“Do you remember Heavy Rags?”
He nodded. Heavy Rags were the most common type of entity to emerge from the Breach. They’d been coming through almost daily since 1978. Each one was dark green, about the size of a washcloth, and weighed over 2,800 pounds. The nature of the material had eluded all attempts at understanding, even after three decades of study by physicists within Tangent. The most they could say was that Heavy Rags weren’t made of atoms. They were dense sheets of some smaller kind of particle—maybe quarks, but that was a guess at best—that were somehow stabilized in that arrangement. Handling them was a logistical chore. There was a wheeled chainfall down on Level 51 with a specially made titanium claw, there for the sole purpose of moving the rags around. They couldn’t be stored anywhere in the complex but the bottom floor, and most of them weren’t even kept there. Over the years, Tangent personnel had bored dozens of foot-wide shafts into the concrete floor of Level 51, all the way to the granite bedrock that lay beneath Border Town. These shafts were the final resting place for nearly all of the roughly ten thousand Heavy Rags that’d come through the Breach over the years.
“And you remember the Doubler,” Paige said, not asking.
Travis nodded again. The Doubler had figured centrally in his dreams, at least one night in three, over the past two years. He often woke from those dreams pounding his knuckles bloody on the headboard, with fog-amplified voices still screaming in his head.
“Heavy Rags are one of the very few entities that can be doubled,” Paige said. “In the future, the bottom three floors of Border Town have been filled solid with them, mixed with concrete to form a kind of maché, though by volume it’s probably ninety-nine percent rags. We calculated that a cubic foot of the maché would weigh about 250,000 pounds—almost twice as much as an M1 Abrams tank.”
Travis pictured three stories of the stuff, compressed into every possible crevice, filling even the dome that surrounded the Breach. The ungodly weight of the substance pushing some distance into the Breach itself, bulging in against the resistance force that made the tunnel a one-way passage. Paige had told him once that in the first year of the Breach’s existence, some people had suggested filling the elevator shaft with concrete and leaving the Breach’s chamber sealed off. That would’ve been a bad idea: in the time since then, entities had emerged that would’ve done very bad things to the world had they been left alone—even in a sealed cavern five hundred feet underground. But what Paige was describing now was a much more aggressive move. It amounted to shoving a million-ton cork into the mouth of the Breach itself, maybe preventing anything from truly emerging from it afterward. What would happen to the entities that were trying to come through? Would they just clot in the tunnel? Would they back up like a reservoir behind a dam?
He saw in Paige’s expression that all the same questions had been troubling her for days, and that she had no answers.
“So at some point,” Travis said, “probably before the collapse of the world a few months from now, someone uses the Doubler to fill the bottom of the complex with that stuff?”
Paige nodded. “It would go pretty quickly, once you had a big enough mass to double from. The Doubler could generate about a cubic yard every few seconds.”
“But why the hell would someone do that?” Travis said.
Paige was silent for a moment. “Because under bad enough circumstances it would make sense,” she said. “Which is why I thought of it.”
Travis glanced at Bethany. She looked as uncertain as he felt. Then he understood.