The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

know you’ve already figured out for yourselves. I’ll tell you the rest. Then at least we’ll have the same gaps.”
    She spent a few seconds considering how to begin.
    “We started testing the two cylinders Monday morning, in the labs. The first time we turned one of them on, it didn’t project the opening right away. Instead it made a sound. A sequence of high-pitched tones, like some kind of start-up process. We realized after a few seconds that both cylinders were making the sounds, in perfect unison, even though we’d only switched on one of them.”
    “Were they synchronizing with each other?” Bethany said. “Matching up so they’d open onto the same point in the future?”
    “They might have been doing that,” Paige said. “But there’s something else they were definitely doing, which we didn’t figure out until later. I’ll explain it when I get to that part.” She took a sip of her Pepsi. “The tone sequence lasted a little over three minutes. Then it stopped, and immediately after that, the projection appeared, from the one cylinder we’d switched on. Through the opening, all we could see was darkness. And then the smell hit us. Stale, dead air, like what it might smell like in a disused mine. We all put on ventilators. It helped a little. Then we shone flashlights into the darkness, and it didn’t take us long to realize what we were looking at.” Her eyes went back and forth between Travis and Bethany. “You know how it works, and you know we eventually determined that it was safe to go through, so I can skip to the relevant stuff. For starters, Border Town is empty in the future. The equipment is gone. The computers and paper records are gone.” She paused. “All the entities are gone.”
    Travis felt the wind shift around. Felt it blow cool across the back of his neck.
    “We checked out the whole place,” Paige said. “We spent the better part of Monday down there, walking the empty rooms and hallways of the complex. There are no bodies. No signs of any struggle. Basic furniture is still there. Some of the beds are made, some aren’t. It looks the way it would on any random afternoon, if everyone just left and shut off the power on their way out. That’s how it was in every lab, every residence, every common area. And then we went to look at the thing we were most anxious to see.”
    “The Breach,” Travis said.
    Paige nodded.
    “We couldn’t get to it,” she said. “We climbed down the elevator shaft, and three stories from the bottom we saw that it was a lost cause. Starting at Level 48 the shaft was filled in, and there was no way in the world to excavate it. It’d be impossible, even if you could move heavy equipment into the future through the projected opening, bit by bit.”
    “Why?” Travis said. “What’s filling it?”
    “Do you remember Heavy Rags?”
    He nodded. Heavy Rags were the most common type of entity to emerge from the Breach. They’d been coming through almost daily since 1978. Each one was dark green, about the size of a washcloth, and weighed over 2,800 pounds. The nature of the material had eluded all attempts at understanding, even after three decades of study by physicists within Tangent. The most they could say was that Heavy Rags weren’t made of atoms. They were dense sheets of some smaller kind of particle—maybe quarks, but that was a guess at best—that were somehow stabilized in that arrangement. Handling them was a logistical chore. There was a wheeled chainfall down on Level 51 with a specially made titanium claw, there for the sole purpose of moving the rags around. They couldn’t be stored anywhere in the complex but the bottom floor, and most of them weren’t even kept there. Over the years, Tangent personnel had bored dozens of foot-wide shafts into the concrete floor of Level 51, all the way to the granite bedrock that lay beneath Border Town. These shafts were the final resting place for nearly all of the roughly ten thousand Heavy Rags that’d come through the Breach over the years.
    “And you remember the Doubler,” Paige said, not asking.
    Travis nodded again. The Doubler had figured centrally in his dreams, at least one night in three, over the past two years. He often woke from those dreams pounding his knuckles bloody on the headboard, with fog-amplified voices still screaming in his head.
    “Heavy Rags are one of the very few entities that can be doubled,” Paige said. “In the future, the bottom three