Rye could almost feel Annie’s weight against his chest when he was eleven. If he thought real hard, he could remember the feel of his cheek against the top of her head and how she shivered.
Did she get the message? Did she stay off the plane? There was no way for him to know until he could have a session in the apparatus alone again.
Rye tinkered with the headset. It weighed more than the game equipment he was used to working with, almost fifteen pounds. Wearing it for more than ten minutes left him with a sore neck. Of course there was more in it and it did more than the VR stuff he was used to also.
On the wall, the clock said 10:12 a.m. According to today’s news he’d seen yesterday, Annie’s plane went down forty-seven minutes ago. A scream rose in the back of Rye’s throat, but he bit it back and kept his face calm. Either she got the message, believed it and saved herself, or she didn’t. Finding out wouldn’t change whatever the outcome was.
“A kind of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle applies to our work,” said Dr. Martin. He sat at a console, waiting for Rye to tell him when to send information to the headset. Gretta sat cross-legged on the floor, sorting through the hundreds of pages of screen shots they’d acquired in the last few days. Many were too blurry to use, which was why Rye needed to adjust the equipment.
“How’s that?” said Rye, giving Dr. Martin the expected prompt. He was constantly trying out new explanations of what they were doing on Rye, as if he were working out different drafts of a paper on time travel. Rye’s hands moved steadily, and the profuse sweating fit he’d suffered from an hour earlier seemed to have passed.
“We can’t look at the future without changing it. You see, our knowledge of what’s coming didn’t exist in the future we look at when we look at it. So after we’ve gained any information from the future, that future may not happen. We’ve altered the continuum.”
Rye could see that the eye tracking sensors in the headset were the problem. The cone of focus needed to be widened, which would require more from the computers. “So what we’re doing is fruitless? Anything we learn will be about a future that doesn’t exist once we see it?”
“Not quite. There is a way around the problem. If our knowledge of the future remains with us. If we don’t allow the information to leak, then the future is unaffected by us. But that means we can’t interact with the world at all. We have to remain in the closed loop. If we send our knowledge out—if we even leave the silo with our knowledge and not say anything, the future changes and all our efforts are wasted. Our actions will be based on knowledge we didn’t have before we knew it.”
“Isn’t that the goal, to change the future?”
“We want to stop the conflagration, yes, but nothing we’ve done has affected that. We can’t come out until we can. Up to that time, we have to remain closed off. Any leak before we discover the cause could move the clues around. Some place we’ve already researched might then contain vital warnings about the end that didn’t exist there before. We can’t risk that.”
Gretta had been staring at Rye through Dr. Martin’s speech. “Your eyes look weird,” she said. She was wearing sweats and balancing a stack of papers on her knee. Lately she’d taken to sporting a baseball cap that perpetually shadowed her face, and Rye couldn’t find her eyes at all.
“You ought to see them from my side.” For several minutes, he’d managed to ignore the floaters, but now that she’d reminded him, he was acutely aware of the blemishes in his vision.
“And your bruises are worse,” she said.
“Gretta,” Dr. Martin said sharply.
“But they are! I’m just pointing out an empirical truth.”
Rye said, “Not bruises: Kaposi’s sarcoma. Has anyone ever told you that you need to work on your social skills?”
“Too much of a computer mind,” said Martin. “All her developmental years were spent in line code.”
“You’re patronizing me again. I’m sleeping in my own room from now on,” said Gretta, turning her back to both of them.
“Empirical truth,” said Martin.
The new chip snapped into place in the headset. “There,” said Rye. “Plug me into today, and we’ll see if this did the trick.”
The headset settled on his forehead, and the display screens flickered on, showing him a virtual rendering of the VR room. Martin looked up at him expectantly, his image crisp and flicker-free. Rye let his vision rove back and forth a few times so the eye-trackers could get a fix.
“What time?” said Martin.
“2:00 p.m. in the monitors’ room.”
Dr. Martin typed in the information on his keyboard; the display fuzzed out, and then cleared. Rye’s point of view was the silo now, where the missile had once stood, but now contained four computer monitors in the middle of the circular space. Each monitor scrolled the day’s news. Martin had told Rye that when he first started trying to discover what caused the end of the world, he had wandered through virtually rendered restaurants and shopping malls in the future, reading newspapers over people’s shoulders, or stood in front of televisions until the news came on. The process was time consuming and frustrating. “Everyone reads the sports and comics,” Martin had said, “and the science news coverage is pathetic.” Then, he realized, he could customize the news for his own benefit by setting up the monitors in the silo. They displayed detailed reprints of scientific journals; synopses of political events; reports of anything in the strange or unexplained category, and current events. But the monitors had revealed nothing so far. Even on the day before the end, they spewed out an unremarkable collections of stories and articles. Of course, there was never any mention of them either, which meant that they had decided to stay underground right until the Earth-searing fire. They never climbed out to warn the world. They kept sending messages to themselves until the end.
It was in the current events monitor that Rye had seen the news of the plane crash the day before.
Gretta stopped him at the doorway to his cubicle.
“I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Did I?” She was wearing gray sweatpants and a blue Highlander T-shirt cut off just above her belly button, slicing Duncan Mcleod at mid-thigh. “I mean, just being factual about people shouldn’t get you in trouble, should it?”
Rye didn’t have a chance to answer. Gretta had a tendency to talk in furious bursts.
“Like, I think it’s more honest to confront disease. Denial, you know, is no good. This whole end of the world thing, for example, would be solved if we just told everyone what we have found out. That’s what we ought to do.”
“But…” offered Rye.
“It’s denial on a grand scale. NSA hides stuff by instinct. Their argument about our technology having security repercussions is hogwash. The end of the world is more important than petty national concerns. We’re caught in Martin’s closed-loop idea. He sold it too well, and look where it’s left us.”
Rye thought how weird it was that he didn’t find her attractive at all. Since the heavy medication had started, he hadn’t felt a whisper of sexual longing for anyone. He wondered if it was his body disengaging from life, letting go of one desire after another. First, sex. Eventually, eating, drinking and finally, breathing. She was the only woman he’d seen in months, and she was neuter to him, a personality, nothing else. He didn’t feel an urge to drop his eyes to her shirt (though clearly she wasn’t wearing a bra): he didn’t have a plan for maneuvering around her affections. He couldn’t decide if the change in attitude was a loss or a gain. Overall, though, he wasn’t sad, so he guessed it was probably a plus.