by Jason Segel
“To whom?” I ask.
“Your mother, for starters,” Nasha says.
Before I can follow up with another question, James cuts me off. “Speaking of parents and children, where is our daughter?”
“On her way to Albion,” I say. “Elvis is with her. Both of their avatars were still in the White City. I don’t know how long it will take them to get here.”
Nasha laughs. “It should take about an hour, wouldn’t you say, James?”
“If they manage to hop on the right transport,” James replies.
“There are transport vehicles that travel from the White City to Albion?”
“Oh, yes, there are transport vehicles from every realm in Otherworld.”
Kat looks concerned. “Is technology no longer banned in Albion?”
“Some is, some isn’t. Following the fall of Imperium, Albion’s population multiplied. Before, it had been easy to live this way,” James says, gesturing to the surrounding village. “Afterward, we had to look for new solutions. There were too many Children to feed. Too much waste to remove. Before Bird died, she and the Elemental had to relax the rules.”
“But I remember you said every technology can come with unintended consequences.”
“And it can—unless a society is dedicated to ensuring that doesn’t happen.”
“Why don’t you take them around and show them some of the changes,” Nasha suggests. “I’ll stay here and wait for Elvis and Busara.”
As the three of us walk toward the outskirts of town, a large transport vehicle passes us on the lane. It’s similar to the model Kat and I rode in with the Empress of Imperium when we accompanied her here. Last time, the vehicle wasn’t allowed past the border.
“Doesn’t that look like one of the Empress’s vehicles?” Kat asks me.
“We used her technology as our model,” James says. “Not everything she created turned out to be dangerous. We discovered that the fuel her transports ran on was remarkably clean and renewable. We made our vehicles larger to allow for more passengers, but otherwise the design is more or less the same. As a matter of fact, Imperium remains Otherworld’s center for innovation. You should visit when you have a chance. There may be other ideas you can use on Earth.”
We’re approaching the tall green mounds that Kat and I noticed when we first arrived back in Albion. They’re not hills, though. They’re buildings covered entirely in vegetation. Outside the buildings, herds of deerlike beasts nibble peacefully at the grass.
“Here you can see more of the Empress’s inventions,” James tells us. “As the population of Albion grew, we needed housing and sustenance. The buildings grow all the food that the inhabitants need. In return, the waste of the inhabitants is liquefied and delivered to the plants as nourishment. Each building is a self-sustaining ecosystem that has only a minor impact on the beasts and vegetation around it. Again, we have the Empress to thank for it. The Council approved the technology with very little debate.”
“The Council?” I ask.
“Our governing body, the Council, is made up of representatives from every realm in Otherworld. Together we decide whether a technology will be in the best interest of Otherworld’s residents. The decision must be unanimous. Anything that is not approved is destroyed. Much has been destroyed.”
“Where are the elephants?” Kat asks. “There was a herd here the last time we visited.”
“Bird brought them here to save them. Once the population was stable, they returned to their native realm, Karamojo.”
The name sends a shiver up my spine. In Karamojo, human headset players once hunted Children for sport.
“That realm and the Ice Fields are now sacred spaces for the Children,” James tells us. “The young ones are taken there to teach them about the past. Only by learning history will future generations ensure that it never repeats itself. If they ever forget, hopefully Nasha and I will be here to remind them.”
Speaking of which, there’s a question I’ve been dying to ask. Once again, Kat beats me to the punch. Sometimes I wonder if she reads my mind. “You knew your wife was coming, didn’t you?”
James gives us a smile. “I hoped it wouldn’t be quite so soon,” he says. “We wanted Busara to have a few more years with her mother on Earth.”
“So the fact that she was a spy didn’t bother you?” Kat asks. This time I’m amazed by her boldness. I doubt I would have pushed it so far.
“I knew. Not from the very beginning, but shortly after that. Nasha told me everything. Her boss had made a fortune stealing secrets from tech companies. But he’d grown alarmed when he saw the kinds of secrets his employees were stealing. He realized there was no one in tech looking out for humanity. So he decided to start keeping tabs on the industry. I trusted him and Nasha with all of the information I had. When Wayne took over the Company, the three of us were thrilled. We thought he shared our concerns. Then he revealed just how dangerous he was. When I died on Earth, Nasha had to return to work to ensure that Wayne was stopped and the Company was taken down.”
“Who was Nasha’s boss?”
James smiles. “A man named Arnold Dalton.”
“Max Prince’s uncle?” I should have known. How else would her people have gotten access to all of his personal belongings?
“Yes,” James confirms.
A transport vehicle glides past noiselessly on its way to the village. There are only two passengers inside. Elvis and Busara have the entire vehicle to themselves, but they’re seated thigh to thigh. I don’t think they notice us standing outside. They only have eyes for each other.
“Should we head back to the village?” Kat asks.
“You guys go ahead,” I tell them. “There’s someone here I need to talk to.”
A man has appeared in the center of the field. The tall grass reaches as high as his chest. A plume of smoke rises from a cigarette he must be holding, giving him the appearance of a magician who’s just appeared onstage. He motions me toward him. There’s something he wants to say. I get the sense that it’s urgent.
“Who are you going to speak to?” James Ogubu asks, looking around. He doesn’t see anyone.
“Go,” Kat tells me. “I’ll explain.”
I leave them and wade through the grass toward my grandfather.
“Sorry to interrupt,” he says as I approach. “Can we have a word?”
“Of course,” I tell him.
“Not here,” he tells me. “I gotta admit—I still find this place creepy as hell.”
I have to laugh at that one. “Okay, then where?”
“Take off that gadget and meet me back in Queens. But—” He reaches out and puts a hand on my arm. “I’m going to look a bit different when you get there. This outfit was pretty snazzy in the sixties, but it’s not really my thing anymore. It okay with you if I change into something a little more suitable for the twenty-first century?”
How am I supposed to answer that question? “I guess. As long as you’re not naked,” I tell him.
“You kidding?” the man says. “Last thing you need right now is an inferiority complex.”
I’m laughing when I pull off my headset. I stop when I realize I’m totally blind. The apartment is pitch-black. We should have left a light on somewhere. I grope my way off the treadmill toward the switch on the bedroom wall. The bright glare of the overhead light doesn’t bother Kat, who’s standing on her treadmill and speaking into her headset. I can’t make out what she’s saying, but I know she’s attempting to explain the situation to the others. I wish her the best of luck.
The Kishka is here somewhere. I can smell smoke in the air. I leave my headset on the treadmill and wander out to the living room in search of him. When I flip on the lights, I find a much older man sitting on the sofa. He’s wearing a dark blue suit that fits him so perfectly it must be bes
poke. His Hermès tie is covered in little blue diamonds. The hair on his head is thinner and whiter. The giant nose tells me this is the Kishka.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Have a seat,” he says, motioning to a chair opposite the sofa.
I drop down into the chair without taking my eyes off the man in front of me. “You look…rich,” I say.
“You forgot old.” He gives me a wink. “I was both. Maybe I still am. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure.”
“I don’t understand,” I say.
“That makes two of us,” he tells me. “If you’d told me ten years ago that any of this was going to go down, I’d have had myself institutionalized. I’d be willing to bet that you feel the same way.”
“Ten years ago I was eight,” I say. “This all would have made perfect sense. But I’m starting to think it might be a good idea to see a shrink.”
“Meh. There are better ways to spend your money.” He pauses to take a drag off his cigarette. “By the way, I gave these up ages ago. They were just part of the disguise. I’d have been dead a long time ago if I’d kept on smoking.” The cigarette disappears, and the Kishka’s hand falls to his bony knee.
“The disguise?”
“Well, I wanted to make sure you’d recognize me. You’d only ever seen me in that gangster book, so I figured I’d better look the part.”
I tap my own nose. “I think I would have figured out who you were without the cigarettes.”
The Kishka beams. “Makes sense,” he says. “That’s how I knew who you were when I saw you. Apparently, the Diamond DNA is pretty damned powerful.”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I say. “So what did you want to talk to me about?”
He leans forward, his elbows on his knees, as if he’s trying to get a good look at me. “I wanted to tell you how unbelievably proud I am of you.”
It takes me by surprise. I don’t remember anyone but Kat ever saying something like that to me before. “Thanks,” I say awkwardly.
“I mean it,” he tells me. “I can’t think of anyone who could have done what you did. Even when everything went batshit insane, you held it together. You got the job done.”
“I didn’t do it alone.”
“Of course not. I never bought that One bullshit either. But give yourself some credit. You put together the team,” he says. “And that girlfriend of yours—she’s one of a kind too.”
“Are you saying that because she doesn’t think you’re proof that I’m losing my mind?”
“Sure. But she’s also pretty damned handy with a bow and arrow.” He whistles softly. “She’s remarkable. I wish I could have had the chance to meet her.”
What an odd thing for a hallucination to say.
“I’m not a hallucination,” the man says. “Took me a while to figure out that you weren’t either. All of this is real.”
I hear myself laugh nervously. I really am going insane.
“No, you’re not,” the Kishka says, reading my mind. “I don’t know what happened—how these lines got crossed.”
“Grandpa,” I say. “You’ve been at the bottom of the Gowanus Canal for over forty years.”
“What? That’s not me,” he says. “You must be thinking of Shorty.”
“Shorty? Who the fuck is Shorty?”
“You’ll find out. But if you don’t mind, I’d rather not spend our last moments together talking about that rat bastard.”
“What do you mean, our last moments together?”
“This is goodbye,” he says. “Whoever’s running this show let me stick around to see how it ended. Now they’re making it pretty clear that it’s time for me to go.”
“You’re not going to visit me anymore?”
“Don’t have to,” he says. “You have Diamond DNA. I’ll be with you all the time.”
“What am I going to do without you?”
“You’re going to keep up the good work,” my grandfather tells me. “I’ve made sure you have everything that you need.”
He teeters as he stands up from the couch. I jump out of my chair and offer him my hand for support, forgetting he’s just a figment of my imagination. He ignores my hand and wraps his arms around me. When I hug him back, I can feel the ribs beneath his jacket. He was right. He’s every bit as real as me.
My mother, Kat and I sit at the back of the funeral home viewing room, watching the people who’ve come to say goodbye to the Kishka, who’s lying in a coffin at the front of the room. Some are mourners. Others seem to be here to ensure that the old man is truly dead. I see one tough-looking senior citizen wearing dark sunglasses stealthily stick his hand into the coffin, lift my grandfather’s hand and let it plop back down. Another leans over as if to give him a kiss, but I suspect he’s making sure that the Kishka’s no longer breathing. My mother let a few of the Kishka’s old associates know about his passing. Word must have spread among the rest.
Mixed in alongside the octogenarian gangsters who knew Arthur Diamond are people I assume were associates of Arnold Dalton. Bankers in blue suits. Socialites with laser-smoothed skin. I haven’t seen many who look like they might be spies. Either my grandfather’s employees chose not to attend his wake—or they’re in disguise. There was a well-heeled couple earlier this morning who caught my attention. They’re still the only two people so far who haven’t flinched when they spotted me sitting at the back of the room.
When I came face to face with my grandfather for the first time this morning, it freaked me out too. Lying there against the satin cushions of the coffin was a seventy-eight-year-old version of myself. At first I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t sad that I hadn’t gotten to know him. Then I realized I knew him better than anyone else—because he’d been with me the entire time.
My mother saw him before he passed away. Nasha brought her to him for the first time a few weeks ago. Nasha told my mom she’d be meeting the man who was funding the efforts to take down the Company. Mom said she would have refused to go if she’d know she’d be meeting her father. She recognized him the moment she saw him, and she almost walked right out the door. But something made her sit down and listen.
When the Kishka disappeared over forty years ago, my grandmother told my mother he’d died. My mom was too young to wonder why there hadn’t been a funeral—or why none of her father’s associates had come to pay their respects. The truth was, the Kishka was still very much alive—and in jail. A man named Shorty Papalardo had been murdered, and the Kishka had helped dispose of the body in the Gowanus Canal. Then he turned state’s evidence and put five other mobsters in jail.
My grandfather was kept in solitary confinement for three years—largely for his own protection. While he was in jail, he and my grandmother secretly divorced. By the time he got out, my grandmother had remarried. Her new husband was a banker. She made it quite clear that there was no room in my mother’s life for a broke felon who’d be on the run from his enemies for the rest of his life.
The FBI gave my grandfather a new identity and he moved west, close to his older sister in Chicago. When he started his first store, he made her the face of it. As the company took off, he stayed in the background. He never remarried. And though he kept an eye on his daughter back in New York, he never dared contact her.
Later in life, the Kishka grew bored with retail. The only parts of the business that still gave him a thrill were the secret reports he received on his competitors’ businesses. When his niece, Abigail Prince, came of age, he turned over the retail empire to her and began a new venture. He hired the finest corporate spies and sent them out to infiltrate the booming tech world. The information they gathered helped the Kishka multiply his fortune tenfold.
“Then, about five years ago, something very strange began to happen,” my mother told me. “My dad told me that whenever he would lie down for a nap, he
’d see a kid—a boy who looked exactly as he had. It was you he was visiting.”
I would have been thirteen. The age I was when I found the book The Gangsters of Carroll Gardens. The age when I first realized that the Kishka was my grandfather. It was the discovery that had changed my life forever.
“He couldn’t understand what was happening. He was sure he was going insane,” my mother said. “He went to see the best neurologists. None of them could explain what he was seeing. Then, on a hunch, he sent one of his spies to Brockenhurst. And he realized the boy he was seeing was his grandson.”
As my mother told the story, I could tell she was still struggling to believe it. She’d devoted her life and career to the rational—written laws and irrefutable evidence. Nothing had prepared her for what her father had told her. There was no logical way to explain how our lives had crossed the way they had.
But I never doubted a word of it. Thinking back, I could feel his presence—even when I couldn’t see him. The experience changed my grandfather as well. It was around this time that he took his espionage business in a new direction. He’d learned enough to worry about the fate of the world. After he found out he had a grandson, such things mattered more than ever. So he began monitoring the tech industry.
“He said when you discovered Otherworld, he knew it meant something. He’d been following developments at the Company quite closely. But when Nasha’s husband died, he lost his main source of information. Then your path and his unexpectedly aligned. You were both being guided in the same direction. He said that for the first time in his entire life, he began to believe in fate.”
Fate. The word still makes me nervous. I’ve seen too much to accept that fate is the only alternative. But I also know there’s no point in worrying about the alternatives. My life and my grandfather’s intersected for a reason. Neither of us could have taken down the Company alone. Each had resources the other needed. We seemed to be following a plot that was already written. But by whom?
Now it’s all on me. I’ve inherited two fortunes—Abigail Prince’s and my grandfather’s. I have unlimited resources—more than enough to purchase what little was left of the Company when it went on the auction block. I became the owner and CEO of the Company at age eighteen—six months younger than Milo Yolkin was when he founded it. When I took over, I had no employees. They’d all been arrested, along with the Company’s board of directors. But the tech that was left behind belonged to me.
