Archive for the ‘Authors’ Category
Grayer
Thursday, September 23rd, 2010
There are two stairwells at either end of the hallway outside your new apartment. You take the one in front for the first week. The weekend comes, and you want to explore the back yard, so you take the steps in back.
Two flights. Four. Six, and you should be on the ground floor, but there’s no exit, just more stairs leading down. Did you miscount? Or is there a basement exit? But no, only more flights of stairs weaving back, then forth, lit by the same weak fluorescent tubes at each landing.
Down you go, envisioning some egress into a rumrunner’s cave, maintenance tunnels, or a disused subway station. Just as it is getting – you think – ridiculous, you reach the bottom. There are no more stairs leading down, there’s a door.
It leads to the street, as if you’d walked out the front door. Not thinking, you let the door close behind you. There’s a finality to its click.
It’s gray. Like the day is overcast, or there’s more smog in the air. But the sun is up there, only weaker. When you open the door again, there’s the front lobby, not the stairwell you left.
Days go by, and it never gets brighter. Everything is subdued, colors washed out, animals sluggish, people less animated. As the days go by you feel it too, this creeping lethargy.
You’ve been living in what looks like your old apartment; there is no other ‘you’ in this world, if it even is a different world. You avoid the back stair.
Until you don’t.
The day comes when you feel that a change, any change, is better than the eternal gray surrounding you. You plod down the hall, open the door, and gaze down the stairs. They seem to go on forever, and it sure looks dark down there.
You take one step, then another, wishing this were the kind of world where stairs could lead upwards.
The Tree of What Could Be
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2010
He read the directions. Five times. The machine had to run, a persistent low whine, for ten days to calibrate itself to his reality, to his “multiversal node-ality.”
After ten days, the button on the front glowed green like page 12 said it would. He pushed it, as described, gently, firmly. The whine became a hum.
In the early hours of day 72, it was lack of hum as much as the machine’s shrill chime that woke him. He dragged a kitchen chair over, sat there in his bathrobe and slippers, the machine’s chilly visor on his eyes, its navigation gloves too tight on his hands.
The interface was anything but intuitive; after an hour, he asked the house for coffee, stronger and more of it than usual. That helped.
The display branched and rebranched, a vast tree, a neuron’s dendrites, a river delta, dividing ever finer. He figured out the twist of hands that allowed him to sync with a particular branch. To drop into the consciousness of his parallel self in that alternate reality.
In the first, he noticed his bathrobe plaid was redder. In the second, his mug brimmed with herbal tea. He went further, twisted gloves, and spent ten minutes searching before he realized that the movies on the arthouse calendar on the fridge were in a different order. But the titles, stars, synopses, were the same, and the same scattering of magnets held it in place.
He’d hoped for something more dramatic–a world ruled by Nazis, or communists, or dinosaurs. A home built of mudbrick, glass, or pure light. A body that was taller, in better shape or half robot. But no matter how far out across the tree of alternatives, all he saw was too-close versions of his too-familiar kitchen.
He began to twiddle the machine in ways the manual discouraged, in ways it warned against, and finally in ways dared not mention. He was sure his other selves were doing the same, all looking for somewhere other.
He twisted in to see, just as another reality turned to nothing but light. An explosion–he saw it in one universe after another, and was too busy watching to do fiddle any further with his own machine.
When his was the only branch left, the machine made a sound like a lightbulb burning out.
He stood and rubbed his eyes, feeling very, very alone.