Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

Yet this function was still not what made it special—or difficult to accept as possible. Not by a country mile on either score.

Paige let the image freeze again.

Five seconds from the open doorway. Out of sight beyond it, her father was staring at Carrie Holden and the map, unaware of Paige’s approach in the corridor.

Perfect.

To use the Tap’s real selling point, all she had to do now was wait. The controls were simple and intuitive. A few seconds passed, the memory still frozen, and then she began to feel her feet beneath her. She was hovering in the void, but her feet tingled as if they could sense the ground half an inch below them.

She willed herself to drop, and felt her shoes connect solidly with the surface.

In that instant the memory came to life. It was no longer an image in front of her—it was a world around her: the hallway and the fluorescent lights and the hum of air exchangers and the trace smell of cleaning solution on the floor. Her body was there too, propelled forward by its own momentum—she’d been mid-stride at this point in the memory. The movement almost threw her off balance as she came to a stop. She put out one hand and caught the wall, and silently halted herself two feet short of the doorway.

To all of her senses she was really standing here, in this moment that was five years gone. Her father was really in the next room, just beyond the edge of this doorway. The Tap let you relive memories exactly as they’d been—but that still wasn’t what made it special.

What made it special was that it let you relive them as they hadn’t been.

Paige moved forward into the doorway.

She took care not to let her shoe scuff the floor.

She saw her father seated at the desk, staring at the map and the picture of Carrie. He had no idea Paige was there.

She took a step into the room. Then another.

He sat there, adrift in his thoughts, eyes fixed on the screen.

Another step, and another.

She could see the map more clearly now than before. She was closer to it than she’d gotten in real life.

Another step.

Still not close enough to resolve the words on the screen.

But almost.

When she’d heard the early accounts from those who’d first used the Tap, she hadn’t believed them. It just couldn’t be true; how could you remember details you hadn’t actually seen the first time around? Then she’d tried it herself, and there’d been no more denying it. In fact the Tap’s power was far greater than she’d supposed in the beginning. You could do more than just cross a room you hadn’t crossed and read words you hadn’t been close enough to read. You could pick up a book you hadn’t opened at the time—or ever—and flip to page 241. You’d see the words on that page as they existed in real life, and you could verify it for yourself after snapping out of the memory and finding a copy. If she wanted to, Paige knew she could back out of her father’s office right now and, in the middle of this memory, go upstairs and schedule a flight to Paris. She could take that flight and walk the Champs-Élysées, and it would be swarming with the very same tourists who’d been there on this day five years ago. The scene would be accurate to the last detail. Every lock of hair brushed from a forehead. Every smile.

As with all entities, there were only guesses as to how it worked. The technician who’d spent the most time testing it, a man named Jhalani who’d once been a colleague of Stephen Hawking’s at Cambridge, imagined the Tap to be a kind of antenna. Clearly it did more than just draw information from the user’s brain—Jhalani believed it drew from something quite a bit grander: the set of all possible universes. Paige had heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but only as an interesting hypothetical notion. She’d been surprised to learn from Jhalani that it was actually a mainstream idea in modern physics. The thrust of it was that every event that could go one way or another actually went both . Every time you looked at wheat bread and white bread and chose white, some other version of you, out there in the great who-the-hell-knows, chose wheat. Physicists mainly talked about it happening at the level of subatomic particles, but if it applied down at that scale, then it certainly applied to loaves of bread and flights to Paris and shoe scuffs on tiled floors. In the end, Paige thought Travis had summed the Tap up best: it let you remember not just everything you’d done, but everything you could have done. A hell of a thing.

She took another step toward her father’s desk. She’d be in his peripheral vision soon—right about at the point where she could read the map. The margin would come down to inches at best.

It was critical that she get this right the first time—the first time would be the only time. The Tap’s one limit was that you couldn’t revisit the same memory twice. The techs liked to say that a memory was burned after you relived it. Not only couldn’t you drop into it again, you couldn’t even remember it the old-fashioned way afterward. The original would be forever replaced by the revision. Therefore an especially cherished moment—a first kiss, say—was better left alone.

Another step.

If it came down to it, she had options. This was, for all its considerable bells and whistles, only a memory. Nothing she did here would be of consequence in the real world after she woke up. Which meant she could leap at her father, shove him away from the computer, and read the map before he had time to react. At that point she could simply be done with the whole thing—to end this memory she needed only to concentrate hard on her last glimpse of reality: she and Travis sitting in the deserted corridor on B42. A good ten seconds of that image would take her right back to it.

But she hoped to avoid attacking her father. Doing so would preclude the other move she planned to make here. The more obvious move, by far, though she wished she could forgo it.

Another step. And another.

The labels on the map were right at the brink of her discernment now.

Another step.

She could see the number on the big road running north and south. U.S. 550, it looked like. She thought that was somewhere in Colorado. Just above and to the left of the grid of streets was a word—almost certainly the town’s name. A short word.

She squinted.

Ouray .

Ouray, Colorado. She’d heard of it. Some friends in college had stayed there when they went skiing at Telluride.

Good enough. If she really wanted to, she could end the memory now.

A big part of her did want to. The same part that hated the second move.

Which was simply to talk to her father.

It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to him. Quite the opposite. She’d been very close to him, especially in their last years together, and then she’d lost him in the worst imaginable way. When she’d first learned what the Tap could do, she’d considered reliving a moment with him. Something happy and good and warm, to replace the ending life had given them.

But she’d resisted. Always. As real as it would feel, the moment would be fake. And desecratory, somehow. The whole notion had seemed wrong from the beginning.

It still did.

She watched him sitting there, unaware of her. She took a breath and smelled his aftershave. She couldn’t remember smelling it on anyone since she’d lost him. All those years, that scent had just been part of the background. A thing to hardly notice, if at all. It could make her cry right now, if she wasn’t careful. She let the emotions swim a few seconds longer, then shoved them all down into the deep.

Time to do this.

She backed away from the desk, turned and left the room without a sound. She walked to a spot in the hallway ten feet from the door, pivoted and faced it again.