The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  “How came you here, trespasser?” the tallest of the redheads asked.

  “What?” I said.

  “How came you through the barbican?”

  “I don’t know if Barbie can or can’t,” said Mose. “But we’re a little lost. Think you can help us out?”

  The tall red man turned to the security guard. “Offer them in the Great Hall.”

  ffer them? Was that really what he’d said?

  It was English. But not only were the verbs and pronouns mixed around in this ancient-sounding way, the attitude was different. Trespasser? Trespassing on what? Was this some kind of restricted area?

  The Great Hall, as they called it, was even stranger to be in than to look at from the outside. Superficially, it was like a school auditorium—the kind that doubles as a gym and has a small stage at the far end. In every other way, it was something else. The walls were painted the color of Pepto-Bismol, and hanging on them, above the stage, and on the side walls, were huge, gold-framed portraits of a guy who looked like he could be the great-uncle of all the people in the room. Bright red hair, greased straight back from his forehead, pink skin, a thin mouth with hanging jowls. And the same white shirt. He wasn’t evil-looking in a typical way, but I didn’t like his looks at all. The smile on his face was more a smirk. It said, “I know something you don’t.”

  I’ve never liked that attitude.

  The picture frames were gaudy, and so was a lot of the other decoration. There was an ornamental border around the arch over the stage, and candleholders on the walls—sconces, they call them—designed in a way my mom would’ve called rococo.

  In other words, the Great Hall looked like a wedding cake left out for three days after the wedding—as crusty and pig’s ear pink as the face of the guy in the pictures. You couldn’t look at him and not see somebody who was supposed to be a big shot. He wasn’t wearing a crown or a fur cape, but he was an emperor all the same.

  Gordon leaned into my ear and whispered: “A barbican is like the fortress wall of an old castle. You’ve seen ‘em in Assassin’s Creed.”

  How Gordon knew this stuff I can’t tell you. But I was glad he did.

  “What?” said Mose, in a too-loud whisper.

  I turned to Mose and breathed, “Later…”

  All the while we were being taken across the room and up to the stage to be “offered,” I turned it over in my head. It was the same building, in the same city, and it wasn’t supposed to be the future according to the rules as far as we knew them. So it had to be a world that would have happened if different choices had been made and events had unfolded in a really different way. But what kind of choices would lead to this? Could my mom and dad live in this world? And if not, how did I get here?

  I suddenly understood what Gordon had meant about the house being ‘there and not there.’ Mr. Bohm had once said that a subatomic particle could exist in two states at once, and that particles that were split could become like separated “twins” in different parts of the universe, connected by something called entanglement. Suppose that was true for multiple universes? And not just for particles, but us?

  There was a Me that continued to exist in my original world: the me that had never pulled the switch in the first place. There was a me that continued to exist in the second world: the one in which my parents, who usually fought it out like ninjas, had become BFFs and Connor—my mortal enemy. Then there was a Jacobus, or I should say a Jerrold, who still existed in the world where I’d met Gordon and Mose—the one in which I’d been born earlier. And now there was this me—who had somehow been born into a world where he was a “trespasser.”

  Mose leaned into my ear. “You notice somethin’?”

  “What?” I whispered back.

  “These are about the whitest people I’ve ever seen.”

  Before the last word had left his mouth, one of our tall, strawberry-headed escorts clapped his hand down on Mose’s shoulder and yanked him out of line. “Stand aside, Schwarze.”

  That last word froze me. And I’d never heard it before.

  I eyed Mose as the man moved him apart from us, and gave him my best “it’ll be okay” look. The second of the tall guys who had seized us in the bathroom addressed the crowd. “Appraise them well. Indelibate to memory what you see. We have been breached. Infracted. We will question the trespassers before disposal.”

  Some of the people on the floor beneath the stage had their hands over their mouths, as if beholding some terrible alien creatures. And indelibate? What language was that?

  From the corner of my eye, I glanced at Gordon, and saw that he was memorizing the man’s words with his lips, repeating them silently. He leaned into me. “Indelible. Something that can’t be erased. Breached, as in broken. Like some kind of barrier. Disposal, as in trash.” I’ll say this: Gordon knew how to whisper. The quietest whisper I’d ever heard. This was not my first inkling that there was something more than just a little different about Gordon Nightshade.

  The man who’d been talking turned and walked over to me. As he got closer, I noticed his skin was kind of doughy, like a half-baked pastry, flaky outside but still gooey inside. His eyes were hard and empty, and in the irises you could see the color of dried blood.

  “Boy, how came you through?”

  I don’t know how long I hesitated before saying, “We were switched through. And it was a mistake. We’d really like to go home now.”

  I don’t think he understood. His eyes got even harder.

  “Boy, who is the first and the last? Whose lies are greater than any man’s truth? Whose words do we sing?”

  I nodded toward the dude in the pictures. “Him?” I said. It seemed like the obvious answer.

  “And how is he called?” the Red Man asked me.

  “I don’t know…Captain?” That’s what I’d heard in the song. He crossed his arms, and I took that to mean no. Wild guess said he was some kind of priest. “F-father?”

  “Vater,” he said, in the way that a Russian says water. “You have some knowledge of the Way, boy. I take you for Albasian. But you are out of your province.”

  At this point, I had no choice but to try and bluff my way through. I had to hope—like you always have to hope—that I could somehow get to his good side, if he had one.

  I nodded. “I know, sir…and if it’s okay with you—” I stepped over and grabbed Mose’s arm. “This guy is my responsibility.” In the wings off to the left side of the stage, I had seen a flight of stairs going down. Like an old fire exit. I nodded to Gordon to follow and saw him shake his head no. As usual, he was more rational than me.

  “We will show you the breach,” Gordon said, trying to speak their language, and I knew right away what he was thinking. Get them to take us down to the basement, show them how we did it, and in the process, switch us the hell out of here.

  “Indeed you will,” the man told Gordon. “After you are examined for contagion.” He turned to his brethren. “Take them underground,” he ordered, and held his palm up. “Vater, light our way!”

  “Vater, light our way!” all the people on the floor repeated.

  The younger guys we’d seen in the bathroom moved to commandeer the steps, and a second man grabbed hold of my arm and wrestled me away from Mose. They seemed determined to keep him separate.

  “Underground” wasn’t a figure of speech. They took us down that first flight of steps, then just kept going. At some point, we stopped descending and entered a long, concrete tunnel with perfectly semi-circular walls and ceiling. The tunnel was lit, but I couldn’t see how. It was as if the concrete was radiating light. I figured we had to be well below the basement level. The tunnel seemed endless, we weren’t allowed to talk (and didn’t dare), and I felt like we were dropping off the face of the earth. It finally came to an end in a T: a perpendicular hallway that shot off to the left and right, continuing all the way into darkness. All along the opposite wall were small doors, painted sickly yellow-green, with handles that lo
oked like the wheel-shaped pressure locks they have on submarines. I had a powerful sense that we were under water, and if it was Lake Michigan, that was a lot of water to have over our heads. All of a sudden, the white sailor shirts made sense.

  Each of the doors had a number over it, painted in the same yellowish-green. Red Guard One spun the handle of Room 3 to the left and beckoned to Gordon. The door swung open to nothing but gray air, like the sky on a typical Chicago day. Gordon froze, just as I’d always figured I’d freeze at the bay of a skydiving plane. The two Reds grabbed him from either side and hauled him right up to the threshold.

  A squeak of panic came out of his throat. “Please,” he said. “I can’t do small, locked spaces.”

  “Until the breach is sealed,” said Red Two. “You will remain in abeyance.” And with that, they gave Gordon a shove and in he went. He fell with a shout. I say ‘fell’ because not only did he go in, he went down. How far down, I couldn’t say. Before I could get out the word stuck in my gullet, they had closed the door and spun it shut.

  “Wait,” I said. “I have information.” Red One squinted at me—which made his eyes go white.

  The two guards exchanged a look, and for a second, I thought they might take the bait. I don’t know what I would’ve told them.

  “In abeyance,” Red Two said and wrestled me to Door 5. As soon as I looked through the door, Gordon’s freak-out made sense. It looked like a jump into thin air, and before I could blurt, I was shoved through, leaving Mose alone on the deck.

  It wasn’t a long fall into thin air, but a short drop to the transparent shell of a plastic sphere six feet in diameter. It was like being inside a beach ball, or some kind of space pod, suspended in void. The plastic was rubbery and pliable, and the sphere shook like Jell-O when I moved the slightest bit. Seeing as there was nothing beneath the spheres but a bottomless concrete canyon, the vertigo was worse than anything I could imagine outside of a dream. Two spheres down was Gordon. He looked really miserable, but his face lifted when he saw me. A few seconds later, Mose dropped into his bubble and bounced once before settling, the door above him screwing shut with a metallic whine. He looked just as dazed and confused as Gordon did.

  Because the spheres were clear, we could see each other, but it did no good to talk. They were completely soundproof. Even my own voice got swallowed up as soon as I made a sound.

  Outside, dozens and dozens of these sealed spheres—maybe hundreds—hung attached to the wall of this enormous manmade cavern like insect cocoons on a tree or barnacles on a ship’s hull. It was a prison compound, but it was something else, too. I felt like a specimen in a petri dish, or an egg in an incubator. There was air, but only enough to keep you alive. You had to work to breathe, like a diver with his oxygen tank close to empty. And it was hot.

  What if these spheres were some kind of transformation chamber? What if we came out of them looking like the Reds?

  They couldn’t hear us, but I figured they had to be able to see us. No prison this hi-tech could possibly have been built without some kind of security camera system. Of course, there wasn’t much to see…unless one of us had a heart attack, a distinct possibility in this situation.

  The squeal of a pressure lock being unscrewed preceded a face popping up in the door above me. Not a face I’d seen before, but an older guy with his pink head shaved and wearing something that looked like a cross between a lab coat and a priest’s robe.

  A second man appeared behind the first, and through the doorframe, inserted what looked like a giant set of calipers—for grabbing hold of large objects, like me. The calipers closed around my left foot, bit down just enough to hurt a little, and then began to lift me out of the sphere. When my legs were through, the lab coat man lifted me out and into the tunnel. He checked my pulse, then pried open my eyelids with his thumb and forefinger.

  Wheels swished on the tunnel floor, and in a minute, there was a hospital gurney. I was lifted onto it and zipped away down the long, dark tunnel, toward what fate I couldn’t imagine and didn’t want to.

  I could only pray that these people were not the sort to cut into my brain to see what made me tick, or insert probes into all my orifices.

  In the examining room, which the shaved-head guy called “sick bay” and which also looked like it belonged on a ship, they poked and prodded me a fair amount and wired me up to some machine that I supposed measured my vital signs. They did not, thankfully, cut into my head, but I was soon to experience another kind of brain surgery.

  One of the orderlies or nurses or whatever they were turned to the other and said, “Bring the Examiner.”

  he door to the little room opened, and The Examiner backed in, closing the door behind him. Sweat pricked my forehead. His black robe and loose-fitting pants looked almost like a karate masters’ outfit, or an executioner’s.

  When he turned my way, I thought for an instant that life could be like movies, where Han Solo or Captain America shows up just at the right time. The face of the man in the black karate suit was none other than the face of The Duke of Earl. The Duke had not left the building after all! I’m sure that the rising excitement must’ve shown on my face. Somehow, some way, he’d slipped through—maybe because he’d helped us pull the switch.

  That excitement faded when I realized he didn’t recognize me. Of course he doesn’t, I told myself. I’m Jacobus, not Jerrold, and in this version of history, he’s meeting me for the first time. But still… if I can see him as the same essential person in a different story, couldn’t he somehow see me? Every time I tried to sort through this stuff, it fried my brain, but it did seem to be getting just a little easier. It still felt like the world’s most twisted maze, but it was a maze I was getting closer to being able to find my way around.

  “Nomen?” he said.

  “What?” I asked. I was still sitting up on the hospital gurney.

  “How are you called?” he enunciated, as if I were deaf.

  “Jacobus,” I said. And then louder and slower, “Ja-co-bus. Formerly known as Jerrold. To the Duke of Earl, that is.”

  Was that a little light of recognition I’d seen flash behind his eyes? No. Just me hoping it was.

  He motioned for me to get off the gurney and take the chair across from him at a table that had nothing on it but a metal box with two meters on it—the old-fashioned kind with needles and marks that went from zero to a hundred. Cables snaked from either side of the box, and at the end of each cable were handles that looked a little like Xbox controllers, but with only one button each. He showed me how to hold the right-hand one on my palm, with my fingers curled around the front and my thumb on the red spot, which wasn’t a button at all but some kind of sensor. I figured out the left hand myself. It wasn’t exactly rocket science. In fact, it was surprisingly low-tech.

  “Came you from Ip-sees?” he asked me, or at least that’s what I thought he said. As he spoke the name, I took notice of a poster on the wall behind him. It had the word YPSYS on it, followed by the words “Retrieval and Disposal,” and a series of digits that looked as if it could be a phone number. I decided, genius that I am, that the best answer to his question was, No.

  The needle on his left moved just a little.

  He looked at me. I looked at him. There was no connection.

  “What is your sector?” he asked.

  “Sector? I don’t know. Lincoln Park. Hudson Street. Why do you guys you talk like characters from an old comic book or a crappy sci-fi movie?”

  I had hoped that might get a smile out of him, but no.

  “Are you a saboteur?” he asked.

  Finally, a straightforward question. “No, just a lost kid.” I leaned forward. “And I know you.”

  The needle on the right twitched, and that seemed to puzzle him because he stared at it for a few seconds before going on.

  “Where did you breach?”

  It was clear by now that they thought we’d broken into their territory somehow—that we were like illega
l immigrants. It was also clear there were areas outside of this one, made up of “sectors,” where people like me and Gordon and Mose had family or relatives. Whatever had happened to the world—or at least to Chicago—had split society up into conflicting tribes, and this tribe—the Reds—seemed to have the upper hand here.

  When I didn’t answer, he said, “You indicated that you had ‘information.’ You wish to avoid anathema? Share it? Suppression will only result in exile to YPSYS.”

  I didn’t know the meaning of ‘anathema,’ but it sounded bad.

  “Like I told the other guy, we got switched through. I can show you if you let my friends out.” I gave him a penetrating look. “You do know that there’s more than one universe, right?”

  He cocked his head.

  I’m not sure what took hold of me then, but I started to sing.

  John Brown’s Baby had a cold upon his chest

  A cold upon his chest,

  A cold upon his chest.

  John Brown’s baby had a cold upon his chest,

  So he rubbed it with camphorated oil.

  This time, I was sure I hadn’t imagined his reaction. It was like a psychic twitch. And it got stronger the second time through, when I coughed instead of singing, “cold,” and thumped my heart instead of singing, “chest.” He stared at me, silently, then glanced at the meters, then back at me. Finally, he said, in normal English,

  “However many universes there are, boy, you must engage with the one you’re in.”

  Now that sounded familiar.

  “Who are these people? And why are you here? I notice they don’t like Mose much.”

  He looked at me blankly. “I don’t understand. You are in the Vaterland. They are the masters, as is the right and proper order of things. I serve at their pleasure.”

  Before I could press on, he slid right back into his character. “Whence comes the law?”

  I was sure this would be the only time, in this or any other universe, that I would hear someone use the word “whence.” I shook my head automatically, and one of the needles jumped. I took a guess. “G-God?” I stammered.