The Shootout Solution

by Michael R. Underwood

  “So how finely sliced do the genre worlds get? Is there a Slasher world, a sports movie world?” Leah asked.

  Shirin gestured to the wall of screens. Looking closer, she started to pick out different worlds. Each pack of 3x3 screens seemed to show one world, but with different styles. “Each world has one umbrella genre which sets the tone for that world. Fantasy world has dark fantasy, epic fantasy, and sword and sorcery, all on different continents far removed from one another. Slasher would be a region in Horror world. Sports stories happen all over, but something like A League of Their Own would go to Women’s Fiction world.

  “I hate that label, by the way,” Shirin added, “but unless we convince the High Council to rename it, that’s what it is.” That sounded like an argument that had gone around the block more than a few times. “I guarantee you that this will be more exciting than answering phone calls, scheduling meetings, and processing expense reports.”

  “Don’t knock expense reports. There’s a kind of magic in paying bills with other people’s money,” Leah said.

  Shirin said, “I could see the appeal in that. But what we do is storytelling at the highest possible stakes, determining the fate of individuals, nations, and entire worlds all at once.”

  Gulp. “No pressure, right?”

  Shirin nodded. The woman seemed to be shooting straight, not sugarcoating it to get her to sign her soul away.

  But curiosity wouldn’t let her just walk away. She might as well see how deep the rabbit hole went before deciding whether to take the leap.

  Leah waved at the screens. “So, what does it take to cross the dimensional barriers or whatever you do?”

  “For that, we go to the Hangar.”

  * * *

  Bakhtin Hangar contained several berths with snub-nosed rocket ships under repair and reconstruction, as well as launching stations.

  One of the ships stood on end, scaffolding and a set of stairs attached—for maintenance, most likely. The ship was twenty feet tall, with a glass port on the top, and a larger hatch near the back. Techs in red jumpsuits surrounded the nearest ships, running diagnostics, moving hoses, and generally making with the busy.

  King watched the scurrying preparations, tapping through menus on a tablet.

  “So you cross dimensions in that?” Leah asked.

  “Exactly,” King said.

  “So why haven’t I heard about the weird rocket launches by BWI?”

  “Because they never cross above that hoop. These ships travel in the fifth dimension, they’re designed to traverse the boundaries between Earth Prime and the narrative dimensions. And this one is about to launch. What do you say?”

  “I say this is still totally bonkers.”

  “That’s fair. But the offer stands—come with us, and you’ll have a steady comedy gig for as long as you want it.”

  “So what are the chances that I get killed in your little excursion?” Leah asked.

  “Not at all likely. I’d give it a seven percent chance. Only three percent if you follow all of my directions.”

  “The fact that you know those percentages without thinking makes me think that the actual odds are way worse.” Leah looked at the ship, at the dome above, and thought about the drudgery awaiting her at the office tomorrow.

  It was totally ridiculous that this place was even here, right under everyone’s noses. A whole multiverse of possibility and semio-thematic thingamawhatsits and professional dimensional story doctors jumping between worlds as regularly as corporate troubleshooters.

  The smart thing to do would be to get them to call her a cab, text her friends that she was coming home, and forget this whole thing. She could try the Attic again, promise to use different material, and keep trying, keep grinding until she got a break. That’s what made sense.

  Watching the techs cluster around the ship, King barking orders, rushing the team to move faster, Leah imagined what that normal life would be like.

  Banality by day, frustration by night. Weekends in coffeeshops writing material, late nights dying on the stage again and again.

  Or . . . this. This bizarre, dangerous job with infinite possibility. And, even if she didn’t like it—wasn’t suited or whatever—she could take the gig. King had delivered for Tommy Suarez, and Inez vouched for him. And wasn’t a steady gig worth an evening of bizarreness?

  She thought about the woman on the gurney, the mention of “casualties,” weighed it against the chance to fly in a rocket ship, to see impossible vistas, to take her passion for stories and use it to make a real difference. That is, if all of this was real. But she’d never know unless she gave it a shot.

  And there was her answer.

  Leah popped off a quick “all clear” text to her friends as she walked toward the rocket.

  “Hey, King,” she shouted. “Do I get to wear a cool bubble helmet?”

  “Not this time,” King said, turning with the hint of a smile. “First, there is some very exciting paperwork for you to fill out.”

  Much less cool.

  But still, spaceship.

  Three: Blast Off

  Leah held on for dear life, sitting with her back to the floor, gravity pulling like a tilt-a-whirl, minus the spinning.

  King was at the helm. Shirin had the copilot seat, calling out sensor data. Leah sat in the second row, alone, with boxes of supplies secured behind her.

  The ship rocked and rattled at a dull roar. Colors kaleidoscoped across the windshield like an acid trip mixed with a music visualizer. Leah tried to keep her regretfully greasy dinner down as the ship lurched and shook.

  “What’s with the rattling?” she yelled, distracting herself from her fear by complaining—a tactic she borrowed from pre-K kids everywhere.

  “It’s dimensional turbulence,” King said, his voice lacking its usual level calm. “The dimensions rub up against one another more sometimes than others, and that friction disturbs our passing in the fifth dimension.”

  “That sounds crappy.” She stopped for a moment to consider. “And yet kinda cool. Has it ever killed anyone?” she asked, not really wanting to know the answer, but fear was in the driver’s seat, and the question was out before she could swallow it.

  “Not often,” Shirin said, her knuckles white on the sides of her seat.

  A strap broke behind her, and Leah saw gear tumbling to the ground. A bag spilled old-timey Western clothes—ponchos, starched shirts, dusters, and chaps. Another bundle went clang with the sound of metal on metal as a rolled-up tube of guns toppled to the floor.

  “The universe is coming undone back here,” Leah said. She caught Shirin looking on, the older woman’s eyes evaluating the damage, worry showing through a hastily applied mask of calm.

  “If you get me killed before I even get to see Westworld, I’m going to be ridiculously pissed-off.”

  King worked the controls, hauling back on a lever and slamming a button. The ship lurched to the left, and a few bumpy moments later, the turbulence faded. The windshield view-screen resolved to a flat white, which then receded into a horizon, a sun-drenched desert at high noon.

  “Can we skip that part on the way back?” Leah asked, taking deep breaths and locking her vision on the horizon to try to reassemble her shattered equilibrium. They were pointed up, gravity tugging on her back.

  “Seconded,” said Shirin.

  King’s smile was meant to be encouraging. Her stomach was still too sloshy for it to help. “That’s one hurdle you’ve already made it past. Fascinating, no?”

  “The light show was impressive, but I could have done without the rock tumbler ride.”

  “Tumblers take off the rough edges, don’t they?” King gave a wry smile. Shirin rolled her eyes as she unbuckled.

  “Why do we have to travel with our backs to the ground? Or is dangling from one’s seat considered a perk?”

  “Now she’s getting it.” King unbuckled, then adeptly climbed out of the chair, dropped to the chair beside Leah, and reached over
to help her out of her seat.

  “I got it, I got it.” Leah swatted at his hand, working the X-cross straps that had kept her mostly stable in the seat during the crossing.

  “Shirin, see to the gear.”

  The woman descended a column of rails at the side of the ship. Leah tested the strength of the rails, then followed.

  King said, “Now that we’ve arrived, here’s what you need to know: to do our jobs and keep the worlds stable, we need to make as little an impact here as possible. We’re surgeons, not sawbones. We nudge the story back on track, and do it from the shadows whenever possible. If the people of this world realize that they’re being messed with by outsiders, then even more stories will go off-track, and the whole problem will only compound until we’re all quite screwed.”

  Leah climbed onto the stairs and made her way down to the pile of rucksacks. “Tread softly, got it. But won’t we stand out regardless? Westerns aren’t exactly known for their diversity. Black guy, Asian woman, and a Middle Eastern woman wander into a saloon, people are going to notice. And then make a joke. And then shoot us.”

  King nodded. “Sad truth is, you’re right. That’s why we have these.” He gestured to the Marshal’s pin on his jacket. “This is a Personal Phase Manipulator, or PPM. They let us project an illusion and fit in to the story worlds. We’ll look like any other three lily-white red-blooded cowfolks. We try to only use them on worlds where our operatives wouldn’t otherwise be able to move unnoticed. Here, the various historical regions on Romance world, and so on.”

  “Anywhere that the three of us would get run out of town if we showed up looking like ourselves,” Leah said.

  “Exactly. That’s why Mallery and Roman went first in this world,” King said. “The Phase Manipulators are incredibly expensive and sometimes unreliable, so we try to minimize the need for them.”

  “That and Western world is usually one of the most dormant, the most stable,” Shirin said. “There hasn’t been a genre-redefining Western for years. The breaches here tend to be small.”

  Leah said, “So all the racist storytelling tropes happen in these worlds: black guys do always die first in Horror world, beautiful white people are ninety-five percent of the leads in Romance world while the ‘ethnic’ friends get paired off with one another in the credits—that kind of thing?”

  “Pretty much, yes.” King helped Shirin sort out their gear while Leah looked on. “Thematic-semiotic resonance is a two-way street. The way we tell stories manifests in the story worlds. The dominant narrative here is reflected on the genre world. Any given world has some room for minority narratives and counternarratives, but those are just as marginalized.”

  “Counternarratives. Like parodies?”

  “Parodies, deconstructions, feminist or antiracist interventions into the genre, and so on.”

  Shirin walked by, a bag over each shoulder. “We should probably save the literary theory lecture for after the mission, Professor.” She put a hand on Leah’s arm. “Go ahead and get changed. The less work the Phase Manipulators have to do to make you fit in, the more reliable they are.”

  Leah gestured to the ship. “What about this thing? It’s a bit more conspicuous than the Minority Musketeers riding into town.”

  “The ship has its own Phase Manipulator,” King said. “It projects the image of something that makes sense in the world—like a boarded-up ranch house or a rock outcropping. Due to the size difference and the fact that it’s inorganic, the phase shift is more stable.”

  “Because technobabble, got it,” Leah said. “Glad to hear the chameleon circuit’s not broken.”

  Shirin draped a heavy leather coat over Leah’s arms, ignoring the reference. “This will make you look bigger than you are. We need to look dangerous. The best way to blend in on this world here is to come off as big and bad. Normal folks don’t get in the way of people they consider to be threatening.”

  King opened the hatch, heading outside to give Shirin and Leah their privacy.

  * * *

  Leah adjusted her ten-gallon hat, looking in the mirror bracketed to the inside of the ship’s hatch.

  With her Phase Manipulator on, Leah saw a stranger before her. Leah moved, and in the mirror, a white man with Norse coloration echoed her. The illusion had sandy-blond hair, an angular face, and hair shorter than she’d had since she cut her own hair as a six-year-old.

  The illusory man had Leah’s build, so she wouldn’t have to worry about people looking her “in the eye” at her forehead or her chest. The whole thing had the feel of LARPing an episode of Quantum Leap by wearing a virtual reality rig.

  She turned away and looked back, catching her “self” out of the corner of her eye. If she was going to keep up this act, she would need to not be startled by seeing this illusion casually in washrooms or watering holes or whatever reflective surfaces were at hand.

  Having to travel in whitewashed drag in order to not get harassed wasn’t exactly what she’d call comforting, but the fascinating bizarreness of having a full-body illusion was fairly distracting from the unfairness of it all.

  “Adjusted yet?” came Shirin’s voice from behind her.

  Shirin’s cover illusion was that of a grizzled white woman of about sixty. She had a time-worn face and bone-white hair.

  “This is weird, right?” Leah said, watching her hands as she talked. “I mean, we’re wearing illusory white people. This is straight-up science-fictional future shock weird.”

  Leah put on her hat, which was two sizes too big. It dropped right down onto her nose, blocking her vision. She flicked the brim and the hat eased back so she could see, weighing heavy on her ears.

  “It’s weird, but things were worse when we tried to go without the PPMs.”

  “So, how do I look?”

  Shirin doled out another one of her classy aunt smiles. “Not quite dangerous, but it’ll do.” Shirin bent down and reached into another bag. She came out with a leather belt holding two holstered revolvers. “This will help with the dangerous part.”

  “I’m not a big gun fan,” Leah said, her hand drooping as she took the weight of the belt.

  “You don’t have to like them, but for now, you definitely have to wear them.” Shirin strapped on her own gun belt. She drew each of the guns in turn, checking the wheel and action.

  “I checked yours before we went. Leave them be for now if you’re not comfortable.”

  “I’ll do that. I’m a whole lot of uncomfortable, and kind of wishing I’d taken a nap today before my set.

  “Also, why isn’t your illusion a dude?” Leah asked.

  Shirin flinched, hurt crossing her face. Leah was about to open her mouth to apologize, but Shirin cut her off.

  “I spent more than twenty years pretending to be a boy. That’s enough for several lifetimes.”

  “Sorry, what?” Leah asked.

  Shirin dropped her shoulders, taking a breath. “I’m trans. I left Iran after the revolution in ’79, when it became very clear that women like me were especially unwelcome.”

  Ah. Leah shut her mouth. “Sorry. I didn’t know. Didn’t mean to . . .”

  Shirin raised a hand. Her forgiving smile wiped away some of the awkwardness. “No worries. I’m old enough that folks here won’t police me quite as much as they would a spring chicken like you. Just remember to speak at the bottom of your register so you can pass for a boy without the PPM having to do it for you. Lean into the drawl and you’ll be fine. And remember, here you’re Lee, and I’m Atlas Jane. Now let’s disembark and put this bit of awkwardness behind us, why don’t we?”

  “Yes, please.”

  * * *

  The hatch opened as Shirin aka Atlas Jane let the harsh desert sun back in. King stood on watch adorned in a brown leather vest and slacks, a bandolier across one shoulder, a shotgun resting on the other.

  “We’re about a mile outside the town,” King said, gesturing off into the distance, beyond some dunes. His illusion was of a black-hai
red Germanic white guy, grizzled enough to wear the mantle of a Marshal.

  They’d arrived in scrublands, setting down at the base of one of a set of rolling hills. There were mountains off in the other direction. Cacti spattered the landscape, along with the light scrub vegetation. The view could have come from one of a hundred soundstages at MGM or any of the Studio’s other golden-age Western sets.

  Leah climbed down out of the ship, the boots pinching her feet. Such were the joys of being a five-wide. Shirin said she’d had to guess on the fly when they were packing, and next time she’d get tailored gear.

  The earth dusted as she touched down, and she could feel the heat sucking all the moisture out of her skin.

  She took a breath, the air dry, sun beating down like it was being paid. All that was missing was a tumbleweed.

  And there we go, she thought, seeing one roll and bounce by on a gust of wind.

  “Lead on, pardner.” Leah tipped her hat, her voice as low as she could take it. King furrowed his brow and started walking.

  Shirin leaned into Leah. “You’re his new best friend.”

  Leah responded, sotto voce, “Hey, he hired me from a comedy club. Don’t know what he was expecting.”

  “I was expecting that you would be a natural at this,” King said over his shoulder. “Let’s see if I’m right.”

  * * *

  Walking into the town, Leah could almost see the cardboard behind the storefronts. It was every Western town from every movie brought to life, with washerwomen, mud-stained miners, vest-wearing gentlemen, prim and proper schoolmarms, and more.

  She had to contain her sense of wonder, the mix of excitement and worry at seeing the tropes of a genre brought to life and plopped right in front of her. She held her hat in place as she craned her head up, scanning the buildings, squinting her eyes to make out what looked like an office for a mine in the distance, beside the ridge of rocks that stood at the town’s back.