Extra Life

by Derek Nikitas

  Paige stepped between me and Connie, like she expected me to take a swing at him. Instead, I pointed an accusing finger, straight over the top of her head. “I figured you out, Connie. You been soaking up my dad’s time-travel intel for months,” I told him. “So you probably knew the lowdown on this program long before it ever popped up on my phone. In fact, I think you put it there. Like, the most elaborate prank of all time, just to get back at me for the helicopter thing.”

  He clenched his fists against his stomach, trying not to freak. “I don’t even care about the helicopter,” he said. “I forgave—I forgave you for that, like you asked. And I can’t—I can’t answer for things I never even did, or things you think I’m going to do.”

  “Convenient,” I said. “You’re going to tell me you weren’t the one who made up that fake account for Paige on Facebook or thefacebook or whatever? You make up weird aliases on there all the time. It’s your modus operandi.”

  “Russ, no—” Paige tried to interrupt.

  “For fun, not because—” Connie pleaded.

  “Did you have anything to do with this?” I asked. I showed him the bloody mess wrapped around my hand wound. I couldn’t imagine him taking a slice out of me or Paige, but people can surprise you.

  He went pale and slumped back into his desk chair.

  “Are you serious?” Paige asked me.

  “I don’t know,” I said, confidently.

  “You know what I know?” she said. “The only way I can tell Russes apart is by who’s the biggest asshole.”

  “You kissed me!”

  “My mistake,” Paige snapped. “And by the way, where is everybody else? Where’s the Russ we met at the Silver Bullet, the one you left with. How do I know you’re not him?”

  They really hadn’t heard. Paige didn’t know that Russ 3.0 was dead—if that was the right word for his sudden nonexistence. She didn’t know about the brief and wild flame that was Future Russ, now vanished in the crash. Russes everywhere, multiplying. Even as I opened my mouth to lie or explain, I realized who was missing from this debate—yet another Russ. The original, Virgin.

  “Woah, wait a minute,” I said. “Where’s your other Russ? Virgin Russ?”

  Silence. Paige looked to Connie for guidance, the two of them still conspiring.

  “Tell me, damn it,” I said.

  “He went home almost an hour ago,” Connie volunteered. “His—your dad called. He said he had a huge breakthrough.”

  DAD BROUGHT the wrong me home. It could’ve happened a dozen different ways—dropped calls, broken cell phones, phones in the wrong hands. Lost in his calculations, Dad could’ve easily gotten confused about which Russ he was calling. Didn’t really matter now how it happened, and there was no time to question Connie and Paige about it. I had to get back to my father. I had to find out what he discovered.

  I’m sure Connie would’ve let me borrow his bike if I asked, but I didn’t ask. When I coasted out from under the canopy of live oaks on Market, the sun made me wish I had shades. Big switch from the artificial static gray that covered the sky a few hours earlier, too fast to be the result of natural shift in the cloud cover.

  Was it possible—glitches in the Grand Design on the scale of weather patterns? Video Russ warned me that my leaps were wreaking havoc on communications networks, and Marv Parker said the whole eastern seaboard was struck with electrical outages, but this was way bigger. The natural world itself, the laws of the physical world recalibrated, and it was all my fault. Nobody wants to screw up that badly.

  I got home in a record three minutes, dumped the bike in my yard, and rushed inside. Upstairs, the collapsible attic ladder was lowered to the hallway floor as usual. Dad never remembered to retract it, no matter how many times Mom sternly reminded him. I climbed with some stealth, just until my eyes cleared floor level.

  Up in the attic, Virgin Russ was in a fold-out chair holding a camera at arm’s length aimed back at himself while my father slouched above his work station. Dad had designed the computer setup, stacking four Mac shells to hold all the hardware he used. Cables and wires webbed the floor, a large-scale model of a motherboard. Or, as Mom liked to call it, the world’s worst fire hazard.

  “Action,” Dad said, tapping a keyboard key. His triptych of monitors captured a single screen shot repeated in triplicate: the camera-eye view of Virgin Russ, ready to deliver his selfie video pitch.

  Virgin cleared his throat and squirmed in his seat. He said into the camera, “Hi, Russ. It’s me—you—from the future. This is all pretty strange for me, but I guess you’re getting used to the idea by now…”

  I’d seen this setup before. Same Russ, same clothes, same plain white backdrop. Virgin Russ was the one I saw in the video recording on my bedroom computer. He was not the Video Russ who sent me the Pastime Project and encouraged me to take the leap. He was Danger Russ, who sent the warning message back in time so Dad and I would received it at 1 p.m. Dad was closing the loop here, creating the very same video he had watched four hours earlier.

  “Wait—cut. That’s not right,” Dad said. He smacked a key, scratched his cheek, carefully considered the setup. He stood hunched in his bathrobe like Igor the mad scientist’s assistant.

  “It didn’t work?” Virgin Russ asked him.

  “You’re not saying exactly what you said. What the you in the video said. It was a warning about something else coming through…” Dad’s voice trailed off as he noticed me climbing the rest of the way up the ladder.

  “Holy Crap,” Virgin said, bolting upright at the sight of me.

  “Surreal, yes. It’s a huge deal, but you’ll get used to it,” I said.

  Dad pounced across the room and grasped me by both shoulders. “Which one are you?” he asked. His heavy breath smelled like an espresso machine after a full day’s work.

  “I’m One O’clock Russ. The one you watched this video with.”

  “Good—good. Maybe you’ll remember…” Dad was in full DEFCON 3 mode. He fumbled back to his desk and sifted through notepads and empty coffee mugs. He said, “The grid’s been haywire all afternoon, so the firewall at Rush Fiberoptics was a mess. Hacking in went considerably smoother than I expected.”

  He bumped his head on the ceiling, stopped talking. He seemed to have forgotten which Russ he was addressing. No matter: he flipped through the pages of a yellow notepad, then showed us both the shower of hieroglyphs he’d scratched across one sheet. “Once I got access to the prototype in Rush’s network,” he explained. “I figured out what big breakthrough they made after I left the company.”

  “And?” I asked.

  “And nothing. There was no breakthrough,” Dad said.

  Somewhere was a breakthrough, but not here, not this world. I felt like a guy waking up in a buried casket. You know you’re still alive and the world you left is only a few feet away, but you’re doomed. There’s no way to get back.

  “But…” Dad said. “I pulled some info off your Mac.”

  He nodded toward the junk leftovers of my computer dumped in one corner. It looked unsalvageable, but I couldn’t be mad, considering. My hard drive was probably swallowed into his monster mainframe already.

  Dad went on, bug-eyed, “I couldn’t fully recover the actual video that was sent to you from the future, but some residual code was left behind. Enough to cross reference with the prototype and activate a real, working inter-temporal signal.”

  “You reinvented the program? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Ha, not hardly,” Dad said. “You couldn’t send a whole teenager through. But information? Binary code? That’s conceivable. It got me thinking that maybe that’s what happened. We, us, here and now, we were the ones, or would be the ones, who sent, or would send, the warning video we saw this afternoon. We made the video and sent it back through time. So I decided I better fulfill the prophecy, so to speak. See if it could be done, at least.”

  “Which is why I’m here,” Virgin said.

&nb
sp; Now it made sense why Virgin Russ would be the video star instead of me. He had the wardrobe and the non-black eye, while us other Russes were running around with identical shiners, dead giveaways that we weren’t the real deal. Dad had it all figured out.

  “Except… I was wrong about the video, too,” Dad admitted.

  “Huh?” Virgin and I said, in unison.

  “There’s no way we can replicate what we received.”

  He was right. In the clip I saw, Video Russ was frantic, worried, and he used an entirely different script. This wasn’t the same scenario. There would be no way to purposefully record the version we saw earlier in the afternoon, even if we could remember exactly what Video Russ said.

  Not to mention, Virgin and Dad didn’t yet know why the leaps were bad news. They hadn’t witnessed half the malfunctions and screwy anomalies and the murderous techno-vortex I’d lived through. This Russ had no cause to be genuinely horrified the way Danger Russ clearly was when he made his video.

  Dad watched me, like he could hear me realizing. He said, “If our multiverse theory is right, then just think of all the universes where a Horace Vale received a working version of the time travel program. And somewhere in all those universes, different versions of me have figured out how to transmit messages through time and space. So the video we saw could be from anywhere. Trillions of possibilities and more.”

  “But not this reality,” I said.

  “Exactly. And somewhere there is a reality where the physics are skewed just enough that some other Kasper Vale could make a time travel program actually work. The tech would be rare indeed—but once it was discovered, it could cut across universes and paradoxically appear in realities where it was a long way from ever being invented, like here.”

  “I’m surprised this doesn’t happen all the time,” I said.

  “In 99.999999 percent of all possible realities, it doesn’t. But keep adding nines until you lose your voice or die of old age. The chances are thinner than anything you could imagine happening to you in this or any other life. Except quantum physics tells us there is a chance, no matter how slight, so it has to happen somewhere.”

  “Lucky us,” Virgin Russ quipped.

  “Right,” Dad said, and he meant it. “The chances of this happening are infinitesimally small, and yet even that tiny number is infinite. So in a sense, this is happening so often, we can’t even imagine, yet it is more rare than we could imagine.”

  We were the discoverers of the most shattering find in galactic history, right here, but also in endless elsewheres, too. Because .0000001 percent of infinity is still infinity. Endless Russes making endless leaps between dimensions, threading an imaginary needle, tying realities together, making a knotted mess of things. That kind of realization can wring out your mind with a good, hard twist.

  Maybe there were infinite Russes, but my consciousness only lived in this one. And this one, the one I called me, he was adrift from his home port, lost from his reality. I was on the verge of a panic attack. I turned and hustled down the retractable ladder, hyperventilating and hoping I wouldn’t pass out before my feet touched the landing.

  Down the main staircase. The view through the decorative front door glass showed me that a car was parked out front where there was no car five minutes before. Typical make and colors of a police cruiser.

  My gut clutched so hard I almost somersaulted down the steps. They found me, tracked me down at home, though nobody had yet rung the bell. Probably they were positioned around the yard, waiting on backup before they stormed the place and collared me for nabbing Bobby’s car. If Marv Parker was dead from a heart attack, I was probably somehow wanted for that supposed crime as well.

  I slipped into the den where the windows were wide and clear, planted my knees on the couch to get a look. No doubt it was a cruiser, but just one, parked, lights off, nobody in the driver’s seat. The decal along the body didn’t quite make sense—not at first.

  It didn’t say Cape Fear Police Department. No, it said Cape Twilight Police Department. Either fictional police were here to arrest me or—

  I turned around. My speculative script for Cape Twilight Blues was right there on the coffee table with my home address typed on the cover page. It had been left in Marv’s office, but here it was, returned to me, special delivery.

  Clear across the room in Dad’s recliner, with a drop-dead scowl, was the delivery boy himself, teen TV sensation Bobby Keene-Parker. He stood, wiped sweat off his glistening red brow. “Where’s my car?” he asked.

  The question struck me as weirdly off topic but, regardless, you can’t tell a guy you crashed his quarter-million-dollar wheels. Even if it wasn’t you, per se. I showed him both my palms. “Your car isn’t here, but it’s safe.”

  Bobby let loose an ugly, throaty groan. Bloodshot eyes and wet streaks across his cheeks meant he’d recently had a fierce crying jag. He said, “They’re all over, hunting for me, because I pulled my gun, but it was you, wasn’t it? You ruined my life.”

  “No,” I said.

  Bobby couldn’t see from my vantage, so he didn’t know Virgin Russ was taking tentative steps down the main stairs. Any second there’d be a creak and Bobby’d hear him, and the surprise would probably be just the kind of freak-out shock that would trigger Bobby’s full-on crazy.

  I shot a warning glance at Virgin on the stairs. Virgin Russ, who I had to keep safe at all cost. What happens to him, happens to us, Future Russ told me. We’re just his shadows in this world.

  Bobby stepped toward me. “You said everything would be fixed.”

  “I’m sure I didn’t tell you to give your father a heart attack.”

  He cracked a hairline fracture of a smile as he swiped an iron poker from the fireplace stand. The poker, with its curved black claw, was only a decoration, but it could still puncture a hole in my head if he swung it hard enough. He said, “Been telling me a lot of things, all right. But I got notions of my own. Like, if I get rid of y’all, everything will go back to before. No more crazy shit slipping through.”

  He took another step closer and turned, glaring straight at Virgin. “You, too,” Bobby said. So much for Virgin sneaking up and saving the day.

  If I get rid of y’all, everything will go back to before. It was another way of saying you are the virus.

  Bobby had seen enough to break a feeble mind—multiple Russ Vales, dead ones pixelating into nothing and fresh reserves teleporting into place. But he seemed immune to surprise, like he expected all this craziness, like he knew.

  “Which of y’all is fake?” Bobby asked. He toggled the poker between Virgin and me.

  Without warning, our mounted flat screen television flipped on, though nobody pressed the power button. Stereo surround burst out with a cheesy synth score at max volume. Cape Twilight Blues soundtrack music again.

  And there was Bobby-Keene Parker on screen and in character, embracing his boyfriend inside the local park bandstand, both of them sobbing about some emotional catastrophe.

  The real Bobby screeched and hurled the fire poker like a javelin. I ducked, but he wasn’t aiming for me. The poker smacked the TV screen and dropped to the floor, leaving a gouge of distorted color in the image. But Cape Twilight played on, amping up the drama with a slow zoom into close-up.

  Outside, an actual Cape Fear cruiser veered into our driveway. Another slammed its brakes just behind Bobby’s dummy car. The sight of them flooded me with relief. They had to be here to nab Bobby, not me.

  On the stairs, Dad brushed past Virgin Russ, arms loaded with notebooks. The hem of his bathrobe billowing behind him. I don’t know what Dad was thinking. He must’ve heard the sirens and thought they were coming for him. Maybe it was some inter-dimensional trace memory of his arrest in another life. Or maybe he was just paranoid. Either way, Dad was oblivious to the real and present threat right there in his living room.

  Bobby reached around to the back of his waistband. Brought out his gun one-handed, cupped it into his o
pposite palm, and shot a hole straight through his own televised face. The screen died for real this time, and so did my ears, again.

  The gunshot got Dad’s attention. He stumbled into the foyer, dropped all his notebooks on the floor and stood defenseless in his house slippers.

  Blue uniforms rushed across our yard, sidearms drawn.

  Bobby winked at me and said, “Down with tyrant fathers, right?” I couldn’t quite hear him, but I read his lips loud and clear. Then he shot my dad square in the chest.

  THE TWO of us occupied a second floor waiting room at New Hanover County Hospital. Virgin Russ and me, seated directly across from each other on the benches. We were twin brothers named Russ and Seth, so far as the police and the hospital staff knew. That was what we told them. Soon enough our lies would get riddled with holes, but neither of us was in the frame of mind to construct a more solid cover story.

  I squeezed my cell phone in my hand. Fifteen minutes till seven. After the shooting, Virgin had given it over to me willingly, no questions asked, because he had to believe he could trust me, trust himself.

  The back of my right hand was cleaned and stitched, courtesy of a triage nurse. I refused pain meds, so the hurt was wafting up my arm, stiffening all the muscles along the way. Virgin Russ glanced at it, every time my fingers moved, as if he could feel the pain.

  Behind him, a glass wall overlooked the parking lot and a baseball diamond on the back edge of the city park. Little league game in progress. A kid pitcher wound up and tossed a wild ball that hit the fence three feet to the left of the catcher. Way off target.

  Sneakers squeaks in the hallway, doctors paged on the intercom, the hum of the vending machine in the corner. The muted TV mounted in the corner showed WCPF’s coverage of the evening’s top story: a “bizarre incident” at Silver Screen Studios, no casualties reported, Marv Parker in intensive care right here at NHCH, a crashed Aston Martin, suspects fled the scene, Bobby Keene-Parker arrested at a local residence, shooting victim also rushed to the hospital... a wild convergence of events that the station had not yet pieced together.