Selfless Series Box Set

by S Breaker

  Laney couldn’t believe what was happening. She was still staring at the man, sprawled and bleeding on the grass behind the bushes. Was it real? She made a face, then looked up at Jake, still heaving. “Is…is he…dead?”

  “Not yet.”

  “W-what are you, like a…ninja or something?” Laney asked, dumbly.

  “I’m a scientist,” he replied, deadpan.

  Laney shot him a yeah-right look.

  He met her gaze, shrugging to add, “But I trained in Special Forces for a few years. Our lab is funded by the government military branch.”

  “And, and…who is that?” She wanted to know, pointing to the man all in a heap.

  Jake didn’t mince words. “An assassin sent to kill you.”

  Her jaw dropped at his bluntness.

  He put up a hand, delaying any further reaction from her. “Listen—listen to me, both our worlds, if not perhaps all of them, are in danger.” He paused as if to convey the gravity of the situation. “Laney, you were right.” He furrowed his eyebrows, looking into her eyes. “We need your help.”

  Laney was having difficulty tearing her gaze away from his intense one.

  This was insane. Jake Donovan from another dimension was asking for her help to save the world—several worlds. It was more than insane. It was plain absurd.

  “Jake—”

  “My name is not Jake,” he cut in sharply.

  “Really? Why?”

  He shot her a strange look. “It just isn’t, alright? I don’t know why some things are different and some things are the same. I can’t explain all the parallel worlds to you. Nobody can.”

  “Alright, alright, jeez, calm down.” She put up her hands in defeat. “So, not-Jake Donovan, what would you like me to call you instead?”

  He made a half-groan, half-sigh sound. “It’s Noah.”

  Alternatively

  Friday, 20 March 2020 5:30 a.m.

  “Noah!” Laney called as he ran way ahead of her. She was completely exhausted. “Slow down!”

  By the time Laney caught up with Noah, he had stopped behind an abandoned white delivery truck in front of a tall building. It must have been undergoing construction, with its last few floors baring its metal framing structure, the wind blowing through the paper sheet covers on the windows on several floors.

  He was looking around furtively.

  “Did we lose them yet?” Laney asked, gasping, rubbing her hands over her arms in the freezing cold, as her clothes were still wet from the rain.

  Noah looked intently at the glowing holographic update display (HUD) hovering above his left forearm, tapping a few keys seemingly in mid-air. “I wouldn’t count on it,” he answered.

  The rain had abated, but it was still dark. It seemed like they had run deeper into the city. Laney looked around. She still didn’t know where the hell they were.

  The whole city looked deserted—more old-fashioned cars were stopped in the middle of the streets, some having crashed onto other cars, or onto building facades with faded, cracked brickwork, fallen rusty bicycles dotted the road, a vaguely iconic-looking red double-decker bus lay on its side at the far end of the street, almost out of view. There was also no trace of any other people around, not even animals. She couldn’t hear any crickets or birds, and the only things wandering the streets were scraps of wet paper and rubbish, blowing around randomly in the wind. Several doors to apartment buildings across the street had been left swung wide open. It was as though everyone had left in a hurry and had dropped everything to leave right away.

  “What…happened here?” she wanted to know, half-dreading the answer to her question.

  “This is the dead city. Ground zero,” Noah replied.

  Laney swallowed. “Ground zero. For what?”

  He sighed, exasperated. Then as if it was no big deal, he relayed, “The global cascade bomb that nearly obliterated all organic life on our world sixty-seven years ago.”

  “Th-the what?” Laney gasped in shock, horrified.

  Her eyes widened as she took a second look around. So, everyone didn’t leave right away. They…vaporized? She shivered in dread all over again. “Do we need to worry about like radiation or something?” she asked, as she had like zero knowledge about bombs.

  “This type of bomb has a different residue, not quite radiation. Although theoretically, the mean lifetime of the active element would have decayed decades ago,” Noah explained almost absently, then he shot her a slightly annoyed look. “Look, can you keep up?” he said. “We’ve already missed the rendezvous window and we’re nowhere near where we need to be.

  Laney braced her hands on her knees, still trying to catch her breath, and shot him an annoyed look right back. “Hey, we’ve been running all night,” she said, haltingly. “I don’t know about the Laney from your world, but this one is not a triathlon champion.”

  He stopped short but didn’t respond to her statement. “Come on.” He motioned, leading them through a gap in the broken wire fence surrounding the construction site, and toward the fire exit door on the side of the building.

  Then he took something out of his jacket pocket and crouched down by the door. He attached some type of gadget under the knob and fiddled with the HUD on his arm again.

  Laney frowned, watching him. “What is that thing on your arm?”

  Noah glanced up at her, before replying briefly, “It’s new tech.”

  She heard clicks and whirrs and then a soft shush as Noah popped the door open.

  “Let’s go.” He gestured her inside first, himself looking around cautiously to make sure they weren’t being followed before he went in and shut the door behind them.

  Laney looked up at the ominous flight of steps in the dark, making a face. “This isn’t any better,” she told him.

  “I’m not getting much signal down here. We need to get up higher,” he said, pocketing his gadget and starting up the stairs.

  She moaned. “I’m pretty sure I can’t do stairs right now. Can’t I just stay down here and wait for you?”

  Noah was already a good fifteen steps up ahead of her. “Your choice.” His disembodied voice floated down.

  She made a face, looking around the creepy, pitch dark stairwell then shivered again, before jumping to, and following him up. “Alright already,” she grumbled.

  “Too bad I don’t have a Fitbit,” she mused aloud after a while. “I’d probably get all the ‘Daily Climb’ badges in no time.” She paused to breathe. “I’m guessing you guys don’t have Fitbit here.” She paused again. “I’m guessing you guys probably don’t have a lot of things here.”

  No reaction from Noah.

  She tried to peer up at him. She couldn’t even tell if he was still up there.

  “And I guess you’re not one for small talk—so totally not Jake Donovan.” She sighed, continuing up the stairs again. “You know,” she called up to him. “Not that slogging up a million steps and running for my life isn’t super fun,” she said sarcastically. “But it would be nice if I actually knew why I’m running for my life. Like that guy back at school, you know that ‘assassin’ that you beat up—”

  “You’re welcome, by the way.”

  She blinked with a start. So, he was still up there somewhere, she thought, a bit relieved.

  “Seriously, I don’t even remember—where the hell are you?” she interjected, trying to peer up at him again. “What happened after you activated the quantum shear. Like, so I remember you beat up the guy, then you took out one of your gadgety things, and then…” She tried to recall, but for some reason everything beyond that, and before she appeared at the river, was all a blur. “I don’t even remember when we got separated.”

  Noah appeared out of a dark corner. “This way.” He motioned her to follow him out onto an empty floor. There were plastic sheets still hanging off the ceiling, woodwork benches in one corner, sawdust under a thick layer of actual dust looked to cover the floor. “Should buy us some time,” he said. “The trac
kers will be expecting us on the ground. Most of them will be on foot.”

  “Most of them? What, the others can fly?” she mocked, then caught his even gaze and cleared her throat. “Right…” She shrugged, feeling ridiculously ignorant. Who even knew what kind of technological advancements they had in this world? And if the gadgets that she had seen so far were anything to go by, all bets were off.

  The first streaks of daylight caught Laney’s gaze, and she walked toward the floor-to-ceiling windows. She pressed her hands against the dirty glass panel, with the big ‘X’ still taped on it, to look outside and caught her breath at the view.

  A circuitous river cut through the city, with several bridges spanning across its width at certain points along its length. Ferry boats were still moored along the river, and the golden sunrise was peeking through the thick layer of clouds beyond the horizon, above the rows upon rows of gothic-architecture buildings. The dead city, true to its name, was completely dead. No organic life meant there weren’t even any plants, gardens, or trees—nothing green anyway. But in the first light of the day, the ghostly gray of everything looked completely peaceful, even with its own beauty.

  “Wow,” she breathed.

  Noah looked up at her from across the room. He didn’t seem surprised at her reaction, but his expression was melancholy, wistful.

  Laney couldn’t even begin to comprehend what it would have been like to have your entire world blown up and grow up with the knowledge that nothing was what it was supposed to be. Noah had probably seen more things in his life that he wanted to forget than she could ever imagine.

  “Did you live here?” she asked, almost sympathetically.

  He shook his head, but his tone remained nonchalant. “Everyone lives on the other side of the world, where those who’d survived the initial blast all moved to. On our part of the world, things have mostly recovered. But here—” He paused. “Nothing has lived here for sixty-seven years.”

  Laney shook her head, her gaze still cast across the view. “That’s funny. With those kinds of buildings, the architecture, this city almost looks like London, you know, with that river.” She pointed toward the winding river. “And the many bridges.”

  Noah tilted his head slightly in recognition.

  “What?”

  “This place was called London.”

  Laney shook her head in disagreement. “No, no, I mean, I should be able to see the London Eye from up here or at least The Shard. This can’t be London.”

  “Perhaps not the exact same London from your world,” Noah supplied. “This city has been dead for decades.”

  A look of recognition dawned in Laney’s eyes. “Right,” she mumbled. “That’s why everything looked so old-fashioned. It’s like time stopped here, otherwise, this place would have become the London I know.”

  She nodded as if everything registered in her brain with a click. “Wow,” she said in wonderment. “Do you suppose we even shared the same history until the 1950s? Wouldn’t it be fascinating to compare, like, how small or how big the differences are between our worlds since our histories deviated?”

  Noah shot her a strange look. “Fascinating?” he echoed, as though suspicious about the word.

  Laney nodded eagerly. “Wouldn’t you think so?”

  He looked at her for a long time. It was as though he wanted to say something more, but he just turned back to his HUD.

  Crumble

  “You didn’t answer my question earlier,” Laney spoke up. “That guy, the one who tried to kill me, and those trackers who wreaked havoc in my room the other night. They were all looking for something—a Zeta something. What is it anyway?”

  Noah didn’t look up from his HUD. “We’re already running out of time,” was his evasive response.

  “You keep saying that,” she drawled. “But what exactly are we running out of time for?” she asked. “I mean, I know it’s bad. And I know it’s today. But what is it? What’s going to happen?”

  He shot her a look, hesitating. “Do you know what spacetime is?”

  “Of course,” Laney replied dismissively.

  He narrowed his eyes at her, dubious.

  She blinked again. “I mean,” she began. “I know it’s like a science thing.”

  “Spacetime is the fabric of the multiverse within which all our worlds exist,” he stated as if he was talking to a child. “Do you know what a wormhole is?”

  She pursed her lips.

  “What do you learn in school?” he asked in disbelief.

  She made another face. “Once again,” she said, gesturing to herself from top to bottom. “Normal person. Not genius nerd.”

  Noah rolled his eyes. “Do you remember the quantum shear?” he asked. “The swirling vortex of doom, I think you called it.”

  Laney blinked. “Yes. That, I remember.”

  “Good,” he acknowledged. “Look, the main thing is, there’s a device. It makes it possible for a person to open and, more importantly, stabilize quantum shears, these rifts in spacetime, to move back and forth between two distinct realities.”

  “Okay.”

  Noah blinked hard. “No.” He shook his head. “Not okay. You’re not comprehending the gravity of the situation. The discovery of inter-dimension travel is an incredible breakthrough, an incredibly big deal in the scientific community,” he relayed pointedly. “We’d been working on the theories for years before the first anchor device was even created. But like I told you before, our lab is funded by the government. So technically, they own all our research—including the Zeta device. And government bureaucracy is…well, they’re not all geniuses.”

  “Aha.”

  Noah was still shaking his head. “We did a simulation based on the forecasting model, and the results all predict that today, Friday, the 20th of March 2020, at 2120 hours, will be an ideal window, that if someone—the wrong someone—decides to open a persistent quantum shear to invade another world, there will be absolutely no stopping them. But what they’re ignoring, what these idiots have decided to dismiss as negligible, is the probability that they’re going to cause a break in the spacetime continuum.” He paused again. “Effectively erasing us all from existence. And life as we know it will be over. Everywhere.”

  Laney wanted to say that she felt like she was already there, but the expression on his face was grave enough. She mused out loud, carelessly, “I still don’t understand what any of this has to do with me.”

  “Well, obviously, the government bureaucracies in my world really want this device back—badly. And unfortunately, they think you have it.”

  She stifled an incredulous laugh. “Why the heck would they think that?”

  “Because…you created it, Laney.”

  Laney’s jaw dropped. “Say what?”

  Noah was again preoccupied with his HUD, which was just as well since his last statement had rendered Laney absolutely gobsmacked. After a moment, he glanced up at her briefly to say, “Step away from the windows.”

  Laney swallowed and blinked hard. “Ho-hold on. I’m still trying to recover from the fact that suddenly—inexplicably—this is all somehow my fault.”

  “Well, technically it wasn’t you that created it,” Noah answered. “The Laney of this world did. But that doesn’t stop the government from thinking that you have it. ”

  Laney rolled her eyes. “Well, that’s ridiculous,” she remarked. “Why don’t you just ask the real Laney where this thingy is? For that matter, why don’t they?”

  Noah stiffened. “Where do you think Laney’s been for the past two months?”

  Laney felt her stomach drop down to her toes. “Oh.” She swallowed hard again, feeling cold dread all over.

  “Yeah,” Noah confirmed flatly then shot her another brief look. “Again, would you please step away from the windows?”

  She sighed out loud. “I guess for a bunch of geniuses, you all aren’t so bright,” she quipped. “See, this is what happens when scientific discoveries are made wit
hout considering the consequences—you know, Jurassic Park was all over it,” she relayed, offhand.

  He glanced up, looking irritated, but he froze, his expression changing as he narrowed his eyes.

  Before she could even prompt to ask what he was looking at, Noah’s eyes widened, and what Laney realized too late was that a couple of combat drones had fired rockets into the huge glass windows right behind her.

  Noah was clear across the room but he dove for her, and the next thing Laney saw was a shower of broken glass and concrete exploding. She screamed and closed her eyes.

  They slid across the floor, skidding to a stop inches away from a still-intact concrete support beam. Laney hadn’t even caught her breath yet when the drones fired again into the levels underneath them, causing the floor to tremble.

  “We have to go. We have to go now!” Noah yelled, helping her up to her feet, so they could start running toward the staircase.

  They hadn’t even reached halfway across before more rockets destabilized the building structure, making the floor crumble like thin ice on a frozen lake, starting from the far end of the room. Laney’s heels scraped the floor as she began to slide again, headed straight for the edge of the building, to a two-hundred-foot drop to the ground.

  She started to scream again, just as her arm caught on something. She looked up. “Hold on!” Noah called, as he managed to hang on to a steel support beam.

  But the drones were intent to collapse the entire building, and the floor started to give way altogether.

  “Laney, we have to jump,” Noah called out.

  “We have to what?”

  “Just hold on!”

  “No, no, no—!” Laney squeezed her eyes shut as they plummeted from some fifteenth floor of the building, expecting the pain from the ground when they landed. But there was none. Instead, it felt as though they were hit by a strong puff of air, stopping their fall a few inches before hitting face-first on the pavement. “Ugh,” she grunted. “What the hell?” She looked over at Noah. Whatever it was, it was generated from Noah’s HUD.