“What? You what?” I try to sit up, but the heaviness is too much. It’s as if I am restrained without restraints. This should worry me, but my head is too muddled for worry.
Ritter’s mouth moves, his eyes bouncing back and forth before meeting mine. “H.IT. Help. Immediate Transport.” He sees that this does nothing for me. He stretches out his arm and opens his hand, revealing a little metal disk. With his right hand, he places it against his left wrist. There’s a tiny snapping sound like magnets drawn together. “It doesn’t do anything here, but—”
“What?” I ask again, my eyes welling up. Am I supposed to know what that means? Is there something really wrong with my head? Had some vital information known by every American citizen been jarred loose when the car hit me? Am I brain injured?
I think about what I can remember, as far back as I can go to the last day I remember. Trying to get out of going to school. Ritter, the creepy jogger. Jake groping me. Reading my essay in class. Jake Armadice snoring. Mr. Elgar threatening him with Workspace. Rae with the party invite. Jake groping me again. Ritter, again. Ritter lunging. Pain. And then the glass box, the vanishing door, the beeping crack pipe —what did Strega call it, again?—the rippling post. My crack about Kansas. In the silence, I edge closer to something I’m not sure I want to know.
Ritter looks stricken. He blinks rapidly, not meeting my eyes.
“I—” he begins, then exhales loudly and rubs the back of his head. “How do you explain something like this?”
And then the words come. Crazy, impossible words that tumble over themselves in fits and starts.
“You’d call it science fiction, back on your Earth, but it’s sort of like a panic button. The H.IT. And it brought us here, but we were still falling, and you hit your head pretty hard on the launch plate. So hard, the crack echoed all through the terminal.”
All those words. All of them leading up to something big.
My Earth? My Earth?
The buzzing is back, and I miss a lot of other words that Ritter says. Strega’s back, too, reaching for me with his silvery fingertip disks as Ritter’s final words erupt and hang irrevocably in the air.
Parallel universe.
4
AS STREGA PUTS it, my brain sort of kept “shorting out”. He wasn’t serious, of course, being a doctor. But he says figuratively speaking, Ritter’s words caused it to “overheat” and it just sort of shut me off. In other words, the combination of emotional distress and the head injury overwhelmed me, and I fainted. Repeatedly. My way of processing the news, Strega insists. Retreating into myself like a turtle into its shell. This is how he pitches it to me when I wake up yet again in the room with no doors, somehow balanced on a rippling post.
Strega decides I am ready to accept that the impossible is possible. “See?” he says, pointing to the strange words and symbols on the wall…the results of my latest BAU exam. If the little New Age crack pipe is really telling him all the things about me he claims, it is one amazing piece of technology.
According to both of them, I am on Earth. Just not my Earth. A parallel Earth, indeed like something out of science fiction. I think of an old show I caught a few episodes of on Netflix. Sliders, I think it was called. From what I can remember about the show, some things were the same or similar in both worlds, and some were varying degrees of different. A little, a lot…ridiculously.
Strega, being a caretaker (doctor, essentially), hasn’t had much time to travel like Ritter, so his grasp of the languages and vernacular of other Earths is tenuous. That explains his frequent baffled expressions and the loaded looks passing between them. He’s asking Ritter to translate. It also explains my own confusion when I ask Strega how old he is and he says,
“I’ll be seven in about three months.”
“Twenty-one,” Ritter translates after a quick calculation. “We used to have a thirty-six month calendar,” he tells me, “but right when your Earth was getting hysterical about the year 2000 and your computer systems, many of the parallels agreed it would be much simpler if everyone adopted the same clock and calendar. Since there were more parallels following a twelve month calendar than anything else, it became the standard.” With a teasing glance at Strega, Ritter adds, “Strega, for all his IQ points, is having trouble with the twelve month thing.”
Strega’s face colors a little, but he doesn’t deny it.
“And how old are you?” I ask Ritter.
“I just turned nineteen,” he replies.
So far, I have come to accept that I am in holding for a head injury and shock, though the shock is credited more toward the emotional impact of being told I’m in another dimension. The oddest thing about holding is that there are no nurses. Strega has been caring for me entirely on his own, readily admitting that I am one of only two dozen active wards under his care. Patients. He rotates from hold to hold (room to room), which refers to their term, held in care. Hospitalized.
When I mention to him how impossibly young he is for a doctor, Ritter offers an explanation. Here, they begin preparing for careers at the age of twelve, which, in my opinion, is well before anyone should reasonably be expected to have any lasting idea of which job they’d like to pursue. But this is how Strega’s a full-fledged caretaker at the age of twenty instead of at roughly thirty. On Concordia, you’re an adult—with all of the privileges—at the age of sixteen.
Strega is just analyzing my latest BAU results when I ask,
“So, where’s the bathroom?”
He turns, dismayed to find me sitting on the edge of the rift, which is what they call beds here. He’s kept me horizontal for several days now because of my habit of fainting. Ritter isn’t here to translate, having left to go get something to eat, and I can see from the searching look on Strega’s face that he’s mentally running through all of the new words he’s learned from my Earth.
“I have to pee,” I try, wondering whether or not it will translate.
It does.
“The…bathroom?” he asks. I nod. “It’s over there,” he gestures.
I look in the direction he indicates and see nothing. Gently, he takes my elbow and walks me over to the other side of the room. He takes my left wrist, which now boasts a slender cord, and lifts it. It is then that I notice the slightest shadow in the uninterrupted field of green, a faint circle I hadn’t noticed from across the room. The wall of glass dissolves, and behind it I can see an entire room I hadn’t known existed. A bathroom. Finally, something that looks exactly like it does at home, from sink to toilet to shower stall.
Strega gestures to it. “The cleanse,” he says. “If you need help, take the monitor between your fingers, press and hold.” He demonstrates on the wrist cord and the lights in the hold flicker.
Strega forces Ritter to go home to rest. For the rest of the day, each time he rotates into my hold, I bombard him with questions that probably make him wish there were nurses to look after me. I ask why I haven’t had to go to the bathroom for days, for instance, and when he shows me that the post I’ve been balanced on is actually a suction drain that’s been pulling my bodily waste from the current of air that forms the platform I’ve been lying on, I demand a shower. Nothing he says convinces me that the air carries specially charged particles which have cleaned me each time.
Standing under the water in this one familiar room makes me so suddenly homesick that I turn my face up into the spray and cry silently. I don’t want Strega to come in. I don’t want his worry or his comfort. I just want to go home. Each time I’ve asked, he’s changed the subject or he’s put those little silver disks against my temples, the ones that temper the worst floods of emotion.
I stay in the shower for as long as I dare, knowing that eventually he won’t knock politely. At some point he’ll stop accepting my shaky assurances that I am okay. I leave the stall regretfully and notice, too late, that there are no towels. When I move to the sink to stand in front of the mirror, a current of air whispers upward from beneath the grate un
der my feet, drying me. I stare at myself in the mirror, watching my long, dark hair swirl around, the contrast between it and my skin much more profound than usual. My eyes, too, look impossibly dark, almost black. When I am not so pale, they are a deep brown color.
My gown has been replaced with a fresh one. It is another thing that is like home, unfortunately…the backless kind that flashes your underwear every time you walk around. I am unnerved by what the presence of the fresh gown means. Strega entered the bathroom while I showered. Silently, saying nothing.
Refreshed, I go back to asking questions. Strega answers everything he can, apologizing when something doesn’t translate. I’m not sure if it is the words themselves or my sudden change in demeanor, but he definitely understands the questions I don’t ask when I say,
“I wonder if my parents are okay.” When he is silent, I keep talking, sharing with him the scenario I keep picturing over and over. The one where Rae searches for me, but I’m just gone. I’m not in the house, in the yards, in one of the bedrooms panting, “Oh, yeah!”, or in the bathroom. Eventually, she calls someone for a ride or catches one with someone at the party. Maybe she’s angry, thinking I ditched her. But at some point someone—everyone—realizes I’m missing. Someone, probably one of my parents, calls the police. I make the news.
I trail off when the tears I won’t shed get caught in my chest.
He sits on the rift beside me and just watches me for a moment. “I think it’s probably much like you imagine,” he admits quietly, tucking a stray lock of hair behind my ear.
When my eyes well up, he says,
“I wish there was something I could do about those things.”
But he knows, wisely, there is nothing.
Today Strega told me I’ve been in holding for fourteen days, the first seven spent medically comatose. Another five I spent checking out whenever reality got to be too much. These last two I’ve spent proving that I’m well enough to be released.
Now, recovered from my head injury and the shock of discovering I am in another dimension (the last point being debatable), Strega will release me into Ritter’s care. Having nowhere else to go, I can’t really argue the point, though I wonder whether it is wise to follow a guy whose habit of following me brought us to this point in the first place. Which reminds me that he still hasn’t explained the stalker bit. He changes the subject each time I ask, and my mind has been too muddled to remember to circle back to it.
Dressed in a pair of pants and a shirt that closely resemble the ones Strega is wearing, I look at Ritter and say,
“I guess I’m ready.”
Ritter tugs down the sleeves that I’ve pushed up to my elbows. “It’s best you leave them down for now,” he says.
“Because I have no tattoo?” I ask, pointing at his left forearm.
He nods. “They’ll know you’re not from around here.”
I wonder if that’s a bad thing, if people will treat me poorly. I don’t ask. It’s scary enough to be leaving this room I’ve been living in, this little bubble that has, along with Strega, shielded me from the entirety of this strange new world.
Because I am Strega’s last ward for the day and because, as I’ve discovered, Ritter is his brother and best friend, he decides to accompany us. I walk between them as we leave holding. Outside the hold, the hallway I’ve been walking up and down for days now looks like any other I’d see in a hospital at home, except without the bustle of nurses, of course. They have cleaning staff, but that’s it. The caretakers are responsible for their own wards. In an extreme emergency, the caretakers will assist each other, but there is no one else.
The elevator is also like what I’m used to, and I zip downward between them.
Ritter seems nervous as we step outside the building. I wonder if he’s worried that I’ll regress back into shock as I meet more of this alternate Earth.
Outside, the sky is the sky. It seems brighter, but that could just be the effect of being in holding for two weeks. It is early in the evening, the sun washing us in the bright orange light of its final moments. Though the architects favor glass heavily, the buildings are unremarkable. I try not to gape too much, after Ritter leans into me and warns,
“It’s best they don’t know you’re not from around here, remember?”
People come and go around us, sometimes nodding at us or saying hello. I’m briefly grateful that everyone seems to speak English. It hadn’t really occurred to me before, but there was never any guarantee that that would happen. The thought makes me a little ashamed. But then, Ritter might never have come to my Earth if he couldn’t speak at least one of the languages there. Maybe it isn’t so amazing.
Though we are surrounded by buildings, there are mountains in the distance. The landscape is not completely alien, but it doesn’t look like Surprise or greater Phoenix. It reminds me more of the Pacific Northwest’s rainforest areas: lush, green, slightly humid but still cool.
Maybe it is the novelty that makes me feel merely like a tourist exploring any foreign place, but I am not as anxious as I thought I would be to go back home. The confinement of holding definitely had me more homesick than I’m feeling right now. I don’t ask when Ritter will take me back. Not yet. It has waited this long, after all. Though he hasn’t specifically said so, I think Strega also wants to monitor me outside holding to satisfy himself that I am fully healed.
The differences are slight but fascinating. I quietly stage whisper to Ritter, “This isn’t so much different from some of the places I’ve been back home.”
Ritter agrees. “Visually speaking, it isn’t drastically different from Attero.” He waits a beat. “Attero is our name for your Earth. This Earth is called Concordia.”
I start to ask why but then I realize the answer wouldn’t make much more sense than the fact that we just call it Earth. That’s just how it is.
Concordia is cleaner. There’s no trash that’s either been thrown carelessly around or blown from receptacles by the wind. The neighborhood, I think, must be mostly houses. There are no shiny wares for sale in the windows, no bright, eye-catching signs boasting the best deals. There are no billboards. The buildings have plain windows, but these are accented by the bits of wood or brick I’d missed in holding.
Off-handedly I realize I should probably ask where we’re going, but I’m too busy noticing one huge difference between our worlds. There are no cars. There are sidewalks and streets with raised concrete medians, but not a single vehicle has passed us in any direction.
“Where are all the cars?” I finally ask, after several minutes of specifically watching for one. “You have streets, but no cars.”
Strega, pleased to understand one of my references, informs me, “Those aren’t streets. Those are solar panels. They provide about three-quarters of the power to the zone. Underneath them is a network of slides.”
“Like a subway,” Ritter says. “Only the stops are above ground. This side of the walk are the east-west locals. These slides stop at one or two mile intervals. On the other side are the east-west supersonics. They go all over the continent, stopping infrequently.”
I think about this, about the fact that the citizens of Concordia get around by foot or by something that looks like a subway train. “If you can…teleport,” I say, “why do you even have slides?”
“Cost,” Strega replies. “The launches are incredibly expensive to build, power, use, and maintain. Use is restricted to parallel travel and emergency travel only. Everyone else walks, flies, or slides. Even the wealthiest, highest functioning members of Concordia society.”
“And it’s in the Agreement,” Ritter adds.
“But you don’t need the launch plates at all. Ritter didn’t have one,” I point out.
Ritter grimaces. “Again, that’s the Agreement. When parallel travel was initially achieved, it was only by use of a launch plate. Later on, technology rendered the launch plates unnecessary if you had the right codes, which are coordinates. But it was too chaot
ic, people just bouncing in and out of the parallels. Many people ended doing that. It’s assumed that when they arrived in the parallel, they were in an unfortunate place…like in the middle of the street, or at the edge of a cliff. So the Tribunal of All drafted the Agreement.”
“How do you know people ended? I mean, how do you know they didn’t just like it better in the other parallel and decided to stay?”
Strega answers this one. “Because your vital signs are tracked.” Ritter nods and points to his tattooed arm.
They stop walking. Ritter gestures to the mouth of a structure that looks every bit like a subway entrance. There are no tracks, though.
“It should be here any minute,” he says.
It’s not that I’m opposed to staying a little longer, if I’m correct that it’s what Strega wants to make sure I’m well, but I’m keenly aware that I’m a missing person on Earth. After all, it wasn’t the car that hit me. I didn’t hit my head until we—landed? I wonder what the right term is. But since I hit my head here I am reminded that every minute that passes is a mystery for my parents and for Rae. Did we disappear in a brilliant flash of light or with a loud boom? Did anyone even notice? The driver of the car had to have seen something…but would he or she admit it? Or did they just drive off?
Either way, staying here just to get a good look around, playing inter-dimensional tourist, would be utterly selfish. I’ve been gone far, far too long already.
“So, are we going to the…launch?” I ask, breaking the silence, pleased with myself for remembering one of their terms. “Are you taking me back now?”
Ritter has trouble meeting my eyes, and my stomach drops like we’ve hurtled downward a hundred feet. “Not exactly,” he answers slowly, rubbing the back of his head. I recognize that gesture from holding. He does that every time he’s about to deliver what will turn out to be unwelcome news. “We’re going to my keeping. House,” he translates.
My breath catches as the slide spews out of the tunnel with only a little vibration to warn us. I’d been waiting for something bigger…a loud rumbling, a heavy shaking underfoot. I can’t tell if the little jolt in my chest is from the slide’s abrupt appearance or from Ritter’s hesitation. Strega says nothing, just takes my elbow and guides me into the slide.
Assimilation (Concordia Series Book 1) Page 4
