On The Surface Tension Read online

  The LaGrues stared at him a long while. “That is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard,” they said in disturbing unison.

  Smithson shrugged. “Told you. Have you seen the twin branch on the rift generator screen like Ron did? Have you ever sent over any of your duplicates to see what it was?”

  “We tried, but the rift generator would not allow the jump.”

  “Did you wonder why? It’s because you are not a gene carrier. The rift generator was designed to go one way unless you are a lawn gnome or Pangborn carrier. But if you want some verification, how about you jump back in time to the universe before Hell was split off? See for yourself. Yourselves.”

  The LaGrues narrowed their eyes and in unison lifted their rift generators. They scrolled far, far down the screen. As one, they all vanished.

  Smithson waited, and before long they returned, looking haggard and shocked. One of them approached Smithson’s cage closely.

  “I must find a way to incorporate that power into the present universe. Then I will be able to beat her.”

  “That won’t work, by design. Otherwise she would have done it long ago.”

  LaGrue pondered this. He nodded.

  “I have made a grave mistake,” the LaGrue announced. “There is no way out of this loop. However many duplicates I make of myself, each going back in time to cut off and eliminate one of Eiffelia’s rift generators, she utilizes the same tactic against mine. I had hoped the stalemate could be broken by utilizing the Pangborn gene in a way that Eiffelia has failed. I was in error. The Mods explained this, but I could not accept their premise. Your story is even more preposterous. Still, the evidence is strong and consistent with your explanations.” He paused. “There is only one way out of this situation. Existence itself is at stake.”

  A sense of dread quickly enveloped Smithson when he noted the LaGrues started stealing clandestine glances at each other. Having learned through training over his lifetime to trust his instincts, he dropped prone onto the stone floor an instant before the eight LaGrues blossomed into a multitude, who simultaneously drew guns and began shooting each other.

  —8—

  Tracey regarded Morrow with narrowed eyes. “That is the most preposterous thing I have ever heard.”

  Morrow shrugged. “Told you. I know it’s hard to believe, but there it is. I agreed that you have reached the point in your training where, without this knowledge, further progression would be meaningless. Remember I warned you that if I told you this, and you believed it, you would be at risk for losing your zest for this life. This is the dusk before the proverbial dark night of the soul. You must keep faith that you will come out the other side and want to live again.”

  Tracey placed her fists at her temples and exhaled sharply. “What do you mean ‘if I believe it?’ And even if I did, why would I lose my interest in living?”

  “You can always believe something but refuse to grasp the enormity of it. Or you can simply choose not to believe something. Even if you see it.”

  “Where would I see this aside from you just telling me?”

  Morrow glanced over his shoulder down the hallway and resumed regarding her with a half-smile.

  “Ah. The Scrytorium. Well let’s go see.” Tracey scowled and started down the hall, resisting the urge to either stop or run.

  She settled into the stone seat. For the past six weeks, she had grown adept at using the artifact, silently observing all manner of historical events and learning many facts that were lost or obfuscated to the known canon of history. Aside from this, however, Morrow had done little by way of instruction. He seemed content to putter about, sipping tea and enjoying meals and music, while she explored.

  “Ok, so where do we go? I’ve gone all the way back to the dinosaurs and have yet to see the first dragon, troll or wizard flying his castle through the sky.”

  “Have you discovered the alternate universe/timeline feature?” he asked.

  “Uh, no,” she answered surprised. It had not occurred to her to wonder about this.

  “So roll us back to our friend under the willow tree on Elisha’s Hill,” instructed Morrow. “Good. Now expand out so we see the whole planet. That gives us a view of the whole world at that moment in time.”

  They watched the Earth suspended against the starry background for a moment.

  “Ok, now what?”

  “So now double-tap the green globe to get us into alternate mode. This replicates the screen on a rift generator that shows the alternate universe lines, but on a larger scale.”

  Tracey rapped the globe with her palm, and immediately an overlay of two ghostly glowing tubes appeared, passing parallel through the globe, one orange and the other blue.

  “So what are those?”

  “The blue channel,” answered Morrow, pointing, “is our current state of affairs. Our history line without weirdness: the hardcore reality players. The orange channel is the one which has the free-form players, the superheroes, wizards and mythic beings. This is the moment when they diverge, when Jeshua had his flash and created them both retroactively. Try moving back in time right before he did that.”

  Tracey rolled the timeline back a short distance, and the blue line disappeared.

  “That is what would have happened if he had not had his Moment. There was only the weird line. If you dialed back to observing history mode in that orange line, you would see that the history you looked at earlier would be quite different. Instead of being a Tekton building a villa, Jeshua was a powerful wizard, working miracles. He sat under the willow tree because he was bored with the way the game was being played and wanted the game to be played with fewer lightning bolts and more love and honesty driving the storyline. Others were dissatisfied too and wanted to scrap the program and start a different ‘game’ with more mundane rules. Instead, he chose to recreate the world from the beginning with both types of players getting what they wanted. He started the blue line all the way back. Now, from that moment on, there was one straightforward history with the laws of science controlling, and another history with the laws of magic and will-directed reality. One line evolved dinosaurs over millions of years; the other bred dragons with the wave of a wand. For the hardcore players, who didn’t want the cheat codes, suddenly things had always been that way and the inhabitants didn’t know any different. The lovers of more free-form play continued on their orange line as though nothing had ever happened. Now, instead of being tempted by the Devil to change things back to the way they were after he made the great divide, there was John checking on him under the tree, like you saw in our history.”

  “And Jeshua?”

  “Ah, since he was the new co-programmer, he walked in both lines. He shared our history but had enough of the old line that he could be born of a virgin, walk on water, calm storms, heal the sick, raise the dead. It worked almost flawlessly. There were a few cheaters who remained in the blue line just to mess things up. There was this one guy named Simon Magus who did that, but they convinced him to go while he was flying around Rome. But they were nothing next to the big cheater.”

  Tracey mulled this silently for some time. She stood and wandered back to the main room, with Morrow trailing leisurely behind. She helped herself to some tea, which had grown cold. She drank it distractedly anyway.

  Thoughts chased each other through her mind. She thought about their series of blue universe lines and the corresponding orange/hell line. She thought about the Pangborn gene. Rift generators. Eiffelia.

  “So Eiffelia is the big cheater who convinced one of the gnomes to insert her back into the blue line. But she wasn’t a programmer herself. Why didn’t she stay in the orange line and be able to use any powers and magical skills she wanted?”

  Morrow rubbed his chin and exhaled. “We have been trying to understand her motivations for a long time. We thought at first that she was flawed or diseased. Over time we realized that she was just plain evil. Her ego drives her. Power over others feeds her ego. Little egos h
ave the unholy craving to be the biggest, most powerful. Fear feeds her power, fear of others becoming more powerful and limiting her ego by comparison. She specifically planned her insertion into our universe, remember. There, in hell, she was a mediocre talent. There, the more skillful players kept leveling up and increasing their powers until they were god-like, and struggled with each other for dominance with thunderclouds and black hole bolts. None of them could harm the others, and dominating the weaker players grew boring. Eiffelia was not as skilled as those, and could not contend with them. When she turned her wrath on the weak, the ones stronger than her slapped her down. So she planned her escape into the blue line. Not by the way it is allowed, by being re-inserted without memory as a foundling or an amnesiac, but by coming intact as a sponge.”

  “Why a sponge?”

  “Hearken back to your time as a marine scientist. Sponges are a loose collection of individualized cells, not tissues. They are like holograms. Any one cell can grow back the entire animal. She didn’t want to come to the hard-core blue line universe only to die like all the rest of the players, even with the power of the cheat code rift generator. She wanted to grow for millions of years to the point that she could be immortal in this world like she would have been there.”

  “They are immortal there?” Tracey asked.

  “Ah,” Morrow smiled. “I forgot to mention that in Hell one cannot be killed by others. That is pretty much their only ‘ground rule.’ If you are destroyed by another dweller of the hell line, you ‘respawn’ and keep playing.”

  “Forever? How horrible.”

  “Your realization of this gives me hope for you. Yes, they keep respawning, but they are not actually trapped forever. They can quit the game themselves and return to the same place we end up when we leave our version of the game. But they only get to do it once.”

  “Wait, we get to do…what…more than once? I’m confused.”

  Morrow stood, paced the room while searching for words. The monkey man brought him some fresh tea, which he poured for them both.

  “I told you earlier that I thought you were ready for this. I hope I am right. Are you ready to proceed?”

  She raised an eyebrow, nodded.

  “Have you ever played an open-world video game?” he asked.

  “No, but I have seen Ron play them. And play them. And play them.”

  “Do you know the basic mechanics, though? You fire up the TV, turn on the game console, navigate to the game you have saved, then the machine loads the saved game and away you go. You are playing as a character in a fantasy world. Right?”

  “I’m with you so far.”

  “So who are ‘you’ at that point? Are you the player manipulating the game controller, or are you the character on the tv screen? Who is the ‘first person’ in a first-person game?”

  “I am always the player with the controller, but I’m experiencing the game through the character and his or her persona.”

  “Right you are. Just so.” Morrow paused again, seeming to wonder down what path to proceed. “So you’re playing along and you have to quit and go make a sandwich or mow the lawn or something. What do you do?”

  “I think you save the game and it freezes that world, and you get on with your life.”

  “Exactly. So what happens to the character in that game while you are eating your sandwich?”

  “Nothing, I guess. Time is frozen until the saved game is loaded back up.”

  “Yes, if it is a single-player game. Even if the time it takes you to get back to the game is an hour or a week or a year. The real life continues at its pace; the game life is on an entirely different plane. But if it is a multiplayer game, the time continues for the other players while your character just vanishes or sleeps for a while.”

  Tracey nodded. “Ok, so if our life here, what we consider the ‘real life,’ is by analogy just the video game and we have a ‘real life’ beyond what we understand, then are you saying that we have pauses where we are doing things in our ‘real life’ that we don’t experience here?”

  “There are some we don’t experience. But if you think about it a minute, we also have breaks in the story that are built in.” He paused for Tracey to catch up.

  “Like…unconsciousness?”

  “Yes, in a way. But not necessarily as dramatic as getting knocked out with a right hook or getting anesthetized for tonsil surgery. We go unconscious most every night.”

  “Oh, sleep of course.”

  “We’re getting there,” Morrow said. “But sleep is a funny thing. Sometimes we lay our heads on the pillow and we wake up the next morning like no time at all has passed. Other times we dream. Sometimes the dreams seem to take only minutes, sometimes they feel like years are going by.”

  “So I assume that the one where no time passes corresponds to the player saving the game and then mowing the lawn or eating a sandwich or something. What is going on with the dream?”

  “That is kind of like when the player goes to make the sandwich but leaves the game going.”

  Tracey thought about that. “So part of us stays in the game?”

  “Part of us never leaves the game. And how much stays depends.”

  “On what?”

  Morrow smiled and raised his eyebrows, signaling Tracey that she was to reason this out.

  “Ohhh-kay,” she sighed. “So on one extreme, we save the game and wake up in the morning and don’t remember anything. On the other extreme, we have vivid dreams and wake up and remember all of them.”

  “Almost correct. On one extreme we wake up and remember nothing, but the other extreme is only applicable for normal people. Those who have the recessive Pangborn Gene have a more…extreme extreme.”

  Tracey blinked. “What do you mean?”

  “Well,” said Morrow, “sometimes they go to sleep still playing the game. The dreaming becomes the new gameplay.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “Tracey, do you remember when you first came here?”

  “Sure. I followed the flying pickle here and cut up my feet and argued with the lady in the Chinese restaurant downstairs.”

  “Right. But before that?”

  Tracey squinted, searching her memory. Maurice told me I would dream and it would take me to Andrew Morrow. I went to sleep, then opened my eyes and saw the flying pickle in my room….

  With a sudden landslide of realization, she knew that she had not woken up when this happened. She was dreaming. She had been doing so for weeks. She was still sleeping in her bed.

  “I gotta wake up, ” she growled. Her vision darkened around the edges, and she felt her feet under the sheets.

  She felt a sudden shock of warm liquid in her face, and Morrow grabbed her by the arm and started walking her around the room. He started singing in a strong voice.

  “Großes, das ins Herz gedrungen, blüht dann neu und schön empor…”

  Tracey wiped her face. Morrow had spashed her with his tea, and it was sticky with sugar.

  “Hat ein Geist sich aufgeschwungen, halt ihm stets ein Geisterchor.…”

  “What the hell are you singing? Is that German?”

  “Nehmt denn hin, ihr schönen Seelen, froh die Gaben schöner Kunst…”

  “I get it. You needed to get me back here and grounded in this…dream? Reality?”

  “Wenn sich Lieb und Kraft vermählen, lohnt den Menschen Göttergunst.”

  “Come on Morrow, help me out here.”

  “Sorry, just wanted to finish the stanza. The Fantasy in C Minor is one of my favorites. I thought I had lost you for a second there! So here you are in the midst of your own miracle, like we asked for when you first got here.”

  “So I’m sleeping in my house and this is all a dream.”

  “It could be that way,” he said, watching her carefully. “But if you think of it as the ‘real’ you sleeping back in your house and this being ‘just a dream’ you, then the miracle hasn’t happened yet, and you will have failed wh
en you ‘wake up’ back there. None of this will have happened. The real ‘real’ you is here. In the flesh and blood. Waking and sleeping, and experiencing and learning. The new universally-shared reality with all the other sentient beings who share this game.”