With a quick glance, Alex noticed his backpack. He grabbed it, unzipped the outside pocket, and rummaged inside for his phone. He found it and tried turning it on. He absolutely had to talk to Marco, but the display refused to light up.
‘Damn it, get going!’ he shouted. But nothing happened. Maybe the battery had run down, or, more likely, water had gotten into the circuitry, damaging it irreparably. He looked around, dejected, and saw a pink-and-blue neon sign at the end of the street. It was blurry in the wall of rain, but Alex could still make out what it said: Internet Café.
A few seconds later, he was talking to his friend. He had tattered earphones clamped to his head, and a small, beat-up microphone that he had to hold up to his mouth. The manager of the internet café, an Indian guy who looked around thirty, was eyeing him suspiciously.
‘Alex, do you understand what this means?’
Marco’s questions always started with the assumption that it was just as clear to Alex what was going on as it was to him.
‘This can only mean one thing,’ Marco continued. His voice rang out loud and clear.
Now that his phone was unusable, there was only one way left to communicate with Marco: talk to him on Skype. Alex was sitting in a corner cubicle, between a fairly chubby kid and a woman with Asian features.
It was about ten in the morning in Italy when the Skype window had opened on Marco’s laptop. He was reading the headlines of the morning newspapers. Pale daylight filtered in through the window, reflecting off the steaming cup of tea that he’d set down on his desk.
From the PC in the internet café, Alex couldn’t make a video call, but the audio quality was perfect. He noticed the people around him looking at him curiously. Perhaps they were staring at him because he was soaking wet from head to toe. His blond fringe was stuck to his forehead and kept dripping, and his clothes had become heavy and cold.
‘You were in her world. You went outside your own dimension, with your mind.’
Alex sat there for a moment, thinking about what his friend had just said. ‘That’s exactly the sensation that I had. The feeling that I was being detached from my body and that I existed only in my mind.’
‘You can cross the threshold between two worlds …’ said Marco, as if talking to himself. He needed to repeat this, which, until just a short while ago, had been nothing but wild conjecture. ‘We don’t know how you did it, we only know that it wasn’t your body on the other side.’
‘Which has nothing to do with what happened in this world, in the house that belongs to Mary Thompson over here. Marco … I saw Jenny, the six-year-old girl, and she talked to me.’
‘What?’
Alex told Marco about the vision he’d had in the living room of Mary Thompson’s house and how he’d run away, only to find himself in the middle of a thunderstorm before fainting. He told him Jenny’s phrase: Remember, Alex? If we wanted to travel, we stared at the belt.
Marco remained silent for a few seconds, while the connection became patchy, with an intermittent buzzing.
‘I can’t hear what you’re saying,’ were the last words Alex managed to make out before the call was cut off entirely. He tried to call back, but he saw that the computer was now offline and, when he looked around at the other people in the room, he realised he wasn’t the only one with this problem.
He stood up, paid, and left the internet café. He’d call Marco later, one way or another. Once he was out on the street, a gust of chilly wind hit him. He pulled his iPod out of his pocket and slipped in his headphones. The opening arpeggio of ‘Getting Better’ by Tesla started playing in his ears. The first words sung by Jeff Keith, about rain, seemed to describe a situation pretty much like his own: in fact, the water kept coming down incessantly, and Alex was drenched and starving.
Jenny got dressed hastily and went downstairs. In a fit of anxiety, she entered the kitchen and sat down to think over what had happened. There had been someone in the room with her. She was sure of it. It hadn’t been a hallucination. It was a presence.
I’m here … The words reverberated in her head. She’d heard them clearly. It had been Alex’s voice.
Jenny got up again, went over to the stove, and opened one of the kitchen cabinets. She pulled out a bag of chamomile tea and started the kettle.
‘I have to stay calm,’ she said to herself. ‘Nothing, none of this at all, really exists. It’s all just in my head.’
17
After closing the Skype window, Marco picked up a pen from a holder that had originally been a Sprite can, and grabbed a ream of paper from his desk. It was a printout of the findings from the search done by the software he’d designed. He preferred to go through the results one by one on paper, rather than strain his eyes staring at the monitor.
He started striking off the ones he found the least interesting: entries on several blogs, jokes on Facebook, Twitter messages from around the world. The software had listed, catalogued, and translated into Italian all types of correspondence worldwide about parallel dimensions and the theory that Marco had explained to Alex.
Useless garbage, the kind of results you’d get from Google: let’s take a look at the text messages, he thought to himself as he drew lines through the various hits, the lid of the pen clamped between his lips. Sifting through those results could take all day, but Marco had invented the program to find private content, the kind of things a simple web search could never have come up with.
There weren’t many text messages that mentioned the Multiverse. Most of the ones that did had to do with scientific theories read on some tech journal or other. Nothing interesting.
Suddenly a message caught his attention:
Yes, I know it. The problem is that this ebook is impossible to find. I downloaded it last year and read it, but a week later I couldn’t open it again. The file appeared to have been corrupted. And I couldn’t find it online anymore.
Marco’s eyes lit up.
I have to find the previous message. He set down the stack of papers on the desk and went back into the program with a click of the mouse.
Once he’d found the message, he right-clicked it, opening a window and selecting the button marked More Information. The recipient’s phone number was right before his eyes. Marco selected it, copied it, and pasted it into a search field in his software to see whether he got any hits. He wanted to see if the program was able to dig up any earlier messages from the same conversation.
‘Yes! This is it!’ he said exultantly as he read the contents.
The sender’s number was a match. And so was the topic of discussion.
It’s called: Thomas Becker’s MULTIVERSUM (Die Realität, die uns umgibt, ist nur eine der unendlichen parallelen Dimensionen).
The translation of the subtitle read: The reality that surrounds us is only one of an infinite number of parallel dimensions.
‘Excellent,’ whispered Marco as he reached for his pen and noted the two mobile-phone numbers on a sheet of paper.
He punched in the first number on his Skype keypad. It proved to be out of service. He drew a line through the first number and went on to the next one. The same thing happened. Then his fingers clattered on the laptop’s keyboard, and he opened three windows with websites of online bookstores.
‘Damn it, nothing’s showing up. It must be out of print,’ he said, as he opened up his software again.
He typed the book’s title and subtitle into a search window to look through the results: not only intercepted text messages but also blogs, social-media posts, and internet sites.
One hit showed up.
It was a blog called The_great_web_robbery. That’s interesting, thought Marco, raising an eyebrow. From his research it would appear that the blog was quoting from Thomas Becker’s book. But as soon as he’d entered the URL, he was confronted with a message: Th
is blog has been removed due to violation of copyright laws.
‘Damn it to hell!’ exclaimed Marco, running his hands through his hair. He took off his glasses, set them on the desk, and rubbed his forehead. He closed his tired eyes.
The text message was about an ebook that’s vanished from the internet. I have to find it.
When he opened his eyes again, his computer screen had gone black.
He clicked the mouse a couple of times. Nothing happened. The screen stayed black. He hit the space bar, but nothing happened either. He checked to make sure that the surge protector into which the various computer cords were plugged was lit up. The orange light was glowing; it couldn’t be an electrical malfunction.
Suddenly, a window opened in the lower right-hand corner of the monitor. A blue panel with a tiny white rectangle blinking in a corner.
‘What the hell …? Why did it just go into DOS mode?’
Marco sat there gazing in astonishment. Then he grabbed the mouse and discovered that it was completely useless in that situation. He was about to type something on the keyboard when the cursor started to move across the window.
It came to a stop in the centre of the window. The letters started to take shape before Marco’s dumbfounded and frightened eyes.
I don’t exist
The phrase changed its position in the window and then started to proliferate, multiplying until it had filled every corner of the panel. The light of the CPU under the desk went out.
The computer ground to a halt with a short, sharp hiss.
‘Shit, a virus!’ Marco swore.
Someone’s taken over my computer, he thought. Nothing like this had ever happened to him before. Could a virus really have gotten into the operating system? That was unlikely, considering all the antivirus programs he had installed and updated constantly. Still, it was possible, given that hackers all over the world were coming up with new viruses every day, and even he couldn’t be prepared for every unexpected attack.
Marco tried to restart the computer, unsuccessfully. He unplugged it and then plugged it back in, before deciding the PC was completely out of order.
On his right, the Mac was still glowing at maximum brightness, the way he liked it. On his left, the Dell laptop was stuck on the Amazon page where he’d searched for the book by Thomas Becker a few minutes earlier.
Marco placed his hand on the controls of the electric wheelchair and backed up into the hall. Then he swung around 180 degrees and steered himself towards the kitchen.
As soon as he was inside, he clapped his hands and the lights turned on. The kitchen table was a mess. Dirty dishes stacked in a sloppy pile. A bottle of mineral water without a cap. Scattered cutlery, a drinking glass, crumpled napkins, and crumbs everywhere.
Marco opened one door of the cabinet and pulled out a jar of coffee. He went over to the stove and reached for the coffee maker, unscrewed it, and tossed the used grounds into a plastic bag hanging from the handle on the kitchen window.
‘It must be a hacker. A hacker who’s better than me. Maybe it’s a joke. Or a challenge.’
When he went back to his study with an espresso in his right hand, he wheeled straight over to the Mac’s keyboard. He opened a new page and typed Thomas Becker in the search window.
‘A musician … a champion kayaker … no, none of these,’ he said, shaking his head.
A symphony of car horns broke the silence. The sound was coming from the street outside the living-room windows. Marco looked up, as if following the direction from which the noise was coming. Outside the window, he could see nothing but the façade of the apartment building across the street, with all the roller blinds of the various apartments shut tight for the night, clothing hung out to dry on a balcony here and there, and lots and lots of dish antennas.
He picked up the cup and drank the rest of the coffee. Then he looked back at the screen of the Mac to continue his search.
‘No! Not this one too!’ he exclaimed as he looked at his 24-inch Apple monitor, which had gone completely black.
He sat there without moving. He felt helpless. He, who could have written an instruction manual for any of the three computers on the desk in front of him.
He was almost afraid that the blue panel would reappear any second now.
He was right to be afraid.
When the window reappeared and the little white rectangle started blinking, Marco was ready and his fingers hit the keys. This time I’ll beat you to it, you can’t fool me.
Who are you? he typed. The cursor went back to the start of the line and went on blinking for a few seconds. Have you had enough fun in DOS? he added immediately after that.
The answer came back like a slap in the face.
You idiot, I’m inside your Mac. You can’t open a DOS window on a Mac.
Marco sat there in silence, his hands frozen in place, his eyes wide open and staring at the screen. He’d stumbled into a trap like some novice. It was only beginning to dawn on him now: the hacker’s open window was something far harder to explain than a simple DOS function.
‘This bastard is controlling my computers from the inside …’ whispered Marco as he nervously bit his fingernails. Another phrase was typed before his eyes: Tell me why you’re looking for information about me on the internet. Who do you work for?
Who are you anyway? What the hell do you want with me? Marco typed rapidly.
I don’t exist. You’re just talking to yourself.
Marco didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t work out what kind of crazy situation he’d gotten himself into.
I was just trying to find a book. I typed the author’s name into the search window and then …
Marco shook his head as he waited for a response. Then, baffled, he read: The author you’re looking for doesn’t exist.
Are you Thomas Becker? he wrote, taking a stab in the dark.
The little white rectangle blinked for a few more seconds. Then the Mac, too, ground to a halt.
18
‘Damn it!’ Marco shouted over and over again, to the two black screens in front of him.
I’ll have to take them apart and reassemble them, he thought as he looked at the PC and the Mac, both so disconsolately silent. Just who the hell is this Becker? How can he be capable of doing all this?
From his mobile phone, which was sitting on a cabinet in the front hall, came the ringtone that alerted him to a new text message. It was the opening bars of the chorus ‘O Fortuna’ from Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. Marco spun around, and then steered his wheelchair into the hall. It must be Alex. Maybe he finally managed to recharge his phone, he decided, before picking up the device and reading the display.
1 new message
Unknown sender
Marco heaved an angry sigh. A phone call could come from a blank number, but things weren’t so straightforward when it came to text messages. He selected the message and read its contents aloud: ‘I took a look at your files. That’s some interesting software you’re putting together.’
Marco sat frozen, petrified, until a noise from the study caught his attention.
A few seconds later, the Mac’s screen lit up again, and a deafening German rock anthem burst forth at full volume. Marco covered his ears as, one after another, every file in his operating system opened up and appeared on the screen. The files flew into the Trash folder all by themselves, and then the computer emptied it.
‘You bastard!’ shouted Marco as he sped his electric wheelchair towards the desk, as fast as it could go.
It didn’t take him long to figure out that he’d been checkmated. The mouse refused to respond to his commands. The keyboard was dead, too.
A Word window opened suddenly.
Somebody’s better than you, said the text.
He’s deleting
everything! Damn it! Marco thought it over for a fraction of a second, then he leaned towards the surge protector all three computers were connected to and yanked the Mac’s plug out its socket. He quickly shut down the session on the PC laptop, the only computer left running. Becker must think I’m a danger to him somehow, he mused as he steered his wheelchair to the bathroom. Either he’s a lunatic, or else he really does know something and this whole thing is much bigger than I thought.
‘I have to find out,’ he said aloud.
At that very instant, the PC laptop started up all by itself.
Meanwhile, at that exact moment, in Melbourne, Alex had left the internet café, still drenched from head to toe, and had started walking down a street that ran parallel to the Esplanade. At every intersection, he could glimpse the ocean beyond the line of palm trees that separated the two sides of the road, while his iPod distracted him with a playlist of random songs, after the track by Tesla. Alex half closed his eyelids, trying to make out, through the driving rain, the twenty metres or so ahead of him. In the distance he could just see the glow of a McDonald’s. By the time he reached it, there wasn’t a single person in the street. The thunderstorm had driven everyone inside. Only the occasional car went racing by every now and then, spraying water as it went through puddles.
Alex walked into the fast-food outlet and went up to the counter. A very tall young man, who wore black skinny jeans, boots, a spiked choker around his neck, and a mohawk, paid and walked away from the counter with a tray in his hands. Alex glanced at the menu overhead and ordered a burger with extra bacon and a soft drink, without even removing his headphones. Then he sat at a table. The place was almost empty. Aside from the young punk, he spotted a man in his early fifties eating a sundae by himself, with an elderly labrador retriever lying next to the table, and a young couple in their thirties who gazed into each other’s eyes and fed each other French fries, with loving smiles on their faces.
Multiversum Page 10