by Alex Ziebart
Kristen looked down at the carving, mouth lopsided with skepticism. Had Jane actually planned this down to the table? “Explain.”
Jane tapped the top circle. “This is the world everyone considers normal. Almost everyone you know belongs to that one. Hell, I belong to that one. There’s nothing special about me other than my knowledge.”
She tapped the other two circles, one after the other. “The next one is the world of the gifted. That’s people like you. The third one…that’s something else.”
“Something else?”
“Will you let me get away with saying you won’t have to deal with that one, and if you ever do, I’ll make sure you’re prepared?”
Kristen grumbled. “For now, I guess.”
“The three worlds all bump into each other. Slowly, they’re merging. Temple, and organizations like Temple across the globe, stand in the middle, where all three overlap.” She tapped the center of the diagram. “We protect them from each other. We learn about them. We prevent one from swallowing the others. Yes, sometimes that means doing shady things where we’re doing a lot of sneaking around and lying, but it’s always for good reason.”
“So you’re what, my handler? Is that your job? Make contact, recruit people?”
Jane shook her head. “No. Frankly, I have no idea why my boss makes me do this. I’m a…relic hunter, we’ll say. My specialty is items. Artifacts. Treasures. Not for their cash value, but for preservation, and sometimes protection. You said you’re a nerd, so I’m sure you’re well-acquainted with magical swords.”
“There are actual magical swords?”
Jane cursed to herself silently before saying, “Yeah. That’s the third circle.”
“So you’re some kind of urban Indiana Jones.”
“Not always urban, not always that exciting. I spend a lot of time at garage sales.”
“Garage sales?” Kristen raised an eyebrow. “You find magical artifacts at garage sales?”
“Most people don’t think things like that exist. Hell, most people don’t even know anything about normal history. An original copy of the Declaration of Independence exchanged hands at a flea market with neither party knowing what it was. The personal effects of Roman emperors have been thrown in the trash by people who thought they were old Halloween costumes. At this point, you’re more likely to find ancient artifacts at yard sales than in tombs.”
Kristen’s eyes roamed over the diagram on the table. The symbol formed where the circles overlapped seemed familiar, though she couldn’t place it. She shrugged. “I guess that brings us to the ring.”
Jane winced. “Yeah, not my finest hour. I knew it wasn’t Egyptian, but I was completely confident it was just jewelry. Nothing special about it. We donated it to the museum. But the Sea People want it, so there must be something there.”
“So you have no idea what it actually is?”
“I have a theory.”
“Which is?”
Jane wolfed down a bite of her burger. “Bear with me, I have a bad habit of going overboard when talking history.”
Kristen shrugged and tore a chunk from her hamburger. She tossed it into her mouth as a way of saying proceed.
Leaning against the table, Jane spoke with animated hands. “It’s been said that the only thing you can’t change is the past. While that’s true, too many people think the past means the same thing as history. History is just our understanding of the past. It changes constantly. In this grand puzzle that is history, there are always fuzzy details we force into place.
Say we find something that looks vaguely like ancient Egyptian jewelry. It doesn’t look quite right and we didn’t find it anywhere near Egypt, but Egyptian jewelry from that period is the closest thing to it that fits the timeframe. We either push it aside until there’s more evidence, or we just decide it’s Egyptian, because it can’t be anything else. Within Temple, and organizations like Temple, there’s a theory: there are puzzle pieces that don’t fit because someone gave us a new puzzle halfway through.”
Kristen shook her head. “Too many puzzle metaphors. You lost me.”
Jane paused, performed a mental rewind, and then began anew. “Right. Forget the metaphors for now. Ancient writings describe lands we’ve long assumed were mythical: Hyperborea, Thule, Shambhala, Shangri-La, Buyan, Lemuria. The list goes on. What if they weren’t mythical?”
“So what, they all sank or something?”
“Okay. We know all about plate tectonics. Plate tectonics are the reason the continents look the way they do. But what if that wasn’t the only force at work? What if there was something capable of rearranging vast swaths of land or speeding up the process of tectonic drift? What if these artifacts are in the wrong place because the actual land they occupy came from somewhere else? What if human migration wasn’t just a result of humans picking up and moving, but rather the land itself picking up and moving? Carrying people from Africa to the Americas, or out into the Pacific?”
Kristen stared. “Okay. This is…way beyond what I expected, but I think I follow. Maybe.”
Jane’s face fell into her palm. “The ring is from the lost continent of Mu and I think the hominid offshoot we call the Sea People are, too. And that’s why no one throughout history knows where they came from, and why modern historians tend to write them off as nonexistent.”
“Cool. What does the ring do?”
“Probably nothing good.”
“So we should find it?”
“Yeah.”
“Any leads?”
“Not yet.”
Kristen shoved the last of her burger in her mouth and hopped up from the bench. “Cool. Thanks for lunch. See ya later. Call me if you see anybody with my face.”
Half an hour later, Kristen was back in the Otherworlds parking lot. Had it been rude to walk off on Jane? Without question, she decided. Still, Kristen couldn’t shake the urge to simply reject everything. It was a hard pill to swallow when she’d first discovered her gift. Accepting it took time. Deciding to use it took even longer. Jane’s wild conspiracy theories, shadow organizations, multiple worlds…Ridiculous.
Kristen slouched in her seat and looked over the wheel at Otherworlds’ front door. A moment of normalcy would have been nice. Something simple, but distracting, to take her mind off of face-stealing Mu-people. Stopping back at Otherworlds suddenly seemed misguided. An afternoon with Emma would have been more appropriate.
She got out of the car and went inside anyway.
Jack was still at the register. He smiled. “Hey, welcome back. Looking for Bernice?”
“No, I was just…” She forced her mind to work. “Just hanging out. I don’t have anything going on right now. Might hit the arcade.”
Jack perked up like a dog shown a tennis ball. “Yeah? I was about to go on break. Tara’s back there with the freeplay keys if you’re up for it.”
Kristen bit back a curse and forced a strained, “Yeah, sure.”
Jack waved another employee over the counter before circling around it and heading off to the store’s back corner. Kristen followed despite her reservations. Saying no seemed to get harder the longer the day wore on. It was like running on batteries. When the batteries ran low, it was easier to go along with something than to put up a fight. Kristen glanced at the back of Jack’s head as they walked. It could have been worse, she supposed. Jack wasn’t that bad. Not yet. He’d done a stupid thing, but he apologized. His worst sin was being too eager.
At the very least, he didn’t seem dangerous.
“So what do you play?”
His voice jerked Kristen from her thoughts, but she wasn’t sure how to answer. “Everything, I guess.”
“Well, what’s your favorite?”
“Depends on the day.”
He was looking back at her as he walked. Trying to play it cool, she suspected. He nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense. I’m totally the same way.”
They stepped into the Otherworlds’ arcade, a caged off cor
ner of the store with brightly colored carpet and neon lights, a flashy parody of the ‘80s as seen through the eyes of twenty-somethings who’d never seen the decade. The cage reminded Kristen of a playground, memories of bodies colliding with fences during frenetic games of basketball. She usually was the only girl playing; the boys had a habit of scaring the other girls off the court. Kristen considered that the theme of her youth: if she didn’t fight for what she wanted, the boys would claim dominion by default.
The retro arcade cabinets emitted a steady stream of bleep-bloops and chiptunes, making it hard to focus on any one noise. Rapid tapping of buttons and joysticks only added to the cacophony. Somehow, Kristen found the tapping soothing. Otherworlds policy forbid children unless they were attended by a guardian, and those guardians rarely let their children play quarter-eating arcade machines. Other than Jack and herself, the only other people in the arcade were older people, and only a handful at that, none younger than twenty and most much older. They were the sort of people who appreciated the technological relics for what they were, and they played with the kind of quiet reverence usually reserved for holy places.
Jack beelined for the back wall with a sweeping gesture. “I couldn’t believe this thing when I saw it. I played it at Chuck E. Cheese all the time when I was a kid.”
They sidled up to a cabinet larger than any other in the arcade—a widescreen, six-player machine. A demo reel showed scenes of beat-‘em-up action, iconic superheroes trouncing nameless, faceless thugs. The room’s neon flourishes seemed to draw the eye to that cabinet, the centerpiece of a feast. The cabinet next to it with a handwritten Out of Order sign seemed to add to its majesty somehow; who cares about the broken one—look at this monster!
“Yeah?” Kristen asked. “I didn’t really go to Chuck E. Cheese. I think I went once for a birthday party.”
Jack grinned as if he were a little boy again. “Oh man, I loved it. My dad would get so pissed. I’d get a big stack of tokens and I’d waste them all on one of these. He’d be all, you don’t even get tickets from that, dumbass. Why don’t you try to win something? Like playing Skee-Ball for three hours was worth a piece of gum.”
“I don’t think I’d ever seen one of these until they got it here.” Kristen flashed her own grin. “I was more of a Metal Slug girl. They had one at the laundromat my mom used. My brother and I would look for quarters under the washing machines so we could play it. We both sucked at it.”
“Everyone sucks at Metal Slug. Getting your quarters is the whole point.” Jack lovingly ran his hand across the monstrous cabinet. “It’s just insane Bernice found one of these. I read there are only a hundred of them left. What kind of strings did she pull to get an original in here?”
Tara, a young woman who’d be lucky to be five feet tall, appeared from behind the out of order machine like a grease monkey from under a hotrod. Dust covered her hair like snow. “It’s not original. Well, the circuit board is. Mostly. I built the rest of it.”
Jack jumped at her sudden appearance; Kristen smirked in amusement. Tara was like a mouse. Rarely seen, you only knew she was there by the occasional squeak. Jack looked between Tara and the machine. “You built this? From scratch?”
“Yup.” Tara had a small voice, but spoke with lightning speed. “I got the measurements online and made the cabinet in my dad’s garage. Commissioned someone to replicate the art and the marquee. It’s totally hand-painted and I put a layer of Mylar down to protect it, otherwise sweaty hands would ruin the whole thing. I did the electrical myself. Lights, joysticks, buttons, everything. The keyhole there, for freeplay? Not a stock feature of the cabinet. I just knew Bernice would like it. Have you ever seen inside one of these?”
“Wow. No, never. I’d love to, though. You did all of that?” Jack’s face lit with wide-eyed glee. Kristen couldn’t help cracking a smile; she found the sheer joy in his expression endearing.
Tara flipped a few latches on either side of the cabinet and raised the control panel up like the hood of a car. Jack and Kristen both looked inside for the metaphorical engine and found it hollow. “Almost totally empty in there. Seriously, you’d think there’d be a lot inside these old monsters, right? Nope. It’s a circuit board as big as an open hand and a whole lot of wires. And the TV up top. The board on this one was a total mess, though. The manufacturer of these boards put some nasty resin over the capacitors and I really have no idea why they did that. Capacitors get hot, the resin keeps all that heat inside, the capacitors go bad, the whole thing gets junked. So I replaced the capacitors.”
“You’re an electrician?” Jack asked.
“I don’t have a degree or a certification or whatever.” Tara shrugged. “I just like playing with broken stuff and seeing if I can fix it. Oh, and you know what’s really cool about this machine? Only one of its kind. When you’re playing, it’s a widescreen, right? No. Widescreen TVs didn’t exist back then. Have you ever seen a widescreen CRT? Doesn’t exist. It’s all smoke and mirrors. It’s two CRTs stacked on top of each other. Literal mirrors reflect the images so they appear side-by-side instead of stacked up.”
“Why not just put them side-by-side?”
Tara rolled her eyes. “Because then it wouldn’t be seamless. You’d have that big bar in the middle where the edges of each TV meets. The mirrors are set up so you don’t get the bars. Honestly, that was the hardest part of the project. Not the electrical. Finding two CRTs of the right dimensions. People don’t realize it, but that’s the actual lifeline of the arcade. No CRTs, no arcade machines. Even if you salvage and repair circuit boards forever, they’re only playable as long as you can find the old televisions, and there are fewer every day.”
“You can’t use flatscreens?” Jack asked. Kristen winced at the response she knew was coming.
“Oh god, no.” Tara gasped. “First of all, modern televisions might be better for modern TV shows, but not retro games. Your new TV has eight million pixels? Well, what happens to a game from the nineties with less than sixty thousand pixels? The whole picture gets stretched, and it looks terrible. That’s not true to the actual experience, is it? Worse, there’s screen lag to consider. These old arcade games required you to be pixel perfect. With a CRT, there’s virtually no input lag. You push a button, something happens. A modern plasma television has a two hundred millisecond delay. That ruins the entire experience. Try to play an old NES game on a brand new flatscreen TV. You’ll suck at the game. You’ll probably be rusty and that’s part of it, but it just won’t be as tight a game as you remember. Because the CRT is superior. You can play old games on a flatscreen, but you shouldn't. At the same time, modern consoles shouldn't be played on a CRT. They aren't made for it.”
Jack nodded along. “Okay, I guess that makes sense.”
“There are actually a few companies out there making a close approximation to the CRT specifically for arcades, but I haven't found one I'm happy with yet. But I'm going to guess the CRT supply will only last another five years or so, so either they'll get better or I'll have to settle,” Tara grumbled. “I hate settling. Anyway, I have to run out and grab my soldering iron. Someone did a real shit job on that beast I just crawled out of.”
Tara scurried off before anyone could say another word. Jack looked to Kristen. “Wow. I've never even heard her talk before.”
“She's the quiet type until you get her started. Then she's intense. And adorable.” Kristen lowered the hood of the monster arcade cabinet. “Are we going to play or what?”
Jack checked his watch. “Pretty sure my break is almost over already.”
“Oh, come on.” Kristen found herself smiling. Tara’s enthusiasm was infectious. “You came back here to play. Just play. It’ll be my fault.”
He bit down on the inside of his cheek, eyes wandering toward the front of the store as he considered. That’s a good sign, Kristen thought. He wasn’t being cavalier about missing a few minutes of work to play games with her. Finally, he stepped up to the joystick on the far righ
t. Another good sign. He grinned. “One game.”
She took the far left. “Sure thing.”
Neither paid much attention to the actual game, she suspected. As soon as they began, he looked her way. “I had no idea what I was getting into when I applied for this job.”
Kristen glanced at him, then back at the screen. “What do you mean?”
“I always pictured a bunch of nerds sitting around reading comic books, with maybe one or two customers. But everyone here is super intense. It’s just all energy. All the time. Like Tara, right? Everybody always has a project, and it seems like everyone is ridiculously good at something. Like, so good at it they should probably be doing it for way more money.”
“I can’t comment on the money thing, but that’s just the kind of person Bernice hires.” Kristen suddenly yelped, jerking her joystick to escape death. She went right back to the conversation. “The small business thing is in her blood. Her dad owns a restaurant. When she opened this place, he told her to never hire someone who can only do one thing. Hire someone who can do the thing you need and things you don’t know you need yet.”
Jack’s finger drummed the buttons. “So the trick to running a small business is the ability to see the future.”
“Not really. Here’s his example: he needed to hire another cook. He did a bunch of interviews, and a lot of the candidates were great, but one of them had experience as a caterer. His restaurant didn’t do catering, but he hired the guy who’d done it before. Now his restaurant provides catering services, and that guy is in charge of the whole thing. Otherworlds didn’t do restoration until Tara came along. Same thing.”
Kristen continued before Jack could cut her off. “Or, as the owner, you play a little trick. Something breaks. You go around to your people and you say hey, this thing is broken, do you know anything about this kind of thing? Not did you break it, but do you know how to fix it. If you find someone who can do it, next time something breaks, there’s your guy. You don’t have to hire a specialist to come in and do it.”
