‘And three, two, one…’
Chapter Sixteen
The octowürm leapt from the shimmering tear she’d carved in the fabric between universes, one fleshy leg still coiled around each of her fellow travellers, and landed just outside the door through which Pierre had pushed her only minutes before. Of course, for the three of them it had felt like a hell of a lot longer than that.
The tear vanished with a sound like an explosion running in reverse. Doxy checked on her two passengers.
‘Oh good. Neither of you blacked out this time.’
Pierre rather wished he had.
It he hadn’t known it better than he did his own face in the mirror, Pierre wouldn’t have believed the corridor in front of him belonged to Le Petit Monde. Not his Le Petit Monde, at any rate. The doors were all busted open. The wallpaper was peeling off the walls… wherever the plaster of those walls hadn’t already crumbled away. The lights had been smashed. The lamps… were simply gone. Someone - or something - had torn up all the carpets.
It shouldn’t have been so silent. Even on the graveyard shift, the hotel was never that quiet.
‘We’re in the wrong world,’ whispered Viola, untangling herself from Doxy’s leg.
‘No, we’re not,’ replied Pierre. He wandered away from them down the length of the corridor like a farmer returning to find his homestead burnt to the ground. ‘We’re in the right one, it’s just… everything’s so wrong.’
He spun around and marched back to Doxy.
‘Did you know about this?’ he asked, staring her in the teeth. ‘Did you know what they were… what they planned to do?’
Doxy squirmed the way only an eight-legged worm can.
‘They never told me the specifics,’ she replied. ‘They only ever said they wanted to put things right. To put things how they ought to have been in the first place.’
‘Oh no,’ muttered Pierre, scratching at the back of his neck. He paced back and forth. ‘They couldn’t have… could they?’
‘Couldn’t what, Pierre?’ asked Viola, but Pierre was already hurrying down towards the elevators.
‘I suppose I’ll leave you to it, then,’ said Doxy, edging away. ‘Best of luck!’
She slipped out of reality like the last bit of bathwater gurgling down the drain. Viola shook her head in disbelief and then jogged to catch up with Pierre. He was coming back towards her, ranting that the power was out. The only way down was the stairs.
‘It shouldn’t be possible…’ he was rambling, jumping down two steps at a time. ‘Gatecrashers… huh… should have been a giveaway…’
‘Pierre!’ shouted Viola, chasing after him. The stairs were in just as poor a state as the corridors, as if they’d been left abandoned for decades. ‘What in God’s name are you talking about?’
‘You’ll see,’ he replied, out of breath. ‘If I’m right, we’ll all see soon enough.’
Pierre reached the foot of the stairs and ran ahead into the lobby. Viola tried to follow but found herself frozen by the scene before her, as if Medusa herself was staring back. The place was deserted. She knew from Pierre’s almost romanticised monologues about the hotel that Le Petit Monde had never been empty - not in Pierre’s lifetime, at least. Worst of all, the grand chandelier - not just the hotel’s centrepiece, but its heart - had dropped and smashed against the floor, decimating what remained of the breakfast lounge. The delicate wooden tables lay in splinters beneath. They looked like the skeletal remains of a shipwreck.
The fact that Pierre hadn’t stopped and broken down in tears at the sight of this scared Viola all the more.
She found him standing by the front doors. Like all the others they’d been smashed wide open, their hinges snapped and the glass of their windows shattered into shards.
‘Take a look,’ said Pierre, sweeping his hand across the vista before them. ‘They did it, Viola. They put the past right. And they changed everything.’
London was unrecognisable. The Thames had been dragged dry, its channel nothing but a cracked fissure in the earth. There were no plastic bags, or needles, or shopping trolleys on its bed, only rocks and moss. The city itself was no ruin, unlike the hotel, but it was… different. Impossibly different. Skyscrapers of a hundred storeys or more rose into the sky like glass needles. The Palace of Westminster remained, as did the clock tower of Big Ben, but both were now built from an alien metal that shimmered a cool and abyssal blue. Instead of clouds and commercial airliners, the sky was occupied by floating battleships and stations. They hovered over the empty city like chrome sea urchins, coloured that same shimmering blue.
Well, almost empty. A regiment of armoured Torri-Tau was marching over Westminster Bridge.
‘This can’t be possible,’ said Viola, her words barely audible above the hum of the spaceships’ antimatter engines above. ‘You told me this wasn’t possible. The past cannot be changed because it’s already happened. That’s what you told me!’
Pierre nodded. ‘And I meant it. Nobody can change something that’s already happened - that’s a paradox. If you went back in time to, say, invent the first electric fan, then the future version of you would have no need to travel back and do so. Why would you? In the future, where you came from, you’ve already invented it. But by not going back - because you no longer need to - you wouldn’t end up inventing it, and so the future version of yourself would have to go back in time to invent it… you following?’
‘I think so. That’s why the very act of travelling back in time forces the multiverse to create a new universe in which your actions can take place. Your own future remains as you left it, but you forge a new timeline going forward. Right? Just like how every action we take results in a billion new, duplicate universes, a different outcome playing out in each one. But you said this is our world, Pierre. Well, your world, at least. All… this… didn’t happen in the last minute or two. What the hell is going on?’
‘No, this is a systemic overhaul of history. A complete rewrite, like… like a second draft. That’s why the hotel looks like it does. It hasn’t been used in years. It’s a wonder it’s even still here at all…’
‘Pierre?’
‘What was it Makka-Soj said, before the Torri-Tau went through the door?’ said Pierre, turning to look at her. ‘That they would spread “to every time and every place there is and will ever be,” just like the Council said they would. Now, Makka-Soj would have known that wasn’t possible…’
‘…because for every universe they invaded and tried to “put right”,’ continued Viola, ‘another universe would be created in which they never arrived. They’d only ever be able to invade half of the multiverse at best.’
‘Exactly. But what if…’
‘…yes?’
‘What if the Torri-Tau don’t leave the same sort of… I don’t know… footprint, as the rest of us? Maybe when they come here from another world… that’s it. They change the past, and the future has to, sort of, stitch itself back together? What if… Oh, I don’t know. What if the Council didn’t hide anything from us? What if the Torri-Tau were nicknamed the Gatecrashers for good reason?’
‘It would go some way in explaining why the Council locked them away in the first place,’ replied Viola. ‘But I guess right now isn’t the time for wondering why it’s happened. We need to round up the gang and fight back. Where’s Wesker?’
Pierre laid a hand on her shoulder. ‘Viola… If the Torri-Tau are rewriting history, then Wesker probably doesn’t exist. As in, he was never born in the first place. Humans are probably an endangered species… if we ever evolved from apes in the first place, that is.’
There was an almighty quaking and part of the Thames began to pave itself over.
‘But if humans never existed… how are we still here?’
‘Well, we were in the Space Between Worlds when it all happened,’ said Pierre, absent-mindedly stepping back into the lobby of Le Petit Monde. ‘Maybe that’s why. Maybe we’re nothing but a couple of l
oose footnotes. I dare say there are a few of our kind off in the future somewhere, where the rewrite hasn’t caught up yet…’
Pierre clicked his fingers and ran off towards the decrepit reception desk. In the latest draft of the universe something large and feathered had been using it as a toilet. One by one the steps of the hotel’s main staircase popped out of existence.
‘What in the world are you doing?’ asked Viola, following him as far as the centre of the entrance hall.
‘If I can get far enough ahead of the Torri-Tau’s changes,’ rose the voice of Pierre from somewhere underneath the desk, ‘then I might be able to go far enough back to stop them.’
He emerged holding an old, rusty, rectangular safe, and dropped it with a bang against the top of the counter. If it weren’t for the electronic keypad on its front, it wouldn’t have looked out of place amongst the battlefields of the American Civil War.
‘Er… Pierre?’
He entered the sixteen digit code into the keypad and the safe’s clunky metal door popped open with a creak. He reached inside and let out a sigh.
There it was. Cold and alone and covered in a blanket of dust, but there it was.
The spare key.
‘Okay,’ he said, looking up. ‘Viola, see if you can…’
He looked around the ruins of the lobby.
‘Viola?’
She wasn’t there. Neither were the front doors, or the cursive nameplate that was supposed to hang above them. The steps of the staircase had vanished entirely and the diamonds of the crashed chandelier were disappearing like bubbles popping on the surface of champagne.
He looked back down at the desk just in time to see the safe plop out of reality.
‘Viola!’ he screamed, running into the middle of the hall. ‘Get out here, quick!’
She didn’t come. He checked back outside, he checked the devastated corridor leading to Wesker’s bar, but she didn’t come. Even as the last of the electric candles vanished from the chandelier and the fragments of wooden tables first splintered and then broke down into dust… she didn’t come.
The past kept rewriting itself. The walls of Le Petit Monde began to buckle and crack.
‘I’m sorry,’ Pierre whispered. Viola was gone. He was sure of it. To the universe it was as if she never existed at all. ‘I’ll put everything back how it was, I promise.’
The front wall of the hotel crumpled like a piece of waste paper, showering Pierre in rubble. He turned and fled deeper into the building.
He needed a door.
The problem was, they’d all been smashed off their hinges. Their locks were all buckled and bent. It was if something had come through the hotel a great many years ago, trashing them one by one the way a jealous partner might systematically tear up all the photographs of their ex. There wasn’t a single one of them left he could use.
And still the hotel erased itself behind him.
‘Come on, come on, come on,’ he ranted to himself, running down the corridor towards the restaurant. He could see all the tables. They were covered in blankets of dust, not cloth. Each door he passed on the way there was as broken as the last.
He glanced inside the men’s bathroom and almost went sprawling onto the floor trying to apply the brakes.
The doors to all the stalls were busted, and wouldn’t have worked anyway. They didn’t have keyholes, for obvious reasons. But there was a cabinet beneath the sinks - a locked cabinet. Aside from access to the bathroom plumbing it only contained rolls of toilet paper and bottles of bleach, but you could never be too careful. It wasn’t just bathrobes and bars of soap that guests had a habit of pilfering.
More importantly, its twin doors were intact… and just about big enough for a man to crawl through.
Pierre skidded across the old linoleum, fumbling with his key. It fell from his hands and slid towards the row of urinals. He caught it before it could slide into the suspicious-looking mould growing beneath them.
The mirrors above the sinks shattered in unison, then immediately vanished with a pop.
He could hear the corridor rearranging itself outside the bathroom. He rammed the key into the cabinet’s lock (it fit, of course - no matter the size of the keyhole, that key would always fit) and turned it.
‘Have to get ahead of their changes,’ he wheezed to himself, crossing his fingers. ‘God, I hope this is far enough.’
From inside the cabinet came the clunk of a tumbler relinquishing its hold on the lock. Pierre threw open the doors and was met by a blinding light.
He looked back at his beloved hotel as it disappeared all around him, brick by brick, lampshade by lampshade, chocolate mint by chocolate mint.
‘I’ll put everything back how it was,’ he repeated, this time as much to the building as to Viola.
He crawled through the doorway and was gone.
Chapter Seventeen
And that’s as far as Pierre got… when it came to telling me his story, at least. As I said before, the tale took more than a few knocks on its way to get to me and I dare say it’s taken a good few more on its way from me to you. I’m no intergalactic encyclopaedia. I’ve pieced it together as best I can; if you spot the glue seeping through the cracks then I can only apologise.
I’m sure Pierre will forgive me for taking a few liberties here and there. It’s not as if he has much of a monopoly on the narrative, after all.
So there I was, nursing a Fuzzy Quasar, which I’d been told was a local favourite but for all I know was the engine grease off a Mark VI Bi-Cerulian Speeder. Whatever the hell that is - I’d heard some of the other patrons talking about buying one. Maybe it’s a hover-bike. Maybe it’s another type of drink. The Fuzzy Quasar didn’t taste all that good, but it wasn’t revolting either. It reminded me of a thick martini, blended with some kind of tangy blue fruit.
I was sat at the bar of some space-dive on a stool designed for all manner of buttocks except my own. A name had been above the bar’s entrance but there’s no way in hell I’ll ever be able to tell you what it said. The letters looked like the offspring from an ill-judged fling between the Greek alphabet and a ringworm. There hadn’t been a great many other drinkers in there. In a port as busy as the one into which I’d stumbled, that had been one of my primary reasons for choosing it.
Somebody was sat to my left. At least, I think it was a body. It could have just as easily been a thing. Whatever it was, it was nursing a tankard twice the size of my head and simpering quietly to itself. Every few minutes the bartender would pass by and top up its drink with more sizzling, milky liquid. My neighbour would nod its leathery, horned block of a head, grunt, then go back to its nursing and simpering.
I checked my watch. Three minutes had passed since I’d made the call on the bar’s inter-dimensional payphone, the one down by the three sets of washrooms. That’s the thing about technology, see. It doesn’t matter how complicated whatever you imagine is; go far enough into the future and you’ll find that everyone’s got one.
Where in the goddamn multiverse was he?
Over in the corner, a customer with more eyes than sense stumbled as he got up from his chair. He knocked over his drinking buddy as he fell. Their various antennae got tangled together as they scrambled about on the floor, much to the amusement of a third friend, whose slow laughter sounded like a dripping faucet.
I looked back at my watch.
Three minutes and eight seconds.
Jesus wept.
Somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I spun around on my bar stool, ready to either run or throw my Fuzzy Quasar over them, depending on how big a mouth I found myself staring into.
It was Pierre. He looked… stressed.
‘Good to see you, George,’ he sighed, climbing up onto the stool to my right. Gesturing for the bartender’s attention, he asked me, ‘What are you having?’
I should have known then that we weren’t headed back home.
Chapter One
I was two drinks down by the ti
me Pierre finished telling me his story. His own mug was left half empty and the froth had hardened to a white crust around its rim. He can’t have lifted it to his lips more than twice the whole forty minutes he’d been talking.
Oh, that’s something I probably forgot to mention before. I wasn’t entirely sober while he spoke.
‘…and then I threw myself into the washroom cabinet,’ he finished, propping his tired head up on the bar with his elbow. ‘Damn near lost my leg when the hotel got written out of existence. I was lucky I overshot no further than the mech boutique round the corner. Could have gone as far as the Big Crunch.’
‘Big Crunch?’ I asked, wondering how I could go about ordering a glass of tap water. ‘Isn’t that the end of the universe, when everything runs backwards?’
‘Don’t be an idiot, George. It’s a salad joint down on Dagger Alley, all the way on the other side of the city. Would have taken me hours to walk here.’
Wherever “here” was.
The bar was emptier than when Pierre had made his entrance, though in fairness it hadn’t been all that full before he’d arrived, either. The bartender was down the other end of the bar, tossing the dirty mugs and glasses into one end of a crusher unit and snatching up clean, freshly-constructed replicas from the other. My rhinoceros-hided counter companion, who had been slurping and simpering through his or her woes beside me, had moved onto new pastures of libation, as had the three gangly-eyed drunks from the table opposite. The only other patron was a black-cloaked insectoid that reminded me of a praying mantis.
Perhaps it was three in the morning, wherever we were. It was hard to tell without clocks. Or a sun.
Outside the bar’s panoramic windows lived the city to which Pierre was referring. Giant frigates and sleek, silver starships came and went from the docks; it was a port city, a trading post and refuelling stop at the edge of some distant galaxy, not locked to any single solar system. Already a bulky, grey asteroid refinery to begin with, it had since been expanded to such a colossal point that the industrial structure now easily rivalled the size and scale of London. When I first looked out of the windows upon my arrival, I hadn’t been able to see how high or how low the storeys rose and fell. I could see the great blackness of space, however. There must have been stars out there, but I couldn’t see them. The neon lights of the space-port were much too bright.
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