Tuners

by Aaron Frale

  Jon sighed. He’s going to have to have a talk with Meathook about this so called wild ride.

  ∆∆∆

  The next day was a little better. He met with DeAndre and Meathook in a decked-out gym after making fun of him for not being able to avoid school yesterday. The exercise equipment was like nothing he had seen before. Some stuff he recognized like dumbbells and treadmills. Others, he couldn’t begin to tell what they were for. There was something that looked more like a blob than a workout device.

  “Welcome to the Pain Lab,” Meathook said.

  “Dude, that’s a stupid name,” DeAndre said.

  “Punishment, Inc?”

  “No.”

  “Sweat your balls off—”

  “Okay, okay! He gets it,” DeAndre said. “Meathook will do your resistance training, and I’ll be giving your hand-to-hand basics.”

  “Like martial arts?” Jon asked. He always wanted to get into martial arts, but his parents thought it was too violent.

  “Kinda, mostly weapons.”

  “Weapons?”

  DeAndre grinned and pressed a button on the wall. A panel opened up with padded versions of just about every type of sword, mace, polearm, bow, hammer, and every low-tech weapon available. Jon grinned. This was going to be cool.

  ∆∆∆

  DeAndre thwacked Jon to the floor for what felt like the twentieth time that day. Jon groaned and didn’t get up right away. DeAndre held out his hand and asked, “Had enough?”

  Jon held his head and asked, “How do you move that fast?”

  “How do you know that you aren’t the one who’s moving slow?” DeAndre asked and helped Jon to his feet. “If you want to see something impressive, you’ve got weight training with Meathook next. The gravity is out of control in his home universe.”

  ∆∆∆

  DeAndre wasn’t lying. The weight machines didn’t have a maximum limit. Jon wasn’t quite sure how they worked, but there were bars suspended in midair. There was a dial for the weight, and Jon could only move the bar if he had the physical strength to move it. When Meathook dialed the bar to over five thousand pounds, Jon could not move the thing even by dangling off of it. Meathook bench pressed the bar like it was nothing.

  Jon was going to have his work cut out for him in weight training.

  ∆∆∆

  Later that night, Jon was sore, not only from the weights, but also the beatings from DeAndre. Padded or not, Jon wanted to do nothing but shower and fall asleep. His plans of going to bed early would not come to fruition as Hailey stood outside his door. She was looking down at her TF3. There was a photo on the screen. It was a little girl with brown hair and a school uniform like the one Hailey wore. The girl in the picture wore a jacket that was too big for her.

  “Who’s that?” Jon asked.

  “She’s my sister. Do you always make a habit of creeping up on people?”

  “You are standing in front of my door.”

  Hailey looked up at the unit number. “Oh yeah, sorry. This unit has been vacant for a while now.”

  She walked down the hall to the next door and waved her hand. It opened for her.

  “Wait,” Jon said. “You’re my neighbor?”

  “You never heard of coed habitation?”

  Jon could feel himself blush. “No, it’s just that—we usually separate the girls and guys in my universe.”

  “This was not built in your universe. You’ll find things are different here. You have cardio with me in the gym in the morning and tech training with Ludie in the afternoon.”

  Tomorrow wasn’t going to be a bad day after all, at least half of it. Jon nodded and said, “I guess I better get to sleep.”

  “Oh no,” Hailey said. “It’s karaoke tonight in the crew lounge, and everybody’s going to be there. Including you.”

  Before Jon could protest, Hailey walked into her room, and the door shut behind her. Now Jon was going to lose sleep and embarrass himself. He had done much stupider stuff for a girl; joining a multiverse covert group, for one thing.

  13

  After a few months of training, Jon had seen just about every inch of the place. There were floors and floors and endless amounts of activity. In addition to the rec room that looked like it was for Tuners only, there was a commons room for the rest of the staff, video game rooms, gyms with full-sized basketball courts, a full-screen cinema, the dreaded karaoke club where Jon would not get on stage no matter how hard Hailey had tried, and a cafeteria that seemed to have any food a person could desire.

  There was even an extensive arboretum that was a maze in itself. It had wild and strange plant species from across the universes. The peculiar part about the arboretum was that there was no natural light. Each room was illuminated with lights that mimicked the earth’s sun. There was even a room with a domed roof that could simulate blue skies. It was so convincing of an illusion that if Jon closed his eyes, he could picture being outside.

  The installation was spherical as far as Jon could tell with operations at the center of it all. There were no windows on the outer hull. Patel had explained that since HQ was floating in the cosmic space between universes, there would be nothing to see, and no world had windows strong enough to withstand the pressure. Tuners HQ was surrounded by a one-mile thick material that was the strongest in the known universes.

  According to one of Patel’s lectures, all the universes were bubbles in a cosmic energy pool. They would expand seemingly forever until some force from the outside would push on them, and they would die in a crunch, only to explode and start again. The multiverse was teeming with universes, all built on the ashes of others. Of course, Patel’s book learning didn’t help him much with his other training.

  “Focus,” DeAndre said and slapped Jon aside the head with a sparring sword. “Your mind is drifting again.”

  Jon took off his helmet and tossed it to the side. It landed near Ludie, who was on an exercise bike watching his favorite show. Jon was sick of it. For months, he had been bored by Patel’s lectures, brutalized by sparring with a person that was way quicker than him, run to the point of exhaustion through Hailey’s cardio, and Jon couldn’t even begin to lift the amount of weight Meathook could handle. A lot of good a weight trainer mentor was when he was from a universe with higher gravity than his own.

  The only person’s training regime he could handle was Ludie’s. The kid had all the tech devices, and Jon was at least pretty good with messing around with technology, thanks to his dad. However, Jon’s fiddling would make Ludie nervous as the kid would often say, “Don’t touch that one!” or “You’ll blow us all up!”

  “You need to pay more attention,” DeAndre said. “If this were a real fight, you’d be dead.”

  Jon couldn’t pay attention because he was itching to get out of the place. Short of nicking a TF3 and convincing Ludie to teach him how to shut down the barrier that prevented unauthorized tuning, he was stuck until Hector cleared him for duty. When the man came by with a mission, all the Tuners would run off and leave Jon feeling useless in the rec room. A video game controller was shoved in his hand and someone would say something to the effect of, “Take advantage of the leisure time now because you won’t have much of it in the future.”

  And to top it off, Jon’s dad was still in a coma. He stomped over to a bench and sat down.

  DeAndre asked, “What’s going on?”

  “What’s going on? Hector won’t let me go on a mission is what’s going on! How does he expect me to be a Tuner if he won’t let me tune?” Jon yelled.

  “We’ve been there, man,” DeAndre said. “None of us even got to step outside this place until we were ready for it.”

  “I’ve been ready for weeks now.”

  “Hey, man,” DeAndre said. “I was ready like you, and so was my brother, but being ready doesn’t mean you are.”

  “Your brother was a Tuner?”

  “I’m a twin, or at least I was a twin.”

  “What happe
ned to him?”

  “Me and my brother. We were ready to take on the world. Not only were we Tuners, but with our ability to move faster in most universes, we got cocky. We were too used to using our speed. When we were ambushed by cultists, we had to find a tuning spot. My brother had stopped to get a memento. He used to get something from every universe, something no one would miss, a coin, a brochure. In this case, it was a toy car some child must have dropped. He missed the tune by a second.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “You know what happens when a universe becomes destabilized?” DeAndre made an exploding gesture with his hands.

  “I bet you tell all the noobs that story.” Jon smiled.

  “Ah hell, you got me. I don’t even have a brother!” DeAndre laughed. “Another round?”

  “Yeah,” Jon said. “I got to score a hit sometime if I wave the sword around enough.”

  DeAndre laughed and patted Jon on the back. They picked up their sparring equipment.

  ∆∆∆

  Later that day, Hector came in while they were all eating lunch and told them, “It is time.”

  Instead of cardio, Hailey and Jon tuned into a dressing room in the recesses of a department store. Hailey had to hold his hand because he wasn’t allowed to get his own TF3 yet. Jon didn’t mind holding her hand. He could think of worse ways to spend then afternoon than being in a cramped dressing room with a beautiful girl.

  After baffling the clerk who was about to offer the room to a customer, they exited the store onto a crowded sidewalk. Skyscrapers loomed overhead. The name of the establishment they had just exited was Janssen’s but could have been a Dillard’s or a Kohl’s if it was Jon’s universe. One department store looked the same to him as all the rest. They walked for a couple of blocks and made it to an alleyway near an old brick building. It must have been ten stories tall and dotted with windows.

  The building looked like a typical New York apartment complex. However, they weren’t in the Big Apple. They were in New Amsterdam in Universe 54G. It was a concept that Jon had a hard time getting straight. It wasn’t because he didn’t understand it. Jon had grown up with science fiction as a part of his diet like any other American. It was just that his brain wanted to see something familiar. His mind said he was in the USA, but union jacks fluttered outside instead of American flags. In this universe, the American uprising was a footnote swinging on the gallows. Jon couldn’t put his finger on why it was unsettling, but it was.

  “Right,” Hailey said and cocked her head upward. “Follow me.”

  “Where are we—” Jon asked, and Hailey cut him off. She jumped and went ten stories all the way to the top. Jon felt dizzy by the height of it.

  “What the—” Jon muttered.

  Hailey motioned him to follow her.

  Jon glanced back and forth. There wasn’t anyone watching. He was sure this was some kind of trick and Hailey had used an invisible wire. He dashed toward the building and leaped. For a brief moment, he floated in the air. His arms flailed, and the wind brushed against his face. It felt exhilarating.

  Then Jon saw the building moving quickly towards him. He was headed straight for the fifth floor. He jumped at an arc rather than straight up like Hailey had done. He attempted to will himself to go higher as if he had some psychic power to bend reality. However, the rules of physics still applied even if gravity was weaker in this world.

  Hailey had tried to explain it to him over lunch before they had tuned into 54G, “You know how Splendidman is from Krypton where gravity is different?”

  “Don’t you mean Superman?”

  “That’s weird. Super? Really?”

  Jon rolled his eyes. “I suppose the Green Lantern in your world is the Green Beacon?”

  “Green Gaslight.”

  “That’s even worse!”

  “At least we don’t have Batman. Who would name a superhero after the flying rodents of the sky!”

  “Batman is the best superhero. Besides, bats are closer to lemurs than rats.”

  “Lemurman! You are not making a good case for yourself.”

  They both had broken out into laughter and had joked about a superhero named Lemurman. Eventually, they had landed on calling their creation a “stupidhero.”

  When Jon wasn’t training, they had talked about comics and music, compared hit songs of their worlds, and stayed up late chatting in the hallway well after lights out. He had felt a connection. There was something in the way they just clicked. It was good conversations, just not the conversations that would have helped him when he was flying through the air into the fifth floor of a building.

  Luck was on his side because he was heading for a window rather than a brick wall. Jon crashed into an apartment. A man, his wife, and a small child were eating dinner. They jumped from the table and surveyed Jon and the shards of glass littering their kitchen. Their mouths gaped at Jon, who was picking himself up after rolling to a stop headfirst into their refrigerator.

  “Um,” Jon said as he brushed himself off. He flashed his school ID and added, “Glass and Safety inspector. It seemed like the panel passed the inspection. Carry on.”

  He was out the door before they could say anything else. He met up with Hailey about halfway to the top of the building.

  “You okay?” she asked as she picked shards from his jacket and then helped him out of it. There was a piece stuck in his arm. She pulled it out, and he winced.

  “I’m fine,” Jon lied. He was sore, and the glass was in deeper then he thought. Ludie came bounding up the stairs. From his fanny pack came a bandage for the wound.

  “Sorry I’m late, guys,” Ludie said, huffing and puffing. “The science team's morning briefs took longer than usual.”

  “You have to be careful,” Hailey said. “The gravity of this Earth is a fraction of what you are used too. You want to push up, not forward.”

  “You sound like my basketball coach,” Jon said, and he winced again as Ludie plucked another piece of glass from his skin.

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Ludie said. “Gravity is one factor. Another is fundamental physics. The universal constant, proton weight, boson size, and these parts of what makes a universe work can be changed in subtle ways. They are all different. Change the property of a quark and everything will be different. That’s why there are void universes out there. Atoms can’t form. Matter doesn’t interact.”

  “You sound like my teacher. So what’s your superpower? You come from a universe of big brains?” Jon asked Ludie.

  “Brain size has nothing to do with intelligence,” Ludie said.

  “He grew up in a universe where kids are taught quantum physics in kindergarten,” Hailey said. “Not all abilities are physical ones.”

  “There you go,” Ludie said. “Good as new. Don’t pick at the goo. When it comes off naturally in a couple days, it will be like it didn’t happen.”

  Ludie had put some goo in each of the wounds and covered them up with a bandage. The goo instantly took away the pain.

  “Maybe it was too much to take you building hopping on your first day,” Hailey said.

  “You started it,” Jon said. “Come on, let’s do this.”

  “You’re injured.”

  “And I don’t think a cultist will wait for me to heal. Let’s go.”

  Hailey rolled her eyes and said, “Well, there’s a cool rooftop not far from here. You can see the ocean from there,” Hailey said and pulled Jon up the stairs. Ludie stood for a moment and awkwardly followed. Hailey saw him and said, “I don’t know if you can go on this one.”

  Ludie blushed, “I just thought that I’d—be offhand. In case something happens to you.”

  “Ludie,” Hailey said. “If anything did, we’d be buildings away by that point. I’ll ring your TF3 if we need you.”

  “If the kid wants to play Batman, why not let him?” Jon asked.

  “I don’t need charity from you,” Ludie huffed and pulled away. He stomped back d
own the stairs.

  Once Ludie was out of earshot, Jon said. “What was that about?”

  “He can’t. The gravity here is akin to his own universe. He needs to work out every day just to stay standing in ours.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  ∆∆∆

  Jumping from rooftop to rooftop was exhilarating. Jon had never felt this kind of freedom before. The closest he had come was when his parents took him to these cabins on the ocean somewhere north of San Francisco. There was a stretch of highway one that hugged the cliff near the seaside. He didn’t know that he’d be back a year later to live in America permanently.

  He hopped from skyscraper to skyscraper, going higher and higher. Hailey even had a little trouble catching up to him because he was a quick learner. She had tried to scare him and told him that even on the low gravity planets, a fall from a high enough place would end in death, but Jon wasn’t afraid.

  He bounced his way up to the tallest building in the city. There was a large steel antenna tower on top with a horizontal bar that could seat two. He decided to stop and wait for Hailey.

  A few minutes later, she made it to the top. She was completely winded, and Jon had barely broken a sweat.

  “Mind if we rest?” she asked and sat beside him.

  He shrugged and looked out over the cityscape. The view was like nothing he had ever experienced. The sky was glowing red from the setting sun. He could see so far in the distance that the sea disappeared behind the horizon. The wind buffeted against him. The city below looked foreign. The advertisements, the names of things, the cars, they all looked different but somehow familiar. He definitely wasn’t on his Earth anymore.

  “Why is this world a British colony and not a land of dinosaur people?” Jon asked after a while.

  “Dinosaur people?” Hailey rolled her eyes.

  “You know what I mean. Why are there humans on all them and not—”

  “The multiverse is like a beach. Each universe is like a grain of sand. It’s not so surprising the ones on our corner of the beach are similar.”