Other Earths by Jay Lake, edited by Nick Gevers Read Free Book Online Page B

as the experimental films he’d seen in college to single shots of dead people to grassy hills littered with wildflowers. Ecstasy, grief, madness, peace. Anything imaginable came through in the adepts’ endless sleep.
    “Only ten people in the world know every aspect of this project, and three of them are dead, Mr. President,” the black-ops commander told him.
    Down below, he could see the little man, blue-tinted, going from vat to vat, checking readings.
    “We experimented until we found the right combination of drugs to augment their sight. One particular formula, culled from South American mushrooms mostly, worked best. Suddenly, we began to get more coherent and varied images. Very different from before.”
    He felt numb. He had no sympathy for the men and women curled up in the vats below him—an adept’s grenade had killed his father in mid-campaign a decade before, launching his own reluctant career in politics—but, still, he felt numb.
    “Are any of them dangerous?” he asked the black-ops commander.
    “They’re all dangerous, Mr. President,” the black-ops commander told him. “Every last one.”
    “When did this start?”
    “With a secret order from your predecessor, Mr. President. Before, we just disappeared them or sent them to work camps in the Alaskas.”
    “Why did he do it?”
    Even then, he would realize later, a strange music was growing in his head, a distant sound fast approaching.
    “He did it, Mr. President, or said he did it, as a way of getting intel on the Heartland separatists.”
    Understandable, if extreme. The separatists and the fact that the federal armies had become bogged down fighting them in the Heartland were the main reasons his predecessor’s party no longer controlled the executive, judicial, or legislative branches. And no one had ever succeeded in placing a mole within evangelical ranks.
    The scenes continued to cascade over the monitors in a rapid-fire nonsense rhythm.
    “What do you do with the images?”
    “They’re sent to a team of experts for interpretation, Mr. President. These experts are not told where the images come from.”
    “What do these adepts see that is so important?’ The black-ops commander grimaced at the tone of rebuke. “The future, Mr. President. It’s early days, but we believe they see the future.”
    “And have you gained much in the way of intel?”
    The black-ops commander looked at his feet. “No, not yet, we haven’t. And we don’t know why. The images are jumbled. Some might even be from our past or present. But we have managed to figure out one thing, which is why you’ve been brought here so quickly: Something will happen later this year, in September.”
    “Something?”
    Down below, the little man had stopped his purposeful wandering and gazed into one of the vats as if mesmerized.
    “Something cataclysmic, Mr. President. Across the channels. Across all of the adepts. It’s quite clear. Every adept has a different version of what that something is. And we don’t know exactly when, but in September.”
    He had a thousand more questions, but at that moment one of the military’s top scientific researchers entered the control room to show them the schematics for the machine—the machine they’d found in the mind of one particular adept.
    The time machine.
     
    The teachers are telling him about the weather, and he’s pretending to care as he continues to notice the florescent lighting as yellow as the skin that forms on old butter, the cracks in the dull beige walls, the faded construction paper of old projects taped to those walls, drooping down toward a tired, washed-out green carpet that’s paper-thin under foot.
    It’s the kind of event that he’s never really understood the point of, even as he understands the reason for it. To prove that he’s still fit for office. To prove that the country, most of it, is free of war and division. To prove he cares about kids, even though this particular school is