PREVIOUS CHAPTER
In a gray, windowless room, with uncovered light bulbs beating down on us, Li and I waited for Agent Cooper to return.
“I hope he brings cheeseburgers,” said Li. “I’m starving.”
Our handcuffs were linked to the table through steel loops.
“They questioned me and Hollywood in a room like this,” I said.
“How’s Hollywood doing these days?” asked Li.
I’d last run into Hollywood in a San Diego bar. Just before I arrived, he must have started a brawl, because I came through the door just as the biggest guy in the place smashed a barstool over his stubborn blond head. I dragged him out the door and down the street, and in return I received a drunken wallop in the eye.
“This is why nobody likes you,” I told him as I staggered away.
He fell against a telephone pole and steadied himself by wrapping his arms around it.
“Hey, Tetris, you know what?” he said as his head lolled back and forth.
“What?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
I realized Li was still waiting for a response and shook myself back to reality.
“I think he’s doing fine,” I lied.
Agent Cooper came through the door, an enormous brown paper bag cradled in his arms.
“Not quite cheeseburgers,” he said. “There’s a great Indian place right down the street. Gimme a sec, I’ll go grab some plates.”
He placed the bag on the table and left. Li stretched against the handcuffs and managed to tug the food over to her. Rooting through, she laid each ingredient out on the table. Despite myself, I was pleased. Indian food was my second-favorite cuisine. It dawned on me that Cooper probably knew that, and my mood soured again.
“They have us under surveillance all the time, you think?” I asked. “When we get out of here I’m going to check my apartment for bugs.”
“Motherfucker even knew our orders,” said Li. “Chicken korma, vegetable pakoras, lamb biriyani. No mango lassi, though. Good thing Zip’s not here. He’d throw a fit.”
We munched on the pakoras as we waited for Cooper to return. They were the crispy kind: my favorite. The door was ajar.
I considered the odds of a successful escape. Slim to nil. We were four floors underground. Even if we got out of the handcuffs, we’d passed countless armed security checkpoints on the way down. Still, it seemed sloppy to leave that door open. Perhaps a calculated play by Cooper to make us feel at ease? There were probably guards waiting right outside. And anyway, we were being watched, possibly by dozens of people, through the security camera in the corner of the room.
“Sorry about that,” said Cooper when he returned. “Break room was out of plates. Had to run up a floor. Let me get you out of those handcuffs.”
He unlocked our handcuffs and stacked them at the corner of the table. Then he leaned back in his chair and watched as we tore into the food.
“Not polite to stare at somebody when they’re eating,” said Li with her mouth full. “Your mother never teach you manners?”
Cooper smiled.
“She certainly tried,” he said.
“Where’d you take Zip?” I asked, wiping the edge of my mouth with a napkin.
“Hospital in San Diego,” said Cooper. “He should be alright.”
The food was delicious. I had to force myself to slow down. Gorging yourself after an expedition was a great way to wind up with a crippling stomachache.
“I’m sure you have more questions than that,” said Cooper.
Li shrugged and wiped her fingers one at a time.
“I’ll try to fill in some blanks,” said Cooper. “First: those body cameras you wear in the forest don’t just record. They also broadcast.”
“Figured,” said Li.
“Signal can only get out when you’re less than fifty miles from shore, but that still gives us plenty of time to screen the footage before you arrive.”
“You knew about the monolith before Hollywood and I found it,” I said. “You knew about the tablet, about the stuff Roy LaMonte saw, you knew about all of it.”
Cooper nodded. “I did.”
“Why try so hard to cover it up?”
Cooper leaned forward.
“Let’s perform a thought experiment,” he said.
Li snorted.
“Let’s say we knew there was something in there, deep in the forest,” said Cooper. “Something big and scary. An entity we didn’t fully understand. What would we do?”
“Warn everyone,” said Li. “And then kill it.”
“Come on. Would we want to advertise its presence to the world? Would we want to get everybody riled up and worried about this thing, before we fully understood what it was, and what it wanted, and what it was capable of?”
He seemed to be waiting for a response, and I enjoyed refusing to give him one, instead molding my features into a blithe stare.
“No, we would not tell everyone,” said Cooper smugly. “First: it would cause panic, perhaps unnecessarily. More importantly, from a strategic perspective, it would tell the thing in the forest — the entity, the civilization, whatever it was — it would tell it that we knew it was there.”
“People have a right to know,” said Li.
Cooper laughed uproariously.
“Oh, that’s a good one,” he said, wiping the corner of his eye, his shoulders bouncing with chuckles. “That’s… that’s one of my favorites.”
“So the whole ranger program is fake?” I asked.
He turned to look at me, slowly regaining his composure.
“Well, rangers would probably have developed anyway. But yes, that’s a way to put it. You’re not just filming a reality TV show. You’re also providing reconnaissance, gathering valuable intelligence.”
“So what’s in there?” asked Li. “What have you figured out? What are we dealing with?”
“When you’re finished eating,” said Cooper, “I’ll take you to someone who can tell you everything we know.”
We followed Cooper into an elevator and he hit the lowest button. The elevator hummed as it plummeted. Cooper’s suit was immaculate, well-pressed, and perfectly fitted to his slight frame. Beside him, Li was coated in grime, mud caked on her boots up to the ankles. Her face was dark with dirt. Both of us left clods of dried mud and brown smears on the linoleum everywhere we went.
“No guards this time?” asked Li. “Guess you figured out they wouldn’t be much help.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said Cooper, straightening his tie.
“You don’t give rangers enough credit,” I said. “Just because those guys are bigger doesn’t mean they’re more dangerous.”
Cooper tilted his head to the side and examined me, eyes half-lidded.
“You’re more cocky than I remembered,” he said. “I thought Rivers was supposed to beat that out of you.”
“Not cocky,” I said. “Just honest.”
“You remember the big gentleman who sat beside you in the van?” asked Cooper.
“Yeah.”
“He was a POW for a week or two in Afghanistan,” said Cooper. “Only for a week or two, though. When they tried to interrogate him, he snapped the restraints and went at them.”
I grinned.
“Strong dude,” I said. “I get it.”
“They shot him four times, point blank range. Two bullets in the shoulder, two in the gut. In exchange for which he killed eight of them with his bare hands.”
Li shifted her weight to the other foot.
“After that he had a weapon. Escape from the camp was easy. But he had to cross the desert, walk a hundred miles, with no food and only the water he could carry.”
The elevator jolted to a stop. With an airy ding, the doors parted.
“I’m not saying you don’t have a hard job,” said Cooper as he exited. “Just that you’re not the only ones.”
He took us through a maze of corridors, finally stopping before a pair of double doors.
“Try to behave,” he said, and pushed the doors open.
On the other side was an enormous pit of a room with descending tiers separated by corrugated steel steps. Everywhere you looked, complex machinery chimed and blinked. In the center of the room, at a table with a hologram projected above it, stood a woman with hair down past her shoulders. She wore a white lab coat. When we entered the room she turned to look up at us.
“Hey, Coop,” she said. “Who are they?”
She spoke quietly, but somehow her voice still reached us. Cooper trotted down the steps toward her, and after a moment we followed.
“Rangers,” he said.
“I can see that,” said the woman. “You couldn’t let them wash up first? They’re going to get dirt everywhere.”
You could trace our progress through the room by the forest debris we left behind.
“Sorry about that, ma’am,” I said.
“This is Doctor Alvarez,” said Cooper. “She can answer all your questions.”
“Try not to touch anything,” said Dr. Alvarez.
Li walked around the table, examining the hologram, which depicted a slowly-twirling molecule. Dr. Alvarez wore a thin glove with blue spots on the fingers. When she motioned with the gloved hand, the hologram shrank and vanished.
“You’re a doctor?” asked Li. Dr. Alvarez couldn’t have been more than twenty-six.
“Yes,” said Dr. Alvarez. “Now tell me what this is.”
She tapped a few quick keystrokes and a green globe sprang to life above the table.
“It’s the Earth,” I said.
“Indeed,” said Dr. Alvarez. “Here are the continents. Around them, the forest. Past certain latitudes, the polar wastes.”
As she spoke, she twisted the gloved hand, and the globe rotated accordingly.
“Now,” said Dr. Alvarez, “can either of you tell me how life on Earth originated?”
I looked at Li. Science hadn’t been my best subject. To be fair, I hadn’t really paid attention in any of my subjects.
“In the water,” said Li. “Single-celled organisms in the lakes.”
“Close, but wrong,” said Dr. Alvarez.
Li furrowed her brow.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “That’s what they —”
“Yes, that’s what they teach you in school, I know that,” said Dr. Alvarez, “but it’s wrong.”
A few more keystrokes and the Earth was replaced by a blue globe with a single gigantic continent in the middle.
“This is the Earth,” said Dr. Alvarez, “one billion years ago.”
I watched the globe as it spun.
“What’s all the blue?” I asked.
“Water,” said Dr. Alvarez.
My head thumped.
“Where’s the forest?” I asked.
Dr. Alvarez turned away from the globe.
“Exactly,” she said.
Li glowered.
“You’re telling me the whole planet used to be one huge lake?”
Dr. Alvarez nodded.
“They’re called oceans,” she said, “from the Greek ‘okeanos,’ meaning ‘great river.’ And it’s there, in the oceans, that all life on Earth began.”
I was suddenly very tired. I found myself wishing for a place to sit down.
“How do you know?” asked Li.
“The geological records leave no room for doubt,” said Dr. Alvarez. “Until about sixty-five million years ago, seventy percent of the Earth’s surface was covered by water. After that? No more oceans. Instead, forest.”
“Oh,” said Li.
“You see,” said Dr. Alvarez, tapping out a few more keystrokes, “the forests are not natural. They’re not supposed to be there.”
Above, the globe morphed once again. Now I recognized the outlines of the modern continents, but instead of being surrounded by forest and white-brown polar wasteland, these continents floated atop endless blue water. It was a dazzling sight.
“That’s what the world is supposed to look like,” said Dr. Alvarez, with just the slightest hint of sadness.
The four of us stared as the globe slowly rotated. I couldn’t even imagine that much water. You could swim for years and never make it across.
“Something, or someone, put the forest there,” said Dr. Alvarez. “And it’s our job to figure out why.”
NEXT CHAPTER
In a gray, windowless room, with uncovered light bulbs beating down on us, Li and I waited for Agent Cooper to return.
“I hope he brings cheeseburgers,” said Li. “I’m starving.”
Our handcuffs were linked to the table through steel loops.
“They questioned me and Hollywood in a room like this,” I said.
“How’s Hollywood doing these days?” asked Li.
I’d last run into Hollywood in a San Diego bar. Just before I arrived, he must have started a brawl, because I came through the door just as the biggest guy in the place smashed a barstool over his stubborn blond head. I dragged him out the door and down the street, and in return I received a drunken wallop in the eye.
“This is why nobody likes you,” I told him as I staggered away.
He fell against a telephone pole and steadied himself by wrapping his arms around it.
“Hey, Tetris, you know what?” he said as his head lolled back and forth.
“What?”
“Go fuck yourself.”
I realized Li was still waiting for a response and shook myself back to reality.
“I think he’s doing fine,” I lied.
Agent Cooper came through the door, an enormous brown paper bag cradled in his arms.
“Not quite cheeseburgers,” he said. “There’s a great Indian place right down the street. Gimme a sec, I’ll go grab some plates.”
He placed the bag on the table and left. Li stretched against the handcuffs and managed to tug the food over to her. Rooting through, she laid each ingredient out on the table. Despite myself, I was pleased. Indian food was my second-favorite cuisine. It dawned on me that Cooper probably knew that, and my mood soured again.
“They have us under surveillance all the time, you think?” I asked. “When we get out of here I’m going to check my apartment for bugs.”
“Motherfucker even knew our orders,” said Li. “Chicken korma, vegetable pakoras, lamb biriyani. No mango lassi, though. Good thing Zip’s not here. He’d throw a fit.”
We munched on the pakoras as we waited for Cooper to return. They were the crispy kind: my favorite. The door was ajar.
I considered the odds of a successful escape. Slim to nil. We were four floors underground. Even if we got out of the handcuffs, we’d passed countless armed security checkpoints on the way down. Still, it seemed sloppy to leave that door open. Perhaps a calculated play by Cooper to make us feel at ease? There were probably guards waiting right outside. And anyway, we were being watched, possibly by dozens of people, through the security camera in the corner of the room.
“Sorry about that,” said Cooper when he returned. “Break room was out of plates. Had to run up a floor. Let me get you out of those handcuffs.”
He unlocked our handcuffs and stacked them at the corner of the table. Then he leaned back in his chair and watched as we tore into the food.
“Not polite to stare at somebody when they’re eating,” said Li with her mouth full. “Your mother never teach you manners?”
Cooper smiled.
“She certainly tried,” he said.
“Where’d you take Zip?” I asked, wiping the edge of my mouth with a napkin.
“Hospital in San Diego,” said Cooper. “He should be alright.”
The food was delicious. I had to force myself to slow down. Gorging yourself after an expedition was a great way to wind up with a crippling stomachache.
“I’m sure you have more questions than that,” said Cooper.
Li shrugged and wiped her fingers one at a time.
“I’ll try to fill in some blanks,” said Cooper. “First: those body cameras you wear in the forest don’t just record. They also broadcast.”
“Figured,” said Li.
“Signal can only get out when you’re less than fifty miles from shore, but that still gives us plenty of time to screen the footage before you arrive.”
“You knew about the monolith before Hollywood and I found it,” I said. “You knew about the tablet, about the stuff Roy LaMonte saw, you knew about all of it.”
Cooper nodded. “I did.”
“Why try so hard to cover it up?”
Cooper leaned forward.
“Let’s perform a thought experiment,” he said.
Li snorted.
“Let’s say we knew there was something in there, deep in the forest,” said Cooper. “Something big and scary. An entity we didn’t fully understand. What would we do?”
“Warn everyone,” said Li. “And then kill it.”
“Come on. Would we want to advertise its presence to the world? Would we want to get everybody riled up and worried about this thing, before we fully understood what it was, and what it wanted, and what it was capable of?”
He seemed to be waiting for a response, and I enjoyed refusing to give him one, instead molding my features into a blithe stare.
“No, we would not tell everyone,” said Cooper smugly. “First: it would cause panic, perhaps unnecessarily. More importantly, from a strategic perspective, it would tell the thing in the forest — the entity, the civilization, whatever it was — it would tell it that we knew it was there.”
“People have a right to know,” said Li.
Cooper laughed uproariously.
“Oh, that’s a good one,” he said, wiping the corner of his eye, his shoulders bouncing with chuckles. “That’s… that’s one of my favorites.”
“So the whole ranger program is fake?” I asked.
He turned to look at me, slowly regaining his composure.
“Well, rangers would probably have developed anyway. But yes, that’s a way to put it. You’re not just filming a reality TV show. You’re also providing reconnaissance, gathering valuable intelligence.”
“So what’s in there?” asked Li. “What have you figured out? What are we dealing with?”
“When you’re finished eating,” said Cooper, “I’ll take you to someone who can tell you everything we know.”
We followed Cooper into an elevator and he hit the lowest button. The elevator hummed as it plummeted. Cooper’s suit was immaculate, well-pressed, and perfectly fitted to his slight frame. Beside him, Li was coated in grime, mud caked on her boots up to the ankles. Her face was dark with dirt. Both of us left clods of dried mud and brown smears on the linoleum everywhere we went.
“No guards this time?” asked Li. “Guess you figured out they wouldn’t be much help.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” said Cooper, straightening his tie.
“You don’t give rangers enough credit,” I said. “Just because those guys are bigger doesn’t mean they’re more dangerous.”
Cooper tilted his head to the side and examined me, eyes half-lidded.
“You’re more cocky than I remembered,” he said. “I thought Rivers was supposed to beat that out of you.”
“Not cocky,” I said. “Just honest.”
“You remember the big gentleman who sat beside you in the van?” asked Cooper.
“Yeah.”
“He was a POW for a week or two in Afghanistan,” said Cooper. “Only for a week or two, though. When they tried to interrogate him, he snapped the restraints and went at them.”
I grinned.
“Strong dude,” I said. “I get it.”
“They shot him four times, point blank range. Two bullets in the shoulder, two in the gut. In exchange for which he killed eight of them with his bare hands.”
Li shifted her weight to the other foot.
“After that he had a weapon. Escape from the camp was easy. But he had to cross the desert, walk a hundred miles, with no food and only the water he could carry.”
The elevator jolted to a stop. With an airy ding, the doors parted.
“I’m not saying you don’t have a hard job,” said Cooper as he exited. “Just that you’re not the only ones.”
He took us through a maze of corridors, finally stopping before a pair of double doors.
“Try to behave,” he said, and pushed the doors open.
On the other side was an enormous pit of a room with descending tiers separated by corrugated steel steps. Everywhere you looked, complex machinery chimed and blinked. In the center of the room, at a table with a hologram projected above it, stood a woman with hair down past her shoulders. She wore a white lab coat. When we entered the room she turned to look up at us.
“Hey, Coop,” she said. “Who are they?”
She spoke quietly, but somehow her voice still reached us. Cooper trotted down the steps toward her, and after a moment we followed.
“Rangers,” he said.
“I can see that,” said the woman. “You couldn’t let them wash up first? They’re going to get dirt everywhere.”
You could trace our progress through the room by the forest debris we left behind.
“Sorry about that, ma’am,” I said.
“This is Doctor Alvarez,” said Cooper. “She can answer all your questions.”
“Try not to touch anything,” said Dr. Alvarez.
Li walked around the table, examining the hologram, which depicted a slowly-twirling molecule. Dr. Alvarez wore a thin glove with blue spots on the fingers. When she motioned with the gloved hand, the hologram shrank and vanished.
“You’re a doctor?” asked Li. Dr. Alvarez couldn’t have been more than twenty-six.
“Yes,” said Dr. Alvarez. “Now tell me what this is.”
She tapped a few quick keystrokes and a green globe sprang to life above the table.
“It’s the Earth,” I said.
“Indeed,” said Dr. Alvarez. “Here are the continents. Around them, the forest. Past certain latitudes, the polar wastes.”
As she spoke, she twisted the gloved hand, and the globe rotated accordingly.
“Now,” said Dr. Alvarez, “can either of you tell me how life on Earth originated?”
I looked at Li. Science hadn’t been my best subject. To be fair, I hadn’t really paid attention in any of my subjects.
“In the water,” said Li. “Single-celled organisms in the lakes.”
“Close, but wrong,” said Dr. Alvarez.
Li furrowed her brow.
“Wait a minute,” she said. “That’s what they —”
“Yes, that’s what they teach you in school, I know that,” said Dr. Alvarez, “but it’s wrong.”
A few more keystrokes and the Earth was replaced by a blue globe with a single gigantic continent in the middle.
“This is the Earth,” said Dr. Alvarez, “one billion years ago.”
I watched the globe as it spun.
“What’s all the blue?” I asked.
“Water,” said Dr. Alvarez.
My head thumped.
“Where’s the forest?” I asked.
Dr. Alvarez turned away from the globe.
“Exactly,” she said.
Li glowered.
“You’re telling me the whole planet used to be one huge lake?”
Dr. Alvarez nodded.
“They’re called oceans,” she said, “from the Greek ‘okeanos,’ meaning ‘great river.’ And it’s there, in the oceans, that all life on Earth began.”
I was suddenly very tired. I found myself wishing for a place to sit down.
“How do you know?” asked Li.
“The geological records leave no room for doubt,” said Dr. Alvarez. “Until about sixty-five million years ago, seventy percent of the Earth’s surface was covered by water. After that? No more oceans. Instead, forest.”
“Oh,” said Li.
“You see,” said Dr. Alvarez, tapping out a few more keystrokes, “the forests are not natural. They’re not supposed to be there.”
Above, the globe morphed once again. Now I recognized the outlines of the modern continents, but instead of being surrounded by forest and white-brown polar wasteland, these continents floated atop endless blue water. It was a dazzling sight.
“That’s what the world is supposed to look like,” said Dr. Alvarez, with just the slightest hint of sadness.
The four of us stared as the globe slowly rotated. I couldn’t even imagine that much water. You could swim for years and never make it across.
“Something, or someone, put the forest there,” said Dr. Alvarez. “And it’s our job to figure out why.”
NEXT CHAPTER