“I don’t under—”
“Have a seat.”
I pull out the chair.
Leighton sits across from me.
He says, “I hear you’ve been going through your old files.”
I nod.
“Ringing any bells?”
“Not really.”
“That’s too bad. I was hoping a trip down memory lane might spark something.”
He straightens.
His chair creaks.
It’s so quiet I can hear the lightbulbs humming above me.
From across the table, he watches me.
Something feels off.
Wrong.
Leighton says, “My father founded Velocity forty-five years ago. In my old man’s time, things were different. We built jet engines and turbofans, and it was more about keeping the big government and corporate contracts than doing cutting-edge scientific exploration. There’s just twenty-three of us now, but one thing hasn’t changed. This company has always been a family, and our lifeblood is complete and total trust.”
He turns away from me and gives a nod.
The lights kick on.
I can see beyond the smoked-glass enclosure into the small theater, and it’s filled, just like on that first night, with fifteen or twenty people.
Except no one is standing and applauding.
No one is smiling.
They’re all staring down at me.
Grim.
Tense.
I note the first twinge of panic looming on my horizon.
“Why are they all here?” I ask.
“I told you. We’re a family. We clean up our messes together.”
“I’m not following—”
“You’re lying, Jason. You’re not who you say you are. You’re not one of us.”
“I explained—”
“I know, you don’t remember anything about the box. The last ten years are a black hole.”
“Exactly.”
“Sure you want to stick with that?”
Leighton opens the laptop on the table and types something.
He stands it up, types something on the touchscreen.
“What is this?” I ask. “What’s happening?”
“We’re going to finish what we started the night you returned. I’m going to ask questions, and this time, you’re going to answer them.”
I rise from the chair, move to the door, try to pull it open.
Locked.
“Sit!”
Leighton’s voice is as loud as a gunshot.
“I want to leave.”
“And I want you to start telling the truth.”
“I told you the truth.”
“No, you told Daniela Vargas the truth.”
On the other side of the glass, a door opens and a man staggers into the theater, led by one of the guards clutching the back of his neck.
The first man’s face is crushed up against the glass.
Jesus Christ.
Ryan’s nose looks misshapen, and one eye is completely shut.
His bruised and swollen face streaks blood across the glass.
“You told Ryan Holder the truth,” Leighton says.
I rush over to Ryan and say his name.
He tries to respond, but I can’t hear him through the barrier.
I glare down at Leighton.
He says, “Sit, or I will have someone come in here and strap you to that chair.”
The rage from earlier comes flooding back. This man is responsible for Daniela’s death. Now this. I wonder how much damage I could inflict before they pulled me off of him.
But I sit.
I ask, “You tracked him down?”
“No, Ryan came to me, disturbed by the things you told him at Daniela’s apartment. It’s those particular things I want to hear about right now.”
As I watch the guards force Ryan into a chair in the front row, it hits me—Ryan created the missing piece that makes the box function, this “compound” he mentioned at Daniela’s art installation. If our brain is wired to prevent us from perceiving our own quantum state, then perhaps there’s a drug that can disable this mechanism—the “firewall” I wrote about in that mission statement.
The Ryan from my world had been studying the prefrontal cortex and its role in generating consciousness. It’s not that far of a leap to think this Ryan might have created a drug that changes the way our brain perceives reality. That stops us from decohering our environment and collapsing our wave functions.
I crash back into the moment.
“Why did you hurt him?” I ask.
“You told Ryan you’re a professor at Lakemont College, that you have a son, and that Daniela Vargas was actually your wife. You told him you were abducted one night while walking home, after which you woke up here. You told him this isn’t your world. Do you admit to saying these things?”
I wonder again how much damage I could do before someone hauled me away. Break his nose? Knock out teeth? Kill him?