“Oh my God!” Thel reacted mournfully. “You’re talking about letting the car completely fill with water, aren’t you?”
“It’s our only chance,” the A.I. answered, confirming Thel’s worst fears.
“But James—”
“Will almost certainly drown. I know.”
“What!?” Thel reacted, aghast at the A.I.’s apparent lack of human empathy. “How... No! That’s unacceptable!” Thel shouted, incredulous.
“We can revive him when we reach the shore, but only if we survive too.”
“How can we?” she shrieked as the water reached her collarbone. The top of her head was now against the roof of the car. “The doors are locked, and we’ll drown!”
“If the electrical system obeys the same physical laws as those of cars of this era in the real world, then they’re designed to withstand being submerged for two minutes so the passengers can roll the windows down before the car sinks. After that, they fail, so the locking mechanisms automatically release, unlocking the doors. I estimate that we’ve been in the water for over a minute. We’ll be under water in less than thirty seconds and therefore—”
“Oh dear God,” Thel uttered, terror-stricken as she struggled to keep James’s face above the water.
His eyes continued to flutter, but it was clear that he had no idea where he was.
“If you and I can hold our breath for thirty seconds, the locks should release. Then we’ll be able to open the doors to escape. After that, it’s a matter of swimming to the surface before our lungs give out.”
“That’s not a plan! It’s insanity!” Thel shouted, her face pointing upward, where only a half-dozen centimeters separated the top of the water from the ceiling. She pulled on the hair on the back of James’s head to force his face upward as well, but she knew there were only seconds before he’d inevitably inhale water. “If the locks don’t fail, we’re just going to drown like rats in here!”
“Our chances of survival are low,” the A.I. conceded, his face pointing upward as well.
The car had now gone completely under the surface of the water, and the candidate’s image rippled above them in the dark sky.
The A.I. met his eyes one last time before the abyss had taken them. “But we’re not dead yet. When James takes in his first water, he’ll panic. Get away from him. When he lashes out, you might be injured if you’re too close.”
“So I just let go? Just let him drown?” Thel shouted, spitting out saltwater, trying to take advantage of the agonizingly small pocket of remaining air. “You son-of-a-bitch! You’re inhuman! Goddamn you!”
“Calm down, Thel. Take in a deep breath, then get away from him.”
“Go to hell!”
“His life depends on you!” the A.I. suddenly shouted, his voice reaching a tenor that shocked her. “Take your breath now!” he commanded. He knew their lives depended on her following through.
She did as instructed and inhaled as deeply as she could before letting her face sink below the surface.
The A.I. took in his last breath simultaneously and also sank, keeping his eyes on the implacable artificial eyes above them, wobbling and distorted, like the eyes of God, unwilling to intervene to save them from their impending, horrific fate.
5
“We’re not as vulnerable as you think we are,” Old-timer replied, remembering his promise to report back to James and the A.I. fifteen minutes after entering Universe 332. “How long have I been here?”
“That’s a helluva good question,” Paine replied. “Time’s pretty much irrelevant here.”
“Let’s not be glib,” Aldous cut in. “We have to be as clear as possible with him.” He turned to Old-timer. “We were brought out of hibernation automatically when you opened your Planck portal. For us, time is now linked to the time for you and your…” Aldous gestured with a tilt of his head toward Rich and Djanet. “Your, uh...compatriots,” he finished.
Old-timer tried to access his mind’s eye, to no avail. “I have to report back,” he said, a look of concern flashing across his face. “I only had fifteen minutes.”
“Until what?” Paine asked, his tone suddenly suspicious.
“Until…” His sentence drifted away for a moment as he tried to figure out a way to explain forces like James and the A.I. to the ghosts from another dimension. “They’ll come looking for me.”
“But you can’t leave,” Samantha suddenly insisted, her wet face now calm, though her expression remained tormented. “You’re our only chance.”
“For what?” Old-timer asked, his voice hoarse, his shock constricting his vocal chords and making it difficult for him to speak.
“To help us live again,” Aldous replied.
Old-timer’s eyes were wide. “Live again?”
He turned back to the Planck platform. Rich and Djanet continued to kneel, but they were no longer working on Old-timer’s body. They’d given up and were now kneeling next to each other, looking down at Old-timer’s crumpled form. Djanet’s arm was over Rich’s shoulders as they consoled each other.
“We’re dead?”
“We’re ghosts,” Paine confirmed. “Ghosts in a machine.”
“As Samantha told you earlier,” Aldous elaborated, “we call this the void. It’s not really a time, nor is it a place. It’s just a storage space for our consciousnesses.”
“We should’ve called it Hell,” Samantha scoffed.
“Maybe it’s Purgatory,” Paine mused.
Old-timer’s eyes narrowed; he’d been thinking the same thing.
“At any rate,” Aldous pressed on, “we don’t have bodies. We couldn’t spare the energy.”
“Energy?” Old-timer reacted.
“Yes,” Aldous answered. “The void is powered by a power source much like the one we found in the Planck portal machine your people left in our universe.”
“The Planck platform,” Old-timer said, realizing what Aldous was referring to immediately.
“It takes enormous energy to protect us here, which is why we only use energy sparingly. It’s why we’re rarely animated. It’s why we’re almost always dormant.”
“But with your help,” Samantha continued, “we could have bodies again.”
It took every ounce of strength in Old-timer for him not to collapse as he shook his head. “I have no idea if I can help with that or not,” he began. He then turned back to the Planck platform and pointed toward it as it glowed as a fixed point, seemingly only a few meters from him. “What I need to know right now is if I can get back into my body. Can my friends and I leave this universe?”
“We’ll show you how to get back into your body, if you agree to take us with you to your universe,” Samantha bargained.
“Uh, I…” Old-timer held up his hands, palms out. “I’m not sure that’s a great idea. There’s uh…people I’d need to discuss that with.”
“It wasn’t exactly a request,” Paine answered as he puffed on his cigar, his steely blue eyes locked on Old-timer.
“What are you saying?” Old-timer protested. “Are you suggesting that if I don’t take you with me—”
“We’re saying,” Paine cut him off, his eyes now revealing the lethal killer that Old-timer remembered had always been lurking just below the surface, “that you’d best be taking us with you, if you ever want to take another breath in the real world.”
6
Thel watched, horrified, as James thrashed violently underwater with a small cloud of blood expanding around his face. His eyes flashed open, and an expression of confused panic crossed his face. His arms bolted above his head, slamming against the ceiling of the car, and he kicked his legs furiously in a gesture that appeared involuntary. Thel wasn’t sure if it was the darkness inside the interior, the distortion of the water, or just simply that James was still in a state of confusion after his blow to the head, but he didn’t seem to be able to see her or the A.I., nor did he lunge for them as the A.I. had feared.
The A.I. calmly placed
his palm on the center of Thel’s back as he, too, watched James suffer through the stages of drowning. Without having taken in a deep breath before the cabin finished filling with water, James, the A.I. realized, would be the first to lose consciousness. He watched as James clutched his throat, knowing full well that James’s breath-holding was involuntary, his epiglottis having closed over now that water had entered his nose and mouth. The experience would be like choking, and James did indeed behave as though a piece of food were lodged in his airway.
While Thel and the A.I. floated in the darkened interior, the seconds ticked by ever so slowly, and each had to resist the urge to go to James in any ill-conceived, fruitless attempt to try to help him. There was nothing they could do but watch the man the A.I. saw as a son and that Thel saw as a soulmate drown in front of their eyes.
Finally, James lost consciousness. His body went completely slack and started to float, the air that was still trapped in his lungs causing his chest and face to point upward as though he were a deceased fish floating to the top of the bowl.
Terrified, Thel reached out for James, but the A.I. grasped her hand before she could and pulled her close to him.
A second later, the electrical system finally gave out. The faint lights of the dash and the dim white light from the trunk’s interior flickered off in unison. The interior of the car grew so black that they might as well have had their eyes closed.
The A.I. reached with his left hand toward the door on the driver’s side of the car and grasped the handle. He knew if it remained locked, it would mean the end of their time as conscious entities on Earth.
He tried it.
The door was unlocked.
He easily pushed it open, all the while keeping his right hand tightly on Thel. When the door was completely open, he pulled her gently toward him, and then guided her to the door. He expected her to swim to safety, but she remained there, unwilling to move. He knew trying to shove her would be counterproductive—it was obvious there was no way she was leaving without James.
The A.I. left her for a moment at the door and moved through the cabin, until he reached the unconscious, seemingly lifeless James. He grasped the simulated body and tugged on the jacket sleeve, hauling the barely-operating pattern with him to the door.
Thel, like a blind woman, groped and grasped him, making sure it was James she was detecting with her fingertips. Satisfied, she clutched the material of his shirt collar and pulled his body free of the car, then began kicking toward the surface.
The A.I. followed, trying to remain calm as he pumped his legs, quickly depleting the tiny amount of oxygen that was keeping him from losing consciousness. He made it to Thel’s side and reached out to help her with her burden, grabbing the other side of James’s shirt and working hard to reach salvation.
It had taken nearly a minute after the submersion for the electrical systems to finally give out. In that long sixty seconds time, the car had been falling toward the surface of the harbor, but they hadn’t hit bottom. It occurred to the A.I. that it was entirely possible that there was no bottom, as there wasn’t any need for the sim to have a seabed. That meant the surface could be dozens of meters away, and in all that murky darkness, it was impossible to tell. There was nothing for them to do but keep pumping their legs and arms, to keep pulling James’s clinically dead body, and to hope against all odds that they’d make it to the surface before they, too, lost consciousness. If they didn’t make it to the surface in time, the A.I. knew full well that they would never wake up.
7
“There’s no need for threats, my friend.” Aldous stepped in, inserting himself between Paine and Old-timer, placing a calming hand on Paine’s shoulder. “Our visitor is understandably cautious. However, when we paint the picture for him, I’m sure he’ll willingly choose to bring us with him.”
“We can’t take that chance, professor,” Paine countered. “Too much is at stake.”
“It is the very fact that so much is at stake,” Aldous returned, “that will lead Craig to help us.” He turned to Old-timer. “And to help himself.”
“I never said I wouldn’t help you,” Old-timer stammered. He was having an extraordinarily difficult time speaking or looking at any of the three ghosts before him in the eye. He knew they were interpreting his behavior as the natural reaction anyone would have to finding themselves in such a ghastly, bizarre scenario. But that wasn’t the reason for his demeanor at all. It was the weight of what their words meant. If the three cyber ghosts were telling the truth, then Old-timer had inadvertently set a chain of events in motion that had, as Paine’s described it, “erased” an entire universe. And, as ghastly as that was, he’d also set a chain of events in motion that was threatening his own universe as well.
He felt his sanity besieged.
“All I want,” he explained, trying to remain lucid, “is the chance to run this by minds far wiser than my own. Believe me, I’m not the guy who should make decisions like this. Let me get word back to them.”
“We can’t trust that he’ll come back,” Paine cautioned Aldous and Samantha, “and we have no idea how much time Universe X still has.”
“Universe X? My universe?”
“Indeed,” Aldous confirmed. “Your universe crossed into ours, which began all of this tragedy. You may not have been aware of it, but you’ve been the focus of our attention for a long, long time.”
“And not in a good way,” Samantha added.
Old-timer turned to the Planck platform. Distraught, Rich and Djanet seemed to be discussing something. He could see them using their mind’s eyes to connect to the Planck’s systems, trying to override what they believed was a firewall. Then he looked down at his lifeless body, perfectly still. He wished he hadn’t seen such an image before, but his memory flashed back to the fallout in Shenzhen, another him, fallen and lifeless—another version of himself who’d died because of his actions.
“I’ll stay,” Old-timer said. “Just let me talk to them first. They can go back and report what’s happened and they’ll bring reinforcements.”
“What kind of reinforcements?” Paine asked, his eyes ablaze with scrutiny but intrigued nonetheless.
“The kind that we’re going to need if what you’ve told me is true.”
“If they go back without you,” Samantha warned, “they’ll have to take your body with them, and it’ll die if it’s separated from your consciousness for too long.”
Old-timer shook his head. “Not that body,” he answered. “It looks human, but it’s not. It’s enhanced—extremely durable. Please let me send them back.”
“We can trust him,” Aldous announced to his companions. “Besides, if we don’t let them go, we’ll be receiving visitors from their universe in short order anyway.”
“If he’s not bluffing,” Paine countered.
“Remember who you’re talking about here,” Aldous replied. “It’s Craig Emilson, the most selfless, heroic man any of us have ever met.”
“But you pointed out yourself,” Paine continued to protest, “that’s not him.”
Aldous smiled. “How different could he be?” He turned back to Old-timer. “We can’t escape our true nature.”
Old-timer remained silent, while, internally, he asked himself the same question. How different can a man be? He wasn’t sure if even he knew who he was any longer.
Paine finally relented and nodded. He looked at Old-timer strangely, as if he was replaying the memories of the man he once knew. “All right. Let’s trust him.”
“Th-thank you,” Old-timer said, continuing to stammer.
“After all,” Paine shrugged, “any universe that could corrupt a man like Craig Emilson isn’t worth saving.”
8
Thel didn’t even speak as she broke the surface of the water and took in a long, painful, lifesaving breath. The saltwater stung her eyes, and she blinked it away, narrowing her vision and focusing on the dark shape that appeared to be the shore, just a dozen meters
away. She tugged James’s body hard as it floated on the surface, still completely limp and lifeless.
The A.I. was equally silent as he swam with his one free arm and his legs, pumping through the nearly freezing water, struggling to see as the saltwater stung, summoning a flow of tears. He tried to turn, craning his neck for a glimpse of where the car had gone down, searching for any sign of the candidate. He couldn’t see the artificially generated intelligence that had attempted to murder them, but the darkness, and the continued splashing of saltwater into his face as they desperately tried to power their way to the shore made it impossible for him to know for sure if the candidate was still looming nearby.
“There.” Thel pointed out, breathless. She was cognizant enough of their predicament to know not to yell out and give their location away. Like the A.I., she was well aware that the candidate could be close.
The A.I. saw the rocky outcrop that Thel was making her way toward. It was the shortest distance for them to swim and there appeared to be a small, relatively level surface for them to get James on his back. It would be then that the desperate attempt to revive him could begin.
“The water’s cold,” the A.I. said in a low tone, just above a whisper, as he continued to struggle in the cold surf. The traumatized trio were only a couple of meters from the outcrop. “That is a blessing. It should buy us a little extra time to get him breathing again, before the damage to his brain is irreversible.”
Thel reached the shore first, and she clawed at the jagged rocks with her fingers, dragging her exhausted, bruised body up and out of the water. Once she was in a sitting position, the A.I. pushed James’s back and forced him up, allowing Thel to pull him further. She scrambled to her feet and pulled James the rest of the way out, grunting with the exertion, before placing him on his back. “What do we do?” she urgently asked the A.I., keeping her voice as low as possible.
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