There's Only One Quantum (4 page)

He nodded, and stepped from the elevator.

“Have a good evening, Mr. Coe,” she said.

It could have been coincidence, but Coe could not recall telling her his name.

It took him several minutes to find his desk among the grid of identical cubicles. He eventually did, but only out of pure luck. He sat down at his desk, removed the sign-in sheet, and spread it out before him. He’d just begun to scan over the names when Ms. Hunter suddenly appeared.

“Did you tell Mr. Hanover?” she asked, dispensing of any pleasantries.

“I couldn’t find him,” he said, resting his forearms on the desk in an effort to cover the sheet. “He wasn’t on thirty-eight.” He proceeded to tell her about his encounter in the steam room, again omitting the detail of the theft—mostly out of concern she might recite some regulation from the handbook that forbade theft of sign-in sheets.

“I see,” she said. “I think you should not tell another person of this matter until you can secure an F2F with Mr. Hanover.”

Coe was relieved. He was certain she was about to recommend he report it to a deputy director of SAU and send him on another wild goose chase. It had been a long day, and it was close to his quitting time.

“Very well,” he said.

“Are you involved, Mr. Coe?”

“Involved?” He was confused by the question.

Her cheeks flushed. “With someone. Do you have a lady friend back in Philadelphia?”

“Yes...er, no. I’m involved with someone, yes; but she is not in Philadelphia.”
“Off-world?”

“Terre Haute,” he said and added, “Two.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “This can be a lonely city when you have no one.” She smoothed out her skirt and said, “I speak from experience.”

“These are lonely times,” he said. “For many people.”

“Don’t misunderstand me,” she said. “Section twenty-three of the handbook expressly frowns upon internal relationships between employees. Subsection B actually prohibits dalliances between clerical support and the auditors they service.”

“Of course, Ms. Hunter. I wasn’t suggesting that—”

“Let’s leave it at that,” she said. “Even the mere discussion that we’ve considered such a relationship—for even just a moment—is certainly grounds for reprimand.”

“But we haven’t considered it.”

“And that’s the official—and final—word on the matter as far as we’re concerned—” She stopped. “What is it that you’ve got there?” she asked.

“Where?” he said, attempting to cover the sheet even more.

“Right there,” she said, pointing. “Is that some kind of sign-in sheet?”

Coe looked down, made an exaggerated gesture at discovering the sheet. “This? Why, yes. That’s what it appears to be.”

“Why do you have it?”

“I must have inadvertently picked it up while exchanging my towel at the gymnasium—”

“The executive gymnasium? What were you doing there?”

Coe rested his arms back atop the sheet. “I was looking for Mr. Hanover, of course.”

She relaxed a bit, if evidenced by the dip of her shoulders, the slump of her breasts. “Of course.” She looked at her watch. “It’s four-fifteen.”

He checked his own watch for effect. “It is. Thank you, Ms. Hunter.”

She nodded, started to move away then suddenly stopped. She leaned in. “About our misunderstanding earlier? You won’t discuss it with anyone? It was obviously a misunderstanding, and one I doubt that anybody might even find remotely amusing.”

“No, of course not,” he said.

“I’ll be clearer from now on,” she said.

“I appreciate that.”

She gave a slight bow which struck Coe as Asian, and then left. He looked briefly down at the sign-in sheet before slipping it back into the inside pocket of his coat.

He had more success with finding the elevators this time. He descended to GL and exited out onto the lobby floor which was alive with activity. He entered the cloak room, located his raincoat with little difficulty and put it on.

It was still raining outside. Coe cinched the belt around his waist and turned up the collar. He put his hands firmly into his pockets and walked the three blocks to the station. Under the elevated tracks, he managed to keep his head dry. He joined a throng of late afternoon commuters and climbed the steps to the train platform.

He switched trains three times, as recommended by his handlers, and took a taxi to his final destination—a cafe situated on a piazza. The steady rain had kept patrons from sitting outside at the tables. Coe sat down on a wet chair and waited. At precisely 1800 hours GMT, the vid-phone inside the booth nearest the cafe illuminated with the message of INCOMING TRANSMISSION. Coe stood and walked to the booth where he entered and waited for retinal recognition. A green scanner sprayed light over his face. The screen’s message changed to CONFIRMED: ATLAS.

A face, mostly cloaked in shadow, appeared on the screen.

“I’m in,” Coe said.

Two.

Mars Needs Women (and men, too). Change your fortunes. Discover the new frontier. Jobs. Affordable housing. Clean air and water. It’s all here on the Red Planet. The American Dream is alive and well on Mars. All that’s missing is YOU—

The train ride home to his new flat was a quiet one. Most of the evening commuters were already home, having caught earlier trains. Coe stared out the window at the wet streets simmering with anticipation. People went about their businesses under the cover of umbrellas; some wore raincoats similar to his own. The train moved slowly, picking up speed only to slow for the next stop. People stepped off, people stepped on.

“How’s security?” his handler had asked him during their vid phone conference.

“I was able to easily move between floors,” he said.

“Retinal scans?”

“Not for the floors I was on.”

“Anyone we should be concerned with?”

Coe said, immediately, “A Mr. Warren Hanover.”

“Hanover?”

“Yes.”

“Funny. We’ve got no intel on him. What department?”

“SAU.”

“What the fuck is that?”

Coe said, “Special Audit Unit. It’s apparently an internal affairs type of organization within the Quantum Corp infrastructure. They take on issues relating to fraud, double-dealings, things of that sort.”

“I see. This is the first I’ve heard of it. Is it new?”

“Seemingly it was created in response to the Steele Affair—” Coe felt strange calling it that.

“We’ve certainly shaken things up over there at Quantum, haven’t we?”

Coe was uncomfortable with the whole “we” reference. “It seems there has been at least some reaction to the breach, sir.”

“Who do you report to? This Lyme fellow?”

“Mitchell,” he said.

“He’s under Lyme?”

“As I understand it.”

“Anyone else we should be concerned with?” the handler asked.

Coe hesitated. “There is one other person.”

“Go on.”

“They have an elevator operator—a woman.”

“A fucking person sits inside the elevator all day working the controls? Unbelievable. How archaic is that? Seriously! An elevator operator, huh?”

“Straight out of the nineteen-forties.”

“And this is our chief competitor? Christ. It’s laughable.”

“She’s not so much a concern as she is, perhaps, a valuable source.”

“How so?”

Coe thought of her sitting ladylike on her stool, bare leg crossed over bare leg. “She hears and sees a lot of things.”

“Name?”

“Carmen,” he said. “I don’t know her last name.”

“Good,” his handler said. “Well done. A very productive first day.”

“Thank you.”

“Anything else?”

“Just one other thing,” Coe said.

“All right.”

“About Janeiro...”

“Who? Oh, your lady friend on the moon—”

“Mars, actually.”

“Talk about a long distance relationship.”

“About that,” Coe said.

The handler said, “That’s no small feat, Coe.”

“I understand—”

“There’s a lot of red tape, if you want to do it right...”

“I do.”

“And there’s vaccinations and mandatory quarantines and a waiting list just to get a seat...”

“I know, sir, and I appreciate that—
we
appreciate that. Honestly.”

“They’re shipping them off Earth by the thousands. It’s hard to get just a temporary visa with the matter of population what it is.”

The man grew still and quiet. For a moment, Coe had begun to think his vid screen had frozen. Finally he said, “Have you ever thought of going there? It’s certainly easier and cheaper to make that move—”

“No,” he said, flatly. “The deal was she comes here.”

“Right,” his handler said. “Right.”

The conversation had left him cold. Or maybe it
was
the cold, the rain—the dampness. Even in the overcrowded train, in the tight, airless quarters, sandwiched between the window and an enormous, corpulent man, Coe was unable to get warm. When the train finally, mercilessly arrived at his stop, Coe stood with difficulty, squeezed past the man and elbowed his way through the standing riders, reaching the doors just as they closed. His briefcase stopped them. The doors opened, and he was expelled onto the platform. He stumbled, touched the briefcase to the ground to steady himself, and caught a glimpse of the squished faces of the other riders—their expressions fixed somewhere between satisfaction and anguish; contentment and resignation. They were Earthlings. They were grateful for their place—even if it was forever shrinking. Coe composed himself and joined the flow of humanity inching its way down the steps to the congestion waiting below.

His flat was a roomy 400 square feet.

“Lights,” he said, tiredly. The apartment was suddenly awash in white light. Coe ignored the sole cockroach as it ran up the wall in response to the light. Quantum furnished the unit as part of his promotion package. They paid for pest control as well. “Left front burner on.” The blue flame of the city gas erupted in a small ring of fire on the stove. “Medium.”

It was a smart-apt. The entire place was cued to voice recognition.

He loosened his tie, shrugged out of his coat. He removed a frozen meal packet from the freezer, dropped it into the boiling water. Fettuccini Alfredo with broccoli spears.

“Coffee,” he said. “Dark roast. Cream...no sugar.”

The rain beat harder against the window.

“Rachmaninoff,” he said.

The Piano Concerto No. 3 began playing softly throughout the flat, canceling out the rain.

He ate his meal. A clap of thunder reported in the distance; the lights threatened to go out—but didn’t. He placed the dishes, the pot—his fork—into the dishwasher, gave the appliance the order to “wash.”

It was then that his vid-phone illuminated with the message: INCOMING TRANSMISSION.

“Identify,” he said. The vid-phone response was, “Janeiro.”

“Accept.”

He sat down before the screen. The familiar image of a woman with olive skin and black hair—her ancestry dated back to the Mediterranean, but she was second-generation Martian—appeared on the monitor. He knew he was looking into the past. The image had left the surface of Mars, relayed to a satellite orbiting the red planet, and then beamed across space—eight minutes before.

“Hello, Scotty,” she said. “How are you? Please tell me about your day. What news do you have to report from your first day at the corporate office? Stop.”

They had the ability to terraform and transform parts of Mars and the moon into livable cities but still could do nothing about the delay in interplanetary communication.

She sat patiently, smiling pleasantly from her flat in the domed city of Terre Haute while Coe dictated the following:

“I am well, Janeiro. Thank you for asking. It is very kind of you...but that is your nature. I had an interesting day. My superior even took me out to lunch. Thai food. Do they have any good Thai restaurants on Mars? Stop.”

They filled the silent gap in transmissions by staring at each others image, their interstellar version of a message in a bottle. She was lovely in her straight, dark tresses that curled at the ends, and her delicately long lashes and her green eyes that sparkled across the expanse of space/time. He did not have the heart to tell her about the intrigues he had committed himself to, for fear she would think less of him. She was aware that he was working on his end to orchestrate her move to Earth, that it was a convoluted affair that involved representatives of the State Department, Global Immigration (GINS), the Martian officials, and the Earth Embassy.

“There are no good Thai restaurants on Mars,” she said. “In fact, there are no Thai restaurants, period.”

He thought for a moment and wrestled with the awkwardness of distance and time. “I’ve met some of my new coworkers,” he said. “I think I’ll be happy at this office.”

He watched her expression change as she received his transmission. The lines around her mouth softened and the corners turned up in a slight look of bemusement. She raised a tea cup and drank from it. She nodded. “I am so very happy for you, Scotty. I am certain your new coworkers will come to love you and adore you as much as I do. I long for the day when we can finally be together, to touch each other—to finally give our bodies to each other.” She smiled then and Coe could see she was blushing. “Tell me about the oceans again. Please. Tell me how it is to stand on the edge of the shore with the first drops of an ocean stretching out to touch your feet. Stop.”

Coe told her. He called up the childhood memory of one of his family’s many vacations to the New Jersey Shore—The Wildwoods, Ocean City, Cape May. He’d not been back since. He told her about the smell of the sea, the relentless murmur of the surf—the salt air on your skin.

“You will take me there?” she asked. “You will take me there when I’m finally on Earth? We will honeymoon by the ocean? Stop.”

He felt himself nodding as she spoke, though the gesture, when finally received by her, will come orphaned and without context. There were still a few stretches of unspoiled beaches not in the shadow of, or within view of, a desalination plant. On a planet where, at its most crowded, there was a person for every square foot and some people had learned to sleep standing up like horses, resources were stretched to their breaking point. The oceans, still lovely to behold, represented for many, the last source for drinking water. Why she would want to come to Earth in its current state, sometimes baffled him. But to breathe air that was not manufactured and pumped in into what amounted to nothing more than a giant cake dish—not to mention the ever-present fear of a space rock smashing into the dome—must have seemed like a delicious luxury, even if that air was rife with impurities and daily weather reports came with the government’s recommendation on the maximum amount of time one should spend outside (that amount of time being accumulative).

“During the silence,” she said, smiling, “I was remembering how we met. Love knows no boundaries, does it, Scotty? It has no regard for space or time or distances...it cares nothing for red tape. Stop.”

It was purely by chance—a sun storm; it briefly interrupted communications, caused a data entry clerk in an office somewhere in the Midwest to type a 9 instead of an 8. That was the difference in the Universal Identification Number (UID), that mixed up Janiero with one, Harold A. Bock, of Winnipeg, Alberta. Bock’s file, as subject of an inquiry, came across Coe’s desk in Philadelphia, and prompted Coe to make an interplanetary call to Mars, to straighten out the glitch. When her image flickered onto his work monitor (she was sleepy-eyed and her hair tousled; Coe had not realized he was calling her in the middle of the Martian night), he felt a stirring almost immediately. Despite her sleepiness, Janeiro seemingly felt it, too.

“The Universe conspired to bring us together,” he said. “Stop.”

After more time had escaped them as they stared sometimes thoughtlessly at their monitors (or at least Coe did), she said, “I made a new VR for you. I hope you like it. I love you, sweet, sweet Scotty. Good night.”

He told her, “I love you, too,” but her screen had already gone dark. She would receive it as an addendum to their communication. A box appeared in the center of the screen. It read: FILE ATTACHED.

“Download,” he said.

It took some time. Coe waited patiently. When the message, DOWNLOAD COMPLETE finally appeared, Coe slipped on his VR goggles.

He was in a bedroom. There were three windows, but the shades were drawn. There was one door. When he turned his attention to it, it opened, and Janeiro walked out. She was in a black lace negligee. It was sheer. Coe could clearly make out her nipples and a dark triangle of pubic hair. She was wearing black high heels. It was all standard fantasy as far VR goes. But in love and lust and desire, even cliché has its place.

“Hello, Scotty,” she said.

“Hello.”

“What would you like me to do next?” she asked. “Would you like me to take off my nightie? Play with my titties? Touch myself to your image? I await your prompt.”

“Take off your nightie.”

“Your response was ‘Take off your nightie.’ Is this correct?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Okay,” she said. “I will take off my nightie.”

She loosened a few draw strings and the lace nightie slid off of her champagne-smooth shoulders and fell to the ground. She stepped out of it and stood smiling.

“Do you like me?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“What would you like me to do next? Play with my titties? Touch myself to your image? Take you in my mouth? I await your prompt.”

He cleared his throat and said, “Play with your titties.”

“Your response was ‘Play with your titties.’ Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” she said. “I will play with my titties.” She cupped her breasts in her hands, rolled the nipples around between her thumbs and forefingers. She smiled as she did this, often opening her mouth to gasp or to emit a moan or an
ooh
, or a
yeah
. “Do you like me?”

“Yes.”

“What would you like me to do next? Would you like me to touch myself to your image? Take you in my mouth? Allow you to fuck me? I await your prompt.”

“Fuck me,” he said.

She suddenly looked alarmed. “I’m sorry. I did not understand your response. What would you like me to do next? Would you like me to touch myself to your image? Take you in my—”

“Allow me to fuck you,” he said, remembering the precise command.

“Your response was ‘Allow you to fuck me.’ Is that correct—”

“Yes,” he answered, impatiently.

“Okay,” she said. “I will allow you to fuck me.” She lay down on the bed and spread her legs.

“Disrobe,” he commanded and his virtual self’s clothing disappeared. He looked down at his virtual self. His virtual erection matched the very real one rising up in his trousers.

He mounted the virtual Janiero. She felt surprisingly real. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Sonata No. 2 played softly in the background.