The Severed Tower

by J. Barton Mitchell

  Zoey watched as more and more platforms, thousands at a time, were wiped away and replaced with empty white light. Zoey didn’t like watching it.

  “Why is the balance coming back now?” she asked.

  “Because you have returned to the Tower. You are its final piece, and all pieces of an unordered whole must be present before they can be ordered.”

  “But … what happens then?”

  “When the Presidium suffered its containment failure, the explosion ripped the ship into two pieces. The impact never occurred, however. Time, in its ruptured state, halted at the epicenter of the quantum disturbance and throughout the expanding blast of energy.”

  “That’s why they’re growing,” Zoey said, thinking about what Mira had believed. “It’s … an explosion. The Strange Lands is a weird kind of explosion. It was frozen in time and now it isn’t.”

  “Correct. The closer you, Zoey, move to the epicenter, the more energy of the blast is released. Now that you are here, the energy in its entirety can be released, and when it is gone, balance will be restored. The Strange Lands will be no more, the quantum disturbances will normalize, and the Severed Tower will cease to exist.”

  Something occurred to Zoey then. “What will happen to all the people in the Strange Lands?”

  “They will die,” the mirror image stated.

  Zoey stared in disbelief. “The White Helix? All of Mira’s friends?”

  “As well as the denizens of Midnight City. The quantum blast will expand and engulf it as well.”

  Zoey’s hands shook at the idea, one part of her mind trying to imagine the devastation, another part picturing images of other people. Ones she knew. Holt. Mira. The Max. Gideon. Even Ambassador. They would die, too. Because of her.

  “Concern for your friends is inefficient,” her twin said, sensing Zoey’s thoughts somehow. Around them, the flashes continued violently, wiping away tens of thousands of Deviations at a time.

  “Why?” Zoey asked.

  “Because they are already dead.”

  Zoey felt the tingling of fear. The thing in front of her couldn’t have meant what it just said.

  “They died fighting a large Assembly force in an attempt to ensure you reached this point. They succeeded,” the mirror image said, as if it should be some sort of consolation, but it wasn’t.

  Pain and sadness erupted inside Zoey with an intensity she had never known. Tears welled in her eyes, she forgot to breathe. It couldn’t be true. It couldn’t …

  “If it provides you comfort,” her twin continued, the flashes strobing everywhere in the distance, “in ninety-seven-point-three-percent of all Deviations, your friends perish. There is nothing you could have done to save them. You have not failed them in any way. You have merely fulfilled your purpose.”

  “And they died because of it!” Zoey shouted in despair and stepped forward. So did the mirror image. “Everyone’s going to die because of it! Because of me!”

  In her mind she saw Holt carrying her on his back; Mira showing her how artifacts worked; the Max pushing his nose under her hand. Zoey’s vision blurred, her body wracked with sobs. She collapsed to the platform and felt her twin do the same.

  Please, don’t let it be true, she thought. Please …

  “We do not understand your grief,” the mirror image stated with genuine confusion.

  The words instilled a foreign emotion in her. White, hot anger. It flared through her, and she wiped the tears away and stared into the twisted version of herself. “When I got here, something good was supposed to happen!”

  “Something good will happen, Zoey. Balance will be restored.”

  “How is that good? How is it good if everyone dies?! This is what I was supposed to do? This is why the Librarian and Gideon and the White Helix and Mira and Holt and Ambassador and everyone else tried to get me here? This?”

  Around them, hundreds of thousands of platforms vanished in flashes of bright light. There were few left now, she noticed. In a few more moments they would all be gone.

  Zoey breathed in and out heavily, shaking, the tears staining her cheeks. She asked her next question almost in desperation. It was the one thing she had wanted to know, the one absolute, the thing that, in the end, drove her need to be here, to find this horrible, unfair place. It was the reason for everything. “Who … am I?”

  “Who do you think you are?”

  “I don’t know,” Zoey admitted. She felt nothing but sadness now, the rage was gone. “I don’t remember. The Librarian called me the Apex. The White Helix call me the Prime—but I don’t know what any of that means.”

  “Different terms for the same thing. While the mathematical equations that underlie the Strange Lands and the absorption of its entities are immense and complicated, they are not efficient. They resulted in a remainder.”

  Zoey was still confused. “I don’t—”

  “If you take ten numbers from eleven numbers, what do you have left?”

  “One,” Zoey answered, wiping away the tears. She had to concentrate, had to listen. Maybe there was a solution in what the Tower was telling her, maybe there was something she could still do.

  “Precisely. The reality is far more complicated than eleven minus ten, but the concept is the same. In the end, there was a mathematical remainder—and that remainder was you, Zoey.”

  Zoey remembered what the Oracle had shown her. She remembered being on the hillside, watching the falling stars that turned out to be something much worse. She remembered her mother, and the explosion in the air, and the panic that swept through the crowd. She also remembered the rushing wave of energy that washed over her.

  “Did I … die?” she asked, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to know the answer.

  “Not entirely. Your original physical form was wiped away with everyone else, but your essence, your consciousness, remained, as did theirs. Instead of being absorbed into the mass that became us, however, you were reborn.”

  “Am I human?”

  “You are human and more. Your body was re-formed from the energy of the Strange Lands. As such, you inherited the same chaotic, improbable nature. You are the person you were—and you are something else. A life-form of pure quantum distinguishability. Your biological structure is beyond unique, adaptive in ways that defy even the power of evolution. You are still mortal. Left alone, you would age and grow and eventually die, just as anyone else. You are human in every sense. Yet you are not human at all. You are of the Strange Lands, yet independent of it. You are both an Anomaly and an artifact. You are the final piece of the Tower, the remainder of a vast equation, and now you have returned.”

  “And you … brought me here? All this way?”

  “Without you, the chaos cannot be ordered. We have repeated the effort among millions of Deviations. Arranged countless seemingly irrelevant events, altered probabilities, all to bring you home. Holt, Mira, the Librarian, the Oracle, Ravan, the White Helix, Gideon, and hundreds of other small decisions or actions that led directly, one after the other, to your return. And you must return in every Deviation.”

  Zoey looked back into the space around her. The millions of Deviations were all gone, wiped away, and the world was full of only bright white light now. But something was wrong about that. It took Zoey a moment to figure out what.

  “Why haven’t we been wiped away?” Zoey asked, looking at all the brightness.

  “Because in this Deviation there is an aberration.”

  Zoey looked back at herself. “What’s an aberration?”

  “Something unplanned for or paradoxical. Something that should not be,” her twin said. “You know him as Benjamin Aubertine.”

  It took a moment for Zoey to connect the name in her mind, and when she did it didn’t seem possible. “Ben? Mira’s friend? He’s … here?”

  “Correct. Which should be impossible.”

  “Why? He had plutonium, didn’t he?”

  “A radioactive substance is necessary to pass thro
ugh the Vortex, but it will not aid in entering the Severed Tower. Attempting to do so always results in the individual’s energy being absorbed into our own.”

  Zoey thought about that a moment. It was contrary to what Mira had said. “I thought … people had made it inside the Tower before.”

  “Correct. In this Deviation, seven in total, but none have ever returned from doing so. Their energy and consciousness are now a part of us. Anyone who has ever claimed otherwise speaks falsehoods. There is no exit from the Tower.”

  “Then … Ben is part of you, too?”

  “No. He is an aberration. Like you, he remains. It is a paradox.”

  “Why?” Zoey asked. Something about this seemed important.

  “He has with him an artifact, the one artifact in all the universe whose power supersedes our own. It has the power to shift probabilities in the favor of whomever possesses it, and currently it is shifting probabilities to keep him alive. It is preventing him from being absorbed into our essence.”

  The Tower must have meant the Chance Generator. The bad artifact that had almost turned Holt into someone else. Another question occurred to her, a possibility, a glimmer of hope.

  “Why is he here?” Zoey asked, wiping the rest of her tears away, looking at all the white around her where the various platforms had been erased. Her Deviation, for the moment, still existed.

  “We do not understand the question,” the mirror image stated.

  “Why is he here? There must be a reason.”

  “Why must there be a reason, Zoey?”

  “Because it’s different! It can’t be a coincidence!”

  “Where the Tower is not concerned, there are only coincidences, Zoey.”

  “But out of all these realities,” Zoey stood up and motioned to all the white, “all these possibilities, he’s here in just this one!”

  “It is irrelevant.”

  “No! Stop! You’re supposed to be smart!”

  “Our intelligence is infinite, Zoey.”

  “Then stop thinking in straight lines!” Zoey shouted in anguish. She had to find a way to save them, to make everything okay again. She had to.

  Her twin hesitated, remaining quiet a second or two—and for something as intelligent as it was, two seconds was an eternity.

  “You … theorize that we think linearly,” the mirror image finally said. “Interesting. No other Deviation has ever made this analysis. It is … wholly unique.”

  Zoey pressed on, her excitement building. “Don’t you see!? This one is different than all the others! Which makes it important!”

  “What are you proposing, Zoey?”

  Now it was Zoey’s turn to hesitate. It was a good question. What was she proposing? There was a solution there, she knew it. She just had to figure out what might be different in her Deviation that she could use. There seemed to be only one thing.

  “The … Chance Generator,” she said. “It’s keeping Ben alive?”

  “Correct. Though, even here, its power will wane. The artifact will expend its energy, and when that happens, balance will be restored.”

  The excitement she felt a moment ago faltered. If what the Tower was saying was true, it meant time was running out. If the Chance Generator died, then everything would continue as it was. Her Deviation would be wiped away like all the others, and Mira and Holt and Max would be truly gone.

  Again, everything seemed to point to one thing. “What if … what would happen if I took it? What would happen if Ben gave me the Chance Generator?”

  Again her mirror image hesitated. “An … intriguing proposition. The restoration of balance would still only be delayed, but, as the remainder, you would … inhabit a unique opportunity.”

  “What opportunity?” Zoey felt the hope building again.

  “You are part of the Tower. Its singular piece. Balance would still be restored, the energy of the singularity would still be released, but the Probability Influencer would … shield you from the discharge. You would not be swept away with everything else. You would, again, remain, and, more so, you could direct the energy as it was released.”

  “Direct it how?”

  “For a brief, limited amount of time, thirty-nine seconds to be precise, you could use it to shape time and space, though only in how it relates directly to your experience in this Deviation.”

  “I could save them!”

  “Understand, Zoey, that balance must be restored. It is a mathematical necessity, and you are part of the same equation. Though the Probability Influencer will shield you from the initial realignment, you are still an aberration to this Deviation. Where you are concerned, things must be balanced as well. Making this choice does not remove that requirement.”

  Zoey thought she understood. It was a grim solution, but, without question, a much better one than the alternative. Everyone she loved would still be alive. She could undo all the damage she had done.

  “I understand,” she said.

  In the distance, amid all the white, a rectangle of pure blackness opened, like some kind of shadowy door. It began to grow, as if racing toward her. Zoey watched it warily.

  “There is one variable that remains,” her twin said. “The aberration. He has become reliant on the Probability Influencer. He will not give it up willingly, and you do not have the physical strength to take it from him.”

  Zoey nodded, seeing the problem, but there had to be a way. “I have to try.”

  “Are you sure this is what you want?” her twin asked pointedly. “If you somehow take the artifact from the aberration, the energy of the singularity will be released and the Tower will be yours to control. You can shape the timeline how you see fit, to an extent. But … you do know where this path leads, don’t you, Zoey?”

  Zoey stayed silent a long time, watching the black doorway rushing toward her. Much of what the Tower had told her was beyond her ability to grasp, but she still thought she understood what this decision meant. How would she ever explain it to Holt or Mira? Of course, those would be wonderful problems to have. It would mean they were alive and she was with them. “It’s the right thing to do.”

  “We find this interesting,” her replica stated. “This choice was … unpredicted. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps this Deviation is singularly important. We wish we could observe the end result, but … balance must be restored. This will be the last time we speak, Zoey. From here until the inevitable end, we can no longer help you.”

  “I understand.” The door was almost there, rushing toward her. “And … thank you.”

  “An inefficient sentiment,” her twin responded. “Good-bye, Zoey.”

  Her mirror image faded. The door roared toward her. Zoey closed her eyes—and was swept away.

  * * *

  “ARE YOU … REAL?” BEN asked.

  It had been an instant transition, without pain or sensation. One moment Zoey was in all that empty, bright whiteness. Then she was here. An old, ruined church, most of its ceiling missing, the stars visible outside. A campfire lit the interior in flickering orange.

  Ben sat on one of the ruined pews, staring up at the night sky. At the sound of her approach, the boy calmly turned and considered her. He seemed slightly dazed, as if he were waking from a dream. Zoey saw the Chance Generator, and the hand that held it shook slightly.

  Zoey nodded. “Do you remember me?”

  Ben pushed his glasses up the rim of his nose and blinked. “Your name is Zoey. You were with Mira.”

  “I was?”

  “In the Vortex.” Ben’s voice sounded haunted. “Where I … left her.”

  Zoey wasn’t sure what that meant. She had been unconscious at the time, but whatever had happened with Mira clearly bothered Ben a great deal. For the first time since she had known him, she could see things were wearing on him. He looked exhausted, confused, not entirely present, but whether that had to do with the Chance Generator or something about this place, she wasn’t sure. All she knew was that she had to find a way to ge
t him to listen to her.

  “I did it because I was supposed to come here,” he continued, “but nothing has happened. The only thing that’s been different is you. You’re the first thing that’s changed. I don’t … feel right.”

  “It isn’t right, Ben,” Zoey said. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

  “Yes, I am!” he yelled with a pained stare. “I know it! But … nothing’s happening. Why won’t something happen?”

  “Ben, I need you to listen,” Zoey said, trying to stay calm. Who knew how much time they had before the Chance Generator was used up? “Everyone outside is gone. They’re dead.”

  Ben barely reacted, he just nodded. “I know. I watched her…” He trailed off without finishing. “Why is nothing happening?”

  “It doesn’t have to be this way. We can change it.”

  “How?”

  “I’m a part of the Tower. It … made me. Long ago. It’s why I can enter and everyone else just gets absorbed and becomes a part of it and disappears.”

  For the first time Ben’s stare focused. She guessed it was because what she was saying was intriguing. From what she understood, that was a big part of who Ben was. “Absorbed?”

  Zoey retold the Tower’s explanation as best she could, but she wasn’t sure she got it right. It had been horribly confusing. Ben, however, listened to what she said, processed it, and the look in his eyes suggested he not only understood it, but that it made sense to him somehow. He looked down at the old abacus in his hand. “It’s this, isn’t it? I’m alive because I have this.”

  “Yes,” Zoey answered.

  The realization set off a chain reaction of other realizations in Ben’s mind, which Zoey knew could only point in one inevitable direction, and for him it was a horrible one. “I was … wrong,” he whispered, barely loud enough to hear. He seemed dazed. “All along, I was wrong. I wasn’t supposed to be here.”