by Aaron Frale
Jacque didn’t say a word. He gave his group a hand signal, and they scattered, leaving the Tuners behind. The vendors in the area who were packing up their carts in anticipation of a fight breathed a sigh of relief and began to unpack. The woman who had saved them turned around. It was Alex, but not Alex. She had the same facial features, but she had a nose ring, long, flowing tricolor hair, and while she did wear the practical pocket and gear-filled garb of the post-apocalypse, it brought out her feminine features.
“From the look on your faces, I take it you met my twin sister, Alexa,” the woman said, “If you see her again, tell her she is dirt—no, less than dirt—dead to me.”
“Don’t you mean they is dirt?” DeAndre said.
“It would be they are dirt,” Patel said. “Gender-neutral pronouns still conjugate—”
“Don’t tell me you are into that crap too?” Alex’s sister said. “She is my baby sister by two minutes, and I don’t buy that non-binary crap. You either got a penis or a vag, and that’s it. End of story.”
“Who would have thought that Alex was the open-minded one?” DeAndre said to Magdalena. She recoiled a little less.
“When you are finished passing notes to your classmates,” Alex’s sister said, “I’m Anya, Anya Meyers. We used to be called the Meyers twins until Alex got that stupid car.”
“It’s been quite useful,” Patel said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Anya said. “She loves that thing, treats it like her baby. Freaking babies are the worst things to have during the apocalypse. It’s a terrible place to have children. That’s why I never believed that movie from your world. What’s it called? Terminator? Who has a baby in the apocalypse? Walking dead? The zombies would eat all of them.”
“You know about U-42 pop culture?” Patel said.
“Wake up,” Anya said. “Look around.”
They stopped to examine the items for sale. During their desperate attempt to sell their own things, they hadn’t looked at the stuff people were selling. On closer inspection, they seemed to have a multiverse flair to them. Magdalena saw two books she had seen at a Target when she went out for a supply run with some of the techs. There was a towel with a character DeAndre said was from 21c and another box set of speakers Patel noted that could only be found in U-88. That’s when Magdalena saw a keyring with a plump penguin from her world that was a popular program from her childhood. She picked up the keychain and palmed it nostalgically.
Anya tossed the Pokémon look-alike on the table, and said to the others, “See anything you like? It’s yours.”
Magdalena pocketed the artifact from her world and said, “So these items aren’t scavenged from your world? They are from other worlds?”
“Ding, ding, ding!” Anya said, “We have a winner. Yeah, crap from other worlds ends up in the desert of this place all the time. Ever wonder where your socks go? They appear in our deserts, and all these fine young people sell them for Judomon cards.”
“Why collectible card games?” Patel said.
“When society collapsed, people needed something to be used as money.”
“Yeah, but why not baseball cards or, you know, money?” DeAndre asked.
“Maybe the first guy to down more birds than he could eat was a big Judomon fan. I don’t know. Either way, Alex and I were good at getting them. We even were thinking about buying a storefront in this place. Then she got that stupid car.”
“You can tune as well?”
“Weren’t you listening? Girl, you should control that man of yours,” Anya said.
“He’s not my—” Magdalena attempted to say.
Anya interrupted. “Alexa found that damned TF2 and was popping in and out of verses, finding cool stuff, new things; like brand new in the box. We were killing it. She taught me to use it, but there were people here who needed me. I can’t go tromping around the multiverse whenever I see fit,” she said. “Either way, she came back less and less. Especially after that car. Once Mom got desert brain, she just stopped coming home at all.”
“What’s that? Radiation sickness?”
Anya laughed. “No, it’s why there are no old folks’ homes, senior discounts, or 55 plus communities here. The desert rots your brain. You go crazy.”
“Do you know Hector Gonzales?” Magdalena said.
“Maybe we should—” Patel cautioned.
“Hector sent us here for a reason,” Magdalena said. “We should find out what it is.”
“Nope,” Anya said. “A friend of yours. Alexa didn’t name her car that? Did she name her car that? Did I tell you how much I hate that car?”
“No, she didn’t,” DeAndre said. “Hector is just a friend of ours.”
“You looking for him?” Anya said. “My mom can help you find him. She knows everyone, the scavengers, the mercs, the jerks, ha! I made that one up. But seriously, she knows every bounty hunter, gang leader, and desert brained mayor who thinks they are going to rebuild this place to its former glory. Society is dead and gone, and now it’s just surviving.”
“Can we see your mom?” Magdalena asked. DeAndre gave her a look, and she shrugged.
“Sure, but I need something from you,” Anya said. “I did save your life. In my world, you repay life debts by following them around until you save their life or die trying.”
“Seriously?” DeAndre said.
Anya laughed. “I’m just screwing with you. No man, I saved you because I need supplies, stuff only versers can get. I no longer care about buying my own market and being the girl with the most Judomon cards. Now come on before the topknots come back looking for more to squeeze out of us.”
They followed her through the market to the exit. She put more cards in the gate guard’s hand, and he let them through without any sort of baggage check. They were thoroughly searching a merchant’s cart before they would let him go into the wasteland.
Outside the walls, it was vast dunes in every direction. Interspersed in the dunes were husks of skyscrapers and junk littering the sand. It was desolate and didn’t look as if it could support life, yet there were birds like the ones they had seen for sale perched on decaying beams from the buildings that used to be there. Magdalena noticed a sand-colored lizard wriggle its way from the dirt, and a bird swooped down and scooped it up into its beak.
There were a few cactus varieties and a couple of desert bushes growing at the base of buildings where the dunes couldn’t reach. There was a freighter ship in the distance turned on its side, weathered by the wind and grit.
They walked for hours through the wasteland. The shadows grew long, and Magdalena noticed something peculiar on the horizon. She swore that she saw a purple cloud in the distance, and something shiny and metal dropped from it. However, she blinked, and it was gone. Maybe it was the heat, or the desert brain was already taking hold.
As if Anya was reading her thoughts, she said, “That was a drop, but we are not on a scavenging run, and who knows if it has anything worth a Judomon card.”
“What’s a drop?” Magdalena said.
“Alexa really didn’t tell you anything about this place, did she?”
“No, they didn’t want to talk about this place.”
Anya rolled her eyes at the pronoun use and said, “A drop is when junk from another verse comes crashing through the barrier between universes into ours. If one is about to happen near you and you got a TF3, you can hear the reverberations like two universes are bouncing crap back and forth until ours gives way, and the junk falls into this one. No one knows how it started. People think it’s the same thing that messed up this place in the first place. I don’t know, nor do I pretend to know. All I know is that my sister and I have been scavenging since we were in diapers.”
“I thought you said this was a bad place to raise kids?”
“Do you think I want to live in this hell hole? I said it was a bad place to have kids. It doesn’t mean people don’t do it. People sex each other up all the time, and some batty women like my mother kee
p the spoils of their sexy time.”
“How long has your world been like this?”
“Don’t know. They don’t keep records, but I’ll tell you what Alexa thinks. She thinks this is Universe One, you know, the first verse, the creator of all multiverse tech. She thinks they screwed up our world bad, and just changed the records, so people think this is 78f.”
“That’s BS,” DeAndre said. “We know how to tune to Universe One; they just have a lock on it like Tuners HQ. It’s not like it doesn’t exist. It’s just closed. Like an exit on the freeway.”
“Sure,” Anya said. “But what if they switched the exit signs? You only know it’s Universe One because someone told you so. How do we know this isn’t Universe One, and they locked down the real 78f, so people just think they abandoned the multiverse and disappeared?”
“If this is Universe One,” DeAndre asked, “why aren’t there TF3s all over the place? You should see the number of people in U-42 who have iPhones. I’m pretty sure if Jon’s people nuked each other, there would be iPhones everywhere.”
“Maybe the TF3s were sold or stashed long ago by bounty hunters who made it rich here and retired in some other universes,” Anya said. “The point is that people here would have died off long ago if it wasn’t for the drops. It brings multiverse travelers, sometimes food; I even found this beverage called Coke. I’m sure it was made for kings because—”
“Travelers? There are others here?”
“Bounty hunters, smugglers, anyone with a TF1, 2, or 3 who doesn’t work for the Tuners.”
“Why would Hector send us to the black market world?” Magdalena pondered.
“Perhaps there is a piece of technology that can help us,” Patel said. “Or maybe there are more like Alex who would help the Tuners now that the cultists are in charge.”
Anya said. “I don’t pretend to know who the cultists are or even the Tuners, for that matter. All I know is that Alexa told me one day that the Tuners may have sticks up all their butts. However, you can depend on them if you ever met them. But the cultists—she said I should just run if I ever see them.”
“How do you know we weren’t cultists?” Magdalena said.
“Look,” Anya said and pulled out a pair of binoculars. She handed them to Magdalena. She looked out to a barren mountain in the distance. After scanning the hillside for a moment, she saw the ruins of another market at the peak. There were still smoldering buildings, and dead bodies littered the ground. Carts packed with goods had been left untouched, which was odd for a scavenger culture.
Anya continued, “It’s the market run by the Dojo clan. The rumor was that hordes of people with scars all over their bodies descended on the place and killed everybody and took the young ones with them. People say it’s cursed. You’ll get desert brain if you even go. You didn’t look like hordes of snarling death bringers, so I figured you must be the Tuners. So is it true?”
“What?” Magdalena asked and passed the binoculars to DeAndre.
“Do you really put sticks in your butts? Does it hurt?”
Magdalena laughed and said, “It’s an expression. How much longer until we get to your mom’s.”
“Five days if we continue through the night,” Anya said. “It’s better to walk in the night when you aren’t scavenging.”
“Five days!” DeAndre said. “We don’t have any supplies.”
“Don’t worry,” Anya said. “I know the best hunting grounds and all the watering holes. We will be fine. Besides, if you wanted to skip the walk, you should have come from 49b. There’s a spot not too far from my house—”
“We didn’t know we were going to your house,” DeAndre said.
“Come on, we are now,” Magdalena said. She tightened her grip on her trinket from her homeworld. Maybe being picked on wasn’t so bad after all.
14
John followed Alex through Universe 132’s mall. They had traveled through 8d, 91, 33c, among others, to get there. It was no wonder no one knew about it. Tuning without the aid of HQ was like wandering through a maze where the exits changed, no two paths were ever the same and your maps were outdated yearly.
U-132 was the most exceptional place Jon had ever been to. The buildings were made from various forms of plant life that were grown into the desired shape. Massive redwood trees served as support beams. Hedges were used instead of walls. Stairs were made from woody shrubs and tree branches. The people of this world shaped the plants into living buildings.
Even the fixtures in stores were living plants molded like a bonsai tree in the desired shape where clothing hung from the tree branch racks. Jon passed a storefront where there were young plants tied off with rope and forced to grow in the desired direction. Carefully positioned sunlight tubes also coaxed the plant to grow. The sign said coming in twenty years with as much enthusiasm as a store opening next week in U-42.
“Twenty years?” Jon exclaimed.
Alex shrugged. “Yeah, time is not as important here.”
Jon looked around at the people, and they were all wearing various forms of colored togas. No one was rushing. They also seemed to move at a slower pace. They took their time to sit, relax, have their coffee, chat with friends, and browse the stores. Even the clerks seemed in no pressure to make the sale or move the merchandise. A man stopped to gaze into a pond in the center of the mall that reflected the natural light.
Jon slowed down as a result of his observations.
Alex laughed and said, “Now, you are getting it.”
“It’s hard to believe the cultists haven’t burnt this place to the ground, literally,” Jon said.
“Hector told me once that he recruited a kid from U-132 once, but had to return him to his home universe. The kid was too slow and made everyone seem like DeAndre.”
“Hector?” Jon asked. “Were you a Tuner?”
“Me?” Alex laughed. “Oh no, Hector tried to recruit me. He gives all the bounty hunters the recruitment speech when they end up in prison at HQ.”
“HQ has a prison?” Jon asked, astonished. This was news to him. Granted, he hadn’t spent much time at the Tuners, but during that time, he never saw anyone arrested or put in prison.
“You got to put all the people who are causing havoc in the multiverse somewhere.”
“We have people locked up in HQ?”
“No much anymore. Hector doesn’t like cramming jail cells with people who sell baseball cards from one universe to another. He’ll usually let us go after a couple days.”
“So, they are only for horrible people.”
“You see, that’s just it,” Alex said. “The nasty people usually do something wrong enough for their local universe even if you don’t account for the fact they are interdimensional travelers. The Tuners typically leave it up to each world. Charles Manson was a Tuner, or at least the members of his ‘family’ could tune. There were murders throughout the multiverse, but it was easier to tip the authorities of your homeworld in the right direction because you only need to catch him in one universe.”
“You’re saying Charles Manson is from another universe?”
“Yeah,” Alex said. “You’d be surprised to find out how many baddies were just in a place for the opportunity. The point is that the Tuners got out of the incarceration business when they started leaving it up to the local authorities. The cellblocks were just used for people like me when you caught us trading multiverse bubble gum cards.”
“It hardly seems like a crime.”
“Interference in the natural path of each universe is, and who knows what objects would have an effect in each place. Maybe the guy who invented Magic the Gathering just ripped it off from another universe and got all rich when he should have been working at Barnes and Noble his entire life.”
“You seem to know a lot about card games.”
“Call it an unfortunate circumstance of my birth,” Alex said. “But the point is that one guy getting rich who wasn’t supposed to might not seem like a big deal, but
it is. Rich people contribute to political campaigns. They have an international audience. People pay attention to what the wealthy are doing. Even the really nice ones decide what schools get money and which ones don’t, what medicine research gets funded, and any number of ways they influence the world. Like it or not, wealth means power.”
“Why would Hector let you go if one baseball card could change the course of a civilization?”
“He didn’t,” Alex said and pulled up their sleeve. Inside the wrist, there was a device that looked as if it was surgically implanted. It had a blinking red light that could be seen through the skin. Alex continued, “In the past, when the Tuners would catch a bounty hunter who wasn’t doing any killing, just making a few bucks from the multiverse, they locked them up until they aged out of tuning. It seemed the simple way to keep us in check. When Hector took the reins, he’d spend a few days trying to win us over. Then when that didn’t work, he’d tag us and let us loose in the wild.”
“Now the cultists are hunting you?”
“See, that’s just it. All the bounty hunters knew the moment Tuners HQ fell because our tags started blinking at the same time. At first, we thought Hector had decided to round us up. Even though the Tuners doctrine said that any transfer of objects between worlds was meddling, Hector didn’t sweat the small stuff. All the tagging meant was that you wouldn’t beat the Tuners to Universe One tech again. Don’t worry; I already had the car by the time I got this.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Jon said.
Alex ignored him and continued talking, “The point is that once we heard that the cultists are in charge now, we are scared. And rightfully so; we—”
“You stole the High Priest’s headdress.”
“Look, man, all it takes is the cultist’s decision to wipe us all out. Chips in your arm sound like harmless security measures until someone who doesn’t like you is put in charge.”
“I’m guessing you want it out.”
“Yeah, or we bash the tracking system out of existence. Either way, I can’t hide from these guys.”