Interlude 2

Somehow, he hadn’t come to hate the tourists yet.

Normally, people working at the Hershfeld Memorial Museum and Visitors Center hated every single guest within their first week. Many didn’t even take that long. The record, according to local folklore among the staff, belong to Brandon Underhill, who had developed a profound sense of disgust at the very notion of travel within three hours. The circumstances grew in the telling, but consistently involved someone vomiting over a railing and all over the scale model of Bermuda.

But it had been two years for Aaron, and he still didn’t hate the tourists. He even, occasionally, found himself appreciating them, in a distanced sort of way. Sure, most of them just wanted some air conditioning and a place to dazedly walk through before they hit the gift shop, but a few seemed actually interested, at least enough to look up and maybe even read a caption or two. Especially some of the kids — among the legions of TikTok brats, there would be a few quiet kids who took their time in each room. Aaron almost liked those kids.

Of course, it was easier for him because he didn’t actually have to interact with the sunburned masses as part of his actual job. He couldn’t call himself a scholar without imagining his father rolling in his retirement home, but he was as close as a place like this would find. So he didn’t have to interact with guests much, although he was sometimes called to public areas while they were in use.

That’s why he was listening to the looping movie explaining the Induction Array again as he adjusted a display of items from the Irma Mae, returning a few pieces that he had just finished regular conservation work on. Putting them back on the shelves was hardly a high-level responsibility, and he could probably have delegated it, but he didn’t want to risk some hamfisted volunteer snapping something in half. And, anyway, he’d heard this video enough that he could recite it.

“-- returned, even though they had no way of seeing the effect they’d passed through. When they did, they shared the things they’d seen with Professor Hershfeld himself. Their observations confirmed what his calculations had anticipated: the Resonance Induction process had the ability to open passages into another world.”

Aaron always admired the way the narrator said “another world.” It was clearly eager and excited, but not so much so as to give the impression that the narrator or the museum didn’t understand what was going on. It seemed like a delicate balance, but the disembodied recording hit it every time. That was probably why they’d gone with Jennifer Lawrence to do the narration in the first place. The script had been written by Marian Simmons, the museum’s Vice President of Guest Experiences and a local who had actually been there for much of the development of the Triangle’s ecosystem, and she’d apparently been considered to narrate it herself. But Aaron knew she’d never have been able to avoid making it all sound like a big mystery, and that wasn’t what anyone wanted.

“ — very same principles are at the heart of the Array that has come to define the Bermuda skyline. While the greater size of the Array allows for longer windows, the principles are the same from the Irma Mae’s initial voyage. A window is opened to a new dimension, or ‘quantum enclosure’ that has never been accessed before and will never be accessed again when the window closes. These Seas, which were totally isolated from each other and from our world, can now be briefly visited on one occasion.”

Aaron always rolled his eyes at that point. The narration was so confident in the assertion that the Seas never connected and were never revisited, and most of the visitors took it as gospel. Or, well, most of the visitors were staring at their phones or trying to clean ice cream off of their childrens’ hands, but the ones who were listening just nodded along. But those sentences were eliding over one of the most fundamental questions of the moment. The mainline position, to be sure, was that there were no confirmed incidents of returning to a Sea and the amount of possible dimensions made the odds of a return infinitesimal. But there was a community online that pushed back, asking: How do we know there haven’t been returns? It’s not like there’s some detailed record that gets compared after every voyage. Would people really be able to tell if they saw the same rocky island on the horizon that some other voyage visited three years earlier? And why were seemingly identical species observed on multiple seas?

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

But there was no space for that dialogue in the official channels. For some reason, it was extremely important to the powers that be that every Sea be a unique and irretrievable instance. There was probably some like legal liability thing in play there, but Aaron didn’t even want to start trying to think about that type of issue. All he knew was that management had made it clear that all exhibits should reflect the scientific consensus of unique instantiation.

He carefully positioned the next piece of the display, the pen and pad that Maria Estevez had used to document her first observations on the Irma Mae. He’d read the notes, of course. Not that the content was new; those notes had been scanned and made available to scholars just after the Irma Mae’s voyage became worldwide news. But it had been a particular pleasure to review the original pages, to look at the strong, decisive penmanship and imagine the woman who’d kept her hands steady even as she left the only world she’d ever known behind. He wondered if she ever imagined that the notepad itself would be on display, what any of the Mae’s crew would think of this museum, of the way he presented the story.

The movie was wrapping up. “But what those men and women have found has expanded our very conception of the possibilities of nature, the ecosystem, and life itself. As you’ll see in the next room, the Museum has been blessed with specimens reflecting the tremendous biodiversity explorers have found.”

This was true. Aaron had worked hard to make sure the taxidermied specimens in the next room were not only perfectly preserved but were displayed in a way that would capture their dynamism and majesty. And, as the credits rolled and the tourists moved on, Aaron heard, just on cue, a few gasps at the six-headed lizard he’d mounted just through the door. It was actually more accurate to say it was six-mouthed: the “heads” barely had brain cells, and the neural activity actually took place at the front of the torso, nearer to the tiny eyes. But the effect was still a good one.

Aaron took his time perfecting this display, making sure that every item was oriented correctly in a way that was both secure and visible. By the time he closed the cabinet, the video had already restarted and was working its way through the story of Hershfeld’s first experiments. He quietly closed the door behind him as Jennifer Lawrence was saying, “The decision to walk away from his position was a fateful one, because it set the stage for the first observation that —”

It was already 3, and Aaron had hours of cataloging to finish before he left. Not that anyone would notice if he put it off, but that led to chaos. As he sat as his desk in the archiving room, Aaron began to sort through the latest donations. An interesting looking fossil that someone had apparently found at the edge of a massive crevice. A bag of blue flower petals that magnetically repulsed each other when exposed to sunlight. A skeleton of a mammal the size of a mouse with two tails, one prehensile and one with a venomous stinger.

Most of these would never be displayed, just quietly cataloged for the unlikely possibility that some scientist would want to look at them. A few would be saved for special temporary exhibits or displays; the mouse-thing was visually attractive enough to be shown as an example of asymmetrical biology, which was vastly more common in the Seas than on good old Earth.

Aaron worked silently, and without incident. But his stomach grew uneasy, which had been happening more and more. That was always where he felt it when he was developing an instinct, and this was a discomfiting one.

He wasn’t a scientist or a real scholar, but he did know about museums. And, in that training, he had developed a sense of how things should be grouped, how they related to each other. It wasn’t anything he could ever submit as proof of anything, but he felt it. And, the more he cataloged, the more he felt it: these weren’t just isolated artifacts from isolated quantum bubbles.

They were parts of a whole.