Multitude, p.24
Multitude, page 24
part #2 of Dimension Space Series
Across the strait’s indigo waters, Sardinia shimmered in lush greens. Scattered clouds hung in the afternoon’s azure sky, dotting the ocean and land with their inky shadows.
Angela suddenly latched onto his arm.
Vaughn turned, half expecting to see a troop of robots or the flying egg.
He released the breath he’d held and relaxed as he saw that nothing around them had changed, but his relief was short-lived. Angela’s face had suddenly gone ash white.
“What?! What’s wrong?”
Wordlessly, she pointed at the water.
Looking down, Vaughn followed the line of her gesture and then understood as he felt his own body respond to the horrible truth revealed by this new, higher vantage point. If he hadn’t been focused on Sardinia, he would have seen it as well.
Visible through the crystal-clear water that surrounded Corsica, Vaughn could now see that the structures they’d discovered along the shoreline were just the outskirts of what appeared to be a vast undersea metropolis.
Through the turquoise water, he saw the outlines of multiple structures. Many of them had the same hexagonal shape as the much smaller habitats along the shore. He also glimpsed long, underwater tubes. Sections of them appeared to have broken away, but enough of the tubes remained that he could still see the winding path they took through the city.
Angela found her voice first. Emotion choked her words. “They killed them … all of them. Another whole world wiped out by those bastard robots or whoever controls them.”
Vaughn had been nodding, but then something occurred to him. “I don’t think there is anyone else controlling them.”
“Why not?”
He pointed at the city. “Whatever these people were, I doubt they ever smelted iron.”
“If the robots found them, they must have created a collider.”
Vaughn rocked his head. “Maybe, but they could’ve gone about it in a different way than we did, might have found another way to mash atoms or whatever. My point is, there wasn’t a ready supply of steel lying here for the robots to use. They didn’t come here for that.” He cast a hand toward the scene. “I think there’s another reason that the Necks did this.”
“If not for someone else, then why?”
“For the same reason the Cylons wanted to wipe out humanity.”
“Cylons?”
Vaughn shook his head. “Battlestar Galactica?”
“Never heard of it.”
Vaughn tried to think of another example. Then he nodded. “Skynet!”
Angela gave him a blank stare.
“You know, the computer intelligence that tried to wipe out humanity in the Terminator movies.”
“Never saw Terminator. Wait, movies? There was more than one?”
Vaughn’s shoulders slumped. He stared at her, resisting the urge to roll his eyes. “You really led a sheltered life.”
Angela crossed her arms and then pointed a thumb at her chest. “Multiple PhDs. What’s your excuse?”
He took a deep breath and then sighed. “It comes down to one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Do unto others before they can do unto you.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I think it means that the effing no-neck-having robots see all animal life as potential competition.”
“Competition for what? Steel?”
Vaughn shook his head. “No. For space, dimension space.”
“That doesn’t make sense. We were no threat to them.” She pointed at the aquatic alien city. “And I doubt these people were either.”
Vaughn nodded. “You’re right. We weren’t a threat to them, yet.”
Angela shook her head. “We were never going to be a threat to them.”
Vaughn wagged his head equivocally. “I’m not so sure about that.” He held up a hand. “Hear me out.”
She nodded.
“This ability to cross dimensions by latching onto micro black holes, do you think we would’ve discovered it eventually?”
Angela’s mouth skewed as she considered the question. Then she nodded. “Yeah, I suppose so.”
He returned the gesture. “I think you’re right. I’ll take it a step further. Once we mastered the technology, jumping between dimensions could conceivably become easier than flying across a continent.”
“Maybe.”
“Okay, so what do you think we would do when we eventually ran across a land-hungry race, robotic or not, that was spreading across every dimension like a virus, even if they weren’t preemptively wiping out all animal life?”
“We would just avoid them.”
He tilted his head and knitted his eyebrows. “Really? We discover an all-consuming race of robots that can cross into our world easier than catching a flight across the pond, and you think we would settle with just avoiding them?”
Her eyes flared, but Vaughn also saw doubt clouding her face. “Why do you always have to be such a condescending asshole?”
It wasn’t the first time he’d heard that. Remembering his last conversation with Matt, Vaughn felt his face flush. “Sorry.”
Angela nodded and held out a hand. “I guess you’re right, but why all animal life? Why do they wipe out everything that isn’t plant-based?”
“I’ve wondered about that too. Could be a limitation of their tech.” He shrugged. “Or maybe they just don’t give a shit, but I think it goes deeper than that.” He pointed at the aquatic city. “If they did this to proactively wipe out a potential competitor, I think their xenophobia extends to all animal life.”
“I don’t understand. Why would they fear all of it? They even wiped out the insects.”
“Taking the long view with an eye toward evolution, maybe they see all animal life as a potential future threat. We are their scourge. To them, life is the virus, something that simply needs to be cleaned from each version of Earth.”
As Angela considered his words, she wrapped arms around herself. She looked out at the underwater structures and then shuddered. “I think you’re right.” She turned suddenly hardened eyes toward Vaughn. “And we’d have been right to do it.”
“To do what?”
“To wipe the bastards out.” She jabbed a finger at the alien city. “Anyone that would do this to world upon world doesn’t deserve to exist.”
Part IV
“Physics is often stranger than science fiction, and I think science fiction takes its cues from physics: higher dimensions, wormholes, the warping of space and time, stuff like that.”
—Michio Kaku
“For the wise man looks into space and he knows there is no limited dimensions.”
—Lao Tzu
Chapter 28
Vaughn glanced at his empty wrist, the force of habit driving the action. By now, even the missing watch’s tan-line had faded. He frowned and wiped an arm across his sweaty forehead. It came away caked with grimy mud.
He looked up at the stars appraisingly. Seeing the now familiar position of the few visible celestial bodies, Vaughn glanced down at Angela. “Only a few minutes to go.”
She nodded wearily and continued to massage her left temple. With her other hand, she aimed a silvery device at a nearby rock. The mechanism looked like a blaster right out of Star Wars. Angela pulled the trigger. This time the thing didn’t even give the high-pitched squeal generated by earlier attempts to fire it.
Angela had spotted the apparent gun earlier that morning, almost a full day after their arrival. To preserve their withering sanity, they’d gotten in the habit of leaving the mounded dead as soon as they arrived in Hell. Unfortunately, they had been discovered shortly after the beginning of the latest loop cycle, so they’d had nearly the full thirty-six hours to burn in Hell.
Vaughn smirked inwardly at the unintentional pun.
Anyway, they had traveled farther than any of their previous visits to the trash world. The two of them had ventured well past the field of nukes when Angela had seen light from the dusty sun glinting off an exposed corner of the partially buried device. She had pulled it from the soil and wiped it down. It was plainly alien. All efforts to get it to fire had failed. The first couple of trigger pulls had generated nothing more than a short pop followed by a high-pitched whine that lasted a second or two before it fell silent.
Angela pulled the trigger again. Nothing happened.
Vaughn shrugged. “Guess it’s all the way dead now.”
She frowned and then stuffed the device into her tattered backpack.
As he watched her, Vaughn massaged his temples. The low oxygen content of this dimension’s atmosphere had generated throbbing headaches and gut-wrenching nausea for both of them.
He studied Angela’s features. Her ghostly pallor concerned him. She now looked nearly as drawn and gaunt as she had when they’d first met aboard the space station.
But then again, now he looked almost as thin.
They had burned through the last of their food stores several loops back—about the time when his watch had died. Since then, they’d been reduced to scavenging for sustenance in the versions of Earth that held most closely to their own. Unfortunately, Angela was still having a hard time adapting to alien foods.
Not that Vaughn was immune to it.
He had vomited his fair share of native grub along the way.
Angela only had a narrow lead in the race to starvation.
Making matters worse, many of the worlds through which they had traveled were more like the one they’d dropped into mid-yesterday: already entirely covered by the robots and their global machine cities.
Each loop iteration still took them back to the strait between Sardinia and Corsica, but in many of the dimensions, those islands had been either covered with buildings or swarming with robots.
When they arrived in those worlds, Vaughn and Angela would seek shelter, trying to stay out of sight of the no-neck bots, but somehow the xenophobic bastards invariably detected them. A couple of times, they hadn’t even made landfall before a Tater, the windowless, egg-shaped craft, had shown up and beamed them to the trash world for the first time … again.
Vaughn thought the ships looked like a giant egg, but Angela said they looked more like a skinned, boiled potato. So now they just called them Taters.
Anyway, this trip to Hell had been particularly … hellish. The fact that a Tater had found them so early after their arrival yesterday meant that this time they’d spent nearly the full thirty-six hours in the place.
During their multiple visits to Hell, they had never found any evidence that this world of refuse had ever had a collider. However, it may have just been covered up by all of the layers of shit deposited by the Necks. Hell’s history and how the robots had latched onto it remained a mystery.
On the bright side, or on the not-quite-as-dark side, the fact that they were always looping back thirty-six hours meant that when they inevitably ended up back on this hellish version of Earth, it was always the same day.
Vaughn stared up at the dust-hazed stars. Returning to the same place and time over and over again was like being Bill Murray in the movie Groundhog Day. However, he and Angela didn’t have the comedic relief of waking every morning to the same Sonny and Cher song blaring from a clock radio.
Realizing that he was still staring at the sky, Vaughn shook his head. He’d found his mind going off on these tangents more and more over the last several weeks.
Where had he been?
Oh yeah. The not-quite-as-dark side.
Vaughn had come to see the loop’s time resets as a blessing of sorts.
Originally, he had worried about what would happen if they dropped into Hell only to be greeted by millions of angry Fish-Heads, but during their weeks and now months of time-loop travels, they still hadn’t seen any sign of the amphibians or any of the peoples from the multiple other eradicated cultures through which they had drifted. Survivors from those events likely would have seen Angela and Vaughn’s alien features and thought them to be the progenitors of their demise.
Pretty sad for a bright side, but it was all he had.
Angela sighed, pulling Vaughn from his ruminations. Looking down, he saw that she had tried to wipe sweat from her brow. As it had with him earlier, the effort had only smeared gritty mud across her face.
Stooping beside her, Vaughn used a slightly less dirty section of his shirt to wipe some of the grime from her face. “I think this is our longest stay at Motel Hell.” He paused and inspected her face. Then he grinned wryly. “I’m actually looking forward to the big plunge this time.”
Angela reflected his wry smile. “Yeah, anything will be better than this.” Tired hope blossomed in her eyes. “Maybe this’ll be the one.”
Vaughn tried to look optimistic, although he was anything but.
During the first several loop iterations after they’d inferred the true nature and intentions of the robots, they had looked forward to each new jump, confident that their home dimension, their Earth, lay at the end of that next loop. However, after weeks and now months of passing through multiple iterations of the same soul-crushing scenery, Vaughn had long ago lost his optimism.
Stifling his doubts, he nodded dutifully and raised his eyebrows. “I hope so, too.”
Unable to hold her eyes, Vaughn scanned the distant horizon, studying the fuzzy line where land met star field. Then he looked at the sky again. “Should be any second n—”
Brilliant light suddenly burned into his dark-adapted eyes. He squeezed them shut and braced for impact with the water. But then his knees buckled painfully as his feet struck a hard surface. Unprepared for the contact, he crumpled into a pile. Squinting and blinking, he looked over to see Angela just as she collapsed into the same surface. He barely had time to register the event before a thought blasted into his mind.
Vaughn scrambled to his feet and tried to look around, but his burning eyes had a hard time differentiating anything through the tears flooding into them. From what little he could see, they were standing on a gently rolling boat deck surrounded by blue water.
Could this be their Earth?!
Still squinting, Vaughn looked at Angela and pointed at the blurred horizon. “Are we back?”
Blinking and holding up a hand to shield her eyes, Angela turned to scan their surroundings. Then her eyebrows rose hopefully. “Could it be?”
Squinting and peering from beneath his own raised hand, Vaughn fought to resolve the horizon fully. Finally, his watering eyes adjusted enough for him to look up. The day wasn’t as bright as he’d first thought.
Vaughn stared at a cloud-filled, leaden sky. Then he flinched and took an involuntary step back.
Dark shadows stitched a straight line across the bellies of the low-hanging, tumescent clouds.
He pointed up. “Oh shit … Look!”
Angela turned and gazed at the gloomy, overhead mantel. Then a short cry escaped her lips.
Vaughn didn’t know if it had been a cry of horror or elation.
Probably it had been both.
The two of them stared wordlessly at the incredible sight. Parts of structures glided in and out of the low clouds. The pointed crest of a toppled radio tower poked out of a vaporous gray cotton ball.
“Could it be?” Angela whispered. “Is this home?”
Vaughn canted his head. “I don’t know. Wasn’t the sky blue that day?”
“I think you’re right, but …” Angela paused as she turned to follow the line northward visually. “Maybe it’s a different day.”
Vaughn shook his head. “How could that …?” His words trailed off as a large, dark cloud directly overhead suddenly birthed a structure like none he’d ever seen. It would be several times larger than Earth’s biggest skyscraper. The evident building had soft, flowing angles and probably had stood a mile tall before being uprooted. To Vaughn, it looked like something humanity might have built a hundred years from now … if they hadn’t already been swept from the damned planet.
In his peripheral vision, he saw Angela shaking her head as she continued to look in the wrong direction. He reached out and tapped her arm and then pointed up.
Angela turned and then flinched. “What in the world is that?”
Vaughn pulled his eyes from the image and looked down at the boat deck underfoot. Again, the lines of the ship were all wrong and so were its colors. He shook his head and sighed. He pointed at the giant skyscraper. “We didn’t build that.” He shifted the gesture toward the deck beneath their feet. “And this ain’t the Angela’s Dream. We’re not home.”
With mounting dread, Vaughn turned and looked at Corsica. A machine city didn't yet cover this world's version of the island. Judging by the levitating line of steel structures, the Necks hadn’t progressed that far here.
As Vaughn studied the land, he saw that this iteration of Corsica sported architecture that would’ve almost looked at home in their version of Earth.
Suddenly, a sorrowful wail came from next to him. He looked over to see Angela staring at the island, shaking her head, tears welling in her eyes. “I can’t take this anymore!” Collapsing to the deck, she sat down and hugged her knees to her chest. “It’s too much.”
Vaughn squatted next to her. He pointed toward the island. “At least the Necks aren’t here already. We should be safe for a while.”
Angela shook her head. “It’s not that, Vaughn.”
The gentle heaving of the boat and sway of her head conspired to push a tear from its reservoir. It rolled down her cheek, cutting a path in the grime and soot deposited by their passage through Hell.
Angela pointed toward the land. “It’s this. It’s what happened to these people.” She turned shimmering red eyes toward him. “Another entire race wiped from another planet. Just when I think it can’t get any worse, that we must have seen the last of these tragedies, we run into yet another world where the damned Necks have wiped out an entire culture.” Angela batted muddy tears from her cheek. Anger hardened her tone. “It’s just too goddamned much!”
