When he saw it, he shuddered; he could not tell at first if the eye was organic or a metallic lens. The effect of the machine on his mind was of a thousand maggots inching their way across the top of a television set turned on but not receiving a station.
He couldn’t stop looking, as if the scientist’s warning had made it impossible not to look. A crawling sensation spread across his scalp, his arms, his hands, his legs.
“How does it work?” he asked the scientist.
“We still don’t know.”
“Does the adept know?”
“Not really. He just told us not to look into it directly.”
“Is it from the future?”
“That is the most logical guess.”
To him, it didn’t look real. It looked either like something from another planet or something a psychotic child would put together before turning to more violent pursuits.
“Where else could it be from?”
The scientist didn’t reply, and anger began to override his fear. He continued to look directly into the eye, even as it made him feel sick.
“Well, what do you know?”
“That it shouldn’t work. As we put the pieces together …we all thought …we all thought it was more like witchcraft than science. Forgive me, Mr. President.”
He gave the scientist a look that the scientist couldn’t meet. Had he meant the gravity of the insult? Had he meant to imply their efforts were as blasphemous as the adept’s second sight?
“And now? What do you think now?”
“It’s awake, alive. But we don’t see how it’s …”
“It’s what?”
“Breathing, Mr. President. A machine shouldn’t breathe.”
“How does it take anyone into the future, do you think?”
The temperature in the room seemed to have gone up. He was sweating. The eye of the thing, impossibly alien, bored into him. Was it changing color?
“We think it doesn’t physically send anyone into the future. That’s the problem. We think it might somehow …create a localized phenomenon.”
He sighed. “Just say what you mean.”
The pulsing red dot. The shifting green. Looking at him. Looking into him.
“We think it might not allow physical travel, just mental travel.”
In that instant, he saw adept Peter’s pale face again, and he felt a weakness in his stomach; and even though there was so much protection between him and the machine, he turned to the scientist and said, “Get me out of here.”
Only it was too late.
The sickness, the shifting had started the next day, and he couldn’t tell anyone about it, not even his wife, or they would have removed him from office. The Constitution was quite clear about what to do with “witches and warlocks.”
At this point, his aide would hand him the book. They’d have gone through a dozen books before choosing that one. It is the only one with nothing in it anyone could object to; nothing in it of substance, nothing, his people thought, that the still-free press could use to damage him. There was just a goat in the book, a goat having adventures. It was written by a constitutionalist, an outspoken supporter of coronation and expansion.
As he takes the book, he realizes, mildly surprised, that he has already become used to the smell of sweating children (he has none of his own) and the classroom grunge. The students who attend the school all experience it differently from him, their minds editing out all of the sensory perceptions he’s still receiving. The mess. The depressed quality of the infrastructure. But what if you couldn’t edit it out? And what if the stakes were much, much higher? (Ossuary. It sounded like a combination of “osprey” and “sanctuary.”)
So then they would sit him down at a ridiculously small chair, almost as small as the ones used by the students, but somehow he would feel smaller in it despite that, as if he were back in college, surrounded by people both smarter and more dedicated than him, as if he were posing and being told he’s not as good: an imposter.
But it’s still just a children’s book, after all, and at least there’s air conditioning kicking in, and the kids really seem to want him to read the book, as if they haven’t heard it a thousand times before, and he feeds off the look in their eyes—the President of North America and the Britains is telling us a story—and so he begins to read.
He enjoys the storytelling. Nothing he does with the book can hurt him. Nothing about it has weight. Still, he has to keep the pale face of the adept out of his voice, and the Russian problem, and the Chinese problem, and the full extent of military operations in the Heartland. (There are cameras, after all.)
It’s September 11, 2001, and something terrible is going to happen, and he doesn’t know what it is.
That’s when his aide interrupts his reading, comes up to him with a fake smile and serious eyes, and whispers in his ear.
Whispers in his ear, and the sound is like a buzzing, and the buzzing is numinous, all encompassing. The breath on his ear is a tiny curse, an infernal itch. There’s a sudden rush of blood to his brain as he hears the words, and his aide withdraws. He can hardly move, is seeing light where there shouldn’t be light. The words drop heavy into his ear, as if they have weight.
And he receives them and keeps receiving them, and he knows what they mean, eventually; he knows what they mean throughout his body.
The aide says, his voice flecked with relief, “Mr. President, our scientists have solved it. It’s not time travel or far-sight. It’s alternate universes. The adepts have been staring into alternate universes. What happens there in September may not happen here. That’s why they’ve had such trouble with the intel. The machine isn’t a time machine.”
Except, as soon as the aide opens his mouth, the words become a trigger, a catalyst, and it’s too late for him. A door is opening wider than ever before. The machine has already infected him.
There are variations. A long row of them, detonating in his mind, trying to destroy him. A strange, sad song is creeping up inside him, and he can’t stop that, either.
>>>He’s sitting in the chair, wearing a black military uniform with medals on it. He’s much fitter, the clothes tight to emphasize his muscle tone. But his face is contorted around the hole of a festering localized virus, charcoal and green and viscous. He doesn’t wear an eye patch because he wants his people to see how he fights the disease. His left arm is made of metal. His tongue is not his own, colonized the way his nation has been colonized, waging a war against bio-research gone wrong, and the rebels who welcome it, who want to tear down anything remotely human, themselves no longer recognizable as human.
His aide comes up and whispers that the rebels have detonated a bio-mass bomb in New York City, which is now stewing in a broth of fungus and mutation: the nearly instantaneous transformation of an entire metropolis into something living but alien, the rate of change become strange and accelerated in a world where this was always true, the age of industrialization slowing it, if only for a moment.
“There are no people left in New York City,” his aide says. “What are your orders?”
He hadn’t expected this, not so soon, and it takes him seven minutes to recover from the news of the death of millions. Seven minutes to turn to his aide and say, “Call in a nuclear strike.”
>>> …and his aide comes up to him and whispers in his ear, “It’s time to go now. They’ve moved up another meeting. Wrap it up.” Health insurance is on the agenda today, along with Social Security. Something will get done about that and the environment this year or he’ll die trying …
>>>He’s sitting in the chair reading the book, and he’s gaunt, eyes feverish, military personnel surrounding him. There’s one camera with them, army TV, and the students are all in camouflage. The electricity flickers on and off. The schoolroom has reinforced metal and concrete all around it. The event is propaganda being packaged and pumped out to those still watching in places where the enemy hasn’t jammed the satellites. He’s fighting a war against an escaped, human-created, rapidly reproducing intelligent species prototype that looks like a chimpanzee crossed with a Doberman. The scattered remnants of the hated adept underclass have made common cause with the animals, disrupting communications.