Cacophony

by Aaron Frale

  Even though Jon had given some reassurances and listened to her, he wasn’t sure if he’d have the strength to resist killing him when the time came even though he wanted to change. Jon didn’t wish for rage to guide his life anymore. Ludie had lost all of Jon’s respect when he erupted a volcano from under their feet. Hailey had still wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. She had insisted that they needed to hear him out. Maybe Ludie didn’t know he was activating the volcano. Perhaps the High Priest had lied.

  Jon had intended to do his best, but he knew there was a side of him that was boiling over, a side that was vying for control. It was a part of him that would crush the life from Ludie if he let it. Jon needed to be strong for Hailey. Jon repeated to himself that his intention was that he was going there to talk. He pulled his TF3 from his pocket and jacked into the intercom system Tuners HQ.

  “Hi, Ludie,” Jon said. “It’s me. Jon again. Look, man, we really need to talk.”

  He was interrupted by a loud crack. People around him glanced up at the ceiling. It began to shutter and pop. Frosted glass panes shattered but instead of raining shards on the people below, the debris floated upward. Soon, the entire ceiling was sucked in the mouth of a giant swirling purple vortex.

  A breach had appeared in this universe, and Jon didn’t waste a second more. He put his earbuds in and ran. He searched for the next one on the list, and 73a was closest.

  Jon honed in on the sound. It was right by the main sale display at the front of a Journeys. In this universe, they sold camping equipment.

  The vortex grew as it feasted and sucked in anything that wasn’t bolted down, including mall goers. People panicked and ran. There was a flood of customers and clerks coming from the store. He pushed past the bottleneck of traffic at the front. Not bothering to see if anyone was watching, he hit the tune button and appeared in a bathroom’s handicap stall in U-91.

  A man sitting on the toilet holding a magazine stared at Jon in disbelief. Jon didn’t notice any mobility devices and said, “You know, some people need these bathrooms. You got your choice of any stall.”

  Before the man could say anything, Jon left the toilet. He walked out into the daylight. He was in an outdoor mall this time. The moment he stepped into the sunshine, he knew something was wrong. People were pointing at a purple anomaly up in the sky.

  Jon listened for the next stop along the way and ran. He could tell that he was in a place that was an inverse of DeAndre’s universe, and he was able to move super-fast. The next waypoint was on the other side of the mall, and Jon didn’t think he would have made it without the burst of speed. The vortex was halfway through the mall by the time Jon got to 33c.

  A vortex was waiting for him there too.

  ∆∆∆

  After they had secured the rest of the survivors, DeAndre, Patel, and Hailey stood on the roof of Rimrock mall. They could see clear over to downtown and the oil refineries beyond that. The Rimrocks skirted the northern edge of town. They could see another formation on the east end. To the southwest, the Beartooth Mountains were a distant blue. The view was breathtaking. For a brief moment, they said nothing and enjoyed it.

  Azerius and Anya came by with a six-pack of an energy drink Meathook used to consume all the time. Despite how many warnings Patel had given him about it tearing up his stomach, he’d drink it anyway. Azerius passed them each a can. DeAndre took two.

  “For Meathook,” DeAndre said and poured the sixth one out on the roof then cracked open the other for himself. The others cheered him back, and they sipped their beverage. Patel crinkled her nose, and Anya spat it out. DeAndre laughed and said, “I don’t know how he could stand these things.”

  DeAndre chucked his.

  Azerius was the only one left. “What? It’s pretty good.”

  Patel pulled out Anya’s TF3 and flipped through the music. She pulled up a heavy metal playlist. She turned the speakers up and said, “This is what Meathook would have wanted.”

  The furious metal shredded through the air while they reflected on their day. The moment was short-lived when Anya saw it first. She pointed towards the sky. A giant purple vortex had opened up over downtown Billings.

  It sucked people and cars into it. The thing got bigger, taking whole buildings with it. The maw engulfed everything and was spreading through the city.

  “It’s a breach!” Patel yelled.

  “But how?” Hailey said.

  “Who cares how!” DeAndre said, “It’s here now. Let’s get downstairs.”

  “What about the others?”

  “Rashaun lives even further out than here. We’ll be dead before they will.”

  “He has to get to HQ,” Patel said. “Ludie must have gotten into the vault. There must be something that started a reaction.”

  “132 is too far away. We’d have to travel through five universes to get there,” Hailey said. “Jon will take down the barrier.”

  “Hopefully, or we are all screwed,” DeAndre said, and they ran for the stairs.

  ∆∆∆

  Jon ran through the mall sculpted from the living trees of U-132. Each universe he traveled through to get here had experienced a critical failure and were in various stages of being sucked into the void of the multiverse.

  The roof of 132’s mall was torn off. A vortex devoured the building like it had in other places. The flutter of leaves and branches spiraled their way into the mouth. It was beautiful, and Jon couldn’t blame the people’s inclination to gawk and stare.

  Jon, on the other hand, sprinted toward the department store. The screams of the people behind him told him what had happened to the gawkers. The vortex grew and stripped the artificial forest of everything that wasn’t deeply rooted. People, merchandise, store fixtures, and benches were sucked inside. People screamed and ran trying to get away from the anomaly. He saw people on his peripheral vision who were too slow and were lifted from the ground toward the sky.

  Jon burst into the clothing store. It was empty.

  The last clerk pushed past him to get out the door. A shrub that acted as a rack of clothes shuttered. The garments fluttered upwards, and the branches began to break. Jon charged towards the back while the store was torn to pieces around him.

  He felt the tug on his body right as he reached the fitting room. He leaped and grabbed hold of a thick tree branch that was grown out as a handhold. His feet rose in the air toward the vortex. With his free hand, he cupped the earbud in one ear and tilted his head so it wouldn’t get sucked out.

  He used his pocket to keep his TF3 in place so it wouldn’t come flying out. He fiddled with the tuning app. It was hard to hear with the wind that was being generated, and his hand was beginning to tire. He would let go any minute now and be flung into the inter-universe.

  He concentrated. He heard a sound. It was hard to tell if it was HQ. He didn’t have a choice because the force tugging him was too strong. He hit the tune button and fell to the floor of the storeroom. Considering Ludie hadn’t killed him the moment he landed, there was a good chance that the kid would talk. He stood up and straightened his clothes. He entertained the thought of getting a weapon but knew that Hailey had raised a good point about bringing a sword to a negotiation.

  If Ludie had been the cause of the breaches, then a weapon wasn’t a bad idea. In the end, Jon had to trust Hailey. He walked out of the storeroom, and an arrow flew past his nose. He glanced to the side and saw a man in his late sixties with a balding spot and wild hair down the hall notching another arrow.

  “I used to be better than that. I was a five-time archery champion in college,” the man said. “But it’s been many lifetimes since those days.”

  Another arrow flew toward Jon. It would have penetrated his skull if he hadn’t dodged it. Jon ran toward the guy, using a zigzag pattern to mess up the man’s shot. He dodged two more arrows and tackled his opponent just as the bow came up for another shot.

  They wrestled on the floor for a moment, and the man reached out for
the arrow that had clattered on the floor. Jon grabbed the man’s hand and overpowered the guy. While he pulled the arrow free, he nicked himself on the cheek. His face went numb and he could feel it droop. He felt the paralytic poison work its way to his hands next.

  Jon attempted to stand and slumped down, unable to move his body. The man stood over Jon and smiled. “My boy. I was never trying to kill you. If I had wanted to do that, I would have rigged an explosive on the door. It was easy enough to calculate where the deterioration in the barrier would most likely be. The calculations are never wrong. A point zero seven percent chance that you’d stop me. Even if you killed me, you’d have virtually no chance of shutting the machine down safely.”

  “What machine?” Jon asked. His speech wasn’t perfect with the droopy face, but he could still get his meaning across. By now he had gathered that this was the psychopath, Dr. Ray, which Patel had warned them about.

  “Dr. Ben’s final act. He thought he could hide it in the vault, but your friend Ludie found a way inside,” Dr. Ray said.

  “Where’s Ludie now?”

  “Buried in a volcano, I suppose,” Dr. Ray said. “I needed to distract the cult. It was a shame too. I would have liked to have played with your friend.”

  “You sick son of—”

  “You speak more truth than you know. Our impulses control us when we were meant to be in control of our impulses.”

  “You’re showing remarkable restraint on killing me,” Jon said sarcastically. He could feel his thumb again. The paralytic was already wearing off. If he could keep the guy talking long enough— “What do you want from me?”

  Dr. Ray smiled and said, “Everyone serves their purpose. We all die for the greater whole at some point. Some were teenagers like you who kept me going through eternity. Now, it’s your turn to be the last human in existence.”

  “The breaches? That was you, but why? You’ll destroy the planet. All the planets.”

  “The planet will be fine,” Dr. Ray said. “Like any storm, they crash on land and dissipate. The Earth being the land in this case, though not without stripping the surface of its topsoil and about thirty percent of the seawater. Even if everything but microbial life died, I’d give it 600 million years until something crawled out of the sea to evolve the equivalent of human intelligence.”

  “I don’t see what this has to do with me.”

  “Come, I’ll show you,” Dr. Ray said and dragged Jon through the corridors.

  Several passages and a service elevator later, they headed down to the bowels of HQ. If Jon remembered correctly, the controls to the barrier were close by. He had regained access to an entire arm, but only tested his abilities when the mad doctor wasn’t looking.

  They got off the lift and came to a thick door that looked as if a combination of drills and explosives punched through. There were two dead cultist guards at the door entrance. They continued further into the vault, and Jon saw that it was more a warehouse than a vault. It was tech the Tuners had confiscated from Universe One. Jon even noticed that there was another car like Alex’s, except this one was black.

  They made their way past the bodies of priests and warriors. Their throats were slit.

  “You killed them?” Jon asked.

  “Yes. It was easy when they revered me like a god. You were a little more of a challenge,” Dr. Ray said. “Your friend Ludie had a lab with plants from all over the multiverse. It was a shame he didn’t know how to use them. With the right combination of chemicals, anything is possible. A fast-acting paralytic. My body is failing. I knew I’d never be able to fight you.”

  They stopped in front of another door with a security lock. Dr. Ray punched in a code to access it. Jon made sure to memorize it as the sensation was returning elsewhere on his body.

  They entered the room with a blue sphere spinning at incredible speeds, and three concentric rings were almost a blur. Dr. Ray summoned a map on the wall. It looked a lot like the one Hector had shown Jon of the various known Earths from different universes. There was a purple dot on some of them, and it was engulfing the entire planet on others. A vortex was forming in every known world.

  “It’s a machine my colleague made, Dr. Ben,” Dr. Ray explained. “It can redirect the flow of the substance that binds the multiverse. The space between universes; not just an abyss but a boiling cauldron of raw creation, birthing and destroying universes all the time. The Flame was an adept analogy for what is beyond the hulls of this station. The membrane that kept our universe from melting back into the pot was weakened when enough of us traveled through it. When our universe was about to go critical, Dr. Ben tempered the event by borrowing a little bit from the barrier of every universe and used the energy from ours to disperse it over time in one universe, U-78f.”

  “Dude, you lost me,” Jon said.

  Irritated, Dr. Ray paced and gesticulated wildly. “But you have to understand. The calculations are never wrong. I figured out how to take away the membrane to every universe entirely. I am returning humanity to the melting pot of creation. Like any tidal wave, it will reach its limit, and the waterline will recede and the boundary between the coast and the sea will be restored, but I need you around afterward for one essential task.”

  “Still not following you,” Jon said. He could feel the sensations coming back. He was close. He eyed the weapon of a dead cultist.

  “Can’t you see? I need someone to shut it down when humanity is wiped from existence. If we leave this running, it will be like a wave pool. The tsunamis will come back. Life will never have a chance to rebound. The whole point is so that we can start again, and see if the next intelligence is worthy of a multiverse. You can’t have that if the system keeps resetting.”

  “Dumb question,” Jon said. “Can’t you do it? I mean, why not shut it down now and show me how. You can always destroy humanity later.”

  “You insolent fool,” Dr. Ray said. “I won’t be around to hit the off switch. I am dying. My system is catching up to all the aging I didn’t do, and it only accelerates the older I get. I have a few days at most until a major organ failure.”

  “So turn it off, or at least tell me how,” Jon said.

  “No,” Dr. Ray said. “That’s why you are here. I figure you’ll need a couple months to figure it out on your own; at least that is what I calculate. Either way, it will be enough time for the pesky humans who cling onto life like maggots feeding on a corpse. I need to make sure we are all gone.”

  “I got an even better plan.”

  “Oh?”

  “Dagger to the face!” Jon said with a line that would make Meathook proud and grabbed the dead cultist’s knife and threw it at Dr. Ray. It stuck in the man’s cheek. The man cried out in pain and pulled the knife out. Jon grabbed the terminal that controlled the machine and ran.

  The feeling hadn’t fully returned in his legs, and he stumbled through the warehouse. He heard Dr. Ray cry out in rage. Jon quickened his pace and tumbled to the floor. The terminal came loose from his grip and slid under one of the shelves. Jon didn’t have time to retrieve it. He picked himself up and ran.

  Jon made his way through the bowels to where he thought the barrier was located. He heard Dr. Ray’s voice echo down the passages after him. The doctor was barely cogent, crying out threats, babbling about equations, and spouting out obscenities.

  Jon pushed open the door and saw a terminal. He was in the right place. It was a lifetime ago when he had witnessed Ludie code TF3s into the system so they would be on the authorized tuning list.

  The terminal was a command prompt. He typed the words, “SHUT DOWN,” and nothing happened. He could hear the sound of Dr. Ray coming closer. He tried, “EXIT,” “TURN OFF,” “ABORT,” and every other idea that came to mind. Finally, he realized Ludie had brought down the barrier when the cultists had first invaded HQ. Jon typed, “HAILEY,” and the screen said, “EXECUTE? [Y/N].”

  Jon typed, “Y,” then hit ENTER, and the terminal began to cycle through a
program. The screen locked with a giant waving finger. Dr. Ray kicked open the door. He had a device that Jon had never seen before. It must have been from the vault. It was a long shaft with a trigger. Dr. Ray pointed it at Jon. There was a discharge, and his vision went dark.

  21

  Hailey and the others spread out throughout the mall, looking for the tuning point for HQ. The sweet smell of cinnamon rolls drifted to her nose. She thought of chili and couldn’t fathom that it was a food pairing. A static on her earbuds took her out of her head, and she narrowed in on the location. Once she found it, she copied the GPS coordinates on her phone and sent them to the group. Not wanting to wait for the others, she tuned out of 42 and landed on the familiar platform of HQ.

  The place was a mess. It looked as if a bomb had blown up the conference room. There were dead bodies of cultists strewn throughout the area that had been left to rot. It was a horror show, but she didn’t have time to think about it. She went for the nearest security terminal and punched up a few buttons. She scanned the station for life signs. There were two, and they were in the surgical center.

  Anya and Patel appeared next. Anya saw the mess of rotting corpses and ran to the edge of the platform and puked. DeAndre and Azerius tuned in next. Hailey let them know where the pair was located, and the group took off.

  They were surprised by what they saw in the surgical room. Jon was suspended on one of the levitation beds. Fluids were being pumped into his body. A weathered old man was shaving Jon’s hair, and there was a cart of tools next to the guy. He swabbed off the spot he intended to slice and went for a bone saw next.

  Patel gasped and said, “Dr. Ray!”