Side Life

by Steve Toutonghi

  “Can you tell us what’s happening?” Kim asked.

  “How can my dreams change things? I don’t understand how it works.” Vin placed his hands on the table, palms facing up. “What I remember,” he moved one palm, “and what’s in the world,” he moved the other, “are different. I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Mona said, “‘Nerdean-is-a-fake,’ huh? That’s the password you’re using? You haven’t found the other one?”

  “That’s the only one,” Vin said. “Wait, there’s another one?”

  “Yeah. Did you try, ‘Nerdean-is-real?’”

  “No,” Vin said, lowering his eyes, his shoulders falling forward. “Of course. No, I didn’t think of it.”

  “Okay, then, after I’m gone. Wait until I go, and then, why don’t you give that one a try?” Mona’s voice was low and even, her gaze sloping like a gently descending road. “What year is this?” she asked. “What month?”

  “What’ll it do?” asked Kim.

  “You’re just going to have to try it. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you. I tried it really early on, on my own. Guessed there might be more than one. Just on a lark. No one told me how to do any of this shit. I just figured it out. And it worked. It totally fucking worked. And now everything is hosed up.”

  “But, what is it?” Kim’s voice wavered as she leaned over the table.

  “I don’t know a goddam thing. I could tell you what I know, but, it wouldn’t sound—it’s not believable. Use the password.”

  “Kim was dead,” Vin said, “and her brother Bill was alive. And then I came out and Kim was alive but Bill was dead. We’re not anywhere close to believable anymore.”

  Mona tilted her head a bit to the right and her jaw came forward. “I see. And did those two deaths—the brother’s and Kim’s—happen at about the same time, in a turn sort of thing, one or the other?”

  “Yes,” Vin said.

  “That’s how I think it works. Yeah. Most often.”

  “How what works?” asked Vin.

  “First, you have to know that when you go into the crèche, that you’re not dreaming. You do know that, right? You know it in your gut.”

  Vin shook his head very slowly.

  “Yes, you do. You do know it. Just like I did. You can tell. The edges aren’t rubbed off like they are in regular dreams, everything has weight, everything has a smell. When you figure out how things work, it feels matter-of-fact, like it does when you’re awake. It feels normal, right?” Vin nodded and Mona continued. “Yeah, you just haven’t believed it could be real. You’re probably too smart to believe that. Not like me. I’m not as smart as you. But we both know that it’s as real in there as it is out here. And when you come out, you remember things that you couldn’t know, never learned. And some things from inside the minds of the people you’re with.” Mona paused. “I mean, do you know what”—one of her hands gripped the side of the table—“do you know what the best, safest way for a woman to kill a powerful husband was in the city of Kota Gelanggi?”

  “No,” said Vin.

  “You didn’t even know there was a city with that name, did you?”

  “No.”

  “Neither did I. No one told me. I never read anything about it. But I’ve lived there.”

  “What are you two talking about?” asked Kim.

  “What I’m saying—I’m saying there is no safe way to kill your husband in the city of Kota Gelanggi. Yeah, and there are . . . penalties for a woman whose husband dies suddenly, or suspiciously. But that’s not the worst. Not even close.”

  Kim stood abruptly, walked to a wall and turned on the room’s lights, washing away the thinning gloom of the underdeveloped day.

  “I’m sorry,” Mona said, sitting back, “but it’s all real. What you do in the crèche really happens. Believe me, I know what’s real. I lost my family. I lost my two kids to that thing.” Vin’s hand covered his mouth. “So I know,” Mona said. “I’ve been trying to get back to them.”

  “You’re saying that Vin’s memory of my brother is real?”

  “Yes. Different things happen in different worlds.”

  “Kim?” Vin asked. “Are you hearing this?”

  “Yes.”

  “The crèche is”—Mona appeared to reconsider—“look, I could go back in. You could both leave the house. Your life might go back to normal.”

  “No,” Vin said.

  MONA BEGAN TALKING IN A swerving, disorganized way about her inability to understand what was happening to her. Eventually she took a deep breath, paused, and said, “I never really thought about time, but that’s where this thing starts. To us, to you and me, there’s a path we follow. We do one thing and then another and so on, moving forward. But it doesn’t really work that way. Everything that happens exists at the same time. And not just the past and future, but every past and every future, every one that’s possible. Everything that could possibly happen is real and is happening right now.”

  Vin said, “You’re talking about alternate universes. Or one very complicated one.”

  “Yes, and—”

  Vin interrupted. “Infinite worlds, and every possibility exists. That machine—nothing could ever do what you’re saying.”

  Kim said, “Don’t cut her off.”

  “Well, then you know,” said Mona.

  Kim had been sitting at the end of the table. Now she rose and walked a few feet, her sneakers making a soft scrik sound on the hardwood. She stood beside Vin, who was staring at the floor, his shoulders bunching up, and put a hand on his back.

  Mona said, “You did things in the crèche, didn’t you, when you thought it was a dream? You figured out how to influence people, make them act, and you did things?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, but, think it through,” Mona said. “Think it all through. Something terrible happened, right?”

  And Vin remembered the brutal scissoring of time cutting on and off while Bucky Wright lay slashed and bleeding on the firm earth. If what Mona said was true—and it felt true—then Bucky’s family, and Matt’s, would be waiting for them to come home from their talk.

  “Think it through,” Mona said again, recalling him. “Yes, the crèche sends you to other worlds, and what you do is real. But, everything that can happen does happen somewhere, so you don’t make a difference. Nothing you do makes a difference. All that changes is you. What you are. The crèche isn’t about doing something. It’s about being something, and living with yourself.”

  “But, I killed them both.”

  Kim said, “You didn’t kill anyone.”

  “Yeah, he did,” Mona said. “Sure, we all do. We’re all a part of things that are larger than us, that don’t even consider life and death at all. I mean, it’s a privilege to even think like that, about whether or not to kill. We get to do that because we’re limited, because we have our own perspective, our minds. But we’re a part of a thing so large that the question doesn’t even exist if we don’t put it there. So you decide to go hiking with a friend. You stand together near the edge of a cliff and look out at a beautiful view. There are worlds where one of you or both of you fell and died. You were the one who decided to go hiking. You killed yourself and your friend.”

  “That’s wrong,” Kim said.

  “I agree, but it’s how things are. Everything happens, it doesn’t matter whether it’s meaningful or not. Look, I made mistakes too. I live with them. They matter to me. But what you find out when you use the other password is that we just live inside all of this, all of these possibilities, like air. You can’t stop these things.”

  “Kim is alive now.”

  “And you can’t see the worlds where she’s not anymore. When you make choices they matter to you, they matter to her. But they really don’t matter because every possibility happens. Look, that’s all I know.”

  Kim said, “What is the crèche?”

  “I’ve read everything about it backward and forward. You get to a point where yo
u have to. When you try that other password you’ll find documents that say that consciousness, your—your feeling of things—is a basic part of reality. The crèche makes your consciousness go to another world.”

  “How can that be?” Kim asked. “I saw his body. He stayed in there.”

  “No, it’s about your consciousness. The crèche can’t move your body.”

  “How does it decide where you go?” Vin asked.

  “At first, I thought that was random. But I’ve done it enough. I think there are patterns. It connects with something and you go to certain situations almost as if your feelings aimed you. I think that’s why they call it a ‘shot.’ Because it’s aimed. Sometimes the aim seems obvious, sometimes it’s not.”

  “I don’t just go anywhere. I’m always inside people’s heads,” Vin said.

  “Yeah. The crèche turns your consciousness into probability. Probability doesn’t exist in a single world. A person in another world somehow notices you, their consciousness connects to you, so then you are in the place you were noticed. That’s where you go. It can happen, I think, when the person you go to is sort of looking for things they wouldn’t normally see, when they’re open, so, a moment of crisis, a really emotional experience, for example. You become a part of their experience.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Vin said with a faint stroke of anger.

  “Well, don’t believe it then. I don’t care. But you felt it, didn’t you? And I just explained that feeling, didn’t I?”

  If he accepted what she was saying, then Matt Deaumont and Bucky Wright were dead. Gao Cheng was lying in the dark torturing himself because Vin wanted to make him do something, and the euphoria of the Empire’s war council as they chose to attack the Dardanelles, the elation and certainty that Winston Churchill felt, that and the carnage it led to, all of it was real.

  “But what about the changes,” Kim said, “when he wakes up?”

  “The changes. I’m sorry, but those are real too. That’s a thing that no one expects. I’ve never met anyone who understood at the beginning—”

  “You keep talking about other people,” Vin interrupted. “Who? Who are they?”

  “They’re people, like us. People who go into the crèche.”

  “But, where are they, then? They’re not in this house,” Kim said.

  “It’s because of the way it works. To move you, it changes the state of your consciousness, so you have a probability of being in many places, like how an electron works. But it has to do the same thing to get you back, which means the machine, the crèche, has to let go of you, because your consciousness isn’t in one world anymore. And, because there are infinite worlds, you never get back to the one you started in.” As Vin processed the words, Kim’s hand pressed deeper into his shoulder. Mona continued, “Sometimes the differences between worlds are small, things you’d never notice, sometimes they’re huge. In some worlds, other people have tried the crèche, so there are people in the house, or the caskets. You do this enough, you meet people, but I’ve never seen you two before.”

  “We’re in other worlds,” Kim said, like she’d known it all along.

  Mona said, “But, it’s hard to say what’s you exactly, isn’t it? If there are different versions on infinite worlds.”

  Vin’s head hurt, as if a murder of crows were shouting into an angry day. “That’s not possible.”

  Mona rewarded him with an exaggerated look of surprise. “Possible? You know all about that now, do you?”

  “Wait a minute,” Kim said, “You go in—”

  “Think about it like a box of chocolates,” Mona said, “or chocolate covered cherries, with one of those slotted plastic things to hold them in place. Every candy is the same but slightly different. You open the box, spill them all out, then put them back in. The candies are your consciousness, the plastic slots are the bodies in different worlds. None of the candies go back in the same slot they started in.”

  “But what about his memories?” Kim said. “His memories are in his brain. That can’t just change. They’re part of his physical brain.”

  “She’s right,” Vin said. “Kim’s mind and her memories, and her body for that matter, they’ve always all traveled through time with her. Everything has stayed together. There’s never a chance of a mismatch.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not how it works, though. That makes it sound like memories are a thing that you can take with you or leave behind, but they’re not. Memories are a kind of interaction between all the things you are in a particular moment. Every time you remember something, you’re really creating a new experience. That experience depends on what happened to you in the past, but there’s nothing unique about that. Everything depends on what happened in the past. Memories aren’t really different. Because each memory is a new experience, there’s no way it can be a mismatch with what you are now, in the way you’re thinking. The fact that you’re in a new world probably does change your memories, but there’s no way for you to know how. I mean, it’s a kind of mystery, right? If you go that deep, you always find a mystery.”

  “Not with technology,” Vin said. “That’s just lazy thinking.”

  “Okay, how about this then.” Mona’s jaw jutted again and her eyes narrowed. “I’m not just saying if there was a crèche it might work this way. I’m asking myself, what the hell is going on with this thing? What I told you is as close as I can come. I’m sharing it with you because you asked. And by the way, lots of things people make, they don’t know exactly how they’ll work.”

  After a moment, Kim said, “We did ask.”

  “You believe I wasn’t born in this world,” Vin said.

  “Well, the idea of world almost doesn’t make sense. But, to answer what you’re asking, then no, you weren’t. And I wasn’t either. But this world could be pretty much identical to where we were born. I mean, maybe exactly the same except one cherry blossom ten or ten thousand years ago, or one moment in a different galaxy a billion years ago. On the other hand, maybe most things here are different except for things about you. I do think that the more shots that I do, the bigger the changes are when I come back.”

  “I’m not hallucinating,” Vin said.

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “You’re not,” said Kim.

  Mona said, “I’ve left notes after really bad shots, to warn other people, but there are still infinite worlds without the notes, so. But the good news is that you usually seem to come back to a place close to the one you left.”

  “But”—Vin was trying to fit his experience into what Mona had said—“why would the designers, why would Nerdean, construct a system with so many terrible flaws? How can it all be so fucked up?”

  Mona shook her head. “It’s tech. I don’t know.”

  “And so, you’re saying that,”—at the curdling sound of Kim’s voice, Vin twisted in his chair; Kim’s face was tense with a dawning realization—“that this Vin isn’t my Vin. You’re saying my Vin went into that thing, and that he’s never coming back. And this is someone else.”

  “I think some people might see it that way,” Mona said. “But you don’t have to see it that way. You could also think of it just like, Vin made a decision, and it changed him.”

  “But, you’re saying I wasn’t born in this world.”

  “That body was. Maybe you’ve had some different experiences than the person born with it, but you’re close enough to fool the crèche, and for the crèche to fit you into that body.”

  “Musical chairs,” Kim said.

  “Yeah.” Mona nodded. “With bodies. Look, I need to get back in there.”

  THEY COULDN’T CHANGE HER MIND. At one point, upset and clearly feeling badgered by people she’d only just met, she rounded on Vin, asking him why he had gone in the last time, after he knew there were risks. The two of them were alone. Kim didn’t want to have anything more to do with the crèche, so she hadn’t come down to Nerdean’s office.

  “I was trying to f
ind Bill. I wanted him to come back, like Kim did.”

  “See, that’s what happens,” she said. “That’s why everybody goes in. To get back what they lose. But maybe nobody ever does that. Maybe you can’t.”

  “Why are you going back in?” Vin asked her.

  “I lost my two kids. If it’s possible to find them and I don’t try, then what am I? Why am I alive?”

  Before she got in, as she was standing naked, heavy and sallow, a kind of weariness radiating from her as if her concerns could dissolve worries about vulnerability or self-consciousness, she said, “Listen, I want to tell you one more thing. Give me back the robe. I’m cold.”

  He lifted it off the chair where she had dropped it and handed it to her. She put it on, and ran a hand through her short, tangled hair. “You should know something, about me.”

  She sat near him and put a hand on his knee for a moment, then lifted it and leaned back in the chair. “I found this place, maybe four years ago, my time. I think. I don’t know. Maybe a little over a year ago your time. Time on a shot isn’t always the same. Anyway, none of that matters. It was all in a galaxy far away. So I went into the crèche. My husband and I had been fighting, and I wanted to dream. I wasn’t smart, like you. I took a long shot right away, a week. Some things happened. You know what kind of things can happen. When I came out after that first time, I didn’t know what was real. And then, my husband didn’t believe what happened to me, when I told him. I couldn’t really believe it either, so I don’t blame him. But he wanted me to take medicine. I guess I believed I might be going crazy, but I also felt like, after what I had seen, I felt like nothing at all was real. You know? That all this was an illusion. So I set my house on fire. And, I killed—I lost my two kids. The fire did it. They burnt all up.”

  She stopped talking. She stared at him for an uncomfortably long time, as if he might say something that would explain what had happened to her.

  “I’m going to go into the crèche again,” she said. “And I’m going to find them. I am. But, what I want to tell you, is to warn you, I guess. I don’t know who will come out of it the next time this body wakes up. There was a very long time when I wasn’t a good person. If I come out like that . . . The thing is, I’m not sure that you’re safe with me. Even now. As I am. I mean, me right now. And I guess the truth is, whoever comes out of there next time, you might not be safe.”