by Ira Nayman
This hilarious science-fiction comedy novel follows the first case for Noomi Rapier, rookie investigator with The Transdimensional Authority – the organisation that regulates travel between dimensions. When a dead body is found slumped over a modified transdimensional machine, Noomi and her more experienced partner, Crash Chumley, must find the dead man’s accomplices and discover what they were doing with the technology. Their investigation leads them to a variety of realities where Noomi comes face-to-face with four very different incarnations of herself, forcing her to consider how the choices she makes and the circumstances into which she is born determine who she is.
Ira Nayman’s new novel is both an hilarious romp through multiple dimensions in a variety of alternate realities, and a gentle satire on fate, ambition and expectation. Welcome to the Multiverse (Sorry for the Inconvenience) will appeal to comedy fans who have been bereft of much good science-fiction fare these last eleven years. Ira’s style is at times surreal, even off-the-wall, with the humour flying at you from unexpected angles; he describes it as fractal humour. Anyone who has read his Alternate Reality News Service stories will know how funny Ira is. The characters we meet from around the multiverse deserve to become firm favourites with all fans of science fiction comedy.
Welcome
to the
Multiverse*
Ira Nayman
* Sorry for the inconvenience
Elsewhen Press
Welcome to the Multiverse (Sorry for the inconvenience)
First published in Great Britain by Elsewhen Press, 2012
An imprint of Alnpete Limited
Copyright © Ira Nayman, 2012. All rights reserved
The right of Ira Nayman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, telepathic, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Quote from Sir Arthur Eddington, 1927, used by permission of Trinity College, Cambridge; quote from Water Logged Mona Lisa: Who Is Mary Sue, and Why Do We Need Her? by J.M.Frey, used by permission of the author. The font Hornswoggled used by kind permission of the designer Nick Curtis. Original artwork by Hannah B Farrell.
Elsewhen Press, PO Box 757, Dartford, Kent DA2 7TQ
www.elsewhen.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-908168-09-2 Print edition
ISBN 978-1-908168-19-1 eBook edition
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This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, agencies, organisations, goods, services, events, media, or alternate realities are either a product of the author’s fertile imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual realities, media, events, services, goods, companies, places or people (living, dead or alternate) is purely coincidental.
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Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1: Noomi’s First Day At Work
Chapter 2: Noomi Rises to the Level of Her Incompetence
Chapter 3: Noomi’s First Case
Chapter 4: Noomi Is Not In This Chapter
Chapter 5: Noomi Plays House
Chapter 6: Noomi Is A Star!
Chapter 7: Noomi Isn’t In This Chapter, Either
Chapter 8: Noomi Busts Heads
Chapter 9: Noomi Has Influence
Chapter 10: Noomi Gets Lucky
Chapter 11: Noomi Gets the News!
Chapter 12: Noomi Is Not in This Chapter (Unless ...)
Chapter 13: Noomi Closes the Case
Chapter 14: Noomi Celebrates
Acknowledgements
“Something unknown is doing we don’t know what.”
– Sir Arthur Eddington
He is the lurker in the shadows of the alleyways behind the eyes of inmates in asyli for the awkward. He haunts the spaces between whole numbers. He feeds on the nightmares of those who sleep soundly because they don’t know any better. He is the vaguely threatening half-heard voice that annoys you because it refuses to speak up even though it continually interrupts some moderately important task that, at that moment in time, should be getting your complete attention. Counting the cost of the compromises we make between our dreams and quality sleep time is something of a hobby with him. On any given night, you can find him in the dark dreams of vegetarian butchers. He is the ache at the center of the hole in your heart before you even know the center of your heart has a hole in it that aches. He is the pre-ache.
He has nothing to do with the story that follows.
He does not know this. In fact, he would be offended by this fact if he did know it. He is the lurker in the shadows of the etc. etc. He was born to be the antagonist of a story. He has been lurking in the shadows and all that since he was 12 – he is very good at it, perhaps the best in the universe.
All of that work perfecting his lurking skills deserves the reward of a central place in a story. To even imagine that he would be a minor character in somebody else’s story, mentioned in the first couple of pages and then discarded like a bad memory that hasn’t quite formed a pattern in the synapses of a dementia sufferer’s brain, well, given all the work he has put into his craft, that just doesn’t seem right. That just…just…
The lurker in the shadows of the alleyways behind the eyes of inmates in asyli for the awkward realizes in mid-rant that he is out of toothpaste.
So he hops into his Prius (what? A lurker in the shadows of you know the drill can’t have an environmental consciousness?) and drives to the nearest MaxiMultiMegaMart (a wholly owned subsidiary of MultiNatCorp: “We do retail stuff”). Okay, his environmental consciousness is selective – whose isn’t? He is dressed in black with a red bow tie, because he had heard somewhere that bow ties were cool. Do not make the mistake of thinking that this is his usual lurking attire – he knew from experience that lurking in a MaxiMultiMegaMart just didn’t offer the same sense of foreboding with a hint of jasmine, that, in fact, the MaxiMultiMegaMart sucked all of the lurk out of one.
It is at the MaxiMultiMegaMart, between the aisles for household appliances, not bigger than a breadbox and weasel supplies (no, the layout of the products in the MaxiMultiMegaMart is not eccentric, it is designed to maximize impulse purchasing – you know how it works – haven’t you ever been looking for toothpaste and thought to yourself, “Hey! I should get some of that Weasel Chow, now with 27% more human disgustingness!”?) that the story truly begins.
“Boy!” a woman says. “Can I get some help over here?”
The lurker with all that descriptive baggage turns to find a well-kept, pleasant enough middle aged woman. He imagines her scrubbing a pot, really putting some muscle into it, dreading finding out what mischief the Beaver would be getting into at some time that day, maybe taking a pill to, you know, take the edge off, maybe help her keep the homicidal thoughts at bay, looking towards the time the children are old enough to bugger off and leave her to a future she couldn’t imagine but had to be better than the present she was living. In short, she reminds him of his mother, except that she absently plays with a space where her left earlobe should have been, and he is pretty sure his mother came with a complete set. Although, when you think about it, it would have saved his mother money on earrings…
“Can you tell me, please,” the woman asks, “What, exactly, the difference is between a Blendmaster 5000 with 17 levels and 12 settings, and a MixMonkey 5001, with 12 levels and 17 settings?”
He looks at the woman blankly. Part of him wonders how a blender could be considered smaller than a breadbox; perhaps the comparison was made with the breadbox on its side. But, mostly, he thinks, Is she serious? Could this woman possibly be serious? She is confusing the lurker in the shadows of the alleyways behind the eyes of inmates in asyli for the awkward with…an aisle rat in a MaxiMultiMegaMart store?
“It’s a simple enough question,” the woman, impatience creeping into her voice, states. “Are you too simple to know the answer?”
“Jesus, lady,” the lurker in the shadows of sarcasm responds, “did you buy that pearl necklace or did you mug an oyster bed?”
“Excuse me?” the woman, dumbfounded, asks.
“Nice pink dress,” the lurker in the shadows of being on a roll continues. “The fifties would like it back.”
“This is outrageous!” the woman, in a cold fury (she kept it in her freezer for just such occasions), states. The lurker in the shadows of obliviousness doesn’t notice that her voice actually got softer.
“What happened to your ear?” the lurker in the shadows that you’ve come to know and love continues. “Get too close to your pet piranha at feeding time?”
The woman stares at him in anger.
Interpretations of what happened next differ. The lurker in the shadows with poor self-preservation instincts swears that he just meant to pick a piece of lint off the arm of the woman’s dress. She must have felt that his reaching towards her was some kind of threat. Before the lurker in the shadows who maybe should have listened to his parents and taken that job Uncle Manny had offered him in his pet electro-shock therapy practice knows what is happening, the woman is standing behind him, bending the index finger of his right hand far enough back to cause him the maximum amount of pain without making him pass out. The Lurker in the shadows of a destiny he cannot comprehend doesn’t know what scares him more: the fact that his mother is bending his finger just enough to inflict the maximum amount of pain on him without causing him to pass out, or that his mother know how to bend his finger just enough to inflict the maximum amount of pain on him without causing him to pass out.
Through his pain, the lurker in the shadows of suddenly realizing what a small fish he is in the universe’s big pond, hears the woman whisper into his ear: “Did you know that there are 237 ways to kill a man with chopsticks?”
Lips trembling, the lurker who is beginning to lose faith in the shadows is about to stutter, “N…n…n…no…” – or some other cliché that people in his situation stutter – when the woman vanishes. He falls to his knees as the pain slowly ebbs out of him. A minimum wage MaxiMultiMegaMart aisle drone notices him, assumes he is praying to the god of weasel supplies and leaves him to his worship.
The lurker in the shadows of getting himself out of that damn store alive did, in fact, have a revelation on the floor of the MaxiMultiMegaMart. He realized that he wasn’t cut out to be the antagonist in a major narrative. The no longer lurker in the shadows of the alleyways behind the eyes of inmates in asyli for the awkward wondered if he could get a small part in a children’s novel. Maybe if he put on a weasel suit. Yeah. That’s it. He could be a weasel…
The Prologue is Past
Chapter One:
Noomi’s First Day At Work
“Wake up, sleepyhead!”
“Rise and shine, sunshine!”
“Well, that was repetitive.”
“Some people find repetition of words or phrases poetic.”
“Some people find gastro-intestinal disease poetic.”
“Oh, yeah? Which people?”
“Some…you know, some people. Uhh…some.”
“Shaddup!” Noomi Rapier mumbled. “Sleepin’ here!” She waved an arm in the direction the alarm clock would have been had she still been sleeping in her room at the Alternaut Academy. However, she had graduated a week earlier, and was now in her half-brother Davros’ smart apartment in Ottawa. There was no snooze button to hit here because the wakeup alarm was built into the furniture.
Davros was currently in Africa, trying to negotiate an intractable border dispute between Namibia and the Falklands Islands. And, of course, when I say intractable, I use the word in its original sense of ‘not being able to be ploughed because it cannot be driven over by a tractor.’ Really. Check page 237 of Gorey’s Dictionary of Imaginary Words if you don’t believe me. Davros allowed Noomi to stay in his Ottawa apartment for as long as he was traveling the world solving problems, which probably wouldn’t last beyond her third or fourth reincarnation.
“Why is Noomi flailing away with her arm like that?”
“Maybe she’s…dreaming of swimming?”
“Could she be dreaming she’s a windmill?”
“Maybe she’s dreaming she’s a paddlewheel boat.”
“Who dreams they’re a paddlewheel boat?”
“How should I know? I just queried the database for motions that could be mimicked by flailing one’s arms, and paddlewheel boat came up. Don’t tell me it didn’t come up for you.”
“It didn’t!”
“What search terms were you using?”
Noomi shot upright in the bed, as quickly as the beanstalk that Jack planted (which, scientists have calculated, must have grown at 2.57483 inches a second to have grown as high as the fairy tale claimed it did overnight). “Okay, who’s there?” she
asked. She had done this every morning since she moved in; fortunately, the room had a near infinite capacity for patience (see Graph One).
Graph One
Asymptotic curve measuring decrease in intelligence against increase in patience. (SOURCE: Useless Information Is More Impressive In Visual Form, P. Buggali, ed.)
“I’m the headboard of your bed,” said the headboard of her bed.
“I’m the foot of your bed,” said the foot of her bed.
“Congratulations! Today is the big day!”
“Yeah. Way to go.”
“You could say it with more enthusiasm.”
“Yeah, well, I would have had more energy if I hadn’t been forced to spend all night accessing the Nature Channel!”
“It’s better than wasting our time with wrestling!”
“Uhh, guys –” Noomi tried to interject.
“Wrestling is entertainment! The Nature Channel is…homework!”
“Can I help it if I’m interested in the world?”
“Wrestling is the world! It’s got heroes! It’s got villains! It’s conflict at its most primal!”
“Guys, seriously –”
“It’s not real!”
“WHAT?!”
“Wrestling is not real!”
“You…you…you take that back right now!”
Noomi dragged herself into the bathroom, leaving the cultural debate to the bed.
“Well, look what the cat modified with whale genes dragged in!” the mirror snarked at her.
“Yeah, yeah,” Noomi grumped back at it. “Everybody needs time to prepare for the day. Nobody wakes up ready to go.”
