Paige is in motion before I’ve finished this last piece of explanation. She’s feeling for her weapon under her coat, opening her door. “All right,” she says. “So let’s go get her.”
“No—wait,” I say. “Stop.”
“Why? We have to go now, don’t we? We have to go right now.”
“We are going to wait until she comes out—tail her to work, pull her over. This is something we gotta do very carefully. As quietly and inconspicuously as possible. This isn’t some kid we’re talking about. This is one of our Acknowledged Experts.”
“Well, so—that’s all the more reason. Right?” Aysa is staring at me, stunned and agitated. Her voice is hot with urgency. “For us to work fast. To go in now. Laszlo. She knows we’re onto her. She has to know.”
“Or she thinks we think it’s about Sampson, about Tester. Something small—”
“She’s smarter than that, Laszlo. Laszlo: we gotta go in. Now.”
“Just a second, Paige. Give it a second.”
“No.” She shakes her head. She hisses, “Why?”
She’s right. I know she’s right. I am sitting here doing what I’m always doing, which is trying to figure out what to do, and she is getting out of the car, patting her holster for her weapon, looking at me evenly through the window.
“Are you sure—in your heart, Laszlo, are you sure that this woman is what you think she is?”
I nod. Monster monster monster. I am sure. For once, I am sure.
“All right, then. Let’s go.”
Paige goes first and I stay close at her heels, matching her stride, directly behind her, an animal pack, a pack of two.
The air changes, you can feel it change, as we pass through the high hedgerow separating Mulholland Drive from the Expert’s house.A short driveway, lined with wide flat pavers. A desert garden, the glistening knifepoints of succulent cactuses in the wan moonlight.
“Here,” I say very quietly as soon as we step across the hedgerow and onto the lawn proper. I whistle softly to draw her attention, and then I crouch and point. “Look.”
The capture is a remarkable forgery, specific in every detail. I snap my fingers in front of it and it moves, minutely, just like a real one. The lens blinks open and closed, open and closed when I move my face; when I snap my fingers, the beak of the microphone jerks up, like a bird’s. I look at Paige and can see that she is feeling what I am feeling, the wavering world, the air rippling and bending with the unacceptable reality: a dead capture. A forgery. A deliberate undermining of the foundation of the State.
It is galling. Horrifying to think of it—so much reality unrecorded, moments racing past. A hundred moments, two hundred. I stand here, counting. If you split each moment then you quickly reach infinity, all the moments in the world going unrecorded—a quantum of moments. A forever of reality, disappearing as soon as it appears. I am standing in the center of a radius of absence. You don’t realize what a comfort reality is until you leave it, what a good strong feeling is the truth under your feet and in the air around you, how nice it is to be surrounded at all times by the truth. To know that everything is being added to the ledger, that everything that happens will be true and will be true forever, that everything that is is, that everything that has happened has happened and will have happened forever.
And it doesn’t feel good. It feels terrifying. I feel like I might float up above the Earth, float away, crash down into the sea somewhere. I look to Paige, staring at the dead captures, the row of dummies, and I can tell she is feeling what I am feeling, the world reeling, the sky becoming suffused with the thick truthless air. We are off the Record
“Hey. Hey,” I say urgently. “Water is made of two hydrogens, one oxygen. Hey.”
She nods. Her eyes regain their focus. She stands up straight, whispers back to me, “Light is faster than sound.”
“A million times faster.”
“Yes indeed it is.”
And we move on together, creeping like soldiers to the front door, muttering facts, good solid facts, the two of us tied to each other by real things, solid true things.
The house is a stone tablet with tall panes of glass for doors and windows. The Moon hangs low; sunrise is close. There is a dog barking somewhere inside, urgent and nervous.
“Wait,” whispers Paige. Holds up one finger. Tilts her head. “Listen.”
Light noise from the back of the house. Barely audible. A murmuring sound, water running or someone laughing.
We look at each other, nod, lift our weapons.
And then, in that quiet moment, there is a minor seismological event somewhere deep inside the topography. The Earth itself rolls slightly, buckles—just a little bit. Just enough so you can feel it. The world adjusting itself to new realities.
It only lasts a second, a half second, and then the world settles again. The State urging us to fix it. Make it right.
We lift our weapons. Paige goes first again, and I follow.
We move silently around to the back of the house, where the sun has just crested the closest hill, the first beams of light, like a Peeping Tom peeking above a fence. The surface of a long pool sparkles, clean and blue, in the new sunlight, and the Expert is a shadow rushing through its depths.
The view from here is extraordinary, unimpeded nearly all the way around: down this way are the glass towers of the distant downtown, this way the sprawl of the Valley, the long arteries of Ventura and Reseda dotted already with morning commuters. The house sits right on the crest, on the very
