The Switch

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The Switch Page 12

by Hill, A. W.


  The needles didn’t move, just vibrated the tiniest bit.

  “God?” he asked, as if he’d never heard the word.

  I swallowed hard, and said, “Vater?”

  I couldn’t tell if that was the answer he’d wanted. He stood up and opened the door, then called in the orderlies or whatever they were, and told them to take me back to “suspension.”

  Before I was led away, I stopped at the door and turned back to him. I tried to block everything out except for him and me, and said, “Why are you faking it, Duke? I know who you are. You’re not really one of these people. Sooner or later, they’re gonna catch on to you.”

  For just a few seconds, the world stopped, and I don’t know how to describe what happened except to say that the Duke began to crumble. Little pieces of him jiggled, then tore at the edges like a bad graphic and flew off. It came to me that the word Mr. Bohm might have used was dematerialization. “Holy crap,” I said, out loud.

  It was as if he wasn’t all there. Everything else seemed real. Crazy, but real. The Duke was like a projection from somewhere else.

  He—the Examiner—stayed in the room as they took me back down the hallway to my sphere, but I glanced back before they shoved me through the door and saw that he’d stepped out and was watching me with an odd combination of sternness and sadness.

  Back in the sphere, my heart sank because we were no closer to getting out than we had been before. I managed to give Gordon and Mose a weak thumbs up to raise their spirits a bit. I couldn’t think of any sign language to indicate that I’d encountered the Duke as a different person. They hadn’t invented sign language for that yet.

  I may not seem like the most exceptional of kids. I wasn’t an oddball genius like Gordon, or an artful dodger like Mose who could slip through cracks without being seen. Back in my old life, before all this had happened, I’d been the sort of kid who teachers always say isn’t “working up to his potential,” and my life’s biggest thrill was getting home to my game console. But one thing about me is that I don’t give up, and I started thinking almost immediately about how to get the “Examiner” on our side. Before I could focus, a sound like lifting the lid off a brand new jar of jelly, except about a hundred times as loud, made my ears pop and took my breath away. Especially once I realized the sphere was the jar, and I was the jelly.

  I looked across at Gordon and Mose. They were feeling it, too, and had their hands pressed against the surface of their spheres as if they could somehow hold on that way. But I knew it was no use. It was the spheres themselves that were coming loose. I watched in helpless terror as the open end of my bubble—the part attached to the steel door—began to separate from the wall. At any moment, we would drop like ping-pong balls into that bottomless abyss.

  We will question the trespassers before disposal, and it looked like they were following the plan. We were being disposed of.

  When you’re about to die, you don’t reflect. You can only act. Ever seen what a bug does when you try to wash it down the drain? You have to give bugs their props. In their panic, they perform amazing feats to survive. All three of us at once did the same thing, the only thing the bug could do: we scrambled and fumbled to grab hold of our doors, only there wasn’t anything to grab. The inside metal surface offered only rows of smooth, round rivets and a long hinge that stuck out barely half an inch. Nothing to get a fingerhold on. With a horrible thwwuup, our spheres came loose from the wall and we began to fall backward into space.

  We screamed, and because, for a few seconds, the mouths of our spheres remained open to the cavernous chamber, I heard all three. They weren’t manly roars. They weren’t the happy/terrified screams of riders descending the steepest slope on the world’s highest roller coaster. They were the screams of the bug as it finally goes down the drain. I knew intuitively at that moment that bugs did scream.

  Thoughts don’t come in a neat sequence when you’re falling backward into blackness inside a huge beach ball. But in some split second of the drop, I remembered that there was a version of my original self who’d never pulled the switch, and I took some small comfort from that on my way to certain death. No theory of the multiverse could possibly say that when one of your many selves dies, they all die. At just about that instant, a new sensation took over, because the speed of our drop slowed. Not as much as, say, with a parachute, but a whole lot slower than it had been. Enough for my brain to rally back on. I knew a little about air resistance, both from school and from throwing things off high places and watching them fall. I also knew that the spheres, whose open ends had sealed up on some automatic command shortly after we began our descent, really were like inflated beach balls. But something more than that had to account for how much we were decelerating. It was as if a cushion of air pushed up from the bottom of the canyon. For the first time, I let myself breathe.

  We hit bottom within half-seconds of each other. First Mose, then me…and finally, Gordon. It wasn’t a smackdown, but a splashdown. We landed in water. My sphere submerged halfway, then popped right back up. Instantly, I began to feel the pull of a current, moving our spheres rapidly toward a distant pinprick of light. It was way too dark for us to see each other or signal our relief. I couldn’t make out my own hand in front of my face.

  But as we neared that light, carried along what must have been an underground river, I remembered Dad telling me years ago that there was another city beneath the City of Chicago. A hidden city built after the Great Fire. I’d asked him if that’s what they meant by “The Second City,” and he laughed and shook his head. When I said I didn’t believe him, he said, “I’ll prove it to you,” and took me to a place called the Billy Goat Tavern that he said was in a part of underground Chicago, and where there were only four items on the menu: hamburgers, cheeseburgers, potato chips, and Pepsi. No fries, chips. “No Coke, Pepsi,” they said.

  After our trip to the Billy Goat, I had begun to imagine an entire underground metropolis, with its own streets and cops and restaurants and bars with women in slinky, low-cut dresses and saxophone music growling out from the open front door. But this—where we were now—had to be not just underground but submarine. We had fallen a long way.

  Every few minutes, the current pushing us would seem to stall, and we’d stop dead in the water, then feel ourselves rising up. This also sparked something in my memory, something about how boats moved through canals. Because a canal connects two bodies of water that are at different heights above sea level, the boat has to be gradually brought up or down to the new altitude, so it doesn’t have to go over a waterfall to get to where it’s going. They build in these things called locks that let water in or out to adjust the levels while the boat sits there, waiting. That’s what was happening. The underground river was so low that little by little we were being brought up to the level of some much bigger body of water.

  That turned out to be Lake Michigan.

  When we came out of the canyon and into the lake, there arose before us the arc of the lakeshore famous from a hundred postcards of the great Chicago skyline. Except that the skyline was missing. The entire city, from north to south, was a sprawling honeycomb of squat, rounded buildings that looked like some sick combination of moon colony, a science class model of how cells fit together to make an organ, and one of those Native American pueblos. But much, much bigger, and rising to the height of a medium-sized mountain range. There was no John Hancock building and no Willis Tower. They’d been torn down, blown apart, or more likely, never been built at all. I was beginning to think like a time pilgrim. The reality that there could be completely different histories, and that somehow, some version of you could exist in a bunch of them, was beginning to sink in, and it was not pleasant.

  The water on the lake was choppier, and some of the waves were big. The three of us bobbed and rocked and even got thrown up into the air a few times, but something kept us on course for the shore, something like the current in the underground river, but also—how can I describe it?
Electromagnetic. This was one bizarre world. Certain things seemed totally futuristic, and others ancient and tribal. It felt as if we were floating into a designer version of Hell.

  It took about ten minutes to get to shore. I remembered that the shoreline of Chicago that wasn’t beach was heavy concrete piers covered with sheet metal, high enough to keep the water away from the roads, except in the very biggest storms. Some people fished off them; others dove off. To me, they’d always looked jagged and forbidding. That wall of concrete and sheet metal was the only thing that remained of my old Chicago in this new world. I suppose that’s because it was such basic engineering. You had to keep the lake away from the city somehow and the natural solution was to build a wall from the strongest stuff you had. But there was a difference, because in some places, the barrier wasn’t a vertical wall but a broad ramp that climbed at a steep angle to a wharf. This seemed smart. A wave that hit a ramp like that would just bounce back to where it came from. But at the same time, the design was primitive, like something from Mesopotamia, or Egypt. It was to one of these huge ramps that our three spheres were headed. When we reached it, we rolled up…or maybe I should say ‘spun up,’ because we stayed upright like gyroscopes. Something was drawing us up like gravity.

  When we came to a stop, on the flat ground of a broad, long quay that seemed to run the whole length of the hive city, the mouths of our beach balls yawned open automatically. The three of us crawled out onto the dock like baby chicks hatching. We stood up, looked at each other, and I swear, we all said at the same time, “What the—?”

  “This is nuts,” said Mose, after that. “Look at this place.”

  “This doesn’t even seem like the same reality we just came from.” I kept my voice low because the city echoed back at me. “Is it possible we were switched again? Without knowing it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gordon, a little out of breath. “But I don’t see how. This has to be one of their ‘sectors’. But why would they send us here?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe it’s YPSYS. Maybe we’re anathema.”

  “Say what?” said Mose.

  “I saw something back there,” I said. “When they took me out of my sphere.”

  “Like what?” Mose pressed.

  “The Duke. I saw the Duke. Only he wasn’t the Duke, he was the Examiner. And at the end, he flickered in and out of reality like when your video stream craps out and has to be buffered.”

  They stared at me.

  “Okay,” I said. “Lemme try again. They took me out of the pod thing. I think because I said I could tell them how we got in. They rolled me into some kind of doctor’s office where this dude who looked just like the Duke gave me some tests.”

  “A black dude?” huffed Mose. “In that place?”

  “He said they—the Reds—were like the bosses. And that everyone else—including him, I guess—were the servants. Only I got the sense that he was ‘put there,’ like the way you can put a digital image into a movie with real people. Except that until he started to break up, it was a hella better graphic than that. Like a…perfect hologram.”

  “Did he recognize you?” Mose asked.

  “Maybe for a split second or two,” I said. “He asked me if I came from Ypsys. Y-P-S-Y-S. And I have a feeling that’s where we are.”

  “There’s this physicist.” Gordon rubbed his chin like a teacher. “From Argentina. Back in my first world. Malder—Maldacena. He says that reality is a hologram projected inward from the boundaries of the universe. Maybe they can do that here. Or maybe the Duke is a recurrent.”

  “A what?” Mose asked.

  “Let me think about how to explain that,” Gordon said.

  “Well, whatever he was,” I said. “I think maybe it was him that got our spheres dropped. For better or for worse.”

  I had another idea, but one that hadn’t taken shape enough to put into words, or even very clear thoughts. It went back to what Gordon had said about floating, and how the key to it was holding on to your original self. The real you. What if the real us was something invisible, unmeasurable, and everything else we thought of as ourselves was just like that Argentinian physicist’s hologram?

  It was at exactly that moment that people began to emerge from the buildings of the beehive city.

  hey came in huddled masses: first dozens, then hundreds—seeming to multiply by the second. They walked slowly but steadily, moving as much sideways as forward, the way you would on a narrow ledge. The younger ones clung to the older ones, the old folks’ hands rested on the shoulders of the strong. But even as the horde grew large, fed by bodies streaming from the hives, it kept a unified direction, and that direction was toward us.

  “Oh, God,” said Gordon. “This doesn’t look good.”

  “I can’t tell if they’re angry or just curious,” I said.

  “At least they look more like us,” said Mose.

  It was true. At least in appearance, the hivers looked more like the Chicagoans I was used to seeing on the street: Latinos, Caucasians, African-Americans, Asians, young and old. As far as I could tell, none were quite like the bunch we’d met in the building. But for all their differences, they moved as a single tribe, and they all wore the same expression. How can I describe that expression? It still haunts me when I close my eyes at night, but until now I hadn’t thought of words for it. If you could see the faces of ants as they march in columns toward a dropped cookie or a puddle of melted ice cream, their expressions might look like these. Not thinking, just acting on instincts.

  “There’s something wrong with them,” I whispered, the front edge of the crowd looming about a hundred feet away. “That’s got to be what the Examiner was talking about with his anathema thing.”

  “You think they’re prisoners of the Reds?” asked Mose.

  “Maybe we’re the first people they’ve seen come off the lake,” Gordon suggested.

  “That can’t be,” I said. “A lot of them must’ve gotten here the same way we did. Maybe we’re just the new prisoners. But I’m not sure we should hang around to find out.”

  “Where would you suggest we go, exactly?” asked Gordon.

  I pointed down the concrete quay that seemed to run along the lakefront forever. In another world, it might have been a sort of bike path or promenade, but in this one, it was empty. “I don’t know where this goes, or even if it’s a better place, but—”

  Mose spoke in a voice that had dried up and stuck in his throat. “Do you think they’re some kind of zombie?”

  “I don’t know,” said Gordon. “But I’m with Jacobus. Let’s—”

  “Run!” I yelled.

  And we ran, three abreast. Mose was faster than me, and I was faster than Gordon, but we stayed together. Maybe it was some primal instinct, but we seemed to know that the one who fell behind might be the one who got captured…or worse.

  When you run in a nightmare, or even when characters run from a monster in a movie, there’s really no place to hide. That’s what this felt like. I knew even as we ran for our lives that we couldn’t get to a safe place, but it didn’t matter. It was pure terror that drove us. The wharf sloped downward as it took a curve around the shoreline, and on our left, a concrete wall rose up to a height of about fifteen feet and separated us from the beehive city.

  “Look!” Mose shouted, and I saw that more hivers—hundreds of them—had come out and were lined up along the top of the wall, watching us with that same empty, hungry expression.

  But that wasn’t the worst of it. When I turned around for the first time to gauge how much distance we had put between ourselves and the beehive people, I saw that it was almost no distance at all.

  They had poured down onto the dock, filling its width and stretching in a long column all the way back to the place where we’d landed, and no matter how fast or far we ran, they kept up with us. They didn’t have to break a sweat to do it. It was as if they could race time itself. If we put thirty feet between us and them, they cl
osed the gap almost instantly.

  But still, the fear drove us on.

  “We better hammer it, guys!” I shouted. “They’re gaining. I don’t know how, but—”

  There was a shout followed by a dull crraack, and Gordon went down. He must’ve tripped when he wasn’t looking ahead, and I saw right away that he wasn’t going to get up fast. It was concrete, and Gordon didn’t have his catcher’s outfit to protect him anymore. At that moment, a strange, sad thought entered my mind, and it was the strangest, saddest thought I’d had up to that point in my young life. Gordon’s mom in one of the worlds had given him that outfit because, she’d said, he needed protection. And she’d been right. Gordon was highly breakable.

  Something changed the instant he fell. Some variation in the timeline. Everything got really quiet. Even the surf on Lake Michigan was silent. I looked up from the concrete where he lay and saw that the crowd had stopped, and where there had been hundreds—maybe thousands—a few seconds earlier, they were now down to the few dozen that had first emerged from the hives. Mose and I went over to Gordon, who wasn’t moving.

  “Gordon?” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  “You all right, brother?” asked Mose, kneeling beside him.

  Slowly and painfully, Gordon lifted his chin from the pavement. His mouth and nose were bleeding badly. He spat a chip off his front tooth onto the concrete.

  “I’m alive,” he said weakly. “I think.”

  We sat Gordon up, and I ripped a piece off my shirt for him to wipe the blood with. Only then did I look back at the hivers.

  The crowd was frozen. Only a slight vibration, like a shudder, running all the way through them like a wave, told me they were alive. Their expressions were frozen, too, in that look I’d first took for hungry and threatening. But they weren’t coming any closer. They’d stopped twenty feet short. And I realized that the hunger I’d seen was loneliness.

  “Is anybody here a doctor?” I said, only because it seemed like the right thing to say.

 

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