by Pam Stucky
“What does it lead to?” asked Charlie, following closely behind Dr. Waldo.
Dr. Waldo shrugged with glee. “It changes every time. That is the best thing about being Lost in Thought. The unexpected revelations that surprise and delight you. Turn a corner in Thought, and who knows what you’ll discover?”
Emma had to agree with this assessment, but she was confused about the creation of this room. “How does Thought change every time, without your changing it? How does it change on its own?” she asked.
“Yes, yes, good question, Emma, good question! It’s all part and parcel with how I built Thought. I wanted the room to crawl into my mind, get into the crevices, see the things I was not seeing, and then show them to me. The room, simply stated, reads my mind and reveals to me the things that are there, but which I have somehow hidden from myself. The things where, as you Earthlings might say, I have two here and two there but have not yet put them together to make four. The Thought room is a tangible manifestation of my brain. You are, in essence, inside my brain right now!” As Dr. Waldo said this, joyful, bouncy music suddenly erupted around them, coming out of nowhere. Dr. Waldo grabbed Emma’s hand and twirled her about. “We are dancing in my brain!” He laughed and wove around the others in a quick do-si-do, then as the music subsided (but still, somehow, lingered, as though the hedge was humming it in its mind), Dr. Waldo’s left hand found the hedge again, and he resumed his walk through the maze.
Ben, however, was still stopped in his tracks. “The room reads your mind?” he said, his brows bunched in skepticism. “That’s impossible. How can a room read your mind?”
Dr. Waldo laughed. “Young man,” he said. “Young man.”
Ben waited for Dr. Waldo to continue, but when the older man said nothing, Ben said, “Yes? Young man what?”
“Young man. Do you understand the word ‘everything’?”
“Yes?” Ben said.
“Do you understand the word ‘possible’?”
Ben gave a shrug that indicated his frustration with this line of questioning. “Of course, yes?”
“Then is it the word ‘is’ that is troubling you?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“‘Everything is possible.’ We discussed this, my friend! ‘Everything is possible in the Hub.’ We are in the Hub. Hence and therefore, everything is possible here. If it’s possible anywhere, then it’s possible here too.”
“Are you saying there are worlds where mind reading is possible?” asked Emma.
“Well, of course! Everything is possible somewhere. There are planets where people can read minds, simple as can be, it’s just a matter of the wavelengths, their brains are calibrated to read brain wavelengths just as sure as your phone is calibrated to read phone wavelengths. That’s simplifying it, of course, but you understand. On our planet, our vision is very different from yours. As you know, your eyes can only see a very small part of the full spectrum of light. Ours see things you perhaps did not imagine could be seen. We can see the spirits of the dead, or at least, those who have chosen to stick around.”
“‘Those who have chosen to stick around?’” asked Charlie. “They have a choice?”
Dr. Waldo nodded vigorously. “Oh, of course! On your planet as well as on ours. Some stick around, some move on.”
Emma thought about her grandfather, who had died two years before. He had been her favorite, with the tall tales he’d spun for the enjoyment of his grandchildren, his laugh, hardly a sound but more of a full-body expression of mirth. Was he still here on Earth … or rather, outside the lighthouse door, on Earth?
“If they move on, where do they go?” she asked.
“We don’t know where all of them go, but we have discovered there’s a whole universe made up, as far as we can tell, of planets filled with nothing but spirits—ghosts, if you will. Spirits from all universes. They don’t all seem to go there, but many do. It’s quite a menagerie! A melding of so many universes! I can well imagine why a spirit, released from its planetary reigns, would want to go there. Imagine being able to talk with beings from all the universes, without hardly having to leave your own backyard!”
The way he spoke, Emma imagined ghosts holding a massive barbecue, alien creatures of every type, size, shape, every imaginable being, streaming in and out the sliding glass door out back, filling up red picnic cups with punch or wine. Did ghosts eat?
While Emma was lost in thoughts of her own, Dr. Waldo continued with a litany of different universes and planets. “There are planets where you can turn invisible,” he said. “Planets with different gravity where people can fly. Planets, as I was saying, where brain waves are more tangible, allowing beings to read each others’ minds. Planets where people—I use the term people for ease of understanding, of course—planets where people can fold space as easily as I can fold a piece of paper, making travel a mere logistical technicality. There’s a whole universe for Lost and Broken Things—lost pens, lost socks, lost time, broken hearts, broken promises, even lost souls, oh, yes. Visiting that universe is only for the courageous and compassionate, that’s for certain. And a universe for Things Left Unsaid. Dense universe, that, so many planets, sad sad place, never want to go there again. There are planets—”
But Emma was still thinking about the spirits. “Dr. Waldo,” she said, hardly realizing she was interrupting him, “Can we visit the ghost universe?”
The spritely old man stopped and shivered visibly. “My goodness. Well, yes, of course, but …” He muttered something so quietly that Emma couldn’t hear, then continued, more loudly, “Well, it’s dangerous. People who stay there too long can’t return. Dangerous. No, no, not a good idea. Best leave death for the dead. We all will get there soon enough.” He continued to mumble under his breath, but Emma couldn’t make out any further words.
They’d been walking only about ten minutes, but with another turn around another corner, the front door to the room suddenly appeared before them again, “Exit” emblazoned and flashing above the frame.
“We’re done?” said Charlie. He nudged Dr. Waldo. “Not much on your mind today, eh, Waldo?”
“Oh, to be sure, to be sure, much on my mind, Charlie! Very much! The room knew that I need to get back to work, that’s what’s on my mind, so today it didn’t let me get too lost. Back to the laboratory I must go! But you kids feel free to look around, if you’re not meant to be somewhere it won’t let you in, no worries! I designed it that way, you see, easier than keys, all about intention. And one must trust the universes, yes, sometimes someone is meant to be somewhere, meant to discover something, unbeknownst to me. If it were left to me I wouldn’t give them the key, of course, you understand? But the universes will let them go where they need to go. Everything in its time, everything as it’s meant to be, such beautiful, unimaginable, chaotic order!”
With that, they exited Thought and headed back toward the laboratory.
“Dr. Waldo,” said Emma, “can you explain to us who the … uh … elevator, how it works, exactly? What it does?”
Dr. Waldo flung his arms wide to include all the universes in an embrace. “Who knows, my child, who knows?”
Emma felt both flabbergasted and a bit annoyed. Here this man had been talking as though he knew everything, and yet he didn’t even know how the elevators worked? “You mean you don’t know at all?”
“We know a little,” he said. “We are scientists. We’re here to study the elevators, as well as many other things. We have ideas, hypotheses as to how the elevators work, we’re striving to figure it all out, but we don’t know everything.”
“Well, what do you know?”
“We know that there are keys, like the one Eve showed you as well as other kinds of keys, strewn throughout the universes, keys that access both places and possibilities. Sometimes the keys work without your doing a thing, and sometimes you need to give them a mental nudge, let them know what you want. The universes have given us keys, indeed, but still it se
ems the universes are not without their own agendas.”
Ben reached to his neck and pulled out the wishing rock that was resting on his chest at the end of a long cord. “Keys like this one,” he said. Emma felt a wave of envy for Ben and Eve’s matching pendants.
Dr. Waldo nodded.
“You said there are keys that access both places and possibilities. What do you mean? How do you access a possibility?” asked Emma.
Eve held out her wrist. “This bracelet,” she said, indicating a brushed metal band around her wrist, embedded with a variety of stones, “isn’t just jewelry. Each of these stones does something. This is a part of our ‘travel pack.’ I’d be lost if I lost this bracelet, because these stones help us travel where we need to go. For example, this one,” she pointed to a stone that looked like an extremely clear crystal quartz, “is a translation stone. I speak more English now, but when we got here, I didn’t know much. The stone helped.”
“How did it help?” asked Charlie, reaching to hold Eve’s fingers, gently turning her wrist so he could get a closer look at the bracelet. It was a little more than half an inch wide, and fit snugly but comfortably around Eve’s wrist, fastened by some well-hidden latch. Eight small, different stones were securely spread out along the full width of the band, with narrow strips of the same brushed metal crossing over the stones to ensure they wouldn’t fall out.
“It … well, it translates, that’s it, really. It makes it so the person talking and the people listening can understand each other, without even realizing they’re not all speaking the same language. It translated my speech to English, and it translated other people’s English to my language so I could understand.”
“It translates … like, into your ear? Into your head?” asked Ben.
“I guess into the air, maybe? It changes the sound waves into the sound waves of a different language, that’s the best I can describe it.”
“Trippy,” said Charlie.
Eve pointed to another rock embedded on the bracelet. This stone resembled amber, and seemed to have a tiny air bubble trapped inside the center. “This one creates a sort of atmospheric shield around you if it’s needed, so you can breathe. We don’t know if it’s permanent or if it only lasts a few hours—we haven’t tested that out yet. But on the occasions where we’ve landed on planets where the atmosphere might not be compatible with us, it kept us alive until we were able to leave. As far as we know, it could work indefinitely, but we hope we don’t have to find out the hard way that we’re wrong.”
“You guys say ‘as far as we know’ a lot,” said Charlie. “Do you not know very far?”
“It’s science, sir,” said Dr. Waldo, taking off his wire-rimmed glasses and studying the glass. Finding a speck, he wiped the glasses on his lab coat and returned them to his face. “We are learning. We don’t know everything, by far, yet. In fact, it’s likely that with all there is to know, we hardly know anything. The greatest and most challenging part of the pursuit of truth, young Charlie, is learning to embrace uncertainty. If we couldn’t, we could never learn. We’d be immobilized, insisting our ideas were impenetrably correct, and we’d stagnate. One thing we’ve observed about Earthlings, people on your planet have become far too enamored of certainty. Clinging to it like a parasite. It will tear you apart, if you all don’t learn to welcome uncertainty again. We’ve seen it happen, on our mother planet.”
“Your mother planet?” started Ben, but by then the group had reached the laboratory, near the entrance from the elevator, where people they’d not seen before were buzzing all around the computers and screens. It looked as though some of the computers had been disturbed somehow; a few people were righting tables and chairs.
A tall brunette woman in a white lab coat rushed over. “Dr. Waldo, we just had a small quake. Did you not feel it? Here, in the Hub. A quake. Vik must be near. Eve must leave now. We’ve found a trail! We have another hit!”
chapter seven
Dr. Waldo spun to face Eve, who was nodding before he even said anything. “No time to waste! Hurry!” Eve started to run off but saw another scientist racing to meet her, carrying Eve’s bag and jacket. Eve slipped her arms into her jacket, grabbed her bag, and quickly re-joined the group.
Turning next to Ben, Dr. Waldo grabbed him by the shoulders and looked him sternly in the eyes. “Are you sure you’re ready, young man? Do you understand what you’re up against? This could be very dangerous. Are you ready?”
Ben radiated nervous excitement. “I’m ready! Where’s my backpack?” He looked around aimlessly, found his pack where he’d left it earlier by the elevator, and picked it up. “What do we do?” His anticipation was almost palpable.
Charlie stepped forward. “We’re going, too,” he said firmly.
Eve, Ben, and Dr. Waldo stared at Charlie. Emma blushed, but straightened her back and moved closer to Charlie to show her solidarity. They were going, too.
“I don’t know,” said Eve, fidgeting with a closure on her bag. “I mean, your parents …”
Dr. Waldo, agitated at the waste of time, flailed his arms in the air. “A decision must be made. We have not had luck yet. We cannot lose this trail!” He looked pointedly at the twins. “Are you certain?”
“We’re going,” said Charlie.
Eve was clearly torn. Ben nodded, but said nothing.
Emma stepped up to Dr. Waldo. “Do you have spare rocks for us? The keys, and the bracelets?”
Dr. Waldo made the decision. He called out to the scientist who had brought Eve’s bag, “Two more travel packs, quickly! These two are going along.” To Charlie and Emma, he said, “I don’t have time to explain anything to you. Stick with Eve. Do not lose the bracelets or the key. They are filled with energies, energies you will need. Stick with Eve. Don’t stray. Don’t lose anything or you may not be able to find your way back. Eve will explain the rest. Stay with her.” In his turmoil, he repeated himself without seeming to realize he was even speaking.
Apprehensive but eager, Charlie and Emma picked up their backpacks, which they, too, had left by the elevator. The scientist came back with two travel packs. She handed them to Charlie and Emma.
“Be safe, be safe,” said Dr. Waldo, mumbling as he helped Emma put on her bracelet. Eve helped Charlie with his. “Eve, you’re sure you’re ready to do this without your father? You remember how to operate everything in the elevator?” Dr. Waldo asked.
Eve’s head moved almost imperceptibly: Yes. “I’m ready,” she said quietly. Ben reached out and held her hand.
“All right then,” said Dr. Waldo. “Now go, luck be with you, and come back safe, and soon.”
The four teens piled into the elevator. The door to the Hub closed and sealed itself shut behind them.
“So,” said Charlie, “yeah, so, what exactly are we looking for?”
“Disturbances,” said Eve. “Things that seem wrong. We aren’t sure, really. We’re just sort of hoping we’ll know. We’re hoping to find Vik before he destroys everything. That’s about it. Now hush; I have to concentrate.”
Eve was staring at a panel on the side wall, a panel that Emma would have sworn wasn’t there before. Had she missed it, or had Eve somehow made it appear? Not wanting to break Eve’s concentration, Emma decided to wait and ask later. Eve typed in a bunch of numbers—coordinates?—paused, typed in some more. At the end, she tapped the tip of her finger on the bottom right of the screen.
“Hang on to something,” Eve said. “I always get a little lightheaded.” She smiled at Ben. He reached over and held her hand again.
Emma grabbed Charlie’s hand.
At first, nothing seemed to happen. Then, there was a slight jolt. The lights in the room flickered. A bigger jolt, and a sound resembling that of a boot being sucked out of mud, a sound that Emma felt she could almost feel in her soul. With the hand not already holding Charlie’s hand, Emma grabbed her brother’s arm to steady herself; then, overcome with dizziness, she sat down on the floor. Charlie joined her. Th
e pull grew stronger, a pressure that seemed to be crushing in on her from the outside while at the same time threatening to turn her inside out. Emma feared she would faint. The lights flickered off for a long moment, then came back on. The air in the elevator smelled of metal and distant smoke and honey.
And then, everything grew still.
Emma swallowed hard to keep her breakfast down, feeling glad she hadn’t had more eggs. She picked herself up from the floor and glanced at Ben and Charlie, who looked as pale as she felt.
Eve seemed pleased with herself, and far less disheveled than the rest of the group. “We’re here!” she said. “Fingers crossed, as you guys say!” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a ring.
Emma, breathing slowly through her mouth, realized there was yet another stone on Eve’s ring. “What does that one do?” she asked, pointing at the rock.
Eve smiled brightly. “You catch on fast,” she said. Emma was taken aback. She’d been thinking of Eve as her adversary, her competitor. She realized she had not been particularly welcoming to this young woman, a stranger on her planet, who had no one for company but her father. She felt ashamed.
She smiled back at Eve. Eve handed her the ring. Emma looked at it with a minimum of real interest; just another rock. “Almost blindingly white,” she laughed, but then her laugh stopped abruptly. “Wait.” Emma reached for her backpack. “I found a rock just like this on the beach by the lighthouse! I’m sure of it!” She dug into the side pocket of her pack. She hadn’t tossed the rock away; she knew she’d kept it. Hadn’t she? Coming up empty in the first pocket, she reached her fingers deep into another pocket, feeling around for a firm lump. Nothing. She moved on to a third pocket, but the rock wasn’t there.