The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

of all possible universes. Paige had heard of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, but only as an interesting hypothetical notion. She’d been surprised to learn from Jhalani that it was actually a mainstream idea in modern physics. The thrust of it was that every event that could go one way or another actually went both. Every time you looked at wheat bread and white bread and chose white, some other version of you, out there in the great who-the-hell-knows, chose wheat. Physicists mainly talked about it happening at the level of subatomic particles, but if it applied down at that scale, then it certainly applied to loaves of bread and flights to Paris and shoe scuffs on tiled floors. In the end, Paige thought Travis had summed the Tap up best: it let you remember not just everything you’d done, but everything you could have done. A hell of a thing.
    She took another step toward her father’s desk. She’d be in his peripheral vision soon—right about at the point where she could read the map. The margin would come down to inches at best.
    It was critical that she get this right the first time—the first time would be the only time. The Tap’s one limit was that you couldn’t revisit the same memory twice. The techs liked to say that a memory was burned after you relived it. Not only couldn’t you drop into it again, you couldn’t even remember it the old-fashioned way afterward. The original would be forever replaced by the revision. Therefore an especially cherished moment—a first kiss, say—was better left alone.
    Another step.
    If it came down to it, she had options. This was, for all its considerable bells and whistles, only a memory. Nothing she did here would be of consequence in the real world after she woke up. Which meant she could leap at her father, shove him away from the computer, and read the map before he had time to react. At that point she could simply be done with the whole thing—to end this memory she needed only to concentrate hard on her last glimpse of reality: she and Travis sitting in the deserted corridor on B42. A good ten seconds of that image would take her right back to it.
    But she hoped to avoid attacking her father. Doing so would preclude the other move she planned to make here. The more obvious move, by far, though she wished she could forgo it.
    Another step. And another.
    The labels on the map were right at the brink of her discernment now.
    Another step.
    She could see the number on the big road running north and south. U.S. 550, it looked like. She thought that was somewhere in Colorado. Just above and to the left of the grid of streets was a word—almost certainly the town’s name. A short word.
    She squinted.
    Ouray.
    Ouray, Colorado. She’d heard of it. Some friends in college had stayed there when they went skiing at Telluride.
    Good enough. If she really wanted to, she could end the memory now.
    A big part of her did want to. The same part that hated the second move.
    Which was simply to talk to her father.
    It wasn’t that she didn’t want to talk to him. Quite the opposite. She’d been very close to him, especially in their last years together, and then she’d lost him in the worst imaginable way. When she’d first learned what the Tap could do, she’d considered reliving a moment with him. Something happy and good and warm, to replace the ending life had given them.
    But she’d resisted. Always. As real as it would feel, the moment would be fake. And desecratory, somehow. The whole notion had seemed wrong from the beginning.
    It still did.
    She watched him sitting there, unaware of her. She took a breath and smelled his aftershave. She couldn’t remember smelling it on anyone since she’d lost him. All those years, that scent had just been part of the background. A thing to hardly notice, if at all. It could make her cry right now, if she wasn’t careful. She let the emotions swim a few seconds longer, then shoved them all down into the deep.
    Time to do this.
    She backed away from the desk, turned and left the room without a sound. She walked to a spot in the hallway ten feet from the door, pivoted and faced it again.
    And cleared her throat loudly.
    She heard her father’s chair squeak at once, and heard the mouse scrape on his desktop.
    She walked to the doorway and leaned in, and found him staring at a file directory. She knocked on the frame and he looked up at her.
    “Hey,” he said.
    “Hey.”
    Her throat