by Alan Averill
The next hours are a blur of jumbled, random images that roll through the confused fugue of her mind. She feels people prodding at the nape of her neck, and at one point notices an odd, stinging sensation from back there. The gurney is wheeled around and around in seemingly random circles. Overhead lights shine in her eyes at regular intervals. A man with a large mustache leans into her face and sticks a tongue depressor into her mouth. Two guards stand in the corner and talk in hushed, worried tones, a pair of shotguns clenched in their gloved hands. She moves past a room stacked floor to ceiling with limp, dead bodies. Someone takes a bite out of a sandwich and drops a piece of lettuce onto her face, then brushes it off with a laugh.
Finally, the gas begins to wear off, allowing Samira to communicate with her brain once again. She finds herself lying on her side and strapped to a gurney in the middle of a sterile operating room. The back of her head is very cold, and for a while she can’t figure out why. But as her senses begin to pulse back to life, she realizes a patch of hair is missing from the base of her skull. Nothing that she couldn’t comb over given a few minutes and a hairbrush, but enough that she can feel cold metal on the bare nape of her neck.
Her head is firmly tied, but by shifting her eyes left and right, she can make out a few dark shapes rustling around. As she struggles to regain her faculties, snatches of conversation drift through her ears like petals on the wind, leaving her more confused than before.
“…ready to hook up to…”
“…much time. I’m telling you, something is wrong. We have to…”
“Nothing is wrong. It’s all going…”
“…strange readings outside Barrow Creek. I think it might be…”
“…prepared. Just make it happen.”
A door slams, followed by the clicking of shoes walking swiftly away. Samira’s vision is still blurry, but she can make out a tall dark shape moving into her line of sight. It hovers over her as a shadowy mirage while her eyes try to shake off the gas. Soon the dark blur becomes a light blur, and before long she finds herself staring into the eyes of a nightmare.
“Hello,” says Charles Yates.
“Don’t…” says Samira, her voice thick and slurred. “N-no…”
“Your fear is misplaced. Think of what you are about to do, of all that you will bring about. No human in existence has ever had such a chance.”
“…J-just kill me.”
Yates leans in close, his face still blurry from the aftereffects of the gas. Samira can feel heat coming off him in waves and wonders briefly if he’s contracted some kind of fever, or if that’s just what happens when your mind finally snaps. “Kill you?” he asks. “Kill you? Is that what you think of me? That I am a Mengele? That I torture people because I find it enjoyable? I expected more from you.”
He reaches into his pocket and withdraws a shiny metal scalpel, which he sets on a table next to the gurney. Samira tries to pull away, but the straps are tight, and all she can do is clench her hands into little fists.
“What are you?” he asks as he removes a half dozen round bits of metal from his other pocket and dumps them onto the table. They shimmer and sparkle in the overhead light as they roll around. “A soldier? A woman? An immigrant? No, you are none of these things. You are a tiny speck on the windshield of the universe; a life-form of such insignificance it is a wonder you exist at all. This is all any of us are.”
He leans over and stills the rolling bits before continuing. “You simply do not understand the true scope of my work. I serve a higher purpose, Samira Moheb. I strive to noble ends. What I seek is nothing less than true immortality, a way for my life force to exist for eternity and thereby preserve something of our kind. Only a truly selfish person could object to such an endeavor.”
Yates grabs Samira’s head in his hands and begins to poke around the bald patch at the base of her skull. Samira feels his fingers pushing at something back there and realizes with growing horror that they aren’t just pressing against the back of her head: they’re actually pressing into it. It’s the most unspeakably terrible thing that’s ever happened to her, and when Yates shows no signs of stopping, Samira tries to hold her breath and black out—but for some reason, her mind decides to hang on.
“The people I bring here, the conduits, they always say the same things: that I don’t understand what I am doing, that I am mad, that they would rather perish. They say these things only because they have not truly considered the alternative. Somewhere deep in their minds, they have been taught to believe in a just and caring God, some mystical force that will grant them eternal life once their physical bodies are no more. This is the madness, Samira Moheb. Not me. I have seen the universe, and it is cold and dark and dead.”
Yates withdraws his fingers from Samira’s skull, shakes them once, then dips them into a nearby jar of clear, viscous jelly. He rubs this on one of the metal pieces from the tray, rolling it around and around in his hand until it glistens. Once it’s completely coated, he produces four wires from an unseen source and begins to thread them into the end.
“In five billion years, our sun will collapse upon itself. In another ten billion years, all the suns of all the galaxies will suffer the same fate. The universe is drawn by entropy toward disorder, which leads to a lack of energy, which leads to death. If there is a spark of life that drives us, some kind of divine watchmaker, then it too will eventually flicker and die. This is inevitable. Would you actually stand by and let it happen? Or would you fight with all of your strength?”
Yates finishes threading the wires through the metal bit and holds it up to the light. “This is going to hurt,” he says. “Please remind yourself that pain is temporary.”
Samira’s eyes grow wide as she realizes what’s going to happen. She tries to protest, to beg him not to do it, but her tongue has grown heavy and refuses to cooperate. She can only lie there, helpless, as Yates takes the wire and plunges it into the back of her head. The pain is immediate and terrible, unlike anything she’s ever felt before. If someone embedded an icicle into the middle of her brain, it might begin to approximate the agony. She feels frost seeping up her neck, through her skull, and right to her eyes, and she screams then—a horrible wail that echoes off the bare walls of the medical room and seems to go on forever.
“The pain will eventually leave you,” says Yates, his voice dim and disinterested, “so I need you to focus on me. Will you do this?”
Samira barely hears him. Her mind is a million miles away, dashing off to a better place, where nothing can ever hurt her, and all of this is just another kind of terrible dream. Yates repeats the question with more force, but Samira isn’t there to respond. She’s somewhere else now, a special place in the back of her mind where deep green grass and the sounds of ocean waves will allow her to sleep forever.
Yates jiggles the wire, and the pain of it snaps Samira back to reality. She moves to scream again, but he claps a hand over her mouth and presses down firmly. Samira tries to bite the fingers, but there’s a disconnect between her mind and her body, and nothing seems to be working the way it’s supposed to; rather than chomping through flesh and bone, she just opens her mouth and drools.
“I am not able to operate the Machine as your friend Tak does,” he says as he inserts another wire, “and so I must build a conduit to reach the Beautiful Land. That is why I do this thing to you, Samira Moheb. You can take some comfort from knowing that I have chosen you, of all people, to continue in perpetuity.”
He snorts suddenly, then coughs. A huge chunk of black goo flies out of his mouth and onto the floor. “You see?” he says, turning back around and starting the threading process for a third wire. “I, too, have made a sacrifice. I understand your pain, and I promise that it will end. The best thing you can do now is relax and accept the situation. Resistance will not save your life, but it will make its end terribly unpleasant. Please blink twice if you are understanding any of this.”
Samira doesn’t have a goddamn clue what
the crazy man is talking about, but if it will make the pain go away, she’s more than happy to agree. She blinks twice in rapid succession, then adds a couple more for good measure. Somewhere inside her mind, the icicle is starting to melt, spreading its coldness down her spine and out across the rest of her body.
“Will you help me?”
“Y-yes,” whispers Samira. She wants to scream again, but the pain is so great, she doesn’t think it will be possible.
“Say it.”
“…Yes. Yes, I will help you.”
The pain stops instantly. Samira can still feel the metal pushing into the back of her head, but it’s a distant feeling, like poking at a foot that has long since fallen asleep. As soon as the last wire clicks into place, Yates leans over and types on a nearby keyboard for a few seconds. Through her daze, Samira can barely make out a long series of numbers flashing across the screen. A weird buzzing begins to emanate from the back of her head as the wires start to tingle. When she looks back at Yates, she is horrified to see a steady stream of black ooze leaking from the corners of his eyes. When he notices the source of her horror, a grin dances across his face.
“The virus will destroy the host,” he says, “but not itself. To survive the end of time, you must become that which will bring about its destruction. You must become the virus. Do you see now, Samira Moheb? Do you understand the sacrifice I have made?”
The tingling has become unbearable. Samira hears a bright, cheerful ding from the laptop, then the sound of the lid’s being slammed down. Her field of vision is nothing but white dots in front of an empty blackness. She tries again to will herself into unconsciousness, and when the white dots begin to fade, she knows the job is almost done.
“We are ready,” says Yates in a gleeful whisper. “Download complete.” He seems ready to say more, but suddenly the sounds of gunfire ring out from somewhere nearby. Samira barely sees him leap to his feet, knocking over the small table in the process, before hearing the sound of a door opening. Though everything is going black, she perceives a screaming man in a dark uniform as he goes flying overhead, leaving a spray of blood in his wake.
“No!” cries Yates. “No! Not yet! You are not supposed to be here!”
He yells something else, but Samira doesn’t care anymore. Just before her mind lets go completely, a massive shape moves across the edge of her vision. She can make out the bloodcurdling caw of a hungry bird, then everything falls into merciful blackness.
chapter twenty-two
“Help me out here, Judith,” says Tak, as a pair of candle flames flicker across his face. “There’s something really fucked-up happening to the timelines, and I need to know what it is.”
Judith nods but says nothing. She’s sitting on the living-room floor across from Tak, wrapped in the blanket from the bed. The bags under her eyes are black and miserable, and her teeth have only just stopped chattering. The thin blouse and skirt combination she’d been wearing on her arrival are draped over a chair so they can dry—Tak hasn’t yet asked how they got wet—so the blanket serves purposes of both warmth and modesty. Tak had turned away as she stripped her clothes off, but not before he caught a glimpse of the bright red underwear she was wearing. This discovery continues to surprise him.
“Talk to me,” says Tak. He shoves the box of Crisp Rite Crackers over to Judith, who takes one and sniffs it hesitantly. “I mean, that’s why you came here, right? To find me?”
Judith seems ready to say something, then decides to eat the cracker instead. She takes small, delicate bites, wiping stray crumbs off the blanket after each one. When the snack is gone, she looks over at Tak and shakes her head. “I don’t think we have time for the long version. Abridged okay?”
Tak nods. She removes another cracker from its cardboard coffin and stares at it before setting it to the side. A corner of the blanket falls, revealing a brief flash of red, but she quickly pulls it back into place. “First of all, yes: I’m here because I knew they were sending you here. I waited until Yates was finished, then computed your position and went through using the second briefcase.”
Tak glances at the small blue briefcase currently resting by Judith’s feet. “I didn’t know there were two of those.”
“I built this one myself. It’s special.”
“How so?”
“Because it’s different. Listen, we don’t have a lot of time. Can I talk?”
Tak makes a motion with his hand and settles back into the couch. Judith coughs once and runs her fingers through her hair, taking a moment to work some of the tangles out. Finally, she grows frustrated of the exercise and just lets her hair hang where it likes. “A while back, we told you to find a timeline where Axon effectively controlled the world. Do you remember that?”
“Sure, yeah. We had that big meeting where you and Yates kept drawing graphs on a whiteboard and talking about the gravitational constant or whatever.”
“Well, we lied to you, Tak. I lied to you. That was never the plan at all.”
Tak leans back against the couch and scrunches his eyebrows together. Judith seems uncomfortable with the conversation, almost ashamed, and this is beginning to worry him. “What do you mean, you lied to me? I don’t understand.”
“Charles was never interested in running the world. He was searching for something else: a very special timeline, one unlike any in existence. So as you were using the Machine, he was following in your footsteps. Taking notes. Making calculations. Watching you. And late last year, he finally found what he was looking for.”
“Wait. Judith. Hold on. You knew about this?”
“Yes.”
“And you helped him anyway?”
Judith stares at the floor even harder than before. “I’m not you, Tak. I’m a theoretical physicist. I don’t know how to steal cars or hack computers or go into hiding. Had I tried to break free, Charles would have tracked me down in a matter of hours. I decided it was better to stay on the inside.”
Tak runs his fingers through his hair and wishes that he’d gotten more than a five-minute nap. “Okay, fine. So what was Yates looking for?”
“He calls it the Beautiful Land. It’s a kind of flexible reality, a place where laws of physics and motion and everything else we take for granted don’t exist. It’s a world that builds itself around your wishes and becomes whatever you want it to be. It’s the hub of all creation. If I was religious, I’d probably call it heaven.”
Tak clicks his tongue on the roof of his mouth and eyes the woman across from him. “You don’t have a beer in that backpack, do you?” he asks suddenly. “Because right now, I need a drink like nobody’s business.”
In response, Judith opens the pack and hands him a bottle of old, cheap whiskey. “I found this in your room after you left,” she says. “Figured you’d want it eventually.”
Tak moves into the kitchen and returns with a pair of dusty glasses, filling each with a healthy pour. “Drinking is only going to dehydrate us,” he says as he downs the shot in a single gulp. “But right now, I don’t really care.”
He takes his glass back to the couch and collapses on one end as Judith takes a seat next to him. The alcohol bypasses his empty stomach and goes straight for his brain, and he’s more than happy to let it. Whatever. If a bird’s gonna eat me, I’d like to be good and sloshed when it happens.
Judith takes a tiny sip before continuing. “As Charles and I pursued the Beautiful Land, he began to change. He’d always walked a fine line between brilliance and madness, but over the years, he became possessed. He started talking about how the Machine could be anywhere, about how if we could invent it, anyone could. One night, very late, he came to me, with tears in his eyes, and said that he had reached a decision. He said…”
She stops talking and takes another sip of whiskey, then reconsiders and downs the entire shot. “He was convinced that someone in another timeline was trying to do the same thing we were, that they would eventually find a way to erase us from existence. He told me w
e had to prevent it from happening, no matter what.”
“So what’s his plan?” says Tak. “Wait, no. Let me guess. He’s going to try and destroy the solid timeline. Right?”
Judith shakes her head, then turns away. To Tak’s amazement, a single tear sneaks out of her eye and down her cheek. He’s never seen her cry in all the years he’s known her; he actually didn’t think it was possible. “Not the solid timeline, Tak,” she says, her voice hitching slightly. “All of them. All the timelines, all at once. He’s going to go to the Beautiful Land and seal the conduit behind him, then he’s going to wipe out any reality that has ever existed or will ever exist. He’s going to destroy everything.”
“Fuck a duck,” says Tak softly. “Is that even possible?”
“I didn’t think so at first. But then I realized he didn’t have to destroy the actual timeline—he just had to eliminate everything inside it.”
Tak shakes his head, suddenly annoyed at the way the whiskey is making him slow on the uptake. “Sorry, I don’t understand.”
“Are you familiar with the observer effect?”
“Wasn’t that a prog rock band from the seventies?”
“Stop fucking around. This is important.”
Judith reaches out her arm and begins to draw a large, imaginary circle in the air. A corner of the blanket falls down as she does so, exposing part of her torso to Tak’s surprised eyes, but because of the alcohol or her focus or possibly both, she pays it no mind. “The observer effect is part of quantum theory. It basically states that reality can only exist as long as there is someone in place to experience it and make it actual. Are you following me so far?”
“I think so,” says Tak as he tries desperately to keep his eyes focused squarely on the floor. Even by the dim light of the candles, he can see enough of Judith to know that he should probably stop looking. “Just keep going.”
