Super World Two

by Lawrence Ambrose

  "What would I be swindling from you? Are you rich? Hold a powerful position in the government?"

  Zach didn't return her grin. "Still, that theory strikes me as a lot more probable than this is all real."

  They exited the freeway and cruised past rows of upscale homes and manicured lawns and greenbelts and fresh-polished stores that appeared recently built. The kind of neighborhoods a young, up and coming professional and his or her family would feel right at home.

  "What could I do to convince you?" she asked.

  "What kind of powers do you have?"

  "Super strength and sight, flight, and telekinetics."

  "You can fly?"

  "That's how I got here."

  "That might convince me...as long as something objectively real resulted that proved it wasn't an illusion or hallucination."

  "I could take you somewhere, you pick up something, and I bring you back?"

  "All right."

  "Where do you want to go?"

  "To the moon and pick up some moon rock?"

  "We could actually do that," Jamie said with a soft laugh, "but there would be dangers. Maybe better to stick a little closer to Earth."

  "Okay. A quick flight into the sky should do it."

  "Not a problem. If you could find a private place as our launching spot."

  "Right now?"

  "Unless you have something else you need to do."

  "Not really." Zach sighed. "In for a penny, in for a hundred dollars."

  He turned off the main drag and onto a dirt road leading between some half-built homes, no construction workers in sight. He stopped behind a two-story house next to a field that extended out to a pair of farm buildings a mile or two distant.

  "Ready?" Jamie asked.

  "Should we get out?"

  "You might be more comfortable in your car."

  A line of sweat had broken out over his brow. He gave her a taut smile. "Guess I'm ready as I'll ever be."

  The Lexus lifted off. Fast enough to push a gasping Zachary down in his seat and to make his youthful, handsome face develop a mild case of sagging middle-aged jowls – but short of crushing him like a bug or even a NASA space launch acceleration.

  The ground receded at hundreds and then thousands of miles per hour. At the same time, Jamie focused on drawing in a cloud of atmosphere roughly one hundred meters across around them – a skill she'd mastered fairly late in her superhero career.

  Her companion was gaping and gasping as if there was no atmosphere, his eyes wide with panic.

  "It's okay," said Jamie, slowing their ascent. "Take a deep breath. Try to relax. I have control of this. Nothing bad is going to happen."

  Zachary jammed his head into the steering wheel, making deep sea diver sounds, his eyes clenched shut. Jamie placed a hand in the middle of his shoulders, exerting the gentlest of pressures. His ragged breathing gradually smoothed out. He raised his eyes a fraction of an inch to peer sideways through the driver's side window. He turned away, swallowing.

  "How high...?"

  "About ten miles. High enough to get out of regular air traffic."

  "How...are we...still breathing?"

  "I brought along a chunk of our atmosphere. I'm holding it around us telekinetically."

  Zach pushed himself back from the steering wheel and blinked down at the checkerboard tiles below, his face as pale as the wispy clouds below. Looking at him, Jamie regretted her bravado in dragging him up here. She reluctantly acknowledged that part of it was wanting to show off. Not a smart move when dealing with fragile flesh and blood. Especially with nosy drones, people with cameras, and conventional aircraft flying around.

  "We'll have to go down just as fast to avoid detection," she said.

  Zach gave her a wobbly smile. "Give me a few moments to resettle my stomach, if you don't mind."

  "We can hang out and talk up here for a while."

  "Thanks. Can't beat the view." His jaunty smile faded. "You said 'avoid detection.' So you want to keep your presence here a secret?"

  "If people know about me, the aliens will know about me, too. That's something I want to put off as long as possible."

  "The aliens."

  "Right. The aliens. And I don't think the government would be too happy about me, either."

  Zachary massaged his face and released a long exhalation. He rubbed his eyes and gazed up at the pale blue sky thinning into darkness above.

  "It's ironic," he said, "but I actually entertained fantasies about being an astronaut as a kid. I didn't realize I'd be such a wimp."

  Jamie laughed. "You just got transported several miles up in a Lexus at thousands of miles per hour. You're not a wimp, Zach."

  "Thanks." He gave her the same lopsided smile that had warmed Jamie's heart back on her world. "I was just thinking...here I am in the most fantastic moment of my life, and instead of appreciating that, all I can think of is getting back to terra firma."

  "I've had the same feeling in space."

  "Have you gone anywhere in space?"

  "To the moon and Mars."

  "You've been to Mars."

  Jamie smiled. She thought he looked more shocked now than he had when they'd first gone airborne.

  "What was it like?" Color reinvaded his face, and for the first time his smile was animated with enthusiasm. "Was there life?"

  "There was. I found an entire civilization there. I didn't see anything living, but I'd love to go back and take a closer look."

  "How did you get there? In some form of ship?"

  "No. I flew there. Just me and a communication satellite."

  "Flew..." He smiled at her as if she was joking. "No food or water? No air?"

  "Turns out I don't need those things." She heard the small edge of regret in her voice. Every word, she knew, created a greater distance not only between her and her old self but between her and Zach...or anyone else here. At least until they change, too, she thought.

  "I don't see how that's possible."

  "But you believe me?"

  "After this, I don't see I have much choice." He averted his eyes from the ground to the roof of his car, still breathing hard. "So what do you want from me, Jamie Shepherd?"

  "I don't know. It depends on how you change, assuming you do change. For now, I just want you and some people who know what's happening – to be on my side."

  "What if I decide not to be on your side? Will you reduce me to elemental particles?"

  "Of course not. I would never hurt you. I have no plans to hurt anyone here."

  "No plans?"

  Jamie sighed. She'd forgotten that her erstwhile lover had a sharp eye for logical details.

  "I don't know how all this is going to go down," she said. "In your world, the U.S. Government looks pretty dictatorial. It might try to stop me or us from saving this world."

  "That's a safe bet, if and when they find out about you."

  "What do you think about the way things have changed here? Are you okay with it?"

  "I don't know anyone, including myself, who's okay with it. But we suffered a devastating attack and our government responded. I and a lot of other people think it went a bit overboard, but when hundreds of millions of lives are at stake I understand why Congress and President Tomlinson chose to err on the side of security."

  "I'm not here to change your political system, Zachary. If Americans here want to live this way, that's their choice. But I can't let anyone stop me from eliminating the threat to our existence."

  Zach nodded. "I get that. But at this moment your aliens are even murkier than some of the terrorists our government is always anguishing about."

  "I can tell you a few things. They're humanoid – or they present that illusion. Some of them – it wasn't clear who, since they don't seem to have a centralized government – created this and many other universes. They apparently keep track of their creations and assess them for future risk. If a civilization is predicted to present a great enough risk, they destroy th
at civilization, while preserving some of its members for posterity, I guess."

  "How do they determine the risk?"

  "We don't know."

  "We do that here now, strangely enough. Predictive Individual Behavioral Analytics Score – PIBAS. Otherwise known as pre-crime."

  "I didn't know. How does that work?"

  "There's something called the Aggregated Behavioral Mobile Data System run by the Office of Behavioral Assessment which essentially develops a personal profile of every person in the United States. It has two aspects. One is the Citizen Status Rating which is loosely based on your credit rating, voting and charity activities, employment, behavior online, and a bunch of other things the OBA doesn't go into."

  Jamie swallowed down what she thought might be a mouthful of bile, her stomach turning.

  "The other aspect is a person's Predictive Individual Behavioral Analytics score which is not publicized, though it is available to all police and national security agencies, and may not bear any necessary relationship to the Citizen Status Rating. The score rates your probability of committing a given crime. Depending on the score and the crime, you may be questioned or detained and possibly subjected to mandatory therapy or other behavioral modification programs under the Anti-Terrorist Identification, Assessment, and Detention Act. Or simply detained indefinitely until the authorities deem it safe to release you."

  "That can't be Constitutional."

  "You're not alone in thinking that."

  "But you accept it?"

  "Not completely. I don't think many of us do. But few people have offered any serious alternatives. Doomsday rattled us to our core."

  "Well, what the aliens are threatening goes way beyond your Doomsday."

  "So I gather."

  "Will you help me?"

  "That depends on what you want me to do."

  Jamie wanted to press him, but what was the point? How could he commit to doing something that she herself couldn't specify? What would the aliens think about recent developments on this world? Would they harden their resolve to eliminate the human race or would they be assured by the USG's extreme security apparatus? Hard to believe they'd approve of this insanity, but then Jamie had little confidence she understood the Elementals' psychology.

  "Okay," she said. "I guess we've talked enough for now. You'll need some time to think it over. Ready to go back?"

  "Yes. I think so."

  "Maybe you should close your eyes?"

  "Maybe I should."

  Zach gripped the sides of his seat, staring straight ahead as they started to descend. Northeastern Colorado resolved into the Denver area, the suburbs north of it, and finally, thanks to her hard-won aerial navigation skills, the fields and half-finished homes they'd departed from. They approached at what she guessed was a hundred miles per hour over freefall and then braked hard enough a half-mile up to lock Zach's seatbelt as he flopped forward with a pained grunt. A final braking deposited them with a soft thunk on the ground from where they'd launched.

  The only sound for several seconds was Zachary's raspy breathing. The sun drifted downward toward twilight, casting sharp shadows from the nearby homes over the car. Zach's fingers clawed their way up his steering wheel as though rock-climbing on a forbidding mountainside.

  "Are you okay?" Jamie asked.

  "I'm okay." Zach gave his head a slow, disbelieving shake. "I'm not sure what about this is the hardest to accept. Parallel universes, aliens, or people having superpowers." He peered at her suddenly. "How did you get here anyway?"

  "Teleportation. I can't teleport myself, but I sort of hitched a ride with someone who can. It seems that teleportation involves a form of interdimensional travel, which can be stretched to include multi-universe travel." She smiled at his expression. "And no, we only have hypotheses not scientific explanations for that and many other things the Object brought to us. It would be like if we dropped a flashlight on cavemen in the Stone Age. They could use it without having a clue about how it works."

  "Interesting analogy."

  Zach rubbed his face, gazing at the sunset. Neither spoke for a minute or two.

  "Well, I should let you go." Jamie summoned smile. "Return to your regularly scheduled programming."

  "Yeah. I wonder how that will work." He frowned. "I was just thinking of calling my dad or my girlfriend and sharing this with them. Imagining their reactions. I realized that there's absolutely no way they'll believe me. They wouldn't think I'm lying...just that I snapped somehow."

  "I wish you would hold off on that. I know I have no right to ask, and I doubt it would matter – as you said, they wouldn't believe you, and even if they did no one would believe them – but if there's a chance any of it would get out I'd rather not take it."

  Zach didn't say anything, but his disgruntled expression said it all, Jamie thought.

  "It's up to you," she said. "But maybe if you wanted to talk to someone who will believe you, you could try my dad or even Dennis Shepherd, my husband from my world. Dennis lives in Fargo. I don't know his number, but my dad would have it. I'm sure they'd like to share what they know with someone, too."

  Zachary nodded without much conviction. The fading sunlight sent shadows across his shell-shocked face.

  "I'm sorry for dragging you into this, Zachary," she said. "I wouldn't have, but this is important. It's about the fate of this world."

  He roused himself, turning slowly to face her. "Can I ask you something? What were we to each other on your world?"

  Jamie had been dreading that question. Part of her wished she'd never made any reference to that, but it had seemed a good idea at the time. Or had she just wanted to place that thought in his head for her own selfish reasons?

  "A lot," she said. "We were talking about making a life together."

  "Yet you came here."

  "Yes. As I said, this world – where my daughter and husband are alive – is at risk."

  "So you've said. But if you eliminate that risk, would you go back?" He paused. "Could you go back?"

  "I'm not sure – about either. I might be able to find a way back, but I can't see leaving my daughter. Ideally, I could go back and forth...or maybe that wouldn't be ideal. Maybe I'd need to make a choice. I don't know."

  Her words ended on an anguished, exasperated note. Zach made an attempt at a sympathetic face, but it got hung up on a frown. He had too much on his own plate to be worried about her.

  "When will I see you again?" he asked. "Assuming I will."

  "Probably not too long. If you're okay with hearing from me again."

  He gave her a gaunt smile. "Unfortunately, now I know too much. I need to know what happens from here on out."

  "I'll keep you in the loop." She touched the door handle, strangely reluctant to leave him. "Talk to you later. And sorry again for the intrusion."

  Chapter 3

  GREG HORNER WAS HOISTING a barbell that appeared to have snagged half the free weights in the gym. Jamie watched the steel bar droop on both ends and spring back as Horner straightened up, veins bursting in his linebacker neck. Lifting that colossal weight impressed Jamie more than any feat of strength the augmented Horner had performed as the Incredible Hulk.

  She'd been watching from a far corner of the gym, waiting for him to be alone, which from what she'd seen was about as rare for Greg Horner as a virgin giving birth. He was either at work, partying, sleeping with some girl, drinking with buddies, or working out. He practiced Muay Thai or Judo or shooting a variety of firearms at the range when he wasn't tossing ridiculous amounts of weights around in the gym. Jamie knew that mostly from his Facebook page, which seemed to chronicle his every move 24/7, but also in person over the last day. She'd been tempted to move on to someone else, but Greg's Colorado Springs residence was too close to resist.

  Now as Horner lowered the groaning barbell to the floor, she spotted a rare opportunity to approach him as his workout buddies departed for the shower and no attractive women were nearby to grab
his attention.

  On cue, his wandering eyes, which had paused on her a few times since she'd shown up a half-hour ago and gone through the motions with some machines, now focused on her in full hunting mode.

  He swaggered over to her, casually toweling off his bristling crew cut, a cocky grin plastered on his face. She'd never thought of him as being good-looking, but he had decent, regular features, cobalt blue eyes, and a rugged masculine appeal that she imagined some women found attractive.

  "Hello, darlin'," he greeted her. "Never seen you here before."

  "It's my first time."

  "You new in town?"

  "Actually, I just flew in this morning. How did you know?"

  "Heh. You got that newbie deer in the headlights look." He stood holding his towel across his bull-neck, veins protruding in his flexed forearms and biceps, his cocky grin holding strong. "Why don't we go grab a drink and I'll give you the rundown on the place?"

  "Okay."

  He cocked his head at her in slight puzzlement, as if he'd been expecting more resistance. "The name's Greg, by the way. Greg Horner."

  "Jamie Shepherd."

  She shook his large, sweaty hand with her customary daintiness.

  "Pretty name," he said. "Just let me clean up a little and I'll be right with you. See you in the lobby?"

  "I'll be there."

  He glanced back at her on the way to the men's locker room, a question lingering in his eyes. Jamie thought she could read his mind: Too easy. What's the catch? She had a feeling he would never guess – not if he spent a thousand years thinking it over in the locker room.

  He entered the lobby ten minutes later, his brawny six-two or three frame stuffed into a pair of green khaki pants and matching short-sleeved shirt. His boots looked combat-issue. He could've been a soldier on civvies – a common sight in this city – but behind his good old boy grin and swagger lay a hint of cool menace. He was the real deal. She knew that as well as anyone.

  "You're still here," he said.

  "You sound surprised."

  "My big self can scare women off sometimes. Even if I'm just a big ole pussycat inside."

  Jamie laughed. "I'll bet."