Empire Games Series, Book 1(49)
“Don’t worry, I’ve got a classified background briefing document for you that goes into all the details in mind-numbing detail. You’re cleared for it: just remember it’s code-word-secret and not for public disclosure.”
“How routine is all this?” Rita opened her eyes.
“You’re the first,” said Smith, staring out the window at the passing traffic on the other side of the highway.
“I’m a guinea pig?” She stared at him.
“How many other Clan orphans do you think we have?”
“I don’t know, I—hell.”
“Listen, we have been manipulating this stuff in cell cultures for nearly two decades now. We know all about how the process works. Most of the stuff you need to world-walk is already inside you: we’re just going to repair the broken on/off switch. Yes, it’s an experimental process. But you’re valuable to us. You’re not the only one, but people like you don’t grow on trees. Professor Schwartz isn’t going to tell her team to do anything if she doesn’t think it’s safe to proceed. And on the other side of the coin, think what the benefits are: you’re going to gain a superpower and get an opportunity to use it to protect America. Doesn’t that mean something to you?”
Sitting in the back of a government limo and listening to a highly persuasive secret police colonel, all Rita could do was nod, nervously: whether because she agreed with him or because it was the course of least resistance she herself could not have said. They ask you to do one more unforgivable thing and you cannot back out, Kurt had explained. At the time, she hadn’t really understood, but now …
“I can cope,” she lied.
SOMEWHERE IN CONNECTICUT, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020
The first week went exactly as Colonel Smith had told her it would, except for one significant deviation: he hadn’t mentioned the boredom. The clinic was located in woodland somewhere off a highway between Durham and New Haven, and there was sporadic cell service at best—and none in her room, which was underground. There was no cable TV, no high-speed Internet access, and if she wanted to update her phone or check her e-mail she had to go upstairs and hope for a signal. There was a small library of dog-eared books in the rec room, but it appeared to be policed by a member of the nursing staff who was both excessively friendly and claustrophobically evangelical. Consequently its contents were not to Rita’s taste.
She was the only patient, although there were half a dozen beds. The clinic’s main function, she gathered, was to perform surgery to change the biometrics of deep-cover DHS agents—bone-shim insertions to change gait and facial appearance, fingerprint and iris transplants, even experimental CRISPR genome editing of epithelial cells to spoof DNA sequencers. Rita spent her time in the break room, trying not to attract attention. Short of going for long walks inside the perimeter fence, it was the best entertainment on offer. Which was to say, very little.
“Good morning!” Dr. Jennifer Lane greeted her brightly on her first morning. “Call me Jenn? I work for Professor Schwartz, who runs the project here, and I’m responsible for your therapeutic regime. If you have any questions about the medical aspects of this procedure, I’m the person you need to talk to.” Rita smiled, taking an instant dislike to the doctor, whose bright-eyed chirpiness reminded her of early morning lectures suffered in silence after student drinking parties. Not her greatest moments, but nevertheless … “I guess you want to know all about how world-walking works for walkers of worlds! Isn’t that the case?”
Kill me now, Rita thought. “Yeah, but can I grab a coffee first?” She hadn’t slept well—or at all, if she was perfectly truthful with herself. She’d spent the night wired up to a mobile EEG and an ambulatory blood pressure monitor, which by 4 a.m. had become an almost unendurable torture (for it woke her up with her arm in agony whenever it inflated, which was every half hour). “I’m not myself right now.”
“Absolutely! Caffeine is safe at this point, so I’ll just fetch one for you right now! How do you take it?”
“Flat white, extra shot, no sugar.”
Rita slumped into the patient’s chair in the doctor’s office as Jenn bounded away in the direction of the coffee robot by the nurses’ station. She yawned, scratched halfheartedly at the inflatable cuff around her arm, and tried not to doze off. The doctor returned regrettably rapidly, just as the blood pressure monitor ground its gears and the cuff began to inflate again, sending sparks of pain into her arm. “So!” Dr. Jenn bounced into her chair. “World-walking! Let’s skip the physics for now, it goes off into brane theory, which nobody understands without a PhD in pure mathematics. Let’s just say we live in a multiverse—a bundle of parallel universes branching off each other. The vast majority are identical but for some quantum uncertainty, and they keep merging and reemerging. But there are sheaves of parallels where the differences add up to something we can tell apart. A huge number of such sheaves exist, and we call them time lines.
“The world-walking mechanism uses some intracellular machinery, self-replicating wet-phase nanotechnology with embedded quantum dots to ensure coherence of the wave function, that can bounce you—and anything electrostatically earthed with you—into another time line, as long as the Q-machines are all triggered together. The trigger event is a bunch of them going into the same state transition more or less simultaneously, and the easiest way to get this to happen is by hitting a bunch of neurons in your brain that contain Q-machines with a signal that excites all of them at once. The easiest bunch to trigger are in your lateral occipital complex, where your vision system recognizes images. We hit them with a unique image—a complex knotwork—and as you recognize it the Q-machines in that part of your brain activate.