by Eddie Patin
After a moment, he heard the buzzing of the fluorescent lights.
There was a plop sound, and Jason looked down to see a glob of orange goo from the inside of the plant monster. It had fallen from his elbow and landed on the concrete floor.
"Gross," Jason said, looking at the door to the living room. He was covered in that shit, smelled strongly of that alien, fermented-OJ odor. He definitely didn't want to track that in on the carpet.
Jason put his rifle on the stainless steel table in the back of the garage and pulled up his OCS. Scanning through the bookmarks, Jason looked for something that he remembered from before.
"It was ... two-hundred-something..." he said, skimming through the list with one fingertip.
Then he found it. Universe 271. It was a world where his rift would open up on a beach. He'd discovered it back when he was exploring saved coordinates from the previous Jason before the golem hearts job. The only notes left on the entry for u271 by Jason 113 was 'Islands and oceans'. Jason could remember from scanning the fauna registry—which he now knew involved the immediate area around the rift—that the animals were mostly like they were on Earth, but there were also mermaids, sea wolves, selkies, and ... a single hydra. There were probably more hydras on that world, but maybe only one of them lived in the vicinity of the portal, just like the one wyvern had been within ten miles of the permanent rift in the Wilderlands.
Universe 271 was within 99% compatibility of the laws of physics of his own world, so it should be a pretty similar place. Jason looked at the spot in the back of his long garage where he always placed his rifts.
He focused on the coordinates.
The rift opened loudly. After a few moments, Jason was left staring at an endless, sapphire-blue ocean, sparkling under bright sunshine. His point of view originated from a white-sanded beach a short distance from shore. The sparse palm trees within sight of his window into the other world were swaying in an apparent constant breeze.
"Paradise," Jason muttered to himself, almost inaudible under the roar and sputtering of the whirling rift. "Hopefully the hydra isn't right there..."
Grabbing his rifle, he stepped through.
Jason appeared in warm sunshine. The air was crisp and smelled of salt. A cool breeze blew against one side of his face. Before releasing the rift, he took a quick look around and found that he was standing on a small island the shape of a big peanut shell, with two smaller islands a few hundred yards away across the water.
Everything else was blue.
He was surrounded by ocean on all sides. There was no larger landmass in sight.
Scanning around with his rifle shouldered for any weird creatures that might be camouflaged and waiting to eat him when his back was turned, Jason scoured the palm trees and copses thick, green bushes and occasional elevated areas of rock and sand around him.
The island seemed safe.
Jason released his rift back to the garage. As it collapsed into a single point and disappeared, his hearing immediately went from the spitting roar of the portal to the gentle drone of the ocean and the splashing of the tide against the beach.
This place was quiet. Peaceful. He didn't even hear any birds.
Movement caught Jason's eye near the water's edge, and looked down there over the sights of his AK-47 to see a crab scuttling toward the sea.
"Okay," he said. "Just something normal. No hydra. No sea wolves."
Hurry, he thought. Focus. Get back home.
Jason approached the ocean. Through the tumbling surf, he could see coral formations a distance away from the current tide. The sand was white. It was like a freaking vacation spot. If he managed to get his friends out of the clutches of that primordial giant, he'd have to take Morgana here sometime to just relax, tan, and make love on the beach.
Satisfied that there were no creatures waiting for him in the water, Jason shucked off his rifle, OCS, battle belt with the lightning gun, and backpack. He took his goopy towel then waded into the seawater, where he worked at cleaning all of the orange slime off of him as quickly as he could. He stayed wary, looking back at his OCS and AK-47 often, but he did his best to wash his body, armor, minotaur-hide jacket, and head as quickly as possible so that he could go back home mostly-clean. He winced at the sting of the saltwater on his slightly-burned right leg.
He tasted the saltwater when he washed his face. The last time he'd tasted saltwater was back in the Wilderlands when he was gathering urchins from that world's version of Lake Granby. Before then, it had been many years since he'd been to the ocean. Maybe the last time he'd been to the ocean on Earth was when he went down to the Caribbean with his parents to Scuba dive and spend a week on a sailboat ... back when he was seventeen.
This place was beautiful. Jason would have to come back.
Then a thought chilled him.
Where's the hydra?
There was no land in sight for miles all around him other than the island he was on that was perhaps two hundred yards long, and the two tiny islands in the distance. Was the hydra close by underwater? Living in an undersea cave, perhaps? For that matter, were all of those other fantastic creatures close to him as well? They must all live under the water's surface. They had to be within ten miles of the coordinates, right?
Jason slogged through the lapping, blue water and pale sand back to shore. Saltwater poured out of his armor. He'd have to clean everything again later—especially his Glock 26 in its shoulder holster under his armor—to avoid the salt damaging anything. But it was a hell of a lot better than being covered in gross orange goop that was probably acidic.
With his now-clean towel, he wiped off the outside of his backpack, rifle, OCS, battle belt, and the lightning gun, returning to the rolling tide twice to rinse off. Then, satisfied, Jason put himself back together and rifted home.
Stepping into his garage once again, he plunked his gear onto the metal table after releasing the rift back to u271. He checked his backpack's ammo supply and found that he needed another two boxes. He was dripping seawater still, but that wasn't a big deal. Jason headed to the bathroom, swapped towels, and dried himself off with another. Then, he grabbed more ammo from his gun safe, stared at the fridge for a while wondering why he wasn't hungry, then made himself drink some water. Jason returned to the garage, put the fresh towel into his backpack, and reassembled his gear onto his body again.
Pulling up his OCS, Jason looked at the three bookmarks that he'd set on u1243.
"If I go back to the second bookmark again..." he said to himself, trailing off but stopping, trying to slog his way through the confusion. Sure, he could go back to the same coordinates in space-time again—to the 'Troll Cave after Giant'—but he'd probably be shunted off to another universe since another version of himself was already there, right? Hell—Jason might meet that other universe's version of him, just like he did when he met Jason 1240 while going back in time to catch Nargog after the alpha minotaur had rampaged away on Kestrel Drive.
That would be useless.
Still, it would be good to check and confirm...
Maybe he could spy on the whole situation from the first bookmark—'The Troll Cave' back before they were attacked and took the troll's head; before everyone but Jason collapsed under the titan's 'sleep' spell...
"Spell?" Jason said to himself. He couldn't believe that he was seriously referencing things like spells in real life. But, what else could it be?
He figured that if he went back to the first bookmark, he'd be shunted off to an alternative timeline and his friends wouldn't really be his friends. But chances were pretty good that they'd go through the same situation, right? Voro would probably take them to the same place, wouldn't he?
Nodding, mostly to just make himself feel better when his brain was practically panicking about losing his friends and feeling helpless, Jason tried to clear his head.
Second bookmark first, he thought.
He rifted to 'Troll Cave after Giant'.
Well-he tried to
open a rift to the second bookmark with his OCS, but failed.
"Oh yeah," Jason said, lowering his OCS and pulling out the focus key. He couldn't use the OCS to get to the Shattered Swamp at all; not from his own universe, anyway. The place was too different from his own world. Jason 113's 'block' would stop him every time.
Holding the old, decrepit troll's claw in one gloved hand still damp from the ocean, Jason rifted back to the Shattered Swamp. The bright orange rift opened with a snap and quickly got to roaring and whirling, spitting sparks around the garage. When the center of the disc cleared, Jason saw exactly what he expected. He'd already stepped into that scene twice now.
Straightening his resolve, not wanting to set foot in the swamp again but needing to rescue his friends, Jason held his AK-47 at low ready with the focus key still in his left hand, and stepped through.
The bog was muddy and grey under an unchanging and dreary pale sky. The mushroom-shaped trees were huge, and the bumpy, moist ground was littered with strands of red algae tossed around through the many black storms. Jason's nose filled with the odor of sulfur.
He released the rift. His senses were immediately enveloped by the sounds of bugs and hidden reptiles and amphibians, calling endlessly out into the muggy, dank world.
Jason wondered if the entire world was like this, or if he was just in a swampy region.
Putting away the focus key, quickly looking around for threats and finding none, Jason pulled up his OCS and opened a rift to the second bookmark—'Troll Cave after Giant'—where he'd already gone back in time to before. As the new rift opened loudly and spewed sparks all over the muddy ground, Jason waited to see through the fiery, spinning disc, expecting to see the back side of himself already having gone through the first time.
As the rift cleared, he saw the area outside the troll's cave where he'd left before after killing that troll with his lava key. He saw the bodies of the ettins that had died there. Bones littered the muddy ground. But there was no other Jason.
"Huh," he said, then stepped through.
He had to be sure.
Jason landed in that spot a few miles away but now also back in time.
The bodies were the same. The troll's cave—a watery hole promising death and terror—was the same. Looking around, Jason spotted the dead bodies of the three ettins he'd killed when he rifted a hundred yards across the clearing, up toward the forest again.
Two of them were still smoking from his electron particle beam pistol.
"It's the same?" Jason said to no one.
He released the rift then aimed his OCS's scanning laser at one of the smoking bodies in the distance like he had before. He shot the heaped corpse with the invisible beam of light of his scanning laser.
Unknown. Lore: Ogre, 85% match. Ettin, 87% match. Universe unknown.
"Shit," Jason muttered. The world was a lot quieter with the rift closed, and the drone of the bugs and small creatures wasn't as thick in the clearing as it had been back in the forest. He heard dripping water at the troll's cave, which terrified him, but no troll emerged.
He'd been shunted off.
So that settled it. If Jason used the temporal dimensions to go back to some coordinates that he'd already passed through, then he wouldn't go to the universe he intended. There was no way to 'change time'. Everything that ever could and would happen would happen. It did happen if Jason looked at it from outside of time in his own mind; in one of the infinite universes in probability space. Now, he was no longer in u1243, because he'd already come back here already. He didn't see another version of himself coming back a third time while he was still there, did he? Which meant that u1243 was never meant to have Jason's third return to those coordinates interrupt his second. Coming back again didn't actually happen in universe 1243. It happened in ... whatever the hell uncatalogued universe he was standing in now.
Had he stepped through too early? He must have come through ahead of his past self returning—this was all so confusing!—and threw everything off. Why hadn't he seen himself like last time? Shouldn't Jason after the Wilderlands have appeared in his view, looked around a while, then went off following the giant's footprints?
"Because," Jason said aloud, "we went through at the exact same time ... into different universes...?"
Right? he thought. That had to be it. Because ... he couldn't be watching himself ... watching himself ... and ... but he'd waited before ... before going through?
This shit was so confusing!
Now, theoretically, Jason knew that he should be able to go to the third bookmark—to a time after he'd left, anyway—and then be right back where he'd left off.
"But not yet," he said.
Jason wanted to go back to that first bookmark—that moment in space-time on u1243 where they were all about to be hit by the storm, then were attacked by the ettins, the troll, and finally, the giant. He wanted to watch. He wouldn't be able to help them. Well, actually, Jason thought, he really could help them, but it wouldn't make any difference to his real friends—the ones that he'd lived and grown with—and their plight. Jason figured that he could watch from the other side of a rift, but the moment he stepped through to help—if he did—he'd be shunted off to that one unknown universe where a future Jason had shown up randomly during the battle to help them.
Hell—Jason could spend the rest of his natural life warning other versions of the Reality Rifters about what was coming after that moment. He could save one team of Reality Rifters after another, along an infinite spectrum of this multiverse, but it wouldn't help his friends that were in trouble.
It would actually be his friends on the other side of a rift spying back into his first bookmark. But Jason knew that the moment he interfered, things would change, and those Reality Rifters wouldn't be the ones he was looking for any longer. There was literally no way to change the course of what had happened in u1243 ... unless he didn't care about leaving that universe behind and dealing with another one.
The thought chilled Jason to the core. He realized that at any point, if one of his friends died or something else terrible happened, Jason would have the ability to 'fix it' in any other universe, but it wouldn't be the same.
"Focus, Jason," he said to himself.
He could do anything by manipulating time. He could go another universe where his parents hadn't died in that plane crash and find them, like he had accidentally during his time in the Wilderlands. He could find a universe where his parents' world was about to explode or something, then rescue them by bringing them to his.
But they wouldn't be his parents. Not really. They'd be another version of them. He'd seen that before.
"Still," Jason said, watching the troll cave to make sure that a huge, green monster wasn't sneaking up on him while he was thinking through his plans. "If I watch through a rift, and watch them get taken away all over again..." Jason trailed off, but he knew what he had to do. Even in an alternate universe, it was pretty likely that the giant would take them away to the same place, right? Especially if Jason didn't break the surface of the rift for as long as he could possibly wait.
It seemed like a good idea. It was a better idea than trying to establish communication with a village of murderous ettins.
Pulling up his OCS, Jason looked at the first bookmark. He might have to watch a while; several minutes at least. He looked around, eyeing the troll cave and its surroundings. This definitely wasn't a safe place for spying...
Looking up the clearing toward the northern forest, Jason estimated some coordinates to get him back to the tree line. He missed a few times, then, when he had a destination portal that would be safe to pass through, Jason rifted back to the towering woods.
Dim Door, he thought with a smile as he hopped from one spot to another through the third and fourth dimensions, essentially teleporting.
When looked up at the huge, mushroom-shaped trees after checking behind him for a moment, eyeing the troll's cave from far away, Jason guesstimated a rift a hundred
feet up into one of the tree's canopies. He created rift after rift, closing in on a suitable destination by trial and error. Eventually, he landed a portal that would put him up on one of the broad lower limbs, very high up there. The bough was as wide as a car, just like last time, so it would be safe.
Then, a black storm came in from the east.
Being close to the tree line helped a little. Jason hunkered down and released his rift up into the tree, making sure to avoid changing or deleting the coordinates. The black vapors on tumultuous winds swept through the clearing from the dark eastern sky where Jason knew that he'd run into some ROUS's if he followed the giant's tracks. Eventually, those tracks would end. In u1243, he was hunkered down on a giant's footprint right now. The winds stung Jason's face and eyes and threw bits of mud and grit all over, so he drew in close to a foreboding root structure the size of a double-decker bus at the base of the closest huge tree. He kept his AK shouldered in case any giant bugs chose that moment to attack him from the wet shadows between the thick, twisted roots.
In time, the storm passed, oddly withdrawing into the trees to the south instead of back down the clearing to the east.
Jason tried to remember going through this before.
"Then ... there's another shortly after?" Jason said to himself, wiping mud off of his face.
If he remembered correctly, there'd be another storm very soon, and it would be better to weather it down here on the ground than up in the tree.
Jason waited.
Another maelstrom swooped in several minutes later, just as he'd predicted. It came and went pretty quickly, crossing the clearing from the southern woods, then pulled away again back to the same horizon.
Correcting all of his clothes and gear, Jason stepped away from the huge root growth, looking up into the canopies again. He lowered his rifle to its sling and pulled up his OCS again.
Jason then rifted up into a tree by the coordinates he'd found, forcing himself to avoid looking over the edge of the huge branch until he was able to hug the massive, bark wall of its colossal trunk. The branch's bark pieces scratched and broke free here and there under Jason's boots.
