidded almost a hundred feet down the road on my back. He’d given me his leather jacket. Without it the pavement would’ve ripped me to shreds. They say it was just rags when the paramedics got there. Serious miracle I didn’t end up in a wheelchair. As it was, I woke up in the hospital with a broken arm and three fractured vertebrae. Wore a halo until Christmas.” She reached up and gestured at the two scars on her forehead.
“That must’ve been terrifying.”
“Oh yeah. Lucked out that I didn’t end up with a bunch of surgical pins or any of that, but I had to get skin grafts over most of my back, sides, and this arm.” She picked up the bottle with her left hand and toasted, but didn’t drink. “They didn’t take well, and it ended up scarring a lot. A complete mess. So ended my days as a cheerleader. No more halter tops or short sleeves. Had to wear this awful, high-necked
dress to the prom. You know it’s bad when an eighteen-year-old boy doesn’t want to have sex with his date on prom night.”
Mike looked at her shoulder. “So your back’s still sensitive?”
“Nah,” said Jamie. “It’s completely numb. The crash grated off pretty much every nerve ending from my neck to my ass. Haven’t felt anything in almost seventeen years.”
“So what’s the—”
“I just don’t like being reminded that I’m disfigured.”
“I’d hardly say that,” he said. “If you don’t mind me saying it, you’re one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met.”
She waved the words away. “Yeah, that’s what they all say. Then they see me naked.” She downed the last of her beer. The bottle hit the bar hard and loud.
Mike looked at her. “Can I ask you a question?”
Her head went side to side. “No, you cannot see my scars.”
“Not that. I was just wondering how you read all that code today.”
“What?”
“Over two million lines of code. How’d you go through all of it in one day?”