The clue drew Aysa’s attention and then it drew mine, but the clue was planted there. An anomaly is a mismatch of facts, suggesting a deliberate falsehood beneath the surface truth. But what if the anomaly is itself the deliberate falsehood?
This stretch was altered subsequent to creation to include the shadow so that we would see it.
The stretch is still rolling. I tell it to stop, just as Mose Crane hits the ground again, and the machine obeys and the room fills with the subsequent silence.
I wish I could say “Stop” to everything, to all of this, shout “Stop” and let reality hang in the balance for a minute, or forever. Stop, I think.
What truth is confirmed by the lie I’ve found?
“Hey, Stone.”
“Yeah?” His voice is hesitant. I don’t know what I look like, what kind of wildness has come into my eyes, but I’m making Woody nervous.
“How does a stretch get changed?”
“What?”
“Reality, Woody. Is there a way to alter one of these stretches of reality, once they’ve been captured and transferred?”
Woody stares back at me, scratches his thick neck. I have reached the edge of his understanding. He looks at his machine. Dumbfounded. It is like I am asking if there is any way to alter a dog so that it can fly, to alter a fish to make it stand up and walk across the street.
“No,” he says finally, but there is a tremble in his voice. A truer answer, just beneath: I have no fucking idea.
“‘No’ because you know the answer to be no, based on evidence?”
“‘No’ because—‘No’ because—” Woody is stammering. It is like he is caught in a loop, a half hitch of reality, as if his reality has been altered, spooled around on itself to say “‘No’ because” and only “‘No’ because” forever.
“‘No’ because—” Finally, with a deep breath: “‘No’ because nobody would ever do that.”
“I know,” I say, but the problem is, I’ve already figured out that yes, somebody would do that, and now I’ve come down hard on a bone truth, on the brutal bone truth that if there is ever anything that somebody could do—something violent, something vicious, something cruel and unconscionable—if there is ever anything that somebody is able to do, somebody will find a way to do it, somebody is going to do it, somebody has already done it.
So of course someone has figured out how to alter stretches to make them reflect reality that never occurred. Someone has done it. Someone has done it to this one, the same person who invented Mose Crane so I might find him.
The only question is who did it, but that isn’t a question anymore.
I know it, I have known it, I can’t not know it anymore.
“Woody?”
“Yeah? Yes?”
He is wary of me now, I’m an animal set loose in his small office, charging in circles. He doesn’t know what I’m going to do next. “I need to do a live watch.”
“Well—”
“Don’t say no. I need to connect to live captures.”
“Where?”
“The Record.”
“I—come on. Laszlo. I can’t.”
“You can.”
He can’t because the world is watching. Because reality is always being captured. Because if anyone sees him do such a thing willingly, he will face the consequences. So he will have to do it unwillingly, that’s all.
I draw my weapon and aim it at Woody. “A live feed. Right now. A tapestry. Every basement. Now.”
Woody turns back to his deck and I keep the gun aimed at him, continuing the performance, until he presses a final button and the blackness of his screen lights up into a thousand subdivided screens. The Record itself has eyes inside it, of course it does, the Record is on the Record, and Woody the magician can open its eyes, open all of those thousands of eyes at once. He turns his screen into a tapestry of screens, divided into a dozen boxes which then scroll, each of them, and we are suddenly everywhere inside of those famous basements, peering into the catacombic guts of reality itself.
It doesn’t take long to find him.
Arlo Vasouvian in the dim subbasement light, moving with deliberation along a narrow carpeted space between two file cabinets.
“What the fuck?” says Woody. As we watch, the old man peels the lid off a box. His bifocals are perched on the tip of his small nose; he’s squinting, looking for something. “Is that—”
“Yes,” I say. But I can’t say the name. It is too painful. There would be glass in my throat. It is one thing to suspect that your heart has been broken, another thing to know.
“What floor is he on?” I croak. “Which capture are we looking at?”
“Uh—sub nine,” says Woody. “What’s he doing?”
“What’s on sub nine?”
But before Woody can answer, Arlo turns to the capture that is watching him, turns and looks at us watching him, and smiles.
“What the fuck?” says Woody, pushing away from his machines and looking at the ground.
Arlo’s smile widens into a grin as he is looks right at the capture and raises one hand in greeting, because he knows we’re watching. He can see us seeing him, and his cheery acknowledgment is as sharp and violent as a punch. He is inside reality, looking out.
I turn away from the screen at the sound I hear behind me, the sound of Woody being quietly sick into the trash can besides his desk. I breathe deep and fight off the same unsettling need, because I am wobbling too, walking slow, dizzy, through a world shuddering under my feet.
-
Agent Charlie Ratesic, the hero laid low, muttered from the depths of his unconsciousness while his head lolled back and forth in his hospital bed. The machines keeping him alive and free of pain beeped endlessly in the small room, their rhythm like a mechanical pulsebeat.
I was sitting on a chair by the edge of his bed, as I had been sitting for a week, keeping him company, telling him stories, waiting for him to wake.
“I’m sorry, Charles,” I said, as much to myself as to him, as much to the captures in the room as to the person who lay before me, past the reach of hearing. “I am so dreadfully sorry.”
I had said these words so many times already. Others had come and gone. Charlie’s heartbroken parents, our colleagues bearing flowers, cards, the doughnuts they knew he loved, which at the end of each day I took out with me and distributed to the doctors and nurses. Poor Laszlo’s, Charlie’s brother, had come every day, come and sat silently beside me for hours after his own shift was through.
Technically, I had little to apologize for. I had told Charlie not to return to that warehouse. Indeed, I had not only warned him but ordered him not to. He knew that it would be my duty and my responsibility to take the steps necessary to shut it down: an Off Record house could not be countenanced, and I had to act.
He knew we would be going in there, and that we would come in with weapons blazing.
And yet when the decisive day came, and we swept in with the full force of the State, there he was, still undercover, skulking among the conspirators, unable to free himself from the idea that there was a monster left for him to find.