The Golden City Read online

  The Traveler turned his eyes away from the small screen and gazed out the window. Still there but not there, he thought. An empty shell.

  * * *

  The chartered jet stopped in Maine for refueling and customs inspection, and then continued to the Westchester County Airport, located in the suburbs north of New York City. A town car was parked on the tarmac and a member of the security staff stood beside it like honor guard. Then it was—Yes, Mr. Corrigan. Hope you had a pleasant flight, Mr. Corrigan—and the car carried him down a two-lane country road. They glided past stone walls that had once surrounded apple orchards and dairy cows. These days, the land was too expensive for farming, and the area was dotted with corporate headquarters and the renovated farmhouses owned by investment bankers.

  The Evergreen Foundation’s research center was at the end of a long gravel driveway. Flower beds and pine trees were a pleasant distraction from the high wall that kept out the rest of the world. The compound was dominated by four glass and steel buildings that were used by the foundation library, genetic laboratory, administrative center and computer research facility. At the center of this quadrangle was the neurological cybernetics building where Michael had once been attached to the sensors of the quantum computer.

  Michael turned on his handheld computer and checked his daily schedule. This was one activity that truly gave him pleasure. Every morning he was sent a schedule that told him what he was going to do in fifteen minute segments; the activities and the tight schedule confirmed that he was an important member of a powerful organization. When he looked back on his past life in Los Angeles, there were always hours and sometimes days when nothing was going on. The empty time made it difficult not to feel weak and pathetic.

  Now that Michael was a Traveler, the schedule helped him stay focused on the reality in front of him. If he thought about it—really thought about it—the other realms made the human world appear false or unreal. But that was a road straight to craziness. His schedule showed that all of his actions had order and meaning. Even ordinary activities like lunch or sleep were on the list. His occasional encounters with prostitutes were placed in the category of entertainment.

  “Now what?” Michael asked the driver. “The schedule doesn’t say where I’m supposed to meet Dr. Dressler.”

  The driver looked confused. “I’m sorry, Mr. Corrigan. But no one gave me any instructions.”

  Michael got out of the car and walked up a sloping flagstone path to the administration center. He still had a Protective Link chip implanted beneath the skin on the back of his right hand. As he approached the building, it sensed his arrival, verified his identity and confirmed that he had passed through the main gate. The glass door glided open, and he entered the lobby.

  There was no need for a security guard or a receptionist; the lobby scanners tracked his passage across the room. But when Michael reached the elevators—nothing happened. Feeling like an unwelcome guest, he waved his hand at the elevator doors. The lobby seemed very empty and quiet at that moment, and he wondered what to do.

  Michael heard a sharp click and turned as Nathan Boone emerged from the side door. The head of security for the Evergreen Foundation wore a black business suit without a necktie. Boone had fastened the top button of his white shirt, and this small detail gave him a severe appearance.

  “Good morning, Mr. Corrigan. Welcome back to the research center.”

  “Why can’t I enter the elevator?”

  “We had a personnel problem a few days ago, and I restricted access to the offices. I’ll reauthorize your chip this afternoon, but right now you need to meet with Dr. Dressler.”

  They left the lobby together and walked across the compound. “What kind of problem?” Michael asked.

  Boone raised his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”

  “You mentioned a problem with the staff. As a representative of the executive board I need to know what’s going on at this facility.”

  “An employee named Susan Howard ended her life. She had problems with depression and contacted the so-called Resistance using an Internet chat room. We thought it was best to change our security codes.”

  Did he kill her? Michael wondered. It bothered him that Boone could destroy someone without board authorization, but before he could ask more any more questions, they entered the computer building and Terry Dressler hurried out to greet them. The scientist was an older man with white hair and a broad fleshy face. He seemed nervous about showing the computer to Michael.

  “Good morning, Mr. Corrigan. We met several months ago when General Nash gave you a tour of the research center.”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “Nash’s sudden death was a real shock to all of us. He was the principal force pushing for the quantum computer.”

  “The board has decided to rename your building the Kennard Nash Computer Center,” Michael said. “If the General was still alive, he would also want to see some results. There have been too many delays in this project.”

  “Of course, Mr. Corrigan. I share your concern.” A door opened automatically and Dr. Dressler led them down a hallway. “I do need to mention something before we enter the laboratory. Our research team is divided into two groups with different security clearances. The technicians and support staff have blue level access. A much smaller core group with red-level access knows about the messages we’ve received from our friends.”

  “How do you know they’re friends?” Michael asked.

  “That was General Nash’s view. He believed that the messages came from an advanced civilization in one of the different realms. Anyone who gives us such useful technical data should be considered friendly.”

  The three men entered a control room filled with computer monitors and equipment panels that glowed with red and green lights. A window looked out on a much larger room where a woman wearing a head covering and two younger men in lab coats were testing the quantum computer. The computer itself was visually unimpressive, a stainless steel box about the size of an upright piano. Large electric cables were attached to the base of this box and smaller cables were attached to the side.

  “Is this the quantum computer?” Michael asked. “It looks very different from what I remember.”

  “It’s a whole new approach,” Dressler explained. “The old version used electrons floating in super-cooled helium. This new computer uses an oscillating electric field to control the spin-up or spin-down direction of individual electrons. The electrons serve as qubits—the quantum bits—of our machine.”

  “So the technology is different, but it works the same way?”

  “Yes. It’s the same principle. An ordinary computer—no matter how powerful it is—stores and processes information with bits that exist in either of two states: one or zero. But a qubit can be a one, a zero or a superposition of both values at the same time, allowing for an infinite number of states. This means our machine can calculate difficult problems a great deal faster than any computer currently in operation.”

  Michael stepped closer to the computer, but he kept his hands away from the cables. “And how does this lead to messages from another civilization?”

  “Quantum theory tells us that electrons can be multiple places at the same time. This is the reason why the atoms in a molecule don’t shatter when they bump into each other. The electrons act as both particle and wave—they form a sort of cloud that binds atoms together. Right now, our qubit electrons exist here, inside this machine, but they also ‘go away’ for a very brief moment.”

  “They can’t just disappear,” Michael said. “They have to go somewhere.”

  “We have reason to believe that the electrons enter a parallel world and then, when observed, return to our particular reality. It’s clear that our distant friends have designed a much more sophisticated quantum computer. They capture the particles, rearrange them into messages and send them back to us. The electrons shuttle back and forth between worlds so quickly that we only detect the result—not the motion itself.”

  One of the young men rapped his knuckles on the w
indow. Dressler nodded and switched on an intercom.

  “We’ve done the system check three times,” the technician said. “Everything is ready to go.”

  “Good. We’re going to start up now. Dr. Assad, would you please come into the control room.”

  Dressler switched off the intercom as the young woman with the head-covering entered the control room. “I’d like you to meet Dr. Assad. She was born in Syria, but has spent most of her life here in the States. With Mr. Boone’s permission, she’s been given a red level security access.”

  Dr. Assad smiled shyly and avoided Michael eyes. “It’s an honor to meet you, Mr. Corrigan.”

  Everyone sat down and Dr. Dressler starting typing commands. Boone was the last person to find a chair, but he never relaxed. He was either watching the people in the room or studying the computer screen.

  For the first hour, they followed an established protocol. Michael heard an electrical humming noise that started and paused and started again. Sometimes it was so loud the observation window began to vibrate. Dr. Assad had a round face and very dark eyebrows. She spoke with a calm voice as different levels of the computer were tested.

  “The first ten qubits are operative. Now activating group two.”

  As time passed, the computer woke up and became aware of its power. Dressler explained that the machine was able to learn from its mistakes and approach complex problems from different angles. During the second hour, Dr. Assad asked the computer to use Shor’s algorithm—a sequence of instructions that broke large numbers into smaller divisors. During the third hour, the machine began to examine the symmetries of something called an E-8, a geometric object that had 57 dimensions. After five hours had passed, Dr. Assad’s monitor screen went blank for a few seconds, and then the calculations continued without pause.

  “What just happened?” Michael asked.

  Dressler and Assad glanced at each other. “It’s what we saw last time,” Dressler said. “At a certain point, the computer begins sending substantial amounts of particles off to another realm.”

  “So it’s like radio signals sent off into space?”

  “Not exactly,” Dressler said. “It will take light years for radio and television signals to reach another galaxy. Our computer’s electrons are going to some place that’s not so distant—a parallel level of reality.”

  Around the sixth hour, one of the technicians was sent out to get dinner. Everyone was munching on chips and sandwiches when the monitor screen flashed several times. Dr. Assad put down her mug of coffee and Dressler scooted his office chair over to her work station.

  “It’s coming,” he said.

  “What are you talking about?” Michael asked.

  “The messages from our friends. This is what happened before,”

  A dark wall of “plus” symbols flashed onto the screen. Then spaces appeared between them like holes in a wall. A few minutes later, the computer began creating geometric patterns. The first ones were flat like paper snowflakes, but then they gained dimension and symmetry. Balls, cylinders and cones floated across the screen as if they were being pushed by underwater currents.

  “There!” Dressler shouted. “Right there! See it?” And everyone stared at the first number—a three.

  More numbers appeared. Groups of them. Michael thought they were random, but Dr. Assad whispered, “This happened before. They’re special numbers. All prime.”

  The monitor screen showed equations using different symbols, and then the equations vanished and shapes returned to the screen. Michael thought the shapes looked like balloons, but then they became living things: fat globular cells that divided in two and reproduced themselves.

  Then—letters. At least, Dressler said they were letters. At first, they were geometric scribbles and scrawls that looked like graffiti scratched on a window. Then these symbols become solid and more familiar.

  “That’s Hebrew,” Dr. Assad whispered. “That’s Arabic definitely. Chinese I think. I’m not sure.”

  Even Boone looked enchanted. “I see an A and a T,” he said. “And that one looks like a G.”

  The letters arranged themselves in lines. Were they in code or just random groups? Then spaces appeared between the letters, forming three-letter, five-letter, and twelve-letter segments. Was that a word? Michael asked himself. Do I see words? And then words appeared in different languages.

  “That’s the word read in French,” Dr. Assad said with flat voice. “And that’s the word see in Polish. I spent a month in Warsaw when I was ”

  “Keep translating,” Michael said.

  “Blue. Soft. In German. Those new words look Coptic. English now. Infinity. Confusion ”

  The words joined each other, forming phrases that sounded like surrealistic poetry. Dog take the star road. The random knife with whiskers.

  By the eighth hour, messages were being sent in several languages, but Michael focused on nine words written in English.

  come to us

  come to us

  COME—TO—US

  2

  W hen she had finished her geometry problems, Alice Chen slid off the bench, grabbed a scone from the breadbox, and pushed open the cooking hut’s heavy door. It was cold and windy on Skellig Columba, but Alice left her quilted jacket open. Her black braids swung back and forth as she hurried up the pathway that connected the three terraces on the northern edge of the island. Two rainwater catch basins and a garden with parsnips and cabbage were on the final terrace, and then the pathway disappeared and she was striding across rocky ground dotted with sorrel and saw thistle.

  Alice scrambled up a boulder, kicking off bits of black lichen as if they were ashes from an ancient fire. When she reached the top, she turned slowly around and surveyed the island like a guard who had just climbed up a watchtower. Alice was twelve years old—a small, serious girl who had once practiced the cello and built forts in the desert with her friends. Now she was living on an isolated island with four nuns who thought they were taking care of her—not realizing that the opposite was true. When Alice was alone, she could assume her new identity: the Warrior Princess of Skellig Columba, Guardian of the Poor Claires.

  She could smell peat smoke coming from the cooking hut and the rotting odor of the seaweed hauled up from the shore and used to fertilize the garden. The cold wind coming off the water touched the collar of her jacket and made her eyes water. Directly below her were the chapel and the four convent huts, each one resembling a stone beehive with slit windows and recessed doors. Looking out at the ocean, she could see the whitecaps on the waves and a dark line on the horizon that marked the circumference of her world.

  The Poor Claires cooked special treats for Alice, mended her torn clothes and poured pots of hot water into a galvanized washtub so that she could enjoy a once-a-week bath. Sister Maura made her read Shakespeare plays and Irish poetry, and Sister Ruth, the eldest nun, guided her through a Victorian Era textbook of Euclidian geometry. Alice slept with the nuns in the dormitory hut. There was always an oil lamp burning in the room; when Alice woke up in the middle of the night, she could see the nuns’ heads lying in the center of goose-down pillows.

  She knew that these gentle, devout women cared about her—perhaps they even loved her—but they couldn’t protect her from the dangers of the world. A few months earlier, Tabula mercenaries had landed on the island in a helicopter. While Alice and the nuns hid in a cave, the men broke down the door of the storage hut and killed Vicki Fraser. Vicki was a very kind person, and it was painful to think about her death.

  Alice believed that everything would have been different if Maya had been on the island. The Harlequin would have used her sword and knives and shotgun to destroy all the men on the helicopter. If Maya had been living at New Harmony, she would have protected Alice’s mother and the rest of the people living there when the Tabula arrived. Alice knew that everyone at New Harmony was dead, but they were still with her. Sometimes, she was doing something completely ordinary—tying her shoes or mashing her potatoes with a fork—and then she saw her mother getting dresse
d or heard her friend Brian Bates playing his trumpet.

  Alice jumped off the boulder, turned away from the convent, and headed west across the rocky ground. The island was formed when two mountain peaks pushed their way out of the water, and the bluish-gray limestone was riddled with caves and sinkholes. During her months on Skellig Columba, she had stacked up columns of rocks; some were signposts for her different pathways around the island while others were false clues that might lead a careless invader off the edge of a cliff.

  Her storage spot was a badger-sized hollow hidden inside a patch of weeds. She kept a rusty butcher knife that she had found in the storage hut and a paring knife stolen from the convent kitchen wrapped in a sheet of plastic. Alice thrust the butcher knife beneath her belt, wearing it like a short sword, and strapped the paring knife to her forearm with two large rubber bands. There were no trees on the island, but she had found a walking stick down by the landing dock, and she used it as a tool to probe mysterious places. Now that she was armed, she tried to walk like a Harlequin—calm but alert, never fearful and uncertain.

  After hiking for about twenty minutes, she reached the western end of the island. The constant attack of the waves had cut away chunks of limestone. Now the cliff looked like five gray fingers reaching into the cold water. Alice walked to the largest of the fingers and stood near the edge. It was a six-foot jump over a crevasse to the next section of cliff. If she slipped and fell, it was a long drop down to the jagged rocks that received the surge of each new wave.

  The gap between the two sections of cliff was wide enough to make the jump difficult, but not impossible. She had already imagined what it would feel like if she didn’t reach the other side. Her arms would flap wildly like a bird that had just been shot. She would have just enough time to hear the waves and see the rocks before the darkness reached out and claimed her.