The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  “Jacobus,” said Gordon. “From what I saw, I’m not sure these people can even talk. I’m not even sure they’re a hundred percent real.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “But I have to try.”

  “Gordon,” said Mose, “I think we have to go with Jake’s gut on this.”

  Gordon seemed even more surprised than I was by Mose’s change of heart, but he gave a nod, and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure I could have entered the beehive city without that nod.

  In my Chicago—the one I knew—you could walk from the shore of Lake Michigan to the John Hancock building in about fifteen minutes. In this place, that entire area of the city, probably at least as far back as where I had lived, was buried under a concrete mountain, a monstrous ski slope of concrete, bigger than any manmade thing I’d ever seen.

  Imagine thousands of oversized igloos made of the same concrete, clustered like the cells of a honeycomb turned inside-out, and going up level after level until a whole city of them reaches the height of a skyscraper. Now imagine narrow lanes that wind like rivers up that mountain of hive houses. Load into your brain those pictures you’ve seen of overcrowded mountainside cities in places like Hong Kong or Brazil, and then replace the white shacks with these concrete lumps. Then open your mind’s eye to see that the illumination in this city is coming from only two places: the unchanging, twilight purple sky that is night in this world, and the millions of tiny, dim lights set into the concrete and lining the lanes on each side like the lights along the aisle of an airplane that guide you to the exits in a disaster.

  Finally, imagine that even though there are maybe tens of thousands of people in this city, not a soul is around and it’s dead quiet.

  That was the Beehive City. Chicago in another universe.

  As soon as we stepped onto one of the streets and set off upward among the hives, I knew how ridiculous it was to think we could find Jemma. The hives didn’t even seem to have doors, let alone doorbells with little signs telling you who lived there. And even if they had, it wouldn’t have been the name I was looking for: Jemma Roberts. Like Jerrold, my identity in the last world, she would have a different name and a different history. Yet, what I did know is that she had the same current as my Jemma. That may seem like an odd word to use in connection with a human being, but that’s exactly what it felt like. An electrical current. Could people have frequencies like radio stations? And if they did, could you tune them in? She was, like Hartūn, some kind of “recurrent,” her true self threaded through these different worlds and identifiable only by its—is waveform the right word, Mr. Bohm? Maybe—I thought—maybe one of those threads would take us home.

  “So, uh,” Mose asked me. “Where you wanna start?”

  “Dunno,” I answered. “We can’t call out for her. We might bring the Reds. But if she’s what I think she is, she might leave us some kind of sign.”

  “Wow, Jacobus,” Gordon remarked. “You’re getting to be a natural at this.”

  “Even lab rats can be trained,” I said. I have to admit I’d borrowed the expression from my dad.

  We had to assume that the compound would be guarded. Mose, the alley cat who could disappear into his own shadow, agreed to be our scout and lookout. Since the lanes ran more or less parallel, Gordon and I split, taking a lane each and keeping eye contact.

  What I was looking for I had no idea. In an old movie or maybe even a video game, she’d hang a white scarf from her door or paint a yellow ‘X’ on the hive. But the hives had no doors that we could see, and paint might have attracted the Reds.

  “Whatever it is,” I said, “It’s going to be subtle.”

  Even in a dream, I had never visited a place so totally alien. Or so lonely. I realized with a sharp pain in my gut that I couldn’t even be sure we were still on Earth. In the silence, our hearing sharpened, and little by little, we became aware of something drifting through the still air like a lost echo. Even before we could identify it, it felt wrong.

  “Oh shit,” said Mose.

  “What?” said Gordon. “What is it?”

  “It’s them,” he replied. “It’s that twisted song of the Reds’.”

  At that moment, I swear I heard all three of our stomachs churning. The song or chant or whatever it was floated over the tops of the hives like a perverted lullaby, coming from somewhere far above and away. Wherever we walked, however fast or slow, it seemed to follow us, not getting louder or softer, closer or farther away. It just stayed with us as if being aimed by one of those satellite transmitters they use to send messages into outer space in hopes of finding alien life. I suddenly had a thought, and at the same time, Mose spoke it.

  “Maybe it’s some kind of brainwashing,” he said.

  “Yeah…to lull them into submission. Or at least put them to sleep.”

  “It’s like their national anthem or something,” Gordon suggested. “The bad guys used to do this in Syria. In my first world. All night, they’d blast this crazy song out over the desert. You could hear it from miles away.”

  “Shhtt!” I said. “They might have listening devices.”

  It didn’t matter which street we turned down: everything was the same. That sameness twisted space and time so much that it was almost impossible to know how far we walked or for how long. The only indication came from our huffing and puffing, because the more we walked, the steeper the hill became. Our elevation was changing rapidly, which was strange because Chicago is dead flat. We were getting farther from the lake, and farther from that safe place we’d found below. The strangest thought came over me: that we might be standing on top of the City of Chicago, as high as the John Hancock Building.

  And then we saw it.

  In the middle of a cluster of hives farther up the hill, there was a single dwelling with two thin black shadows running up it in a ‘V’ shape.

  In some way, the light was different in just that one place.

  “Let’s check it out,” I said. “It could just be a coincidence—”

  “Or not,” Gordon added, spreading his index and middle fingers. “Remember, she flashed you a peace sign.”

  “If it’s a coincidence,” Mose made a three-sixty as he spoke, “it’s the only one. Look. The light on all these places is exactly the same everywhere. Even. No shadows.”

  And he was right. In all the city, in every direction, this appeared to be the only distinguishing mark. I broke into a sprint, with the others following, but right away knew that the slapping of our tennis shoes against concrete made too much noise.

  “Let’s take our shoes off until we get there,” I said.

  In stockinged feet, we covered the distance to the shadow-striped hive. As soon as we got there, I knew my intuition was right. Someone had scratched an upside-down triangle over a portion of the light path on the right side of the street. The scratch caused a break in the even lighting. That break made the ‘V’ shape. If the lights had been burned out or broken, I might’ve doubted that this was the sign, but scraped? It had to be a signal.

  The question was how to let her know she’d been found. Knocking on her hive seemed way too stupid, and I doubted anyone could hear a knock through solid concrete.

  Now, it’s funny the nonsensical connections your brain will make when you’re in a world that makes no sense. I remembered getting a tiny rise out of the Examiner when I sang the Duke’s John Brown song. From somewhere in a distant part of my mind came a song we’d learned in fourth grade for a school concert, at which Jemma had been placed next to me in the choir—the first time I’d noticed how pretty she was.

  Kookaburra sits in the old gumtree…

  It was no more likely she’d be able to hear me singing than hear me knocking, but what can I tell you? I got a signal from my brain that said: do it. So I hummed, very softly. I’m sure that Mose thought I’d lost it once and for all because he shot me a seriously doubtful look. Gordon pretended to ignore me and guard the path against interlopers. I did two verses and then even I b
egan to question my sanity, so I stopped for a full minute.

  With a sigh, I finally said, “Guys…maybe we better move on. Maybe we should go back to the safety and pull the damn switch after all.”

  The light there was very dim—as I said, like twilight—so it took a beat or two for me to notice that Mose, standing opposite me, had gone wide-eyed, and his mouth was hanging open like he was on the loop-the-loop of a roller coaster.

  “Uh…Jacobus?” Gordon’s voice cracked. He was also facing me, so he could see what I couldn’t. But from his expression, I made an educated guess. Still, when I turned around, I felt a part of me—maybe my soul—jump right through my skin.

  It was her, not more than eighteen inches away.

  “J-Jemma?” was all I could say.

  “How did you do that?” Gordon breathed. “Just appear out of nowhere like that?”

  I blinked. Gordon had actually started a conversation with this supernatural girl. He was amazing that way. She didn’t answer him with words. She made a gesture, raising her hand up to the sky and then down to her heart. It was the most expressive answer I’d ever not heard. All I can tell you is that her meaning went straight into my brain. She was saying she was up there and down here at the same time. Where up there was, she didn’t attempt to explain. She motioned us to a space off the street, where four hives came together, leaving a star-shaped place for the four of us to squat down.

  Jemma (I’ll call her that because there was no way for me to know her name) was as good at using her hands and face to tell her story as she had been at answering Gordon’s question. It was a kind of telepathic sign language that could be understood even by people who hadn’t learned it, at least by the evidence of my own understanding. Like some ancient code we’d all once known but forgotten. Now the whole frequency/wavelength idea made sense. She used her whole upper half to speak, shimmying her shoulders and cocking her head and drawing pictures in the air in lines I swore I could almost see.

  “How did you get here?” I asked her.

  She jerked an imaginary chain around her neck and then made like she was turning the key on a prison cell. She was telling us that her people had been taken prisoner. By the Reds, I assumed.

  “They just—keep you locked up here in these…whatevers,” Mose exclaimed. “You stay here all the time?”

  She shook her head no. Then did a perfect impression of three different kinds of work: shoveling, stamping out machine parts, and carrying something on her back. They were the workforce for the Reds. Some things in history are depressingly basic.

  “They’re enslaved,” Gordon said soberly. “This is like ancient Babylon.”

  “Damn,” said Mose. “That burns me.”

  Then Gordon cocked his head in the direction of the chanting and asked the hardest question yet, “Who are they?”

  What Jemma did blew me away. It was a whole mini-movie, with her hands moving all the time, her face carrying all the emotions, her body taking the shape of whatever physical thing had taken place. She told us that the Reds had destroyed the city. That meant there had once been a real city here. She made hills and tunnels with her arms to say that the Reds had created a “mountain” and that there was a whole underground city beneath it. Then she said something that no ordinary sign language can say. Cupping both hands to that place just above her stomach—the place where you can feel your diaphragm rising and falling with each breath—Jemma drew her “soul-stuff” out as if drawing water from a well and then brought it up above her head and released it to the purple sky. I couldn’t be sure, but the way I read it is that the Reds had taken the people who remained after the destruction and “uploaded” some part of them to someplace else. So now they existed both “here” and “there.”

  Now, as I had once heard Mr. Bohm say, ‘the implications of this are staggering.’ It was so farfetched that if we had been in any kind of normal world, I would’ve called her on it. But I remembered Mr. Bohm had also said that if there truly were multiple universes, we had to accept that some of them would operate by completely different laws. Even things as basic as gravity might work differently. (He got a big laugh out of the class when he said that in another universe, people might have their butts where our faces are, and Connor had joked that this meant they really could be asshats). But I wasn’t thinking scientifically at this moment. I was thinking how amazing it was that she’d been able to get across an idea like this with nothing more than her hands.

  Little by little, we got the hang of the sign language, and after a while, the four of us were actually ‘talking.’ Simple things, obviously. Some things even made us all smile, and would’ve made us laugh if we hadn’t been afraid to. I tried to explain to her that we’d come from another universe, but it was pretty lame. You can’t say “out there” when what you really mean is “here but not here.” If this were French, I’d be spinning my wheels in French I and she’d be a native speaker. But she must have gotten the gist, because she nodded and touched my hand. And all the while I watched her, something turned inside my chest. It wasn’t just that she was pretty, or that she had “grown into” the womanly body she’d already had in eighth grade. It was the way she expressed ideas with her whole self, and how good she was at it. When people are really good at something, you lose yourself in them.

  A few things began to make sense. Why she’d been in every world. Why I’d felt like she might somehow be a way home. And why, for the first time in my life except for stupid, embarrassing crushes that never went anywhere, I felt like I was falling for a girl.

  I took the Gameboy out from the pocket of my hoodie and flipped it open. The game had remained frozen on the frame of Mario leaping onto the switch. I showed it to her, and did my best to explain how we’d come to be in her world. Honestly, it wasn’t all that different a concept from her “here” and “there” thing, and I was even able to borrow some of the same signs. I made the motion of flipping a switch. “We want to go home,” I said. “Should we pull it?”

  She nodded a “yes,” quickly tempered with a “but,” and began orbiting her forefingers around each other in ever-widening concentric circles. As if each circle was a layer and each layer was a world, and she was telling us that home might still be many worlds away.

  “I told you they knew about the multiverse!” whisper-yelled Mose, and fist-bumped me.

  “An onion skin,” muttered Gordon. “Or even a helix. An onion-skin helix! And we have to find our ‘home layer.’ Except that it’s a moving target, because nothing in the cosmos ever stays in one place. Einstein proved that.”

  “Will you—” I said haltingly, holding the Gameboy out to her. “Come with us?”

  She lowered her eyes, glanced sidelong at the hive that must have been hers, then pantomimed having her shoe glued to the concrete. She couldn’t come because she was ‘stuck.’

  “But you’ve got the way out!” Mose pointed at the Gameboy. “Right here.”

  She made another series of gestures, and I may have been wrong, but I said to the others, “I think what she’s saying is that since part of her is ‘up there’ …uploaded in some kind of cloud… and a part of her is down here, she’d tear herself in two if she left. I mean, you saw the way they just disappeared down by the lake. And I told you what happened with the Duke.” I gulped and said what I didn’t want to believe. “Could she be virtual?”

  Gordon shook his head.

  “No. That can’t be right. They’re tricking her. They want her to believe that, but you can’t separate spirit from body till you’re dead, any more than you can pry the protons apart in an atomic nucleus, and she’s not dead. Maybe they uploaded some kind of memory file or imprint, but it couldn’t be her. And if she’s virtual, it’s in some evolutionary way that we don’t know yet.”

  “Yeah,” said Mose. “Sounds like a con job to me. Wouldn’t put anything past those pasty-faced mothers.” He swept his arm over the crazy landscape. “This whole thing is probably a con. Some kind of fa
ke reality.”

  Jemma didn’t seem to understand “con,” and Mose couldn’t think of any signs to describe it. Things got quiet for a minute, and then Gordon spoke up, using his hands and his mouth.

  “Why can’t you talk?” he asked her. “Like we can?”

  She lifted her chin until her neck muscles stretched, and with her finger, she underlined a scar about an inch and a half long, right where I’d learned in school that the vocal cords are.

  “Those bastards,” said Mose under his breath. “They cut you.”

  There were so many things I wanted to say, and to ask her. Who were these creeps who’d hurt her? Was it because of her inability to speak that she had learned how to share thoughts? Who was this “Vater” they all worshiped? And where was her family—if she even had one?

  But what came out was this:

  “I think,” I said, more boldly than I felt, “that I can take you someplace better.”

  There was a long silence while she thought about it, and when I felt like the time was right, I added, “What have you got to lose?”

  Maybe it was the malicious God of this world answering my question because suddenly there were footsteps in the street.

  And then a sound that froze my blood.

  rom the sound of the footsteps, I would have guessed three or four of them at the most, but I would have been wrong. There were at least a dozen, and they wore shoes with thick, padded soles that made almost no sound on the pavement. Jemma reacted instantly, and obviously not for the first time. She moved like an antelope, and the thought flashed across my mind that even though she wasn’t any taller than I remembered her being, she was somehow stretched out, more muscle and sinew than soft girl—just like we had been stretched.

  She led us in a dizzying maze pattern, weaving around and through the hive houses so quickly that there wasn’t any time to think, only to follow. She was as good here as Mose was on his turf. In the vague dimness of that twilight world, I sometimes lost sight of her, but the minute I panicked, she would flicker into being as if teleported and motion us on. Maybe she was an evolved form of human. If so, the wrong people were ruling this world.