Now That You're Here (Duplexity, Part I)

by Amy K. Nichols

  “And even if you did have one,” Mac says, “that would hardly cause you to jump universes. Stop your heart, yes. Inter-universal travel? No. So there must be another variable.”

  “There’s something you’re not telling us,” Eevee says to Mac.

  “Solomon,” Warren hisses.

  She ignores him. “Why do you keep using the word jump? And how did you know the orange juice would help him?”

  Mac shrugs. “I’ve seen a lot of inexplicable things in my time.”

  “Things like this?” She points at me. “We show up at your door claiming he’s from a parallel universe and you’re not even fazed.”

  Tension chokes the room. Mac sets his soda can on the table and stares at her. He looks like he’s having an argument with himself.

  “Clearly, he’s—” Warren starts, but Mac holds up his hand.

  “No, no. She’s right. Good observation, Eve.” He stands up and walks to the counter. “I would have told you eventually, of course. After. But with the feds breathing down my neck, well, it just seemed easier to pack up and move on.”

  “Told us what?” Warren looks confused.

  Eevee, though, looks hurt. “You were going to leave without telling us why?”

  “It would’ve been better that way. Safer, at least. For all of us.” He turns around to face us again. The stark kitchen light deepens the circles under his eyes. He takes a deep breath and begins. “About ten years ago, after NASA but before teaching, I worked for DART, Division of Advanced Research in Technology.”

  “Never heard of it,” Warren says.

  “Few have. The department was above above top-secret.” Mac walks to the fridge and straightens a magnet. “Also, it no longer exists.”

  “What happened?”

  “Our team was tasked with developing innovative methods of travel utilizing clean energy. We had our hands in everything. Gyroscope propulsion. Hovercrafts. Plasma generators. But it’s when we delved into electromagnetism that things got really interesting. It started with high-speed railways. It ended with teleportation.”

  The pen falls out of Warren’s hand. “What?”

  “You heard correctly.” Mac puts his hands in his pockets and meanders as he speaks. “We’d perfected our models, built the units and were all set for the first test when we ran into a roadblock. Getting the higher-ups to sign off on using a live test subject. Namely, one of the team.” He pops open a can of soda and takes a drink. “Admin refused and the project went silent for about two weeks, until we couldn’t stand it any longer.”

  We watch in silence as Mac crosses the kitchen and joins us again at the table. “Ever put your heart into something, only to have it snatched away? Well, that’s what it was like for us. We wanted to see that unit hum.”

  “You tested it anyway,” Eevee says. Mac raises the can and winks. Warren’s mouth hangs open.

  “So?” she asks. “Did it work?”

  He considers his answer. “Yes. Mostly.”

  “Who volunteered to be the guinea pig?” she asks.

  Mac holds out his hands. Ta-da.

  “Wait.” Warren lifts his goggles onto his forehead. “You teleported?”

  “Which is how you know what’s going on with Danny,” Eevee says.

  “Well, kind of.” Mac takes a sip. “I only jumped from one place to another within the same universe. And I did it with the help of technology. What’s happened to him is…” He looks at me and shakes his head.

  “But it’s similar, right?” I ask. “The pulsing. The wonky eyes.”

  “Sounds like it. The system we utilized was much more stable, but stepping out on the other side, I felt exhausted, famished. Among other things.”

  “Yeah.” I can’t help but smile. Someone understands.

  “How many times did you jump?” Warren looks like he’s gonna pop.

  “Just the one time.” Mac sets the can down. “After the jump, it was pretty clear we needed to do some more calculating.” He stands and puts one foot up on the seat of the chair. “There was a glitch in the restructuring sequence.” He lifts the hem of his jeans and pulls down his sock. The light from the kitchen shines on the metal where his ankle should be.

  Eevee and I both gasp. Warren just about falls out of his seat. “You’re a robot?”

  Mac laughs so hard he has to wipe his eyes with a paper towel. “Sorry to disappoint you, Warren, but I’m just a run-of-the-mill human.”

  “Did it hurt?”

  Warren and Eevee gape at me. Okay, it was a stupid question. But his answer is surprising. “Not really, to be honest. Traumatic, yes, but not painful. When I arrived at the receiver unit, my lower legs simply weren’t there.” He sits down and puts his arms behind his head. “We couldn’t hide the accident, of course. The bigwigs found out we’d performed an unauthorized test and the project was pulled. My colleagues and I were reassigned. Didn’t last much longer there, though. I was tapped for my knowledge in electromagnetism to work on surveillance technology, but that didn’t hold any interest for me and I quit.” He holds the soda can with both hands and inspects the label. Lost in thought. “Got a job teaching at Palo Brea, and the rest is history. Or rather physics, I suppose. Good thing I left DART when I did. Not long after, they lost funding and the whole place was shut down.”

  None of us say anything for a long time. What can you say after all that? Eevee finally breaks the silence. “What are the generators for?”

  Mac shakes his head, a smirk on his face. “Nothing gets past you, does it?” He stands and stretches. “This isn’t exactly how I’d planned to spend the evening, but okay. Since we’re all here, baring our souls, I may as well show you.”

  After checking again for the white van, Mac leads the way across the darkened driveway to the shop. We follow in silence. The night, the sky, everything feels like it’s spinning too fast.

  Mac unlocks the shop door. After we’re all inside, he closes it again and switches on the lights. We file past the nearly completed entertainment center Warren and I worked on that Saturday afternoon. Sheet metal now covers the frame we helped weld, and the doors are lined with forged scrollwork. Looks amazing. Mac keeps moving, though, and we follow, continuing on toward the off-limits back room. My heart pounds so hard I swear it’s going to beat out of my chest.

  “About a year ago I had this idea,” Mac says, unlocking the door, “that I should try to replicate the transport technology, based on memory. Crazy, right?”

  The door swings open.

  “Here it is.”

  He switches on the light and steps back for us to enter. The blue tarp still hangs across the top and over the sides. Without being asked, we all work together to pull it down. Then we stand back and stare.

  The transporter is large enough for a full-grown man to stand inside, but smaller than the entertainment center in the other room. Two curved metal walls form an oval with open sides, and the inside of each wall is covered with holes about the size of a pencil eraser. Attached to the outside of one wall is a panel of controls. Knobs and dials and monitors. I run my hand along the polished metal. It’s incredible.

  “Does it work?” Warren asks from the other side of the unit.

  “Of course it works.” Mac walks over to the control panel. “Which is why Principal Murray is so unhappy with me.” When he sees our confused faces, he explains, “The receiver unit is currently housed in a rarely used storage closet at school.” He turns one of the dials. “The fact that it works is also why I need to disappear. The feds are onto me. If I’m going to finish this work—and get it right this time—it’ll have to be somewhere far away from here.” He flips a switch, then walks to the door. “I’ll be right back. Don’t touch anything.”

  As soon as he’s gone, Warren does the geekiest celebration dance I’ve ever seen. He grabs me by the arms and exclaims, “This is so awesome!” before going to drool over the transporter some more.

  Danny stands beside me. “My mind is blown. How about
yours?”

  I shake my head. “It’s all so…” Before I can put my scrambled thoughts into words, I hear the generators start up outside. Danny follows me out the door, into the main shop. Mac is already on his way back inside.

  “Where are you going?” he says. “The show is in here.”

  We follow him into the off-limits room just in time to see him shoo Warren away from the controls. Mac pulls out his cell phone. “I set up the receiving unit with remote technology so I can control it from here.” He presses his finger to the screen and types with his thumbs. “There we are.” He turns a dial on the console. The transporter hums louder and blue lights pinprick the inside panel.

  Danny’s grip on my arm startles me. One look at his face and I realize what’s happening.

  He’s jumping.

  “No!” I grab him by both arms. “Mac!” I yell. “Turn it off!”

  Mac sees Danny’s reaction and races back to the control panel. The lights of the transporter dim and the hum quiets until the only sounds in the shop are the rumble of the generators and Danny’s ragged breathing. I watch his eyes until they focus on me again, then wrap my arms around him.

  Mac stands still, like he’s so lost in thought he’s forgotten how to move. “Can’t be. Not possible.” He pulls a records log from a nearby cabinet and scans the pages. “And yet, there it is.” He presses his finger against the log entry. “The first successful transmission happened two Fridays ago. A Macintosh apple left this shop and materialized in the utility closet at Palo Brea. The same day he jumped universes.”

  “Maybe it’s a coincidence.” Even as I make the suggestion, though, I realize I don’t believe in coincidences. Not anymore.

  Back in the house, Mac paces the living room while Danny recovers on the couch. He looks like a train wreck, his face so pale it scares me.

  “Clearly the transporter is causing some kind of disturbance,” Mac says. “But what kind? And more importantly, how?”

  Warren flips through the pages of his notebook. “Could it be a wormhole?”

  Mac continues to pace, considering Warren’s suggestion. I lean over to Danny and whisper, “Did you see anything that time?”

  He shakes his head. “Not now.”

  I wish he’d just tell me. Like anything would surprise me at this point.

  “Wormhole…wormhole…” Mac stops pacing and holds up his hands like he’s imagining a large picture on the wall. “If I could just…Then we’d…” He snaps his fingers. “Be right back.”

  He disappears down the hall, then yells, “Warren! Come give me a hand.”

  After some banging noises and a small crash, the two slide a whiteboard into the living room. They lift it onto the loveseat and secure it at the corners with stacks of books.

  “This is more like it.” Mac uncaps a marker. “Can’t think without a pen in my hand.” He draws a green line down the center of the board. At the top of one side, he writes DANNY and on the other, TRANSPORTER. “Now,” he says, turning back to us, “if we can figure out the correlation between Danny and the transport system, perhaps we can find a way to send him back home.”

  “How about to keep me here?” Danny asks.

  Mac looks surprised. “Is that what you want?”

  “Yes.” Danny’s face looks strained, but he squeezes my hand. “If I can.”

  Mac nods, his fingers uncapping and recapping the marker. “Well, then. Appears we have our objective.” He turns back to the board. “Let’s generate some theories.”

  Just after midnight, the whiteboard is full of scribbled words and symbols. One side is about me, my symptoms, my jump here. Mac writes on the other side, which is all about the transporter and how it works. “As you can see,” he says, “while it’s a complex system, the process of teleportation is really quite straightforward.” He writes WORMHOLE across the green line separating the two sides and finishes with a question mark. “But how it could possibly cause a reaction resulting in Danny jumping worlds is not—”

  “Incredible,” Warren says. “I can’t believe the government destroyed such technology.”

  Mac waves the marker like a scolding finger. “Not destroy. Defund. There’s a big difference. I doubt the government ever disposes of anything.”

  Eevee sits on the edge of the couch beside me, leaning forward on her elbows. Her face is serious, still. If we weren’t trying to figure out the mysteries of the universe right now, I’d grab a pencil and draw her. Instead, I etch her image in my brain. The way the light hits her cheek and casts shadows down her neck. The way her hair spills over her shoulder. How her eyes can change from intense to playful so fast it gives me whiplash.

  The other Eevee was all intensity. Sure, our encounter at the museum only lasted a few minutes. But there was an edge to her, a hardness that I haven’t seen in this Eevee sitting here. Which explains why that Eevee had no problem turning me in to the authorities.

  Maybe I should just tell her what I saw in the last jump, about the other her.

  I reach over and tuck her hair behind her ear. She turns to me and smiles, but goes right back to theorizing with Mac and Warren. How would she react? What good would telling her do? It would crush her to know the other Eevee betrayed me. It’s best she doesn’t know. At least not about that.

  “The connection must be electromagnetism.” Eevee points at the whiteboard. “The EMP. The transporter. Both involve electromagnetics. That’s got to mean something.”

  “But the EMP happened in his universe,” Warren says from the moving box he’s using as a chair. “Why would electromagnetism there affect our world here?”

  “Well, it affected me,” I say. “And I’m here. Maybe it carried over somehow? Maybe I brought it with me?”

  “Electromagnetism changes how electrons behave,” Warren says. “Is it possible the EMP affected his electrons, and the motion of traveling from there to here continued that effect?”

  “Movement,” Mac mutters, staring at the whiteboard and tapping the capped marker against his chin. “Movement.” His eyebrows lift. He writes WAVES on the board and doodles scientific symbols as he continues to speak. “Electromagnetic waves carry the vibration of an electric charge from one atom to the next. What if the electromagnets in the transporter are creating waves powerful enough to disrupt our gravitational field?”

  “Warping the fabric of space-time,” Warren says. “Cool.”

  Mac doesn’t respond. He’s looking at me. “We’re talking about parallel realities here. Parallel universes. Danny, are you aware of anything like this happening in your world? Anything in the news about electromagnetism or issues with gravity?”

  I think back to my world, two weeks ago, before everything turned upside down. The familiar fears about my family, Germ, the other Danny begin to creep in, but I push beyond that, try to focus on the stuff going on in the background. When was the last time I even watched TV? I shake my head. “I can’t think of anything. But then, I don’t really watch the news. It’s not very reliable.”

  Warren rolls his eyes. Eevee kicks his moving box.

  “It’s okay,” Mac says. “I just didn’t want to overlook anything.” He returns to the whiteboard.

  “You okay?” Eevee whispers.

  Fear continues to bleed in through my defenses. “Just thinking about home.”

  She squeezes my hand.

  “If that’s the case,” Mac says, “if the transporter is warping the fabric of space-time…” He draws two parallel lines horizontally. “It’s possible that wave pattern is causing the two worlds to connect.” He erases a section of the top line and redraws it so it dips down, touching the bottom line.

  His eyes are distant, the wheels in his head turning. “And what’s another name for an opening or connection in space-time?”

  With the red marker he circles the word WORMHOLE.

  Who would have ever guessed the discovery of wormholes between parallel universes would happen in a science teacher’s half-packed living r
oom in the suburbs of Phoenix, Arizona?

  Ironically, it’s Warren who’s now arguing that wormholes can’t possibly be the answer. Mac deflects each objection with his own counterpoint. Watching them is like watching a seat-of-the-pants tennis match with a volley that just won’t end.

  With a groan, Mac runs a hand through his hair and stares up at the ceiling. “Listen, it’s two a.m. We have a long way to go yet. Let’s take ten and regroup.” He caps the marker and goes to the kitchen. Warren follows.

  Danny sits with his arms crossed, his jaw tight. What is he thinking about? He startles a bit when I put my hand on his knee. “Want to get some air?”

  “That sounds good.”

  We walk through the kitchen, where Warren and Mac are still debating, out to the back patio. The light just reaches the shadowed shop building where the transporter is locked away. Where will Mac go to finish his work? Will he ever come back? I shiver, either from the thought of never seeing Mac again or the fact that my body thinks anything under 70° is cold.

  Danny wraps his arms around me and rests his chin against my forehead. “I need to tell you something.”

  “You built a transport device, too?”

  The sound of his laugh comes from deep in his chest. “No. It’s something else.”

  More revelations? I’m sure he can feel my heart pounding.

  “The morning of the explosion,” he says, his arms warm around mine, “Germ and I weren’t at the mall just to skate and see a parade. We were there doing a job. For Red December.”

  “What?” I step back. “You mean, you blew up…”

  “No.” He shakes his head. “We didn’t know anything about that. We just helped them spread their propaganda through graffiti, though I guess that’s bad enough. Friday morning was our last gig for them. We were tagging buildings when the bombs went off.” He exhales slowly. “I think they set us up to get caught. Or worse.”

  The pieces fall into place. “And now Danny—the other Danny—is taking the blame.”