by J.J. Mainor
Chapter P-1
Jails are pretty much the same wherever you go: four walls, an impenetrable door, uncomfortable beds, a very public toilet, and a sink. They all reek of filth, sweat, and stale urine. Stains mar every corner and crevice; cleanliness is never a concern for the jailors or the jailed.
Cole Greenburg had seen enough of them in his brief nineteen years to recognize the cell he was in as just another jail. It wasn’t much different from the one he bailed his friend from last year, or the one some guy from the barracks landed in during Basic Training after punching a drill sergeant. This was the first time Cole found himself on this side of the bars though.
The whole situation seemed surreal to him; Cole was never one to get into trouble. Sure he caroused with the other recruits during weekend liberty. Like them, he sometimes had too much to drink. Sometimes he got a little too fresh with the ladies frequenting those bars. But somehow in that chaos, he always managed to keep enough of his mind to avoid the stupid mistakes that landed so many of his Army buddies in front of the First Sergeant on Monday morning.
It didn’t seem to surprise him though to find himself in this jail. He wasn’t surprised to find himself locked up with his father, Michael. It didn’t even bother him that this was supposed to be another universe, an alternate Earth.
Had this not been the third world they visited since the mishap in his father’s lab, he might not have believed it. The arresting officers and the guards in the other room all wore strange uniforms, but along with the unrecognizable languages they spoke it was all proof of nothing more than the fact they were no longer in the America he knew.
Cole had no idea how such a thing was possible. The whole field of study was Michael’s wheelhouse. The quest for evidence of this multiverse was the single thing that kept his father from home all through his childhood. His singular focus on proof of its existence drove out all thoughts of his family and finally convinced Cole’s mother to walk out when Cole was sixteen.
Whenever Cole needed his father’s help with homework, the old man was too busy working on his own math problems. He was late to Cole’s graduation because he claimed to have had a flash of brilliance and wanted to jot it down before he lost it. And when the boy chose to use his 96 hour pass to say goodbye to his father before disappearing on a six month deployment to Iraq, the man was too busy finishing his prototype.
The multiverse was all that man could talk about at the dinner table – when he talked – and yet Cole could never wrap his mind around it. One would think having a brilliant astrophysicist for a dad would have given him an advantage in his own science and math studies, and yet the opposite proved true.
Cole struggled through both subjects all throughout school. To his father, he was a disappointment. His mediocre high school football career didn’t even make up for it. When he announced he had enlisted in the United States Army, it was like he had announced he was gay in an Evangelical household.
No, the thought that this was supposed to be a different Earth in a different universe didn’t seem as strange as the fact he was locked up in a jail with his never-do-wrong father.
The morning meal came in a close second for bizarre. They were given nothing more than a bar-shaped thing no larger than a candy bar, but with the texture of bologna. If only it had the taste of bologna, Cole would have counted himself lucky. But the “food” had little taste to it whatsoever. He recalled more flavor in that horrible oatmeal they served in the mess hall on the first day of Basic.
His stomach grumbled, waiting for the midday meal.
Neither of the prisoners had any idea what the actual time was. They had not seen a window to the outside since they showed up in the middle of that bizarre market, and there were no clocks on the wall to show them the passage of time. Cole didn’t wear a watch, and his cell phone (not that it was very useful after that moment when Michael’s lab vanished around them) had been seized with the rest of their belongings, including that magical universe-hopping contraption, so he couldn’t even check time on that.
“Guard!” he called out through the opening on the cell door. It appeared they understood his language as little as he understood theirs, but if he could get their attention, he was sure he could communicate his desire for food.
A man with reddish-brown skin entered the holding area and approached the cell door. Cole had tried to guess his origins, thinking he was East Asian, but his eyes didn’t look right, and he stood taller than many of the Asians in his battalion. When the man spoke, the funny language didn’t sound like anything he heard from an Oriental mouth back home.
Cole placed his hand to his mouth trying to communicate his desire for food. The guard cocked his head before understanding the request. Instead of the desired outcome, the man gave a hearty laugh as if his suffering was a big joke. Then he turned and left.
Cole slumped back onto his rack and dropped his head into his hands. His father sat on the rack across from him, with his eyes closed, but his head up. It was his usual posture when working through his own thoughts, and Cole knew the old man was more concerned with his theories than with his own son’s hunger.
Hell, he was probably more concerned with Jessica at that moment!
Four years older than Cole, Jessica was Michael’s latest research assistant and the last member of their unfortunate trio. She was a doctoral candidate, putting in her time under Dr. Greenburg before presenting her thesis and hopefully taking a job with NASA.
To Michael, she was the child he wished he had: smart enough to keep up with his theories and with the same burning desire for the stars that he had. The man shared more dinners with her in the past two months than he ever shared with his real family, and he never cared how much it hurt Cole when he would brag about her or all the other research assistants he had worked with throughout his life. Though they came and went, year in and year out, the man had more praise and more pride for each of those temporary children than he had for the son who stuck by his side after the divorce.
Michael didn’t care what might happen to Cole before this was over, but with Jessica in a separate cell somewhere else in this jail, the old man was worried sick over the things those guards might be doing to her – or perhaps it was a cell mate inflicting those unspeakable tortures.
Cole had to break the silence. “Can you at least pretend you care what’s going to happen to us?”
Michael raised his head as if his son’s complaints were a nuisance to his peace and tranquility. “I’m sorry,” he snapped. “I forgot your generation has to announce every one of your stupid feelings to the rest of the world. Guess what! No one cares if you’re sad because someone called a celebrity a ‘fag’ online! I’m too busy thinking about how to get my hopper back!”
“Unless you happen to have a key to the cell, I don’t see how that’s going to happen.”
“I figured since my son is in the Army, maybe he could call in the Seals to break us out of here in a Blackhawk.”
Cole rolled his eyes. Any chance his father found to throw his disdain for his service in his face, he took it.
“And how would I do that if we’re supposed to be in one of your other worlds?”
“See? Instead of wasting your life, you should have gone to college and learned something useful. Then maybe you could be helpful!”
Cole shook his head and dropped his head back into his hands. It was always useless trying to talk to his father. Even when he wasn’t trying to goad the old man, the old man always found a way to insult him.
He knew in that other mind, there was blame swirling for their predicament. They barely put that lab behind him before the old man screamed at him for activating the device. It didn’t matter that Cole was a good five or six feet away from it, nor did the old man accept responsibility for the fatal flaws in its design.
All Cole wanted was one more chance for some sort of relationship when he booked that ticket for New York. When he s
tepped off the plane and into the terminal, he wasn’t even surprised his father wasn’t there to pick up him. Cole had to find his own taxi and give the driver directions to the university – no use going to the house across the river in New Jersey first since Michael spent all his time in that lab.
The man practically lived in that lab. Michael had had his theories on the existence of the multiverse for as long as Cole could remember – likely even beyond that. He always knew those other universes lay out there somewhere, but how could he even get there? Mankind couldn’t even travel to another star, let alone beyond that to a different universe. Yet Michael knew there was a way to find those other universes. He always talked about how the space between two universes was different from that within a universe.
Cole could never understand how there could be other universes living side-by-side with this one. His teachers in school always talked about this universe as if it was everything. The concept of parallel worlds was one he only saw on TV and there it was presented as if each one existed in the same space but out-of-phase. According to his father it had something to do with bubbles in a bath. It made no sense at all to Cole, and eventually his father grew tired of explaining it over and over.
Their relationship froze around the time he entered junior high. That was probably the time Michael realized his son didn’t have the aptitude for advanced science. It was around that time he stopped bringing his son to the lab.
There were always excuses with Michael. In those early years, he spent his time doing some crazy math. He had to create the formulas and equations from scratch that would even point to the existence of his supposed multiverse, and guide him on a path towards proof.
Cole’s mother would complain when he walked in at the most absurd hours of the night – when he came home at all. She would scream at him with a prepared tirade, and when she finally took a breath to study the pain she expected in his eyes, all she received was a calm if emotionless explanation regarding a breakthrough with those calculations.
By the time he put the calculations behind him and moved on to inventing the technology he expected would grant him a peek at those other universes, the mother turned her attention to the son.
To his detriment, Cole looked too much like his father. The similarity hardened as his face slowly changed through adolescence. When it was clear Michael would give her complaints and her anguish no satisfaction, she turned it all toward her son, finding fault in everything he did and magnifying the same notes of disappointment in his weak grades.
When he entered high school, Cole knew the day was coming when his parents would divorce. He had been ready for it every day, but like always, his father kept right on with his work as if the problems at home didn’t exist.
The boy came home from school one day to find his mother waiting at the door. Her stuff was already packed and away in her new apartment, but still she waited for her son to come home. Cole knew this was it and expected to leave with her. Though his mother’s attitude hurt him worse than that of his father, he tried to understand her pain and let it roll off his back, hoping that one day she would become the mom he used to remember – the mom who used to bake cookies at Christmas time, the mom who used to take him trick-or-treating each Halloween as a child, the mom who used to bake his birthday cake and decorate it herself.
He stood at the door that day, unable to ask if this was it, instead waiting for her to give the word. In a flash, he could have his clothes packed and they could be away from this cold man. Instead a flash of anger crossed her face and wounded tears glazed her eyes.
“You ruined my marriage!” she spat at him. Then she pushed him aside and turned her back on him, on Michael, and on the whole house.
For all the insults Michael threw at him over the years, all the disappointment built up in that man’s small heart, and all the distance he kept from his own son, it was that one simple statement from his mother that hurt him more than all of it.
It might have been ridiculous to think he deserved the blame for his parents falling out of love with each other. Then again, even as a teenager, Cole knew it was his perceived failure and disappointment as a son to his father which kept the old man away as much as his work. He had held hope right up to the end that his mother didn’t so fault him; but it was that final accusation along with the fact that she had waited to deliver it, and probably practiced it all day, that marked an unmistakable end to that maternal relationship.
He stayed with his father as the lesser of two evils, and it was that one last hope for affirmation that brought him to his father’s lab before placing New York and New Jersey behind him once and for all.
Michael was too excited over his creation to offer more than a barely audible “hello” before returning to Jessica and the affectionately dubbed “hopper.”
The device itself was rather awkward and clumsy. Three large rods were set in the middle of the room, equidistant from each other, and each one had a mess of wires and motors (at least that’s what it looked like to Cole) wrapping the base. Cables from each converged on both a power supply and the laptop controlling this device. From the talk between the two scientists, it sounded as if the device was finally complete and ready for its first test.
Cole had to admit had he been closer to his father, he would have been happy to finally see the completion of his life’s work. As it stood, he was merely relegated to the far corner of the room and out of the way as if he were the man’s umbrella.
He thought it better to just leave and put this all behind him before it raised his anger. The power supply sat underfoot, and he tripped over it when he turned for one last look at his father. Michael rushed over to see that it was all right, and calling his son “idiot” under his breath only affirmed that concern didn’t extend to Cole.
The young man headed once more for the door and stopped. For all the disappointment he felt, there was a certain curiosity he couldn’t put aside. The test was about to get underway, and he had to admit he wanted to see if the device worked as planned. He hoped it would fail and become the disappointment his father claimed he was. A piece of him expected to rub it in should it prove that man spent his life on a pipe dream.
Jessica set a lead bar between the rods and stepped back. Michael smiled over the expected disappearance as he opened the activation program on his laptop. With the entry of a few commands, the power supply sprung to life, feeding power to the motors. The whirring grew louder at the base of each rod as those shafts of metal began to vibrate, subtle but quick.
Cole felt the air vibrating all around him as the light within and around those rods bent and stretched. The lead bar became a blur as did everything on the other side of the experiment, as if he was looking at everything through a pool of shimmering water.
But that blur grew larger, encompassing the rods themselves and expanding outward beyond the intended field. Jessica’s excitement only peaked as she no doubt realized what this success would mean for her degree and later job prospects, but Michael’s brow furled; a scowl betrayed his disappointment as he turned to his laptop once more and tried to shut it down.
“What’s going on?” Cole asked him, finding his father’s temperament to be contagious.
“Don’t bother asking a question when you won’t understand the answer,” his father snapped, trying to ignore him to focus on the problem.
That was the last straw as far as Cole was concerned. He turned for the door, only to realize the field generated by that device had begun to encompass him. The vibrations left the air and filtered through his skin. He felt it through to his organs, imagining this was how an egg felt when hard-boiled in the microwave.
Jessica felt it too. “What’s wrong with it?”
“The coils are drawing too much power,” he answered with the kind of understanding and concern Cole expected a father should have shown a son. “The tuning rods are expanding the field.”
He tried to explain
how he needed to shut it down before it sent off the entire lab, but before he could even begin, the room went white around them.
Cole rubbed his eyes trying to get his sight back as he felt the vibrations leave his body. While the world slowly came into focus again, his father already shouted a string of obscenities. As he took in the overgrown forest which had replaced the walls of that lab, Cole began to understand the problem.
All three of them looked to each other, but it was only Michael who truly understood their predicament.
Excitement replaced Jessica’s worry. To her, it was more than she ever could have hoped for. She was supposed to see the proof of the multiverse when that bar disappeared to some unknown realm – yet here she was, seeing one of those other Earths with her own eyes, smelling the fresh and pristine air unspoiled by human actions, and witnessing a Manhattan without the skyscrapers and streets and people.
But Michael was terrified. “This is very bad,” he mumbled as he shook his head.
Cole wanted to ask what the problem was, but he knew his father would only dismiss him and insult his intelligence some more, so he decided to let the teacher’s pet make the inquiry.
“The device wasn’t designed for travel,” he explained to his assistant. “It wasn’t meant to expand the field outside the rods, and we were definitely not supposed to send people through.”
“So just start it up again and get us back home,” Cole offered, still not understanding what his father’s problem was.
“It wasn’t designed for that!” his father snapped. “It was designed to send an object out, not bring it back!”
“Are you saying we’re stuck in…this!” At that moment, Cole’s mind could focus on nothing but his liberty. If he wasn’t back on base by 0600 Monday morning, he would be labeled a deserter. His command would discharge him dishonorably, and when they did back, he would be arrested and thrown in the stockade. Michael had always hated him for joining the Army, and it seemed his work had managed to steal that from him. The one thing he had going for him in his life was the service, and his father’s selfish work ruined that.
“There’s a chance the doorway is limited,” Michael said as he checked over the equipment to make sure it still functioned. “It is possible this thing only goes between our world and whatever world this is. If that is so, then activating the device might take us back.”
“If not?” Cole hoped for the possibility his father was right, but the old man’s hesitation to state the alternative left him more fearful than ever.
“Then we end up in another universe,” he answered rather matter-of-factly.
“Can’t be worse than this one,” Cole blurted out, studying the tall, thick trees all around him, the overgrown weeds and briars dominating the undergrowth, and the lack of any sign of animal trails cutting through it all. If there weren’t even animals living in this supposed world, then what hope would there be of finding other people that might help them?
“You really didn’t pay attention all those years,” Michael sighed, putting to bed any hope of explaining the situation further.
Jessica, suddenly uncomfortable with the tension between the father and the son, decided to mitigate it by answering for them all. “There are possibly an infinite number of universes, each with their own variations. Many have other versions of an Earth that are different to ours, but many more do not. If we get sent to one of those universes, we won’t live long enough to know it.”
Cole regretted asking the question. It made his desertion seem like a minor nuisance. Suddenly he wondered what the hell was wrong with his father to devote his life to such dangerous research. This wasn’t like the atom bomb which only affected people he didn’t really care about, though it had served a purpose (albeit a gruesome purpose). This quest for the multiverse was nothing but a vanity project. There was no purpose in travelling to these other universes, especially when their own hadn’t yet been explored. There was no reason to send people away, especially if it could end in death.
The past twenty years was spent satisfying his own ego, and now it looked like it might kill his own son and a grad student.
Yet, Cole knew, sitting in that cell across from him, his father blamed it all on him. Never mind that Michael had checked over his equipment before powering up. Never mind that it was his faulty device that carried them from one primitive world to another before landing in this nightmare. And never mind that it was his rush to test that put this all into motion. As far as Michael was concerned it was his clumsy son who sabotaged his life’s work simply by tripping over the power supply.