Rabbits

by Terry Miles

  “Decompression sickness?”

  “Yeah, but for your brain. When you skip dimensions you’re displacing all of the other instances of you, shifting everything over.”

  “Doesn’t that mess everything up? All these different versions of somebody suddenly living in different dimensions?”

  “It’s actually mostly fine. Like I told you earlier, all of the instances share a kind of connection, and nothing is really permanently lost…it’s like we’re all drawn from the same source.”

  “But if we’re able to move between dimensions, isn’t it possible that I’m not your K? That your K might still be out there somewhere?”

  “You are my K, and you definitely came here, to this dimension, four years ago. There was a displacement. If you don’t remember us together, then…”

  Emily blinked away a tear and wiped her cheek. I could see how hard this was for her.

  “It’s my fault,” she said. “You left because I asked you to.”

  “What?”

  “I discovered that Crow was manipulating the Radiants to try to bring back his wife and daughter, and that it was messing up not only the game but the entire multiverse. I tracked you down and convinced you that we needed to do something. We spent years together coming up with a plan, and then you changed your mind.”

  “What happened?”

  “We fell in love. You told me you didn’t want to leave me. You didn’t want to risk forgetting.”

  “And then?”

  “Four years ago, we discovered Crow’s manipulations were causing more damage than we thought, and if we didn’t act soon, the entire multiverse was in danger of collapsing. I talked you into slipping dimensional streams to try to stop him.”

  “That sounds completely insane.”

  “Does it?”

  “Slipping into dimensional streams and forgetting a whole other life where you and I are married doesn’t sound like the most likely explanation. My experiencing a severe break with reality feels far more likely.”

  “You and I used our connection to the Radiants to facilitate the slip.”

  “Our Gatewick sauce.”

  “Yes.”

  “You said you weren’t sure how much Gatewick sauce I have.”

  “I’m still not sure, but I think it might be a lot.”

  I wanted to tell Emily what she was saying was crazy, but I’d been experiencing missing time and discrepancies in the fabric of reality. I wasn’t sure what to think anymore.

  “Okay,” Emily said as she turned back to face me. “I’m going to ask you a weird question.” She took a breath and steadied herself. “Do you remember the black well?”

  “I—”

  The dream came flooding back immediately. It was like being struck. I hadn’t thought about it for decades.

  In the dream, Emily, Annie, and I were walking in one of the farmer’s fields out near their family’s vacation home. We’d been laughing and running through the high grass for hours when Emily and I went back to the barn to get a drink from my backpack.

  We’d reached the barn and were watching Annie running and jumping across the middle part of the field, chasing the neighbor’s dog, when she just disappeared.

  We’d been watching her run one second, and the next she vanished into thin air.

  “Yes, I remember, but the black well was a dream,” I said. “It was my dream.”

  “It wasn’t a dream, K,” Emily said. “It was real. It happened. We found those Playboys in the old house, you tripped and hurt your knee, we talked about a grasshopper army taking over the world and about Annie having nightmares after seeing part of The Exorcist. That was all real. I was there. Annie was there. It happened.”

  “It was a dream,” I said.

  I knew it was a dream; it had to be. But I’d never shared the contents of that dream with anyone. There was no possible way Emily could know those specific details.

  Not unless she’d been there with me.

  I’d forgotten all about that dream. But I remembered it clearly now.

  I could feel the grass in the field against my legs as we walked, hear the beating of my heart in my ears, smell the evening rain forming in the air.

  I remembered the two of us walking through the grass for a long time, looking for Annie, calling out her name. We ended up standing in front of a dark-ringed ancient stone well that we’d discovered the summer before. The stones had been blackened with some kind of burned ash or mold.

  We called it the black well.

  Emily and I yelled out Annie’s name one last time as we slowly looked over the edge.

  There at the bottom, in a pool of dark, shallow water, was Annie’s tiny broken body.

  She was dead.

  I remembered screaming, falling into a pool of nothingness, the sky shaking and shattering in a brilliant flash and glow, and feeling every part of myself and the world around me break apart like a huge jigsaw puzzle.

  Then I woke up in bed.

  I ran straight into the room next door where Annie and Emily had been sleeping in the bunk beds.

  When I opened the door, Emily was sitting up in the top bunk staring at me, her eyes wide with terror.

  Annie was curled up in the bottom, sleeping soundly.

  I went back to bed and fell asleep.

  “Annie didn’t remember a thing,” Emily said. “When I told her the story, she thought I was making it up and asked me to stop. It really scared her.”

  “I imagine that would be scary,” I said, “telling her that she’d fallen into a hole and died.”

  “For decades, I thought it was nothing but a terrifying dream. I didn’t mention it to you back then, because I didn’t believe for a second that you and I had actually shared the same dream.”

  “Why would you?” I said. “It’s impossible.”

  “The following morning, Annie told my parents what I’d described and that I was scaring her. They pulled me into their bedroom and shut the door. This was the first time they asked me about false memories—dreams that felt so real part of me believed they’d happened in real life. I told them what had happened, and they nodded and listened. I don’t know how to explain it, but something told me they believed that what I’d described happening to Annie in the black well may have actually happened—and not in a dream, but in real life.”

  “What makes you say that?” I asked.

  “It was just something in the way they looked at me as I was describing the events of the dream. And…”

  “What?”

  “When I told them that you were there, in the dream, their faces changed. They were scared like I’ve never seen them. And there was something else.”

  “What?”

  “A few days later, I overheard my parents speaking with a man in our kitchen. They told him about the memory I’d described, and he said that he believed I might have some kind of special ability, something they’d been looking for. My parents did their best to smile and nod politely, but I could tell they were worried, and that the fact that this man was saying these things might mean something extremely bad.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “Nothing, really. Everything went back to normal. I didn’t think about that conversation again until years later.”

  “What made you think about it again?”

  “The man from that conversation showed up at my apartment.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He told me he knew my parents from way back when, and that he wanted to make me an offer of employment. It was more money than I’d ever seen in my life. I told him I’d think about it. The next day I was working for him.”

  “Crow.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Fucking Crow.”

  “What happened?”

  “At
first, things were good. I believed that he really was working to make things better. I helped him track down discrepancies, patterns, and coincidences, and uncover some of the complex pathways he was looking for.”

  “But wait, so what happened with our parents and Gatewick? What eventually shut it down?”

  “Our parents and a few others expressed their concerns, and Worricker himself shut down the project. It wasn’t until after Hawk Worricker’s death that Crow insisted on revisiting that avenue of research.”

  “And what happened when Crow started things up again?”

  “Do you remember Natalie?”

  “Kind of,” I said. I’d met her once or twice, but I didn’t really know her. “She was a bit older, around your age.”

  “Natalie was Crow’s daughter. He was working with her to try to detect one of Meechum’s Radiants, but when Natalie received the news that a friend of hers had died in a car accident, something happened. Crow believed his daughter’s ensuing emotional distress resulted in her inadvertently causing an interdimensional slip, which led to her disappearance.

  “None of us ever saw her again.”

  * * *

  —

  Now that Emily had mentioned it, I remembered Natalie going missing, but it had happened while my family was away in Europe for the summer, and by the time we came back, talk about Natalie’s disappearance had faded.

  “When Crow recruited me, I believed he was sincere about wanting to improve the world, that he was using Natalie’s death to inspire his working toward genuine positive change, but any good that came of our work back then was simply a side effect of his actual goal, which was trying to bring his daughter back.”

  “Couldn’t he just slip into a universe where an instance of her might still exist?”

  “That was the first thing he tried—multiple times—but Natalie was never there.”

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “We’re not sure, but it looks like when certain people die or disappear, they do so across the board, so to speak. We don’t know exactly how or why this happens with some people and not others. If an alien or previous terrestrial civilization created or managed the mechanism connected to these Radiants in the past, they didn’t leave us any kind of instruction manual.”

  “So, Crow has been obsessively manipulating both the game and the Radiants in a fruitless effort to find a universe where his daughter isn’t…dead, and that obsession is what put the multiverse at risk?”

  “Yes.”

  “How does that work?”

  “It used to be that when you messed with things in one dimensional stream, it didn’t really affect the others. Sure, you’d get the occasional Berenstain Bears or Nelson Mandela controversy, but otherwise, memories and experiences would remain consistent along dimensional lines and stability was maintained. But, over the years, Crow’s obsession with finding his daughter has resulted in him completely destabilizing the game and therefore the dimensional lines. It looks like now, if one goes, they all go. He’s fucked up everything.”

  “How does it really…work?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, the science.”

  “What do you know about coherence and interference?”

  “Assume nothing.”

  “Imagine the multiverse consists of waves. When you have coherence, there’s no interference, and all the waves are functioning perfectly fine. But when there’s something called constructive interference, waves can blend together to create a wave of greater amplitude than either one individually. Now imagine countless numbers of very powerful waves that used to exist in a coherent state suddenly coming together. The amplitude of that resultant wave would be impossible to measure.”

  “That’s what’s happening to the multiverse? It’s becoming one giant, super-unstable, decoherent wave?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The last time I saw you, you told me that my parents used my ability to slip me into another dimension in order to hide me from Crow.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But that doesn’t make any sense. Don’t he and I both exist here in this universe?”

  “Yes, but because of dimensional drift, the Crow in your primary stream no longer knew that you existed.”

  I shook my head. This was a lot to take in.

  “So why do you think Alan Scarpio asked me to help him?”

  “No idea, but the whole thing had to be part of Worricker’s game.”

  “Rabbits sent Scarpio to meet me here in the arcade?” I said.

  “I think so, yes.”

  We sat there in silence for a moment, then the world began shaking again—longer and harder this time.

  “The tremors are lasting longer now,” Emily said, squeezing my hand.

  I nodded, still trying to come to terms with everything she’d just told me.

  “So, in another dimension where we’re married, you and I somehow figured out a way to send me here in order to stop Crow from killing the multiverse?”

  “Yes. Well, we had a little help.”

  “Help?”

  “From the woman who calls herself Swan.”

  “What’s going on with her? Who is she?”

  “You told me once that you believed she was what’s known as a Warden.”

  “Wait, Swan’s a Warden?”

  “I’m still not really sure, actually. She’s not a big talker. I just know that she’s concerned with the integrity of the multiverse, and that she’s capable of moving between dimensional streams.”

  “Did you ever think about, you know, slipping streams or whatever, to try to find a way to bring Annie back?”

  Emily stared at me for a long time.

  “You don’t remember?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The night Annie died.”

  “I remember everything.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah, we listened to Tori Amos while you drove the truck up to the Petermans’ house. You pulled out a journal or something, added some numbers together.”

  “One-oh-seven point three,” she said.

  “Exactly. You called it The Night Station.”

  “Years later, I discovered that Crow believed The Night Station was a kind of shortcut to a very powerful point of The Terminal. It turns out that one of the strongest of Meechum’s Radiants is located right here in the Pacific Northwest.”

  “Yeah, Crow mentioned The Terminal.”

  Emily nodded, and the world started shaking again. If we hadn’t been sitting on the floor, we would have been thrown to the ground.

  “It’s getting worse,” I said.

  “What else do you remember about that night in the truck?” Emily asked.

  “Well, I remember you turning off the headlights at exactly six minutes past ten. We drove in the dark for a while with the radio tuned to that frequency. We were listening for something, and then suddenly there was a huge elk, and that’s when you swerved to the left.”

  “That wasn’t what happened.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You swerved to the left,” she said. “Not me.”

  “What? No. I—” But she was right. Suddenly I remembered.

  I was the one who had turned the wheel.

  “And it was a tractor, not an elk,” Emily said.

  “That’s right,” I said, and in that moment something shifted in my memory. Maybe it was my proximity to Emily Connors after so many years, but it was like a fog had lifted and the entire scene was suddenly clear. I remembered now; the tractor was rust colored. “It didn’t have its lights on,” I said.

  “The police told us later that if you hadn’t swerved, none of us would have survived. You saved my life, but Annie died.”

>   Tears streamed down Emily’s cheeks.

  I closed my eyes and brought myself back to that moment on the side of the road just after Emily and I were thrown from the truck. The truck had landed in the ditch, but somehow we’d ended up on the dirt shoulder next to the pavement.

  When I woke up my head was killing me. I found out later that I’d suffered a massive concussion.

  “I remember it had started to rain,” I said. “There was a lot of smoke or steam, and you were crawling over to Annie in the truck. And then, I think you came back and dragged me over there.”

  “That’s right,” Emily said.

  I could picture Emily’s face, streaked with motor oil, tears, and dirt. She was screaming something. I couldn’t quite make it out.

  “You kept yelling at me.”

  “Yes.”

  “You kept yelling at me to help you save her. You said we have to save Annie, like before.”

  “But we didn’t save her,” Emily said.

  “Then the man in the tractor came over, and then the police, and that’s all I can remember.”

  While we sat there in silence, I could smell the hot metal on the asphalt and taste the copper tang of blood in the air. And I could see Annie’s peaceful face as she leaned back in the truck, as if she’d just decided to rest her eyes for a minute.

  “We couldn’t save her,” Emily said.

  “Of course not,” I said. “We weren’t paramedics. We were kids.”

  “I know how it sounds,” she said. “But what happened at the black well was real. We were able to save her then. We were able to somehow slip dimensional streams and save Annie. I know it seems crazy, but that’s what happened. We saved her once, but we weren’t able to do it again.”

  Emily wiped away a tear, and as if on cue the world began to shake again.

  I stood up and put my hands against the Night Driver machine.

  If our world had less than an hour to live, how were we supposed to go outside and walk around knowing what was about to happen? It all seemed so completely unreal.

  I was staring at the screen of Night Driver, watching the car move along the road at night in the dark, when I had an idea.

  I smiled.

  “What?”