Cacophony Read online

  “That’s ludicrous! At least my plan only takes out two universes.”

  “How is that better? When our world is one of them. At least, in this case, our world survives and maybe we can do it right this time.”

  “Or blow out another third years down the road when we can’t control ourselves.”

  “Look, I don’t like it any more than you, but if there is any iteration of humanity that should survive, it has to be us. We invented the technology; we will learn from our mistakes and use it wisely.”

  “Killing countless trillions to survive doesn’t seem wise to me.”

  “It is a stopgap and nothing more.”

  “And the next time we need a stopgap?”

  “We can’t learn from our mistakes if we aren’t given a second chance.”

  “We had plenty of chances to change, Ray.”

  “So what? That’s it? You, Doctor Benjamin Weatherford-Rice, get to decide the fate of everyone on our world?”

  “I’m the only one who will do what needs to be done. Goodbye, Ray.”

  “You’re going to leave our technology scattered? If people with bad intentions get ahold of my machine—”

  Dr. Ben hit a button on his TF3, and Dr. Ray disappeared. He turned to the control panel and sealed the fate of U-78f with a single click. The multiverse was safe and no longer in his charge. It was time for some other universe to stumble up the technology mountain. Maybe they would have more wisdom than his world. He opened a drawer under the control panel. The orb at the center spun at increasingly faster speeds. There was a makeshift gun he had crafted from the various parts that weren’t banned from interdimensional travel. It was crude but would do the trick.

  He put the gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.

  2

  New Estonia in U-66 was located in the same spot on the map, where Chicago would have been in Jon’s homeworld. Even the concept of a map was boggling to a person who had grown up with borders clearly marked. New Estonia was the capital of the Baltic Confederation that would have taken up most of the Midwest United States and some of Ontario and Quebec in Canada. It would have been called the Great Lakes Empire if the great lakes weren’t named after Baltic bodies of water.

  Having grown up with Illinois so clearly labeled, it was strange to see other configurations and names for the place he was used to seeing. Jon realized just how arbitrary borders were. What defined a place just happened to be the people in power at the time. In the case of this world, North America was colonized by people from Eastern Europe, and the continent was carved up by the different economic powerhouses at the time.

  It was the same tide of history that just took different forms. It wasn’t only Europe that had spread its influence. In DeAndre’s homeworld, Africa had colonized most of North America and had even taken Europeans as slaves with them. It was a world that was familiar to Jon yet somehow foreign. In an effort to not make his head spin with every possible world out there, he decided to use his world as his reference point.

  As far as he was concerned, they were in a warehouse in Chicago with a makeshift headquarters that also acted as their living space. When they weren’t at the hospital waiting for news about Hector, they came to the warehouse. Now that he was dead, there was no reason to stay there. He wanted to take one last look at the city before tomorrow, when he would venture back into HQ. The rooftop was a place to think. Now it had become a place to mourn, and to prepare himself for the battle ahead.

  Jon planned to sneak in the back like they had before. He would then head straight for the barrier that prevented tuning and shut it down. The others would come in looking for a fight. They even had the suit Carrie had acquired in case the atmosphere was still powered down.

  He had everything ready to go. Hailey was the only reason he hesitated. While they had never formally broken up, she didn’t accept his calls, respond to his texts, or even once made an effort to talk to him. No one had seen her since she decided they were genocidal maniacs for pursuing the plan to blow up the cultist homeworld.

  Jon didn’t even need to run the calculations in his mind. The cultists killed, kidnapped, and tortured countless amounts of people. They had it coming for a while now. As unfortunate as it was to lose Hector, Jon knew the adults wouldn’t ever be able to make the decision. He would lose no sleep over what he was about to do.

  When they had first brought Hector to the hospital, Jon couldn’t sleep. Lack of sleep hadn’t helped his mood, and even though Meathook had scored this world’s equivalent of a PlayStation, he couldn’t play games and spent most of his time on the roof of the warehouse looking at the unfamiliar skyline. The Chicago of this universe had some similar buildings. The Sears Tower was silver and more massive. Lake Michigan had floating mansions for the elite. Where the aquarium should have been was a capital building that housed the powers of the country.

  He had visited Chicago a fair amount as a child. His dad had worked a lot down there. The drive on I-90 was probably the one he knew the best. He wondered if his dad ever got sick of the journey because tuning was a faster way to travel. Jon wondered if a person could tune into another universe and then back to his own at a different location. It was a question he would have to save for another time.

  When his butt became sore from sitting too long, he stood back up and turned to climb the service ladder and maybe feign interest in a racing game that DeAndre and Meathook had begun the task of one-upping each other in achievements. Before he could take two steps, he saw Hailey standing about five paces behind him.

  “Hailey,” Jon said. “I didn’t hear you climb up.”

  “If you did,” Hailey said, “I wouldn’t be a very effective Tuner.”

  “I don’t suppose you are here to kill me.”

  “You’d already be dead, and it’s not funny, Jon. You know why I’m here.”

  “I haven’t changed my mind.”

  “I get it. I really do. But can’t we try some alternative ideas first. Create a tuning barrier and lock them in their home universe.”

  “Even if we could find the parts to create another barrier, they’d find it and destroy it.”

  “Suppose we run it from HQ and beam it in their direction.”

  “How many years of research are we talking about? The cultists are a problem now.”

  “You don’t know if you don’t try, and have you truly thought through all the options? How about a strike at the machine that my sister was tied to?”

  “There it is. You just want to save your sister.”

  “She’s dead, Jon. That thing was sucking the life force out of her and everyone on it. They probably have a whole new batch of unfortunate would be Tuners hitched to it. We’d be doing them a favor if we destroyed it.”

  “Okay, so we take it out,” Jon said. “Then what? They build another. They still have acolytes young enough to tune.”

  “Then that buys us some time to figure out our next move. Maybe we’ll figure out how to project the barrier from HQ. In the meantime, we rebuild, watch for cultist activity, and get the Tuners back.”

  “No, it’s too risky. We are outnumbered on that world and no longer have the element of surprise. They know we know about the machine, and even if it is their only one, they will protect it with everything they got. The Death Star is the only way.”

  “Fine,” Hailey said. “But I’m going to open the gates of HQ.”

  “No,” Jon said and attempted to walk past her.

  She stepped in front of him and said, “What do you mean no? You are not Hector.”

  “I’ve been there before. I know what the cultists have done to the place, and I have a good idea what Ludie has been up to.”

  “I lived there a lot longer than you. I know every area of that station. I also don’t clomp around like an ogre. Not to mention the suit Carrie stole would fit me better anyway.”

  “I don’t clomp like an ogre,” Jon said.

  Meathook poked his head from the service ladder.


  “Yeah, you do,” he said and noticed Hailey. He climbed onto the roof. “You’re back! Come on down and let me show you the place. I also got a freezer full of Italian Ice. I don’t care what anyone else says. This place has the best Italian Ice.”

  Hailey ran to him, and Meathook gave her a giant bear hug that swept her off the floor. Once the greeting was over, they slipped in like old times as if they were just some friends who hadn’t seen each other in a while. Jon didn’t want to go back inside. He walked over to the edge of the building and took the fire escape down to the street level. A walk would clear his head. Too bad nothing of his childhood would be in this version of Chicago. There weren’t even street hotdog vendors. They were all pierogies and cabbage.

  3

  After Patel got over the shock of seeing another person, she hit the lock on the front door and stepped out into the hallway. She noticed that to the left, the hall was encased in hardened sealing goo. It resembled a wall of water frozen in time. There was a woman caught inside the solid blue block forever stuck mid-run with an expression of terror on her face. The hallway was also a mess. It looked like a horde of university students had torn through the place for summer break and left the area in shambles. Most of the objects were decayed from time. There was a tablet where the plastic was cracked with age. A sun-bleached TF3 with a pair of disintegrated headphones had been left to rot. A pencil had become brittle.

  The man wore an expression as if he thought that she must be a dream. The top of his head was bald, and the hair on the side sprawled out in white and gray wisps. He wore thick glasses and a doctor’s coat that looked like it had seen better days. The fabric was frayed and worn. There were brown stains from dirt, and it didn’t look like he had shoes. He reached out and touched Patel’s shoulder as if he expected to reach right through her.

  “He brought more! You are really here.” the man said.

  “Last I checked,” Patel said. “Yeah.”

  “Dr. Ben was wrong!” The man exploded. “People would find our technology and use it again. It was simple. Any old teenager with the right genetic makeup could use it. Does that mean the barrier is down? Did the fusion reactor finally run out of power? No, that’s not possible. A stable reaction would last—let’s see—carry the two—the power of twenty—”

  “Excuse me,” Patel said. “Sir. Sir. I am having trouble following—”

  The man laughed, “That’s funny. You are brilliant! You’re here! You made it! Universe One! It didn’t have to die. We could have saved it.”

  “Who could have saved it?”

  “Oh, yes, excuse me. Introductions are in order, I suppose. People still do that stuff? Why not just pass the information digitally. Oh yes, the network is down. Can’t do it digitally. Dr. Raymond Stevenson. People call me Dr. Ray.”

  “I’m Patel. It’s nice to—”

  “Yep, very good. Hello, nice to meet you, how’s the weather. There is no one to forecast it, not with the planet missing.”

  “The planet missing?”

  “Come, come. Easier to show you. I suppose.”

  The man turned without another word and walked down the hallway. Patel hesitated for a moment and continued forward. She wasn’t sure what to make of the man or this place. After seeing more rooms like the one she had appeared inside, she deduced that she was in a dorm of a university.

  At the end of the hall, there was a staircase. The man pushed the door to the stairs open, and she could hear his footfalls echo while he bounded down. From the sign in the corner, she could see that they were on the sixth floor. It was eerie, seeing the same font and style of buildings as HQ. If it wasn’t for the fact of daylight streaming through, she would have thought that she had made it to another station floating in the void.

  The man pushed through to the ground floor, and Patel quickly followed. She was shocked at the extent of the effects of the blue sealing goo. They were in a courtyard of a building that must have been at least ten stories tall. A quarter of the building was encased in the hard blue substance. It went up well beyond the roof to a height that seemed like it would touch the stars. It was as if a tsunami the size of a mountain had frozen before engulfing the rest of the building.

  The part of the courtyard that was not sealed had a garden with rows and rows of various vegetables. From the grime in Dr. Ray’s fingertips and the brown stains on his lab coat, it looked like he maintained the garden. They went into the building on the other side of the courtyard and stepped into a common room in the same sort of disarray. The other half of the space was locked within the azure prison. Students were running with the same look of panic.

  “What are they trying to get away from?” Patel asked.

  They stepped out of the common room through the front door of the building to the grounds of a university campus. The sealing goo stretched on into the horizon, sealing away half of the college. Dr. Ray pointed to the wall and said, “That!”

  Deeper into the block, Patel could see cars, buildings, trees, and even people being sucked towards the sky. It was like a breach had opened large enough to swallow a city and they had somehow closed it off with more of the sealant than Patel could even imagine.

  “How did you even come up with enough of the sealing goo to handle a breach of that size? We’ve only been able to manufacture enough to handle localized phenom—”

  “A breach?” Dr. Ray asked and ushered her forward through the campus away from the wall. “You mean the instabilities? How did you get here? A TF3?”

  “Yeah.” Patel pulled out hers. She was nervous about showing it to him, considering what happened last time a local knew about her tuning device. However, because she had seen a lot of them both inside and out of the giant blue block that engulfed half the city, it felt safe to show it off. If the guy wanted a TF3, he’d have plenty to choose from. “I am from an organization called the Tuners; we protect and safeguard the multiverse from—”

  The guy didn’t turn back and continued walking. “Imagine that. Do you hear that, Dr. Ben!” he screamed at no one. “They are protecting and safeguarding!”

  He laughed and continued ahead. Patel had to practically run to keep up with the man’s pace. She elected to not ask any more questions for the time being. The guy had clearly been alone for quite some time, and she wasn’t quite sure how reliable his answers would be.

  While they walked, Patel noticed that there wasn’t just one wall, but four just as significant as the side she was on. It looked like they were in the only portion of the city that wouldn’t be forever frozen in time. It was as if somebody took a perfect square out of a tsunami and then froze the rest.

  The campus hadn’t been maintained for a long time. Sidewalks were bumpy from roots, trees were overgrown, and the grass was tall. There was one building where the vines growing on the outside had overtaken the whole thing. It looked more like a mound of foliage that an artificial structure. Windows were broken or too dirty to be useful. Whatever happened was long ago. It reminded Patel of a city from U-42 that had been evacuated because of radiation. She was pretty sure the nuclear disaster was called Chernobyl.

  He led her to the center of the square, where a six-story building with 360 degree balcony sidewalks surrounded the place. It was labeled Weatherford-Rice Hall with another sign for the Department of Physics. While Dr. Ray led her up the steps, he said, “It’s ironic that Dr. Ben thought of everything for the barrier. The generator is fusion-powered with enough fuel to outlast the buildings. The light bulbs will rot before the power goes out. But what he didn’t calculate was that the barrier wouldn’t last. Machines break down. Machines require maintenance. You being here means the barrier is weakening. First, it starts with a few weak spots. Little pinpricks that allow a person through. Maybe in a thousand years, a whole flood gate.”

  “What do you mean a thousand years?” Patel said. “Who are you?”

  “Weren’t you listening? I’m Dr. Ray. The Dr. Ray! The man who conquered aging, or a
t least figured out how to slow it down. I probably would have conquered it if I could have gotten regular injections. It’s too bad my laboratory is three thousand miles that way!” he screamed and pointed towards the wall of blue.

  The man continued to climb the stairs, and Patel decided to walk again in silence. They went through the front doors of the Physics Department, and she expected more of the same decay as the rest of the structures. Instead, it was surprisingly well maintained.

  When they turned down the hall, she could tell that he spent a lot of his time here. There were smart boards with handwritten equations in almost every classroom. He wasn’t kidding about the power. Even though most of the boards had pixels that were no longer functioning, and the screens were failing on some, they all had power.

  Patel would need more time to study the math to tell what he was doing, but at a glance, it was more complicated than anything she had ever seen. While she wanted to know more, she decided to wait at least until she could figure out where he was taking her. The man was unstable enough to keep her on her guard but seemed harmless overall.

  He turned into a laboratory where a computer was running a simulation. It showed the planet’s oceans boiling over and the flood turning a solid blue. A square in what would be the Northern California coast was the only surface on the Earth that was left green. He saw her looking at the simulation and said, “I used the world’s oceans as a catalyst for a worldwide sealing goo event. Sealing goo, I like that name. I was able to null the reaction in this area by setting up four towers a couple miles apart from each other with a fifth in this building to power the rest. This is it. This is all that’s left of Universe One.”

  Sensing more stability in his mood, she asked, “What about the rest of the people? The ones in this area?”