The Tomorrow Tower: Nine Science Fiction Short Stories

by John Moralee

  “Don’t you ever feel that things happen because they have to happen?”

  “Everyone feels that some days.”

  “Exactly. Call it fate or destiny or whatever; it looks like things have been set up so they happen in a specific way.” Like the car crash, he thought, wiping acid sweat out of his eyes. “I don’t believe in coincidences any more. Things happen because they have to happen. Things might not make sense - they don’t have to because there’s nobody writing the rules - but there are always the hidden laws. The Laws of the Waves.”

  “Waves?”

  “The universe is made out of nothing but energy waves,” he said.

  Dr Benson looked puzzled. She had a right; the picture was only coming clear to him as he talked it through. He told her about his waking dream. “I think the whole thing was a metaphor. The beach was reality, where I am. The ocean was the imagination, the unconscious. The waves were where these places overlap. When I tried to reach Rachel and Melissa I failed, because they no longer exist. But I kept trying to reach them, but the water rejected me. Then there was the tidal wave, which probably symbolised the end of everything. It was so dark and endless.”

  He shuddered at the memory.

  “David, what do you think will happen if the tidal wave had reached you?”

  “I think the universe would have stopped existing.”

  “Interesting. Tell me more.”

  David could feel the room changing, or rather his perception of the room. It happened fast. Unnamed colours streamed in through the windows, the walls fading to a transparent veneer. He could see through objects. Dr Benson leant forward her face emitting a bright cherry glow, her fingers shimmering with a vermilion light.

  “What do you see?” she said.

  “I see ... your words coming out of your mouth like raindrops splashing on a still lake. I can see the air molecules moving towards me as they make a sound wave. The colours are like ... nothing I’ve seen before. My God, it’s amazing. I can hear some music - no, radio waves, I think. Yes, there are radio waves raining down from the sky, and I can hear them, all signals at once, voices, songs. If I concentrate I can listen to just one at a time ...”

  “David?”

  He felt someone touching his shoulder. The contact collapsed his vision. The room conformed to familiarity.

  “For a moment you looked spellbound,” Dr Benson said.

  “I was. It’s an awesome experience.”

  “It’s only a hallucination, David.”

  “No.”

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “But I could see so much.”

  “It’s a condition called synaesthesia. That’s when someone can hear what they see, or see what they hear. It can be caused by drugs like LSD, or perfectly naturally. Some artists and musicians have it. There are people who can hear a word and think, say, the colour pink, and whenever they hear the same word it’s the same pink every time. Apart from that they live perfectly normal lives, as can you. I’ll admit that for someone to have the condition in a latent capacity is unheard of ... but combined with the stress of losing your family in so brutal a way, the synaesthesia has manifested itself just as your present emotional difficulties are at a peak. At the heart of your problem is your trouble adapting to the world without Rachel and Melissa. You have to accept their deaths, David.”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “No offence - I think you’re completely wrong. This hallucination switches itself on and off with a purpose. What I can see isn’t imaginary! It’s real! More real than what you see as you talk to me. Excuse me, but I have to go.”

  “We haven’t finished the session -”

  “I’m sorry,” he mumbled. He hurried outside, through the reception area and towards his car. He was feeling his pockets for his keys when Dr Benson entered the car park.

  “David, I want to help you.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  “I believe it’s real to you. That’s what counts. Come inside and we can continue.”

  He paused, considering.

  “I never explained my theory, about the Laws of Waves.”

  “So come inside and tell me.”

  *

  “What does that have to do with energy waves?” she said.

  “I’ll come to that, but I’ll have to start at the beginning, with my research. First, you know how sound can be thought of as a wave?” She nodded, so he continued. “Well, with sound you can hear a piece of music that gets in your head and suddenly everyone is humming it, even if they hate it, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “The sound waves make patterns in your mind, and your mind plays it over and over. It’s as if the music has transmitted its essential essence, stored itself. But what creates the music? Another mind. Music is just an energy wave formed by vibrating molecules, but it can make you feel direct emotions. Why is that? It’s because your consciousness is a similar sort of wave: more complicated, yes, but basically your soul is just a wave in more dimensions. I can see those dimensions.”

  “I see,” she said.

  Do you? he wondered. “It’s impossible to describe what I see because it is constantly changing, but I believe each conscious entity from humans to amoebas possesses an identity, a special wave - or soul - unique to them that forms part of the fabric of the universe. It’s as though the entire universe is just one big mathematical equation with our reality as one possible answer. Each soul is part of the big equation, moving like a bead on abacus towards the final solution. And my dream is the solution to all of the smaller equations put together.”

  “My maths is a bit fuzzy,” the psychiatrist said. “What do you mean? In English?”

  “Have you ever read the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”

  “Yes, a long time ago. So?”

  “In that story a great computer is asked to find the answer to the ultimate question. After years and years it comes up with the answer: 42. But the answer is meaningless unless the question is known. The answer can’t be in the same universe as the question. That might be a joke by Douglas Adams, but this is not. My dreams are getting closer and closer to the answer to everything! Then our real world will collapse to nothing. I can feel it, like a thickening in the atmosphere, a feeling of impending doom.”

  “I don’t sense anything.”

  “Some people are closer to reaching the solution. My mother was one. She almost reached the answer. But she killed herself to save the universe, even if she didn’t understand why. I’m like her, approaching the answer. My dream will unravel the universe. I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true. I’m not making it up. When I see things, I see emotions. I see the strings that bond us all together. The closer I get to the solution the clearer the universe becomes to me, and it scares the hell out of me.”

  He sat back, exhausted. The chair was glued to his hot buttocks.

  “Like you said earlier, David, it’s just fantasy.”

  “But the patterns are becoming visible!” He stood up, no longer able to sit still. Why wouldn’t she believe him? Was her mind so closed to new perceptions? He walked to the window. The sky broiled with grey clouds. The shapes were fractals, repeating patterns written in mathematical formulae. “Wait! I can prove it. The patterns show me things.”

  “David, you’re becoming manic -”

  He giggled, uncontrolled laughter slipping out. “It’s happening again.” He could see his own body patterns: blood, flesh and bone. Even the helices of DNA, vibrating. And smaller still - atoms and quarks and the nothingness between. The sight seemed to suck at his eyes, pulling him in. He had to force himself to look away, to look at Dr Benson. He could see her thoughts, now, her inner voice, her identity, was a band of silver and gold.

  “Your life is a pattern, Doctor. I can see the strands coming out of you. I can see your past and your future. You are twice divorced, both times the men had affairs with younger women. You have a pet Labrador called Shelley named after your favo
urite poet. You’re a vegetarian and donate money to animal charities. You really wish you had married your childhood sweetheart, Henry, but you never told him how you felt. ”

  “How - how do you know that? Have you been stalking me?”

  “You wanted children, but a complication after an ectopic pregnancy resulted in the removal of your womb. You deeply regret the loss and devote your time to helping others partly out of guilt, blaming yourself despite it being not your fault.”

  “My God -”

  “And you live in a small village in a stone cottage. The roof is leaking and you promise you’ll get it fixed, but -”

  “Have you been watching me?”

  “No. No! I can see your entire life. It’s like a map, all written out. I know your life because you soul is clearly visible.”

  “I don’t believe this,” she said. A grey torus of disbelief wrapped around her, like a doughnut. It started to shrink the more details of her life he told. “Okay, okay, I believe you!”

  She was telling the truth, he saw. At last he had convinced someone.

  He was weeping. “What can I do?”

  “If it’s really like an equation you are solving, I can see just two ways to stop yourself solving it. The first way is to stop the calculator ... by killing yourself. I don’t advocate that method. The other way is to make the equation unsolvable.”

  “How do I do that?”

  “Change the parameters.”

  Change the parameters.

  He had to change the rules.

  Death was a constant. But what if he could change it?

  What if he could make Rachel and Melissa exist again?

  David closed his eyes. If he pictured them hard enough, real enough, then they would be alive - in his universe. And if they existed, none of this would have happened. It would become just a dream. If he looked back in time and grabbed hold with both hands and willed him back to a time before the accident ... yes!

  It sounded so simple.

  It sounded impossible.

  “I have to face the dream,” he said.

  Joyce Benson’s head brightened as if a torch was shining out of her mouth and eyes and ears.

  “I’ll help you,” she said. “Move over to the couch.”

  He did so.

  “Lie down,” she said. “Close your eyes.”

  Even with his lids shut, the world was just as vividly visible. He could see through the ceiling, through the clouds and beyond. A billion stars lit his sky with dizzying brightness, an optical overload. He could even see the nebulous splashes of alien thoughts on alien worlds.

  “Relax,” Joyce Benson said, sounding far away. “I’m going to hypnotise you.”

  His head pressed against the headrest, the full gravity of endless wakefulness weighing him down. The psychiatrist’s reassuring voice kept him from panicking as the Rorschach patterns formed the faces of the dead. If only he could see Rachel and Melissa again. Alive.

  He could see Joyce Benson standing over him, holding his pale hand as she induced a hypnotic state with quiet words. Instead of slipping into the abyss that waited for him, roller-coasting into non-existence, he controlled his descent towards the dream like an abseiler dropping off a cliff.

  *

  He was on the beach again.

  He could no longer see Joyce Benson, but he could feel her presence like the warm hand of a mother.

  The dream started where it had finished, the tidal wave mere seconds behind him. He faced it. The tidal wave loomed over his fragile body, but he wasn’t afraid. When the wave reached him he embraced it and stared deep into the torrent, and let it swallow him whole.

  Layer after layer of reality peeled away, like adding colour filters over a photograph. What was left was black and white. The blackness was the absence of everything: the death of the universe. The whiteness was the sum of love and truth and beauty and charm and strangeness. Fundamentals. He just had to choose a direction, a new way of looking, a new way of thinking. He could change things.

  And with that thought he took a giant mental leap. He rode a great tunnel of white light towards a distant shore. He knew where he was going Rachel and Melissa still lived. The car crash had never happened. Dr Joyce Benson had children. And the universe had a purpose, and that purpose was good. Time and space were just variables in the big equation. He had the power to change them for the better. And he did.

  *

  Joyce Benson blinked. She had a migraine, nauseous waves of pain rolling over her. One second there had been a man on her couch, the next he had disappeared. The pain stopped as suddenly as it began. She felt as if the universe had shifted, somehow, corrected an anomaly. Her office was empty. She was staring at a couch with no one lying there. Weird. She touched her swollen stomach, where her baby daughter kicked, eager to join her two grown-up brothers in the real world. At fifty she had been surprised she could still have babies, but the unexpected pregnancy had been a miracle, a new lease of life. A strange feeling lingered, as if she had not been pregnant until this very moment. That was ridiculous. But yet ... hadn’t she been talking with someone? No. She had no appointments for the rest of the day. She decided to go home. Henry would be missing her.

  Her phone rang.

  “Dr Benson speaking,” she said.

  “Thanks, Joyce,” said a voice she did not know. She could hear a child in the background, laughing.

  “Pardon? Who is this?”

  “Your guardian angel,” the man said, hanging up.

  Curiously, she believed him.

  John Moralee © 2012