The Shootout Solution Page 2

  Tommy hadn’t made it big yet, but he’d gone straight from working the regional circuit to an HBO special, which did not happen in the normal world. And if this was the guy who helped Tommy make that jump, she could take the time to check out this “lab.”

  Plus, this place was tapped out, so she’d need a new lead. She’d made the rounds in the Baltimore circuit, and she was getting nowhere. She needed a break.

  “You should have had Inez vouch for you in the beginning,” Leah said.

  “It means more if you do the asking for yourself. If you’ve changed your mind, I’d like to introduce you to the team tonight. And if you come along, hear me out as I explain what our team does. I’ll ensure that you have a weekly gig here or at any other club in the Baltimore-DC area you want for as long as you like.”

  A steady gig, indefinitely. She hadn’t gotten close to graduating out of the open mics. If this guy could guarantee her a steady gig, give her time to sort out her material, find an aesthetic that could connect with audiences . . . Leah tried to avoid salivating at the idea.

  Leah checked her phone. “But it’s eleven o’clock. Your team works that late every Thursday night?”

  “Tonight we do. Shall I bring my car around?”

  Leah shifted her weight from one hip to the other. She took a long swig and asked, “You have to tell me if you’re going to axe murder me, right? Some kind of professorial code of conduct?”

  King’s expression brightened. He mimed a posh British accent. “Indeed. It’s a condition of my tenure. Along with the requirement that I be absentminded and wear tweed jackets with patches.”

  “Well, if that’s the case, sure.” Leah finished off her drink and left a tip for Inez, who made the glass and bills vanish with her magic.

  King lead the way and Leah followed, reassuring herself that her mace was in fact where it was supposed to be in her jacket.

  The two made their way out into the ever-humid Baltimore night. King worked a key fob and a too-nice-for-a-visiting-professor Mazda came alive three spots up the street.

  “Where’s this lab of yours?”

  King opened the door for Leah. “South of the city. Shouldn’t take but twenty minutes to get there.”

  Leah held the door as King went to the driver’s side, not quite ready to climb in and commit to doing something quite this dangerous. “And a reminder. No axe murdering.”

  King climbed into the car. “Ms. Tang, if I wanted to find someone to kidnap and axe murder, I’d be looking for victims that are far more trusting than you. And I wouldn’t be hunting in Baltimore. Things tend to go poorly for men who look like me when we’re suspected of crimes in this city.”

  “Point.”

  King started the engine, which purred to life, running quiet. “As a university professor, I specialize in the disquieting reassurance. It means that my office hours are blissfully uneventful.”

  The sound system turned on, leaping into an Eddie Izzard CD. One more layer of resistance peeled off, and she took her seat.

  Two: The Story Lab

  True to King’s word, about twenty minutes later, they arrived at a two-story-tall office building off I-97.

  The car had already passed several turnoffs to nowhere in particular, so if he was going to axe murder her, he was taking the long way there. That was comforting. Sort of.

  The building had a dome on one side that arched up another story’s worth. IMAX, maybe? Maybe that’s what he meant by narrative immersion. She could think of worse jobs than getting paid to watch IMAX documentaries about penguins and hummingbirds.

  King rolled the car into a spot that read “Team Leads.”

  “What I’m going to show you may seem incredible, but know that it can all be explained by science. Our mission is one of exploration.”

  “That’s not ominous at all,” Leah said, stepping out of the car. On the drive over, she’d texted two different friends to check on her in an hour to make sure she was okay. Mr. and Mrs. Tang didn’t raise no dumbass. Smartass, yes, but not dumb.

  King opened the door with a quick scan of a passcard, revealing a stark corridor with an institutional look. The rooms were labeled innocuous things like “Archives, 1970–1979” and “Personnel Files” and odder things like “Probe Reports,” “Skill-acquisition Lounge,” and “Dimensional Barometric Chamber.”

  Her nerves had resumed assembly of a worry-henge when King threw open a set of double doors at the end of the hallway, leading into a room that looked half like the NASA command center and half like a newsroom.

  The room was nearly empty, only a half-dozen of the stations filled by men and women in polo shirts, each watching several screens of TV shows, none of them immediately recognizable.

  “My team is through here,” King said, leading her along one side of the room. At the far wall, wide windows showed a room that looked for all the world like a hangar. If her spatial sense was working, that would be where the IMAX dome was.

  King led her into another long hallway that spanned the length of the building. Part of the way down the hall, voices prompted Leah to turn and see a crash cart round the corner behind front of them. Lab-coat-and-scrubs-clad figures pushed the cart, checking the IV drip, taking pulse, and more. The patient was a white woman, blond, very banged up, and wearing an outfit that belonged at a kitschy Wild West party. The cart raced by, and King peeled off to join them, pointing to a nearby room.

  “Wait in there,” he said.

  Leah stood befuddled for a moment as the cart and its entourage rounded a corner.

  What was this place? A shiver ran down Leah’s spine, fear tackling curiosity into a confusing melee.

  The doors King had pointed to revealed a break room, and a nice one at that. It had several flat-panel TVs on the walls, treadmills with built-in screens, a full kitchen, several fridges, couches, tables, and a library in one corner.

  An older Middle Eastern woman with silvery hair sat in the rocking chair amid the library. She held a massive hardcover in her lap.

  Noticing Leah, the woman set her book down and stood.

  “Hi,” Leah said.

  “You must be Leah. I’m Shirin Tehrani.” Her voice was a smooth alto, welcoming and kind.

  Shirin crossed, heels clicking on the floor, and extended a hand along with a warm smile. “Pleased to meet you.”

  “So King told you I was coming, did he?”

  “Of course. He keeps us apprised of candidates and solicits our input. Your evaluations in improvisational thinking and threat responses were very impressive. You have to be quick on your toes in this job.”

  “Threat responses?” Leah asked. “I thought this was a lab. What is it, really? There was a crash cart or something, and King went off and said I should wait here.”

  Worry crossed Shirin’s face, but didn’t stick. Why was she so calm?

  Leah’s danger senses were going off. She had a few minutes left to send the all-clear text. It didn’t seem like anyone was hiding axes for murdering, but they might all be delusional.

  Or maybe it was a cult. A story cult? Granddaughters of Grimm or something?

  “It’s as he said—a narrative laboratory. This will go more smoothly if you wait for him to explain. Please help yourself to coffee or a snack or anything while you wait. But try not to worry about the woman you saw. Our medical facilities are top of the line.”

  Shirin’s smile was gracious. The woman’s whole demeanor said “classy aunt.” Leah could use some classy aunts in her life. All of her aunts were back in Minnesota.

  Leah looked around for some normalcy to latch on to. Hey look, coffeemaker. Yes. Java was needed to face the fear. “Is the coffee any good?” she asked.

  “It’s good for office coffee. And the granola bars are passable, if you’re hungry. They’re in the second drawer to the left of the fridge.”

  When Leah looked back, Shirin had plopped back down and was once again consumed with her book. She was acting like this wasn’t weird, bu
t it clearly was.

  Leah’s pulse quickened, and she tuned in to her peripheral vision, wary.

  Think about the gigs, Leah, she thought, trying to find her calm.

  The coffee was, in fact, passable. More importantly, it was hot. She passed on the granola bar, and walked the room, not comfortable enough to sit down when she had a hundred questions and the only other person in the building she’d met so far didn’t seem interested in talking.

  A few minutes later, Leah’s coffee buzz was in full effect as Professor King returned. He wiped off his hands and tossed the bloodied rag in a bucket beside a waste bag.

  Leah asked, “Are you going to tell me what this is all about, now? And who was that on the gurney?”

  “The woman on the gurney is Mallery, a member of my team. She’s being treated now. As for what this is about, why don’t I just show you?” King said, his voice level. King escorted Leah to the command-room thing. Shirin put her book down and joined them.

  As they entered the command room, King made straight for a woman Leah’s age with thick glasses and an incredibly bright wardrobe, patterns on patterns set against a traffic cone orange shawl. She sat in a wheelchair, a complex set of monitors and two keyboards within arm’s reach.

  “This part is really cool,” King said. “Preeti, can you bring up the orientation video on Big One, please?”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  The woman’s hands blurred, typing at court transcriptionist speed. A moment later, one of the large screens went dark. Preeti held her over-the-ear earphones out to Leah.

  She took the wireless headset, which played the opening riffs of an orchestral score like an epic movie trailer.

  Earth popped up on the screen, clouds and storms and oceans and all that jazz. The screen zoomed out, showing Earth surrounded by a rough circle of red light, a dozen other worlds in fragments around it. The orbiting was replaced by circular logos—crossed revolvers, a heart, a magnifying glass, a rocket ship.

  I am surrounded by crazy people right now, Leah thought, already prepping her escape strategy.

  A familiar voice started to narrate. It was King.

  “Stories are the DNA of the universe.”

  Wait, what?

  “We think of life in three dimensions. With time, that makes four. Some scientists posit that we live in eleven dimensions.

  “But for our purposes, there are only five that matter.

  “The fifth dimension is narrative. In the fifth dimension, Earth is surrounded on all sides by worlds that are simultaneously familiar and irreducibly distinct.”

  The camera panned to the side, zooming in on one of the adjacent worlds. Getting closer, every bit of land area on one continent was covered by city, towers and factories, and the circuit-board of lights that reminded Leah of flying into Southern California by night.

  “Each world hosts the inspiration for a narrative genre. This world inspires our stories of Science Fiction.”

  The world spun, resolving into shots of iconic science fiction scenes—a launching rocket, a massive laboratory filled with androids, a cityscape with flying cars, a bustling space station.

  “There are dozens of others.” The screen showed a Western boom town, a mine shaft entrance in the distance.

  Next came a contemporary American city filled with people going about their lives. The camera moved inside a café, where every table was filled with couples. Some were awkward, stealing glances and then looking away. Others were twitterpated. One woman was on her knee, proposing to her girlfriend. Another was having a knock-down drag-out fight.

  “Romance.”

  The screen flipped through other worlds more quickly.

  First, a fantasy kingdom, with gnomes, dwarves, and elves walking around a market town, castle towers in the background. A flourish of colorful magic erupted from the gnome’s hands as a crowd looked on. It was her bit come to life.

  “Fantasy.”

  Then the screen jumped through several more, offering views of worlds Leah pegged as noir, horror, and one world populated by pirates with shirts open to the waist, oiled chests, and tight breeches, and women in gigantic Elizabethan dresses corseted within an inch of their lives.

  Finally, the screen returned to the picture of the earth, surrounded by the other worlds.

  “Because of your specific skills, you’ve been selected to join this elite team and protect not only Earth, but dozens of other worlds, from destruction.”

  This was too much. Leah pulled one ear of the headset off and sniped back at King. “Are you serious? This is some Rylan Star League ridiculousness.”

  She started walking for the door. The playback continued. “In any system, there is entropy. When something breaks down in one of these worlds, when a story goes wrong, it ripples back on Earth.

  “When a story breaches in the Western world, violence runs rampant on Earth Prime.”

  She looked back as she passed Preeti, starting to take off the headset. On the screen, a newspaper showed the headline “Shooting Spree in Omaha. Seventeen wounded, two dead.”

  Leah took the headset off entirely. “Hold up. You’re telling me that broken stories affect our world? Some kind of feedback?”

  “Keep watching,” King said, his patience clearly wavering.

  The video continued.

  Leah’s curiosity grabbed her, and she donned the headset again.

  “Every world has a different influence on Earth.”

  The worlds again.

  “The mission of the Genrenauts Foundation is to minimize these dangerous ripples between the worlds. When a story world goes off-track, it’s our job to set it right. Using inter-dimensional vessels launched from this and other facilities around the world, teams travel to the impacted world, investigate the story breach, and put it back on-track.”

  The screen resolved to a logo—Earth surrounded by a dozen worlds, with “GENRENAUTS—MID-ATLANTIC ASTRODOME.”

  Leah took the headset off and turned to the group. Her disbelief, her desire to not be caught by some weird gotcha, took center stage.

  “This is some kind of History Channel documentary, right? On after Ancient Aliens?”

  King was nonplussed.

  “Some kind of lab hazing prank or something? I thought this was going to be a touchy-feely writing job, like High Culture TwitFeed or something.”

  Preeti paused the playback.

  “It is exactly what the pretentious video says it is,” King said. “Maintaining balance between the worlds is of incalculable importance. We stand in one of several bases that monitor and respond to dimensional disturbances. There is one such disturbance right now, in the world that inspires our Western genre. One of our team has been severely injured in a failed attempt to patch the story breach, and I would like to bring you along with my team to observe as we resolve the situation.”

  “Tell me more about these ripples.”

  King had to be a professor, he had the sigh of the put-upon down pat. “When a story breaks, that breach creates a thematic-semiotic ripple effect, which crosses over from that world to our own Earth. Each of those story worlds has its own distinct signature derived from the genre it represents, and each signature has a different effect on Earth when it ripples over. Identifying and patching story breaches as quickly as possible minimizes these ripple effects and keeps the earth roughly as we know it.”

  Heady stuff. No wonder they hired a lit professor to run the team.

  Leah made the “go on” hand gesture. “And now, unpack that one more time like I’m stupid. Because this still sounds crazypants.”

  Another sigh, this one more exasperated. “Right now, a story is broken in the Western story world. Western world’s signature is about violence, order vs. lawlessness, and taking the law into your own hands. Do you remember the shooting in Vegas yesterday?” King asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “That was only the first of several identified ripple events over the last forty-eight hours s
ince the breach began.”

  King turned to Preeti. “Bring up the news feeds.”

  Preeti tabbed through to another program, and pulled up a news site.

  The headlines read:

  Vigilante shooter kills five burglars in Evansville, IN

  Unidentified gunman shoots seven in Washington public park. All in critical condition. Gunman still at large.

  SWAT raid gone south: five officers in critical condition.

  “And if we don’t fix this story breach,” King said, “the shootings will continue. The whole world will shift. More people will take the law into their own hands, will take what they think they deserve by force.”

  King jabbed a finger at the screens. “That’s what I mean by thematic-semiotic resonance. A story breaks, and then people die, lives are ruined. I need to send a team to Western world and fix the story now. I brought you in because I thought you could help. Do you want to critique stories your whole life, or would you rather fix them?”

  “Hold up. I have friends in Vegas, and you’re telling me they might have gotten killed because of some broken story in a whole other world?”

  “Those are the stakes, Leah. Now it’s time to make a decision. You have ten minutes.”

  King turned and made his way out of the room, apparently done with the conversation.

  Shirin watched him go, saying, “He gets what we’d call ‘passionate’ about the job.”

  Leah turned to watch the news feeds. She’d heard about the shootings, but had blamed it on the social media age, where a small story can become a huge story within an hour.

  “So you’re script doctors, but for real worlds? And somehow also dimensional cops?” Leah said, trying to parse the unbelievable.

  Shirin smiled. “That depends on what you mean by real. The people on these worlds have their own lives, their own desires, but they are bound by the rules of their world. We help keep their worlds running as they’re meant to. It’s the best job you could ask for. Adventure, excitement, a new challenge every mission.”

  Preeti had turned back to her workstation, watching three screens, each showing a view of what had to be the Western world—Old West buildings, saloons, cowboys on horseback, and a trio of Native American men from a Great Plains tribe trading with a merchant on a street corner.