The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  The vibration increased in intensity and created a kind of blur over the heads of the hivers. They began to part right down the middle, and a boy came forward, holding something in his hand.

  The boy was Hartūn.

  Or, at least, he had Hartūn’s face. While the expression of the crowd had not changed, his was different. It said only, “this is for you.” He didn’t even have to talk. I heard him.

  When he was within eight feet of me, I saw that what he had in his hand was an old Gameboy Advance. I’d had one when I was nine, but I’d left it on the school playground, and someone had snatched it. Now, this Hartūn-like person seemed to be giving it back to me, and in an instant I knew it was mine because it had a crack through the cover flap from when I’d accidentally run it over with my bike. It seemed impossible, but nothing surprised me anymore.

  “Hartūn?” I called out. “Is that you?”

  “Whoa,” whispered Mose. “You know this kid?”

  “Maybe he’s a recurrent, too.” Gordon spat out another tooth chip. “Someone that bridges two worlds. I heard that this could happen, but I’ve never seen it. Between this kid and the Duke, I think we’re in some kind of limbo world.”

  “I don’t know, Gordon,” I said. “He pulled the red house switch with me the second time. He might’ve wound up here. But how he got my old Gameboy, I have no idea.”

  Hartūn said nothing. I was beginning to sense that none of the hive people could talk. He just walked forward and handed me back my Gameboy, and as it passed from his hands to mine, I knew that it had been Hartūn who’d taken it that day on the playground. He was making amends. He was returning the stolen goods.

  “Thanks,” I said, as he stepped back. “I’m not sure what good it’s gonna do me right now, but thanks.” A twinge of guilt went through me. I’d brought him to the switch.

  But Hartūn and the crowd turned in a single motion and began to move away in that weird, sidewise fashion. Only one person remained behind, looking in our direction, and I couldn’t believe my eyes. It was a slightly older, or maybe just more mature, version of Jemma. Her hair was darker, her face thinner, but she was unmistakably the same girl. I couldn’t make myself speak. Something stole my voice, and before I could get it back, she began walking away with the others. I started after her, but Gordon, even wounded as he was, managed to throw an arm up.

  “No,” he said. “Not a good idea. Trust me on this.”

  Mose nodded in agreement, so I stopped. But just before she vanished into the mass of hivers, she turned and held up two fingers in what looked just like a peace sign. I didn’t know why at the time, but it broke my heart to see her go.

  And suddenly, we were alone on that big, wide, weird causeway running alongside a city that I prayed wasn’t any version of my city I’d ever have to live in. My hand was on Gordon’s shoulder and Mose’s hand was on mine, and we were linked in a feeling of bottomless solitude.

  “Whoever they are,” I said, “I feel really bad for them.”

  “Yeah,” said Gordon. “Me, too.” In his condition I thought it was pretty big of him to feel bad for anyone. “Something evil happened in this world. Something that allowed those Reds and their leader to take control. They own the high ground, and they must’ve built this colony to keep everyone else away.”

  “And they did something to them,” I said. “They did something to their minds.”

  “Guys,” said Mose. “You talk like this all makes some sense. But you’re a couple of jumps ahead of me. Remember, this is my first trip. These people can appear and disappear like ghosts. What’s that about? And why’d that dude give you a Gameboy?”

  I put off Mose’s question for a minute, because I spotted something off in the distance, maybe a quarter-mile farther along the dock. Something familiar. At exactly the same bend of the lake where there had been a little park in my world, there was a single tree, and beneath the tree, there was a park bench that looked out on the lake. I knew that tree, and I was sure it was the same bench my dad and I had once sat on when he was trying to explain to me why he and my mom might have to get a divorce. I didn’t know how that could be, but it was. Like some kind of relic from another reality, if that makes any sense at all.

  “Gordon,” I said. “Do you think you can walk?”

  “Yeah,” he said bravely. “My face got the worst of it.”

  “I see a place up there where I think we can rest and figure out things. I can’t explain it, but it’s a place I know.”

  Gordon brightened a bit under the blood. “That’s a thafety,” he lisped through his split lip.

  “A what?” asked Mose.

  “In thum old games, like hide ‘n theek, there’s a zone where you can’t get tagged.” He must have seen the incomprehension on Mose’s face, and spoke his next words slowly. “Well, the way I under-thand it, when you’re jumping worlds, there can be carry-overs from your original world. Like the kid with the Gameboy. Or the girl. A place can be a recurrent, too, and if you find one, it’s a thafety. Nothing can hurt you there.”

  “Okay, brother,” said Mose. “Whatever. You’re the man.”

  We helped Gordon to his feet. I put his right arm around my shoulder, and Mose took his weight on the left side. Together, we limped our way toward the ‘safety.’ There wasn’t a sound in the world except for the waves as they crashed against the dock, and twilight fell over us like a powdery haze.

  “I think,” said Gordon. “We might be getting clo-ther to home.”

  I didn’t ask him to explain what he meant. For me, it felt farther than ever.

  The bench and tree were more distant than they had appeared. We must have walked for close to fifteen minutes, and the twilight went from lilac to deep purple and then just stayed that way, as if there was no true night in this world. They say that twilight is when things are hardest to see, but the tree and the bench remained visible and crystal clear.

  Every so often, we heard the sound of footsteps on the other side of the seawall, and I would look up, thinking that maybe Hartūn or Jemma had followed us. But there was never anyone there. The footsteps were like echoes of some other history, trapped in the layers of time. From off in the distance, there came a sound like ten-thousand automatic garage doors closing, and all the lights in the hive city went out at once. It was a sound I never wanted to hear again.

  “It must be lock-down time,” said Mose. “Those poor folks. Or whatever they are…”

  “This is it,” I said when our feet hit the grass. “This is the place.”

  We helped Gordon down to the bench. He was feeling better, but still a little dazed. That concerned me. I remembered falling once when I was little and hearing my mom and dad talking worriedly about concussions, about falling asleep when you do, and never waking up. I thought about how people in my world took for granted things like seeing a doctor.

  “Ah,” said Gordon as he settled. “This is better.” Mose and I sat on either side of him. I took the Gameboy out of my pocket and flipped open the lid. To my amazement, the screen lit up.

  “Now that is definitely bee-zarre,” said Mose.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “And what’s weirder…there’s a game cartridge in it.”

  “Which one?” asked Gordon, really intrigued.

  That was easy enough to answer, but impossible to explain. The game was the old Super Mario Advance 4, and somehow, some way, the game was in play. Paused, but in play. Luigi was in World 4 of the Mushroom Kingdom, trying to get to Bowser’s castle to rescue the princess.

  It suddenly felt as if a vortex had opened up in the middle of my brain. I could hear Mose and Gordon saying things to me, but only faintly, as if they were very far away. Images appeared to me, as real as in a dream, as close as memories. When I snapped out of it after what must have been only a few seconds, I said:

  “This is the cartridge that was in there when I lost my Gameboy on the third-grade playground. And this is the level I was playing.”

  Mo
se whistled.

  “So it came through completely intact,” Gordon said. “You know what that means?”

  “No,” I said. “My mind is way too wacked. Tell me.”

  “It means there’s an opening.”

  “How do you figure that?” Mose asked.

  “There’s the proof.” Gordon pointed at the Gameboy. “We’d just need to find a carrier to bring us back the same way that kid brought the Gameboy back to Jacobus. And the right angle through the layers.”

  I stared at him. I think what freaked me out the most is that I was beginning to understand him. “A carrier,” I repeated.

  “Yeah. It could be a non-living thing. Mechanical. Electrical. Even an actual vehicle. Or it could be a person.”

  “You know, Gordon,” I said. “You never really told me how you got to know so much about all this. You said you’d been around, but now I’m beginning to wonder for how long.”

  Gordon’s face, smudged with blood and purpled with bruises, took on a look that was halfway between geeky kid and Albert Einstein. “So long,” he said, in a husky voice, “that I don’t remember how long. In my first world, I could be an old man by now.”

  “But you told me…back when we met…that you’d been traveling since your fourteenth birthday.”

  “Yeah, I did,” he said. “But weird things happen to time when you’re traveling. You think it’s standing still, or moving at the same rate it was in your home world, but without anything to mark it, it just flows. Judging by how many places I’ve been, I’m guessing a lot of time has flowed—”

  “Then why don’t you look a day over twelve?” Mose smirked.

  “I probably will,” Gordon said. “If I ever stop traveling.”

  Those words, and their implications, brought a deep silence over us. I put my arm around Gordon’s shoulder. I half-expected him to cry, but it was me who got choked up. I missed my world, with all its faults. But Gordon had been trying to get home forever. My chest swelled up for his bravery. I could tell that Mose felt it, too.

  The silence was broken when Gordon said, “See if it plays.”

  I looked down at the Gameboy. Was there a possibility? Or, as Mr. Bohm would have said, a probability.

  “The probability that x will collide with y can be stated as a ratio, which can be stated as a number. Between ‘yes, it will’ and ‘no, it won’t,’ there is an almost infinite quantity of digits. The range goes from highly improbable to highly probable—not possible or impossible. We should never dismiss the chance that something really strange will happen.”

  Why I remembered his words verbatim I can’t tell you. I had always thought my mind drifted in school, but maybe I had been listening with a whole different part of it.

  “Okay,” I said, resuming play. “Here goes nothing.”

  The game started up more or less instantly. A crackle or two, and some glitchiness in the video—which seemed only natural after how much time it had been—and then it was off and running. Mario raced across a long, flimsy bridge, over a chasm that dropped down into blackness. Projectiles shot out from the dungeon walls on his left and right. He had to leap and somersault in order to dodge the missiles, but that was his specialty. A ledge appeared on the right—one he might be able to leap to. Just as Mario was about to make the jump, I became aware that suspended from the walls of the dungeon were semi-transparent spheres, crappy 8-bit versions of the ones in which we’d been held captive.

  Mose whistled again. “Man, this just keeps getting more freaky. How can they do that? Get inside the game like that?”

  “More important,” said Gordon. “Who are they?”

  The bridge finally ran close enough to the ledge to leap, and just in time, because a squadron of drones with jagged-sharp propellers set to cutting apart the bridge. Mario made it up onto the ledge, and ahead of him was the huge fortress door.

  And the door was closing. My job, and the only thing that mattered at this point, was to keep it open so Mario could make his escape. I looked about for a button, a lever, a chain. And then I saw it. Mounted on the wall to the right of the dungeon door. Silver with a red handle. A switch.

  “Can you believe this?” I said, under my breath.

  “It looks just like it,” said Mose. “Damn!”

  “You gotta pull it, Jacobus,” said Gordon.

  “I guess I do,” I said. “Can there be any other reason it’s here?” I turned to Gordon, who had recharged and was as excited as I’d seen him since I’d agreed to play catch with him. “Gordon, you said before that the switches didn’t always come in the usual, you know… form. Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  He shook his head. “Not inside a game. No way. One time it was a push button. Another time it was a knob that only had two positions. But this—this is new.”

  It wasn’t an easy matter getting to the virtual switch, with missiles coming at Mario from every side, but I finally got an opening and made the leap. After a couple of attempts, I landed right on top of the handle. And that’s when I took my hands off the game and set it down.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  There was a moment of silence before Mose said, “Why the hell not?”

  “Because we have to go back for them.”

  e have to help them.” I got up from the bench. I don’t remember it, but I must have started walking, because next thing I knew, Gordon was struggling to catch up.

  “But how?” he asked.

  “I dunno. Maybe by telling them they’re not stuck here if they don’t want to be. That there’s more than one—”

  “They must know that.” Mose cut in front of me, walking backward to slow my pace. “They gave you the game.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “They might not even know it has a switch. He gave me the game because he stole it a long time ago, in my first world, and he wanted me to have it back.”

  “That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think, Jake?”

  “Mose.” I stopped beside the big seawall. “Don’t you see? Nothing’s a stretch anymore. These worlds are like—” I wriggled my fingers through the night air, trying to come up with the right word, or the right metaphor.

  “Fluid,” said Gordon, and I could tell it hurt his mouth to make the ‘f.’

  “Yeah,” I said. “Gordon’s got it. Fluid. They bleed into each other, even when they’re completely different. They’re not completely disconnected. And maybe if we can figure out how this world happened, we’ll know more about how to get back to ours.”

  “No way,” said Mose, and it was the first time I’d heard his voice that strong. “I got a bad feeling about this. We shouldn’t get sucked into a world we don’t belong in. We should move on. Keep going north.”

  “You can if you want,” I said. “I’ll try to catch up.”

  “Now you’re losing it, Jake,” Mose said flatly. “We’re not splitting up.”

  “Fine, then,” I said. “Come with me.”

  “Jacobus,” said Gordon. “I think Mose is right.”

  “I don’t care,” I said and now the strong voice came out of me. It must have been the testosterone kicking in. They tell me there’s a lot of that at this age.

  “Uh-uh-uh.” Mose put his hand out. “I know what this is about. It’s about that girl.”

  “No, it isn’t,” I said, maybe a little too firmly.

  I learned then and there that I was a bad liar.

  “That’s bullshit, Jake,” Mose shouted.

  “All right,” I said. “It’s about her, but not what you think. I had a strong feeling back in the last world that she was a key to getting home. And I’m starting to pay attention to those feelings.”

  “Don’t you think those feelings might have something to do with that pretty face?”

  “You’re starting to piss me off, Mose,” I said. “Back off.”

  “And you’re being kind of a dick, Jake. I think I liked Jerrold better.”

  When he stepped in front of me ag
ain, I shoved him, and he shoved me right back. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, we were adversaries, facing each other on that endless, empty wharf, our long shadows thrown out onto the water by the security lights on the seawall.

  I suppose what we’d been through would stretch anyone’s nerves to the snapping point. None of us had had any sleep, or anything to eat but the Duke’s bacon. But you don’t think about that when the adrenaline kicks in, when your fists tighten and the muscles in your arms contract.

  Gordon stepped in between us.

  “Wait a second!” he sputtered. “Chill out, guys. We have a long way to go. Jacobus. That girl. Are you saying she’s the same girl we saw at the crosswalk? Only when she was little? The one you told me you talked to in the hallway at school?”

  “Yeah.” My arms went limp. “It’s Jemma.”

  “Who’s Jemma?” asked Mose, probably relieved that he didn’t have to kick my butt after all.

  “A girl I knew in my first world. At school.”

  “Was she like…your—”

  “No,” I said. “Not in the first world. But in the second one, yeah. I can’t explain that any more than I can explain the rest of this.”

  “And then she was little,” Mose said, repeating Gordon.

  “In the third world, yeah,” I said.

  Mose spoke softly. “And now, she’s here.”

  “Right,” I said. “Only maybe a year older.”

  “Damn,” said Mose. “This shit only happens in dreams.”

  “Wait,” Gordon said, in his most authoritative, oracle voice. “It could mean something. That’s four appearances. Worlds one, two, three, and four. I haven’t seen that before. You told me you thought she might be a way back? I remember that.”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged. “But I can’t explain why.”

  “So what are you gonna do,” asked Mose, “if we go back there. If we can even find her. What are you gonna say?”

  “I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I feel like I need to give her the chance to tell me something if she wants to. And I feel like I should pull the switch when she’s there. I mean, sure, we could pull it and see what happens. But who says we won’t just end up in a world even more screwed up than this one?”