Faller

by Will McIntosh

  He flinched as a hand touched his back. It was Harry.

  “How are you holding up?”

  * * *

  HE LINGERED in Ugo’s downstairs bathroom as long as he thought he could. As he stepped out, Bill and Audrey DeNiro surrounded him.

  “We’re so sorry for your loss.” Audrey pressed her cheek to Peter’s, the odor of Noxzema wafting from her.

  “Thank you.”

  Ugo appeared around the corner. He waited there as Bill clutched Peter’s hand.

  When they were gone, Peter and Ugo had the hall to themselves.

  “I understand that you had no choice in coming here—”

  “Nothing could have kept me from coming. I loved Izabella like a blood sister—”

  Ugo raised a finger, cutting him short. He stepped in very close to Peter. “Don’t ever speak her name to me again. If I had my preference, you’d never speak to me again, period. Just stay away. If we have to be in the same room together, stay on the other side. Do you understand me?”

  Peter nodded. He didn’t want to be around Ugo any more than Ugo wanted to be around him. If not for being tied to him through family and work, Peter would do everything in his power to never see Ugo again. Now that Izabella’s funeral was behind him, all he wanted to do was work, to forget that night, to devote himself to helping people suffering from these bloody bioengineered diseases and hope in time he would feel as if he’d done enough to balance the scales.

  20

  AS THEY drew closer to the edge, no sounds drifted down from the streets. Evidently the fighting was concentrated inland.

  “So who was the woman you thought you saw in the crowd?” Storm asked as they picked their way through the subway tunnel, the torch providing a circle of black-orange light around them.

  “A friend on my world. Part of my tribe. Her name was Orchid.”

  “Just a friend? Did you have someone special on your world?”

  “I did. Someone I loved with all my heart.” Faller grinned as Storm tried to mask her surprise. “Her name was Daisy. She was about four feet tall—”

  “About your height, then?”

  Faller laughed. “That’s right. I adopted her as a daughter, during the purge.”

  “The purge?”

  “When it became clear there wasn’t enough food for everyone, and a band of men began throwing the weak over the edge. They killed thousands—everyone who couldn’t fight back. I wanted to stop them, but how could I? Then it occurred to me: I could save one, at least. I ran up to a child at random, waving the photo of the two of us, shouting that it was a picture of me and that child.”

  Some of the suspicion had melted from Storm’s eyes. “You’re just full of surprises.”

  Faller hadn’t meant to tell the story to win points with Storm. Daisy deserved better than to be used as a ploy for sympathy. “I did it for myself, more than anything. If I hadn’t saved at least one, I knew I’d feel sick with guilt for the rest of my life.”

  “Those men throwing children off the edge were also doing it for themselves. They were worried about their stomachs. You were worried about your conscience.”

  “The thing about it was, most of those men? They were crying. Sobbing. But they just kept on—” Faller choked up. He didn’t want to return to that day.

  Up ahead, a sliver of light announced the next station.

  “That’s the one we want.” Storm picked up her pace. “It must be hard, knowing Daisy is still up there, thinking you’re dead.”

  “I just hope the tribe is taking care of her. I’m sure they are; they’re good people. Especially Orchid, odd as she is.”

  Storm tossed the torch down the stairwell behind them as they emerged squinting into the sunlight at the edge of the world. The streets were deserted.

  The sky grew immense as they approached the edge; Faller’s heart thrummed at the thought of intentionally leaping off the edge of this world.

  Storm stopped well short of the edge, on chewed-up blacktop. “I don’t think I can do this.”

  Faller kept going. He peered over the edge, checking for obstructions. There were none. “I faced this choice once before. Fall into the sky, or die. It’s not much of a choice, if you think about it like that.” He turned to face Storm. “I don’t want to die. Beyond that, I need to see what’s at the bottom. I drew that map for a reason.”

  Storm eyed the edge like it was a poisonous snake.

  “Ever since Day One, we’ve lived with nothing but questions,” Faller said. “Wouldn’t you like some answers for a change?” He held out his hand.

  She studied him for a long moment, then reached out and took his hand.

  “Storm!”

  Over Storm’s shoulder, Faller saw four men pushing a hollowed-out car, a fifth man steering. The fifth man was Moonlark. The car bumped and rattled toward them over ruptured pavement.

  “Storm!”

  This time Storm heard Moonlark. She turned, gasped at the sight of him, alive but clearly injured.

  Faller squeezed her hand. “If you go to him, you’ll die with him. You said it yourself, there’s nowhere to hide.”

  Faller’s heart hammered as Moonlark grew closer and Storm wavered, uncertain.

  “Wait.” Moonlark was close enough now that he didn’t have to shout. It was the same word the doomed man with the shovel had used.

  Storm tried to unclasp her hand from Faller’s. If he let go, he knew he’d lose her.

  He grabbed Storm’s wrist with his free hand and pulled.

  Startled, Storm pulled in the opposite direction. “No.”

  Faller pulled. Storm dropped to her knees, then stretched full-out, raking at his fingers with her free hand, screaming.

  “You’ll die.” Faller’s back foot found nothing but empty space. He let himself fall backward, a death grip on Storm’s wrist. Storm scrabbled to grab something with her free hand, digging at chunks of pavement, clutching at weeds that pulled free.

  Faller’s momentum dragged them over the edge.

  As they plummeted past outcroppings of stone, Moonlark appeared above them, limping, one leg bloody. He shouted something Faller couldn’t hear over Storm’s terrified shrieks, then raised his arm. Gunshots rang out—three, four, five, six—each dimmer, less pressing than the last until Moonlark was nothing but a blur of bloody charcoal suit on a backdrop of powder-blue sky.

  Faller felt a lash across his face. His first crazy thought was that one of the bullets had hit its mark far later than seemed possible. Then he realized Storm had hit him. She seemed less angry than panicked, a drowning woman reaching wildly for a branch.

  “We’re okay.” He tried to secure her flailing free hand, but it swung wildly, matching the panic in her eyes. She seemed lost in her terror, completely unaware of him, every muscle tensed, as if she were bracing for impact. Still clutching her hand, Faller gripped her shoulder. “Storm. Look at me. Look at me.” Her gaze flicked across his face for an instant before returning to the sky underfoot. “We’re okay. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

  X

  AS THE front door to the lab swung open, a jolt of adrenaline shot through Peter.

  It was Andrew Stone, one of the graduate students from UVA, looking bleary-eyed, probably here to gain access to a piece of equipment that wasn’t available during the day.

  Peter gave him a salute. Andrew returned it.

  Ugo hadn’t been to work in a week—not since before Izabella’s funeral—yet a jolt of terror went through Peter every time the door opened, day or night. Ugo had to return eventually; one time the door would open and it would be Ugo storming in.

  “Are we really going to do this?” He hadn’t noticed Harry standing in his doorway.

  Peter set his bottle of Zing on the desk, pushed his wheeled chair away from the bank of computers that surrounded him on three sides. “Why not? How often do you get to see how the fabric of reality reacts when you stick a whoopee cushion under it?”

  “I ha
dn’t realized that’s what we were doing.”

  Although they weren’t talking about her, the body of Izabella’s duplicate might as well be hanging in the air between them. Peter felt it whenever they were together, and he was certain Harry did too, but Harry was too good a friend to bring it up, and Peter felt too ashamed. And what was there to say, really?

  The lab was deserted except for Andrew. They headed for the iris, Harry holding the tray containing the anesthetized mouse.

  With Ugo gone and the organ replication program stalled until the transplant team perfected their procedure, Peter was left with nothing to do but basic research. Most of the experiments they were conducting were aimed at understanding why Izabella had died, although only he and Harry understood that that was what they were doing. They now knew one crucial fact: no complex organism could survive the procedure if it was conscious when it went into the duplicator. Peter wanted to know more. He wanted to understand the duplicator inside and out. Right now he wanted to see how it reacted if he gave reality a good, hard shove. It was a wild experiment, best conducted in the middle of the night.

  “So, what’s your guess?” Peter asked Harry.

  “Shit, I have no idea. If I had to guess, I’d say the mouse comes out duplicated, as if the loop never happened.”

  Peter grinned. “Fair enough.” Peter was dying to see what would happen; it was like having an intimate conversation with the universe about how it worked.

  Polchinski had first devised the physics version of the classic grandfather paradox: what happens if an object is sent through a wormhole and returns a millisecond earlier, but is sent back through the duplicator less than a millisecond later, and blocks itself so it can’t enter in the first place? It creates a paradox. Polchinski had used billiard balls in his thought experiment, but the paradox was no different when the objects were sleeping mice. To create the effect, they’d fashioned an additional delivery duct that fed directly back into the iris.

  Peter went to the delivery duct on the left—where the original mouse would be delivered, if it came back at all. “Whenever you’re ready,” he called to Harry. “This is exciting.”

  “Here we go,” Harry called back.

  A shadow dropped out of the duct.

  Peter lurched backward; Harry shouted in surprise. It was not a shadow cast by an object—certainly not the shadow of a mouse. It was darkness. The size of a tire, it blocked out the grey tile floor beneath without replacing it with anything but darkness so deep it created the illusion of a hole.

  The sight of it sent a wash of terror through Peter that bordered on superstitious dread, as if a demon, or a god, had dropped into his lab.

  “Get Andrew out of here,” he said to Harry. Peter had no idea what it was, no idea if it was dangerous. It had just fallen out of a wormhole, and it absolutely should not have, so it was by definition dangerous. He turned, found Harry still staring at the thing, transfixed. “Now. Get him out.”

  As Harry jogged off, Peter circled the object.

  Nothing should be able to come out of the duplicator except objects they put in. It made absolutely no sense.

  The lab door opened and shut; Peter heard the lock click into place. Five seconds later, Harry was back. “What the hell is that?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What if it’s bathing us in radiation right now?” Harry was standing a dozen feet farther back than Peter, as if that much extra distance would matter if the thing was doing them harm.

  “If it is, it’s probably too late.”

  It was three-dimensional. When he looked directly at it, it was difficult to see, as if his visual field were resisting it, trying to close up the blank space it created. Peter could see it better when he looked a few feet to one side; then it solidified into a spherical object resting on the laboratory floor.

  No, not resting. The bottom of it was no longer perfectly spherical—it was flattened. The object was slowly sinking. There was a bluish glow where it was eating into the floor. It was ionizing the matter it was in contact with.

  Peter giggled. He clapped his hand over his mouth, tried to get hold of himself. He thought he might be in shock. Taking a deep breath, he tried to think.

  First, they had to neutralize this thing before it ate right through the floor.

  Peter turned to Harry. “We need to introduce something charged. Come on.” Peter sprinted toward the Van de Graaff generator.

  “Something charged?” Harry said. He stood as if glued to the floor. “Holy shit. You think it’s a singularity.”

  “Yeah. I do.” He grabbed Harry by the arm and tugged him. “If we charge it, we can control it. Help me.”

  They set the Van de Graaff generator near the black sphere.

  “Find two metal plates somewhere,” Peter said as the generator began to spark as it charged up. If the object wasn’t a singularity, it was sure doing a fine job of reacting exactly as a singularity should. He ran to get a battery.

  Peter returned with two metal covers he’d torn off air-conditioning ducts. They set the metal plates on either side of the object, attached the positive pole of the battery to one plate, the negative to the other.

  The object rose into the air until it was centered between the two plates.

  It was neutralized and suspended; now they needed to get it out of the lab, to somewhere secure, and figure out what they were dealing with.

  In his underground explorations with Ugo, they’d often passed a huge factory room with a thick steel door. That room would do nicely.

  “Grab an end,” Peter said, grasping one of the plates.

  “Jesus,” Harry breathed as he lifted the other plate.

  The object rose as if by magic.

  “If this is a singularity, why isn’t it heavy?” Harry asked.

  Peter nodded. A singularity with the circumference of a tire should weigh more than the Earth. “Hell, don’t ask me. The paradox must cause some unusual quantum effect. There’s so much debate about what happens when quantum mechanics and singularities come together, the only thing that would be surprising is if the result didn’t surprise us.”

  They stood gawking at the object hovering between them.

  “What the hell did we do?” Peter asked.

  “Hey, don’t look at me. I just work here,” Harry said.

  Peter smiled at him. “You practicing for when the feds find out?”

  They located a wheeled cart to carry the battery and Van de Graaff generator, then slowly moved it all toward the hall. The stairs were going to be a bitch.

  “Once we’ve designed a more professional electrostatic trap, let’s start with a Geiger-Müller tube, alpha spectrometer, gamma and neutron detectors, to see if we need to set up a quarantine and call in the feds. I don’t want to call the feds if we don’t have to; they’re liable to shut us down and then sort it out.”

  21

  STORM’S PANIC eventually subsided. What choice did she have? Your heart can only race for so long, as Faller and everyone else had discovered in the weeks after Day One.

  As she grew less panicked, she grew angrier.

  “I couldn’t let you die.” Faller had to shout to be heard over the wind.

  “You have no idea if I was going to die. Maybe Moonlark was coming to tell me they’d pushed back the invasion.” The constant pressure of the wind against her face made her look strange—her cheeks stretched, skin rippling, eyes wide in a look of perpetual surprise.

  “The other boroughs were pouring in from all sides. They were going to kill you. You’d be dead right now if you’d stayed.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It wasn’t your decision to make.”

  “But will you admit there was no conceivable way you could have survived if I’d left you there?”

  “Who the hell do you think you are? You think you can make decisions for me, just because you have a picture of me? If I wanted to stay and die with Moonlark, you had no right to stop me.”

  “He sh
ot at us.”

  “He shot at you!”

  Faller took a deep breath, tried to speak as calmly as possible, although the need to shout made it difficult to sound calm. “I’m sure he was primarily shooting at me, but you were right there, so he wasn’t showing much concern for you. That’s all I’m saying. If you care about someone, you don’t shoot at something close to them.”

  “You dragged me over a cliff. Don’t lecture me about right and wrong.”

  Faller fell silent. She had a point. He’d acted instinctively, because he’d had no time to do otherwise. It had seemed like the right thing to do in the moment. Even now, with time to think, he thought he’d done the right thing. But he had to admit an argument could be made that what he’d done was wrong.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, and again, it was hard to sound sincere while shouting.

  Storm didn’t answer.

  Not sure what else to say to make things right, Faller watched the sky. He followed the progress of a dozen dark, oblong clouds in an otherwise clear sky. They looked like fish swimming in an endless blue lake. Some on his world were convinced clouds were alive, that they ate sunlight and rain was their piss, or their tears. Faller was the only person in the worlds who knew clouds were nothing but misty air, though Storm would soon be in on the secret.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” he finally asked.

  “What?”

  “The sky. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  She looked at him, apparently gauging whether he was serious. Then she shook her head in disbelief. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  Soon after, they fell through a cloud and came out misty-damp.

  22

  IT OCCURRED to Faller that he’d done nothing to address the issue of one chute and two falling bodies. He needed to be prepared when a world appeared. He reached for his pack. The simplest solution was to expand the harness so they could both squeeze into it, though when the chute opened they’d be yanked together.

  “Can you hold this tight?” Faller held out the folded-up chute and lines. Storm glared at him, then, careful not to let them blow out of her hands, she took them.