LOVE, ROCKET SCIENCE, AND THE MOTHER OF ABOMINATIONS
BY STEPHEN BLACKMOORE
Pasadena
Diane wakes in a cold sweat, the image of James lying on the floor of his apartment, blood cooling underneath his shattered head, is as vivid as the day it happened. She used to play it back in her dreams every few nights, then weeks, then months. A way to cling to her rage and despair. Then it was to help her mourn. Finally, she had to admit that she was just punishing herself.
So she stopped. Copied it into long-term storage. Almost ten years on and it had gotten blurry, fuzzy around the edges. Couldn’t quite bring herself to delete the file, though. Like an ex-smoker who keeps that one cigarette in her pocket to remind herself she can resist.
She thought she had moved on. Wanted to move on. She’d cut professional and personal ties, got out of the business, used her expertise to build a security consulting business where she operated under a different name.
She was out. She was done.
Until an AI search she’d set up so long ago she’d almost forgotten it got a hit. The surveillance footage from around her building that night, the footage that had somehow all disappeared from the street cameras. That was three years ago.
She sits up in the single bed, slides a command over to the window to open the blinds. A hazy yellow light fills the studio apartment. First thing every morning, she does what everyone does—she checks her messages. Three phone calls while she slept shunted to voice mail, icon blinking in her left eye.
One call each from Pam and Indigo giving her the green light. Indigo bitching about bandwidth at the site, but Indigo’s always bitching about bandwidth.
Then there’s one from Peter. Peter the Partner, Peter the Broker, Peter the Knife in Her Back. He’s a charming man, Peter is, with an easy smile, smooth voice, and slicked-back hair. Hadn’t seen him in years, but got in touch with him a few months back. She’s back in the game. Now she’s ready to play.
“I found a buyer for you.” His voice sets her teeth on edge. She pushes it down, forces herself to listen. “Buyer wants to see that sample. Meet me at Curb Stomper tonight. Seven o’clock. Oh, and it’s good to be working with you again.”
He didn’t have anything for her then, and she knew he wouldn’t. That wasn’t the point. She just needed to be on his radar long enough, nonthreatening enough, that when she dangled the bait he wouldn’t look for the hook.
Diane sends a thumbs-up emoji to him. He responds with a heart. She takes a deep breath and tries not to rip her own eyes out in anger.
You want hearts, motherfucker? She’s happy to oblige. After all, he tore hers out and left it bleeding out on an apartment floor.
Bank district, Downtown LA, a withered old lady, broken but dignified, surrounded by the young, the hardy, the terribly tall. Skyscrapers loom over this three-block patch of dead businesses, ancient facades, shitty bars.
She sips her drink, a poorly made, overpriced Manhattan using rye that’s never seen the inside of a barrel. The walls are floor-to-ceiling, corner-to-corner, 3-D panels, scenes changing every five minutes with a fidelity greater than the human eye can detect.
But they’re so old and the programming’s so jacked that they’re out of sync. Part of the bar is a vibrant beach in Mallorca, next to it stand redwoods towering into the sky, vivid trees, snow falling in whorls. Two more are nothing but jagged static that makes Diane want to vomit.
So she focuses on the bartender, the only appealing thing in this place. His shirt is threadbare thin, all the better to show off his six-pack abs. She wonders if they’re store-bought. These days most things are.
She feels Peter long before she sees him, before he even exits his Uber. He knows how to blend in, go unnoticed. But ten years on Diane can still feel his passage through a room by the void he leaves in his wake, a null space that closes up behind him like the collapse of a wave function.
Peter slides into the seat next to her, opens a tab, throws her a receipt. She does the same. Now there’s a big, fat digital stamp that will show anyone who looks that they were in the same place at the same time.
Tit for tat, of course. It’s as much insurance for him as it is for her. Diane has prepared for this. She sends Pam a quick text. A thumbs-up pops up in her vision a few seconds later. Pam’s copied Diane’s digital footprint at the bar, and erased her from the system.
Something happens to Peter, she was never here. Something happens to her, her data slides back in and a big red flag gets sent to a security firm she’s hired, just in case.
“How’s your evening treating you?” Peter says. He orders an old-fashioned, winces at the taste.
“Impatiently.” She smiles, forcing it to reach her eyes. She’s done this before. Every woman has done this before. Smile at the man and he won’t hit, shoot, mock, belittle. Smile the lie that says everything’s fine.
But tonight, hers is a predator’s smile.
“This drink’s shit anyway,” Peter says. “Shall we?”
Outside, the heat hits Diane like a brick. Summers keep getting longer, winters shorter. Here it is February and the thermometer’s cracking at a hundred and change with a low in the nineties. The Santa Ana winds are an almost year-long phenomenon now. Worse, in fact. The high buildings channel it, focusing the dry, blazing heat, scouring the streets like a wind-powered belt sander.
The heat bakes in the smell of homelessness, urine, brake dust, overheating batteries, while the wind carries it on to assault everyone who takes a breath. Windows above the street are dark. Historic buildings converted to luxury lofts and bought by offshore companies to hide their money. They sit empty, unused. If it weren’t for the high-priced security in place, they’d be filled with squatters by now.
LA isn’t a city that grows. It’s a city that swallows, bloating ever fatter off the neighbors it subsumes. It accretes. Layer upon layer upon layer. History like coral. Skyscrapers lie on two-hundred-year-old foundations, ancient buildings gutted, leaving nothing behind but the facade.
LA likes to forget its history, but it never can. It’s always there, slathered over with spackle and steel like it’s pancake makeup, an aging Norma Desmond so desperate for her close-up she’ll do anything to get it.
Peter hails an Uber with a wave of his hand. The stubby, driverless car pulls up to the curb, door sliding open. He requests a preloaded sightseeing route that will drive them aimlessly through Chinatown, up to look at Google Stadium, and back down again.
He pulls a small tube that looks a little like lipstick out of his pocket and thumbs a button on the side. Diane feels, more than hears, the high-frequency buzz of the device that momentarily futzes the car’s transmitter to the network, wipes its memory of the last three hours, and deletes everything as it’s recorded. When they’re done it will be as if they never existed at all.
“You said you have a buyer?” Diane says. She considers killing him right then and there. Put a bullet in him and damn the consequences. But where’s the poetry in that?
“If they’re what you say they are, yeah. What do you have?” Peter asks.
Diane doesn’t blink at the lie. She knows there’s no buyer. She pulls a flat, 3-D-printed object from her purse. Rectangular, small. At four-by-five inches it’s half the size of the real thing. Its topography is exaggerated to show details, false colors indicate actual height and depth, like a map of some distant planet.
“LIDAR image?” Peter says.
“And MRI. It’s sitting behind a wall inside a box. Had to hack a surveillance drone to get the scan. Took a lot to clean the image, but it’s definitely one of the tablets.”
“How do you know?”
Diane takes the tablet back, points out the trenches, the ridges. Runs her finger along cliff tops, dips it into canyons. “It’s Enochian,” she says. “Language of the angels, according to John Dee, personal astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I. This one only has four symbols” She touches each one in turn. “Mals, Gon, Un, Mals. Spells piap of all things. Means balance.”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Peter says.
“Nope. It’s all bullshit, but it’s verifiable, historical bullshit. And it fits. Parsons wrote on slate tablets by dragging lines through his, um, particular medium, with a stick.”
“Particular medium?” Peter takes back the tablet, peers closely to make out the letters. Diane has to give him credit. He’s good at looking ignorant.
“Jizz,” Diane says, and Peter drops it, a look of surprise and disgust on his face—Diane can’t help but laugh. “Parsons rubbed one out over every single tablet and used a stick to run through a puddle of come to make the letters.”
“How many are there?”
“No idea. From the dimensions of this one and the box they’re in, it could be two or three, or twenty or thirty. I’ve matched them against records of another group of tablets that came on the market about ten years ago and then went missing. I’ll know more when I get to it and get everything scanned. Honestly, I think it comes down to how hydrated Parsons was.”
“The client wants the originals. That’s the contract.”
“He’ll get them,” Diane says. “But he won’t like getting a pile of mostly blank slates he can’t read. These were written between 1945 and 1946 in the desert. After 110 years that shit’ll turn to dust in a heartbeat, if it hasn’t already. They need to be scanned before they disintegrate.”
“The scanners have a resolution of .1 angstroms. No matter how badly degraded they are, the scanners will pick up the designs.”
“When are you expecting to have them?”
“Not for a couple of days,” she says. That will give her plenty of time to get everything in place.
“Okay,” Peter says. “Are you asking for more money?”
“No. Built the scans into my asking price.”
“Good. I don’t know that he would go any higher.
Unless …” “Unless?”
“He’s pretty keen to get his hands on these. So much so that he asked for the location so he could get them himself. Was willing to pay three times your asking price.”
“What happens if he finds there isn’t anything there?” Diane says. “He’ll have paid for a bullshit treasure map. He gets nothing, I get a bad reputation. Hard pass.”
“A boy can dream,” Peter replies with that charming smile.
“Keep dreaming.” Dream like she does. Dream like drowning. Dream like the world is swallowing you up and you fall and fall and fall and never wake. Dream like that, Peter, she thinks, and maybe eventually you’ll understand.
John Whiteside Parsons. Jack to his friends. Genius. Gullible, high most of the time, couldn’t keep his dick in his pants. He was a rocket scientist before there were rockets, paving the way for America’s entry into the space race whether he knew it or not.
Engineer, occultist, chemist, entrepreneur, a founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, heroin addict, paranoiac, hated by Howard Hughes, the LAPD, and numerous men and women whose sisters, lovers, and partners he banged with wild and religious enthusiasm.
Literally. Parsons was a follower of the occultist Aleister Crowley. A member of Crowley’s Church of Thelema. High on orgies, low on sin, big proponent of enlightenment through sex. A tailored fit for Parsons.
In 1945 he went out to the Mojave Desert to ride the snake like a wartime Jim Morrison, listened to Prokofiev, got high as balls, and whacked off a magic spell across slate school tablets like Richard Dreyfuss building mashed potato sculptures and yelling, “This means something!”
Mostly, it just meant that he got come all over everything.
It takes Diane fifteen minutes to find the GPS tracker Peter slipped into her purse. She crushes it and scatters the pieces out the window. When she wants Peter to find her, he’ll find her and not a second before.
She gives the car a new destination. It’ll be an hour until she reaches the site in Pasadena. Five minutes in, she gets the shakes. She’s been holding everything together for way too long. And seeing Peter after all these years has cracked something inside her.
She gives herself thirty minutes to break down and scream, beat the seats and the ceiling, let out all the rage and frustration, the longing. She shuts down the waterworks when the timer flashes in her vision, puts her Diane the Competent mask back in place, cleans her face, purpose renewed.
The car heads up the dirt drive of the abandoned equestrian center on Oak Grove next to the Jet Propulsion Lab property at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains.
Though it should already be cleared, she wipes the car’s onboard memory a second time, sends it on its way. It’ll slide back into the network somewhere in Glendale with a case of digital amnesia.
The equestrian center is a charred field that never recovered from a brush fire that swept through the area twenty years before. It might have, if the same thing hadn’t happened the year after, and the year after that, and the year after that.
It was during that time that the Jet Propulsion Lab was shuttered. Too much fire damage, too much risk. Fifteen people died on the grounds when flames ignited a badly sealed fuel tank that took out three buildings when it went up. After that they packed it in. NASA didn’t have any funding, anyway.
But they couldn’t completely abandon the place. High chain-link fencing surrounds the whole 170+ acres, and armed quadcopter drones patrol 24/7. To get past them, Diane had a subverted security drone reconfigured, changed its route, spoofed the servers to make all the other drones blind to it while it zipped in and out of windows, up staircases, into subbasements.
Fortunately, she knows someone very good at doing all of that. Pam Lao steps out from behind the ruins of a stable as the car drives away.
“How’d it go?” Pam says.
“About as you’d expect.”
“I kind of expected you to kill him.”
“I want to hit him where it hurts,” Diane says.
“Kind of my point. I honestly wasn’t sure if you were going to go through with this. I’m starting to worry.”
“Only now?” Diane digs the heels of her palms into her eyes in a futile attempt to ward off the headache growing between her temples. “I know I’m getting more—”
“Erratic,” Pam says.
“You can walk away anytime you want, you know,” Diane says, struggling to keep the anger out of her voice.
“You know I won’t,” Pam replies. “But this will only work if you believe it’ll work.”
“If it works—” Diane starts. Not for the first time she wonders if she’s delusional. If she is, then all of her friends are delusional too.
“When,” Pam says. “When it works. I just hope you’re still you on the other side of it.”
“Me too,” Diane says. She’s scared, because who wouldn’t be? But she has to go through with it. If she doesn’t, then what’s the point of anything?
Parsons masturbated obsessively on every single slate tablet, drawing letters with a stick, his fingers, whatever his drug-fueled muse told him. “Parsons,” said a colleague once, “jerked off in the name of spiritual advancement.”
Parsons did not disagree.
The Babalon Working. A rite to summon the Thelemic goddess Babalon, the Scarlet Woman, the Mother of Abominations. Probably so he could fuck her.
Diane steps into the ramshackle shed hidden behind a copse of trees on the field of the equestrian center. Little more than a shell, it looks like the sort of place a leather-masked chainsaw killer would feel right at home. Charred walls, crumbling wood, rusting rebar. More bugs, lizards, and snakes than she can identify. If there isn’t a body buried somewhere under the floor, she’ll be surprised.
Tim and Indigo are going over their gear. Happily married but look terribly mismatched. Tim’s five foot four, a rail-thin black man with close-cropped hair and a neatly trimmed beard. He wouldn’t look out of place wearing a business suit in a conference room.
Indigo, on the other hand, is six foot three, two hundred and fifty pounds of solid muscle and fake tits. Porcelain skin, a shock of short red hair. She’s had her Adam’s apple shaved and her finger bones lathed to make them look more feminine. It took her three years to get her voice where she wants it. Sometimes, Diane is still a little startled to hear a soprano come out of her mouth.
“How are we?” Diane says.
“Cutting equipment’s ready, scanner’s packed,” Tim says. He’s wearing a skintight stealth suit covered in microscopic graphene hairs that swallow light across the spectrum, so black it’s hard to see the edges.
“Green across the board,” Indigo says. “Scanners are good.”
“The Cat?”
“All set up,” Indigo says. She taps the side of an old D-wave quantum computer she salvaged five years ago and named Schrödinger’s Cat. A pair of stick-on googly eyes and a cat’s nose and whiskers from a party mask are stuck to the front with a note that says, Now you see him. Now you don’t.
Indigo hits a switch and a holograph projects a scrollwork of Enochian text. There are holes in it. Letters missing, incomplete sentences, gaps like missing teeth. “Code’s good,” she says. “We just need the rest.”
“That’s what we’re here for,” Diane says.
***
When Parsons finished the Babalon Working in 1946 with the help of a man who would con him, rob him, and ultimately begin Scientology, he came out of the Mojave as renewed as Jesus. If Jesus had lived in Pasadena and spent his forty days and forty nights jacking off to classical music.
Not long after, he met a woman named Marjorie Carmen, assumed this was the Scarlet Woman, his goddess made flesh.
He was wrong, of course. She wasn’t Babalon. She was an out-of-work illustrator who enjoyed orgies as much as he did. The two spent the rest of his life together until he blew himself up in his chemistry lab with a coffee can filled with mercury fulminate.
He was probably high.
“Then I don’t see any reason to stall any longer,” Diane says. “Last chance to back out.”
“You know we’re not going to,” Pam says.
“Thank you, everyone. I know it’s been rough. I know there have been doubts.”
“We’re doing this for James,” Tim says. Diane hears the unspoken words, whether we believe in it or not, but maybe that’s just her own fears, her own anxieties.
Diane has debated whether this part is strictly necessary, or whether they would be better off doing it in a conference room, a church, something a little more hallowed.
But what’s more hallowed ground for what she needs than a land burned, and burned, and burned again? Where even now, when there’s nothing left, she still smells smoke.
They gather in a circle, the five holding hands. Their candles are blinking cursors on consoles, rapidly cycling surveillance video. Instead of the susurrus of wind through trees, they’ve got the quiet hum of computer fans, the hiss of coolant.
“Yea, it is I, Babalon,” Diane says.
“It is Babalon,” the others say in unison. “Time is.”
It says a lot about Parsons’s ego, and perhaps about men in general, that the invocation he used to summon his goddess was his own creation, penned over the same year he made the tablets. The Book of Babalon, Liber 49. Written in a plaintive, yet demanding tone that if she were to just pay attention to him, smile at him, maybe show him some leg, or maybe a little more, he would move the earth for her. A celestial pickup line that, like most men, he couldn’t imagine not working.
“Thou hast called me, oh accursed and beloved fool,” Diane says.
The words flow from something that isn’t memory, from something deeper, cleaner. Parsons’s words shift and writhe, twisting into something far stronger until it is unrecognizable from the original. Their voices become one voice, their breath becomes one breath.
“Set my star upon your banners and go forward in joy and victory,” Diane says, and falls silent. The moment hangs, time stilled for a beat, for an eternity. When it passes, Diane feels hollowed out.
“You okay?” Pam says.
Diane’s vision is blurred, but goes so sharp a moment later she’s afraid she might cut herself on it. “I think so. Tim, you ready?” She pulls off her top, slips out of her pants, revealing the same type of stealth suit Tim is wearing. She pulls the hood of the suit up, affixes the faceplate, the suit’s HUD sending data to her eyes.
“Always,” he says, his voice a genderless digital noise through the mask. He shoulders his pack, and the two set out across the field.
Poor, sad Jack Parsons. Rocket scientist, student of the mystic arts, clumsy explosives manufacturer. He didn’t get the Babalon Working wrong.
He just didn’t have the tools to make it right.
Most people who even know about the tablets assume they’re at the bottom of a landfill. A dozen surfaced in 2047 and went up for auction. The man appraising them was something of a Parsons fanboy. He saw something in those inane ramblings that no one could have when Parsons created them. Possibly not even Parsons himself. The appraiser ended up being the only bidder on the slates. Nobody else cared.
Diane cares. Cares every time she dreams of that appraiser, every time she pulls up that memory of James on the floor, blood spattered along the walls, the ceiling, slick and dark across the floor. Diane cares very, very much.
Pam’s swarm of tiny drones zip past Diane toward the abandoned grounds of JPL. Two minutes later, Pam’s voice over the radio: “Security’s blind for an hour. You know the drill.”
Diane and Tim bolt across the field following the objective markers appearing in their HUDs. A timer blinks in Diane’s vision counting down the seconds.
One of Pam’s drones has cut a line in the chain link with a laser too small to see. They push through onto the grounds.
JPL’s security drones hover in the air like sharks drifting in ocean tides. Diane knows they’re offline, knows that they won’t suddenly come for her, weapons hot, but she hurries her pace nonetheless.
The grounds of JPL are a cracked, concrete wasteland of old dreams left to die. Once this was the center of the most amazing things humanity could achieve. Now it’s little more than rubble and shattered glass.
Most of the buildings still stand, though more out of luck than anything resembling structural integrity. But the one they head for has given up even trying to pretend. When the last fires swept through the JPL grounds before it was closed, they utterly consumed this building, like a head on a pike left behind to warn others.
What remains is little more than dust, a concrete pad, a heat-warped metal staircase leading into a dark hole of subbasements. Diane layers a drone-made map over her vision, highlighting obstacles to avoid, where not to step. Good thing too. Even with the thermal and IR sensors in her faceplate, the basements are pitch black.
“We’re here,” Diane says into her radio. Tim unpacks his cutting equipment, scanners. He burns through concrete and conduit with a high-watt laser in minutes.
Diane helps him lever out chunks of precisely cut concrete. It’s slow going because the wall’s so thick, but they open up a space that hasn’t seen light since this building was erected in 1952.
And inside, a military footlocker covered in dust and spiderwebs, hinges and a padlock rusted shut. By then Parsons was persona non grata at the lab. Did he put it there? Did someone else? Why?
The answers are as elusive as they are irrelevant. The slates are here. That’s all that matters. They pull the footlocker out, and with some elbow grease and a pair of bolt cutters open it with a scream of cracking rust.
There they are. Twenty-five slate school tablets framed in desiccated wood and held in place by warping wooden slats. Diane lifts one carefully out to get a close look. It’s either the real deal or somebody planned an elaborate joke a hundred years ago and smeared them all in Elmer’s Glue.
“We’ve got them,” Diane says, her voice too quiet to carry.
James talked about Jack Parsons and Crowley’s Thelemic Church the way a twelve-year-old might talk about his favorite video game. A couple of weeks after getting the job to appraise whether the Parsons tablets were genuine, he went on a three-hour rant about how the man was a genius never getting the acclaim he deserved.
James asked Diane to marry him the next day. He wanted her to know what kind of crackpot she’d be stuck with if she said yes.
She already knew. She said yes anyway.
Whether his obsession was faith, belief, a hobby, Diane didn’t really care. She trusted him. And vice versa. He knew what she did for a living. Had even helped her plan a few jobs.
And then one night he showed her the pattern.
“I think I’m onto something,” James said, the 3-D projector showing a revolving cloud of symbols Diane didn’t understand. There were gaps between symbols, black holes where text should be.
“What is this?” she said.
“Enochian. An occult language made up by John Dee in the fourteenth century. Unless you look at it a little differently. Then you get this.” James flipped a switch and the cloud changed. Symbols shifted, numbers, formulae, equations appeared in their place. “These tablets? They’re nonsense. But they shouldn’t be. Enochian is just English with a different alphabet and vocabulary. Dee wasn’t very imaginative. So I ran it through a script that compared each tablet, looked up similar patterns, and spit out the results. The first one that stood out was this one.”
One set of equations pulled away from the rest, grew until it filled the the projection space. “This is the Caldeira-Leggett model,” he said. “It describes quantum dissipation, the idea that energy is never destroyed, it just turns into something else, but at a quantum level.”
“So, he wrote quantum equations to summon a goddess on tablets for an occult ritual with his come?” Diane said.
“Stranger,” James said. “These were written around 1945. The Caldeira-Leggett model wasn’t discovered until 1981. I’ve got equations here describing concepts that didn’t show up until after 2020.”
“Is it a hoax?”
“If it is, it’s a really good one. I checked everything. Handwriting analysis, handedness, DNA. As far as I can see, this is one big quantum algorithm. Before the idea of quantum computers even existed.”
“What does it do?” Diane asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Diane?” Pam. Worried.
“Yeah?”
“There’s a truck ten minutes out.” After the fires no one comes out here, not even scavengers.
“It can’t be.”
But it can, and it is. Diane can feel it in her gut, that wake of void he leaves everywhere he goes. “Trust me.” But how? Diane wonders. Did he have another bug on the car? Did she leave some clue behind?
“There’s an old surveillance satellite that’s been parked over us longer than it should be.”
“He rented time on a satellite?” He wants the tablets more than Diane realized.
“What do you want to do?” Pam says.
Diane checks her timer to see how long before security comes back online. Thirty minutes. “Indigo, can you run the algorithm?”
A pause, then, “Yeah, I’ll feed them in as you get them to me.”
The plan has been to scan the tablets and leave them behind. Something about hauling a hundred-year-old foot-locker past security drones feels a bit risky. Indigo’s job is to make sure the data scans match the gaps in James’s pattern before they leave the site. Make sure they’re good.
But not actually, you know, do anything with them.
At least not until they are someplace more comfortable, better lit, not looking down the barrel of security drones and heavily armed men.
“Pam, can you stall them?”
“Already did. I’ve got road closures up on the 210 they’ll have to detour around. That’ll give you twenty minutes max.” But Diane needs more time.
Tim has unfolded a small table with interlocking sheets of metal that stick up along its edges like a flower blooming in fractals. Once it’s powered up, Diane carefully places the first tablet in the middle of the table and steps back.
“Indigo, you’re up.”
Lights pop from the petals in a machine-gun rhythm bathing the tablet in half a dozen wavelengths. Two minutes later it’s over.
“Got the scan,” Indigo says. “It’s uploading and running through the index. Give me the next one.” There are twenty-four tablets left. At two minutes a pop, they won’t make it.
“Can we do more than one at a time?” Diane says.
“Up to three. Resolution’ll be shit, but they should be okay.”
“Do it.” Diane slides three tablets into the scanner and readies the next batch to go. Twenty-one.
Lights go off in a rapid flicker from the scanner, go dark. “Shit,” Indigo says. “Hang on. Okay. Running it again.” The scanners flash, the data uploads. Twenty-one to go. They get a rhythm going. Diane puts down the tablets, Indigo scans, Tim pulls them out. Eighteen, fifteen, twelve, nine, six. Diane begins to hope that they might just make it.
Then the scanner blows a fuse. It’s a small fire, but the equipment’s trashed. Diane doesn’t realize that she’s muttering, “No, no, no,” until Tim shakes her.
“What happened?” Indigo says. “I’ve lost the connection.”
“Scanner’s busted,” Tim says. “We’ve got three left. Diane, what do you want to do? Diane?”
“Bigger problem,” Pam says. “Truck’s almost here. ETA’s three to five minutes.” Even if they take these last slates and run for it, they’ll never make it.
“Both of you turn on the recording equipment in your suits,” Indigo says quickly, “and send me the feeds. Highest fidelity you can get.”
“That’s gonna burn out the optics fast,” Tim says.
“You got a better idea?”
Tim glances at Diane, who nods.
“What about the truck?” Pam says. “I’ve got six heat signatures.”
Diane can hear the fear in her voice. “Can you reactivate security early?”
“Yeah,” Pam says.
“Wait for my signal.”
“All right,” Tim says. “We’re live.”
Diane follows Tim in a circle around the tablets, looking down, from the side, from the floor. They get every conceivable angle multiple times. The characters have to be clear enough for Schrödinger’s Cat to understand them. It eats into their time.
Diane hears a pop and Tim cursing. “Tim’s optics are out,” she says, but keeps going. A second later hers die too. Everything goes pitch black.
“Did we get it?” Diane says, pulling off her useless faceplate. She’s already running for the surface, dodging debris in the dark.
“Looks like the algorithm’s running,” Indigo says.
“They’re almost here,” Pam says.
Diane hears the sound of a rack sliding as Pam readies a gun. If it comes down to a firefight they’re all going to die.
“Hold on.” Diane bursts out from the darkness of the stairwell like a swimmer surfacing from a riptide. She triggers every transmitter she has on her, even sends Peter an emoji of a raised middle finger. She pulls her stealth hood back to make it easier to get a fix on her.
“Diane, what are you doing?” Pam exclaims. “You just lit up like a bonfire.”
“Wait for it.” Diane can hear the truck slowing at the equestrian center, then speeding up toward the JPL grounds, following her signal like rats to the Pied Piper.
The armored truck bursts through the chain-link fence, pops the curb, heads straight for Diane. It screeches to a stop a few feet from the building’s foundation. Diane stands defiant as five men step out of the car. They’re thugs, nothing more than monkeys with guns.
There should be six.
“Do it,” Diane says.
The pitch of the JPL drones overhead shifts into a deeper whine. Diane bolts for the staircase back into the darkness, sounds of gunfire overhead.
Halfway down to the first landing her shin hits a chunk of concrete with a loud snap. Pain like she’s never felt before blossoms through her leg. She tumbles, hits hard, body crumples like a puppet with cut strings. She’s not sure if she’s screaming or not. She’s not sure it matters.
She’s blind, can’t walk, can barely think through the blaze of pain. Shaking, skin clammy. Shock reaches up to pull her down, but she won’t go. Crawls by feel along the dark corridor. Knows this isn’t over yet.
Above her, footsteps on stairs echoing across abandoned walls. The pain is too much. Her heart hammers in her ears, her breath a ragged wind she can’t quiet. An oval of blinding light pops to life around her.
“Diane,” Peter says, flashlight in one hand, gun in the other. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“There are gaps in the code,” Diane said.
“And I’ve been able to fill some of them based on what I know of the math,” James said. “But most have too many holes. I think there are more tablets out there, the rest of the algorithm.”
“And you really have no idea what this does.”
“Well … no, it’s insane,” James said.
Diane responded with an attack of tickling that ended with the two of them on the floor, and James on top of her.
“I’ve defeated you in fair combat,” she said. “And got you right where I want you. You have to tell me.”
“I think it might actually summon a goddess.”
“That looks like it really hurts,” Peter says. He crouches down just out of reach.
“You killed him,” Diane says through gritted teeth.
“I did. And I took the tablets.”
“Why?” She’s waited years to ask this question.
“Did you know I was a priest of the Church of Thelema? Of course you knew,” Peter says. “James approached the church with a language problem. I helped him with Enochian. Do you think he knew you and I worked together? I didn’t connect him to you until … well, after. You never knew we were friends.”
“You kill your friends?”
“When they try to murder my goddess, yes.” Peter’s voice goes harsh, words punching out like fists. “I saw his pattern. A mathematical construct of my goddess. Mine. He explained away my faith with all the poetry of spin, rotation, probability. He tried to trap her in algebraic amber.”
Peter’s motive has always eluded her. Why take the tablets? Why even care? Now she knows. And that makes this all so much sadder.
“I wept for days at what I’d done,” Peter says.
“I wept for years,” Diane says. “I think I win that contest.”
“I wish you hadn’t found them,” Peter says. “They were just fine where they were. I don’t understand why you even went looking.”
“You knew about them.”
“Of course I knew about them. Just like I knew you used them as bait to … what exactly? Lure me out here? Doesn’t matter. I did what I had to. But I don’t have to do it again. I don’t have to kill you. I just want the tablets and all your scans. They can’t exist. What if someone else found out about the pattern, and actually ran the program? I’m not going to let that happen.”
“Oh,” Diane says, a slow smile creeping up her face, “I have some bad news for you.”
“You’re serious,” Diane said.
“Very,” James said. “I think Parsons was onto something, not just crazy bullshit. He was trying to summon Babalon. But if he had tried to actually run the math, it would have taken him decades. So why’d he write it? He couldn’t do anything with it. And where did he get all the information? He was describing mathematical concepts that hadn’t even been invented yet.”
“You think this goddess, this Babalon, showed him?”
“Got a better explanation?”
“No,” she said. “Doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
“True.” James began to move toward the display, but Diane pulled him back down.
“If you’re looking to solve mysteries of the universe,” she said, “I have a few thoughts on where you could start.”
“How could I possibly say no to such an invitation to philosophical debate?”
Peter says nothing for a moment. Diane can’t read his face, the glare from the flashlight blinds her. Then, “What have you done?” Diane laughs as much as the pain will let her. “I need those tablets.”
“So take them.” Tim has crept up behind Peter, inch by silent inch, and when he’s in range swings a hammer made of three stacked tablets.
But the blow slides inches over Peter’s head, the tablets shattering against the wall. Peter turns, fires. Tim drops like a stone.
“Well, that’s three down,” Peter says.
He turns to Diane, the flashlight playing across her, and freezes.
Later, Diane and James lay together in a pile of sheets and sweat. “You told me Parsons was trying to summon Babalon,” she said.
“You want to talk about this now? All right. Parsons called it an elemental. Someone imbued with the power of the goddess. That’s what he thought Marjorie Carmen was when he met her.”
“What if it’s not about summoning her,” Diane said, “but giving someone her power?”
“Huh. I suppose. Good a theory as any.”
“Think about it,” Diane said, and rolled over to go to sleep.
***
Diane is standing. Diane should not be standing, cannot be standing. She has a shattered tibia, she is going into shock. And yet, here she is, standing.
It feels like she’s looking out of the window of a car she’s not driving anymore. She feels a momentary panic. A gentle voice soothes her mind. She listens and gives her consent.
“I’m not sure how you pulled that off,” Peter says, “but I don’t have to wonder long.” He raises the gun.
“I came here to kill you,” Diane says in a voice that she barely recognizes as her own.
“Funny, I came here to kill you. Hoped it wouldn’t come to it, but here we are. Now, Diane, be a dear and hold still—”
“You misunderstand me, child,” she cuts in, her voice like a thousand violins playing as one. “I am not Diane.”
Peter doesn’t hesitate. Thundering gunfire echoes through the abandoned halls, flashes of light revealing impossible images. Then the hammer falls on an empty chamber, and Peter drops to his knees.
“Please,” he says. “I didn’t want to kill him. I had to. Don’t you understand? I had to.” Tears run down his face visible in a building glow in the hall. “Forgive me. Please forgive me.”
Diane leans down, kisses Peter on the cheek, gentle, a mother saying good night to her child, and whispers in his ear, “No.”
And the night shatters with a terrible, beautiful light.