The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  I was pretty sure the guards—or whatever they were—hadn’t spotted us yet, but they had to have heard us, even in our stockinged feet, and I could feel them on our tail not more than thirty feet behind. Only one thing was on my mind, and I’m sure it was the same for Gordon and Mose: no way was I going back to that prison. Even this phony world, with its starless sky and its concrete igloos, was preferable to that. Here, at least, we had a friend.

  We ran uphill. I could feel it as my lungs began to ache. And then, without warning, we were going downhill so steeply, I lost my sense of balance and nearly tripped. It felt as if we were moving over the curving surface of the earth itself. I didn’t dare turn around to see how close they were. I had that little kid’s false faith that if I didn’t see them, they wouldn’t see me. Then the concrete rose up and Jemma tore around what seemed to be a boundary ridge dividing one section of the beehive compound from another. On the far side of it, we finally stopped and beheld our pursuers.

  “They don’t look human,” said Gordon, out of breath.

  “They can’t be human,” Mose agreed.

  “Holy shit!” I must have expected something that looked like a squadron of Empire guards from the Star Wars movies. Instead, what I saw were more like bipedal robotic insects. Cyber-Cockroaches. Giant, transparent heads with spindly legs growing out of them, skittering across the terrain like swarming ants. “They’re drones,” I said. “Must be. Have to be.”

  Jemma made a quick sign, miming a chain around her neck and the backbreaking work of shoveling and lifting. If they caught us, I inferred, we would go straight to the workhouse or the prison farm, wherever they were.

  Jemma motioned us to move, and we began a steep descent into a canal cleaved into the concrete. It ran on till everything faded into murky, violet darkness. This was indeed a boundary of some sort, but all I could see beyond it as we dropped down into the channel were more beehives. Jemma pointed in that direction as she ran, shook her head furiously, then slid her finger across her throat. The bad side of town, I guessed. Every town seems to have one, even one as bizarre as this.

  She suddenly shot ahead in that surreal, warpspeed way that the crowd of hive people had when they pursued us along the dock. I lost her in the purple haze. On my right, Mose tore past me. Man, the kid had speed, probably from street scrambling in Chicago. I would’ve tried to keep up, but I knew Gordon couldn’t. His legs were just too short. So I stayed with him, even though all my instincts itched to pour it on.

  Ahead, the canal walls steepened, and narrowed into a darkness too deep to reveal its color.

  “C’mon, Gordo,” I said. “Give it all you got. We don’t want to lose them.”

  The little guy turned on the turbo, even though it must have sent bolts of pain through his injured face and banged up knees. We were about to merge with the darkness, when the insect drones appeared suddenly at the top of the cement ridge, lined up like sentries, scanning the channel below. I grabbed Gordon by the sleeve to brake him, and via my own sign language, told him we had to slow to a creep. Running would only alert them.

  That’s when the sirens went off—sirens that sounded the way a mosquito sounds when it’s right next to your ear, but a hundred times louder. And with the sound, a volley of searchlights, issuing from those monstrous transparent roach heads and sweeping over the canal. I grabbed hold of Gordon, and I swear I nearly flew him into the shadows, not more than a half a second before a beam swept over the place we’d been standing.

  “Jemma!” I whisper-shouted into the darkness. “Mose!”

  “Over here!” came Mose’s response, so full of echo that it was hard to locate the source. Gordon and I felt our way through. The passage was so narrow, we could put a hand against each wall. I stopped inching forward when the toe of my tennis shoe came up against Mose. Something glowed into shape from where Jemma was crouched against the wall. A long, narrow thing she held in her right hand, shaped like a Fourth of July light stick, except that its glow seemed radioactive.

  I squatted down in front of her. “Are we safe here?”

  She gestured, first to the right where the insect drones were, then to that dark No Man’s Land on the left, then cut a line between them with her hand, like a karate chop. I think she was saying that the drones could not cross over the border canal. She might also have been saying we were trapped.

  “Jemma.” I took the Gameboy out and used my hands as much as I could. “The kid who gave me this. Can we bring him with us?”

  She shook her head soberly, telling me that it was too dangerous to go back.

  “Please,” I said. “I owe it to him. My dad taught me to leave no debt unpaid.”

  “Jake,” said Mose. “We went along with you so far, and I don’t regret it. But maybe she’s right.”

  “I wouldn’t calculate the probabilities in our favor,” Gordon agreed. “And look…you have no way of knowing that you put him here by having him pull the switch. We exist in many universes. One for every time things came down differently or God sneezed or whatever. This could be just—”

  “No,” I said. “He had a connection with me. With my history. Otherwise, how do you explain the Gameboy? And if we’re not accountable for our history—in any universe—then we’re like those bugs out there.” I turned to Jemma, but she put her finger to her lips and cupped her other hand around the glowstick.

  The horrible whining of the insect drones had begun to fade and drop in pitch, as sounds always do with distance. They were moving away, and before long, the air was still and quiet again.

  For the moment, we had escaped them.

  “Where does he live?” I asked her. “Can you take me there?”

  This was when I became sure that the girl I was talking to in sign language was in some real but totally inexplicable way the girl I knew, and that even if part of her had been ‘uploaded,’ the part that mattered was here. She looked at me as a girl can only do when she admires something a guy has done. She took my hand, and together we scaled the steeply sloping wall of the canal. When we got to the top, I turned to Gordon and Mose and said, “We’ll be back.”

  From the high ground, we could still see the searchlights of the insect drones sweeping over the hives. They were backtracking, covering the vast expanse of concrete again in hopes of finding us. I reasoned from this that their programming probably wasn’t all that advanced—that they were being directed from another location. I started to move forward, but Jemma put her hand against my stomach to stop me. I liked feeling her hand there. After the last of the searchlights had dipped below the curve of the artificial world, she crouched, motioned for me to do the same, and took off, weaving me among the hives. How she could tell one from another, I’ll never know, but she could, and she knew just where to look for Hartūn. Through her eyes, I began to see that the hives were not completely uniform, after all. There were shallow markings cut into the concrete in the way I’d once learned that ancient stonecutters chiseled their symbols or signatures into monuments. It hadn’t been possible to spot them before because the light threw no shadows and the markings were so small. But Jemma, it appeared, could put her fingertips up against them and know whose house it was.

  When she was certain she’d found the right place, she knelt and took something small and jagged from the pocket of her hiver’s one-piece coverall. It wasn’t any bigger than a Native American arrowhead, or a flint for starting fires in the woods. She tapped, then gently scraped the shell of Hartūn’s hive with the stone, setting off sparks.

  I didn’t know what to expect. Did Hartūn have parents, or a family in this world, or did he live alone in his hive? If we awoke his parents, there would be a lot of explaining to do. But the question was moot because within thirty seconds, he materialized behind me the same way Jemma had. I scanned the area for a secret door, a manhole cover—anything that could lend an explanation other than quantum tunneling. But there was nothing.

  “How do you—” I started to say, but Jemma
cut me off.

  She turned to me and gestured urgently for me to make my case to Hartūn.

  “You want me to—?” But how? How do you explain to a guy who’s half a ghost that you feel like you owe him a trip to a better universe? I decided to keep it ultra-simple. I took out the Gameboy and held it up. Then I made my pitch, illustrating my words with actions, pointing in turn to Jemma, himself, and me, and mimicking pulling a switch. I could tell right away that it worried him. He paced back and forth, and took Jemma aside for private conversations in sign language way too complicated for me to comprehend. He kept shaking his head and pointing at the sky, then at the far city of the Reds, a dim cloud of light on the horizon. For an instant, he seemed to fade in and out of physical reality, and I had the strong feeling that he might just disappear back into the hive, leaving us with our mission unaccomplished. It was the whining sirens and sweeping beams of the insect drones coming back that made his mind up.

  The three of us, like cars on a high-speed train, took off across the plain of hives, Jemma in the lead, Hartūn close behind, and me a ways back. I’ve never seen people move like that, but once I observed what they did, I could almost fake it. They used the narrow crescent-shaped lanes like curves on a racetrack, leaning into the turns so far that they seemed to hug the sides of the hives. A couple of times, to build speed, we went right over the top of them, barreling down so fast that the only way not to trip was to go faster. Something made a dull kli-klunk behind and to my left, but it was nowhere near as loud as my heart, so I ignored it. My eyes and my mind were on Jemma’s flying mane, the only part of her I could see in that permanent twilight.

  The volume of the insect sirens kicked up a notch. They had our scent.

  We leapt into the channel and found our way through the blackness to Mose and Gordon.

  “Damn,” said Mose. “I just lost five bucks.” Then he smiled.

  “You made it!” Gordon cast a glance at Hartūn. “Can you introduce us?”

  “Gordon and Mose,” I whispered. “This is Hartūn. We go back a bit, but I don’t know if he knows that.”

  “‘s he comin’?” Mose asked.

  I gave Hartūn the best hand signal I could summon up, and I don’t think he could have mistaken it for anything else.

  He nodded.

  “Yeah, Mose,” I said. “He’s with us.”

  “Then let’s get our game on,” said Mose. “Flip that Gameboy open, and let’s get the hell out of Dodge.”

  And I would have done just that. Except, that the Gameboy was no longer in my pocket. That sound I’d heard. The kli-klunk.

  I put my hand to my heart. It was, as they say, instinctual. It was also because, for the first time since the journey began, I heard the ghostly whooshing of my heart murmuring.

  “You lost the Gameboy,” said Mose.

  A sigh was all that came out of me.

  “Oh no,” said Gordon.

  “We’re screwed,” said Mose.

  Jemma understood everything. She skittered up the channel wall and peered over, then shook her head with that resolute ‘no’ I was beginning to recognize and trust. We couldn’t go back.

  For a few moments, we were paralyzed.

  Then, Mose spoke up. “It can’t be the only switch. Nobody would make a universe with only one exit…would they?”

  “It’s possible,” said Gordon. “I hate to say it, but—”

  “I’m not buyin’ it,” said Mose. “You said a while back that there might be some kinda plan to all this. That somebody or something wanted us to get home.”

  “I know I did,” Gordon replied sadly. “And they gave us the switch. I never said what would happen if we lost it.”

  Mose pursed his lips. “Um-mm. Shit happens, right? You gotta find new ways around it is all.”

  I was too guilt-ridden to speak, and too absorbed in the sounds my heart made. Mose nodded to my hand on my chest. “You okay, Jake?” I nodded yes, but I wasn’t.

  “Look,” Mose turned to Jemma, speaking fast and urgently, “you said there was a whole underground city that got covered up by all these hives, right? Is there a way to get down there? At least long enough for us to make a plan?”

  She looked at Hartūn, then back at Mose, and finally square at me. She gave one nod of her head toward the left channel wall, and the expression on her face was not encouraging.

  To get to the underground, we would have to enter the bad part of town. That much was clear. But there was something else she wanted to tell me.

  “So what are we waiting for?” said Mose. “Those robot bugs are coming again, and I had enough of roaches back on Clybourn.”

  Very slowly, painstakingly, she spelled it out with her hands. She held them palm-to-palm, and turned them simultaneously left, right, up, and down, as if in a mirror. Then she indicated me, Mose, Gordon, Hartūn, and herself, and pointed over the wall, making the mirror symbol again.

  “What’s she saying?” Mose asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Gordon, who’d been following intently. “Something about mirroring. Over there, on the dark side, where we have to go.”

  “This could get very bad.” Mose squatted down. “Almost sounds like she’s describing one o’ those carnival funhouses. You know, where you see yourself everywhere, but warped.”

  Jemma nodded. Evidently, Mose had read her right.

  “Guys?” I had to speak up. The guilt was killing me. “I should go back. Try and find it.”

  “No,” said Gordon. “They’re too close, and you’ll never find it in this light. Every inch of it looks the same.”

  I looked at Jemma, and I think my heart must have been whooshing loud enough for her to hear. I was sure she had never been beyond this boundary, as strange as that seemed.

  “Can you take us down there?” I asked her. “Will you?”

  Her eyes said yes without any qualification.

  “Then, let’s go.”

  But as we started over the wall, she had one more thing to tell us. It made no sense to me at the time. Gesture by gesture, slowly and methodically, she pointed to each of us, straight into our eyes, then into her own eyes, then back into ours—and finally, putting her hands up and turning away with a violent headshake. She seemed to be saying, “If you see it, look away.”

  Whatever it was, I knew we were headed into a nightmare.

  e followed the canal as far as it would take us. Cutting a winding gash in the surface of the hive world, so deep in places that it seemed almost like an earthquake fault line, it then ascended, as if toward some kind of pole, which made sense because we’d come a long way down to get where we were and might have to go a long way up to find what remained of the City of Chicago.

  “Push it!” shouted Mose. “I can still hear those damn bugs!”

  “Save your breath!” I yelled, and surged past him.

  After five minutes of running steadily uphill, the channel shallowed out and eventually leveled altogether, spitting us right back out onto open ground, but in a place more alien than my poor imagination could ever have devised. That false purple, on the ground, in the sky, everywhere, was so deep it was like the inside of your head before the nightmares come. Whispered curses filled the air and our ears: the angriest, ugliest cacophony of curses all combined into one horrible sound. And over this accursed ground wandered an army of shadows. Not people, but the shadows of people. Like the shades we’d learned about in Greek myths, caught between life and death, between earth and hell. These were what Jemma had been trying to warn us about. And suddenly I understood her ‘mirror’ sign language: somewhere out there was probably one that looked like her. Maybe one that looked like me.

  “Oh, my God,” said Mose, in a half-whisper. “Is this Hell?”

  For some reason, we all turned to Gordon.

  “More like purgatory,” he said, his voice flattened by fear. “But in a multiverse.”

  “A place for lost souls,” Mose exhaled.

  “And we have to
get across it,” I said. “Without getting lost ourselves.”

  Jemma pointed straight ahead and gave us a gesture kind of like the flag at the start of a race. We were going to barrel through.

  All any of us could do was follow Jemma’s lead as she wove her way through them, head down, hands out front like someone pushing curtains away, never slowing down. The shades rolled over and around her like a dense fog, and I couldn’t keep the shout from my lips when one of them came at her face and seemed to glom onto her, nose to nose, until she tore it away like a cobweb, its night-colored shreds flying away behind her.

  The air was full of the things, flapping like ravens’ wings or the tattered sails of the blackest pirate ship. You couldn’t see them until they were right in your face. I quickly determined that most of them just rushed up and then blew away, but some seemed to want a closer look. I had a deep dread that the more of them we encountered, the greater the chance that one of the shades would be mine. I kept my head down. It was like running home from school through a heavy rainstorm, except that the things smacking against your forehead weren’t raindrops but cursing phantoms born from the midnight air of a horrorshow somehow made by human beings.

  As we approached what seemed to be the crest of a vast concrete slope, the shades got so thick that for a moment I lost sight of my friends, and for that moment, my understanding of fear hit a new high. I yelled out, “Mose!” And then again, “Mose!”

  He seemed like the only solid thing in the world right then. Mose was solid—that much I was sure about.

  “Jake!” his voice came through the beating and flapping and cursing of the Shades. “Go to your right, and keep your head down!”

  I did as he said and felt myself rising up to a dizzying summit. Just before dropping again into some kind of gully, I spotted the thing coming at me from the left. It was dark and mostly formless, but what little form it did have was the one I knew. For an instant before I tore my gaze away, I saw my own face and screamed. My face as a little boy, a middle-aged man, an old geezer. And then I went stumbling into a cavernous concrete space that was as familiar as it was totally out of place, and the Shades were now behind me, their flapping and cursing dying away. I gulped in relief along with cool air that was blessedly empty of living ghosts.