Multiversum (8 page)

‘Jenny isn't here,' Alex interrupted him. ‘I'm right where we agreed to meet, but she isn't here.'

‘Maybe she ran into some problems. She's probably on her way.'

‘No, that's not it. We just talked.'

Marco reversed his electric wheelchair away from the computer area. He stopped by a small table that had a bottle of mineral water on it. He took a few gulps while he tried to figure out what Alex meant by that phrase.

‘You just talked … in your minds?'

‘Yes.'

‘Well, what did she tell you? Did she explain why she wasn't there?'

‘The exact opposite.'

‘I'm not sure I follow.'

Alex looked around, as if he was afraid that someone might be listening in, but there was nothing but the waves crashing against the pilings beneath the pier.

‘She says that she's here, right where I'm standing right this second.'

His friend was speechless. From the very first instant that Alex had spoken to him about Jenny and their bizarre encounters, he'd never doubted for even a second that his friend was telling the truth and, more importantly, that he hadn't lost his mind. He was convinced that all the gears in Alex's head were meshing properly. In that case, though, what lay behind their failure to meet?

She was there, or at least she'd told Alex that she was right where the two of them had agreed to meet. But there was no one on the pier, according to what his friend had told him. Just an empty pier.

‘Alex, you do realise that what you said makes no sense, right?'

‘That's what I keep telling myself. None of this makes any sense. I'm going out of my mind!' Alex pounded his fist on the ground.

‘Listen to me. Try to stay calm: there has to be a rational explanation. Give me ten minutes. I need to check something out. I'll call you right back.'

‘All right,' said Alex unhappily.

‘Don't move from there, stay right where you are — go get a bite if you want, but try not to do anything until you hear from me again.'

Alex put his phone in his pocket, picked up his backpack, and started walking towards the steps that led down to the beach. There was a group of kids playing soccer in the distance. A man with a dog was walking briskly along the edge of the surf. At that moment, Alex understood the meaning of the phrase he'd read on the internet, when he'd typed in the name of that neighbourhood and had found himself looking at a travel website that said:
the quietest area in Melbourne, an oasis of relaxation.

He sighed impatiently and stretched out on the sand, his eyes lost in the clear blue sky. The migraine was starting to subside.

In the meantime, Marco had typed a series of search terms into Seeker and was waiting for the results.

Seeker was a program he'd invented himself. He always liked to say that it was destined to become the most extraordinary search engine in the world. He'd be able to sell it to some big software developer and make a huge amount of money.

It was just a pity that, for now, the software was completely illegal.

The algorithm that Seeker was based on ensured that its search encompassed many levels. It went through posts and comments on forums, Facebook status updates, tweets on Twitter, the contents of Myspace, and all the major platforms that used software to allow users to interact. The results were then compared with those produced by the top search engines and the most reliable encyclopaedias, as well as online archives and databases. The basic idea behind this software was to intertwine online and offline content: results that couldn't be verified would be combined with solid, reliable information. Only in this way, Marco insisted, was it possible to plumb the infinite array of possibilities and come up with new hypotheses. The point, then, was to formulate hypotheses, not to go in search of prepackaged answers. But there was an area — certainly the most interesting field to investigate, and the one that yielded the most useful information — that didn't exactly comply with the letter of the law. Marco had managed to worm his way into the databanks of the main national telecommunications companies, and he had created an algorithm that sifted through all the text messages exchanged by people and looked for matches for the search terms. Privacy be damned, he said.

The central processor was starting to crunch the numbers.

After less than ten minutes, the purple progress bar that dominated the middle of the screen reached one hundred per cent, and the first results started to appear. The screen started filling up with links, bibliographic lists, and authors' names. Marco knew that it would take more time to go through and analyse that information. He'd also have to add some further input to eliminate the less useful hits.

He picked up his smartphone and texted his friend:

I've found some information
.
I'm going to need to think it over. Go take a walk, get something to eat. We can talk later.

Alex read the message and understood that he had no alternatives. Now that the tension had subsided somewhat, he realised that he was pretty hungry. At first, what had happened had killed his appetite entirely. But it was early afternoon by now, and his friend's advice was starting to seem reasonable. He walked down the Esplanade in the opposite direction from the way he'd come in the taxi.

He walked past a couple of bars. Then he noticed the sign outside a restaurant. It was called Steak Mex! and it looked like the kind of place where you could get a plate of excellent food for ridiculously high prices. He went past it. A short distance further on, he saw a shop that sold pizza by the slice and decided that was the place for him.

He sat down at a table in the shade and put his backpack on the next seat over. He ordered a slice of pizza and some potato wedges. As he waited for his food, he propped his elbows on the table and put his head in his hands, slipping into darkness and taking refuge in that corner of solitude until the waiter brought him his meal.

On the other side of the world, Marco was printing out pages and pages of findings, highlighting paragraphs, processing further blocks of data on his computer, and jotting down notes on an A4 pad of graph paper. He felt he was on the verge of an explanation — an incredible explanation for what had happened to Alex, but one that fit. He'd already formed an idea; all he had to do now was to check out certain bits of information. It all might lack a credible foundation, it might seem surreal, not to mention paranormal, but his lead took him down a trail that pointed in only one direction. Unless his friend was suffering from some kind of mental problem, there was only one explanation for everything that was happening. An answer that sprang from a question Marco had first asked himself years and years ago, the day of the accident that had killed both his parents.

The screen of Alex's phone lit up suddenly, while he was drinking watery coffee from a large cardboard cup.

‘I have a lead. Let me start by saying that it's going to seem completely absurd to you. You can laugh at me if you want. But if we say for certain that you're not mentally disturbed, then there's only one solution to the puzzle. And that's the only solution worth focusing on from this point forward.'

‘I'm all ears.'

‘We're talking about something that the human race still doesn't fully understand.'

‘I've travelled halfway around the world to talk to a girl I've only ever contacted through my mind … I'm ready for anything.'

‘Then tell me this: when did these attacks first start?'

‘Four years ago. You know that.'

‘Right. You started to hear voices, see things. It was all very muddled; the communication with the other side was complicated and often incomprehensible. Correct?'

‘Yes.'

‘Over time, both you and Jenny have refined this technique to communicate, exchange information, learn something more about each other.'

‘Why are you telling me something I already know?'

‘Listen to me! In the past few months things have evolved. You've managed to communicate without feeling pain or fainting, or experiencing any interference from voices or images that have nothing to do with your lives. In other words, short but actual conversations, getting clearer and clearer with time.'

Alex thought back to the first time he'd managed not to faint, when he'd heard Jenny's voice at the university library and it had felt as if he were floating in limbo, while his body sat rigid in a wooden chair. ‘What's your point?'

‘Jenny confirmed that she exists by making a date to meet you somewhere you'd never heard of. And from what you've told me, she also told you things you couldn't possibly have known …'

‘The name of an Australian mayor.'

‘Exactly. Ergo, Jenny exists, beyond the shadow of a doubt. And she lives where she says she does.'

‘But she wasn't on that pier! She said she was, but there was no one there at all!'

‘Alex … Jenny was on that pier.'

A boy on a skateboard went racing past the pizza place, leaping over the kerb at top speed. Alex picked up his backpack and went over to the counter, pulled out the debit card, and handed it to the attendant without so much as a glance at the price displayed on the cash register.

‘Are you still there?' asked Marco.

With a nod, Alex thanked the attendant and left the shop. He went over to the low wall and looked out over the golden sun-kissed surf.

‘Marco … what the hell are you saying?'

‘Exactly what you heard me say. That from now on we have to see things differently, my friend.'

‘Forgive my ignorance but, as far as I know, if a person is on a pier looking at a lamppost and I'm on the same pier looking at the same damn lamppost, I ought to see the person, too!'

Marco smiled as he riffled through the pages of notes on his desk. The papers were piling up, and the Mac's keyboard was buried under a stack of sheets. He'd tidy up later.

‘Okay. Let me give you one small example to show you what I'm talking about.'

‘Go for it.'

‘Ten years ago, I don't get paralysed from the waist down in that accident. The car slides into the ravine but it crashes into a tree, only damaging the engine block: my parents survive, and now your friend is completely healthy.'

‘What are you going on about?'

‘It's a hypothetical scenario. Can you picture it?'

‘Well, sure … I can picture it. And I so wish it was true. Unfortunately, it's nothing but a fantasy.'

‘Do you agree that there are certain events, in all our lives, that change the course of our existence forever?'

‘Of course.'

‘Some are more serious than others — take for instance the car crash I was in — while others might seem totally trivial, but are anything but. Nothing is insignificant. The concept of just how serious something might be is completely relative. Everything changed for me that day because I lost my family and the use of half my body. For the president of the United States, if there's a scandal that threatens his re-election, then that's serious. For each of us, there are hundreds of different critical moments.'

Alex listened carefully to his friend's words. He was reminded of the ‘theory of lines' that he'd come up with while observing the people at Charles de Gaulle Airport. Every person was a path. According to what his friend had to say, Marco's path had deviated sharply ten years ago, because of that car crash. Everything that could have happened later in his life had been hijacked onto an entirely different route on account of that tragedy.

‘Now try to think,' Marco went on, ‘that in a hypothetical reality I wasn't left paralysed in that accident, that my parents weren't killed in a heap of twisted metal. Where would I be now?'

‘I don't know. You'd be at home with your family, you'd be able to walk … Why are you asking me these questions?'

‘What if this scenario actually existed?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Somewhere, I'm with my family, I can walk and I can run, and you've probably never met me.'

‘Somewhere where?'

Marco took a deep breath before launching into the central theme of his research. ‘In an alternative space-time continuum.'

Alex sat in silence for a few seconds. On the horizon a ship was gliding away, vanishing little by little, almost as if it were being swallowed up by the ocean. Alex watched it until the last black speck disappeared into the distance.

‘Marco, what does all this have to do with anything? What the hell is an alternative space-time continuum?'

‘A parallel reality. A world exactly like the one we live in now, with an infinity of things in common with this one, but where we might have followed … different paths.'

Alex looked up, gazed at the sky, and paused for a moment at the shape of a cloud. It looked like the profile of a wise old man, with a long beard and a cigar in his mouth.