The Breach

QUICK REF REPORT-BREACH ENTITY 0353-"DOUBLER"

BREACH EGRESS: 1991 January 24-14:50 UTC

PHYSICAL: Doubler has a mass of 7.85 kg. Long dimension is 18.2 cm, height 5.1 cm, width 5.1 cm. It is black and yellow and resembles a large, square-shafted flashlight with two lenses, one on each end.

FUNCTION: When switched on, Doubler projects a discrete cone of light from each end. Yellow light from the yellow end, UV light from the black end. Each light cone flares outward from the lens and terminates sharply at a distance of just over 1.5 m.

Anything contained within the yellow light beam for more than 3.44 seconds is physically cloned, with the copy appearing inside the UV light beam. Creation of the copy is almost instantaneous, with time from start to finish not exceeding two frames of digital video, less than.066 seconds.

The fidelity of the clone to its master is physically perfect, presumably to atomic detail. This was demonstrated by the doubling of a laptop computer, the clone of which functioned properly and contained all the same code as its master. Chemical compounds and processes may also be copied. Cloned bullets fire as normal. Cloned food ingested by test animals produced no ill effect. A lit "Zippo" lighter was reproduced with its flame still burning.

THEORIES ON HOW ENTITY FUNCTIONS: None.

LIMITATIONS OF USE: (1) Does not work on most Breach entities. As of [November 16, 2008-latest update] only [5] entity types have been successfully doubled: Entity 0001 (Heavy Rag), Entity 0004 (Shard), Entity 0012 (Bottle Cap), Entity 0028 (Drift Wire), Entity 0051 (Inertia Plank).

(2) Living bodies may be cloned, but in all experiments so far, the clone has arrived dead. Autopsies have failed to reveal any specific cause of death. The master specimens (for ethical reasons, only mice and rats have been used) appear to suffer no harm. There is universal agreement within Tangent that no doubling of a human will ever be sanctioned.

When Travis finished reading the reports, he saw that Paige had opened a laptop. She turned it to face him.

"This is test footage of the last entity Pilgrim has," she said. "It's not quite unique. Four of them have come through over the years. He only has one. It's no Whisper, but it's powerful, in its way."

She opened a video frame on the screen and clicked PLAY. The video showed a stark white room containing a metal cage, no larger than a single-occupant drunk tank in some backwater police station. A man in his forties, balding, entered the frame holding an orange cube maybe four inches wide. There were markings on it, symbols etched in black, but they were too far from the camera to be discernible. It didn't matter: Travis could see that the writing was different from the strange jumble he'd read on Paige's wall. And it sure as hell wasn't English.

"October 4, 1986," the balding man said. "Video demonstration of Entity Zero Two Zero Five: Ares."

He entered the cage with the cube, closed the door and locked it from inside. Then he manipulated something on the cube, moving the symbols on its surface, arranging them. Here the camera reframed to a wider field of view, revealing a dozen people seated in chairs outside the cage, the nearest maybe ten feet away. Men and women, twenties to forties. Dressed casually. Nothing strange about them, except their anxiety. Something was about to happen, and they knew it.

The man in the cage finished whatever he was doing with the cube: the thing suddenly flared bright, throwing off the camera's white balance and making the room appear darker. In the same instant, all but three of the seated people turned sharply, regarding the man in the cage with something like surprise.

Then, as one, they came up out of their chairs and rushed him, like baseball players charging from the dugout to beat the shit out of some opposing player. They hit the cage en masse, trying with all their force to get at the man inside. Arms reached in through the bars. Hands gripped the steel and shook it. A few of the attackers stepped back and aimed heavy kicks at the cage door's latch. Had they reached the balding man, they would have torn his limbs from his body. There was no question of it.

By their moves, it was clear that they weren't seeking the orange cube itself. They weren't looking to destroy it, or even take it away; they were only reacting to the man who held it. They crouched and reached for his legs. Climbed atop the cage and plunged their arms into it, going for his head. They wanted to kill him. It was that simple.

Yet beyond the rage, their actions were surprisingly normal. Nothing about them suggested that they were controlled like mindless puppets, or even reduced to some animalistic state of mind. Not even close. They were just extremely pissed-off people focused on a target. Their minds were, if anything, clearer for the adrenaline rush. As Travis watched, two of them conferred and then one took out a set of car keys and tried to pick the cage's lock with it.

The man in the cage only stared at the horde around him, rattled by the experience but not at all surprised. Like a marine biologist in a shark cage.

Travis's eyes went back to the seats and the three people who remained in them. They were the farthest three from the cage. The farthest from the orange cube. As if the thing had a radius of influence, and they were just outside of it. One of the three looked up, his eyes drawn to someone out of frame. He nodded in response to something he was told, then stood, and took a single step toward the cage. His eyes hardened. His jaw tightened. A second later he was sprinting toward it, crashing into it with the rest of the throng.

The video ended.

Travis stared at the blank screen a moment, then met Paige's eyes.

"What's the write-up on that one?" he said. "Pisses people off like nobody's business?"

"It does something to the R-complex," she said. "The reptile foundation of the human brain, where the fight-or-flight response comes from. Where rage comes from. The cube does two things. First, it tags anyone within a couple feet of itself as a target. Then it affects everyone within another twenty feet beyond that, maxing their aggression and turning them inward against the target."

"Bet someone at Border Town learned that the hard way," Travis said.

Paige nodded, looking away. Travis didn't bother her for the details.

"Anything nice ever come out of the Breach?" he said. "Instant puppy generator, something like that?"

Paige managed a smile. "It's not all bad. We survive the next thirty-six hours, I'll show you some of the good stuff." Somewhere over Greenland, Travis reclined his seat and tried to rest. He was asleep within minutes.

Paige watched him.

After a moment she felt self-conscious and looked away, even though there was no one else in the room to see her.

She didn't trust what she felt about him. There was every reason not to; her feelings were exaggerated all to hell right now. The guy had saved her from the worst thing she'd ever endured-had literally come in with guns blazing-and then carried her over fifteen miles to safety. Her memories of the journey out of the mountains, early on before she'd gone completely comatose, comprised a vignette of little waking moments. Coming to in his arms, being carried like a child. A big part of her had hated that feeling: being unable to stand up for herself after years of training her body to military-specialist standards. But here was the thing, and there was no getting around it: being carried had also felt good. Irrationally good, on some primal level that was all about vulnerability and security. He'd simply made her feel safe.

And then she'd kissed him. Jesus, why had she done that? There'd been no real need for it; he'd already been faking it well enough, as far as the chopper was concerned. Looking back, she wished she could write the moment off to her delirium, but in fact she'd felt pretty damn awake at that time. Rotor wash made for an effective alarm clock.

She glanced at him again. Sound asleep, sunlight across his chest, the shadows of folds in his shirt sliding back and forth as he breathed.

No, she definitely didn't trust her feelings. A few hours earlier, when she'd seen his life history on the screen of her PDA, she'd taken it like a kick to the stomach, and then had immediately found herself rationalizing, finding ways to cut him slack, to not blame him for what he'd done-for what he'd been-in his distant past. It was a wonder she hadn't said it all out loud and made an ass of herself in front of her people.

All this, superimposed over the thing she wasn't dealing with at all.

Her father.

Even now, she hadn't cried. Not since her initial reaction in the clearing. She'd tried. Tried to get there, to at least accept that it had really happened, if nothing else. So far, it hadn't worked. It was still too big, too close-she couldn't get a sense of where its edges were.

It would happen in its time. It seemed there was no forcing it.

For now, she thought she could use some sleep of her own. She stood and left the room to find a place by herself. Travis felt someone shake his shoulder. Had he even slept? It hardly felt like it. He opened his eyes to find Paige standing over him, haloed by the ceiling lights of the little room. Outside was darkness, broken every few seconds by the pulse of the aircraft's starboard beacon.

"Wheels down in five," Paige said.

Travis nodded. She left the room to speak to someone in the hallway.

The plane banked steeply, offering a view of its destination: Switzerland's Meiringen Air Force Base, its runway threaded tightly between mountain ridges in a way that was uncomfortably familiar.

Ten minutes later Travis stepped out of the plane's tarmac-level exit into crisp air, the stars hard and bright above the mountains.

A tandem-rotor helicopter-a Chinook, he thought it was called-waited with its turbines already whining at idle. The team transferred the gear, and within five minutes they were airborne again, moving north over the high country toward Zurich, and whatever waited at 7 Theaterstrasse.