The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  The first thought I had, once I was capable of coherent thought, was “underground parking,” although there were no cars. What had made me think parking were the angled slots, the enormous arched steel columns holding up a ceiling blackened with years of soot and grime, and on the far side, an opening that reminded me of a garage exit, with one of those old yellow-striped wooden gates.

  From behind me, Mose appeared, gave me a slap on the back and a very shaky fist bump. “Well, we made it through ‘em, homey. It can’t get worse than that.”

  He smiled, but his jaw trembled, and I knew that if Mose had been born with different pigmentation, he’d have been white as a ghost.

  I had to sit down on the dirty, gravelly ground for a minute. My legs just couldn’t hold me. In fact, they had turned to jelly. “Well, I want to get Gordon’s take, and Jemma’s, if she can explain it, but I’m thinking that those things, whatever they’re called, might have been that ‘uploaded’ information. Like anti-selves, designed to keep everyone in. Mr. Bohm told us how when the matter comes up against anti-matter, they blow each other up. Just disappear into energy. I think maybe that’s what would’ve happened if one of those things had gotten a hold of us.”

  “Let’s get with the others.” Mose gave me a hand up. Then he stopped, looked around, and added, “Hey…did everybody make it through?”

  I surveyed the vaulted underground space, which did in fact look like some ugly part of old industrial Chicago. Jemma was up ahead, and Gordon, and Mose right by my side. But where was Hartūn? A wave of shock split me from the top of my head to my feet, and I wheeled around to look up at the black chasm we’d just descended. The violent flapping and cursing of the Shades, echoing off the now distant concrete made me sick with vertigo.

  Then we heard a sound in that distance I can only describe as what you’d hear underwater if a school of piranhas were tearing a person apart. Never before, and never since, have I heard one like it.

  “Oh God!” I shouted. “They got him. They got Hartūn!”

  Jemma came running over with Gordon, and for a long minute we were frozen in place by those awful sounds. Then Jemma, with tears in her eyes, made a series of signals really fast, and the gist of them was that, no matter what, we could not go back.

  I’d never experienced death except for a goldfish and an ancient great-grandmother. Hartūn had once been my tormenter. Then, for a day, he’d been my friend and I had led him to the switch. If you’re the type to mark people as one thing or the other, I guess he would have been 50/50. But then, he’d returned my Gameboy and given me a way out that he would never have. That tipped it for me. And it occurred to me, standing there in that bleak, cavernous space, that nobody is ever just one thing: villain or hero, dirtbag or prince. If the multiverse was about choices, and all possible choices were being made, then we might be all those things and everything in between. And that brought up a question that my dad would’ve loved to discuss: what’s the right moral choice in a multiverse? What good was it to make the right choice in this one if somewhere else I made the wrong one? Did they cancel each other out, or was it the average of all choices, the ‘sum over histories,’ that determined if you were a good person or not?

  I went back to the Duke for an answer: we can only live in one at a time, and try to make the best choices there and then. Maybe the choices rippled out somehow and affected the outcome in others. Although they weren’t supposed to touch or interact, there had to be some connection across universes. Jemma seemed to be proof of that.

  Mose said, “Maybe he’ll have another chance. In the next one…or the one after that. He did a good thing. That oughta count for something. Gotta be karma even in the multiverse, right?”

  There was a shout from the far side of this urban crypt that I recognized as Gordon’s.

  “Hey! Everyone! Check this out!”

  As we ran in the direction of his voice, I began to make out what he was shouting about. At the edge of the concrete cavern, and leading up and out of it, there was an elevated train trestle. And on that trestle sat four cars of a rusted, graffiti-covered CTA train, plus the engine car. This was Chicago, buried like the city of Pompeii.

  By the time Mose and I got there, Gordon had already climbed halfway up the trestle. I hadn’t known the kid possessed a climbing ability. Or maybe I just hadn’t known he had so much will. There were bumps—rivets, I suppose—going up the stanchions that supported the track, and Gordon leveraged himself up by locking the toes of his sneakers against the rivets and then grabbing hold of either side of the upright, pulling himself up one rivet at a time. He inspired me, and I took off after him, following his example.

  Then there were four of us, each one on a separate stanchion: Gordon, Jemma, Mose, and me. Jemma was the first to pull herself up on the tracks, and somehow that didn’t surprise me. Once we were all up and standing, we held still for a minute, just looking down the track to its vanishing point. The perspective was bizarre. The track led up and out of the underground at a steep angle, like a roller coaster track. It also looked as if it had been bent out of shape by Godzilla. Or an atomic blast. Anyway, some force that was beyond imagining.

  “Whoa,” I said. “What are we looking at?”

  “I dunno.” Mose pointed to a dim, decrepit corner opposite the trestle. “But check that out down there, Jacobus.” He laughed darkly and added, “I guess we’re home.”

  “Oh my God.” I gasped. Hanging over the door of a broken-down building at the place where two streets had once intersected, was a barely readable sign that said: BILLY GOAT TAVERN.

  “My guess,” said Mose. “Is this is where the old city starts. The Billy Goat was underneath North Michigan Av, close to the lakefront, in the part of Chicago that was built before the big fire.”

  “That would mean,” I said, “they made a new lakefront. They pushed it farther out into the lake to build the hive city. A mountain of concrete.”

  “Like the Dutch,” said Gordon. “My ancestors. Filling in the ocean.”

  This, I’d learned in school, was how cities had always been built: one on top of another, in layers, like ancient Mesopotamia. Some cities, like Alexandria, had been built out into the sea. And it occurred to me that even though the rules said we couldn’t time-travel, that might mean only that we couldn’t travel along the same timeline to future or past. Another universe could have a whole different clock, just as it could have different natural forces. They were all blended together: space, time, and gravity. At least according to Einstein, and Mr. Bohm.

  In the meantime, a strange yet wonderful sight appeared before our eyes. Outside the tunnel, where the track curved steeply upward into what must be the aboveground part of Chicago, a real sun, pale orange in a pinkish, late afternoon sky, began to set, its rays diffracting through the train tracks in a ladder of light.

  “Damn,” said Mose. “Now, that’s a vision.”

  “Could that be real?” I said.

  “A real sky behind the fake sky,” Gordon mused. “Or maybe another fake.”

  “Sure is pretty, though,” said Mose. “Even if it is fake.”

  Gordon was the first one to climb through the little window of the engineer’s compartment. On the Chicago L-Trains, it was hardly more than a closet at the front of the pilot car, with the gauges and radio equipment, and the controls for braking and accelerating the train. I decided to see if I could pry the passenger doors open so that we could enter the compartment by an easier route. They gave with some muscle, and with a little help from Mose, we held them that way so Jemma could slip through. Finally, the two of us quickly popped in behind her and the doors clapped shut.

  I couldn’t even begin to guess how long the train had been sitting there. Years? Centuries? Who had been the last human beings to ride it? Everything in the car looked exactly as it had been left, except with a coating of dust that had hardened into a crust. Since it was all plastic, glass, or steel, nothing had really decayed. That would take thousands o
f years, maybe more.

  The advertisement posters lining both sides of the car were brown and dry, but not anciently so. They had a familiar look, but what was really odd was that none of the products or companies on them was the least bit familiar. Instead of McDonald’s, for example, there was a place called Leckerhünde, with a picture of a blond cheerleader-type biting into a huge hot dog, with the words Es is’lecker beneath her as if she were saying it. And a store selling clothes that looked like the 1950’s and called by an English word that I’d heard but didn’t know: ENIGMA. The instruction and warning signs in the car were all in picture language. In my head, I began to put links together: The Reds, with their Vater and their chanting in unison like schoolkids; the way they’d treated Mose. How the city was zoned off, with the hive people like a slave race, sent to the work camps every day. The Reds were afraid of a rebellion. That’s why they’d interrogated us. And now, this. An abandoned elevated train with advertisements in a foreign language for places I’d never heard of.

  This was Chicago, all right. But not my Chicago. Something truly awful had happened when the “vector of probability” had gone shooting off this way. It was as if there’d been a war, and we had lost. Not in the future of my world, but in the past of another. And one of my lives was in this world. I had a sudden, very bad feeling about what might have happened to my parents.

  We couldn’t all squeeze into the engineer’s car, so Mose joined Gordon inside and Jemma and I huddled at the door. We all saw it at the same time, of course. Mounted on the control panel to the right of all the gauges, with a red handle, worn and dusty: a switch.

  There was another one on the floor, longer and skinnier, but it looked more like a brake.

  “Okay, Gordon,” I said. “Could one of them be a switch? Do we pull it? What if the train moves?” It was a stupid question, but it was instinctive.

  “The train isn’t gonna move, Jake,” said Mose. “They run on electricity. There can’t be any power down here.”

  “Something worries me, though,” said Gordon. “All the other switches have been ‘on’ or ‘off.’ Binary. This is a rotary thing. Lots of positions. As you push it up, it increases the voltage or whatever and the train accelerates, and as you bring it down, it slows eventually to nothing. It would be like a quantum computer. Not just on or off, but all possibilities at once. That can’t be.”

  “But if it is,” I let my hopes jump ahead of my brain, “and if we could locate the position of our universe and jump off…”

  “Nice idea,” said Gordon. “But I don’t think this is our train home.”

  I let that sink in. Even if it was our train, Gordon wasn’t going home to my universe. For that matter, Mose wasn’t necessarily getting off at my stop either. And as for this version of Jemma—who knew? I had this notion that I was bringing her back to where she really belonged, but maybe she didn’t belong there at all.

  Jemma looked at me, as if she’d read my mind. She gave me a sign.

  She made a big circle with her arms, which I took to be the whole enchilada—that is, all the possibilities. Then she put her hands out in front of her and spread her fingers wider than I thought fingers could go, showing all the different paths. “In this reality,” I said out loud, “there are a gazillion roads.” She brought her hands together almost as if in prayer, and raised just two fingers. She pointed them to me, and back to herself. “You and me…” I said. Finally, she raised one forefinger. “Are on the same road.”

  She did it so naturally, without any big drama, as if it were just a simple fact. But I swear, I felt my heart swell inside my chest, and the murmuring stop. And I knew that she was my way home.

  “Holy crap!” Gordon shouted, breaking my romantic trance. I looked over and saw that he had leaned in close to the throttle switch and was wiping a thick layer of oily dust from a metal plate riveted to the instrument panel, like something you might see in an airplane cockpit. Into the metal had been engraved the words: Erga Porta Centralis.

  “Bingo!” he said. “If it’s Latin, it has to be for us. Why else?”

  “Porta Centralis,” I repeated. “Maybe porta like portal or port. The main one…”

  “Move aside, Gordon,” Mose said. “No disrespect meant, but I’m doing this one.”

  “Give it a shot,” Gordon said. “I guess you never know.”

  Mose took the switch and rode it to the top. And against all the odds even in the multiverse, the train began to move.

  t ground out slowly at first, as if its wheels hadn’t moved in eons—which, as far as I knew, they might not have. If Mose was surprised, it was only the stiffness of his spine that showed it. Mose, I could tell, was a kid who’d learned early on how to say, “I got this.” He was the right guy to have in the driver’s seat on this one.

  Jemma’s eyes widened as the train lurched out of the station.

  “It doesn’t seem possible,” I said.

  “Except in a multiverse where anything’s possible,” said Gordon.

  “What I wanna know,” said Mose softly, pointing out the pilot’s window, “is how we’re gonna get up that.”

  He meant the incline of the track ahead, the one that looked like a roller coaster track. We all thought as one: the old train would never make it up, and if it did, we were all sure to die.

  “Should I pull back on the throttle?” Mose asked. “Should I try and stop it?”

  Jemma stepped out from behind me and shook her head. She straightened her fingers and swooshed her hand in a confident arc.

  “The girl says, ‘Do it,’ Mose,” I said. “I think we have to break through or out of something.”

  “Shit,” whispered Gordon. “I think she’s talking about a uni-boundary. I’ve heard about ‘em from other floaters, but never crossed one. It sounds like maybe she has, somewhere along the way. We’re gonna tunnel through to another brane. That’s gotta be as dangerous as a black hole.”

  “Remind me to ask you, Gordon,” I said, “where the hell you came from.”

  Mose spoke up. “You mean we might not come out?”

  “Or we could come out like beef jerky.” Gordon shrugged. “But no matter what, I think we might be leaving Chicago for a while.”

  The train began to build momentum on its way to the big climb. I hadn’t realized that there was a long, sloping descent before the rise that allowed us to pick up speed. And it was speed Mose was going to need.

  “Oh God.” My stomach rose, then began to fall with the climb. It was stone panic. As we labored to the top of the incline and nosed over it, for a moment, my insides dropped right down to where they could drop no further. Try to imagine a roller coaster that hops a galaxy.

  “Hold on, everybody!” shouted Mose. “We’re coming to the drop!”

  There was a single instant before we plummeted when I saw what had been the City of Chicago all around us, under a kind of yellow cast, like someone had spray-painted it the color of malaria. Some of the buildings were still there, but not the taller ones. Everything was different, and still, I recognized the basic contour from photographs. It was Chicago frozen in the 1930’s or 40’s. And then the speed and the force of the drop blotted out all perception. It was just a blur. There was nothing to do but hold on.

  Very suddenly, there was nothing. I mean nothing. Silence.

  Somewhere along the line, maybe when we crossed the “uni-boundary,” I passed out. As I learned later, we all had.

  I was out, and yet that silent unconsciousness was filled with images and sensations, the way that maybe it is for someone in a coma.

  That malaria yellow city became a malaria yellow blur, and the blur then passed through all the colors of the spectrum, compressed into slices of pigmentation, with us cutting through them at warp speed. The slices narrowed and compressed, then cleared up, like wafers of the thinnest, purest crystal, each one a tiny sliver of reality, compacted by our speed into something continuous and solid. But then I saw them begin to strobe and stutter, l
ike an old-fashioned movie, which meant that they were less compressed, which must have meant…we were slowing down.

  The strangest thing of all was that, as we slowed, and came back to consciousness, I remembered that while we’d been zooming through the time-slices, the train hadn’t been there at all. Not that I could see. Now that our speed was down, it returned, in all its noisy, rusty, heavy-metal clunkiness.

  We were still on a track—or must have been, but we were traveling through what seemed a broad savannah. The grass was tall and its color was a dirty gold. It waved gently in the wind. There was nothing—absolutely nothing else—in sight. No grazing cows, no telephone poles. Finally, the train just ran out of juice and slowed to a creaky stop in the middle of the empty, silent field.

  All we heard was the wind, and the occasional clink of the old train parts as they cooled.

  I looked at my companions. I’m sure that my eyes were as wide and my jaw as slack as theirs. “Did we make it, Gordon?” I asked in a flat, numb voice I hardly recognized. “Did we make it through the boundary?”

  “I think so,” he said. “Otherwise, we wouldn’t be talking.”

  “Good point.” Mose patted himself down as if to check if he was still all there, then glanced out the window. “Damn. That’s a lot of grass. Maybe we finally made it to Kansas.”

  I turned to Jemma. “Do you know this place?” I wanted to make sure we weren’t still in some portion of her world. I waited for her to sign me an answer.

  “No,” she said. And she didn’t even think twice about it. “I’ve never been here.”