Now & Again (3 page)

He gunned the pickup off the freeway and leaped onto the shoulder. Gravel rooster-tails spouted behind him as the bucking truck howled up the steep embankment. Just below, the freeway chaos had begun.

“Get your belt off now! You know it’s gonna twist!”

The pickup smashed through shrubs and small trees. A mirror ripped off as they powered up the steepening hill toward a guard rail at the top.

Josh struggled with his seatbelt as he was tossed about the seat. “Tryin’! Damn thing won’t work!”

Kendall yanked off his own seatbelt. Unexpectedly, the bouncing truck scraped a boulder and skipped sideways in the gravel. Kendall tried to recover but it bucked a deep hole and suddenly ground out. The motor shrieked and seized. Kendall’s body flew from his seat and slapped the windshield. Everything crunched to a stop. The smoking truck groaned as it slowly tipped sideways, towards the driver’s side, and back down the embankment.

Josh freed his belt. “Dad?”

The truck tipped more steeply. Josh kicked his twisted door open and jammed his feet against its armrest to keep it ajar while he extended a hand back down to his groggy father.

“Dad! Move it! You know what happens next!”

Kendall heard a remote voice but couldn’t make sense. He knew he needed to move but he couldn’t remember why. From below him, an air-horn blasted a warning. Kendall jerked awake. He grabbed at Josh’s hand like a drowning man. “Get out! Out! I’m comin’! Out!”

Kendall transferred his hold onto the center console in the nearly vertical world of the crew cab and let go of Josh’s hand. “Hurry!” He yelled as much to himself as to Josh.

Kendall pulled himself up far enough to grasp the now dangling seatbelt in a death grip. The truck continued its slow motion roll over.

Josh was poised at the door, waiting. Kendall furiously yanked himself up the belt with both hands and tackled Josh. They were both catapulted out the open door as the truck rolled away and tumbled downhill.

Below, vehicles were smashing onto trapped cars and the jack-knifed gas truck slid inevitably toward the center divider.

Kendall jerked Josh to his feet and shoved him ahead. “Up the hill! Now!”

Josh didn’t hesitate. He raced off in a mad dash with Kendall right behind him. Both of them clawed and scrabbled up through the underbrush. Reaching the top, they felt the concussive whump of the tanker’s detonation and heard the roar rising behind. They leaped the guard rail together. A torrent of flame and truck parts howled by just above their heads and continued on into the air.

The two men rolled wildly down the opposite side, with their arms swishing through the tall grass, to arrive at the bottom in a tangled heap. For a time, neither man did anything but gasp for breath and stare at the blue sky above them.

Josh slowly propped himself up on his elbows and swallowed enough spit to lubricate his voice. “Is that it?”

Kendall coughed and rolled onto his side. “Just wait.”

Josh sat up. He checked his hands, front and back. “Wait for what?”

“Hopefully nothing.”

“You mean it’s over?”

Kendall gently probed his bruised forehead and shrugged.

Josh looked at him. “So, you were right?”

Kendall painfully sat up and cocked his head to the side. “Always a first time.”

Josh staggered back up the berm and carefully gazed over the guard rail, shielding his eyes.

Kendall gingerly rose to his feet to follow but stopped. He grabbed wonderingly at his suit coat, holding out the sides. “Hey Josh, what the hell?” He swayed a bit on uncertain feet and looked at himself. “When did I put this on?”

“What?” Josh looked curiously down the hill at him.

“My suit coat! I took it off first thing before I got in the truck.” He shook his head and laboriously crawled up the hill after Josh, muttering, “That’s just nuts.”

Together they peered down at the horrific devastation below them. The massive tanker fire raged across both sides of the freeway, its unrelenting flames roiling from the wreck in bloated orange waves. Thick black smoke swelled into a solid column high in the air. At the edges of the accident, injured people wandered aimlessly. Bodies and twisted cars were strewn everywhere. Faint sirens wailed a promise of help while the distant stutter of helicopters grew louder.

“What just happened to us?” Josh asked, still staring downhill.

Kendall tipped his head back following the column of smoke up into the air. “We survived.”

“Did we?”

“I think so.” Kendall puzzled at something he saw below him. He stretched higher on the brow of the hill and unconsciously moved his head forward as he looked more intently down the embankment. “Josh?”

“Yeah.”

“What color’s my truck?”

“What? Why?”

“C’mon. What color?” Kendall’s voice had become hard. This was no idle question.

Josh moved nervously. “Black…”

“Yeah. Right. So, what color is…
that
truck?”

Josh stared down the hill at their flipped and abandoned
red
truck. He blinked a few times and then his face went empty. “That’s not your truck.”

The Reivers Corporation headquarters building in Pasadena, Maryland presented a striking edifice; as well it should, since it was the expensive result of a spirited architectural competition. Seated on a forested plot of high ground within a manicured twenty acre campus, the unusual three-story, reflective skinned building commanded a pleasant view of Beards Creek to the west and Glebe Bay to the northeast. It was positioned perfectly to take advantage of its unique woodland views, and yet close enough to Chesapeake Bay for visitors to smell the sea. Perhaps that was why the owners of the large homes that used to grace the very private Burgh Lane fought so hard to keep their property. Still, with the high-level government contacts and deep pockets that Reivers’ founder controlled, it was only a matter of time before the fears of eminent domain convinced them to settle for the generous cash offer that was already on the table. Two years later, after the winning architect had executed his startling vision, there was not one shred of evidence that those unique homes had ever existed; even quaint Burgh Lane itself was gone.

Only twelve miles southeast from Baltimore, Reivers’ corporate executives and their distinguished guests had easy access to major airports as well as the largest seaport in the Mid-Atlantic States. In fact, Baltimore’s Inner Harbor was once the second leading port of entry for immigrants to the United States, a fact not lost on many of the world’s most prominent citizens as they made their own journeys to visit the powerful brain trust at
the Reive
.

Unknown to many outsiders, and unappreciated, even by those who worked inside,
the Reive
had far more building beneath its grandiose surface façade than above. Indeed, there were other, equally expansive subterranean areas under all the other surface structures that dotted the acreage. Some of these lower floors, principally those in the main building, were relatively accessible to visitors and divided into the surprisingly diverse endeavors of the corporation, including medicine, process industries, energy, agriculture, literature and the arts, computer science, physics, archeology, general science, to name a few. These divisions were staffed by a panoply of highly paid, bright minds that efficiently churned out the many breakthroughs, insights, advances, and inventions that fueled
the Reive’s
staggering fortunes, and kept its New York financial firms supplied with fresh meat.

The levels beneath these public floors, however, were accessible to only a select few. In fact, these deeper rooms were rarely mentioned, and certainly did not appear on any unsecured schematics or architectural renderings. Still, these protected catacombs were the very heart that pumped the oxygenated blood of Reivers Corporation. Without them, far more than a single company stood at risk, although no one fully comprehended how fragile the muscle had become or how uneven the heartbeat.

* * *

Deep inside a secure section of the main building, in a multi-storied open space nicknamed
the arena
, a series of low-toned computer alarms beeped insistently. Concerned technicians in white coats moved quickly among tall banks of semi-transparent, flat screen monitors. Each bright rectangle was mounted flush beside others, with the lowest one set at a height just under eye level, and the highest at about ten feet. These colorful walls of moving images faced each other across narrow corridors that marched, rank upon rank, until they completely filled the shiny tile floor of the arena. From one of the many second and third level balconies, the constantly changing walls of color and light below took on the appearance of a sparkling maze within which the technicians scurried like lost people searching for an escape. Though imprecise, the image bore a certain semblance of truth.

The live-action points-of-view presented on the screens had ethereal, almost floating qualities to them. Some views bobbed along and followed people walking, others hovered above school classrooms or beside scientists working in complex labs, still others glided behind children running on playgrounds or next to people preparing food. There were office workers busy in cubicles, commuters racing by on freeways, passengers boarding flights, and angles into corner offices in high rise buildings. Everything was in high definition sharpness and in full spectrum color and yet, the overall impact was disturbing; the arena felt so public and the images displayed, so private.

Taken as a whole, the screens represented the immediate, ongoing slices of the branching multiverse. The images were captured in-real-time by less-than-bacteria sized nanorobots and retained within the massive underground memories of the Reivers Corporation archive. The archive itself was the single biggest product
the Reive
produced, as well as its most irreplaceable resource. The ultimate relational database, everything that happened at
the Reive
connected in some inescapable way to the archive.

Within the hierarchy of
the Reive
, the arena floor technicians held a critical but undervalued place. Perceived more as brawn than brains, each floor tech, or often more than one, was aligned with unique teams inside the corporation. A floor tech’s investigative work was driven by the needs and projects set by specialists above him, who were committed to one of the many endeavors currently competing for archive search time. Similar to the highly charged buyers and sellers in the pit at the New York exchange,
the Reive’s
floor techs skillfully traded for time and space on the powerful workstations in the arena.

Alarms in the archive meant a serious degradation of one of the bundled signals initiated by the nanos and propagated through the membrane that enclosed one of the myriad of timelines. At least, that was what they traditionally meant, and why the techs dubbed them
branestorms
. Formerly, alarms were exceedingly rare and typically of short duration, with full event capture smoothly resumed. In fact, many older techs, now senior techs or section supervisors, could recall years with no alarms at all. In recent days, however, the warbling of a branestorm was progressing from a weekly to a nearly daily occurrence, and the end results were troubling.

This time the alarm was focused on a medium height screen whose images were rapidly distorting and losing coherence. The first responders quickly paired off, each with different diagnostic equipment. One tech probed the connections while the other waved a handheld sensor device and noted the readings. More techs raced up just as the screen suddenly devolved into digital snow and, just as abruptly, the alarm switched to a prolonged, single tone – which indicated a total loss of signal.

All the techs stared in shock at the hissing screen. Sweating and out-of-breath, a senior tech in a tie bustled up to the group and paused dumbfounded before the disrupted screen. He dug out a palm-sized device, manipulated it for a moment, and then watched as the screen went black. Discouraged, he continued tapping on his tiny screen until the tone cut off. The small group assembled beside a nearby workstation to debrief when the sudden warbling cry of a new alarm scattered them again.

Two levels above the arena, Quyron Shur, a slender Asian woman, hurried down a transparent hallway overlooking the arena. Glancing below, she scanned the walls of screens to locate the display that had triggered the second alarm, but couldn’t see it. She stopped beside a door and pressed her palm against a subtle rectangle in the wall. The door opened with a soft pop and she quickly entered one of the balconied offices. Inside, there were transparent walls all around, although a few sections of glass had been tinted to provide a sense of privacy. Except for a wide, multi-function workstation near an inner wall, the office layout was stark in its simplicity. Quyron smoothly crossed the room, waved the computer awake, and activated multiple, razor-thin screens as she swiveled her mesh chair beneath her.

Hurriedly fluttering a hand near the central display as an ID sign-in, she scowled. “Hello? Faster would be nice.”

Complex icons and data swiftly populated the interface. Using deft finger and hand motions she paused, enhanced, cut, and saved pieces of the colorful gibberish. Gathering her selections of data with a quick hand, she tossed them onto one of the side screens. Next she typed a flash of code and then watched as her recently cleared middle screen repopulated with dense columns of numbers and symbols, all changing as they scrolled up. Quyron rolled close to the display and began to methodically scan the lines for incongruities. “Echo,” she said out loud. “I’m going to need a hand with this.”

* * *

One of the turning points in the establishment and exploitation of the multiverse, and part of what made Reivers Corporation possible, was the rapid development of practical quantum computers. The core of a classical computer obeyed the well understood laws of classical physics, a quantum computer harnessed the unique properties of quantum mechanics to create a new mode of information processing.