One Verse Multi, page 20
Section 20
It’s fucking raining
“Let’s hurry,” Hugo said.
“How did you do that?” I said. “I thought you used the fissures. There wasn’t one there. Was there?”
“There was, of sorts,” Hugo said. “I don’t have time to explain.”
A shiver traced my spine, and my body tingled slightly. We were in a dark conference room. I could hear other people but nothing distinct.
“What happened to Benny?” I asked.
Hugo pulled the badge off my shirt and the tingling stopped. “He’s gone.”
“Gone? Did you kill him or something? Transport him into the ether?”
Hugo shook his head. “No. Well, in that language, we’re gone. He went to the lab.”
“Where are we?”
“Come.”
My anchor in his hand, Hugo started walking toward the door.
“What the fuck, bro?” I shouted.
“You can come with me or you can go where you want, but I promise you it is the same place. I’m going to find MVP Hugo.”
“Are you insane? Are you defecting?”
Hugo opened the door. “Oui, Martin. Now shut up.”
Leading us out into the hall, he straightened and walked like he was supposed to be there. I tried to follow his example. My brain was clouded with pain and confusion, but I kept my mouth shut.
“Hello, do you need help?” someone asked as we passed a desk.
“No, thanks. We came to see my brother, but we’re leaving now,” Hugo said in a surprisingly good American accent. I just nodded and followed out of the building.
On the street, he started marching down the sidewalk. I was having a hard time keeping up, but I didn’t say anything. As we walked, he tapped his smart watch, and I could tell he was navigating. We walked for almost an hour, snaking through the city away from the office building. When we rounded a corner, I spotted a food truck.
“Oh yeah, I want food,” I said.
He looked at me, “That’s not why we’re here.”
“It could be.”
He rolled his eyes. “Okay, what do you want?”
I cheered and ordered two bean and chicken burritos and two waters. Hugo ordered a soda. As he waited to pay, he dropped the anchor I’d been wearing into the semi-open window of the truck. The watch followed. Then he paid, and we left.
“So…” I said as we walked down the street at a much slower pace.
We were almost exactly tracing our steps back, only we were on the other side of the block. His pace was almost relaxed, even if his face wasn’t. He had a scrunched expression and the skin under his eyes was dark. He looked exhausted.
“So?” he asked when I didn’t follow up.
“All that was to throw them off the trail?”
He nodded. “Well reasoned.”
“I’ve had good training,” I said. “I knew a Margo and have, like, three degrees.”
He just grunted. “Your reasoning skills are why I’ve decided to find your Hugo.”
“How’re you planning on finding him?” I wasn’t interested in why at the moment. I had spent a week in a hospital and gotten zero straightforward answers to that question.
He smiled. “I had planned on you sticking with me, finding him for me.”
“Fair enough.” Then I thought about it. “Wait. How do I know you aren’t going to try to kill him?”
“You didn’t believe him to be a killer, but you think I am?”
I shrugged and tried to chew a burrito. I was lucky it was pulled chicken and not chunks. My headache was bright, but the food helped.
“I’ll find him either way,” Hugo said with finality.
“Okay, okay.” I stopped walking and looked around the city. “What universe is this?”
“We call this universe five.”
“So, you were just numbering them as you discovered them?”
He nodded. I looked around again. Nothing immediately placed this universe. It wasn’t like the last, which was unique in a million different ways. This one gave me a vague sense of familiarity, but of course it would. I had been to so many universes.
“How many universes would we have to go through to get back to the FOX universe, I mean the universe that Don stole Tidus from?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I wasn’t totally sure where that one was. I’ve never been there.”
“What about the one we left Josephine in? Are we next door?”
“That one is three universes from this, but the path between there and here is narrow, succinct, like passing through a deck of cards. Do you plan to go back to the one Tidus was from? I don’t think it’s safe.”
“I agree. No, there are only two universe that fissure naturally with that verse.”
I didn’t feel like cluing Hugo into my idea. I was thinking I could get back to my own verse. There was a beacon in my house. With a broadcast signal back to HQ. Every tech had one hidden in a universe we could always find so we could be retrieved. Considering the limits to their exploration of the multi-verse and where I suspected they had started, I doubted VIP had found their way to my home-verse.
“FOX universe?”
“It’s part of MVP universe designation.”
“We knew that, though it seemed arbitrary to us. You were right in that we’re reliant on the fissures.” Hugo’s voice was curious. “What do you call the one we took Tidus to?”
“The letters are GOZ.”
“Our explorers were in GOZ not long ago and were trying to use our device to cross into FOX, but the parameters of the fissure decayed. They reported that your team was there, on the other side. We were trying to open it, but you succeeded in closing it. When we investigated more, we knew it was you. We had been looking for you, and we tracked you from there.”
“You hunted me? Wait! I thought that fissure was weird. You were trying to open it at the same time as I was closing it? Wait, it was…did you create it?”
“Yes.”
“Damn,” I said. “How…you know what? Never mind. I can’t even with that right now. I just want to go home.”
“I can get you to GOZ if you would like,” Hugo said.
“Do it. I can get us help from there.”
“Voilà, a plan.”
Hugo hired a car to take us across town. The rain started. Even though it made absolute perfect sense, it was annoying how rainy all Floridas were. I was starting to feel nauseous again, but I wasn’t about to barf in some stranger’s car. I counted my heartbeats as they pulsed through my skull.
“Are you feeling okay?”
I swallowed my sarcastic comment and shook my head. He left me in peace for the rest of the drive. The driver let us out at a government building two blocks from the location of the rift. Hugo explained he could create a rift for himself using his anchor and watch, but since he got rid of mine, I needed a natural rift.
“I think we should go to the location and make sure we can do it without being seen. I’m just gonna need a pit stop soon,” I said, going for casual.
“Right,” Hugo said as he typed on his watch. We had been walking with our heads down to keep the rain out of our eyes. My locs were already dripping down my back and the sensation of wet clothes was starting to piss me off.
“I—fuck!”
I didn’t see what I slammed into. It felt like hitting a slightly pillowy wall. I did see an array of blue and white lights as pain raced into my skull. I felt the rain and the cement and the fire in my chest. I heard voices, but the words didn’t register. When I opened my eyes, I saw two sets of shoes, then a set of thighs as someone kneeled on the puddly sidewalk.
“I’m so sorry,” the voice attached to the thighs said.
“Martin,” Hugo said.
The pain was hot and flowing all over my body. I could feel it in my blood like an electrical current. My muscles tensed as each pulse brought a new wave. The image of the thighs went static in my head, and the edges started to frame in black. I couldn’t hold still enough to stop the pain.
“You have to breathe,” the voice said.
Wasn’t I breathing? His voice was familiar and soothing. The fear of taking a breath was real and petrifying. If I took a breath, the pain would increase.
“Martin,” the voice said, and there was a hand on my shoulder. I felt my lungs fill with air.
“Oh my God,” I gasped.
“Just breathe calmly. I’m so fucking sorry. What the hell happened to you?”
“He was attacked and has bruised ribs—”
“Why isn’t he at a hospital?”
“He was, but he needs to get home,” Hugo said.
“I’m okay.”
Breathing had forced my lungs against my bones, and the fresh pain, different from the collision, different from the injured bones, brought tears to my eyes. I tried to lie on my back instead of my side. I didn’t like the rain on my face, but I liked the solid feeling of the concrete.
“You can’t just lie in the street,” the other man said.
I finally looked at him, squinting through the pool of tears and rain.
“Tidus?” I could have shouted.
“Hi,” he said. He looked at me from under a hoodie, just as tired and bored as the last time I had seen him.
FAX Tidus. “So we’re in that universe?”
He gave me a curious look, then glared. “Well, I’m not ecstatic to see you either.”
“No, no,” I said, coughing. “I meant I’m surprised to see you. I just didn’t realize how close we were to you.”
“Look, I have to start opening, but you can come in the bar and sit down for a second. Or you can drown in the street. I don’t care.”
“I drowned once—zero out of ten, won’t buy again,” I said, mostly to throw him off. I put my arms around my chest as gently as I could. “I need help.”
Hugo and Tidus worked together to right me. My body wanted to black out again as they lifted me, but I forced myself to stay awake. Because of that, my next sensation was to throw up. I didn’t do that either.
“You need painkillers. I’ll go get some,” Hugo said.
“I…I’ll be okay, I don’t—”
Hugo helped Tidus put me in a booth near the back of the bar, and then he left. I lay on the cool leather for a few minutes while Tidus moved around the bar.
FAX Tidus. I couldn’t believe it. My brain tried to work out the puzzle. I should have been able to get home from here, rift by rift. But I couldn’t think. The pain in my side had reduced to a numb throb. My headache was back, right behind my eyes. I had almost forgotten about my jaw, but I had smacked into Tidus with my face, so it ached too.
“Water?” Tidus asked. He put a glass down at the table without waiting for me to answer.
“Tidus,” I said.
“Yeah?” he asked sadly.
“I’m sorry about the last time we saw each other.”
“Martin, it’s fine.” He looked down at his feet. “I can’t say I remember what happened between us.”
“What do you mean?” I asked. I rubbed my eyes as if that would clear some of the pain I felt all over. “Nothing’s happened between us.”
He side-eyed me. It clicked. As closeted as he was, FAX Tidus hooked up with strangers from time to time, usually after getting shitfaced with his friends.
“We didn’t hook up,” I said.
That seemed to catch his interest because he slipped into the booth. “So, what then?”
“I can’t explain.”
“If you can’t remember, then how do you know nothing happened?”
I almost laughed. “Naw, nothing like that. I…you wouldn’t believe me.”
“What’re you, an alien? Did you abduct me?”
I sighed. I was too tired. I could also see I was doing damage. He’d spent a lot of time regretting his actions. He looked brighter than when I had met him, though. The bar was empty. The crowd of tan bodybuilders and models may have suited the bar, but it hadn’t suited him. His black hair was down, curling like a greaser’s around his eyebrows. And in his eyes was visible regret.
“I’m not an alien. We don’t deal with space,” I said.
He rolled his eyes. But he didn’t get up from the table.
“Have you heard of the multi-verse?”
“Who hasn’t?”
“There exists a universe where I’m close to a version of you. Something is wrong with the universes, and you picked up on something he and I had talked about a while ago.” I tried to sound as casual as I could.
“What, so you had a crush on me a long time ago or something?”
“See? It’s unbelievable.”
He looked at me. I tried to sip the water and got maybe three sips down before I gave up. I put my head back and held the glass to my cheek.
“They really did a number on you,” he said.
“Tell me about it.”
“Why didn’t you go to the hospital?”
“Like Hugo said, I have to get home.”
“You’re going all the way to Denver like that?”
“Yup.”
He went silent, and I closed my eyes.
“I’ve never had purple hair,” he said after a minute.
I looked at him.
“I dye it, sure, but not purple.”
“You don’t have purple hair, but the Tidus I know does.”
I watched the emotions cross Tidus’s face as he decided whether or not to trust me and his own memory—or non-memory—about that moment. He was recalling the purple of Tidus’s hair the same way the words in that conversation had come to him.
“How did you get out of that universe?” he asked skeptically.
“It’s a long story.”
“Have you been to a lot of universes? Are there more of me?”
“Yes.”
“How many more? How many universes are there?”
“A lot. And because there are so many of you, it’s dangerous for you to travel around them.”
He laughed. “Ah see, now I know you’re full of shit.”
“Why does that make me full of shit?”
“It’s hard to believe that only you can travel through these universes. It’s like when a guy tells you he works for the FBI but won’t show you his badge. No proof, you know.”
I shrugged. “Fair assessment.”
I could see, though, that he still wasn’t sure that I was full of shit. He had the details in his mind: my name, my conversation with FOX Tidus, FOX Tidus’s purple hair. But it was hard to believe.
“How do you get to them? A spaceship?”
“No, it’s not space. See, all the galaxies and shit are in this universe. And all other universes have a space with planets and stars and galaxies.”
“How?”
“The quantum foundation is different for each. It hurts to think about. I mean, scientists in most universes agree space is expanding, right? But those who study the multi-verse know the volume of the container that holds the multi-verses is finite. Space is infinite but the space for spaces is limited.”
Tidus blinked, but then he smiled. “You’re right. That does hurt.”
“You also didn’t explain it very well,” a familiar voice said.
Both Tidus and I jumped. And Hugo grinned at me.
“Hugo!” I cried.
“How’d you get in?” Tidus said. “I thought I locked the door.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “How’d you know I was here?”
“He came with you. Are you having amnesia?” Tidus asked. We slid out of the booth at the same time, but I let Hugo hug my head while Tidus crossed his arms.
It was Hugo, MVP Hugo, my Hugo. I took a step back and looked at him. In all my suffering, I had completely missed the tell for someone tuning into the verse.
“Wait, who are you? You can’t just bring people into the bar. I’m going to get in trouble for even letting you in here.” Tidus was talking to someone over Hugo’s shoulder.
I almost didn’t recognize him. I had only known him at HQ, surrounded by plain gray walls and computers. But Luca was there in the bar. He looked tired and excited and perfect and was exactly who I wanted to see. Tidus stopped talking when Luca stepped closer and let me kiss him.
“I’m sorry,” I said to Luca.
“You’re a dumbass.”
“Can’t argue with that.”
“Well, since your friends are here, maybe you can leave?” Tidus said, his annoyance obvious.
“Yeah, let’s go. We can talk later,” Hugo said.
Luca turned my hand over and placed my sequencer into my palm. “Come on, the code is—”
“I can’t go yet,” I said. Hugo and Luca stared at me.
“I can’t go without—”
Someone knocked on the door of the bar. All of us turned and watched a soggy VIP Hugo staring in through the glass. He knocked again and cupped his hands to try and look in. MVP Hugo said something in French I couldn’t understand.
“He’s with you?” Luca asked.
“Yeah. He wants to talk to you,” I said to Hugo.
“What in the fuck is happening?” Tidus looked from the Hugo standing in the bar to the one on the street.
“Tidus, someday I’ll make it up to you,” I said. Then I took Luca by the hand and started toward the door. Tidus said nothing.
Hugo followed me and Luca. I unlocked the door to the bar and stepped out into the rain. VIP Hugo let out a relieved sound.
“You’re upright,” he said. Then he saw Luca. “And met someone?”
“Hugo, this is Hugo,” I said, and I stepped out of the way so they could see each other. VIP Hugo said the same thing in French that MVP Hugo had.
“Oh jeez,” another voice said over my shoulder. Tamar and Wei were standing on the street. I felt my eyes burn with tears at the sight of them.
