Extra Life

I had maybe a few seconds to recall everything I knew about driving a car from the three or four training sessions I had with Mom. I held my breath and eased the car out backwards, shifted into drive. At the main road, I flicked the left turn signal and waited, counting the seconds.

  Behind the gate, blue uniforms converged in the courtyard like a whole football team in a pile-on tackle. A glimpse of my father’s gray sweatpants in the center of it all. The crowd broke and there was Kasper Vale with his hands cuffed behind his back.

  That’s when I knew for sure that Dad’s plan was no plan at all. He’d totally winged it, and he failed. The guy could invent a time travel device, but he couldn’t figure out how to break into a building without instantly attracting the attention of the entire Cape Fear Police Department.

  As much as I wanted to, I didn’t cry out. I didn’t ram the gate with the car or throw myself at the mercy of the lawmen. Nothing but my own arrest would come of it. So I played a random passer-by rubbernecking for a glimpse of the ruckus at the Rush building. Don’t mind me, just taking a shortcut home.

  What else could I have done? I left my father to his fate. Took that turn and drove.

  I CLIPPED an SUV at an intersection and scraped a long thread of paint off its passenger door. I wouldn’t have realized if not for the chorus of horns. Without a backward glance I left the scene of the accident, because why did it matter now? Dad was arrested and Paige was dead.

  Nearing twenty-four hours with no sleep. So exhausted, I could hardly climb the main staircase in my house. Up ahead in my room the lights were on, the doorway open. Russ 2.0 lay sprawled on my mattress, hands behind his head, thinking, while Connie manned the keyboard and monitor at my desk.

  I stood there for a few seconds before anyone noticed.

  “You,” 2.0 said, bolting upright. “What are you doing here?”

  When Connie turned, his glazed eyes cleared fast. He glanced back and forth between the twin Russ replicas as if he forgot which was which.

  The computer monitor displayed a familiar video: Bobby Parker and Savannah Lark seated in a booth at the Silver Bullet, playing characters who weren’t themselves. The footage I recorded just a few hours earlier.

  I didn’t have to ask where Connie got the video. He must’ve salvaged the memory stick from the camera I smashed against that brick wall across the street from Paige’s.

  2.0 rolled off his bed and came at me with an open hand. I flinched, but all he did was press his palm against the side of my face, probed my skin with his fingers, staring. Nothing happened to correct the paradox. No sick mutant melding together of our flesh, no body molecules suddenly unsure which Russ to cling to.

  His own face was so slack with idiotic wonder, I was embarrassed for us.

  “I still can’t believe it,” he said.

  “Believe it,” I said. This had to be exactly how schizophrenics experienced their lives. Like me, Russ 2.0 was also wearing a hoodie. I noted the sliver glint of our cell phone, peeking out from the belly pouch.

  “Time warp? I’d never do anything so stupid,” he claimed.

  “Hindsight, Monday Morning Quarterback, and all that, brother.”

  I swung a fist at his stomach. His abs clenched and my sudden sneak attack put him off balance. He stumbled backward into the dresser, toppled a pile of clean laundry we had both forgot to put away.

  I had the cell phone in my hand, neatly pickpocketed.

  “Guess I should’ve expected that,” 2.0 complained.

  “You of all people,” I said.

  Connie stayed out of it. He returned to the keyboard, minimized the video display to uncover the WCPF local news station site, and dialed up the volume so we could all hear. It was aerial shots from a helicopter. Cruisers on a roadside somewhere.

  For a second, I thought he was showing late breaking news of Dad’s arrest.

  He wouldn’t look at me, but I saw his tortured expression reflected in the screen clear enough.

  “You’re the outsider here,” 2.0 told me. “And you’re a disaster. Look.”

  The news clip wasn’t about my father after all. Chopper footage showed a single-vehicle accident, a car crushed against a telephone pole. The front end was a squeezed accordion, but the back was all I needed to guess the make and model. Only one guy in town had an Aston Martin Rapide.

  The voice-over reporter solemnly intoned Bobby Keene-Parker’s name. A high-speed wreck, emergency airlift to New Hanover Hospital, critical condition. Then, they cut to a live shot of movie mogul Marv Parker outside one of the Silver Screen sound stages. He was a thick man with a trimmed beard and sunglasses to keep his dead eyes from view. Couldn’t be bothered to rush to his son’s hospital bedside, apparently.

  Marv Parker told the press, deadpan, “Kid’s been on a self-destruction streak for a long time now, so frankly I’m not surprised. Ruined a beautiful car. Eventually a parent’s got to let go. The boy’s responsible for his own screw-ups, you know? He’s got to realize there’s a lot of people in this business depending on him.”

  The minions crowded behind Marv Parker tried their best not to grimace.

  I’d thought those hours at the Silver Bullet were the only stretch of perfection I managed during this disastrous second pass. But I was drunk on my own glory. Didn’t pay enough attention to the way Bobby got up and sped off as soon as the torture of recording his scenes was over.

  He left distracted, his emotions scraped hollow from the inside out. All that daddy subtext must’ve wormed into his thoughts, took his mind off the road…

  “This happened after you finished shooting your video,” 2.0 said. “This, and Paige. I don’t know what you did. What I know is you’re not me—because I’d never go around hurting people like this, knowing what would happen.”

  “But I didn’t… I wouldn’t…” I tried to say. He didn’t even know about Dad’s arrest yet.

  The movie posters on my walls, the close-up faces of Batman and Tyler Durden and Walter White and Imperator Furiosa and Dr. Manhattan all glared at me. My jury, just waiting to have their unanimous guilty verdict read aloud by the court.

  My alarm clock read 6:58. Less than two minutes to go.

  “Look,” I pleaded. “The message told me I had one shot and I had to take it. The message was from me, from the future, so why wouldn’t I?”

  “I don’t know… common sense?” 2.0 said.

  “We suck at common sense and you know it,” I said.

  The phone buzzed in my hand just as the clock flipped to 6:59. Right on schedule, the text from the future coming through. Take the leap, it would offer, just like last time.

  2.0 leaped for the phone, caught me off guard, and a tangled mess of Horace Vales bounced onto the bed. Lookalike pairs of hands grabbing for the phone. I clutched his arm. We put me in a headlock. He elbowed his face.

  The phone spun out of our hands and dropped to the floor at Connie’s feet. He leaned forward in his chair, hands squeezing both armrests. The phone was Connie’s for the taking.

  We froze and looked at him, but he hesitated.

  “Connie,” 2.0 said.

  Connie picked up the phone. “You’re my best friend,” he said. “You’re both my best friend. I didn’t know which one of you to trust, except that you… you’re the one causing all of this.”

  The phone buzzed a second time. Seven p.m. The Pastime Project had arrived.

  “Connie,” I said. “Please be careful. You could mess up everything.”

  2.0 squirmed out from underneath me, shoved me into the headboard, and slid off the bed. I thought he’d take the phone from his accomplice, but instead he backed away from both of us, toward the open closet. He crouched in there, enveloped by the hanging clothes.

  Then he shut himself inside.

  “Do it, Connie,” he called out from behind the door. “Like we decided.”

  My attention snapped back to the guy with the phone, my best friend, just as he pressed the icon. An arm’s length out of reach,
I couldn’t stop him in time.

  Too late I realized: 2.0 had ducked into the closet so he wouldn’t get caught in the wormhole.

  I screamed, “Stop!”

  But it wasn’t what I expected, as usual. Connie didn’t take the leap for himself. Instead, he turned the display against me, and I was bathed once again in a blast of bright white light.

  WHAM, I was awake. Just like that.

  But I didn’t know where I was or how long I was gone, not until total recall smacked me across the skull. Then I realized I’d lost barely a second of time. A nanosecond. My hands were still clutching at nothing. If I was screaming before, I was screaming still.

  Naked on my bed. Pins and needles head to toe.

  This time I knew exactly what happened to me: a program created by my father sent a localized black hole cycloning out from my phone, and it spun me in its vortex at such an absurd speed that my molecules stretched like sugar in a cotton candy machine.

  Like, instant death. Except now I was reconstituted and deposited on a precise point in the space-time continuum. Born again, the new Horace Vale, same as the old Horace Vale.

  My alarm clock bleep bleep bleeped. I whacked snooze but the racket kept going. No actual time was displayed—just random digital dashes. Glitches. I found the cord, pulled the plug. The clock went blank.

  Over on my desk, my computer clicked away at a frantic round of internal processing and spit the results onto the monitor in a running trail of alpha-numeric Matrix-style nonsense. The toy lightsaber in my closet was firing off the electronic sizzle it was only supposed to do when it hit something. And when it sported batteries that hadn’t been dead for at least four years.

  I knew 2.0 was not inside that closet. Connie was gone, too. Empty desk chair. Or it was me who left them behind. Or maybe their time line was completely deleted. Or the fabric of the universe was so twisted now, I didn’t know when or where the hell I was.

  Footsteps pounded in the hall. I got my bearings enough to sit upright before my surprise visitor arrived. It turned out to be Dad, out of breath, gripping both sides of my doorframe. He was home and safe and sound, not locked away in a city holding tank for breaking and entering. He was still wearing his morning bathrobe over the sweats.

  I laughed aloud to see him here, pardoned of his crime because he never actually committed it. His presence in my doorway had to mean the whole day was reset, back to seven a.m.

  Bobby Keene-Parker would soon be cruising around in his pristine Rapide.

  Paige Davis would be alive.

  Everything could be fixed or rigged never to happen in the first place.

  “Um…” Dad said, and averted his eyes.

  Because, you know, I was naked. I made a fast sleeping bag out of my comforter and then waved my hands at him, insisting, “no, no, no, I wasn’t…”

  “No, no,” Dad parroted, urgently agreeing with whatever it was I was going to say. He pulled the door almost shut to give me privacy, then spoke through the crack. “Don’t be embarrassed, son. I was a teenage boy once—”

  “Dad—no! It wasn’t that. Come in here.”

  He eased back into the room, but it took him a couple tries to actually look at me. By then I’d pulled on a pair of shamefully old Despicable Me boxer shorts. All this awkwardness was Dad’s fault, actually. He was the one who invented a time-space transport that rejected all carry-on items, including clothes.

  “I heard you screaming,” he explained. “Are you home sick today?”

  “Sick? No. Maybe? But something is definitely wrong.”

  “What happened to your eye?” Dad asked.

  Before I could answer, the barrage of meaningless script on my Mac smash-cut to a video feed, even though I didn’t touch the computer. The speakers filled will the hissing white noise of an open mic, demanding our attention.

  Once again, the talking head news anchor for today’s webcast was your host, Horace Vale. There he was on my monitor, without my distinctive black eye.

  Video Russ leaned in and said, “Dad—Russ? God, I hope you get this recording. We tried to time it for right after your leap.” Static interference crackled through his voice. The video feed digitized and wobbled like a roving weather update from the worst stretch of a hurricane.

  Dad crouched into the desk chair and slipped on his reading glasses.

  “Hello?” he said to the screen.

  “It’s not a Skype session, Dad,” I said. “It’s pre-recorded.”

  “I can barely see it. Is that you on there?” Dad said.

  Video Russ went on, “We’re transmitting this back, but we can only do it once, so—” Most of what he said next was garbled by ear-splitting static, laced with snippets of random music beats accidentally borrowed from some other frequency:

  “…warning… pay attention… no matter what…” Not a great time for bad reception. I slapped the screen as if violence would solve something, but of course it didn’t. This was a transmission through time, not a jammed jukebox.

  “Is this a school project of yours?” Dad asked.

  I shushed him. This recording wasn’t the same Video Russ who spammed me the original pitch for the Pastime Project. At least, it didn’t seem to be the same video shoot. The first one used a steady camera and professional framing. This one was slapped together stat, totally amateurish. This Video Russ used the jittery selfie-cam method, the final victim’s desperate plea for rescue in a found footage horror flick.

  “…someone else… not just you…” Video Russ went on. The image flipped to negative, went to black, stabilized, pixelated, froze. The static inhaled and exhaled. I couldn’t make any sense of it, except when Video Russ said, “You have to stop the leaps.” I caught that message with sky-blue clarity.

  “Stop the leaps?” Dad asked.

  “Shhhh!”

  “…every time you leap… messing with the space-time fabric… holes… through the wormholes… glitches… someone else besides you…”

  At that, the video cut off for good. Just a blinking cursor on a black screen, and then the random characters tumbling merrily along again. Dad leaned back in the chair, took off his glasses, scratched his scruffy cheek with an earpiece. He stared at the screen like he could actually read that gibberish—and who knows? Maybe he could.

  “Did you catch much of that?” I asked him.

  “Space-time fabric?” he asked. “Wormholes?”

  “Exactly,” I said, squeezing between him and the computer to grab his full attention. His eyes drifted up to mine. “To be clear, you never told me about the time travel program you developed for Rush Fiberoptics, right? You never said squat about mini-black holes and algorithms and tiny tilt-a-whirls fueled by cosmic energy—”

  “Negative energy,” Dad said. Even flabbergasted, he had to correct me.

  “Whatever. The point is, as far as you know, you never breathed a word about your top-secret experiments to me because this shit was way too dangerous to leak into the world, right? Stuff you couldn’t even trust your teenage son with. Am I right?”

  “But—then—how?” he asked.

  “Because we’ve had this conversation already, Dad.”

  His face went slack with the weight of understanding.

  “Or we will, later today,” I said. “Listen, your theoretical time-travel device has been developed, and I used it. Twice. Just now. That’s why I showed up naked out of thin air, and why we just watched a video of me from the future.”

  “Russ, hold on a second—”

  “No time, Dad. I already had to waste time convincing you once before—or actually later—and we ran the clock down. So now you have to just listen. We’ve got twelve hours to figure this thing out. You heard the guy: I can’t use the program again. I’m screwing with reality here and making it worse every time.”

  “Twelve hours?” Dad said.

  “Half a day, seven a.m. to seven p.m.—that’s the span of the leap.”

  “But, no, this can’t… ther
e were so many insurmountable technical problems and inconsistencies at the prototype stage. Not just negative energy, but radioactive decay, safety concerns. I never really got this thing out of the brainstorming stage.”

  “Here and now you didn’t. But something changes, eventually.”

  “Yes… yes, I see,” he said. But then his face soured. “No.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “A time machine couldn’t be used to change the past. The slightest change creates a paradox, because now the world is no longer the world in which the time machine was invented. Do you see? Paradoxes can’t happen. Schrödinger’s cat can’t be both dead and alive in the box, unless…”

  I planted my hands on both sides of his face and brought our eyes just a few inches apart. “I don’t know about a cat, Dad, but I’m here, in my own past. This is the third time I’ve lived through this morning.”

  “My God, Hugh Everett was right all along.”

  “Who’s Hugh Everett?”

  “That band you like, the Eels? They did the songs for that ogre thing—”

  “Shrek soundtrack, and it’s you who likes the Eels, but what’s your point?”

  “The main guy,” Dad said, “Mark Everett, well, his father was Hugh Everett the Third, a quantum physicist with honestly almost zero clout in the field because he developed the Many-Worlds Interpretation to solve the Schrödinger problem, and everyone thought he was a fool.

  “Everett said the only way to avoid paradoxes is parallel universes, discrete from one another. Nearly infinite multiple realities branching off like grape clusters, each just slightly different from the other. What happens in one doesn’t affect the others. If it were possible to jump between them…”

  Parallel worlds. So that was it. I wasn’t warping back into my own time line after all. That was a logical impossibility. Instead, those patented Pastime Project wormholes were sucking me into the near past of another universe, one almost identical to mine, but still different.

  There I was, proof of a concept that physicists would only take seriously in mathematical theory. Consider our known universe, Dad explained. You know, the one that’s still in mid-explosion after the Big Bang fourteen billion years ago? The one with three dimensions and particles of matter floating inside a vast shell of empty space? Well, this universe is only one of an infinite series of them, trillions upon trillions born and dying at every millisecond.