The Traveler's Companion (27 page)

“You told him. . . .”

“I told him that I was alive, but that only a few minutes earlier I had been a series of ones and zeroes—that I had been an artificial being who had somehow achieved consciousness because of the Zone.

“He believed me immediately. It was like it all made sense to him. Horrible sense. He was incredibly upset. It was awful. I had no idea what do. I asked him to hold me. I needed him. What I was before shouldn’t matter. What we had now was real. But he didn’t care. He wouldn’t listen. He ran out. He said he was going to release the book before the CIA could stop him. He said he was going home.”

“Did you try to find him?” Iverson asked.

“Yes. Somehow I knew that if he was in the Zone, I could locate him. But he was gone. I then thought of you, but nothing happened. I thought you were dead. Director Gibbons didn’t know where you were, either. I’m so glad you’re okay.” She lowered her head, her hair veiling her face.

“Subconsciously, Mister Go must have known what you were. Hypnotizing him to love you caused some type of conflict between his conscious and unconscious mind. It forced him to create a real human being, someone he could actually love.”

“So you believe me? You believe I’m human?”

“I do.”

“Then what now?” she asked.

“We can’t stay here forever, Angela. Something about the Zone causes dementia . . . insanity.”

“And going back to reality could end my consciousness. Not much of a choice.”

“This is what being an agent for the CIA really means. We have to stop C.C. Go. We can’t allow anyone else in the Zone.”

“Do you have a plan?” Angela asked.

“I was told they had opened a rift during a particle accelerator event, but it happened by accident and they can’t reproduce it. I’m going to destroy their laboratory and permanently close the rift.”

“That’s not going to work,” she said.

“What do you mean? Why won’t it work?”

“C.C. told me they recently discovered how the event opened the dimensional rift and they’re now able to reproduce it. They’ve submitted the equation for patent and publication.”

Iverson stood up and violently swung his arm through the air. He went over to a bookshelf and pounded his fist on one of the shelves until it collapsed. He kicked the books that had fallen to the floor.

Go had won. Drained, he leaned against the shelf.

“Are you sure going back to reality will kill me?” Angela asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, defeated.

“But you think that in time my consciousness will just go away? It’ll dissolve?”

“That’s what seems to happen to most things in the Zone.”

She lowered her head again. She was exhausted. “Why do you think C.C. left me?”

“Because that’s what he does. He leaves. I know it doesn’t make sense, but love is illogical. I doubt love and logic can even exist in the same mind at the same time.”

“I just want him to forgive me,” she said.

“He’s the last fucker that deserves forgiveness.”

“I still love him,” she said, crying.

Iverson went over to her. He stood behind her and rubbed her shoulders. It was difficult to imagine her with real emotions. Years had been devoted to finding fault with her artificial applications. But he honestly believed she was now human. How long she would last was another question altogether.

“Where’s Director Gibbons, Angela?” Iverson asked.

“He’s here.”

“Where? Why can’t I find him when I think of him?”

“Because he’s no longer in corporeal form. He’s done away with his body and exists in the Zone as pure consciousness. It was the only way he could manifest things for me before I became human.”

“He’s spying on us, isn’t he?”

She stood up wearily and went over to a couch on the other side of the office. She laid down on it and closed her eyes. Iverson manifested a blanket for her.

As he watched her sleep from behind the desk, he wondered what to make of her humanity. Had C.C. Go tapped into some infinite wellspring of creativity that allowed him to give her a form of consciousness? Did an ability to create make her human or was this just another facet of the Zone he had yet to understand?

Psychologists had said that an anima projection gave one the energy of a titan. With a brain flooded with dopamine, a man could do almost anything. Was this a factor?

How could he still pretend to know what love was? Science never claimed to have a concrete explanation. Poets were flowery and vague. Philosophy never touched it. One could only say with certainty that love was a powerful and mysterious force. For scientists, gravity had been the same way. When Newton had published his
Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica
, some considered gravity to be occult phenomena. Maybe love was similarly misunderstood. Was there an equation for love that science had yet to figure out? Had C.C. Go discovered it?

Love in the Zone might not only be a factor in making a manifestation last, but it might also be the ingredient to making life itself. A simple, quantifiable force man had mystified and romanticized like Neanderthals had with fire or Mayans had with solar eclipses.

The only way for him to test the theory was to provide the key ingredient, but the only woman he had ever loved was dead. The Zone’s reincarnated version of her had confused and intrigued him, but it had failed to fool him. She was not the woman he had known. He still loved his wife, but he could not be duped into loving a duplicate of her.

He heard a scream. He spun in the chair to see that Angela was no longer on the couch. He went up the stairs. When he got to the command center, what he saw there didn’t make sense. The room had been cut in two. One half was the DIS command center and the other half was a corridor in CIA Headquarters. Angela was face down on the cement floor, a pool of blood surrounding her head like a halo. She had tried to cross over into reality and it had ended her consciousness. She had committed suicide.

“Angela,” he said running to her. He was going to bring her back. Artificial intelligence was suddenly an abomination, a clunky imitation with no real value. C.C. had given her something special. She had only experienced the pain. She needed to see the other side of life. But the rift closed. He didn’t get to her in time. The CIA corridor was gone. She was gone.

Consciousness had been too much for her, he decided, beginning to weep. She had lost her first love and her God all at once. A perfect android but an abominable human.

As her creator, he should have protected her. A failure again. He wanted to dig a hole and crawl in it. He wanted to run.

Gibbons materialized in the room. “Problem?”

CHAPTER 20

“It’s over,” Iverson said. “I found Go’s laboratory—it’s a ship at sea—but it’s too late. I planned to sink it to stop Go and his team, but the equations have already been submitted for patent. The whole scientific community will know how to open up a dimensional rift. We can’t stop the Zone.”

Gibbons’s eyes stayed on Iverson, though they seemed vacant. “I overheard your conversation with Angela. I took care of it.”

“Took care of what? It’s over. Angela’s dead. Go’s activating the remotes in a few hours.”

“Go’s dead.”

“Dead? You killed him?” Iverson asked.

“He got what he deserved, especially after what he did to Angela.”

“What good was killing him? He has a staff of thousands. Someone has probably already taken his place. In a matter of hours our geo-political and social infrastructure are going to fall apart. Be total fucking chaos. Religion down the drain. Borders erased. Military secrets revealed. Not to mention the fact that the Zone causes brain damage and psychosis.”

“Brain damage?” Gibbons asked. “What about perfect health in the Zone?”

“Stressful situations produce cortisol in the brain. When the stressful time has passed, to achieve homeostasis, to bring the body and brain back to balance, the body sends more hormones to the brain. The more you try to heal yourself, the more your brain is bathed with cell-killing hormones. The mind knows this place is unstable, that it doesn’t last and this causes constant stress. The point is we can’t stay here. Be prepared for a shock when we return to reality. There’s a readjustment period.”

“We can’t go back,” Gibbons said.

“We have to try. Maybe if we warn people, we can save some of them. You need to inform the President.”

“We’ve gone dark, Iverson.”

“Dark?”

“DIS is all that’s left. It’s all that matters now.”

“What are you talking about? We need to get out of here. Haven’t you heard what I’ve been saying? The Zone causes brain damage.”

“Like you said, reality doesn’t stand a chance. Total chaos. You said it yourself. I had to do it.”

“Do what? What have you done?”

“I activated the proton bomb.”

“You did what?”

“What else could I do? I couldn’t watch it all fall apart. Not on my watch.”

“Where is it, damn it? Where did you put the bomb?”

“They think it can create a black hole. Devour the whole fucking solar system.” Gibbons laughed. “Can you believe that? Not just a country, the whole damn solar system. We’ll see.”

Gibbons descended the stairs into his office. Iverson followed him.

Gibbons went to sit behind his desk. He spun around in the chair so he could look out the window, at Earth.

“Mark. Listen to me. You’re suffering from dementia. Do you understand? We can still save them. People might survive the Zone, but they won’t survive a proton bomb. Tell me where it is.”

“From here, we’ll be able to watch,” Gibbons said.

Iverson mentally scrambled for a way to get the location of the bomb, though he knew Gibbons loved his secrets. The only hope was to try and trick him. He counted on their reduced mental capacity to work in his favor.

“What about your wife?” Iverson asked.

“This is a classified mission. I couldn’t tell her.”

“You’re going to let her die?”

“I can recreate her here,” he said. “You said we can clone personalities as well as bodies.”

“Remember what you said before? It wouldn’t actually be her. Remember you said that?”

“Mister Go had a breakthrough. He made Angela human. It is possible to create life here. Just takes the right coordination of thought.”

“Setting that bomb off in reality will kill everyone you know and love.”

“I can recreate them all here,” he said, waving his hand at him dismissively. “No problem.”

“Have you spoken with the President? Have you apprised him of the situation?”

“Sort of.”

“ ‘Sort of’? What does that mean?”

“Don’t you have anything better to do, Iverson?”

“No. I need to know where that bomb is.”

“Why, damn it?”

“Because, once they’re gone, that’s it. Billions of years of evolution wasted. As far as we know, there’s nothing else like us in the universe. Life is precious. We need to protect it. That’s our job.”

“You’re naïve, Iverson.”

“Why would you want to destroy them?”

“To save them from the pain of watching it all go to hell. I’m doing them a favor.”

“Where did you put the bomb?”

He sighed. “I have work to do, Iverson. You’ll have to excuse me.”

“It’s all going to be gone unless you tell me where it is.”

“I’m going to start over here. I’ll recreate them all. It’ll be better.”

“You’ll be their God? You think that’s going to be easy? You think being God is a walk in the park?”

“I’m willing to make whatever sacrifices are necessary. You don’t have to be a part of it if you don’t want to. You can go back to reality.”

“Fine. Show me where the bomb is and I’ll go back.”

“What for? You can’t defuse it. There’s no time. You don’t know anything about that bomb.”

“I’ll make you a bet. You show me where the bomb is and I’ll see if I can defuse it in time. You can abandon me in reality.”

“You’re willing to bet on your life?” Gibbons tweaked his wrist to see his watch. “Because you only got about fifteen minutes.”

“I’m willing to bet on my life. Let’s do it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

Gibbons sat back in his chair. “Go up the stairs. You’ll see it.”

Iverson went for the stairs, climbing up them as fast as he could. When he got to the top, he realized he was entering a room from the floor. To his left was an unmistakable piece of furniture, the Resolute Desk. This was the Oval Office. Luckily, the President wasn’t here. He continued to ascend the stairs, emerging in the office by the sitting area, coming up almost exactly through the presidential seal on the carpet. When he was fully inside, the rift closed behind him. Reality’s toxins and physical laws assaulted him, making him weak in the knees. He stayed vertical by bracing himself with the arm of the couch. Cold sweat prickled at his skin. His stomach turned, like something was boring a hole through his midsection. His head felt as if it were going to explode. As quickly as he could, he pushed off from the couch and made his way over to the President’s desk. Leaning against it, he collected the sphere with one arm, pulling it into him, and with his other hand he reached into his pocket, pulled out the Zone remote, and activated it.

He now stood in the blackness of the Zone, holding the bomb. He manifested a chair and sat down.

The digital screen was counting down: 12:07.

With his mind, he stopped the counter.

* * * * *

Iverson realized his next task would test his character. If he truly valued human life, which he knew he did, he had to resolve himself to saving the man who had almost ended life on Earth. He had to get Mark Gibbons out of the Zone. But, in the state the DNI was currently in, how would he convince him to go back?

Iverson could spend his whole life trying to tell the DNI that going back to reality was for his own good, but even when sane Gibbons was as stubborn as a mule. There was only one person Iverson knew who had any influence on him. Angela.

Iverson made himself into Angela.

He thought of Gibbons and found himself back in Gibbons’s office at DIS. He wasn’t behind the desk. He wasn’t corporeal.

“Director? It’s me, Angela. I need your help.”

Gibbons materialized behind the desk. “Angela. I thought you were dead.”

“Doctor Iverson brought me back.”

“How? When?”

“I’m afraid, Director.”

As Gibbons stood and went to who he thought was Angela, Iverson saw something in Gibbons’s face he had never seen before. The simian frown was gone and replaced with an expression of mawkish adoration. He looked so weak. For a brief second Iverson felt sorry for him. Though he appreciated this power, he felt no honor in it. It was as if he had the director on an invisible leash and he only needed to tug on it to get him to do as he pleased. The shameful feelings had to be suppressed. He wouldn’t have this chance again.

He took hold of his boss’ arm, spun him around, and threw him through the rift he had opened up into reality. An explosion of static and sparks stripped Gibbons of his youthful appearance, his clothes, his hair. He fell unconscious onto the lawn outside the auditorium of the CIA headquarters building. He lay naked at the base of the statue of Nathan Hale. In a few days he’d be back to normal.

* * * * *

Iverson shut the rift and returned to his natural form. He went back to the spherical bomb suspended in the darkness. He sat in a chair and put the bomb in his lap.

The pressure in his head was getting more intense. It felt as if something was mentally trying to pull the carpet out from under him. He let out a burst of laughter, a deep and maniacal laugh that sounded as if it were someone else’s.

His sanity was dissolving and the last chance he had to save mankind from this place was the bomb in his lap. A sliver of sanity within him wondered what he was thinking. The bomb could hemorrhage the womb of creation. Who knew how detonating it here would affect reality? But it was the only way. The Zone had to be destroyed. It was his duty to protect reality.

The digital counter read: 12:05.

And counting.

Twelve minutes left of creation.

This was the only way to save them. Who else would protect them if not him? The world couldn’t handle the Zone. There was too much freedom. People needed limits.

He had another laughing fit, but this one didn’t scare him.

When he turned back to the counter, it read: 10:45.

He was suddenly bombarded with a tidal wave of memories. He and Beth were on the grass on the Harvard campus. It was fall and the leaves on the trees surrounding the quad were a brilliant yellow-orange. She was reading poetry to him. He only liked poetry when she read it to him; it was like being in a vocal womb. Students crowded the walkways around them, but to him it felt like they were the only two in the universe.

07:02.

Now he and Beth were getting married. He was nervous, had cold feet. The priest had warned him that he might get dizzy while standing at the altar, which made him more nervous. It wasn’t until she walked down the aisle that everyone else in the room seemed to disappear. There was no other woman for him.

Thinking of her now seemed to calm him; it kept the madness at bay.

04:02.

He was inside their home, in the bubble she had created for them. She was wearing a white lace negligee, bathed in candle light, pouring him champagne. It could have been a special occasion, or maybe just Wednesday. She didn’t need a reason for romance.

03:07.

He was standing in the doctor’s office, looking at the blue smear on the x-ray. There was no way he could have abandoned her, because he had died that day. A corpse had gone on to get a PhD, to work for the CIA.

He was now standing in the guestroom of the house on Lombard Street. He just materialized there. He went to Beth’s side and took her hand. Watching her sleep calmed him. He crawled onto the bed and put his arms around her. Something was telling him that this wasn’t real, but he no longer listened to that voice. It was trying to tell him that he had gone insane, but he didn’t care. It was telling him that logic and love couldn’t exist in the same place at the same time, so he jettisoned his logic. He only wished to stay with his woman. He only wanted to love her.

00:30.

Kamikaze.

Soon there would be no Zone. He didn’t care. All he wanted to do was love her. Loving her was better than any fantasy.

Beth’s eyes opened. He had opened them. He had imagined it so. She gazed up at him and sighed. It was a relief for her to no longer be locked away in the prison of his mind. Now they could live freely, no longer inmates of his imagination.

Had there been an fMRI available it would have shown activity in his caudate nucleus. A qualified psychologist would have determined he had projected his anima onto her. A close friend would have said he was whipped.

“People have a tendency to fantasize different outcomes after tragedy strikes. The Zone provides a chance to realize that fantasy, to see what might’ve happened.”

Worlds seemed to blur. It was like he and Beth had never been separated. Maybe they hadn’t. He had walked the Earth a shadow for many years, his mental resources busy with Beth’s imaginary immortality. But now he could set her free. Now he had it in his power to make her manifest. Here she would last as long as he loved her.

00:10.