The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  “You’ve made it to the switching yards. The central station. Missing two of your group, but that is consistent with the probabilities. I’ve been waiting for you a very long time. You have no idea how tedious it can be to wait out the development of the human mind.” He stood up, or rather, rose from the chair like some new kind of energy that had been shaped into semi-human form. “I am Orlong, the Mapmaker. Welcome, pilgrims.”

  “You said two,” I spoke up. “Missing two. But it’s only Hartūn that got taken. Otherwise, we’re all here.”

  “And your friend Connor?”

  That took me by surprise. It’s funny how four words can show that someone is way beyond ordinary. “I-I’m not sure he ever left the first world line. Or I guess I should say, the second one, since we hit the switch together.”

  “Oh, but he did, Jacobus.” The Mapmaker made two mouth clicks and the lizard hopped into his lap. He gently massaged its neck behind the ruff of its collar, and the creature started to make a kind of purring sound.

  “Would you like to see where he is?” the Mapmaker asked. His voice…her voice—I still couldn’t tell—alternated between deep and high, raspy and sweet: from the dry crackle of a kindly grandfather to the rough silkiness of a queen mother.

  “How do you know my name?” I cleared my throat. “Orlong.”

  “There are no secrets in the universe, Jacobus,” he said. (To make things less clunky, I’ll call Orlong a ‘He,” but the truth is, I didn’t know and still don’t.) “Whatever is said, whisper or scream, in love or anger, has a wavefunction, and all wavefunctions eventually make their way to the switching yards, which exist in what your scientists call Hilbert Space.”

  “The porta centralis,” said Gordon.

  “Yes, indeed, Mr. Nightshade. Everything passes through here…” Orlong sighed. “…but nothing stays.”

  He swiveled back around and got up, setting the lizard gently down, then stood, chin in hand, inspecting the display panels. Where before they had been dancing with light, they now displayed an enormity of arcane technical information, mapped out in bundles and clusters. I began to understand what he meant by “switching yard.” If you’ve ever seen an aerial photograph of a railroad yard, or an extreme blow-up of the circuits etched on a silicon computer chip, you’ll have a slight idea of what we were looking at. Only here, there were hundreds of millions, maybe billions of such tracks or circuits, branching off from each other like a continually forking river. The panels were super-responsive touch screens, so that Orlong could swipe through at lightning speed and zoom in instantly on any particular junction.

  “Oh my God,” said Gordon breathlessly, just as a shiver ran up my spine. Clearly, we had shared the same thought. “It’s a map of the multiverse.”

  “A time-aligned graphical representation,” Orlong corrected. “It’s nowhere near this tidy in reality.” He zoomed in on a multipronged fork of branches, muttered, “No, no,” then continued swiping. “I had him just moments before you came in.” Then: “Ah, there he is. There’s the little fellow. There’s Connor.”

  I stepped closer, then made my way little by little to the screen. I admit I was a little spooked by Orlong, and the closer I got, the less certain I was about what he was made of.

  I trained my eye on the branch he had identified, and saw that each of the branches was labeled with an ultra-tiny sequence of numbers and letters, the way astronomers tag new galaxies like M106, except that there were a lot more digits than that.

  “This is his current worldline,” said Orlong. “He’s found some friends, just as you have, but he’s even farther from home.”

  “How could he get any farther?” I said, and added, “I’m not even gonna ask how you know that.” Then a crazy thought struck me, and an even crazier question came out of my mouth. “Are you…some kind of God?”

  That dry crackle of laugh escaped Orlong, and off to the side, the lizard clicked away in obvious amusement.

  “Oh, no,” he replied. “I am all-too-mortal.”

  “You don’t look mortal,” said Mose from the rear. “You look more like Gandalf.”

  “I am material,” he said. “So was Gandalf. Everything material dies. And doesn’t. That is to say, it goes to entropy, but then takes a new form. I am close to death. You can see it from my ragged edges.” He pulled at the cloud-like wisps as if picking lint from a coat. “I was afraid you wouldn’t make it in time, and it might’ve been quite a while in your years before a new mapmaker arrived. Time runs differently here. Faster, in fact.”

  “What do you mean by Mapmaker?” Gordon asked.

  Orlong pointed to the programming handiwork on the screens.

  “It’s just a different sort of map than what you’re used to.”

  “What if we hadn’t,” said Jemma. “Made it in time?”

  “Then, assuming no one had as yet arrived to replace me, you would have had to figure this mess out—” He indicated the massive world line map. “—all by yourselves.”

  The lizard chattered quietly, no doubt having a laugh at the thought of us trying to decipher the map. Mose finally asked what we all wanted to ask.

  “Hey…what’s with the gecko? Does he understand you?”

  “Not as well as he thinks he does,” said the Mapmaker. “But well enough.”

  “So he’s a brainiac lizard?” Mose pressed.

  “He…well, I should say, the original of his kind, was an experiment. An experiment run amok. I gave him a mate. One day, there were two. The next day, there were twenty. Then two hundred. I had to limit their environment, or they would have bred themselves out of existence.”

  “So he’s a sex machine braniac lizard,” said Mose.

  “He’s an exponential breeder.” Orlong chuckled.

  “Environment?” Gordon asked. “You mean that huge field outside? You made that?”

  Orlong nodded. “Back in your worlds, they are just discovering what they call 3D printing. Extremely primitive, as new inventions always are. The grasslands are an advanced application of the same idea. Well…very advanced. You see, ultimately, information becomes reality.”

  “And those earth tremors that feel like pulses?” I asked.

  “Those are the lizards’ life support. Each stalk of grass is plugged into the power grid beneath the ground. The stalks are their energy source.”

  “So you…” Jemma hesitated. “You make worlds?” There was a slight accusation in her voice. “Did you make the one we just came from?”

  “No,” said Orlong. “I only map them. I design things to fill the idle time and to pitch new creations to the, umm—perhaps we’ll discuss that later. The grasslands aren’t a world. Only a simulation of one. I am a cosmocartographer. A dying cosmocartographer, as it happens.”

  The four of us—Jemma, Gordon, Mose, and me—we all shared a look. Until it came out, we had no idea who’d be the one to ask the question.

  It was Gordon.

  He said, “Can you show us a map that will get us home?”

  hat is your proper name?” the Mapmaker asked Gordon. “I told you mine.”

  “Gordon Philip Asmodeus Nightshade,” he answered.

  Orlong chuckled. “I knew that. I just wanted to hear you say it. We keep them shorter here.”

  “Just call me Gordon,” Gordon said. “Everybody does.”

  “All right, Gordon,” said the Mapmaker. “By the way, have you, by any chance, lost something? Perhaps in the last world?”

  Gordon reflexively ran his hands up and down the front of his body, as if checking to see if he’d dropped a pen or a quarter. Then his eyes widened. “Yeah…I lost my protection.”

  I gulped. Gordon must have felt the absence of that lumpy turtle-shell catcher’s guard on his chest, and somehow I still felt responsible for that.

  “You see,” Gordon went on after a swallow, “when I was on… I’m pretty sure it was my third world, I played Little League baseball. I couldn’t hit, or field, or run well enough, so t
hey made me catcher, and I was actually okay at that. But then I got sick, something with my inner ear that gave me vertigo. So, I had to leave the team. Which… was surprisingly difficult, considering my hate-hate relationship with sports. But the thing I hated leaving most was my catcher’s outfit. Inside it, I felt like I was finally safe. You know, safe to think, which is what I seem to do best, anyway. So my parents talked to my shrink and then bought me an outfit. It was supposed to be a temporary thing, but you know how that goes. And when I started seriously floating, it went with me. Kind of this one thing that was always there, even when home wasn’t.”

  Orlong’s white, wispy face seemed to break into a thousand fissures, which freaked me out a bit until I realized it was his version of a smile. “Well,” he said. “Then let me see if I can give some of that protection back to you.”

  “How?” said Gordon.

  Orlong took his hands and ran them over Gordon’s body from head to shoulders to hips, like an airport guard with a metal detector.

  “Feel better?” The Mapmaker shook off his hands as if dispelling the excess energy they’d built up. I couldn’t see the energy, but I could have sworn I felt it.

  Gordon at first just stared. Then, slowly, something came over him and he said, “Yeah. Yeah. In fact, I do. How’d you do that?”

  “It’s easier than you’d think.” Orlong stepped up to the giant video displays, which I now realized weren’t like giant screen TV’s made out of solid stuff like plastic or metal. They were only semi-material and floating free in the air, just as the castle itself did. I’d seen something like this once at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry: a hologram of the John Hancock Building. I was beginning to wonder if there was anything that couldn’t be made of pure thought.

  “Let me tackle your first question first,” Orlong said. “About going home.”

  He swiped his index finger over the “screen” on the left, and if I had blinked, I might not have seen that everything changed by the tiniest degree. But it was more of a blur than a hard shift.

  Orlong turned to Gordon, seeming to speak only to him. “These maps change many times a day. And almost as many times an hour. And almost as many times as that each minute and each second.”

  Gordon cocked his head in confusion. “How many times is that?”

  “An almost incalculable number,” the Mapmaker replied. “Almost. The number of times the multiverse replots itself, say, per millisecond can be calculated, but what would be the point? The only point of importance is that the number is finite.”

  “Why is that important?” asked Gordon.

  “Because if it was infinite, we’d never get you home.”

  When he said the word ‘home,’ Orlong’s voice cracked almost like mine had at puberty. I wondered if, somewhere, he had once had a home.

  “Is that because you could never make an algorithm for an infinitely variable series?” Gordon asked, again impressing the hell out of me.

  “Something like that,” said the Mapmaker. “But fortunately, that’s not the case, and we can, after aeons of watching, follow the patterns. ‘Attractors’ is what they’re called. As the branches converge and diverge over time, you start to see them bend toward recurrent patterns. Reality, it seems, develops habits, just like its inhabitants.”

  Recurrent. There was that word again. The same word Gordon had used to describe people like Jemma who kept showing up in different universes.

  “So you’re saying,” I piped in, “that what happens when we pull the switches isn’t completely random…”

  “Not one-hundred percent,” said Orlong, who was getting even more wispy and indistinct, like bubbles in a bath when you blow on them, or smoke from a chimney torn by the wind. And he knew he was fading. “We have to move quickly.” He turned to Gordon, giving him a long look. “Will you assist me, young Mr. Nightshade?”

  Gordon nodded, and went just a little bit pale.

  “To Mr. Rose’s point,” Orlong said my name as naturally as one of my teachers, “the switches tend to direct you down proximate worldlines, like current moving through a circuit. That’s not to say you can’t ‘jump the circuit’ and wind up in a completely alien universe, as you discovered. Just that there’s a lower probability of that, and that’s a factor we can use to hack into the system and reprogram it in order to get people like you home.”

  “Hold on there, Obi Wan.” Mose stepped forward. “You say ‘hack’ and ‘reprogram’ and that makes it sound like reality is some kind of internet. Is that—” He gulped. “True?”

  The Mapmaker gave Mose the longest, deepest look, as if searching his soul to decide if we were old enough and smart enough to know the truth. Then he said, “Only in the way your bloodstream is like a river system. The multiverse isn’t a computer program, any more than the brain is just an expensive PC. But it is made up of information, and that information all participates in a network. That network is a mind, you see. A mind. Do you take my meaning, Moses?”

  Mose got a look on his face I hadn’t seen before. I would describe it this way: he was standing inside his own head and looking out through the eyes as a stranger.

  “Oh,” said Jemma, startled. “Now that is really weird.”

  “Mega-weird,” said Mose, numbly. “Massively mega-weird.”

  “A mind?” Gordon whispered. “But whose mind?”

  “You have a thousand questions,” said the Mapmaker. “But as you see, I’m beginning to come apart.” He smiled, and his face fractured again, like cracks in an ice cube when you drop it into hot tea. “Gordon the Unprotected, step up to the console and watch me work. If I can’t finish the job, you may have to.” He gave Gordon a meaningful look. “Would you be ready for that?”

  Again, small clouds of panic moved over Gordon’s face like shadows on a hillside. I began to feel there was a message going back and forth between the two, and I wasn’t sure it was one I liked. Gordon’s panic was followed by resolve, and he came to Orlong’s side and stood with his spine straight. “As ready as I’ll ever be,” Gordon said.

  I shot a look at Mose, and he returned it, confirming my uneasiness.

  “Wait, Orlong,” I said. “One thing before we do this. The switches. Why are they there? Why do they even work?”

  “I’m afraid that answer will have to wait, Jacobus. But it will come to you before your journey ends. Until then, just think about the fact that your own native mind makes ‘switches,’ too. Neurons and synapses. They are quite literally switches. Each time you master a new skill, make a new memory—” He glanced at Jemma. “Feel a new burst of love…”

  He turned to the giant map displays while my face glowed red and hot. For a few minutes, I couldn’t look Jemma in the eye.

  “…new switches are formed which allow you to access the new feelings or memories. If the multiverse is a mind…”

  Orlong let the thought hang and ran his finger over a console that seemed to have only a few simple controls. Its main feature was a row of six black disks, each about six inches in diameter and lined up like recessed electric hot plates. And that immediately brought back Duke and his bacon.

  Orlong placed his right palm on one of the disks, and within seconds, its color shifted from black to violet to green, and then to a kind of glowing peach.

  “Yes,” he said, anticipating Gordon, “it’s reacting to the heat in my palm, but only among many forms of energy—some that your worlds don’t know about yet. In your worlds, they’ve recently discovered that the human genome holds much of the information that makes a person an individual—but with big pieces missing—such as musical ability or memory of places your body has never seen. Those things are to be found in the PEF. The Personal Energy Field, which is like a higher-dimensional genome. That’s where the part of you that stays constant through all your travels lives. That’s why you are still you.”

  I looked at Gordon as my eyes went wide. “You knew this. You told me about this. But how did you know?”

&
nbsp; Gordon shrugged, almost guiltily, and Orlong said, “I think your friend Gordon is just a very astute observer.”

  Gordon, the astute observer, moved ahead with his lesson.

  “And our PEF’s are going to get sucked through these plates to wherever you send us next?” he asked. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Like teleportation?” the Mapmaker quirked an eyebrow. “Not exactly. Nothing gets ‘sucked through.’ The probable outcomes will shift around you until they find a plateau and settle, guided by the desired coordinates. And you will find yourself in a new place. Hopefully, the place we want you to be. If not there, then at least on the right vector.”

  “That’s what happened on the train!” Mose called out.

  “He’s right,” echoed Jemma. “We stood still, and the world changed around us. You can make that happen by touching those circles?”

  “Yes,” Orlong said. “But you notice that although I have my hand on the conversion disk, I haven’t gone anywhere. That’s because I haven’t completed the circuit. That takes two hands. There are two disks for each of you. So not only will each comprise a circuit, you’ll be connected in series, so when you go, you go together. Synchronously.”

  I can’t swear the thought hit me first, but I was the first to speak it.

  “There are four of us,” I said. “And only six disks.”

  “Yes.” The Mapmaker’s voice warbled, then shifted to a higher pitch. It was an eerily female voice that said, “We haven’t figured out how to do more than three at a time yet. But in any case, I believe one of you may be staying behind.”

  We all exchanged looks like machine gun fire, Gordon’s eyes widening, suddenly understanding it all. He had been chosen.

  “No!” said Mose. “You can’t do that. I gotta get everybody home.” His shoulders rose, the muscles in his arms tightening until he seemed like a bigger person. “That’s my gig!” he asserted. “I’m sorry, Mister…Orlong, you may be the chief wizard here, and I mean no disrespect, but Gordon stays with us. He’s our pilot.”