“Can you feel it?” she says.
I can’t at first, but it starts to rise as we descend the dark steps. It fills my head like viscous fluid, like a low vibration from some distant factory. By the time we reach the bottom, it’s actually audible, and Julie’s earlier description was accurate but understated. It’s not just a lot of songs playing at once; it’s every song—and every show and film and news broadcast, melodies clashing, beats overlapping into a shuddering rumble, a thousand voices shouting over each other.
The basement of Julie’s home is a perfect cube of concrete lit by a single red bulb, completely empty except for a beige rug in the middle of the floor. I see no cobwebs or rat droppings or other signs of life, just thin drifts of dust that have settled into strange patterns on the concrete: triangles and whorls of bristling fractals.
“She would sit right here,” Julie says, stepping onto the rug. “Like she was meditating.” She drops to the floor, cross-legged. The red light casts deep shadows on her face; she looks like a statue of some terrible goddess. “I don’t know how she could stand it.” She rubs the sides of her head. “Feels like I’m being buried.”
“It’s BABL,” Tomsen says, so giddy her voice cracks. “Same noise as the eastern generator. Harmonic resonance with the mantle? Tuning tectonic vibrations and distorting the magnetosphere? Maybe, maybe, but where is it?” She squirms and fidgets. She looks ready to set the bomb off right here. “Julie, where is it?”
Julie looks down at the rug. “This thing was Dad’s idea. To make Mom more comfortable, he said.”
It’s not actually a rug, just a rough-cut square of the same stiff commercial carpet that covers the floors above.
“She told him she didn’t need it, she liked the cool concrete, but he put it here anyway.” She tries to lift the edge—it doesn’t budge. Shaking her head in angry disbelief, she hops to a crouch, digs her fingers in deep, and pulls. The rug rips free of its glue and peels back, revealing the faint lines of a rectangle cut into the concrete. She pushes a tiny button, there’s a hiss, and a section of the floor swings upward on pneumatic hinges.
Another staircase awaits. But this one isn’t dark. This one is flashing with colored light, echoing with voices and snippets of music.
“Goddamnit, Dad,” Julie whispers. “You knew.”
Tomsen starts for the stairs but M pushes past her. “Bullet sponge coming through.”
I clench my hands into fists as I follow him.
The staircase is narrow and incredibly steep, sloping almost straight down into the flickering darkness. I have to keep my hands on the walls to stop the vertigo.
“He knew,” Julie murmurs into my back. She sounds far away, caught between anger and grief. “All those years, he could have cleared the fog and reached out to the world, and he sat on his hands.” Her voice trembles. “All those medals…and he was a coward.”
I can think of no possible way to comfort her. No wordless hug is enough for pain like this. But she won’t have long to dwell on it. After a descent of about four stories, we have reached the bottom.
Squinting against the flickering lights, we step into the basement beneath the basement.
This place bears no resemblance to the standardized structures above, as if it were built in a different era with a far bigger budget. It feels like we’ve crawled under a county permit office and discovered a pharaoh’s tomb. The huge, circular chamber rises sixty feet to a geodesic dome of tarnished green copper. The curving walls are lined with heavy-duty versions of familiar equipment: bulky monitors with inch-thick glass, mixing boards with palm-sized steel knobs and faders, computer towers encased in concrete and so overbuilt they’re the size of refrigerators. Technology that once strived to be as small and disposable as possible has reversed course, adapting to a world without repair or replenishment—adapting to live forever.
Because this place was precious to the former owners of the world. To control who can see and say what; this was always the dream of such people. In past eras they had to rely on social convention, political machination, and physical intimidation. All so very effortful. So when they found a way to silence the whole scary mess from the safety of their bunkers, it’s no surprise they poured their hearts into it.
BABL will last for centuries. Unless it doesn’t.
It gapes in the center of the chamber, Tomsen’s “inverted tower,” a perversion of its namesake in form as well as function—not an edifice reaching for the heavens but an absence plunging to the depths. The mouth of the pit is wide enough to swallow the house above us. The walls of the shaft are studded with green copper tetrahedrons that grow smaller as the shaft narrows, funneling toward some distant choke point deep in the blackness. Each stud seems to produce its own faint noise, bleeding together into that chaotic chorus, and from somewhere at the bottom…a churning. A thick, low rumble that I hear only in my bones, like the growl of some enormous stomach.
It’s good down there, says a voice near the base of my skull, perhaps my limbic cortex. We drank the deep dark and it was sweet.
Am I standing on the edge of the pit, staring into its dizzying regression of pyramids? Is the noise that fountains up from those depths actually in the air or only in my head?
A hand clamps onto my shoulder.
“R,” Julie hisses under her breath. “Look up.”
I tear my eyes away from the pit and raise them. Across the gap, on the far end of the chamber, I see what looks like a news broadcast studio. The colored light is from a wall of monitors displaying video streams and editing software. And a man and a woman in colorful ties are grinning and gesticulating into a camera while three men in white shirts operate the controls.
I had almost forgotten there’s more to this place than the jammer. Before we silence its noise and let the world start talking, we have one final message for it to shout.
The pitchmen and their assistants are so absorbed in their production that we’re close enough to smell their rancid cologne before they notice us. But of course they express no surprise. They just swivel their grins from the cameras to us.
“Hello!” Blue Tie says.
“How can we help you today?” Yellow Tie says.
Black Tie is notably absent. The other two seem somehow more absurd without his dull gravitas backing their prattle.
The pitchmen await our response patiently, but their more recognizably human assistants seem to understand the threat. Tomsen rushes toward them and they cower against their equipment. “Excuse me,” she says politely, like they’re blocking her path on the sidewalk, but they just cringe away from her. “Excuse me!” she shouts and starts hitting them with the briefcase like an old lady berating ruffians. I wince, imagining the contents of her “purse” turning us all into char, but the assistants scatter and she sets the bomb down and goes to work on the control panel.
“I’m afraid you’re interrupting an important announce-ment,” Blue Tie says, switching to his grave face. “The Axiom Group headquarters is under attack at this time.”
“Our employees are very important to us,” Yellow Tie says, still smiling. “If you’ll allow us to continue our announcement, we’ll get someone from the nearest branch to assist us right away.”
Above all the editing screens, I notice a bigger monitor that appears to be the actual Fed TV broadcast. I expect to see something like an emergency weather warning—flashing alerts and clear instructions, perhaps a screeching tone to get people’s attention—but to my amazement, even their distress call is embedded in LOTUS obfuscation. Stock footage of thunderstorms and forest fires intercut with old photos of the stadium and inspirational quotes about patriotism and preserving our way of life. The closest it gets to specificity is a repeating clip of the pitchmen gazing earnestly into the camera and urging America to “support our leadership in these difficult times.”