Extinction Game (5 page)

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, with what sounded like genuine conviction. ‘We really, honestly, were worried you might hurt yourself. Both times.’

‘Fine,’ I said. I didn’t really know what else to say, and I was already starting to feel far, far out of my depth. The other man’s grin broadened, and despite my
lingering animosity towards him, I could detect no trace of ill-will in his forthright gaze.

He let go of my hand and looked at Nadia. ‘Y’all set? ’Cause there’s a truck due any second now we can take right back through. I already cleared it.’ He hooked a
thumb towards the hangar’s interior.

‘Sounds good,’ she said. ‘Lead on.’

I followed them inside, still utterly baffled as to what was going on. Most of the interior was taken up by two broad circular platforms, each about four metres in width and resting on a forest
of supporting struts and miscellaneous pieces of unidentifiable equipment. From the rim of each platform rose three metal pylons, equidistant from each other. The pylons curved in towards each
other until only a narrow gap separated their tips. Each pylon was wrapped in thick bundles of steel and copper wire, while power cables connected the platforms to a pair of quietly humming
generators in the rear of the hangar. I saw several men in what looked like military fatigues standing or sitting around a card table near the doors, talking quietly among themselves. A coffee
machine was perched on top of the table.

‘These are what we call transfer stages,’ Yuichi explained, pointing to each platform in turn. ‘Now watch,’ he said, directing my attention towards another man in
fatigues, seated before a rack of equipment. Yet more cables snaked from the rear of the rack, disappearing beneath the nearest of the two platforms.

I watched as this operator tapped at a keyboard mounted on his rack of equipment, then he reached up to flick various switches with practised efficiency. A screen set at eye level burst into
life before him, data scrolling across it too rapidly for me to fathom its purpose.

A faint hum began to emanate from the nearest platform. The air between the tips of its surrounding pylons began to shiver and twist, visibly writhing. I gaped, uncomprehending, as this twisting
effect expanded suddenly to encompass the entire platform. Air swept past me in a sudden gust and towards the platform, ruffling my hair.

Then, where the platform had been empty just a moment ago, it now supported a large diesel truck. I squeezed my eyes shut, then opened them again, but it was still there.

‘What the hell just happened?’ I gasped. A trick of some kind: a sleight-of-hand illusion, or a switch. It had to be.

The vehicle’s driver reversed it down the ramp before coming to a halt. The men lounging around their card table had come forward, and they now began to unload a number of plastic and
metal crates from the rear of the vehicle, stacking them next to the hangar doors. I gaped, open-mouthed, at Nadia and Yuichi. The way they grinned made it clear they were enjoying my reaction.

Yuichi stepped towards the truck and had a quick word with its driver, who had just disembarked and was in the process of lighting up a cigarette next to the open door of its front cabin. The
man shrugged and stepped away, and Yuichi turned to look at me and Nadia, gesturing to us to join him.

Seconds later the three of us had crammed into the three seats in the truck’s front cabin, with myself in the middle and Yuichi behind the wheel. He guided the vehicle back up the ramp and
onto the platform.

A creeping, icy sensation formed in the pit of my belly at the thought of whatever might be coming next. I had to fight the urge to climb over Nadia and get the hell out of the truck again;
their friendly manner be damned.

‘Please,’ I said finally, although it took an effort to unlock my jaw and get the words out. ‘Just tell me what’s going on.’

‘The important thing,’ said Nadia, ‘is to remember that seeing is believing. Like the moon, yes?’

I leaned forward, glancing up through the windscreen at the pylons overhead. The air twisted around us, and the hangar became a smear of light.

‘No,’ I said, suddenly losing my nerve and leaning over Nadia to try and reach the door handle. ‘I don’t know what you’re—’

I gasped as the ground opened beneath us and we plummeted – or so it felt. For a very brief instant, I caught sight of a grey void all around the truck, and suddenly we were somewhere
else.

I stared out at a frozen wasteland. I gasped convulsively and rapidly, my heart hammering with such ferocity I feared I might be on the verge of a heart attack.

Yuichi and Nadia both climbed out, letting in blasts of freezing air. Nadia held the door open for me, an expectant look on her face. It took me a few moments to finally unlock my limbs and join
them outside.

The hangar – the island – were gone. The cold bit at me, sucking every last dreg of warmth from my bones and flesh.

I could see that the truck was parked within a circle of half a dozen metal bollard-like objects. A single-storey flat-roofed building stood close by. I looked up to see a sky draped with
impenetrably heavy clouds. At first I thought it must be late evening, but then I made out the faintest outline of the sun, almost directly overhead. Undulating dark hills reached out to a gloomy,
barely visible horizon, their slopes studded with the corpses of trees.

‘In there,’ said Yuichi, guiding me towards the building. I needed no further prompting, my teeth were chattering so hard. The three of us pushed through the door and inside, and I
bathed in the delicious heat within.

A short, cheerful-looking man got up from an easy chair as we entered, a book in one hand. He nodded in greeting to Nadia and Yuichi as the three of us gathered before a roaring log-fire.

His smile faltered, his eyes widening when he saw me. ‘You’re . . .’

‘This is Jerry Beche,’ said Nadia, ‘our
new Pathfinder
.’ She said this with what struck me as exaggerated emphasis, although she did not explain what a
Pathfinder actually was. ‘Jerry,’ she continued, looking back at me, ‘this is Tony Nuyakpuk. He helps run things around here.’

‘Hi,’ I said, nodding. Tony mirrored my gesture, still staring at me in a way that made me uncomfortable.

‘I wasn’t expecting anyone,’ said Tony. His eyes narrowed. ‘Is this on the record?’

‘Sure,’ said Nadia. ‘We’re just taking Jerry here on a whistle-stop tour.’ She said this in a matter-of-fact way, but from the way she held his gaze, and the uneasy
look on Tony’s face, it was clear there was some subtext of which I was not aware.

‘Nuyakpuk,’ I said, wanting to break the awkward atmosphere. ‘That’s an Inuit name, right?’

‘Sure is,’ said Tony. ‘Anything I can do for you people while I’m here?’

‘It’s just a stop-over, but we need cold-weather gear,’ said Yuichi. ‘We’re going for a little drive, and in the meantime we need you to realign the stage for a
trip to AR-21.’ He hooked a thumb towards the far end of the cabin. ‘Cold-weather gear still in the same place?’

Tony nodded, and Yuichi led me over to a door at the opposite end of the building. I glanced back at Tony, who muttered something under his breath to Nadia. It sounded like
Holy Mother of
God
.

Behind the door was a walk-in cupboard, and I was handed a pair of heavy padded trousers, a hooded parka and thick gloves. Before long, suitably dressed for the Arctic temperatures, I was back
in the truck, watching as the building dwindled behind us in the gloom. Nadia had taken the wheel, carefully guiding the truck between two of the bollards.

‘Start talking,’ I said, feeling cold for reasons that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature. ‘How the hell did we get here, and what the hell is this place,
anyway?’

‘What do you know about parallel universes?’ asked Yuichi.

I searched his face to see if he was joking, but he looked deadly serious. ‘Outside of a couple of science documentaries on the Discovery Channel, about as much as anyone else,’ I
replied. ‘Is that what you’re saying? We’re in a parallel universe?’

‘Look outside,’ he said, nodding out through the windscreen. ‘Does this look like any place you’ve ever been?’

I stared at him beside me. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied, with only a slight tremble in my voice. ‘I think you’re asking me to believe a lot.’

‘I know we are,’ Yuichi agreed. ‘Which is why we came out here.’

‘We’re here,’ said Nadia, pulling over by the side of the road.

I followed them back out of the truck, thinking again about the moon’s fracture and what it implied. Nadia left the engine running, and I guessed we weren’t going to be hanging
around for long. From what I could see, we were in the middle of nowhere. There was no sign of anything resembling civilization, bar the cracked and broken tarmac of the highway.

A torch appeared in Yuichi’s hand, and he switched it on as he stepped towards a sign by the side of the road. He played the torch’s beam over the sign as the freezing wind bit at
the exposed skin of my face. It read: ‘
WELCOME TO THE WORLD-FAMOUS WINE-GROWING REGION OF NAPA VALLEY
,
CALIFORNIA
’.

I stared at the sign, then up at the dark and lowering skies. Frozen devastation, in all directions.

‘In this particular alternate,’ said Nadia, ‘Yellowstone Park erupted, big time. Not everyone knows this, but beneath all those hot springs, geysers and attractive scenic
routes lies a lake of molten magma the size of Long Island. And the pressure’s been building and building down there for millions of years, just waiting for the right conditions to come
bursting out.’ She shook her head sadly. ‘From what Tony and other survivors tell us, they didn’t have much warning. There were a few more earthquakes than usual, as well as a
sudden, inexplicable outwards migration of wildlife trying to get as far away from the park as they could run, swim or crawl.’ She raised her hands. ‘Then,
boom
. Enough ash and
dirt got blown into the sky, in the space of a single day, to build a life-size replica of Mount Everest. It’ll be still more years before anyone sees the sun.’

‘And that all means that just about everything died,’ added Yuichi, switching the torch back off and stepping over. ‘Food cycle shattered, crops failing. Most species went
extinct and the forests died. That, along with a catastrophic crash in global temperatures, pretty much did for civilization here.’

‘How many survivors?’ I asked, even as part of my mind refused to accept the evidence of my own eyes. I pictured them making the sign up and planting it in some remote region, in
order to fool me into believing their ridiculous story. But to what possible end? And was such a notion really any less lunatic than what they were telling me?

‘After the plagues and the fighting, maybe a few thousand here and there. People like Tony were better equipped to survive, but they still suffered badly. It’s pretty much over for
humanity in this place, and it’s the same on world after world after world.’

‘So there’s more than just this world, and the one we just came from?’

Yuichi started to pull himself back up into the truck. ‘Sure as shit, there’s more,’ he said. ‘And you’re going to see at least a couple others before we head on
home.
Now
do you see what we mean by “seeing is believing”?’

We drove back the way we had come, to find Tony waiting for us with hot coffee and bowls of soup he had prepared for our return. We sat and ate by the fire, Tony insisting on
squatting next to it while Nadia made use of his easy chair. Myself and Yuichi crouched on low stools taken from the kitchen nook.

Tony seemed more relaxed this time around, and as we talked, I learned he was a member of one of several Inuit communities that had made its way south from Alaska a few years before the
Authority first found their way to this alternate. Even when he showed me snapshots of a New York half-buried under glaciers, the Statue of Liberty still just about recognizable despite being
mostly submerged in ice, I still had trouble believing in what I was being told about parallel universes. A couple more years, Tony continued, and both the city and the statue would be ground down
to dust. He explained there were other, similar communities scattered here and there across this Earth, all from cultures with long experience of dealing with harsh and frozen environments.

After we had finished eating, and as we sat by the glowing warmth of the fire, Nadia explained in precise and concrete detail the substance of my new reality.

She, Yuichi and a number of others were all, she explained, survivors of some apocalyptic event or other, on different parallel Earths. Each had come from somewhere identical in most important
respects to my own – up to the point where most, if not all, of humanity was wiped out.

Yuichi, I quickly realized, despite the outward appearance of a biker outlaw, was clearly a man of deep learning and intelligence. He soon took over, delving for my benefit into the mechanics by
which an infinity of parallel universes might exist. Although not a physicist, I was nonetheless still a scientist, so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concepts he outlined. My
comprehension, however, was at times paper thin. Whenever there were two or more possible outcomes to any event, he explained, the universe fractured, quietly and invisibly, so that each of those
possible outcomes in fact took place. Creation was big enough to accommodate a near-infinity of parallel realities, each branching off the other and accommodating every possible history.

I learned some of the acronyms they used to describe certain of these worlds; NTE stood for Near-Total Extinction – meaning bad enough to kill most of humanity, but not all of it. TEA
stood for Total-Extinction Alternate. The worst was TPD, or Total Planetary Destruction. Along with these acronyms were further bifurcations of classification, such as Category 3 NTE or Category 5
TEA, terms Yuichi and Nadia tossed around with apparent abandon.

I barely had time to take any of this in before we were once again back in the truck, then back at our arrival point. The air twisted around us, and I felt that same fleeting moment of
weightlessness before we materialized somewhere new.