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world he knew, heading for an earlier, younger one. In the dark, with mountains all around and no corn anywhere to be seen, it might have been twenty years ago, or more.
    It could have been anytime. Except for the girl, sleeping in the passenger’s seat. Time’s arrow made visible.
    He was still considering the tyranny of entropy when he arrived at the coordinates. He was there—or as near there as he could get with a chain-link fence in his way.
    He stared at it for a moment, wondering why this place, why here? He didn’t see anything special beyond the barrier, certainly nothing cosmic enough to warrant a message written in gravity. But this was it—the moment when he would learn whether he was inspired or delusional.
    The answer lay just yards away. And it was denied to him by the fence.
    His daughter was still asleep.
    “Murph,” he said, gently. “Murph.” She opened her eyes and looked groggily around, struggling to sit up.
    He nodded at the fence.
    “I think this is as far as we get.”
    Murph glanced at the fence and then closed her eyes again.
    “Why?” she asked sleepily. “You didn’t bring the bolt cutters?”
    He felt a smile broaden his face. That was his girl.
    “I like your spirit, young lady,” he said.
    He exited the cab and got the bolt cutters out of the back, feeling the palm-slicked wood of the handles, cool to the touch. He looked either way, up and down the road, but there was no light, no sound, only the quiet of a mountain night. He reached out with the cutters, laying their steel jaws to the fence…
    Blinding light exploded and he threw his hands up to protect his eyes. A voice boomed, harsh, artificial—electronic.
    “Step away from the fence.”
    He dropped the cutters and threw his hands up in the air. He still couldn’t see anything but the glare of the spotlights.
    “Don’t shoot!” he hollered. “My child is in the car! I’m unarmed! My daughter is—”
    * * *
    From the car, Murph heard a sharp snapping sound and instantly sat upright. She saw a flash of actinic blue light as her father jerked, and then dropped like a sack of grain. She felt the car tremble and heard the thud of massive footfalls as she scrambled back in the seat, trying to think—trying not to think about what had just happened to her dad…
    The door was suddenly yanked open, and blinding light poured in.
    “Don’t be afraid,” a weird, inhuman voice said.
    But she was, and she screamed.

NINE
    Cooper woke to brightness. Not sunlight. Not the glare of the floodlights—no, this was what he remembered from his youth in government buildings, supermarkets, hospitals.
    Institutional lighting.
    Everything around him fit with it, too. Each surface was clean, polished, maintained—and uncannily dust-free. And the air smelled funny. Or rather, it didn’t smell. Not at all. He was so used to the smell of dust and blight that they only became truly apparent by their absence. The air he was breathing now was filtered, scrubbed. Clean.
    If he was forced to guess, he imagined he was in some sort of industrial complex.
    Yet that was impossible.
    He was sitting in a chair, facing a big grey rectangular slab of metal with many dozens of articulated segments—a cuboid of lots of smaller cuboids, like the blocks he’d had as a kid that snapped together to build things.
    The machine had a data screen near the top.
    Memories began to whirl. He remembered the shock jolting through his body. He remembered…
    Murph!
    He cast about frantically, looking for his daughter.
    “How did you find this place?” the slab asked in its electronic voice. The voice from the chain-link fence.
    “Where’s my daughter?” Cooper demanded. His whole body was prickling with fear now, and anger.
    “You had the coordinates for this facility marked on your map,” the machine said, ignoring his question. “Where did you get them?”
    Cooper leaned toward the thing.
    “Where’s my daughter !” he bellowed, but the machine