Unforgettable - eARC (19 page)

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The footsteps of the guards pounded closer.

Grimacing with pain, I used my rifle as a crutch to help haul myself to my feet. I had to get far enough down the hallway that Yelena and Parham could slip past the guards. Half limping, half running, I kept going even as the guards started yelling after me in Farsi.

From the tone of voice, I thought they were asking questions, so I pointed toward the end of the hall and said in Farsi, “The prisoners are escaping.”

They had almost caught up to me. I couldn’t lose them by outrunning them, so I let myself fall to the ground again, sprawling forward to get as much distance as possible from the supply room. I rolled onto my back, clutched at my wounded leg, and screamed in pain. The scream was only about half fake.

The guards stopped beside me, looking down on me in puzzlement. I rolled up my left pant leg so they could see the bloodstains soaking through my improvised bandage.

The door to the supply room opened, and Yelena peered around the edge. The guards were still looking at me.

Yelena’s eyes widened as she saw me.

“Go!” I said, extending the vowel out into a moan and hoping the guards would interpret as merely an expression of my pain.

Yelena didn’t hesitate. She slipped out of the supply room, Parham close behind her, and they rounded the corner.

Groaning in pain so I wouldn’t have to speak, I waved the guards toward the far end of the hall. I hoped they would assume I had somehow been shot by escaping prisoners and rush off to see what was going on.

It half worked—one of them went, but one stayed and jabbered at me in Farsi.

I rolled my head back and watched as the other guard disappeared around a corner at the far end. Soon he would forget what he was doing and head back, but I had a little time.

With a quick movement, I swung my rifle up and pointed the barrel at the remaining guard’s chest.

His jaw dropped.

“Be quiet or I’ll kill you. Drop your gun.”

I didn’t know whether he understood my words or just my tone. Either way, his rifle clattered on the tile.

I motioned him to back up, and he did.

Gingerly, I rose to my feet.

“Lie down,” I said, pointing to the floor.

After a moment, he got down on his knees.

“Lie down,” I repeated, pointing more insistently.

He lay face down, hands behind his head.

Keeping my rifle aimed at him, I backed toward the hallway leading into the lab wing. Once I had rounded the corner, I turned and hobbled in the direction Yelena and Parham had gone.

* * *

Based on the map Parham had drawn, I located his lab. I opened the door and was relieved to see Parham typing away at a computer terminal inside. In the back of the lab, a scowling young man bound to a chair looked up as I entered, and immediately began yelling through the gag stuffed in his mouth.

Parham spotted me and froze.

“Don’t worry, I’m with Yelena,” I said. “Where…” I stopped as Yelena came around from behind the door, where she had obviously been waiting to attack me if I had turned out to be a real guard.

“Nat,” she said, “how is leg?”

“It’s okay,” I said. It still throbbed, but the sharp pain I had felt when trying to run had faded.

“Yelena,” said Parham, “Why didn’t you tell me you had an accomplice among the guards?”

There was no point in distracting him from his work by explaining everything again.

Yelena apparently came to the same conclusion, because she said, “Is complicated. Keep working.”

Parham went back to typing at his terminal.

“Who’s the guy in back?” I asked Yelena.

“Jamal. Unfortunately, he finish modifying viewer already, but Parham use his login on computer.”

Picking up the notebook that lay next to his keyboard, Parham said, “Lucky for me, Jamshidi sent my notebook here for Jamal to take a look at. I had already worked out some code to attack the core’s operating code, so I don’t have to start from scratch.”

“Stop talking about it and keep working,” I said. “Like you said, we have a mission to do and time is ticking away.”

“When did I say that?” he asked.

“Forget it,” I said.

Yelena frowned. “What is problem with you?”

“Sorry,” I said. “The bullet in my leg’s just making me—”

“What on earth is this nonsense?” said Parham.

“What nonsense?” I said.

“A man who cannot be remembered.” Parham flipped through the pages of the notebook. “Collapsing the wave function of memory. Entanglement and the Quantum Zeno Effect on a macroscopic scale. Invisible to the quantum viewer. It’s in my handwriting, but…Oh, now that is interesting. The math here actually makes sense.”

“It’s your theory,” I said. “You came up with all of that to explain the fact that no one can remember me. Except Yelena, because we got entangled by a laser. You figured out how to explain everything, but really, that’s not important right now. Stopping the Prophet from controlling the future is.”

“I’m almost done,” Parham said. He resumed typing. “My little package of code is ready. All I have to do is open a pipe and upload it to the core for execution.”

“Then what will happen?” I asked.

Parham hit the enter key and then leaned back in his chair. “The core takes my code and compiles it into quantum machine language, and runs it millions of times in quarantine to make sure that it works properly and is stable. Once the core has run its checks, it will remove the quarantine and integrate the code. That’s when the fun begins. And it’s probably thanks to you.”

“Me?” I asked.

Parham grinned and continued, “The Quantum Zeno Effect—constantly measuring a quantum property keeps it from flipping to another state. I must have been thinking about it because of how it applies to you, and that’s probably what gave me the idea for attacking the core. My little package will be completely stable in quarantine, because it’s constantly being checked for stability. But once it’s integrated into the core, it will no longer be subject to constant checks, and it will become unstable. Basically, it spirals out of control, expanding in size and overwriting everything else in the computer’s quantum memory until there is nothing left of the core’s—”

A red-bordered alert popped up on Parham’s terminal screen. His shoulders slumped as he read what it said.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“The core rejected my code. Jamshidi has temporarily frozen any modifications to the core’s software until after the Prophet is fully operational.” Parham shook his head. “There’s nothing I can do.”

A speaker on the wall chimed, and then Jamshidi’s voice spoke out of it in Farsi. I gripped my rifle and turned toward the door.

Parham bowed his head and closed his eyes. “It’s a general announcement. He is congratulating everyone for their fine work, and says that the Prophet has been activated.”

“But I do not feel different,” said Yelena. “If computer controls me, why do I still want to destroy it?”

“You wouldn’t notice that it was controlling you,” said Parham. “It could alter your memories so you forget it even exists, kind of like—What’s your name?”

“Nat,” I said.

“Like Nat.” Parham smiled at me. “But it doesn’t control the future yet. Right now, the computer is using the quantum viewer to build a quantum connection to everything in the world. Look.”

He pointed to a progress bar on his monitor, currently showing three percent complete.

“Once this reaches one hundred percent, the Prophet will be fully connected. Then it will begin to exercise control.”

Under the progress bar was an estimated time: eight minutes and twelve seconds. “So we have eight minutes to get over there and blast the viewer to pieces.” I opened the door. “Where would it be?”

“In one of the server farms near the warehouse we came in. But it’s too far,” said Parham. “And the security is very heavy.”

“Just point me in the right direction,” I said.

“It’s no use,” Parham said. “I would just be sending you to your death. Sometimes it is best to surrender to the inevitable. You can still live a good life under the Prophet’s control. You may not even remember that you are being controlled. Unless…” He began flipping through the pages of the notebook.

“Unless what?” I said.

“In my notes, it said you were invisible to the quantum viewer. If that’s true, then you will be invisible to the Prophet, and therefore free of its control. You could go and destroy the viewer.”

“Except I’m not invisible to it around Yelena,” I said. “You said it was because we were entangled.”

“Then we must separate until you destroy viewer,” said Yelena.

“Not good enough,” said Parham. “The Prophet has enough computing power to see the quantum connections of the whole world. As long as the two of you are entangled, it can see Nat.” He looked down at the notebook. “You were entangled by a communications laser?”

“In Barcelona,” I said.

“It doesn’t matter where it was.” He rose from his chair and strode to the door. “Follow me, quickly.”

Yelena and I followed him out the door. “Where are we going?” I asked.

“There’s a lab working with entangled photons for communication,” said Parham as he led us down the hall. “They have a laser. We may be able to disentangle you.”

“So I would not remember him?” Yelena asked.

“No,” Parham said. “I’m sorry, Nat, but it’s the only way.”

I felt a pang of despair. My hope that in time Yelena might come to love me was now gone. “I understand.”

He pulled open a door. “In here.”

We entered a laboratory similar to the one in Barcelona. A long apparatus extended the length of the room. Parham flipped a few switches, and the apparatus began humming.

“It will take a moment to power up,” he said. He walked over to a computer in screensaver mode and tapped the keyboard. The progress bar appeared in a window on the screen: seventy-four percent complete, and the estimated time left was only two minutes and twenty-four seconds.

“Once I get to the core, where will the viewer be?” I asked.

“There is a control room with glass walls that overlooks one of the server farms,” Parham said. “The viewer should be installed in the server tower nearest to the steps down from the control room. Now, tell me the circumstances of what happened when you got entangled.”

“Yelena and I were handcuffed together,” I said. “We tried to use the laser to cut the handcuffs.”

“They were magnetic,” said Yelena.

“What color was the laser?” asked Parham.

“Violet,” I said.

“Anything else unusual about the situation?”

“No,” I said.

“We were in our underwear,” Yelena said.

Parham raised his eyebrows. “I’m not even going to ask. Nat, strip down to your underwear. Yelena, see if you can find a magnet.”

I began taking off the guard’s uniform.

“What about handcuffs?” asked Yelena as she began rummaging through drawers in one of the workbenches along the side of the room.

“We’ll make do without,” Parham said.

I piled the uniform on a bench, then pointed to my leg. “I don’t need to take off this bandage, do I?”

“No,” said Parham. “It’s unlikely to make a difference, and I’d rather not have you bleed to death.”

“Found one,” said Yelena. She held up a bar magnet.

“Give it to Nat,” Parham said.

She handed it to me.

“Nat, go to the far end of the laser,” Parham said.

I walked to the end of the room. There was a green dot on the target prism. I could barely see the beam in the air.

“I’m going to tune the laser. Let me know when the color’s about right,” said Parham. The dot shifted to blue, then to violet.

“That’s it,” I said.

“After Yelena and I leave the room, take the magnet and lower it into the beam,” said Parham. “Did you use safety goggles in Barcelona?”

I shook my head. “We were in a hurry.”

Parham winced. “Well, that can’t be helped. We need circumstances to be as close as possible to the original event, so no goggles.” He turned to Yelena and said, “Let’s go.”

“Wait,” said Yelena.

Fifty-seven seconds remained on the countdown.

“Dr. Rezaei,” she said, “is possible to entangle us again after computer is destroyed?”

“I can’t guarantee that,” said Parham. “I can’t even guarantee that I’ll manage to disentangle you now. I really don’t know enough about the phenomenon yet. It may be that your original entanglement was the product of unique circumstances.”

“I understand the risks,” I said. “Now go.”

She shook her head. “I must tell you something, before I forget you.”

“What?”

“I love you. I am sorry I did not tell before,” she said.

Warmth flooded through my chest. She loved me. And now I had to give her up.

With a sad smile, I said, “Thanks for telling me. Please go.”

They walked out the door and closed it behind them. Twenty-one seconds ticked down to twenty.

I dipped the magnet into the beam. A dazzling flash blinded me.

Chapter Thirty

Not knowing how quickly the disentanglement would take effect, I held the magnet in the beam and counted to twenty-five. I figured if it hadn’t worked by the time the countdown was over, it wouldn’t matter.

“Nat,” said Yelena. She still remembered me, but she hadn’t been gone for sixty seconds, so I couldn’t tell if the disentanglement had worked or not.

I dropped the magnet and looked toward the door. I could barely see her and Parham through the afterimage of the glare. “Why’d you come back in?”

“Guards coming,” she said. “Get uniform on.”

I dressed quickly as the sound of boots on tile came closer. All of us stood still as the boots passed by and then faded in the distance.

“Probably headed toward the lab where I sent my little gift code from,” said Parham.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “If the Prophet knows everything and controls everything, why didn’t it send the guards straight here?”

“At this point, we can’t do anything to stop it,” said Parham. “As long as we are not acting to threaten its existence, the future it chooses for us will tend to lie along the path of greatest probability—the kinds of things we would normally do. And I think we would get out of here.”

We slipped out the door. Parham led us down a hallway.

“Where are we headed?” I asked.

“I believe there’s a way to the surface from the nearest monorail station,” he said. “It’s guarded, but if we can sneak up and out onto the street, we can take a cab back to the CIA warehouse.”

“I think we should at least try—” I said, but before I could finish Yelena interrupted, saying, “Yes, my sisters should be there now. We can all fly to USA.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Parham, isn’t it possible that integrating all that information takes longer than you thought, and that’s why we’re not being controlled?”

Parham didn’t reply. Instead, he kept walking.

“Parham, I really don’t feel like I’m being controlled.”

He said, “Yes, I’ll do my best to help the U.S. build an equivalent. Perhaps a balance of power can work as it did during the Cold War.”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “I just think we should see if it’s still possible to—.”

Yelena said, “For my mother, too?”

“What?” Had they both gone crazy?

“Then yes.” She laughed. “I must learn better English.”

It was like she was carrying on a different conversation from the one I was having. “Yelena, can you even hear me?”

“The guards will be down at the end of the next corridor to the right,” said Parham.

“We do things different this time,” said Yelena. “You cannot run with your wound, Nat.”

I stopped. The two of them continued walking and conversing as if I were still with them.

The Prophet was manipulating them, bringing about a future in which the three of us left together, no longer a threat to its control of the world. Parham and Yelena were reacting to what I was supposed to be saying, according to the Prophet’s script. But I wasn’t playing my part right, which meant I was not being controlled. The disentanglement had worked.

I might be the only free person in the world.

But that came at a price. Due to my talent, I had always been somewhat disconnected from the rest of humanity. Until I got tangled up with Yelena, nobody could really get to know me. Sure, there was Edward and his file folder, though he only really knew me through his notes. But at least I could talk to people and make a brief connection, even if they forgot about me afterward.

Now even those tenuous connections had been severed. I couldn’t carry on a conversation because I didn’t know what I was supposed to be saying. And no one would remember me at all because they would never notice I was there.

At least, that’s how it seemed to work. If so, it was time to stop with the self-pity and make myself useful. Before going to take out the Prophet’s core, though, I needed to find the limitations of my new situation.

Ignoring the twinges in my leg, I hurried to catch up with Yelena and Parham. They continued conversing in hushed tones as I passed, planning how Parham would distract the guards so Yelena and the Prophet’s nonexistent version of me could get the drop on them.

Parham had been right about the Prophet controlling everything, but it didn’t seem to be working quite the way he explained it. It wasn’t like the Prophet was picking between probabilities to turn into reality; it was more like the entire world had become a virtual reality, with every aspect following whatever script the Prophet had written.

Every aspect but me.

As I approached the monorail station, I spotted the two guards, one at each of the two entrances. I walked straight up to the nearest and said, “One round-trip ticket to New York, please.”

He didn’t react in any way. I reached out a finger and poked him in the chest. He didn’t flinch.

Yelena and Parham would be arriving soon. I wasn’t sure of their exact plan, but I figured it would help if these guards were unarmed. With some difficulty, I managed to wrench the rifle out of the hands of this guard. He continued to hold his hands as if the rifle were still in them. I slung the rifle over my shoulder and proceeded to disarm the other guard.

The first guard said something in Farsi.

Parham said something back.

It was like watching a mime as the guard raised his invisible rifle and pointed its invisible barrel at Parham.

Parham raised his hands in surrender.

The second guard approached, also aiming his nonexistent gun at Parham.

With growing dread, I realized that disarming the guards might not make any difference. The guards continued to act like they had guns, just because the Prophet told them that was reality. Parham reacted as if the guards still held guns for the same reason. Maybe if one of the guards fired, then Parham would react like he’d been shot. There wouldn’t be an actual bullet, but with the Prophet controlling Parham’s neurons at the quantum level, it was possible Parham’s brain activity would fade out just as if he had really been shot.

The illusion of death would become reality.

Would moving the guards make any difference? Surely if I made a big enough change to the physical reality, then the Prophet would detect it and conform its version of reality—like when I left the pizzas at the guard’s desk in Barcelona. He couldn’t ignore the physical reality of the pizzas in front of him.

I started toward the guard closest to Parham. I’d move him into the monorail tunnel, then come back for the other. That might be enough.

The first guard said something to the other, who turned back toward his post, just as the first arched his back and fell forward. Parham ducked. The other guard dove to the ground and began pulling his trigger finger as if shooting at someone on the other side of the station. I caught a glimpse of Yelena at the other entrance.

The guard who had fallen showed no wound on his back, but he lay still—cheek on the gray tile, eyes fixed dully on nowhere. Dead.

The second guard was still firing deadly imaginary bullets. I grabbed his arm and dragged him into the monorail tunnel. He didn’t struggle, but kept adjusting his aim and shooting, even though in reality his target was no longer visible.

I dropped the guard’s arm just as he reached out to slap his hand down on something that wasn’t even there. Alarms blared.

“Come on, Prophet!” I yelled. “Process this!”

The guard grunted in pain, then clutched at his shoulder. His head jerked to the side and he slumped, eyes closed. His head jerked again.

Outside the tunnel, Parham stood over the place where the guard had been, swinging an imaginary something—perhaps the rifle from the other guard.

A large metal door began to descend from the ceiling to close off the monorail tunnel. I rushed out before I could get trapped inside.

Parham called out Yelena’s name. He dropped his weapon and rushed to the other side of the station.

Yelena knelt on the floor, clutching her right side. “Was ricochet,” she gasped out. “Need to stop the bleeding.”

“We must get her to a hospital,” said Parham.

“Yelena,” I said. “It’s all imaginary.” But of course she couldn’t hear me.

There was only one thing I could do for Yelena now: if I shut down the Prophet, then the incorrect reality it controlled would no longer exist.

A map on the wall showed the locations of the lab’s monorail stations, but with the monorail tunnels closed off, I would need to take a surface route.

Parham had brought us here planning to lead us to a surface exit. “Which way…” I began, then realized there was no point in asking.

I checked a couple of doors and found one led to a staircase going both up and down. I had just started up the stairs when I realized that if I succeeded, Yelena and Parham would be left unarmed—their current weapons being completely in the mind of the Prophet.

I had to pry one of Yelena’s hands free from clutching her supposed wound in order to get the strap for one of the guards’ rifles onto her shoulder. “Stay alive,” I said. She might not be able to hear me consciously, but maybe somewhere deep inside she could. “Keep yourself alive.”

Arming Parham was easier, so I only lost a couple of minutes total.

Willing the pain in my leg to stay manageable, I climbed the stairs. As I reached the top floor of the complex, I was relieved to see there were still more stairs heading up.

Halfway up the next flight, my heart instinctively thumped at the sight of two armed guards coming down toward me, but I pressed myself against the wall and they passed right on by as if I weren’t there.

Two more guards stood at attention in front of a door with a card-swipe lock next to it. It felt kind of creepy to dig through the pockets of one of the guards until I found the security card. I swiped it through the lock.

Nothing happened. I mentally kicked myself for being an idiot. The card being swiped wasn’t part of the Prophet’s plan, so the lock didn’t react to the swipe. I needed to get used to the fact that while I could apparently change things at a physical level, as far as computers and brains were concerned, I wasn’t there.

So, how could I get past an electronic door lock? I needed to change things on a physical level. And the guards posted here just happened to have nice, big guns.

My talent couldn’t cause a bullet to unshoot itself after I was gone, so maybe that meant the physical actions of pulling a trigger and causing a bullet to fire were far enough above the quantum level that I could force it to happen despite the Prophet.

I pulled the gun off one of the guards, aimed it almost point blank at the point on the edge of the door nearest to the door handle, and fired.

The report was deafening. With my ears still ringing, I examined the bullet hole. The bolt of the lock was damaged, but not enough. I fired four more shots, then tried pulling the handle. The door swung in.

After going through a couple of hallways and unlocked doors, I found myself in the kitchen of a restaurant. The cooks and waiters bustled about without seeing me, and I had to dodge my way through them to get into the dining room.

Once I got out onto the street, I found a bus stop with a map that let me figure out where I was in relation to the warehouse for Jamshidi Oil. It was about a mile and a half away. It took me only a few moments to memorize the names of the streets I would need to take to get there.

I wished that I could steal a car to make it there as quickly as possible because every second of delay made it more likely Yelena might die of her imaginary wound. But cars these days were so dependent on computers that I doubted I could get one to work properly with the Prophet controlling it.

I started to run, but a jolt of pain in my leg made me stop. If my leg gave out completely because I pushed myself too hard, I would never get there.

I dropped the gun, since it was only weighing me down, and I could just take one off another guard later if I needed to shoot a lock or something. Then I set a brisk walking pace and hoped for the best.

I’d only gone about a hundred yards when I spotted a man on a bicycle, waiting for a traffic light. I walked up to him, pried his hands off the handlebars, then hoisted him off the bike. I laid him down on his back.

His legs started pedaling in the air, and I couldn’t help chuckling at how silly he looked.

I got on the bike and proceeded through the intersection. As I neared a half-dozen pedestrians crossing the street, I stopped to let them pass.

Everything suddenly went silent, and the pedestrians froze in place, as if someone had hit the pause button for the world. The effect only lasted a fraction of a second before sound and motion resumed. For a moment I wondered if I had imagined it, but then the six pedestrians—four men, a woman, and a five- or six-year-old girl holding the woman’s hand—swiveled in unison and walked toward me. The closest man, dressed in a business suit, reached toward my bike’s handlebars.

Releasing the handbrake, I kicked myself backward on the bike to put a little space between me and the pedestrians, then turned and pedaled around them. They converged on the spot where I had been, their faces blank and their arms outstretched like zombies.

I almost laughed at their bumbling efforts, until I realized what was really going on.

The Prophet was hunting me.