Chrysalis

3

Jeremy Logan nudged the accelerator of his Lotus Elan and felt it leap ahead on the highway with a low growl. He was all too familiar with the route up 91 from the Connecticut coast to Hartford — he’d attended, spoken at, and been bored by enough conferences in the state capital to last a lifetime. But the area beyond — leading to Springfield and Holyoke, Massachusetts — was relatively unknown to him. He’d veered west onto 44, then north on 202, surprised at how quickly the densely populated southern area of his home state gave way to tiny hamlets dozing in the afternoon sunshine, occasional boutique inns or wineries, and picturesque farms. As he continued north, and the land began to rise and pastures gave way to forest, even those vestiges of civilization began to fall away, until at last — after seeing no sign of human activity for five miles — he came across a gas station, where he pulled the vintage coupe in. The facility was so old that an attendant in bib overalls insisted not only on filling the tank, but cleaning the front and rear windshields as well.

Logan glanced at the battered map of Connecticut he always carried in his duffel — it was more a nostalgic relic now than useful tool — and then the screen of his phone. It showed empty green terrain, crazed with tiny crooked side roads that didn’t seem to lead anywhere… and, of course, the usual message: please activate omega interface.

He paid the attendant and then, with a sigh, reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the device that had rarely left his side the past six months. He’d originally purchased an older model, but new ones arrived now and then in the mail: each better looking, less intrusive, and quicker to integrate with his other devices and daily chores.

Starting the motor, he turned the device over in his hands. This latest model he’d synchronized — the Omega Venture 7a — was slender and stylish: a blend, he’d read somewhere, of plastic, silicone, and trade secret polymers. It looked something like an oversize hearing aid, as imagined by a high-end Italian designer: beautifully proportioned, with a pair of thin rimless glasses attached by one of the temple bars. A tiny QR code etched into the device identified it as his and his alone.

Logan fitted the device behind his ear and let the glasses rest lightly on the bridge of his nose, automatically activating it. Looking in the rearview mirror, he could barely see it: the Omega designers were obsessed not only with making you forget you were wearing it, but with making it barely detectable to others as well.

He pulled back onto the road. “Syncing,” came the silky feminine voice. And then, almost immediately: “Sync complete.” That meant, Logan knew, that the Venture had updated itself with his mobile phone.

Logan glanced toward the passenger seat. “Kit,” he said to his wife, “it seems Arthur C. Clarke was right: any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Do you think that’s going to put me out of a job one of these days?”

Kit did not answer, of course. She had died of cancer six years before. But Logan still enjoyed speaking to her from time to time when he was alone. It was mostly a one-way conversation; only rarely did she answer back.

The view remained as before, but now other things changed significantly. The Venture was in communication with all the orbiting satellites and server farms that held the petabytes of data making up his digital life. The glasses now displayed a semitransparent map, altitude, heartbeat, and half a dozen other things marginally useful: all he’d had to do was snug his Omega into place.

When the Venture first came out some eighteen months before, he’d dismissed it as another expensive byproduct of the Internet of Things that would prove a passing fad. But instead, it seemed to be filling a niche nobody had even known existed. When the conglomerate behind the device finally took it public, Logan’s curiosity got the best of him and he joined twenty million other Americans, perhaps against his better instincts, and purchased a unit. At some point along the way, he must have drunk the Kool-Aid.

It tasted good.

“Pythia,” he said, “find the best route to One Thousand Mobius Strip.”

What have I gotten myself into? he wondered at the same time.

“Thank you, Jeremy,” said the voice from somewhere in the vicinity of his right ear. “Route calculated. Certain details of this route are secure and should not be divulged. Destination fifteen point three miles ahead. Estimated arrival, twenty-one minutes.”

A new image came up on the eyeglasses: a route through the maze of back-hamlet roads, like a trail of breadcrumbs through a shadowy forest.

“Audio directions, Pythia,” he said.

“Thank you, Jeremy. Turn left in two miles onto Unnamed Road.”

The trees thickened around him and he realized he was entering the foothills of the Berkshires. This corner of New England, once given over to hardscrabble farms, had more or less surrendered again to the woods and low mountains, along with a few towns full of summer homes. And then of course there was his destination, which was no longer on any normal map.

After a reminder from Pythia, Logan turned onto Unnamed Road. Here the elevation began increasing in earnest. There were no road signs. The forest closed in on both sides, beautiful and remarkably virgin. The sun was low, its descent accelerated by the heavy tree cover. He turned onto another nameless road, still climbing through the woods. No vehicles passed the other way. It seemed undisturbed since the days of Lewis and Clark, and he half expected Sacagawea to step out of the forest and offer directions.

But something odd was happening. At first he couldn’t tell what it was. Then he realized: the car wasn’t bumping over cracked, ancient highway anymore. The road was new and smooth. And as he watched, it widened ahead of him, from two lanes to four. The wild forest remained, but it too had changed subtly: it looked more cultivated somehow, the understory less dense and unkempt.

“Estimated arrival time six minutes, Jeremy,” said Pythia. “Be prepared to stop.”

The early evening sky was beginning to make it difficult to see the trees around him. He turned a sharp corner, then slowed in surprise. Ahead, set into the woods as carefully as a dovetail joint, a building stretched across the road, metal lift gates in each direction. A sign on the shoulder said stop ahead.

There was nobody in line, and Logan drove up to the nearest entry window. A man in an unmarked uniform looked down at him with a smile. “Can I help you?”

“The name’s Jeremy Logan.” Grabbing a thin envelope from the passenger seat, Logan handed it to the guard.

The man opened the envelope, looked at the letter inside. Logan expected he’d be asked for his driver’s license. But instead, the guard simply reached out of the window and aimed a small wand at Logan’s Venture. There was a chirrup. The guard smiled again, then put the paper back in the envelope and handed it to Logan.

“Go straight on, Dr. Logan,” he said. “Where the road divides, make a right toward the processing station.”

“Thanks,” Logan said. What looked like an industrial laser ran a beam quickly over his car. Then the lift gate rose. At the same time, Logan noticed that a spike strip, camouflaged the color of asphalt, was retracting beneath the surface of the road. Apparently, security here was not quite as laid-back as it seemed.

Maybe I should have asked for more money.

He drove on. The grade grew abruptly steeper, switchbacking around a large outcrop of granite that protruded through the deciduous forest. And then suddenly, the Lotus crested the mountain.

“Holy shit,” Logan breathed. He pulled the car over for a better look.

Ahead in the dusk lay a bowl-shaped valley, almost perfectly symmetrical, as if the hand of God had carved it out with an ice cream scoop. The upper edge of the valley was of almost uniform height, like the crater surrounding the throat of a volcano, its circular crest softened by the autumn covering of red, yellow, and green. At the four ordinal points, airplane beacons blinked intermittently. But their lights were almost drowned by the glow radiating up from the valley itself.

Looking down, Logan saw a hulking, torus-shaped structure, seemingly carved right out of the flanks of the hills, circling the entire valley. Countless lights winked up from countless windows, arranged in serried rows like the portholes of an ocean liner. The bowl of the valley was aglow with them.

From its interior side, four bridge-like structures — each of gleaming steel — ran along the same ordinal points as the beacons. They joined in the center of the valley, where a tower rose at least fifty stories — more than half the distance to the mountaintop. Logan stared at it in wonder. It, too, was dotted with the lights of countless windows. Here and there were large balconies, arching around the sides of the tower. Some were occupied by people, no larger than ants from this distance. On one particularly large balcony, they were chatting and mingling at what appeared to be a cocktail party. Logan thought he could even make out the faintest susurrus of conversation, the strains of a jazz band, floating toward him on the evening breeze. At its base were small dots of activity. The sun was sinking now, throwing the eastern edge of the valley into dark relief and making the lights of the vast and humming city — for there was really no other word to describe it — seem to shine all the brighter.

Naturally, he’d heard of the Complex. He’d seen grainy renderings of it in online magazines and Wikipedia. But those images didn’t do it justice. Much like the product perched lightly on the bridge of his nose, the Chrysalis Torus looked like something slightly out of time: something from a future world.

The email that brought him here had arrived just five hours earlier, as he was returning from an early lunch with a Yale colleague. Logan was used to receiving urgent and sometimes odd requests, many of which were jokes. But this email contained a notarized link to a secure server, and the text got right to the point:

“Jeremy,” Pythia prompted.

“Yes?” Logan replied, staring.

“There are no delays to your destination, One Thousand Mobius Strip. Estimated arrival time remains at six minutes.”

“Okay. Don’t get your virtual knickers in a bunch.” And tearing himself away from the view, he pulled back onto the road and began descending the inside curve of what, when it was allowed a name, had been known as Hurricane Valley.