He moved around the body and went to the rear of the lab. A few doors there stood open. More storage and a closet with an electric panel and breaker box. He followed the conduits from the box. They appeared to go into the wall, where they went both up the building and down into the floor. The generator and the headmaster’s office, he guessed. One conduit emerged from the closet and ran along a wall to the front of the lab. It terminated at a junction box with open ports. The power then continued to a second shell of a machine identical to the one in the headmaster’s office.
Brendan examined it.
It was almost waist high and about half the size of a washing machine. It had no side panels, so all its electronics were exposed. The machine held six large copper discs around an open top. There was a space in the center as if the machine were missing some component.
“I wonder if this was a prototype,” he said. “It doesn’t look finished.”
He heard a rumble.
It rolled through the basement and up the walls, a jarring shudder from the ground up. The building above them began shaking. Brendan almost lost his footing on the bouncing floor. The rolling sound grew in intensity as the walls groaned, and a few jarring jolts knocked him side to side. Tina moved to the doorway and held on. The piles of electrical components began to bounce and dance. Several loud cracks resounded from somewhere above the ceiling. A light fixture fell, along with a number of foam tiles. Then all the lights blinked and went out.
Just as the shaking started to subside there followed a second groan from the earth that grew and grew until it was louder than the first quake. The building seemed to jump, sending Brendan down to the floor. He landed on top of the shifting mess around him. Metal machine parts and tools were falling and rolling. He could see nothing. Tina was shouting at him to get to the doorway, but he couldn’t stand. Glass shattered out in the hallway. Metal twisted and bent. The air became thick with dust that choked him, making it hard to breathe. After what felt like minutes, the shaking finally stopped, the sounds settling into a few pops and squeaks as the entire structure above them seemed to sigh. Alarms were going off.
Emergency lights clicked on in the hallway, but the workshop remained pitch black.
“Tina?”
“I’m okay.”
He could see her silhouette as she remained still, clutching both sides of the doorway.
“Oh my god, that was intense,” she said. “Are you hurt?”
He got his phone light out and shined it around. “No, I’m fine.”
Something groaned above them as if the entire building was settling. “This whole thing could come down.”
“Yeah.” He began sifting through the scattered debris of the workshop.
“Brendan, did you hear me?”
He kept searching. What was a vault but a room where valuables were held? Rooms had doors. Besides the closets in back, the workshop had no other visible doors, so perhaps there was a trapdoor in the floor that could be unlocked with the ring.
“We should go outside and see if anyone needs our help,” Tina said softly.
Some random pops and piercing squeaks came through the ceiling. Maybe the building was about to come down. They didn’t know the scope of the earthquake, and it had been Brendan’s first. Are they all like this? He knew California had them regularly. This had been a large one, just judging by how it had damaged a new building that had no doubt been designed with such seismic events in mind. But his world had suffered one quake because of an opening door from this world. The scientist had mentioned earthquakes—plural—had been happening for three weeks straight. If the vault held the secret to stopping them from ever happening again, he couldn’t stop his search.
“Tina, I don’t know if that was a regular earthquake or one that has something to do with a gate opening. According to the headmaster, someone from here figured out how to use his machine. They’ve suffered a bunch of quakes recently. Now one just happened, and the machine isn’t even in one piece. We have to keep looking.”
She hadn’t let go of the doorframe. “I know. Just find the damn thing.”
Brendan stepped carefully though the wreckage. The floor was concrete. Any hatch to a space below would be of solid construction and not some hole in the ground. He kicked at a spare breaker panel lying on the floor.
“There’s nothing under all this crap.”
He took a final look around. More dust was cascading from the ceiling.
He slid the ring on. On Brendan’s world, it had acted as a trigger to allow the wearer to access the headmaster’s machine. He moved about the room waving his hand in the air, swiping at the dust and creating eddies. He almost stumbled over the body. Debris now partially covered it. He stepped carefully away and back towards Tina.
“You really think there’s a gate we can find in here?” Tina asked.
“I don’t know. I’m out of ideas. If the ring did open another gate, wouldn’t Charlotte have just told us about it?”
“She held a lot back. Let’s get out of here. I have an acute fear of buildings falling on me.”
They were about to leave the workshop when Brendan paused. He brought up his light and shined it on the machine shell hooked up to the power conduit. He knelt over it. The space in the middle of the copper discs revealed a tiny depression at the bottom. He took off his ring and placed it into the groove. It fit perfectly, but the machine had no power.
“This is it,” he said.
“What do you mean, that little box? That doesn’t look like any kind of vault.”
“The ring fits in here.” He made his way back to the breakers, being careful to avoid the body. He reset them all. Some of the lights above blinked on while others remained dark.
“You’re going to get us electrocuted.”
“The headmaster has his own power here. If the generators survived the earthquake, we should be fine.”
“Until the building pancakes on top of us.”
The box had power. He touched it, expecting it to start feeling hot or cold or to hum, but it did nothing. A sole power indicator was illuminated. He plucked the ring out of the recessed niche, examined it, and put it back inside.
“The ring itself is just a key, right?” Tina asked. “So what does this machine do?”
“Remember the glove we had Soren use on the headmaster to gain access to his gate? It just copied some sort of frequency the ring put out. What if this box somehow programs the ring? He had to make it somewhere. Maybe that’s how they got the machine to work again.”
Tina finally set foot back in the lab. A rattle above made her stop and close her eyes for a moment before stepping closer. She examined the top of the shell. “There’s a switch here. Only one way to find out what it does.”
She flipped the switch. The machine’s light blinked. They both watched. After a minute the light went solid. Brendan opened the lid and took out the ring. It looked the same.
“This concludes the test of your ring-polishing machine,” Tina said. “If this had been an actual emergency…”
“Just stop. The ring works with the gate machine somehow. We just did something. Now we have to look at the machine up in Sperry’s office to see if anything’s different.”
“The machine that’s taken apart.”
“Yes. But I’m going upstairs to see if we can’t put it all back together.”
8. Hall of Mirrors
The stairwell was choked with white dust and lit only by the emergency lights mounted to the exit signs. They hiked up. The stairs felt slightly crooked, as if the entire building was listing to one side. Scattered safety glass covered the floor of the lobby. They heard shouts outside, and Brendan and Tina went to the shattered doors. Flashing red lights blinked across the shadows of the academy grounds. People were moving about, some with flashlights.
“There’s hundreds of students in the dorms,” Tina said. “Some might be trapped. We could help.”
“How long do you think the water effect i
s going to last? We might have minutes left, and there’s only a sip remaining. After that we’ll be no help. We’re on our own time limit.”
Tina remained by the door.
He put a hand on her arm. She jerked it away. “We should go,” he said.
“I know that.” She preceded him to the stairs and led the way up to the fifth floor.
The doors to the office were locked and the hidden key wasn’t there. Tina smashed the doors open, but the joy in using her enhanced strength no longer showed. Brendan went straight for the desk and shined his phone light across the parts the headmaster had taken from his machine. Computers were never Brendan’s strong suit, but he had helped Vlad and enough other students in the electronics lab with a few computer projects to know the basics.
The headmaster’s machine was merely a sum of parts, nothing more, nothing less. Each part had its place. Unfortunately there would be no YouTube video to coach him along.
Tina examined the machine but became distracted. She opened the door to the balcony and pulled the curtains aside. Emergency vehicle lights flashed up from below. Even inside the office Brendan could hear men shouting. The stuttering honk of an ambulance momentarily drowned out the other sounds.
“Oh god,” Tina said. “I think one of the dorm buildings has totally collapsed.”
Brendan went to look out the window. Dutchman Springs Academy had four dorm towers, two for boys and two for girls. The top of one of the boys’ dorms was missing from the skyline. Brendan felt dizzy. If he had gone to this school on this world, if he had even existed here, that would have been his dorm. He would have been inside at this hour doing homework. How many were dead? A campus security vehicle was driving slowly past a shuffling group of students who were helping several others along.
Dutchman Springs didn’t have the robust emergency services of a larger community. It would take time for out-of-area responders to show up to help.
“Can you do it?” Tina asked.
He looked at her blankly.
“Can you put it back together so we can figure this vault out so this doesn’t happen to us?”
He turned to the gate machine. “Find more flashlights.”
The breakroom had a large flashlight that could be propped up on its handle in a number of configurations. When Brendan got the largest pieces of the machine together, he saw it was not unlike a large personal computer in that it had a power source, cooling unit, and motherboard where the circuit boards were placed. That was where the similarities ended, but it was a start.
The sealed components reminded him of Charlotte’s glove technology, just built with less precision. The daughter could teach the father a thing or two.
Brendan kept glancing at the doorway. Someone had murdered the man in the workshop. If this person wasn’t the one that had used the machine earlier, then he still could be inside the building. Noticing where his attention was drifting, Tina closed the doors and blocked them with a chair.
“No one will sneak in, at least,” she said.
Brendan continued to work. The headmaster’s tools were still there, as well as the wearable magnifier with its own light. He began snapping pieces in where it seemed logical, only getting stuck a few times when a board or plug didn’t want to fit. If the headmaster had actually intended to destroy the machine, he could have a done a better job with a hammer in a fraction of the time.
Tina got distracted every time a new siren or series of shouts came from below. She checked the window constantly. She wiped her brow, and her breathing was labored.
“So this is an upstream Earth without the benefit of the water,” she said.
Brendan could feel it too. The water had worn off. The air was thicker and felt like it was providing less oxygen. His limbs felt heavy, as if gravity tugged harder at him.
“Torben’s world was worse.”
“That’s not helpful. Explain to me why it is that the Poser from this world is having such a hard time on ours?”
Brendan snapped a board into place. It was the only one that could fit in the longest slot on the motherboard. “I don’t know. Downstream is easy, from what we experienced. It’s only after time that we acclimate. Charlotte did well on our world for so long because she had Nurse Dreyfus’s help.”
“But didn’t the nurse try to help Poser number two?”
“I think Brian’s double might have gotten better physically, at least somewhat. But think about the mental strain of everything being slightly off. He realized he didn’t belong. Imagine your parents, family, friends, every detail of your life where the other you makes even slightly different choices.”
“Or bigger ones. I didn’t even get sent to the academy in the downstream Earth. Maybe that’s true here. Is it bad that I’m glad for me?”
“At least you exist downstream. You may not even have a double here. I know I don’t.”
“Oh yeah. Sorry.”
“But this world’s Brian must be dealing with some depression or other psychological trauma no one has a name for. It’s not like any doctor would believe him when he says he’s from another world and doesn’t belong.”
She exhaled sharply and double-checked Brendan’s work. She didn’t spend much time in the lab and wasn’t part of the official electronics club, but she’d hung out enough that she had a basic understanding of the fundamentals. She wiggled a circuit board and pointed at it. Brendan popped it out and put it back in. It didn’t wiggle anymore.
“So that brings us to the next moral dilemma,” she said. “Do we keep both Posers on our world or send the one that belongs here back, with everything that’s going on?”
“This is his home.”
Brendan checked the machine over. They had it back together in what appeared to be good order. Much of the space inside the box was filled with power transformers and some kind of heat sink. These hadn’t been taken apart, so Brendan left them alone. His hand hovered over the three toggles.
“This could be all the headmaster did before dropping an earthquake on us,” Brendan said. “He turned it on, not knowing that Charlotte had corrected some of his mistakes. Then came the consequences.”
“What do you want me to say?” Tina asked. “Do it? Don’t do it? We’re flying blind. All we know is that the ring did something to a machine downstairs that you hope has something to do with this machine here. But something’s happening outside. We’re getting weaker by the minute. This building could come down on us. This is horrible, but all I can say is that we don’t have a lot of time now to think through our steps. It will either work or it won’t.”
“I was hoping for some reassurance.”
He hit the three toggles and stepped away from the machine. He held the ring hand out. In response, the machine hummed. A disturbance like rising heat waves appeared in the air, and a wall of cold hit them. Silvery threads sparkled in the stirring current of air. It looked unlike any gate he’d seen so far. They both moved back.
“It’s different,” Tina said.
Brendan took a breath as if about to plunge into cold water and stepped forward.
***
There had been no sensation when passing through the other gates. During their fight against the headmaster, Charlotte had even stacked her gate with the headmaster’s without anyone noticing. But just touching the silver gate was like licking the terminals of a nine-volt battery, except the sensation ran across Brendan’s entire body, a jarring mild shock that repulsed him.
He was no longer standing in the office or anything resembling the admin building. In fact, he was pretty sure he wasn’t on any Earth. Cloudy reflections of himself stared back at him, hundreds of reflections, thousands, as he looked in every direction. Each image stood in its own reflecting frame. A white open plane stretched before him into the distance, where it split into a multitude of lanes lined by the mirrors. The lanes twisted to the right and left and banked upward and down. He looked at his feet and lost his bearings, as the white floor was translucent and
he could see even more lanes of reflections twisting below him, unwinding and dividing like corkscrewing ribbons.
Tina stepped out next to him and almost bumped him into the closest mirror.
She grabbed him and they steadied one another. Now each reflection had her image, the pair looking back at them and standing equally unbalanced.
“What is this?” she asked.
“The vault. It has to be. The machine took us here. It’s not a gate to another world, but the gate to every world.”
“It’s us.” She reached forward to the closest reflection, and her counterpart reached towards her.
“Wait. Look.” He pointed at another mirror. In this one Tina was pointing at them. Her hair wasn’t a straight-cut bob but tightly wound braids wrapped behind her head. There were other differences in other frames. In some Brendan was alone. His sweatshirt was a variety of colors and his hair varied in length.
“This is overwhelming,” Tina said.
“Try not looking down.”
Her grip on him tightened. “Too late. But this makes it look like there’s not just a world up and downstream. There’s unlimited worlds. What do we do with all of this?”
“I think we start by not breaking anything.” He tried to take it all in. The notion that each reflection looking back at them was on another Earth was stunning. Billions of lives on each, each with near-identical people. Not completely identical—he didn’t exist in the headmaster’s world, and their own world differed in a number of other ways. But how was it possible that so many Earths had developed with almost exactly the same details?
He had heard about multiverses before in movies and video games. One theory held that each moment and every decision caused a splinter, resulting in infinite realities that would never know one another. This fissure they were in, leading between the spaces, was an abnormality, a look behind the curtain to things no one should see. This was something not to be messed with. He wanted to step back, to go back through the gate. Any motion forward and he would risk losing his place in the twisting roadways of mirrors. And then he saw himself, many hundreds of himself, do just that: retreat and vanish. But not all. Tina stood alone in a few of the frames. In others the frame was now empty. In at least a dozen, Tina was pulling him back, while he pulled at Tina in several more.
The Supervillain High Boxed Set: Books One - Three of the Supervillain High Series Page 50