STARWEB 1-5

by M. Modak

The blurriness in his eyes cleared. There were two people close by him talking. The hurting in his neck was still too much for him to turn his head, but out of the corner of his eye he could make out a tall black man he knew from John’s memories, but couldn’t yet fully recall…and… Just out of sight, sitting next to him, he heard Anna’s voice cut through the background racket. “Keep still!” she scolded, “The bleeding has almost stopped.”

  Comprehension struck him, I’m not alone anymore!

  The hallway had a red stripe he recognized running down the center of the floor; “this is the exit from John’s main lab.” He spoke as loudly as he could, which was barely a whisper, “Aughra has been turned on!” He huffed, “It’s spinning on the other side of this door!”

  “Quite, whoever you are.” Anna said, “I need just a few more minutes before you freak out. I’ve got to stop this bleeding.”

  Memories flooded his mind and he shuttered as he thought the sound of Void’s last words to Rose, “There is nothing you can do to protect Drake now.”

  When the premature activation of the Aughra experiment occurred, he had been switched with Dr. John Aurora and placed in his body. After being ejected from his body, and then taken on a journey through the multi-universe, he had discovered that actions taken in different realms, by other versions of himself, were at this moment coming to a head. And the one Tree that linked it all, The Great Tree Of Life, was in danger for the third time in all existence.

  TOL’s universe was immensely compressed. He had experienced strange physics in there. That universe was nearing its total collapse. The planet TOL seemed like a magical place where beings, which he once only believed real in his imagination, not only lived but did so gloriously.

  Life’s greatest enemy was now becoming clear. A Quantum Computer, Sapen, had recently awakened. It seemed that the quasi-machine had become self-aware in its programming and was using its networked technologies, and Nanos, to infect Drake. Joshua suspected that he now wanted Aughra’s secrets.

  Then he made a conceptual leap. Other, trans-dimensional beings were quietly helping them. However, he didn’t know who or where they were. He thought, because of Sapen, Lavar must be keeping secrets from me. The connection was weak most of the time, but Drake’s and his mind were still linked. If he knew all Lavar knew, as he did with John and Drake, Sapen might discover his plan.

  Then there were the countless others, just like himself, spread throughout the other universes, living separate lives. He had absorbed all their knowledge. Most of those other versions had developed unique aspects of himself, which he now found useful. He blessed God, those skills were vital for stopping Aughra.

  However, he was now trapped in this world, away from his wife Rana. As bad as all that was, all existence was about to be disentangled, matter would soon evaporate. All would be lost within the local multi-universe if he couldn’t stop Aughra from spinning. Nevertheless, he couldn’t just blow it up. John’s memories had shown him that. Right now, he needed answers. It was all up to him to find another way, and he needed help from a Professor of Mathematics John had known...

  A hundred other questions bombarded his mind all at once. Could Drake keep his mind clear of John’s memories? Did Sapen gain access to Aughra’s secrets? Would he every see his love again?

  He blinked at the stinging in his eyes as he thought; I need to solve one world-ending problem at a time. He wanted to go back to sleep; go back over all that had recently happened. Perhaps he could find another way out of this mess… And what was happening to Drake… He took a deep breath and calmed down. I’m in John’s world now and I have to stop Aughra.

  More memories were returning. Aughra had created a tornado above her, and it was rattling the door behind him. The image of the ceiling …destroyed… gone, with a black funnel extending up into the stormy sky terrified him.

  Anna kneeled beside him and placed a new bag of ice to the back of his head. He winced as another bolt of pain hit him when he tried to move. Something blunt had struck him hard. He reached up and gently touched his head where it hurt but Anna pushed his hand away.

  “Stop moving,” she said as he pulled his bloody hand back. “I don’t think you cracked it. There’s just a lot of blood.”

  Joshua watched her for a moment, and then asked, “Anna or Kayla?”

  Anna glanced up at the man standing nearby then back at Joshua. “It’s Anna. You know me?”

  “Do you have anyone else’s memories?”

  “No,” she answered, as an astonished look appeared on her face. “Joshua, is it you?”

  “Yes, do you know anything about John or Aughra?” Joshua asked.

  She looked at him for a long moment, and then whispered, “John is a scientist. Steve,” she pointed to the uniformed man standing by them. He hadn’t yet noticed Joshua had awakened. “He thinks you are him. You apparently made a machine that will destroy the whole world by tomorrow night, but he’s not sure what will happen. I am, or at least Kayla was, supposed to be in charge when you’re not around.” She took a calming breath, “Aughra is the machine in there tearing up the place.”

  Joshua just remembered who Steve was. Steve was one of the security men John new well, and he had been on vacation.

  Steve noticed Joshua looking up and he bent down beside Kayla. He asked, “Dr. Aurora, are you okay?”

  “My head is hurting but I’m ok. How long have you been here?

  Steve looked genuinely relieved, and then he said, “What the hell you goanna do now?”

  Joshua ignored his question and asked, “But how long have you been here?”

  “I just got back home not long ago. I came here when I saw the explosion on the news… Ten minutes.”

  “I don’t believe you have much time Steve. You need to get out of here now. I need to find a way to stop Aughra.”

  Steve gave him a no shit, look and said, “What do you mean, ‘you need to find a way,’ can’t you just turn it off?”

  “There is no off switch. A controlled anti-matter explosion powers it. There was an… accident. There is no easy way to shut it down now that it’s running at full speed. Eventually it will stop on its own but that could take months.”

  “Why don’t we just wait then?” Anna asked.

  “We can’t wait! Aughra will tear this and three other universes apart if it is still running when Nebula311 is in full alignment with the Earth. After that, the whole multi-universe will unravel. We have to stop it by…“He remembered the vision of the future he had seen in John’s eyes. He added that to understanding that in Drake’s universe one night had passed. It was sometime after 5:00pm the next day over there. Had one day already passed here? Time was a relative thing when great speeds and such huge distances were involved. The thought came, distance, time, speed… what strange concepts. What are the differences in time between universes?

  When he was forced out of his own flesh and bone, he had found that he still had a kind of astral body. In that body, he had traveled the dimensions of time and space, skipping through galaxies and universes like one might pass through rooms in their house.

  Anna asked, “What is a multi-universe?”

  “You know that we live on a planet in a solar system that’s going around a galaxy?”

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “Just like our galaxy is but one among trillions of other galaxies in the universe, this universe is one among countless other universes.”

  “But…but… how do you know that?”

  “I don’t have time to explain it now. What day is it?”

  Steve’s facial expressions had turned from worry to wonder and now he looked ready to strangle him as he checked his watch. Through gritted teeth he said, “It’s September 8.” Anna moved slightly closer to Joshua. He yelled, “How could you’ve made a machine like this with no way to turn it off!”

  Joshua said, “Steve, I can’t begin to explain all that’s going on right now but I intend to stop it. We need to think ab
out the answer to this problem now, you can kill me later.”

  Steve cooled only a little, he said, “Want do you want me to do?”

  “Evacuate everyone, I mean everyone from this building and get everyone else as far away as you can. Then take your family and leave, if this thing blows it’s going to take the city with it.”

  Joshua looked at Anna and said, “Have there been any reports of people blacking out and then waking up acting like they’re someone else?”

  “What… like you and me? Yes. Most of the people I saw when I came-to didn’t know what happened to them, or knew where they were. Steve is the only one here who knows anything about this world. Most of the others just panicked and started running around screaming.”

  Steve looked at Anna and then at Joshua as if seeing them for the first time, “Dr. Aurora, Kayla, or whoever you two are, none of the security guards I’ve seen here are themselves, the FBI, and company personnel, everyone here is claiming to be other people.”

  Joshua stood up, but Steve and Anna had to catch him as he lost control of his legs. For a moment, he waited, blinking as the world continued turning in a sickening manner. After a few seconds, the angle of its spin adjusted enough for him to stand on his own. He said, “I’m okay now, thanks.”

  Steve said, “John, I’ve never known you to make a joke so I’m going to take your warning as serious as a heart attack. I’m getting these people out of here, tell everyone what you said and then I’m getting my family and we’re leaving the city.”

  Joshua nodded as he spoke. He knew John, the man who owned the body his mind was now forced into, was a severe person. Everything he did hinged around building Aughra. Aughra was a Quantum Entanglement Generator designed to discover the hidden secrets to the entanglement phenomena. It had resulted in swapping his and John’s minds but the disaster had only started there. Anna and Kayla’s minds had been switched too, and he was sure many more people were to follow.

  John was a polite person but it was not to be mistaken for anything more than the goal to create a professional environment. His work had meant everything to him.

  “That’s right,” Joshua said, “tell as many people as you can and get out of the city. And Steve, there’s going to be a lot of people scared crazy. Everything is crazy! There are people from another universe here, so don’t dismiss what they are telling you. But don’t wait for them. Tell them what I said and keep moving.”

  Steve put a powerful hand on Joshua shoulder and looked him in the eyes for a long, tense moment. “Okay John, were counting on you, now stop Aughra.” With that, he turned to the people not far down the hall and yelled, “It’s time to leave, now!” They all quickly disappeared around the curving hallway.

  Joshua suddenly recognized the building from his world; Michael’s business was just like this. He wondered if Anna had recognized it yet. In the next room, Aughra sat almost exactly where the table sat, near the huge aquarium in her offices', “Fun Room.” There were many differences between the two buildings like Aughra being on the first floor here, and the lab’s position was in the center of the building. He wasn’t sure what it meant or even if it meant anything.

  The metal door behind them began shaking violently. Aughra had ripped out the floors above her. The picture of that in his mind, made him think for a minute. There wasn’t any other debris lying around. All he remembered seeing in the lab before he blacked out was some lab equipment, which had been on the ground.

  He thought, perhaps the explosion had blown a hole right through the ceiling sending all the debris out into the surrounding landscape. But as he recalled the physical effect Aughra had on the linking force between distant particles, he realized the upper levels hadn’t blown up, rather; they had disintegrated, or dis-entangled. The ceiling had literally vaporized. That means that the focus of Aughra’s most destructive affect is pointing straight up, into space... If Aughra had been pointing horizontally, half the city, perhaps half the Earth too, would already be gone. He felt a little relief at that, people were being ripped from their lives and dumped here but, he thought, at least there is still a here, for now.

  Anna had been silently watching him the whole time. When he looked at her she said, “You know, Michael gets that same look just before he comes up with some wild idea.”

  He wished Michael were here, he could use some outside the box kind of thinking. The thought of Michael being in another universe made him suddenly realized where Rana was and his heart sank. She was his love, his wife. She was in the other universe with Michael, John and he guessed Kayla, the woman Anna had been swapped with. He knew Anna would’ve quickly noticed the change of personality and character of himself into John. She was probably terrified as she tried to figure out what was happening to him.

  John would have recognized her as the same women he had divorced, Elizabeth. At least John had Kayla with him; he was with someone he loved. He felt a little jealous and not a little anger at John. Here he was, in this world, trying to destroy the machine John had made. A machine that may be his only ticket back to the woman he loved more than life itself.

  Elizabeth was on the other side of America. From what he gathered, Aughra was taking people from this world, those that were closest to the machine when it had been turned on, and switching them with the people from his universe. That was why Anna was here, with him, but not Michael or Rana. Because of Steve, he knew there was a minimum of ten minutes in-between Aughra’s cycles.

  If he stopped Aughra, there was no going back. If there were a way for him to use Aughra to send him and Anna back he would take it. However, if he delayed and this Earth completed its alignment with the nebula that was magnifying Aughra’s mindswapping and entanglement effects, then all four universes he, John, Drake and Lavar lived in will evaporate.

  The idea of never seeing Rana again felt worse than death. Whichever way this turned out, living without her was his fate; that made him want to quit. His head spun from the pain and the heartache was unbearable. Despair waited at the edges of his exhaustion, what does it matter, all I want in this life is to be with her.

  Beyond the local noises, he heard another loud roar, but it wasn’t coming from Aughra! It was coming from people, perhaps thousands of screaming people just outside the building. He suddenly felt compassion for them. How many of them have a love like this? He was sure there wasn’t many, but there had to be some. He told himself, I’m going to save the world for all the other people who have a love like Rana and I. And for those who might someday find it. If I let my mind linger here, I will fall into despair and never return. I won’t think about Rana again until I have finished this task.

  Anna stepped closer and put her arms around him and her embrace warmed him. It drew his sorrow back up from the well of his heart. He tried to hold it down, to push it back inside that dark place that was forming. Resisting this simple act took him right to the edge of his strength. His will threaten to collapse but he just stood there breathing as he looked off into the hallway. Then slowly, he put his arms around her. She spoke through watery eyes, “I miss Michael too.”

  Joshua tried to say something but his sorrow held his tongue. Unbidden tears were flowing. He could do nothing but hold her and share her loss. The pain was too great, and there were no easy answers. He only knew he had to stop Aughra. He stepped back carefully, “Anna, I must stop Aughra. For now, I am going to put all my energy and thoughts on that task. I love Rana with all my heart but if we can’t stop this machine from tearing the universe apart neither she nor Michael will live.”

  He paused wondering if he should tell her more but he remembered that this woman ran one of the most successful companies in Atlanta, in their world. She is one of the greatest people he had ever met and he needed all the help he could get. He continued, “I need you to know that I have all the memories that the scientist John had,” he swallowed hard, “and many other lives.”

  Her eyes brightened a little at that. She said, “I was wondering wha
t that question was all about. Who are, 'the Others?”

  “Other versions of me scattered across the multi-universes. I’ll tell you all about it later. As far as Aughra goes, I can…remember how he built that thing but there is more to it than John understood. I have to find a professor John use to debate. I think he may know something about what’s going on here. He has information John ignored and he may be able to help us stop it.”

  Tears were streaming down her face as she looked up at him. She was one of the most beautiful women, inside and out, he had ever seen. Right then he felt a deep pain for her and Michael, sadness equal to his own. She blinked away the tears and said, “What’s his name?”

  “Dr. Dmitry.”

  Anna took a deep breath and let it out hard, “Okay, let’s get out of here and find a flexphone. Do you have his e-phone address?”

  “Yes.”

  *******

  Dozens of police cars were parked yards from the front doors, flooding the parking lot with flashing blue and red lights. Spotlights traced the outline of the lab following the tornado above it into the gathering clouds.