The Blank Wall

"You don't decide the big things. You only notice, afterwards, the moment you stopped being able to decide otherwise."

I sat in Meeting Room 4B with the envelope in my fist and did the only thing I have ever really known how to do, which is to lay out the options and eliminate them one by one.

His phone was dead. Not dead—disconnected, which is a different thing, and a deliberate one. I had no address. I had no relatives to ring, no employer to call, no last known whereabouts beyond a laneway I had walked out of ninety minutes earlier. I could not go to the police without the conversation ending in a quiet room with a leaflet in it. And there was nobody in my life I could tell, because he had told me not to tell anybody, and because the one person I would actually have told had stood and watched me lie to her face that morning and had let me through the door anyway.

Every road to Seth Holder was shut. Some of them had been shut by whoever was hunting him, and the rest of them, I now understood, he had shut himself—years ago, patiently, one deflected question at a time. And that left exactly one, which was the one he had put into my hands himself, in a laneway, with his fingers closed over mine, while telling me to be careful.

He had simply neglected to mention that it was a wall.

I tipped the envelope and let them roll out again, and the five of them lay there on the meeting-room table in their bubble wrap, weighing more than they should.

A shadow slid across the frosted glass.

It came from the left, distorted and elongated by the pane, the shape of a human being smeared into something that was almost but not quite a person—and my body reacted a considerable time before any part of my mind was consulted about it. I had the nearest Portal Key off the table and into my trouser pocket so hard that I felt the lining tear, and I was sitting bolt upright with both hands flat on the desk in the posture of a man doing absolutely nothing at all.

The shadow kept going. It thinned, stretched, slid off the end of the glass and was gone.

Nobody knocked on the door. Nobody stopped, or slowed, or so much as glanced in.

I sat with my heart slamming and listened to somebody's footsteps recede down a corridor towards a photocopier or a kitchen or a three o'clock meeting, entirely unaware that they had come within four feet of causing a cardiac event in a man they had probably said good morning to.

I gave it a full sixty seconds. I counted them.

Then I got up and checked the booking on the wall panel—4B was mine until two—and I dragged one of the spare chairs across and wedged it under the door handle, which is not a thing that the Tasmanian Government's meeting room protocols make any provision for whatsoever, and which I did anyway.

I sat back down and took the Portal Key out of my pocket.

"We're still alone," I told it.

The absurdity of that registered somewhere distant and failed entirely to stop me. We. I had been in possession of the object for about a quarter of an hour and I had already started including it in the pronoun.

"So we'd better make this quick."

I turned it over in my palm. Matte grey, drinking the light. The tiny indent near one end.

What if it works?

The question arrived fully formed and I made myself sit with it, because I am not a man who presses buttons without understanding the consequence, and because this was self-evidently the last moment at which any understanding was going to be available to me.

If Seth was telling the truth—if the thing did what he said it did—then everything I had ever been taught about the shape of reality was wrong. It was not incomplete, and it was not merely awaiting refinement in the fullness of time. It was simply and comprehensively wrong. There was another world; it had been there the entire time; and people had been going back and forth between the two of them while I sat in this building writing requirements documents about authentication protocols. The implications went out from that like rings on water and touched every single thing I had ever known, and I could not follow them anywhere near the edge, and I did not try.

And if it didn't work?

Then Seth had lost his mind, comprehensively and irrecoverably, and I had spent the afternoon of his collapse sitting alone in a cold room unwrapping his delusions from bubble wrap while he ran through the streets of Hobart pursued by men who were, in that version of events, entirely imaginary.

Except that the men were not imaginary. I had watched one of them search the windows of a café with his hands behind his back.

Either way, I had to know—and that is, I think, the only completely honest sentence I am able to produce about that afternoon. I had spent ten years gently and affectionately humouring the man. Ten years of oh, Seth. And here at long last was the one theory of his that could actually be tested, and my thumb was already moving before I had finished giving myself permission.

I stood, turned, and aimed the thing at the far wall.

The wall was three metres of institutional off-white plasterboard, and I knew it intimately. I had stared at it through six years of steering committee updates and vendor presentations and quarterly reviews, and had let my eyes drift across it while my mind went to weekend plans and holidays and, on one memorable occasion, a barista's forearms. There was a scuff near the skirting board, down and to the left—somebody's shoe, years ago, during an argument about scope. There was a faint rectangular shadow where a whiteboard had once hung and been taken down. It was, without any competition at all, the most boring surface in my life.

Not for very much longer, perhaps.

I drew a breath that felt like drawing in something heavier than air, and slid my thumb over the indent.

The prick was sharp and precise and entirely unexpected, and I hissed and very nearly dropped the thing.

A ruby bead of blood welled up on the pad of my thumb, and before I could pull away, the device took it.

That is the only word I have for what happened. The droplet did not smear, or run, or sit there on the surface. It went into the surface, drawn down and in, absorbed with a quickness that had appetite in it. And the grey material pulsed once—a shift in colour, or possibly in texture, so brief that I could not afterwards have sworn to it—and then it settled, and it was matte grey again, and there was no moisture anywhere on it at all.

It had wanted my blood. It had not simply received it. It had wanted it, and now it had it, and there was something about the whole transaction that felt considerably less like operating a device and considerably more like putting my name to something.

Then the wall opened.

A sphere of light left the end of the Portal Key—small, pulsing, moving far too fast to properly see—and struck the plasterboard, and burst.

Colour flooded out from the point of impact and ran across the entire wall like an oil slick spreading in reverse, gathering rather than dispersing, and in under two seconds the whole surface was gone. Not damaged. Not broken. Gone, and in its place a slow, luminous churn of colour that moved with a fluid, unhurried grace, blues bleeding into purples bleeding into greens and then into things I could not name at all—hues sitting right at the edge of what my eyes had been built to process, colours which my brain kept attempting to file and kept failing to file, so that looking directly at them produced a faint seasick ache somewhere behind my sinuses.

And it was silent.

It was the silence that undid me, rather than the light, which is not what I would have predicted. There was no bang, no crack of splitting plaster, no rush of displaced air, no sound of any kind whatsoever—an entire wall of a government office building had ceased to exist and it had done so without so much as a whisper, and the absence of any noise proportionate to the enormity of it made the whole thing infinitely worse than a detonation would have.

The room changed. The pressure shifted, subtly, the way it shifts in an aircraft on descent. The air conditioning I had been listening to all afternoon seemed to recede, fading beneath something else—not a sound, exactly, but a vibration, low and slow and continuous, which I did not hear so much as feel in the long bones of my legs and in my back teeth.

The temperature dropped. Or possibly rose. I genuinely could not tell; my senses had stopped filing accurate reports.

I took a step towards it. Then another. There was no decision involved in either of them; I was simply closer than I had been.

The colours turned over and over, and the patterns they made had an order in them that I could very nearly read—an order I could almost make out and could not make out at all, the shape of a sentence in a language I did not have.

A doorway to a new world.

That morning the phrase would have made me smile into my coffee. Standing four feet away from it, it did not seem absurd in the slightest. It seemed insufficient.

I lifted my hand.

I hesitated—my fingers stopped an inch from the surface and hung there, and every rational instinct I possess stood up and objected in the strongest possible terms—and then I put my hand into it anyway.

It closed over my skin.

The sensation was like nothing else in the entire catalogue of my experience. Pins and needles, but alive. A gentle electricity that was not electricity. Like pushing my hand into carbonated water, if the water had been paying attention to me while I did it. It moved through me, up the wrist and into the forearm—a fine buzzing pressure that felt unmistakably like being read. Not scanned. Read. Measured against some standard I had not been told about and could not possibly have prepared for.

And my hand was in two places at once. I could see it vanish at the point of contact, cut off cleanly at the wrist as though I had put it into a wall of water and the wall had swallowed it whole. And I could feel it, on the other side, out in the open, with air moving across my knuckles—air that was cooler, and cleaner, and drier than the recycled atmosphere of Meeting Room 4B; air that had never in its life been through a filter.

There was a world on the other side of my wall, and my hand was in it.

Clive sees you, Nathan Cowdrey.

The words did not come through my ears. They did not travel. They arrived, whole and complete, in the middle of my own head, in a voice that was neither male nor female, neither young nor old, and that carried no accent and no origin and no body. It simply was—the way a number is, the way the colour blue is.

And it knew my name. It knew my name, and it had spoken my name in the manner of something that had been expecting me for a very considerable period and was now, at last, noting my arrival.

I tore my hand out of the wall and went backwards fast and blind, and my hip caught the edge of the meeting table hard enough to send a bolt of pain up my side, and I have never in my life been so grateful for anything as I was for that pain. It was ordinary. It was furniture. It was the corner of a table in a government building, hurting me in exactly the way that the corners of tables have hurt people since tables were invented.

I stood there with my back against it, breathing like a man who had run up stairs, staring at my own hand.

It was fine. Wet, slightly—not with anything, just cold, as though I had held it out of a car window in winter. Nothing on it. Nothing in it. Just my hand, and a bead of drying blood on the thumb.

I snatched up Seth's letter and read it again, the paper crackling in my grip, my eyes skidding across the lines and refusing to hold still on any of them.

Clivilius has a caretaker: an artificial intelligence called CLIVE… whether it means us well or ill I genuinely cannot tell you.

An artificial intelligence. A caretaker. A network hidden in undisclosed locations around a world I had not known existed at lunchtime.

Fine. All right. I could hold that. It was the most conventional sentence in the whole letter—we have artificial intelligence, we have networks, we have caretakers; these are words I have put into requirements documentation and been paid for.

But there was nothing anywhere in that paragraph that explained what it meant to be seen.

Clive sees you, Nathan Cowdrey.

The voice again. Identical. Not louder, not more insistent. Precisely the same, delivered a second time, with the flat completeness of a fact being restated for somebody who has failed to write it down.

And this time I understood the thing about it that had been frightening me and that I had not until then been able to name.

It was not threatening. There was no menace in it at all. It was not urgent, it was not hostile, and it was not even particularly interested.

It was patient.

It had the patience of something that had been waiting an extremely long time and was perfectly prepared to go on waiting. My terror, my hammering heart, my hand braced against a table edge in a meeting room in Hobart—none of it registered with that voice as an event of any kind. On whatever timescale it was operating, I was not a crisis. I was an arrival. It had noticed, and it was going to go on noticing for as long as it took.

Somewhere out in the office, a printer started up.

I turned and looked at the frosted glass, at the ordinary world four feet behind me. Somebody's shadow crossed it again, quite slowly, going about the ordinary business of a Wednesday afternoon. At three o'clock there was a stakeholder meeting two doors down that I had been preparing for since November. Sal was at her desk with her succulents. Verity was at hers, not asking.

I could put the Portal Key down. That was still entirely available to me. I could put it back in the envelope and put the envelope in my bag and walk out of that room, and the wall—I assumed, I hoped—would close, and I could go to my three o'clock and never say one word about any of it to anybody for the rest of my life.

And Seth would still be out there. Disconnected. With a cut on his jaw. Being followed by men in a van. Having apologised to me for choosing me.

Trust Seth.

I said it to myself like a prayer, or a spell, or the sort of thing a man says out loud when he has run entirely out of reasons and needs something to hold instead.

The man who had talked me through two redundancies and one bad break-up over pints I could not afford. The man who had made me laugh until I cried in a pub in July wearing a paper crown. The man who had never once, in ten years, deliberately steered me wrong—only sideways, only into rabbit holes, only ever downwards into places I had always come back out of.

He had known what would happen when I pressed this. He had done it himself. He had stood where I was standing, at some point, and he had put his hand into it, and he had heard that voice say his name.

And then, at the end of everything, with people hunting him and his life coming apart in his hands, he had chosen to give it to me.

I put the letter into the envelope. I put the four remaining Portal Keys in on top of it, and the white plastic card, and I folded the flap over and slid the whole thing inside my shirt, where it had been for most of the afternoon, flat and warm against my chest. I picked up my bag. And I put the fifth Portal Key—mine, I understood by then, mine in some way for which I did not yet have any vocabulary—into my trouser pocket, and closed my hand around it.

Then I let go of the table and stood on my own feet.

There was no leap. In every version of this I had ever watched on a screen there was a leap—a plunge, a man flinging himself heroically into the unknown with his coat flying out behind him—and I did nothing whatsoever of the kind.

I walked into it. One foot, and then the other, exactly as I have crossed a thousand thresholds into a thousand other rooms. It was only that this particular doorway shimmered, and hummed, and had no floor on the far side of it that I could see.

And the world changed—though not in the manner I had braced for.

There was no flash. No tumbling. No screaming rush of light and time. There was a brief pressure at the back of my neck, the sensation of stepping out of one barometric system and into another. A faint warping of the air across my face. A buzz at the base of my skull, the same buzz I had felt as a boy standing too close to a transformer on a fence line outside Morphett Vale.

And then nothing.

There was no fanfare, and there was no music, and there was nothing at all to mark it.

I simply came out the other side.

I stumbled a step, caught myself, and stood breathing.

The air was still. Not dead—suspended. Held. The way the world holds itself in the last minute before a thunderstorm breaks, when the birds have stopped and the leaves have stopped and everything living has agreed, without any discussion, to wait.

Behind me there was no wall. There was no meeting room. There was no printer, no stakeholder meeting, no frosted glass with a shadow crossing it, no Sal, no Verity at her desk not asking me anything.

Tasmania was gone. The office was gone. The whole accumulated weight of my familiar, careful, load-bearing life was gone—and not torn away, not ripped from me, nothing so violent as that.

Simply absent.

As though it had never existed at all.