When the white cleared from my vision, I realised that I was lying on the hard ground, outside, in a wilderness, and it was twilight. Yu-Wei squatted down in front of me, then uncapped a bottle of mineral water and put it to my lips; I was suddenly more thirsty than I’d ever been. I downed half the bottle and breathed deeply, and when I was ready, stood back up on wobbly legs.
“Fuck, Lucas, what have you done? We’re really not supposed to be here. Don’t you know better than to startle a woman like that?”
I asked where “here” was, why we were no longer in the hotel, but she wouldn’t answer. Instead, she took off her backpack, unzipped a front pouch and poked at what was inside. We seemed to be in a swampy clearing, totally absent of any other human beings. It was quiet except for the buzzing of insects. Every single tree and plant around us was a deep shade of reddish-purple. It felt wrong. I could hear the sound of water nearby, but couldn’t tell exactly where it was coming from. There were also far more stars visible than I would expect to see, even in an isolated area, even in full dark; it was like I could see the entire galaxy at once.
I asked again where the fuck we were and how we’d got there, but there came a rustling from the treeline, and after a few seconds this creature bumbled into view. It was the size of a small dog, but its eyes were huge, and a row of long pointy teeth stuck up out of its protruding lower lip. I recoiled, but Yu-Wei calmly stood up and shrugged her backpack on again as the thing wheezed loudly and made its way slowly towards us. I asked if she knew what it was.
“No,” she said, suddenly smiling. “I have no idea. Isn’t that great? Isn’t it beautiful?”
It kept getting closer and closer, and I imagined the feeling of those sharp teeth around my leg or my throat. When it was in range, and I was shivering hard enough to rattle my teeth, I kicked at the creature; Yu-Wei shouted, “Lucas, no!” and pulled me away from it. The dog-thing scrabbled backwards and whined. Then it let out this horrible noise like a lion growl and a wolf howl and a train whistle all at once. The sound just kept going and going, and before I knew it, a whole pack of the creatures could be seen, purposefully edging our way. But before they could reach us, Yu-Wei threw her arms around me in a bear hug, and the light and static enveloped us again.
This time, the effect was much quicker to subside, and I found myself holding on to Yu-Wei to stay upright. When the world stopped spinning, I looked around: no red-purple vegetation, no dog-creatures. We were back in the Maugham Suite.
Yu-Wei pushed me hard. “Goddammit, Lucas! What the fuck is wrong with you? Is that what you do whenever you go to a new place, attack the indigenous animals there? You know the damage you could have done to their evolution, to their continued existence? Fuck!”
I didn’t know how to respond, other than to sputter and stutter and blurt out, “But it was a fucking monster!”
She sighed heavily and threw the backpack on the bed, poked around inside again, then pulled out a display that was connected with wires and brandished it at me. “Plus, you drained the fucking battery with your added mass! It has to recharge, which means I’m stuck here for three more days!” She crumpled down onto the bed next to the backpack.
“What are you talking about?” I shouted. “What was that place? How did we get there? What the hell is going on?”
Yu-Wei looked up. “You know, I almost told you last week over Wave. You’re basically a good person, Lucas. I felt bad about what I’d done, that you deserved the truth.” She exhaled. “All right, what the fuck, here it is.
“Remember me writing about Many Worlds Theory and moment-universes? I am not from your world. Where I’m from, this country has a different history and geography and even a slightly different understanding of the laws of physics. In my M-U, the Range never existed, and neither do the swees.”
I eased into a fancy chair as Yu-Wei continued talking. “I work for an organisation called the Tesseract Project, which stretches across countless numbers of moment-universes to monitor and maintain the health of the Multiverse, and police it if necessary. An infinite number of parallel universes is born in every moment, but eventually, the ones closest in probability naturally merge due to redundancy; there are still an infinite number of universes, but it’s apparently a smaller infinity. This is a natural function of the Multiverse, to perpetuate balance.
“However, since mid-October, moment-universes have been disappearing at an alarming rate, far more than the natural process of reduction. It turns out that the cause was you. You are a swee, Lucas, a very special one, or at least you were up until a couple of weeks ago.”
The room spun around me and the edges of my vision darkened; I took several deep breaths to keep from passing out. What the fuck was she saying?
“It’s not possible,” I said. “I was screened multiple times before I started working at the DESD. There was never any sign that I was different.”
“It was latent inside you. The analysts at the Tesseract Project said that if you’d never come to Tinhau, your power would have remained dormant for the rest of your life. But when you landed here in October, you were ‘activated’ due to the concentration of phlogiston and ætheric energy in Tinhau; it’s higher here than anywhere else in the world. But rather than being able to shift your features like Aya, or fly, or melt metal, your ability was far more dangerous: the power to control reality itself, merely by unconsciously wishing for it to change.”
I thought suddenly of the boatload of women who’d drowned, my noisy neighbour who’d vanished, Ailene burning in her own kitchen. I had made those things happen. Those deaths were all on my hands. I started shivering uncontrollably, but Yu-Wei didn’t seem to notice.
“You were basically the thief Ala ad-Din and his wish-granting djinn all in one. Every time you made an unintentional wish, your ability kicked in and made it happen. But it gets worse. As a result, immeasurable numbers of moment-universes collapsed in an instant; those that remained were all linked by your mental actions. In other words, the moment-universes in which your wishes didn’t come true have vanished irrevocably. My own world is gone; the only thing that saved me was being on assignment elsewhere. Left alone, this destruction would have continued on an exponential scale until only one moment-universe remained, the one in which you would have complete and utter control.”
I have to stop here. My hand aches and I’m starting to get that feeling again, that I might faint.
Supplemental
I’ve had a glass of water, massaged my writing hand and done some deep breathing. I think I’m ready to write the rest of this.
So because of my swee powers (and I still can’t believe I’m writing that), I was destroying more and more universes with every unconscious wish that I made. I can’t even fathom how many lives I’ve destroyed and didn’t even know it.
“Obviously,” Yu-Wei said, “we had to do something about this. My superiors sent me to find you and nullify your ability in every moment-universe. I couldn’t just kill you, because there would still be infinite yous out there with the same latent ability, even if only one version of you can be ‘active’ at a time.”
“Well thank goodness for that,” I said. “But why?”
“We don’t know, actually, but the strong suspicion is that it’s a function of your ability. The Tesseract Project scientists devised a gentle biological weapon that would infect your brain and neutralise the section of it associated with your swee ability, an action that would ripple out throughout the Multiverse to every single other version of you. You remember that mosquito bite on your cheek?”
“Yeah. Wait, how do you know about that?”
“That was me,” she said and held up her index finger. “I know that all of this sounds crazy.”
I laughed. “That’s the biggest understatement I’ve ever heard.”
“But it’s no crazier than all of these things happening to you by coincidence, right? Plus, as we just saw, the Multiverse has already started healing itself enough to produce tha
t bizarre parallel world we were just in, which has diverged so much that human beings don’t even exist there.” She nudged her backpack with a knuckle. “In here is the transmission device; I control it by psychic linkup. I basically think of which M-U I want to go to, and the backpack takes me there. But you surprised me so much just now that it threw off the coordinates and sent us where it did.”
She stood. “Listen, it was nothing personal, just my job. You were really better off not knowing, living the rest of your life in ignorant bliss. But you just had to come here tonight.”
She sighed. “How do you feel?”
“Not great,” I admitted. The room seemed to spin again, with Yu-Wei the single still point. “I might puke.”
“Well, do it someplace else,” she said. “I want you to leave now.”
So I did.
I can’t stop thinking about that twilight world and those scary dog-things. That place was not an illusion or a hallucination, which means that all the rest of what Yu-Wei was telling me was the truth. But how can it be?
Sunday, December 2
I’ve spent most of the day in bed, either sleeping (dreamless and total) or staring at the bedroom ceiling and thinking.
Inconceivable as it is, I’ve decided to believe Yu-Wei. She could have always just kicked me out of her hotel room after we escaped the dog-things, leaving me to flail for meaning on my own, but she didn’t. I was her assignment, and the assignment is now over, mission accomplished. She could have even killed me afterward had she wanted, unbothered by the knowledge that infinite other versions of me would still be out there in her Multiverse, but instead, she felt bad enough for me and for what she’d done that she actually revealed the truth; her employers might not be too happy about that, although if I tell anyone else, who the fuck would even believe me?
ENCRYPTED DISPATCH
#BC6C68CB5E0FA00E1FC3AD28F5
Sent: Mon, 03 Dec, 5.37pm
Well, that’s that then. Thanks for telling me, Rick. I don’t know what else to say.
To Joseph Lehrer, NAUAF, Ret.
Monday, December 3
Dear Dad,
I’m sure that you’ve heard the news by now. I honestly don’t know what to say about it, or how to feel.
You mentioned being harassed before, and I can’t imagine that this will let up now that I’ve been convicted in absentia. I’m so sorry about this. Please take care of yourself.
And please write me back soon. I haven’t heard from you in a while, and it’s making me worry.
Love,
Luke
To EVC Aya Quek, Tinhau Ministry of Stability, Cultural Affairs Sector
Monday, December 3
Dear Aya,
I know that it’s probably not exactly professional to email you after hours, but I don’t know who else to turn to. Right before I was getting ready to leave for the day (after you’d already gone home yourself), I received an email from my old boss at the DESD informing me that I’ve been tried after all, and found guilty of high treason and collaboration with “subhuman persons”. My NAU citizenship is now revoked, and my passport worthless. If I ever set foot on NAU soil again, I’ll be arrested immediately and shipped off to Utah; the email actually ordered me to report to the salt mines post-haste, which might have made me laugh if it weren’t so dead serious.
I am now stateless, and I feel a bit like I’m about to have a nervous breakdown. I don’t know what to do.
I’m sorry to dump this on you, but I could really use a friend right now. I’ll likely be home all night, pacing.
Lucas
FROM THE PAPER JOURNAL OF LL
Monday, December 3
It’s late. I don’t know how late.
I emailed Aya earlier about the conviction, how I’m now considered a traitor to my own homeland, and she came over to my place around 8.30. She asked if I’d had any dinner, but I’d had no appetite since getting the email. Like magic, from her bag she produced a tiffin carrier with char kway teow, grilled eggplant and some leafy green vegetables. I talked while I nibbled, and she sat next to me on the sofa and listened, quick to assure me that Tinhau would not extradite me to the NAU, that I could stay here as long as I needed to. When I was done with both the food and the talking, she leaned over and hugged me. I held onto her, and after a minute or two, she pulled back, looked me in the eyes and put a hand to the side of my face, like Yu-Wei had on the night of our coffee date. I leaned in and kissed Aya, but she immediately tensed up and pulled away.
“Oh God, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”
“No, Lucas, it’s okay.”
“I’m so stupid! I can’t believe I did that!”
“Really, it’s okay.”
“But it’s not. It’s just… My life is just such a shit mess right now, and I’m clearly insane at the moment, and I shouldn’t have assumed…”
“Lucas, stop. I’m not offended. I’m actually flattered, but you took me by surprise. Plus, I’m confused about some things going on in my life; I’ve had some pretty scarring relationships recently…with both men and women.”
Which took me by surprise.
“I was actually trying to get something going with Yu-Wei,” she continued, “but she turned me down. Look, Lucas, I just don’t trust myself to be emotionally available to anyone right now. I hope you understand.”
“Sure, of course.”
After an awkward silence, I revealed that Yu-Wei had discovered that I was a swee, although she’d also taken my power away. I didn’t get into the specifics (and I definitely left out all the universe-hopping stuff), but Aya nodded along as though what I was telling her was not news.
“You know that I get my swee ability from my mother, right?” she said. I assented. “Even though she can no longer shift her features like I can, as compensation she can detect the swee potential in others; it’s one of the reasons that she hired you for the job, because she wanted to keep an eye on you and see what you could do, even if you didn’t know yourself. Especially then. It’s horrific that your ability was taken from you, without your consent.”
I admitted that it was a strange situation, that I should be more upset about it, but that I’d lost something I never even knew I had. And that, since it was so dangerous, I was probably better off without it anyway. She hugged me again, quick to emphasise that it was “just a friendly hug”, and we both laughed, which helped to ease the tension. We ended up talking for the rest of the night.
She fell asleep on the sofa and I just watched her for a while. I slipped into the bathroom to pee, then brought my journal into the bedroom to get all this down.
Tuesday, December 4
I just woke to the sound of thunder, but there’s not a cloud in the dawn sky. Strange.
Quiet in the living room; I’ll let Aya sleep. Make coffee in a little while.
FEBRUARY
FROM THE PAPER JOURNAL OF LL
Tuesday, February 12 (?)
I haven’t been able to write in this journal for months. It’s just been too hard.
Our escape from Tinhau and the coup d’état by the Tinhau Army was by the slimmest of margins. Yu-Wei made it to Aya’s apartment with only moments to spare, barely beating a phalanx of troops that was also making their way there. Aya was a complete wreck when Yu-Wei arrived; her mother had been killed (or at least presumed dead, we still don’t know for sure) and the whole country had seemed to turn against swees all in the same morning. I asked Yu-Wei where she was taking us.
“Tesseract HQ,” she said. “Transporting this much matter across moment-universes is going to completely burn out the backpack, and I don’t want to get stuck someplace even nastier than here. Squeeze in tighter; hold your stuff close.”
I felt like I was going to suffocate, but I tried to press even closer together. Yu-Wei closed her eyes and said she needed a moment to zero in on our destination. As she did, I could hear the clomping of boots in the corridor outside. The sound got closer and closer, and then someone b
anged hard on the front door and Aya let out a shriek that made my ears ring, then Yu-Wei opened her eyes and said, “Got it,” and everything disappeared into whiteness and static.
I woke up some time later in a near-silent room with pinkish walls and soft lighting. A bed underneath me, and an IV in my arm, but this didn’t feel like a hospital. I found out later that these recovery rooms were most often used by Tesseract agents transitioning under emergency circumstances, just as we had done. My things had been put away in a closet that hissed open with a touch. There was a small alcove with a mirror and sink, and I shuffled over to splash some water on my face.
After ten minutes or so, a small moustachioed man of indeterminate ethnicity wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt stepped through the door of my room and said his name was Uncle Michael, the director of the Tesseract Project; he looked like he was in his late forties, but told me he was actually seventy-three years old.
“A nice side effect of working in an organisation that exists outside of space-time,” he said with an easy smile.
I asked after Aya, and Uncle Michael said that she was still resting, but that she was fine; I could see her in a little while. Yu-Wei was being debriefed, which he said could take some time. He departed to attend to other things, and left me by myself. At some point, a striking woman with the darkest skin I’ve ever seen, dressed in a red uniform of some sort, came into the room to remove my IV and apply a plaster on the top of my hand.
I didn’t know what to do while waiting, so I got my æ-reader out of my suitcase, and paged through several books without actually reading anything. The door to my room didn’t seem to be locked, but I was pretty sure I’d get lost if I decided to wander, so I stayed put.
Diary of One Who Disappeared Page 9
