Hawking's Hallway

by Neal Shusterman

  He took a very deep breath, held it, closed his eyes, and pushed the button. He disappeared, along with half a million gallons of water beneath him, and a single scale of some unidentified water creature.

  The Colorado Springs Inland Quasi-Tsunami, as it came to be known, was just one more annoying, anomalous event marking the town’s Dark Time.

  People were surprised and yet not surprised; people were shocked, yet not really shocked at all. It was just one of those things, as everything in Colorado Springs lately had become just one of those things.

  The deluge occurred at about 4:15 in the afternoon, which had been 11:15 at night in Scotland. As Loch Ness contains more water than all the lakes of England and Wales combined, the loss of half a million gallons from it was not even noticed.

  The diameter of the spherical teleportation field had been set to thirty feet, and since Vince was in the middle of it, he appeared in his boat precisely fifteen feet in the air, with enough water to fill Shamu’s tank beneath him. The water instantly flooded Acacia Park and the surrounding streets, washing small children away from Uncle Wilbur Fountain and creating serious traffic headaches.

  Vince was unaware of most of this, however, because the boat had overturned in the deluge and dislodged his battery, leaving him facedown and dead in a pond that had previously been a parking lot.

  An elderly man who had been wandering around the downtown area for over a day witnessed the occurrence.

  He recognized the dead kid right away, even facedown.

  While others around him struggled to comprehend, recover from, or flee the flash flood, the eighty-year-old man sloshed through the water, found the backpack, and knew what to do. He’d done it several times…but wasn’t that many years ago? He couldn’t be sure. He took the two wires extending from the backpack and connected them to the EKG electrodes behind the dead kid’s ears.

  The kid immediately opened his eyes.

  “Where have you been, Vince?” the old man asked cheerfully. “Someplace wet, it looks like.”

  Vince stared at him. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “It’s me,” the old man said with a wide grin. “Nick.”

  A horrified look came over Vince’s face. “Nick? How long have I been dead?”

  Right around the time Acacia Park was flooding, Nick returned to his ruined home. The Accelerati found him sitting on the couch in the timber-strewn mess that had once been his living room, reading a paperback of The Lightning Thief. The irony was lost on the Accelerati. They aimed their weapons, and called for the Grand Acceleratus.

  Ms. Planck, looking very un-lunch-lady-like in her vanilla skirt suit, arrived several minutes later. By her side was Petula, her pigtailed Mini-Me.

  “Explain yourself,” Planck said.

  “I don’t need to explain myself to anyone but Edison,” Nick told her.

  Around them, the Accelerati cringed. No one talked to the Grand Acceleratus with such disrespect.

  Nick waited to see what she would do, but he suspected she would have to swallow whatever he dished out. One perk of being Edison’s pet was that Nick did not have to grovel before her.

  “Where’s the prism?” Her voice simmered with a pre-volcanic fury that Nick found very satisfying.

  “All that time serving up lunch and advice, and you were just a spy,” Nick said. “And to think I actually liked you.”

  “The prism,” she said again.

  Nick sighed and pulled it out from beneath him. “The things you find under old sofa cushions.”

  She tried to grab it, but he held it out of her reach and stood up.

  “Get the jet ready to take me back to New Jersey,” he told Ms. Planck, making it sound as much like a demand as he could. “I’ll give it to Edison myself.”

  Ms. Planck nodded to her minions, and they left to make preparations. Nick looked to Petula, who appeared like one of those rubber toys you squeeze to make its eyes pop out. I can’t believe you spoke to her like that, those bulging eyes said.

  Ms. Planck took a step closer to Nick and spoke in a smooth, controlled voice, any lava forced way, way down beneath the surface. “You will not always be necessary,” she said, and it chilled him. Jorgenson was fond of threats, but this was not a threat. It was a mere statement of fact.

  Nick could only hope that Evangeline Planck became unnecessary before he did.

  Petula’s eyes were not, in fact, bulging in horror at Nick’s treatment of Ms. Planck. That was her look of intense concentration. She was studying Nick, because there was something about him that was just…wrong. She couldn’t place what it was. He sounded like Nick. He acted like Nick. He looked exactly the same as when he had vanished the day before…and yet…

  Petula knew she had a sensitivity to ripples in the cosmos that others lacked. When she had plucked the cosmic-string harp, it had awakened something in her that she could not explain to this day. You will compete the circuit was the message the universe had imparted to her in that profound moment of transcendent connection. And yet it had been Nick who had completed the circuit, making the machine work.

  Petula could only conclude that the universe was a liar, just like most people in it. But she still held out hope that a deeper meaning would reveal itself. Probably on her deathbed, because the universe was cruel that way.

  Be that as it may, a fine-tuning of her personal cosmic antennae was a lingering aftereffect of having plucked the harp. Perhaps Nick looked and sounded all right, but to Petula, he didn’t feel right. He was…diminished.

  That was the only way she could think to describe it. She told no one, because she knew not even Ms. Planck would take her seriously. Instead she kept the feeling to herself, resolving to figure out exactly what had happened to him.

  Mitch and Zak were the only ones whose efforts against the Accelerati bore fruit that day—although not at first.

  BeatNick was of no use to them at all. Upon their arrival at Colorado State University, he wandered off to talk with some college girls who looked like Caitlin, but ten years older.

  As for the school’s mainframe, it was formidable but nowhere near as powerful as the one in Princeton’s math department—yet that didn’t deter Zak. “It’s more about memory space than the speed of the processors,” he told Mitch as he got down to business.

  As Zak worked his digital magic, they heard the others in the computer lab start complaining about how slow their applications were running. Zak smiled. The users were falling victim to the random number algorithm, which he had set to take priority over everyone else’s work.

  “Tell me I’m not a genius,” he said, gloating. “I dare you.”

  Yet, after three hours of circuit-searing computation, he still couldn’t catch up with the money—he was always just behind the account number. “Nine-point-three seconds!” Zak lamented. “I can only find the account where the money was sitting nine-point-three seconds ago, and that’s the closest I can get!”

  “Bummer,” said Mitch.

  “It’s like mass approaching the speed of light….” Zak flexed his fingers above his keyboard and focused on the screen. “Like the closer we get, the more difficult it becomes, until it’s just impossible to reach.”

  In spite of Zak’s genius, it was Mitch who solved the problem. “Instead of trying to catch up with the money,” he suggested, “why don’t we just jump past it? Then we can be there waiting for it.”

  Zak just glared at him. “Great idea, Einstein. And how are we supposed to do that?”

  But before Mitch could answer, his phone rang.

  “Yeah?” said Mitch, taking the call. “Okay, I’m listening.” He grabbed a pen from the table and scribbled a number on his palm. “Got it. Thanks.” He hung up then showed his palm to Zak. “Try this number.”

  “Who was on the phone?” Zak asked.

  Mitch just held his palm closer to Zak’s face. “I said, try this number.”

  With no better ideas, Zak humored him. He had already hacked into th
e World Bank, so entering the digital account number was simple. He hit return and, in a fraction of a microsecond, everything changed.

  When a slot machine hits the big bucks in Vegas, there are enough bells, whistles, and flashing lights to induce a seizure. Security is called in, the machine is temporarily shut down, and the Jumbotron in front of the casino projects a smiling middle-aged face, proclaiming BERTHA JOHNSON JUST WON $500,000—YOU COULD BE NEXT!

  But in the world of digital banking, money moves with deathly silence and lightning speed.

  To Zak’s utter amazement, the account he had just accessed began to fill with virtual money that seemed to spill from the heavens. Or, more accurately, the Cloud. Approximately $750 million worth.

  Zak stared at it, bewildered.

  “Quick!” said Mitch. “Pull it out before it moves again! You’ve only got twenty seconds!”

  Snapping out of his stupor, Zak opened the “trapdoor” account he had created and dumped the entire fortune into it—all except a single penny. When the twenty seconds were up, the Accelerati algorithm kicked in again to send that penny ricocheting away.

  The rest of the money was now theirs, hiding in an account no one else could access. And there it would stay. They had stolen the Accelerati’s stolen fortune.

  Nine-point-three seconds later, Zak’s algorithm spit out the number that Mitch had written on his hand. Then the screen froze, the server crashed, and around the computer room there was much weeping and gnashing of teeth.

  Mitch grinned proudly, and Zak stared at him as if witnessing the Second Coming.

  “Who was on the phone?” Zak asked again, almost afraid of the answer.

  “Me,” Mitch told him happily. “One hour in the future.”

  Unlike Zak, Mitch was not bound by linear logic. The moment he thought about jumping ahead of the money, he also thought, Wouldn’t it be funny if I called myself on the Teslaphone to give us the number? No sooner had he thought that than the phone rang, so he wasn’t surprised at all to hear his own voice on the other end giving him the number. All that remained now was getting back to Vince’s house so he could place the call to himself in an hour.

  “Tell me I’m not a genius,” Mitch said. “I dare you.”

  But Zak was still too stunned to comment.

  Vince was not expecting to find squatters in his house. In fact, he’d thought he would have to break in, because he didn’t have a key on him. Instead, no sooner had he and his elderly companion reached the welcome mat than the door opened, and he was faced with a man with a dark trim beard.

  “Vince!” said the man with a surprised smile. Then, seeing the much older man, he added, “And you found Old St. Nick!”

  “Old St. Nick!” said elder Nick. “I like it!”

  Inside were several other people, many of whom appeared to belong to the same gene pool.

  “Look,” said a middle-aged man, “Vince has the globe!”

  It required a lot to put Vince off his game. He took his own death and reanimation in stride; he’d even kept his cool while being held hostage in Scotland. But being accosted by a whole bunch of strangers who apparently knew him just tweaked him the wrong way.

  “Who are you people and why are you in my house?”

  A smiling kid whose front teeth hadn’t entirely come in looked up at him and said, “We’re Nick!”

  “Oh,” said Old St. Nick, getting it before Vince did. “So that’s what the prism did.”

  “Yeah,” said a twenty-something Nick dude with a goatee. “Welcome to the family, old man.”

  This was one curve that Vince didn’t mind being behind. The moment was already spiking way too high on the TMI scale.

  Vince scanned the room and saw that the only Nick who wasn’t present was the fourteen-year-old one he knew. Mitch was there too, having just hung up a funny-looking old telephone; as well as a kid Vince didn’t recognize.

  “Are you gonna tell me you’re Black Nick?” Vince asked, only half kidding.

  “Nope, I’m Zak,” the teen said, shaking his hand. “You look pretty good for an undead guy.”

  “Right,” Vince said. “And now this undead guy is gonna go downstairs and listen to some Death Metal until I find my Happy Place.”

  Caitlin arrived about an hour later, and went down to the basement to talk to Vince. It had only been a couple of weeks since he’d last seen her, but it seemed like a whole lot longer. So much had changed.

  “How was Scotland?” she asked.

  “A weebee cloister-feebee,” he told her, happy to leave her baffled by his response. “The globe is a teleportation device,” he went on. “I should call my mother and tell her to cash in my return ticket—although she’s probably still dragging the lake for my body,” Vince said with a smirk of many mixed emotions. “This may finally break her of her cheeriness.”

  “You can call her yesterday, and cut her worrying short,” Caitlin told him, and she seemed happy to leave him baffled in return. “All the objects from Nick’s attic have been found,” she continued. “The globe was the only one still missing, which means the Accelerati have everything except that…and your battery.”

  Vince swallowed a little bit nervously. “I intend to keep it that way.”

  Caitlin offered him a slim smile. “So do I,” she told him. “Because yours isn’t the only life that depends on it.”

  She explained to him that Nick had become divided, and how the one-seventh of him that they knew had returned to the Accelerati. “I really don’t know what he’s thinking anymore…he just doesn’t seem…right.”

  “Well,” Vince said wryly, “he’s not entirely himself.”

  Caitlin wasn’t amused. She called the others downstairs, and they crowded into Vince’s basement bedroom, which, mercifully, his mother had tidied before they left for Scotland.

  Vince found the kaleidoscope of Nicks hard not to stare at. He wondered what the Seven Ages of Vince would be like, and decided that he was lucky he didn’t have to find out. Mitch seemed pretty chummy with that Zak kid—which emphasized how alone Caitlin seemed to be—and not just because she was the only girl present. Vince knew all about being solitary, but it must have been a new experience for Caitlin.

  “I found out what the Accelerati are planning,” Caitlin told them. “They’re rebuilding Wardenclyffe Tower.”

  The Nicks gasped in unison, then responded at random.

  “As a base for the F.R.E.E.!”

  “It’ll be a hundred times stronger than the original.”

  “A thousand times!”

  “Whoa!”

  “It’s all our fault! We never should have had that garage sale!”

  On that, all the Nicks could agree. Even the baby, who gave what appeared to be a very serious burp.

  “So are we going there?” asked Mitch, “Because if I miss another final, I’m screwed.”

  “Dude,” said Vince, “you gotta consider the big picture.”

  Mitch sighed. “I know, I know, but sometimes the little picture is all in your face, y’know?”

  “We have to be there,” Caitlin told the Nicks. “Because if you’re ever going to get put back together, that’s where it’ll have to happen—that’s where the prism will be.”

  “So what’s the plan?” Zak asked. “I mean, we’ve got the money—and I don’t think the Accelerati have figured out they’re broke yet. That gives us an advantage, right?”

  Vince tried to wrap his mind around the $750 million. Then he realized you don’t wrap your mind around it, you just dive into it and wallow.

  “Yeah,” said BeatNick. “We can use that money to take them down!”

  Nickelback folded his arms. “And how are we supposed to do that?”

  BeatNick shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe buy a mercenary army?”

  Nickelback gave a bitter laugh. “Face it. You have no idea how to launch a large-scale offensive against the Accelerati.”

  “Oh, and you do?”

  Nickelb
ack sat up a little straighter. “I have more life experience.”

  Nicholas laughed at that, shifting the baby to his other shoulder. “No, you don’t. None of us do. Our last memory was being split by the prism—then it’s like we slept for twenty, or forty, or seventy years. None of us knows any more than we did at fourteen.”

  “Well, I know something,” said Little Nicky. “I know that you all just talk, talk, talk and never get anything done.”

  That left all the other Nicks silent and chastised, because he was absolutely right.

  “We do have an advantage,” Vince pointed out. “You can be seven times more effective than just one Nick.”

  “Or cause seven times more problems,” Zak grumbled.

  “No,” Caitlin said. “They’re all Nick.” Then she turned to the various ages of Nick Slate and said, “You’ll get the job done. I have faith in you.”

  “Even me?” said Little Nicky.

  She smiled at him. “Yes. Even you.”

  “Well, this is all wonderful and heartwarming and stuff,” said Zak, “but my mom’s life hangs in the balance, so do we have a plan or not? Because with or without a mercenary army, we might be leaving a whole lot of people a whole lot less alive.” He turned to Vince. “No offense.”

  “None taken.”

  Caitlin took a deep breath. “I do have a plan,” she said. And they all turned to her, eagerly awaiting her brilliant strategy.

  Caitlin had been dreading this moment. Planning was not her strength. Her life strategies were like her artwork: she would smash something that was no longer useful, consider the pieces, and then rearrange them into a masterful pattern that she couldn’t see before she’d done the smashing.

  But then, isn’t that what was required now? Everything—including Nick—had fallen apart. What she needed to do was move the pieces around and make something glorious out of them. She’d always been a little envious of the way Nick could see the pattern of the machine and put it together—but she didn’t have to be envious, because she did the exact same thing, just in a different way. Perhaps that’s what made them work so well together.