by Ryan Schow
In Holland’s new lab—a new lab I’m not familiar with—I see ten glass canisters with ten men in stasis. In three side-by-side reclining medical chairs are three unconscious subjects. One of these subjects is Aloysius, another is me (although it doesn’t look exactly like me), and the third is a man I don’t recognize.
Draco lets me see this, and then he removes his hands from my head. I am back in my room, Draco standing like a giant before me, a splash of artificial light cutting though the darkness.
Inside, a low psychic roiling upsets me.
I feel The Operator stirring.
He starts to laugh, but that laughter devolves into a sobbing fit, which becomes invisible hands on an invisible cage shaking, shaking, shaking the hell out of my insides. This imprisoned soul, this extra few ounces of abhorrent contagion, he begins to really buck and twist inside me, upsetting me on a base level.
“What an irate little creature you carry around inside you,” Draco says in observance of what I’m experiencing.
“Can you excuse me for a second?” I ask.
He gives a dismissive wave with one of his hands and says, “Do attend to your toddler.”
I close my eyes, dive down inside my mind, follow the sounds of The Operator’s tantrum. I swim down to his cage, slam a fist against it with such force it rattles everything. The tantrum stops. The energy of this imprisoned soul is dark and hateful; it is malevolent and murderous.
“You are here until my end you sour little tart,” I roar. Then, more congenial, I add: “Unless I stamp you out.”
“You wouldn’t…”
“I can make you not exist at all,” I say, carrying the tone.
“If you had that kind of power,” he half sniffles half growls from the dark corners of this mental prison I’ve trapped him in, “you would have done that already.”
“Perhaps I like torture as much as you liked dragging all your little sheep to slaughter.”
“You aren’t me,” he says, low and forlorn. “No one is.”
“Yet I have you. You are mine. The roach I always keep underfoot. Remember that you snot nosed bitch.”
He falls still, his energy settled. I pull away from him, let myself drift up through the layers of my mind until I open my eyes.
“Why was I in the lab next to Aloysius?” I ask. “And why do I look different? I mean, I look similar…but not the same.”
“That was you, but not you.”
“Elizabeth?”
“No,” Draco says.
“Raven?”
He shakes his head.
Now I get it.
“How many of me are in this world?”
“You still only see this as one world. You still only see time as something you can travel though, but that is only the time of this world. You don’t see this existence of your world for what it is, for what it can be.”
“And that is?”
“Your universe is but a single page in the tallest book ever, a book so tall you cannot see its ends. Each page in this book is a universe. In this book of universes are billions of different universes, each containing millions of worlds.”
“Wait, slow down. What?”
He continues on, unabated. “You have contained timelines and untold species. A million years in one world is but a blink in time for another world. We are one page, and each page contains variants of all of us.”
“Are you talking about multiverses?” I ask.
“I am. But until you move from this universe to a parallel universe—which is the easiest way to surf the multiverse if you’re a novice—you will only see this world as linear, yet we do not live in a linear universe.”
“You already described it as a box containing all time. That everything is happening all at once. My future self is impacting my past self, my current self, other versions of me, right?”
“Yes,” he says. “If you can travel from one universe to another—which you can—then you can also travel to any time in that universe’s history. All times are happening at once. They are not unfolding in real time. Nothing is linear to you or me.”
I blink my eyes, try getting my head around this. If I was to tell you I’m having a hard time unpacking all this, I would be exaggerating on a massive scale.
“So you’re saying the girl in the chair isn’t exactly me, rather it’s some version of me from another universe?”
“That is precisely what I’m telling you,” he says telepathically.
“Wow,” I hear myself utter out loud.
“This is but one of hundreds of you, thousands of you, perhaps even millions of you. This version of you, she comes to deal with…a problem.”
“What problem?”
“The problem of Enzo Holland, Adolf Hitler, his son Aloysius and The Operator.”
“What does The Operator have to do with any of this?”
“In this transfer, The Operator was scraped loose. He took on a host body—Aloysius. The original Aloysius, horrific as he was, is no longer.”
“So you’re saying Aloysius is now The Operator?”
“He is a variant of The Operator, but worse. He has no clones, but he has this body, Holland’s immortality serum, a vampiric thirst and some rather monstrous abilities.”
“How did that happen?” I all but cry out. Having The Operator loose is one of my greatest fears. “He’s in a cage inside me, imprisoned. I wouldn’t let it out, ever.”
“I took him from you,” he admits.
I look up through the darkness. Standing on my bed, looking face to face with him, I say, “Why would you do that?”
His reptilian slits blink back and forth, his scaled head tilting slightly. “It’s no secret, child, I have developed a bit of an affinity for you, as all monsters do.”
“Am I that bad?” I ask.
“You have untapped potential. An endless amount of power about you. And because of this, there is always a war raging inside you. The struggle for good and evil. You are a good person, but you carry evil in you, and you are more powerful than even I imagined. Eventually it tears you apart.”
“I saw that.”
“This is why you’ve changed bodies.”
“It is.”
“Yet you love the rage you feel in vengeance. This is your euphoria, your addiction, your fix. I believe you call yourself a justice junkie.”
“Guilty as charged.”
“You love your righteous indignation, the confrontation, the fight. You love to stand nose to nose with the worst monsters because you believe you can kill them, that it is your right, your duty.”
“You say that like that’s a bad thing,” I say out loud, defiant.
“There will always be monsters,” he whispers into my mind, so low I barely hear it.
“I’m not in this existence to buy better shoes, nicer clothes, make more money and drive nicer cars. There has to be a greater purpose to me. A reason for all of this.”
“Are you getting religious on me?” he asks, amused.
“I’m becoming philosophical.”
“Well don’t,” he replies, more serious. “You were a natural born killer with that thing inside you. It needed liberating. I care about you, if you can believe that, and that’s why I pulled it out of you.”
“Wat happened to me after that?”
“Those men you saw in the tanks, ten of them, they are the perfect male specimens. Clones from Monarch Enterprises. After the bloodshed unleashed upon the royal family, these men were ordered up and infused with the most lethal form of DNA imaginable. A mix of you, Aloysius and the third man—a mute with the power to scrape souls from men’s bodies.”
“Is he sort of supernatural like me?”
“Yes.”
“But how?”
“We have our own species. Our own…experiments.”
“Of course you do,” I say with a bitter edge.
“You are one of them, Savannah.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“T
hese ten men in the canisters will become raging machines of death and large scale destruction. They will be unleashed upon the rest of the Saudi Royal Family, and from there they will multiply, tearing a bloody swath through the country in a display of such grotesque violence, it will forever scar not just the country but the entire world.”
“What does that have to do with me?”
“In this future, I make a deal with Holland to transfer The Operator into Aloysius when he is unconscious. I do this in exchange for your multiverse sister’s DNA. From what I know of me, I believe I can oversee the transfer of souls, then kill Aloysius and these men once the transfer is complete.”
“You know that won’t get rid of The Operator,” I say. “He’ll just be another soul who will get another body.”
“This is of little concern to me now,” he says.
“Why is that?”
“When he wakes, the instant Aloysius opens his eyes, The Operator controlling his body shoots out of his chair and eviscerates both me and the multiverse you. He literally rips us to shreds in seconds. After that he goes after your family and you in particular. He kills them all. He kills you. This is why I stopped the memory. In this future, I should have contained him better, but I did not realize how cunning he was.”
“He killed you?”
“Yes.”
“Then how are you here?” I ask.
“This time has not happened yet. One of our seers showed me a way we can fix this problem. How we can alter this timeline. This is why I want to show you how this future we have began and what it means for me. For versions of you. For our world.”
“You say you took The Operator from me because it was making me crazy, and that I wanted it out. I assumed that burden to protect others. You can’t just take it from me.”
“Your greatest dream, your only wish after hundreds of years, will be for all of this to come to an end. I came back in time to let it be over for that version of you.”
“But?”
“But then the ten monsters happened. When Holland, Hitler and Aloysius saw what they could create, they bred into existence things far worse than they could ever have imagined. They did not take into consideration the unique measures of your DNA, your other self’s DNA and the mute’s DNA.”
“What did they miss? I mean, how could they not see this coming?”
“Random mutation generation. It is selectable in the alternate universe, but here it is uncontrollable. One day you might be what you call a fae, another day someone with dragon’s blood and the ability to conjure fire, a telekinetic, a shifter. This universe was not equipped for what that version of you brought here, but our merry band of misfits harvested your DNA and then they joined it with the blood of the multiverse version of you. From there they set into motion the events that will eventually destroy all human life on this world as we know it. That is why you must kill Hitler before the bombs go off. Why Aloysius must be killed before he can be born.”
“I have all of time to do that,” I say, unsure of how I’m going to do this but resolute that I must.
“This universe is organic, which is to say it is influenced by each and every person in it each and every second of the day. All of their seemingly inconsequential thoughts, to a large degree, form it.”
“I don’t need all that psychobabble shit to go to where Hitler’s at and kill him.”
“That’s what I’m telling you,” he says. “The past you went to last has changed in slight degrees, as it is ever changing based on minute adjustments made by those occupying it.”
“English, please?”
“I went there and he is not there. I went to the time when the bombs went off and they had already detonated. If I go there again, to where history says Hitler is, it will have shifted once more. Traveling ahead isn’t the same as traveling backwards. Even traveling backwards has a certain degree of…uncertainty.”
“So I’ll go backwards, then?”
“The future version of Hitler went back in time and scurried him out of Berlin. That’s how he got away from you. If you return another time, you’d be chasing a ghost. Which means you were always chasing a ghost.”
“What about the history book with a picture of us before we cut his head off?”
“Changed. A streak of luck.”
“Is that why Elizabeth and Raven couldn’t stop the nuclear war after I failed to kill him?”
“Yes.”
“Or stop the bombs?”
“Yes.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“You need to find him the same way Raven called out to Alice from the desert. You need to track him over time and I cannot do that.”
“I don’t know how to do that yet,” I admit.
“You need to start by relaxing, maybe having some fun.”
“I’m not sure this is the time.”
“I just told you, child. You need to have some fun. You are wound so tight, even my own even disposition is being sucked into the gravitational pull of your toxic teenage angst.”
“This isn’t exactly my perfect life.”
“Of course it isn’t. But what are you going to do? Sit here and drown in your flood of crybaby tears?” he asks, snide.
I crawl out of bed, walk back to the bathroom.
“Like I said, Draco, I’m not sure I’m capable of having fun anymore.”
I pull down my underwear, go number one. He’s seen me at my worst, so modesty around a giant reptile is probably on par with taking a dump in front of your cat.
It’s just not a weird thing for me anymore.
“My point is that you are a dark cloud, an agitated child, always primed for some kind of fight. You need some humility, a way to relax, the knowledge that for the next thousand years you will be important sometimes, but irrelevant to the world most times. In those times of irrelevance to this world, you must live your life. This is a gift if you use it appropriately. But if you fight it, it will be a curse.”
“Perhaps you could just get to the point,” I say, wiping then flushing.
“Stop fighting unless it’s necessary.”
“Raven thought it was necessary,” I say, pulling up my underwear and returning to my bed.
“The Raven who laid waste to the world is gone. She is but one timeline that you changed. Like I said, the future is organic based on seven billion minds in constant states of creation.”
“Alright, so how do you suggest I find Hitler?”
“Meditation.”
“I can do that,” I tell him snuggling back under the covers.
“When you find him,” he says telepathically, “you must go and you must be thorough.”
“But for now you say I should relax?”
“Get Anetka, go to a club, drink, dance, let go of this burden enough to cleanse your mind. Georgia, Cecily and Tempest will be there.”
“School hasn’t started yet.”
“Bring them to town early. Use your newfound abilities to compel them.”
“Isn’t that like mind rape?” I ask. I’m not sure why I still see this as a moral dilemma, but it is. If you take away free will, then you are a slave to someone else’s ambitions.
I could enslave the world, I think to myself for a moment. This is a truly humbling thought. I’ve never considered this before.
“What you do with them will be for their own good. So no, I’m not sure rape, or even slavery, is the appropriate word to use.”
“My friends are not my friends anymore,” I confess.
“You buried your history with them.”
“I did.”
“There is a reason they are at the club. There are reasons all of you are there. So go dress up, do your face, spritz your perfume, drive your car fast. Have fun.”
“I’m not exactly a party girl. Besides, I’m with August now.”
“A fine choice. But what he doesn’t know won’t kill him.” I start to speak, but he holds up a claw and says, “Make of that what you will
when you are there. I must go now.”
“What’s got your tits on fire to leave?”
“There is distress among the elders, as I indicated earlier. Messages like these are coming more rapidly now that a shift in the future has occurred.”
“And they sent you to see me?”
“Yes.”
“How special for you.”
“It is actually a punishment,” Draco says, which surprises me.
“And here I thought I was good company,” I joke.
“They know what I did for you.”
Sitting up, crawling toward him, I stand on the bed and put my hand up to his chin, feel the scaly flesh beneath it. I have never done this before, but I feel compelled to make a connection to him. For the first time I see him, and I feel him. He’s not bad. He is not a monster. He is simply a rational being who found he could feel for something, for someone, and that someone was me.
“Now you know,” he says.
I smile. “Now I know. And I’m truly touched.”
I stand back as he becomes his human form. Leaning forward, he kisses my forehead. I warm to his affection this time, then feel sad when he tells me he has to leave.
“Just so you know,” I tell him, “I think you look fucking awesome in your natural form.”
“As do you in yours my sweet, scary child.”
Chapter Twelve
So Draco tells me I have to have fun to relax my brain so when I save the world I don’t have my undies in a twist. I get it. That night, I roll into the minds of Georgia, Cicely and Tempest. Within a few hours, the girls are booking their rooms and plane tickets to San Francisco. They suddenly had it in their mind that a few days of R&R in the city before school would be a great way to start the second half of their senior year.
I call Raven and she says, “What’s up?”
“Do you know?” I ask, sort of getting how this tripletish thing works. “The things Draco said, I mean.”
“Yeah. Both Elizabeth and I know.”
“So then you know why I’m calling, right?”
“You’re going to steal dad’s R8, come and get me and take my place, right?”
