by J Boyd Long
The tide was in, and the waves stopped several yards short of the tree line. The raw, stunning beauty of the place caused them to stand there in awe, just trying to absorb it all. To the left and the right, palm trees lined the beach, interspersed with larger hardwoods. The white sand was patched with areas of gravel and shell deposits, which helped reduce the glare from the sun. The flawless blue sky overhead completed the scene, and merged with the endless ocean on the hazy horizon.
“Oh my god,” Eissa said. “This is it. This is the place I’ve always wanted to find. It’s the secret world in my head.”
“It’s unbelievable,” Quentin agreed. “There’s not a single beach umbrella in sight, not a kid, or a beer can, or a piece of trash, or an idiot in a jeep, nothing. This is the way it’s supposed to be.”
They walked down to the water, breathing in the salty air and enjoying the breeze that played with their hair and the palm fronds behind them. Tiny crabs scuttled away from them, and little shore birds ran farther down the beach. If Bob and Tocho hadn’t been here in at least three years, and maybe longer, then the birds and crabs had probably never seen a person before. The idea was at once delightful and overwhelming, and he felt a bit like an intruder in their world.
“We ought to drag a branch or something out here and mark the trail so we can find it again,” Eissa said. “The last thing we need to do is get lost out here and make Tocho and Bob have to come rescue us.”
“Shit,” Quentin said. “Good point. Hang tight, I’ll go find something.” He felt terribly guilty for making Bob mad, and not realizing that he had crossed the line until he was already past it. That should have been enough to get him back on track, and he should have thought of marking the trail, instead of Eissa. Get your head back in the game, Q. You can do better than this.
He disappeared into the jungle, and re-emerged a moment later with a small, dead pine tree. He dropped it on the beach, and dusted off his hands.
“That ought to work,” he said. “I’m going to take off my shoes and get my feet wet. What do you say?”
“That’s the best idea you’ve had in months,” Eissa said. “Let’s do it.”
They stripped off their socks and shoes, and Quentin rolled his pants legs up. The warm water rolled in rhythmically, and the soft sand under his feet was like a gentle massage. They stood there in silence, watching the tiny shells rolling in the surf as the waves moved them about.
“I wonder what this dimension is like,” Quentin said. “In the populated world, I mean. I wonder what event happened, or didn’t happen, or whatever.”
“I don’t know, but they haven’t built a fucking resort or anything here, so they’re off to a good start.”
“And there isn’t any trash washed up on the beach,” Quentin added. “That’s something that’s hard to get away from in our dimension. I bet Easter Island even gets trash washing up in our dimension, and that’s about the most remote place on the planet.”
Of course, it was also possible that there were island people living on the very next island in the chain, just over the horizon. Maybe a super-virus spread across Europe in the Dark Ages, something even worse than the Black Death, something that prevented Europeans from colonizing the rest of the world. If that had happened, then the indigenous peoples of the world might have gone on unmolested. If so, where would their technology be by now? What would that world look like?
“Well, Bob and Tocho seem like pretty careful guys, so I’m guessing they did their research before they picked this place as a hideout. They must not expect anybody to show up in a plane or a yacht and decide to build a house here.” Eissa bent down, and picked up a sand dollar. “Hey, check it out.”
“Good find.” Quentin grinned, and looked around. “I wonder how big this island is. It looks like it’s fairly large, just looking at the length of the beach, and considering the hike through the jungle to get here.”
“It’s probably big enough to have a good fresh water supply and room to plant a garden, or something.” She tossed the sand dollar back in the water. “I wonder how they scoped it all out, though. Do you think they brought a plane through a DimGate and flew around and checked everything out until they found the perfect island?”
“Hhmm, that’s a great question,” Quentin mused. “Seriously, how did they manage that?”
“When Bob gets his panties out of a wad, I’ll ask him about it,” Eissa said. “Oh, fish.” She pointed at a flash of silver in the retreating surf. “That was a pretty big one, too.”
They slowly walked down the beach, pointing out interesting shells and sea life to one another. Quentin found himself returning to the idea of dimensions with different pasts, and different futures. The concept was new and exciting, but it was also awe-inspiring, and made him feel tiny and insignificant. The more he saw, the more he wanted to put regular life on hold and go explore. He had done a bit of travelling with Eissa, but now that seemed like a woefully inadequate attempt to appreciate what was out there.
After a while, they came to a huge fallen hardwood tree, its branches and roots bleached white by the sea air and reaching for the sky. They clambered up a large branch to the trunk, and sat down to rest.
Quentin watched the sky for a while, noting the complete lack of contrails. That thought drew his attention to the ocean, and he carefully scanned it for any sign of a ship. Seeing nothing that suggested human presence, he turned his attention back to the sky. A pod of pelicans caught his eye, and he watched them skim the waves, gliding effortlessly across the surface of the swells.
He marveled at how much his understanding of the world had changed in a matter of days. Denise was probably planning his funeral, and here he was, hopping from one dimension to another. Seeing a line of cars flying along a hundred stories up had almost melted his mind. How could he ever explain to her where he had been? Assuming he could get home, of course. And assuming that DimCorp hadn’t taken her in for questioning. Worry began to creep into the edge of his thoughts.
“I don’t know how you could have a door that leads here, and not use it all the time,” Eissa said. “Even if you had a bad storm once and your house got filled with sharks. I mean, have a fucking shark barbeque, and move on. I’d spend all my time here, and just go back for groceries and some new books once in a while.”
“It would probably get lonely after a while, even for an introvert,” Quentin said. “It would definitely get too boring for me day in and day out. I need something engaging to occupy my brain.” He had learned a long time ago to take projects to the beach when Eissa decided they needed a weekend getaway. While she could sit and stare at the waves for hours, he needed something to do. He usually ended up reading a lot, which was fine with him, but that was for two days at a time. Two months? That was a whole different story.
“I’m willing to give it a shot,” Eissa replied. “I think I could do it for a few years.”
“It’s great for the first few months,” Tocho’s voice boomed behind them. They both jumped, and Quentin nearly slid off the tree trunk.
“Dude!” Quentin sputtered as he grabbed a branch and stopped his fall. “You can’t sneak up on people like that. You scared the shit out of me.”
“We didn’t sneak at all,” Bob said with a chuckle. “We walked right down the center of the beach in plain sight. You were just looking the wrong way, that’s all.” He climbed up the tree and sat down stiffly beside them. Tocho followed him, and found a spot to sit below them on a branch.
“My original plan was to stay here forever,” Tocho said. “I fell in love with it, just as you have, I imagine. I made it about eight weeks before I started getting lonely, and another month after that, I started going stir-crazy. Once you’ve seen the entire island a few times, and got the hang of fishing and hauling water and all that, it loses some of the magic.”
“And the sharks falling through your roof,” Quentin added. “That probably didn’t help.”
“Oh, yes, well, that didn’t happ
en until years later.” Tocho laughed. “But it was bad, and I didn’t want to see this place for a long time after that.”
Quentin tried to sneak a glance at Bob and sense his mood. He seemed brighter, but it was hard to say for sure. He didn’t want to add fuel to Bob’s fire, but he was curious to know what the situation was with the DimGate.
“Did you get the door figured out?” Quentin asked. “Not that we’re in a rush to leave, mind you, just curious.”
“Not exactly,” Bob said. “Everything on our display says it’s functioning properly. Whatever’s happening, it’s happening at the master control center.”
Quentin nodded. Bob’s news wasn’t good, but his temperament seemed to be okay.
“So, what does that mean for us?” Eissa asked. “Are we only able to travel to random dimensions?”
“It seems that way,” Tocho said. “We got to this one intentionally, and 443, but we went to the other three on accident, and two out of five ain’t good numbers.”
“How many dimensions are there?” Quentin asked. “Is it possible to just start going through them sequentially until we get to the right one?”
Tocho and Bob glanced at one another with a knowing chuckle.
“There’s no way of knowing how many dimensions there are,” Bob said. “We have a list of about five hundred in the panel, but that’s not a complete list by any stretch of the imagination. Those are just the ones we know about.”
The sheer enormity of the whole concept was overwhelming. Hundreds of dimensions, each spinning out its own version of reality. Maybe even thousands, who knew? How many of those dimensions had a Gainesville? His eyes widened, and he licked his lips. How many of those dimensions had a Quentin James?
“Another problem with going sequentially is that we don’t know if it will take us to a different dimension every time, or the same few over and over,” Tocho said. “And trying is so risky. In the developed dims, we could open the door in the middle of a train track or something, and get demolished before we even knew what happened. It’s too dangerous.”
Quentin nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense. I’m just trying to come up with potential things to try.”
“I appreciate that,” Bob said. “I like that you’re contributing to finding a solution, so don’t stop. We shoot down most of each other’s ideas; that’s how we keep from accidently killing ourselves.”
“Polytheistic brainstorming,” Quentin said. He flashed them a grateful smile. “So now what?”
“That is the question,” Tocho said. “Now what, indeed?”
“We’re going to be staying here tonight, no matter what,” Bob said. “That being the case, we might as well make the best of it. Let’s build a fire so we can have a nice coal bed to cook something later. We put a couple of crab traps in the water on our way down here to find you, and Tocho brought some food along from home. Once we get that going, we’ll eat dinner and talk this out, and figure out what we’re going to do.”
Chapter 13
Quentin scooped a depression in the beach with his hands and used the sand to build a ramp against the tree trunk. He sat down in it experimentally, rolled out, and made a few adjustments to it by removing sand from one spot and putting it in another.
“That’s quite a recliner you’ve got going there,” Eissa said, tossing the last crab shell into the fire and licking her fingers clean.
“It’ll do in a pinch.” Quentin settled in and wiggled his hips to pack everything in place. “It’s a bit damp, but I need the moisture to hold the form.”
The sun was sinking over the tree line, casting a shadow over the beach. The tide was going out, and the shore birds were racing around the flat wet sand, looking for their supper. The breeze had settled down a bit as the temperature and the sun dropped, and the four travelers stared into the flames of their driftwood fire.
“Well, supper was excellent,” Eissa said. “I’m sure that’s the freshest crab I’ve ever had, and it was way better than I expected. You guys are pretty good cooks.”
“We’ve done this once or twice before,” Bob said with a grin. “I’m glad you enjoyed it.”
“We better get on with the discussion,” Tocho said. “Quentin’s going to be asleep here pretty soon. He’s already built himself a bed over there.”
“Nah, I’m okay,” Quentin said. “I just want to be able to look at the stars without getting a crick in my neck, and still be able to enjoy the fire, which I couldn’t do as well if I were lying down flat.”
“Well, we’ll see.” Tocho grinned.
“We do have a lot to talk about,” Bob said. “We’ve got a dilemma here. Two dilemmas, really. First off, we’ve got the problem of you two, and trying to get you back to your dimension with a DimGate that’s not working right. Second, we’ve got the DimCorp situation, which is a bigger problem altogether, but related to the first one.”
“Can you tell us a little more about DimCorp?” Quentin asked. “I mean, I know about IBZ where I work, but what about DimCorp as a whole?”
Bob crossed his legs and began whittling on a piece of driftwood. “DimCorp is the umbrella corporation that owns all kinds of oil drilling, mining, and logging companies that go around working in other dimensions. They’re the ones who built the whole DimGate system.”
“Right,” Quentin said. “I got that part.”
“They’re the biggest, richest, most powerful entity there is in existence,” Bob went on. “They pull resources from under-developed dimensions, and sell them in the more advanced dimensions. They also operate in developed dimensions, like yours. They’re making money across the spectrum of dimensions. If you think about the biggest raw materials companies you know of, they’re probably owned by DimCorp. It won’t say that on any documentation anywhere, but they own it. They own the biggest banks, too, which makes it a lot easier to handle all the money without anyone knowing.”
Quentin absorbed this information, and considered the implications. If DimCorp was running operations at that level, then they had probably spawned new dimensions, too. Maybe a lot of them. It also meant they had political power in all the dimensions they operated in. That was a scary thought.
“So, you’re saying that some of these Fortune 500 companies that make billions of dollars a year are owned by DimCorp, and they’re making that kind of money in a bunch of different dimensions at the same time?”
“Yep,” Bob confirmed. “Except they’re probably making it in hundreds of dimensions at the same time. At least, they were, until we destroyed the DimGate system.”
“Wait a minute,” Eissa said. “You two took on this mega-giant evil corporation and beat them?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say we beat them,” Bob said. “We caused them a lot of problems, and slowed them down for a while, but they’ve been doing this a lot longer than we’ve been around, and they’ll be there when we’re gone. The best we’ve been able to do is make them work a little harder to get what they want.”
“We cost them a good three years or more when we destroyed the DimGate system,” Tocho added. “We figured they’d recover from it eventually, but we were hoping to be dead and gone before they got it working again.”
“You started slave revolts all over the place, and eventually destroyed their way of moving things around,” Quentin said. “You must be the most-hunted people in the history of people.” He looked over at Eissa. “I don’t think we realized who we stumbled across. These two put Robin Hood to shame on a colossal scale.”
Good intentions or not, they must have been responsible for a lot of people getting hurt or killed, and probably more than a few new dimensions being created. Quentin avoided saying it out loud, but the thought stayed in the front of his mind.
“The way I see it, we’ve done a great deal of good for the inter-dimensional economy,” Bob said. “DimCorp has spent a lot of money hiring a lot of people to track us down, and to fix the damage we’ve caused. We’ve probably provided employment for hundreds of t
housands of people across the dimensions.” He chuckled, and poked another piece of wood into the fire.
“And we didn’t do it all by ourselves,” Tocho said. “We did have an inside guy, which is the only way we managed to do a lot of this stuff. Still, we were way more effective as a three-person team than we ever could have been as a bigger organization. Three people can hide a lot easier than three hundred, or three thousand. The bigger you get, the more it becomes a shooting war, and just about killing each other. We wanted to keep it pure on our part, and hurt the people who were the real bad guys, not the pawns of the bad guys.”
The idea of Bob and Tocho playing Robin Hood made Quentin smile. It was a romantic notion, and he could picture it all in his mind. Zimmerman would be the Sherriff of Nottingham, Tocho would be Friar Tuck, Eissa, well, Eissa could be anyone she wanted to be. He knew better than to cast her as Maid Marion, or anyone else who might be a stereotypical damsel in distress. Some mistakes only need to be made once.