Before We Die Alone

by Ike Hamill

  I think about kneeling in front of the grate and calling for Adam. I’m not going to do that. I won’t give him the upper hand.

  I meditate until I can sense the warmth of a lateral fold. I’m pretty sure I have it right, but I’m still pretty nervous as I step through.

  I expected day, but it’s the middle of the night here too. Even in the dark, Maldy is unmistakable. A cricket, an owl, or a mouse moving through the leaves—any living sound would be comforting. Instead, all I hear is the little breeze in the trees and the grass. It’s a dead sound. It makes my bones ache. I spin until I see the shape of Adam’s cabin blocking the starlight. I step carefully in the dark.

  I stand on his porch and knock. Maybe Adam isn’t even home. Maybe he’s off somewhere, collecting more supplies or building materials. Maybe he’s trying to convince some woman to come and be his pioneer wife.

  One of the engineers I used to work with would have loved this place. He always used to say, “I was born too late to explore the Earth, and too early to explore space.” Little did he know, there was a crazy world of mayhem and adventure all around him. The bears must know something of the afterlife. I should ask one. Then again, I’ve never gotten a straight answer from a bear. Maybe I won’t ask.

  A light appears in the window. He’s home.

  He shines the light in my face before he opens the door.

  “Dennis? What are you doing here?”

  “What’s your plan for breaking the machine?” I ask.

  For clarity—InAeternum has been causing massive changes to humanity, but they’re the kind of changes you see on TV rather than see every day. As free energy is spreading through Australia, their exporting prowess is growing. Suddenly, exports of gold, aluminum, and iron have shot up. They’re running major desalinization projects and using the fresh water to produce new crops. ProNavitas won’t supply power to mine coal or natural gas. They’ve insisted that only carbon-negative projects need apply.

  But the world isn’t totally ready. Stiff tariffs are keeping the cheap products at bay. China is clinging to its new-found dominance in production and the US hates to see any market collapse. We see stories about the impacts of InAeturnum, but it’s not like my own power bill has been reduced yet. Vietnam is lobbying the hardest for submarine power cables to take advantage of Pronavitas’s offer, but construction will take a long time and it hasn’t even begun.

  Some people are flocking to Australia. Others are barring the gates against change. It makes good fodder for the news channels.

  “Come on in,” Adam says. He holds the door open. “Let me get some coffee going and I’ll explain it to you.”

  Chapter Forty

  * Assault *

  I WOULDN’T HAVE RECOGNIZED it. ProNavitas used to be on the edge of the desert. Now it’s the center of its own little city. Wide roads stretch out in every direction. Enormous towers carry high voltage lines. Security is intense. Adam’s plan is complex.

  Now that the ribbon is running at full-strength, the fields it throws off are buttressing the fifth-dimensional space. It can’t be folded or twisted, at least not very far. As Adam describes it, it’s an inverse-square relationship. That means that the closer we get to the energy ribbon that powers InAeternum, the less we’ll be able to fold space. To get inside the building, we’re going to have to execute a series of little folds.

  At first, when Adam said he was working with a group of radical militants, I was relieved. I assumed that those people would have tactics and weapons to get us inside ProNavitas. When we met with them for the first time, my hope evaporated. I recognize one of them. He’s the guy who led me on a rooftop escape from the bears who would eventually arrest me. He’s naked and dirty, just like the rest of his group. Against a powerful corporation with a professional security detail of armed guards, we’ll be protected by two-dozen naked savages. And these naked savages have questionable allegiances.

  I don’t try to hide my dismay. “These guys are working with the black bear,” I say.

  They look to Adam. One of the naked guys raises his spear to his shoulder. We’re standing down near the shore of the lake. Adam’s cabin is behind me. Adam brought them through on a fold that’s already rippling its way across the lake. For the record, my folds stay stable a lot longer than Adam’s.

  “They were working with him. He betrayed them. Now they’re working with me.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why are you trusting them when they’ve already shown that they’ll change their allegiance?”

  Even more of the naked men are now testing the weight of their spears. It reminds me of the way men always cock their weapons in movies. If it’s intended to intimidate me, they need to think of something different. I’ll fold these guys and leave them on the surface of the moon before a spear even reaches me.

  “Their purpose has remained unwavering,” Adam says. “They were tricked by the bear, sure, but now that they’ve seen what he was up to, they’re on my side.”

  “And what is their purpose?”

  Adam gestures to one of the men. He raises his chin before he answers me. “All technology must go. We will live as we evolved to. It’s the only way to regain balance.”

  “Medicine is technology. When I was hurt, that guy there said you people could heal me. Healing isn’t technology?” I ask as I point to the guide who rescued me briefly from the bears.

  “For medicine we use only natural cures. If a plant lowers blood pressure or decreases pain, we will use it for that. If we can splint a broken bone with sticks and vines, we will do that,” the naked guy says.

  “But no electricity?” I ask.

  “No.”

  I turn to Adam. “How are these guys going to help you anyway? All they have is spears.”

  “Let me worry about that. Your job will be to stay calm and help me fold. Once we’re inside, we’ll hold off the guards while you disable the machine.”

  He’s going to get me into the control room and then it’s my job to turn the thing off.

  “You can do that, right?” he asks.

  When he first talked to me about his idea—the night of the knocking—I said no. As far as I was concerned, there was no way to break the machine. After a few months of thought, I’m ready to amend that conclusion. There is one way to break the machine, but it’s going to take time and direct access to the build machine and the servers.

  “I can do that,” I say. “But it’s going to take three hours once I get access to the machine.”

  Honestly, I can’t imagine it will take more than an hour. I’ve thought about this problem hundreds of times and worked my way through all the steps. Even if they’ve changed everything, I should be able to execute my sabotage in under an hour. But I’ve managed developers far too long to give that estimate as my final answer. I took my worst-case scenario and multiplied it by three.

  “Three hours should be okay,” he says. I don’t know where he got his information, but the schematics he showed me looked like the floor plan of ProNavitas. He has his strategy planned out. Of course, when he presented his strategy to me I was expecting his army to be more than men with spears.

  ---- * ----

  Our little group is bunched up in an orchard. I can just see the corner of the building from my spot.

  “I’ll fold us to the parking lot,” Adam says. “You take us into the lobby, and then I’ll take us down into the living quarters.”

  He’s told me this a dozen times. We’ve drilled the plan back and forth until I felt like I could repeat it in my sleep. Now that we’re actually doing it, I’m glad for the refresher. It seems like adrenaline is pushing out all my memories. I don’t need the extra energy. I need to remain calm so I can execute my folds. I can feel the resistance. Deep below us, the ribbon of energy is making reality stiffer. The folds are going to take all my skill.

  Adam begins to march his people forward as I start to imagine the polished marble of the lobby.
I imagine the elevators, and the guard desk. I remember how the bear seemed to appear on the elevator out of nowhere.

  “Come on,” Adam says. He’s tugging at my arm. I look up and see that everyone else has been ushered through the fold. We’re the last ones. I have a terrible premonition about what we’ll find when we go.

  He pulls me through.

  I’m wrong.

  All of his naked men are there, spears ready. They’re lined up along the side of the building. Surely they’ve been spotted on security cameras by now. It doesn’t matter. We won’t be here but a second.

  Space is even stiffer here. Folding it feels like doing a sit-up with an elephant on my chest. I close my eyes and force my brain to empty as I exert my will. I breathe out my anxiety and fear. I breathe out the cloud of doom. I open my eyes when I hear Adam shuffling his men into the golden light. He’s going to fold us into the living quarters. I’m going to fold us down to the conference room. Then he’s going to aim for the control room. We’re not sure if that last one is possible. We might have to make a smaller fold into the power distribution area, but that will be a tight squeeze for all of us. If that happens, then I’ll go first so I can start working.

  Again, I’m the second to last through.

  I can’t imagine what these naked warriors think of this process. I’m accustomed to it, and it’s still bizarre to me. One second, I’m standing next to the ProNavitas building, between the bushes and the stucco wall. When I step through the golden glow, all our plans are dashed.

  ---- * ----

  The men have closed into a circle, spears out. Twelve are crouched low. The other twelve are aiming their spears high. Between their shoulders, I see bears. Between their hips, I see the hunched forms of attacking gorillas and chimps. The circle stretches as a couple of Adam’s men jab forward to ward off a lunging bear. One spear catches the bear in the face. Another spear draws blood from his shoulder. The bear roars and swats a spear so hard that the man holding it tumbles to the floor. On the other side of the circle, a chimp uses the distraction to grab at a spear. He jerks it forward, pulling the naked man out of formation.

  Adam is supposed to get us out of here. I spin and realize that he’s not here.

  My fold has collapsed. When I saw the attack, I panicked. With the excitement, my brain dumped the fold. This has never happened to me before. Since I had no idea it could happen, I never prepared for it.

  I try to picture the bushes and the side of the building. Adam didn’t study the lobby. If he tries to follow us, there’s no telling where he will appear. The best I can hope for is that he’ll stay put so I can come back for him. I try to clear my mind.

  A bear tumbles forward with a spear stuck between his ribs. He clamps down on a man’s neck and the two of them slam into me. I try to roll away, but the fur and flesh lands right on me. My leg bends backwards at the knee and I feel tendons stretching to their limits.

  I breathe out my pain. I try to picture the bushes and the side of the building as I breathe out the feeling of the elbow crushing my thigh. I breathe out the feeling of bear teeth beginning to clamp down on my arm. The image of the bushes won’t come. All I can think of is the height of the ceiling in the ribbon room. It’s somewhere below me, somehow holding up the dirt and living quarters, and office space, and the marble floor. With that thought the three of us slip through the floor into an unintentional fold.

  ---- * ----

  We’re so high that the floor is lost in haze. Between us and the floor, the ribbon twists and squirms with a billion volts of electricity. We’re falling—me, the bear clamped to my arm, and the naked man on the other end of the spear. My reactions are quick, but a lateral fold seems impossible here. I reject the idea as soon as it enters my head. I can’t possibly save myself with a lateral fold, but a twisting fold seems entirely doable. The space even seems to want to twist here. With a moment of thought, I envision it. The golden glow appears right below us as we fall.

  When we slip through, the infinite loop jumps. The light from it stretches and spreads out as it shifts backwards through my twist. We’re still plummeting towards certain death. The bear spits out my arm, and the naked man lets go of the spear. We’re free-falling as three entities. I imagine another twist, but I imagine it as a loop, like the spark below. It’s frantic nonsense. I’m grasping at straws. We tumble into my twisting loop.

  It doesn’t take us somewhere safe. It doesn’t land us gently on solid ground. My twist does something unexpected. The infinite loop of energy below us stops. We stop. Time stops. We’re stuck in a tiny hole in time. If I had to guess, I would say we’re turning a tight circle in the fifth dimension, and it makes it appear like we’ve ground to a halt in the four dimensions we normally inhabit. That includes time. We’re three creatures who are stuck in time.

  I can’t move, but I can think.

  If I ignore what my eyes are telling me, I can imagine that we’re floating in the ocean, and the infinite loop below us is a strange new species of jellyfish. If I could breathe, I would breathe out my concern. I would breathe out my will to survive and exist only here forever. The bear’s mouth is stretched into a silent scream. His teeth are decorated by my blood, or maybe that’s blood exhaled from a punctured lung. He can’t move his mouth to tell me.

  In this frozen moment, I believe I can execute a fold. There’s still a lot of resistance, but it has been greatly reduced by the stoppage of time. I imagine the parking lot. It’s the first image that jumped into my head. I imagine the baking heat of the day when I first came here. I envision this fold directly below me. If I ever move again, I’ll fall right into the fold. With luck the bear next to me will miss it.

  Even though the world I see is static, the glow appears.

  I’m not sure it’s right, but there’s only one way to find out. I have to go through the fold to find out where it leads. I’m not sure how to do that. I’m stuck in time. If I can’t move, I can’t go through it. The twist that saved my life is now the thing preventing me from getting out of here.

  Far below us, the infinite loop is a frozen arc of light. It’s like a photograph of lightning, but it’s not because it emits its own glow. I don’t know much about relativity, but I’ve read that the speed of light is constant, regardless of the frame of reference. I wonder if it’s constant now. If time is stopped, then why can I still see at all? Why are photons still reaching my eyes?

  Just as I have that thought, an answer reaches me. I see a little red spot on the infinite loop that I’m sure wasn’t there before. It’s just to the right of the golden glow of my fold. I can’t move my eyes, but I focus my attention on the red spot. As I consider it, I see that it’s stretching out. We are moving through time, just very, very slowly. I turn my attention back to the bear. There’s a little drop of blood at the end of his nose. As I concentrate on it, I see it elongate.

  My new fold is feet below me. If I could move my arm, I might just be able to graze it with my fingers. Given our progress through time, I can’t even begin to imagine how long it will take for me to fall into that fold. Hours? Days? Weeks? Without moving, I don’t know how to get out of the twist that I’m in.

  Perhaps I can collapse the twist and release myself.

  I can’t even sense the twist anymore. Normally, a fold I’ve created feels like an extended limb. I can feel where it is just like I can feel my own fingers. With the twist I’m caught in, and the lateral fold I’ve imagined below, I feel nothing. I’m frightened to do too much. I don’t know the limits of my capabilities, and I don’t want to trade what I have just to find myself falling to my death.

  As I’m trying to decide what to do, a new problem occurs to me.

  I’ve been in this room before when there was a ribbon of energy twisted into an infinite loop. But when I was here before, I was on the floor in the protective bubble built there. The bubble acted as an insulator. Without it, the electricity might have jumped to me to fry me in place. With any other type of powe
r, one might think that falling through the air would be safe. I’m not grounded, so the electricity should have no business with me. But this is not normal electricity. This is a special type of power generated from inter-dimensional potential. It doesn’t operate by normal rules. That’s why the bubble was built.

  I’m not in a bubble.

  That red spot on the arc is growing. It’s growing into an arm of deadly power and it’s growing in my direction. I have no way to judge which will happen first—will I cross into the fold, or will the arc cook me in the air? I’m in one of those dreams where I’m facing certain death but my body is paralyzed and helpless to react. I am moving, but it’s at the speed of an hour hand. The arc of red death is coming like a minute hand. If I focus on it, I can watch it grow before my eyes.

  Is this how a carrot feels as it senses a rabbit approaching?

  With no ability to act, and unable to turn away from the specter in front of me, how long will it take to go insane?

  I suspect it won’t take long at all.

  Chapter Forty-One

  * Brother *

  WHEN I THINK OF my brother, I always think about that fragile four year old, whom I was tasked with watching. He was allowed to tag along with me, but I always had to look out for him and make sure he didn’t get hurt.

  He always got hurt.

  It someone threw a rock, it would bounce off a tree and send bark into Robert’s eye. If someone lit a firecracker, the explosion would somehow burn Robert’s finger. Before we went home, I always had to dip the corner of my shirt into a puddle so I could wipe the tears and dried snot from his face. Robert was my constant responsibility, and I always resented him for it. It seemed that without him I would be perfectly free.

  When he left, I did feel free. I felt free and alone. The part of me that watched out for him died quickly, and it took along with it a certain quantity of my joy. The struggle to shake free my tethers was the same struggle that removed all my supports. I was independent but alone. For a while I surrounded myself with friends and girlfriends. I tried to make a new family from the people around me. Those relationships always fall apart. People drift away and form new connections. In time, I found it easier to keep to myself. The energy required to hold on to people took more out of me than it returned. It’s an unbalanced equation.