Marcus Sakey - Brilliance

Something like “interrogation cell.”

You bought the ticket. Time to take the ride.

The last thing he saw as the door slid shut was Shannon looking over her shoulder at him, something inscrutable in her eyes.

Standing in the tiny box, he had a sudden vision of himself as though from a satellite. A close-up that quickly zoomed out: man in a box in a building in a complex in a city in a state in a nation—and an enemy of all of them. Panic slid slick fingers through his stomach. He took a breath, rolled his shoulders. Only way out was through.

Millie stared at the middle distance, her face hidden by bright green bangs. She looked so lost that for a moment he forgot his own situation. He wondered how many meetings she had sat through, how many billion-dollar deals. How many times her insight had led to someone’s death. The weight of it would have been a lot for a soldier to bear. And she was just a child.

“It’s okay,” she said.

Cooper started. He wondered if she meant his situation or hers. “It is?”

“Yes.”

He blew a breath. “All right. If you say so.”

Again, he couldn’t feel which direction the elevator was going, but it could only be down. And given the length of the ride, lower than the ground floor. Odd. And why a private elevator with a hidden door? What kind of executive lounge was accessed through the boss’s office?

Ten more seconds, and the door slid open. Another hallway, but no sunlight or botanical garden here. They were in the basement, huddled beneath the humming power lines that drove the building.

“Go ahead,” Millie said.

“You’re not coming?”

She shook her head, still staring at the floor. “Go to the end. There’s a door.”

Cooper looked at her, then down the hallway. Shrugged. “Thanks.” He stepped off the elevator.

“You should be careful,” Millie said behind him.

“Why?”

For a moment, he thought she wouldn’t answer. Then she raised her head, swatted a lock of green hair behind one ear. Took him in with those strange, sad eyes. “Everybody’s lying,” she said. “Everybody.”

The elevator door slid closed.

Cooper stared at it. Slowly, he turned back and faced the dim hallway. He flexed his fingers. Wondered how deep he was right now. At least as far underground as he’d been above it a moment before. Something nagged at his subconscious, that hint of a puzzle piece that hadn’t fallen into place yet, a pattern he could sense more than see. A hidden door. A private elevator. A child for an escort. A gifted, troubled child.

What was this place?

If this is the executive lounge, I’d sure hate to see the regular one.

He started down the hall. Thick carpet muted his footsteps. He could hear the rush and whoosh of air, ventilation systems of some sort. The walls were undecorated. He ran a hand down them; carbon fiber weave, very strong, very expensive.

At the end of the hall, a door swung open. There was no one standing there, and the room beyond it was dark.

With the feeling that he was entering some sort of a dream, he walked in.

Data. Constellations of numbers glowing like stars, neon swipes of sine-curves, charts and graphs in three dimensions, hovering everywhere he looked. It was like walking into a planetarium, that darkened silence and sense of wonder, only instead of the heavens, it was the world hanging in every direction, the world broken down into digits and sweeps and waves.

Cooper blinked, stared, turned slowly on his heel. The room was big, an underground cathedral, and in all directions, three hundred and sixty degrees, luminous figures hung in the air. Things cycled and changed as he watched, the light seemingly alive, the correlations bizarre: population figures graphed against water consumption and the average length of women’s skirts. Frequency of traffic accidents on non-rural roads between the hours of eight and eleven. Sunspot activity overlaid on homicide rates. A chronology of deaths in the 1941 German invasion of the Soviet Union mapped to the price of crude oil. Explosions in post offices from 1901 to 2012.

In the center of this circus of light stood the silhouetted ringmaster. If he was aware of Cooper, he didn’t show it. He raised a hand, pointed at a graph, swiped sideways and zoomed to a micro level, red and green dots plotted like a map of the ocean floor.

The air was cold and smelled of…corn chips?

Cooper walked down the ramp in front of him. As he passed through a graph, the projections glowed in his peripheral vision, a neat line that swept across his body. “Ummm…hello?”

The figure turned. The ambient light was too dim to make out his features. He gestured to Cooper to come forward. When they were ten feet apart, the man said, “Lights to thirty percent,” and soft, shadowless illumination sprang from nowhere and everywhere at once.

The man was thick around the waist, the beginnings of a second chin sprouting off the bulwark of the first. His skin was pallid and vaguely shiny, hair a rat’s nest. He ran a hand through it with the jerky speed of a regular twitch. Cooper stared at him, the pattern beginning to come together, the truth of it huge and shattering and suddenly obvious.

“Hi,” the man said. “I’m Erik Epstein.”

Cooper opened his mouth, closed it. The truth slamming home, obvious. The structure of the face, the shape of the eyes, the breadth of the shoulders. It was like looking at the pudgy, nervous double of the handsome, assured billionaire he’d just left.

“The hologram,” Cooper said. “It’s a fake. It’s all you.”

“What? No. Huh-uh. Reasonable intuitional leap based on limited data, but incorrect. The hologram is real. I mean, the man is real. But he’s not me. He plays me. He’s been me for a long time now.”

“An…actor?”

“A doppelganger. My face and voice.”

“I—I don’t—”

“I don’t like people. I mean, I like people, people don’t like me. I’m not good at people. In person. They’re clearer as data.”

“But. Your…doppelganger, he’s been on the news. He eats dinner at the White House.”

Epstein stared at him as if waiting for him to say something else.

“Why?”

“For a while I could just be in the data, but we knew people would want to see me. People are funny that way, they want to see, even when seeing isn’t the point. Astronomy. The important information scientists get from telescopes isn’t visible. Radiation spectra, red-line shift, radio waves. Data. That’s what matters. That’s what tells us something. But people want to see pictures. Supernova in vivid color. Even though scientifically it’s useless.”

Cooper nodded, getting it. “He’s your color photo. What was he, someone who looked a lot like your high school yearbook?”

“My brother. Older.”

That couldn’t be. Epstein had had an older brother, a normal, but he’d died a dozen years ago in a car crash. “Wait. You faked his death?”

“Yes.”

“But that was before anyone knew about you. Before you made your fortune.”

“Yes.”

“Are you telling me you two planned this twelve years ago?”

“Together we are Erik Epstein. I live in the data. And he is what people want to see. Better at talking to them.” Epstein twitched his hands through his hair again. “Here.” He gestured, and a vivid image appeared. The office upstairs, but from a different angle. Shannon in the chair, saying something. The lawyer, Kobb, shaking his head. Millicent hunch-shouldered, lost in her game. A security camera?

No; the angle was wrong. It was the view from behind the desk. The room as viewed by the hologram. By the other Erik Epstein.