The skyline is largely unchanged but for one notable exception, a massive tower that erupts out of the ground to claw at the sky. Jonas estimates that it’s even taller than the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. It is sleek and bright, a shard of silver planted in the middle of the city as if by God. Little wonder why they call it “Za Supaya”—the Spire.
Two days after his arrival in Hiroshima, Jonas walks, carrying two plastic bags laden with new purchases. He’s relieved to have left an electronics store without having stolen anything. The apartment he’s renting with Eva is a five-minute walk from the Spire, a prefurnished lodging of the kind favored by businessmen on long trips. The apartment has only one bedroom, but Jonas takes comfort in the routine of sleeping on the couch.
He enters and finds Eva working on her laptop. He pulls a charger from one of the bags. “Will this do?”
“Perfect,” Eva says, reaching for it gratefully. “Can’t believe I forgot to pack mine.”
“Well, we left in a hurry.”
“What about you? Did the store have everything you need?”
Jonas begins emptying the bags. He spreads a coterie of electronic items out on the coffee table, including circuit boards, copper wiring, and an AC adapter. “Mostly. There are a few precision tools I’ll need to find at a jewelry store or something. I’m not worried, though. If I can’t find them in Japan, they can’t be found.” He could have made his purchases in New Berlin, of course, but that would have meant trying to get them through security at Himmler International, and the risk just wasn’t worth it.
“This is all for your tether?” Eva asks.
Jonas gestures to his work. “I don’t know how it will react to the recalibration of the particle collider. Seems like a sensible precaution just to overhaul it entirely. Of course, I’ll need to replace the lithium-ion battery.”
“Of course,” Eva says dryly. “But I thought if you take the tether off”—her fingers flutter like a flock of birds—“you’ll leave this universe.”
“That’s what makes it tricky. I’ll have to work with one hand while the other maintains contact with the capacitance sensors on the inner circumference.” Eva greets this news with a blank stare, and Jonas just waves the notion away. “At any rate, I hope it’s all moot. The idea is to leave this reality for my final destination. Either way, I won’t need the tether anymore.”
“You know,” Eva says, “for some reason, I find it mildly offensive that you keep referring to my reality as ‘this’ reality.” Her tone is playful.
“I apologize.” Jonas bows his head in mock penitence. “I need to make sure your reality’s Linear Accelerator will do the same job as my reality’s Large Hadron Collider.” He looks down at the formulae on his arms. “I only have one more shot at this,” he continues. “Speaking of which, have you received any word from your friend?”
Eva hesitates for a fraction of a second longer than Jonas expects. “He says he’s still working on it.” Her voice sounds far away.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“Fine.” Something in her voice still sounds less than convincing. “I made us reservations at Sushitei Hikarimachi tonight. Hope you like omakase.” She forces a smile and carries her laptop and new charger off into the bedroom.
As Jonas watches her go, he wonders what’s bothering her. For someone so warm and inviting, she has moments of inscrutability.
Dropping the thought, Jonas turns back to the parts he’s collected. He has a lot of work to do.
Victor’s Cray has lost the scent.
After encountering Jonas’s pathetic doppelgänger—a low-resolution copy of Victor’s nemesis—Victor tasked his computer to scour the multiverse for signs of the quarks and neutrinos thrown off by Jonas’s tether, but those signs went inexplicably dark. Of course, Victor has no way of knowing that the phenomenon was an unintended consequence of Jonas’s “overhaul.” And so Victor continues to search, pushing his machine to its limits. He weaves new algorithms and releases them into his computer models like hounds on the hunt. He codes and recodes and codes again. His computer peers into universe after universe, but each time, his hounds return breathless and empty handed. The multiverse contains a near-infinite number of realities, yet all are quiet.
Victor considers the possibilities. That Jonas could be dead is the first that comes to mind, but in that case, his tether would still be working, casting off telltale neutrinos. Or maybe Jonas and his tether reality-slipped and found themselves underground, their molecules coalescing with that of soil and silt, rocks and pebbles. Such a mishap would likely damage the tether beyond operation, accounting for the lack of detectable neutrinos. The thought of Jonas tortured by dirt in his bones and rocks in his blood brings a smile.
Victor rolls the idea around in his head, envisioning all the myriad ways Jonas could be consumed by the earth. Each vision is more grotesque than the last, but in every one, Jonas’s mouth is agape, caught in the act of a final, silent wail of indescribable agony.
As satisfying as this ending would be, as exquisite a justice as Victor could contrive—Jonas ultimately killed by his own attempts to defy the will of the universe—he knows it’s not the explanation. True, it’s just an instinct, but that same intuition has guided Victor throughout his whole life. It won him Phaedra. It brought him to the zenith of his profession. The fact that that very same instinct lost him both is an inconvenient point he chooses to ignore.
He knows that Jonas is still alive. It’s just that his tether has ceased to function. But that doesn’t mean Victor cannot find him.
Jonas resides in a world not his own. A dog in a manger. An interloper. In whatever reality he has landed in, his presence is unnatural, an anomaly. As a matter of science, such peculiarities should be easy to detect. The multiverse may possess a near-infinite assortment of realities, but it is only a matter of time until Victor locates his nemesis.
And then they’ll finish this.
Though modest in appearance, Sushitei Hikarimachi is considered one of the best restaurants in Hiroshima. White lamps dangle, casting a sheen on the laminated menus, which seem out of place in such a high-end eatery. Jonas and Eva share a table along the wall, where they are served slices of fish so delicate, they’re almost translucent. Sashimi in assorted shades of pink and ivory. Sushi that rises to the level of art.
“Can I ask you a question?” Eva says.
“Of course,” Jonas answers. “Anything.”
“I’ve been avoiding it . . .”
“Why?”
She waves at the air with her chopsticks as though trying to catch the right words with them. “I don’t know. It feels selfish. Or weird. Or something.”
Jonas smiles warmly, trying to recapture some of the camaraderie and lightness that he has enjoyed with Eva in both her incarnations. “Why don’t you just ask and let me be the judge?”
Eva reaches for her sake and drains the small glass. “You told me how you met me before. Well, not before. Elsewhere. Not elsewhere . . .” She shakes her head and furrows her brow. “There’s really no good word for it, is there?”
Jonas shrugs. “Scientific breakthroughs often require new words to describe them.” He studies her and is reminded of her beauty, a quality he’s studiously ignored since meeting her counterpart several universes ago. Why? He casts the thought away. “You want to know what you were like,” he observes, reading her. “If you were different.”
She nods, a hint of embarrassment in her expression.
“You weren’t different,” he assures her truthfully. “You were pretty much exactly the same, right down to the way you picked at your right thumb.”
Eva had been digging at the skin of her thumb with the nail of her index finger, but she stops, instantly self-conscious. But then another emotion replaces it. Jonas has had enough experience with feeling like someone was stepping on his grave to recognize it in someone else, and he knows that he’s just made a serious mistake.
