by J Boyd Long
“Wow, that’s horrible,” Eissa said. “So, if you were a slave, how did you meet Bob?”
“Well, one day I was repairing the railroad track that went through the DimGate. All of a sudden, this guy comes running through from the other side, and dives behind the stack of railroad ties that we had sitting there. His timing was perfect, since everyone else was down at the equipment shed eating lunch. They didn’t like being close to the DimGate, but I was kind of curious about it. I wanted to see what the world was like on the other side, which was why I was poking around up there by myself. Anyway, I didn’t know what to think. Here was this Odim, but he was acting like a runaway slave. He was looking at me, and I was looking at him, and finally he said, ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ and I said, ‘Pretty good,’ and he said, ‘I’m here to end slavery and destroy this DimGate, you want to help?’ and I said, ‘Uh, yes, actually, I do.’ So, that was the beginning of the mission for me.”
“You ended the slavery of an entire planet by yourselves?” Quentin asked. “That’s pretty incredible. How did you manage that?”
“It’s not so hard, once you’ve done it a couple of times,” Bob said. “It’s a two-pronged approach. You need to organize a series of slave rebellions, and shut down the flow of goods by destroying the DimGates at the same time. If you can disrupt both the production and the transportation systems, then you’ll probably succeed. The slaves outnumber the DimCorp people by a thousand to one, so you have a ready-made army. DimCorp guards get slack when they’ve been stripping a dimension for a hundred years without any real problems, and they don’t have the resources to fight against a major revolt, especially when you can get the same thing happening in several of the dimensions they’re mining at the same time. It’s a numbers game. You just have to overwhelm them with too many fronts at once.”
“Wow, you really had a system in place, huh?” Quentin was impressed. “So, what happened? Did you decide to quit while you were ahead, and retire to this dimension?”
“Basically, yes,” Tocho chuckled. “We blew up the DimGate master control room. We thought that would end it for good. And it did, at least for a few years. But then you showed up, so maybe we didn’t end it, after all.”
Quentin looked down, a guilty feeling creeping up from his stomach.
“You two aren’t the problem, just so there’s no misunderstanding here,” Bob said. “You’re just evidence that they’ve rebuilt the DimGate system. You’re victims of circumstance, so to speak.”
Quentin looked around the yard. The sun had climbed across the sky, moving the shadows around the yard. Everything felt surreal and complicated, as if he had somehow downloaded an entire encyclopedia of new information directly into his brain. There were a lot of conflicting bits to be sorted out, and he didn’t even know where to begin.
“How did you come to be at the restaurant?” Quentin asked, turning to Tocho. “Were you waiting on us? Did you know the door was there?”
“Pure chance, really,” Tocho admitted. “I just happened to be coming into town. I travel a lot, you know. I was headed for Bob’s house, since I haven’t seen him in a while. I was going to stop at Pop’s and eat lunch, when all of a sudden, I saw you two spring into existence on the porch. That really surprised me, because I haven’t seen it happen in years. After that, I just followed you, trying to figure out what you were up to. You’re very easy to spy on, just so you know. I knew for sure by the time you went to bed last night that you weren’t from DimCorp.” He sighed. “Now the problem is, what do we do with you?”
“And the other problem,” Bob added, “and possibly the more important one, is what are we going to do about the DimGate system? We can’t just cross over and jam a crowbar into the control panel, since we don’t have a functioning door anymore.”
They all sat in silence for a moment, contemplating the situation. Trying to comprehend the concept of dimension travel, alone, was more than Quentin could handle, but his mind kept returning to the time travel aspect.
“I- we traveled in time. It was the middle of the night on our side, and the middle of the next day, here. I can’t- I don’t- How is that possible? Does DimCorp do this in different times, as well as different dimensions?”
Bob laughed. “You’re headed for an intellectual overload, my curious young friend. But to answer your question, no, DimCorp doesn’t do much time travel. Bad things happen to your body, so no one wants to do it more than once, if that.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t really know how it works. Most of the DimGates don’t even have the capability, just a few of them. From what I understand, you age significantly when you move around in time.”
Quentin’s eyes widened, and he looked closely at Eissa. She looked the same as she always did.
“It doesn’t happen like that,” Tocho said. “You won’t notice anything from your little hop. The further you go in time, the more pronounced the aging effects are supposed to be. If you had jumped a couple of years, you’d probably see a difference.”
Quentin relaxed. “So, if I tried to go back in time to kill Hitler, I’d come back as an old man?”
“Probably,” Bob said. “We don’t really know. It’s all second-hand information, and it all says don’t do it, so we haven’t tried.”
Quentin tried to imagine explaining his feelings at this moment to his therapist. She would want him to talk it out so that they could both share in the process of discovery. I feel ecstatic, like my head is going to explode if I don’t tell someone else about this, he would say. But at the same time, I feel incredibly despondent, like I would feel if my whole family got killed in a crazy accident, or something. She would ask him, Where do you feel this? And he would say, In my stomach. I’ve found a time machine, but I can’t use it, and that feels like I drank a gallon of bleach.
“Don’t think about time travel,” Tocho said. “Nothing good comes of it. It’s too hard to comprehend, and it’s pointless, anyway.”
Quentin nodded dumbly, knowing that he would probably never stop thinking about it. How could he?
“How is it that you can walk around town?” Eissa asked Tocho. “We had a lynch mob formed within a few hours of arriving, just because some kid and his dad are racist assholes.”
“What started that? I was too far behind you to hear any of it. All I knew was that you two got in a fight with one of the blacksmiths, and Quentin set his shop on fire, right before you ran into the woods.”
“Yeah, I may have lost my temper. The kid told me that his dad says the only good Indian is a dead Indian, and I told him his dad’s an asshole.”
Bob and Tocho laughed, surprising Quentin. He was expecting an admonition for interfering with the town folk.
“Well, someone needed to tell him,” Bob said. “Not that it will make any difference, but he should know.”
“There are lots of people who hate us,” Tocho said. “I’ve had my run-ins with them in the past, but we mostly leave each other alone these days.”
Silence settled over the porch again. Quentin felt like throwing up one moment and jumping up and dancing a jig the next. He idly wondered if he was having a nervous breakdown. If ever there was an excuse for that, this was it.
“Okay, I can’t think anymore,” Eissa said. “I need to lie down and let all of this gel for a bit.”
“We’ve given you a lot,” Bob said. “Why don’t the two of you take a break, while Tocho and I figure out how to handle this? There’s a spare bed and a couch, if you want to rest.”
“That’s a good idea,” Quentin said. “I could use a break, too.”
Bob stood up and stretched. “What do you say we take a walk?” he said to Tocho. “Bewildered, how about it? Are you up for a walk in the woods?”
The dog looked up from where he had been napping beside the pile of plates, and thumped his tail on the floor. Tocho got to his feet, and walked down the stairs as Eissa and Quentin went inside.
“A walk is an excel
lent plan,” Tocho said. “A short one, at least. I’ve been walking for three days, and while I’m sore and tired of walking, I’m also in need of a bit of activity to get the old bones and muscles in working condition.” He set off around the corner of the house, followed by Bewildered and Bob.
Quentin took his shoes off and stretched out on the couch. He went over and over all the information that he had received, and tried to create a new image in his mind of the world, or rather worlds, and marveled at the expansion of his perspective in the last day. At least he felt safe here, probably safer than he would feel at home right now.
The mission that Bob and Tocho had undertaken really appealed to him. What a noble cause, and what an adventure it must have been. The last clear thought he had before drifting off to sleep, was that he, too, was on an adventure, and it was fantastic.
Chapter 8
Quentin woke up to the slow realization that something with questionable oral hygiene was vigorously licking his face. He sat up, pushing Bewildered away, as he tried to clear out the cobwebs of sleep. Eissa was talking to someone out on the porch, so he slipped his shoes on and walked outside. He was surprised to see that the sun was already on the other side of the house.
“Hey, sleepyhead,” Eissa said. “It’s about time you woke up.”
“What time is it?” he asked, running a hand through his hair.
“I’m not really into tracking time anymore,” Bob said. “My last clock quit about two years ago, and I’ve just stopped paying attention to things like that. It’s sort of morbid, really, tracking time. Every hour the clock would chime, and I would know that I had one less hour to live.”
“Sorry I asked,” Quentin muttered. He swung his arms overhead in a full-body stretch, and released it with a satisfied sigh, looking around the porch. “So, what did I miss?”
“They’ve come up with a plan,” Eissa said. “Tocho was just about to tell me about it.”
Quentin sat down in a rocking chair, his brain quickly becoming alert. “Alright,” he said. “What’s the plan?”
“We have a DimGate that we, well, appropriated, to do our thing, years ago,” Tocho said. “After we blew up the control center, we took it apart so no one else could use it, even if they got the system restored someday. So, the plan is to reassemble our door, and get you back to your dimension.”
Quentin’s eyes opened wide, his jaw dropping slightly. They had their own door? That was a game changer. It was also something they might have mentioned right away and saved him some stress. He bit off a sarcastic comment. It wouldn’t do to be rude to the only people who were able and willing to help them get out of this predicament.
“Sounds good,” Eissa said. “So, we ought to be home in time for supper?”
“Well, not exactly,” Bob said. “First, we’ve got to get all the stuff together. Then we’ve got to put the door back together, and get it working. That might take a while, depending on what condition the parts are in. When we took it apart, we really weren’t planning on putting it back together again. We’ve got to find everything, for starters.”
“Oh,” Eissa said. Some of the enthusiasm left her voice. “Well, we can help you look for it. Are they just in a box labeled ‘DimGate Parts,’ or what?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t have labeled the box,” Bob said. “You don’t want something like that falling into the wrong hands. However, it’s out in the shed somewhere. It’s mainly just a matter of digging it out.”
The idea of digging around in a stuffy shed didn’t appeal to Quentin, especially after all the walking they had done the day before, but getting home and turning his hard drive over to the FBI did. He stood up and stretched again.
“We’ve got to work out a plan, once we get it working,” Tocho said. “We can’t just walk into another dimension. We don’t know what the situation is on the other side of the door, especially in a place where IBZ has just suffered a major security breach. We have to be prepared in case there’s a DimSec team standing on the other side.”
“What’s a DimSec team?” Quentin asked.
“DimCorp Security,” Bob said with a scowl. “Basically, a private army; a squad of soldiers whose purpose is to keep guys like us from doing what we do. Or rather, used to do. We’ve been retired for a while.”
“Were retired,” Tocho said. “I think we’re in the process of making a comeback.”
Dealing with one security guard in Zimmerman’s office had been bad enough. Quentin certainly didn’t like the idea of running into a whole group of them. “It sounds like you think this could get dangerous.”
“Do you think a company that makes more money in a day than most dimensions have in their entire global economy is going to just lay down passively and not try to stop you from interfering with them?” Bob asked. “Don’t be naïve about any of this. It’s not just a conflict of morality. When there’s that kind of money on the line, they are quite willing to kill anyone who threatens them. We have to expect the worst, here.”
Eissa’s eyes grew round. “Oh,” she said. “I guess I didn’t realize that.”
“Don’t worry,” Tocho soothed her. “You couldn’t have known. There’s no way to understand how big this all is, until you see it firsthand. It’s just one of those things.”
Quentin sank quietly back into his seat. Every time he thought he was taking a step forward, things got exponentially more complicated. Obviously, it wasn’t going to be as simple as giving the FBI a hard drive, Zimmerman gets arrested and goes to jail, and everyone else goes back to work, business as usual. Had he really thought it would? Yes, he realized. Yes, he had. How naïve he had been until this moment.
“Don’t let it get you down,” Bob said cheerfully, climbing to his feet. “We’ve done way worse stuff to them than you have, and we’re still kicking around. Come on, let’s go see what we can find in the shed.”
An hour later, they sat in the yard surrounded by piles of boxes, tools, parts to unidentifiable things, boat paddles, buckets, bits of lumber and pipe, and gadgets of every shape and size. All four of them were hot, sweaty, and covered in dust and grime. In the middle of the yard was a nondescript wooden box, battered and oil-soaked. Inside was a scramble of wires and electronic bits, nuts and bolts, fuses, and various other pieces that Quentin couldn’t identify.
“Well, that’s it,” Bob said. “That’s the first box.”
“There’s another box?” Eissa asked. “I thought this was it.”
“Oh, no,” Bob said. “It wouldn’t do to put everything you need to make the door work in one spot. That’s operational security 101.”
Quentin was torn. His logical, protocol-driven side agreed with Bob completely, but the rest of him was ready to get home, and get on with whatever they were going to do about Zimmerman and Holt. He also had the problem of his sister. At a minimum, he needed to get somewhere that he could call her and prevent her from going into a meltdown, and the delays were wearing his nerves thin.
“Um, okay,” Eissa said. “So, where is the other box?”
“It’s at my house,” Tocho said. “We’ll dig it up on our way to the door tomorrow.”
“On the way to the door?” Eissa asked. “As in, the door isn’t here?”
“No, the door is south of here a ways. We can walk it in a few hours.” Bob stood up. “Let’s get this stuff back in the shed, and get cleaned up. It’ll be supper time by then.”
Quentin looked at Tocho, a frown crossing his face. “I thought you said you didn’t live anywhere around here. You told us you stay at that barn when you’re passing through.”
Tocho grinned and pulled a strand of spiderweb out of his hair. “Did I say that?”
Quentin nodded. “Yep, right after we met you.”
Tocho shrugged as he wiped the web on his pants leg. “I was probably messing with you.”
Quentin couldn’t help but grin. Tocho was maddening in some ways, but he was definitely a character. He glanced at Eissa, a line of worry creasing
his forehead. Eissa had done a lot of walking in the last two days, and soon she was going to hit the breaking point. He climbed wearily to his feet, and began passing boxes to Bob.
◆◆◆
By mid-morning the next day, they had arrived at Tocho’s house. It was a tiny A-frame cabin, much smaller than Bob’s house, and it was nowhere near a road. The roof went all the way to the ground, and a wild tangle of vines was slowly taking over one side. The yard was overrun with weeds and young pines, and it looked abandoned. Tocho had said he was just returning from a trip. From the looks of the place, it must have been a long one. Quentin paused to watch a squirrel scamper up to the peak of the roof, then hurried to catch up as the others followed Tocho around back.