{"id":10325,"date":"2012-03-24T13:47:37","date_gmt":"2012-03-24T17:47:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?page_id=10325"},"modified":"2012-03-31T13:22:06","modified_gmt":"2012-03-31T17:22:06","slug":"the-propagational-library-5-the-two-gabes","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/the-propagational-library\/the-propagational-library-5-the-two-gabes\/","title":{"rendered":"The Propagational Library (5): The Two Gabes"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Previous Chapter<\/a>] [Table of Contents\/Overview<\/a>] [Next Chapter<\/a>]\n

\"\"<\/a>T<\/span>he concept: relatively simple. They “just” had to keep Gabe’s mind — or rather, its thrown<\/em> counterpart — separate from the rest of him. They “just” had to keep the two Gabes separate long enough that Kali could wipe the-rest-of-him<\/em> (along with the all-of-everything-else<\/em>) from the universe. Bodiless (whatever that meant) and hence presumably indestructible, and with all of time before him, Gabe could accomplish the seemingly impossible tasks they’d agreed on.<\/p>\n

The technology to set him on that course, to make it happen: almost as simple. How it worked, exactly or even approximately, no one alive knew. Presumably, Matt Burghar had left a record somewhere on Earth — buried in an abandoned salt mine; scattered digitally among the network servers of the world’s data grid and the more (haha) permanent magnetic, optical, and quantum storage media around the planet; launched into orbit for later retrieval. Somewhere, surely. After all, no matter how heartbroken by whatever’d happened to Dolly, no matter how frightened by whatever he (and she) had seemed to accomplish, no matter how committed he’d felt to his daughter’s health and happiness, Matt Burghar had not destroyed the room lined with steel teeth. He would not have left the machine without — if not a user’s manual — some<\/em> form of documentation of its inner workings, the details of its intended use. They knew what it was supposed to do. They just didn’t know how “the room” did it.<\/p>\n

But actually operating the machine, yes: simple. The panel in the outer room — “Mary’s room” — wasn’t studded with dials and sliding switches, controls infinitely variable over a range of values; every switch was binary, either on or off (although their exact purposes mystified, being marked with gibberish symbols instead of true labels). And only one switch — actually just a thumb-sized pushbutton — sat off to the side, on a little subpanel by itself, completely unlabeled, outlined with a bright-colored ring. Not slow-down yellow or ambiguous blue, not red for “Do not press.” Green: the color of GO<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The timing, they’d always known, ah: that would be tricky. In a sense, within the timing lay the bulk of those million-million-to-one odds against success which Adrienne kept mentioning. In another sense, the timing didn’t count at all. They could do it any time; they could have done it already. In order to set the switches just so, and then to push the green-ringed button — trial and error had taught them that much. It really wasn’t intellectually difficult, let alone physically challenging. At exactly the right moment, they “just” had to stop functioning as humans, had to stop caring or even imagining that one life, two or three lives or even a billion lives mattered.<\/p>\n

And therein the ultimate complication — because without that belief, they wouldn’t be doing this at all.<\/p>\n

—-<\/p>\n

L<\/span>ike the rest of the world, Gabe and the Lanes watched the authorities’ announcement of the world’s certain end on a Saturday night in late summer. By then, the announcement as such was superfluous. You still couldn’t see Kali by daylight, but at night the skies were full of her. You didn’t need to be an astrophysicist or prophet to notice the blotting out of the heart of the Milky Way as Kali’s superfast approach eclipsed it all.<\/p>\n

Unlike the rest of the world, though, Gabe and the Lanes had had time to prepare for what followed.<\/p>\n

They had done as much prep work as possible, without doing more than they figured they’d need. The three of them were sealed inside the central building at the MagBurg Labs research campus. From the outside, the building looked dark and abandoned — indeed was<\/em> dark and abandoned, from the sub-basements to the roof. But off in the southwest corner of the first-level basement, behind an apparently blank and apparently concrete wall, lay a miniature self-contained bunker. Its LED-lit facilities, from refrigeration and air circulation to waste disposal and, of course, everyday electronics, were powered not from the outside, but with gigantic storage batteries which had been charging for months, leaching off the power grid. (Eventually the charge would run out, of course, but by then the batteries themselves, everything they powered, and everyone who cared would have long since ceased to exist.)<\/p>\n

If anyone on the outside had wanted, they could relatively easily have located the bunker, using ground-penetrating radar or just the business end of a sledgehammer, applied at just the right spot. If<\/em> they’d wanted. As expected, no one did.<\/p>\n

“Jesus,” Gabe said. “That didn’t take long.” He gestured at the wall-sized video screen in the common room, needlessly. Eldon and Adrienne had noticed it too, of course. The first fires.<\/p>\n

Eldon had installed high-definition video and heat-sensing cameras on every rooftop on the campus, covering over with black tape the tiny red blinking LEDs which would give away the all-important information, Power Here<\/em>; the feed which they were watching at the moment showed them the view almost due north, from twelve stories above the ground. Tiny orange pinpoints had appeared here and there within a quarter-hour after the President offered her final prayer, and Eldon switched the screen’s signal source over to the roof cameras. (A quarter-light<\/em>-hour, Gabe thought obsessively, reflexively, calculating as he’d been doing regularly over the past week: Time for Earth and Kali to come about 150 million miles closer<\/em>.) The biggest pinpoint had blossomed surprisingly quickly into a small rosette of crimson and yellow: the dome and spires of the Capitol. Gabe wondered how a structure of mostly steel and stone could possibly have caught so fast. Maybe someone with the government, some doomsday cadre with advance knowledge of Kali — maybe they’d stacked fuel—<\/p>\n

“Shut it off, Eldon,” said Adrienne. “There’s no point in watching it for a while. It’ll just distract us. Upset us.”<\/p>\n

Eldon nodded. He poked at a couple of buttons on the screen’s remote, and the scene switched over to its usual view: a forty-eight hour non-stop video loop, recorded months ago, of a clearing in a Pacific Northwest rain forest. It was night now in that virtual setting, too; the rain had stopped for a while, the skies were clear, and the crescent moon was as visible through the trees as the black, star-speckled counterpane on which it lay. Although they all knew it wasn’t “real,” the scene immediately lowered the anxiety level in the room, as though the video screen were an actual window looking out onto the serenity of the deep woods.<\/p>\n

“Why don’t the two of you take a little break,” Gabe said. “I’ll fix us something to eat. Come and get it in an hour, okay?”<\/p>\n

—-<\/p>\n

T<\/span>hat meal hadn’t required much in the way of preparation, which was just as well because Gabe didn’t know much about cooking. (Not that he’d have bothered, even if he’d known. And not that the Lanes would have cared about the quality of his cooking, one way or the other.) Just burgers, seasoned lightly and run under the broiler — soy for Eldon, who’d suddenly and without explanation gone vegetarian a couple weeks ago, but prime well-marbled ground beef for Adrienne and Gabe himself. Served with the burgers, a bottle of red wine so exquisitely acidic-sweet that they’d had to fight the urge to finish it before the first bite. They had to keep their minds clear: refreshed, and clear.<\/p>\n

None of the three of them slept much that night.<\/p>\n

When Gabe came out of his room in the morning, Adrienne was already at the cooktop, throwing something together. The rain forest day was underway on the screen, too. A squirrel sat, drenched, on a downed, moss- and lichen-covered tree trunk, apparently oblivious to the steady rain in the air but twitching in paranoia about everything else.<\/p>\n

“El will be out in a few minutes,” she said (and Gabe thought: light-minutes<\/em>). “He wants to get started pretty quickly, I think. Just in case of, well, in case of complications.”<\/p>\n

Gabe had no idea how any situation could be more complicated than the one they already faced. He — and Adrienne — soon learned.<\/p>\n

“Camera’s out over on the south wall,” Eldon said as he entered from the Lanes’ own room. He propped up his smartpad on the counter, so they could huddle around and see it with him. Unlike the wall screen, the smartpad displayed a split-screen view of nothing at all from the rooftops; to the left was an infrared and light-intensified view of wherever the pad’s camera was aimed, and to the right, a similar view from the point of view of a camera mounted on the south wall of the basement, aimed out into the hall which led from outside the bunker itself to the sealed doorway to “Mary’s room.” In theory, Eldon’s device would enable them to make their way from here over to that room, in the dark if need be. The view from the smartpad’s point of view would simply be their eyes. The view from the wall camera, though, would alert them to any intruders between here and there. Both sides of the pad screen were blank.<\/p>\n

“Turned off the pad’s own camera,” he said. “Nothing useful to see here. I’m more worried about the wall camera. The lights are out as we expected. But<\/em>. It ought to show a little flare of light up here” — he tapped a corner — “a low-power Exit sign mounted on the wall there. It usually shows up on the screen here as a sort of tan blur.”<\/p>\n

“Maybe it’s just the sign that’s out?” said Adrienne.<\/p>\n

“Um, well, maybe. But the sign draws power from the batteries over here where we are. If the lights here are on, if you’re making coffee and breakfast—”<\/p>\n

Gabe chimed in. “That Exit sign oughta be lit up, too.”<\/p>\n

“Right. We should be able to see that little smear of light up in the corner here.”<\/p>\n

Gabe tried to imagine what might await them down at that end of the hall. “Why would somebody disable the sign? I mean, if it’s the only source of any light at all?”<\/p>\n

“Right,” Eldon said. “What I thought, too. Which makes me think it’s not the sign, but the camera, that’s out.”<\/p>\n

In the end, they agreed to the only course of action which seemed to satisfy all their requirements for the trip:<\/p>\n

All three of them would go, as originally planned. But with them — besides Eldon’s smartpad, besides the folder of technical notes and diagrams which Adrienne always kept within reach anymore — they also carried a canister of pepper spray, and a Taser. (Gabe suggested one of the old camera-flash units he’d brought with him from home, but they nixed the idea at once: it might blind an opponent, of course, but it would blind them<\/em>, too.) If they had to use either weapon in the dark, narrow hallway, they’d just have to hope to hit a real target, and not a companion.<\/p>\n

“I’m going to turn the lights off here before we leave,” Eldon said. “To give our eyes a few minutes to get used to the darkness.”<\/p>\n

Left unspoken was the other objective: not leaking light out into the corridor when they shoved the wall open; not alerting anyone else to their presence.<\/p>\n

When he doused the lights, plunging them into darkness over by the wall through which they’d exit, Adrienne said, “I think we should wait a minute or two before turning on the smartpad. That’ll throw some light, too.” She was already whispering, unconsciously, although only Eldon and Gabe could hear her.<\/p>\n

Gabe jumped when someone touched his shoulder: Eldon, whispering. “Okay. I’m opening the wall. Let’s go. Just a few feet, stop, and listen. If everything seems okay, I’ll turn on the pad.”<\/p>\n

He guided them slowly and carefully towards the blackness where the wall had been. Two feet, five feet, ten— A squeeze of the shoulder: Stop<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Gabe strained to hear something, anything other than what seemed to him to be the thunder of his own pulse in his head. To his right, he heard Eldon breathing. He heard the light scrape of a shoe from a little further in the same direction: one of Adrienne’s sandals, he hoped, shifting on the concrete floor. He could see nothing. Nothing.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, beneath their feet, the ground shifted.<\/p>\n

“Oh, El—“: Adrienne’s whisper gone, her voice pleading.<\/p>\n

“I know. Time to go. Don’t have the luxury anymore.”<\/p>\n

The smartpad screen flickered into life. On the left side of the screen, they could see the hall before them: empty, at least as far as the eight or ten meters to the bend to the right which would lead them to “the room.” On the right side, a sudden movement of some kind — a shadow? — revealed that end of the hallway, and then it went dark again.<\/p>\n

They picked up the pace, while still moving carefully.<\/p>\n

But Gabe’s mind — and, he bet, Adrienne’s and Eldon’s minds — raced, raced. He knew what the tremor underfoot meant, because the Lanes had prepared him to expect it: the first sign of Kali’s onrushing direct influence. They didn’t know how long everything would hold together. They just knew that they had to get Gabe seated in “the room” and then activate the switch, keeping Gabe1<\/em> and Gabe2<\/em> separated as long as possible while the world collapsed around them, immediately draining all that stored up battery power and simultaneously sucking in every last milliwatt of power they could from the outside grid. The interior of every building would go dark. People would huddle in their homes and churches and other public buildings in terror, assuming the grid had failed “naturally,” and maybe some utility workers somewhere would without thinking go into emergency-management mode, scrambling for tools and ladders and handheld battery-operated probes and meters without noticing the sudden spiraling of energy into a single point here, on the Eastern seaboard—<\/p>\n

They turned the corner, quite suddenly, and paused without thinking, facing down the corridor towards the door to the control room, staring unblinking down at the smartpad in Eldon’s hands. The way ahead was — seemed to be? — clear. No intruders visible. But the right side of the screen was still dark — no, there was that shadow-flickering again—<\/p>\n

“You see that?” said Eldon.<\/p>\n

“Yeah—”<\/p>\n

“The shadow,” said Adrienne.<\/p>\n

Eldon: “No. Not the shadow on the right side of the screen. Down at the end of the hall, on the left<\/em> side.”<\/p>\n

Gabe looked at that side of the screen. The shadow on the right, he could see, fluttered briefly. On the left, at the top right corner and very briefly, a bright-green point of light winked on and off. He looked up away from the smartpad, trying to see with his own eyes what it saw with its sensors. Out of the corner of his eyes, the right side of the screen flickered and went dark. Straight ahead, at an impossible-to-guess distance, a bright-red light blinked on and off.<\/p>\n

Eldon and Adrienne burst out laughing.<\/p>\n

“A goddam moth<\/em>,” Eldon said.<\/p>\n

“On the camera<\/em>—” Adrienne began.<\/p>\n

The ground shook again.<\/p>\n

Without stopping to think further, the three of them were hurrying up the hallway. While Eldon punched in the combination which would admit them to the control room, Adrienne swatted at the moth with her file folder. “Darned thing,” she said, and when it fell to the floor Gabe half-expected her to step on it. But no. Eldon swung the door open as they stepped over the dazed, twitching creature. He hit the wall switch, and closed and sealed the door behind them.<\/p>\n

“This is it, kids.”<\/p>\n

Now Adrienne took the lead, as her father’s successor. “Into the room, Gabe.” The ground shook once, twice.<\/p>\n

He went in and seated himself, and while Adrienne set the switches to the positions they apparently needed to be set to, Eldon went over the instructions one more time with Gabe.<\/p>\n

He handed Gabe the thumb-controlled switch they’d rigged up — a fallback device, tied into the same circuit as the green-ring button on the control panel. Gabe himself was to operate it, when Adrienne signaled him from the control panel. If the situation in the control room “deteriorates too quickly” (that was the euphemism Eldon used) for Adrienne to hold the button down out there, then Gabe in here, with this button clutched in his hand, might be able to keep the circuit open for a critical few seconds more.<\/p>\n

Neither Eldon nor Gabe talked about what would happen then. Neither of them knew. It was pointless. There was no time. The tremors were nearly non-stop now.<\/p>\n

Eldon put his hand on Gabe’s shoulder. “Thanks for doing this. So much.” Without waiting for a reply, he left “the room,” sealed the door, and joined his wife in the outer room on the other side of the glass. They spoke to each other, briefly, and then both looked up through the glass at Gabe.<\/p>\n

Gabe’s mind was popping almost uncontrollably as the floor shifted under him. Adrienne put her right hand over at the right side of the control panel, raised her left hand and gave the little squeezed-fist-lower-your-thumb signal. Without taking his eyes off the glass, Gabe pushed the button in his hand—<\/p>\n

And yet, he realized at once, he hadn’t even waited for Adrienne’s signal. He’d felt again the sense of dislocation, looking in at himself in “the room” even as he looked out at Adrienne raising her fist, and as soon as he felt it the Gabe1<\/em> in “the room” hit the switch. That version of Gabe watched intently as he suddenly realized the Lanes had forgotten all about him. They were hugging, clutching at each other, kissing ferociously, both of their faces wet, neither of them with another glance at “the room” let alone with a thumb on the green-ringed button. They knew this would happen<\/em>, he thought, looking down briefly at the switch in his hand. This is the only switch that counts<\/em>. He looked up again. The glass pane in the wall between the outer and inner rooms had developed a crack. The floor shook, violently. Terror coursed through his veins, lit up every neuron, and Gabe — almost blindly, certainly without thought — grabbed hold of the button switch with his other hand as well just because it gave him something to focus on, something to—<\/p>\n

The crack in the glass spread, the pane collapsed. He could see the Lanes now apparently screaming into the limited space of the room. The floor heaved. He screamed himself, he thought. The lights went out. He continued to press the button, continued to scream in blackness, until…<\/p>\n

Outside “the room,” looking in, Gabe2<\/em> did not scream. The lights did not go out for him. For him, the space was flooded with light. He was aware, remotely, that the Lanes were close by. He could sense, sort of, that the glass had fallen apart. He “looked” up, somehow, and could “see” the ceiling falling as if in slow motion. He could likewise “see” the walls and floor buckling as the planet began to tear itself apart. Mostly, though, his attention was directed straight ahead, at Gabe1<\/em> in “the room.” No single word could capture the sense of what Gabe1<\/em> radiated at this long, drawn-out final instant. His eyes, unseeing, were wide open. His mouth (Gabe2<\/em> was certain) howled, wordlessly. His thumbs squeezed, squeezed, squeezed the device clutched in his hand. He stood up from the stool — no, the wall of “the room” had disintegrated, the floor and the stool were falling away from him—<\/p>\n

Just a split-second before Gabe1<\/em> evaporated, the dispassionate Gabe2<\/em> saw something very curious, curious indeed, the source of the light which enabled him to see all of this:<\/p>\n

Around Gabe1<\/em>‘s head, a glowing… well, a glowing cloud of silvery light. As Gabe2<\/em> focused on it, the cloud resolved itself into gleaming particles. Each particle was not a single point but a tiny streak of light, apparently bent at each end, and they were all hooked together somehow, each one shedding a minuscule glow of its own, the whole cloud shimmering, waving… Gabe2<\/em> “looked” to his left. Each of the Lanes had a similar cloud, and the clouds touched at the edges and hooked together, rippled, separated—<\/p>\n

The Lanes’ lights went out. Before Gabe2<\/em> could direct his attention back to “the room,” Gabe1<\/em> was gone, too.<\/p>\n

Drifting then, up and out of what had been the main building of what had not so long ago been MagBurg Labs’ research campus, free of Earth, looking down as the little silvery clouds flickered and poof<\/em>ed into nonexistence all around the late planet, oblivious to the force of the dark passing gravitational giant and to the nearby exploding yellow star, rising, yes, and looking down at it all but also out, to whatever lay ahead: The Librarian soared — trailing behind him, in his wake, a tapering cloud of glittery elongated particles.<\/p>\n

__________________________<\/p>\n

[Whew.]<\/em><\/p>\n

__________________________<\/p>\n

[Previous Chapter<\/a>] [Table of Contents\/Overview<\/a>] [Next Chapter<\/a>]\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Previous Chapter] [Table of Contents\/Overview] [Next Chapter] The concept: relatively simple. They “just” had to keep Gabe’s mind — or rather, its thrown counterpart — separate from the rest of him. They “just” had to keep the two Gabes separate long enough that Kali could wipe the-rest-of-him (along with the all-of-everything-else) from the universe. Bodiless […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":10150,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"class_list":{"0":"post-10325","1":"page","2":"type-page","3":"status-publish","5":"entry"},"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/P6kZSG-2Gx","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10325","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10325"}],"version-history":[{"count":16,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10325\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10347,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10325\/revisions\/10347"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/10150"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10325"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}