There was a blinding flash of light as soon as the door closed behind us. It was a vibrant, electric blue, brilliant and seemingly without source or direction. It dazzled my eyes, and as I stood there—blind—a loud, mechanical hum filled the lobby. The air around me grew pregnant with electricity; it felt like every molecule in the room was vibrating against my skin. Something was happening inside my body; I didn’t know what, but the hair on my arms was standing up straight.
Then it stopped.
“What the fuck was that?” Floyd asked as we exchanged confused glances, our eyesight slowly returning. “Was that some type of scanner? Were we just fucking scanned?”
“Scanned?” Taylor repeated, a gruff, mocking tone to her voice. “What does that even mean, Floyd? Fucking scanned?”
“I don’t know. X-rays? MRI? Something like that?”
The thought gave me a jolt, and I shrugged out of my backpack to check on my camera. I scrolled through the last couple of images on my memory card, making sure that they hadn’t been erased by some strong magnetic field. They were still there. Pictures of the Poet’s latest work: “Above me, there is a face/Funny.” I didn’t remember taking these pictures, but they were there on the card, and they seemed completely unharmed.
When I once again raised my eyes, I found Floyd nervously downing pills from his oxycodone stash. For a moment, I felt a reflexive itch to follow his lead—I still had an almost full bottle of Vicodin in my pocket—but I suppressed the urge. I was trying to be strong here, I reminded myself. I hung my camera around my neck and shrugged into my backpack.
“Look,” Charlie said, pointing up into the corner of the room. There was a surveillance camera up there, and as I watched, it slowly swiveled my way. It paused for a moment, freezing with me in the center of its glass-eyed view, and then it continued on its circuit, turning to sweep back toward the other side of the room. “There’s still power! It’s still active!” I was surprised at the excitement in Charlie’s voice. I myself felt nothing but fear.
“Is it some type of secret government installation?” Floyd asked, voicing my very next thought.
Charlie just shrugged. He flashed us an indecipherable smile, then turned and headed toward a door on the far side of the room.
The door opened up onto a long carpeted hallway. Charlie paused just inside the door and ran his fingers over the nearest wall. After a couple of seconds, the overhead fluorescents flickered on. The hallway was disconcertingly normal. It could have been any corridor in any office building in any city around the world—just minutes after closing time, maybe, with the workers all gone for the day. The heater kicked on as we were standing there, warm air blowing down from the overhead vents.
Charlie headed toward the nearest room, and the rest of us followed.
It was a small, windowless office, something for an assistant, maybe, or an administrator. Inside, there was nothing but a desk, a chair, a telephone, and a computer. While Charlie rummaged through the desk drawers, I picked up the telephone handset and listened to the sound of a dead line. The phone was getting power, but there was nothing on the wire, not even static. I replaced the handset just as Charlie lifted a thin sheaf of paper into the air.
“Office directory,” he proclaimed triumphantly as he started flipping through the pages. “Biologists, physicists, psychologists, computer scientists … theologians. They certainly didn’t narrow it down any.” He paused halfway through the directory, his finger on a listing at the bottom of the page.
“Did you find them?” I asked.
He nodded, but there was no excited smile on his face, not anymore. Just a trace of confusion. He handed the pages to me and pointed to a pair of names near the bottom: Dr. Stephen Daltry and Dr. Cheryl Daltry. Instead of having a standard office number next to their names—112 or 315 or 423—they both had B13 listed as their location. A basement laboratory, I guessed. But that was not what had killed Charlie’s excitement.
There was an unsteady line drawn through both of the names.
I scanned the rest of the page and saw that most of the names had been crossed out. “It could mean anything,” I said.
Both Taylor and Floyd moved into place behind me, where they could study the document over my shoulder. “Maybe those are just the people who—I don’t know—people who completed security training,” Taylor offered, “or signed a nondisclosure agreement, or something.”
“Or RSVPed for a lunch,” Floyd added, “or complained about their paltry-ass government pay.”
Charlie nodded. But he didn’t look reassured.
Since he had seen those names, his face had turned an ashen gray, drained of all blood and color. “Yeah, I know,” he said, his voice barely more than a whisper. “But I have a bad feeling about this. Like I should know what that means.” His eyes darted from Floyd to Taylor and then to me. “Like I do know already. Something bad. Something very bad.”
Floyd shook his head. “Fuck no, Charlie,” he said. “You don’t know what that means. Those are just lines on a piece of paper. What the four of us do know—about this place, about this situation—it couldn’t fill a motherfucking thimble.”
Taylor nodded. “He’s right.” She reached out and grabbed Charlie’s hand, giving it a gentle squeeze. “You can feel like shit, you can feel like the world is crashing down, but that doesn’t mean you know anything. It just means that you’re afraid. And you’re afraid because we’re getting close.”
She met Charlie’s frantic eyes with a calm, reassuring smile.
“So let’s go, okay?” she said. “Let’s go find your parents.”
We took the elevator down to the basement.
The lights in the main corridor were already on, bright and institutional, about as far from natural as you can get. The first couple of doors were closed, but the third—B6, actually—was standing wide open. It was dark inside, but in the middle of the room I could make out a worktable draped under a sheet of clear protective plastic. There were microscopes and Bunsen burners hidden beneath the sheet, shielded from the dust and mold floating thick in the uncirculated air.
Charlie continued down the corridor ahead of us. He pulled to an abrupt stop in front of B13, and we all piled up behind him. The door here was open, and the lights were on.
“What is it?” Floyd asked when he finally got a look inside the laboratory. “What exactly am I seeing?”
Charlie shrugged, and we all filed into the room.
The laboratory was large—at least twenty-five feet by twenty-five feet—and most of the floor was taken up by a single piece of makeshift machinery. There was a table with several computer terminals set against the wall just inside the door, but the majority of the apparatus was in the center of the room. It consisted of two parallel mirrors standing about fifteen feet apart. There were black boxes set against the near end of each sheet of silvered glass.
The apparatus was running, and every five seconds the entire thing lit up with brilliant green light. It was very bright, and I had to narrow my eyes to get a good sense of what was happening. At first, it was all just flashes of light. Then, on about the fifth flash, I noticed a pattern in the apparatus, hundreds of lines of light—laser light— crisscrossing between the mirrors. Then, on perhaps the tenth flash, I realized what was happening. There was movement in the intricate weave—nothing I could actually see, but it was there. The line of light was shooting out of one of the black boxes and progressing down the length of the apparatus, bouncing back and forth between the two mirrors. At the far end, it ricocheted off a separate angled piece of glass and returned on a similarly sharp, crisscrossing trajectory, ending at the second black box.
It was all happening so fast, it looked like nothing but a binary switch. Off and on. Light and dark. But there was movement in there, just too fast to see. The four of us stood silent for a time, watching the flow of traffic inside this miniature city of light and glass.
Floyd was the one who finally broke the silence. “Whoa,” he muttered. “This thing … it’s better than any fucking lava lamp.” When I turned, I found him lighting up a new joint.
With the silence broken, that initial period of awe left the room, and we all started moving once again. Charlie headed straight for the computer terminals, bending down to study the lit screens. Taylor moved forward and
