by Al Macy
Based on the senators’ questions, not only did they not understand—hell, I didn’t understand—but they were beyond clueless. Questions like “Can we just build a really big wall?” showed the depth of their ignorance.
Gordon Guccio was there to provide the input of a Washington insider. He’d appeared before Congress often, and his words lent credence to our testimony. He said he supported the plan.
I was last, and related my adventure once more, even though everyone on the planet had watched my video journal. Capitol Police brought the white chest in, and I played a few brief clips. They had to realize this was not a technology that existed on our Earth, right?
Finally, Senator Halgren addressed me. “Mr. Corby, I would like to read part of a transcript from some of the instructions for building this world-saving, excuse me, universe-saving, device.” He looked at me over his glasses. “This is from a set of instructions which, according to you, are of the most critical importance to the survival of the world.”
He read from a sheet of paper, taking a second to find his place. “It reads, ‘... at this point, the cocksucking technician must slide the goddamned tube into the motherfucking oscillation chamber.’”
A few people in the audience tittered, but most were silent.
He removed his glasses then held the paper up and shook it. “How do we take a document that uses this kind of disgusting language seriously? Is this whole thing some kind of elaborate joke, Mr. Corby?”
Damn it! I had no memory of my time in the other universe, but I know myself. I was one hundred percent certain that I had injected those swear words as a way of amusing myself during what must have been a long and tedious time. I’d done that once with a foreign girlfriend.
Yes, it was childish. I shook my head. My stupid joke was imperiling the entire universe.
A muffled exclamation came from the audience behind me, and then another. An aide tapped Senator Halgren on the shoulder and handed him a smartphone. He looked at it, and the blood drained from his artificial tan. He started speaking on the phone, and tears flowed down his cheeks. He leaned to the microphone. “Just a moment, please.”
My phone vibrated. I pulled it out of my pocket. I’d missed a call from … No! Was it a joke? Her picture was on the screen. I returned the call, and she answered.
“Jake, honey, could you pick up some spaghetti noodles on the way home?”
My heart fisted, and chills ran up my spine. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I lowered the phone and stared at the image again.
“Jake? Jake, are you there?”
“Mary?”
She laughed. “Jake, are you okay? What’s going on?”
It was her. Mary, my first wife. My wife who had been killed in 2012.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
There in the senate chamber, tears tickled my face as they ran down to my lips. Salty tears. I did nothing to hide them.
In 2012, I had been working on a counterterrorism operation. Because of a “strategic leak,” the terrorists found out where I lived. They kidnapped Mary then tortured and killed her. She had been my soul mate.
“Jake, are you there?”
“Sorry, Mary, I’ve just had a bit of a shock.”
I looked up at the monitors. The hearing was effectively over, the media now covering this new event. One monitor displayed the CNC coverage. I was visible in the background.
“Mary, turn on CNC, and make sure you’re sitting down.”
“Oh, honey, do you always have to joke around?”
“What?”
“You know Cronkite outlawed CNC.”
My jaw dropped. “But—”
“Wait a second, someone’s coming up the walkway … oh, it’s you. It’s you, Jake, and you’re not holding your cell phone. How did you do that?”
“Mary, don’t hang up.”
She hung up.
Elon had his eyes fixed on the monitor. He turned to me. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Did you get a call from someone who’s dead?”
I whipped my head toward him. How? Why? Questions crowded my thoughts, jamming in my throat until I couldn’t speak, could barely breathe. “How did you know?” I brought up the record of the call and pressed send.
Elon pointed to the monitor. “You’re not the only one. I think—”
I held up my hand. My call to Mary, to her cell phone, was picked up on the second ring. The call was answered just the way I always answer the phone. “Jake Corby.”
“Jake, don’t hang up,” I said. “This is not a joke.”
“Is this Dane? You have gotten really good at imitating me.” He had a laugh in his voice. My voice.
“No. Dane’s … Remember when you and Amy Braden broke up? You went backpacking by yourself and wrote a long letter to her then burned it? And you never told anyone about that.”
Silence.
“Remember when you told Mom—I mean, your mom—that you had lost that fountain pen, but in fact—”
“Okay, you’ve got my attention. Spill it.”
“Don’t hang up, this is not a joke. Because of a weird quantum problem with the universe, I’m you. I’m Jake Corby from another universe.”
After a pause, he said, “I’ll play along. What was the code word for project Short—”
“Project Short Blade. ‘Preservative.’”
“Project Orion?”
“Partridge.”
“Where did I hide the Playboy magazines?”
“In a Ziploc bag pushed up inside the hollow tree behind the shed. Now, turn on CNC.”
“What are you talking about? Cronkite dismantled CNC months ago.”
“Try it anyway.” I had no idea whether it would work, but the twin gasps that came over the phone line told me what they were watching. CNC was covering the chaos in the congressional hearing chamber, and I was visible in the background. I waved.
A reporter came up to Elon Gray, sitting next to me. “Dr. Gray, we’re getting all kinds of fantastic reports. Senator Halgren apparently got a phone call from his dead sister. Can you explain this?”
Elon shook his head. “We’re going to look into it, but the dinobirds warned us of possible events called confluence rifts, in which a patchwork of different universes might exist together on a single planet. So, for example, Nevada might be one universe and California, another.”
“You mean like red states and blue states?”
Elon frowned at the newsman and patted him on the shoulder. “Let me get back to you after we know more.”
I tried to fit the puzzle pieces together. Mary, in a different universe, had called my cell phone number. Because I had the same cell phone I’d had for years, the over-the-air signal was somehow routed to the phone in my hand. In my universe. The same thing, in reverse, happened when I called her back.
I turned away and spoke into the phone. “Are you up to speed there, Jake?”
“Not really. It seems like a dream, but it’s not.”
We said the last three words in unison.
This was an event of worldwide importance, but I had other things on my mind. Could the confluence reverse at any time? “Was the child born okay. Do we—do you have a child? Boy or girl?”
“A boy. Jake Junior. I don’t get it. Don’t you have him, too? Is Mary there with you?”
I took a breath. “No. In this universe, Mary died.”
“I’m sorry, Jake. Jeez, that must have been hard. You want to—”
“Yeah, I want to talk to her. I know she’s your wife, not mine …” I had a wife. I had Charli.
“I understand, Jake,” he said. “Trust me, I understand. Here she is. She’s been listening, so she knows.”
She came on the line. “Jake, honey, I’m sorry.”
I bent low with my elbows on my knees, tears falling directly onto the chamber floor. News cameras might have been catching it, but I didn’t care.
It took me a while to get my voice back. “I love you, Mary. I had wanted to
tell you that, say goodbye, but I couldn’t—”
“Jake, I always knew you loved me. You were a wonderful husband. You still are.”
“After you died, I lost it. I was a wreck for many years.” My voice stuck in my throat. I sat up straight and took a breath. “But I’m married now to a wonderful woman, and I have a wonderful daughter.”
“Do you want to talk to Jake Junior?”
“Uh, no. That could be too confusing for him.”
The three of us spoke for over an hour. The hearing was gaveled to a close and the chamber emptied out, but I stayed in my chair. I didn’t trust my legs. We brought each other up to speed on the different worlds. In his universe, Cronkite had successfully taken over the world.
“But things have been going well,” Jake said, “and I’m working very hard at my job, just like Adeeb did.”
“Yes, he was a hard worker.” Wow. I thought back to a covert mission I’d been on in Afghanistan. Adeeb had been an undercover resistance fighter who’d worked tirelessly against the Taliban, often putting himself in great danger. Jake was telling me he was working against Cronkite and was worried Cronkite could monitor this conversation. “I understand.”
Reading between the lines, I understood that Jake was working in the resistance, but it was an uphill battle. He couldn’t talk about it outright. Unless they could separate Cronkite from his spherical spaceship as we had done, they didn’t stand a chance.
I told him how it had gone in our universe in case that information was helpful. I also spoke with him privately, without Mary listening in. I told him how Mary, when pregnant, had been killed by terrorists.
“You can decide whether to share this with Mary. Either way is okay with me. About a month after she was killed, Renata was comforting me. One thing led to another, and we slept together.” Renata had worked at my company.
“Really? What about Pierre?”
“They were involved in a bitter divorce at the time. Are they together in your world?”
“No. Well, they were, they reconciled, but then they both died when Cronkite culled us.”
“Yes, they died in this universe, too. Anyway, Sophia was born nine months after our affair, and she lives with Charli and me. We’re both devoted to her. You remember Charli?”
“Um … right. Short blonde. Worked with me—uh, us—on the space station terrorism thing. I liked her. You’re a lucky guy, Jake. We’re both lucky.”
We continued talking until the battery on my phone died.
* * *
Six days later, the confluence rift was still in place. The image everyone became familiar with was a map of the world, displaying parallel stripes over the globe. The stripes, highlighted in red, showed the rift—the other universe.
On a map of the US, the red stripe, about as wide as California is tall, stretched from left to right across the country, angled about thirty degrees from horizontal. That is, the stripe’s upper border went from the top-left corner of California, past the top of North Dakota and on up to Labrador. The bottom went from LA to Boston.
The world within that stripe was transported from another universe to ours, and presumably vice versa. Historians determined it was a universe that had split from ours on August 6, 2012.
The dinobirds referred to our normal universe as Human-1, so the media referred to the new one as Human-2. Jake-Human-2 and Mary-Human-2 had been at their home in Northern California when the rift happened. Fortunately for me, Charli, Sophia, and Marie were all with me in DC. I didn’t even want to think about being parted from them.
The government warned people not to cross the boundaries between zones, in case the rift collapsed. For example, if I were in Upstate New York when the confluence reversed, Charli-Human-1 might never see me again. Governments around the world marked the boundaries so no one would cross unintentionally.
Of course, millions did cross over on purpose. If I didn’t have Charli, and Mary didn’t have Jake, I’d have gone to her in a heartbeat, even if it meant living in a world governed by a crazy alien. I didn’t stay with Charli out of obligation; I loved her with all my heart. But I … complicated didn’t begin to cover my feelings.
Many soap-opera-worthy situations arose when two versions of the same person vied for the same spouse. Poor souls who had happened to be straddling the boundary when the rift occurred either died or lost parts of their bodies.
There was a silver lining: The confluence rift convinced everyone, even the clueless senators, that parallel universes were indeed real, and a world-ending collision needed to be averted. Funding for all of the three projects, communication, transport, and collision-avoidance, broke through government red tape around the world.
Charli, Elon, and I were in the Oval Office going over priorities when President Young took a phone call. He looked at us and said, “They’ll be right over.”
He stood up behind his desk. “That was your lab, Dr. Gray. Apparently an urgent message is coming through from the galactic association.”
* * *
Arriving at the lab with Elon and Charli, I thought back to our introduction to the galactic association.
In July of 2019, after our defeat of Cronkite, the association had contacted Earth for the first time. Their advanced robotic probe, known as DJ1, orbited Earth and relayed faster-than-light messages between us and this benevolent group of societies. Since then, we’d been hooked into their version of the internet, vastly advancing our technologies and scientific knowledge. We called them the extraterrestrials. The ETs.
I followed Elon to the ET room. Devoted to communication with the ETs, it held computer terminals, a large screen, and chairs for an audience of up to twenty observers.
Elon consulted with his researchers then stood at the front. I’d learned that his worried exterior hid a fun-loving inner core that better matched his comedian-like appearance. He waited for us to sit down. “This is the message that came in from the association just thirty minutes ago.” He nodded to a technician and sat down.
The title page for the video showed the association’s logo: an image of the Milky Way Galaxy taken from light-years away. Bright dots indicated the locations of the forty-three members of the association. Not many, considering our galaxy held four hundred billion stars.
The image was replaced with a schematic of our solar system. The image zoomed in to show only the inner planets and the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter.
The voice-over began, a soothing female voice. “We are currently experiencing an overlap of parallel universes. This is probably affecting your planet as well. Our scientists have just determined that this is a precursor event to an impending collision of parallel universes. This collision, if allowed to occur, will destroy everything. All of the civilizations in our galaxy will be obliterated.”
Our solar system’s asteroid belt was highlighted in red.
The narration continued. “This collision is being instigated by an advanced entity in this area of your solar system. Yours is the only universe close enough to prevent this event.”
Elon leaned over to me and whispered, “No pressure, though.”
“Your mission,” I whispered back, “should you choose to accept it …”
Charli punched me in the shoulder and shot me a frown. Dire situations always brought out the kid in me, and Elon wasn’t helping.
The monologue continued. “We are analyzing the situation and hope to provide assistance, via the probe you call DJ1, soon.”
* * *
A few days later, I dropped down onto the couch in the Oval Office. Charli sat next to me, slipped off her shoes, and tucked her legs under her. She wore thin wool slacks.
Her informality was accepted. She had spent many hours in that historic chamber as advisor to former President Dane Hallstrom.
The other informal visitor to the room was Boonie. Since he’d been President Hallstrom’s dog, I got permission to bring him along. We even held a quick reunion session so the staffers who had
known him could say hello. In the Oval Office, Boonie seemed to be searching for his former master, but maybe that was just my imagination.
Maddix Young finished up some paperwork behind his desk. He’d gone light on the makeup, barely hiding his albinism. With his stylish vest and suit, he looked as if he were ready for a cover shoot for GQ.
His fashion foil, Gordon Guccio, trooped into the room with Elon. Guccio’s tie was loose and his suit jacket was missing. Elon had an Afro comb in his hair. Was he becoming absentminded?
President Young came around the desk and sat across from me. “Jake, I have some bad news for you.”
I hate it when people say that.
He looked me in the eye. “We need you to go back to Celano-1, to the dinobird universe.”
“What?” I looked back and forth between the others. Guccio seemed to be in on this. He’d done a good job of hiding it.
“The instructions clearly state that it must be you.” President Young sat on the couch across from me.
“You’re kidding, right?” I said. “How many times do I have to drop out of the world to get it to stick?”
Guccio’s travel mug had “World’s Best Secretary of Defense” printed on it. He took a slurp and set it down. “I’d go instead of you if I could. I need a change—tired of politics.”
“Why does it have to be Jake?” Charli frowned. “Hasn’t he done enough?”
The president nodded to Elon. “Dr. Gray?”
“Right,” Elon said. “One of the things inside the white chest was a small electronics chip. The instructions tell us to implant that deep inside Jake’s nasal cavity, close to his brain. It will make him easier to transport.”
Charli crossed her arms. “Fine. We’ll implant it in a willing volunteer.”
“No. It’s set for Jake. It won’t work on anyone else.”
I leaned back on the couch, stared up at the presidential seal on the ceiling, and came to grips with my upcoming return to service. I thought back to Marie saying “We’ve got to play the cards we’re dealt in life.”
