think they did, either—they were gathered around it in their protective suits like apes trying to figure out an internal combustion engine.
“Don’t look directly into it,” the scientist beside him advised. “Those who have experience a kind of… disorientation.”
Unlike the apes examining it, the two of them stood behind three feet of protective, blast-proof glass, and yet both of them had moved to the back of the viewing room—as far away from the artifact as possible.
The machine consisted of a square housing made of irregular-looking gray metal, caulked on the interior with what looked like rotted beef, and in the center of this assemblage: an eye of green light. In the middle of the eye, a piercing red dot. The machine was about the size of a microwave oven.
When he saw the eye, he shuddered, could not tell at first if it 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 stare. 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 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. (
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 was back in college, surrounded by people both smarter and more dedicated than he was, as if he is 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—
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 2001, and something terrible is going to happen, but for a moment he forgets that fact.
And 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 and 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 of 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 bioresearch 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 has 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
