How to Save the Universe Without Really Trying

by John Cusick

  “What happened then?” Becca said in a kind of titanic whisper.

  “The professor is hurtled through time!” said Lola, waving her arms to illustrate the tumult. “And he travels all the way back to Mars.”

  “That’s where they left the Crystal of Lies!” said Garth. “In episode thirty-five.”

  “Bingo,” said Lola with a grin. “So the professor uses the Crystal to rewrite time and bring back June’s brother from the dead.”

  “I can’t believe it!” said Becca.

  “And then they all take the Interstellar Conveyer Belt back to the future, and rescue June from the space whale.”

  “Oh man, I bet that must have been awesome,” said Becca.

  “It was,” said Lola. “So anyway, finally, they get back to the professor’s home world of Megatraxis, and then . . .” Lola let the moment hang, let the Phan roil in their godlike anticipation. “On the floor of the Senate Hall . . . ,” she said slowly. The Phan inched forward a few hundred miles in space. “In front of the entire Galactic Council . . .” The words dripped from her lips, the Phan quivering before her. “Professor Rivulon gets down on one knee . . .”

  “No!” said Garth.

  “Yes!” said Becca.

  “And asks June to marry him.”

  The Phan erupted in the interdimensional equivalent of applause and joy.

  “That’s perfect!” thundered Garth.

  “That’s so perfect!” erupted Becca.

  “And that,” said Lola, “is how Dimension Y ends.”

  Hovering in space, protected by her space-time bubble, Lola Ray bowed.

  The Phan exploded with delight. In their ultimate satisfaction they unwound themselves, unwound time, and in a kind of cosmic ecstasy, unwound reality itself . . .

  . . . and then wound everything back up again.

  Gasping, teary, filled with pleasure unending, the Phan sighed.

  “Oh wow,” said Garth. “Wow wow wow. I mean, not knowing was seriously killing me.”

  “Season six ended on such a cliffhanger!” said Becca. “I mean, we’ve been waiting . . . what, a thousand years to find out how it ends?”

  “That is glorious,” said Garth. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” said Lola. “Now.” She brought herself up to full height—which is a funny thing to do when you’re floating in space. “I think you owe us one.”

  “What’s that?” said Garth.

  “Hmm?” said Becca.

  “I told you how it ended, I think you owe us one,” said Lola. “Come on, without me you’d have never found out.”

  The Phan seemed to confer. “All right,” Becca said after a moment. “What would you like?”

  “Firstly, I want you to free all the Jeremys, Mr. Jeremy included. No more slave labor. Let them all go.” Lola glanced at the Jeremys suspended in space and then quickly added, “I mean, metaphorically let them go.”

  “Fine by us,” said Garth. “We don’t need them anymore anyway.”

  “Great,” said Lola. “Secondly, I’d like you to send me home.”

  There was a long silence. “You mean Hoboken?” said Becca, uncertain why any being would want to go there.

  “In the twenty-first century,” said Lola. “Yes, please.”

  “Oh,” said Garth. “Yeah, we can’t do that.”

  “We have no idea how to time travel,” said Becca. “If we did, why would we need to ask you how Dimension Y ended? We could just go back in time and watch the DVDs ourselves.”

  “Yeah, sorry about that,” said Garth. “Anyway, it’s been real!”

  “Thanks a lot, everyone!” said Becca. “Hope you have a great rest of your lives!”

  “See ya!” said Garth.

  And with that the Phan slipped back through their doorway and out of our universe, gone forever.

  Lola remained suspended in space, her mouth agape.

  She couldn’t get home.

  She didn’t even know how to get down.

  49

  IN THE AFTERMATH OF the Phan, there was lots to do.

  The galaxy had just experienced something totally unique. Forevermore history would be divided into before and after the Phan. It would be called the Day of the Answer. In history books and in university classrooms it would sometimes be referred to, inaccurately, as the Battle of Singularity City (historians being the type to throw the word “battle” in front of everything just to make their books and classes seem more exciting). Miniseries would be produced dramatizing the events, in which the galaxy’s most famous actors would dress in giant spherical papier-mâché balls to portray the Phan. And across the stars, network showrunners would wake in a sweat, remembering what they referred to as the Great and Terrible Spoiler.

  But that was all to come. Now there was work to be done.

  Ten thousand Bog Mutants were left floating in a space-time bubble above Singularity City. While many could now return happily to their respectable jobs as floor sweepers and parking attendants, nearly half had been employed by the Temporal Transit Authority, which, now that the Phan had no use for it, was defunct. Thousands of Jeremys were now out of a job, a horrible thing for a Bog Mutant, and none of them were quite sure what to do with themselves.

  As if in answer to their occupational anxiety, an enormous planetoid-sized fungal core floated toward them out of the night.

  “Come, my children,” said Mr. Jeremy, “and let us be together again.”

  A family reunion was held on the surface of Mr. Jeremy, with all ten thousand Bog Mutants in attendance, as well as the population of mushroom people, their phenotypic brothers. Reunited with his children, Mr. Jeremy vowed to protect them and offered them a home on his surface. They were welcome to stay forever, or until they decided what they wanted to do with their lives. So long as they cleaned up after themselves and didn’t let the laundry pile up.

  In the hours that followed there was a great party on the surface of Mr. Jeremy. Bog Mutant DJs spun the latest tracks, Professor Donut served tea and scones and cucumber sandwiches for all, and the mushroom people showed the Jeremys a dance they’d invented that involved spinning on their dome-like little heads—which the Jeremys attempted without much success.

  When the party was over, only four Bog Mutants decided they wouldn’t be staying. The first three claimed they had found their purpose in this universe, which was to open and run the galaxy’s first interstellar taco stand. Mr. Jeremy gave them his blessing and out they went into the universe to seek their fortune.

  The fourth was Gretta.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stay with us?” Professor Donut asked as they stood in the shadow of a Temporal Transit Authority shuttle. “Now that the Triumvirate of Pong is disbanded, your father and I have all sorts of exciting projects we want to tackle,” the little cat said excitedly. “There are so many questions cute science has yet to answer. We could use a mind like yours!”

  “No thanks,” said Gretta, not unkindly. “Someone needs to dismantle the Temporal Transit Authority, and with Bolus gone and the Bog Mutants freed, I guess it’s up to me.” She stuck her hands in her pockets and considered the stars. “Maybe I’ll repurpose the fleet for something else . . . something better.”

  She kissed the professor on the top of his head, spit out a bit of fur, hugged her brother Mutants and brother mushrooms goodbye, and promised Mr. Jeremy she would call from time to time. Then she ascended the ramp into the little shuttle and flew up and out, toward her destiny, whatever that happened to be.

  But in the moments just after the Phan had vanished, before all the hullabaloo with the Bog Mutants had a chance to begin, a sleekly red ship climbed into the massive reaches of space the Phan had only just occupied. In all that near emptiness it found a young girl, alone in the vacuum.

  She was sitting in space, in her little bubble of space-time, her knees pulled to her chest, looking out at the stars, or at nothing in particular. The ship pulled alongside and opened a hatch, and
after a moment, the figure of a young boy appeared in the airlock. Gingerly, he stepped out into space, testing the nothing beneath his feet and finding it sturdy.

  The boy approached and stood a moment above the girl, who still sat, chin on her knees. The boy crouched. He might have been saying something to her. It could have been promises, reassurances, or even apologies on behalf of the big, uncaring, impossible universe.

  The girl did not move or speak.

  And then, the boy stopped speaking too, and simply wrapped his arms around her shoulders.

  Suspended there, in a teardrop in space, they appeared to tremble.

  Epilogue

  A LOT OF PEOPLE had been preparing for the Phan for a very long time, and now that they’d come and gone, another question beat in their hearts.

  What now?

  The glittering towers of Upper Vancouver shone in the afternoon sunlight. Shuttles hummed between the skyscrapers. On the streets below, markets were closing for the day and cafés were switching to the lunch menu. In an alley not far from the shore, a small mangy dog peeked its nose out of a doorway and sniffed the air.

  Cautiously, it stepped out onto the cobbled street on its morning search for lunch.

  Just then a shadow passed over the alley. A steady hum filled the street as a downdraft scattered the scraps and sent the puddles left over from last night’s thunderstorm rippling. The little dog barked and went scurrying back to the safety of its doorway as a spaceship descended, adjusted, and settled itself between the two brightly colored tenements in this, the oldest part of the city.

  The ship was small, with a racing stripe down one side and what appeared to be cute little ears hot-glued to the roof. A hatch opened, and out stepped two figures in clean if slightly rumpled jumpsuits.

  “This is it,” Phin said, considering a readout on his tablet.

  “Okay,” said Lola. “Because you also said that about the shopfront in Gastown, and the empty lot across from the marina. In fact, that’s what you said about the last five places we checked.”

  “Well, the records aren’t exactly thorough,” Phin grumbled.

  Lola shot him a look.

  “But I’m sure this one is it.”

  “Okay,” she said, steeling herself. “Okay, let’s do this.”

  Together the pair entered a darkened doorway, beyond which a staircase led them down, away from the sounds and smells of the city’s historic district. Into the damp they descended, their flashlights sweeping over cobwebs and films of falling dust. Through basements and subbasements they passed until at last they came to a steel door. On it was emblazoned the seal of the University of British Colombia, and below it, the special research group of which Lola’s father had been a part. Its image was faded by the wearing of time, but a slogan was still visible in flaking blue letters. Move Ahead.

  “This is it,” Lola said, her breath catching in the small, damp space. “That’s the group Papa was working for when I, you know . . . blipped into the future.”

  Phin affixed the handle with a small device the size and shape of a pencil. There was a hiss and a pop, and the steel door opened. They were met with a gust as the chamber’s hermetic seal was broken, and Lola felt a chill as she and Phin smelled air that had not been breathed in centuries.

  Could she smell her father? Maybe. Under the stale, recycled smell was something else that might have been something familiar, but she couldn’t be sure.

  They followed a long corridor, passed empty rooms containing nothing more than broken glass and rubble, until at last they came to a final door. It was shut. It had a nameplate. The nameplate read Ray.

  “Are you ready?” Phin asked.

  They’d talked about this. Yes, she was ready. She was ready to find whatever remained of her family, and no, she didn’t expect much. Her father, her mother and sisters, everyone Lola knew was long gone. Whatever might have outlasted them in Newark had been vaporized in the Great Pork Fat Meltdown in 2415. But if there was something, a scrap of paper or an old coffee mug, that once belonged to Papa—well, Lola wanted it. It had become her quest the moment she realized neither the Phan nor anyone else could send her home.

  The door had its own, secondary hermetic seal, which Phin opened with his electronic lock pick. The room beyond was dark, cluttered, and unremarkable. The seal had preserved the papers and posters hanging on the wall, but a thousand years is a long time to wait.

  “What are these?” Phin asked, shining his light on a shelf of slim volumes.

  Lola grinned. “Those are DVDs. Dimension Y, seasons one through six,” she said. “We used to watch it together sometimes. Papa loved it. He even wanted to name the dog Professor Rivulon—”

  Phin had wandered away, already having lost interest.

  Lola shook her head and ran her fingers along the dusty spines. “Too bad these are useless now.”

  “What was your father, er, Papa,” said Phin, “researching?”

  “Particles?” said Lola. “I think? I never really understood it.”

  Phin shone his flashlight on a whiteboard in the corner. Someone had been scribbling equations on it, and they were still mostly legible.

  “He was working on something,” said Phin. “It looks complicated.”

  “He came here on a research grant,” Lola said, peering into a far corner.

  “This can’t be right,” Phin mumbled to himself. “I mean, I don’t fully understand what he wrote here, and that’s saying something.”

  Lola was no longer listening. She wasn’t interested in Papa’s business papers. She didn’t care about his work. She wanted something personal, something his. A photograph maybe, or even (she didn’t dare hope) a journal of some kind.

  She shone her light in another corner of the laboratory. There were filing cabinets she could search. Plastic storage bins to upend. But something small and unassuming on a desk caught her eye.

  Back home, Lola’s father kept their important family documents—birth certificates and the like—in a small lockbox. A similar one sat on this table, here in the thirty-first century, under a thin layer of dust. This box, however, had the words FOR LOLA stamped on the side.

  Lola hadn’t been breathing much before. She stopped breathing now.

  “It looks like your father was into some serious deep physics,” Phin was saying. “He was fooling around with space-time. It’s an interesting theory. Using alternate dimensions as a shortcut to travel through time. Looks like he’d even found one and named it.” Phin sniffed. “Totally impractical though.”

  “This box,” said Lola. “Phin, this box has my name on it.”

  Phin dropped what he was doing and came to her side. Lola ran her fingers across the stamped lettering. Whatever this box was, it had been built to last. Whoever had left it had intended it to sit here for a very long time indeed.

  “Looks like it’s for you,” said Phin, and swallowed.

  Lola was transfixed. As if in a dream, she turned the box, revealing a numbered combination lock. Lola entered her birthday, and the lid popped open on the first try.

  Inside, untouched by the centuries, were two objects.

  The first was so simple and homey in its familiarity it made Lola’s heart hurt. It was a Twinkie, still wrapped in its protective cellophane, pillow soft and fresh as the day it was packaged, the same snack Papa used to sneak into Lola’s lunch box when Momma was on one of her health-food kicks. Lola pressed the precious little confection to her nose. She could almost smell it through the wrapper.

  “Still good after a thousand years,” she said, beaming.

  “That’s disgusting,” said Phin. “Look, there’s something else.”

  The other object was a note. It was written on plain ruled notebook paper. The scrawl was unmistakably her father’s.

  “Here, shine your light on this,” said Lola, holding up the note for them both to read.

  “You’re shaking, I can’t read it.”

  “Just, shine your light!”
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  “Okay, okay!”

  Together, breathless, they read Papa’s last message to his daughter.

  “Oh . . . ,” said Phin.

  “Yeah,” said Lola.

  “That’s just . . . ,” said Phin.

  “Yeah,” said Lola, and met his eyes. Her own were shining, for the first time in a long time, with hope.

  Dear Lola Girl,

  I’m so sorry for what’s happened to you. I fear something may have gone terribly wrong and it’s all my fault.

  If you get this note, whenever you get it, your mother and sisters and I will be waiting for you.

  Find us in Dimension Why.

  Love,

  Dad

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  Acknowledgments

  I owe a lot of people gratitude for enabling me to take this spin around the galaxy.

  Thank you to my agent, Melissa Sarver White, for believing in this silly book, and for allowing me to hang out in her office for extended wisecracking sessions. Thank you too to everyone at Folio Literary Management, especially my Folio Jr. team, helmed by the indomitable Emily Van Beek.

  Thank you to my prince of an editor, David Linker, whose support and guidance steered Phin and Lola away from rougher shores and into safe harbor. Thank you to the entire team at Harper Collins, especially Vanessa Nuttry, Robby Imfeld, and Anna Bernard. Thank you a thousand times over to artists and designers Chris Kwon and Alison Klapthor for giving me the cover I always wanted (I said “make it wild” and you did, thank you). And thank you to my marvelous copy editors, Jon Howard and the delightful Megan Gendell, who made sure to laugh at my jokes, albeit in Track Changes.

  Thank you to all of my clients—working with you is the greatest privilege of my life, and you inspire me every day.

  Thank you to Deborah Jaffa, without whose support and care the past three years would have been much more difficult. Seriously, Deborah, thank you so much for all you’ve done for me, and thank you for raising an incredible daughter.

  Thank you to Ammi-Joan Paquette, whose notes on this book’s sequel helped inform some vital changes to part one. Thank you to the many colleagues and fellow writers who also offered to read early versions of this manuscript, and thank you for not judging me when I was too self-conscious to take you up on it. Next time, I promise.