by Daniel Price
Just as her eyelids finally fluttered on the cusp of sleep, a soft and tiny glow seized her attention. It hovered directly above her, like a distant moon or a penlight. The radiant circle spit a small object onto her nose, then disappeared in a blink.
Baffled, Mia sat up in bed and retrieved the item from her pillow. It was a small scrap of paper, tightly rolled into a stick. She turned on the lamp and unfurled the note.
You just survived the worst day of your life. I won’t say it’s all candy and roses from here, but it does get better. Hang in there. Put your faith in Amanda, Zack, and the others. They’re your family now.
The note was punctuated with a U-shaped arrow, a symbol Mia herself often used to indicate more content. She flipped the note over.
Yeah, that includes Hannah. Cut her some slack. She’s a really good person. She even saves your life.
Mia read the words over and over, her heart thumping with agitation. She remembered the curvy feminine letters of her first note, the one that had encouraged her to keep digging for air. Not only did the penmanship on this message match her memory of the original, it triggered a new and disturbing sense of familiarity.
She climbed out of bed and flipped on the desk lamp, transcribing a snippet of her note onto a blank sheet of stationery.
After comparing the two handwriting samples side by side, Mia choked back a gasp. She wasn’t sure if she should laugh or cry at the true scope of her weirdness. She wasn’t speeding or blanching. She wasn’t hearing voices or losing artwork. She was simply getting notes. Notes of prescient knowledge. Notes in her very own pen.
Mia lay awake for hours in furious bother. By the time her eyes finally closed, the darkness had given way to pink morning light. Her second day on Earth had already begun.
NINE
There were nine Silvers at the start.
Though Sterling Quint’s physicists had monitored all nine arrivals in progress, only six of the refugees made it to the Pelletier compound in Terra Vista. The remaining three signals led the Salgados to a dead woman, a dead man, and a cracked and empty bracelet.
Quint was upset to learn that he’d lost a third of his future case studies, but his benefactor strangely didn’t seem to mind. Azral assured Quint that the three fallen subjects were expendable in the grand scheme.
But what of the missing one? Quint had texted. I assume the owner of the empty bracelet is still at large.
An hour later, while Quint sat in the conference room with his new guests, the handphone on his desk lit up with a curt new message.
You’re better without him.
—
Before his cosmic migration and universal upgrade, Evan Rander wasn’t a fan of his native Earth. His favorite things in the world, in fact, were the ones that helped him escape it. Sci-fi movies. Video games. Internet smut. He was—by sight, sound, and self-acknowledgment—a geek. Even in his rare bouts of style and swagger, he resembled a meerkat with his narrow frame, sloping shoulders, and hopelessly juvenile features. At twenty-eight, he was continually mistaken for a ginger-haired boy of seventeen. He’d given up correcting people.
With each lonely year, Evan became increasingly convinced that Earth wasn’t a fan of him either. Most of his frustrations came from the pretty young women of his world, who continually rejected his awkward attempts to engage them, his creepy leers. It had been theorized in more than one ladies’ room that Evan Rander had a stack of restraining orders at home. Or worse, a stack of bodies.
If his lovely detractors could have seen inside his mind, they would have learned that his fantasies, while hardly chaste, were actually quite romantic. But after a lifetime of cold shoulders, Evan feared he didn’t have the looks to attract a suitable girlfriend. He certainly didn’t have the money. His lean existence as a part-time computer specialist had left him in a sinkhole of debt, enough to force him out of his apartment and into his father’s house in City Heights West.
No baron himself, Luke Rander was far from happy to share his meager abode. For years, his best hope for Evan was that the boy’s baffling nerd proclivities would one day lead to some profitable nerd venture. Soon his furtive disappointment began leaking out of him like sweat. No work again today, huh? You should be pounding the pavement instead of playing computer games. At least get some exercise. How do you expect to find a woman if you’re all pasty and scrawny? Guess the family name’s dying with you. No work again today, huh?
Round and round the record spun, until the stress caused Evan to wake up with ginger hairs on his pillow. The only ray of sunshine in his dismal life was Shannon Baer, a young account executive at his main worksite. Though she’d failed to make his A-squad of office lusts, she was an indisputable cutie, and she bucked the trend of her peers by treating Evan with smiles and banter. He even detected flirting when she teased him about his LEGO coffee mug.
Eager to learn her feelings without the risk of asking, Evan used his administrative access to log into her e-mail archives. She’d only invoked his name three times. The first two mentions were work related. The last one, in response to her teasing boss, was a knife in the eye.
Oh shut up. It’s not like that at all. I just feel sorry for him. Anyway, Evan’s not as creepy as everyone thinks. Of course if I ever go missing, be sure to check his basement first. :)
The next day, he returned to the office in his nicest clothes and warmest grin. After engaging Shannon in friendly chitchat, he told her he needed to install a new antivirus program on her PC. He joked that she was getting the special package, despite her misguided hatred for LEGOs. She laughed and let him do his thing.
Unfortunately for Shannon, his “thing” was a custom malware script that, at the stroke of midnight, erased her project files from her computer and every backup server. Thirteen months of work, irrevocably destroyed. For Evan Rander 1.0, it was the cruelest punishment he was capable of inflicting, though he’d spent the night imagining far worse.
His vengeance quickly backfired on him. Once his handiwork was discovered, the president of Shannon’s company had him blackballed from all his freelance agencies. With a simple series of phone calls, Evan had become a toxic commodity, unemployable.
Luke Rander gritted his lantern jaw when he learned of his son’s comeuppance. “You know, for all your flaws, I never thought you were stupid until now. But you did it. You screwed up your life, all because you couldn’t handle a little rejection.”
For the last three weeks of his endemic existence, Evan moved through the house in a grim and listless state, his thoughts frequently dancing around the handgun under his father’s bed. Maybe it was time. Maybe it was high past time to put the world out of his misery.
On the third Saturday of July, he woke up in freezing cold, his gadgets blinking in confusion. He barely had a chance to process the new peculiarities before a large, round pool of radiant white liquid bloomed on his wall like an oil slick.
Evan watched in bug-eyed wonder as a towering stranger stepped through the surface, a white-haired being of crystalline perfection. Despite his splashing entrance, there wasn’t a hint of wetness on his skin, his hair, his tieless gray business suit.
Expressionless, the man approached the bed and addressed Evan. His voice was honey smooth, peppered with an anomalous accent.
“Listen up, boy. Time is short and I have much to do. In five minutes, everything around you will cease to be. If you wish to continue living, extend your wrist quickly.”
Evan raised his arm with meek and dreamy deference. Azral’s thin lips curled in a smirk.
“Your cooperation is a welcome change. I won’t forget that.”
He procured a featureless silver bracelet from his pocket. Evan’s thoughts screamed as he watched it break into four floating elbows. They glided over Evan’s fingers, reconnecting at the thinnest part of his wrist with a clack.
“What is this?” Evan aske
d in a tiny voice. “Am I dreaming?”
“I don’t have the time or mind to explain your situation, child. Just keep your head. Stay where you arrive. Help will come for you shortly.”
Azral squinted with revulsion at the unwashed garments on Evan’s floor. “You’ll wish to find proper clothes, if you have them. Then say good-bye to your father. You won’t be seeing him again.”
Amidst all the daft and scattered notions in Evan’s head, it occurred to him that he’d rather eat his own arm than suffer one more look of disapproval from the bearish old man.
Suddenly Azral’s white brow crunched in wrathful scorn. He lurched forward and grabbed Evan by the collar.
“Only a weak man fails to honor his parents. You should be grateful. It was your father’s unique genes that saved your life today. Clearly I didn’t choose you for strength of character.”
As the fearsome stranger walked back to his white liquid portal, Evan suddenly found himself in a small pool of yellow.
“Pathetic,” said Azral, before disappearing into the breach.
Over the course of his long and lawless existence on Earth’s wild sibling, Evan would find many reasons to hate Azral Pelletier. Near the top of the list was the ridiculously short amount of time he’d given Evan to prepare for his great upheaval. He’d only just zipped his jeans over fresh boxers when the silver bracelet buzzed with life. Shirtless and barefoot in his father’s moldy bathroom, he was sealed in light, safely preserved as the house and sky collapsed around him.
It was in that final moment that he forgot his fear. In the space between worlds, the space between lives, he was briefly at peace with himself. The old Earth faded away to an empty white void, and Evan Rander felt nothing at all but gratitude.
—
As the proprietor of a dreary midtown mini-market, Nico Mundis was used to seeing odd behavior in his store. Aside from the typical assortment of ne’er-do-wells who would rob him at gunpoint or speedlift his wares, he’d suffered his fair share of rants, raves, threats, and propositions. The sexual come-ons always baffled Nico the most, as he was sixty-eight and quite obese.
His favorite strange incident occurred three years ago, when a group of egghead scientists traced an invisible signal to his canned goods aisle. The group leader, a spiky-haired Poler named Constantin Czerny, offered Nico three thousand dollars to let them affix a small device to his wall. Some kind of particle scanner enhancer thingy. Sure, why not? Money was money. At the end of the transaction, Czerny gave Nico his phone number and advised him to call should anything unique happen. Nico had no idea what Czerny meant by that and wasn’t sure if Czerny knew either.
Now, just minutes before opening for Saturday business, something unique happened.
As Nico filled the register, the overhead lights died. The table fan came to a stop. Even his electronic watch went blank. Only the white tempic barrier continued to function. It coated the windows from the outside, giving the shop a hazy, snowed-in look.
A flash of light filled the back of his store. Nico grabbed his shotgun and aimed it at the disturbance. He blinked through the dancing brown spots in his eyes and reeled to see a shirtless young man where previously there’d been no one.
Evan blinked twice at the gun, then raised his scrawny arms in terror. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”
Nico moved closer to survey the damage. The blast had taken a curved bite out of his store, leaving a concave groove in the wall and slicing half the cans and shelves around the intruder. Tiny wet vegetable morsels dripped onto the floor, covering broken pieces of bathroom tile that had come from God knows where.
“Who are you?” Nico shouted. “What are you doing here?”
“Look, just don’t shoot, okay? I have no idea! The last thing I—”
His eyes rolled back into his head and he launched into violent convulsions. Nico took an anxious step back. He couldn’t tell if the boy was suffering an epileptic seizure or an otherworldly possession. He wasn’t entirely wrong on either count, but what he was truly witnessing at the moment was nothing less than the death of the original Evan Rander.
As Evan stood and stirred, a tidal wave of cerebral data flooded into him. Millions of vivid new facts and memories. They filled his brain node by node, reshaping his psyche. On the outside, he was still a twenty-eight-year-old man with a seventeen-year-old face. In his altered consciousness, he was older now. Many years older and exponentially sharper.
His upgrade had arrived.
Evan breathed a weary moan, as if he’d just given birth. For a moment Nico feared the intruder would fall into tears, but Evan soon let out a delirious laugh.
“Oh man. Man oh man oh man.”
He swept his blinking gaze around the store. Nico was amazed at how differently the stranger carried himself. He looked fiercely confident now. Not even a tad confused.
With a hammy grin, Evan spread his arms out wide. “Nico! Nico-Nico Mundis! Ti kanis?”
The shopkeeper took another step back. “How do you know my name?”
“Ah, Nico-Nico. You and I go way back. You’re my Square One Buddy, buddy. Always here at the beginning to greet me with a friendly smile. And since we’re such good buddies, hey, why don’t you put down the boomstick?”
Evan was unsurprised to see the gun remain fixed on him. As he sighed and stretched, his hidden hand seized a can of string beans.
“Well, I figured it was a shot in the dark, no pun intended. Guess I can’t blame you for being sore. For years you’ve been praying for some young and topless beauty to pop into your Efta-Edeka, and here I am. You should’ve been more specific.”
He swung his gaze to the cloudy white doorway. “Oh, hello, bishop.”
As Nico reflexively turned his head, Evan hurled the can—a perfect throw that connected squarely with the shopkeeper’s temple, driving him down. Evan rushed around the counter and grabbed the shotgun off the floor. He jammed the barrel into Nico’s stomach, then his nose.
“Why must we do this dance every time, Nico? You know I don’t like hurting you.”
Evan launched a swift kick into his ribs.
“Well, I like it a little. So do us both a favor. Waddle your ass over to that wall and stay there. I’ll be gone soon enough. I just need to do a little convenience shopping.”
Snorting through bloody nostrils, Nico crawled to his checkout stand and sat up as best he could.
Evan unwrapped an epallay and stuck it to his chest. “Oof. Mama. These reboots never tickle. My head’s all fourped. But who am I to complain? I’m alive, right?”
Nico eyed the silent alarm button at the floor of his station. It was so easy when he could just step on it. Now it was five feet away—a mile in his condition.
Evan sauntered over to Nico’s sparse selection of clothing. He threw on a black Viva San Diego T-shirt and cheap bresin sandals.
“Since I last saw you, Nico-Nico . . . well, I’ll be honest. This last round sucked. Everyone was extra annoying. The Pelletiers. The Gothams. The Deps. And don’t even get me started on You-Know-Who. Hannah had her tits in such a wringer, I had to kill her to keep her from killing me. And then her sister came looking for blood. Nearly killed me with her goddamn tempis.”
Evan grabbed a handbasket and filled it with items: a quart of rubbing alcohol, a pint of orange juice, a hammer, a hunting knife. He stopped at the soda/vim dispenser and grabbed a large drinking cup.
“Between you, me, and the green beans, Nico, I’m still kinda pissed about it. So now I have two Givens at the top of my shit list.”
Evan retrieved a near-empty tube of Crest from the floor. It had traveled with him from his father’s bathroom and was now a one-of-a-kind relic. He stashed it in his basket.
“I don’t know, Nico. Part of me’s tempted to sit this one out. Maybe find an island somewhere and sip margaritas while the idiots do their idiot
dance. I haven’t written myself out of the story since . . . God, what round was it? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? Oh, hey. That reminds me.”
Evan unwrapped a magic marker and drew a large “55” on the back of his right hand. It was a mnemonic device, a way to help organize his multiple sets of memories. He’d eventually hit the laser-brand parlor and get a more lasting reminder. For now, this would do.
“Aw, who am I kidding? I can’t stay away from the fun and games. You didn’t believe it for a second. You know me too well.”
Nico had managed to halve the distance between himself and the alarm trigger. He shuffled another inch to the right, then froze when he spotted Evan’s smirking face above the dog food bags.
“Pathetic, man. You’re usually within slapping distance of the button by now. Are you even trying?”
“Please. I have children . . .”
“No you don’t. Stop it. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
Evan doubled back to the checkout stand and emptied his goods into a knapsack. He popped open the cash register, then arranged the crisp blue bills into a folded pile. There was no need to count it. It was $212, just like always.
“All righty. The power’s coming back and I have a date with a sweet Georgia peach. So this is where we . . . wait! The synchron! May I have your watch, parakalo? I need it more than you do.”
Nico hurriedly removed his timepiece and held it out to Evan. He snatched it away and wrapped it around his wrist.
“Thanks. Now we’re ready.”
He checked the ammo in the shotgun, then blew dust off the barrel. Nico crawled backward.
“No! Please!”
Evan aimed the gun at his face. “You know, I remember a time, long ago, when I was the one crying and begging for my life. You didn’t kill me but you still weren’t nice. I’m just saying.”