One Verse Multi, page 7
It was the last box that surprised me. As he was carrying it out, a homeless man, woman, and dog crossed into the alley. They watched Tidus but didn’t say anything, though you could see the question they wanted to ask. They wanted the pastries. Tidus didn’t look at them, but he left the box on the ground by the compactor instead of putting it in like he had done the others. Then he went back inside. Manager Cody was waiting there.
“I saw that,” Cody said.
Tidus just shrugged and tried to walk past him.
“Tidus, you can’t give them food. It encourages them to stick around.”
Tidus turned and said in a tone that was practical and impassioned but not loud, “Cody, they are people, not stray cats, and it’s danishes, not gold.”
“I still have to tell Gwen.”
Tidus waved a so be it hand and went back to the front of the store. The person called Gwen was taking customers, and Tidus fell in line with her, saying nothing about it. I felt that pull again, that want to know more. Charming and kind. I wrote kind in the box on his form marked “characteristics.” The bell went off, and I had to switch to the next Tidus.
Tidus 44AAD was also at work. He was a clerk in a law office across town from where the coffee shop would be located. I just watched him file reports. His hair was the natural curly brown that FOX Tidus must also have under the dye. I wrote the differences into his chart. If the multi-verse was created by the actions of people, this choice or that choice, branching into every possibility, I had to wonder what choice AAD Tidus had made or hadn’t that FOX Tidus had or hadn’t.
Halfway through my observation, AAD Tidus pulled a single-serve box of Honey-Ohs cereal out of his desk and snacked on it. Honey-Ohs was analogous to the cereal Luca’d had for our first dinner together, Honoy-Os. I wrote that in the chart. A person came into the room just then, and I switched on the audio.
“I’m sorry,” Tidus was saying.
“Isn’t that just the worst, though?” the person responded.
“You won, Di. Try to stay positive and focus on that. The kid’ll be in a better home because of us.”
“Yeah, I guess it just goes to show you how messed up those parents were. Why’d they keep the dog? It was the only decent gift that kid had ever got from them.”
“I agree, it’s fucked up. We can hand the dog’s case over to animal rights and maybe someday…But for now, Jason was our biggest concern, and we helped him.”
The Tiduses were two for two in the heartstrings department. I finished up AAD Tidus’s forms and clicked away from the Tidus group. It was on to good ol’ Peter Rogers.
Section 7
You will make sense of this
I was standing behind Tamar as we got on the bus. It was a cold day in the town of San Jose. The air felt thick and still, like a storm was coming. I pulled my backpack straps and tried not to think about this verse being blown apart like the ground zero verse.
“Pass?” the driver asked Tamar. Tamar nodded and inserted her pass into the reader. She wouldn’t tell me why she wanted to take the bus across San Jose. Maybe it was a part of some observation she was making. Maybe she just wanted to see it. Either way, I was down for her plan.
“Pass?” the driver asked me. I pulled my backpack over my shoulder.
A security guard on the bus stood from where he sat behind the driver. I rummaged for my ticket and then put the pass into the reader. The security guard sat.
“Keep that in your pocket,” the bus driver warned.
I saluted her and plopped into the seat across from Tamar. For some reason she was fuming.
“Did you see that?” she said.
“No…maybe?” I wasn’t following.
She glared at me. “You know that guard only did that because you’re black, right? He assumed you’d have something in your bag.”
“Oh yeah.”
“Doesn’t it piss you off?” she said.
“It would if I let it.”
“Well, fuck that and fuck them. I can’t believe it. This is a fucking bus, not a bank or something. Also how dare they not search my bag? I mean if you’re going to be racist, be racist equally and do me the honor. I’m Chicana, after all.”
“You can get the next racism, I promise,” I said, smiling.
“Why are you like this?”
I laughed. It took a week of searching and annoying Hugo, but we were finally able to get permission to visit the Dugan verses. Mason uncovered seven more James Dugans on top of the sixteen known. Minus the dead, there were ten we could visit. We submitted a proposal to the research coordinator and were given passes to visit the B-class verses.
Our whole HQ was A-class universe focused, from our clothes to our food to our entertainment. By definition, B-class universes were twenty years or more behind the progress of A-class verses. Which put my twenty-eight-year-old ass in a place that reminded me of when I was in elementary school. Tamar and I were pretending to be high schoolers.
I looked at Tamar across the city transport, funnily named The Zip. She was chewing gum and kicking her crossed leg gently. The man next to her pretended to read the paper, but really he watched her boot get dangerously close to grazing his slacks. She was still her goth self but with the energy of the early 2000s. She had on tight, red plaid pants with black hanging suspenders. She had on a black denim vest, detached fishnet sleeves, and thick, smeared black makeup.
I felt like what I was wearing was pretty damn close to the skater vibe I always wanted but wasn’t allowed to have. When I was young and wanted to bury my body under a pile of clothes, hoodies and wide-legged pants were a godsend. I was kind of a chub as an adult, so the skinny jeans they tried to put me in made me sad. I opted for baggy shorts, a hoodie, fat lime green skateboarding shoes, and a beanie.
“What are you looking at, Martin?” she said, whipping her face toward me.
“What made you suspicious of MVP in the first place?” I asked.
She popped her gum. “What made you?”
I stared at her until she rolled her eyes. She dug into her backpack and handed me a folder.
“I’m pure-unique,” she said.
“Weird flex, but okay,” I said. Pure-unique were people who had never had a counterpart, living or dead. They were statistical anomalies, the rarest of people in all the multi-verse.
She just rolled her eyes. “Since I can go basically wherever I want, I sometimes go to a random verse. Mostly for hook-ups.”
I nodded, not an uncommon story.
“One day I found this.”
She gestured for me to open the folder. The topmost item was a magazine with an older black man with a square jaw and trim physique on the cover. He had on an exceptionally well-tailored suit and was shaking hands with someone while accepting a plaque.
“Senator makes history, works with judges to eliminate prison time for minor offenses,” I read. I looked at her. “Sounds like a good guy.”
“I guess, except the alternative is to be forced to pay two hundred dollars a week to rent an ankle monitor from his family’s company,” she grunted. “That’s not the point. Do you recognize that guy?”
I shook my head.
“Look at the next photo.”
It was of three men and a woman standing against the ocean horizon. One of the men was the guy on the magazine cover, and the other was Don Brady. I didn’t know the third man, and the woman’s big glasses obscured her face.
“Are these MVP founders?”
“More or less. I’m not sure who started when, but they’re top MVP execs. Turn to the next thing.”
It was a magazine with the same black man on it, seated behind a podium at what looked like a press hearing. “CEO Steps Down, Names Housekeeper’s Son Successor.”
“I thought he was a senator,” I said.
“He is…in the first verse. In this one he is—was a CEO.”
I was speechless. It was a basic understanding that MVP founders were all universe-unique. They also told everyone they were almost exclusively MVP now, so even in their home-verse, they shouldn’t have been so important to warrant being on magazine covers. My mind flooded with questions.
I set the first cover on my left thigh and the second on my right. Side by side, the man was as distinct as he was the same. The senator had a fade and was clean-faced. The CEO had a five o’clock shadow and a forearm tattoo. But they were the same man—Carl Payne. I closed the folder.
“What do you make of it?” I asked.
Tamar shrugged. “I don’t know, but my gut tells me it’s not good.”
“Wow.”
That was all that was in the folder. I handed it back. She put it in her backpack and looked at me sternly.
“What about you?” she asked.
“What about me what?”
She grinned. “Martin, you’re so dumb. When did you become suspicious of MVP?”
“I think it’s suspicious that a company who says their top priority is to protect the universe from rifts only gives twenty-eight percent of their resources to the Tangential Encounter Management Group.”
“That’s it? Where does the rest go? Research?”
“Research and Monitoring are only thirty-two percent combined.”
“What’s left, HR?”
“Right, but even with the employee compensation programs and equipment, there is still thirty percent unaccounted for.”
Tamar nodded as if she agreed it was strange. “What do they do with the money?”
“No, not just money, Tam, resources. There’s a labor budget that exceeds compensation, there’s logs for equipment that can’t be accessed by any department. There’s accounting lines labeled weird things like Universe Expansion Preparation.”
“That sounds useful to have.”
“Yeah, but why then is it listed as inventory?”
“You know what? I don’t understand how MVP makes money anyway.”
“That’s half the problem, most of the employees don’t. MVP makes money by investing. They put money into financial markets of specific universes. They also provide microfinancing services in said universes, which means they offer small short-term loans to individuals through an app called Peanuts. But that’s it. And even that portion of the business is less than three percent. They shouldn’t have some of the financial line items they have.”
“How do you know all of this?” Tamar asked.
“I read the financial statements.”
She stared at me.
“They’re a corporation only because employees need a familiar structure to operate under, which means we’re the only ones who can hold it accountable. It’s not like there’s a multi-verse government to investigate corporate malpractice.”
“You get your compensation, so what’s it matter what they do with the rest?” Tamar asked.
“So, what does it matter to you that the founders claim they’re universe-unique but might not be?” I said.
Tamar just nodded and shrugged. I understood. We both had the same voice in the back of our heads that said something was wrong. Now we had each other’s information but couldn’t reconcile the two.
“You ever ask anyone about it?” she asked as the bus took a hard turn around a traffic circle.
“Yeah. I got a form letter and a financial statements for beginners packet. They basically said, ‘Keep at it, Mr. King, and you will make sense of this complicated financial information with time and practice.’”
“Brutal.” Then she asked, “How do you make sense of them?”
I laughed. “We all nerd out on something.”
We didn’t say anything for the rest of the ride.
Section 8
I feel bad for the guy
The retirement home was a sprawling complex of four-story buildings that could have passed for apartments. We had to walk a block from the bus stop to the estate entrance. The gate was open, and I followed Tamar up the quarter-mile driveway to the front desk. We gave the receptionist our names and our fake teacher’s note from Mr. Del Mar. She gravely wrote out our visitors’ passes and pointed us in the direction of Dugan’s room. I set up my drones before we went in. I thought about Luca back in HQ, waiting for the data I would send. He would also be watching me and Tamar on drones assigned to us. When I was ready, Tamar knocked.
“Come on in,” the man behind the door said.
James Dugan looked like Santa Claus, with a thick, white beard and balding head. He had a pleasant demeanor and offered us tea as soon as we plopped down on his brown sofas. Tamar conducted the interview while I tried to investigate the room with drones, hoping Dugan wouldn’t think too hard about the cell phone I was holding. I told him it was a tape recorder, and he seemed to trust that. From what I could see on the sequencer, nothing here suggested a rift event or any other multi-verse phenomena.
He had a lot to say about any subject Tamar brought up, but very little of it was about the multi-verse. She was easing her way in. We didn’t land on anything good until Dugan mentioned having strange dreams. He was calling them dreams, but it seemed more to me like he was walking through the multi-verse without knowing how he was doing it or what had really happened. When he said it gave him inspiration for his paintings, Tamar asked to see them.
As soon as Dugan was out of the room, retrieving his paintings, my sequencer beeped with a message from Luca: Scans complete. No quantum variance, cept you and T. Cute green blob man.
“Stop flirting with Martin and focus,” Tamar said to Luca through the drone, reading over my shoulder.
“You can stop too,” she said, glaring at me.
I rolled my eyes and put the sequencer back on the table. I wasn’t flirting. I was being flirted with. There was a difference.
James was shuffling back down the hall, explaining as he walked. “Some years ago, seven maybe eight, I started having dreams like I was living whole other lives. I was me but my home or my job or friends would be different. Or I was watching myself live my life. They weren’t always bad, but it did distort my sense of reality. The doctors diagnosed it as a sort of schizophrenia.”
“Oh?” Tamar and I both said as he sat.
He sighed. “I think that was their best guess, really. Nothing they did helped, but I didn’t care much for evaluations and such, so for a while I would lie and say their medication helped.”
“Interesting,” Tamar said.
James had morphed from jolly to grave. He seemed to be studying our faces, trying to land on our reactions. He put a pile of papers and sketchbooks down on the coffee table between us. I scooted closer to Tamar. She opened the book. The first few pages were just self-portraits. Well, they appeared to be self-portraits at first glance. The more we saw, the more I realized he had been drawing counterparts. One stood out. I pulled the loose page out of Tamar’s hands.
“What’s going on here?” I asked.
“That was one of the first dreams I remember.”
It was a picture of a Dugan looking down at his reflection in the ice. The image had been rendered with what I guessed was watercolors. It gave the ice a realistic wetness. You couldn’t see the face of the man standing on top of the ice, but the other was Dugan.
Tamar asked him to explain the inspiration for some of his work. He talked about them and how each dream episode would be in a world just like the one he knew, only different. While it sounded like multi-verse, there were some missing pieces. He couldn’t have possibly visited a universe with a counterpart. They would have converged. Second, there were no rifts in the area he could have walked through. And finally, there was a clear tell when someone tunes, traveling the MVP way through the multi-verse.
For some people it was a sound or feeling. For me it was a smell. It was just the way a brain would come to interpret the act of changing universe frequencies. I always smelled peanut butter when I tuned. Try as she might, Tamar couldn’t get Dugan to admit to some consistent thing that would have meant tuning.
In all, it left us with more questions than answers. When it was over, Tamar and I left in near silence. We walked to where James said he had lived and the several locations around town where he worked. I couldn’t stop thinking of the photo of Dugan under the ice.
“I feel bad for the guy,” I said.
“Me too.”
I think in that moment we both abandoned the idea of visiting other Dugans.
* * *
The Dugan experience was the first event in a chain leading to a melancholy that came over the group. Shortly after returning, we got a report of a plane gone missing because of a rift, three hundred plus people lost to a dead-verse. The week ended with Hugo reporting that all our hours of observation so far had concluded nothing. We weren’t making progress. Of course, that was exactly when the founders started sending messages to Hugo, demanding results. Hugo became very grumpy about the structure of the experiment.
Tamar sulked around the lab and quietly did her observations. Wei fell ill again and was cooped up in bed. Luca agreed to take over Wei’s subjects, so we only saw each other at the worktable. And since the data still poured in, Luca, Kiki, and Mason were busier than ever, even if it amounted to nothing. I found it hard to work, to draw my focus away from my friends. I mentioned to Hugo I had noticed a depression creep up on everyone. He said it was normal—starting projects was exciting and kept the adrenaline high and the brain focused. When that started to wane, the collective low was expected.
I knew it was more than that. I didn’t tell him I couldn’t let go of Dugan. Who would he have been without the multi-verse travel? Living in the dead-verse was like stepping out of a party and looking back in through a closed window. I had been a tech with MVP for ten years, what else did I know? Or maybe I knew too much.
