The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  Did that make any sense? If it did, then you’re with me. Gordon had also said that we’d been chosen to be pioneers, cosmonauts who would bring a new way of seeing things back to our worlds and by doing that, change history.

  All good. Except that we still hadn’t landed. And then, with an uprush of hot wind and a stinging spray of coarse dust, we did. It wasn’t a hard landing but it was enough to knock the wind out of me. My eyes stung and burned, and my tear ducts filled. The only sensations were blinding brightness and great heat. Then I started to spit reflexively. To rid myself of whatever was getting into my mouth, between my teeth, down my throat. Ptew. Ptew. Ptew. Little tiny, sharp, hot grains of…sand.

  It was a dune, a really big one. We weren’t so much sliding as tumbling, and every time I tumbled, I got a mouth full of sand. I was rolling so fast that if the sand had been snow, I would have ended up a boulder the size of Pluto. Behind and in front of me I heard, “Whoa! Whu-? Oww! Hunh!” Then I came to a dead stop and the air left my lungs. When I could breathe, and my heart had settled down, I sat up and saw that the others had too.

  “This isn’t my beach,” said Connor glumly.

  “It isn’t Lincoln Park either,” I said.

  “Did we just get eaten?” Jemma said, in a daze.

  Mose looked out over an ocean of sand, stretching in every direction, with undulating dunes like those huge swells that capsize even the biggest cruise ships. “Where the hell are we now?” he said in a half-whisper. “Wasn’t there a planet like this in Star Wars?”

  “Tatooine,” I said. “That’s where Luke Skywalker came from.”

  “Who’s Luke Skywalker?” Jemma shook sand from her hair.

  “A movie character,” said Connor. “A hero, like my asshat friend, Jacobus. Who abducted me from paradise. You date-raped me, Jake.”

  I appreciated the compliment—even the insult—because it made me look better to Jemma. “That wasn’t paradise, Connor. It was nowhere. It was phony. Even the monster was phony. Except for…”

  “And what’s this?” Connor scooped up a handful of sand and let it sift through his fingers. “It looks familiar, but I don’t see any girls bringing me drinks. This is nowhere.”

  “Well.” Mose stumbled to his feet. “It’s gotta be somewhere. Let’s take a—”

  He never finished the sentence. From complete silence came a roar every bit as loud as the Leviathan’s and a rumble every bit as deep and strong as the blasts of current through the ground of Orlong’s world. We all heard it at the same time, and we all looked uphill at once.

  Over the top of the dune they flew, one by one, each with a roar of its engine. One, two, three, four, five, six…tricked out, blacked out pickup trucks, armored and bristling with weapons, riding on monster tires.

  Black flags flew from all of them, tattered from the desert winds but with some kind of insignia in an unknown language. Mounted on the bed of each truck was a machine gun the size of a small cannon, and manning them were guys in black from head to toe who, judging by the size of them, didn’t seem to be all that much older than me. That was all I was able to see before Mose grabbed hold of both Jemma and myself and pulled us down into a shallow trench behind an outcropping of red rock, where we huddled as the trucks roared past.

  “What the hell was that?” I said after they’d vanished over the next enormous dune.

  “You know,” said Mose. “What you said about Tatooine? Maybe it isn’t so far off the mark. Only those weren’t Jedi knights. That was most definitely the Evil Empire.”

  “They looked like some kind of tribal warlords,” I said.

  “I thought you were taking me to Chicago,” Connor grumbled. “I was looking forward to at least getting a Julius.”

  I stared at him. “So, Connor,” I said. “You do remember.”

  “What’s a Julius?” asked Jemma.

  “But you don’t,” I said. “And that’s weird. That’s the difference, I guess, between travelers like us—who pulled the switches because we chose to—and our parallel selves, who just exist in whatever reality chance put them into. But if we ever do get back to Chicago, that might mean that you’ll remember where you came from and where you’ve been…and we won’t.”

  “That’s all real interesting, Jake,” said Mose. “Meanwhile, there’re mean-looking dudes with rocket launchers out there. What do we do?”

  “Again, you’re asking me?” I harrumphed. “How the hell should I know?”

  The wind kicked up a cloud of hot sand and we all reflexively covered our eyes. When it had settled, Mose said, “I’m appointing you the new Gordon. The man with the answers.”

  “Oh no,” I ground out. “I am not Gordon. He’d been traveling a lot longer than me.”

  “Still,” said Mose. “You got seniority.”

  “Not any more than Connor.” I stabbed my finger at him. “He started—”

  Jemma cut in. “No matter what, we’re not going to last long out here without water. There are people. We saw that. If there are people, they must live somewhere. And the people who live there can’t all be bad. That was true even in the hive city.”

  “She’s right,” I said. “Let’s try and get to a high point and see if there’s any evidence of civilization.”

  The sun was low in the sky, and with each degree it dropped, the desert wind picked up speed and force. I had a very bad feeling that something had gone wrong in our transit. Maybe that last switch had sent us off on a worldline that had only a .000000001 probability—but we had hit it. The farther we walked, the more my sense of dislocation grew. The dunes flattened out and gave way to a red, rock-strewn plain that looked like pictures I’d seen of Mars. It occurred to me that there was really nothing in Gordon or Mr. Bohm’s physics that prevented us from being on a different planet. The place in time could be exactly the same. It could still be April 2 on Earth, but we could be light years away. Without realizing it, I had hit on something pretty deep: that even with those enormous distances between planets and stars and galaxies, it was always the same instant in the universe—no matter how many of them there were. And if I took that to the next step, those distances were a kind of illusion. Much later, I learned that Einstein had come up with the same idea.

  But I’m not making any comparisons.

  The ground rose, gradually, and I stumbled, then looked up to see that the surroundings had changed again. From the flat ground rose huge rocky mounds, little mountains made of slabs and boulders of ancient rock, but separated by miles of desert. I couldn’t guess how tall they were. Maybe five, six hundred feet. On top of the nearest one was an ancient ruin, a fortress of some kind, but built in a circular form, like those in Bible times.

  “I’ve never seen anything that old,” said Mose. “Except in games.”

  “I’ve never seen anything like that at all,” said Jemma.

  “Should we check it out?” said Connor.

  I considered it. “Don’t think so. It may look close, but I bet that’s a three-hour hike, and there’s not gonna be any water up there.”

  “Not only that,” said Mose, using his t-shirt to shield his face from the blowing sand. “It looks like the kind of place those war-boys might hang out. And they did not look friendly.”

  “I see something,” said Jemma. By then, she had to shout because the wind kept rising. “Over there, just beneath that dip in the land.”

  She was pointing to the left, which, from the position of the sun, I knew must be south. About a half mile, I guessed. In this landscape, gauging distances and shapes wasn’t easy. The air was incredibly clear, but at the same time, the blowing sand and the tricks played by the light—mirages, I suppose—made everything jittery. What I saw following her finger were a series of bumps on the horizon, too small to be hills, but maybe just the right size to be roofs.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let’s check it out.”

  After we’d covered about half the distance, a distant rumble powered back. We all had the same th
ought: the trucks. Mose spoke up. “I think we should make a plan. In case we get captured and those dudes are as bad as they look.”

  “I’m all for that,” said Connor.

  “The way not to die,” said Mose, “is to be useful. I learned that from dealin’ with my mama’s weasel. Out here, there ain’t no good place to hide. So if they come after us, we’re gonna wave our arms and be all like, ‘Praise God! You are exactly the dudes we came all this way to see.’ That might buy us a little time to figure out what to do.”

  “It’s worth a try,” I said. “But I’m willing to bet they don’t speak our language.”

  “Then we’ll talk the way you and I did when we first met in the hive city,” said Jemma. “With our hands.”

  “Yeah, but you had some kind of telepathy going,” I said. “That made it easier.”

  “Who knows?” Jemma squared her shoulders. “Maybe I still have it.”

  Her last two words were swallowed up by an explosion in the east that shook the ground and caused dust to rise all around. It lit up the notch between two of those mini-mountains with a ball of flame that was, for a few seconds, as bright as the sun. Then, out of the thundercloud of smoke, we saw a wedge formation of black-winged objects that from this distance looked like a squadron of fire-breathing dragons. It was only when they ripped overhead that we realized they were some kind of exotic rocket-powered fighter planes.

  “Holy shit!” said Connor. “We are on Tatooine.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But if those are Rebel Alliance fighters and they just bombed the Empire Walkers, maybe at least we have some friends.”

  “We don’t know who our friends are yet,” said Mose.

  “No,” Connor agreed. “But at least we know that rumble we heard was bombers, not trucks.”

  We came over a ridge and finally saw what those bumps on the horizon had been. Jemma went pale and fell to her knees, and I knew why. In the valley was an entire village of beehive houses made of some ancient reddish clay, and if they hadn’t looked so old and rough, and I hadn’t believed it impossible, I would’ve thought we were back in some version of her nightmare.

  I went over to her and put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s not what you think,” I told her, though my shaky voice couldn’t have been very reassuring. “My history teacher said once that these kind of houses were common all over the old world. They were cheap, easy to build…like igloos in the Arctic.”

  “You mean like Mesopotamia and all that?” Mose asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like that.”

  “Look!” said Connor. “There’s somebody down there. A boy and a goat. Maybe he’ll give us some water. Or tell us where we are.”

  “No harm in asking,” said Mose.

  We walked down the hill into the village, four abreast, long blue shadows thrown on the dusty ground. The goat boy watched our approach warily, and it seemed for a few moments that he might run for help. Help from where, I couldn’t say. The little village looked deserted. When Jemma knelt down to pet his goat, he relaxed a bit.

  I pointed to my chest and said, “Jacobus,” then did the same with the others. “Jemma. Mose. Connor.” Finally, I pointed to him and waited.

  “Bashar,” he finally said.

  “Friends?” I held out my hand. Slowly, cautiously, he took it, but as he did, his eyes widened in terror.

  A blast of automatic fire ripped down from the top of the hill, bullets slicing into the sand to our left and right. One of them hit the boy’s goat and brought it down instantly. He fell to his knees, wailing, the goat probably as much his food source as his friend.

  They had appeared as if out of thin air. Not in their trucks this time, but on foot. Twelve, eighteen, twenty or more of them, like desert ninjas with their heads and most of their faces covered in black balaclava-like hoods, each carrying a mean-looking weapon, also black.

  Slowly, we put our hands in the air. Mose looked at the boy and his dead goat and whispered, “Bastards.”

  We were prisoners again.

  hey tied our hands and covered our heads with hoods of some scratchy black material that made breathing an effort and smelled like sweat and fear. I knew we hadn’t been the first to wear them. In that foul blackness, the greatest cause of panic was not being able to see my friends, or even call out to them for fear I’d get a rifle butt in my face.

  They marched us up and down four hills, prodding us over rocky ground with their rifles. I kept stumbling, and finally tripped and cracked my knee against a big rock, crying out.

  Nearby, a voice I recognized as Mose said simply, “Uh-huh.”

  It reassured me, but it didn’t make any sense. Uh-huh what? Then I realized it was a signal. An expression only we would recognize.

  “Uh-huh,” I replied.

  A few seconds later, I heard from Connor, over to my left. “Uh-huh.”

  There was nothing from Jemma. Nothing except the sound of heavy breathing, gunmetal clanking against belts and canteens, and wind.

  “Uh-huh,” I repeated. I waited, and as an answer, got the business end of a rifle shoved against my spine.

  Nausea rose from my stomach into my throat. Jemma was a pretty, teenaged girl. We were in some post-apocalyptic world where they probably did terrible things to girls like her. And I couldn’t help her.

  The voices around us sounded more like boys than men. They matched the impression I’d gotten that the guys on the trucks weren’t much older than us. That was no comfort. Boys can be just as mean as men. The language they spoke was sharp and guttural. Some things sounded like earth language; others might as well have belonged to an alien species. How was I to know? We’d been sucked through the mouth of a mechanical monster into a space-time limbo and dumped in a moonscape. Only the trucks and jet fighters made it seem modern.

  When we got to the bottom of the fourth hill, I heard new voices, and smelled a strong funk, only identified when I heard a, “Baaaaah.”

  They forced us to kneel, and it was then that the thought first struck me that these guys, whoever they were, might indeed kill us. A thought like that has physical effects, and they are all horrible. I had a flash of something I’d seen once on TV just before my dad had switched it off. In another world, another time: a man kneeling on the sand with a hood over his head and another man behind him, with a knife.

  Something else happens in the heart of paralyzing fear. Our English teacher once quoted some famous Brit who said that nothing clears the head like the prospect of being hanged in the morning. It was true. My muscles froze, but my head was clear. It felt like my hearing was twice as sharp, and my brain’s CPU had just gotten an upgrade.

  That’s when I heard her. Her voice was muffled and echoey, and there were other voices around it. But it was Jemma, and although she wasn’t screaming, she sounded scared, and that moved something inside me. It just shot from my dry, constricted throat. “Jemma!” And like a punctuation mark, the stock of a rifle came down and I went out like a birthday candle.

  The first sense I experienced when I began to come to was vibration, followed by the sound of a truck pulling up close. Then a second truck. The third sensation was that my scalp beneath the hood was wet, and a sickening realization that the wetness was my blood.

  Before I could rise completely from the sand, I was grabbed from both sides, dragged for maybe ten feet, and then thrown onto a hard, ridged metal surface that I knew must be the bed of one of the trucks. My head bumped up against another body, and to show you how deeply old habits can be drilled into you, I said, “Sorry.”

  “Jake,” said a muffled voice. It was Connor.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s me.”

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “I think so,” I answered.

  “Are they gonna kill us?” he said and hearing his fear doubled mine.

  “No way,” said a third voice, and that was Mose. “We’ve made it through zombie cult guys, robot insects, phantom black things, giant iguanas, and some
machine that kills you with sound and then swallows you. We’ll make it past these mother—”

  He didn’t get to finish because the truck lurched and began to move up.

  “Where’s Jemma?” I said, louder over the engine and the clatter of metal. “Anybody know?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Connor, “but I heard her a little while back and there were other girls…women…taking to her.”

  “Maybe they separate the males and females,” said Mose. “Maybe she’s in the other truck.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “I hate to say it, Mose, but this doesn’t look good to me. I think I understand what my dad said about life and video games.”

  “Wha’d he say?” asked Connor.

  “That in a game, there’s already an algorithm for how you defeat the boss. You just have to find it. But in life, nobody writes code for you.”

  “I wonder about that,” said Mose. “Seein’ what we’ve seen.”

  The G-forces that had been squashing us together as we ascended the hill relaxed a little, and then for a long time, we just lurched and rattled over flat, rocky land. The vibrations were so intense, I bit my tongue, and then had blood both on my scalp and in my mouth.

  I tried to scoot down to give Connor a little more room, and realized when I came up against a boot that it wasn’t just the three of us in the back of the truck. One of them—maybe the machine-gunner—was with us, probably aiming at my head. I decided just to freeze in position and say nothing.

  We drove for more than an hour. At some point, I passed out, my head still throbbing from the whack. When the truck finally came to a stop, after a long time on a rutted dirt track and a short stretch of paved road, I could tell we were in a very different place. It was cooler, with a slight breeze, and along with the gun grease, exhaust fumes, and body odor, there was a smell of wildflowers. One of their guys jumped up onto the truck and pulled off our hoods, then shouted something that sounded like it meant, “Move!” When my eyes finally recovered from the blazing light, I saw the church.