Patrick Lee: Deep Sky

She crossed to the vault, turned the dial back and forth in sequence, heard the lock disengage, and hauled the door open. Inside was a single tiny object: a rich green translucent cube half an inch across. It might have been a blank die cut from emerald. But it wasn’t.

Paige stared at it a moment, then picked it up and turned from the vault. Her movements were casual in a way that seemed deliberate to Travis. A forced calm. He didn’t blame her. She crossed the small room, stepped back out through the heavy door, and stopped in the middle of the corridor.

“Right here is as good as anywhere,” she said.

Travis joined her in the hallway. For a second her calm facade slipped. Then she discarded it altogether and sat down at the base of the wall. She leaned her back against it and drew her knees close to her body. Travis sat beside her.

“Deep, slow breaths,” he said.

“I know.”

“Give anything to trade places with you.”

“I know.”

She had the Tap lying on her open palm, eye level in front of her. Travis watched how the light played over and through it. Strange, silvery shapes in its depths. Tiny swirls and arcs, like scimitar blades.

Then in one fluid move Paige took the cube between two fingertips and put it to her temple. She pressed it against her skin, and Travis saw the thing’s edges blur as it vibrated.

Paige’s breathing accelerated in spite of her efforts. She reached across her midsection with her other arm and took hold of Travis’s hand.

“You’re okay,” he whispered.

She nodded quickly, probably not even processing the words.

Then it happened. The little cube liquefied in the span of a second, and collapsed to what looked like a thick drop of aloe gel between Paige’s fingertips. In almost the same instant the top of the gel rose and formed a point—and then a filament. A wirelike structure maybe a centimeter tall, thin as fine guitar string. It stood there swaying to the tremor of Paige’s body. Then it pointed itself inward and plunged through the skin and bone of her temple.

Her hand spasmed and gripped Travis’s tightly. Her breaths turned into little cries, betraying the pain but only just. Travis knew how much it hurt. He’d experienced it himself. The Tap had emerged from the Breach during the two years he’d been away, but had still been in frequent testing when he’d returned. Like many others he’d volunteered to have a go at it, and his single use had gone as smoothly as he could’ve hoped. Despite the pain involved, he’d intended to use it again.

Then a woman named Gina Murphy had taken a turn with it, and everything had changed. In the six months since, not a single person had used the Tap.

Travis watched as the gel drop shrank by the second. The thing was feeding itself into Paige’s skull through the tiny hole made by the filament. Though Travis couldn’t see what was happening inside, he could easily recall how it felt: like a living thread, ever lengthening, darting and slipping among the deep folds of the brain’s surface. Flitting and hunting and finding its way like a snake’s tongue. Every second of it agony.

But that was normal for the Tap. So far, everything was going well.

Paige’s cries intensified. Her eyes were screwed shut.

“I’m right here,” Travis whispered.

Five seconds had passed since the lead end had gone in. The gel mass on her fingertips was half spent. The insertion never took longer than ten or twelve seconds.

Paige got control of her breathing just before the end. She went quiet and let her face relax. The last trace of gel shrank to wire thickness and slipped in, leaving nothing but a tiny drop of blood at the entry point.

Paige opened her eyes.

“Better?” Travis said.

She nodded.

The tendril always stopped moving once it was fully inside; the pain stopped with it, for the most part.

She was still gripping his hand. With his fingertip against her wrist, he could feel her pulse pushing three beats per second, though it was slowing by the moment.

“I’m ready,” Paige said. “Catch me if I start to tip over.”

“Wait.” He repositioned himself so that he was seated facing her. She got the idea and scooted forward from the wall, until their chests were touching and their legs were around each other’s hips. He hugged her close to him, and she rested her head on his shoulder.

“No worries about falling over,” he said.

She nodded against him and let her body relax, her breathing now almost back to normal.

“See you in three minutes and sixteen seconds,” she said.

She felt the effect begin as soon as she closed her eyes. One moment there was a floor beneath her and Travis’s arms were around her, and the next she was gone, floating in some neural equivalent of a sensory deprivation chamber. She felt the Tap vibrating softly inside her head, its pathway wandering from her temple across the underside of her skull, to the parietal lobe on the opposite rear side. No sense of her limbs. No sense of anything but her thoughts.

And her memories.

She focused on the one she wanted. Envisioned her father’s office— her office, now—on that day five years ago. He’d been sitting with his back to her, the map on one half of his monitor and Carrie Holden’s face on the other.

The image came to her almost at once—much more easily and vividly than it normally could have. She saw it from her own point of view as it’d been in that moment, just passing through the office doorway, her shoe scuffing the tile and making her father flinch. She froze the image just like that, in the instant before he closed the map.

The Tap was a hell of a thing. The memory image hovered in front of her like a projection, as complete and accurate as a high-res photo of that moment would’ve been.

But this capability wasn’t what made the Tap special. If it had been, she would’ve come up empty: at this range she couldn’t read any of the map’s labels. Not the street names. Certainly not the town’s name, if one was there. She could resolve only a road running north and south, and a modest grid of streets clumped along the middle of its length. A few lesser roads strayed off left and right from the bunch. It could’ve been any of a hundred thousand small towns in the world. The image told her nothing.

She allowed the memory to slip forward in time. The desk and computer began to grow in her field of view as she advanced into the room.

Then her father’s hand moved on the mouse, and the map vanished—its clarity had improved hardly at all.

She froze the image again, then let it begin to run backward. Her viewpoint drifted away toward the door behind her. The map popped onto the screen again. Now came the doorway’s edge, sliding into her view from the side. With it came the scuff of her foot, sounding eerie in both reverse and slow motion. She pulled back all the way into the corridor and kept going, retreating to maybe five seconds before she’d entered the room. She knew from experience that if she wanted to, she could play the memory stream forward or backward at just about any speed she could make sense of. It was scarcely different from rewinding or fast-forwarding a video file. She could plunge back through a spastic wash of images at an hour per second, skim through a day in less than half a minute, then slow down and dial in on anything she wanted to see. Every split second of it would be rich with photo-accurate detail. Every moment of her life was there to be revisited and studied. It should’ve been impossible—with even her passing grasp of neuroscience she knew that. Human memory was good, but not this good. However adept the Tap was at pulling information from her brain, this much information shouldn’t have been there to begin with. The Tap was a hell of a thing.