Before We Die Alone

by Ike Hamill

  “Sixty-nine,” the first guy says.

  Next, the problem should spread to…

  “Imbalance on number six,” the serious guy says.

  Yup.

  The bear leans back against a desk. He looks smug. He should look worried.

  “Seventy.”

  “Imbalance failure on ten and eleven,” the second guy says. “Should we ramp down to prevent damage?”

  The bear holds up his paw. The glass door slides open and Janice rushes through. She jogs up to the bear’s side and puts an arm on his elbow.

  “How is it coming?” she asks the bear. He turns and whispers something to her. She nods. I can’t help but imagine her wearing a hood and baggy clothes. Was she recently holding a blade to my brother’s neck?

  The young man is so excited that his voice can barely squeak out a sound. “Seventy-two percent,” he says.

  A little cheer rises from the other workstations.

  I focus on the guy who has been reporting the imbalances. He sits up straight before he makes his announcement. “We have stability back on ten and eleven. Six is back online.” He holds up a hand. “Three is stable.”

  What?

  I whip around as the black bear starts to speak.

  “The last time we tried to bring the system online, we didn’t have enough of a delta between the predicted generation and the actual results.”

  I understand theoretically what he’s talking about. There’s a hump the machine has to summit before it can really kick in. It’s like trying to roll-start a car with a manual transmission. If there’s not enough of a hill to coast down, the engine will never turn over when the clutch is popped.

  “We needed a secret ingredient,” the bear says.

  Janice puts her arm around the bear’s waist. They don’t look broken up. Maybe they reunited. “We needed sabotage,” she says.

  “High stress sabotage,” he says.

  They’ve lost me. Parts of the machine make sense, but I’ll never understand the weird theory behind why it works. The idea of a potential energy between actual and predicted results is nonsense.

  “It should have destroyed itself,” I whisper. They knew what I was going to do. They were counting on it.

  “Eighty percent,” the young man says. I can hear the smile in his voice. Excitement bubbles in little murmurs of congratulations passed between the workers. They’re all thrilled at having doomed the planet to destruction.

  “You’ll kill us all,” I say.

  “You’re fired,” Janice says.

  Chapter Thirty

  * Desert *

  ON THE ELEVATOR, ONE of the men puts a hood over my head.

  “Is that really necessary? I was brought here without a hood. If I was going to learn anything about the location, I would already know it.”

  My hands are bound with a rubber strap. If I worked at it, I’m sure I could get it off, but there are three guards around me.

  When the elevator doors open, I’m guided forward. We take a left.

  I can hear our footsteps echo in the shiny lobby. Somewhere below us, the machine is generating enough power for the whole country. When they cycle up the rest of the units, it will be able to power a good chunk of Asia. I can’t even fathom the amount of infrastructure required to distribute this power. They’re going to have to run enormous cables under the ocean, I suppose.

  It seems impossible. Then again, with limitless free power, a lot of things are now possible.

  We go through two sets of doors and the heat hits me. It’s like a furnace outside. The air is so hot that it’s difficult to breathe.

  I’m pushed forward.

  I hear the car running as we approach, and then I hear the door open. From a million shows on TV, I know the drill. When the hand presses down on my head, I duck to get in the car. I’m pushed across the back seat and someone slides in next to me.

  The car starts moving.

  I don’t know how far we go. The trip is long enough that my hands start to go numb behind me. I squirm in my seat and try to work them loose from the rubber cuff. The more I pull, the tighter it gets. Fortunately, even with the air conditioner on, it’s hot enough in the car for me to start sweating. The sweat lubricates my wrists. I slip one hand free and try to disguise the movement as just a shift in my position. I need a plan.

  I could jerk the door open and dive out.

  I could try to overpower the guard next to me and maybe steal whatever weapon he has.

  The car grinds to a stop. Doors open. The shoulder next to me disappears. Doors close.

  “You can’t just leave me here,” a voice says.

  I untangle my arm from the seatbelt and pull off my hood. Through the windshield, I see a Jeep pulling away. Closer than that, in the front seat, is a person who is still wearing a hood.

  Of course—that voice. It has been a long time, but it’s still fundamentally the same.

  My door handle does nothing. My window switch doesn’t work.

  “Who’s there?” my brother asks. The hood turns.

  “Unlock the door,” I say.

  “I can’t. Who is that?”

  “It’s me,” I say.

  “Who?” he asks. I can hear the recognition though. He is piecing it together. “I can’t unlock the door. My hands are tied.”

  “So get out of it,” I say.

  He grunts and twists as he struggles.

  “Damn it,” I say. “We’re going to be lost out here in the middle of nowhere if we let them get out of sight.”

  I begin to crawl over the back of the seat. This must be a very old car. The front has a bench seat and there’s not much room for me to fit. My head hits the metal ring concentric to the steering wheel and the horn honks.

  “What are you doing?” my brother asks.

  “I’m trying to…”

  I grunt as I try to roll in the seat.

  “At least they left us the keys,” I say. I sigh as I get my legs into place. This feels natural.

  “Untie me,” my brother says.

  “Which would you rather have?” I ask as I put the car into gear. “Free hands or a clue about how to get un-lost from this desert?”

  He doesn’t answer. He simply resumes struggling.

  ---- * ----

  I haven’t admitted that we’re lost by the time my brother gets his hands free. His wrist is bleeding. I guess his bonds were tighter. He pulls the hood from his head and looks at me. Our eyes meet for the first time in maybe twenty-five years.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” he asks.

  “I don’t know where they went,” I say. “I haven’t seen any intersections or tracks leading into the desert. I’ve been driving at maximum speed. Where did they go?”

  He leans over and consults the gauges.

  “Slow down,” he says.

  “You don’t want to catch them?”

  “You want to go back to that place? If you stop driving like an idiot, we’ll have enough gas to get to the next town.”

  The problem with my brother is that he always takes assumptions and stretches them into facts. It’s a dangerous habit.

  “This is Australia. It could be a hundred miles to the next gas station. Those people could be our only hope for survival,” I say.

  “This is a 1970 Pontiac LeMans. It has a seventy-five liter fuel tank. At the speed you’re going, it will take maybe 25 liters per hundred kays. If you slow down a bit, it will only take 20 liters per hundred.”

  My foot eases off the accelerator as I think about what he just said. The “per” sounded like “pur.” The “bit” sounded “bet.” He has a little Australian twang to his voice.

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Focus on what’s important,” he says. “You’re going west. We should probably be going east.”

  “But the guys who left us here went west. Don’t you think that means something?”

  “Have you seen them lately.”

 
“No, I just said that. I haven’t seen them since they disappeared over the horizon.”

  “Then how do you know where they went? Maybe they wanted you to think west was the right direction,” he says.

  “Why would they?”

  “Why not? Turn around.”

  With old bias, it’s tough to choose logic over instinct. He seems like he has the advantage of local knowledge, but I can’t imagine he knows as much about our situation as I do. He was a hostage, a pawn, in a situation where I was a player. And maybe he’s still battling me for supremacy. Maybe he’s still trying to get the upper hand in our fraternal struggle.

  “Turn around or let me out,” he says. “I would rather walk the right way than keep driving the wrong way.”

  I glance up at the sun. I don’t know why he thinks he knows which way is west. It has to be about noon and the sun is overhead.

  “What makes you think we’re headed west?”

  “I have eyes,” he says. He has hands, too. He reaches up and stops the swaying compass that hangs from the rearview mirror. It’s a black ball suspended in clear plastic. When he stops the sway, I see that he’s right—we’re headed west.

  I feel foolish that I didn’t see it there. I’m tired of feeling foolish.

  I apply the brakes and slow to a stop. The Pontiac has a wide radius and I have to reverse to get it all the way around. On the final turn, one wheel drops off the pavement to the soft shoulder.

  “Careful!” he says.

  “Relax,” I say. I keep the gas even and the tire grips its way back up on to the road. I feel vindicated. At least I did that right.

  A plume of steam erupts from under the hood. The engine sputters and then makes a horrific screeching noise as it grinds to a halt.

  “Great,” he says.

  ---- * ----

  We walk until the sun is squarely at our backs. We walk with light cotton shirts tied around our heads so that we have a little shade for the back of our necks. I’m taking my cues from my brother. He’s the one who found the bottled water and the shirts in the trunk. He’s the one who declared the Pontiac dead.

  “Probably over-revved,” he said before slamming the hood down and giving up on the vehicle. I suspect that was a dig at my driving.

  The road is straight. Heat makes the horizon hot liquid. I can’t help thinking that we’ll have to walk all day just to get back to the place where we were abandoned.

  “How long have you lived in Australia?” I ask. I immediately regret the question. If I had asked in a different way—one that didn’t presuppose any assumptions—he might have opened up. Instead, my question closes him off even more.

  “Save your strength,” he says. “Talking takes energy.”

  Side by side, you might guess that I’m in better shape than him. As we walk, he proves the opposite. His body is erect and efficient. His pace never flags. I can hear my feet scuffing as I get lazy with my stride. My shoulders ache. I want nothing more than to dig a hole down to where the sand is cool and bury myself.

  “I’m going to leave you if you don’t keep up,” he says. I hadn’t even realized that he was so far ahead. I don’t relent. I keep plodding along until I catch up. He starts pulling away from me as soon as he starts walking again.

  “I saved your life, you know,” I say. This is a dirty lie, and I know it. I typed in the wrong code on purpose, his life be damned. I suppose they were never going to chop his head off, but he wouldn’t know that. Just like he wouldn’t know that I tried to trade his life for the safety of the universe.

  I nearly run into him.

  He’s standing there, blocking my path.

  I straighten up and look him in the eye.

  “When? When did you save my life?”

  “Back there, in that place. They held a blade to your throat and demanded I put in the proper code. I could have let you die.”

  “I could see and hear you, you idiot,” he says. “You did let me die. I saw it on your face and heard you say it. You put in the wrong code on purpose, even though you thought they were going to kill me.”

  “It was for the safety of the world,” I say. “The whole universe.”

  He turns and walks away.

  ---- * ----

  By the time the sun goes down, I’ve already lost sight of my brother. My last water bottle is empty. My cracked lips are stuck together. The next time I open my mouth, the skin is going to open up. Dehydration is driving an icepick right between my eyes.

  I thought sunset would give me back a little vitality. I was wrong.

  After trudging along, head pointed straight down at my feet, I decide to take a break. I stay right on the edge of the road, even though the heat is still pulsing up from the pavement. If I should lose consciousness, I don’t want to be missed.

  I’m thinking about Adam. Maybe if I can relax, I’ll be able to summon one of those folds. The only ripples I see are off to the west, where the sky is still orange. The red dirt seems to glow. I can’t relax. I’ve heard too many things about the Australian outback.

  For clarity—nine of the top ten deadliest snakes live in Australia. If I remember correctly, the one with the worst venom is the Inland Taipan. It’s also known as the Fierce snake. One strike has enough venom to kill a hundred people. They’re not supposed to attack people unprovoked, but I’m not sure if that edict has reached this deep into the country. I hate snakes. I think it must be instinctual, because the mere notion of one makes me jump. Spiders are creepy, but snakes really freak me out.

  I imagine a snake army coming out from under rocks and out of stolen burrows to hunt now that the temperature is falling. I imagine their little temperature-sensitive pits detecting my heat-signature and snakes deciding if I’m worth investigating.

  My fear is stopping me from relaxing. If that’s the key to creating a fold, I’ll be stuck here forever.

  I can’t sit here. I can’t stop thinking about something creeping up behind me.

  I stand up and start to shuffle again. How much of fatigue is mental? I’ve wondered this before. I’ve definitely gone through periods when I thought my physical endurance was tapped, and then I discovered a reserve of energy that was available as soon as I stopped denying it. I believe that a lot of people stop because of their brain, not because of their muscles. I should be in decent shape. I lived in the woods for weeks, and then spent quite a while on a treadmill. In those circumstances, my brain was preoccupied. Maybe that’s the secret for me. Maybe I have to forget about my body and it will just perform.

  There was a bear who was dressed up like a homeless guy. He said that all possible futures exist in the fifth dimension, or something like that. To jump between possible branches, one has to fold the sixth into the fifth. It’s crazy talk, but there has to be some amount of physics involved in this crazy travel.

  If we’re contemplating all the possible timelines from the Big Bang, we would have to have six dimensions. Assuming the fourth dimension is time, the fifth dimension would contain all the branches of our current timeline. If I chose to have eggs versus pancakes, that would represent a fifth-dimensional shift.

  The sixth dimension would contain all possible worlds emerging from our initial Big Bang.

  The seventh would be all possible Big Bangs including our own.

  It’s more than just dehydration. Trying to contain these concepts is stretching my brain in strange ways.

  Assuming the bears have some way to fold the sixth dimension and move linearly along the fifth, they would be able to facilitate any outcome they desired. Beyond traveling from one location to another, they could travel from one time to another. They could jump to what lunch would be like had they chosen the eggs. Then why would they need to predict or simulate anything?

  If they want to know what happens when they let an asteroid hit Earth, they could simply fold the sixth dimension and take a peek at that future.

  I’m getting nowhere with this experiment in logic, but at least I’m not shu
ffling my feet anymore. With my brain occupied, my legs are working much better.

  Now that the sun is down, the sky is lighting up with stars and planets. It’s a big sky out here. The eastern horizon is so dark that it almost reminds me of the view from the moon. I had never seen anything so black as that. I wonder if there’s a perspective that’s so illuminating that it could break your brain. Didn’t I read that in a book somewhere?

  On the moon, the stars didn’t twinkle. I wonder if the Apollo astronauts were forever changed once they knew that. I wonder if my brain broke at some point, and all this is a delusion. That would certainly make more sense than what has been happening.

  ---- * ----

  When the moon comes up, I can’t take my eyes off of it.

  Bears and birds up there, folded in through the sixth dimension. Absurd.

  Are you still sane? That’s what the bear asked me before he let me climb the ladder. Had I said no, I would have been covered over with moon dust. But shouldn’t I have been able to just leap from the pit? The moon’s gravity is only one-sixth of Earth’s. I should have been able to simply jump out of the pit. Only I don’t remember gravity being different at all there.

  I wonder where my brother went.

  Is he still ahead of me on this same road, walking as doggedly as I am?

  What kind of road is this, anyway? It’s paved, and I’ve walked it for twelve hours, but I haven’t seen a single living soul. Why would they bother to pave and maintain a road that nobody uses?

  My brain keeps returning to the same questions, over and over. To keep walking, I must keep my brain occupied, but it’s getting more difficult with each step.

  When was the last time I had a haircut or shaved? When was my last decent night’s sleep, uninterrupted by predators or imprisonment?

  Where’s my brother?

  A new star is coming up on the horizon. It’s so bright—it must be a planet, and not a star.