Now & Again (13 page)

Everett took hold of a rail. He pulled himself steadily closer to Josh. “You ever heard about parallel worlds?”

Josh cracked a hopeful smile. “I read your paper.”

Hugh’s eyebrows went up. “That’s a first. Understand it?”

“Not all of it.”

“S ‘okay.” Everett coughed and hacked at something in his dry throat. He motioned feebly at the bedside tray table.

Josh looked and then understood. He brought the water glass over and stuck the straw between the old man’s dry lips. Everett sucked in some liquid and then waved the glass away.

“Try again. New approach.” He caught Kendall’s eyes. “Think before you answer, ‘kay?”

The two nodded their heads in unison.

Everett made a clicking sound with his teeth. He narrowed his eyes. “Are you from this…timeline?”

Josh and Kendall looked at each other with relief. They seemed to relax and get excited all at the same time. Josh spoke first. “We’re not sure. We don’t think so. That’s why we came to find you.”

Each grabbed a chair and shoved it close to the bedside of the shriveled old man. Kendall came close to smiling. “We didn’t…start here, in this…time deal, whatever you call it. At least I don’t think we did. We were born somewhere else but we’re here now – but we remember both times – if that’s what you mean?”

The old man smiled with growing excitement. His arthritic fingers coiled and uncoiled in pleasure. “I think
that
just might be exactly what I mean.” His eyes danced. “Tell me how you got here. Tell me everything – every single thing – exactly.”

The words began to flood out of Josh like a river in the spring. “See, we were in these car accidents and they kept happening over and over until, until we survived; but some of the things here are wrong, like the color of Dad’s truck and my car, and I have a PC instead of a Mac, and Mom is alive again but Hannah’s missing and…I mean, not everything, but…it’s messed up, you know?”

Everett drank it in like nectar. “It’s not messed up; it’s an alternate, a line that follows a new path. Think of it as a child line to your parent timeline. If it wasn’t different, it wouldn’t work.”

Josh stared at the old man, astonished by the implications. He didn’t know what he thought; he wasn’t sure he could even take in what the old man had said.

Everett abruptly cocked his head. “Wait a minute. You jumped lines, and yet you kept your memory of the former lines? Is that what you meant?”

Josh looked at him blankly, trying to follow. “I don’t know about jumping lines, but things just switched without any warning and then both memories were there – all the memories – new ones and old ones, all jumbled up. That’s what’s so hard; there’s new memories that half of you doesn’t remember, and then old ones that all of you knows aren’t true anymore.”

Kendall chimed in. “Yeah, it’s tough to keep everything straight. And we’re afraid to explain what’s goin’ on inside because it sounds…” He lowered his voice, “It sounds insane.”

Everett looked suddenly thoughtful. “Jumping and remembering…neither should happen, but both together? That’s absolutely not supposed to be…allowed.”

Growing excited, he hooked his other crippled hand around the bedrail. With surprising strength, he yanked himself up into a near sitting position. “And sudden death is the trigger! Hey, what do I know? That’s why it’s a theory.” He giggled to himself. “Wouldn’t Schrodinger’s cat have been surprised?”

Josh and Kendall weren’t following the old man’s comments at all but they kept watching him, confused.

“Whose cat?” Kendall asked.

Everett’s eyes glowed in the brightness of an epiphany. “Forget the cat. Schrodinger’s dead. It’s you that’s important. Who would have suspected? Nature’s wild card! I’m glad I’m still here. I’ve been waiting a long time for people like you.”

Kendall felt lost. And when that happened, he usually grew cynical. “Like us? People like us? Whaddya mean waitin’ for people like us? What the hell are we?”

Everett swayed as he barely held his position against the bed rail, but his face glowed. “Think of yourselves as counterweights. You’re what’s going to bring everything back into balance.”

They looked at him and tried to fathom what he meant. Finally, Kendall pushed back in his chair. The rubber feet squeaked loudly against the floor. “Not us. You can just forget about that. We didn’t come all this way to help you out of some balancing act. We just wanna know what happened to us.”

“And what’s the sudden death thing?” Josh added firmly. “I told you, we didn’t die; we just kept re-doin’ that same crash and then…”

“No! You don’t get it!” Everett interrupted him with a sudden strong voice and then slumped back on the bed, exhausted by his effort. “It’s not the same crash. It’s decision points. Every crash is a new option, a new timeline, a new choice – that’s what happened to you. You died, Josh; you died, again and again.”

The old man’s eyes darted back and forth in thought. “You were killed in each crash – at least your body was, but you weren’t in your body anymore, were you? That’s the wrinkle. See?”

“I’m dead?”

“Yes, you’re dead; both of you are dead, in that line. But you and your father apparently jumped to
other
you’s
in
other lines
and got other chances. I think that’s how it worked.” He looked suddenly pensive. “Why it worked that way is a whole different question.”

“And buried?”

Everett closed his eyes, exasperated with slow minds. “Yes, buried. I should expect so, unless they cremated you.”

Josh looked horrified. Kendall abruptly stood up and walked away from the bed. He wandered over to the covered windows, and peeked out through the curtains at the pastoral scene outside. Finally, he looked back at the dried up old man huddled under the sheets.

“No. There’s no way that makes sense. Your theory’s nuts. It’s gotta be.” He came back to stand behind his chair. “If I spin off whole universes and timelines every damn time I turn around, I’d feel somethin’, wouldn’t I? I know I would. I’d hafta! And I don’t feel a thing.”

Everett cracked one eye open. He pursed his lips in glee. “Is the earth spinning? Are we orbiting the sun?”

“What the hell’s that got to do with anything?”

Hugh opened his other eye and sighed with sheer intellectual delight. “Do you feel it? Do you feel dizzy? No. But is it true? Yes! The earth rotates 360 degrees every 24 hours! She orbits the sun every 365 days! And you’re riding on her, and you don’t feel a single thing. Do you? Huh?”

Kendall was momentarily silent but unconvinced. “That’s different. There’re reasons. They can prove those things. But what about your…many worlds deal, huh? It’s all made up. Things can’t work that way. It’s a bunch of…sci-fi bullshit!”

The old man smiled sadly, “You really think so?”

“Damn straight I do! Normal life ain’t like that.”

Everett nodded, pleased that the argument was won. “Ah! That’s true, normal people live their normal lives unaware of the multiverse – but you and your son have never been normal people. You just didn’t know it until now. And the fact that you’re both standing here in my room
in the wrong timeline
arguing with me, proves it.” He beamed at them. “Q.E.D.”

A muscular young man sat at a table in a small windowless room. He was tapping his fingers and moving his shoulders to a musical beat. His light sweater was open at the front and it allowed the glimpse of a harness and the bulge of a shoulder holster. On the table in front of him was a thermos, a silver communicator unit and a slim rectangular remote, like a high tech garage opener. He was listening to music from tiny wireless earphones, the volume cranked high enough so that a thin tune spilled out of his ears and into the room.

The com in front of him suddenly beeped and flashed. The man couldn’t hear it but he noticed the pulsing light. He hurriedly yanked the tiny phones from his ears and guiltily stuffed them in a shirt pocket. He swept up the com and pushed the talk button. “Yep, I’m here. Go ahead.”

He listened briefly and then replied. “Copy that. Walk ‘em in. Here you go.”

He thumbed the remote. The heavy door near him buzzed loudly and opened outwards. Another armed guard stepped in followed by Vandermark and Nsamba. The exterior guard immediately exited and the door auto-locked behind him.

Vandermark and Nsamba nodded a greeting to the interior guard and then crossed the room to the two metal doors in the opposite wall. They briefly slid open small view ports built into each door face and glanced in, one after the other, and then stepped back.

Vandermark was upset with Nsamba. Keeping his voice low, he was obviously continuing an earlier conversation. “Do you think for a minute I like all these complications? Believe me, I have enough problems.”

Nsamba was clearly not happy. “Complications?” He stepped closer to Vandermark and harshly whispered at him. “Assault, kidnapping, false imprisonment – these people haven’t done anything.”

“Not yet. Don’t be naïve.”

Nsamba flared black eyes at him. “I’m not being naïve. I’m stating a few
minor
facts that make me extremely uncomfortable.”

“I’ve explained all this. You know what’s at stake. You saw the timelines. These people could become a problem for us. Just think of it as…detainment until I’m sure we’re safe.”

Behind them the com unit beeped again. The interior guard answered. “Yeah? That time already? Okay.” He smiled at something the other guard said. “Copy that.”

He buzzed the door open to admit a third guard carrying a set of trays with three covered meals and water bottles. Nsamba watched the food go by and looked darkly at Vandermark. “Spare me your finer points; I already know how stupid I am to listen to you.”

* * *

The jumper lab at
the Point
was hopping with activity. An additional area of the floor had been cleared, and electricians were installing elevated cable trays. Below them, additional cradles were being fitted out for service. Techs fed cable harnesses through ports in the translucent skin to other techs crouched inside. In other corners of the room teams of engineers were comparing schematics and line drawings on thin, hand-held electronic displays. Workers nearby were assembling equipment racks and control boards to be paired up with the new cradles. Beside a workbench, a jump engineer wore one of the VR helmets. He was testing the output dynamics by twisting the joystick in one hand and checking readouts on a palm-sized device in his other hand.

A floor above, Hahn Song Lee appeared at the control room window and silently observed the focused frenzy below. Her face looked drawn and her eyes tired. She and her teams were working around the clock to prepare enough cradles, and their attending hardware, to meet the demanding mobile unit deadline she had been given. Her headset crackled with queries and responses flying back and forth between the exhausted engineers and technicians below her. The control board crew around her occasionally chimed in as well, but she recognized that nothing required her immediate personal involvement. For the moment, she was visualizing an image of herself as a resting boulder in the middle of a wild cataract of white water – it was the only rest she was likely to get in the next 16 hours, and she intended to make the most of it.

“Excuse me, Dr. Hahn?” Echo’s voice sliced through the bedlam of Hahn’s headset and shattered her reverie.

“Yes Echo?”

“I cannot provide an accurate estimate of the child lines likely to branch from Quyron’s jumpers without a hard end date in this timeline. Can you procure that information?”

“You know our deadline for the truck; use that. It should be close enough.”

“You understand that will not generate a precise number, but a range of numbers?”

“It’s an estimate!” Hahn was irked. “It’ll be good enough. Estimates are not expected to be precise.”

“Of what value is a number that is not precise?”

Song Lee often had issues dealing with Echo, voice-to-voice, due to the quantum computer’s maddening literal bents, and the imprecision of spoken English. Her assistants claimed that Echo’s misunderstandings were often eased by reducing requests to written words or mathematical formulations.
No time for that now.

“Echo, we’re very busy here and I need to feel as if I have control over somebody. So, can you just do what I told you?”

“Of course.”

The absolute sincerity of the computer’s tone did little to alleviate Hahn’s displeasure. In fact, it had just the opposite effect. Song Lee loaded her final response with all the sarcasm she could stuff into the two words.

“Thank you.”

Echo immediately responded with sunny earnestness. “You are very welcome, Dr. Hahn.”

Hahn shook her head. She was quickly swept back into the technical give-and-take in her headset. Soon all memory of the interruption from Echo, as well as her lost quiet moment, were swallowed up by the demands of the now.

* * *

The back third of the control room was a windowless area often used as a makeshift break room during the recent extended work shifts. It featured simple counters and cupboards, a sink, a tabletop refrigerator and two coffee makers.

The space had now been commandeered by Nsamba and his cradle riders for mission planning. Diagrams, street maps and enlarged aerial photos of various aspects of a suburban Cincinnati neighborhood were pinned to cluttered corkboards and propped onto easels. Distances between selected buildings were prominently marked and travel times were noted on colored post-it notes. Two metal tables were pushed together in the middle of this disorder and seven people, including Nsamba, Salazar and Fargo, were gathered around in chairs or standing. Rose, a plain woman in her thirties, sat near Kranzie, a thick, quiet man. Vinnie, a bright, sandy haired young man, perched on the edge of a table and listened intently to the briefing that Julie was giving. A former combat medic, Julie was muscular and kept her hair short. She worked as a certified pharmacy technician now, but missed the intensity of military action. Tempted by the heavy cash payment she’d been offered, Julie had burned up some earned vacation time to join the team.