by Peter Clines
Olaf opened his mouth, then closed it with another snort.
“No,” said Neil. “No, no, no.”
“All of us?” Sasha looked at Neil, at Arthur, and then at Mike. “How can you be sure?”
“Because you’ve all been through the Door,” Mike said. “Just like Olaf said, anyone who’s gone through would have switched.”
“This is nonsense,” said Olaf, and for a brief moment he sounded like Bogart, too. “We were all given multiple exams.”
“The exams were all looking for something that had gone wrong,” said Mike. “Nothing else. And they still missed something important, something you wouldn’t’ve thought to test for.”
“What?” Jamie’s eyes were calm, but still wide.
“Disease,” Mike said. “Each of you is carrying different versions of the flu, the common cold, and probably some other stuff that never took hold. And you’ve all got different resistances. That’s why there’ve been so many sick days.” He shrugged. “I’m tempted to say that’s what caused the last two or three flu scares here in San Diego.”
Olaf brushed the words out of the air. “The many worlds interpretation is nonsense,” he said. “It’s a mathematical party trick, nothing else.”
“We would’ve noticed,” said Neil. “How could someone be replaced without everyone else noticing?”
“You did notice,” Mike said. “All of you did. You just didn’t understand what you were seeing.”
Arthur furrowed his brow.
“When I first came out here,” said Mike, “most of you mentioned memory problems. Arthur, you told me you’d forgotten the date of your anniversary. Bob was confused about which trailers Jamie and Sasha lived in. Olaf thought his office was on the other side of the hall.”
“My office is on the other side of the hall,” snapped Olaf. “It was another one of Bob’s stupid jokes.”
“We’ve been busy,” Jamie told Mike. “Forgetting things isn’t that surprising.”
“Except none of you actually forgot anything, did you?” He looked at each of them. “None of you ever drew a blank, you all just remembered something different. Something from your native reality.”
“I don’t remember anything different,” Sasha said.
“Neither do I,” said Jamie.
“It wouldn’t be different to you because it would line up with your experiences. But those experiences don’t always line up with the facts here.” He looked at Jamie. “When we were at the bar, you told me you had a cat named Spock growing up.”
She shook her head. “No, I told you, my cat’s name was Isis.”
“Your cat was named Isis,” said Mike, “but I remember Spock because you aren’t the Jamie I was talking to in the bar.”
“You were right next to me.”
“Not me,” he said. “Another me on another world. The experiences don’t line up.” He glanced at each of them in turn.
Sasha looked around the room. “So this is the mirror universe?”
Mike nodded. “From your point of view, yeah.”
“But you’re not all evil?”
He shrugged. “No more than usual, I guess? I don’t know what you think we’re supposed to be like.”
Neil looked at his hands. “You’re saying I’m from another dimension? I’m not from here.”
“If it makes a difference,” said Mike, “the Neil you replaced wasn’t from here either. According to the reports, Neil made his first crosswalk last January. He’s been gone ever since.”
“Not necessarily,” said Arthur. “There’s a chance the native Neil could’ve been shifted back the same way this one was.”
Mike shook his head. “You’re talking about millions of potential realities. Billions. The odds of finding the same one again are astronomical.”
“How can you know it’s not the same one every time?”
“Because you’re not all like Bob. If you were all from the same place, you’d all be from there. And you’re not.”
Neil was still studying his hands. His wedding ring. “So my wife…the woman I’ve been sleeping with for the past year and a half…isn’t my wife?”
“Sort of,” said Mike. “She’s the same person. You probably still have a lot of the same experiences together.”
“But she’s not my wife,” said Neil. “She’s not the woman I married. She married some other me.”
Mike didn’t say anything.
Arthur’s eyes went wide. “Ben Miles.”
Mike nodded. “He didn’t have a breakdown. He doesn’t remember his wife because the Ben who came out of the Door married someone else. His wife really is a stranger to him. An impostor.”
“They locked him up for nothing.”
“I’ll talk to Reggie in the morning,” said Mike. “We’ll get him out.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Neil. “I’ve been cheating on my wife.”
“You’ve been cheating on her with her,” said Sasha. She rubbed her chin. “It’s not that bad.”
“Yes it is.”
She looked Mike up and down. “You’re not the guy I was flirting with back in Washington?”
“Definitely not,” he said.
She turned to Arthur. “And you’re not the man who recruited me at DEF CON?”
He shifted his feet. “Apparently not, although I remember recruiting you there.”
“It doesn’t seem to make that much of a difference,” Sasha pointed out. “I mean, we’ve all been functioning fine. It’s been six weeks since my last crosswalk, and I haven’t had any problems. None I’ve noticed, anyway.”
Neil grabbed a handful of hair above his ear. “How can you all be so calm about this?”
“It would stand to reason,” mused Arthur, “that with the number of potential realities, there would be an almost infinite amount with negligible differences. We step through the Door and there’s a small change. Something that either slips by or we brush off as a minor mistake of some sort. The date of an anniversary. The name of a cat.” He glanced at Olaf. “What side of the hall your office is on.”
Olaf didn’t say anything. His stare was focused just past Jamie’s shoulder. Mike wasn’t sure if he was trying to keep an angry outburst in check or if he was deep in thought.
“Eventually, though,” said Mike, “you’d end up with an undeniable difference. Someone comes through from a more divergent reality.”
“Someone like Bob,” said Jamie. “Or Miles. Or me.”
“You’re not quite as extreme a case as Bob,” said Mike, “but, yeah.” He considered taking her hand, but decided he shouldn’t. Under the circumstances, with all she was getting hit with, it needed to be her choice.
“And would we have even known about Jamie if…” Arthur looked at the table. “Forgive me for being blunt, but it seems you two are sleeping together, at least.”
“Neither of us slept,” Jamie said. She managed a half-smile. “And I thought he was somebody else at the time.”
Mike’s cheeks warmed. He tried to tighten his lips and push past it. Sasha chuckled.
“My point is,” continued Arthur, “there may be several differences that just haven’t come up for the rest of us because there’s nothing to put them in context. How long would your lack of scars have gone unnoticed if, well, someone hadn’t seen you…naked.” He looked down at the table again on the last word.
“I’m sure I would’ve worn something revealing sooner or later.”
“You’ve been happier,” said Neil. “I just figured you were so relieved that nothing went wrong when you crosswalked.”
Sasha nodded. “It’s been a little weird. I just figured…” She glanced at Mike and smiled. “Well, I figured you two slept together that first night.”
Jamie raised an eyebrow. “Are you saying you thought I just really needed to get laid?”
Now they all chuckled. Even Neil made a tight grin.
“I’d guess,” said Mike, “this might be one of the reasons you’ve all been t
ense. Everyone’s body language is wrong. Each time someone went through the Door, he or she ended up surrounded by people whose movements and gestures all felt off. And he or she would seem wrong to everyone else. Just little things, on a subliminal level.” He looked at Arthur. “You told me that half the time you felt like you were surrounded by strangers. In a way, you were right.”
They all looked at one another. Studied one another.
Mike took another breath. “And I figured out something else, too.”
Neil sighed. “More bad news.”
Mike crossed his arms, stared at Arthur, and counted to five. “None of you actually know how the Door works, do you?”
Arthur took in a breath and raised his hand. Now that Mike was looking for them, he could see the way all the facial muscles shifted in time with the movement, how the lips formed words that came quick but with no urgency. It was a practiced motion, something prepared and rehearsed.
Then someone cut him off.
“No,” said Olaf. “No, we don’t.”
THIRTY-FIVE
“Olaf, you’ve signed a number of—”
“Give it up, Arthur,” he said. “It’s over.”
“We all agreed—”
“It’s over,” Olaf said again. “He figured us out.”
Arthur made a point of not looking at Mike. “You and I both agreed that we wouldn’t—”
“You and I didn’t agree to anything,” said Olaf. He waved his hand at Mike. “He’s probably right and I’m not the guy who discussed anything with you.”
“But you know what we discussed.”
“Fuck it,” said Sasha. “Olaf’s right.”
They all traded glances for a few moments. Neil played with his wedding ring. Jamie squeezed Mike’s hand, then let go and settled back into her chair.
Another moment of silence passed.
“So,” said Mike, “should I keep making educated guesses, or does someone want to explain how you built this thing?”
More looks went between them. Then Olaf cleared his throat. “The SETH project was a disaster,” he said. “On every possible level. We’d been kidding ourselves for ages, and then we were just in deep denial, even after the failure with the first two test blocks. After Tramp, we knew it was all downhill. Especially for me and Arthur. No more grants, no more research. For the rest of our careers, we were going to be the idiots who killed a dog trying to teleport it. If we were lucky, we’d end up teaching Physics 101 at some community college.”
Olaf paused to rub the bridge of his nose. “I came up with the idea of the Door as a way to stall the inevitable. We thought we might get an extra year or two before anyone realized we weren’t producing anything. Enough to maybe dim the memory of SETH a bit.”
Arthur coughed into his hand. “There is some real science behind the Door,” he said. “It wasn’t a complete hoax. It was just decades, maybe centuries past what we actually knew how to do.”
“It was like NASA’s warp drive project,” said Sasha. “It’s hypothetically possible, we just don’t know how to make it work in practice.”
“But it does work,” said Mike. “How’d you do it?”
Arthur and Olaf glanced at each other.
“Well?”
“We got drunk,” said Olaf.
“Beg your pardon?”
Arthur pulled off his glasses. He reached for a tie he wasn’t wearing, sighed, and polished them on his shirt sleeve. “We managed to hold off Magnus for fourteen months,” he said. “And then he demanded to see something. Some scrap of proof that we were making progress. If not, he wasn’t going to renew our funding. And we had nothing. We’d constructed the rings, the whole system, but without the equations to make it all work it was just a very powerful, very expensive electromagnet. We’d hit the end of our careers.
“Olaf came to my office, and we each had a double whiskey. Then another one. And a third.”
“Then we sent someone out to get more,” said Olaf.
“Me,” Jamie said.
“Was it you? I don’t even remember anymore.”
“I think it was,” she said, “but I guess who did what is up for debate now.”
Olaf snorted.
Arthur straightened up in his chair and looked around. “Most of us were there at that point, and we were all pretty drunk. We started talking about how we were going to go down in history as a bunch of crackpots. Maybe mad scientists if people were feeling particularly kind. And we were right there in my office. With my book collection.
“One of them,” Arthur said, “is a treatise by a man named Aleksander Koturovic. Limited run. I think only two or three hundred were ever printed, and most of them were destroyed. I found it in a used bookshop in England while I was doing research for The History of What We Know.”
Mike waited a moment for him to continue. Everyone was staring at Arthur. Olaf made no move to pick up the thread.
“Koturovic did a lot of early work in neuroscience and biochemistry back in the late eighteen eighties, but he also dabbled in physics, mathematics, a bit of everything. Dabbled being the key word. Half of his ideas were brilliant, even by today’s standards. The other half…” Arthur pushed his glasses back onto his face. “Well, I didn’t even bother to include him in my book. Let’s say that.”
“He was a doomsday nut,” said Sasha. “He thought someday humanity was going to form some kind of telepathic gestalt, a collective unconscious, that’d open a dimensional breach between worlds. And then monsters from those other worlds would come attack us.”
Mike glanced at her. “You’ve read it?”
“We’ve all read it at this point,” said Jamie. “Two or three times.”
“If he was alive today,” said Neil, “he’d be showing up on the History Channel all the time, talking about mermaids and pyramid power and Bigfoot and all that crap.”
“Or he’d have a movie deal with SyFy,” Sasha said.
Arthur cleared his throat. “Olaf made some comment, something that reminded me of the treatise,” he said. “I can’t remember what. But we pulled it off the shelf and read some passages out loud. A large part of Koturovic’s work is his doomsday theory, and he had a lot of math backing it up. It was all nonsense, of course, and we imagined people reading about us the same way in a hundred years. Then we reached a few pages of his raw calculations for breaching dimensional barriers. I stumbled over them for a few minutes, and then Sasha said we should just use his equations to run the Door.”
She shrugged. “I’d had three or four drinks at that point,” she said. “It sounded like Koturovic had a better grip on how to create a dimensional breach than we did.”
“We were all drunk,” said Olaf. “Drunk enough that it made sense to try it, not so drunk that we couldn’t do it.”
“We took a pair of bottles down to the main floor,” Jamie said. “Arthur read off thirty-seven pages of equations and I typed it all in.”
“Jamie’s the fastest typer,” said Neil. He twisted his wedding ring off and flipped it back and forth between his fingertips. “Our Jamie was, anyway.”
Her lips twitched and her gaze dropped to the table for a moment.
“I think,” said Arthur, “on some level I was hoping it would destroy the system. That it would all overload, seize up, short out, something. That was my high hope, that we could just end in failure rather than disgrace. Jamie entered the equations, we all made one last toast, and we turned it on.”
“And it worked,” said Mike.
Arthur nodded. “Yes. And to this day we don’t know how. We all stood there and stared at it. It stayed open for fourteen seconds before we blew a fuse.”
“We caused a blackout,” said Neil. “Everyone for half a mile lost power.”
“The next morning we weren’t sure if it really happened or not,” Arthur said, “but there were too many things we all agreed on. So we spent two days replacing everything that had burned out and tried it again. And there it was.
Jamie and Sasha nodded. Neil bowed his head.
“Over the next few months we improved the tech side of it, made it more energy efficient, and doubled the time. Then we tripled it and eventually got it to where it is today.” Arthur pulled his glasses off again, remembered he still wasn’t wearing a tie, and pushed them back on. “But we still don’t know why or how it works.”
“You’ve had almost three years to study it,” said Mike. “You must have figured out some of it.”
“There’s nothing to figure out,” said Olaf. “The man’s hypotheses were—are—gibberish. Even back then, people said they were gibberish. Psychic energy and dimensional barriers and giant alpha predators. His science is weak at best and a third of his equations aren’t even finished. He published a volume of loose premises with nothing to back them up except a few mathematical coincidences.”
“And yet,” Mike said, “it works.”
Olaf managed a bitter smile and nodded. “It works.”
“Why didn’t you just say something? Come clean and get some more people in here?”
Arthur took a deep breath and sighed. “Pride,” he said. “Ego. We were so sure we could crack it, then too embarrassed that we couldn’t.”
“Suddenly we’d go from being the people who created the Albuquerque Door to a footnote,” Olaf said. “We’d just be the people who laid the groundwork for someone else to figure it out.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” said Mike.
“You don’t publish a lot, do you?” smirked Olaf.
“We kept running trial after trial, hoping to learn something,” said Arthur. “Olaf and I spent weeks combing through the treatise and going over every crosswalk again and again. It gave us material to feed to DARPA. If nothing else, we hoped an overwhelming series of successful tests would deflect attention away from the fact that we didn’t understand why they were successful.”