by Jon Sauve
The “Portable” and the “Unit” weren’t troubling; the “Hyperspace” part was. If you weren’t careful, if you let your eyes linger too long on the PHU’s inner dimensions or stuck your hand too far in, bad things could happen.
The lid on top was help down by two clasps which required considerable strength to open. Sov was known for his speed and cunning, but not his strength; he grunted and strained at the clasps for several minutes before they sprang open.
When the first one went, the pressure of the Unit’s interior caused the loosened side of the lid to lift up. A bit of condensed hyperspace leaked out, causing the air to shimmer and split into colors.
When the second clasp went, the lid exploded open and Sov felt his hand get sucked in. After the initial equalization, the pressure weakened to the point where Sov was able to fight it. He pulled his hand out and looked at it. A peculiar sensation prickled in his fingers. It was probably similar to what frostbite felt like, Sov thought.
He now had to do something scary. Had to perform a reorientation on himself.
His socks came off next. His feet were sweaty. He had been running for a long time. Looking back once more, Sov let out a sigh of relief followed by a long groan when he fully realized what he was about to do to himself.
It was best not to think about it much.
Scooting himself back over the mushy snow, Sov jammed both feet into the PHU’s slot, up to the ankles. Immediately, they were covered by the pins and needles sensation he was familiar with. When he felt them lock into place, held there in the folds of hyperspace, he started twisting his body around.
The feet stayed where they were as he turned over onto his stomach. It didn’t hurt as much as he thought it would, but the feeling he did get was just as bad; a weird humming in his ankles, as well as a feeling like someone was scouring the bones with steel wool.
Still on his stomach, he pulled his feet back out. His heels hit the snow, and he looked down. The feet had kept their orientation, and now faced backward.
Putting his socks and shoes back on was not easy. Nor was standing up. But Sov was also known to be very adaptable. After a few minutes, he decided that he could do this.
He put the PHU back over his shoulder, then turned it over. The antimatter jets on the bottom were damn near empty. Of course they were. If they weren’t, he could have flown out of here lickety-split.
They did, however, have enough left in them for a short flight. He had been saving it for days, and now his willpower had paid off. If this reorientation ruse was going to work, he really needed that antimatter.
He looked toward the sun, dead ahead. It was hard to see the effects of the imminent convergence through the cloud cover, but they were there; the sun was shooting out spikes of plasma in all directions, dancing tendrils of fire that sparkled every color of every rainbow in every universe that was involved in the convergence.
Enough of that. It hurt his eyes. He looked back at his tracks instead. Here, the handiness of the PHU really made itself apparent. Every single track he had left on this world, in this universe in fact, had flipped itself around. And they would stay that way, as long as he waited until he left to fix his feet. And since his enemies had no idea he had a PHU, let alone what a PHU even was, they would be ridiculously confused. Add to that the fact that they were likely still on the steppe, where there was no snow, and where they would still be a little while in picking his trail back up, he had a very effective ruse.
Now, to add the icing on top. He moved to the edge of the cleared area and pulled his firebox out. He used it to carry embers between camp sites, but now it would serve a different purpose. He opened the thing and upended it into the center of the cleared spot. Then he pulled out his bundle of kindling and threw it on top. After a few minutes of careful stoking, he had the fire going. There wasn’t much wood, so it would burn out before the pursuers found it. They would see the ash and the prints, and think that Sov had headed back to the steppe. They would follow, and track him across that snowless expanse. Perfect!
He centered the PHU on his back, cinched it down tight, and face toward the sun. The clouds seemed to be thinning now. Probably natural, but there was a chance that the first tendrils were reaching the atmosphere now and burning the moisture away. During really bad convergences, on similar planets, the atmosphere could be entirely consumed in the space of seconds.
Hopefully that wouldn’t happen here.
Sov reached for the controller in his pocket, found the jet button by memory, and pressed it.
After a fitful start, he was soon sailing through the frigid wind, his hair blasted back, ice forming in the hairs of his nose. He went a good half mile before the PHU started chugging and gasping. He released the button, let himself fall ten feet or so, then pressed it again. In this way, he inched his way back to the ground. The antimatter went totally dry when he was still fifteen feet up, but he was ready for it, and fell with grace despite the fact that his feet were on backwards.
The sharp glaze of the snow cut his hands a little, and his newly reoriented ankles burned and ached when he landed, but otherwise he was OK.
He looked back. The combination of the flat landscape and the stark plainness of the snow made it so that he couldn’t see his other tracks at all. Only the hint of smoke rising. Very good.
He turned and walked. Now that he didn’t really need the backwards feet anymore, they started feeling more like an annoyance. His top speed was greatly reduced. He looked at the PHU’s readout again:
T minus forty minutes, thirty six seconds
And he still had a couple of miles to go.
About ten minutes later, as Sov was walking, he realized the little hill just ahead of him wasn’t getting any closer.
He looked around and puzzled over the problem for a moment before realizing what was happening. He had been walking steadily, but hadn’t moved an inch. Each time he moved forward, space-time smeared and carried him back again. The phenomenon was made evident by the weird crystal-like artifacts floating in the air, surrounding him. After wracking his brain for a moment, he remembered that it was something known to occur during converges, and was called a Box-In. The only way to cancel out the effect, and enter back into the ordinary flow of time, was to cause a hyperspatial burst.
Luckily, he had the PHU. He set it between his knees, squeezed it there, and with a choreographed effort managed to get both clasps to come free simultaneously. Normal space was pulled in and distorted. As a result, the Box-In matrix was realigned with the temporal flow and things went back to normal. Seemingly.
He had wasted a couple more minutes there. And if Box-Ins were now happening, it meant that the convergence was getting very near. All bets were off now.
He got to the hill and had to blink a few times. The landscape ahead, still snowy but now gently sloped here and there, seemed for a moment to be a swimming ocean of negative colors. The effect left an after image on Sov’s eyes. He wasn’t sure what that was called. Either it was too boring and common to have ever been mentioned to him, or it was some exotic, rare thing.
An exotic, rare event during a convergence wasn’t always a bad thing. Just ninety-nine percent of the time.
Sov kept going, pressing the speed even more. There was some strain on his ligaments that soon caused a tight, twanging pain in the backs of both knees. He had the idea of walking backward, so that his now backward feet would suddenly be forward again, but that somehow felt even more awkward.
Oh, well. Better to have sore knees than a body dissected and mutilated by overlapping dimensions that were never supposed to exist in the same universe, let alone ever touch one another.
T minus twenty four minutes, eighteen seconds
Sov lowered the PHU and looked back. No sign of his pursuers, not even a wisp of smoke. He was long gone. Given enough time, they might find him. But time was something they didn’t have. Or, quite possibly, they had absolute eternity, as convergence scientists like to call it; that st
ate of total temporal void, in which nothing moves or ever changes; where everything freezes forever.
Either way, they would never get him. Even if Sov suddenly turned to a human statue, even if the dust of snow in the air suddenly hung fixed as if from strings, they would never get him.
The land behind him, in the direction he had come leaving his backwards footprints, things looked normal. This planet wasn’t prized for its beauty. It wasn’t prized for its anything, really, which was why Sov had come here to begin with. But it did at least look natural back that way. Snow, the curve of land, a smear of gray further along where the steppe began. A terrestrial place, one where the human mind could exist assailed by nothing except loneliness.
Ahead of him, though, the effects of the convergence were twisting reality like a wet rag.
Sometimes when Sov looked at the horizon it appeared flipped; sky below, snow above. Under ordinary circumstances this wouldn’t trouble the eye much. White sky, white ground and the lack of contrast between them. But now the sky was starting to clear, revealing itself as not a blue expanse but a deepening void in which the many colors of the hyperspatial seepage presented themselves in electrical starkness. The stars, light years away, appeared magnified and blurred. Thunder filled the sky, more melodic and more disturbing than any thunder that could be considered natural.
Sov realized how foolish it was that he was going toward all that. But in convergence, one must learn to be counter intuitive. When one runs back in the direction of normality, one is condemning themselves to a worse fate. The longer the convergence has to effect reality, the more terrible the reality becomes. The only way out is forward.
Sov had survived three convergences in his life. The trick to getting out of them was to find a traveler. Back in his home universe, people had been using a system called NTS to travel great distances in less than a second; teleportation, in other words. NTS had been a common system of travel for a very long time. It worked by throwing people through hyperspace.
If you traveled just far enough into a convergence to see into hyperspace, but not so far that your body was smeared across ten light years in ten different universes, you sometimes saw the travelers floating by. All you had to do was grab on to one of them and ride them back home. If not your home, then someone else’s.
By the looks of the mess of unreality ahead of him, Sov was getting close to that magical point.
T minus fourteen minutes, fifty two seconds
The convergence was all around him. Sov had already stopped three more times to get out of Box-Ins. He had also suffered a marrow quake, which is when a certain particle flying out of hyperspace and through your body reacts badly to the marrow in your bones, resulting in a very nasty sensation that your limbs are about to disintegrate. Which they absolutely will, if you don’t get out of the way fast enough.
Sov stopped. Up ahead, a wobbling sphere of purple supermatter floated in the air. It looked familiar. He opened the PHU again and stuck his hand in. It came out of the sphere up ahead. He felt cold air on his fingertips.
He had heard of this happening a couple times. Each PHU is rooted to its own chunk of supermatter, which is suspended somewhere in hyperspace. The supermatter acts as a buffer so that you don’t cause your own convergence on accident. Sometimes, during convergences, you will glimpse a supermatter orb or two. But it is extremely unlikely that you would come across the orb of your very own PHU.
Sov took his hand back and shut the Unit. The orb went drifting past him, headed for normalcy. It wouldn’t survive much longer, not immersed in normal space as it was. It would soon burst, causing a cascading effect of splitting molecules that might, under the proper atmospheric conditions, entirely destroy the possibility of life on the planet. All the more reason to get out of here.
The worst part was that his PHU was now useless. He would have to find another one once he got out of here if he wanted to turn his feet back around.
He walked onward, racing the convergence now rather than his pursuers.
T minus fourteen minutes, thirty seconds
It should have read around ten minutes. Now that that the PHU was disconnected from hyperspace, it was now unable to get a gauge on the progress of the convergence. Sov was now playing it by ear. Thankfully, he had already seen his first traveler up ahead. The woman had been here and gone in about five seconds. Enough time to grab on. He just had to walk up to where he had seen her, and hope another one would come by.
He went. It was easy to tell where she had passed because the snow was melted slightly in a wide trench there.
Sov waited awhile. About two minutes passed. He was starting to feel anxious. The sheer amount of people who used NTS meant that, on average, he should see several more before the convergence was on him. But averages had a way of biting you in the ass.
A troubling thing had occurred. The sky and the air around him had taken on a thick blueness. And not the fresh, brave blue of the normal sky. No; this was the ominous doom shade that immediately preceded the heart of a Class C Convergence, which wasn’t the worst but it wasn’t the best either.
Sov blinked. And of course, that was when the traveler came. But he was quick, and he latched on to the flying shape with both arms first and then wrapped his legs around it.
The traveler flew on, in a perfectly prone position parallel to the ground. A bubble of heat surrounded them, which was a result of the interaction between hyperspace and that protective gel they put on you before you took an NTS trip. Sov singed himself a little as he grappled onto the traveler, but it felt nice and cool inside the bubble.
The traveler shot on, unaffected by gravity, and then punctured through the wall of reality which was weaker than ever here at the edge of the convergence. They were now in hyperspace.
It wasn’t Sov’s first time here, but he never got used to it, nor did he ever find the words to describe what it was like. Maybe it was like standing inside of a hollow sphere made of mirrors. Or maybe it was like dancing in the heart of a black hole. Or maybe it was like having angels sing your demise as you died in the most unimaginable, horrific way the multiverse could come up with.
Thankfully, the trip would be short. The traveler might be unconscious and thus safe, but Sov’s fragile human psyche was at the full mercy of hyperspace.
To take his mind off it, he took a closer look at the traveler. It wasn’t even human, he realized. He wasn’t sure of the species. He hadn’t been back home in a long time. But it was alive, and it was dressed in the typical gown given to travelers at official NTS stations, which meant it was civilized and hopefully friendly as well.
One good thing about his backwards feet was that they made it easier to get close to his alien companion.
The bubble dissolved as they passed back into normal space, as it was meant to do.
The NTS pod was far too cramped for two people, and the alien was rather large anyway. Sov was crammed against the pod’s lid, his throat pinched between it and the alien’s shoulder. The operators immediately saw that they had an unexpected tagalong, and opened the lid. Whilst the alien traveler slept on, the operators grabbed Sov and rushed him over to a special shower designed to clean any residual hyperspatial particles off of his person.
When the process was finished, Sov underwent a brief exam and interview. He almost expected to be thrown into prison, but it seemed enough time had passed in this universe that they didn’t have him on record anymore. Also, his PHU was apparently so outdated that they thought it was some kind of travel case. When he told them what it was, they said that it made sense considering the state of his feet.
After all the formalities someone brought in a working PHU and Sov got to fix his feet. They hurt worse after being turned back, but it was such a relief that he didn’t care.
As soon as he was able to walk he went out to explore the place where he had found himself. It turned out to be a pissant lunar research station, barely worthy of even having an NTS pod. Oh, well. It would have
to do, at least until he found out if anyone else in the universe remembered him. And until he found out where to go next.
POEMS
INTERSTELLAR JUMP
It cuts, we bleed
It flows, we lead
In the dark
Where there is no light
In the dark
Where there is no fight
We jump, it bends
We fall, it wins
In the dark
Where there is no air
In the dark
Where there is nowhere
We jump, it withers
We die, it glitters
In the dark
Where there is no night
In the dark
Where there is no light
No life, no death
No hope, no less
We live, then die
In a single breath
In the dark
Where there is nowhere
WHEN THE L
IGHT TURNS ON
A cold wind blows
And an old door groans
Enter what you thought was gone
Songs that never have been sung
In hallways of the forgotten
Where the new souls now arrange
Words of truth are torched
Thought and memory destroyed
All familiar things made strange
You begin to see that all is gone
And you don’t look like yourself
When the light turns on
IN MOONLIGHT