Chapter 16

When I awoke, my head felt a bit fuzzy, undoubtedly a parting gift from my fondness for scotch the previous night. I hadn't been drunk, but I'd had enough that I could feel it the next day. But I still felt marvelous, because next to me Lauren was still fast asleep, her hair tousled and her face peaceful and serene. I lay on my side for a bit and just watched her. I felt I could easily wake up like this every day. I felt more alive and fulfilled than I had in the past year.

The truth was that I hadn't been intimate with a woman since Angela died. I had dated, a bit, but I hadn't clicked with anyone and, despite some unmistakable offers, I hadn't been to bed with anyone either. Angela was an American lit major when we met and a PhD candidate when we married, and she'd become an associate professor at George Mason University. She was — had been, I reminded myself — very different from Lauren, both physically and temperamentally. A full-figured brunette, she could stand eye-to-eye with me wearing flats and with heels, was taller than I was. Despite her striking physical presence, she had been much more of an introvert, often more content with reading than with people, and I'd been good for her in that respect, pulling her along to parties and outings. She had in turn opened my eyes to a whole world I had dismissed as pretentious nonsense, showing me the meaning and power of literature and art. And we'd been good together, so much so that I had wondered if I'd ever click with someone again.

And now as I looked at Lauren, I shook my head in amazement that the woman I had found was so different, no one I ever would have pictured loving. Sure, like every man, my eye had been occasionally drawn to a shapely teen form during the summer months when clothes were brief and tanned flesh at a premium. But appreciation of the nubile form, or even brief fantasies involving anonymous coupling were not at all like picturing a relationship. I didn't 'fantasize' about relationships — I am, after all, a man; the Y-chromosome prevents stuff like that — but when I sometimes thought about relationships, I wouldn't ever cast an eighteen-year-old in the starring role.

And yet here I was. Amazing.

Lauren's eyes fluttered and she stirred a bit, yawning sleepily and catching me staring at her. She smiled at me and murmured, "Good morning."

"Hi," I said.

"Were you watching me sleep?" she asked with amusement.

"Well, I couldn't find the remote for the TV..." I grinned at her.

She rolled on her side facing me and said, "Just in case you're still worried about how you took advantage of a troubled girl, or any similar nonsense... I want you to know how happy I am. And I want you to believe that this is right, because I do."

"I do, too," I told her. "I probably should be feeling all that stuff you mentioned, but one of the great thinkers of our time explained to me how wrong I was. And for good measure, then she showed me how wrong it was."

She smiled happily. "Well, if a great thinker said it, then it must be so. Everyone knows that. Right?"

I was forced to agree.

We got up, showered, and dressed, me resisting the temptation to make it a joint shower and extend our recreation period a bit, but I desisted, vetoing the motion from one of my body parts urgently supporting the plan.

We knocked on the other room's door and heard a guarded, "Who is it?" before we identified ourselves and were admitted.

Courtney was up and dressed, a nice pale pink blouse and yellow capri pants which looked good on her, a tribute to Lauren's skill in shopping choices since they were obviously part of yesterday's haul. She had made herself a cup of coffee from the room's complimentary coffee maker and was watching the channel that carried WNBC. "I probably should be going crazy just about now," she greeted us, "but this is so far beyond weird that I almost just feel like laughing." She gestured at the screen, where the Today show was running and Katie Couric was just finishing up an interview with some young, blond actress I didn't recognize, talking enthusiastically about 'The Battle of Shaker Heights, ' which I inferred was the actress' latest movie project. "I've been watching it since it started. It's deja vu with a twist."

"I can only imagine," I replied.

"What's weird to me, though," she said, "not that everything about this isn't weird, is that almost nothing else has changed. The set is the same. This interview with Amy Smart was scheduled for this week, I remember. I can't believe it was possible to just write my entire life out of being, but look at that! Hey, the hand is quicker than the eye, nothing up the sleeves, and the lady in the box is gone!" She gave a short, humorless laugh.

"As near as I can figure it," I said, "and, by the way, in the category of weirdness, I want to remind you that the person that explained this to me was you, sort of, there are two kinds of changes. The machine can create something new on top of the real world. If it does that, then the act of change is part of our reality. If I went under the machine and said, give me blond hair, and went back to my office, everyone would ask me where I got the dye job. The other kind of change is what happened to you: the machine erases part of reality and writes a new piece in. If I used that kind of change to get blond hair, I'd go back into my office and no one would say a thing, because as far as they all would remember, I would have always had blond hair."

She shook her head. "If I weren't living it," she said, "I wouldn't believe it. It sounds ridiculous."

"It does," I agreed, "but we have to figure out how to deal with it anyway."

"So we do," she said grimly. "Do you have any suggestions?"

"Breakfast," said Lauren before I could answer. "I'm starved."

"We could do room service," I suggested, "or take turns going downstairs. But I think someone should stay..."

"Just bring me a saucer of milk," said a new voice. "I'll be fine."

All of us turned and gaped at the bed, where Lisa had emerged from underneath the covers and was sitting defiantly in an upright position, looking at us. She shook her head. "I've been waiting for this dream to end. And waiting and waiting. I tried crying. I tried pinching myself. I tried praying. And finally that worked, because God said to me, girl, this is not a dream, this is real, and if you don't get moving, it's never gonna get changed."

"We haven't been formally introduced," I said, "But I'm Rick Mason, and I'm trying to help out in fixing this."

"I know," she said. "I heard everything everyone said. I just wasn't in a very... talking... place. Sorry. But..." she gestured helplessly at her face. "My mama always said to me not to be vain, that my looks weren't always gonna be there and it was more important to be a good person than a pretty one. And I know she's right. But I was a model since I was fourteen, and an actress after that, and in those businesses everyone tells you how gorgeous you are, every day, so maybe I didn't believe my mama's words as deep down as I should. Because I've been sitting here curled up inside myself thinking my whole life is ruined because I'm only twenty-four and have to go through the rest of my life looking like this." She shook her head. "God kept me alive, though this whole nightmare, through this whole evil; He must have a plan for me. Jonah didn't want to go to Ninevah; God sent a huge fish to swallow him and spit him out near Ninevah. I don't know why God needed this to happen to me, but he did, and I'm not going to wait for a bigger fish to swallow me. I'm ready to be a part of fixing this, of wiping this evil man and his evil machine out of existence."

I looked at her. Even under the feline accoutrements, you could see the high cheekbones of a beauty. The fur and whiskers didn't help matters, true, but the more you saw them, the more they grew on you, the horrible pun notwithstanding.

More than her appearance, though, I was impressed with her new-found resolve, and I told her as much.

"Mr. Mason," she said, "you might think that being a successful actress means being spoiled and a diva. And probably a lot of us are. But a lot of us have been rejected for more parts than we ever got, a lot of us have worked eighteen-hour shooting days because that's what's needed to get the movie done, a lot of us have done press junkets with six morning show interviews in a row after a late-night talk show gig because you agreed to do publicity for a movie you've ended up hating. I can do what needs to be done here, too. Just show me."

"OK," I said. "I don't exactly have a roadmap to the solution quite yet, but let me lay out what I learned last night." I took them through a brief summary of the computer success, leaving out the details and the fact that Brock was confident he could continue invisibly accessing the system even if they deleted the login IDs we had used at first. I discussed in a bit more detail my idea that the Ithaca room was a complete vacuum now, the door held shut by air as well as locks.

"Even though we have computer access," I concluded, "it seems likely to me you need to physically be under one of these dishes to make something happen that involves you. The computer kept calling that thing the 'secondary' dish. Logic suggests there is a primary dish somewhere."

"Rick," Lauren interjected. "I was never under the dish until he took me into that cave thingy. But he did something to me before that to make me just go with him."

"Me, too," said Courtney.

"And me," said Lisa. "We all went with him willingly before he got us in his little fuck-fest." She paused. "Pardon my language."

"That means my theory is wrong," I admitted. "But let me rephrase: we don't know how he did that, but we know we can make something happen if you're under the dish. So even if there's another way to do it, we don't know it and thus can't use it. But we can go after the dish."

"But..." said Lauren.

"Yes. But." I agreed. "I shot the dish we know about and may have damaged it irrevocably, or for all I know maybe it just needs a new fuse. Again, we're just guessing. And we know that it was the 'secondary' dish, which suggests a 'primary' dish somewhere, but we don't know where. We know that both the man that did this and the man that invented the whole concept are associated with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. We have a way into a computer that seems to be the one controlling this operation." I paused. "Put 'em together and what have you got?"