The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  “You can talk!” I said, flabbergasted.

  “Of course I can talk,” she smirked, and added, “Jacobus.”

  My jaw moved up and down, but nothing came out.

  “Okay,” said Gordon, slowly. “That makes sense, I guess. Her history is different.” He peered under her chin where the scar had been but was no more. “What doesn’t make sense is that we all look pretty much the same.” He pointed to himself. “I’m Gordon. Everybody recognize me?”

  We all nodded.

  “Mose,” said Mose. “I hope I’m still the same.”

  “Jacobus Rose,” I said. “I’ve felt what it’s like to come out different, and it’s no fun.”

  “Aw, you weren’t so bad as Jerrold,” said Mose.

  We all looked toward Jemma.

  “I don’t know my name,” she said and turned her eyes down.

  “Is Jemma okay with you?” I asked. “That’s how I knew you before.”

  “Before?”

  “I’ll try to explain it…when I figure it out.”

  She nodded shyly. I think she was even prettier on this side of the uni-boundary. Maybe not quite as confident, but I figured that was because she was as lost as the rest of us.

  “So what do we do now? Looks to me like we ran out of power and…” Mose glanced out the engineer’s window. “…and track.”

  I turned to Gordon. “Should we just assume we’ve entered a whole new universe?”

  “We have to,” he said. “There’s no way the train would’ve moved for any other reason than to take us somewhere.”

  “I have a feeling,” I said, “we’re farther away than we’ve ever been before.”

  Gordon stared out at the thick golden stalks of grass for almost a full minute. His wheels were turning, but slowly.

  “If there’s no pattern to this,” he said and there was something sad in his tone. “If it’s just random—no intentionality…we’re screwed.” He let that one sink in for a moment. “Up to now, even though it might’ve been more a wish than a reality, I’ve figured there was some plan. Some cosmic but mathematically possible reason why we meet and connect with the people we do. And why we were going where we were going. I figured it might be some kind of Fibonacci sequence.”

  “A Fibba-what?” asked Mose.

  “It’s a kind of ancient algorithm,” Gordon said. “Discovered back in the twelfth century, I think. Based on a ratio where every third number is the sum of the previous two. But it’s deeper than it sounds, because it’s also tied into the Golden Ratio that was used to build things like the Pyramids and the Acropolis, and something called the Golden String…” His voice drifted. “I thought we were on the Golden String. I thought—”

  “Maybe we are,” I said. “Don’t give up, Gordon. If anything is gonna get us home, it’s your crazy ideas.”

  “Before we leave the train,” Gordon said to Mose. “Just try something. Just pull back real easy on that speed lever. Real easy. I want to see if we go into reverse.”

  “You sure about that?” said Mose. “I like the looks of it here better than where we were.”

  Gordon nodded.

  Mose pulled back on the throttle as gingerly as if it might trigger a bomb. Nothing happened after the first couple of notches. Not even an electrical hum. Gordon motioned him to go a little farther.

  Nothing. The train might be some kind of spacetime machine, but it evidently only went in one direction.

  “Never mind,” Gordon said. “There’s even an arrow of time in the multiverse.”

  “So,” said the new Jemma. We all turned. We still weren’t used to hearing a voice come out of her. “Let’s go.”

  Even with all four of us pulling, we couldn’t pry open the main doors of the passenger car, so we returned to the pilot’s cabin and, one by one, crawled through the small window and dropped down into the field. When I say “field,” you’ll picture normal wild grass, skinny and supple and two or three feet high. It was nothing like that.

  The grass, if you could call it that, was taller than the tallest of us (Mose) by at least a foot. And the way it felt when I pushed it aside with my hand wasn’t like anything I’d ever felt before. Not like those soft blades of yellow-green straw you can pull apart and chew on. These were rubbery jungle stalks, each one as thick as an electrical cord. Up close, I could see that what gave them the dirty gold complexion was that each stalk had thousands upon thousands of tiny “rust spots.” At least, rust was their color. Maybe a better word is tarnish, since the dark spots were on a gold background.

  “We can’t see more than a foot ahead of us,” Mose said. “Now that worries me.”

  “Not unless we come to a hill,” I said. “And from what I could see from the train, it looks as flat as a pancake.”

  Gordon sighed. “It can’t go on forever. And we can’t stay here. “

  “That’s for sure,” Jemma said and pushed ahead into the thicket of rubbery wheat-grass.

  We followed at a clip, but soon the lack of visibility slowed our pace. It was true. We could see only as far as the end of our noses and the next curtain of grass. And though the sun was straight overhead in an eerily pale blue sky, it could not penetrate all the way down into the thickness of the grassland, so the space directly ahead of us at each step was dark and uncertain. As we moved deeper into it, and farther from that one remaining piece of Chicago—the train—we all became aware of a soft but unnerving rattling. Part of it, I realized, was the sound of the thick stalks of grass tapping against each other in the breeze like the strings of some huge musical instrument. But there was something else, too, at a higher pitch. Like a million crickets. But not crickets.

  “What’s that damn noise?” Mose growled, going for volume to make himself feel braver.

  “I don’t recognize it,” said Gordon. And then, stopped. “Except that once, in a world I can hardly remember, I went with the Boy Scouts on a hike in the Nebraska brushlands. And we heard a sound kind of like this…”

  “Well, what was it?” I asked, fighting a growing panic.

  “The scoutmaster said,” Gordon answered slowly. “It was a rattlesnake. Only this sound we’re hearing…it would be about a million rattlesnakes.”

  “I wish you hadn’t said that,” said Mose. “I am not a snake person.”

  My spine went as rigid as if an electrical current was running straight up it.

  Something shuddered in the darkness to our right. More like a deep tremor than the scampering of an animal: a vibration in the tall grass I could feel through the soles of my shoes. I prayed that it was some kind of earthquake, because if not, it was the footstep of something big. Jemma’s hand slipped into mine. The combination of raw fear and the sweetness of having a girl’s trust in my protection was a powerful feeling.

  “Look,” I said. “Let’s just push through like we own the place. My dad always told me when we went to the woods that we didn’t need to be afraid of things that were smaller than us.”

  “Unless it’s a rattlesnake,” said Mose. “And what we heard just now didn’t sound small.”

  “No,” Gordon agreed. “It didn’t. Remember, we don’t know what kind of world we’re in. Things could be really different. Nature could be different.”

  As that idea sunk in, my confidence dipped.

  But I had Jemma’s hand and her trust, so I took one step at a time and led her forward through the giant stalks of grass. It’s amazing what you can do when you’re trying to do the right thing—and impress a girl. But there was a sudden rise in the volume of the rattling-clicking, close and just ahead, and when Mose pulled aside a clump of stalks to let some light in on our path, every nerve in my body snapped because we now saw what was doing the clicking.

  The stalks crawled with lizards the size of large iguanas. They climbed them in a continuous spiral from the ground to the head of the stalk, and when one reached the top, it opened its reptilian jaws and let out a sound like shaking one of those plastic Easter eggs fi
lled with jellybeans, but nowhere near as comforting. They were exactly the same gold and rust color as the grass, so their camouflage was perfect. And they weren’t our world’s lizards. For one thing, they each had six legs. And their skin oozed with a shiny oil that looked like it might be very toxic.

  Just one sound came out of Jemma’s throat.

  “Oh.”

  I had expected a scream, even braced myself for it, because sometimes fear is scarier than the thing you’re scared of. But she didn’t scream. She just stopped and looked, her mouth open.

  Mose, for his part, let out a “Whoaaa!” and that triggered a similar reaction from Gordon, in turn setting the lizards off, their throats rattling ever more aggressively, like a reptilian warrior tribe.

  There was one not sixteen inches from my nose.

  I could have lost it right there, but I didn’t, because her hand was in mine, and for some reason, she didn’t seem frightened.

  “They’re nasty looking,” she said. “But not dangerous.”

  “How do you know?” said Mose, trying to keep as much distance from the things as he could.

  “I’m not sure. Maybe because if they wanted to chew us to death, they would’ve done it by now. They outnumber us a thousand-to-one.” She paused as another tremor whirred through the ground beneath our feet. “But something else out here might be dangerous…”

  “Maybe it’s the lizard big mama,” Mose said. “Like in Godzilla.”

  The weight that the lizard creatures put on the stalks bent them back so as to open V-shaped sightlines in the grass, and through one of them, I sighted what looked like an elevation in the land. Any elevation might give us an idea of where we were going.

  “Well, let’s find out if she’s right.” My voice warbled a bit, which I hated. “There’s a little hill up ahead. I say we make a run straight for it.”

  I didn’t wait for the others to agree. I gave a pull on Jemma’s hand, and we sprinted toward that rise, the lizards chattering on all sides. I found out then that my dad had been right, because as we ran, they scattered, frightened by our progress.

  All the way through the field and up that little hill, the ground shook from the vibration of something immensely powerful. I can only tell you I wouldn’t have been surprised to turn around and see a creature the size of King Kong behind us.

  We stumbled up to the rise, because the stalks had closed around us again and their roots were thick enough to trip us. Arriving at the clearing, we were all out of breath, but for some reason, not sweating. The air was as dry as powder. Looking back the way we’d come, there was nothing but an endless forest of stalks, and in the distance, the outline of the roof of the Chicago CTA train. For a few precious minutes, it felt as if we might have found one of Gordon’s ‘safeties.’ “Before we move on,” I said, “let’s take a break.”

  Just saying those words must have made everyone feel the exhaustion because we all dropped to the ground.

  After a few minutes of silence, I asked, “Did anybody else notice the language on those posters in the train? It was foreign, but I’m not sure what kind.”

  “It looked like German to me,” said Gordon. “With some Dutch mixed in.”

  “German,” I repeated. “I think you’re right.”

  “I read a sci-fi book like this once,” said Mose. “Alternate history, they call it. Suppose Hitler had won. Suppose they didn’t actually march in and conquer the United States, ‘cause they didn’t need to. But they got control of its, you know, businesses. Like the way you see a MacDonald’s or Starbucks in China. There’d be—”

  “I get it,” I said. They’d run things like the Romans ran their empire. And there’d be German fast food places everywhere.”

  “Exactly,” said Mose.

  “And in a weird way,” said Gordon, “that would help explain the Reds and their great leader. If Mose’s history played out, there might be little Hitlers everywhere. He was—”

  “The leader of the Tempelrot,” hissed Jemma, “was a red-faced monster. He captured all the freiemänner and put us in the hives. The weak, the old, and the little ones were disposed of. But those who could work…they were kept.”

  “Templerot?” I said. “I guess it’s an appropriate name.”

  “It means Red Temple,” Jemma said.

  “And that other word?” asked Gordon. “The hive people.”

  “Freiemänner. Freethinkers.” She stared off into the distance for a few moments. “I can’t believe I can remember that place…and not be in it anymore.”

  “You’re not alone, sister.” Mose tapped his head. “Every last detail here, loud and clear.”

  “We’re floating,” Gordon said. “We won’t start to forget until we stop moving. At least, that’s what my Syrian sensei told me. Plus, I think we may be in some transitional place.”

  Looking forward from the rise, we could in fact see an end to the field, but it also looked like the end of the world. A few miles ahead, it just dropped off to nothing but pale blue sky. I think we all knew that, whatever it was, we didn’t have a choice but to go there.

  The little hill shook and seemed to buckle and then rise up as if something were rolling through beneath the ground, and with the feeling came the strongest tremor yet, strong enough to knock us off our feet. It was a pulse of some kind. A long rolling contraction followed by three shorter bursts. I began to think, and then Gordon said what I was thinking before I could think it through:

  “It feels electromagnetic. Now, that could be natural—whatever natural is in this world—or it could be artificially generated. But I don’t know what that means either way.”

  “Well,” I said. “If it’s artificial, someone’s causing it, and I guess we should find who that is.”

  “Or not,” said Mose. “No way to know yet if they mean us harm or good. The last bunch wasn’t too friendly.”

  “Look!” Jemma shouted, leaping to get her head above the stalks. “Over there, where it drops off. What is that? Is it some kind of building?”

  “Or a projection of one,” said Gordon. “Maybe a hologram…”

  “It looks like it’s just hanging there in empty space,” I said. “Maybe it’s a mirage.”

  “Or maybe that’s just the way they build things here,” Jemma came back. “We should check it out.”

  Her word seemed pretty much final. I was getting a sense of the new order of things in our expanded group. It changed each time we added or dropped a member. As of this moment, Jemma was the chief scout. She’d earned this role without asking for it because we all understood that what she’d been through had been bigger and scarier than what the rest of us had experienced so far. Some new kind of knowing had come to her, and with it, knowledge of the territory. Did I mention that the Jemma in my home world had been a geography wiz?

  Before we dropped back down into the high grass, I got my first good look at the ‘mirage.’ It was white, no doubt about that. Not adobe white, like pictures I’d seen of houses in Greece. This was a pale, ghostly white, only visible when the sun hit it from certain angles. In places, you could see the blue sky right through the skin of the place, almost as if it were made of crystal. It looked, at least from where we stood, as big as a castle. But it wasn’t a castle. It was more like an immense structure made of giant, semi-transparent and infinitely bendable Legos, and containing all the geometrical forms: cubes, pyramids, polygons, and so forth. There were curved shapes, too, visible when the light shifted. Arcs and semi-circles and parabolas, and one giant spiral that ran around the castle from bottom to top. All strung together in space.

  “Now,” said Mose, as we moved through the stalks, “I really feel like I’m dreaming. This may not be Kansas, but it could be the Emerald City…if it was green.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “It even sounds like a dream here. The wind, it’s like music. If this is what drugs are like, I don’t think I’m cut out to ever be a stoner.”

  “But,” Gordon added, “i
t’s way weirder than either a dream or drugs. Because it’s real. I read that Plato said things exist as geometrical forms before they ever exist as physical things. Like if the universe had a mathematical blueprint.”

  “You wouldn’t believe,” said Jemma. “How weird real can be.” She was leading, so her voice was mixed with the swish-swish of the stalks.

  She sounded sixty-four thousand years old, and a chill went through me. Now I knew that she must be some kind of old soul. How long had she been hopping universes? Maybe since the beginning of time. But then, it wasn’t time, because it was all things all happening at the same time. And yet, she was still Jemma. The Jemma I knew. This required a whole new way of thinking.

  We all fell silent for a while. These were heavy thoughts, and besides, we had to focus on clearing the stalks for each other and not tripping, and on keeping that unbelievable crystal palace in our line of sight. Little by little, we made it to the edge. The building was still there, big as ever, but no more ‘real.’ It hadn’t dissolved the way mirages do, or melted like rock candy, but it hadn’t become exactly solid either. It was like—how can I say this?—the thought-form of a castle.

  A bridge arched over to it from the cliff, but it didn’t look any more ‘material’ than the castle. Not like a chair or a table is material. Nothing here was solid, but maybe nothing really is solid anywhere. As Mr. Bohm had once said, “it’s all quantum pixie dust.”

  I had a Gordon-like thought: what if everything had a virtual existence before it ever became physical? As Plato had said, what if there was always a kind of “ghost reality” behind things? And what if we were seeing that ghost? The ghost of things that hadn’t yet become.

  nce we had stepped through the last curtain of stalks, we found ourselves at a precipice. A strong, continuous updraft wafted from whatever was below. None of us had the courage yet to look over the edge. That updraft had worn away the grass at what felt like the edge of the world, down to nubs and even some soft, mossy tufts that looked pretty welcoming after the long walk and the terror of the Shades and the hive world.