by Alan Averill
A few minutes later, she hears Tak crunch his way through the snow and take up a position a few steps to her left. “Two years ago, I found a timeline where snow is different colors,” he says quietly. “Over there, you can see different spectrums of light, and the snow absorbed it somehow: blue and green and red all sparkling in the air. The people live in these little huts, and every time it snows, the kids gather it up in glass jars and shake them until the snow starts glowing. Then they run around in big dumb circles, giggling and holding up the jars to create these miniature firework shows…. It’s the most wonderful thing I’ve ever seen.”
He places a tentative hand on Samira’s shoulder. “We can do a good thing here. We can make amends. And when we’re done, I’ll take you to that timeline, and you can see that brilliant snow and watch those kids, and I swear you’ll never have a terrible dream again.”
She kicks at a small tuft of white snow and sends it flying into the wind. Her mind is a blur of dreams and guilt and terrible thoughts, but incredibly, there is also a small flicker of hope. She’d almost forgotten what such a thing felt like.
“I still don’t believe you,” she says quietly.
“That’s okay,” responds Tak. “You will.”
chapter ten
They drive for nearly an hour; Tak bearing down on the wheel like a man possessed, Samira staring out the window at an empty Nebraska sky. The entire adventure seems unreal, and Samira finds herself wrestling with the notion that the past few hours have been nothing more than a PTSD fever dream. What if I’m not really here? What if I’m actually in a VA hospital pumped so full of thorazine that I’m imagining my childhood friend is some kind of time-hopping policeman?…God, if that’s the case, I hope they just let me sleep it off.
Tak, however, harbors no such illusions. Samira’s decision to accompany him has filled him with a clear sense of relief, but she can still feel stress and tension flowing off him in waves. Every few minutes, he reaches under the seat and feels around until his hand lands on the slim, metal briefcase, as if reassuring himself that it hasn’t sprouted legs and run away. Each time a car appears on the highway, he tightens his grip on the wheel and stares at the rearview mirror until some unseen sign convinces him that they are not being pursued. Occasional beads of sweat pop up on his forehead and slowly dry into salty crystals, and whenever he reaches up to wipe them off, he runs his hand through his hair for good measure. After the first sixty miles, it’s sticking so high up that it scrapes the roof of the pickup.
Eventually, Samira rolls down the window and puts her head out into the cold night air. Nearly twenty hours from its last washing, her hair is beginning to curl into small, tight ringlets that bounce up and down against her back as the truck rockets along. Her father used to tell her that she had her mother’s hair; when she was a small girl, he would often sit on the sofa and brush it while she sat cross-legged in front of him and watched documentaries about African wildlife. He couldn’t get enough of such shows—he purchased them in bulk from the local public television station—and by the time Samira was in high school, she felt like a zoologist in her own right. As her father brushed, he would nod at the narration, occasionally interrupting his work to say “Did you know a lion could do that, Samira?” or “The world is fantastic, is it not?”
She finds herself tearing up at the thought of her father and quickly pulls her head inside and rolls up the window. If Tak notices her tears, he says nothing, and they spend another hour driving in silence. She doesn’t know where they are going, and actually doesn’t feel the need to ask; the more she learns, the more likely she is to decide that this whole plan is madness, and that means returning to her previous life. Even if Tak’s new reality is a total sham, she wants to hold on to it for as long as possible.
Finally, as if directed by an unseen force, Tak pulls onto a small strip of dirt pointing away from the highway. He follows the trail, the truck bouncing and juking over ruts in the road, until he arrives at a large, metal gate. Without a word, he shuts off the engine, grabs the case, and slips out the door, forcing Samira to bolt from the truck in order to catch up.
The two of them clamber over the gate and toward the west, skirting around the edge of a small, unlit farmhouse. Behind them, the sun is just beginning to rise, casting a thin pale glow on the surrounding nature. After a couple of minutes of walking, they suddenly stumble into a huge field filled with waving stalks of corn.
“This works,” mutters Tak. “Yeah, this’ll do nicely.”
He drops to one knee and sets the briefcase in front of him. Flipping the catches on either side, he grasps the top with both hands and lifts it open. Samira kneels beside him and stares inside with breathless anticipation. She’s been forming ideas of what is inside ever since he described its purpose, and her imagination has been demanding lights and wires and indescribable technology, both alien and frightening. But once the lid is pulled back and locked into place, all she can see is a round glass panel, two lights, and a few knobs. A dim green glow emanates from the panel and shines weakly off the nearby snow.
“That’s it?” she asks with dismay.
“That’s it,” responds Tak.
“This looks like a community theatre prop.”
“It’ll look better once it powers up.”
“I knew this wasn’t real,” she says with disappointment in her voice. “Why would you do this to me?”
“It’s gonna work, Sam. I don’t know how it works, but it does.”
“How can you not know?
“Because I didn’t build it, I stole it. What time is it?”
She glances down at her watch. “Ten to seven.”
“Okay, good.” He reaches into his pocket, removes a small black notebook, and begins to thumb through it as he talks. “So here’s the deal. They’re going to turn on the Machine, the real Machine, at ten seventeen Australian time. That’s seven seventeen here, so that means we have about half an hour before we have to make the jump.”
“Do we have to cut it that close?”
“Yeah, because this portable guy here doesn’t let us control how long we stay in the other timeline. It could be a day or a couple of minutes. And if we go too early and get pulled back, we’ll be here when they activate the real Machine and then…Well, you’re screwed. So we have to wait.”
Samira nods, then leans over and stares at the entries in the notebook. Tak glances at her for a moment, then holds it open so she can see. The page before her reads:
1 2 1 4 5 3 — Wasteland
1 3 7 7 7 1 — Portland? Where is this?
2 3 1 3 2 2 — Wasteland
4 2 1 6 4 8 — Holy shit, dude! Conduit dead.
1 3 2 1 3 8 — I think this was nuked.
3 1 5 7 6 9 — Mario Land! Yay!
“These are my notes,” he says by way of explanation. “Each number here corresponds to a dial in the portable Machine. So if I set it to 1, 2, 1, 4, 5, 3, then we’ll end up in that red sand wasteland I told you about.”
“What does ‘conduit dead’ mean?” asks Samira, as Tak flips another page.
“That’s, uh…That means that the doorway to that timeline isn’t open anymore.”
“Why not?”
Tak starts to answer, then turns away. “It’s the people I told you about,” he says after a moment. “The ones in the basement who hold the timelines open. Sometimes they die, and then I can’t go back to that world anymore.”
“You call them conduits?”
“Yeah, well, saying that Mary Joe Ellen died is just too damn depressing. Look, can we not talk about that right now? I need to find a safe timeline for us to visit.”
“Okay,” says Samira. She rocks back on her heels and twists one ring of hair around her finger. “Hey, Tak?”
“Yeah,” he says, distracted.
“What’s it going to be like? Time travel, I mean?”
“It’s not great,” he says without looking up. “You’re gonna see old memories, but they’
ll be all mixed up and weird. You’ll probably see some of my memories too, because when you go through the Machine with other people, it tends to smoosh ’em all together.”
“Is it going to hurt?”
“No, but you’re gonna be sick as a dog when we come out the other side because you didn’t eat enough pancakes. So just be ready for that.”
Samira giggles slightly at this. “I think I would have puked if I ate any more.”
“Yeah, well, you’re gonna totally paint the walls when we…”
Tak trails off. Samira starts to say something, but he holds up one hand to silence her. As she watches, he tilts his head to the side and closes his eyes, seeming for all the world to be listening intently to nothing.
“Oh, fuck,” he says suddenly.
“What?” asks Samira. She is about to ask again when Tak’s eyes fly open. One look at them tells her all she needs to know—he is absolutely terrified.
“What time is it!?” he asks.
“Uh, it’s…It’s seven.”
“Oh, fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck me running! They’re early!”
“What?”
“They turned it on early! Goddammit, we have go, we have to go now!”
She is about to ask him how he knows, how he can possibly know what people are doing thousands of miles away, when the air suddenly grows cold and thick. The sky above her, which had been glowing faintly orange just a moment before, begins to darken.
“Tak, what’s happening?” asks Samira, as her stomach clenches into a knot. “What’s going—”
“Put your hands on the plate!” he barks, flipping through the book with renewed speed.
“What plate? Tak, I don’t—”
“The plate!” he screams. “The glass thing in the center of the briefcase! Put your fingers on it!”
She does so instantly. Fear, that old, unwelcome friend, climbs from her gut to her head and makes a home there. She feels the way she used to feel before leaving on a patrol, a combination of nervousness, nausea, and shame.
“Okay, here!” Tak cries. He stuffs the notebook back into his coat and begins twisting the dials. As he does, the green light from the plate begins to brighten, becoming more brilliant with each click. By the time he’s turning the sixth and final knob, Samira’s fear has abated to a dull throb deep in her chest. There’s something hypnotic about the green light, something calm and peaceful and totally wonderful.
But as the final knob clicks, the green light begins to wane. The area around them gets darker, like all the light is being sucked from the world. After a moment, she realizes there’s something terribly wrong with the sky. And as Tak puts his hands over hers, and a deep musical tone bursts forth from the briefcase, she lifts her eyes and sees a large purple hole in the sky. It begins to slowly spread across the heavens like a tumor, wiping out the orange of the sunrise and replacing it with a sickening dark color. Lightning crackles from somewhere within the hole, then other sights follow: an explosion of light like she has never seen and colors that she has no names for because they shouldn’t exist. But these things are there only for a moment; seconds later, a hellish dark mass belches out of the hole and fully consumes the heavens, leaving the small green glow from the glass panel as the only light in the world.
The wind begins to bellow with fury, kicking up a blizzard of snow around Samira. “Tak!” she screams. “Tak, what’s happening?!”
“It’s the Machine!” he screams back. “It’s overwriting the solid timeline!”
She can barely see Tak anymore, so black is the sky. He’s become little more than a dark silhouette with spiky hair. Suddenly, she regrets ever doubting her friend. It’s true. Everything he said. Oh my God, it’s all true.
The moment she thinks this, Samira hears a noise from the depths of the briefcase. Seconds later, she feels her hands getting heavy, then her arms, then her chest. Within moments, it’s as if someone has wrapped her in a massive lead curtain, crushing her with equal force on every inch of her body. She tries to lift her head and fails, then manages with great effort to lift her eyes. She can see Tak now because he is glowing with streaks of white and blue, almost like she’s watching him on a television with bad reception.
She glances down and sees her hands stretch across the bottom of the case, fingers growing impossibly long and thin until they begin to disappear. The noise is terribly loud, drowning out even the howl of the wind, and she feels it reach into her head and push her eyes against their sockets. Her arms begin to stretch, growing thinner and thinner until they, too, begin to vanish from sight. The darkness and noise sear themselves on her brain until all Samira can do is close her eyes, grit her teeth, and, inside her mind, scream the loudest scream of her life.
Oh God, she thinks, as green light leaks out of the case and swirls around her vanishing frame. Oh God, oh God. This is what it’s like to die. I’ve done this to people. I’ve sent them to this place. Please, please, let this work. Please help me make it right.
Seconds later, as the world dissolves around them, Tak and Samira wink out into nothing.
chapter eleven
The first sign that something is happening is the small black dot that appears in front of the sun. It’s impossible to gauge the distance of the object; sometimes it seems to be hanging in the atmosphere, but then it will suddenly shift and move away. It looks like a kind of shadow that’s projected on the sky as opposed to being part of it. Most people stare at it with their mouths open and wonder what exactly is going on, but, far to the south, a woman with long red hair stands on a roof and begins to wonder what in God’s name she has done.
The dot hangs in space for nearly a minute, pulsing around the edges like the cilia of an amoeba. Word of the event spreads, and soon people all across the world are leaving their desks, abandoning their cars, and staring up at the sky in wonder. Neighbors who haven’t spoken more than a few words to each other in years clasp trembling hands across property lines. Soldiers drop their rifles and stand side by side with sworn enemies, gazing into a once-predictable sky that they had long since taken for granted. Presidents, CEOs, schoolteachers, homeless veterans, baseball players, cattle-dung sellers, train conductors, prostitutes, and thieves—billions of people of every race, creed, and status all stand in place and stare at the same black dot in the sky. It’s a moment of global unity unknown in human history; and for a few fleeting seconds, it is a beautiful thing.
But then, deep in the heart of a barren Australian desert, the Machine cycles up to half power. There is a terrible sound from the depths of the device. An alarm begins to wail. And suddenly everything goes to hell.
Across the world, people hear the terrible sound: a deep-throated bass roar that blasts out windows from New York to Nanking. The noise seems to be coming directly from the dark spot in the sky, as if it were alive and calling to them. Religious people take it as a sign of the end times—the judgment trumpet for which they have been waiting their whole lives—and suddenly find that they are not so sure of their salvation as they had been moments before. The harmony of billions of people staring into the same sky quickly dissolves into a shared panic. People flee into houses and pull the shades; they run into office buildings and huddle under stairways; they mount horses and camels and motorcycles and mopeds and ride as if they can somehow outrun the very universe itself. The sound rings out forever: a clarion call, a warning, a triumphant scream. On and on it goes, until it seems that the noise will tear the entire world apart.
But then, as quickly as it began, the sound stops. Sirens wail out across the civilized world and slowly die as power grids began to fail. The spot begins to eat its way across the sky, bringing with it an unnatural silence that is somehow worse than the noise of a few minutes before.
Time slows. People feel themselves getting heavy. Those who were trying to flee find that they can no longer move, while those who wanted only to sob in the arms of a companion discover their tears are too weighty to fall. Across the planet, the peo
ple of the human race can only stand in place, lift their eyes, and beg for whatever is happening to be over quickly.
The dot becomes a yawning purple hole that leaks out of the sky and into the streets, crawling down buildings like a thick syrup, enveloping everything and everyone in its path. This is the way the world ends, thinks the planet with a collective moan of terror. Not with a bang or a whimper. It ends in blackness.
The Machine cycles to full power.
There is a brilliant white flash, then nothing. The darkness shrinks down to a pinprick and vanishes, leaving a cheery yellow sun to shine on the daylight half of the earth once again. Across the world, electrical grids flicker back to life. People slowly disentangle themselves from each other and wonder why they are crying. And the memory of the past few minutes fades away and is lost. Mere seconds later, people are going back into their offices, picking up their phones, and resuming their business deals. Teachers go back to instructing their classes. Airline pilots return their attention to the controls. Ministers and priests and imams and rabbis once more begin to wait for a sign from their respective gods. It is as if the entire event, the most remarkable event in all of human history, never happened at all. But while most people simply forget everything and move on, there are a few exceptions. There always are.
• • •
in green bay, Wisconsin, a policeman named Martin Jarock stares at the traffic whistle in his hand and wonders where the hell it came from. He’s standing in the middle of an intersection with cars honking at him in every direction, and yet he can’t quite figure out how to put the device in his mouth. I can’t direct traffic, he thinks to himself. I sell kitchen equipment. I’m not supposed to be here.