“How dare you!” the Senator shouted. Heads turned toward them and he toned down his argument. He gritted his teeth and pushed through in a harsh voice, “You needed us. As I recall, you needed...what did you call us? Clout? Oh yes, you needed clout and importance where you were headed. That’s why we agreed to basically commit treason against our own world.”
She smirked. “And treason is the name of the game, my good sir. There’s no going back now. The president is probably already unraveling the conspiracy, and thanks to some well-placed clues I left behind, you and a few others in here are more than implicated in the decisions made.”
Senator Dipwad gasped, speechless at what he was being told.
“So, we wait. I have a man who is reestablishing control over the situation. Our travel papers have just hit a...snag, so to speak. So why don’t you go over to the corner and sit down. When the time is right, you’ll see these portals light up like Christmas and we’ll get to start a whole new life in a brand new world, untouched by the violence that we’ve seen here. We’ll have the chance to start anew.”
The man’s jaw was just a few centimeters from the floor, but he managed to walk away with a sliver of his dignity intact. He didn’t head straight for the corner as Penelope had suggested, but instead slumped against a wall about five feet away from it.
She looked at her watch and saw that about fifteen minutes remained on her and Nicholas’ deadline. The man always had a thing for her and she knew he would do anything—even sacrifice his own shot at the new world—for her. After seeing Penny and Nik and their life together, it gave Penelope pause at her course of action, but just briefly. She was too dedicated at this point. Besides, that was a different life. A different person entirely.
She shuddered to think of living in a town in rural Indiana, and quickly shoved it to the back of her mind. The portals were off, and Nicholas had pledged to do whatever it took to get them on again.
_____
Dr. Lleyton Bridges stood at the instrument panel in the Engine Room, his hand hovering over the control to turn the interdimensional portals back on.
“You can’t,” Hoppy said. Bridges turned his head and saw Hoppy and Marie looking at him. The only two in the room who really understood the science of what he had done. But forgetting what he had done, what about the ethics? If he didn’t turn the portals back on than his grandchildren—his only grandchildren were going to be killed by a man who was genetically identical to his son-in-law. This was not only preventable, this was his fault. He didn’t have to build the portal system in the first place. He didn’t…
Marie interrupted his thoughts. “I know. It’s easy to second-guess your decisions. I did the same thing in Arizona. My friend...I failed him. I survived and he didn’t. He was the hero, and I simply survived. What good was I? What could I do when only I won the lottery of life that day?”
Bridges pulled his hand away from the switch that activated the portals. “My dear, it isn’t that simple.”
“Isn’t it though? You’ve lost a lot. I get it. But we all have. We’ve all had to sacrifice to get to this point. Some more than others—maybe you most of all. But don’t make those sacrifices worth nothing by negating them with the easy way out, now. I’m sure when you first created the portal system, you did it with the intention of helping humanity and to further science,” Marie pushed.
Bridges nodded.
“Then you can do the same now. Humanity doesn’t need all of them in that portal room mucking around on an earth that isn’t their own. It might be tough, but give Agent Smith time to work. He isn’t perfect, but that man is the best federal agent I’ve ever had the privilege of working with.”
Bridges let his shoulders sag. Marie was right. He couldn’t let emotion take over now. Science and reason had gotten him this far—he needed to see it through to the end. It wasn’t rational to simply let Penelope win.
Marie smiled and let out a small laugh. “Besides, it isn’t like we could send her to a third Earth, could we?”
Bridges might’ve sworn a cartoon light bulb appeared over his head. He carefully looked around the room and then back at Hoppy and Marie.
“Funny you should say that.”
_____
The tunneling was slow going for Smith and A. Street, but the pair needed it to be as quiet as possible as they headed towards Nicholas and his four-pack of hostages.
“Where are we going to end up?” Agent Smith asked, his eyes focused on the damage the drill in front of him was inflicting on the earth. As terrorizing as the drill might have been, it was relatively quiet. Only the displaced earth made noise.
“We’ll come out right underneath Dr. Bridges bed. If we plan it right, we can stop the drill as soon as we break through and he won’t hear us at all,” Agent A. Street said. He held a small tablet in one hand and his gun in the other. Smith decided he liked the two agents—even if their similarity was disconcerting. Well, he supposed not everyone had an “evil” twin.
“Good deal,” Smith said. He looked down at the tablet. Less than seventeen minutes left. He hoped he could contain Nicholas and rescue the hostages in that amount of time. Unfortunately, there wasn’t really time to make a plan. Not a good one, anyway. Smith knew he had more training and more field time than Nicholas would have, so in a way, he was depending on his own skill to overcome this world’s Agent Green. If only I’d blown up the Davidson’s house before he brought this creep back with him, Smith thought to himself. Everything would be different—Wesson would be in one piece and his entire team would be wrapping up their investigation. But, Nik and his family would have suffered—would all have probably been dead by now, and who knows if Penelope would have infiltrated his earth without his knowledge…
The mind-bending possibilities were too much to think about. Smith would leave that up to the U.C. psychologist after he got back; he knew Director Wall would require at least a few sessions with Dr. Bolz before he could resume active duty. For now though, he needed to focus on the portal drill operating just a few feet away from him.
“We’re almost there,” A. Street said in a whisper. Smith drew his own gun and held it in his left hand. His right hand rested on the drill controls, ready to pause the action once it broke through into Bridges room.
Light streamed in, and Smith blinked.
_____
Back in the Engine Room, Marie and Bridges were talking excitedly and rapidly, working out math on paper and occasionally arguing about the end result.
“Time is running out and this could be our last chance!” Bridges shouted.
“I know. But we have to do it right, or the entire system will collapse,” Marie replied. She put her hand on his shoulder and he exhaled and sat down for more calculations.
Nik and Penny huddled in the corner, waiting for the moment they could reclaim their children.
Hoppy, on the other hand, was working furiously at an alternate workstation on the other side of the room. Closed circuit video footage was playing in multiple windows on his desktop, over and over. He would click on one and examine it, blowing it up and inching it along pixel by pixel, but quickly, as if there was a hidden and imminent rationale for his actions. One video stayed constant—the feed from the Portal Room where Penelope and her two dozen or so followers waited with ever-increasing frustration for their door to open to another world.
For Hoppy though, that window could have been invisible. He didn’t care about the present or future...not when the past had a much more interesting story to tell. A story that could affect everything. Then he saw something. It could have been nothing, but with everything else, it was definitely something.
Hoppy knew he wasn’t supposed to have found this. With the anticipation and action happening all around him, this footage was supposed to have been lost to the ages. But there it was. Begging him to do something.
“Agent Street?” Hoppy called out. Agent E. Street had been wat
ching the complicated math sparring of Dr. Bridges and Marie, but was more than happy to divert his attention towards Hoppy. He took a few steps over to the analyst.
“What’s up?”
Hoppy hesitated.
“Come on. If you’ve got something, let’s hear it, Hoppy.”
“Well, uh, you might want to see this,” Hoppy said. E. Street walked around to behind Hoppy and looked over his shoulder as the analyst played one video clip and then another.
E. Street was silent for a few seconds after them.
“Agent Street?”
“I’ve got to go. Don’t show those to anyone else. If I fail, they won’t have mattered anyway,” E. Street said. He unclipped his gun and checked the chamber and magazine. Still brooding over what he saw, Agent E. Street strode away from the Engine Room, and after a few steps Hoppy could hear them fading away.
“What was that?” Nik Davidson asked.
Hoppy hurriedly closed the videos open on his desktop. “Uh, nothing.”
Nik and Penny’s eyes met and they were instantly on their feet. “What’s going on? If it’s about our kids, we deserve to know.”
“I...I can’t tell you,” Hoppy stammered.
Nik shoved Hoppy against the wall. “Darn right you can tell me. It’s my family! Tell me what’s going on!”
Hoppy crumpled to the floor, tears flowing from his eyes.
“Leave him alone.”
Nik looked up and found Dr. Bridges right behind him.
“You don’t know what they did to him. Do you see his fingers? They—Penelope and her people have been messing with Hoppy here for years. Give the man a break,” Dr. Bridges said. “Besides, I need you and Penny to come over here. We need to talk. Hoppy, I think we’re going to need you, too. I would love to give you as much time as you need, my friend, but I’m afraid time is of the essence.”
Hoppy sniffed and stood up, refusing to look Nik in the eye.
“What’s going on, Dad?” Penny asked.
“Well, I’m going to chalk it up to Marie here. She said something about transporting Penelope to another world,” Bridges started.
“Right, but we’re trying to stop her from getting there,” Penny replied.
Bridges face broke out into a huge smile.
“But maybe we shouldn’t be stopping her,” Bridges said. “I say we should let her go through the portal, but instead of going from here—we’ll call it Earth 2—to what we might call Earth 1, let’s send her to Earth 3.”
Hoppy narrowed his eyes.
“You mean you’ve figured it out?” he blurted.
“Actually I did have limited success in breaching the barrier between our world and another one a few months ago, but with all of this going on lately, I haven’t done much more work on it. The problem is that I would need to recalibrate the controls on the doors in the Portal Room to make it possible. So, someone would need to do that and right now there are a couple dozen enemies of ours in there along with a very vengeful version of a daughter of mine,” Bridges said wryly.
“So, we’re saying we want to switch the portals to go to that other world rather than ours. Penelope and her crew would go through, expecting our world, but they would get something else entirely—maybe a U.S. that never won World War II or something like that, but we need to get in there to do it,” Marie said.
The group was silent for a moment.
“I’ll go. You need a distraction. I can do that,” Penny said.
Dr. Bridges’ face softened. “Oh honey, you don’t have to.”
Penny sighed deeply and nodded her head. “Yes. Yes, I do. I have to do this. If I don’t get some things off my chest, I’ll regret it for the rest of my life. I’ll distract her by confronting her about her actions involving me and my family. I’ll play up the drama a bit, but I’m not sure much acting will be required.” She reached down and took her husband’s hand. “Nik will come with me—she would expect him to be there as well, and Hoppy here can do the maintenance work on the portal controls, right?” Penny asked.
Hoppy looked up at Bridges.
“That’s what we were figuring. Hoppy, you up for it? I’ll give you a code. All you have to do is get to each of the portal controls and input the code. Put it in a majority of the control panels and they’ll propagate it from there. So with twelve portals on site, you need to hit at least seven, okay?”
“Whatever you say, Dr. Bridges. I trust you.”
When A Plan Comes Together
For Smith and A. Street, the space under Bridges’ bed was cramped and filled with dust bunnies. Thankfully, the bedroom was sealed off from the main room of the basement apartment. Nicholas and the kids were in the next room and so far, they hadn’t made enough noise to disturb Nicholas.
Smith shoved the mirror drill off to the side and shimmied out from under the bed. He stuck his arm under the frame, and gripped A. Street’s hand, pulling him out of the diagonal hole he’d created to get into the room.
“From the angle of the video, I expect Nicholas to be behind the door with the kids behind him. I don’t know if that is ideal, but nothing about this is perfect,” Smith said.
Agent Street put his hand to his face, apparently deep in thought about how to approach the situation. “We don’t want to hurt any of the kids,” he said. “I think I might be able to see a little bit into the next room if I peek under the door. Let me check.”
Without any further discussion, Street walked to the door separating the two rooms and crouched down to look under the threshold. He craned his head back to Smith.
“Agent Green is positioned on the far left side of the room with the kids against the right wall. If you go in now, you might be able to catch him by surprise.”
Smith sighed, realizing this was a poorly thought-out plan, but it was what he had. If he failed, he could at least say he tried.
“Okay. I’ll go first. Cover me.”
He reached the door handle, and silently counted to three, quickly and quietly opened the door on the third beat.
Street was wrong.
Nicholas was standing less than two feet away, a gun in one hand, and Jodi in the other. The girl was struggling, but relatively unharmed. In spite of the seriousness, Smith relaxed a little; Jodi was fine.
He, however, was not. Just inches behind his left ear, a gun was cocked.
“Sorry Muchacho. Time’s up,” Street said. “I kinda liked you, Agent Smith.”
Crap.
_____
Penelope checked her watch again. Less than ten minutes to go. Of course they would wait until the final moments. Of course.
Across the room, a portal activated. The light above the once-dormant mirror flashed red, then green, and the ripples began. Penelope wasn’t the only one to notice; most of her party was already anxious for the moment the portals would activate to allow them transportation to their new homeworld. The din, already low and steady, increased, and a few voices could be heard cheering the opening of the portal.
Penelope knew better and shushed the crowd.
The quiet lasted for about five seconds. Until Penny walked through—looking exactly like the woman who was leading the expedition behind all of them. The room exploded in a tumult of voices, and didn’t abate even when two other men walked in behind her—Nik and Hoppy.
Nik and Penny walked towards Penelope, while Hoppy stayed behind, hovering near the portal which had shimmered shut and then blinked off.
As if they were the Red Sea, and she were Moses, Penelope’s followers parted to let Penny and her husband through, essentially pointing the way to their leader. Two men wouldn’t let them through—Penelope’s last guard.
Penny went right up to the men, and put her finger in the bigger one’s face.
“Excuse me. I’d like to talk to myself. Move it,” Penny instructed.
The men paused, and Penelope paved the way. “Let them through, but be ready for anything.”
The two moved aside. Penny took two more steps and pointed the same finger in Penelope’s face. “Let our kids go. They have nothing to do with this.”
“I beg to differ,” Penelope said.
Penny saw movement out of the corner of her eye—Hoppy sliding along the wall, trying to stay inconspicuous, but if she saw him, she wondered if others might as well. The words Penelope was saying were hurtful enough that Penny didn’t have to put on much of a show, but she knew there needed to be a show nonetheless. Penny ground her teeth for a second, considering her next decision. “How so?”
“They’re my leverage. If you and our daddy dearest don’t do what I’m asking, they’ll pay for your mistake. Hence—leverage,” Penelope said.
Even if Penny hadn’t intended to create a diversion in the first place, she doubted she would have been able to stop herself. When that final “leverage” came out of Penelope’s mouth, Penny released a primal scream and leaped at her doppelganger.
“You…bitch!” Penny cried. She shoved Penelope to the ground and straddled her torso, pinning her arms to the floor. She bent low, so she could be face to face. “Look at me!” Penelope was struggling, but Penny got closer, nose to nose. “Look at me, damn you! We’re the same person! Genetically, those are your kids, too. Their grandparents are Lleyton and Tricia—you know, your parents. You can’t tell me you have no feelings.”
Those who had come with Penelope gathered in close, like a crowd of junior high kids at a fight between seventh grade girls. The two men who had previously moved in to protect Penelope crouched down and grabbed Penny’s arms, but Penelope waved them off. She pushed Penny back and sat up, dusting off her jacket.
“They’re not my kids,” Penelope said distractedly, “Sure, they share some of my DNA, but so does my hair. Do I cry at my monthly haircut? No. Besides, you’re just from one world of many— hundreds, or millions maybe. There are plenty of other worlds out there where we’ve never met, where your kids are safe and sound, and where my father is still alive,” Penelope shot back.
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