Authority

“Did you know the members of the twelfth expedition before they left?”

“I wouldn’t say ‘know,’” Whitby said, clearly uncomfortable with the question.

“But you saw them around.”

“Yes.”

“The biologist?”

“Yes, I saw her.”

They cleared the cafeteria and its high ceiling and stepped into an atrium flooded with fluorescent light. The crunchy chirp of pop music dripped, distant, out of some office or another.

“What did you think of her? What were your impressions?”

Whitby concentrated hard, face rendered stern by the effort. “She was distant. Serious, sir. She outworked all of the others. But she didn’t seem to be working at it, if you know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know what you mean, Whitby.”

“Well, it didn’t matter to her. The work didn’t matter. She was looking past it. She was seeing something else.” Control got the sense that Whitby had subjected the biologist to quite a bit of scrutiny.

“And the former director? Did you see the former director interact with the biologist?”

“Twice, maybe three times.”

“Did they get along?” Control didn’t know why he asked this question, but fishing was fishing. Sometimes you just had to cast the line any place at all to start.

“No, sir. But, sir, neither of them got along with anyone.” He said this last bit in a whisper, as if afraid of being overheard. Then said, as if to provide cover, “No one but the director wanted that biologist on the twelfth expedition.”

“No one?” Control asked slyly.

“Most people.”

“Did that include the assistant director?”

Whitby gave him a troubled look. But his silence was enough.

The director had been embedded in the Southern Reach for a long time. The director had cast a long shadow. Even gone, she had a kind of influence. Perhaps not entirely with Whitby, not really. But Control could sense it anyway. He had already caught himself having a strange thought: That the director looked out at him through the assistant director’s eyes.

The elevators weren’t working and wouldn’t be fixed until an expert from the army base dropped by in a few days, so they took the stairs. To get to the stairs, you followed the curve of the U to a side door that opened onto a parallel corridor about fifty feet long, the floor adorned with the same worn green carpet that lowered the property value of the rest of the building. The stairs awaited them at the corridor’s end, through wide swinging doors more appropriate for a slaughterhouse or emergency room. Whitby, out of character, felt compelled to burst through those double doors as if they were rock stars charging onto a stage—or, perhaps, to warn off whatever lay on the other side—then stood there sheepishly holding one side open while Control contemplated that first step.

“It’s through here,” Whitby said.

“I know,” Control said.

Beyond the doors, they were suddenly in a kind of free fall, the green carpet cut off, the path become a concrete ramp down to a short landing with a staircase at the end—which then plunged into shadows created by dull white halogens in the walls and punctuated by blinking red emergency lights. All of it under a high ceiling that framed what, in the murk, seemed more a human-made grotto or warehouse than the descent to a basement. The staircase railing, under the shy lights, glittered with luminous rust spots. The coolness in the air as they descended reminded him of a high-school field trip to a natural history museum with an artificial cave system meant to mimic the modern day, the highlight of which had been non sequiturs: mid-lunge reproductions of a prehistoric giant sloth and giant armadillo, mega fauna that had taken a wrong turn.

“How many people in the science division?” he asked when he’d acclimated.

“Twenty-five,” Whitby said. The correct answer was nineteen.

“How many did you have five years ago?”

“About the same, maybe a few more.” The correct answer was thirty-five.

“What’s the turnover like?”

Whitby shrugged. “We have some stalwarts who will always be here. But a lot of new people come in, too, with their ideas, but they don’t really change anything.” His tone implied that they either left quickly or came around … but came around to what?

Control let the silence elongate, so that their footsteps were the only sound. As he’d thought, Whitby didn’t like silences. After a moment, Whitby said, “Sorry, sorry. I didn’t mean anything by that. It’s just sometimes frustrating when new people come in and want to change things without knowing … our situation. You feel like if they just read the manual first … if we had a manual, that is.”

Control mulled that, making a noncommittal sound. He felt as if he’d come in on the middle of an argument Whitby had been having with other people. Had Whitby been a new voice at some point? Was he the new Whitby, applied across the entire Southern Reach rather than just the science division?

Whitby looked paler than before, almost sick. He was staring off into the middle distance while his feet listlessly slapped the steps. With each step, he seemed more ill at ease. He had stopped saying “sir.”

Some form of pity or sympathy came over Control; he didn’t know which. Perhaps a change of subject would help Whitby.

“When was the last time you had a new sample from Area X?”

“About five or six years ago.” Whitby sounded more confident about this answer, if no more robust, and he was right. It had been six years since anything new had come to the Southern Reach from Area X. Except for the forever changed members of the eleventh expedition. The doctors and scientists had exhaustively tested them and their clothing, only to find … nothing. Nothing at all out of the ordinary. Just one anomaly: the cancer.

No light reached the basement except for what the science division created for itself: They had their own generator, filtration system, and food supply. Vestiges, no doubt, of some long-ago imperative that boiled down to “in an emergency, save the scientists.” Control found it hard to imagine those first days, when behind closed doors the government had been in panic mode, and the people who worked in the Southern Reach believed that whatever had come into the world along the forgotten coast might soon turn its attentions inland. But the invasion hadn’t happened, and Control wondered if something in that thwarting of expectation had started the Southern Reach’s decline.

“Do you like working here, Whitby?”

“Like? Yes. I must admit it’s often fascinating, and definitely challenging.” Whitby was sweating now, beads breaking on his forehead.

It might indeed be fascinating, but Whitby had, according to the records, undergone a sustained spasm of transfer requests about three years ago—one every month and then every two months like an intermittent SOS, until it had trailed off to nothing, like a flatlined EKG. Control approved of the initiative, if not the sense of desperation embedded in the number of attempts. Whitby didn’t want to be stuck in a backwater and just as clearly the director or someone hadn’t wanted him to leave.

Perhaps it was his utility-player versatility, because it was clear to Control that, just like every department in the Southern Reach, the science division had been “stripped for parts,” as his mother would have put it, by antiterrorism and Central. According to the personnel records, there had once been one hundred and fifteen scientists in-house, representing almost thirty disciplines and several subdepartments. Now there were only sixty-five people in the whole haunted place. There had even been talk, Control knew, about relocating, except that the building was too close to the border to be used for anything else.

The same cheap, rotting scent came to him again just then, as if the janitor had unlimited access to the entire building.

“Isn’t that cleaning smell a bit strong?”

“The smell?” Whitby’s head whipped around, eyes made huge by the circles around them.

“The rancid honey smell.”

“I don’t smell anything.”

Control frowned, more at Whitby’s vehemence than anything else. Well, of course. They were used to it. Tiniest of his tasks, but he made a note to authorize changing cleaning supplies to something organic.

When they curved down at an angle that seemed unnecessarily precipitous, into a spacious preamble to the science division, the ceiling seeming higher than ever, Control was surprised. A tall metal wall greeted them, and a small door within it with a sophisticated security system blinking red.

Except the door was open.

“Is this door always open, Whitby?” he asked.

Whitby seemed to believe hazarding a guess might be perilous, and hesitated before saying, “This used to be the back end of the facilities—they only added a door a year or two ago.”

Which made Control wonder what this space had been used for back then. Dance hall? Weddings and bar mitzvahs? Impromptu court-martials?

They both had to stoop to enter, only to be greeted by two space-program-quality air locks, no doubt to protect against contamination. The portal doors had been cantilevered open and from within glowed an intense white light that, for whatever reason, refused to peek out beyond the unsecured security door.

Along the walls, at shoulder height, both rooms were lined with flaccid long black gloves that hung in a way that Control could only think of as dejected. There was a sense that it had been a long time since they had been brought to life by hands and arms. It was a kind of mausoleum, entombing curiosity and due diligence.

“What are those for, Whitby? To creep out guests?”

“Oh, we haven’t used those for ages. I don’t know why they’ve left them in here.”

It didn’t really get much better after that.

003: PROCESSING

Later, back in his office, having left Whitby in his world, Control made one more sweep for bugs. Then he prepared to call the Voice, who required reports at regular intervals. He had been given a separate cell phone for this purpose, just to make his satchel bulkier. The dozen times he’d talked to the Voice at Central prior to coming to the Southern Reach, s/he could have been somewhere nearby. S/he could have been observing him through hidden cameras the whole time. Or been a thousand miles away, a remote operative used just to run one agent.

Control didn’t recall much beyond the raw information from those prior times, but talking to the Voice made him nervous. He was sweating through his undershirt as he punched the number, after having first checked the hallway and then locked the door. Neither his mother nor the Voice had told him what might be expected from any report. His mother had said that the Voice could remove him from his position without consulting with her. He doubted that was true but had decided to believe it for now.

The Voice was, as ever, gruff and disguised by a filter. Disguised purely for security or because Control might recognize it? “You’ll likely never know the identity of the Voice,” his mother had said. “You need to put that question out of your head. Concentrate on what’s in front of you. Do what you do best.”

But what was that? And how did it translate into the Voice thinking he had done a good job? He already imagined the Voice as a megalodon or other leviathan, situated in a think tank filled with salt water in some black-op basement so secret and labyrinthine that no one now remembered its purpose even as they continued to reenact its rituals. A sink tank, really. Or a stink tank. Control doubted the Voice or his mother would find that worth a chuckle.

The Voice used Control’s real name, which confused him at first, as if he had sunk so deeply into “Control” that this other name belonged to someone else. He couldn’t stop tapping his left index finger against the blotter on his desk.

“Report,” the Voice said.

“In what way?” was Control’s immediate and admittedly inane response.

“Words would be nice,” the Voice said, sounding like gravel ground under boots.

Control launched into a summary of his experience so far, which started as just a summary of the summary he had received on the state of things at the Southern Reach.

But somewhere in the middle he started to lose the thread or momentum—had he already reported the bugs in his office?—and the Voice interrupted him. “Tell me about the scientists. Tell me about the science division. You met with them today. What’s the state of things there?”

Interesting. Did that mean the Voice had another pair of eyes inside the Southern Reach?

So he told the Voice about the visit to the science division, although couching his opinions in diplomatic language. If his mother had been debriefing him, Control would have said the scientists were a mess, even for scientists. The head of the department, Mike Cheney, was a short, burly, fifty-something white guy in a motorcycle jacket, T-shirt, and jeans, who had close-cropped silver hair and a booming, jovial voice. An accent that had originated in the north but at times relaxed into an adopted southern drawl. The lines to the sides of his mouth conspired with plunging eyebrows to make of his face an X, a fate he perpetually fought against by being the kind of person who smiled all the time.

His second-in-command, Deborah Davidson, was also a physicist: A skinny jogger type who had actually smoked her way to weight loss. She creaked along in a short-sleeved red plaid shirt and tight brown corduroy pants cinched with a thick, overlarge leather belt. Most of this hidden by a worn black business jacket whose huge shoulder pads revealed its age. She had a handshake like a cold, dead fish, from which Control could not at first extricate himself.

Control’s ability to absorb new names, though, had ended with Davidson. He gave vague nods to the research chemist, as well as the staff epidemiologist, psychologist, and anthropologist who had also been stuffed into the tiny conference room for the meeting. At first Control felt disrespected by that space, but halfway through he realized he’d gotten it wrong. No, they were like a cat confronted by a predator—just trying to make themselves look bigger to him, in this case by scaling down their surroundings.

None of the extras had much to add, although he had the sense they might be more forthcoming one-on-one. Otherwise, it was the Cheney and Davidson show, with a few annotations from the anthropologist. From the way they spoke, if their degrees had been medals, they would all have had them pinned to some kind of quasi-military scientist uniform—like, say, the lab coats they all lacked. But he understood the impulse, understood that this was just part of the ongoing narrative: What once had been a wide territory for the science division had, bit by bit, been taken away from them.

Grace had apparently told them—ordered them?—to give Control the usual spiel, which he took as a form of subterfuge or, at best, a possible waste of time. But they didn’t seem to mind this rehash. Instead, they relished it, like overeager magicians in search of an audience. Control could tell that Whitby was embarrassed by the way he made himself small and insignificant in a far corner of the room.

The “piece of resistance,” as his father used to joke, was a video of white rabbits disappearing across the invisible border: something they must have shown many times, from their running commentary.

The event had occurred in the mid-1990s, and Control had come across it in the data pertaining to the invisible border between Area X and the world. As if in a reflexive act of frustration at the lack of progress, the scientists had let loose two thousand white rabbits about fifty feet from the border, in a clear-cut area, and herded them right into the border. In addition to the value of observing the rabbits’ transition from here to there, the science division had had some hope that the simultaneous or near-simultaneous breaching of the border by so many “living bodies” might “overload” the “mechanism” behind the border, causing it to short-circuit, even if “just locally.” This supposed that the border could be overloaded, like a power grid.

They had documented the rabbits’ transition not only with standard video but also with tiny cameras strapped to some of the rabbits’ heads. The resulting montage that had been edited together used split screen for maximum dramatic effect, along with slow motion and fast-forward in ways that conveyed an oddly flippant quality when taken in aggregate. As if even the video editor had wanted to make light of the event, to somehow, through an embedded irreverence, find a way to unsee it. In all, Control knew, the video and digital library contained more than forty thousand video segments of rabbits vanishing. Jumping. Squirming atop one another as they formed sloppy rabbit pyramids in their efforts not to be pushed into the border.

The main video sequence, whether shown at regular speed or in slow motion, had a matter-of-fact and abrupt quality to it. The rabbits were zigging and zagging ahead of humans in baggy contamination suits, who had corralled them in a semicircle. The humans looked weirdly like anonymous white-clad riot police, holding long white shields linked together to form a wall to hem in and herd the rabbits. A neon red line across the ground delineated the fifteen-foot transition zone between the world and Area X.

A few rabbits fled around the lip of the semicircle or in crazed jumps found trajectories that brought them over the riot wall as they were pushed forward. But most could not escape. Most hurtled forward and, either running or in mid-jump, disappeared as they hit the edge of the border. There was no ripple, no explosion of blood and organs. They just disappeared. Close-up slow motion revealed a microsecond of transition in which a half or quarter of a rabbit might appear on the screen, but only a captured frame could really chart the moment between there and not-there. In one still, this translated into staring at the hindquarters of about four dozen jostling rabbits, most in mid-leap, disembodied from their heads and torsos.

The video the scientists showed him had no sound, just a voice-over, but Control knew from the records that an awful screaming had risen from the herded rabbits once the first few had been driven across the border. A kind of keening and a mass panic. If the video had continued, Control would have seen the last of the rabbits rebel so utterly against being herded that they turned on the herders and fought, leaping to bite and scratch … would have seen the white of the shields stained red, the researchers so surprised that they mostly broke ranks and a good two hundred rabbits went missing.

The cameras were perhaps even less revealing. As if the abandoned rushes from an intense movie battle scene, they simply showed the haunches and the underside of the hind paws of desperately running rabbits and some herky-jerky landscape before everything went dark. There were no video reports from rabbits that had crossed over the border, although the escapees muddied the issue, the swamps on either side looking very similar. The Southern Reach had spent a good amount of time in the aftermath tracking down escapees to rule out that they were receiving footage from across the border.

Nor had the next expedition to Area X, sent in a week after the rabbit experiment, found any evidence of white rabbits, dead or alive. Nor had any similar experiments, on a far smaller scale, produced any results whatsoever. Nor had Control missed a finicky note in one file by an ecologist about the event that read, “What the hell? This is an invasive species. They would have contaminated Area X.” Would they have? Would whatever had created Area X have allowed that? Control tried to push away a ridiculous image of Area X, years later, sending back a human-size rabbit that could not remember anything but its function. Most of the magicians were all snickering at inappropriate places anyway, as if showing him how they’d done their most notorious trick. But he’d heard nervous laughter before; he was sure that, even at such a remove, the video disturbed many of them.

Some of the individuals responsible had been fired and others reassigned. But apparently adding the passage of time to a farce left you with an iconic image, because here was the noble remnant of the science division, showing him with marked enthusiasm what had been deemed an utter failure. They had more to show him—data and samples from Area X under glass—but it all amounted to nothing more than what was already in the files, information he could check later at his leisure.

In a way, Control didn’t mind seeing this video. It was a relief considering what awaited him. The videos from the first expedition, the members of which had died, save one survivor, would have to be reviewed later in the week as primary evidence. But he also couldn’t shake the echo of a kind of frat-boy sensibility to the current presentation, the underlying howl of “Look at this shit we sent out into the border! Look at this stunt we pulled!” Pass the cheap beer. Do a shot every time you see a white rabbit.

When Control left, they had all stood there in an awkward line, as if he were about to take a photograph, and shook his hand, one by one. Only after he and Whitby were back on the stairs, past the horrible black gloves, did he realize what was peculiar about that. They had all stood so straight, and their expressions had been so serious. They must have thought he was there to cull yet more from their department. That he was there to judge them. Later still, scooping up some of the bugs from his desk on his way to carry out a bad deed before calling the Voice, he wondered if instead they were afraid of something else entirely.

Most of this Control told the Voice with a mounting sense of futility. Not a lot of it made much sense or would be news; he was just pushing words around to have something to say. He didn’t tell the Voice that some of the scientists had used the words environmental boon to describe Area X, with a disturbing and demoralizing subtext of “Should we be fighting this?” It was “pristine wilderness,” after all, human-made toxins now absent.

“GODDAMMIT!” the Voice screamed near the end of Control’s science report, interrupting the Voice’s own persistent mutter in the background … and Control held the cell phone away from his ear for a moment, unsure of what had set that off, until he heard, “Sorry. I spilled coffee on myself. Continue.” Coffee somewhat spoiled the image of the megalodon in Control’s head, and it took him a moment to pick up the thread.

When he was done, the Voice just dove forward, as if they were starting over: “What is your mental state at this moment? Is your house in order? What do you think it will take?”

Which question to answer? “Optimistic? But until they have more direction, structure, and resources, I won’t know.”

“What is your impression of the prior director?”

A hoarder. An eccentric. An enigma. “It’s a complicated situation here and only my first full da—”

“WHAT IS YOUR IMPRESSION OF THE PRIOR DIRECTOR?” A howl of a shout, as if the gravel had been lifted up into a storm raining down.

Control felt his heart rate increase. He’d had bosses before who had anger-management issues, and the fact that this one was on the other end of a cell phone didn’t make it any better.

It all spilled out, his nascent opinions. “She had lost all perspective. She had lost the thread. Her methods were eccentric toward the end, and it will take a while to unravel—”

“ENOUGH!”

“But, I—”

“Don’t disparage the dead.” This time a pebbled whisper. Even with the filter, a sense of mourning came through, or perhaps Control was just projecting.

“Yes, sorry, it’s just that—”

“Next time,” the Voice said, “I expect you to have something more interesting to tell me. Something I don’t know. Ask the assistant director about the biologist. For example. The director’s plan for the biologist.”

“Yes, that makes sense,” Control agreed, but really just hoping to get off the line soon. Then a thought occurred. “Oh—speaking of the assistant director …” He outlined the issue that morning with sending the anthropologist and surveyor away, the problem of Grace seeming to have contacts at Central that could cause trouble.