On the upper left corner, beside the reference number, someone had written, using my print style, Thought you should see this. And do take a look at the soft drink coolers. They’re empty most of the time now.
I had had quite enough.
I drove back to Building 10 and found Tiflin in his office. “We need to look at building security videos.”
“Why?” Tiflin said.
“Someone may be trying to mess with us. Humor me,” I said.
We approached the security office and made our request. We were both placed high enough that the head of security allowed us into the inner sanctum, a dark room fronted by two tiered banks of monitors and staffed by five guards.
Two of them relinquished their seats to make room.
I scrawled notes on a sheet of legal paper as we went through the videos for the last four days. The cameras in the warehouse were separate from the lab system, and not accessible from this center, but we still had a clear view of all the rooms, offices, and corridors in three big buildings—a lot to process, and I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Lots of people, lots of team members wandering around, going to the cafeteria, sitting in their cubicles sucking down Soylents or Pepsis or Mountain Dews or Snapples—
I thought I saw Mickle in a hallway, then, under the same time stamp, working in his office. “Look at that,” I said. “The times are off.”
“That could explain the numbers at the warehouse. Why is it important?” Tiflin yawned.
“Okay,” I told the security chief, “show our offices right now.”
The chief worked over his keyboard and we saw my office and Tiflin’s office in Building 10, in real time, just a few cubicles apart. My office was empty. Empty—just me, I wrote on my little pad.
We looked into Tiflin’s office.
“Wait,” Tiflin said.
Tiflin’s in his office, I wrote and noted the time, the room number, and the chair beside me.
Tiflin no longer sat in the chair.
And his office was empty.
The head of security bent to look over my shoulder. “Looks like the boss is off campus,” he said.
I felt a spreading wave of dismay.
And then, I think I simply forgot.
A few hours later, back in my own office, behind the locked door, I reviewed my notes, not at all sure where I had been or why—and wondering how I had just lost so much time. The last thing I had recorded was, Tiflin’s gone! He just vanished, and I’m forgetting—
I unlocked my door, clutching the diagram I’d found in my car, and checked the soft drink coolers in the adjacent hallway. Mountain Dew and Pepsi were in very short supply—just a few cans.
With real trepidation, I passed down the hall to Tiflin’s office. There he was, sitting at his desk, on the phone. He looked up and lifted an eyebrow—go away, he was busy.
I turned and left.
What the hell had just happened?
I stood before 8 Ball again, my neck hair on end, looking on it not with pique or adoration, but with genuine fear. This time, my visit numbers were consecutive.
“What the fuck are you up to?” I whispered at the black sphere.
The warehouse security gate clicked with the insertion of another key. Mickle entered and spent a number of seconds staring at the counter. From this angle I could not see his number, but he hesitantly answered the cage’s questions, then walked across the concrete floor to where I stood by the rail.
He tipped me a salute. “It says I’ve been out here fourteen times in the last twenty-four hours,” he said.
“Have you?”
“No.”
“Just what are we worried about?” I asked. “What could possibly be going wrong?”
“Nothing, really.” Mickle assumed an expression like a little boy who has just bottled a weird bug. “We’re famous. We’re making headlines around the world.”
“So why are we standing here looking so anxious?” I asked.
Wong entered next and joined us by the rail. “We need to see the building security videos,” he said with a squint.
Before I could answer, Mickle said, “Been there, done that. I took Dieter with me to the security center. His wastebasket kept filling up with Pepsi cans—his favorite. So we asked to see who had been visiting his office.”
“Looking for what?” I asked.
“To count how many Dieters there were in the universe.”
“Why should there be more than one?” I asked.
Mickle shook his head. “Dieter said something more than a little weird. He said every program had to have a programmer. Since 8 Ball was running trillions of programs, how many programmers would it need to import to satisfy causality?”
“How many Dieters.”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
“Not just Dieters. We’ve all contributed code over the years. We’ve all noodled and made suggestions. So we’re all potential dupes.”
“As in suckers?”
“More like duplicates. We played the video until we saw Dieter enter his office. And then—I don’t remember all of it. But there was no Dieter standing next to me in the security center. And there was no Dieter in his office, either. Both had vanished, or at least that’s what I wrote down right after it happened—on a napkin.” Mickle held up the napkin. In his loose scrawl, a black marker message read, Two Dieters canceled.
“Why would they cancel each other out?”
“Because they’re non-Abelian,” Mickle said. “Like fermions. They can’t occupy the same universe at the same time—and become aware of it.”
“That is nuts!” Wong said.
“I agree,” Mickle said. “What shall we tell Tiflin?”
“Let me decide that,” I said. “We should make sure nobody’s playing a joke. I wouldn’t even put it past Tiflin. Make sure we’re not being deceived.”
“That is not the right word,” Mickle said, tapping the rail with his finger. “They wouldn’t be deceptions. They’re just as real as you and me. They even fool the counters. But if we’re going to take this any further, we have to avoid looking for ourselves. Because, gentlemen, if we find us, we’ll just fucking vanish.”
“Tiflin hates multiverses or mystical interpretations,” I said.
“So do I, remember?” Wong said.
“Don’t search for yourself,” Mickle said, poking Wong’s shoulder. Wong shrugged him off with a resentful scowl. “And we won’t look for each other—not when we’re together. You look for me, alone, and I look for you. Alone.”
“Can we look for the others, too?”
“I think so,” he said. “But maybe we shouldn’t tell them we saw them.”
“That might be allowed,” I said, thinking back to the Post-it Notes and my wife telling me about my “sister.” “But we should be cautious.”
“What’s the point, then?” Wong asked.
“Maybe they won’t believe us and they’ll stick around regardless,” Mickle said.
8 Ball kept patiently cycling.
I asked Tiflin to meet me in the lobby of a nice hotel where we put up our international guests. I wanted to be away from the campus, away from our colleagues—away from anyone or anything that might make Tiflin feel stubborn. It was too early for a beer, so he and I took seats in the small bar and sipped cappuccinos.
“We’ve still got a lot to do,” Tiflin said, fidgeting. I was too important and connected to ignore, but he seemed to know he wouldn’t like what I had to say.
“8 Ball’s not working the way we thought it would,” I told him.