Chapter 6
Two or three hours later Damien sat in a comfortable chair and stared disbelievingly at the serious man in front of him.
“You want me to perform a Turing test… on myself?”
“Yes. We want you to discover the discrepancies between the worlds.”
“How?”
“Standard Turing test interface. You ask a question, then your counterpart asks a different question. Wash, rinse, repeat.”
“And what’s your interest in this?”
The man was the kind of man who would have been fat if he hadn’t been so muscular. He was known as the General, although this was a strictly honorary title, these days. He grinned broadly.
“Come now, you know that Medusa has always been devoted to pursuing the most exciting fields of pure research!”
He laughed, and bit off the end of a cigar (imported, and extremely expensive, as the Gardener refused to grow tobacco at any price)
“Information is distributed here on a need-to-know basis… You don’t need to know why we want this done. All you need to know is that we do, and we’re willing to pay through the nose for you to do it.”
Damien leaned back.
“To tell you the truth, I’d as soon stay away from the whole thing – it gives me the willies, and my constructs are yelling at me to get out of here.”
The general regarded him levelly.
“I thought we might have a problem there. But before you make any rash decisions, there’s something you should know.”
Damien straightened.
“And that is?”
The general lit the cigar and took a long drag. He exhaled the smoke and then set the burning cigar down on a small silver stand. He looked Damien in the eye.
“Your wife is alive.”
Damien’s world went crimson. He lunged, and probably would have been killed by the General inside ten seconds were it not for the two guards on both sides of him forcibly pinning him to his chair.
“Liar!” he spat through clenched teeth. “Rose is dead. Don’t you dare say otherwise.”
The General placidly tapped a centimeter of silver ash from the end of the cigar, and then said calmly
“We’re not the only ones having this conversation right now, you know. Somewhere, there is another room almost like this one. Maybe it’s a little dustier. Maybe the books on the desk are arranged differently. Maybe this cigar is a different brand.” He held up the withered brown paper, curling into black ash at the end. “In this other room, someone very like you is sitting there glaring at someone very like me, because he just told you that Rose is dead. In that room, the person who might be you is still married to a woman who is almost your Rose, who did not die in the Cambridge incident.”
Damien stared, disbelievingly.
“You don’t believe me? Would you believe yourself? I could put him through for you.”
Damien swallowed dryly.
“When do I start?”
The cabs were famous for their bad driving. It was an old joke that the people inventing them hadn’t been able to write an algorithm to recognize stop lights, so they’d decided not to bother. Who would the ticket go to, anyway?
It wasn’t hard to believe as the cab shot around a breakneck turn doing easily 150 klicks. Technically, the cabs used GPS to track each-other and avoid collisions (driving a private car was more or less suicide), but it was hard to believe it would work at these speeds.
He gripped his armrest, knuckles turning white as they shot down an overpass grown over with weeds (the company that owned it had a local monopoly, and didn’t pay much attention to the state of the roads until they actually became impassable). He wished he didn’t need to take a cab, but Mary had called him at the last minute to ask him how the interview had gone (he’d told her he was taking the job, but he had been vague as to why), and to ask him out for a drink.
His constructs were of the opinion that if the cab continued at its current speed, assuming zero air resistance, he would arrive no more than five minutes late. He glanced nervously out the window at the bleached landscape streaking past. Water was rare here, even with the collection towers on the mountains. The massive superstructures were very simple in the way they worked – when clouds passed over the mountains, they condensed on the refrigerated metal and ran in a torrential rush into the city’s water system. Unfortunately, there still was barely enough water as it was – no one was stupid enough to use it for landscaping.
A dead cactus shot past the window in a kinetic blur. Suddenly, something caught his eye out the other window. It was a car – a real car, not a cab. He didn’t remember the company name, something to do with cats, but it was beautiful. The curves of the body were black as charcoal, and shone like chrome. The car looked like a predator, lean and hungry and streamlined.
It seemed to be getting closer. Later, he could never quite remember the precise moment of impact. It seemed like one moment the two were barreling side by side down an empty stretch of road. Then, suddenly, he was off the road, and the car was tilting. A tiny part of his mind sat safe and confident in the knowledge that it would go rocking back if he gave it a chance. Then, he felt it cross the tipping point. He was moving a hundred and fifty miles per hour down the freeway at night upside down, and he was about to die.
The next few seconds were a mess of light and noise – moments were all that made it through his senses. The window beside him vanishing. The dull sound of the metal of the roof grinding away. The roof mostly gone now. More tilting. The whir of dead grass and pavement whistling beside his ear. An impact, the sound of metal crumpling. Darkness.
The world was empty and silent. He fumbled around in the torn metal and fractured pavement for his glasses, but couldn’t find them. He was blind and dumb and helpless. He was upside down. He tried to free himself from his belt buckle, but he couldn’t seem get it to work. After a moment to let his hands stop shaking, he dropped himself out of it, landing painfully on his shoulder. He got to his feet and tried to get out of the cab.
His leg buckled. Broken? He put weight on it. It shot little needles of fire down it's length, but it held. No. Just sprained. There was a lot of blood running down his face. He started to walk away. He wasn’t sure quite where.
He got perhaps three steps before he fell over. It was there, half-lying on sparkling shards of glass that the man in black approached him, surrounded by a glowing halo of the black car’s headlights. From head to foot, he was dressed in clean, shiny black padding. The stuff was woven spider’s silk, plated in elaborate designs that would almost certainly stop a bullet.
The figure sat down gently on the tire of the crushed cab. He reached into a pocket and pulled out a lighter, an old model, carved in ivory and ebony.
He flicked it on, the little fire dancing in his hand.
“You shouldn’t mess with what you don’t understand.” He said quietly.
Flick.
“Medusa has uncovered something that is better left in darkness. If you are wise, you will leave it alone. Otherwise…”
Flick.
“Don’t reply. I just want you to know something. I want you to remember this. It’s very simple. You should be able to remember it without your glasses, eh? If you go to work for Medusa, you will die. You and the people you love will die. Am I making myself clear?”
Damien was in a fog of confusion and disorientation, and the shock was wearing off. He was, he realized, in pain.
Flick.
Something about the sound jarred a dull memory in the back of his head. Self defense training. He and Rose had taken courses at the Gardener’s insistence after someone had hijacked one of his trucks.
Barely realizing what he was doing, he reached for the small black box clipped to the side of his waistband. He pointed it in the figure’s direction, aiming.
“What are you doing?” The figure’s deep voice ended the sentence shrilly as he started to straighten, started to reach into his pocket for something.
Damien pushed the button, and there was a quiet thud. The figure froze. He took a step backwards. Then another. This time, his left leg didn’t hold his weight, and he toppled, collapsing limply.
Damien dropped the box. He tried to stand up and fell over again. He was sick, he realized. He threw up. He dragged himself over to the figure, and tried to pull the mask off, but he couldn’t make his fingers do it. Finally, he started down the road, using the concrete median to hold himself up. He had made it almost a hundred meters when he heard the car’s engine start up behind him. He lay there, barely-upright, watching his breath crystalize a few inches from his face and waited for the car to run him over. He saw no other alternative.
The car spun around, and vanished into the desert. Even in his vague, confused state, that registered as unusual. He saw lights. Colored lights. Coming down the street towards him. Oh yeah. His glasses would have alerted his insurance company when they came off. So would the cab, come to think of it. His knees buckled.
The world shrank to a small point. The last thing he saw that he was in any fit state to comprehend was Mary’s face, staring anxiously into his dimming eyes. And then there was silence.
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Continue to Chapter Seven