The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  We took the places Youseff had assigned us, about fifty meters apart and twice that distance from the entrance of the fortress-in-the-rock. After fifteen minutes, I couldn’t see anything but a dusky rose-colored haze everywhere and the twinkling of a few early stars over the craggy mountain summit. I was in a little natural dugout behind a pile of boulders, on my knees. The earth of the desert is like a hard mud made of sand, dust, and rock blown in there a thousand years ago, packed down by the winter rains and then cracked by the summer sun.

  The first sentry appeared five minutes later, fanning his flashlight beam over the tops of the boulders, and clinking as he shifted his gun from shoulder to shoulder. The beam brushed the edge of Jemma’s shirtsleeve—stopped—then returned. My heart went into my throat. But she’d pulled back behind her boulder, and after a beat, and hearing a faint echo from the face of the rock, the sentry pivoted. In the spill from his flashlight, I saw him drop his goggles over his eyes and head for the mountain. Then the flashlight went dark. A moment later, the second sentry appeared, close enough to my right shoulder that I almost felt his breath. He turned on his light for a few seconds, pulled the goggles over his eyes, and made for the fortress at a forty-five-degree angle opposite that of the first one. They were clamping Youseff in a triangle formation. And they had night vision goggles.

  When the sentry’s boots crunching on the rocky desert floor told me he was about halfway there, I made my first try at the lizard sound. All that came out of my throat was a sort of gagging. It was too dry and too tight. I swallowed and then tried it again. That muscle that Youseff had shown us—somewhere between the back of the tongue and the tonsils—was frozen. Youseff had told us he’d need less than a minute to survey the fortress. I hoped he had already accomplished his mission and gotten the hell out of there.

  But then there was a third sentry, way over on my left, moving rapidly and muttering into a walkie-talkie. I tried again. Still nothing but gurgling. Then, from the right—where I figured Connor was—came the lizard chitter, loud and clear, cutting through the desert night just the way Youseff taught us. Somehow, the excitement must have oiled my throat, because now the sound came out of me, followed by a chorus of clicks from our lookout positions. When the clicks died down, I heard the harsh whisper of radio static. Voices. Urgent. One of them was Youseff’s.

  It’s astounding what you can hear in the desert. Things get carried to your ear by a hot breeze so delicate that it’s as if the air is alive with wings. There was more radio static, coming each time one of the sentries pressed the talk switch on his walkie-talkie. Then I heard Youssef again, shouting into his souped-up Samsung. More static and shouts, and then the sound of boots slapping the ground fast, and close. And more boots coming after them. And the worst sound of all: a gunshot.

  I got up off my knees. We weren’t supposed to move. But all of a sudden I cared more about a guy I had only met four hours ago than anyone else in the world. Youseff was Mose. He was Gordon. He was the Duke. I had to know what was happening. Almost as soon as I got to my feet, I felt my neck snapped back from behind, a forearm pressed into my windpipe, and cold metal against my head. I tried to make the owl sound. “Hfffff.” “Hwoofff.” It was pathetic, and it only got weaker as whoever had me dragged me backward. My heels scraped over the caked soil. More bootsteps, as rapid as hoofbeats. More radio static, and finally—Youseff’s voice shouting, “Confirm! Confirm!” It couldn’t have been two seconds before I saw him, with the phone to his mouth, and with one of the sentry’s automatic rifles in his right hand. I knew they must have been close on his heels because even in the murky light I could see the terror in his eyes. “Whoooo,” I finally squeezed out. Youseff didn’t break his stride as he turned toward me. And I swear that what he did could only have been done by someone who knew how to bend time. The sentry who had me by the neck turned on his flashlight and aimed it at Youseff to make him an easier target for his comrades, but it also made my captor an easier target for Youseff. And Youseff—my new friend, the one who sent the pigeons home and traveled in the second sphere—raised the barrel of his rifle, aimed with one arm, and with a single shot took out the guy who’d been holding me. Then he tossed me his satellite phone, and called out, “The switch is 1-2-3-0-0! Just call the number!” Then, like lightning, he shot off to the right.

  Seconds later, there was a volley of automatic weapons fire, and when it finally stopped, I knew in my heart that Youssef was no longer in this world. And despite what he’d said about it not being possible to destroy a soul, my heart was broken, and I felt alone under the cold stars.

  took the rifle and the flashlight from the dead sentry and made toward Jemma as quickly as I could in the desert darkness. I didn’t dare turn on the light, so I kept tripping, and each time, my heart hammered my throat for fear I’d given myself away. As for the gun, I had no idea how it worked and hoped that I wouldn’t have to find out. It felt cold, oily, and evil in my hands. Once I’d shot at tin cans with my father on some farm in Wisconsin, but that was a .22, and seemed only a step removed from the toy guns. The weapon in my hands, I knew, had one purpose. I saw the hole it had made in the sentry.

  I’m not sure whether or not I’ve mentioned this, but I’d never seen a dead body before, much less one with a hole the size of a tennis ball blown through its chest. I’d kept my eyes turned away as I took the rifle and the light, but then I looked for just long enough to see that he wasn’t more than nineteen, with that scraggly beard that says you’re not really a man yet. He would have killed me—of that I had no doubt. I’d probably been minutes away from having my head sawed off. I felt no guilt, and only gratitude toward Youseff, but a hollowness settled in my extremities and a sort of yawning out-of-placeness.

  Soldiers and doctors and funeral directors probably know this, but the dead don’t look as if they’ve ever been alive. They look like figures in a wax museum or in bad motion capture animation. That means that what makes us look alive isn’t the eyes, or the mouth, or even movement, but something behind these things. That something was the part of us that traveled. What Orlong and Youssef had called the PEF. A virtual person made of information, but somehow much more than a computer program, because it was part of that big mind.

  Somewhere out there in the darkness, Youseff looked the same way, and was no more alive in this world than that teenaged warrior boy. But in my pocket was a piece of his soul. His phone, and a number: 1-2-3-0-0.

  A panic bit down on me when I didn’t find her right away. I realized that in this place, I could walk in circles for hours and never know where I was. The other sentries were still there, and by now had probably found the body of their dead partner. They would be looking for us, and wouldn’t stop looking. I remembered what my parents had always told me about what to do if we got separated at a theme park or in a crowd: stay where you are—we will come to you. That didn’t seem like a good strategy under the circumstances. But when I thought I might faint from the pressure in my chest, I squatted down beside a boulder and tried my best to make the lizard sound.

  On my third try, and just as I managed to get something out of my throat, my little click was swallowed up by the sky. From behind me, above me, and then from every direction, came that whistle that turned into a whine that turned into the motorboat sound—as if the black sky was a great sea carrying an armada of sleek, silver speedboats. The first explosion came only seconds later and lit up the desert.

  The drones. Youseff had managed to call in the strike. A second explosion tore the face off the fortress in the rock and shook the earth beneath my feet. It was then that I spotted Jemma and Mose, about thirty feet away. He was shielding her with his body from the splinters of rock that were flying off the side of the mountain. I waited for the glare from the bomb blast to dim a little bit, and then made a crazy dash across the open ground. When Jemma saw me running toward her, her face melted into an expression somewhere between tears and hysterical happiness.

  “Damn am I glad to
see you, bro,” said Mose.

  “Likewise,” I said, breathlessly. “Are you guys okay?”

  They nodded, and then Mose eyed the rifle and gave me a “Where the hell…?” look.

  “I took it off a dead sentry,” I said. “He had me by the throat, but Youseff—” The name caught in my throat. “Unbelievable. He blew the guy off me with one shot while he was running full speed. And then—”

  I dropped my chin to my chest and didn’t have to finish. Both of them got it. Another drone swooped in, firing missiles right through the main entrance of the fortress. When the noise and the shaking died down, I lifted my head, looked around, and said, “Where’s Connor?”

  Mose shook his head. “Don’ know, Jake. The last I saw him was just after we got into position.”

  “Did he send out a distress call?” I asked. “You know, the owl thing.”

  Mose and Jemma shook their heads.

  “Not that we heard,” said Mose. “And we wouldn’t hear it now.”

  “We have to find him. And quick.” I fished Youseff’s phone out of my pocket. The satellite sleeve made it bulkier than a normal smartphone. “He tossed it to me right after he… He shouted a number. One-two-three-zero-zero. I think it’s the switch. He told me to dial it.”

  “Or maybe some kind of SOS,” Mose said. “It sounds too easy to be the switch.”

  “Either way,” I said. “We’re gonna call that number. But not until we find Connor.”

  We didn’t “fan out” to look for Connor the way they do in combat movies. We stayed together and in a crouch, moving from boulder to boulder, hanging on to each other like one body. The bombs made so much noise that we didn’t need to worry about being heard, only about being seen. Every so often, in the afterglow of a blast, eerie silhouettes of the warrior boys ran, scattered, limped out of the fortress. There were screams, too—screams that must be a part of any kind of war. In one of those afterglows, we spotted him, flat on his belly, and not moving. When I saw that, some impulse beneath thinking made me break from Jemma and Mose and run to him.

  The first thing I did was say his name. Then I put my hands on the back of his shoulders. They trembled—vibrated as if there were an electrical current going through them. His skin was pale and clammy. I didn’t know a thing about “shock,” but it made sense to me that Connor might be in it. Just then, Mose and Jemma arrived.

  “Is he—” Mose asked, with dread.

  “No,” I said. “Maybe some kind of, you know…PTSD. Like the soldiers come home with.”

  “What should we do?” he asked.

  But it was Jemma who knew. She lay down beside Connor, put her arm around his shoulders to quiet them, and talked softly to him. And because of all the noise, she talked mostly in the way she’d talked to us in the beehive city: on some other wavelength. It seemed that between the three of us, we always found a way, and I’d never had that kind of team before. It made me understand: that’s probably the only way soldiers can get through a war without going insane.

  It took five agonizing minutes to get him sitting up, of which I counted each and every second because it was only a matter of time till we were discovered, and if we were discovered, we would die. But once he sat with his back propped against the boulder and the shaking had calmed a little, I shouted over the bombs, “Connor. We gotta go.” I held up the phone. “I’ve got the switch. From Youseff. It’s a phone number.”

  He looked at the cell phone in wonder. I think he was a little dazed because I swear he said, “Top o’ the morning to ya, my good man.” But he did give me a really limp salute. For some reason, in the midst of this hell, it made me smile. There was a little tiny bit of the island left in him. I wondered: did we carry pieces of who we’d been in every world away with us? There was a roar as the next drone came in, and I began to dial the number. We huddled together as close as we could, practically face-to-face. My hands shook and sweated, and I was afraid they’d slip on the keys and dial the wrong number.

  “Do you want me to do it?” Jemma asked. “I’ve got small fingers.”

  “No,” I answered, maybe a little too quickly. “I’m good.”

  1 - 2

  I stopped to take a deep breath and looked at my friends.

  “Hey, Moses,” I said. “This might be a good time for one of those prayers.”

  “Already there,” said Mose. “I just don’t have my hands together ‘cause I don’t want to let go of y’all.”

  “Connor,” I said. “Listen to Mose. Hang on to us. You’re still new at this. I don’t know why it works, but it does. Maybe it’s electrical. Maybe it’s some kind of mind-meld. Or maybe it’s like Peter Pan. Who the hell knows? Just don’t let go of us.”

  “I think I know what it is,” said Jemma.

  “What?” I asked. There was something really intense in her eyes.

  She shot a look over her shoulder, and then said, “I’ll tell you on the other side. Go. There are three sentries headed this way.”

  “Oh, shit,” said Connor. “Do it, Jake. They’re close.”

  My mind suddenly went stone blank.

  “What number was I on?” I asked.

  “You punched 1 and 2” said Mose. “That leaves—”

  “Three,” I said out loud. “Zero.” A gunshot sounded. Heavy breathing was accompanied by the scrape of boots on the rock. Someone tried to grab Mose from behind and pull him loose, but their grip slipped for an instant just as I yelled, “Hang on! Zero!” And we were free.

  Of all our trips, this one stayed the longest in limbo. I lost all sense of my body. It was like being numb, except I couldn’t feel the absence of feeling, the way you can when the dentist shoots you full of Novocain. I couldn’t see anything either, except white. White everywhere, in every direction. Then I realized it wasn’t white, but light. Light pouring in as if the stars had tipped over like milk pitchers and flooded the passage. It was way too bright for me to see anything else. I had the impression that I was falling up, if you can possibly imagine that. Every so often, I thought I heard a voice, and once, I’m sure I heard Jemma calling.

  I began to travel back through all the places we’d been. Not as memories, and not even like a dream, but as if receiving information from the light. The first new world: where my parents got along like old pals but were somehow phonier; where Connor was my enemy and Jemma was my girlfriend. The second world, where I was Jerrold, and Mose had my back; where I had no dad, and where I’d met Gordon on the baseball diamond. Where Jemma had been just a little girl and I’d been born earlier. Where the Duke had entered my worldline. That, I concluded in my bodyless-falling-upward state, had been a very important world. Transitional. On Orlong’s—now Gordon’s—maps, it would have been a major junction.

  But then the real weirdness begun, because in the third world all these things and people combined in a way that was like the most vivid dream—or nightmare. The Reds and their demented Vater. The plastic sphere prison cells and the Duke as the Examiner (who was with the Reds, but somehow knew us, and helped us escape). Now I had a better idea of why from what Youseff had told us: the Duke was a kind of angelic traveler’s aide, with no wings.

  Then we’d come to the beehive city, and that strange, endless quay along Lake Michigan leading to a place I knew. And Hartūn with my Gameboy. Hartūn, who made it past the robot insects but didn’t make it past the shades. And a train that tunneled through a uni-boundary to the oddest world of all.

  Orlong, the Mapmaker’s world. A world that was a holographic reality. Completely abstract, but completely real. A world where somehow all the worldlines met on a map screen like train tracks or airplane routes and allowed them—whoever they were—to observe our path through the multiverse. They were The Watchers. The Watchers Of The Mind. The name just popped into my head as naturally as “blue” or “dog.” For a fleeting instant, I knew who they were, these engineers of reality who had placed the switches where travelers like us could find them. And then the knowledge was
gone and I was left falling upward and feeling like I’d lost the most important thought I’d ever have. I knew I might not have it again till I died.

  Gordon, talk to me, I thought to myself. Help me remember.

  Then there was the Island, where I’d found Connor and we were friends again. Where we’d eaten coconuts and barbecue and things seemed mellow until they weren’t. Until we realized that everyone there was a captive, kept from leaving by blue zap juice and a devouring monster made of sound and heavy metal.

  Who would make such a world? Or, I should say, how would such a world come to be made? I had the answer before the question was finished, and it’s the one thing I brought back that I can tell you for certain: every world is possible, from the best to the worst.

  How did I know this?

  I knew it because we had escaped the Island, then been shot into a rushing tunnel of light and heat and sand into a world that was so close in time and space to my own that I could almost feel it on the other side of a papery thin skin, and yet so cruel and violent that it could have been some Dark Ages apocalypse. A world of boy warriors who wanted to end history and leave nothing behind but poles swaying with human heads.

  That world, just through the onion skin, had been the one Gordon had grown up in, and somehow it made sense that we’d gone there. Not because Gordon or The Mapmaker had steered us there, but because there were links connecting worldlines which had people and stories in common, and because the only way we could get home was through Youseff. He had been our guide. It had all connected through Gordon’s little church basement. Gordon was the hub.