Branch Off

by Dario Solera

  ***

  “We have mapped the shape of the anomaly,” the young, blond man said as he handed her a map printout. “It’s a perfect sphere, roughly eighty meters in diameter, with the center at about thirty meters in the sky.”

  “Your name again?”

  “Adam.”

  “Theirs?” she asked, pointing at the other three men.

  “Bill, Charles, and David.”

  “A, B, C, D. Funny. These are not your real names, am I right?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Sarah eyed the man for a moment and then snatched the map from his hands.

  “It’s centered right above the particle detector, just like you estimated, and it doesn’t intersect with the accelerator tunnel.”

  “How did you map it with this accuracy?”

  “Electromagnetic interference. We took a couple dozen readings at several wavelengths and triangulated them.”

  That was clever, but she wouldn’t admit it to them.

  “Anything else?” Richards asked.

  “No heat signature, no radiation of any type. It’s there, but it’s not.”

  “This means that radio waves don’t go through,” Sarah noted. “We cannot communicate with the other side.”

  “Well,” Adam said, “that would have been interesting, but I’m not sure that the boss would be happy.”

  “Speaking of which,” Sarah said, “who is he? And who are you?”

  They stood in the main control room of the particle accelerator facility, near Sarah’s usual desk. It was empty and most workstations were turned off, some gone altogether.

  “We are physicists and we work in the Special Projects division. I don’t know the name of that man, but he’s famous. They call him Requin—the Shark.”

  “I can guess the reason. Why are you here? What do you usually work on?”

  “Some secret projects. Nothing this big, anyway,” Adam answered with an excited smile. “We swore to top secrecy. Other than that, we’re normal people.”

  “Yeah. Sure. What else do we know about the anomaly?”

  “Men went through and never returned.”

  “What men?”

  “Soldiers.”

  “On foot?”

  “Yes. They sent them in to have a look at the other dimension, but they haven’t come back.”

  ***

  “So, let’s go through the plan once more,” Adam said.

  The day was dying, and despite the control room having no windows, everyone knew it by their circadian cycles. Sarah was exhausted and lay on her office chair with the backrest reclined, looking up at the grainy false ceiling.

  “We don’t have a plan,” she groaned. “Not yet. We have step one: review all recorded data and compare it against my original model. Find where it doesn’t fit.”

  “That’s not enough. Requin won’t be happy.”

  “I don’t care. We cannot do much for now.”

  Richards sent her a tired but understanding look. Even though their goals were different, the first stage was the same.

  “And it will take three months, at least,” she added.

  “Make it two, Doctor,” came a voice from the far entrance to the control room. Requin was walking over to them.

  “Three months is an optimistic estimate.”

  “So what would be the pessimistic one?”

  She laughed. “You don’t get it, do you? We might never understand it. I told you before, and I’m repeating it to you now.”

  “Professor Richards, make sure that her… attitude doesn’t get in the way of our goals.”

  “I’m afraid she is right.”

  “Now, if you don’t mind,” Sarah said, walking a few steps closer to the man, “I will go home.”

  “I prefer to have you always around here. We’ve built bunks for all of you.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “It was not a request.”

  “I’m demanding to go home. I need to rest.”

  Requin looked into her eyes for a long time as she clenched and released her jaws.

  “If you don’t let me out, then you can go fuck yourself with that anomaly, for all I care.” Her hands trembled and she was on the brink of bursting in tears.

  He nodded slightly. “Fine. My men will escort you to your apartment. I assume that you, Professor, also want the same special treatment.”

  “That would be very kind of you.”

  “Just remember what I told you before. Remember it word for word.”

  Nineteen

  “I feel everyone’s eyes on me.”

  “We’re fine,” Gagnier said, glancing behind them. “No one is following us, or they’d have caught us already.”

  Caught. Like animals. Prey. She still felt a slight tremble in her legs, a thrill that she had never experienced before.

  “Here it is,” he said as they approached a bus stop. “This will take us to Geneva. Then it should be a ten-minute walk.”

  They sat on the bench under the bus-stop shelter, as normal people would do. The streets were empty, with just an occasional car passing by, its wheels splashing on the wet tarmac.

  “Surprising that it works,” Léa said after sending a text to purchase the tickets. “Our phone numbers exist in both dimensions and are identical.” She then went on to explain to Gagnier her and Sarah’s conclusion about the moment when, three years ago, their world had split in half.

  “Wow,” he said. “So there’s another me in this world.”

  “Apparently.”

  From behind the corner came the roar of a diesel engine. The bus trudged forward and the driver stopped at the curb in front of the shelter, with the brakes screeching a little.

  They found a pair of seats at the back of the mostly empty vehicle.

  “We can see the entire bus from here,” he said. “Just in case.”

  The bus pulled away as the dull daylight was beginning to die, giving way to dusk.

  “I don’t remember that restaurant,” she said as the driver paused at a red traffic light. “It must be new.”

  He looked outside the window without speaking, his face tired.

  After the tingling in her hands and feet stopped, the warmth emanating from the bus’s heaters lulled Léa to sleep.

  ***

  “Hey,” Gagnier said. “We must get off in a moment.” He had shaken her awake. Léa took a deep breath and wiped some condensation away from her right temple, which had lain on the windowpane when she had fallen asleep. It seemed to her that she had slept for just a minute or two, but outside was dark already. “Come on,” he said as he pressed the stop button and got up.

  Her legs didn’t want to move, but she wrestled herself out of the seat to a standing position. The dreaded idea of another walk in the cold flew through her mind, and a sigh left her mouth.

  “What?”

  She shook her head.

  The bus slowed down and came to a stop, and then the doors whirred open. Gagnier jumped off and turned, offering a hand to Léa.

  “Thanks,” she groaned.

  “We’re almost there.”

  Léa’s legs loosened after a few steps, and her walk was brisk again, although her feet ached. Her stomach grumbled.

  “I’m hungry too,” her companion said.

  “I haven’t been this tired since, well… forever.” Walking in the streets like average people—like a couple, even, to observers—sent contrasting thoughts through her mind. On one side, it didn’t feel like her life, not anymore, but on the other, she yearned for it all to just be normal again, as it was before the war.

  Before the war. It was only four days ago, yet in so little time everything had changed. She was in her city, safe and without bombs falling, but it all appeared different. Every building, every car passing by, every lamppost, they looked familiar and alien at the same time. “I wish…”

  “Yeah. Me too.”

  She felt the gentle touch of his hand on her shoulde
r, but it lasted only a second.

  Twenty

  Waiting at the door, Sarah paced up and down until the doorbell rang. She opened and found Gagnier and Léa standing outside, with strange clothes and a battered expression, like that of a dog that had been astray for a week. “Come in,” she said.

  Gagnier stepped in but Léa hesitated.

  Sarah moved closer and offered a hand. She had been in her mind for the entire day, wondering where she was. That hesitation was not in Léa’s blood. She would never stand outside the door, speechless, and even the expression in her eyes was different. “Come on,” she added softly. For a moment she thought about having both Léas in the same room. Would she be able to tell one from the other? Maybe.

  “Thanks.”

  Sarah led the two to the living room. “This is my friend Will,” she said. The TV was on and showed something on military unrest in the Middle East.

  “Nice to meet you,” Will said, coming forward and shaking their hands. “Sarah told me about you. About what happened.”

  “Yeah,” Gagnier said.

  “Sit down, have some rest. You want coffee?”

  “It would be great,” Léa answered. Sitting down on the sofa, in the calm of Sarah’s apartment, she felt at peace. For the first time in days, her heart was beating at a normal rate, she wasn’t looking behind her, and her hands weren’t covered in blood.

  Sarah went into the kitchen and poured four large mugs of coffee. She set the mugs, sugar, and milk on a tray and brought them to the table in front of the couch. “You’ve made it,” she said after sitting on the sofa near Léa, with Gagnier and Will on the armchairs.

  “We had to—” Léa began, “we broke into a house and took clothes.”

  “My idea,” Gagnier admitted, raising one hand. “I had to ditch my uniform.”

  “What if they find us here?”

  “It’s not like you are wanted. You don’t even exist.”

  Léa frowned. “They will discover that we are missing, sooner or later.”

  “You’re safe.”

  “No.” Léa stood. “They’ll come to your home. You’ll be in trouble. We must go,” she said, walking over to the door.

  “Léa, calm down. They won’t search for you here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Nobody knows that we know each other, except Professor Richards.”

  She stared at Sarah for a moment and then nodded.

  “OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Let’s have something to eat. I bet you’re hungry. I guess pizza is fine for everyone. Will, would you mind going to the place at the corner and buying a couple?”

  “No problem,” he said, getting up.

  “Thanks.” She waited for him to close the apartment’s door. “He’s trusted. I’ve known him since high school.”

  “Of course,” Gagnier said.

  “I mean it. I threw him into this thing without notice, but he’s coping.”

  “Thanks for helping us.”

  “It’s fine. You’re friends. Léa is, at least, and if she trusts you, then I trust you as well. Anyway, there is the restroom,” she said pointing at the hallway. “First door to the left. I have a spare bedroom for you, Léa, but I’m afraid you two boys will have to share this room.”

  Instant sleepiness made its way in Léa’s mind at the thought of a real bed. “Wow. This will be the first time in almost a week that I touch a proper bed in a proper home.”

  The TV showed people jumping off military vehicles in the Morges army base. “In these stolen images,” the presenter said, “we see about fifty people, some of them wounded, being unloaded from trucks and conducted into a large hangar. We don’t know their names or where they come from, but our reliable sources say that these people have been transported from a place north of Geneva to this base.” The voice continued recapping the day’s events and the mysterious appearance of several people. “We don’t know for sure, but it would be a sensible guess to assume that these men and women are those that began appearing this morning.”

  Will came through the door with two pizza boxes wafting fragrant smells across the room. He laid them on the table and opened the lids. Jones peeked out from the side of the sofa, inspecting and smelling what was being served.

  “Guests first,” Sarah said.

  “Thank you.”

  Without speaking, the four munched for a while. The view of the pizzas only made Léa crave more, while the intense, satisfying taste of cheese and tomato permeated her mouth.

  “I’ll grab some napkins,” Sarah said.

  The presenter went forward with the story. “Authorities are keeping silent as to what is happening, but experts around the world are speculating that everything was caused by a space-time tunnel that, somehow, has connected our world with another.”

  Sarah shook her head as she emerged from the kitchen with napkins and beers. “They don’t even know what they’re talking about, yet they have nailed it.”

  “Professor,” the voice continued, as an aerial image of snowy fields flew on the TV, “were this true, would it make them aliens?”

  Recorded images squeezed in the leftmost side of the screen, and on the other side appeared the picture of a man. His voice came in metallic through the phone connection. “From what I’ve seen, they look perfectly human. They have the same clothes as us and speak our language. No, they are not alien.”

  “Where do they come from?”

  “I don’t know, but I have yet to see evidence of any phenomenon that explains what happened in the way that others are depicting it.”

  “Are you saying that none of this actually happened?”

  “No, of course not, but we don’t have much information, and the explanation might be very simple. We must not jump to conclusions.”

  “Do you think that yesterday’s plane crash is in some way connected?”

  “I’m not able to answer that question, but I am sure that authorities are conducting an appropriate inquest.”

  “What I don’t understand,” Gagnier said, “is why only one of the alien spaceships came through.”

  Sarah snorted. “They’re downplaying the whole story. Covering it up. In a few days, they’ll tell us that these people were weirdos, members of a sect, or something like that.”

  “Also, why drop just one bomb?” Gagnier continued. “In a way it confirms what they did in our world—dropping bombs at random places. But why?”

  “It looked very accurate to me,” Sarah said.

  “What do you mean? Some have died, but it could have been much worse.”

  “They hit the accelerator. The blow was spot-on and disabled it.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Those people, what will happen to them?” Will asked. “I mean, they can’t keep them in the base forever.”

  “They’ll make something up.”

  With a feeble voice, Léa spoke. “Those are our people.” Seeing how her own fellow citizens were treated sent an urge to vomit through her guts. She threw the half-eaten slice of pizza into the empty cardboard box.

  “I’m sorry,” Sarah began. “Today—” She needed to spell it out to someone, but she couldn’t. That man, Requin, had been clear. Earlier his threats hadn’t felt real. They had sounded comic, even, but now, watching those images and sitting near someone who could have been one of those people, Sarah grasped the actual scale of what was happening and the forces at play.

  “Yes?” Léa said.

  “It’s nothing,” Sarah answered without being able to hold her gaze.

  ***

  “Want another pillow?”

  Sarah and Léa were prepping the guests’ room for the night. The double bed took most of it, with just the space for a small dresser and a couple of bedside tables. Gagnier and Will were arranging the living room to sleep on the wooden floor.

  “No. I think I’ll just collapse on the bed.”

  “You can have a shower if you want, and I have some c
lothes for you.”

  “Thanks,” she exhaled as she sat.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Difficult question. Stranded?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You know me. Well, you know my other me. I thought I had a clear life path in front of me. All the details were decided. I would become a neurosurgeon and have a great career. With a bit of luck, I would find someone to love. Now it’s all gone.” She rubbed her eyes. “I’ll never have that life.”

  Sarah sat near Léa, surrendering to the need to embrace her. “We’ll get you back to your world.”

  She took a deep breath but didn’t say anything for a while.

  Will and Gagnier were speaking in the living room, their voices coming in muffled.

  “And what about you?” Léa said. “How do you feel after all this?”

  Sarah’s eyebrows raised for a moment as she repeated the question in her mind, with flashes of Requin piercing her thoughts. “After all of this, I got something very important to me.”

  “What is it?”

  “You told me where I can find my biological parents.”

  “But it’s on the other side.”

  “It is.”

  “It’s dangerous. There’s war. We don’t know what’s happening.”

  “I don’t care. I must go. I gave up once, I won’t do it again. Not now that I know where to look, and that is thanks to you.”

  “Sarah, I don’t think you should go.”

  “I have to find the place they lived before moving to Geneva. Just that.”

  “That’s not the point.”

  Sarah frowned.

  “Your parents’ Sarah is dead. Meeting her again, and then seeing her leave forever… you’ll break their hearts.”

  Sarah sighed. “You can go with me and ask them. We’ll find an excuse.”

  “They know me.”

  “Oh. Then someone else. Will, maybe.”

  “There’s war. They might have been evacuated.” Léa avoided telling her that they might be dead.

  “I know, right?” Sarah stood from the bed and walked over to the window, looking outside at the melting mounds of snow accumulated near the curbs. The light cast by streetlamps made the white matter a dull orange. “I’m sorry.” She turned and stared at the floor between her and Léa. “I have to go. It’s the only chance I have.”