The next morning, she repacked her bags, checked out, and headed for the office address she’d been given. It turned out to be located in yet another anonymous concrete ten-story cube, part of the constellation of government buildings that had sprung up in Baltimore as government overflowed from the downtown D.C. fallout zone.
She wasn’t sure what to expect of her posting at first. What she found was an office building shared between a bunch of DHS back-end divisions: everything from procurement services to HR and IT support. But there were uniformed officers at the front desk, sitting under a huge gold-fringed flag, and they were expecting her. “Please spit here, ma’am,” said one of the guards, proffering a tube. Rita spat to order. “Thank you. Please take a seat and wait over there while we authenticate you, ma’am. Bags go on the belt.”
There were DNA scanners everywhere. Fly’s-eye arrays of webcams goggled from the corners of the ceiling. The turnstile led to an area with X-ray belts for bags and T-wave booths for bodies. Her phone rolled over onto a red FEDERAL OVERRIDE network ID instantly. Nobody wanted terrorists to be able to bring phone-controlled bombs into federal buildings, not after 7/16. Not that smartphones or fatphones had existed back then, or that the terrorists who nuked D.C. had used phones of any kind at all, but—Rita flashed back to her own kidnapping and felt a sudden spike of remembered terror and pain.
“Ma’am?” Rita looked up, broken out of her reverie. “Your badge is ready.” She approached the desk. “Fingerprints, please.” She spread her hands on the glass plates. “This is your visitor badge. Wear it at all times and go where it tells you. If you lose it or it’s taken from you, report to security immediately. You may now proceed to security screening, then go to room W4. The badge will show you the way. Do not cross any red lines on the floor or try to enter any doors the badge shows in red.”
Rita took the smart badge and lanyard, looped it round her neck, and managed a weak smile: “Thanks.” She flipped the badge so she could see the animated arrows on the map display on its backside, and followed them down the rabbit hole. At least the security checkpoint here was less overloaded than the ones at Penn Station.
Room W4 turned out to be a conference room on the fourth floor. As Rita let herself in, her phone vibrated. She stared at the message from Colonel Smith: Running late, be with you in 30. “Huh,” she said under her breath. There was nobody around, just a conference table and a sideboard with a coffee vending machine. Hurry up and wait.
Smith took closer to an hour than thirty minutes to show up. “Sorry I’m late: I was in a meeting with the boss.” He glanced at her suitcase. “You’ll need that. Everything packed? Excellent, let’s go.”
“Where are we going?” Rita asked, hurrying to keep up with him as he headed for the lift to the parking garage.
“It’s called Camp Singularity, and it’s in time line four.” Elevator doors closed around them. She saw herself and the Colonel in the walls of the lift, reflected to infinity by a wilderness of mirrors. “You’ll be staying there for a couple of days.”
“More training?”
The elevator doors opened onto concrete and cars. “Not exactly: more like a background briefing. Stuff we want you to be aware of.”
“Stuff.”
“Stuff we shouldn’t talk about outside of a secure conference room—or outside of Camp Singularity.” A Mercury winked its sidelights and rolled out of its parking bay, turning toward them. Doors slid open. “Get in.” They sat in the back as the sedan made its way to the exit, steering wheel spinning eerily under the fingertips of an invisible AI driver. “We’ve got one more body to pick up, then we’ll go—”
The car stopped at the top of the ramp, and the front passenger door opened. A few seconds later, Julie from HaptoTech climbed in. “Reporting for duty, sir! Hi, Rita.” The smile she sent Rita was just faintly apologetic.
“Make yourself at home,” said Smith, ignoring Rita’s frozen face. Julie’s door closed; a second later the car moved off, heading for I-83. “Transit point’s about an hour out of town. Julie, you’ve seen the Valley, haven’t you? Why don’t you fill Rita in on it.”
“Sure! Prepare to have your mind blown, Rita. Uh, sir, I assume she’s…”
“She wouldn’t be in this car if she wasn’t cleared.” Smith closed his eyes. He looks tired, Rita realized. Like he’s been up all night. “Tell her about your first time out.” The car turned onto Charles Street and ground to a halt in the sudden snarl of traffic. “I’m going to catch thirty winks.”
Rita wasn’t exactly feeling receptive. She fumed quietly behind a polite mask as Julie prattled on about the mind-expanding experience of a trip to some archaeological site in a capital-V Valley, somewhere over the rainbow. You set me up, she thought grimly, not sure whether to direct her venom at Julie, who was merely a pawn, or at the Colonel, snoring quietly beside her, his mouth disarmingly ajar, whose will was almost certainly the one in question: You set me up. There was no other plausible explanation for Julie to surface as a DHS undercover agent reporting to the Colonel. You had me under observation all the time I was at HaptoTech, and you want me to know it! But why?
“—Climate in time line four is a lot cooler than here, because it’s in an ice age right now. The climatologists say it began about two thousand years ago because of anthropogenic change caused by an, uh, nuclear winter—” Julie was surreally lucid. For the trade show in Seattle she’d done a convincing impersonation of a bottle-blond bubblehead. Since then she’d lost the perm, dyed her hair back to a more natural chestnut, and acquired a set of rimless aug-reality specs. In office-casual she was almost unrecognizable. But she still wore a gold pin on her lapel, a hieroglyph of a scarab beetle. “They had a nuclear war back when the Roman Empire was at its peak. Freaky, no?”
“I’m sorry?” Rita shook her head. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I’ll show you when we arrive.” Julie gave her a worried smile. “Is he asleep?”
Rita glanced sideways. “Yes for now.” Smith was in fact out cold, but she was not prepared to share a dust mote more than was strictly necessary with Julie right now.
“I hope you’re not sore at me. I was just following orders—nobody even told me to keep an eye out for you!”
“Well, that makes it all right.” Rita kept her tone even. “You don’t need my forgiveness, anyway.” Just the Colonel’s paycheck.
“Like that matters? Listen, in this organization you go where you’re told and follow orders. That’s all I was doing. No need to make it something personal!”
Rita nodded, reluctantly. Julie had a point: once you took the agency’s coin you couldn’t really blame anyone else for the consequences.
“Anyway, the Valley we’re going to really is a headfuck because those people were so far ahead of us it’s not even funny—”
“Wait.” Rita struggled with the phantoms of her distraction: “People? We’re talking about another time line here, right? One that was nuked?”