Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  I was exploring the coastline and looking at a winding set of weatherworn wooden stairs that led from the lighthouse parking area down to the beach, when I noticed something strange. It wasn’t immediately clear what I was looking at, until I zoomed in to get a better look.

  There in the countless smooth gray stones that made up the beach, written using scraps of ubiquitous golden-colored driftwood, was a message comprised of one word and one letter: Monorail K.

  For just a moment I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I took a sip of water and looked around the coffee shop. What the fuck was happening?

  I looked down at my phone again. Nothing had changed.

  Monorail K.

  I took a look at the date the picture had been taken by Google. June 2018.

  Is it possible that this image, taken three years ago, might have something to do with me, sitting in this coffee shop staring at it three years later? If I wanted an answer to that question, I suspected all I had to do was call an Uber and ride ten minutes south to the monorail.

  * * *

  —

  The car dropped me off at Seattle Center Station, and I took the escalator up to the monorail. I slipped my card into the machine and was just about to buy a one-way ticket back to Westlake Station when I noticed something strange about the screen.

  I had two choices.

  I’ve lived in Seattle since I was a kid, and in all of that time, the monorail has consisted of only two stops, roughly a mile apart: Seattle Center Station and Westlake Center Station. Those are the only two stations. No matter which station you board at, the monorail has only one stop to make. But now I was presented with two choices: Westlake and Sea-Tac.

  Suddenly, the monorail had a station at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport?

  This was impossible. There was no Sea-Tac Station.

  I bought a one-way ticket to the airport.

  I could tell things had changed from the moment I stepped into the car.

  Because the monorail has only two stations, there’s no need for a map of the route. Instead, there are drawings and photographs featuring the historic train throughout the years.

  But now, in place of the historical drawings and photographs I’d been looking at my entire adult life, there was a map that included three stations: Center, Westlake, and Sea-Tac.

  I sat down and rode the monorail to the third station on the map.

  If there was any question I was following the correct path, there was a newspaper sitting facedown on the seat beside me. I picked it up and flipped it over. The date of publication was a few days ago, which was just as impossible as a third station on the monorail, because the newspaper had shut down ages ago, publishing its last issue sometime in the fall of 2000.

  It was a free biweekly called The Rocket.

  * * *

  —

  “Welcome to Sea-Tac Station,” said a woman’s voice on the loudspeaker as the train pulled into the station. I’d spent the fifteen minutes it took to reach the airport alternating between scanning the train and the faces of the six other people riding it, and looking through The Rocket for clues.

  I couldn’t find anything.

  But there had to be something.

  It turns out that something was actually a someone.

  She was standing on the platform when I stepped off the train at Sea-Tac Station.

  It was Emily Connors.

  “Come on,” she said, grabbing my arm. “I don’t have much time.”

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “Wasting my time looking for you when I should be figuring out a way to save the world,” she said, leading me down to the street.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You don’t need to be sorry. Just get in the fucking car.”

  Emily pressed a button on her fob and the gull-wing doors of a nearby black Tesla X opened with a distant whir and click.

  “What’s going on?” I asked. “Is reality somehow…changing?”

  “I’m guessing you noticed a few…discrepancies on your way here?”

  “Yeah. Is this…”

  “Another dimension?”

  “I didn’t wanna say it,” I admitted. “But…is it?”

  “It’s kind of complicated. But right now, I really just need you to get into the fucking car.”

  The two of us got into the car and Emily started driving. Fast.

  As we merged onto the freeway, I looked out the window at downtown. The building that had appeared out of nowhere earlier was gone and the skyline was back to the way it had been before all of this stuff started. Sure, the Fremont Troll was holding a different car, and the monorail had three stations, but if I didn’t look too closely, I was almost able to imagine that everything was back to normal.

  Emily pulled off the freeway one exit later.

  I had a million questions, but I couldn’t decide what to ask first, so I sat silent in the passenger seat as Emily guided us through the city.

  She eventually pulled into a small concrete carport just off Lake Washington Boulevard. We stepped out of the car and onto what I’d assumed was a stone pathway treated with some kind of rubber, but as soon as our feet touched the surface, the path started moving. It was a conveyer belt, kind of like you might find in an airport—what they call a people mover.

  The conveyor belt eventually dropped us off in front of a small white concrete structure that housed an elevator. There was no call button, but Emily did something on her phone, the doors opened, and the two of us stepped inside. As soon as the doors shut behind us, the elevator started moving up.

  We stepped out of the elevator into a marvel of open-concept design.

  Directly across from us as we entered, facing the lake, were enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. The view was impressive. It felt as if somebody had removed everything that wasn’t water, trees, and distant mountains. The dark gray clouds hanging above the lake gave the place a sad but cinematic feel, like a wealthy murderer’s house in a Nordic thriller.

  Through a sliding-glass door that opened onto a wide deck, I could see a set of stairs leading down to the conveyer belt we’d just taken to the elevator. Beyond that was nothing but grass and trees.

  The interior was perfectly appointed, from the Florence Knoll sofa, Noguchi table, and Nelson ball pendant lamps to the built-in, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and light cork floors.

  “Your place is amazing,” I said.

  “Me?” Emily laughed a little. “No way. It belongs to a friend.”

  “They must be some friend,” I said.

  Emily’s smile disappeared and she nodded toward the sofa. “I don’t have much time, so if you have a lot of questions, you’ll want to start asking.”

  I took a seat on the sofa. Emily grabbed a nearby molded plywood chair, slid it across the floor, and sat down directly across from me.

  For the first time since she’d picked me up at the monorail station, I could see Emily clearly. She looked tired—nothing that a few good nights’ sleep wouldn’t clear up—but there was something else: a look in her eyes, a kind of distance, a sadness.

  “The last time I saw you, in that penthouse at WorGames…was that real?” I asked. I figured why not start with a big one.

  She didn’t answer me. Instead, she just stared.

  I had the feeling she was looking for something behind my eyes, but I had no idea what it was.

  “Emily?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You remind me of somebody else.”

  “Who?”

  She shook her head and answered my earlier question instead. “It was real,” she said. “The penthouse, Crow.”

  “What happened? When I went back up there, everything was gone. It was completely different.”

  “Everything was gone be
cause Crow moved it.”

  “He moved a building?”

  “Well, mainly just the top floor, and it’s more like he kind of…changed it.”

  “How does that work?”

  “It’s similar to the method I used to bring you here.”

  “Where is…here?”

  “It’s complicated,” Emily said.

  “Fine, then. Let me ask you this. Are we in another dimension?”

  Emily ran her hands through her hair and exhaled before ignoring my question and asking one of her own.

  “How much do you know about quantum physics?”

  “Not a lot,” I said. “I mean, I know particles can also be waves, and that in a two-slit experiment, observation affects the outcome, but I’ve always found the probability stuff daunting.”

  “Okay, so I’m going to do my best to explain the mechanism behind what’s happening to the best of my ability. Just stop me when you don’t understand.”

  I nodded. I had the feeling there was a whole lot I wasn’t going to understand.

  “What do you know about the Meechum Radiants?” Emily asked.

  “Only what Crow told me, and what you can find online.”

  “What did Crow say?”

  “He said Kellan Meechum had discovered something he’d likened to ley lines—veins in the fabric of the world—and that Meechum called them Radiants.”

  “Good so far,” Emily said.

  “He also told me that my parents believed in these Radiants, and that these mysterious lines of energy could be used to somehow manipulate travel between dimensions.”

  “A lot of this is going to sound a bit…out there, but…there’s something going on beneath the world, something that you and I take for granted.”

  “Some magical multiverse type of thing?”

  “Quantum mechanics isn’t magic, K. It’s science.”

  “What the hell are the Meechum Radiants?”

  “We don’t know exactly, but back in 1945, while Meechum was leading an experiment connected to strange attractors and the butterfly effect, he believed he’d stumbled upon something. He discovered that certain cause-and-effect manipulations, coincidences, and chance encounters were…enhanced in very specific parts of the world—amplified somehow.”

  “And this amplification was connected to his Radiants?”

  “Yes. By performing certain…movements or patterns, or by following connections and tracking coincidences, Meechum claimed he was able to…manipulate the butterfly effect, that he could perform a series of seemingly unconnected moves and facilitate an effect based on a completely unrelated cause.”

  “A series of moves?”

  “Okay, the story goes that Meechum had spent years mapping out a number of ostensibly random coincidences and anomalies in and around the city of Seattle. He eventually discovered that, along certain pathways, these anomalies weren’t as random as they appeared. He began noticing groups of highly improbable coincidences the closer he came to successfully engaging certain pathways—what he called Radiants. Meechum believed that these Radiants might be used to facilitate changes in the world, and that the ability to move back and forth between universes was not only possible, but probable. He said that, in one case, he’d been able to successfully manipulate a bank’s interest rate by simply preventing a data analyst in an unrelated field from buying her morning coffee.”

  “And you seriously believe this stuff?”

  “Yes. And our parents believed it too.”

  “So that’s what we’re dealing with here? Magical lines?”

  “I already told you, it’s not magic, K. It’s science.”

  “We are in another dimension, aren’t we?”

  She stared at me for a long moment, like she’d been describing something completely obvious and couldn’t believe I wasn’t getting it.

  “Have you noticed anything strange about your life? A terrible feeling comes over you and the world is suddenly…different somehow?”

  “Like déjà vu?” I asked, but I knew Emily wasn’t talking about déjà vu.

  She was talking about the gray feeling.

  “Déjà vu is most likely a brief glimpse into being awake in another dimension. I’m talking about something else. Have you ever experienced missing time, or an obsession with patterns or coincidences? Or maybe you notice that part of your reality has suddenly changed? Normally it’s nothing huge, like the South won the Civil War or the Beatles never existed. It’s something small, but significant to you in that moment. Maybe a company’s logo looks different from the logo you remember as a kid, a children’s book no longer has the same name, or a farmhouse in a famous painting has a different number of windows.”

  “You’re talking about the Mandela effect,” I said.

  “What I’m talking about is feeling like the world around you is slowly forgetting the world you know, one tiny piece at a time.”

  “I’ve felt all of those things,” I admitted.

  Emily nodded, and I noticed something in her eyes. The exhaustion I’d noticed earlier was still there, but there was something else. She had the look of somebody ready to give up after treading water alone in the deep ocean for days waiting for help that was never going to arrive.

  “How does it work?” I asked.

  “In order to find me, you had to follow coincidences, find a pattern. And on your way here, I’m sure you noticed certain…discrepancies.”

  “The Fremont Troll was holding a Mini Cooper instead of a Volkswagen.”

  “Interesting,” Emily said.

  “You remember that troll holding a Volkswagen, don’t you?” I asked.

  “I do,” she said.

  “Thank god.”

  “But I’ve forgotten so many other things.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Most of the discrepancies—those things that you notice are different in your new world—will soon fade. You can write them down on scraps of paper, compose intricate stories to yourself, use audio and video, but none of that will matter. Because, in the end, you’ll never believe yourself, never remember. Those things will always seem like a fiction.”

  It sounded impossible, but I felt like I was already losing the plot of the Richard Linklater movie Before Midnight. I still understood that it had existed, and knew that I’d seen it at least three times, but I could no longer remember any of the details.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, checking the time on her phone, “but I’m going to have to speed things up. Where was I?”

  “You’d just finished with the Meechum Radiants.”

  “Right, so, a few years after Kellan Meechum published his final paper on the Radiants, a computer scientist named Hawk Worricker picked up the baton, so to speak, and started digging deeper into Meechum’s work.”

  “WorGames’s Hawk Worricker?” I asked.

  “Yes. WorGames is a lot more than it appears to be,” Emily said.

  “What is it?”

  “I’m getting to that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine. Just stop talking.”

  I opened my mouth to apologize again, but quickly shut it.

  “Worricker was a genius—a total savant when it came to mathematics and statistical analysis. He was brilliant at forecasting strategic outcomes. He would collect as much data as he could and then extrapolate certain results involving clusters of people and industries over time. He was amazingly accurate and made millions by betting on changes in the market. But it wasn’t until Worricker discovered Meechum’s Radiants that he found his own life’s work. That’s when everything changed.

  “Worricker became obsessed with figuring out what the Radiants were, how they worked, and why they existed. Eventually, he’d collected enough data to run some models and projections, and he disco
vered something incredible. Meechum’s Radiants were real. He was astounded and excited…until he discovered something else—something terrifying.”

  “What was it?”

  “Worricker discovered that Meechum’s Radiants were decaying, and that they would soon lose their efficacy.”

  “Their efficacy? What were they doing?”

  “Worricker believed what Meechum had discovered was more than simply invisible lines of manipulatable energy beneath the world. Worricker believed that these Radiants existed for a reason, that they functioned as a kind of multiuniversal insurance policy.”

  “What?”

  “Okay, I don’t have much time, so I’m going to explain it to you the way it was first explained to me. The Radiants serve as a kind of universal reset mechanism—a way to release a little steam, so to speak. They exist to help maintain the integrity and health of the individual streams of the multiverse.”

  “The multiverse? That’s where quantum physics comes in?”

  “Yes. We live in a multiverse, K.”

  “So there are endless Emilys and Ks out there, having thousands of variations of this conversation right now?”

  “As far as I know, it doesn’t work like that. A new universe isn’t created based on every minor decision point in a person’s life. It requires a significant output of energy to create an inflection point.”

  “Are we talking planetary events?”

  “That would qualify, sure, but even a single human being can create enough of this type of energy—more than enough to create an inflection point, given the right set of circumstances. And it turns out there are…other ways to manipulate the Radiants as well.”

  “What kind of ways?”

  “It’s something our parents were into.”

  “You’re talking about the Gatewick Institute.”

  “Yes,” Emily said, “but we’re not there yet.”

  “Sorry.”