by Aaron Frale
“Why?”
“I want to pass down the last family secret.”
“There is a Tuner. At first, I thought she was there to power your machine. But now, with your return, I see she was given to us to take her as my bride. What she lacks in physical strength, she makes up in spirit. Her bones cannot function on this world. Will that suffice?” the High Priest said.
“All that matters is that we keep certain genetic markers—” He was about to go off on a lengthy technical explanation and felt the emotion bubbled up again. He squeezed the shoulder of the High Priest. “You are truly one of my own. Now leave me. You have a wedding to plan, and I have a gift to prepare. Let no one disturb me until I am ready to emerge.”
“Yes, milord.” The High Priest bowed and left.
Dr. Ray couldn’t contain his excitement. He turned to the nearest board and erased the work of one of the priests. The clarity in his mind seemed to fade as symbols and numbers marched into his head. Soon, his thoughts were invaded by complex equations. The math flowed through his soul to the smartpen filling the screen with pure thought. He directed the flow to the deep recesses of his mind, where the security formulas were locked away. For the first time in years, he did not think about Dr. Ben.
8
Jon pushed past the clerk in U-132. The last twenty four hours were the hardest in his life. Something had happened to Hailey, and he had to wait before he could act. Unlike his father, mom, and even Hector, he at least could do something about it.
He pushed his way into the fitting room and pounded on the door of the one with the back entrance to HQ. The occupant ran out in terror. The mall security would be there any moment, but he didn’t care. He’d be gone soon enough. He pulled out his TF3 and queued up A Tout Le Monde by Megadeth.
Meathook burst into the room seconds later. He heard Jon’s choice of music coming from the headphones and said, “That’s a good song, but I can’t let you do this.”
Meathook yanked Jon’s headphones, and the song shorted out.
“Give that back!” Jon roared, charged, and caught his friend off guard. They both crashed to the ground.
Meathook clenched his fist while Jon futilely attempted to pry them out. There was no contest. Jon couldn’t even move a finger on his friend’s hand.
“Give it back!” Jon cried out again.
“Not till the window of time has passed,” Meathook said.
“But we need to save Hailey,” Jon said.
“Bro,” Meathook said. “We don’t even know if there is atmosphere. The window isn’t open long enough. You wouldn’t have time to test it and come back.”
“I don’t care,” Jon said. “We have to try something.”
“We are,” Meathook said. “If you had bothered to hang out with the rest of the group instead of sulking. You’d know that we are going to Universe One today. There has to be something there that can help us.”
“We don’t know that.”
“Do you have a better idea?”
Jon let go. The window of opportunity was gone. He sat up. He could feel the tears coming.
Meathook gave back the headphones and said, “It’s okay, bro. Let it out.”
“They are all gone. Anyone who I ever cared about. They are gone,” Jon said and broke down.
After a moment Meathook said, “You have me, bro. I mean you won’t make out with me like you do Hailey, but it’s okay, my feelings aren’t hurt.”
Jon laughed, “Yeah…”
“Dude, bro. We are thick in the suck, but all we can do is try to do the best we can with what we have. We will attempt to rescue Hailey, but we need to play it smart. Right now, Universe One is the best chance we have. Dude, if your Dad, Hector, and your mom were the blue dudes at the end of Return of the Jedi, I’d think they’d agree with me.”
“I should have never shown you those movies,” Jon said.
“There you go, that’s the spirit. Let’s get our Tuner repartee on, and go take care of some cultists,” Meathook said and stood up. He extended his hand to Jon.
Jon took it. They heard the clerk telling the police about the disturbance in the fitting rooms and knew it was their time to exit.
∆∆∆
Jon was ambivalent to the fact that they were tuning to Universe One despite Meathook’s pep talk. However, he didn’t have a choice. He didn’t see how the trip would help.
Hailey was their one shot, and it had failed.
Jon had hated himself even more to think that. He regretted that he hadn’t been firmer and ignored the vote and gone to HQ himself. He had lost too many people, and Hailey was the one good thing in his life.
The only reason he didn’t give up and go home to throw himself off the Rimrocks after U-132 was that he wanted to do that to the guy who started the mess in the first place. He didn’t care if the guy was a crazy old man. He wanted to end him, the cult, and everything that had to do with this horrible mess. Now the Tuners were doing what they did best: poking around rather than taking action. Perhaps they’d find something that would help, but Jon doubted it.
They all stood in the cave where Patel had flung herself over the boiling lake. The grappling hook Alex had used to prevent themselves from falling when they had tuned back was still wrapped around a rock. They picked it up and said, “We’ll probably need this.”
Patel told them what to do and went first. She sprinted towards the edge, jumped, and tuned at the highest point of her leap then disappeared. Meathook shrugged and went next. Jon followed and vanished over the abyss.
He appeared in a dorm room and stepped out of the way as DeAndre materialized next. Patel motioned them to the door. Once the group was through, they all walked down the stairs.
Alex said, “As far as Mom could tell, the way is only open for an hour or so each day, so if we want to go back, we should set a timer.”
“Fascinating,” Patel said. “Your mom was telling me earlier that it was only opened for about forty-five minutes back when she first discovered it. Dr. Ray wasn’t kidding. That means at the rate of decay, the barrier should last—”
“We’ll all be dead by then, so what does it matter?” Jon asked and pushed ahead of everyone.
“What’s with him?” Patel said.
DeAndre shrugged, “Who do you think?”
“God,” Patel said. “I hope you weren’t like that when you thought I was dead.”
“Naw, babe,” DeAndre said. “You know I love you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Patel said.
“I think he is deflecting the question,” Anya said.
“You’re not helping,” DeAndre said.
Jon pushed the door to the stairs open and trotted down. When they got to the courtyard, he mumbled something about exploring in a different direction and broke away from the group. They all continued toward the physics building, and Jon walked along the wall. Patel and the others were convinced that they would find something in Dr. Ray’s lab or by looking over his work. Alex was quick to remind them that everything here was theirs after it was all over, and Anya wanted to inspect on how Dr. Ray siphoned off power from the fusion reactor in the basement in case she could find anything to help her home.
Jon didn’t really know what he was looking for and should have paid attention to his instinct and stayed back at the warehouse in Chicago. Either way, he wasn’t in the mood for banter at the moment, and whenever the Tuners did anything, they couldn’t do it without banter.
He walked for a while until he got to another building. The main entrance was encased in blue, so he had to climb in through the window. It was the same mess he had seen on the rest of the campus. Objects were strewn about from the calamity. Plants encroached on the structure. The building was in a state of decay. From what the others could tell, the survivors must have gathered in the Physics Department because it was the only place that looked like it was well-tended and cleaned postcalamity.
He picked up a TF3 and dusted it off. He pressed the on button
, and it gave a low power symbol. It was crazy to think that the battery lasted so long. All it needed was a charge, and it would be ready for another Tuner to use it.
Unlike the technology on his world, Universe One was built to last. It was no wonder they were only on the 3rd generation of Tuning Fork, and 42 had who knows what version of iPhone. Jon had lost track after ten. Maybe if the people of his world focused on quality over making money, they would be the ones to have invented multiverse travel.
He tossed the TF3 aside and continued through the remnants of the illustrious Universe One. Jon was surprised that it wasn’t far off from his. There was evidence of more technical advantages as devices were everywhere, and he didn’t see much paper or books, but it was indistinguishable from a school from his world. He could have been fooled that he was at Montana State University.
Since the other universes were some iteration or another of what he had seen in other ones, he wondered how much of it was simply baked into human DNA. Did the structures and systems people make come from ideas that originated in their heads? Or was it because they had no choice because it was always determined in the very core of their person? Maybe if there were alternate Jons, they would always end up alone. From his mother to Hailey, no one was permanent in his life.
He walked down the hallway of the building and peeked into the classrooms. There was nothing that seemed of any use. The next floor was teachers’ offices, and it was still just a graveyard of a dead society. It wasn’t until the fifth and final floor of the building that he found something of note.
It was in an auditorium that had a large skylight that let in natural light to the space, though it was dark because of the blue wall that cut through most of the seating area and part of the stage. There was an object on stage that looked a lot like the tuning platform they had used in HQ. He even recognized several of the control stations. They must have been ready to demo an upgraded version of the command module at Tuners HQ. Part of it was stuck in the blue sealing goo, but Jon didn’t see how that would be a problem.
He ran from the room to the only stairwell in the building that was accessible. He imagined they probably would be staying here past the hour mark.
9
Ludie knew they had been holding her for the last week or so. She was locked in a basement deep within the cultists’ castle. From what he had heard, they had allowed her to keep her power armor. The one he had made for her. He wanted to see her in it. Drink in her form. It was enough for him to leave 121B, where pleasures of the flesh were considered a human right, and his apartment on the top floor of the most powerful city in the world that had more delights than one could imagine in any wildest fantasy.
He had intended to stay there for the rest of his life. After the High Priest had outwitted him and spared his life despite the coup, Ludie knew when he was beaten. He would have lived a life of carnal pleasure, only working for his masters when they called, but then he heard about Hailey. She had returned home in the gift he had made for her.
It was too tantalizing to dismiss as circumstance. No matter how many women he encountered, none of them were her. At first, it was enough to have them dress like her, and then close lookalikes were preferred. However, none of them were Hailey. It was a hollow existence. He was able to ignore it when there was a chance at power and could occupy his time with ambition.
However, when it was clear that no amount of ambition could defeat the High Priest, he settled for a haze of instant gratification. Now, walking through the bowels of the cultists’ homeworld, he felt giddy and excited like when he had first decided to leave the Tuners behind and take control of his life.
When he had first approached the cultists, the High Priest had strung him up over a lake of lava in a throne room only to come back with still smoldering skin and accept, presumably after the Tuners had destroyed his machine. The rest he thought would be a footnote in his life story. Now, he realized the cult would be his life story. However, in an effort to take some control back, he decided there would be another chapter about Hailey.
His destiny wasn’t power, the pursuit of intellect, but rather love. There was no possible way she wouldn’t like him now. Jon needed the Tuners whereas Ludie could save her single-handedly. It was hard for him to see how it wouldn’t be possible for her to know him as more of a man than Jon ever was. She would love him back, or at least he would die trying. It was better than spending a life chasing a pale version of her.
He descended further into the tunnels. There was a festival going on, so his journey was easier than expected. As far as he knew, Hailey and he were the only ones who were allowed to wear augmentations for the gravity of this world. People who needed assistance were considered weak and thrown into a pit of lava. Even the wounded were sacrificed. If a person couldn’t fight, they were dead.
Despite the rules of the cult, the High Priest was a pragmatic man. He knew of Ludie’s value and had allowed him leeway no one else received. His status helped now because he was able to traverse the compound with minimal folks questioning his presence, and with the festivities, there were even fewer people to wonder where he was going.
Despite the ease of his descent, he still had to be on his guard. Even though he was an ally to the cause, there were still places off-limits to him. Hailey would most certainly be in one of those places. Because he had learned of her power armor, he knew there was really one place to secure her. There was a storage room with doors dense enough that augmented strength couldn’t breakthrough. They had built it to store whatever Ludie was going to find in the Tuners vault.
On his way, he passed the machine they used to punch their members through the membrane that surrounded each universe. Hailey’s sister was on another round at the device. The people who had the ability to tune but couldn’t handle the gravity were quietly used to power their primary form of transportation. A person could only last a few months on the machine before their brains would boil. Since people with the ability to tune were scarce, they would nurse them back to health and then put them on another shift on the machine. Her sister would be coming off her shift any day now.
Ludie felt that it was ironic that the only form of healthcare they had was for people too weak to even move in their gravity anyway. They probably wouldn’t have to spend all their time recruiting if they spent a fraction of the time mending their wounded. The few doctors they had were there to keep the machine going.
Ludie was glad when he would never have to walk past that thing again. He couldn’t help but think that it would have been him if Hector hadn’t gotten to him first. Even though he could picture himself strapped to the machine and tortured endlessly, he didn’t empathize with the people on it. They would have picked on him too if they were Tuners. People like Ludie had to make their own way. Nobody would look out for them except themselves.
When the storage room was past the next bend, he peeked around the corner and saw two guards posted outside. He was confident that he had come to the right place. He glanced back down the tunnel he had come and saw no one. He poked his head around the curve again and surveyed the scene.
The door was at the end of the tunnel, and two guards stood at attention. They were the elite who came from a universe very similar to Patel’s. It meant they were immune to most hand-to-hand weapons. However, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t succumb to electricity. Ludie took a deep breath. There would be no going back to the cult after this. He was prepared to be done with it, the Tuners, the Order of the Flame. It was all the same crap with a different name. Alphas, beating their chest, trying to figure out who was more prominent. Ludie was smarter, and while they killed each other off, he’d be with his real prize, one step ahead of whoever won the pissing contest.
He turned the corner, and one of the guards barked, “You cannot be here.”
When Ludie didn’t turn around, they both drew their swords. By the time he was close enough, he raised his arm and overloaded the circuits on his power suit. It acted as a F
araday cage for him but blew electricity in every direction. The two men shook from the blast and crumbled to the ground, a smoldering mess.
Ludie’s backup power supply kicked in. He made sure the blast wouldn’t affect any of his vital circuits, but his primary power was gone. There were a few days left in his suit. It was more than he needed, and Hailey was worth it. He went to the security on the door. It was a system he had installed, so tripping it was easy and didn’t take much time.
The door opened, and he saw Hailey. She was on a table wearing a crimson gown that looked like a wedding dress. He saw her armor off to the side.
After helping her into the suit, he asked her about the outfit. She told him about the High Priest's intention to marry her. He clenched his teeth. Now he knew that he was doing the right thing. On the way out the door, she picked up one of the weapons from the men on the floor. No sooner was she ready to go when two cultist soldiers rounded the corner with a priestess.
The men drew their weapons, and the priestess ran. Hailey told Ludie to go after the woman, and she approached the warriors. Ludie did as he was told and ran down the escaping cultist.
Right before he was on top of her, she whirled around and attempted to stab him with a blade that ejected from her arm. It bounced off his armor but that didn’t stop her. She hit his faceplate with another blow, and it cracked.
Ludie pulled out a scimitar he had trained in for hand-to-hand combat and battled the priestess. She was an excellent fighter, but he had gotten better himself. Even though he took longer to master physical skills, the cultists never forced him to be the medic and let him learn to fight. He fought harder than he had ever in his life. He finally had Hailey, and they were fighting for each other.
Finally, after many exchanges of blows, parries, and maneuvering, he bested her. He went back to Hailey and found her dispatching the last of the two warriors. She pulled a dagger from each of their bodies and put them on her belt. When she saw his bloodstained sword, she nodded and told him to lead the way.
