Patrick Lee - Ghost Country

Bethany's face lit up as the idea came to her. "You scratched the rock in the present time, so you could see the same scratch appear in the future."

"You'd think it would show up there, wouldn't you?" Paige said.

"How could it not?" Bethany said.

Paige shrugged. "I can only tell you that it didn't. I scratched the hell out of the boulder in the present. I chipped a crevice two inches deep into its surface. But in the future, the scratch wasn't there. It just wasn't. The rock was as smooth as ever."

Bethany stared. Met Travis's eyes. Looked at Paige again. She couldn't seem to find the words for her level of disbelief.

"Changes are locked out," Paige said. "I think it's that simple, however the hell it works. I think when those tones were sounding, the first time we switched these things on, the cylinders were locking onto whatever future we were on track toward at that moment. Independent of changes we'd make later on, once we could see the future for ourselves."

"Changes locked out…" Bethany said. "But you don't mean our future is locked… do you?"

Paige shook her head. "Just the future we see through the projected opening. Think of it this way. Suppose these cylinders only showed us a future ten days ahead of the present. You might look through and see yourself going about a normal day. You might also see a newspaper with next Saturday's lotto numbers in it. Suppose you jot them down, and in the present time, you run to the store and buy a ticket. You win the lotto, and now your whole future is going to change. But when you look through the opening at your future self, the one ten days ahead of you, nothing has changed. She's not celebrating. She hasn't quit her day job. That future, on the other side of the opening, is still following the original track-the one in which you didn't have the lotto numbers. It's locked. That's the only way I can put it. The future the cylinders show us is like a living snapshot of the future we were headed for, at the moment we first switched them on."

"So we can still save the world on our side of the opening," Travis said. "But the future we see on the other side will always be in ruins. The way it would've originally turned out."

"Exactly." Paige was quiet a moment. "Why the cylinders are designed to do that, I can only guess. It's worth keeping in mind that these things are built for some purpose. Built to be useful. Maybe a future that reacts to present changes is too fluid to make sense of. Maybe it would flicker through alternate versions like some rapid-fire slideshow right before your eyes. Think about chaos theory. Sensitivity to initial conditions. Maybe it's practical, or even necessary, to just lock these things onto one future and stick with it. That way, you can keep going back and forth between the two times, and never worry about the world transforming under your feet. And I'm sure the designers had some way to reset them, prep them to be locked again later on, whenever they wanted to, using equipment we obviously don't have. We've got the iPods but not the docks."

Bethany gazed off at nothing, thinking it over. She seemed to be accepting it, whether or not it made sense to her.

Travis didn't expect to fully understand it, but Paige's reasoning sounded right. If the iris opened onto a future that did react to changes in the present, it was hard to believe they weren't triggering at least some changes just by looking at it.

"I'm sure my expression at the time looked like each of yours does now," Paige said. "I stood there for probably half an hour trying to get a grasp on it. And then I heard Pilar and the others shouting, and waving at me to come back, because one of the satellite pings had finally gotten a response."

The satellite was called COMTEL-3," Paige said. "In our present time it's positioned over the Atlantic as a relay for news-wire services, bouncing article text between ground stations in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. On the other side of the opening, we picked it up over the Pacific, moving east toward Ecuador, two hundred miles below its intended orbit. It answered the ping with a status screen full of critical error messages. It also had the date and time, based on its own onboard clock, which is probably accurate to within a few seconds over a thousand years. Adjusting for local time, at that moment in the other desert it was 6:31 in the evening, October 14, 2084."

A relative silence came, beyond the ambient whine of a jet powering up somewhere across the airport.

"Christ," Bethany said.

Travis felt something like a chill. They'd already known the kind of timeline they were dealing with, but to hear it specified to the minute made it real in a way he hadn't expected. He did the math. Seventy-three years and not quite two months.

"Having a known position for COMTEL-3 did a lot for us," Paige said. "After that we could rotate the dish to follow it, and stay in contact. Which was good, because Pilar believed some of the satellite's final transmissions-news stories-might still be stored in its memory buffer. She worked on it for a while, but she wasn't optimistic about actually retrieving the information. The bird was in pretty bad shape. It'd gone into some kind of safe mode after enough time passed without contact from its human controllers. Its orientation was off; its solar panels weren't angled to grab as much sunlight as it needed. It's a wonder it still worked at all. But after about half an hour, she managed to pull a number of articles from the buffer. They were corrupted all to hell. They were like fill-in-the-blank puzzles, with more blanks than words. We sat out there the rest of the day and most of the night trying to make sense of them, while we kept pinging for more satellites. We didn't find any more, but from the COMTEL-3 information we eventually narrowed down a few basic details of the event that ends the world."

She looked down at the table.

"The media gives it a name," she said. "They call it Bleak December. Whatever it is, it starts on December fourth of this year, and unfolds over the following weeks. We know that Yuma, Arizona, plays a key role in the event. Even a central role. But we don't know why. The city was mentioned in every article, numerous times, but the context was never intact. We also know that in the weeks before the event there's a major buildup of petroleum supplies in large metro areas. Gas stations with three or four tanker trucks parked outside as reserve stores. So whatever the event is, apparently people see it coming. Or at least those in power see it coming, and make preparations for some potential crisis. If that sounds vague, it is. There was just so little text to go on. We assumed they wanted the gas for electric generators, if power grids failed, but that was only a guess."

Bethany turned to Travis. "The cars," she said.

He nodded. There had to be a connection.

"What cars?" Paige said.

"All the cars in D.C. were gone," Travis said. "Everyone left at the end, but not in any kind of panic. There was no gridlock, as far as we could see. They left with cool heads."

Paige stared at the runway and tried to tie that fact in with everything else she knew. Travis watched her eyes. He saw only an echo of his own bafflement. Finally she shook her head.

"Doesn't make the image any sharper," she said. "Maybe they wanted the gas to evacuate the cities, but there was nothing in the articles to suggest why they'd need to do that."

"What did the articles suggest?" Bethany said. "I mean… beyond what you were sure of, was there anything in them that offered even a hint of what the hell happened?"

Paige thought about it for a long moment. On the far side of the airport, a 737 accelerated and lifted off.

"We had the sense that it wasn't a natural phenomenon," she said at last. "A sense that it was… a failure of something. Like a plan. Like a very big, very secret plan, that went very fucking wrong in every possible way. We couldn't pin down any one passage of text that said so… but it was there in general. It was sort of everywhere. And toward the end, the articles were fewer and farther between, and very short, leaving almost no text to go on. And then they just ended. The last thing anyone ever bounced through that satellite was dated December 28. Whatever the hell Bleak December is… was… will be… it takes about twenty-four days from start to finish. And then people stop writing newspaper articles, and correcting satellite orbits. And at some point, apparently, they stop doing everything."