Super World

by Lawrence Ambrose

  Here, the photos continued, showing her daughter growing up, Dennis alternately clean-shaven and bearded, but no Jamie. The implication was obvious. In this world, they had lived and she had died. There was no other explanation for the missing photographs of her.

  She moved into their bedroom. A large-framed photo of her and Dennis – a close-up of them staring into each other's eyes – hung on the wall facing the bed. There was nothing else on the wall, as if Dennis wanted no distractions. It was a shrine to them, Jamie was sure of it.

  She lowered herself on the bed. She couldn't actually sit on the bed, but she could position herself as if she were. Time passed in her silent prison. She supposed she could be grateful she could at least see beyond it – a see-through, soundproofed prison.

  Dennis entered. He grabbed a windbreaker from the closet. Jamie followed him out. Kylee was waiting in the living room wearing a jacket, too. They were going somewhere in the brisk October air. The TV was still on. A newscaster Jamie recognized but could not name was speaking with a somber expression, an image of a large church beside him bearing the caption: Thousands of People Gone Missing? The image faded, replaced by a video of a long-haired, handsome young man smiling beatifically and spreading his arms wide as though he were embracing the whole world.

  Brian Loving.

  Jamie stopped, the loud buzz in her head the only sound in her world. Dennis and Kylee paused in front of the TV, too. Dennis was shaking his head and saying something to Kylee with a scornful smile. He'd never had any tolerance for demagogues – or for anyone who took themselves too seriously. But thousands of people missing? That was obviously big news.

  Dennis snatched up the remote and the TV went black. They headed outside, their ghostly companion in tow, and climbed into the pickup. Jamie floated in between them. There was no way of expressing the strangeness of sitting between her dead daughter and husband – now living – so Jamie just accepted it and went along for the ride.

  Her husband and daughter had stopped smiling. The mood, if not sad, had turned solemn. Jamie didn't have long to wonder why. Montefiore Cemetery, where her mom was buried, rolled into view. But she doubted they were here to mourn her mom. Assuming her mom was even dead in this world.

  Dennis parked the pickup inside the gate, and they walked out into the small, pine tree-ringed cemetery. They stopped at a medium-sized, rose-colored marble gravestone.

  Jamie didn't want to read what was on the gravestone, but she couldn't help herself.

  TO A LOVELY WIFE AND MOTHER. THE MOST BEAUTIFUL OF SOULS. WE WILL LOVE YOU FOREVER.

  Short but sweet, Jamie thought. She turned away. A prairie wind stirred the trees. A dove was preening itself on a nearby telephone pole. Life goes on. At least for some.

  It seemed so absurd that in neither world did her family get to live on as a whole. She had to believe that there were other worlds where they did, but it still seemed strange, as if some cosmic force wouldn't allow them to go forward together.

  "I'll love you forever, too," she said.

  She knew as soon as the words left her mouth that she had to leave. It was tempting to follow her husband and daughter around for days, maybe weeks or months – maybe even years - seeing all that she'd missed, watching her daughter grow into a young woman. Haunting them as a ghost. A ghost that couldn't even make dishes clatter or lights flicker on and off. They'd never know she was there. The loneliness and separation would be beyond bearing.

  Her practical, levelheaded side asserted itself. If she wanted to escape her blurry purgatory she needed to get back to her world – to people who might have the power to break her out.

  Jamie moved in behind them and placed her hands on Dennis and Kylee's shoulders. Dennis turned his head, and for a freaky moment he was staring directly into her eyes, as though he was actually seeing her and responding to the touch. But then he continued to turn, taking Kylee's hand, and they both walked right through her back toward the pickup.

  "Goodbye," Jamie whispered, her voice breaking. "I know you'll have a great life."

  She turned from them and faced back to east. Time to brave the blinding light and the blackness again.

  Chapter 23

  ZACH SLOWLY TWIRLED HIS Coke and Rum, imagining a primordial soup from which a mini-Jamie might emerge. But then he was drunk. Not falling-down drunk, but probably at least one and a half sheets to the wind. Drunk enough that ABBA's Dancing Queen, blaring over the Alkie's loudspeakers, touched him emotionally. Enough to earn worried glances from Tildie and Jay, sitting across the table from him.

  "She's okay," said Tildie. "I know she is. She's trying to find her way back to us, I know it."

  "Now if we could just have that confirmed by one of our resident psychics." Zach's attempt at a sardonic smile fell lopsided. "But it turns out super-powered psychics aren't much more reliable than the old garden variety ones."

  Tildie regarded him with sympathetic eyes but also a hint of a frown. "I know it seems that way sometimes, but in all fairness, Kim-Ly got most of it right. She just didn't see everything."

  "Right. Just missed one little detail. The commander of Team One disappearing. Oh, and the nuke under the stage. Make that two little details. Only sheer luck prevented you and everyone else in that area from being blown to hell."

  "She did the best she could, Zach." Most of the sympathy had bled out of her eyes. "All of us did."

  "Hey, we stopped as many as six nukes from exploding in the city," said Jay. "I know how you feel, dude, but I think you're a bit out of line there."

  Zach returned their stares bleakly. After a moment, he dipped his head and emitted a long sigh.

  "You're right. I'm being a dick. Everything considered, you guys did great. It must've been unbelievably frustrating to be up against someone who could flash in and out of reach and kill you and thousands of people in an eye blink."

  The tension in the two people facing him deflated.

  "Yeah," said Tildie, sagging in her chair. "That's how it was, every second of every minute of every hour of that day."

  "I can't even imagine."

  "Thanks, man," said Telly.

  "When I think of what that terrorist piece of shit might've done to her..."

  Tildie reached across and clasped his hand. "He just teleported her somewhere. He didn't kill her, Zach. Wherever she is, she'll find a way back."

  "You're right. No way did that cowardly asshole have the strength to kill her."

  "I'm not sure anyone has that much strength," Jay chuckled.

  They looked up as Kim-Ly and Kevin Clarkson approached the table with an urgent air. Zach couldn't recall ever seeing Kevin in the bar. In fact, he rarely ventured out of the science division housing on Level Five. He had seen him talking with Kim-Ly on a few occasions and had the impression they were friends.

  "Hey, Kevin." Zach frowned at the slight slur in his voice. "It's been awhile."

  "Hi," said Kevin, while Kim-Ly examined her hands.

  "What's up?" Tildie asked.

  "Kim-Ly thinks she knows where Jamie is."

  "Where?" Zach nearly fell out of his chair as he pushed himself up. "Is she okay?"

  "Yes."

  Zach remained half-standing up, arms extended rigidly to brace himself on the table. "So where is she?"

  Kevin turned to Kim-Ly, who with some hesitation raised one thin arm and pointed stiffly to a space right beside their table. Jay and Tildie traded frowns and swiveled toward the indicated spot.

  "Is she invisible?" Zach grated.

  "Yes," said Kim-Ly.

  Zach crumpled back into his chair with a disgusted grunt.

  "Wait a minute," said Jay. "Are you saying...Jamie's here in N-Space?" Kim-Ly frowned. "The Phantom Zone? The place teleporters go between teleportation sites?"

  Kim-Ly nodded.

  Hope sprang back into Zach's chest. "And you're saying she's standing right there?"

  "Yes. She's trying to find a way out."

  "That son of a bi
tch teleported her to nowhere!" Jay half-shouted, drawing the attention of several other patrons. Jake and Horner, sitting a few tables away with Belinda (Hot Girl) and Denise Rogers (Ice Queen), craned their heads around along with the women. They pushed away from the table and came over to them.

  "What's going on?" asked Jake.

  "Kim-Ly says Jamie's here." Zach pointed at the space a feet from their table. "Trapped in the Phantom Zone."

  "No shit," said Horner.

  "I'm going into N-Space right here and see if I can see her," Jay announced.

  And he was gone. Tildie turned her worried eyes on Zach.

  "Can he safely enter her zone?"

  "I have no idea. Maybe." Zach rubbed his jaw, trying to remember his brief discussions with Dr. Hayashi and other physicists on the theoretical nature of teleportation, and wishing he could go back in time and not have had those drinks. "There could be some danger if he attempts that. Anything less than a perfect phase match might destroy him – or her."

  "Fuck," said Tildie.

  Jay was trying to recall what the physicists had said, too, as he stared at Jamie's ghostly image a few feet away, which looked something like a backlit reflection in a window. A ghostly reflection that was grinning and waving at him. He waved and grinned back. She's alive!

  Jay moved closer, and saw concern flicker along with desperate hope in her near-transparent eyes. He held up a hand in acknowledgment and slowed his approach, stopping just short of her. A faint crackling sound had invaded his silent world, and a swirling pink-red color hissed between them, reminding him of the northern lights on a summer night in Michigan.

  What had the physicists said about the possible effects of teleportation zones coming in contact with each other? One possibility was that the fields would "short-circuit" each other, causing the teleporters to materialize. Another speculation was that if the fields were not in near-perfect synch on the quantum level that a "runaway cascade of atomic destabilization would occur," resulting in an explosion of unknown force that would obliterate both the teleporters and anything or anyone around them. Dr. Hayashi, on the other hand, posited that the fields would simply repel each other, making short-circuiting or any other effect impossible.

  Jay tapped his temple, shrugged elaborately, and made a calming motion with his hands that he hoped conveyed to her that he was going to work on it and for her to stay put. She nodded as though she understood. He materialized.

  "She's okay," he said, meeting Zach's desperate gaze. "We just have to find a way to get her out. I think we should bring Dr. Hayashi and other scientists into the loop, see what they say."

  "That's what I was thinking," said Zach. He took the first deep, clean breath of oxygen since Jamie had disappeared. He was incredibly relieved and hell-bent on bringing the woman he'd come to believe he might love back to them.

  They dragged Dr. Hayashi out of bed and Doctors Eileen Hui and Randolph "Wild Man" Wilde out of their labs, and they all gathered in Testing Room 12. In Zach's opinion, these were DARE's top scientists, each one brilliant in his or her own way. Zach was particularly hopeful about "Dr. Wild Man," widely acknowledged as the Department's most creative and bold thinker - the man whose submersible rescue idea had saved Jay Utrecht's life.

  Testing Room 12 was the facility's most formidable laboratory, a complex mélange of chemical and electrical testing that had pried out more secrets behind superpowers than any other lab in the facility and perhaps any other lab in the world.

  Dr. Hayashi scribbled "Hello, Jamie, good to have you with us" on the whiteboard against one wall. Jay had materialized and dematerialized a few times to confirm that Jamie was in fact with them. They'd both made crossing-finger signs to each other.

  "A key point," said Dr. Hayashi to Jay, "is exactly what happens when you come out of the Phantom Zone state. So far we've failed to determine the essential elements of that process. But then we've never given it our full attention, either. Too many unanswered questions elsewhere." He smiled. "But today it's going to get our undivided attention. And if I have anything to say about it, our first priority will be to resolve this issue for as long as that takes."

  Zach was smiling and nodding along until it occurred to him that resolving the issue might not mean rescuing Jamie, and that "as long as it takes" could mean days or weeks or even years. In some ways, when it came to analyzing the Object and its effects, they were like Stone Age people trying to pull themselves into the Twenty-first Century. It was more than merely a steep learning curve; sometimes they couldn't even locate where the curve began.

  They started simple. Hayashi asked Jay to describe his mental process when he departed "N-Space" in as much detail as possible on the whiteboard. After much erasing and starting over, with frequent prompting from Dr. Hayashi and the others, Jay managed to write a paragraph that they felt described his techniques as well as words could describe them.

  While Jamie worked on applying those techniques, the scientists worked on other possible remedies. Dr. Wilde suggested that either a very strong explosion, possibly even nuclear, or a particle beam - either from a person or from the mini-collider – might break or tear a hole in the field. He reasoned that since N-Space was connected to our reality, however tenuously, events in their world should be able to impact it. The more powerful and energetic the event, the stronger the effect, Dr. Wilde reasoned.

  So when Jamie signaled to Jay that her mental efforts to materialize had failed, they moved on to phase two. They brought in Barry Apple, whose high-powered particle beam was believed to be the strongest in DARE's employ – in stark contrast to his mellow personality – and placed him in the High Resistance Test Chamber (HRTC) with instructions to focus his beam at full intensity at the wall where Jamie would be standing.

  Barry blew a hole through the inner walls and started to eat through the outer containment walls before he lost power. But Jay told them Jamie's zone hadn't been affected.

  "Maybe if we could narrow the focus of the energy on one side of her field?" Dr. Hayashi ventured.

  They attempted lasers, microwave radiation, and extreme heat – all features the testing chamber was equipped to provide – but Jamie remained in her ethereal purgatory. After some debate, they had her move to the High Explosive Testing Chamber where she'd drop-kicked the Object some months before, and proceeded to test explosives of ascending power on her, starting with one hundred pounds of TNT and working up to DARPA's recently concocted Super High Explosive – the equivalent to a two kiloton nuclear bomb – all without any effect.

  To Zach, who watched each test with his heart pounding in his throat, it was almost good news that her phantom world hadn't been breached.

  Midway through the second day of near-nonstop testing, with nerves fraying and Jay running out of teleportative steam, Randy Wilde announced abruptly:

  "I think we may be going at this all wrong. What if it's not massive increases in energy and heat that would collapse the field, but the opposite? Wasn't it when Jay encountered the far side of the moon, which has – 150 C temps, that his 'zone' started to fall apart? In fact, I believe he was crossing over one of the poles, where an area in permanent shadow can reach nearly -250C."

  "You're suggesting that N-Space might collapse in extreme cold," said Dr. Hayashi, a tremor of excitement in his voice.

  "Should be easy to test," said Dr. Hui. "Denise Rogers – what the IED teams call 'Ice Queen' – can chill objects to around 10 Kelvin. That's much colder than anywhere on the moon."

  "Then let's bring her down here!" said Zach.

  JAMIE KNEW it was way too soon to give up hope. She'd made it back to her world and to the one place in her world where people stood a chance of breaking her out of her N-Space exile. And they'd been working day and night since she arrived, thanks to Kim-Ly. Without her, they probably wouldn't even know she was there.

  But despite all that, the bottom line remained that nothing they'd done had worked. She could sense them losing energy, even from her
blurry perspective.

  Then, suddenly, they seemed re-energized. Zachary was scribbling on the whiteboard: "Dr. Wilde has an idea. We're going to try collapsing the field by freezing it. We're bringing down Denise Rogers."

  Ice Queen. Jamie didn't see why cold would work any better than heat or brute force, but at least it was something different. Everyone was hustling, repairing the High Resistance Test Chamber from Belinda's roasting – the last person to attempt to free her - the polar opposite of Denise.

  Now Denise arrived, animation coloring her beautiful, pale features. They'd set up a transparent cubicle constructed of plasti-steel in the center of the test chamber that Jamie was supposed to occupy, where Denise could focus her frigid superpowers. Jamie had already endured temperatures not far from what Denise could generate, but small explosive charges would bust open the plastisteel cubicle if need be, and Terry Mayes would be on hand if she needed medical care.

  Jamie took her place within the cubicle and Denise focused her frosty gaze on her, just short of actually meeting her eyes, but still an intimate and forbidding gaze. She never thought Ice Queen could hurt her in real life, but they'd never put it to the test. Standing face to face with her right now, seeing the fierce destruction in her midnight blue eyes, she couldn't help feeling a slight chill.

  Her eyes started to glow. The plastic box frosted up. Jamie felt nothing, no hint of any cold penetrating her space. No more than she'd felt the heat or explosive force before.

  After a time, the frost cleared and a weary-looking Jay was standing there. Their eyes met and he offered her a sad shrug, which she returned. "We'll keep trying," he mouthed to her. She nodded.

  Out in the lab, people moped around, shaking their heads, and Zach wrote on the whiteboard: "Sorry, J. We aren't giving up, just out of inspiration for the moment."