World Walker 2: The Unmaking Engine (15 page)

He paused and registered the confused look on Mee’s face.

“Um, at first, the Manna worked automatically. I—Seb—er,
we
had very little control. We could direct it and it would work for us. That’s the level Manna use has worked for humanity for centuries. But the Roswell Manna isn’t a small part
of Seb. It’s so intimately weaved into his DNA, it almost
is
Seb.”

Mee shifted uncomfortably on the bench.

The Seb sitting next to her took her hand. “I’m still me,” he said.
 

“I know.”

Seb2 paced up and down as he spoke.

“I—Seb—have integrated with the technology. But that means some of what I can do is automated. It’s considered so basic that I don’t have to consciously control it.”

“I’m lost,” said Seb. Mee squeezed his hand in agreement. Seb smiled at her. “I should warn you, he’s probably going for an analogy or a metaphor right now.”

“You got it,” said Seb2. “Ok, try this for size. When we are children, we learn to walk and talk, but once we’ve got it, the process becomes automatic. You don’t have to think about putting one foot in front of the other, transferring weight while staying balanced, keeping momentum going in the direction of travel, constantly adjusting to compensate for uneven terrain. You just do it.”

“Right,” said Mee.

“Ok, now imagine you never learned to walk at all. You didn’t even know it was possible. In fact, no one in the world could walk, we all just dragged ourselves around on our stomachs. Then one day, you wake up, pull yourself outside, decide you’re going to drag yourself along to the store and suddenly, you’re walking. It’s impossible, it’s some kind of miracle. Everything looks different from your new point of view. You make it to the store in five minutes, when it used to take you hours. And you can walk whenever you like now, you don’t have to think about it. You just do it.”

“Ok, with you so far,” said Seb.

“Good. But here’s the thing. For you now, walking—or Walking—is the most natural thing in the world. It’s almost as natural as breathing. You just do it, right?”

“Yes,” said Seb.
 

“But
how
are you doing it?” said Seb2.
 

“I don’t know,” said Seb. “It’s like you said, I’m not
consciously
making it happen.”

“Exactly,” said Seb2. “And that’s the situation we’re in right now. If I go back to my metaphor—the crawler who is suddenly walking could only gain a full appreciation of what’s going on by going back to how he was before and trying to work out the stages that might lead to being able to walk. Even then, he might never get it right. He could spend years trying. It might be dangerous—he could fall.”

“Why would he even bother?” said Mee. “He can walk now.”

“Yes,” said Seb2. “And that’s what happened tonight. That’s what I need you to understand so I can explain what happened. It was an automatic process, as automatic as walking—physical, human walking—is to all of us. It happened without any conscious decision on our part, because it was natural, expected, inevitable.”

“Now you’re starting to lose me again,” said Seb. “Answer this: did we save Felicia and her children tonight?”

“Yes, we did,” said Seb2.

Mee let go of Seb’s hand.
 

“But they died,” she said. “I saw it on TV.”

“Yes,” said Seb2. “They died.”
 

“What?” Mee and Seb both spoke at the same time.

“You’re both right,” said Seb2. “Think about
how
you Walk. The process. What are the stages involved?”

Seb thought for a moment.

“I think of the place I want to go,” he said, “and various options appear.”

“Hold on,” said Seb2. “You
think
of where you want to go. Now, it just so happens you knew last night’s neighborhood pretty well. You’re a New Yorker, you could picture somewhere close by. But you didn’t know the building itself, right?”

“Right,” admitted Seb. “The nearest place I could think of was Jonny’s CD Emporium. About a block away.”

“And yet when you decided to Walk, the options available were all of the apartment itself, right? Because every piece of information available about the local geography was available to us. Unconsciously, I accessed that information so fast it seemed instantaneous.”

“Ok, makes sense,” said Seb.

“Hold your horses, you two,” said Mee. “What options? What do you mean?”

Seb turned toward her on the bench.

“When I decide to Walk, I choose where to Walk to. I try to find somewhere safe and inconspicuous. I can’t get hurt, but if I appear from nowhere in front of someone’s car, they could hurt themselves or someone else.”

“Ok, makes sense,” said Mee. “So, how do you choose? I mean, what do these ‘options’ look like, exactly?”

“I’ll show you,” said Seb2. He pointed up toward a few wispy clouds drifting over the skyscrapers of central London. A picture formed. It was Darknells, a club in Los Angeles where Mee, Seb and the rest of Clockwatchers—her old band—used to hang out sometimes after shows.
 

“Wow,” said Mee. “I can’t believe it.”

“I know, said Seb2. “Impressive, isn’t it?”

“No,” said Mee, “I mean I can’t believe they still haven’t changed that carpet since Dan threw up on it.”

“Oh,” said Seb2. He looked back at the sky. More pictures appeared. Each one showed the identical scene. They were more like high definition webcam feeds than pictures, as people were moving around in them—dancing, drinking, talking, laughing, shouting. As Mee looked closer, she could see they weren’t actually identical at all. There were tiny differences. In ten of the images now floating above them, there were three bar staff struggling to serve the crowd. In the eleventh and twelfth, a fourth staff member had joined them. The crowd itself showed subtle differences—the color of a shirt here, the lack of a jacket somewhere else. A poster advertising an acoustic night was missing in two of the images.

As she looked for the differences, more images appeared. Now the differences were easy to spot. The first showed the same club, but empty, closed. Yellow and black police tape sealed the door. Another image showed an apartment with people sleeping in it. Another was a storage area with barrels of beer and crates of drinks. The dimensions were the same as Darknells.

Mee squinted upward.
 

“Are these all…?”

“…The same place?” said Seb2. “Yes.”

“But how? Are you showing me the future? The past? What?”

“All of these images are real-time,” said Seb2.

As more images appeared and flickered across the sky, Mee frowned in confusion. There were many tiny variations on the apartment, the same for the storage room. Some of the images appearing now were blank, completely featureless.

“What does that mean?” said Mee.

The images stopped appearing. Seb2 pointed up at one showing the storage room.

“Darknells was never built there,” he said. The bar above might be the same, might be different, but they never opened a club downstairs.” He pointed at the apartment. Mee could see a couple asleep in bed. It felt disturbingly voyeuristic.
 

“They might be the owners of the building above,” he said, “or—just as likely—they’re renting the place, there’s no bar above, it’s an apartment building.” He pointed at one of the blank images.
 

“There’s no building at all above that space, otherwise we’d be looking at the foundations right now. New York might not even exist there.”

“New York might not what?” said Mee. A joint appeared in between her fingers. It was already burning and smelled intoxicating.

“I know you too well,” said Seb2, smiling.

“Humph,” said Mee, taking a drag nonetheless. She inhaled the sweet smoke before blowing a cloud upward toward the disconcerting pictures. She looked at the spliff. “This isn’t real, of course.” She felt the familiar rush. “Bloody feels like it is.”

“Tiny changes in your brain chemistry,” said Seb2. “Safer than the real thing, as I can be very precise, tailor it to your particular synaptic connections, without any danger of side-effects.”

“Well,” said Mee, taking another long drag at her imaginary spliff, “it’s good shit, whatever it is. Now, go on.”

“New York exists in hundreds of thousands of almost identical incarnations,” said Seb2. As he spoke, about twenty images above him went back to showing Darknells, the clubbers inside dancing and drinking.
 

“Incarnations?” said Mee. “What the bollocking hell are you on about?”

“The multiverse,” said Seb2, trying, and failing, not to look amused at Mee’s language.

“Oh, give me strength,” said Mee. “Explain, but remember I’m just a simple female who can’t grasp advanced scientific concepts.”

“Yeah, yeah, very funny,” said Seb beside her. Mee had dropped out of university while studying physics. She was far better informed on the subject than Seb.

“All right,” she conceded, “I know about the multiverse. A hypothetical concept positing the existence of parallel universes, possibly infinite, possibly finite. If there is such a thing, and we’re merely living in one universe within the multiverse, then…oh.” She looked up at the images, thought about the way Seb Walked. “Oh,” she said again. “It’s true, then.”

“Yes,” said Seb2. “Can’t tell you whether it’s finite or infinite, though. I can’t see an end to the alternatives, but that doesn’t prove it either way. What were you going to say?”

“Mm?” said Mee, inhaling more marijuana. She realized her mind was absolutely sharp again—none of the usual dulling of her senses was occurring any more. “Oh, you bastard.”

“I need you focused for a minute,” said Seb2. “I’ll make the next one a doozy, ok?”

Mee shrugged and flicked the spliff away. It turned into a butterfly and flew off across the pond.
 

“Oh, very clever,” she said.
 

“You said if the multiverse hypothesis were true, if we really were living in one universe within it, then—what? What were you going to say?”

Mee got up from the bench. Despite the warmth of the sun, she crossed her arms and rubbed them as if she was cold.
 

“I was going to say, it takes a lot of the fun out of science. Some people would say it takes all meaning out of it.”

“Why?” said Seb, standing behind her and putting his arms around her.

“Because we can only investigate, test, create hypotheses about the universe we inhabit. Any conclusions about the fundamental basis of reality are unlikely to hold true for other universes. Although…”

“Although?” said Seb2.

“Although, when the multiverse was just a theory, the theory only needed to be internally consistent. There was no way of testing it. But you are the proof, you can show it to be true. This changes everything. You need to get in touch with the scientific community, this needs to be investigated properly.” She suddenly stopped short and walked away from Seb. When she turned to face him and Seb2, there were tears in her eyes.

“Let’s just skip the theorizing for a minute,” she said. “A woman and her family died tonight. Died horribly in a fire. And you say you saved them. Please, please, tell me what happened.”

“I’m sorry,” said Seb2, “I was trying to. Now that you understand a little of what is going on—probably more than we do, to be fair—you must realize what happened.”

Mee stared at him for a few seconds, then moved back to the bench and sat heavily, as if all her strength had just been sucked out of her.

“Oh, God,” she said, “you saved them in another universe.”

“What?” said Seb.

“Yes,” said Seb2.

It was Seb’s turn to get up and pace.

“Another universe?” he said. “You mean, Mee’s right, Felicia and her family died? They all died in that fire? I failed them?”

Seb2 looked calmly at him.

“You didn’t fail,” he said. “I’ve had more opportunities to get used to this than you. I’ve gradually been learning what happens when we Walk. And I’ve begun to understand the implications. The Felicia in our universe? She was dead before we got there.”

“What?” said Seb. He was pale. “What do you mean?”

“In the first few hundred apartments we saw before you Walked, the roof was about to cave in and crush them. It happened as we Walked. You remember the apartment we Walked to?”

“Yes,” said Seb. She was alive—they all were. The kids were playing. She was cooking.”

“There was no fire in that universe,” said Seb2. “Not tonight, anyway. But it’s the same deathtrap of a building, so it’ll likely burn down another time. And we won’t know about it.”

Mee stood, took Seb’s hand and led him back to the bench. They both sat down.
 

“From the first apartment, we Walked into the burning apartment, but it wasn’t in our universe. It was the closest one where the roof hadn’t collapsed. It was the universe where we had a chance of saving their lives. Which is what we did.”

Seb sat silently for a long time. When he spoke again, his voice cracked slightly. He felt utterly exhausted.

“And Cubby?” he said.

“Who?” said Mee.

“The landlord,” said Seb. “We stopped him in that other universe, but not ours?”

“No,” said Seb2. “That was our Cubby. In our universe. He’s a changed man. His apartments are about to get a makeover.”

“But in all the other universes…?” said Seb.

“We can’t be everywhere,” said Seb2. “But we’ve intervened in similar situations 489 times in the last year. And this is the first time we’ve had to move into a neighboring universe. It’s gonna happen, but it’s gonna happen
rarely
.” He glanced upward. All the images faded away. “Something I need to tell you.”

“What?” said Seb.

“There’s only one of you in all of the universes we’ve touched when Walking,” said Seb2. “You—me—Seb Varden—you exist in some, you’re dead in some, you were never born in others. But this universe is the only one where you became a World Walker.”

Seb sat completely still.

“So I can’t be everywhere, I can’t help everyone. And when I choose to save someone, I’m effectively allowing the same person to die in every other universe. And there’s only me?”