by Eddie Patin
"Nah," Riley replied. "This blaster goes with me almost everywhere." Jason remembered them being weaponless in Citadel. Almost everywhere. "But I'll have a Gauss rifle and my Marlin. I'll have to get some more ammo—maybe something even denser than those Xtreme Penetrators."
When they reached the rendezvous—leaving the bustling foot traffic and now mostly out of view—Jason opened a rift which roared and sputtered and threw sparks. He was immediately dazzled and had to turn off his night vision; the light was blinding! Soon, they were looking into his garage.
Jason noticed a weird, colorful shape in the background on the stainless steel table next to the game processing sink. He stared at the anomaly for a moment, then shrugged.
"Come on," he shouted against the roar of the portal, leading the team through.
As soon as Jason stepped into the garage, followed by Riley and Gliath, he saw something that made his stomach and heart flip-flop and forced him to question his senses.
He, himself, was lying on the table on his back with one knee up, right arm draped off of the side. His head and neck stretched over the rim and into the sink. There was a splash of bright red on the back steel wall of the sink, gleaming metallically in the fire of the rift.
Is that blood? Jason thought, staring at himself and the red sheen on the stainless steel. The rift roared in his ears, ebbing and flowing with his increasing heartbeat.
Jason's body turned numb. His brain felt like it was turning inside out. He was confused. He was dead. His heart started pounding loudly in his ears and neck. The garage around the edges of his vision started pulsing with black. The sound of the portal blasting and sputtering behind him blurred together into a drone of thick, white noise...
It's me, Jason thought. I'm dead. I'm dead there...
He couldn't make sense of it. Jason thought that he was outside of himself, looking at himself sprawled dead on the table, head hanging into the sink...
Jason was standing there looking at himself dead...
And then he realized that it wasn't him. He wasn't having an out-of-body experience.
With a creeping fear as cold as waking up in a snowy field at night, Jason suddenly realized that the man lying on the table with head lolling in the sink ... was Jason 1241.
"Oh my God..."
His voice didn't sound like his voice.
Jason became dimly aware of Riley and Gliath appearing at his sides. The two mercenaries stepped past him to examine the body without a sliver of shock or pause or fear.
He's dead, Jason thought. The other me is dead. Me from another universe; dead.
"Holy shet..." Riley muttered. "The other Jason fruking offed himself!"
Chapter 10
"My name is Jason Leaper. I'm from a universe catalogued in my Omniversal Cosmic Scanner as u1241, but that number doesn't mean shit. It's just a number given to one of infinite universes by myself and Jason 934. I am one of many. I matter, and I don't matter at all. I thought—"
Riley scoffed. Jason 934 lowered the suicide note and frowned at him.
"Sorry," the soldier said, staring down at the concrete.
"I thought my life had meaning," Jason read on. "I'm thirty-three years old and I've lived a life of love, loss, and pain. The loss of my parents had meaning. When Mom and Dad died fifteen years ago, my life was changed forever; it was a tragedy that I never recovered from. Even now, I think of using my OCS to find a universe where they still live so that I can go back to how my life should have been.
"But I know that my parents live on in infinite other universes where they never died and I was never crippled; worlds where life went on and I did not drop out of college. There are universes where I went on to live a nice, normal life. If my entire life can be shaped by the loss of my parents, but infinite other versions of Mom and Dad still live on other Earths and other realities were I never came home to an empty house that day so many years ago, then what is my life? What is the relevance of their lives? I am dust. They are dust. We are all dust.
"In an omniverse where anything is possible and any consequences can be avoided by rifting into the next universe over to fix a problem, then nothing really means anything. This meaninglessness has been crushing me ever since I saw my neighbors—nice, innocent, real people—die as a result of my actions. I am responsible for the deaths of Mr. and Mrs. Hines as well as Dan and Tonya Clayburn and their children, Tim and Jennifer. Others may have died as well in the time it took to destroy the monster that I brought into my world. But here on u934, these good people are still alive and have no idea that they were murdered on my world. I have seen my neighbors brutally killed—I have seen some of their remains—and when I talked to their living versions here, I could not wash the blood and broken bodies from my memories. These people exist in infinite worlds. They are dead, and they are alive, and I cannot help but go mad under the weight of it all. The omniverse is incomprehensibly huge! Infinity is too much for my mind and the meaninglessness of it all—the constant view into the void—is too terrible for me to bear.
"As if dealing with the meaninglessness of existence isn't enough, I am also guilty of being a Jason Leaper. I did not ask to be born into this, but I recognize the insanity of being a multidimensional entity. There are infinite versions of me out there and each one of us that partakes in the power will inevitably walk between these infinite worlds and take what we want recklessly, leaving death and destruction in our wake. I have ruined my world and murdered innocents with my carelessness, and all Jasons will likewise eventually ruin lives and cause pain and sadness across space-time. As my final act of restitution to the omniverse, out of good will to the infinite innocent lives that I and other versions of me will destroy, I have decided to remove myself from the number of Jason Leapers out there who wreak havoc and break worlds in the pursuit of gold and glory.
"Jason 934, Riley, and Gliath, thank you for being my friends. I know you mean well, but Riley, you cannot exist in infinity while just pretending that the meaningless doesn't exist. All of you Reality Rifters, I wish I never met you. I rue the day that Jason 113 sent you my way, but Jason Leapers will be Jason Leapers, won't they? Jason 934, I urge you to stop planeswalking before you destroy something that you will regret for the rest of your life. If I was you, and I am, I would self-destruct. Our experience surviving the Wilderlands felt like such personal growth, didn't it? We weren't drifting through life anymore. But it's all the same. It's always the same. There's no meaning; no design. No point and no purpose. Pull the plug now and be done with it before the pain becomes unbearable and you lose your mind. We're all just dust in the wind..."
Jason 934 stopped reading where the words ended.
His hands that held the letter buzzed. Looking at the page, he saw his own hand-writing. The whole situation was beyond bizarre and assaulted him with a level of sadness that he’d never processed before.
It looked like his second self had committed suicide with a bullet to the brain pan over the game processing sink. Strange that he was considerate enough to avoid leaving a mess, especially with his final perspective of nothing matters.
Gliath stood in the garage near the stainless steel table and Jason 1241's legs, watching the reading of the letter and considering the dead body without any expression or words. His yellowish-green feline eyes were as impassive as ever.
Jason lowered the letter.
As he’d read the note, Riley alternated between smirking and shaking his head, crossing his arms over his chest and staring at the dead body. Riley used his body language to disagree with a lot being read. Jason could understand the soldier using cynicism and a bristly exterior to deal with the death. Did Riley feel guilty about it? he wondered. It was Riley's choices back on Maze World that had led to them ambushing the Nothrix, ambushed in turn by the alpha minotaur, which led to the clusterfuck that included the rampage through the homes of Kestrel Drive on u1241.
By now, Jason still couldn’t mentally find his way to a place where he completely
blamed himself for the deaths on u1241. Of course, it was his fault that the minotaur had rifted onto that world in the first place. But on his own universe of 934, and on u1242—the third Jason's world—the monster had merely caused a lot of property damage. There was no way to know that the tactics he and Jason 1241 had used up in the mountains would result in the death and destruction in u1241’s neighborhood. As Riley sometimes said, Shet happens.
Jason 1241 apparently had felt differently. Then, the guy went deep down a rabbit hole of nihilism.
Jason stared at his own dead body sprawled out on the game processing table with his head hanging into the sink, mouth hanging open and burned by muzzle blast, and the back of his head exploded around the stainless steel drain. There was even a dent in the sink where the bullet had hit after passing through his second self's skull. It looked like the round had slowed down enough to avoid piercing the sink bottom.
Full of confusing feelings of terror, sadness, sickness, and a strange, deadened numbness, Jason watched the body. He felt tears well up in his eyes. They fell when he blinked, then dried up.
He stood looking at his own dead face for what felt like a long time before Riley's hand on his shoulder made him jump.
"What?!" Jason snapped, feeling tears fill his eyes again. His heartbeat quickened. He realized that he was holding his breath, so let out a long, shuddering sigh.
"Are you okay, Jason?" Riley asked.
"I ... um ... I don't know."
"You know, some of what he said had merit, but that stuff about Jason Leapers? Don't worry about that shet. Zapping yourself definitely isn't—"
"I know that!" Jason replied, then caught himself and softened his tone. "Don't worry, Riley. I'm not going to listen to his suggestion. He's wrong. I don't fully understand why he's wrong, but I know he's wrong."
"Well, there ya go," Riley replied, clapping him on the shoulder. "You want a beer? Wanna think about this for a little while before we go to that gargoyle world?"
Fuck—Riley was already thinking about the job? Well, of course he was. It was an important job. They had to get to it. Jason had impressed Skinner by speaking up and taking it over. He didn't want to throw that away.
"No," Jason said, wiping his eyes and frowning down at his second self's slack, dead face. "Damn it. He made the wrong damned choice. If only he held out a while longer, if only he had the courage to face it, then he would have been okay." Now Jason felt angry. His heart was surging with all sorts of emotions. "What should we ... uh...?" He was about to say 'do with the body,' but he didn't want to hear Riley suggest leaving a Jason Leaper to be devoured by scavengers back in the Wilderlands. He choked on something rising in his chest like a geyser from his heart, then took a deep breath, feeling tears well up in his eyes again. "I mean—I don't really want to go to a funeral for another version of myself."
Riley took a few easy steps through the garage, then leaned over Jason 1241's corpse. He scratched his beard.
"Damn," he said, shaking his head. He looked back at Jason 934 and spoke gently. "My first thought—if you think it's a good idea, Jason—is to put him back in his own world. Maybe even make it look like he did it there. If the authorities ever return, they'll find him and ... eh ... tie everything up. Also, then, if we ever have to go back there, they won't be looking for you anymore."
Shit, Jason thought, looking down and shaking his head. How could Riley be thinking so clearly after walking in on this?
He sighed.
"Okay, let's do it."
"Just take his OCS, okay?" the soldier added. "We'll head over there in a few. Come on, Gliath. Get a quick bite to eat in case there's any trouble."
So that's what they did.
It was terrible.
After putting away the wyvern eggs and arming themselves fully again, the three of them stripped Jason 1241 down of anything that would be useful to keep; mainly his OCS and its sling, but there were also focus keys to the Wilderlands, Maze World, and the Market in his pockets. He had his own necklace with a 'home' focus key blank, which Jason tucked away into a zip-lock baggie he labeled U1241 Garage. Jason 1241 hadn't worn his Merc armor in several days—since he'd been bumming around the house mostly getting drunk—but Jason decided to keep the suit as a backup. It would definitely fit.
Looking through Jason 1241's wallet, Jason saw nearly the same of everything in there that he had himself with one exception: Jason 1241 had a membership card to a gun club with a picture of his face smiling goofy with his longer hair back before the Wilderlands experience. It was a place called 'Valor Point'. Jason pulled out his phone and did a quick search, not recognizing the name. There was no Valor Point Gun Club in Colorado; it must have been a quirk unique to universe 1241. Jason kept the membership card, feeling a strong desire to keep a memento of the other Jason.
When they rifted to universe 1241, Jason used the bookmark he'd set for his second self's living room. Upon arriving—all three of them touching down with Gliath carrying dead Jason in his long, muscular arms—Jason 934 immediately released the portal before its roar could draw any attention.
There was still a good second or two of swirling and roaring, but the rift quickly closed with a pop, and they were left in quiet darkness.
The police tape still hung on the door to the garage in the same way as after they'd pushed their way through it before. Nothing looked different. The light of day peeked through the blinds at the front of the room, and daylight shone through the window of the back door in the kitchen, just around the corner and down the hall.
"Gliath," Riley said. "Put him in the same place if there's no one watching from the street."
"Yes, Ranaja," the leopardwere said, stalking off to the garage on padded feet with the body.
Jason stared around the room. He wasn't quite sure what he felt.
This was all so surreal.
It was his house alright, but with police tape and everything turned off. Maybe the police had turned the power off for some reason. The TV had worked before, Jason remembered, but now, it seemed that the normal droning of the refrigerator, heater fan, and whatever else were all silent. The house was very quiet. Jason didn’t bother to test the TV.
Before long, Gliath had repositioned the body—along with the other Jason's pistol—to very-closely resemble the same scene they’d come home to an hour or so before. There was no dent in the sink, and no blood spatter or mess of brains and hair—Jason's stomach turned thinking about it—but what did it matter? He didn't want to go to greater lengths than this to make the suicide look like it had actually happened on this world. Like the dead Jason had said, it was all dust in the wind. Maybe the police on this world would think that something fishy was going on, but they'd have the man they were looking for. How much more would they look into it? Maybe they’d be satisfied. How likely was it that Jason would ever come back to this universe again, anyway? Maybe he'd come to sell some gold or something in the future, but there were plenty of universes for laundering his earnings. He just had to find them.
"We’re good," Riley said, stepping back into the room. "All done with 1241. You okay, Jason?"
Jason realized that he'd been mostly standing around in the living room the entire time.
"Uh ... yeah. I guess. Are we done here?"
"Not yet," the soldier replied with a smirk. "Gliath and I on this world probably have a stash of gold in your folks' room. We're gonna pick up any duplicates if they exist."
"But there was no Riley and Gliath."
Riley shrugged. "There were at some point. Maybe when you came here chasing the minotaur and got spun off into u1241 with dead Jason there, while Gliath and I were in the Wilderlands ... maybe we merged or something, so we're the same. I dunno. Planeswalking and time travel is fruking weird."
"Okay."
"You should also grab your other guns. I know he left the other Rigby back at base, but you had a lot more stuff in your safe, right? It'd be good to have two of everything I reckon."
/> Jason sighed. He just couldn't think about the right or wrong of it. His brain hurt, and whenever he closed his eyes, he could see himself lying there on that stainless steel table and sink.
"Alright."
Wandering to the kitchen, Jason grabbed some grocery bags then headed to his second self's gun safe to start loading up on ammo and gear. He found the safe busted open and cleared out.
Evidence, he thought. Damn. When the cops had searched the place, they must have confiscated all of the firearms. Shit—they took the ammo and everything.
Jason sighed and went to his other self's bedroom. He checked for gold, first heading to the old hiking boot up high in his closet. As he stretched up to reach it, he recalled that Jason 1241 never went home with a cut of gold from the minotaur job. He'd only put away the gold from the handful of hides they'd turned into Skinner the first time they went back to the Market. Jason searched the little hiding places he'd chosen back then: his sock drawer, his dad's dresser in the main bedroom (where Riley and Gliath were collecting their own stashed gear), and a little box behind his computer desk, and—
"Damn," he said. He'd stashed two ounces of gold in the gun safe. That was gone, of course.
Well, he had eight more ounces of gold than he had before. It occurred to Jason that he could make an entire living from stealing duplicate riches from other versions of himself if he wanted to. He shook his head and tried to smile. What a shitty life that would be. Then he wondered how many Jason Leapers were doing just that.
His heart was heavy and this house felt too much like his own.
The gold in his pocket make Jason feel like he was stealing from himself. He felt bad.
Eventually, Riley and Gliath were done doing whatever the hell they were doing, then all three of them ended up back in the living room.
"No guns?" Riley asked, cocking his head.
"Looks like the police emptied out the safe."
"Shet. Grab the beer."
Jason groaned and recovered a couple of six-packs from the fridge. The fridge was indeed off. His head was numb and his heart was dull and black.