“Is that yours?” The man asks through a white mustache that sloshes as he speaks.
“Is what mine?” she asks.
“That there on the floor deary, or doe. You dropped that,” the man says.
“My, sweat?” she asks.
“Yes, that’s right madam.”
“I guess.”
“Well it's rude of you to litter. You get that up, will you?”
“And how do I do that?”
“By sipping it of course. Acting as though you don’t know what I’m talking about. Ha, the nerve of some people.”
“I'm not doing that.”
“Sure you will, it’s the law,” the conductor states.
“Do I have to sip it off the ground?” she asks Cider, who laughs through saying, “It’s the law.”
“I guess,” she squeaks, and she looks to her feet to see the puddle of sweat lifting from the cracks as a splash of water and vapor rising up to her shoulders. Collecting into the shape of an empty coffee mug that floats closer to her unsure face and tips to her lips. At first she resists, then sips it down, tasting to her like chilled raspberry mint tea, with a warm sensation leaving her muscles loose like untied ropes, while slowing her movements and relaxing her mind.
“I think I'm going to blow chunks,” she slurs. The bellhop looking conductor blows his whistle and reappears at his post under the split-flap board showing departures and arrivals.
“Who's chunks?” Cider laughs, “how was it?”
“A little bit like honey.”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“WHAT? Then why?” she shouts.
“Deary or doe, he gave you a clue. C'mon, we should catch that train, this Alto is done for,” he says making for the last silver subway car in the line of a hundred, or a thousand.
Beep Boop.
“NOW!” he shouts, she quickly follows, until feeling an electric pulse surge through her brain. Stopping her in place as the doors close on her, squeezing her and opening to squeeze her again.
“Oh that's right. It's your first time. It could be a bit, overwhelming,” he says loudly so the other passengers don’t see her as strange for holding the doors on them. This being her first step out of her own Alto and into the Altonevers is a bit of a shock to the senses. Everything to her inside the train car is haloed in its shape by an aura of blue light. Her mouth dries as her ears are invaded by a low vacuous waaaaaaaaaaa-ing noise. Her body numbs and pulsates the sensation of pins and needles through all of her senses at once. Anna splashes into the seats with heavy heaving breathes next to him. Each melting in relief on a two seat bench next to the conductor’s quarter, opposite the closing doors. A massively dense map of infinite depth showing the infinitely intertwined Altonevers stations is behind their tired heads. That she leans against, away from him and sinking into the seat, exhaling until she deflates herself and sits, stirring in the shock of surviving.
“We made it. How do you feel?” he asks.
“Alive, thanks,” she says pecking him on his cheek, and resting her head on the map. He slumps against the pole as the doors clunk mechanically closed. Their shoulders sway and her head is tugged to the wall, as outside the train, pillars and light blur past her line of sight, looking like looking through fast spinning fan blades. Before blending into a solid blue gray as the train immeasurably accelerates and vanishing into a lightless tunnel. Depriving her of almost all sensual orientation, but for her and the other passengers popping out of this reality and into the shadowless black like a raindrop rejoins a puddle. In an instant they're gliding along the curves and angles of the nacreous amber rails, the only thing glowing through a scentless, empty black.
The lights flicker, eventually coming on to show the interior of the train car and its window light echoing reflections. A moment later the black is swept away, unveiling a colossal churning nebulous wave of metropolitan matter cresting toward the ruptured sun beaming from high above. The amber rails surf along its curving surface, splashing in and out of the cataclysmic wave’s trough. The vague shapes of the city’s skyline are splayed across its vaporous surface, as though stretched specters projected up the face of the celestial sized tidal wave facing them. The turbulence lasts for seconds, minutes or hours, as they sit unmoving, unbothered by any gravity or physical sense at all. Numb to anything but the silent sight of coming completely un-tethered from the reality they're watching form into a wave of all matter rendered to Anna's memories. All she's ever known reducing to effulgent vapor rushing by a foot from the windows. The train rides the wave a little before four o’clock, then sways, banking heavily to its left. Sailing away from the curling atomic ocean like wave of sublimation. Escaping its velocity and careening into starlit space faster than can be formulated using the known forces of nature.
CHAPTER THREE
Hole in the wall
“The Altonevers are an infinite, in theory anyway. They say that if it were ever to be seriously contemplated, the footnotes of the formulations would take up the infinitely expansive existence it persists in. In reality stretching far past any conceptions of infinity as it would be impossible to travel to its ends in any direction to ever truly know. None have succeeded in doing so and everyone in the know has given up hope to care. It's scope is incomprehensible when compared to everything that has come into being, or any civilization that has pondered the question of persistence. Many a person's life, and even entire histories have been lost around the idea of reaching the other end, none have ever have gotten anywhere, not even a measurable amount of its immensity. Some of these peoples existing before time itself, but whose time and what time, where? As each Alto is itself its own, bound by its own standards. Its own time, histories, creations and cultures. No two are the same, though parallels do exist, as echoes to whomever is their own present. Each individual moment of even an individual's life, of just one of these countless Altos, is itself a manifestation of the infinite possibilities of their present plausibly unfolding in the circumstance created by the past. The path they were previously on that has lead them to their present.
Collectively the individuals form civilizations, that, one way or another are connected to the InterAlto system, collectively known as the Altonevers. Travel through InterAltos can occur in any way that travel does. Most commonly and predominantly used by all, is by rail, also called the InterAlto. To get a ride by other means is called a fetch, Like by a car. There are taxi drivers who make a living solely off the trip. By boat, plane or rocket, sometimes bicycles. Even by just walking, though not often, can take you away to a new plain. Sometimes accidentally slipping through the cracks of everything known to you, and into an another with simply the blink of your eye.
There are many civilizations, plains interconnected culturally and historically, closely bound. All are reachable, though some are a ways more remote. When an Alto is interacting with another Alto, it’s an open Alto. Through the InterAlto’s, someone from one open Alto can touch, see and breathe in galaxies full of societies in their lifetime alone. A single stop on the rail can be whole multi-verses in size, or as small as a single village or a puddle ,maybe a pebble. When they are less interactive they are known as hermits, and when they are out of the loop entirely they are closed. If an alternate Alto exists along the same rails as its original, it's a parallel. When one is after the other on the stations map or path chosen, they are said to be in series, or on the thread. There are more Altos, and amber rails than the number of skies in a universe. More than the number of peoples to ever exist, more than the perspectives of every person to be held, and the infinitely numerous civilizations of the Altonevers itself are miniscule to its scope.”
“Sounds like something you like,” she says a bit uncomfortably and a bit amused.
“You should hear the sounds of the languages, the way a tongues can move is countless, and see the colorful cultures and subcultures of each plain. There is so much, ya know.”
“Really.”
; “Yeah,” he says excited nearly standing in excitement to be telling her, “to know all or even think you know anything in the Altonevers is ludicrous, insane and irrational, which one must actually be to even attempt to understand their breadth. The ruin of countless civilizations according to legend. A strange thing they say, the more you know of it, the less you understand it. So to contemplate it is to not comprehend it. No one knows how it’s happening or came to be, but it is, and around a single obsidian mass supposedly at the core of it. The Central Station, called simply Central, is the heart of the InterAlto system. The center of all things to ever be conceived. Where all the eternities of the Altonevers converge and emanate from. The trains ceaselessly arriving and departing in every direction at once. I've only been there once,” Cider says sentimentally.
“I'd love to see that,” she says.
“Well good, because you have to, if you want to get home anyway.”
“Why?”
“Well we can’t just take the next thread back. That's not how it works, we have to get to Central, and work our way back to your home Alto, your standard. It's the only way to be sure you get back to the time and space that you've left behind.”
“Have you ever went back to your, home?”
“No,” he replies. “so each new Alto will have its own standards, right?”
“Standards?”
“It's traveler's talk. It's the Alto you’re entering, like the physical laws of the place or their culture, like how they measure time or distance. Like you have, sorry had, minutes and inches, pounds or whatever. They have whatever they have, how they eat, what they eat, what they wear, their culture, what they exist in, their customs are its standard. How they operate, I guess. The weather as it’s more commonly called as it includes their environment as well.”
“Oh,” she says.
“The weather,” he smiles.
“You’re a weather chaser, aren’t you?” she asks, wondering why he has gun in his jacket, and another at his ankle, but no camera or even a thermometer.
“Uh, yeah I am. The good weather to find and feel is of one that would be an anomaly or impossibility anywhere else, but are normal happenstance of that Alto.
“Like how the Aurora Borealis is normal to Eskimos, but exotic to us?”
“Uh, sure, or like how Kansas is tornado country but the west coast is brimming with earthquakes, but it's only good weather if it's unique to the time and place. Twisters and shakers are not themselves good weather in that way, but if say there are twisters of earth or somehow the sky fissures like from a shaker, then that would be good weather.”
“I get it. I think it's nice that you enjoy that sort of thing,” she says.
“Why?” he asks.
“I don't know.”
“Well, but what does that say about you?”
“Yes, but only if they really see it, and feel what they are seeing,” she says smiling. “So what's a real example of weather”
“Okay. I've been to a place where nothing is solid, only liquids under different pressures behaving as though they’re solids. The peoples of there are human in shape, though see through with a visible bones that looked like lightning. They're called Jupitans, and they’re a vapor people. At their heart is a miniature black hole. They feed on smaller vapor fish looking things to sustain themselves, or they're consumed by their own hearts. The weather is what they exist in, liquid solids in an ocean of stellar dust”
“How did you survive?”
“I didn't even get off the train, those are sometimes the funnest, the ones you have only to think about what’s there and never see it. Not all places, in fact most aren’t suitable for just anyone, but no worries that still leaves an uncountable amount of places to be. I've been at it for a long, long while in days, and still haven’t seen even a fraction of a fraction of what's possibly out there.”
“Don't you mean years?”
“Years are irrelevant when you travel the rails. A few days here, a few days there, a day’s length varies from place to place. Time is almost completely irrelevant, but for lunch and sleep that follows anywhere you go.”
“Only thinking of what to eat, eh, typical,” she laughs.
“No, I meant when you have an appetite is mealtime. Whenever you sleep is night, your internal clock is all that comes to count.”
“Travel itself has to be tiring, like jet lag?” she asks.
“Kinda, though it’s more like at each stop your brain is scrambling, reconfiguring to comprehend the sights and sensations that your own species didn’t evolve to process, as it wasn’t your-”
“Standard,” she cuts him off.
“See, your gettin’ it. So let's say the color blue, like the sky, you know why the sky is blue right?”
“Yes.”
“Anyway, what’s blue to you or us, is not blue to another person or person thing.”
“Right, because their eyes are adjusted to their standard,” she says.
“Wait, if they all have different times and that, how does it function? how do they schedule the arrivals?”
“They don’t,” he laughs. “It's chaos, they need millions of astrophysicists just to know when one train will show up at one station, let alone the trillions or whatever others. They just show up when they do and life goes on. But they do have their own time, in the InterAltos system, so they will arrive at say 73 IAT, though that could be anytime at the actual station the train eventually arrives at” he says.
“This is all very confusing.”
“It sounds confusing in theory, but not for us. We just ride the rails, and sails, or whatever it is at the moment, onto the next Alto. Simple stuff in practice, a person from one Alto may be a waitress or a banker in another, coming and going just as you do from home to work,” he says.
“Where are we going now?”
“Who knows exactly, but as long as we're on the right path, right?”
“Right” she agrees, thinking she doesn't know what path she's on.
“And what’s most important,” he says. “Wherever you are, act like you've been there before.”
“Ah,” she oh's. The train banks sharply left, showing Anna a new set of speed stretched stars marbling her view to marvel. A sea of blurred suns, in their depths and sizes, clusters and formations staring for long enough to she sees larger celestial patterns forming of them. Thinking of how much it all resembles the speckling on the train car's floor.
On the train with them, to their left in the middle of the car is a boy seeming no older than ten in a tuxedo that's slightly too small, tight around his wrists and neck. Across from a girl appearing about his age in a dress. Both having powder blue faces and pale silver hair, with large black watery eyes.
“Youths of another Alto,” Cider whispers into his coat.
“The blue ones?”
“Shh, yeah, they're not always blue. Their skin takes on the sky of their feeling.”
“Is this the weather from before?”
“No, these are Terullians. Watch, they're the weather they feel” he says as the kids exchange grazing glances, then match eyes, excited, the boy brightens to light red’s and yellow’s. He looks away, shyly unsure of what to say. The girl frowns for a second then smirks, unseen by him. He catches Anna staring, who looks away but takes to her peripheral. A patch of clouds forms over the boys head, he doesn’t notice until it drizzles on him, cooling his orange to a blushing pink of embarrassment. The girl giggles loudly and glows, covering her sunlit laugh with her hand, as her happy eyes show it like it's shining through open windows. The boy smiles, casting a cloud over her that spins into a hurricane and ruffles her hair, the girl tries to speak, but stutters instead. The clouds swipe back and forth in currents, then bridge between the two, mixing the drizzle with the swirl into a warm sun shower.
“Sit next to her will you, your flooding the damn train. Hooligans!” shouts a grouchy suit in priceless loafers from behind a penny paper. The boy, emboldened, gets
up and walks with his head through the clouds to sit next to the girl. Sliding closer as they smile and glow a golden red radiating through the interior and windows while dancing like light through a shallow pond. Then beaming and amplifying, erasing the train and its inhabitants with each brightening fluctuation.
“What's happening?”
“This is normal, we’re transitioning to the next station.”
“This is how it happens?”
“It's different every time,” he says, shrugging. The two, and the things around them return fairly quickly to their proper shapes. Their physical senses resurface over the seconds after. The wheels screech and shriek as the amber rail becomes the scratched steel of another Alto.
“We're getting off here.”
“Where's here?”
“I don't know yet.”
“We're lost?”
“Usually, but that’s a state of mind, I think so anyway.”
“Are we lost or not?”
“No worries, I know the way. Were just making a quick stop.”
“Why‘re we getting off here?”
“It's just a place, and it's night time. To me anyway, you’re not tired? we should find a place to rest.”
“Don't get any idea's,” she says.
“Not until you spread them,” he answers.
A throbbing sensation emanates from well within Anna's chest as they enter the station. Her bones are reverberating through her vertebrae, her skin is sliding over pulsating flesh. Seeing resonance in primary colors as her sight, in strobes of flashes that grow to overlap and form into vague shapes. At first seen as though she'd just woken up, then slowly becoming defined and refined into a lucid physical realism. The waaaaaa-ing in her ears lowers to a bearable hum as the wheels screech then shriek, spraying molten metal in coming to a complete stop. Just as they and the trains interior becomes recognizable to her senses, and rendered to definitive shapes, the doors slid open to the station. She’s unsure, anxious of what she'll see , or be, in this Alto. Again in the grips of gravity, she stands from sleeping limbs, shedding vertigo with each step off the train. Merging into the morning swarms of coffee clad fists and clean shaven faces. All with frightened eyes, awoken for responsibility, are echoing the moonlit morning sunrise under a band of crowding thunderclouds. She follows him, weaving in and out of their flocks of peacoats while jostling through the in rushing tide of shoulders and briefcases. He grabs for her hand, but gets her sleeve, and tugs her through the clicking of heels and shuffling of shoes.
The Altonevers Page 3