“How long was I asleep?”
“Not long. We’re here.”
It seemed more like a second, but I felt a little better. When I looked out the window, the people outside looked better dressed than they did when I closed my eyes. The sidewalks were clear and there wasn’t any graffiti anywhere.
“Where are we?”
“Alto Do Mundo.”
“Why?” Rich people lived there.
“Because this is where you live now. Come on.”
She opened the door and got out. I followed her, kind of in a trance. We were in a little private lot in back of a huge, fancy building with shiny glass panels. Alto Do Mundo was one of the tallest buildings, and ritziest places, in the city.
“Wait. This is where you moved me to?” I asked.
“Yeah. Come on. You’ll like it.”
When I looked around, everyone looked rich and well dressed. They looked clean. One old guy across the street was looking at me like he thought I was a hobo or something.
“Don’t worry about them,” Penny said. “Trust me. You’ll fit in fine. Follow me.”
She took us inside, through a lobby that looked like it must have cost a million dollars, then up a fancy elevator to the sixty-first floor. She turned left in the hall, and then left again before stopping at a door with a bronze number 11 on it. She flashed a key badge at the scanner, and the lock snapped open.
“Here we are,” she said as she walked through the door. She stood there, holding it open with one hand. “What do you think?”
I walked past her and looked inside as she turned the lights on. My mouth hung open.
“Nice, huh?” she said, shutting the door. I nodded.
Nice was kind of an understatement. It was amazing. It was too nice for me.
“This is for me?” I asked. It was all I could think to say.
“Yes.”
“How much …I mean, how much does it cost? I—”
“Rent’s taken care of. Don’t worry about it. Ai’s putting you up. All expenses go through her.”
“But …”
“Oh, come on. You’ve got to admit it’s great. Ai’s richer than God. This is nothing to her. Believe me. It’s not even on her radar. You lucked into something good. How often does that happen?”
“Not very often.”
“So live a little.”
I looked around. The apartment was five times the size of my old place, and every inch was spotless.
“My place is kind of a mess,” I said, still staring.
“Your old place. I’ve seen it. I was in it.”
“I …can’t keep this place like this.”
“So don’t,” she said. “I don’t. It’s your place. Keep it however you want.”
“But why?”
“Is she giving you this? You’re more important than you think, sister. Besides, she does stuff like this. I think she forgets sometimes the rest of us aren’t like her. I know it seems like a huge deal, but it’s just how she is.”
“Do you live here too?”
“I’m your new downstairs neighbor,” she said, kind of apologetically. “Come on, I’ll give you the tour.”
“Okay …”
The floors were hardwood, and the kitchen had stone countertops. The living room had a gas fireplace, and expensive-looking furniture set around a huge flat-screen TV. They’d installed surround sound and a big stereo rig, and someone even wired up the old switchbox I used to listen in on the psychic line calls. The bathroom was huge and had a giant hot tub in it. There was a TV on the wall in there too. It was incredible.
“Where’s my other stuff?” I asked.
“In boxes. It’s all in the spare room. You won’t need any of it, but keep what you want. Same with your clothes; she set you up with some stuff in the closet you can wear. If you really want to, you can keep your old clothes, but you ought to think about giving it to the needy or something.”
I walked down a short hallway and I could see a big queen-sized bed through a doorway at the far end. To my right was an open doorway leading to some kind of study with a big, wooden desk. There was an expensive-looking computer set up on it with a huge, flat screen.
“Your notebooks are here,” Penny said, pointing to a stack of boxes against the far wall. “From now on, though, use the computer to write that kind of stuff down. Ai will want the handwritten stuff transcribed at some point, but she’ll have someone else do that.”
“You keep track of that stuff?”
“All of it. It all goes in the database.”
“Why?”
“Probabilities,” she said. “If one person sees something, it might not be a big deal. It might even just be a dream, or a hallucination …but if that person sees the same thing twenty times, then probably not. If twenty people see the same thing, and they all see it twenty times, then the probability it’s a real event goes way up. You follow?”
“Sure.”
“This way we’ll know. Scratching stuff down in note-pads won’t cut it, there’s way too much data.”
She walked over to the computer and waved her hand in front of it, turning it on. When the screen lit up, a colorful shape appeared. It reminded me of a nebula, in the shape of a big, wavy ring. There were bright points sprinkled throughout it, and the inside of the loop was completely dark. One big bright point, like a big star, sat on the edge of the dark center.
“That’s it,” Penny said.
“That’s what?”
“The future. Well, a mathematical model of it.”
She touched a spot on the ring and it zoomed in. As the zoom got tighter and tighter, I saw that the shape was actually made up of millions of tiny lines that crisscrossed to connect millions of tiny icons.
“What is that?” I whispered.
“Entries, like in your notebooks,” she said pulling a chair up next to her. “Come here.”
I sat down, and she touched an icon on the screen. When she did, it zoomed in on it until the lines connecting to it filled the screen. She tapped it and a page of text came up next to it.
“This is a single entry,” she said. “The circle means it has a connection to at least one more entry, meaning at least one other person saw something related to it. The green lines connect to related entries.”
She zoomed back out, then back in on a square shape. That one had hundreds of lines connected to it.
“When enough entries reference the same thing, it’s considered an ‘event’; something that most likely will happen, but we don’t know when or how. If the rate of recurrence gets high enough, meaning enough entries reference the same event over and over persistently, then you get something like this.”
She zoomed out again then panned over to a spot where the lines were so dense they formed a white star around a little diamond shape.
“The diamond means an event is almost certain, and that the event will have a serious impact.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“That’s the wasteland,” she said.
I stared at the diamond shape. It looked like thousands of lines were connected to it.
“That many people have seen it?” I whispered. Penny nodded.
“Now watch.” She tapped the screen again and the whole thing zoomed out until the lines blurred together and became the nebula shape again. The diamond and all the connecting lines became that bright star that sat on the edge of the dark hole in the middle.
“What’s in the middle?” I asked. “In the dark part?”
“We don’t know,” she said. “Ai’s trying to close that gap, to find out.You can see that all around the rim there’s nothing much, nothing conclusive, except right there. That one big event happens right on the edge there.”
“Then what?”
“No verifiable entries. The model falls apart.”
“But why no entries?”
“Maybe there’s nothing left to see.”
Nothing left. I remembered the wasteland and how everything was gone.
“But even in my dream, it’s just the city,” I said weakly.
Penny shrugged. “Ai calls it the void. It doesn’t necessarily mean there isn’t anything after the event, just that no one has seen anything after it.”