Page 46 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

He nodded. “Now can you understand our impatience?”

The sense of urgency that overcame me in that moment was almost visceral, like it was eating away at my insides.

I’d known all along that I was in danger, but I’d never imagined the risk extended beyond me.

From everything Finn told me, I could now see that if I didn’t do something, and quick, I’d never forgive myself.

But I needed to think. There was still so much I was missing.

“Uta Symon, he’s the CFO here, right? But he’s been pretending to be Jim. Why?”

Finn shook his head, confounded. “I’m not sure. He insisted on being here when you returned.”

“I think he’s mixed up in this,” I said, the words feeling true almost as soon as I said them. “I think it’s even possible that he did this to me.”

“I can’t say I’m surprised. He’s someone I’ve had my eye on for a long time. I suspect he might be the main force behind the … Let’s just call them the opposition. And he has been on campus a lot in the past year.”

I was beginning to get a fuller picture now. “I think he did this to me somehow, or forced me to do this to myself, and I think he took me to New York. Can I talk to him?”

“He left a few days ago, quite abruptly actually.”

I mulled that over. “That’s probably good,” I said, looking around. I needed somewhere calmer, somewhere I could have some space to think. “I think I need to go somewhere and be alone.”

Finn nodded. “Do whatever you need to do, but I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, the clock is ticking.”

I went back to the conference room in the derelict building after that.

It seemed like a good enough place to start.

I searched through files and spent the better part of the night thumbing through every piece of paperwork I could find, and as I read, I began to remember more.

There were aspects of the work I now understood that I hadn’t on my first pass.

Now that I knew about the horrors that lurked below, some of the notes I hadn’t understood earlier began to take on new meaning—the biohazard, the hostile material had now became starkly real.

And then there was Sabine. Something had gone wrong with Sabine.

We’d—no, Charles, it was Charles, I was sure—had taken something too far.

This was why I took her with me. I was trying to protect her. I was trying to make it right.

As I worked my way through the documents, slivers of recollections rose to the surface—late nights with Charles, eating junk food and laughing during a break; the feeling of being at the center of something truly magnificent.

But accompanying those memories was a darker presence, a kind of malevolent watchfulness hovering just outside of view.

We weren’t really alone out here, were we?

There had been someone else always, someone looking over our shoulders. The wizard?

I fell asleep at some point, crashed out on the floor in Charles’s office, and when I dreamed, it wasn’t a dream. It was a memory.

I was in the lab, staring at Charles. I held a sheet of paper with frantically scribbled numbers on it. I knew what they were. It had to do with cybersecurity, with quantum cryptography. But I was unable to believe what it meant.

“Who did you sell it to?” I demanded.

“I haven’t done anything,” he snapped.

“Not yet, but I heard you on the phone. How could you, Charles? Throwing away your life’s work—our life’s work—just like that?”

He closed his eyes, clearly frustrated, and held my shoulders. “I did it for us. I’m trying to keep us safe. You have no idea what these people are capable of.”

“These people are our friends.”

“Bugbear, you have to give up the delusion. These people, this place, it isn’t what you think. We’re not doing good things here.”

“We’re advancing science.”

“Look, it happens over and over, right?” He adjusted his cap.

“Mankind thinks we are smarter than everything around us. We develop a computer program thinking it will help us, and it doesn’t; it just destroys our jobs.

We develop a medicine to combat bacteria, but it outsmarts us and evolves to become indestructible.

That’s what we’ve been doing here. We thought we were containing these things, using them, but we weren’t.

We were strengthening them. All along we were strengthening them.

They’re going to destroy us. It’s only a matter of time.

If we try to leave, they will stop us. I needed something to bargain with. ”

“So you’re bargaining with Uta Symon? Letting him, what, sell our research?”

He looked at me blankly. “Not our research—the harvest.”

And I knew. I saw it all. The notes I’d found had been about quantum cryptography, which had nothing to do with memory, but I saw now that it had everything to do with the substance we extracted, the substance that comes from them.

I awoke with a start, trapped somewhere between my current self and Isabelle, haunted by what I’d just seen.

It was almost startlingly basic. The alloy was powerful enough to exponentially scale up the capacity of quantum computers, rendering encryption technology useless.

It would mean the end of data safety as we knew it.

Of course someone would pay a high price for that—an almost unimaginable sum.

At the same time, I knew somewhere deep down that something wasn’t right.

Charles was a good man. If he was even considering selling the alloy, then something much darker was going on.

And if I was honest with myself, there was something else, wasn’t there?

Something I feared even more than I could articulate.

Something I was still blocking out. There was something inside me—that creeping guilt that enfolded me in the middle of the night—and it felt like it was waiting just around the corner.

It was the barrier I couldn’t get past. But the question arose: Could I truly not get past it, or was it that I didn’t want to?

Because I felt certain that waiting just on the other side was something so horrific that once I discovered it, I didn’t know if I’d be able to survive it.