A Fractured Infinity E-Book

Nathan Tavares

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 513

Beschreibung

A thrilling race across the multiverse to save the infinite Earths - and the love of your life - from total destruction for fans of The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, The Time Traveller's Wife and Rick and Morty.Film-maker Hayes Figueiredo is struggling to finish the documentary of his heart when handsome physicist Yusuf Hassan shows up, claiming Hayes is the key to understanding the Envisioner - a mysterious device that can predict the future.Hayes is taken to a top-secret research facility where he discovers his alternate self from an alternate universe created the Envisioner and sent it to his reality. Hayes studies footage of the other him, he discovers a self he doesn't recognize, angry and obsessive, and footage of Yusuf... as his husband.As Hayes finds himself falling for Yusuf, he studies the parallel universe and imagines the perfect life they will live together. But their lives are inextricably linked to the other reality, and when that couple's story ends in tragedy Hayes realises he must do anything he can to save Yusuf's life. Because there are infinite realities, but only one Yusuf.With the fate of countless realities and his heart in his hands, Hayes leads Yusuf on the run, tumbling through a kaleidoscope of universes trying to save it all. But even escaping into infinity, Hayes is running out of space - soon he will have to decide how much he's willing to pay to save the love of his life.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

1Sneak Preview

2The Hermit

3Stage

4Voiceover

5Hypotheses

6Cut

7Circling

8Orientation

9Footage Farm

10Oracle

11Dice

12The High Priestess

13Experimental Evidence

14Elixir

15The Magician

16Rewrites

17Intermission

18Colliding

19Observation Effect

20The Fool

21Breakthrough

22Homecoming

23Knife Edge

24Crystal Oxford

25Mushcubes

26Entanglement

27Thundersnow

28Packed

29Costume Change

30The Tower

31Goldilocks Zone

32Flashbacks

33A Frayed Knot

34The Hanged Man

35The Universe Machine

36Brane Trust

37After Credits

Acknowledgements

About the Author

“With a narrative voice full of charm and punch, gripping from page one, the story unpeels layers of Hayes’s life while painting a hopeful near-future Earth. The cozy pace ramps to a dazzling finale exploring the resilience of entangled time and the malleability of morality when love is on the line and power free at hand. A wonderful debut perfect for fans of Arrival and The Space Between Worlds.”

Essa Hansen, Nophek Gloss, Orbit 2020

“A cinematic rollercoaster ride through the multiverse and an imaginative page-turner told in an engaging and original narrative voice. The worldbuilding alone would be reason enough to pick up this book, but there is something else even better here: the real beating heart of the novel is the compelling gay love story between its main characters, whom I will remember for a long time: brilliant, flawed, multi-layered and beautifully human.”

Emmi Itäranta, author of The Moonday Letters and The Memory of Water

“Both poignant and thrilling, A Fractured Infinity takes us on a wild ride through vividly imagined worlds: it’s a multifaceted jewel, with humanity’s flaws at its heart.”

Stark Holborn, author of Ten Low and Hel’s Eight

“Gut wrenching at times and with razor sharp prose, this complex, intelligent novel is ultimately empowering. It’s a page-turner of a love story that you’ll power through to see if the world is saved and if Hayes and Yusuf survive together.”

Kaaron Warren, author of Slights and more

“A Fractured Infinity is a heartfelt and haunting journey through the multiverse, with a clever, compelling narrative voice and a love story that shatters the boundaries between realities.”

Ren Hutchings, author of Under Fortunate Stars

“Unboxing a puzzle-box crush an alternate universe. ‘Eastcoastopian’ road trips, across post-cinematic futures. Nathan Tavares explores new American feedback loops, in an idiosyncratic take on the ever-expanding multiverse genre.”

Nikhil Singh, author of Club Ded

“Tavares hits the gas, sending the plot rocketing through dozens of fascinating possible Earths. The epic love story forms an intense emotional core and Hayes’s conversational narration charms. Anyone looking for queer sci-fi should check this out.”

Publishers Weekly

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A Fractured Infinity

Print edition ISBN: 9781803360386

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803360393

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: November 2022

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Nathan Tavares 2022

Nathan Tavares asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

1

SNEAK PREVIEW

And here, in the cerebral sci-fi movie—not a blockbuster, not my style—based on the next year or so, the title card will roll. SOMETHING EVOCATIVE IN ALL CAPS. Cue the score, the swelling bwahhh bwahhhh chest-rattling synth undercut by tinkling wind chimes as the blackness fades. CUT to HAYES FIGUEIREDO on a beach in the furthest part of the multiverse you can dream up, staring out at a sea strewn with stars.

I’ve seen a million versions of myself, on a million different worlds, so who knows who’d they’d cast as me. Hopefully some unknown who could say he got all Method and really mined his darkness to tackle the role of troubled filmmaker. Troubled, sure, even though the studio will cut most of the depressive bouts of self-medicating, and the functional alcoholism, and the MDMA-euphoria bonfires with the pack of other lost queers I lived with in my twenties, in that crumbling co-op we all called Saint Homo’s Home for Wayward Boys. All to focus on the story of the man I love and the futures I’ve seen where he has to die, again and again, so the world isn’t smashed to bits by an asteroid, or swallowed up by a rogue black hole, or nuked until it’s a glowing pile of ash.

HAYES (VOICE OVER)

Do you see all the stars out there? All the possibilities?

SLOW PAN out, following HAYES’S eyes out to sea, then the camera angle flips upside down and vaults into space, where an unassuming asteroid floats by the screen.

*   *   *

There’s nothing quite like the sunrise on the beach in this corner of the multiverse.

The juicy lemon wheel of the sun rises over the ocean and torches the horizon with the colors of fruit punch I used to drink as a kid. I rustle on the leaky air mattress, which sends a rubber balloon fart across the pink sand, towards the copse of beach grasses that thicken into what looks like ferns the size of redwoods. That graceful wakeup call would’ve gotten a smile out of Yusuf, not long ago. Before he left. He hasn’t been smiling lately. Just his dark, downturned eyes, and his short sentences.

I mean, of course I get it. It’s tough to tip your head to the sunlight when you know that billions of people have to die because you’re alive. And the man you love kept that from you.

I putter around the camp for a while, with our ring-of-rocks fire pit and our improvised refrigerator that’s a shallow hole covered with palm fronds. The dunes of pink sand and the tropical forest of ferns with their coconuts that taste like bananas and their bananas that taste like coconuts. I’m alone on this island and the whole planet, as far as I can tell.

I knew the end was coming, so I woke up the past few mornings before Yusuf and tried to memorize every detail of him. The shadows on his cheeks from his beard. The swoops of his sooty eyebrows. His halo of black curls. The moles dotting his body like he’s a constellation of some ancient hunter.

SCENE: A sad man alone with a bunch of junk that seems washed ashore from a shipwreck.

*   *   *

I wish, sometimes, that I never crossed paths with that fucking machine. But then I never would’ve met Yusuf. The Envisioner—the huge, dark gray box with all its facets and spindly metal spider legs—sits about a quarter mile down the beach. You know how spiders can feel anything that brushes against their webs because all the strings give off a different vibration? I can feel the other universes like glowing threads when I press my hands against the machine.

I don’t know how the thing works exactly. Every sci-fi movie I’ve ever loved has had some hand-waving here and there. Let’s just take this premise and go with it, deal? I mean, I don’t know how airplanes exactly work either, but they do.

Anyway, the thing is a predictive device. It’s a gateway, sorta. It’s also a plague. A time-bomb fucking with reality on a multi-universal level. Yusuf talks a lot about knots in the fabric of multidimensional space-time, with each Envisioner a point connecting different paths. When he talks like this, words get all crammed together and I can’t make much sense of him or anything else.

The thing crunches a bunch of numbers and spits out predictions. There you go. You’re all caught up.

*   *   *

Yusuf tutored me in physics when I first arrived at the Compound, and I was still interested in not feeling like an idiot around the global brain-trust of the research staff. I use tutored loosely since the sessions were him doodling on his bedroom window with a marker and me wondering at what point in his talk about quarks I could slide his underwear back down and get him to swear in Arabic under his breath again.

“In nature, quarks exist in twos and threes,” he said one session. “You can’t ever find a solo one flying around.”

“Why?”

“Because the force that binds them actually increases the farther you try to pull them apart.” He squiggled a wavy line between two circles on his window.

“How in the hell does that even make sense?”

“It’s like an invisible umbilical cord connects them. Quarks can’t exist on their own.”

When he told me he was leaving, I wanted to say something about how we’re bound together, too. Except it would’ve been shitty of me to hold him emotionally hostage.

I know it’s small-picture thinking to focus on Yusuf breaking up with me with all we’ve done—surfing across universes and messing up timelines. And I know it doesn’t sound self-determination-y to say, but he is what makes me feel the most myself. He makes me know that this me is not a random jumble of molecules or events or whatever. Maybe my life is less my own and more an expression of how I love him. That’s why I’m supposed to be here.

He bickers with me a lot on the meants and the shoulds and the supposedtos—anything that sounds remotely like a bearded, white director set this whole universe up for us and we are just bit players hitting beats in the script. He’s all, in a multiversewhere literally every possible version of every possible event exists simultaneously, nothing is meant to happen, and nothing is important, and… Which is usually when I have to anchor him with a tug on his hand and a joke. Like, jesus, lighten up. I just asked if we should get dinner.

I’m aching, like the thread between us is tied to one of my ribs. And this thread pulls tighter with every breath, now that we’re drifting farther apart.

*   *   *

This flash-forward teaser is running a little long, but give me a break because with all my universe road-tripping and Envisioner scrying, my sense of time is fucked. Maybe I’m also stalling because I’m not really looking forward to getting into how all of this was my fault.

I pull Junior, my hand-held camera, from the supply stash by the air mattress and plod over to the shade of the fern forest. I rest Junior on a rock, point her lens at me, and flick her little video screen around so that I can see my face during my seaside confessional. I tap the red “record” button and settle on another rock across from the camera.

I look too thin. Sunburned, with green shadows under my eyes. My therapist ex, Narek, told me once that my docs and films are all vanity because everything I make is about me. But he’s wrong—also an asshole—because I already exhaust myself with my constant thoughts so I don’t need to make whole films devoted to myself. My filmmaking is more about record-keeping and storytelling, as proof that these people existed or these things mattered. A middle finger to entropy.

This isn’t about me, I guess is what I’m trying to say. It’s a warning. Or something.

“Welcome to Hayes’s Disaster Drive-In Theater,” I say to the camera. “You already missed the coming attractions, but that’s okay. Sit back and I hope you enjoy the show.”

I suck in a deep breath, close my eyes, and trace the threads back to the start.

2

THE HERMIT

I didn’t expect to have an audience when I stumbled out of my cabin late one morning to take a leak.

My feet hit the worn wooden steps in the woods of Connecticut, where, like the other artists here, I was supposed to be head-down and plowing through my Great Work. Mostly, my head was foggy from last night’s weed. Unlike when I film and all bets are off, I don’t like to get high while I’m editing a doc, which is supposed to be all about discipline. Drinking water and eating vegetables and working all day, and all these other good habits I’d heard so much about. But last night, boxed in by the trees outside my windows, everything I’d lost the last few months bowled into me at once, dragging me into a pity-party of one.

I yawned, murky-mouthed, and blinked away the sleep while I battered the grass with piss.

“Sir?”

I jumped at the voice and turned, hand still down the front of my shorts and the other idly scratching a mosquito bite on my bare chest. Four men stood in front of the cabin. The closest guy was dressed in a light sweater and khakis, even in the scorching July heat. My first sight of the man I’d love so hard that I’d break through universes for him, and I thought, is this off-duty English lit professor lost in the woods?

I don’t believe in love-at-first sight lightning bolts and angels whispering you’ve just found your soulmate. And I know it sounds weird, but I love that I met him—probably the most important moment in my life—while grasshoppers bounced away from my piss stream in the grass.

“Yeah?” I asked, cocking my head.

The guy at the front cleared his throat and looked down at the ground. The other three were rooted to the earth, all earpieces, clenched jaws, and lumpy shapes under their black jackets. They looked like black ops personal trainers who could kill me three times before I hit the ground.

“Hayes Figueiredo?” the guy at the front asked, peeking down at a tablet in his hands.

“Who’s asking?”

“We need you to come with us.”

Behind the group, tall grasses swayed in the breeze.

And here’s where I die, I thought. I’ve been chased out of bars and had my ribs broken in alleyways. I’ve been tear-gassed in political riots. People who come to you knowing your name are never there to just chat. Worse when they’re smiling, when they’re needing. We need you to put down your camera. What use are you—really—in this village, or in this school, or in this bar with these sad and twisted people?

Mostly, I didn’t think I’d die while holding my dick in the woods, hoping the little film festivals where I showed my work would have a nice memorial after they screened one of my docs. Hayes Figueiredo, thirty-three, was gunned down in the woods while at an artist fellowship. This was his final work. Roll credits.

I shook off, snapped the waistband of my shorts, and slapped on fake cockiness. “I don’t fucking think so,” I said.

The guy at the front with the tablet blinked, tipping his head. “I’m sorry—what?”

A too-tight string snapped in my chest, and I bolted into the cabin, slamming the door behind me. For fuck’s sake, why didn’t I bring my mace here? A knock on the door matched my manic heartbeat.

“Mr. Figueiredo? We’re actually here because—because we need your help.”

“With what?” I called out.

“I can’t really say,” the guy said. “We’re here to ask you to come with us, to someone who can fill you in.”

The guy leaned at the window of the cabin’s door, the glass mashing his thick black glasses to his face.

“Can I see some ID or something?”

“Uh—all I have is my badge from work. Does that work?”

“Sure.”

There was some rustling outside until the guy pressed a white card with his picture on it to the window. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, so I squinted at the badge for what I thought was a good amount of time for me not to seem gullible. His name was Yusuf Hassan. On the little picture I saw the same face as the one peeking through the window—a stubbled face with wide eyebrows. Unsmiling full lips and dark eyes that seemed focused on something just behind me. Slightly wild curly hair. I sucked in air to try to douse the fire in my blood.

“Alright. Hold on.”

I opened the door just wide enough to look outside.

Yusuf toed my worn front step, only risking eye contact for a second before glancing at the three hired guns behind him.

“I’m realizing that this looks more forceful than we intended,” he said.

“You think?”

“Sorry.”

His wavering smile eased some of the stiffness in my shoulders. I opened the door wider and stepped back into the mish-mash of my tiny cabin, strewn with notebooks and underwear, with stills from my latest doc taped to the wood walls.

“What could you possibly need my help with?” I asked. “A film?”

I’d done a few guest lectures at my old college before, when my doc about an underground gay bar in Barbados made the festival rounds. I can’t say that I gifted the students with a ton of wisdom. I’d overheard some douche professor had bellyached about the film chair even inviting me there to talk about my “smutty fag art.” And, oh man, I almost tattooed that badge of honor on my forearm.

Yusuf hesitated for just a second. “Yeah, you could say that.”

“Alright. Where are we going?”

He turned to the group for some hush-hush chattering, and, jesus, if this was how all of our conversations were going to work, this was going to take forever.

“California,” he said, finally.

“Oh,” I sputtered. “Oh.”

I’d seen a few of my other film school dropout friends—the bonkers, perfect weirdos who shoved their uncompromising shit on a world that didn’t ask for it—get snatched up by studios in LA that wanted new talent to liven up their bizarrely mainstream movies. Each time, I threw them parties and popped cheap bubbly for their Big Break, wishing for them all the luck in the world. But maybe next time it’ll be me, was the thought that I held between my teeth because you were never supposed to say it out loud.

“Wait. I don’t have my passport here,” I said.

The Second American Civil War had lasted just over a year and had ended with the secession of California, then Oregon, to join the Union of Pacific States, three years before I was born. I remembered the maps projected onto the boards at school, showing the shifting borders of America shaped by two generations of wars—warring troops, warring truths—without the resources or leadership to anchor what was left of it together. On the map, the borders of Texas and other states shifted and I’d wondered if I’d just been hallucinating—a little too well-done after my wake-and-bake. Before the war, Hawaii had already been an independent nation for going on ten years. Last election, President Whatshisname ran on some platform of mythical reunification, his speeches broadcast to a nearly independent constellation of cities sometimes called the Urban Archipelago of America. With wide patches of unincorporated land and rural, self-governing towns stretching between coasts connected by high-speed mag-trains and shared memory. That reunification hadn’t happened yet and probably never would. My future was now circling the drain because I’d left my passport in Boston and wouldn’t be able to get to California. Wonderful.

“You’re fine,” he said. “You won’t need it where we’re going.”

“Okay.” I tried to iron out the jitters in my voice. “Can you give me a couple of minutes to get my stuff?”

“Just be quick.”

*   *   *

In the 1980s movie montage, I tried on a bunch of outfits in the mirror before I finally decided on the shoulder-padded threads I’ll wear when I waltz into my studio Big Break meeting. When really, I rinsed in the cabin’s outdoor shower and crammed some stuff in a duffel. I was a week into my five-week editing bender away from my life in Boston, and I’d already gone full hermit. I hadn’t showered in days and was living mostly on instant coffee and beef jerky, avoiding the other artists because I was in the zone.

I’d also been hiding. I didn’t need Narek to pull his horn-rimmed glasses off his nose and tell me that. After I finally left him, I threw myself into documenting my friend Genesis’s fight for legal protections for synths. Then I lost her, too, a few months back—just as she became the face of the movement. I was here to work and hide and try to pull myself together again. I’d buzzed my hair when I got here. Something about shedding the outside world.

I don’t own anything professional-looking—I mostly look like I pinch my clothes from thrift shops. Which is sometimes true. I yanked on a white T-shirt that smelled clean and a pair of khaki shorts that were splotched with paint from my occasional house-painting gigs when film work dried up. I made sure to stuff Genesis’s tarot deck, my laptop, and Scarlett, my lucky hand-held camera with her red electrical tape slashes, into my duffel before meeting Yusuf and the others outside.

They followed me down the dirt paths, through the humid July air that was thick with biting flies, to the main house of the grounds, where a black bulldozer of a car idled in the driveway. I’d spent a lot of my twenties getting into cars with strangers, so what the hell. I hopped inside, into an air-conditioned bubble of awkward silence with me alone in the back row.

“Anyone you need to call to say you’ll be out of touch for a few days?” the guy in black at the wheel asked, as he rumbled off the dirt driveway and onto the main road.

I guess I could’ve called someone, theoretically, then and during the previous night’s grief bender. I had some friends, still, though the gap that Genesis left in my chest widened every day. The people I cared about were used to me ghosting on them for six months while I worked on a doc. My mom was in the ground, but if you’d asked me how long it’d been I’d have to stop and close my eyes against all the air leaving my lungs because five years still felt like twenty seconds. I’d lost her to uterine cancer before the cures rolled out, and me and my dad, who’d peaced out of half-drowned Boston to live in Florida, had mercifully agreed to stop talking. Once you realize that every phone call ends in a screaming match it’s better to stop pretending blood means anything.

“No, I’m good.”

Yusuf sat in the row ahead of me. I got the sense that if anyone was in charge here, it was him, though he wouldn’t cough up much when I tried to wheedle some info out of him. He didn’t mention a specific studio, but maybe it was a superhero thing? The CGI-fueled skull-rattling action movies were on their way out, making room for a return to more realistic filmmaking. I’d heard, anyway, which could be why they wanted me and my hand-held films that zoomed in on sweaty hairlines and the searching eyes of my doc subjects.

The other guys—security guards?—called me “sir” and “Mr. Figueiredo” and asked if the air conditioning was alright. I cracked some stupid joke like Mr. Figueiredo is my mother, but I can’t really remember because I get all blabbermouthed when I’m nervous.

Slowly, the giant hand cranking a bike chain around my gut eased up. Everything was a fast-forward blur. We drove a while, then hit the highway, then off again to a tiny airfield where the car rolled to a stop by a plane. A plane—what the actual fuck—aprivate plane with gorgeous flight attendants in red lipstick and little sleeper pod things in two neat rows. They were nice enough not to look embarrassed for me, in my paint-splotched clothes and frayed blue hoodie that was this close to disintegrating. Only people with statues of dead relatives in city parks could afford cross-country flights, what with the high-speed mag-trains connecting the coasts, and the first-born cost of fuel.

I tried to settle into the white egg of my sleeper pod. I spilled water all over myself and had to cram my eyes shut during takeoff so that my stomach didn’t fly out of my ass. I managed to doze for a while, somehow, though I don’t remember dreaming, only a blackout worthy of my best tequila benders. A sea of green beneath the plane greeted me when I woke up, with trees that seemed to stretch out forever. I bounced into one of the open pods to get a different look.

“Great Basin National Forest,” Yusuf said, a flash of his white teeth poking out from behind his lips. “Have you seen it from up here before?”

Looking back, it lights me up to think about how much courage it must’ve taken him to start talking to me out of nowhere, when he was usually happier staring out the window in silence. That was the longest string of words I’d gotten from him, with his eyes that seemed to dodge everything finally settling on me. Some accent I couldn’t quite clock flavored the low tune of his voice. His secret-identity glasses cut black lines across his face. His dark hair wasn’t short and wasn’t long, a messy, curly mop with shorter sides. He was handsome enough that it’d take me two drinks, easy, to screw up the balls to make a pass in a bar—sorry, professor, my dog ate my homework.

“Never,” I said.

I actually cried, just a few tears and a snotty nose, as I looked down at the forest that from here looked like the green crocheted comforter of my mom’s bed. She’d told me stories, when I was a kid, of shriveled-up plains, and ozone holes, and droughts torching the green fields of what used to be the United States. Before the trees spliced with quick-grow genes borrowed from bamboo birthed pop-up forests around the globe to suck up the carbon, before the United Arab Emirates-led desalination of millions of gallons of seawater a year to be used for crop irrigation, before the refreezing of the ice caps. Even though that had come a few years too late to stop the flooding of coastal cities, and the sinking into the sea of the small Portuguese island in the middle of the Atlantic where my mom was from.

One night after she’d spread little kids’ history picture books on our splotched blue carpet, I’d dreamed of elephants with rib bones poking out, of tigers konking over from heat, and I’d screamed myself awake.

“Querido, that was before we learned to work together to fix things,” she’d told me, kissing the sweat on my forehead.

The plane touched down in the desert far beyond the forest, and then we all hopped into another black car. A single inky road led us over the flat earth, past a tall wire fence and a security post to a building that looked like a giant beetle with a white, geodesic dome for a shell. And where the hell in California were we? Weren’t there supposed to be palm trees and models/actors everywhere? I could only guess that we were on some big-budget set. The car rolled into an underground parking garage where the three guys in black took a hike, leaving Yusuf as my only tether through a maze of white halls, bleached overhead lights, and glass doors marked with white block lettering. Cold storage. Dormitories. To Theater.

My duffel bag bounced against my hip as we passed people in white lab coats who gawked at me like a pair of nuts were dangling from my forehead. One woman actually spun away into a side room blabbing a “sorry” behind her. The bike chain started winding around my stomach again. My tongue was a slab of jerky in my dry, salty mouth.

Just as I started to wonder if Yusuf was lost, he flashed some badge at a heavy white door that led down another hallway.

“Good luck,” he said.

“You’re not coming?”

His only answer was to leave me in my dirty sneakers in front of a plain white door that looked like a broom closet. What the hell. I came all this way, I might as well walk in.

Inside was a small white room with a single circular conference table and a huge screen stuck to one of the walls. The only person there was a slim, white-coated woman with dark hair who turned from one of the big screens to face me.

The screen must’ve been a live security feed of the room or something, because on it I stood by a wall of glowing hard-candy-colored buttons. But I was wearing some long green coat instead of my traveled-in clothes. And the room didn’t look quite like here. And—whatthe actualfuck—the guy who was maybe me but also definitely not leaned over what looked like a giant mechanical spider pounded out of shadows, fiddling with some dials.

“Perhaps you can tell me,” the woman said, her asymmetrical bob swaying by her chin as she tipped her head, “why this is you.”

The bike chain grinding around my gut hit a snag, and the floor dropped out from under me.

3

STAGE

In the editing room in my head, I have a tough time stringing together these early bits of Dr. Nakamori, through all the flash-forwards, and flashbacks, and flash parallel-universes—storyboarding and re-cutting to figure out just who the hero is in all of this.

Not that I think it’s me.

I’ll call her Kaori soon enough, after I wheedle past her soft voice and stiff back that she rules her staff with, like a doctor bombing cancer diagnoses onto her patients with all the warmth of a bleach colonic. Back then she was cold and mistrusting, with her bored eyes and undercurrent of I can’t believe you’re involved in this. But I like to think I cracked open her armor with my charm, or something.

In the small white room, she didn’t move a muscle while I had to venture a hand to one wall to keep from keeling over. The potato chips I’d eaten on the plane wanted to splatter onto her white sneakers. I swept my dizzy eyes up at the screen behind her, where some version of myself in a long sage-green lab coat leaned over the nightmare machine on its angled silver legs. He twisted a few dials with his tattoo-less hands.

“How?” I managed to sputter.

“You’re telling me you have no idea where this footage is from or how this device got here?”

It’s a trap, Kaori’s cool voice broadcasted to me. She knew everything already, she was just waiting for me to goof. One half of her hair swooped and curved past her chin, the other half a blunt shelf that stopped just past the middle of her cheeks.

“You mean how you have video of some guy with my face? Abso-fucking-lutely not.”

The cocktail shaker inside my head was crammed with ice and plot points: long-lost twins, cloning, imaging software—banned by governments across the world—that could spin a scene of anybody doing anything, and only forensic analysts could spot the smoke and mirrors.

“We were pretty thorough with the background checks.” She shrugged. “But had to be sure.”

“Could you please turn that off. It’s fucking with me. I’m gonna be sick.”

She fiddled with her tablet and—thankgod—the video winked off.

“Hold up,” I said. “Did you say background checks? Have you been following me?”

“Researching.”

“Spying?”

“Please,” she snorted, barely looking up from her tablet. “Spare me the Data Rights crusade. Every government is listening to every phone on this planet and that crumbling warehouse you live in has paper-thin walls.” She eyed me like she caught me peeking through a hole drilled into the football team’s locker room, one hand pumping down the front of my shorts. “Also, you should consider investing in curtains.”

I winced, wracking my brain for what I’d been up to lately in my place—studio was too generous a word for the single room in the old wharf building I was squatting in, with its chipped brick walls in the drowned neighborhood of South Boston. My mattress on the floor and the card table with the single chair I rescued from the curb one trash day. The collages of doc stills on my walls, along with torn pages from antique beefcake magazines I’d found at a flood sale across the river at Harvard. At the very least, whenever I got home I freed myself from my pants.

“Find anything good?”

“You’re…” she trailed.

“Nondescript.”

“Ouch.”

“Sure, you’re a unique and beautiful snowflake,” she said, managing to crack a tight smile. “Nondescript is a classification. A good one. If I’m being forthcoming here—”

“I’m begging you.”

“We had to be sure that you weren’t a…” She struggled, looking a little embarrassed. “An extraterrestrial. Or time traveler. Or whatever else, given what we’ve found so far.”

“And what’s that?”

Her lips pressed into a line as sharp as the lapels of her white coat.

“Nothing I tell you leaves this facility.”

“Alright.”

“The only reason you’re here is because the machine never gives us a straight answer about you, no matter how we ask.”

“Wait. What?”

“Best we can tell, we discovered some tech from another universe. And for some reason—here’s the kicker—some version of you was in charge of the project and…”

I didn’t hear much of what she said past the words “some version of you.” Everything else just rattled around like noise in my brain.

*   *   *

The layout must’ve made sense to everyone else there, but as Kaori led me around the Compound, the place was a rat maze of white walls, long hallways, and dead ends. Of frosted glass doors that rolled open when I walked by, or others with chrome handles that I was afraid would shock me if I touched them. I followed Kaori, who sucked in a breath as I badgered her with questions. What does this thing do? And how can you keep it and evidence of alternate realities from the public? Just who do you think you are?

With all the conspiracy theories I’d heard on the doc circuit—of a world-wide phalanx of fourteen-year-old geniuses paid by governments to hack into housekeeping synths to sniff out treason and ransom off nudes, of billionaire CEOs strapping cement shoes on their competition and disappearing them down deep wells—I never thought any of them could be real. As I hoofed it through a secret, multinational research center, maybe a little suspicion wouldn’t hurt.

Before I’d been born, scientists had found evidence of former life on Mars, from back when it had oceans. My third-grade teacher had told the class about the tiny organisms discovered on Titan, swimming through the planet’s ammonia oceans and looking like something I’d sneeze up. Public schools had been big on STEM, then, and the teacher had been dropping words like “organisms” and “multicellular life” and “flagella-like structures” in both English and Mandarin as me and the other kids had poked oversized gooey models of the Titan creatures. The Titan news had sparked riots at first, outside of the UN Headquarters and the Vatican. No one cared much about dead cells from a million years ago on Mars, but living creatures on another planet messed with them. Like, you’re not so special on your little hunk of dirt.

“It was like being mad at the sky,” my mom had told me of the riots, which had happened when she’d been in college.

Me and my mom were already talking a lot more, then, after my little overdose at the tail end of my sophomore year, and I’d shriveled, and wheezed, and screamed for half of that summer in rehab. Self-healing, blahblah, and talk therapy, and a journey that I’m supposedly on to this day, which made Genesis give me shit about my weed use and occasional tip-toeing into tequila territory until her death. Even without the Social Skills forced conversations at school, my mom used to sit me down every day—after making me cut off contact with my friends, after taking my bedroom door off its hinges for weeks—and we’d talk. Even if she was exhausted after another overnight shift as an ER nurse at the clinic in Dorchester, she’d sit me down, still in her scrubs. You can’t shut me out, anymore, she’d told me. We have to figure out how to be on each other’s sides and move forward together.

I’d heard her praying at night through our cardboard-thin walls, begging Mary. Avé Maria, cheia de graça, o Senhor é convosco. Please guide me. I know you have a son too.

“Be mad at it if you want,” my mom had told me about the Titan discovery, though obviously it was more about the black hole of rage I was carrying around, “but what’s that going to do?”

I’d spent years after that apologizing to her for being an asshole when I was a kid. I still have voicemails saved, just to hear her voice. How she’d tell me everything would be alright, even when it might not. The advice she’d serve up with instant coffee and buttered toast in the morning when I’d visit her years later, hungover from an editing bender. I know I’m a wallower—“You ruminate,” Narek had told me, in therapist-speak—but I hate that she never got to see me be someone.

A near-death experience, a mom who would sit with an infuriatingly calm face while I screamed at her about how everything was bullshit and I was going to sneak out and do whatever fuck else I wanted, plus a few doc assignments that had me at the wrong end of a cop’s bullhorn taught me how to cram my feelings in a lockbox and keep cool. All of which came in handy as I followed Kaori through the hallways, ignoring the part of me that wanted to run for the exits. Instead, I badgered her until she plucked a two-way radio from her belt and asked Yusuf to take me to some tests.

I didn’t piece together what “tests” meant at first, because the Storyteller voice in my head was already spinning film reels and telling me to chill. There was a story here, itching my brain. The voice was as cool as the air-conditioning against the back of my neck. Wait this out. Roll over and play nice and dumb.

Yusuf met me and Kaori at an intersection of white hallways, where half a dozen painted lines on the floor crisscrossed. He’d slipped on a white lab coat—the stiff collar a snowy cliff ledge against his brown neck—since I’d last seen him. He led us through a main hallway of white glossy tile and glass walls. A few short hallways and small conference rooms for whiteboard-brainstorming branched off from the main drag. Temporary rooms for visiting researchers were down that way, he waved, and a cafeteria just big enough for a couple of tables waited down at the other end.

I still had my phone on me, though when I ducked into a bathroom I saw that I had zero service here in the middle of nowhere. I waved off Yusuf’s offer for me to leave my bag in his office since my laptop and Scarlett were still stashed inside. I figured one of the white coats that fluttered around was going to snatch them and tag the back of my neck with a barcode or something. Kaori’s researchers breezed the hallways in pairs, their eyes suddenly interested in the clear glass tablets in their hands when we passed. Sometimes they wagered a “Good morning, Dr. Hassan” to Yusuf, who tossed a low hmm back.

“What’s your deal here?” I asked him.

“I used to work with Kaori back at the University of Oxford. She brought me here to be her…” He trailed. He spoke out of the corner of his mouth a lot, like using the whole thing was too much effort. “Deputy director. Though titles don’t matter here.”

“And she has you giving tours to the freshman?”

He fiddled with the edge of his glasses, a nervous tic of his I’d already picked up on. “She has a tough time delegating. She’d rather do everything herself. Which doesn’t leave a lot for everyone else.”

“I gathered. And how long have you been here?”

“A couple of weeks.”

He opened a door to a small white room with a padded table. The room—the whole place—smelled new, like the staff had just peeled off the plastic wrap. He mumbled something about hoping the tests weren’t too invasive and then fled the room so I could change out of my clothes and into a paper kaftan. My brown, tattooed arms and legs stuck out from the blue paper doll dress. Someone came in without knocking to press a cold stethoscope to my chest and take my vitals. Someone else drew a vial of blood the color of crushed rose petals.

I let myself be poked and the inside of my ears gawked at while I offered smiles and cracks. My Storyteller voice slips out of my mouth, sometimes, when I’m mid-chat with someone and I’m not sure yet if they’re a friend or a lead on a doc. The voice is the soothing low drawl of a yoga teacher and its eyes spark with just a little mischief. It speaks mostly in questions. What if… And why do you think… Do you mind if I just switch my camera on real quick? And I’ll sip my coffee and whoever’s talking keeps their eyes on mine and forgets about Scarlett’s blinking red light. After a marathon unloading session, more than one person has stood up on woozy legs, clocked the business end of the camera, and remembered it was there.

I tried the Storyteller voice on a few of the people who rolled in. How’s your day going? And just before the pinch of a needle in my arm, it’s gotta be going better than mine, right? What’s up here, anyway? I got one to cough up something about looking for abnormalities in my blood before she blinked free of the Storyteller voice, like, waitaminute.

Each time one of them left, Yusuf popped back in, so it was pretty clear Kaori told him not to leave me alone for a second.

“Babysitting?” I smirked at him.

One corner of his mouth hooked up into a smile. He shrugged.

An MRI machine. A urine sample. Someone asked me about my background of substance use—why, what’re you offering?— and my family medical history and mental health. Standard-issue depression and anxiety enjoyed by all humans with a pulse, just a dash of all-purpose gay body dysmorphia. I waited for the finger puppets of Jungian archetypes and the please tell us about your relationship with your father. Were you loved? Thankfully, the head-shrinking didn’t last long.

I pressed my fingertips to my temples in a useless attempt to massage away my headache. The only thing I’d eaten that day was a bag of chips on the plane. I was crabby enough to threaten the next person who walked in with how I was going to rip off the hospital gown and run naked through these goddamned hallways if someone didn’t get me some food. Turns out that was Yusuf.

“Did I pass the tests?” I asked in the hallway after I’d shrugged into my clothes.

“You’re human,” Yusuf said, not meeting my eyes. “So, who knows.”

He buzzed us through locked glass double-doors into another maze, trailing a vein of deep green painted onto the floor while I bobbed along, balloon-brained from the blood draws. A cold sandwich in the cafeteria with its sterile yellow walls didn’t bring me back to life. Kaori’s words about “some version of you” still bounced around the echo chamber of my head.

Two huge glass doors at the end of another hallway were buck teeth in a giant mouth, with the words “Theater One” stenciled across in white block letters. Beyond, I could see walls of screens and panels, with a giant gray machine an island in the white floor.

“You ready?” Yusuf asked.

His eyes finally hit mine. My throat was suddenly clogged with sand. I don’t get speechless. I word-bomb. Even when I’d argued with Narek and realized, two minutes in, that I was the one who was wrong, I dug my heels in and rambled. Pestered with brute force until he’d fling his hands in surrender and hightail it, grumbling.

“Any advice?”

Yusuf’s eyebrows crowded together in a small V. “She needs you. Don’t let her convince you otherwise.”

I stepped closer and the double doors whooshed open on their own.

4

VOICEOVER

Forget about film studies snobs bellyaching. Sometimes you need a voiceover.

I hate the sound of my own voice, as much as Narek would get all psychologist on me about malignant narcissism, no room in your life for anyone else, and blahblah. Funny, coming from him, who surprised me with how he’d been dating someone else against our “occasional one-nighter with someone is cool” rule. He called it “spontaneous non-monogamy.” See also: cheating. By then, we’d been together two years, living together most of that, and it took me all of an hour to cram my stuff into a few bags. I should’ve listened to Genesis and left long ago instead of waiting for this latest lie of his, which he wouldn’t even own. Instead, he spun it as a chance for me to grow emotionally. Like, don’t see this as an obvious betrayal of your trust, but instead an opportunity to reflect on what you can reasonably expect out of a partner.

SCENE: INT. NAREK’S CONDO (and it’s his and not ours, Narek loves to remind, with just his name on the deed.) – EVENING

NAREK (his forced calm hiding rage)

You’re a child and no one will ever fill that black hole of need in you. And you think your shitty little videos are doing something? I’m embarrassed for you. Embarrassed.

His voice likes to blast into my head when I’m low, even still. So let me drown him out with the voice of someone stronger than me. Maybe after she’s had a drink and just a tiny bit of her accent slips in, but before she’s goofy enough to laugh at her own jokes.

KAORI (VOICEOVER)

We were hoping to unlock the secrets of the early evolution of our solar system. What we found on this tiny asteroid was so, so much more.

Cue the CGI footage—we’ll have to bug the studio for a bigger budget—of the Mugen probe, looking like a mirrored roulette budget—of the Mugen probe, looking like a mirrored roulette wheel, sailing through the black silk of space. In the control room of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, dozens of staff in of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, dozens of staff in white and pale blue jackets wait in silence, because the pictures white and pale blue jackets wait in silence, because the pictures the probe just beamed back at them of the two-kilometer long the probe just beamed back at them of the two-kilometer long Endovelicus asteroid can’t be right. No way is there a metallic, Endovelicus asteroid can’t be right. No way is there a metallic, clearly unnatural clearly unnatural thing sticking out of its craggy surface. They sticking out of its craggy surface. They were expecting to find ice and organic material, not something were expecting to find ice and organic material, not something extra-terrestrial. Especially not extra-terrestrial. Especially not humanmade since the asteroid since the asteroid spins ninety-thousand kilometers from Earth.

The JAXA researchers fiddle with instruments to adjust the course of two stag beetle rovers that hatch from the underside of the probe to fling themselves at whatever device is lodged in the asteroid. When the spindly legs of the rovers touch down, the room gushes out one collective breath. Someone pops a bottle of champagne, and one of the staffers screams at the thunk of the cork through the heavy silence.

KAORI (VOICEOVER)

JAXA couldn’t bring the device home. Not then. Mugen had to circle back to Earth with the samples and thousands and thousands of pictures of what it had found. They shared their findings with space agencies across the globe. Governments were used to working together – begrudgingly, sure – with carbon emissions capped and HIV/AIDS wiped from the planet. But never held to this level of secrecy. The agencies united to build a craft to return to Endovelicus, dig the probe out, and haul it safely back to Earth for study. After a quick pit-stop at the International Space Agency to make sure that this black box wasn’t a bio-weapon or alien-made doomsday device.

“And who made the device?” I asked, in the Mexican restaurant in Indian Springs an hour from the Compound and just outside Southern Paiute Country, which became our favorite haunt a few weeks into our time together.

Here’s my favorite part, which I whipped out during verbal brawls with Kaori like an uppercut finisher to prove I was right, even about dumb things like “this sci-fi movie was better than that one.” And I should know, because I made the Envisioner.

I squeezed Yusuf’s hand to keep me from pounding the table in margarita-boosted bliss. Yusuf just rolled his eyes like, easy.

“There’s no actual footage of you making the device,” Kaori said.

“She can’t even say it!” I cackled. Our waiter, used to us taking over the restaurant on weekend afternoons by then, looked over with a lopsided smile. I nodded for another round. “She literally can’t even say that some version of me—and I will definitely admit that it was not this idiot nondescript version of me—was smart enough to make the Envisioner.”

“Waitwaitwait,” Kaori sputtered, laughing. “Show me the evidence. Show me!”

“We’re scientists,” Yusuf said, lowering his voice to sound serious. The voice he saves for when he’s trying to explain wave functions, or when he’s got me pinned down against my bed in the Compound, rumbling in my ear, do you want it? “We need observable evidence to—”

“Such bullshit. Such bullshit. Oh my god,” I said.

“I will concede that an alternate version of you led his universe’s Envisioner program.” Kaori tipped her forehead to me.

“Oh, thank you, Doctor, for your concession.” I laughed, licking the salt off my margarita rim. “Us fucking serfs bow to the queen.”

Kaori had to lower her cactus-shaped margarita glass before she spilled it, and her honking goose laughs got us all cracking up until we swatted the table like stop, my stomach can’t take this.

“Okay,” I said, wheezing air. “Here’s my favorite part.”

KAORI (VOICEOVER)

We – with permission from the Timbasha Shoshone, Western Shoshone, Southern Paiute, and Owens Valley Paiute Nations – moved to a temporary facility at the site of the former Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in the Commonwealth of Great Basin Nations, once known as Nevada. We hoped to repurpose the concrete tunnels and chambers that scarred the earth and create a safe environment to study the device away from the rest of the world. There, an international team of researchers first switched on the device and learned that it is capable of calculating unimaginable amounts of data to predict the most probable future outcomes.

“Hold up,” I said. “Rewind. Who’d they pick to lead this black-ops brain trust?”

Flashing a toothy fox smile, I locked my eyes with Yusuf’s and started a drumroll on the table that rattled the little dishes of salsa against our glasses.

Who, then, to run the Envisioner Initiative? Not that it was called that in the early days. A cosmologist? Astrophysicist? Theoretical physicist? Blam-o—Dr. Kaori Nakamori was that and more. Her parents had crammed her with a steady diet of now-banned evil-genius grade nootropics and Mozart symphonies basically since birth, hoping she’d snag a job when she was older. High-sea piracy had been a more stable career than whatever work you could find in Japan. A global life expectancy crawling past 110—even higher in Japan with their healthcare breakthroughs—plus a booming synth workforce meant people brawled into their nineties for whatever non-automated jobs they could find. Suicide, especially after the yearly workforce placement exams, was the leading cause of death in Japan, which had ignited the world population boom with gene-editing therapies and mandatory cancer inoculations. Thirty years after Kaori had been born, the nation would join most of Europe with universal income for citizens—America had been among the holdouts then and now, cramming her fingers in her ears and lighting candles in a séance for the long-dead ghost of capitalism. Kaori had led her class at Tokyo University when she was fourteen and had left for the University of Oxford at sixteen. She’d led the initial JAXA team, so who would they pick to lead the multinational research coalition?

“Dr. Kaori motherfucking Nakamori, bitches,” Kaori said, cheersing the air.

I miss those times with the three of us, which I know is weird to say since not long after that afternoon she’d start chasing us across universes and hunting us down like dogs. But that was the last time the three of us were really happy together.

5

HYPOTHESES

Yusuf hung back a few steps while I walked into the lunar landscape of the Theater, with its white-tiled floors glossy like they were slick with rain, and walls of polished steel dotted with huge screens. A security feed played on one of the screens above and I watched myself creeping into the room like I was walking barefoot over hot coals. Towards the hulking spider of a machine in the center, under a latticed greenhouse-like roof.

A dozen or so techs puttered around with glass tablets by two steel workstations, with Kaori nearby. They all froze when I walked toward the machine. Yusuf joined the flock, so no chance he was offering me backup.

The roof must’ve been one giant FantiSee screen because a flock of seagulls flew across the panes, even though we were underground. A watercolor sky, the vivid blue of Genesis’s eyeshadow. Normally, I’d be itching to call her. We had a habit of rescuing each other, her bailing me out of jail that time a guy at a bar had called her a rug-sucking bitchbot and I’d slugged him. Me bailing her out of jail after another one of her protests had stopped traffic in the middle of the city. As I paid her bail after hocking one of my cameras, an officer yakked something about how she was lucky she lived here or she’d be in the fucking scrapheap.

I’d met her around eight years back, just when I’d started thinking, you should probably quit giving yourself a pass for being a mess all the time and actually—youknow—try. When she heard about my past, she was basically the first person not to treat me not like some damaged thing made out of glass.

“Excuses are so unbelievably boring,” she’d told me. “What really grinds my gears—pardon the pun, babe—is that you people run on excuses.”

I could have used some of her no-nonsense while I stared at the Envisioner. The machine was the size of a small electric two-door car, held up on six dull metal legs that were jointed at wide angles. Its matte gunmetal gray surface had hundreds of facets, like some giant semi-precious stone worked at for decades by a manic jeweler. The surface barely reflected the fake sunlight from the FantiSee screen above.

I stepped over a snake of black cable that led from the machine to the workstations. My eyes were locked on the machine, and it yanked me closer—some horizontal free-fall like I was bungee jumping while attached to a piano. Four screens, slightly domed and with a greenish tint, were set into its surface, its panels etched with what looked like cave drawings. Oversized dials and switches glowed the color of hard candies.

My first semester in film school, I’d roamed the neighborhood on trash day and had hauled a bunch of ancient TVs into my truck. Then, I’d duct-taped them together, wedged some cherry bombs in between, and filmed the thing blowing up on super slo-mo. A classmate named Rachel, who I’d really wanted to like if she hadn’t been so unbearably pretentious, had said something like, “I love that it’s a commentary on the destructive power of technology.” Sure, I’d told her. That was completely what I’d meant.

Really, I’d just wanted to blow shit up.

The machine looked like the big brother of my duct-tape craft project, here for revenge.

“Sorry about all the tests,” Kaori said. She hovered close enough by me that I could smell some whiff of eucalyptus. But she didn’t seem like the perfume type.

“Yeah. What’s my deal? Radioactive blood? Am I a superhero?” My Storyteller voice, again. I must’ve been playing it up for the machine, waiting nearby like a spider crouching to pounce.

“Not unless your superpower is mild hypertension.”

“That’s pretty boring.”

“Yes.” She paused. “Would you mind stepping closer? And grabbing those two dials there?” she asked so casually, nodding to nubs on the machine that could’ve been volume controls of a huge stereo.

Sweat pricked in one of my armpits.

“I am one-hundred percent not touching this thing until you give me a little more to go on.”

She pressed her lips together in a hard line. “What do you want to know?”

“What does that… thing…”

“The Envisioner.”

“Sure. What does the Envisioner do?”

“It’s a modeling device that determines the most probable expected outcome of a given situation.”

Even though I flunked my Stats for Idiots class before I dropped out of college, I could wrap my brain around her annoying vaguery.

“You’re kidding me. You’re saying this machine tells the future?”

“I’m saying that this is about probability and—”

“How are you keeping this away from the rest of the world? They deserve to know.”

“We’re testing foreign technology in a secure environment.”

“I call bullshit. And I still don’t know how you got that footage of the—theother me.”

“The device has a recording function and we’ve been able to access some of the existing footage. This is already far more than you have clearance to know. I think I’m being very accommodating here. Now, please touch the dials.”