“Okay, I’ve got another series of knots for you,” Jenn told her. “Ten coming up. Press the button if you feel queasy, have any visual disturbances, or feel unwell in any way—that shouldn’t happen, but it’s a precaution.” The button was attached to a long cable leading to one of the racks of equipment behind her. Rita clutched it nervously, thumb hovering. What appeared to be an elaborate sailors’ joke appeared in the middle of the screen. “Next one coming up.”
The knot dissolved, replaced by a similar, but somehow different tangle of lines. Rita stared at it, vision blurring. Somehow it didn’t want to come into focus. “How many more—” she began to complain, as the lines writhed and another knot condensed out of the pointillist flickering on the screen. “Hey, your monitor’s broken.”
“Broken?” Dr. Lane looked up sharply. “Okay. Let’s try the next.”
The disturbance went away, as another knot appeared. “Hey, it fixed itself,” said Rita.
“Uh-huh. Next.” Something about Dr. Lane’s tone had changed.
“Was that it?” Rita asked.
“Listen, why don’t we get through the rest of this sequence then break for lunch,” Jenn suggested. Rita, knowing a diversion when she heard one, nodded and kept watching the screen, and herself for sudden headaches. That was it, she realized. That was a trigger engram. But she was grounded, electrostatically earthed, the Q-machines she still only half believed in blocked from entering their excited state. Somehow it barely seemed real.
After lunch—another bland burger in the staff canteen—Rita slouched reluctantly back to the test room with Dr. Lane. She was even more enthused than usual: babbling about procedures and test protocols and blood pressure monitoring for some reason. Rita nodded politely and let it all flow over her. The reality was that she didn’t much want to be here, but there was no obvious way out. And the morning’s tests had reassured her slightly that whatever they’d stuck in her hadn’t had any obvious bad effects. She could live with an itch in her left forearm and the inability to focus on a particular odd-shaped knot. “After you’re jaunting controllably we’ll switch on your engram generator,” Jenn told her. “But not until the day after tomorrow at the earliest.”
“Engram generator?”
“The implant in your left arm.”
“Huh.” Rita squinted. Her left forearm was a little sore near the wrist, where she might have worn a watch if she were so inclined, and the fine downy hairs were missing. “I can feel something there.”
“Really? It should be almost unnoticeable. Come over here now—”
They hung a shoulder harness on her, with slim medical data loggers connected to the EKG and EEG pickups, then stood her on a black plastic mat where the chair had been that morning. “Okay, Rita,” said Dr. Lane. “I want you to just relax and look at the engram when it shows on-screen. That’s all. Don’t move from where you’re standing.”
Rita glanced over her shoulder. Colonel Smith had arrived, was standing quietly at the back of the room, watching her intently. Another middle-aged man stood behind him, balding and self-important in a white coat. Rita assumed he was the elusive Professor Schwartz. “Are you sure this is entirely safe?” she asked.
“Quite sure.” Jenn moved aside to one of the control tablets. “Look at the screen…”
Rita looked. Something shimmered, and she tried to focus on it, then staggered slightly. “Dr. Lane, I don’t feel—”
She stopped. Jenn, the Colonel, Schwartz, and the nursing orderlies had vanished. So had most of the equipment racks and the examining table. There was a different table on the wrong side of the room, and the screen on the wall had shifted sideways minutely and gone blank. Her ears ached; she swallowed, and they popped.
“What. The. Fuck?” Rita glanced up. Tiny insect-eyed webcams watched impassively from the corners of the room. Oops. She turned round. A sign on the inside of the door read:
“Welcome to Nova America four, Rita!”
Wow. Just wow. She swallowed again, just as the door opened and Colonel Smith, followed by Dr. Lane, rushed in, calling congratulations and questions—“Excellent!”; “How do you feel? Any headache? Visual disturbances?”
“I’m fine,” Rita said. She swallowed again, her throat dry, and rubbed her left forearm. “Just a bit…” She didn’t want to say freaked out in front of them. They’d take it the wrong way, like the trainers after she’d fallen off the wall when she tried the assault course at Quantico. Or her seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Stewart, the time she’d forgotten that Mrs. Stewart was easily upset by others’ failure to share her religious beliefs. “Slightly shaken. I knew what to expect but it didn’t feel real…”
“You’ll get used to it,” Smith said. He was breathing fast, as if he’d had run to catch up with her, but he sounded pleased. “Once Dr. Lane’s checked you out and confirmed everything’s all right, you can jaunt between here and the clinic until Dr. Lane’s satisfied you can control it—and avoid jaunting by accident whenever you see a trigger. Tomorrow, Dr. Lane will switch on your key generator implant and you can try programming it. Then we head back to Camp Graceland.”
“Wait up!” Jenn raised a hand. “I thought I had her for the next four days? We’ve got commissioning tests to run, and biofeedback training, and—”
Schwartz cleared his throat. “Prioritize the basics. You’ve got one and a half days. If there are holes in her training, you can travel with her and finish the job on-site.”
Rita looked between them. “What’s the sudden hurry?”
Smith’s crow’s-feet wrinkled. “Remember what I told you during your last briefing? Stuff happened.”
“Oh. Yeah.” Rita nodded, trying to hide her frustration. Stuff happened, and she had to jump to attention without knowing what.
“We’ve got some final orientation to hurry you through,” Smith said, downplaying it, his tone dismissive. “Nothing you can’t handle in your sleep after your last three months.”
“Uh-huh.” Final orientation? That sounded ominous.
“So if you’d like to jaunt back over to the clinic?” Jenn’s lips tightened in something like a smile.
“How?” Rita asked. Then she saw something on the screen, out of the corner of her eyes. “Oh—”
And they were gone again, in another round of interdimensional ping-pong. Dr. Lane kept her busy until dinnertime and exhaustion brought an end to the day’s training: and Rita didn’t have a chance to ask Colonel Smith what his final orientation involved.
BALTIMORE, TIME LINE TWO, JULY 2020
FEDERAL EMPLOYEE 004910023 CLASSIFIED VOICE TRANSCRIPT
DR. SCRANTON: So, what progress are we looking at with our JAUNT BLUE subject?
COL. SMITH: She’s nearly ready. I mean, Schwartz’s group hasn’t activated her key implant yet, but she’s already able to jaunt at will if given a trigger engram, and reject inadvertent triggers if she recognizes them in time. Dr. Lane only managed to get her to jaunt by accident once, in the lab, and she came back instantly. The stability is phenomenal compared to the observed capabilities of captured enemy couriers. The blood pressure problem just isn’t there at all—I mean, she made multiple jaunts in a fifteen-minute period and her readings were within ten percent of median. If the key generator works properly, so we can dispatch her to surveyed time lines at will, we’re onto a winner.