Blind Lake

She was still laughing when Ray reached for her throat.

Sebastian had always been a sound sleeper.

He was quick to nod off, slow to wake. Morning classes had been the bane of his academic career. He would have made a lousy monk, he had often thought. Incapable of celibacy and always late for matins.

He slept through the distant sound of the doorbell and through the considerable noise that followed. He woke to the sound of someone whispering his name.

Or maybe it was only the wind. In a cocoon of blankets he opened his eyes to the darkened room, listened a moment and heard nothing but the keening of the storm about the eaves. He reached across to Sue’s side of the bed but found it cold and empty. Not unusual. Sue was something of an insomniac. He closed his eyes again and sighed.

“Sebastian!”

Sue’s voice. She was not in bed but she was in the room with him, and she sounded terrified. He shed layers of sleep like a wet dog shaking off water. He reached for the bedside lamp and nearly toppled it. The light sprang on and he saw Sue by the bedroom door, one hand clenched against her lower abdomen. She was pale and sweating.

“Sue? What’s wrong?”

“He hurt me,” she said, and lifted her hand to show him the blood on her nightgown, the blood pooling around her feet.

Twenty-Six

Charlie Grogan, when he wasn’t troubleshooting the Eye, lived in a one-bedroom condo-style unit a couple of blocks north of the Plaza.

Charlie slept in the bedroom; his old dog Boomer slept in a nest of cotton blankets in a corner of the kitchen. The chime woke them simultaneously, but Boomer was first on his feet.

Charlie, coming out of a confused dream about the Subject, grabbed for his pocket server and punched the lobby co

“Ray Scutter. I’m sorry, I know it’s late. Hate to disturb you, but it’s something of an emergency.”

Ray Scutter, down in the lobby in the worst storm of the winter. Middle of the night. Charlie shook his head. He was unprepared for serious thought. He said, “Yeah, okay, come on up,” and buzzed the lock.

He had thrown on a shirt, pants, and socks by the time Ray reached the door. Boomer was freaked by all this late-night activity, and Charlie had to order him to keep quiet as Ray entered the apartment. Boomer sniffed at the man’s knees, then shuffled uneasily away.

Ray Scutter. Charlie knew the executive administrator by sight, but he hadn’t spoken to him one-on-one before now. Nor had he watched Ray’s Town Hall address earlier, though he’d heard it was a disaster. Charlie was generous about such things: he hated public speaking and knew how easy it was to get tongue-tied at a podium.

“You can hang your jacket in the closet,” Charlie said. “Sit down.”

Ray did neither. “I won’t be here long,” he said. “And I’m hoping you’ll leave with me.”

“How’s that?”

“I know how strange this sounds. Mr. Grogan — it’s Charlie, right?”

“Charlie’ll do.”

“Charlie, I’m here to ask for your help.”

Something in Ray’s voice troubled Boomer, who whined from the kitchen. Charlie was more troubled by the man’s appearance — rumpled suit, hair askew, what looked like fresh scratches on his face.

There had been a lot of gossip about Ray Scutter, to the effect that he was a lousy manager and an asshole to deal with. But Charlie held such hearsay inadmissible. In any case, the boss was the boss. “Tell me what I can help you with, Mr. Scutter.”

“You carry an all-pass transponder out at the Eye, right?”

“I do, but—”

“All I want is a tour.”

“Pardon me?”

“I know it’s extraordinary. I also know it’s four in the morning. But I have some decisions to make, Charlie, and I don’t want to make them until I personally inspect the facility. I can’t tell you more than that.”

“Sir,” Charlie said, “there’s a night shift on duty. I’m not sure you need me. I’ll just call A

“Don’t call anyone. I don’t want people to know I’m coming. What I want is to go out there, just you and me, and we’ll do a discreet walk-through and see what we see. If anyone complains — if A

Good, Charlie thought, since it was Ray’s responsibility. Reluctantly, he took his winter jacket off the hook in the hall.

Boomer wasn’t happy with this turn of events. He whined again and stalked off to the bedroom, probably to find a warm spot in Charlie’s bed. Boomer was an opportunistic hound.

They rode in Ray’s car, a squat little vehicle with lots of bad-weather options. It took the snow pretty well, microprocessors controlling each wheel, finding traction where there should have been none. But it was still slow going. The snow came down like bags of wet confetti, almost too fast for the wipers to clear from the windshield. In this opacity of space and time the only landmarks were the streetlights, candles passing in the darkness with metronome regularity.

In the close interior of the car Ray smelled pretty ripe. His sweat had a strange acetic undertone, not pleasant, and there was something coppery on top of that, the kind of smell you registered with your back teeth. Charlie tried to figure out how he could crack a window in the middle of a blizzard without insulting Ray.

Ray talked a little as he drove. This wasn’t really a conversation, since Charlie had very little to contribute. At one point Charlie said, “If you tell me what you’re looking for at the Eye, Mr. Scutter, maybe I can help you find it.”

But Ray just shook his head. “I trust you,” he said, “and I understand your curiosity, but I’m not at liberty to discuss that.”

Since Ray was pretty much the boss of Blind Lake since the shutdown, Charlie would have thought he was at liberty to discuss anything he liked. He didn’t press the issue, however. He realized he was afraid of Ray Scutter, and not just because Ray was executive management. Ray was giving off very peculiar vibes.

The spots on his jacket and slacks, Charlie thought, looked like dried blood.

“You’ve worked a long time with the O/BEC processors,” Ray said.

“Yessir. Since Gencorp. Actually, I knew Dr. Gupta back in the Berkeley Lab days.”

“Did you ever wonder, Charlie, what we woke up when we built the Eye?”

“Excuse me?”

“When we built a motherfucking huge mathematical phase space and populated it with self-modifying code?”

“I guess that’s one way to think of it.”

“There’s no phenomenon in the universe you can’t describe mathematically. Everything’s a calculation, Charlie, including you and me, we’re just little sequestered calculations, water and minerals ru

“That’s a bleak point of view.”

“Said the monkey, apprehending a threat.”

“Pardon me?”

“Nothing. I’m sorry. I’m a little short on sleep.”

“I know the feeling,” Charlie said, though he felt as wide awake as he had ever been.

Somehow, Ray kept the car on the road. Charlie was vastly relieved when he saw the guardpost coming up on the left. He wondered who had pulled guard duty on a miserable night — no, morning — like this. It turned out to be Nancy Saeed. She sca

Moments later Ray parked by the main entrance. The nice thing about coming in early was, you could always find good parking.

He escorted Ray to his own office, where they left their jackets. Charlie had conducted enough of these dignitary and VIP tours that he had gotten it down to a routine. Prep and instructions in his office, then the walk-through. But this wasn’t the usual dog-and-pony show. A long way from it.