“Wooo. That smell. That smell is progress. And probably a dash of farting.”
Marie Walker took a second deep breath, completely satisfied with the smell, farts and all.
The Silver Wheel was undergoing another round of renovation, this time at Marie Walker’s discretion. Installing computers, assorted devices whose working and purpose were beyond even Teresa’s comprehensive knowledge, and upgrading the Silver Wheel’s power output, because the wattage you need to operate a chandelier and a radio isn’t quite up to the task of powering an array of quantum supercomputers. It was a time-consuming process, but since the Silver Wheel existed in a dream-scape, they had all the time in the world. Almost literally.
During the process, Teresa stood behind the bar, silently watching as people came and went out the front door, as freely as if they were working on a location in their physical world. Ratna, who had nothing better to do, passed out drinks and flirted with the workers. Mr. Eight remained out of sight.
Teresa was not having a good day.
“Yo. Teresa. I’m talking to you.”
Teresa turned to Marie Walker, who was leaning against the door frame. Smelling things.
“...nothing you said indicated you wished to speak to me.”
“Right right but is it okay if we cut holes in the walls? Like, it won’t cause everything to get sucked out into space, right?”
“No,” she answered objectively, “but all you would see is darkness. Very similar to staring at the open door of the Silver Wheel from the void, you would not see the ‘outside’ of the building itself.”
“That’s fine. I knew all that already. I just wanted you to know we’re cutting holes in the walls.”
Teresa didn’t blink.
“...cuz… you know… this is my place now.”
“I am aware, Marie Walker.”
“Alrighty! As long as we’re on the same page. Oh, and, I’m gonna make a little… office space in the corner. Tiny little space. Nothing fancy. If you could be a dear and make sure Mr. Eight visits there real fast, that’d be swell. Super swell.”
Teresa watched her walk into the parlor. She continued to not blink.
The radio was playing “We Have All the Time in the World”, by John Barry.
~*~
Ehije was awake, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to be.
The events of last night sat heavy on his mind, leaving an imprint that would be sure to haunt him for the rest of his life. That feeling of self-loathing resentment when you look back on a moment and wish you’d done something else -- an intense regret when you think on all the different, better paths your life could have taken -- feelings that usually need decades to mature were stirring in him already, fully grown and seeping through his entire being. Becoming part of his identity.
Now, he would always be the one who gave up his chance to save the world.
Logically, he knew there was nothing he could do about it. He was aware of the situation he was in and the necessity of his roundabout surrender. But logic did not rule here. He had, after so many years, fallen victim to the dreaded “what if”. Not “what if he could have stomached all that knowledge”, he knew the answer to that. No, he couldn’t help but wonder what could have been if his guard was up sooner, and he had realized what Marie Walker was actually betting: if he had put the pieces together sooner, took what Oberman had told him seriously, and taken the necessary precautions…
...well, it was doubtful Marie Walker would have played, then.
But while his confidence was shaken, it was not destroyed. Perhaps better if it had been, because he still believed that if he had truly tried, maybe, just maybe, he could have found a way to get her to agree to play while lessening the impact of what she was offering on his mind.
If only, what if.
He sighed, blinking boredly at the ceiling of his holding cell.
He’d be going to prison soon enough, he supposed. And then he would die soon enough, he supposed some more, which meant this bother wouldn’t be his problem for much longer. He would be leaving the land of What If soon enough, and he would land… somewhere. Probably someplace like the Silver Wheel, if what Teresa told him was true, to work in weary labor until he was fit to stay in one of those bright places she seemed to come from. That didn’t sound too appealing, but he would make it work.
At least as far as this life was concerned, he had lost.
...but just because he lost didn’t mean he would let Marie Walker win.
He had anticipated, after Marie Walker’s earlier call, that he could lose. And he had taken steps to ensure that even if he failed, he would find a way to drag her down with him. And there was no better time to play his final hand than now.
It was a crapshoot. A risk. A gamble.
But that was what made it so perfect.
“Excuse me,” he gestured to a passing guard, one he knew to be more morally flexible than the others, flaunting a pack of cigarettes between the bars, “I really need to use the phone again. For a while.”
The cop furrowed his brow. Ehije had used idle conversation and careful listening to determine this guy wasn’t exactly the most upstanding individual, but he’d never tried bribing him before. Then again, he’d never needed to use the phone this much before.
“...it is nothing nasty. You can watch me the whole time. I just want to text some family and friends. I am going to prison soon, correct? All I want is to let them know I love them and that I am doing okay.”
The cop snatched the cigarettes out of his hand and walked away without a word.
That was fine. Always have a backup plan. And in this case, having his cigarettes stolen would only make his story sadder for the next cop he would solicit, the one he knew to be a bleeding heart. The man didn’t approve of the attempted bribe, but he was struck by how deeply Ehije cared, and agreed to let him use his phone as long as every message was checked first. Ehije agreed to the conditions gratefully.
He wrote out ten texts saying “Hello, I am healthy and well, and I love you all. But I don’t think we’ll ever see each other again. Always in my heart, Claudia”.
He explained that Claudia was his drag queen name. The cop believed him.
And he hit send.
~*~
To say Claudia had been having a rough few months would be an understatement.
Goodness, where to begin: kidnapped, hidden in an underground lab, losing all her limbs, transformed into a grotesque abomination that defied any human description who could perceive reality in a way that eternally twisted her old understanding of existence, lied to, violated, and now she was trapped in a dark, nearly empty facility with her long-time tormentor, who, in some small mercy, seemed to have gotten over his obsession with her and was now as scared of her as everyone else, which was the only time she could recall welcoming the howls of terror.
But maybe she’d be getting more good news soon.
The other day, Oberman -- ugh, even the name was gross -- mustered up the courage to approach her just close enough to throw a phone at her. On the other end was a gentleman who seemed to know an awful lot about her situation, and what’s more, seemed to know a lot about the person who was ultimately responsible for what she had become. Communicating over the phone was hard, on account of the fact that she had a hard time making this new body vibrate air at the correct frequency, but through considerable trial and error the two of them were able to come to an understanding.
The phone, which she had kept on her person ever since they hung up, vibrated. She opened it.
...well she’d never say she was “well”, but technically Ehije had held up his end of the deal. Her friends and family knew she was alive. A burden was lifted off her… chest? Heart? She didn’t even know if she had either of those things anymore. But she did feel better. It wasn’t often someone got the chance to say farewell after they’ve already died, but then it wasn’t often someone died the way she had.
She lurched forward. She moved with inexpert clumsiness, able to stagger forward despite how unwieldy her body had become. She had spent enough time with it, and with her new and unorthodox mind, to be comfortable with the process of moving. But she was a non-concrete entity trying to navigate an irritatingly static world. Of course there would be collisions. Mistakes. Occasional discharges, if she misjudged a distance and impacted some metal harder than intended. She was aware of them, but also aware that whatever notified her of each collision, it wasn’t pain, strictly speaking. The nervous system that human bodies used to communicate problems seemed so comically obsolete compared to what she had now.
There was only one other warm body in this place. Easy to find. Easy to smell. She knew he had spent all this time hiding, as if she couldn’t see him when atoms had so much space between them. She could alway see him. She could always reach him. She could always slip between those enormous gaps that make up solid objects. Including the enormous gaps in his own construction, if she wanted.
She didn’t want to, though.
He was in the kitchen, probably scavenging whatever was left in the fridge. An increasingly thinning resource. He was looking rather ragged, and was hosting more life than most humans would be comfortable with, on account of a lack of bathing. It was actually rather nice, now that she could appreciate the complexities of this system without the burden of dealing with the smell. Plus, it made him more tolerable when she remembered that she functionally only disliked about 1,300 grams of him. All the other parts were okay.
She appeared behind him just as he turned around.
She waited out his screaming and his sobbing as he tried to push through the fridge to escape, as it was the only direction she was not. Unfortunately, he lacked the capacity, so all she could do was wait until he got acclimatized to her appearance.
When he started hyperventilating and clawing his eyes out, she realized this was not a waiting game she could win. She rolled her many eyes and skulked into the shadows, then told him that she needed him to calm his ass down.
“W-what?! You can talk!?”
Yes, but that would sound way worse than communicating this way.
“Why are you doing this to me?! Go away! Where am I?!”
Location was something that was rather hard for her to narrow down, considering she had far more points of reference than she used to. But without information to color a lot of that raw data, she could honestly say she didn’t know, either. But she also said that it didn’t matter, because if he wanted to get out of this alive, he needed to do what she said.
“You’ll let me go if I do?!”
Sure, she lied.
“Okay. Okay, fine. Whatever you want, please!”
He still hadn’t opened his eyes. She didn’t like this, but she still much preferred it to whatever had been going on in his head earlier. She asked him if he had heard of a place called the Silver Wheel.
“W-what?! No!”
She asked if he knew anything about interdimensional travel.
“What are you talking about?!”
She asked him if he knew how to use the computers around here.
“W-wha… y-yes, I think so…”
Then she told him that he needed to turn them on and get himself caught up. They had a lot of reading to do.
“Please, please forgive me, but with the power out-”
She’d return the power.
“H-how?!”
That part was easy.
She slithered away, keeping one eye on him while she got to work. The issue of power may have baffled her in another time, in her old body, but now that she had become this thing, it wasn’t a question of what was possible, but rather what she could execute. Electricity is simply organized electrons, synchronized and pushed in one direction. And electrons were just steady particles of a specific mass with a negative charge. A negative charge is just a state of matter that projects a force. And while she didn’t have the same matter that the rest of the world had, she could turn herself into a convincing facsimile. Slipping into the wires. A space so small to a human, but incredibly spacious to her current body, she almost felt it was a little too empty.
Stretch herself out. Vibrate. Synchronize. Push through the wires. Become the charge.
Electricity was just a thing, after all.
And Claudia could be whatever the hell she wanted.
----------------------------------------
Ture had died something like… forty times now? It didn’t occur to him to start counting until a few weeks ago, and he sort of guessed it had been around twenty-eight at that point. So twelve deaths for sure, and somewhere in the range of twenty-eight beforehand. Could have been more, but probably not less. Marie wanted to scare a lot of people. ‘Get the wheels spinning before they even hit the ground’, to use her terminology exactly. And to her credit, it had pretty much worked exactly the way she hoped: turned out, having powerful, rich people lose friends in a grotesque, seemingly unavoidable way makes a great catalyst for societal change and government approval.
At this rate, all this P.I.N.K shit would be ready in a few weeks. And her plan would be ready to go, as far as he understood it. And to be clear: he absolutely did not understand it, nor did he ever try to.
Frankly, he was just here for the ride. And what a hell of a ride it was. Sure, he had to work for Marie Walker, but frankly, his tasks involved doing what she said, and dying at the end of it. As long as he did all that stuff on time, and it wouldn’t compromise her ultimate objective, she let him do whatever the hell he wanted.
And he wanted to do a lot. He ate food — real food, that never got old — all the time. He took naps in the sunshine. He ran in circles. He shouted a whole lot. He tried to fly a kite. He climbed a tree, and rode a bike. He ate copious amounts of ice cream and cake. He stripped naked and rolled around on a bed. He did a lot of drugs.
The only thing he hadn’t done yet is fuck someone. It’s not that he didn’t have opportunities, typically the men and women whose bodies he controlled had unsuspecting spouses, but… well, there was a line. Using someone else’s body to screw their loved one felt a bit too rapey for Ture’s tastes, so he figured he’d put that on hold until he got a more permanent body and just masturbate a whole lot in the meantime.
Which should be soon. It would be bad form for people to die in the gruesome way they had been once those P.I.N.K collars were out. After a few more — according to Marie Walker’s timeline, just to move things along at a healthy clip — they’d be good to go and he’d have his pick of the remaining bodies, plus an incredibly generous severance package so he could spend the rest of his days on earth basically doing whatever, as long as he kept his mouth shut. Turned out, Marie Walker preferred the carrot to the stick when it came to employee loyalty. Which makes enough sense, when you’ve got nothing but carrots to pass around.
Yep. All he had to do was what Marie Walker said, and he’d be set for life.
...so why hadn’t he thrown out the Royale Treatment pills yet?
His first thought was “well once she’s done with it, it’ll be business as normal — I could visit, maybe win something”; but then, he doubted Teresa would give him a warm welcome considering how he helped Marie Walker with her ambitions. So that wasn’t really a good reason to keep them.
Of course, he could always sell the pills for some extra spending money. Not that he would need that unless he made some truly terrible life choices. Or… maybe to start a cult or whatever. If someone could be brainwashed into thinking Charles Manson could kickstart a race war then surely there’s someone out there dumb enough to think he’s a savior just because he can give people dreams of magical casinos a few times. But cults, by definition, are full of dumb shits, and for the life of him Ture couldn’t think of a reason why he’d want to hang out with more dumb shits. He generally went out of his way to hang out with as few dumb shits as possible.
He even thought that maybe he could keep them for emergencies? But what emergencies, exactly, would require a visit to an interdimensional casino?
Holding on to the pills was not something he could logically ferret out. So he stopped trying, and just accepted the fact that whatever reason his goblin brain wanted to keep the pills, it was harmless enough as long as Marie Walker never found out. And she was so engrossed with the final few steps of her plan it seemed doubtful she would pay him any mind at all, as long as he kept dying in the right spots.
He was in Prague now. Europe was one of the first places to go along with the whole P.I.N.K scheme, and the collars were being distributed right now. But she still wanted to give the world a little nudge, so, he was supposed to die in his hotel room. Marie Walker figured it would be too suspicious if people kept dying in these highly-concentrated public areas, so she wanted to sprinkle in some deaths in more private, solitary settings. A body in a hotel would be found quickly enough, and thanks to social media, the whole rest of the world would find it at the exact same time.
But that was tonight. Today, he was doing his two favorite things — slouching in the grass of a park, and eating something new and delicious — in this case some kind of funnel cake called a trdelnik. Letting the grass cradle the back of his head and a hat keep the harmful rays of the sun out of his eyes.
He sighed. Complacent. Watching some drones carrying more collars to more waiting hands.
Ture died in 1998. Marie Walker did very little to prepare him for what the present day — his future — would have in store for him. It wasn’t easy, even now, to cope with it all, even if he could have technically lived to see this point if he hadn’t died so young. The internet — that thing that let him see boobs from his home PC if he was willing to wait half an hour — was everywhere now. And way faster. Phones seemed to get an upgrade too: now they could be injected into your body and project out of your skin as holograms. You could live up to 140 years comfortably, if you had the money for it. “True” AI had been created in an isolated environment, and “limited AI” flourished in modern electronics. Planes were faster. Cars were self-driving. There were people living on the moon, and some had even managed to set foot on Mars, although that particular experiment didn’t go well. And of course, automated drones could do everything from delivering packages to performing life-saving surgery.
...it all would have been so marvelous if it weren’t for all the downsides. Apparently, since he died, people managed to flood the planet, destroying coastlines, devastating food production, sending scores of refugees inland, and reawakening lethal infections that had been frozen in the ice caps. Lots of people died. Everyone had a digital identity that could be tracked at all times, so “privacy” was just a pretty word that only the rich could afford. There was a flux of nationalism, which apparently started even before the refugee thing, so everyone was violent and angry. Income disparity was at such comical levels that simply owning property made you wealthier than 60-something percent of the population.
Oh, and all the music was awful. It was like the last good song had been written in 2021 and everyone seemed to agree to stop trying and just talk over generic techno beats. Every time he heard a contemporary song it only made him… tired.
He couldn’t say he cared for the way the world turned out. But it was a whole lot better than serving drinks for an eternity.
“A- Scruffles! Scruffles, where are you going?!”
In a universe where everything that could happen did, the only luck anyone could be said to have was the luck to be in the right dimension at the right time. Ture was already lucky enough to be in the designated ‘saved’ dimension, and now that luck was about to double down on itself.
Because he was soon tackled by a very large, yipping dog.
“I’m sorry! Something must have — this is very, uh, um, this is very unlike him. Scruffles! Scruffles come here!”
He sat up, pushing the ball of short fuzzy fur and slobbering away from him as he shot an irritated glance at the owner.
It was a blind girl in a wheelchair.
It was Iva.
~*~
“He’s a trained support animal. He’s supposed to know better. Did you see if something spooked him?”
Ture didn’t know for sure, but he had an idea: judging by the black, charred fur on the tip of his tail, some jerk was having fun with matches. To Scruffles’s credit, who was currently resting under the coffee table they were sharing, he calmed down very quickly, once the fire had been put out. He seemed like a good dog. A homie. And, accidentally or not, had proven to be the best wingman Ture could have hoped for, considering this was exactly the way some kind of cheesy love story would start. He wouldn’t throw the poor fellow under the bus.
“Yeah.”
“What was it?”
Ture tapped his finger against his coffee cup.
“He’s got a little burn on his tail. I think some jerk kid thought it would be funny.”
“Oh, that’s awful! Is he hurt?”
“No. He’s fine. Just a little singed fur.
Iva didn’t look good. Ture remembered she was sharp-witted and confident, someone who likely could have won a normal game at the Silver Wheel, and used what she had won to great effect. But she had been up against Charlie. And Ture helped him cheat. And she had turned into… this.
When the Silver Wheel takes its toll, it doesn't take extenuating circumstances or cause-and-effect into account. When Iva lost, she didn’t just have to cope with the loss of her legs, she had to cope with the circumstances that caused it, and the ones that followed. Clearly those circumstances hadn’t treated her well. Her hair was already graying. She was way fatter, although that makes enough sense. She had the kind of bags under her eyes that look like the bruises of many nights spent in tears. And judging by her clothes, her finances weren't in great shape either. Ture had no idea how hard it was to find a job when you were blind, but blind and crippled? He was kind of surprised she was out and about.
And now she was anxious. Shy. Maybe even a little desperate, given how quickly she took him up on his offer to get her some coffee. He had an attractive voice in this body. And wasn’t too far from her age. She kept straightening out her shirt, as if that would make her look better. It didn’t. It just made Ture feel sad to think she was getting anxious and hopeful and stressed for nothing.
“You… speak Czech?” She asked.
“No. Phone implant. It, uh, does the work for me.”
“Oh, so English?” She swapped instantly. She hadn’t lost that, at least.
“Yeah. English.”
“Are you a tourist?” She pressed.
“...yeah.”
“Prague is a very nice city, especially if you don’t have pockets to pick,” she nodded, “And I’m told it’s very beautiful, too.”
He didn’t say anything. She fidgeted under the weight of his silence.
“Um… haha, I, uh… I live out of town too…”
Ture was having a hard time looking at Iva. While running into her was just fortune’s usual mischief, he had invited this awkwardness on himself by asking to spend more time with her like some kind of masochist. He never wanted to face the consequences of his past actions, the ones he regretted the most, but with the opportunity in front of him, he couldn’t bring himself to turn away from them either. This was a unique pain. A special kind of pain you have to be very lucky to experience: to adopt an intense hatred for yourself on behalf of someone who doesn’t even know they’re supposed to loathe you.
“...hey. Mind if I ask... an uncomfortable question?”
“Um… yes?”
“How did you lose your legs?”
“...and you still… um… it was an accident. A car. Jerk was drunk or something.”
“That sounds painful.”
“...well it… yeah.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Unless you changed your voice, I already know you weren’t driving. It’s fin…”
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She caught herself.
“...it’s not your fault.”
Ah, there it was. The iconic line. He supposed it would have been a shame to sit down with her if she didn’t unwittingly spit out that tripe.
“...who knows, maybe it is?”
“I’m… I mean did you…?”
“I’m just thinking, you know, butterfly effect. I spit out some gum, gets on someone’s shoes, tracks into a carpet, pisses off the maid who steals a wallet from a hotel room, that guy goes broke, starts drinking in their misery... “
“Oh. Well, then… it’s everyone’s fault for everything, so… we’re back around to it not being your problem, right?”
He snorted.
“Yeah. I guess.”
They took a few more sips of coffee.
“...must be hard.”
A flash of irritated indignation crossed her face.
“Was there a reason you wanted to talk to me? Or were you just practicing being a dumbass?”
Well, it’s good to see there was still a bit of the Iva he remembered in there. He smiled.
“No, I… I was actually, er… how do I put this… inspired? I guess? And I wanted to know more about you. It’s just hard to put into words, exactly. I dunno if you’ve ever felt it, where you run across someone and you’re… you feel like you need to get to know them.”
“I get that a lot. Being a blind girl with no legs. I used to get it a lot more when I was prettier though. Lots of guys who wanted to save me or something. No one wants to save this, though.”
She gestured to herself.
“...um…”
“You can say it. I don’t need eyes to know.”
“I would say… you don’t need saving.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what I’m supposed to say, right? A legless blind girl is only good for inspiring people, and there are a lot of dumb lines I could throw out to do that. But here’s the shitty truth: I’d love to be saved. I’d love for someone — anyone — to just sweep me off my non-existent feet, get me some mechanical legs and some ocular implants, and let me go back to living.”
He swallowed, and his smile faded.
“Aren’t you living, though? You’re out. You’re drinking coffee. You’re-”
“-existing. Life doesn’t work for people like me the way it works for you. I’m not just talking about the obvious stuff — like stairs, or street signs, or doors — I mean everything. Dreams? Someone like you doesn’t have to limit their dreams. You literally can do anything you set your mind to. I can pretend I’m an astronaut but I can’t make it a goal. You can think that one day you’ll see the, the great wall of China — I can’t. The gap between what I want to do and what I can ever even hope to do is enormous. Bigger than you can ever imagine. And maybe that wouldn’t be so bad if I wasn’t surrounded, every day, by people and media who remind me that the way I live my life is incomplete. And that includes people like you, who want to gawk at the blind crippled girl hoping she’ll give them the inspiration they need to do the shit she never can. Thanks for that.”
Ture didn’t have a lot to say to that. He sat in silent, baffled sadness. Angry at himself for having been so insensitive. And furious with himself for having done this to her in the first place: her, and the countless others he had hurt trying to buy his way out of the Silver Wheel.
But he did finally figure out why he had decided to keep the Royale Treatment.
“I never thought about it that way,” he said, slipping one pill into each of their drinks, “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
They both took a drink. They’d both fall asleep at the table in a couple of minutes. They’d be woken up before long, he was sure, but he didn’t need long to forfeit a game at the Silver Wheel.
It’s not like this body needed legs or eyes anymore.
~*~
“Ture?”
“Ture?!”
“Ture… oh fuck is this that fucking gambling shit fuck shit!”
Oh. Marie Walker was here. And Teresa, who looked like a startled dog at the mention of his name. Her body was fixed up now, at least. And as it turned out, he was in his old body too. So it was a right and proper reunion after all. A mildly awkward reunion.
Made more awkward when Marie Walker, neck-deep in some heavy sci-fi tech, waddled over to him and slammed a gloved hand into the wall behind him, pinning him.
“The fifty shades of fuck are you doing here my dude?!” her smile cracked a little bit, a lot of stress clearly mounting onto her shoulders and adding some weight to the darkening bags under her eyes, “Didn’t I tell you to throw out the goddamn pills?”
“Is this… Ture? Is it really you??” Teresa asked, leaning over the countertop. Their eyes met. Their gazes lingered. A spark of familiarity was visible within Ture. He blushed, and looked away.
“Yeah, yeah, I brought him to earth like I promised I’m a miracle worker can we go back to the part where you tell me why I-”
But Teresa had a habit of appearing wherever she wanted within the Silver Wheel. So she was between Ture and Marie Walker instantly. As if she had always been there, with her arms wrapped around him, her cold, porcelain body pressed against his, her chest artificially rising and falling in synch with his own startled breathing. Her cheek rested against his shoulder. He could feel the cold nothing escaping her nose.
The moment was somber and sudden. Enough to stun all but one soul in the room.
“What the hell is going on?!” the blind girl begged.
“Gay shit,” Marie Walker sighed, leaning backwards, having been shaken out of her disbelief. “You two done? Can I get back to interrogating my employee now?”
“Relax. I’m not here to fuck up anyone’s plans. I just wanted to give this girl some legs and eyes. It’s not like my current body will need them in a few hours.”
“Hey. Hey. Sweetie. That’s noble. That’s nice.” Marie Walker grabbed his cheeks and forced him to look at her, while Teresa helped the girl to the last remaining stool, “that’s not the point. Why do you still have the Royale Treatment?! I don’t want to lean all the way into the cackling villain thing but what the hell — that’s literally the only thing that could interfere with my plans now!”
Plans that have come along quite a ways. The old Silver Wheel he had left behind was gone — it looked more like the basement of an IT lab now. Even the few remnants of the Silver Wheel that remained — the poker table, the bar, the radio playing “Goldfinger” by Shirley Bassey, and the “employee of the month” sign — had been made gaudy. As if Marie Walker decided to turn the place into a fake Vegas casino before she tore out the walls and replaced them with wires and silicon.
She had bad enough taste to do something so eccentric just because she could.
“...I wanted to visit Teresa when you were finished,” he lied, “Sorry.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. You were keeping them in your locker, right? Goddammit Marie, you respect your employees' privacy once and all of the sudden… right, well, I hope you get your goodbyes in, because…” she took out her phone, texting quickly with one eye while the other stayed on him, “...because I’m gonna have the janitor chuck the rest out right now. Okay? Okay.”
They exchanged glances. Cooler, somehow, than the look he shared with Teresa. He wasn’t afraid of her, but he did respect her enough not to appear too defiant… or to show how disappointed he was that the pills were going to be discarded.
“That’s fine. Can we play our game?”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever, knock yourselves out.”
And Marie Walker got back to work.
~*~
Gene Oberman was distressed to see how many of these reports were signed by him.
Well, distressed and, in the most dark and childish corner of his tormented mind, slightly amused. This really was the most Hollywood twist of them all, after all: discovering that you were not only the victim of a terrible tragedy, but also its unwitting author.
That didn’t mean he was smiling, though, when he listened to himself rambling about how much he wanted to violate that thing that was powering the computers. No wonder it hated him. He kind of hated himself right now too. This place — or this Marie Walker person — must have twisted him in some uniquely dangerous ways. He was almost glad to have forgotten, if it wiped his slate clean and gave him the opportunity to make amends — both to himself, and his work at this laboratory, called “Bigger Skies.”
It- no, she. She was behind him. She wanted to know what he was reading about.
Well, being an interdimensional eldritch horror didn’t mean you automatically understand quantum physics, he guessed.
“It’s about what we were doing here. In this lab. And— I mean we as in— not you.”
She communicated that she understood what he had meant.
“We were investigating parallel worlds and alternate dimensions, stuff of that nature. Most of it was scrapped. The stuff that we kept working on was… a bit of a mess… the big project was a thing called the, uh… let me find it again… UCA. Universal Collapse Apparatus. The plan was to, uh, ‘collapse’ all the alternate dimensions so only one would remain. Then stop more from being formed. It would kill a lot of people.”
Miss Nine observed that was bad.
“Yeah. I think even Marie Walker knows that. She has a whole squad of people who just… hunted down versions of herself? Killed them? The versions of herself who must have opposed her plan. Millions of dead Maries. The number is still going up now. But I think… what you wanted me to look up was the only other ‘active’ project at this facility… something called Project 20:7.”
The name sounded familiar to her. As if she had heard it before, muttered by the scientists and faculty who had seen her before they were evacuated.
“Let me see… some people discovered a dimension where thing… uh, people like you live. I think the first plan was to weaponize them but they were too — and I could be reading this wrong — structurally variable and prone to pacifism. But we… well, mostly I, I guess, wanted to know what you exactly were. You know scientists and their need to… label. It became an obsession when we got our hands on you. According to my personal logs I was keeping you a secret from Marie Walker for a long… long time.”
“As for what caused you to transform, well, it happened at a place called ‘The Silver Wheel’. Does… that name means anything to you?”
She confirmed that it did not. He supposed that made sense: the Claudia who went to the Silver Wheel had vanished — and according to his old notes, “Miss Nine” was a different Claudia they had brought over from a parallel dimension to study the effects of the Silver Wheel.
“It’s something like an interdimensional gambling house. I don’t… ever explain completely how it works, but I think it’s a place where you can wager stuff that’s not just money. Like… talents or fates. But something happened to you there that impacted every version of you, so we, uh… we kidnapped you from an adjacent parallel universe so we could study how the Silver Wheel, uh… works.”
She stated that he was fucked up.
“Yeah, I’m seeing that.”
He wasn’t completely sold on the notion that studying something like that was problematic. If he was being honest, he might argue that the benefit of understanding how such a system operated vastly outweighed the single life that was sacrificed to study it. But he was not going to disagree with the now super-powered mutated version of his former victim on the morality of it.
“Anyway. The Silver Wheel comes up a lot. It’s the lynchpin of this whole operation. Marie Walker needed it to make the UCA work. And, uh, if what that guy told you over the phone is right, she’s probably setting it up over there right now. There’s only one thing that’s slowing her down now, and it’s… uh… it’s you, I think. Or something like you.”
She slithered closer to the screen. He flinched, froze, and trembled while her assorted limbs wrapped around it. He soon had to close his eyes and just focus on his breathing.
“This is the only dimension where you exist anymore. All other versions of you managed to escape to… um… whatever world things like you live in. But you also seem to be exempt from the theory of parallel universes. Which is to say, your actions and decisions don’t spawn new dimensions, and moreover, you at least dull the ability for things around you to do the same. There’s… something like you at the Silver Wheel. Once she’s in control of it, she’s probably going to force it to cooperate with her so she can spread that effect to everyone in this world. That’s, uh, probably where the P.I.N.K collars and pylons come in… if I had to guess…”
She asked if there was a way they could get to the Silver Wheel.
“Uh… they had pills but they’re all destroyed now… but… they were able to get there in the first place with a physical gate and outer-dimensional wear… I think that’s still here…”
She stopped powering the PC. The white screen suddenly turned dark, as did the room he was working in. Oberman yelped.
And while he staggered in the darkness, she told him to take her to the gate.
~*~
“Okay, so, you’ve both been here so I trust you remember how this place works, right?”
“What?”
“I said you know how this place works right?!”
It was kind of hard to hear over the sound of construction. There were at least ten other people here, not including official Silver Wheel employees, who were all working directly under Marie Walker to get the Silver Wheel ready for the final phase of her plan. They were trying, more or less, to be considerate of the three people at the table, but that consideration didn’t extend beyond trying to not bump into them as they shuffled back and forth, putting a variety of machines and computers together.
Marie Walker was supervising. Bags under her eyes, a hard-hat on her head, and a weary but concerningly genuine smile on her face. The Goldeneye theme underlined the menace.
“Yeah, I’ve been here before,” Iva huffed, “And I’m still not sure I believe you when you say you just want to give me limbs. How’s that gonna work, is a truck gonna back up and drop new legs on my stumps?”
“I don’t know. But it will work,” Ture insisted, “The Silver Wheel just… does.”
“You’ll probably get abducted by a mad German scientist who will use you to test his regrowth serum,” Ratna suggested boredly, watching a group of three install yet another generator, “that will work against all odds and expectations. And he’ll be so mad he’ll kidnap Ture and… eat his eyes or some shit.”
“Sounds plausible,” Ture shrugged. Iva frowned, and went back to fingering the hard plastic domino tiles that were on her side of the table.
“...okay, fine. But how can I trust you?”
“Once we make our wagers we can’t change them. I’ll start. I’ll bet my-”
There was a slight yell off to the side. Everyone glanced over to see one of the workers leaping back from what appeared to be a loose wire. A jolt of electricity. Harmless but frightening. She wiggled her hand a bit, laughed, but Marie Walker looked less amused as she stomped over.
“What the hell was that, Gretta?”
“Just a little-”
“-just a little? This is too important for you to be fucking it up Gretta! A whole lot of work went into this Gretta. We don’t get a second chance to do this, Gretta!”
“...sorry-”
“I don’t- I- just, just go home. Out the door. Comeon. I’ll be the new Gretta now. Christ.”
Gretta, who looked a strange mix of hurt and relieved, started for the door. One player and his dealer watched her go. The other player didn’t, because she was blind. But she was still listening.
“You, uh, you okay there boss?” Ratna asked with a shit-eating grin.
“Fine! I’m fine. Gretta is fine. Do your dumb game.”
“Mmmmmmm... “ Ratna leaned to the side like a stupid child armed with a stick, facing down a bear, “are you sure? You seem a little… on edge. Would a soothing suite of insults delivered directly from the bitter core of my cold heart help?”
“Fuck off and play!”
“Fuck off? I wish. But play, well-”
“-actually, can I ask what’s going on? There wasn’t so much construction last time I was here,” Iva asked, “it’s distracting.”
“Fair enough. You happen to be at the Silver Wheel in a historic time. The woman you’ve been hearing bitching is none other than Marie Walker, and she’s going to use the Silver Wheel to destroy every other parallel dimension but one. So all that construction you’re hearing? That’s her working on that.”
Iva opened and closed her mouth a few times, as if thinking she knew what she wanted to say before changing her mind.
“...that’s… Marie Walker? And she’s doing something that’s stupid.”
“I’m not having this debate with you!” Marie Walker called from the generator.
“Parallel universes are what made you rich, though.” Iva leaned to the side, towards where she heard Marie Walker yelling.
“Ug- I can get rich other ways, darling!”
“But the parallel universes are the only reason most people have fresh water and food.”
“Sucks for them.”
“There’s going to be wars.”
“Oh my god- good point! I can get rich selling weapons, then!”
“Wow, fucking bitch…” she leaned back up, “shouldn’t we be stopping her?”
“We tried,” Ratna shrugged, “but see, around these parts, we use gambling to settle our differences, and despite our best efforts, Marie Walker won. So.”
“Best efforts my ass, you were chea-”
Marie Walker tried to stand up, and in the process, bumped into one of her employees who was carrying one of the heavier CPU cores to their destination. He staggered and caught himself, while Marie Walker stumbled into the wall.
“You okay?” He asked, readjusting his grip.
Marie Walker looked as if he’d just pissed on her mother’s fresh grave.
“The hell was that?! Say something when you’re walking past! Fuck I could have hurt myself!”
“It’s… a pretty small space, I figured you saw-”
“Figured? You assumed?! Assumptions could get one of us killed! And spoiler alert, this is like the one place in the whole multiverse where we can’t die!”
“Um-”
“Fuck it, put that thing down, get out. Take a paid holiday, go to fucking… fucking wherever people go on holiday! Miami? Costa Rica? Don’t care, get out!”
This time, all the remaining employees, in addition to the player at the table, watched him go. Iva merely listened.
“It appears you are distressed,” Teresa noted, having appeared next to Marie Walker instantaneously, “Could I interest you in a drink?”
“Christ I-” Marie jumped — still very much not used to Teresa’s more peculiar habit, despite having seen it on video before “-don’t do that either! What is wrong with you fucking people?! Announce yourselves! Don’t fucking… phase out of nowhere like a pale apparition trying to teach me a lesson about Christmas!”
“Of course,” Teresa bowed her head — her normally calming aura doing little to ease the owner’s nerves, “but I really would recommend a drink.”
“Are you mental? I’m working next to a live generator! With so many people friggen’ jolting me I’m liable to electrocute myself!”
“That would be most regrettable,” Teresa noted “I shall prepare you some tea and leave it at the bar for you. Away from the live wires.”
“I ain’t drinking shit if I don’t watch you make it!” She called after Teresa, who started walking for the barroom door at an incredibly leisurely pace. Teresa met eyes with Ture, and winked. Ture flinched. She really didn’t look flattering in… light. Good light.
Ratna leaned backwards. Iva took a sip of her ginger ale.
“...right, so, I wager my legs and my eyesight.”
“Oh, right, um…”
Iva’s expression twisted in thought, folding her arms over her chest as she deliberated. “The Look of Love”, by Dusty Springfield, accompanied her thoughts.
“...just… pick something. I’m just going to give up anyway.”
“No offense but I still don’t completely trust you,” Iva noted, “I mean, you helped an asshole cheat me out of my legs, I still don’t know you weren’t the rat ejaculate who attacked my dog, and you drugged my coffee. I’m desperate enough to do this, but not stupid enough to do it blindly.”
“...why would you think I’d attack your dog?” He asked with genuine hurt in his voice.
“I don’t know how assholes work, man, I just have to live with them.”
“...right.”
“What about one of my languages? I’ll wager my language knowledge.”
No chips appeared.
“Not equal. I have that app, remember? Learning a new language just isn’t appealing to me.”
“My arms and my sense of taste.”
No chips appeared.
“...I… I don’t want more arms.”
“Are you serious? But my legs were worth two-something billion to Charlie?”
“He didn’t value the money very much.”
“How much can you value your legs and eyes if you’re going to die soon?”
“I guess I value them enough, considering I’ll probably lose them painfully.”
Ratna nodded, flashing a grin.
“If I had my say it would be excruciating.”
“Good to see you too, by the way,” he dryly retorted.
“Ugh, fine—what about my dog? You like my dog, right? I wager my dog.”
And, as if magic, the chips appeared: Ture’s were the blackest night, a void from which barely any light could escape, and Ivy’s were a fuzzy gray, the same color as Sir Scruffles the Second’s fur. She couldn’t appreciate the color, but when she put her hands on the chips, she could appreciate the texture, which seemed familiar despite being an unwavering hard plastic.
“...I guess I like your dog.”
“About damn time,” Ratna announced, “with that, I can finally introduce tonight’s game: Matador!”
~*~
Gene Oberman didn’t quite know yet how he lost all of his memories. The man on the phone simply said he could help, he didn’t detail the circumstances as to why he needed it: probably to avoid losing too much control over the situation. It would have been nice if going over the reports and working on the dimensional gate triggered these destroyed memories so they would all come rushing back at once. But while nothing that convenient happened, he did enjoy the next-best thing: as he absorbed this all-new information for the second time, he found it shockingly easy to retain and connect. Like filling in a half-finished jigsaw. Everything just… snapped into place.
That didn’t make the job easy or stress-free of course. Just manageable. A manageability that’s important when you’re trying to re-activate a device that could very easily punch the wrong kind of hole in space-time and send the world careening towards catastrophe. There were fail-safes for that, of course, it’s not as if he was building it from scratch, but a far more likely outcome — and one there were no fail-safes for — was him making some critical error or inputting the wrong coordinates and stranding him in the middle of the… big fat nothing that apparently surrounds this Silver Wheel place.
Or at least stranding Miss Nine. He wasn’t entirely sure who was going there, all he knew was that she wanted to get there through the gate, and he was fairly certain he knew why.
The lights overhead flickered slightly. He looked up anxiously.
“You, uh…”
She was all around him. Even if he couldn’t see her, he knew she could see him. Knowing one of those bulbous… tumorous… oozing eyes was always locked on him made him feel sick to the stomach. It was the feeling of being watched, if it were a nauseating cold that burned through his goosebumps and made his bones themselves feel as if they were full of sick.
“...you need to keep the power constant. A flicker like that would be lethal in the gate.”
A part of her emerged from the wall — not like a ghost, but as if the wall itself was vomiting her out in wet, heavy belches. The sound of all the eyes rotating to face him made him feel even worse. How could he have ever been enamored with this thing?
She told him she would work on it.
He nodded. He wanted to swallow but he was sure if he did he would just throw up.
She asked him how much longer it would take.
“Um… I, I’m not sure. They disabled it before they abandoned the lab. But since it’s still intact I could fashion a workaround, that’s not the hard part. The hard part is figuring out how to get to the Silver Wheel with it. The coordinates are very… precise. It’s not like a 3D plane with an x, y, and z axis. And… it’s not quite right to say the Silver Wheel has “moved” since our first trip there, but… well, we functionally did. So I’ll need to do… equations.”
He took a few deep breaths. The air was dusty and tainted with the flavor of electricity and metal. It grounded him, ironically enough, and helped steady him… important, considering the work he had to do.
...that thing was still sticking out of the wall. He tried not to look at it.
“But soon. I think we’ll be able to try it soon.”
She asked him if he knew what she was going to do.
“...I kind of assume you, uh… want to play me at the Silver Wheel. So you could become human, and I’d become… that.”
She said that was a good idea. But she also said that he wasn’t the same person who tormented her. And now that she was getting more confident in her new body, she wasn’t sure she could trust anyone else with it.
“It’s that powerful?”
It’s not that it was powerful, she assured him, it was that it had options. Nothing that bound him bound her. The laws of reality were merely a suggestion, which she could disregard without consequence. Her physical body alone was merely the byproduct of a negotiation between where she came from and the reality she inhabited now. A way to keep things, if not consistent, at least manageable. She equated it to freedom. But her freedom was still limited by what she knew. Being able to see atoms didn’t mean she understood how they worked. In that respect, he would be far more dangerous in this form than she could be without further study.
“So… what are you going to do, then? After we’re done with the Silver Wheel?”
First, she would find a way to escape this laboratory. He and his associates had managed to prevent her from leaving, using science beyond her understanding to seal the gaps between space she could normally swim through: but she felt that it was an incomplete seal, and before long she could break out into the world at large. And once she did? She would dwell in the space between space. Lurk, explore, expand, and observe. And, if she felt so compelled, intervene. With amusement, she recalled all the times Marie Walker equated herself to a god on television. Perhaps she would take up a similar role. There was no force on this earth that could stop her, after all.
He started sweating.
“Ahah that’s great rooting for you!”
The wet sound of something moving behind him suggested she was moving closer.
She said that maybe she’d learn how to read minds, if she spent enough time with him.
He started working faster.
~*~
Dominoes has been around for a while — their first historical mention was in China, specifically in Former Events in Wulin, by Zhou Mi, which was penned between 1232 and 1298 — but have spread considerably further since, although it wasn’t first recorded in the wider western world until the early 18th century, when the game showed up in Italy, likely brought over by missionaries. While it was never as popular as dice and card-based games, they were the undisputed champions of analogies: perhaps most famously when US president Eisenhower used the “Domino Effect” to justify military intervention in Vietnam in 1954.
“There’s nothing especially unique about Matador — sometimes called Russian dominoes — except that it’s easier for me to dick with the rules, which is why we’re playing it. Like most blocking games, the-”
She was cut off by another frustrated growl exploding out from the Silver Wheel’s owner. Ratna sighed.
“Get out! Out!”
Two other people, at the command of their increasingly agitated boss, shuffled for the door. Marie Walker watched them go. Every corner of her face took turns twitching.
“...actually, you fucking go too,” she pointed to another employee on the other end of the room, “Yes, yes you. You’re sloppy. Are you listening to some podcast or something right now?”
“Actually-”
“Fuck I don’t care just go.”
They were down to significantly fewer employees than they started with. Around five brow-beaten souls.
“Try to do a nice thing and not replace your workforce with drones, and this is what you get,” she muttered under her breath, although she was breathing so loudly it was still audible across the room. Another employee, reading the room, saw what was coming and just showed herself out.
“...are you done?” Ratna asked, her wolfish grin replaced with a wearier dog’s irritated scowl, “This may come as a shock but not everyone’s in love with the sound of your voice, and we’ve got a game to play.”
Marie Walker didn’t reply to that. Ratna, rather than prod further, shrugged.
“Right, so, Matador. At the start of the game, you both will grab five dominoes from the pile — called the boneyard. The player who grabs the highest double, or a domino with matching numbers on both sides, goes first. On your turn, you’ll have to connect one of the dominoes in your hand to a domino on the table. You do this by matching pips so they add up to seven: so if there’s a five/five domino on the table, you’ll have to connect a dominio that has a two on one of its sides. If you have a Matador — which is to say, a domino whose pips add up to seven by itself, such as a four/three or a six/one — you can put that down on either end of the domino line. We play with special rules for blanks, I’ll get to it.
“You take turns putting down dominoes one at a time. If you find you don’t have a playable dominio in your hand, you have to draw from the boneyard until you draw something you can play. If the boneyard is empty and you find yourself in that situation, you just pass. If both players pass, then the player with fewer dominoes in-hand is the winner. Otherwise, it’s whoever runs out of dominoes or chips first.
“Which is what brings us to the chips, which normally aren’t a part of Matador. In this version of the game, you can put chips onto ends to act as additional pips anytime on your turn — so if you’ve got a one-pip domino and you want to connect it to a five-pip domino, you can put a chip on the five-pip to turn it into a six-pip, making the move legal. This is also the only way to use blank dominoes — but note that each chip only affects one side of the domino. Put two chips on one end of a blank domino, and either you or your opponent will have to flush out the other end to connect it to something else.
“But there’s one extra unique maneuver I’d like to tell you about: a chip combo. If you can arrange it that three dominoes in a chain have the exact same number of your chips on them, you can force your opponent to discard that many chips. So if you have three dominios in the chain, and they each have three of Ture’s chips on them, then Iva has to throw out nine chips. So if you want to punish your opponent for spending too many chips, or restrict their ability to easily get rid of dominos, now you know how. After all, there’s no way to get chips back, so be careful how you spend them!
“Oh, and I should mention: three dominoes with chips on them — anyone’s chips — is the maximum allowance. After three, it has to be a natural connection. Otherwise it would be way too easy to buy victory from the start
“That was a long explanation for a game we’re not even going to play, but did y’all get it?”
“Yes.”
“Got it.”
“Sweet. Pull your tiles.”
Ratna, guiding Iva’s hand, helped the girl pluck five tiles from the boneyard and place them in front of her, and behind a small barrier so she could freely feel up each tile without Ture being able to see it. Ture obviously didn’t need the barrier, nor even to hide his dominos, so he rather carelessly pulled a one/three, a two/three, a five/five, a blank, and a one/two.
“Not to spoil anything, but it looks like Ture goes first. Ture, would you like to play?”
The moment of truth. Iva leaned forward.
“...nah, I surrender.”
“Wuss.”
And at that moment, a miracle happened: Iva blinked. And as she did, the whites of her eyes expanded, and her pale eyes, for the first time, found focus: darkness parted way to light, and a world of color and shapes flooded into the abyss that had once engulfed her entire life. Muscles that had never been needed, accessories of uselessness, were suddenly activated, taking their first, sudden, and terrifying steps forward. It would be wonderful if it was beautiful. It would be inspiring if tears swelled up and she marveled at the world that had so long been denied her by the misfortune of her birth and economics. But it was confusing. It was a blurry swirl. And more than anything, without a lifetime of associations to inform what she was seeing, it was ultimately meaningless. Like an illiterate man being handed a bible in the expectation he would discover faith.
But even if she had received the comprehension necessary to make the most use of her eyes, she wouldn’t be able to appreciate the drama in front of her. She wouldn’t be able to understand who had just entered the Silver Wheel, nor why Marie Walker looked at him as if he was a ghost. She wouldn’t quite get why they started shouting, at each other, or what they were shouting about, muddied as it was with their intermixing voices, Ture’s confused vocalization as he tried to navigate a suddenly black world, and the radio, blaring out “The World is Not Enough” by Garbage. And she certainly wouldn’t understand — much less appreciate — the weave of limbs that surrounded them, a dance between two eldritch abominations as they grappled against one another.
She would be confused about it all, until one loud, piercing noise suddenly made everything crystal clear. Even when blind, she knew that sound.
Marie Walker had been shot.