Patrick Lee - Deep Sky

And cleared her throat loudly.

She heard her father’s chair squeak at once, and heard the mouse scrape on his desktop.

She walked to the doorway and leaned in, and found him staring at a file directory. She knocked on the frame and he looked up at her.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey.”

Her throat constricted; she couldn’t help it. Jesus, even a random moment like this. Especially a random moment like this. The kind they’d had a million of—should’ve had a million more of.

She swallowed the tightness and stepped into the room. “I have a question.”

“Shoot.”

No reason to drag things out: “What was Scalar?”

He didn’t quite flinch. It was more subtle than that—all in the eyes. A flicker of fear and then perfect calm. He tilted his chair back and appeared to search his thoughts.

“Rings a bell,” he said. “Where’d you come across it?”

“In the archives. There’s an index page for it, but all the entries are crossed out.”

“Oh—I remember. Let me guess, the entries went from the early to late eighties.”

Paige nodded.

“It was a clerical thing,” her father said. “Had to do with videotape formats, way back. We used to shoot everything on standard VHS, and then we switched over to VHS-C—digital was still a ways off. Anyway, when we made the switch we decided to transfer all the old stuff too, for shelf-life. Huge pain in the ass. Couple thousand hours of stock. Probably took us six years or more, on and off.”

He shrugged, waiting for her to let it go.

She returned his gaze and wondered if he’d ever lied to her before this. Sure, he’d kept his work with Tangent secret from her, all through her childhood, but what choice had he had? This was different. And harder to stomach than she’d have guessed.

“That all you wanted to know?” he said.

Only a memory. She held onto that idea like it was a handrail at the edge of a cliff. If she called him on his lie, she wouldn’t actually be hurting him. He wasn’t real.

“Honey?” he said. “Everything okay?”

“I’ve already asked some of the others about Scalar,” she said. “No one wants to say much, but I’m pretty certain it wasn’t about transferring videotapes.”

His expression went cold.

“There was government involvement,” she said. “And it cost hundreds of millions of dollars. I want to know what it was.”

He stared. He seemed to be coming to some careful decision. When he finally spoke, it was in a calming tone, but one full of fear— for her . As if she were standing there with a gun to her head.

“Paige, you don’t want to get into this.”

“I have a right to know. And I don’t appreciate being lied to.”

“You’re right—I lied about the VHS stuff. But you lied too. No one here in Border Town told you a thing about Scalar. There are maybe half a dozen who know the parts you just described, and none of them would’ve said anything without coming to me first. Which means you talked to someone on the outside. And that scares the hell out of me.”

She couldn’t think of what to say to that. Almost every word had caught her off guard.

Her father stood from his desk and crossed to her. He stared at her with that strange, minefield caution still in his eyes.

“Who have you spoken to?” he said.

“First tell me what Scalar is.”

“Paige, this is more serious than you can know. If you’ve talked to the wrong people, you may have already triggered things we can’t stop.”

“Then tell me. Everything.”

He shook his head. “Knowing about Scalar puts a person at risk. I wouldn’t tell you a word of it to save my life. Now I need to know exactly who you spoke to. I’m not kidding.”

“If others here know about this, then I should know too—”

He grabbed her arm and pulled her toward him—she had to step fast to stay balanced—and shouted into her face. “ Who did you talk to? ”

She pulled her arm away, turned and ran. Through the doorway, along the corridor, the lights sliding by and her father’s footsteps coming fast behind her. She shut her eyes as she ran. Pictured the deserted B42, where she and Travis were sitting. It was hard to focus on it now.

“Paige!”

Running. Eyes shut tight. Only a memory.

Travis held on to Paige and waited. Three minutes, sixteen seconds. It always took that long, no matter how much time someone spent inside a memory. During his own use of the Tap, Travis had revisited a random night of his stretch in Atlanta. He’d dropped into the middle of a long shift at the warehouse, then just walked out of the place and got in his Explorer. He drove west all that night and all the next day, stopping only for gas, food, and a couple naps, and reached the Pacific in about thirty-six hours.

Had he wanted to, he could’ve stayed in the memory for months—probably even years. Techs had remained under for as long as six weeks without encountering trouble. They’d even tried staying under while catching up to the present time and surpassing it; had it worked they would’ve found themselves remembering their own futures, a trick with all kinds of fun potential. But all attempts to do that had failed—even the Tap had its boundaries. Subjects hit the present and saw their vision start flashing green and blue like some system-crash warning, and then they involuntarily emerged from the memory—three minutes and sixteen seconds after going under, as always.

Only one person had ever come back sooner. Gina Murphy. Her eyes had popped open at around two minutes and thirty-five seconds, and she’d screamed and held her head as if it were being pried apart. The screaming had lasted for over a minute, while Travis and others carried her to the medical quarters. Along the way Gina managed to evict the Tap from her head—another intuitive control, you got it out by simply wanting it out—but that didn’t end the pain. Her death ended it, around the time they set her on a bed in medical. By then she was bleeding from every opening in her face, including her eyes. An Army medical examiner, off-site, did the autopsy the following day. The results, understandably, were unprecedented in medical literature. Gina had died from laceration and hemorrhaging of the brain, confined to a narrow pathway atop the neocortex. In the doctor’s words, it looked like someone had taken a radial saw to the contents of her head, but had managed to do it without cutting the skull.

More disturbing than those answers were the questions that didn’t have any. Above all, what had gone wrong? Had something about Gina’s biochemistry triggered the problem? Had she used the Tap in some incorrect way? What would that even mean? She’d gone under to relive a memory, like everyone else had done—some sibling’s birthday party she’d missed years ago. The fact was that the questions weren’t just unanswered. They were unanswerable. As with all entities, Tangent was simply out of its depth. There was a way to get yourself killed using the Tap, and no victim would ever live to say what it was.

Travis watched the time on his phone.

Two minutes and thirty-five came and went.

He relaxed only by a degree.

Three minutes.

Three minutes and ten.

Fifteen.

Sixteen.

Paige jerked against him and took a hard breath.

“ Fuck ,” she whispered.

She raised her head from his shoulder.

“One for two,” she said. She rubbed her forehead, looking badly rattled by something. “I’ll explain while we wait for the plane.”

Before they’d even returned to their residence, Paige called Bethany Stewart—one of the youngest people in Tangent, at twenty-five, and very likely the smartest. Bethany answered on the second ring with no edge of sleep in her voice, despite it being four in the morning.