---Chapter 1
Some tales tell what might have been, or what could be. The outlines of the future or past are seen through a thin gauze of action and adventure, characters and wit. Many worlds, shown in shades of light or dark as it may be. Other stories tell of how the bridges between those worlds came to exist. This is one of those tales.
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Square pillars of buildings shone gunmetal gray and crystal silver on each side of Main street. One structure had a dark blue door of synthetic wood set in its side, decorated with round studs. Vehicles glided by like phantoms, their shades tending towards burgundy and cobalt. A thin figure stood in front of the door, arms akimbo.
His hair was watery pale, while his gaze was an intense gray.
The day before had been one of the strangest days Lenny Staff had experienced while working for Dr. Devi. And now this, a locked door with no note on the outside and no lights showing from within. The young man did not know what to make of it, or what he should do next.
The doctor was an expert in electronics and electro-mechanical gadgets, though he refused to work with computers or other AI machines. But though he was tall and well-built, he was not as strong as Lenny. So while Devi calculated currant flows and Stato-tronic uplift for his newest project, Lenny had shifted crates of new material from the sidewalk outside into the storage bay of the doctor’s work space. At first everything had gone normally, Lenny’s mind wandering down familiar shadowed paths as he worked. But on the forth trip with the Stato-tronic hand truck, he had noticed something odd about the support beam just inside the door.
It was solid metal, polished to a white sheen on the inside like most of the interior walls of the scientist’s place. Half-way up it, at about eye level, there was a dark purple stain on it. Or what appeared at first to be a stain. Lenny had stopped to look at it, puzzled at how it had come to be there. He was fairly sure that it had not been in that place when he had gone by it that morning, nor just a few minutes before with his last load of crates. It was down the hall at least twenty feet from the laboratory where the doctor was working, so nothing could have sprayed to that distance without staining the rest of the hall.
As he stood watching, the stain seemed to pulse, lengthening itself on the white post. With a start, Lenny let go of the hand truck and stepped over to the pillar, reaching out a finger towards the mark. It was a deep, rich purple color with a dark center, so dark indeed that it almost appeared to be a shadow. As he held his hand toward it, Lenny noticed waves of cold coming off of the stain, almost like the cold which came out of an open freezer door. More puzzled than ever, he snatched his fingers back just before contact and called, “Doctor Devi! Doctor! Come here, I need to show you something.”
Devi, wrapped in a white lab coat, came striding out of his workroom towards the young man. “What is it now?”
He had seemed irratable, wrapped up in his calculations. But as soon as Lenny showed him the stain, a new expression crossed his face. It was, the young man realized, very close to terror.
“Did you touch it?” The doctor asked harshly, after having peered at the purple mark for a moment.
“No.” Lenny shook his head, glad that the cold sensation had dissuaded him. Strange things had been happening in his city lately. Half-seen creatures knocking over garbage cans in the dark, leaving marks on the metal like fangs bigger than any dog’s. People finding cracks in stone that had stood firm for many years with no signs of impact or wear. One of his own best friends disappearing under mysterious circumstances. Lenny had become far too wary of anything strange to go sticking his fingers into it when it felt freezing cold on a warm summer morning.
“Good.” Devi had drawn himself up, face becoming stern and cold. He had dark gray hair and a long, solemn face which usually showed only intent interest in what he was doing, or a sort of wistful gentleness that Lenny did not understand. Now it was dark with foreboding.
“Put those crates away,” the doctor had ordered, “then go home. I won’t need you for the rest of the day.”
“But--” Lenny started to protest, when the doctor had cut him off abruptly.
“No! Do as I say. Who is the master here? I do not need you. Take a day off.”
Dr. Devi had strode up the hall into the laboratory, slamming after him a door that Lenny had never seen closed before. Puzzled, as the doctor had always treated him almost as an equal despite how much Lenny owed him, the young man shoved the floating hand truck into the storage bay nearby.
After the crates were stowed, he walked slowly down the hall towards the door. His feet echoed emptily on the white tiles. The lights did not seem to cast as much brilliance as they used to. As he passed, Lenny saw that the purple mark had spread even further. With a small shiver, he had walked passed it and shut the door behind him.
Now he stood looking at that same door, gray eyes searching the faux wood surface for any sign of a note or explanation. It was not the weekend. No holidays would call Dr. Devi away on this day. And never before had the door been locked to Lenny when he came to work in the morning. Even when he came very early, or late.
Finding no evidence of a reason for being locked out, Lenny turned away. He had already banged on the door and called for the doctor in hopes of being heard from within, but to no avail. Pacing along the smooth, dark concrete of the sidewalk, he stopped in front of his car. It was painted a bright red in defiance of modern fashion, with yellow flames along the side which his friend Markham Brood had insisted on putting there. Mark was into cars, not just as a hobby but as a passion. There was nothing he could not do with one.
Slipping into the brown leather smoothness of the driver’s seat, Lenny put his hands on the steering wheel and leaned forward against them for a moment. What should he do? The doctor obviously did not want him that morning, but Lenny didn’t have a reason why. It all seemed caught up with the strange purple stain which had been found on the laboratory door frame, yet he could not figure out a reason.
Sitting up with a shake of his head, he reached out to twist a knob on his dash. A light came on and a faint, soft female voice said, ‘communications, on.’
“Plug me in to Dr. Devi’s main com-stay,” he ordered the car’s AI firmly. Her name was Sasha, but he did not quite like to call his vehicles by their name. It was just a computer, if a sophisticated one, and he could not think of it as a human being. No matter how close to it he was in many ways.
Markham, on the other hand, was one of those people who would have given his cars birthday presents with their names on the tags, if his rather thin wallet could have sustained that impact.
With a soft whirl and a click, the light on the car dash turned pale blue. The voice told him that they were connected, but there was no answer.
“Leave a message.” Lenny waited a moment before dictating, “Doctor, I could not get in your door this morning when I came to work. No one answered my knock. If you want me, I’ll be at my apartment until tomorrow morning. That’s all. End.”
The AI locked the message into the doctor’s com-stay. With a flick of his hand, Lenny turned his car’s communication station off, before pressing his thumb onto the starter plate. To prevent theft, every car had a specific thumbprint locked into its memory when it was bought. If you sold a car to someone, or traded it, you had to reset the thumbprint by first pressing in your own, then accessing the computer to change it. Hence, ‘pressing the thumbs’ had come to be a saying for arriving at an agreement.
The car lifted up off of the ground. The Stato-drive buzzed softly behind Lenny’s head. Using static electricity created by the movement of the car, the Stato-drive directly powered the liftpads which made it hover and move forward. Since perpetual motion is impossible on an earthly plane, the car also burned a small amount of liquid fuel to propel itself. But because of the Stato-drive, this was only a tiny amount compared to what vehicles had taken in the past.
Lenny was a proficient driver. It was not long before his hands and eyes took over the job of getting him home, while his mind wandered. The image of the purple stain on the doorpost kept recurring to him, dark and vivid. The cold he had felt from it had seemed to sink into his fingertips, so that they were still cold when he thought of it today. So many strange things had been happening lately. Thinking back, he could vaguely remember hearing something else about a purple crack appearing on a building within the last few days. Somewhere important, like the mayoral mansion or city hall.
Trying to recall it more perfectly, Lenny told the computer, “AI, play last Wednesday’s news report back to me. Second sector, third and forth graph.”
“Here it is:” Sasha began in her never-changing voice, “graph three. Citizens of the great city of Belltoh were puzzled this morning to find a crack in their courthouse wall. Approximately three feet long and six point five inches across, the crack was not caused by any obvious cause. Stranger still, the crack was found to be scintillating purple. Darker in the center, lighter at the edges, this stain was at first attributed to pranksters. But the opinion was reversed when scientists began to study it and found that it was emitting strange waves of cold air and particles. The scientists, headed up by Dr. Freeson of Sync-sign, have not disclosed their full findings to the public. More details to follow as they occur.”
The machine began on the forth graph, but it had no more information on the subject. Lenny told it to stop the replay, while he thought over what he had just heard. There were purple stains appearing in other parts of the town, that much was evident. Unlike the one in Devi’s laboratory, the one on the courthouse had caused a crack to form in the masonry. Cracks were appearing all over in odd parts of Belltoh, Lenny had heard. From which he drew the logical conclusion that the other cracks might have something to do with the one that had been stained purple. In fact, they might all start turning that color and emitting unknown particles once enough time had elapsed.
But the big question was, what was causing these phenomena? And the question Lenny added privately to himself, though he would not have spoken it aloud, what did Dr. Devi have to do with them? Had one of his experiments gone wrong, creating this blight on the city? Or perhaps he simply knew of a government experiment which would cause them, some sort of queer radiation that they were trying out as a weapon.
His sentiments darkened by all that had happened, Lenny pulled into the multi-level garage near his apartment. It had walls of thin, tinted glass held together by pillars and beams of jet black metal. Through the windows could be seen the shapes of many vehicles parked inside. The whole thing sparkled in the morning sun, reflecting and refracting beams of light across the sidewalk.
Lenny’s car turned magenta as he drove up the ramp into the first story. From there he took the lift to the third level, where he had a pass to park his car in lot thirty-three. Here, one wall was tinted orange, another purple and the remaining two a deep maroon. The cars were all infected with these colors, shifting their natural tints to mix with or match the glass.
The dangling 'wipers’ on Lenny’s car brushed to a soft stop in his lot, like the bristles of a mop moving lightly across the floor. These helped create the static electricity on which it ran. They crumpled easily under it as it sat down on the smooth deck of the garage.
Stepping out, Lenny shut his door softly behind him. The cars Stato-drive automatically shut off, rendering the space almost silent. No one else was moving on this level at the time. The young man walked with clicking footsteps to the door in the side of the garage, which had a bridge connecting from it directly to the third level of his apartment building.
Renters of rooms were usually given passes for the garage levels closest to their own, so that coming or going was made easy.
Inside the bridge the carpeted halls of the apartments began, with their peach-colored walls and shiny, artistic decorations. When he was younger, these ornamental brackets in public buildings had given Lenny nightmares about metallic spiders chasing him down endless passageways, but now he hardly saw them.
The new thing was to hang clusters of fake fruit and vegetables on the walls of public spaces, but his apartment was too old-fashioned for that. As old, Lenny thought to himself with a smirk, as a man going on his twenty-first year. But fashions grow and die as quickly as grass blades in a field, here one year and gone the next.
There was a thumbprint lock on his apartment door, number fifty-eight, which opened it with a touch. Stepping inside, he let out a sigh and felt himself relax all the way through. No strange stains on the walls or weird creatures had invaded this space yet. It was still his sanctuary, his home, the place that he could be himself the most without fear.
The floor was covered in a thin black pad that was surprisingly cushy, while the walls were un-decorated cream. The one large window had the blinds drawn, cutting off the view of the city outside. In this comfortable darkness, little blue or green lights glowed. Soft humming sounds and the clicking of a real grandfather clock wisped through the air. With a light swipe of his finger on the wall, Lenny turned on the lights. Now he could see the desk which ran around two thirds of the wall space and was covered in neatly spaced electronic gear. His main computer, with a holographic screen that covered the narrow wall, sat in the center of the desk on one side. Near it were printing machines, analyzers and equalizers, and his capacious workbench area. Drawers of tools and components were slung under the desk. Furthest along it to the left was his Violetfish display; an electronic fish tank which had realistic holographic displays of water, varying ornaments and neon fish in blue and violet colors. They reacted like real fish to outward stimuli, fleeing from taps on the glass, or gathering curiously when something touched the 'water’ at the top of the tank. The even appeared to swim about in the moldering castle at the bottom of the enclosure and eat the plastic weeds which grew there.
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
The other side of the room, near the window, held Lenny’s bed and a door into the tiny kitchen. It, in turn, had a door leading into a closet of a bathroom. He did not have a job that could afford him larger, more luxurious living spaces, but he was content with what he had. Every spare bit of change went into his hobby for electronics. And every day he earned money to live on, he learned more from Dr. Devi.
“Every day but today,” he muttered to himself, moving over to slump in the comfortable office chair in front of his computer. Pushing the chair with a slight kick, he glided on the slick wheels over in front of his work space. There he picked up an object which lay on the edge of the bench and inspected it closely, before letting out a sigh. Yet another unexplained mystery in his life, this one which had affected him personally.
It was a rectangular box of silver metal which he held, much like a large remote control in appearance. There was a few buttons on the front, a silver tube coiling up one side, and a slider on the other. On the upper half of its face there was a gauge which displayed numbers from one to twenty, the first five being marked in green, while the middle ones were orange and the last, red. It was obviously a homemade contraption, because of how the pieces were fit together both inside and out. Lenny had taken it apart to see what was inside and noticed the simple quality of the solder joints and wire wrappings. But one of the things which puzzled him about it was that he did not know what some of the components inside were. One of them was a slim cylinder about as thick and long as his ring finger. This had some sort of faintly luminous filament inside, stretching across it like a fuse. The second was simply a blob of black, rubbery material on a chip of silvered glass, with a second, smaller chip set into it on the top. Despite his training in electronics and science, the young man could not figure out the use of these pieces, nor of the constructed whole.
Turning it over, he looked at the back. There were the letters S. L. scratched there as if with the tip of a knife, but nothing else to explain them or carry a message.
Setting the device carefully back on the desk, Lenny scooted over in front of his computer. It was connected to his main Com-stay so that all he had to do was start it to see if any messages had been left for him during his absence. Turning it on with a blink of his eyes, he checked the message-board on his home screen.
The first item was an advertisement for 'Tooth-Whitening Ultra-Paste!’ which he immediately erased with a swipe of his finger. But the second message on the list came from his mother, titled with 'Son, how are you?’.
Selecting it with another blink of his eyes, Lenny had the message replayed. His mother had sent it from the Live Screen, so that her face appeared phantom-like in front of him in the three-dimensional computer, speaking to him directly:
“Len, it has been so long since we have seen you!” She began, lipstick bright against her wrinkled skin, “Father and I would love to see you sometime this weekend. We know you are busy with your work, but even you must take some time off to have a bit of fun! Sissy is coming as well, and we will have Orange-Goo with chicken dinner, your favorite. There is even a new episode of Inspector Drenchcoat for the family to sit and watch. Please contact us soon! Love.”
With that, the face disappeared, leaving only the cold, refreshing blue of his computer screen. Lenny twirled his finger thoughtfully on the chair’s arm. It had been a while since he stopped in to see the family. As the youngest of three, he had been the last to leave home. But it had been a fairly permanent leave-taking, with only occasional visits to uphold the old ties.
Not that he disliked his family; he had simply moved outside of their sphere. There was so much they would not understand now...
“But I should see them,” he told himself, nodding his head at the 'send reply’ button on the message board. It tried to make a contact, and found that there was no answer. For the second time that day Lenny left a message, this one with a live view of his face as he promised to stop by and spend all of Sunday with the family.
“That will give me tomorrow to finish a few things up around here and find a present to bring them,” he added once the message was sent. Flicking the screen to a news feed, he began to search for any more information on the strange stains which had been appearing about the city.
He was interrupted by a strange noise by the window. A faint clunking and clicking, followed by the soft swish of the pane being raised. With a start, Lenny spun his chair around to face that side of the room. The curtains bulged, feet hit the floor and a figure came stumbling out into the middle of the room.
“Whoa, that was no easy climb!”
It was a young man wearing an overcoat of soft black felt. Underneath, his green T-shirt read 'Galaxy Gas’ in large, bubbly letters. His face wore a bright, toothy grin under a plumage of spiky yellow hair.
“What are you doing here?” Lenny arose from his chair, preparing to fight if the newcomer meant trouble.
“Well, I saw all of the antennas outside your window,” the stranger explained, obnoxiously scratching one of his ears as Lenny stared at him blankly. There was a cluster of small antenna outside of his window, for his radios and other electrical experiments. But they failed to explain why this young man had just jumped through the third-story window of his apartment building.
“So...I gathered that you know at least a little bit about working with electronics.” The intruder shrugged, pulling out a battered rectangular object from his pocket. “And so...maybe you could fix this!”
Lenny’s gaze focused on the box in the intruder’s hands, then gave a little start of surprise. It looked much like the one he had laying on his desk. A slight difference in button color and spacing, a different shade of paint on the metal; that was all. And the fact that it had a fifth button on its face, large and oval, with the word ‘Panic!’ written above it in drippy red paint.
“Where did you get that?” Lenny exclaimed, stepping forward and reaching out for the box.
But the stranger pulled it away from him. “Whoa, hold on a minute! Do you even know what this is?”
Lenny paused, meeting his gaze for a moment. He turned and stepped over to the desk, picking up the one that lay there.
“It’s one of these.”
The stranger’s face showed almost comical surprise. “Hey, I didn’t think that anyone else had invented a Di-jump like mine. Did you make that? Does it work?”
Lenny shook his head, handing it over. “No, I didn’t make it. I don’t even know what it is. A friend of mine, her name was Sara Lancaster, she made it...I think. I don’t really know. I found it in her house, laying on the floor, one day when I came to pick her up for lunch. She...had hinted about some strange and powerful technology that she was playing with, but had not told me what it was.”
The strange young man gave him a sympathetic look. “Tough. She must have made it in secret. It’s strangely like mine. Do you think she left it behind for you on purpose?”
Lenny blinked. The thought had not occurred to him before. With a shake of his head, he answered, “I don’t even know what it is, like I said. Sara had been, well, depressed for days before she disappeared. I thought that, maybe, she had used it to for suicide. Disintegration, you know. Her parents died and they were everything to her.”
“Double-tough.” The young man slapped Lenny on the back roughly, making him jump in surprise. “But not everything’s lost! This is just a Di-jump machine, not a suicide contraption. Though I get the feeling it might be a little more powerful than mine...she must have left it behind on accident. I did that the first time, too. Wheew, it took forever to get a new one and get back!”
While he had been talking, he had opened up the case and was looking at the components inside. Pointing at the black blob with the mirrors placed in it, he shook his head. “Yep, this is a little different than mine. See that? I don’t know what it is, but I suspicion that it might be a Dimension-wave amplifier for bending Sission beams in new directions. Golly, if only I knew how to make an amp, or even use this one! But there is no way of knowing how it is connected. I’m not even as good at this electronics stuff as my pal Grummage. He really built mine, but was too afraid to use it.”
All the time he was pointing and speaking, Lenny was watching him with his penetrating eyes. After a moment of silence, he said, “look, I don’t know what you’re talking about. Doctor Yohan Devi has taught me much of his expertise in electronics, but I don’t think he would know what you are saying, either. Perhaps you could slow down and tell me your name and what a Di-jump machine is, before I try to fix it.”
The newcomer slapped his forehead dramatically, almost dropping the two pieces of the gadget. He seemed to have a flare for the dramatic, whoever he was.
“Of course, where is my brain? I’m Jax.”
He tucked the pieces of the machine in the wide pockets of his coat and held out a hand to be shaken. Both hands had black gloves without fingers. When Lenny shook one he felt what seemed like wires under the first layer of cloth. For a minute it gave him pause, as cybernetics were highly illegal in Belltoh, But then he realized that the wires were in the glove, not the hand beneath it.
“Jax who?”
“Just Jax.” The young man gave him a sideways grin. “Son of Iax, you know, said just like 'yikes’ what a horror. 'Ax’ is the family moniker. Don’t ask my mother’s, I never really knew her.”
Lenny raised his eyebrows. “Alright, now that I have your family history, can you tell me what a Di-jump machine is?”
Jax moved over beside the desk, looking at all of the devices grouped on it. He put the pieces of Sara’s machine there, too, before flopping himself in the chair with a sigh of enjoyment. “This is a groovy place you’ve got.”
But when Lenny began to tap his foot threateningly on the floor, Jax hastened to go on, “right, Di-jump machines. Er, you’ve heard of a teleporter?”
Lenny gave a brief nod of his head. Teleportation devices had long been a dream of the human race and experimental versions had been created in his country. But they were so large and took so much energy that only one was kept in working order for scientific use. Due to the inherent problems with decomposing humans into particles, sending through the air and reassembling them, experiments in teleportation were forbidden to all but certain professors of the art.
“Well, this is a sort of hand-held teleportation unit.” Jax took out his Di-jump again to show him. “Except for that it does not simply take you to different places in one, single world. It can transport you across the borders to other dimensions. Di-jump is short for Dimensional Jumping Apparatus. It’s a title Grummage and I worked out together.”
Lenny just stood gazing at him with narrowed eyes. He did not fully believe what Jax was telling him. Other dimensions were another concept that had fascinated humans for hundreds of years, whether it was a 'land of the dead’ that could be accessed while still alive, or fairylands full of bewitching creatures. But he had never believed in them himself; the world he lived in was the real thing. There was Heaven beyond it, perhaps, and a worse place, but no living lands of elves and centaurs just waiting to be discovered.
“I can see you don’t think that I’m telling the truth.” Jax shook his head and sighed, his grin fading away, “I guess it must be hard to swallow, at first. Maybe if I explain how these worlds are connected you will start to understand. Watch.”
He took a small, electronic pad from one of his pockets. Flicking it on, he drew a diagram on the screen with his finger tip.
“See, here is a cluster of worlds, kinda’ like stars. Or an archipelago of islands. Each one is, in some sense, a reflection of the other. Parallel universes. Worlds that could have been the same, except for that they made a different decision at some point in their past and diverged. You’re on this one, here.” He pointed out one of the circles he had just made in a clump of about ten. “We both are, right now. All these worlds seem very separate, because of the 'dead space’ between them. Most of the time, this keeps worlds apart so that we can not come in contact with each other.”
He waved a hand over the blackness between the glowing lines, before dabbing a dot in the center of the ring of circles.
“Now this part I’m not exactly sure about, but I think there is some sort of 'power core’ in the center of these worlds which usually keeps them apart, orbiting in their places. But it connects them at the same time, because of this influence it exerts over them. Like electricity running through a grid to far away houses. But something has happened to it recently.”
He paused, looking up at Lenny with a solemn expression on his triangular face. “Some of the worlds are being drawn closer together by this power. And I think something has corrupted it, because every world it has touched has been infected by strange creatures, purple stains and odd occurrences. Hasn’t your world, yet?”
Lenny nodded slowly. The whole story seemed so far-fetched. And yet, it was beginning to make sense to him. Not only because it explained the weird purple stains and odd occurrences in his world. But because he felt, deep in himself, that Jax was telling the truth.
“Well, that’s the corrupted power, leaking into the parallel worlds and messing them up,” Jax explained, drawing curling tentacles all over his illustration, “not only that, but it’s done something to my Di-jump machine. At first, there were many worlds I could access. Galaxies of them, you might say. Some were a longer jump, some shorter. Now for some reason I can only reach a set of nine. My own, yours and seven others. Yours is the first I’ve tried since this change came about. But the dial tells me that there is only those seven others within range.”
Lenny came to kneel beside the chair Jax sat in, looking at the two halves of the Di-jump machine that Sara had left behind.
“So you’re telling me that Sara Lancaster was able to manufacture a Di-jump apparatus like yours because our worlds are in some way parallel to each other. And with this, she jumped to another world either inside or outside that ring of seven, accidentally leaving her machine behind?”
“You’ve got it,” Jax wiped the electronic slate clean, “and now that you’re in on the whole secret, I’ll tell you this: I’m going to find out what is corrupting this ring of worlds and put a stop to it. If I can. I just need to get some help and then find a way to jump to the central power station.”
He pushed his own Di-jump machine into Lenny’s hands. “And that’s why I need this fixed.”
Taking it carefully, Lenny stood up and stared at the five buttons and one gauge on top of it. Still shaking his head, though not in disbelief now, he began to pace up and down the room. Every once in a while he frowned blankly out of the window. Parallel universes. Worlds like mirrors in a circle, reflecting his own in strange colors. A corrupting central power that was reaching its purple tentacles into his own world like some sort of horrible blight...
“I wish that Dr. Devi was at home,” he said suddenly, “or I knew where he was. He would understand this whole thing a lot better than I can. Come to think of it, he always was dropping odd hints about ‘transdimensional electricity’ but I thought that he meant that in a more mundane sense.”
“Probably not,” Jax returned complacently.
“Alright,” Lenny muttered, turning to stride back over to his workbench. “Alright, I’ll help you. But I don’t know anything about this machine. You’ll have to do it with me.”
“I don’t know much about putting electronics together at all,” Jax told him, still grinning. “But I’ll try.”