How differently would people act
if they could experience their actions as others do?
|
The story I want to tell you now is the oldest story in the book. It’s the defining story of humanity, and it goes like this: A new tool comes along. Men see it in the world or in their minds. They strive to reach it, attain it, hold it aloft for a moment’s wonder. Then they wield it wisely or wantonly, and in so doing they transform a society–a tribe, village, city, corporation, nation-state, or global institution, spreading the effects on up the evolutionary ladder of civilization.
It’s a familiar story, yes. But to date, no tool has transformed human society as drastically as deep-projection technology. Not the first spark flinted for a fire, not the first ink put to page, not the first night lit by electricity, not the first atom split inside a bomb. None of those shocks were as transformative as Transdimensional Extended Projection technology, a.k.a. deep-projection.
How can I be sure of this?
I’m sure because deep-projection allows the impacts of those famous shocks of the past to be directly re-experienced–by allowing the past to be directly revisited from the present by qualified volunteers, a group that included myself from the very start. Yes, I was there, at the Institute for Advanced Study in New Jersey back in 2030, when the pilot test was performed. I was there, and I witnessed an opening being made for the very first time into unseen dimensions that stitch together the universal fabric of reality. I watched the very first volunteer, a dear friend of mine, project across the unseen frames of reference that surround and suffuse our reality; with my own eyes I saw her enter a dimensional plane that shared its reality with a precisely targeted moment in the past. You may or may not know that she was killed the following year, in riots at the Institute.
Whatever you may think of her, and whatever you may have heard of our early efforts, do not be misinformed about our technology. Deep-projection was not "time travel" as anyone had foreseen it. It was more like stepping into a virtual-reality display of the past, a past that we cannot affect in any way. . . . At least, we believed that at the start. And for the most part it’s perfectly true: we cannot affect the past in any way that can change what’s already happened.
It’s also perfectly true that some of my fellow volunteers made the mistake of targeting moments in history that proved explosive to cultures founded upon those misunderstood moments. Still more explosive were news stories about the projection volunteers who returned from the past suffering strange side effects, consumed by poisonous thoughts and emotions long put to rest, feelings they rereleased into our present-day world.
Those news stories were true too, though I myself never experienced anything so negative during projection. In fact, my own experience was so much the opposite I felt compelled to join what’s being called New Spiritualism, a movement among deep-projection users that focuses on "weak interactions" with the past. Before long, I was an outspoken leader of this movement.
And that is why I was called on to testify at international hearings on the global crisis that deep-projection technology had triggered, hearings convened at the Hague in the fall of 2033. By that time, a worldwide ban on the use of the technology had been decreed, and most deep-projection centers were already shut down. Many had been ransacked by mobs, and in some countries, projection facilities had been burned to the ground, the staff and volunteers that made it out of the fires alive arrested or worse. . . . I was one of the lucky ones. Lucky enough to avoid being lynched, and lucky enough to be asked to present the first case-study on our technology at the international hearings.
Even the World Court was curious to hear about my one-of-a-kind case study–rumors had been circulating for months about an unusual group of Americans who’d approached me, seeking assistance for the innovative application of deep-projection they’d come up with. The court saw my story as a potential antidote to all the media horror stories concerning what scientists had seen or experienced in the remote past.
When I walked to the podium in that great court, I began by stating emphatically that deep-projection was not a dangerous technology in and of itself. It was not, after all, a weapon. It was merely a kind of transportation device. So whether it was used for good or for ill depended on us.
Then I shared with the members of the World Court what I’m about to share with you: the case of a voluntary projection made by an inmate of Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary in Pennsylvania.
What follows is adapted from the inmate’s deposition. . . .
Raed was in his thirtieth year of incarceration at Lewisburg when they made him the offer to participate.
It happened on the day of his annual psych review, and the instant he entered the review room Raed knew something big was up. The faces on the penitentiary’s psych panel changed slowly over the decades. A few more wrinkles, an occasional fresh new face to replace a retiree; but few new emotions. Yet three new faces were visible on the panel. And Lew’s balding senior psychologist looked guarded, even confused.
Plus there were a couple of lawyers present in the room, which was very odd indeed. Raed hadn’t even seen a lawyer since 2014. . . .
"Please sit down."
A guard ushered Raed to the lone chair facing the table of psychologists. He lowered himself onto the chair, feeling small, even though he was taller than anyone on the five-man panel; he could see right over their heads to the mirrored observation-pane in the wall behind them. Raed was careful not to look directly into the mirrored pane, not because he was afraid of being watched–after thirty years at Lew, he’d feel out of sorts if he wasn’t watched–but because he didn’t want to see how much he’d aged in Lew. There were no mirrors back in his cell, of course.
"Something different on the agenda today, Raed," Lew’s senior psychologist said, managing to sound both weary and impatient. "I’d like to start by informing you of an assessment made by our medical staff." The old man held up a slate plugged into the table, read from it: "Raed, you were twenty-four years old when given over to the supervision of this penitentiary. With the supplements we feed you and with the fitness routine you’ve elected to maintain, the prognosis is you’ll have another fifty years with us here at Lew."
That simple assessment slammed into Raed. He blinked at the senior psychologist, feeling disoriented, drawn out of the "safe-houses" the man claimed Raed had in his head. Fifty more years!
He hardly heard what the two sharply dressed lawyers were trying to tell him.
". . . which is why we’re your court-appointed representation. We’re here to tell you about a petition made by a group of interested citizens."
What were these men going on about?
"Concerning an experimental rehab program," one of them continued, "that might be looked upon favorably by the Federal Board later, if you agree to undergo it."
Raed suddenly laughed, something he did so rarely it hurt his throat a little. "To what end?" he asked them. "Reducing one of my life-sentences?"
Raed was serving two thousand back-to-back life-terms. Convicted of being an accomplice to "one of the most heinous crimes in recorded history," he’d received the longest prison sentence ever handed out by a United States court–partially because he’d been a naturalized American citizen, but mostly because he’d been fully aware of the outcome of the crime. So Raed was never going to be released, reintroduced to society.
Extending him an offer of rehab was a ridiculous gesture.
"See this program through, and who can say what’s possible?" The lawyer shrugged. "For now, two things are directly on the table. One: an opportunity to see your daughter."
Again Raed blinked at them, feeling his face reddening, stunned into apoplectic silence. When he’d entered Lew, he’d left a wife and a three-year-old daughter behind. And the last time lawyers had come to see him was back in Raed’s thirteenth year here, when he’d been served divorce papers from Haifa and papers disowning him as a parent from Basma, his daughter. Basma would have just been old enough to sign those papers, that year. Had she changed her mind, now that she was in her thirties?
"Also," the lawyer went on, "an opportunity to enter the world beyond your prison, in a limited and–well, unusual way." The lawyer said this as though he didn’t quite believe it.
Certainly Raed couldn’t quite believe it. He hadn’t seen the outside since his trial ended. The thought unnerved him, for he had no idea what the world was like anymore. "Who made the offer?" Raed managed to ask.
Now the second lawyer spoke up. "A group of citizens who have a certain relationship with you, but do not wish to be identified."
"Ah." Raed knew just what group the lawyer was referring to. He sighed, "I need to think about it."
After the review was over and the guards took him back to his home in Lew Cell #1, Raed found he couldn’t stop thinking about the astonishing offer made to him. Raed knew the group that had petitioned for the offer pretty well: an Arab-American Rights group that checked in on him over the years, to ensure he wasn’t abused in the penitentiary simply because of the notoriety of his conviction. In the occasional letter he’d received from the group every couple of years, they emphasized Raed must not advertise their low-level connection with him. They threatened to stop making inquiries on his behalf to the Lew administration if he failed to maintain their privacy.
Raed understood the group wasn’t actually "making inquiries on his behalf" because they were concerned about him, per se. Their concern–especially during the early years–was that Raed might take his own life in prison and become a martyr to his old cause.
Raed had no pent-up desire to become a martyr, and he was not considered a serious candidate for suicide–although, due to his uniquely lengthy sentence, he was permanently assigned to the suicide-watch list at Lew. If ever there was a prisoner who had nothing to looking forward to, it was surely Raed.
But now he could be a research volunteer for a new one-of-a-kind rehab program.
He would get to see his daughter, they’d told him.
He would get to walk the outside world for short stretches.
And for long stretches he would get to leave Cell #1, the largest and most expensive cell in the penitentiary, where Raed resided alone under constant guard and camera surveillance.
After thirty years, the cell was a home to him. Raed had taped up a picture of soaring desert dunes on one wall, a vista of the Moon over the ocean on another. He’d nursed a dozen plants up round the tiny window overlooking the courtyard that Raed could see out of, but no one could see in through. He’d even built up a modest bookshelf, though none of the books dated from this century. And there were no newspapers allowed in here, there was no television. Raed’s media exposure was censored from the start of his incarceration "in order to prevent continued political inflammation of the prisoner."
Nevertheless, in the early years Raed protested this political censorship of news by cutting himself off from all news, all knowledge of outside events. He’d withdrawn from modern civilization completely the day he set foot in Cell #1. And why not? Raed had lost everything. So he restricted himself to reading older texts, like the Alif Layla Wa Layla, the Thousand and One Nights. Shaherazade, it turned out, provided a soothing escape for a man sentenced to spend ten thousand and one nights in a single room. At his own insistence, none of the books on Raed’s shelf were published after the day of infamy he’d been convicted of participating in: the day the Lew staff still referred to as "9/11."
In the early years, Raed’s psychologists hadn’t been bothered by his self-censorship. But after the first decade, they changed their minds, complaining that he was retreating too far from reality. That’s when the psychologists began to talk about "safe-rooms" in his mind, about a "labyrinth of rooms" he was building to escape not just from imprisonment but from himself. Raed snorted when he first heard this metaphor–but even then he’d suspected the description was all too apt.
An internal labyrinth. A long chain of rooms within rooms to hide in at the back of his mind.
For years he’d been building them, extending himself into new selves, splinter-selves that left his memories of life on the outside stored in some distant mental "room." In the decades since Raed arrived at Lew, the administration had constructed four new versions of Cell #1 just for him, each room a little more livable, more "humane" than the last. Over the same period, Raed probably constructed forty new rooms inside his head, just to block away the portions of his mind he didn’t need anymore. The first to go was his entire twenty-four-year-old "outside-self," long lost now, dropped down some dusty crevice of the labyrinth Raed built to divide and conquer himself. During the ensuing years he’d wound his way deeper into the labyrinth, until he’d found a room strong enough to withstand eternal confinement and isolation.
After three very long and sleepless nights spent reflecting on his position–something Raed hardly ever did–he broke down and asked what was involved in the experimental program. He was told it involved a new technology, but much of the program itself would be left up to him.
A month later, Raed was taken out of Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary for the first time since he’d been brought into it. He was taken out just after dusk in an armored van without windows, and driven through the mountains toward a destination unknown.
By the sound of it, the armored van had a police escort, and the escort led the way for about an hour, about as far as Reading, Pennsylvania might be, Raed guessed. Then the van stopped, and he heard the driver talking with security guards. Raed heard something else too, a muffled sound familiar from his trial: the sound of protestors shouting at the van. He was astonished to think the public had found out he was being brought here, had gotten up in the middle of the night to come here themselves–but Raed wasn’t surprised that people still harbored so much hate for him. On the rare occasions he gave interviews, Raed saw the wariness in the journalists’ eyes, caught them looking at him like a kind of living ghoul out of the pages of history.
The van parked in a loading dock. Raed was unloaded under guard, then brought to an empty conference room, wearing a monitoring restraint-collar that would sedate him instantly if he tried anything. Moments later, the same trio of young psychologists who’d sat through his review in Lewisburg entered the room, followed by a pair of middle-aged men introduced to him as "senior researchers." The two researchers began outlining their experimental program, describing the new technology Raed would be required to use. . . .
Raed listened to them, briefly astounded, then disappointed. "Projection" through a "dimensional fold" to a "targeted moment in the past"? Raed’s mind began doing backflips trying to guess what was really going on here. Had the legal climate in the United States changed? Had new forces declared Raed should be put through some punishment alternative to confinement?
He told the researchers flat out he did not believe them. Traveling to the past was impossible, he didn’t care how many decades had gone by since he’d been in the outside world.
So they took him down to the main "projection" floor, brought him into a room dominated by a big spherical cagework. There had to be a hundred different bars to the cage, not all of them completely encircling it. And hanging in the cage’s center was a body harness. Raed examined it suspiciously, wondering what exactly these men were trying to trick him into. . . . All the cage’s arcing yellow bars were studded with cones that pointed inward, toward the harness suspended by a dozen blue coil-cables.
"Questions, Raed?" one of the psychologists asked him.
"What are the curtains for?"
The long back wall of the "projection" room was concealed–to hide a viewing gallery?
But then one of the guards who’d accompanied Raed from Lew drew back the curtains, revealing a long pane of Plexiglas that separated the room with the cage from–
A much larger room with a hundred identical cages that were occupied by suspended people.
At least, the suspended occupants appeared to be people. Raed stepped up to the Plexiglas pane, pressed his face against it, uncertain whether he was seeing an image televised across the pane or a real room on the other side of the pane.
The arena-sized room was real.
The hundred-odd yellow cages seemed real.
But all the suspended people looked blurry, far-off, fake, like projected images. Most of the image-people were moving, some running in their cages, a few leaping and rolling in midair.
"Those people aren’t real," Raed said over his shoulder, unable to turn from the pane. He was mesmerized. . . . Abruptly, one of the closer cages flashed with light, and the false floating image-person inside was instantly transformed into a clear-as-can-be jumpsuit-wearing woman, a real-as-can-be woman who stepped out of the yellow cage, a little shaky on her feet, but otherwise not visibly worse for the experience. She began conferring with a three-man team clustered round display-desks adjacent to her big yellow cage.
"You’re telling me that woman was deep-projecting into the past?" Raed asked, noticing now there was a separate team for each harnessed and hanging "time traveler." If this was all a hoax, it was an elaborate one.
"Volunteers like her call it ‘ghosting’," someone behind him said. "You’ll see why if you decide to follow our program, and volunteer to try it for yourself."
The "volunteers" in the cages beyond the Plexiglas pane were not other prisoners, according to the researchers. The volunteers were mostly historians and cultural anthropologists, a handful of students, and others who routinely "ghosted back to the past" from this facility round-the-clock. Raed’s researcher-guides claimed the yellow projection cages allowed people to experience the physical reality of the past without fully being part of it.
But Raed knew that it was all a trick of some kind. If those volunteers were experiencing any sort of "projection," it was the sort of computer-fabricated reality the outside world used to call–what was the word? Oh yes: a simulation.
That was the only thing "projection" could be, the only thing Raed could bring himself to believe. . . .
His rehab programmers seemed prepared for Raed’s disbelief.
For the rest of the night, they cloistered Raed and his two Lew guards in the otherwise-empty conference room, so that Raed could browse through "holeos"–interactive 3-D training videos. The holeos began with a list of weird implications of "classical quantum theory": how subatomic particles appeared out of nowhere and then disappeared, how such particles could exist in many places at once, the development of a mathematics that suggested particles were boring between dimensions.
Apparently Raed’s rehab programmers knew he’d been exposed to such strange concepts before, while studying for his certificate in electronics.
Of course they knew. Raed’s electronics training came out at the trial because his certificate got him a position with the airline, a low-level job that allowed him to scrutinize airport security. . . . Anyway, one of Raed’s electronics courses had touched on quantum theory–mainly for the students continuing on into cell-phone or computer technology. Raed hadn’t understood the half-day "quantum overview" his college course included.
According to the holeos, Raed wasn’t the only one who hadn’t understood. Most physicists chose to treat the theory simply as a convenient way to calculate and predict the positions of particles, rather than believe the world could really be riddled by multiple dimensions. The holeo invited Raed to imagine Copernicus and Galileo choosing to ignore the overall implication of their new way of calculating and predicting the positions of the planets–and refusing to believe the Sun could really be the center of the solar system.
Raed didn’t see why it was important for him to know or imagine any of this. But he didn’t want anyone to think he was backing out of the program. He didn’t want to be driven back to Lew, not just yet. And he was an expert at biding his time. Patience and playing the game were the essential survival skills of a long-term prisoner.
So Raed patiently sat through a tedious holeo-guided history of quantum-in-the-large, which elevated the theory from the subatomic realm up to far larger scales. He listened patiently to young scientists attacking the notion that "multiple dimensions collapsed into a single dimension" whenever a human observer happened along–how could a theory of matter seriously include human consciousness in a central role? He patiently examined 3-D renderings of the first machines built to scan "N-space," a theoretical realm that surrounded and suffused the visible Universe with all manner of strange dimensions.
But when the holeos moved on to the topic of "forces experienced during projection into N-space," Raed must have groaned aloud, because his researcher-hosts came in and turned off the holeos. They didn’t seem disappointed; perhaps they’d thought he’d give up on their theoretical material much sooner.
Next they let Raed watch an old pre-millennium black-and-white movie that was supposed to give him an idea of what it would be like to be "projected" to a city he could do little but wander through.
The setting was Berlin, and the city was revealed through the eyes of two angels wandering among the living–angels who resembled two somber German men in stylish dark greatcoats. The citizens of Berlin couldn’t see them, but the two forlorn-looking angels could see and hear people talking in the world around them. They could even hear the thoughts of people, although in those parts of the film the soundtrack reverted to German, so he didn’t get to hear what the citizens were thinking. All he could tell from the tone of their untranslated thoughts was whether they were sad or happy, angry or afraid. . . .
After it was over, one researcher sat down with him, described the projection experience as a lot like being a ghost lurking in an otherwise real world. Projection volunteers could see the physical environment of the past perfectly, but could not be seen by people in that past.
"Because," the researcher laboriously explained, "light is so low in mass that it merely has one-way transdimensionality. Volunteers can see light from the past, but past-states can never receive light from farther along Time’s dimension."
Raed nodded dutifully, wondering what all the researchers here were really up to, and why they would try so hard to make him believe in an impossibility. . . .
An hour before dawn, he was hustled back to the armored van waiting in the loading dock, handed printed materials to review if he wanted to, then whisked out through the unseen but audible protestors and returned to Lew to spend the day resting in his cell. Which was fine by him. Stepping back through the door of Cell #1 felt like waking from a dream. He didn’t feel so out of sorts here, so confused and vulnerable.
But he couldn’t sleep. The thought that he’d just been beyond the penitentiary’s walls had opened up a crack inside his thinking. He still didn’t know what to make of his night out. So much scientific argument just to convince him of something untrue?
Eventually he gave up on sleep altogether, and began looking over the strange explanations in the support material they’d given him, looking for loopholes, looking for the truth behind their lies. Raed used to be an imaginative man. But imagination was not a good thing to have in prison and he felt very rusty. Long-forgotten thoughts stirred up faded memories of his teenage struggle to master challenging Western concepts–an education paid for by the organization, the money funneled to Raed through his cousins Nazir and Sayf, both of whom died back on 9/11.
The truth about "deep-projection" finally dawned on Raed. Now he saw through the rehab programmers’ game, and saw how to get what he wanted: a chance to see his daughter Basma, whom Raed hadn’t seen since she was three years old.
With that reward firmly in mind, Raed finally fell asleep.
The next night, he was again driven out of the Appalachians to the deep-projection complex. And again he heard protesters out in force as the van went through the complex’s gates, although the van’s walls muffled whatever was being shouted at him. . . .
Waiting for him in the same conference room as before were the three psychologists and the two so-called senior researchers–his "projection parole board," for all intents and purposes. These five men could approve his participation in the program or send him packing for the rest of his life.
"Questions, Raed?"
He held up the printed materials he’d brought back with him. "Is it really necessary for me to know any of this before I can project?" Raed already knew the answer, but was curious to see how they’d try to rationalize it to him.
A compact researcher with close-cropped gray bristles instead of hair took the printouts back from Raed. "You reviewed all this?"
"Yes."
"Well then, let’s see where last night’s holeo-lessons broke off. . . ." He flipped to the final pages. "Ah, yes: N-space forces and the role mass plays in them. Complex stuff–but crucial to understanding what you’ll encounter during projection, how you can move around, and so on."
An evasive answer that simply pressed ahead with the logic crafted to convince him. Indeed, that was the ultimate purpose of all this preparatory theory:
To make Raed believe "projection" would show him the real past, so that the psychological benefits of the rehab program could take effect.
The science was all part of the rehab, part of the game these psychologists were playing with him. He recognized their bag of tricks well enough.
But Raed could play the game better than anyone. After all, he’d lived in America for seven years and played the game of being one of the ordinary people on his Brooklyn street without anyone suspecting his deep-seated separateness. So he would play along with tonight’s game, stay on the move inside his head, hop from room to room through the labyrinth until he came out as the winner. . . .
This time, the compact senior researcher with the bristle-hair remained behind when the others left. The man introduced himself as Francis Drummond, a volunteer himself during the earliest test-projections. He seemed committed to helping Raed understand the hard stuff.
"Get through an hour with me, and you’ll get to project for the rest of the night," Francis promised as he began summoning images onto the conference table’s display-surface: the Moon; a mountain; a building; a metal barricade. According to Francis, each of the displayed objects was massive enough to exert force "into many N-space dimensions." But people who projected through N-space into the past could apparently thrust their ghostly hands right through a foam mattress–or even through a pane of glass, if they were patient enough.
Raed nodded, knowing all this information was being trotted out to explain away the defects of the simulation he’d be projecting into. "Will I be able to walk through walls, like the two German angels in that black-and-white movie?" he asked, getting into the spirit of the game.
"If it’s the wall of a tent, sure. There’s a kind of ‘tingly give’ when you step through thin structures. But you can’t step through ordinary walls of concrete or steel, no. It all comes back to mass and massive structure. . . ."
Over the course of two hours with Francis, Raed struggled to keep on top of the complex concepts paraded before him. Francis even told him about the big surprise from the earliest test-projections: "We discovered that life-forms of sufficient mass exert some kind of energy into a few dimensions; we call these ‘biomass signatures.’ Volunteers pick up these signatures when animals of a certain size wander close to them."
How did they simulate that, Raed wondered. "That include people?"
Francis nodded. "Conscious animals exert the strongest signatures. Please don’t interpret this as something ‘psychic’; individual thoughts are far too fleeting to be sensed. They essentially have no weight. But strong emotions can last a long time in the forebrain, fill the hindbrain, contort the face, change the way we walk, permeate our muscle-tissues. Massive, you might say."
Francis seemed to be trying to reawaken Raed’s mind as much as teach him about projection. And that was all right with Raed. Because if he was going to go through their rehab program, and notice all the things they’d want him to notice, and win the reward they’d promised him, he’d need to be on the ball. . . .
"Well, that about covers it," Francis finally announced, shutting off the conference table. "Any last questions?"
Raed sensed this was a test he must pass. "You said gravity has ‘two-way transdimensionality’?"
"Yes." Francis seemed pleased. "It’s a strong-weak interaction. Gravity from the past is exerted strongly onto the N-space fold you’ll be in, and your own mass exerts itself weakly onto the past–"
"Doesn’t adding my mass to the past change the past? I thought paradoxes were outlawed by quantum-in-the-large." Raed’s rusty brain was beginning to work again. He wanted to show this clever man he’d been listening and he would catch flaws in his logic, if Francis wasn’t careful.
"Paradoxes are ruled out. Our technology wouldn’t work at all if it were possible to project into the future, for instance. And according to quantum-in-the-large, people who project through N-Space to the past already visited that past the first time around, so to speak. So their mass was accounted for, and their presence won’t change anything. They can only go back and weakly interact because they were there all along."
"I understand you perfectly."
"Excellent." Francis stood up. "I’ll send in a medic who’ll take you downstairs, get you hooked up to the cage."
The man strode out of the room.
And Raed waited, feeling out of his element, out of his cell, completely out of sorts. He glanced at the guards watching him from their shadowy corner of the room. He glanced at a bookshelf against the conference room wall, took down a text, looked at the cover: Creating Transient N-space Intersections with Past Time.
A book about a false bunch of theories? The book’s spine was cracked worse than Raed’s copy of Shaherazade, as though it had been thumbed through many times.
The crack deep inside his thinking hadn’t gone away; it was still down there, wedged wider by all the information they’d fed him. And now a hint of fear was seeping up through that crack. . . . Because Raed knew what his rehab programmers were up to, he could guess their "precisely targeted-destination," oh yes.
They intended to project him back to 9/11.
A burly male medic arrived, and led Raed and his two guards down to the same curtained chamber off the main projection arena, where the guards removed his restraint-collar. The medic explained that the chamber’s projection cage was the only one isolated in the facility, set up just for Raed. Then he helped Raed don the harness, which was worn under his clothes, against his body so the ’trodes could record biofeedback. After strapping it on, Raed got into a magnetic jumpsuit. The medic told him he could put his clothes on over the top of the jumpsuit.
So he did, fingers trembling as he re-buttoned his shirt. . . .
The pair of lawyers who’d first appeared at his review back in Lew suddenly reappeared with a slate for him to sign. They informed Raed about the protests being held outside the facility. The protests were not about him, they said; no one outside knew he was in here.
"What are they protesting?"
Apparently the people outside felt projection technology was too dangerous to be used. The lawyers assured Raed no volunteer who’d undergone projection had been physically harmed by the process itself; it was emotional damage, that was the real risk. The potent "biomass signatures" people gave off in the past could be quite corrosive.
"That’s the only danger?"
One of the lawyers told him, "There’s a movement called ‘New Spiritualism’ that contends the transdimensional interaction can be positive. Some New Spiritualists are sponsoring your rehab program, by the way. . . ."
But Raed was hardly listening, seeing more of the truth peeking out from behind their lies. The protestors outside were opposed to the simulations this technology produced. And now Raed had been brought here–because if they could convince him the simulations were real and use them to help him rehabilitate, wouldn’t that be a big coup for a beleaguered technology?
Raed signed the slate held out to him. Then the lawyers asked the medic to strap a special "ripcord" over Raed’s clothing, reiterated that he could back out at any time, and as they left the chamber, his personal projection team came in. An Asian senior researcher, a boyish-looking controls operator, and finally a woman psychologist–a Muslim psychologist, no less, wearing a black cotton burqa that kept her hidden and proper. Didn’t they realize Raed was no longer a devout?
As Raed was introduced by his guards, the woman’s wide-set black eyes looked coldly over the burqa-veil at him. No doubt she’d been sent by the Arab-American Rights group who’d petitioned to get him into this crazy rehab program.
The team quickly took their positions, the medic helping Raed through the yellow bars into the cage, then pulling down the blue coil-cables and magnetically latching them to anchor spots on the jumpsuit beneath Raed’s clothes. The moment the medic stepped out of the cage, the operators powered up the blue cables, which recoiled, hoisting Raed comfortably into midair. He tried to calm his breathing, and listened to the chatter around him.
"Got five hours."
"Time for, say, ten projections?"
"Aim for ten, minimum."
"Curtains open or closed?"
Raed realized this was addressed to him. "Open." He didn’t care if anyone looked in; he wanted to look out. So the curtains were drawn aside, and Raed peered at the hundred-odd cages across the main floor, which were again all occupied by volunteers, some in jumpsuits, some in tracksuits, some in regular clothes. Presumably this facility was packed day and night. He heard something below him, and realized the Muslim psychologist had stepped into the cage.
"Your program for tonight involves a number of projections, all of them focused on a primary time-locus–"
"I know where you’re sending me," he told her. "Back to the day I was convicted of being a party to. As punishment," he added.
The psychologist shook her veiled head. "It’s up to you what you get out of the projection experience. If you want the offer made to you upheld, you’ll have to stick the program out. On the other hand, if you decide you no longer want to continue–" She indicated the ripcord round his waist. "Pull this, you’ll instantly shut down the cage-frame and return to the present."
Raed had been advised by the lawyers that any ripcord shutdowns would be treated as a withdrawal from the program. "I’m not afraid," he said to her.
He was curious, though. Raed hadn’t thought much about 9/11 in nearly two decades. All by itself the mind sprouted rooms within rooms to tuck away what was destructive. And tucked a hundred rooms away from the Raed of today was the twenty-four-year-old Raed who’d aided and abetted his cousins Nazir and Sayf. He no longer had any connection to that Raed, but he was curious to know how history now looked on the events of that day. . . . The medic was now strapping a lightweight breather-mask round Raed’s neck. Would it secrete some kind of hallucinatory gas?
"In case we project you to the wrong coordinates," the woman psychologist explained, still standing below him. "You’d pass out in certain environments, but there’s little chance of real physical harm. Anyway, you can use the microphone on the breather to call out to us during projection. We’ll hear you. The people of the past won’t hear you, remember. Sound can only travel one way across the dimensional fold, just like light. Now brace yourself," she warned him. "The world of the past’s going to feel both startlingly real and surreal."
With a twirl of black cotton, she quickly slipped out of the cage. And within seconds the inward-angled cones on all the arcing yellow bars began to focus shimmering beams on him, opening a "transient N-space fold" around him. Raed blinked through the bars, met the hard eyes of the young Muslim psychologist, still refusing to believe–until the woman began to blur, and shift, and slide off to one side, and everything around Raed swirled into a tunnel of light–
A light thump, and the tunnel of light focused into a tubular space. Raed’s eyes adjusted, recognized an oh-so-familiar interior: he was inside a large, mostly empty 767 passenger jet sitting on a runway.
Raed had dropped down into one of the rearmost seats from midair, as the "gravity" of the simulation took hold of him. It was a simulation, wasn’t it? He blinked at his surroundings, seeing every detail of the seat-back ahead of him and the belts and buckles lying on the empty seats beside him, the empty row across the aisle, the magazines and folded-up meal tables all perfectly visible, his surroundings absolutely real no matter which way he looked. Light has a strong multidimensionality, Francis had said, but such negligible mass it can only cross one-way, from the past to the present. . . .
But then Raed noticed he was sinking right through the padded seat-cushion beneath him–he could feel himself bumping down against the hard steel frame inside the seat itself. Flaws in the simulation, just as he’d suspected! He let out a sigh of relief, and watched his body rebound slightly, settling into place almost on the surface of the seat cushion visible between his legs. It was a strange sensation, but Raed was sure it was controlled by the coiled harness cables back in the "projection" cage he had to be still hanging in. . . . From a great distance away, too far off and far too soft to be real, the whining sound of jet engines powering up. More like a whisper, when the sound should have been screamingly loud in his ears–another flaw! Raed felt he was hearing a faulty soundtrack in a movie theater too big for the speakers.
But then he recalled the materials he’d been given to study: sounds would be strange, nothing would be loud enough to make out unless Raed was standing close to the source.
Slowly the 767 went through a 30-degree turn on the runway, and the quality of light spilling through windows across the aisle made it clear to Raed this was an early morning flight. His heart began to beat faster. He leaned over the seat beside him, peered out the oval window. His plane appeared to be taxiing toward a main runway, and the airport was–
Logan International, Boston.
No doubt this was supposed to be the fateful day. Raed struggled to get up, wanting to see if he could see Nazir or Sayf seated in the rows ahead, biding their time until the 767 had taken off. But no, something was wrong–the weird far-off whining of the engines was powering down, shutting off altogether. Raed tried to get to his feet, struggling with the distorted friction of this simulation-world, all the while clinging to the fact that he was really attached to a harness in the air somewhere. In the seat ahead of him, a passenger was sleeping, one arm thrown across his lap, digital wristwatch visible: 9:13 am.
An hour after the time they should have been in the air, if this was one of those infamous flights. No wonder the plane was at a standstill! Plopping back down in the empty window seat, Raed pressed his face to the strangely rubbery glass of the window, caught sight of other motionless planes lined up on another runway. . . . On the morning of 9/11, all flights in the country had been grounded shortly after 9 am.
They’d projected him back aboard the wrong plane! Raed released a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
But if it was all just a simulation, under the control of the two projection operators, then shouldn’t this be one of the planes that had left Boston an hour earlier?
He moved back to the aisle seat, saw a stewardess walking towards him from the front of the plane, looking distraught, touching the passengers she passed on the shoulder, and speaking soundlessly to them. Raed heard nothing at all until she was quite close, then he heard the stewardess speaking four words to the passengers in the rows ahead of him: "Never forget this day."
Her voice sounded too loud, and more than a little hoarse, as though she was on the edge of tears. "Never forget this day," she boomed again, leaning in to touch the passenger in the seat directly ahead on the shoulder. She passed Raed by without looking at him, but her knee brushed his hand, resting on the hard plastic aisle-arm–
FEAR-ANGUISH-DISBELIEF! All three emotions flooded out of the passing stewardess and into Raed, the potency of his brief physical contact with her a kind of pain he’d never experienced before. He recoiled from the aisle, clutching his hand as though he’d been burned, and feeling certain in every fiber of his body that the stewardess had just been informed about the planes striking their New York targets.
For an instant, just one instant, Raed was clutched by the fear that he was not in a simulation. . . .
Murmurs were rising from the surrounding seats:
"What’d she mean?"
"Why aren’t we taking off? Know what’s going on?"
Raed rubbed at his hand, wondering whether stewardesses had actually acted this way on the real day of infamy. Two rows ahead and across the aisle, a man was listening to his cell phone, a shocked look dawning on his face. And in the aisle seat three rows ahead, a woman was standing, turning, walking slowly toward the back, moving as though she had arthritis even though she was only in her thirties. She looked directly at Raed when she came alongside him, leaned over him and repeated the same four words: "Never forget this day." Then she reached down to Raed’s shoulder, but before she could touch him, the woman’s arm elongated, slid away, there was a whirl of light and–
Raed was back in the deep-projection facility, hanging in the center of the projection cage, groggy and disoriented and fighting a desire to remove the harness, exit the cage, and ask to be returned to his cell in Lew. The veiled psychologist stepped through the bars beside him, gave him a thumbs-up to show his bioreadings were acceptable, wanted a thumbs-up in return–Raed was supposed to signal if he was up to continuing, ready for the next part of the program.
He didn’t give her a thumbs-up. Instead he lifted his breather, gasped to her, "I thought you said the people of the past couldn’t see me?"
"They can’t," she agreed, tapping a note onto the slate she was holding.
The projection cage operators called out that the target-coordinates were recalibrated, and the cage was ready for a second "folding." Was Raed ready for a second "ghosting"?
"They can’t see you," she repeated, covering her veiled mouth with her hand to remind Raed to refit his breather. "And don’t worry," she assured him, "you’ll get used to ghosting after another few tries." She slipped sideways out between the bars again, before turning back and adding, "You won’t be harmed, Raed."
Who did she think he was? Raed wasn’t afraid of a computer simulation. His hand still tingled from his brushed contact with the stewardess, but it was all a trick of the ’trodes lining his harness straps, all just a trick of the mind. He’d been conned into overreacting by all the holeo material they’d made him study, that’s all. He was playing the game so well he was beginning to con himself.
But they could not send him into the past.
And he was not ready to give up. The thought of being driven back to Lew was deeply comforting–Cell #1 was the only place Raed felt safe, felt under his own control. But Cell #1 was also a cage more frightening than this cage, and after leaving it two nights in a row, Raed knew the crack inside him was yawning wider. He sensed the new need pouring through, throwing the balance of his desire in the direction of continuing these trips out of Lew, no matter what simulation they put him through.
The psychologist gave him the thumbs-up again, and in response Raed balled up the hand that had touched the stewardess into a defiant fist, and said into his breather-microphone, "I am ready."
And said to himself only a simulation as the universe around him shifted, slid, swirled into the tunnel of light–
–which widened to become a vast, impossibly wounded sky. It was the sky of some inhuman world wreathed in shadow, pierced only by shafts of weird blue light, and threatened by thunderclouds that coiled not with water, but with ash that rained down on a dead land.
Another bump as Raed fell back onto a patch of ground littered with jagged concrete shrapnel and twisted piping, which did not cut him; he barely sensed any sharp edges. Pushing himself up off this rubble was extremely difficult. Raed struggled to stay on his feet, see where he was. All round him lay a spaghetti-panorama of tangled wiring, twisted metal braces, giant steel girders scattered like logs, sections of shattered furniture–and paper. Crests and swirls of scattered pages, documents jammed between wiring, sticking out from shards of concrete. Suddenly a nearby swell of paper shot skyward as steam vented from the unsteady, uneven landscape. Raed had "projected" to a place where some war had been going on forever, by the littered looks of things–a place worse than any he’d seen before coming to America as a teen. Far worse than any part of Beirut, where he’d lived for a time as a small boy.
Unfortunately, Raed knew the name of this impossible place.
"Ground Zero," they’d called it.
He appeared to be standing on the island of Manhattan, on the spot where the Twin Towers had stood–and stood not long before he’d arrived, if the roiling sky was rendered accurately. This time he seemed to have missed 9/11 not by an hour, but by twenty-four hours. Smoke still hugged the rubble-strewn ground like patches of fog; distant figures drifted in and out of this fog, mostly firemen and policemen; a few were using search-dogs, trying to sniff out victims trapped under the rubble.
Raed himself smelled nothing. Not the smoke, not the scent of jet fuel that should have filled the air. Not even the singed-cinder aroma from the ongoing fires in the distance. Thirty years, and they still can’t program smells properly in computer simulations, he told himself, but that was just his mind trying to deny what he was seeing: an inconceivably detailed landscape of devastation that extended for blocks in every direction, and a too-huge-to-fake sky above, drawing Raed’s eyes up through bluish curls of smoke to the heavens. Out under the sky!
His soul had yearned for open sky for three long decades, but now that he seemed to be standing beneath one, he felt it was too awesome, too exposed, too heavy, too terrible to bear.
So he turned his eyes down to the tangled ground, and began to pick his way over to the only source of noise close enough to hear: a soft hissing emanating from the mist-shrouded bank of rubble directly behind him. Clambering back over a filing cabinet that might have fallen from the Moon–it was flattened like a stomped soda can–Raed started slowly across the damp ground toward this soft sibilant sound, presumably a very loud sound "in reality." Keeping his balance was complicated by the fact that he kept plunging through an insubstantial blanket of papers and paper ash, soot and concrete dust, getting his feet stuck in crevices beneath this visible surface-blanket, yet leaving no footprints in it, disturbing nothing he fell against, moving nothing he grabbed onto for support. At one point, he blinked down at a pair of eyeglasses, both lenses starred, crushed underfoot–
But not by him. Whoever had worn them was not his victim, no. Raed could sense the old defense almost rising to his lips, could almost hear himself saying it in a courtroom long ago. America puffed itself too high in those two towers. Anyone trapped inside them had been trapped there by America alone, so they weren’t my victims. The old defense, the denial he’d dropped somewhere along the way, abandoned in an outer room of the labyrinth in Raed’s mind, rooms away from the middle-aged man he was now. It all seemed so long ago, too long ago to feel clear on the subject.
Nothing seemed clear about 9/11, especially not here, not now.
But then a breeze he couldn’t feel began clearing the mists ahead, revealing a looming shape just a few feet from him: the side of a huge fire truck, its designation ash-smeared but still visible. Tower Pumper No. 146.
Raed maneuvered round the front of the pumper truck, and dragged himself onto an adjacent mound of debris to get a better view of things. He was now level with the top of the truck’s cab, and he could see the mist was coming from a hose being aimed from the crow’s nest atop the pumper. A giant fireman in a soot-stained yellow coat stood in the center of the crow’s nest like an indomitable statue, soaking down a fire inside a half-collapsed structure sixty or seventy feet away. A second fireman lay face-down further down the roof of the pumper, obviously exhausted.
Only two firemen for a truck this size?
It had to be less than twenty-four hours after 9/11; otherwise Ground Zero would be swarming with volunteer firefighters from out of state, even out of the country, if Raed recalled correctly. From his debris-hilltop, Raed turned and surveyed the entire scene, which was opening up as the imperceptible breeze cleared more spray and smoke and steam away.
The scene before him might have been some imaginary rendering of the end of the world. Smoldering multi-story sections of both towers lay strewn about like so many titanic accordions, while in the distance, Manhattan’s financial canyons were on fire in a hundred spots. Closer at hand, the ground was draped with stretches of outer tower-walling, glittering and ribbed, resembling enormous metallic mats–or magic carpets used by giants from the Alif Layla Wa Layla, Jinnis that had vanished back into the sky, leaving behind explosive plumes of blue smoke. It was a vista more fantastical than any Shaherazade ever imagined. . . .
So unreal.
Yet this unreality was far harder to pass off as a simulation than the contained commonplace-reality of a passenger plane stranded on a runway. The interior of a 767 was a plausible space to model. But the exterior of New York, under an open sky? Around him the ground was seething, and crews of firemen and rescue workers were materializing from beyond veils of vapor swinging grappling hooks and pick-axes, each figure perfect and alive and real. Many of them disappeared into the gray-white crater in the center of this vast dead zone in time and in place.
The dead past.
Not rendered, not simulated.
Legs turning watery, going out from under him. Raed dropped helplessly onto the blackened husk of what might once have been a fine office couch.
Ground Zero.
Could his cousins Nazir and Sayf really have brought this about?
Could he really be here?
Real or unreal, Raed wanted this re-visitation to end. He was more than ready to return to the present. And if the first projection back to the grounded plane was anything to go by, he wouldn’t have to sit here long before they brought him out of all this. So Raed waited, watching the fireman atop the pumper truck hose down flames licking out of a crushed-accordion section of one of the fallen towers, and wondering whether he was seeing something that might be real, might be true: had the two men on Tower Pumper Truck No. 146 been working here through the night, fighting fires since the World Trade Center collapsed?
For an instant, the huge man working the hose lost his grip on it. A cloud of spray swept over Raed, and he swung his hand through the moisture without feeling a drop. Not massive enough, he thought, the science they’d fed him regurgitating an explanation for this flaw in the visual reality. Things will appear both startlingly real and surreal, the Muslim psychologist had warned him.
Suddenly the hose shut off altogether, and the weary fireman stumbled out of the crow’s nest, tore off his goggles, wiped tears from his eyes–no doubt he’d lost many firemen-friends when the towers came down–then the man collapsed on the pumper’s roof right beside his prone coworker. That’s when Raed became aware of a prickling sensation, a cloud of something uncomfortably tingly swimming over him. . . .
Heat! Heat was able to "span the dimensional divide" that purportedly separated Raed from this past. Heat was cumulatively massive, Francis had told him–it had sufficient structure to transmit a force across N-space. Whatever the case, he was definitely sensing a radiation from the burning accordion-floors not far away–an itchy, uneasy chill. A cold and ticklish pressure, unlike any cold he’d ever felt.
So this was heat in the land of the dead, three decades back!
Raed shivered, on the verge of believing again, wondering if those two firemen really were lying only a dozen feet from him, unaware of his ghostly presence. He rubbed the edge of his left hand, where it had made that fiery contact with the stewardess. Human contact was one that did feel hot in these projections–too hot too handle, which was why Raed was being careful not to get too close to anyone this time around. He would not touch any of the people he encountered at Ground Zero, and he would not be touched by them. He was not responsible. He was not the twenty-four-year-old who’d helped two cousins bring the Twin Towers down. That boy was long gone, locked down in the dustiest, most unreachable part of the labyrinth of Raed’s mind, the key to his pre-prison self thrown away ages ago.
So how could it possibly help him to see all this again?
But Raed had never seen Ground Zero the first time around, of course; he hadn’t dared venture anywhere near it in the aftermath of 9/11.
A minute after the first fireman shut off the hose and slumped down on the pumper’s roof, his resting companion slowly got up, climbed into the crow’s nest, and started the hose up again.
Fifteen minutes later, this shorter, stockier fireman began to tire too, stepped out, dropped onto his back in exhaustion. Then the larger of the two men rose again, and took his place back behind the hose.
Raed was left to imagine how many hours their tenacious routine had been going on. . . . After two more edge-of-exhaustion exchanges of duty in the crow’s nest, someone else appeared atop the pumper, a track-suited citizen just visible climbing up the ladder at the far end of the truck. A journalist, Raed thought, or some lost local too distraught to go home. Someone foolish enough to show up without a filter over her mouth, at any rate. The woman stepped right up onto the pumper, reached the fireman lying prone on the roof before her and was so overcome she crouched down beside the man, and abruptly embraced him. An emotional show of gratitude for his efforts to extinguish what was left of the angry fire from the jets. . . .
Or maybe she was hugging the spent fireman just because he looked like he needed it.
Raed didn’t have to wonder whether this sort of thing had actually happened after 9/11–he’d seen it happen, in the streets of Brooklyn just hours after the towers came down. He’d seen strangers walk straight up to a weeping member of New York’s Finest, and spontaneously embrace the policeman. New Yorkers had reached out to each other in ways that had surprised Raed that day. . . . Again falling spray clouded his view of what was going on, Ground Zero became a swirling gray, began sliding away, and–
He was back, praise be, he was back.
Pulling off the breather-mask, Raed gasped in mouthfuls of air and blinked out through the bars of his cage at the hundred-odd other projectors beyond the pane of Plexiglas, writhing and walking in their suspended states, ghosting back to other places and other times, if all this was to be believed.
No, no, no, he would not believe. Turning back to the team assisting him, he saw the veiled psychologist saying something to him from outside the cage, and again offering him a questioning thumbs-up, wanting to know if he was okay.
Raed gave her a thumbs-down.
She entered the cage immediately, her eyes alight behind the burqa–with concern? With contempt? "Are you unable to continue?" she asked him, fingers poised over her slate to make another note.
"Can’t you project me somewhere else?"
"Perhaps." She tapped in her note, glanced back at the researchers manning the controls, shrugged, then said to Raed, "I’m obliged to remind you: you can withdraw from our program at any time, if you don’t feel up for it."
She made it sound as though quitting was the obvious choice. Maybe she expected him to give up, go back to his cell in Lew and simply rot away for the rest of his days. . . . But the crack that had opened deep within Raed was wider now. It was swallowing the walls he’d built to hold the outside world out–his mind’s labyrinthine safe-house was losing whole rooms to that yawning insidious divide-inside. So he didn’t know if he could just give up and go back. It was surely not so easy as this wide-eyed woman made it sound.
Anyway, he was not about to give up.
"Send me where you will," he told the woman, waving her dismissively out of the cage, all the while thinking please let it be just a simulation! Bracing himself again as the beams shimmered on and the rift reopened, twirling the cage’s bars away, tunneling him back to–
A living-room in someone’s house.
Raed dropped softly onto a pine floor in front of an antique cabinet, bounced once, fell forward onto hands and knees, and looked around at the spindly legs of furniture handcrafted from some dark wood. He got to his feet easily, but saw no one down the hall of the house’s ground floor. Was he in some suburb of New York? Raed peered out a shaded front window onto a lawn gleaming in the Sun. The street at the end of the lawn looked broad and sleepy under large trees; there was no traffic, and the houses across the street were widely separated.
He doubted he was in New York.
The cage-operators must have heard the request he’d made to "project somewhere else" through his breather-microphone. . . . That, or they’d really missed the target this time.
No, it’s just a simulation.
Again, the light filtering through the trees onto the lawn suggested it was early morning; so did the dew still gleaming on the grass. Perhaps there were people still upstairs, getting ready for work. Raed cautiously made his way up to the second floor, and peeked even more cautiously into each of the floor’s rooms: guest bedroom, master bedroom, a spacious bathroom, a small office. The house appeared to be empty.
A window at the back of the office was partially open, so Raed slipped inside the room, glanced through the window over a side lawn at a neighbor’s clapboard house, then tried to put his arm out beneath the window. He had to push his hand right through the mesh-screen meant to keep the bugs out; he felt only a little gluey resistance. He got his arm completely out, but that was all–the window, presumably left open for air, wasn’t open enough for him to squeeze his head or chest out. And as hard as Raed pushed on the window-frame itself, he couldn’t budge it wider. He couldn’t move things in this world.
So leaving the office, he looked in again at the windows of the guest bedroom and the bathroom, found them all closed. The master bedroom at the back of the house had a big window, but it was closed too, and curtained for privacy. . . . Lying on a big bed beneath the window was a cream-colored blouse, a black skirt folded neatly, a frilly pink bathrobe. The sight of the clothing reminded Raed powerfully of Haifa, his wife. His eyes went helplessly to the framed photo on the bedside table, which showed a couple hugging on a beach. The woman was laughing. The man was bent to kiss her neck. Almost certainly a photo of the couple whose bedroom Raed was standing in–and placed on that table, he guessed, by the woman, as a proud memento of her happiness.
No such photos of Raed and Haifa existed, not even in his memory. What Raed remembered most when he thought of Haifa was her fear of him. He hadn’t treated her well, especially in the final years, when his cousin Nazir’s beliefs took a stronger and stronger hold over him. Turning away from this thought, Raed caught a shaft of sunlight streaming through a partly-open door in a corner of the bedroom. Stepping over to it, he discovered a bright bathroom, the morning Sun pouring gloriously down through a big skylight. After ensuring the bathroom was empty, he eased round the door into the Sun-filled space–only to find more woman’s things arranged on the long counter. Skin creams, make-up, hair clips, a big brush with fine black strands wrapped about its bristles. . . .
To his surprise, Raed found himself in the grip of an unbearably lonely longing he’d thought he’d gotten rid of ages ago–as though he’d just eased round a partially-open door into a room in his head he’d thought he’d lost the key to. Mixed in with the longing was an intense sense of lost opportunity. For Haifa had edged more and more toward moderation in America, whereas Raed had arrived a moderate and only became a devout in those last few years before the towers came down, under Nazir’s tutelage. And after the towers fell, after his fear grew and his family was taken from him, Raed gradually lost his devotion altogether.
So it was unpleasant now to recall how he’d fought to keep Haifa under his thumb, forcing her to accept a fundamentalism he hadn’t believed in when they’d married as teenagers. The innocent boy he’d been became a kind of monster, a fanatic to be feared during those final years of freedom, before he’d melted down into something else entirely during the first decade of imprisonment.
Melted down into what, though?
Raed had been careful not to step in front of the bathroom’s long mirror. Now he took a look, and saw–
No reflection of himself.
It was the eeriest thing, as though he was . . . what did they call it? A vampire. Raed was a kind of vampire in this past.
But if he was supposed to be back in September of 2001 again, wouldn’t he then look young again? Raed’s hands were still veined, mottled with middle age. He ran one hand through his hair, tracing the receding hairline, then ran the hand back down over his bony brow and over the breather-mask to his chin and throat. Clean-shaven, as he’d been back in 2001, to attract less attention in America. For a while, he’d grown a proper beard in prison. But a few years later, Lew started handing the new shaving gels out to prisoners–offering the prospect of a wipe-on, wash-off mirrorless shave–so Raed went back to clean-shaven again. He’d grown too used to the routine, during the years leading up to 9/11. Routine was the key to staying sane in prison.
Routines like avoiding mirrors.
Raed was glad he cast no reflection; he hated to think what he looked like now. A ghost of the young man he’d been for sure, his thick dark hair turned thin, his strong face turned gaunt, the high cheekbones of his people sticking out too much now. . . . But his fear of mirrors wasn’t really about becoming old, was it?
Another surprising memory breaking free from a locked storeroom in his mind: Raed realized he’d started avoiding mirrors before he went to prison. He’d avoided them immediately after 9/11 because he’d looked so awful. He’d looked twisted, like a monster even to himself–
Raed wriggled out of the narrow bathroom door and fled the bedroom, almost tumbled back down the stairs, forgetting how tricky walking was on an intangible carpet covering soft slippery wood beneath. When he reached the bottom–and got back to his feet–he began looking for a way out, wandering through the handful of rooms; living room, dining room, the long hall with its open coat-filled closet, a downstairs bathroom, a cozy den with a fireplace. Each of the rooms exhibited a down-to-the-last-detail visual authenticity, and each was a living space that made a mockery of the concrete cell he called home. None of the rooms, however, offered him a way to get outside.
Raed felt the wholly believable reality of this American home closing in on him, reducing the number of rooms for him to hide in in his mind.
The last room on the ground floor he managed to squeeze into was a blindingly bright back kitchen. One whole wall of the kitchen was floor-to-ceiling windows, letting in the sun and letting Raed look out over a patio and a long yard. Raed walked right up to the windows–one was actually a glass patio-door–and gasped at the vista before him: beyond a picket fence at the end of the yard, the land dropped through rolling green hills down to a small steepled village about a mile away. The village stood on the edge of a sunlit ocean, the waves sparkling off to a distant horizon.
Nothing Raed had seen in thirty years looked more like home!
It was not the home he’d been born into, a small village that had stood near waves of desert sand. No, this was the American ideal of home: a peaceful village with quaint clapboard houses and colonial buildings, like something out of a story book–a story Raed had lived for a time. He’d been a preteen when he’d arrived in America, and had lived all the years of his adulthood on American soil, so he knew its stories, knew its dreams. . . .
The dream-house he was in now looked like it might be on the shores of Rhode Island. He and Haifa had driven along that shoreline after Raed finished a bit of "security reconnaissance" at the airport in Boston. During their seaside drive, Raed had derided the storybook villages they’d passed through. Now he could not remember why the sightseeing had left him so unimpressed, or why had he’d been so eager to obey the organization ordering him to Boston in the first place. He must have been hiding in rooms in his head even before he’d reached prison. Hiding from the reality he’d lived in, hiding in a seventh-century corner of his mind and ignoring the twenty-first-century America around him. . . . But that was another Raed, not the middle-aged ghost from the future standing in this kitchen, looking with longing on the village down below, a wholly magical place Raed was ready to believe in.
He felt his throat tightening with emotion. He wanted to be back in this past, simulation or no simulation. He wanted to break free of the harness holding him to 2033 and wander down into that peaceful perfect village, buy a coffee in a shop, sit and listen to people talk, and never look back.
They’d said if he participated in their program he would get to see "the outside world again, in a way." Is this what they’d meant? If so, the psychologists had cheated him. The scene before him was so pristine it was heartbreaking to look upon. And Raed couldn’t so much as step out to the backyard.
Then he remembered what the researcher Francis told him about volunteers sticking their hands through glass. So he began to try, pushing hard against the glass of the patio-door, and gradually feeling his fingers sink into a surface like glue that had almost hardened. But after several minutes, he’d only managed to get the tips of two forefingers to peek through the other side of the glass. And he did not want to be stuck here if people arrived, came into the kitchen, and brushed up against him.
As he stood drawing his fingers back out, Raed glanced around the kitchen, and saw a calendar facing him from the nearest wall. It was open to September 2001, and on the week of September 11 the words TOM IN L.A. were marked across several days. The calendar could not tell him what day this was, of course; but Raed knew, oh, he knew. He turned back to the glass door, focused on freeing his fingers. That’s when he noticed the reverse-reflection of the digital clock on the stove at the back of the kitchen behind him. He turned completely around to see if he was reading it right.
8:45 am.
One minute to go on the last pristine morning of the world. One minute before the first of the four planes would hit its target. Raed drank in the view beyond the glass door for another few seconds, wishing this last moment could last forever, bracing himself for . . . 8:46 am.
Nothing happened. Naturally, New York was far from Rhode Island. His fingers finally popped free, and he stood there flexing his hand before realizing he was hearing a soft buzzing from somewhere. The front doorbell? No, it had be something close, in the kitchen. Raed walked around the room, and ended up beside the phone, which was ringing really loudly when he was right beside it. The ringing stopped, and an answering machine adjacent to the phone clicked on. A woman’s voice announced, "We’re not here, but you can leave us a message." Then the caller began to speak:
"Angie, I’m . . . it’s Tom," a male voice said, and Raed’s eyes shot to the calendar. TOM IN L.A.
"My flight’s been hijacked," Tom continued all too calmly. "I’ll try to call again, but don’t know if there’ll be time. Whatever happens, Angie, know that I love–"
Raed leapt away before he heard the end of the message, knowing the sound would drop off faster than it should–and it did, the rest of Tom’s words to Angie unable to reach across a foot more of kitchen floor. He backed all way into the patio door, disturbed and disbelieving. How could a man caught on any of those planes have been so calm?
It was a question Raed had asked himself over and over the day before 9/11. That was the day he’d driven his cousins across the state border into Connecticut and booked them into a motel on the Massachusetts border for the final night of their lives. Chipmunk-cheeked Nazir. And thin-faced Sayf, always skeletally thin, more than a little obsessed-looking. But Sayf and Nazir had both been calm and controlled during that afternoon drive through the Connecticut countryside, mentally preparing to sacrifice themselves when the morning came. They’d met with their cell-leader less than an hour before the long drive began, and had been let in on the target of their mission a little early because their leader trusted them. Nevertheless, Nazir broke down and let Raed in on their terrible secret before they reached the motel because Raed was kin, the last member of their family who would see Nazir and Sayf alive. After his cousins booked into the motel under assumed names–the names later published under their photos in the papers–Raed stayed in their room with them for a few hours before driving back home to Brooklyn alone, wondering all the way how his cousins could have been so calm.
Raed saw the light on the answering machine start to blink. He walked toward it slowly–wanting to be sure it was finished recording–then stared down at the damned machine, hoping the cage-operators didn’t make him wait in this house until Angie came home and listened to what was on it. But at least, he thought, as the kitchen began to slide sideways away from him, at least Tom had said what needed to be said to his wife–
Back, back in the present, and breathing hard.
Raed shook his head, wanting to rid himself of the sad end to such a beautiful dream, a beautiful simulation. He gazed blearily through the yellow bars, saw the hundred other spherical cages beyond the Plexiglas, scattered across the main projection arena. A hundred other volunteers were hanging in their harnesses, looking strangely blurred, squirming and swaying in midair. Folding back across N-space to a hundred lost moments in history?
It can’t be.
"Feeling all right, Raed?"
The woman psychologist was already in the cage below him again, waving a hand before his eyes to get his attention.
He dragged the breather down again.
"I feel. . . ."
"What?" She waited, one hand poised over her slate.
Lost, he wanted to say. Full of lost opportunities. Raed had heard passengers had contacted their loved ones from those doomed planes, but . . . he hadn’t ever contacted Haifa to tell her his own feelings–because he hadn’t realized how strong his love for her really was until too many years had passed, and it was much too late. So the acid dose of heartbreak filling him now was as much for himself as for the man who’d left that bittersweet message.
Raed peered down at the psychologist, knowing he was already losing tonight’s game badly. "You can’t make me believe," he said to her, no longer wanting to play any more games. "You can’t convince me I’m really seeing the past, I don’t care what you show me."
The woman nodded, tapping away at the slate. "What you believe is entirely up to you. And what you do where we send you–that’s up to you too."
"What is there to do," Raed retorted, "when I’m just as cooped up back there as I am in Lewisburg?"
"You really want to find out?"
Raed let out a long shuddering breath, unsure whether this veiled and proper young woman sounded hopeful for the first time–or whether she was trying to warn him about what was coming next. But he was sure of the answer to her question. Some part of him did want to find out. Something was stirring down in the crack through the core of his being: an ashen yearning to go back there and confront whatever they would show him.
"Yes," he sighed. "Send me again."
The look in the psychologist’s wide black eyes subtly changed. Surprise? She whirled, exited the cage, and conferred with the two operators sitting at their consoles. And Raed closed his eyes, knowing it didn’t really matter where they projected him to this time, because what he’d told the psychologist was the truth: he wouldn’t, couldn’t bring himself to believe that he was folding through "N-space" back to–
New York City, an empty sidewalk.
Raed dropped onto the walk as it appeared before him, caught his balance, steadied himself on his feet, and looked around. He was not in Manhattan, not in any of the busier parts of the city. And he was finally outdoors! No walls to hold him back, no mounds of rubble to block his progress. Free to go where he pleased.
Raed started up the quiet side-street he was on, heading for a larger cross-street so he could figure out where he was. He passed the steep steps of a row of four-story walkups. One of the boroughs, for sure. This was the New York he remembered, glad to have an image of it to replace the desolation of Ground Zero. . . . Blue skies above, a breeze rippling the leaves of a haggard tree on the corner. An autumn morning, for sure. Back in that morning once more? Before the attacks occurred? After?
The signs at the end of the street told him he was back in Brooklyn, on a corner several miles from where he’d lived; a vaguely familiar corner. Raed spun around, orienting himself. The East River had to be just behind the row-houses that were blocking his view of the World Trade Center. He couldn’t see whether the Twin Towers were still standing–but if they were, he could walk around the block and head down to the riverside, maybe just in time to watch the planes striking their targets.
Was that what the projection operators wanted Raed to do?
Surely it would do him no good whatsoever to witness the destruction of the towers all over again. He’d seen those images a hundred times on TV, along with everyone else. Surely it would be senseless to waste this precious chance to walk the world he’d lost by going down to the river to gawk. The Twin Towers were not his victims anyway–they were the West’s victims, America’s victims. . . . Raed started walking west, keeping the Trade Center’s location behind his back. His eyes kept turning to the perfectly clear skies, searching for low-flying passenger jets. He prayed he wouldn’t see any. Stopping at another cross-street to let a yellow taxi roll by, he felt certain he knew this neighborhood. Only a few people were out on the streets, and those that were hurried along as though late for work. The Sun looked too high to be early in the morning. What time was it? What day was it?
A New York Post box coming up on his left. When he reached it, Raed hunkered down on his haunches, and saw something on the cover page about "Ban on Cell-Phone Use While Driving."
But the date on the newspaper was 9/11, all right.
He walked on, hurrying now, spying a tiny park across the street not much farther ahead. Not much more than a grotto, really, but Raed began jogging toward it, feeling sure the visually stunning simulation of a New York morning he was moving through was about to change. All he wanted was a few moments of peace sitting beneath those trees before this blissful reality was yanked out from under him.
And then it hit him: he was near Basma’s Islamic daycare and prayer school, a small building at the other end of the little grotto park. No wonder all this looked so familiar.
Basma.
Raed broke into a run, remembering the promise made to him–that he might get to see his daughter again. Was this what the rehab programmers meant? Then they’d tricked him–they’d known perfectly well he’d hoped to see Basma all grown up. Raed ran for the school all the same, wanting to see his little daughter in this all-too-perfect recreation, suddenly wanting it very badly. Wanting to know once and for all.
As he ran up the block, something happened to the sky. A cloud of confetti appeared from over the four-story walkups on his left. Snowflake-sized particles were fluttering down onto the sidewalk ahead of him, some larger pieces of paper floating down too. . . . Documents! Memos and letters and receipts from all the way across the East River, fallout from Twin Tower offices. The paper cloud began to litter the tops of trees in the grotto-park as he passed it.
Just ahead loomed the Islamic prayer preschool, all the toddler-students dressed in their jackets and milling about on a fenced-in patch of tarmac alongside the school’s front steps. Half of them were roped together.
What was going on?
Raed reached the wrought-iron fence, and found the school’s entrance-gate closed. He struggled to get over the tall black bars but kept slipping down, unable to get any purchase with his shoes. There was no room for him on the crowded tarmac beyond anyway, so he strode impatiently around the fence, hearing the chaos of chattering and squealing, trying to spot Basma among the children. In the midst of the preschoolers stood a teenage girl dressed in salwar and kameez, gaping up at the sky in astonishment; a more resourceful Muslim girl was untying the rope tethering several kids together. Of course! The young teachers had been caught preparing the children for their eleven o’clock walk through the park. No TV was allowed inside the conservative classrooms, so neither the children nor the adults looking after them had any idea what was going on yet.
But where was his Basma?
The thickening confetti-rain was making it harder to see who was who. Unleashed four-year-olds danced through the downfall, turned their tiny faces upward, and grabbed at papers. . . . At last Raed spotted a child smaller than the rest, squatting with tiny hands on knees in a familiar blue raincoat, her head turned to the ground, looking curiously at the scraps of paper lying there.
Heart in mouth, Raed knelt outside the bars, as close to her as he could–but the girl scrambled away into the center of the crowd, vanished for a moment, and reappeared duck-walking toward him with an ever-so-Haifa-like look of concentration, creased brow, mouth drawn tight, sucking her teeth exactly as Basma so often did during the three years he’d been father to her.
God and the Prophet within, what am I seeing?
The child stopped just a few feet from him, crouched just as before, reaching now for a big file-folder that had just landed, its edge smoldering.
"Don’t!" he cried out. But the Basma before him did not pause, did not hear him, could not see him. Raed thrust an arm through the bars, and tried to snatch her tiny fingers away–too late: she’d grasped the burning edge and immediately let go. She began to cry, lower lip shooting out exactly as it had on the day Raed was taken away from her forever. He had not seen Basma since his trial, not until this very moment. . . .
For Raed knew in his heart of hearts he was actually seeing his daughter now.
His mind reeling, the world whirling, Basma blurring as she drew back, plopped onto her bottom–
"Please," he gasped into the microphone of the breather-mask, "I believe, don’t bring me back. . . ." But it was only his own tears blurring things. Raed was still there, still clutching the iron fence in September of 2001, inches from his real daughter.
Another teacher burst through the school’s side-door, teary-eyed herself, shouting something to the teenage girls standing among the children–something about parents coming early to take their children back, the city under attack!
Basma’s wailing finally drew one of the teens to her side. The girl scooped his daughter up, and Raed leapt to his feet, reached as far he could over the fence, Basma sobbing over the young teacher’s shoulder right in front of his eyes, his hand almost touching her hurt little fingers, almost. . . .
"We put a bandage on that?" the teacher asked, and little Basma nodded through her sobs.
Raed watched the pair disappear through the school’s side-entrance while the other two teens rounded the rest of the children back inside, out of the paper rain. "I believe," he moaned again, tugging his arm from between the bars, sinking to the paper-littered ground. "Now I believe." Raed had not allowed any cameras in his house during those last paranoid years of freedom; he’d certainly forbidden any video footage to be recorded of himself or his family in those years. And the Islamic daycare and prayer school could not afford any video equipment . . . so no one could possibly simulate the Basma he’d just seen.
Raed knew he was actually kneeling outside her school.
"Be merciful–let me stay," he prayed aloud, hoping the projection operators would hear his words in the future. "Let me wait here and see her again." But the wrought-iron bars of the fence were already sliding out of his hands. The school building was beginning to swirl into the confetti-sky, and he was starting to tunnel back–
To the present.
Hanging in midair in the yellow cage, his breath still hitching with emotion. Had Basma’s hand been bandaged when Raed picked her up from the pre-school that day? He couldn’t recall, and he doubted he would have noticed. That day Raed had been too busy worrying about being tracked down, accused, arrested. He’d spent the entire day wondering how to ensure he didn’t end up getting burned by the backlash to the World Trade Center attacks to notice whether Basma had already been burnt or not.
Not his victims?
Surely little Basma was his victim, if anyone was–and a couple of bandaged fingers was of little consequence compared to the inevitable consequence of losing her father. . . .
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