9 Tales From Elsewhere 4

by 9 Tales From Elsewhere

  UD Students Participate in a Pre-Game Spirit Rally

  In a Wright State basement tunnel, three University of Dayton trespassers scribbled a chalk pentagram. Tim Seeger, their leader, spoke the summoning chant in the Akkadian he’d copied down in the UD Languages Library archives. Tim doubted keeping up a sports legacy merited this effort. The demon, a simulacrum of Wright State’s Raider mascot, appeared in a brimstone puff. It careened up the tunnel wielding an axe. Unfortunately, Tim’s helpers failed to clear in time. Decapitation events resulted. Was a 16 – 0 season really worth all this bloodletting? The Flyer alumni who celebrated that night’s victory assured Tim it was.

  Discovery of an Invisibility Serum Causes a Disappearance

  Keeping to the shadows on the west side of Brown Street, Melissa peered in brick-framed tavern windows until she located a crowd of coeds bouncing off their stools one after another. She knew those shocked looks well, the outrage at unseen impertinence. Jerry acted out this way whenever she prodded him to complete his chemistry degree before their wedding. Melissa backtracked. She found Jerry’s clothes. She carried them to their loft. On the back of a takeout menu, Melisa wrote this: no one sees the invisible man, but it’s his fiancée who disappears. Then she drove off never to return.

  UD Chapel Welcomes new Postdoctoral Fellows

  Dennis studied the images of the atom that the quantum microscope took before the collider’s beams of protons and positrons sped it up and smashed it apart. He rejected the proof of his eyes. Trees and a lake? Women with blonde hair? Beseeching hands raised? Impossible. Dennis threw away the worthless images. No other postdoc took credit, but obviously someone’s idea of a joke. At this magnification, one saw, at best, a pearl of a nucleus and the ionized rings of circling electrons. Not people. Not worlds. Still, he went to the university chapel that night. And lit a candle.

  Campus Internship Offers Students Opportunities to Face Change

  At the campus daycare’s playground, Wendy pushed an android in a swing. As a robotics intern, the university paid Wendy to interact with new models. She’d have done it for free. For science. This model mimicked a toddler. Big eyes. Pigtails. Only a squeak, a creaking chain squeal, when it turned gave little Roberta away. They had a fix for the noise. Today’s upgrade would solve it. But in the process, the patch deleted memory. And afterward, Roberta wouldn’t remember Wendy. Or anything. Don’t, Wendy told herself. Keep scientific. But her vision of the android on the swing still blurred.

  NANOTECH Center announces contest for best new designs

  When he started snoring, Brenda disentangled herself from Diego. She combed her right bang with an index finger, freeing the hidden microdot. Brenda stroked Diego’s temple. Sensing its target, the microdot dissolved, releasing its agents. Doing a stint as a teaching assistant at the university nanotech neuroscience lab had its perks, including the capability of making her own boyfriend-altering nanophages. No argument, Diego was a good guy. But he had the potential to become a great guy. Just a few rough edges to smooth, that’s all. See how he smiled in his sleep? You could tell he wanted a makeover.

  Physics Student Aids in Statewide Dragnet

  Around his bones, Ben felt the time-jump heat. He shoved hangars. No, not this rack of dresses. The marked-down slacks? Ben had two minutes before the neutrinos absorbed in the jump seared his body in a burst of Cherenkov radiation. Once, he’d tried using his invention to pay his tuition with a lotto ticket. The hospital stay put him even further back. The little girl hid behind the coats. “Mom’s there,” Ben said. Nearby, something fried. A few burns to prevent another Amber Alert? To save a kid? Totally worth it, he thought, before the white flash blanked out everything.

  THE END

  DREAM KILLER by Rik Hunik

  Mike woke up and went to the bathroom, then he ate breakfast, kissed his wife good-bye, drove away in his car and woke up with a start.

  His right leg was still in a cast, hurting intensely from a recent break. The time on his clock said 7:40, about the time he was usually driving to work, but with the cast on he couldn’t drive or work.

  “What’s the matter, dear?” His wife Ruth, holding a tray, stood in the bedroom doorway.

  “Uh, nothing. I must have been dreaming.” Mike dragged the cast up so he could sit up against the pillows and she set the tray across his lap.

  “Dreaming about what?”

  “Nothing much, just the daily routine of getting up and driving my car to work, only my leg wasn’t broken.” He used half the orange juice to wash down the prescription pain pill.

  “You don’t drive a car; you drive a nifty little four-wheel-drive truck.”

  It took Mike a long second to realize that was true, and a couple more to remember that it was blue. He looked up from the ham and eggs and toast. “In the dream I drove a car with a brown interior.” His eyes narrowed as he studied her face.

  After a few seconds she said, “What?”

  “Your hair. In the dream it was a style you never used before. I liked it.”

  She leaned down and kissed him. “That’s why I love you. Most men wouldn’t even notice in real life, let alone in a dream.” He tackled the breakfast. She said, “Maybe your dream predicted the future. Today I have an appointment at the salon to get my hair done, and I’ve been thinking about doing something new.”

  Mike was mobile enough to get around with crutches, but it was still painful after more than a few steps so he gathered up some snacks and beverages and lay down on the couch to watch a movie. He made it almost halfway through before he fell asleep.

  He was in an office, studying blueprints on a table, which wasn’t unusual in his job as a carpenter, but the blueprints were not for the project he’d been working on when he broke his leg. He pointed at a detail drawing of the foundation and said, “Right here it says the minimum spacing for the rebar in all those pads is twelve inches, no matter what it might say anywhere else.”

  “Right, Mike, thanks.” The man in the orange hard hat and the high-vis vest hitched up his tool belt and exited the office.

  Mike sat down at the desk and reached for the phone to call the local building supply store, like he did this sort of thing every day, like he was the general contractor, not just a carpenter like Mike.

  Mike-with-the-broken-leg pulled back a bit, feeling like he was in a lucid dream, but with a strange duality, unlike any dream he could recall. According to the book he’d read years ago, after realizing he was in a dream the next step was to attempt to control the dream, starting with a simple action.

  Mike hung up the phone and immediately felt the other Mike’s confusion, separate from his own emotion. The other Mike hesitated a second, then focused and reached for the phone, pushing the intruding Mike away.

  Now Mike had an impulse nailer in his hand, he was leaning over, nailing two by six studs to a plate, building a wall just as he frequently did at work. He fell into the rhythm, finished the studs, squared the wall and tacked down a few sheets and it was lunch time.

  Mike wondered what his wife was having and suddenly he was sitting in a restaurant across from her and they were both busy eating. The salmon steak was delicious and Mike enjoyed the meal by proxy. While he ate he picked up from this Mike’s mind that he was an architect, not a carpenter, and he had just landed a big contract.

  What bothered Mike was that the wife across the table from him was not Ruth, but a stunning blonde, with sculpted hair, painted face and designer dress. A trophy wife if he ever saw one.

  Mike woke up at the sound of Ruth’s entrance, but it was the pain in his leg that provided the connection that drew him back to the self he had left behind. The movie was over and the DVD player had shut itself off.

  “Hey, I like your hair.”

  She beamed at him as she came over and sat on the coffee table. “Thanks, but what I really want to know is if it’s the same style I had in your dream.”

  He laughed and took a closer look at her natural blonde hair
. “It’s close, but no. Her hair was longer, not quite as rigid, like she had it done a couple of weeks ago at a different salon.”

  “Oh, so it was just a dream.”

  “No, it was more than a dream, even if it didn’t predict the future. But it was less than a reality because I ate there but I’m hungry here. It doesn’t feel like dreaming at all. I seem to be just going about my everyday life, doing routine things like driving, or working or eating.”

  Ruth, said, “Isn’t that sort of redundant, since that’s what you do every day anyway?”

  Mike shook his head. “Not exactly. It’s not my life I’m living in the dreams, and I’m not me in them. I mean, I am, I feel like me, but I’m not quite the same. I think different and I have a different life, I go to a different job, and I have a different wife.”

  “Anybody I know?”

  “Not even anybody I know from this side.”

  He saw her tense for a moment but she kept her voice casual, even joking, when she said, “Is she prettier than me?”

  “Yes, she is,” he replied, keeping his answer honest but light-hearted. “Apparently I’m very rich there and she’s gorgeous, but I can’t even remember the last time I had sex with her.”

  Ruth smiled briefly.

  “What I think it does is show me alternate worlds through the senses of my alternate selves. What I want to know is how come I can do this?”

  “Because you’re telepathic.”

  “But I’ve never been able to read thoughts.”

  “Sure you have, but you never noticed; you attributed it to luck or intuition. Now it looks like your pain, the painkillers, and sleeping outside your regular cycle, have combined with your slight telepathic ability to put you in touch with some of your other selves in alternate worlds.”

  “You could be right. I wonder how many there are. I’ve only seen about half a dozen, and they all seem different.”

  “Theoretically there could be an infinite number of them, so you won’t have time to see them all. I’ll make lunch.”

  After lunch they watched the movie he’d started, then he read for a while and took a nap on the couch.

  Mike woke up and had a wonderful dinner with his wife. While he helped her clean up they both got dishwater on their clothes so they went to the bedroom to change. While they were naked they made love. Afterwards, though it wasn’t yet seven o’clock he fell asleep on the bed.

  He woke up with Ruth shaking him. “It’s almost eight o’clock, time for your pill. Do you want a bowl of stew?”

  He remembered eating just a while ago so he said, “No thanks,” but his stomach growled to remind him he hadn’t fed it, that it was one of his alternates who had eaten.

  Ruth pointed. “Somebody in there wants some. I’ll get a bowl.” She came back a few minutes later and while he dug in she said, “Didn’t you date a Mandy for a while before you got serious with me?”

  “Yes,” he said, dredging up the painful memory while he chewed. “We even lived together for a few weeks before a drunk driver killed her on her twentieth birthday.”

  “Is that who you were dreaming about?”

  “How did you know?”

  “You mentioned her name once while you were sleeping. You sounded like you loved her in that dream.”

  “Oh.” He ate stew for several seconds while he thought about it. “I lost her but I never stopped loving her. And in that dream that’s not really a dream my alternate self loves her as much as I love you. It’s what she would be like now if she had married me back then, and if she hadn’t been killed. The problem is that while I was dreaming my life with her it felt so right it was as real as this one.”

  Ruth put her hands together in front of her chest, bowed, and in a bad Chinese accent intoned, “Are you a man dreaming you are a butterfly, or are you a butterfly dreaming you are a man?”

  Mike put his hands palms together and did a partial sit-up, the horizontal equivalent of a slight bow. “O thank you for your confusions, mighty Zen Master.” They both laughed, then Mike said, “But that’s an easy one to explain; no matter how many dreams I have of how many alternates; I always wake up to this life, where I belong, with you.” He kissed her lightly on the lips. “Right where I want to be.”

  Asleep, not very focused, Mike wandered from alternate to alternate, from one mundane evening at home to another. After a while he came to the conclusion that he led a pretty ordinary and unremarkable life in all these alternate dimensions, just as he did in his own, and started to seek a bit further afield for some kind of excitement.

  It was a bit like channel surfing, but more subtle. He passed up a Mike having sex with a slightly different Ruth because it was too much the same as what he’d done so many times himself with his own Ruth, and it paled in comparison to his afternoon with Mandy, which had been so natural and sublimely beautiful he would remember it the rest of his life.

  Mike was drawn to a Michael kissing a woman full on the lips, sweet luscious lips like none Mike had ever tasted before. Michael had tasted them before, just recently, and he’d tasted other parts of her as well. He’d just had sex with her.

  Mike fell into her gorgeous blue eyes as she pulled away and said, “Good-bye Michael. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” Her sultry voice was full of promise.

  “Goodnight Wendy,” he said, watching her make a performance out of walking away down the hallway.

  Ruth jolted Mike with her elbow. “Who’s Wendy?”

  “She runs a burger joint.” he muttered, still not awake.

  She stabbed him again, not amused by the joke. When his eyes opened and came into focus she asked again, “Who is Wendy?”

  “A redhead, a one night stand.”

  “What?”

  Her tone jolted him fully awake and he came more fully to himself, realized he was in his familiar bed with his wife Ruth. He separated his memories from Michael’s. “In the dream. The alternate there is recently separated so he’s sleeping around.”

  Her frown deepened. “So you’ve been sleeping around vicariously?”

  No such luck, he thought. He said, “Don’t worry, he was done before I started dreaming him. And besides, it would be too much like voyeurism.” He put his arm around her. “Not only that, you’re prettier than her.” He kissed her and they snuggled down into sleep positions.

  Mike loved Ruth. They had been happily married for a decade, they still had sex a couple of times a week, and he really did find her prettier than the redhead his alternate self had just been screwing. The problem was that even though he had missed the actual act, his alternate had still been thinking about it when he said good-bye, and Mike had been there for the good-bye kiss, which had thrilled him more than any kiss from his wife in recent years.

  Mike had always considered himself lucky to have Ruth, and she had always been a devoted wife. He had never before considered straying, but the taste of the redhead had awakened something in him, something he hadn’t known was there. Or had forgotten about for years.

  He thought about connecting with the newly single Mike he’d just been with, but after a moment of thought he realized there was no point; that Mike wouldn’t be seeing anymore action tonight. But if there was a theoretically infinite number of alternate selves out there, surely at least one of them would be having sex now.

  Looking for thrills, he drifted off to sleep.

  She was pretty and well-formed, and she favored tight, skimpy clothes that showed lots of skin and revealed her form, but it wasn’t her appearance or the provocative way she walked down the sidewalk that excited Mick, it was anticipating what he was going to do to her tomorrow that got him worked up, so worked up that he became a beacon that drew Mike to him.

  Driving slowly in a plain gray car rented under a false name, Mick watched the young woman walking home from the restaurant where she worked as a waitress. He had eaten there once, a few months ago, watching her strut her stuff for the customers. Sure, they were low-lifes in a seedy restauran
t, but she teased them, laughed at them, treated them like dirt, even looked down her nose at him because he was dressed like one of them, though his clothes were part of his disguise. But it wasn’t until she saw him looking at her, cupped one breast for a second in her hand and said, “Like what you see?” that she became his next target. He didn’t know her name and he didn’t care.

  Mick didn’t do this very often so, when he did, he made the most of it, relishing each step, imprinting it in his memory, so he could replay it at will. This fish was almost ready to reel in and Mick’s excitement was building to a feverish pitch. It was the intensity of this thrill that held Mike. It wasn’t at all what he had been looking for, but it was so powerful he was immediately hooked on that feeling. In order to get more he had to stay on for the ride.

  Mick checked his watch, saw that his victim was on schedule as she passed the alley he had selected, then turned left and drove away. As Mick, driving a roundabout route, headed home, he thought about the other women, eight of them now, he had dealt with in the past. For Mike it was like a flashback reel, bringing him up to date, but it also brought him into the spell so far he lost himself, making him anticipate tomorrow as much as Mick did.

  Mick went home and went to bed. When he fell asleep Mike got some real sleep himself.