Cacophony Read online

  “What he lacks in strength, he makes up in smarts. That kid has power armor.”

  “Hailey does too.”

  “There might be a kill switch in the armor for all we know. We didn’t have time to test it.”

  “Dude, bro. You were going to wear that suit!”

  “Yeah, that’s a risk I was going to take for myself.”

  “Jon loves Hailey,” Meathook mocked him.

  “Shut up!”

  “You just want to get that suit off of her, bro.”

  “Shut up!”

  “I’d bet you’d like nothing better than to—” Meathook stopped, and his jaw was opened.

  Patel stood there. Alex and Anya were a step behind. Meathook pushed Jon out of the way, and he flew into a display. He grabbed Patel and picked her up with a giant squeeze. She was the only person in the Tuners who could get a full force hug and live to tell about it.

  One clerk told the other to call security. Jon pulled himself up from a pile of shirts. It was time to go.

  ∆∆∆

  The group sat at the food court while Patel, Alex, and Anya devoured a meal. They were so overjoyed at her return, they almost forgot about Hailey for the time being.

  Alex said with a mouthful of fries, “So can you believe it? My mom and Hector found freaking Universe One, and they wouldn’t tell anyone about it.”

  “That’s because you would try to sell everything in it,” Anya said.

  “Shut up,” they retorted, slurping down a shake to wash down the fries. “It’s my story. So, I come home, and of course, my mom is thrilled to see us. It’s been a while since we’ve been under the same roof. And I’m like, ‘I’m only here to sell stuff I stole from the Tuners.’”

  “Hey!” Magdalena said.

  “Get over it. Put a lock on it if you don’t want people taking it. This sends my mom into a tirade. Typical crazy talk, but then she says, ‘I shouldn’t have helped that girl get to Universe One.’ She knew the jig was up.”

  “That’s not how it went,” Anya said. “She told us because she loves her daughters and wants us to help.”

  “Help us to a fortune! So anyway, she tells us this story about when Hector and her were Tuners. They were running from something. Not sure what. When they got to the boiling lake, they heard the sound of an unknown universe and figured it was better than what was coming for them and leaped. They got to Universe One and met this crazy old man. He promised them power or something.”

  “It was a trick,” Patel said.

  DeAndre said, “Isn’t Universe One going to help us? Aren’t we doing their job?”

  “He was just trying to get more people for his machine.”

  “What machine?”

  “Universe One—they created the cultists.”

  Everyone sat for a moment, and Meathook said, “So, let’s take the fight to Universe One. One guy seems a lot easier to handle than a world full of cultists.”

  “If that,” Alex said. “There was no one there when we got there. We were searching this abandoned building when we heard Patel scream.”

  Patel frowned and said, “Even if we did take the machine, it requires Tuners to run. Even if we had enough suicidal volunteers, what can we do with it? We don’t have an army. Even if we rounded up all the techs, ex-Tuners, and anyone who’d join us, it’s still not enough to take out the cultists. Not to mention the gravity problem.”

  “Yeah, but Hector sent us there for a reason—”

  “Looks like we are back to the Death Star,” Carrie said.

  Jon realized that he hadn’t checked for the sound of HQ in a while. He opened up his tuning app and dialed through the different frequencies. There was still no HQ, and Hailey should have taken down the barrier by now.

  Something had gone wrong.

  “Hailey didn’t make it,” Jon said and pushed himself up from the table. He kicked a chair on his way out of the food court.

  Alex turned to Patel, who had barely touched her food. “You gonna finish that?”

  7

  Dr. Ray calculated the closed form of a linear recurrence with constant coefficients sequence in his head while he walked for over a day. It was a mathematical expression that comforted him when his mind was left free to wander. Back at the university, he had entire classrooms, and each smart board had pages and pages of math where he contemplated the more profound mysteries of the universe. He had been alone for so long that he almost ran out of classrooms when a new complex idea would strike him.

  The only time his mind was not cascading through numbers and formulas was when he tended the garden in the old dorm room building. Planting seeds, pulling weeds, and harvesting cleared his thoughts, which was serendipitous because he saw her turn the light on in the dorm room after the girl had tuned to his world.

  It was unfortunate that he wouldn’t be able to shut the machine down after he had left. Even at the cost of a human life, it was way more efficient than the platforms. The tuning platforms required quantum super stacks that let adults do what the teens could do naturally. Dr. Ben’s ridiculous research station required half its power just to run one platform adults could use and didn’t even have the energy to bring them back. If Dr. Ray was given time to perfect his system, he could probably squeeze many uses out of the life of one person.

  While his machine was good at crashing through human-made barriers, it was using a nuclear bomb to dig a tunnel. He would rather have something more precise. He envisioned a machine that networked many youths to tunnel through the membrane between worlds. It would destabilize a universe if it was used too much, but considering his original device had about a 1/3 chance of destroying the destination universe, he’d take the improved model.

  It didn’t matter now. His world was dead. This world, with the red lighting and dark magenta storm clouds, was his home now. He walked through a forest with brownish-red leaves and black trunks. The sand was a dull grey, and a rat with glowing eyes scurried by.

  He climbed up a trail that hugged a cliff toward a castle that towered over the land. It was bigger than any structure anyone in the past could have done without generations of workers stacking stone by stone, an entire city on a mountain top. He knew his daughter had made this happen. She had restarted civilization. He stumbled on a loose rock and grabbed the edge to prevent himself from falling.

  He adjusted the gravity modifications in an implant on his arm. An orange aura surrounded his body as he dialed down the gravity in his personal sphere. It was typical of his universe. Rather than make an exoskeleton, manipulate the environment around him instead. He had lost track of the calculation in his head. He was somewhere in the thousandth number in the sequence. “0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34,” he muttered to himself while he scrambled up the cliff face.

  Just before the top, he entered a cave. It was the same cave where he built his first machine. The device was gone, but the bones still littered the ground of the hominid species that had once lived here. He had used them as experiments for his machine and then eventually to get back to his homeworld when Dr. Ben cut him off. He picked up a skull.

  Dr. Ray always thought it would be interesting to watch humans evolve. With his age-reversing injections, he could have done it too. Wait for millions of years for humans to become modern. This world seemed like the right place to do it. The only species close to human wasn’t quite there yet. They were primitive and easy to scare, which made them easy to round up for his experiment that became more pressing when his world was headed for disaster.

  It was unfortunate that Dr. Ben hadn’t listened to reason. The old coot and the rest of them thought they knew what was best for the multiverse. Dr. Ray knew now after his years of isolation that they were wrong, and he was wrong too for trying to save his people. Civilization needed to be built from the ground up so it could grow anew.

  He picked up another skull from the pile. He could almost hear the screams while the machine whirred to life. These creatures were noble for gi
ving up their life for him and his people. Most people didn’t think about who had to die so they could live. Dr. Ray wasn’t afraid to think about it. He wanted to remember their screams.

  He put the skulls down and continued to count the numbers in his head. He walked toward the front of the cave, and two women stood there. They were both wearing armor and had scars on every exposed surface of their skin. They reminded him of his daughter’s tattoos though they looked like they were carved with knives. The women each had a battle-ax at their side.

  “The Prophet of Fire,” one of them said, and they both kneeled.

  “Stand up,” Dr. Ray said. He sighed. His daughter’s ideas must have turned into a religion. It irked him that humans had this need to cling to the supernatural when the world was utterly wondrous as it was, but he wasn’t surprised. Religion was an easy tool for people in power to get people to a group consensus. His daughter knew how to use power well, so he could see how her legacy would be remembered with mysticism.

  The women stood up, and one of them said, “It was written that a man clad in flame would return to our realm one day.”

  Dr. Ray laughed. “The Gravity Adjustment Field? I suppose it must be a flame.”

  “All hail the Flame!” the two women said in unison.

  Dr. Ray smiled. “Right. I see this is important to you. Right. Um, I decree, take me to your leader.”

  ∆∆∆

  Dr. Ray’s progeny had really outdone herself. He stood in a large room with a lake of lava. He walked on a bridge going across the lake toward an island in the center while several members of the Order followed behind him. To each side were statues of the various High Priests throughout the ages. They towered three stories high out of the lava and went all the way back to a larger than life version of his daughter standing over a raised throne in the middle of the room.

  The chair was made of human skulls, and the bones were sharpened to a point where the person on it would be sitting on spikes. It was a brutal display of power meant to scare people into servitude. Several bodies of people were tied up on giant X’s and dangled over the lava near the throne. Some were fresh and dripping blood in the fire. Others were dead and dried out by the heat.

  A man sat on top of the throne. From the robes, headdress, and thick leathery skin that looked like it had been burned, Dr. Ray assumed he was their leader. Two large men with cuts crisscrossing their bodies stood beside him. They were stoic and held jagged blades in front of them. Even though Dr. Ray had no use for religion, it was a beautiful sight. The statue of his daughter towering over the highest authority in the land was not lost on him. Maybe if Universe One had had a unified authoritarian religion, they wouldn’t have splintered into pointless squabbles that ignored the broader issues facing society.

  “The weak die! The strong survive!” the entourage that had been escorting him called out and knelt to their ruler. All except for Dr. Ray; he was the lone person to stand fast to the High Priest.

  The High Priest made no motion for his minions to stand. Instead, he got up from his throne, and Dr. Ray could see the blood spots from where the bones pierced his leathery skin. The priest walked to one of the women who had discovered Dr. Ray in the cave. He lifted her head and said in a soft voice, “You are the one who found the prophet?”

  “Yes, Holy One,” she said.

  He nodded to one of the elite guards, and he decapitated her. The head rolled into the lava lake, and the High Priest kicked the body over the edge as it collapsed to the floor. He walked toward the other one who had encountered Dr. Ray in the cave and asked, “You are the one who found the prophet?”

  “No, Holy One,” she said, her voice trembling. “You found him.”

  “Good,” the High Priest said. “Let it be known that the prophet has returned, and our victory is at hand. Go forth and spread the news. Wine of the Flame and extra portions for all.”

  The escort scurried back across the bridge. The High Priest turned to his guards next. “Go,” he said. “Drink. The Flame will soon consume us all.”

  The guard eyed Dr. Ray and said, “Holy One?”

  The High Priest slipped a ceremonial dagger from his robe. He slowly dug it under the chin of the man until his mouth was pinned shut. “Do not ever question my strength again.”

  The man made no effort to remove the blade. Both henchmen walked down the bridge. The High Priest sat at the steps of his throne and beckoned Dr. Ray to join him. They both sat wordlessly for a while. It was an awkward moment, almost as if they were two actors taking a break from a show.

  Dr. Ray broke the silence. “My offspring has taught you well.”

  “Only those at the top know the true scripture,” the High Priest said and stood up. He walked back toward the statue and nodded for Dr. Ray to follow. He pressed a secret button on the big toe, and a door opened in the calf. Dr. Ray and the High Priest entered a laboratory.

  It was reasonably close to the facilities at the university. A lot of the tech had been patched over the years. A few high-ranking priests were surprised to see them and bowed their heads. The High Priest dismissed them, and they filed out of the room.

  Dr. Ray inspected the place and said, “It’s remarkable that you kept this running all these years. Especially when we were cut off from each other.”

  “Not all wanted to acknowledge our origins. The High Priests had become weak. They hid this place and were too afraid of its power. I brought it back. I even found your original machine. It would have made an excellent weapon if the Tuners hadn’t destroyed it.”

  “You used it as a weapon? You know there is a chance of it kicking back and destroying your own—”

  “Trust me. I know. I had read the scriptures writ by your daughter’s hand. Her machine could destroy a universe too and not risk mine, but the cost of my soldiers was high and having slaves to keep it running was too much,” the High Priest said.

  His daughter must have made the machine he was only dreaming about over the years. He could feel a swell of emotion. It had been so long since he had felt anything. It meant he was right. Teens with the ability to travel between worlds could be networked to power the machine. His universe wouldn’t need slews of quantum stacks, gobbling up resources, creating the need to gather more, increasing the need to travel between worlds, and weakening the membrane that protected their world. The lives of a few teenagers and the loss of another universe here and there didn’t matter when their world could be the one to survive. Survive at all costs.

  “Tell me, where is my daughter?” Dr. Ray asked, unable to fight the tears.

  Dr. Ray held out hope that she had been able to hold on to enough injections to travel through time as he had. While his age-reversing regimen could eventually be discovered again, the equipment to manufacture it was on his world, but the ingredients were not. Had Hector come through with a supply, he would have dug out his lab from the sealing goo. After all, when he could take himself back into his twenties, he had nothing but time.

  The High Priest said, “The Truth Scripture says the Holy First reigned with her son who succeeded her as High Priest. Her body was consumed by the Holy Flame, and she rules in eternity.”

  “Quite right,” Dr. Ray said. He didn’t even know he had a grandson. It didn’t surprise him that she shared the injections with him. He would have given her the rest of his if he had the chance. “Tell me. What happened to the family line?”

  “The roots of the Life Tree make births hard here, and the mother and offspring rarely survive. Most of our rank is plucked from other universes, but family lines have continued. Your grandson was weak and struck down a few years after your daughter had succumbed to age, the only High Priest to do so. However, he sired a son, who sired a daughter and so forth. I am part of this lineage.”

  Dr. Ray stopped calculating sequences in his head. He took off the headdress of the High Priest and cupped the man’s cheeks. He turned the head from side to side and could see it. The relation was distant, but it w
as there.

  “Our clan was weak,” the High Priest said. “One of the lesser for a long time, but I took our glory back, and when I finally learned the truth and had access to the lab. I did the DNA test. It was a match. I am your only living progeny.”

  Dr. Ray held back a tear. He had cracked the code to death and now lived to see that he also had figured out life. Here was his ancestor at his rightful head of his universe. Now here he was to perform his last duty to secure their place at the top. When he was young, the bickering and weak government had hired him to ban the transit between universes of unapproved objects such as weapons and chemicals that could be used for bombs. It would fry electronics and render chemicals inert.

  While he felt the protocols unnecessary, his one and only true passion when he was young was the accumulation of wealth. Gain as much money as possible, then he would have the luxury to only work on the projects he cared about. Age was next. What good was wealth when death would take everyone? Now, here he was in a society where willpower and ambition were the only things that mattered. Pride welled up within him.

  Now it was time to strip down the restraints of the old world and let his lineage take their rightful place as the rulers of the multiverse. He always thought that without the constraint of a human lifetime, he’d be the one to shape the multiverse with time and subtlety. He worried that the cataclysm would set back progress. Burning down the old world paved the way for a glorious new one. Now the new one needed the tools to keep their power over the rest of the multiverse.

  It was clear that he was not meant to live forever, just shape the rest of it. Maybe Dr. Ray had dismissed religion too quickly. Perhaps there really was a Will of the Flame.

  “Do you have kin?” Dr. Ray asked.

  “None have been strong enough to take my seed,” the High Priest said.

  “I need you to create one. With another person who could travel the multiverse by ear alone.”