The Traveler's Companion (9 page)

“And this helped you?” Iverson asked, doubtingly.

“It did. But after a few months of getting up early and going to school, getting chased by bullies, and suffering through hours of tedious homework, I nearly begged for my childhood back. The best part is that now I have both memories,” Go said.

“You lived as a Norwegian school boy?” Gibbons asked.

“I did,” Go said.

“Amazing!” Gibbons said.

“So you want me to create a scenario wherein my wife lived? Her cancer never happened?” Iverson asked, annoyed.

“If you wish. Or, you find that cure you were looking for during all those hours in the laboratory. You’re her hero again,” Go said.

“Imagine that,” Gibbons said to him, smiling widely.

“I wouldn’t know where to begin,” Iverson said.

“Somehow I doubt that,” Go said. “You’ve never imagined a scenario?”

Iverson thought a moment before saying, “We had plans to go to San Francisco after her operation.”

“Then it’s a date. You’re going to San Francisco with your wife,” Go said.

“Just like that?” Iverson asked.

“Why not?” Go asked.

“You expect me to create an entire city with my mind?”

“You’re making it too difficult,” Go told him. “You’re not going to recreate the real San Francisco. You’re going to imagine a city
like
San Francisco. You see, all creations are somewhat autobiographical. Everything you do and everything you create reflects your unique personality. It would be impossible to do it any other way. Think of God creating man in his own image.”

“Why wouldn’t I create the city exactly the way it should be?”

“I challenge you to try. Imagine a door, and on the other side is your perfect San Francisco.”

Iverson stood up from the bed. He stalled by smoothing out his lab coat. He was not particularly happy about any of this. Why would he want to create a city with his mind? But Gibbons was monitoring him, pressuring him to do as Go asked. He had no choice but to imagine the city he had been to many times, and to try and recreate it perfectly in his mind.

Imagine a door, and on the other side is your perfect city.

A door appeared. It was an old wooden door similar to the one Go had created earlier.

“There’s your door, Doctor,” Go said.

Iverson turned to Angela. “You’ll be okay here?”

“I’ll be fine,” Angela said, taking Iverson’s hand affectionately.

“Through that door?” Iverson asked moronically.

“I should add a word of warning, Doctor Iverson,” Go said, taking Iverson aside. “Beyond that door is a city that, for the most part, is just like any city on Earth. While in the Zone, there’s a tendency to think you’re God-like, and you will no doubt have God-like abilities, but you’ll still be human. Comic book–obsessed geeks will want to treat the Zone as an opportunity to be supermen, but it will be at their peril. For some reason, we haven’t been able to create anything in the Zone that wasn’t based on something in reality. The Zone connects with our subconscious and if our subconscious knows its fantasy, it won’t work.”

“No dragons or batmen. Got it,” Iverson said.

“You can create a dragon; it’d just have to be a Komodo dragon.”

“I understand.”

“Enjoy yourself, but be careful. I’ll check on you later,” Go said.

Iverson took a deep breath and made his way to the door. When he opened it, he saw the Golden Gate Bridge.

CHAPTER 6

Russian Hill.

Or a surprisingly accurate reproduction of it.

At first glance he could barely distinguish it from the real thing. To the west was the Golden Gate Bridge, now nearly engulfed by fog. Panning northeast along the bay brought him to the Marina District and the small island prison, Alcatraz. Further inland was Coit Tower atop Telegraph Hill, and beyond that was the giant gray steel San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

The vastness of the city struck a chord of agoraphobia within him. He had spent too much time indoors, inside the sublevel womb of the DS&T laboratories. But wasn’t there something wrong with this place, some imperceptible difference from reality? At first he couldn’t put his finger on it, but then he realized that the trees weren’t rustling in the wind. No smells were wafting up from the harbor. The ocean wasn’t glistening in the sunlight. It was as if he were inside a photograph. The stillness was dreamlike.

More mistakes began to reveal themselves. No cracks in the cement. No trash in the gutters. No graffiti on the sides of apartment buildings. No traffic noise. No dogs barking. No children playing.

Go was right, perfection was impossible and unconvincing. Though this place could inspire all the anxious feelings he got when being exposed to an urban environment, he knew it wasn’t real.

He stepped into the middle of Hyde Street, crossing over the cable car tracks. The only noise was the sound of the soles of his shoes on the pavement. Facing north, a steep hill led down to the wharf. There wasn’t a person in sight. No movement whatsoever.

He continued to walk when he realized he was only a few steps away from Lombard Street, the “crookedest” street in the world. Paved with red brick, lined with colorful flower gardens, Lombard Street was situated in a residential area of magnificent Victorian homes, most of which had panoramic views. Usually a steady line of cars waited to navigate the famous street, and tourists jammed the walkways, but today Iverson had it all to himself.

He decided to do something he would have never done in reality. He would commit a crime. He headed straight into the carport of one of the homes, made his way around a sleek black Mercedes, and went up to the side entrance of the home. The door was unlocked. He opened it and stuck his head inside.

“Hello?”

The door opened into the kitchen. The room was flooded with natural light. A window above the sink offered a view of the entire coastline, including the Golden Gate Bridge. Quite a place to wash dishes.

He stepped inside.

“Anybody here?”

The first thing he noticed was the peculiar lack of personal touches. No appliances on the counters, no pictures on the walls, and no notes magnetically attached to the refrigerator. The kitchen island seemed a perfect place for a bowl of fruit, but there was only a clean granite surface. The place looked as if a realtor had come in and stripped it bare for viewing.

He made his way into a dining room. A polished mahogany table was framed by six chairs, and a matching armoire against the wall displayed floral china behind glass cabinet doors.

Two carpeted steps led into a sunken living room. A telescope on a tripod stood by a floor-to-ceiling window, placed to peer out at an unobstructed view of the bay. He aimed the telescope in the direction of Alcatraz and looked through. The old yellow stone prison looked fairly dilapidated. In all his visits to the city he had never actually taken the tour; this was the first time he had seen it up close. He then turned the telescope to Fisherman’s Wharf. Pier 39 was a mall on cantilevers and one of the busiest tourist traps in the city. It was now deserted.

For a moment he had forgotten it wasn’t real.

He left the telescope to explore the rest of the home. There were three bedrooms in all. One was furnished with a bed and a chest of drawers, while another functioned as an office with a desk, bookshelves, and a file cabinet. The master bedroom at the end of the hall was much more impressive. It had its own bathroom, fireplace, and French doors that led out onto a deck. Iverson threw open the doors and went outside. The experience was incomplete without the wind brushing his face, so he created wind. He even added in the smell of the ocean. He went over to the wooden railing, rested his arms on it, and gazed out. There wasn’t a better place to watch a sunset. Should he wait a while or should he have the sun set now? Better to wait, he decided. He would have some coffee first.

* * * * *

He was reclined on a lounge chair, his legs crossed at the ankles, a cup of manifested coffee in hand. Making the sun set was more of a chore than he had anticipated. He was on his third effort. The first one had been all wrong. Too much orange. Adding in the conventional colors, pink, yellow, and violet, seemed to coalesce into a watercolor gone wrong, a dirty brown, like something out of a doomsday movie.

He decided to give up on the sunset. He made it night and then manifested the city’s electric lights as easily as flipping a switch. He strung bright white bulbs along the Bay Bridge’s suspension cables, gave the high-rise buildings golden frames, and lit up Coit Tower. It looked quite dramatic.

A voice called out to him: “How’s Frisco?”

Startled, he dropped the cup of hot coffee into his lap. He sprang up, letting out a screech. The porcelain cup launched off him. He swiped off the hot liquid from his pants like a windshield wiper and quickly peeled off the coat.

A suppressed cackle came from the master bedroom. Gibbons was standing in the dark, a silhouette convulsing from laughter. When he came out onto the deck, he turned his head to hide a grin.

Iverson took a handful of the damp fabric from the lab coat and rung it out, unable to extract much more than a few drops of warm liquid. When he released the fabric, it held the shape of a wrinkled, coffee stained cone.

“How did you find me here?” Iverson asked.

“I wanted to yell at you and suddenly there you were.”

“You just materialized here?”

“Where’s your wife?” Gibbons asked, ignoring his question.

“I produced an entire city with my mind, Mark. Give me a break.”

Gibbons sighed impatiently. “Go said to create your wife. That was the objective. He could show up any minute to check on you!”

“I don’t feel comfortable with that just yet. Getting involved emotionally could compromise my objectivity. I need time.”

“Go has taken you on as a project, Ryan. If you don’t do what he says, he’ll give up on you. We’ll lose him.”

“Angela is our connection to him, not me.”

“Remember why we’re here, Ryan. We’re here to complete a mission.”

“I understand the mission objectives, Mark.”

“Do you? Do you understand what will happen if we don’t get control of this place?”

“Control of this situation would be an illusion at best. Our only hope is that Angela finds the source of Go’s remote signal so we can shut it down.”

“Right,” Gibbons said. He crossed over to the deck railing.

“That is the objective, right? We’re going to shut it down. Trans-dimensional travel alone poses significant threats to national security.”

“If I were you, Ryan, I’d use this as an opportunity to make peace with your wife’s death. Who knows how long we’ll have here.”

“With all due respect, Mark, I don’t need you tell me what I should or shouldn’t do with my grief.”

“Whoa! This was Go’s idea. Don’t blame me.”

“Fine, but don’t expect me to be happy about using my wife’s death for one of his imaginary projects.”

“This isn’t finger painting, Ryan. This is a global threat. We need to figure out how this place works. Go needs to be stopped. This mission is more important than anyone’s personal feelings. I get it. You don’t want to dredge up old memories. But I need you to commit. Figure out what’s possible here and what’s not. Apparently, we have more time than we thought. Go told me something about Einstein’s laws not applying. I don’t know what that means, but according to him time is much slower here. A day in the Zone equals an hour in reality. I don’t know how.”

Iverson felt Gibbons was trying to handle him, but he had to play along. Fighting him wouldn’t help. He took a breath to calm himself and said, “With no gravity, in fact with no space-time, our concept of the twenty-four hour day doesn’t apply. Go said one hour Earth-time equals one day here?”

“I think so.”

“We left our reality around midnight. He said he’s going to hold a press conference tomorrow at nine a.m., so we have what will feel like nine days, give or take.”

“Make it a week. We don’t want to cut it too close,” Gibbons said. “God created heaven and Earth in six days. Hopefully we won’t destroy it just as quickly.”

“No space-time, huh? I wish I could speak with his scientists. Did he mention why he won’t let us speak with them?”

“He probably doesn’t want us extracting information. He likes playing dumb: ‘I don’t really get the whole science thing.’ He’s full of shit. He’s obviously smarter than he lets on.”

Iverson detected a note of admiration in his tone.

“Learn how to navigate this place, Ryan. If we’re going to stop him, we have to outwit him somehow.”

“Where’s Angela?”

“She’s with him. They’re getting real chummy. I see what she’s doing. I knew a girl like her in college. She could get a guy to do just about anything. Your romantic warfare is working.”

“Back in 1997, Grandmaster chess player Garry Kasparov lost a match to an IBM computer named Deep Blue. Must have shocked the shit out of him. I can only imagine how Go would feel if he knew Angela was artificial.”

Gibbons pushed off the railing. “I should get back. Go’s been trying to show me the ropes. I’ll send him your way when I think I can’t put up with his shit anymore. Then you take him for a while. Sort of good cop, bad cop. We’ll get this bastard.” He saluted and said, “I’ll expect a full report in the next few days.” He disappeared instantaneously.

Iverson went into the bedroom. He sat on the end of the bed and kicked off his shoes. He leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. He was worried about Angela. This was her first unsupervised field operation, and he felt like he was abandoning her. In a universe without science, how would she function? Sooner or later she would need his assistance. Clearly she was no match for C.C. Go here. She was not designed to be creative. How long would it take Mr. Go to exploit this weakness?

The director was right about one thing: C.C. Go wasn’t stupid. But by far, his greatest strength was his imagination. Growing up the way he had, isolated, never in one place for very long, must have forced him to create a rich inner life. His imagination was his only friend, his best friend. And now it was his greatest weapon.

Iverson thought about the conversation he had had with Angela earlier concerning the origins of the universe. The big bang. A singularity expanding like a balloon. Hydrogen and helium coalescing to form stars. Supernova remnants forming planets. None of that mattered anymore. The Zone had potentially made a liar of him. Science had been kicked to the curb. Here, one could create a universe with a thought. Who cared about the details?

Suddenly a jarring concept crept into his mind: if he went to sleep, San Francisco would probably be gone by the time he woke up. Nothing lasted in this fucking place. He would have to start from scratch. Luckily, he was not even remotely tired.

* * * * *

He cursed into the dark matter. He had only closed his eyes for a short while, but when he opened them he found himself in total darkness. After a few moments of disorientation he remembered that light and matter were now up to him to produce. So he manifested the bedroom, the deck, the bathroom, and eventually the greater metropolitan area.

He considered having coffee out on the deck while trying to manifest the west coast’s first sunrise, but after a shower he decided against it. He had a long day ahead of him and he needed to reserve his creative resources for navigating the city and finding out how things worked here. He had approximately one week Zone time. In that time he hoped to find a way to either stop Mr. Go from opening this place to the public or find a good scientific argument that would at least convince him to wait, the latter being a dubious goal at best. Mr. Go already had a staff of scientists studying this place day and night. With no equipment, what could he hope to discover that they hadn’t already? For all he knew they had already found good reasons to keep it from the public, but chose to ignore them.

Iverson could have easily imagined clean laundry, but after his shower he put on the same clothes, a pair of brown corduroy slacks, a cobalt blue button down shirt, and black leather shoes. Things had a way of dissolving here. Even the brown stain on his lab coat from the manifested coffee was gone. He decided against wearing the coat today, though he almost felt naked without it.

In the kitchen, he perused the cabinets for breakfast food. He wasn’t actually hungry, just a slave to routine. The cabinets and the refrigerator were bare, so he manifested enough supplies for a family of ten for a week. Today’s breakfast was a pear and a bran muffin.

As he was cutting off a slice from the pear, a voice startled him. “City looks great!”