Jonas had wanted children. He wanted a family. He wanted to share the love he felt for Amanda with one or more children. So he’d proposed adoption. Amanda admitted that the idea had crossed her mind, too, but she wasn’t ready to go there yet. Thinking about it would make their “setback,” their “difficulty,” a reality. She had scant hope of victory but wasn’t yet prepared to surrender.
Whenever they were together, Jonas would stare at her, his gaze turning more diagnostic as he carefully examined every aspect of her mood, wary of hairline cracks or fissures in her affect. He could see it weighed on her but was unable to stop. He fought against the fear that he was losing her and consoled himself with platitudes. This is all in your head. Time heals all wounds. Stop worrying, and take things one step at a time. Was it possible that after two years of telling Amanda he loved her too much, it was actually true? That there was a limit to how much one person can love another without smothering the other?
Apparently. Because when Jonas returned home one night, he found the envelope. It was cherry colored and nearly square, propped on the kitchen counter with his name written in Amanda’s angular print, sharp and precise. He could feel paper inside, folded in quarters, and something else. Small and round and untethered. It slid around inside the envelope, and Jonas felt his heart clutch.
Dread rose within him as he tore the envelope open. Amanda’s engagement ring slid into his hand. He heard himself make a sound like a wounded animal. It wasn’t the noise he imagined whenever he’d pictured the world ending.
NOW
Victor’s Cray has been on the hunt for days, scouring the multiverse for signs of Jonas’s tether and its signature neutrino emissions. With each processing cycle that passes without success, Victor’s belief that Jonas is marooned or dead grows. As the Cray combs through universe after universe, reality after reality, without finding its quarry, Victor works to convince himself that his holy war against Jonas might really be over.
His mind—always prodigious, always active—begins to meander. He has the reconstruction of his life to consider, the rebuilding of his career. He could continue to live off his divorce settlement, but he knows he’s not built for the life of a dilettante. Eventually, the thought of a Nobel Prize beckons. Surely, the scales of cosmic justice cannot be balanced until Victor receives the same accolades that have been bestowed upon Jonas. And why not? Jonas stole his work, and that theft drove Victor to improve upon it. Jonas won the Nobel for a series of equations that proved the existence of parallel worlds, but Victor has invented the means not only to map them, as his Cray is doing this very minute, but also to travel to them, and with great precision. This achievement overshadows what the Nobel Committee lauded Jonas for by several orders of magnitude. Jonas may have proved the theoretical existence of fire, but Victor invented it, a discovery with no less potential to change the world.
Soon he’s filling notebooks with ideas for applications. Historians will pack libraries with books about alternate histories. A cure for cancer could be discovered in the infinite multitude Victor will open the door to. He’ll bring fusion—sustainable, clean energy to change the world—from a parallel Earth where it’s been perfected. Whole new technologies will be made possible from the curation of inventions from other universes. “Crowdsourcing” will be replaced by “reality sourcing.” Victor will give the world the means to become a utopia. Eventually, the Nobel Prize feels too small an ambition.
As Victor writes and thinks and writes some more, as the notebooks—crammed with new ideas—begin to pile up, Jonas becomes a distant memory. Victor once heard that “hate is a nutritious emotion; one can live off it for years.” And that’s been true for him. But with the idea that Jonas is dead, and Victor’s future is incandescent with possibility, hate and its sibling, vengeance, leave his heart. He feels lighter. Younger. He toys with the thought of restarting his life. He thinks of calling Phaedra.
Then the Cray awakens, and everything changes.
The algorithm was one of the first Victor wrote for the supercomputer. For years, it’s been buried beneath strata of newer code. He wrote it as a baseline for the detection of different universes, a way of drawing a signal from the noise of the cosmos. Universes, he discovered, have their own quantum signatures, each as unique as a snowflake. Such signatures are more complex than a billion strands of DNA, but then, that’s what he had the Cray for.
And today, the Cray reports an anomaly unlike anything Victor has ever seen. Data floods the computer display in the arcane language he himself invented, but it makes no sense. He tries to draw meaning from what he’s seeing, but he might as well be blind. The reason, he discerns, is that the Cray itself doesn’t know what to make of what it’s detecting. It’s trying to apply Victor’s algorithm to a phenomenon it wasn’t built to understand, like trying to talk to a dog by barking at it.
At first, Victor worries this is somehow his doing, that a version of himself in some neighboring reality attempted to put one of his ideas into practice and, in so doing, broke the world or tore the fabric of space-time. The thought that he might not have his own doppelgänger—his own counterpart who found the same keys to unlock the secrets of the multiverse—was the purest form of narcissism. Of course there’s another Victor out there with the ability to slip realities, and of course he’s done something horrible.
A coldness clutches Victor’s chest as he dives deeper and deeper into the data the Cray is throwing back at him. If he can’t determine what exactly is happening, he has no hope of fixing the multiverse he fears his twin has broken. He writes hundreds of lines of code, fashioning newer and newer algorithms, trying to bring the problem into focus. He’s a Copernicus, working to craft a more accurate vision of the universe, but he fears that the “telescope” he is constructing isn’t equal to the task.
He works feverishly, without food or drink or sleep. A kind of madness overtakes him. At least, he begins to fear it might be madness. How else can he explain the data his new algorithms have conjured? Even in his own mind, the thought sounds irrational: The universe he is studying appears to be in an act of open rebellion. The idea doesn’t even make sense. How does a universe rebel? And against what? But the closer Victor examines the event—a cascade of events, really—the more solid, the more accurate that interpretation feels. The universe is reacting to some unnatural stimuli. He envisions a stone thrown into a pond.
And then it hits him.
The anomaly isn’t him. No version of himself caused what he’s witnessing. The stone in the pond doesn’t belong. The universe is reacting to a foreign incursion, the way an infected organism spikes a fever in reaction to a virus.
Victor has no doubt what the virus is. Who.
He hears the siren song of the Nobel Prize and tries to return himself to thoughts of research, of reconstruction and reconciliation. He tries to put Jonas Cullen out of his mind. The man isn’t worth the obsession, Victor reminds himself. Jonas has stolen too many years as it is. Let it go, some voice inside him beseeches. The voice sounds like Phaedra. It’s over. Or it can be if you want it to be. All you need is to move on. She makes it sound so easy. Like lying down. Surrendering to gravity.
And he knows it would be easy. More than easy. He wants to let go. He is tired of his crusade. Pursuing a vendetta is exhausting business. Vengeance takes its toll on the vengeful.
He turns again to the Cray and thinks of unplugging the beast. Letting go would be that easy. He’ll turn it off and call Phaedra. He’ll do it right now. The late hour doesn’t matter. He’ll wake her up if he must.
The Cray’s power cord runs to an industrial outlet Victor had to have specially installed, snaking past the desk where his keyboard and monitor lay, where he has logged countless hours in pursuit of his blood feud with Jonas. En route to the outlet, he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the monitor. He doesn’t recognize the man staring back at him. And if his own reflection is a stranger, there’s only one reason why, one person responsible.
Beneath the reflection, data waterfalls, tempting Victor with the location of his nemesis. Before he’s even aware, he’s sitting down at the workstation, translating the information the Cray has surfaced into a specific reality, a universe where he can find Jonas and end this. He’s close. It’s almost over, he tells himself. Why would he abandon his crusade now, when he is so close to its end? This will be done by the end of the week, he tells himself, bargaining like an alcoholic weighing whether to enter a liquor store. The end of the week. Then he’ll call Phaedra. But first he has work to do.
NOW
Jonas and Eva spill out of the stairwell onto the Spire’s 174th floor. The landing is mostly white with accents of silver and pale maple. The sky outside is framed by a window of curtain wall glass, offering a view of pure blue beyond. They are more than half a mile up.
A man waiting by the elevator turns, surprised to see anyone emerging from the stairwell, which is rarely utilized and was only included in the building’s design to comply with the local fire code.
The man is in his fifties. Japanese, with gray flecking his hair and a goatee. His affect, the way his eyes soak in detail and exude intelligence, identifies him as a fellow academic. A Spire identification card, laminated with his picture, hangs from a lanyard around his neck. It reads KOBAYASHI, DAISUKE.
“Dr. Kobayashi,” Eva says, extending her hand. “Thank you so much for seeing us.”
Kobayashi looks to the stairwell door, mouth agape. “How many stairs did you just walk up?”
“Too many,” Eva says. She’s still short of breath.
“Due to the earthquake?”
“In a manner of speaking,” Jonas deadpans.
Eva gestures to him. “This is my friend, Dr. Cullen.”
Jonas shakes Kobayashi’s hand. “Thank you for your help, Doctor. And for not evacuating with the rest of the personnel.”
“I had to stay to satisfy my curiosity,” Kobayashi says, studying Jonas. “Dr. Stamper asserts that you’re quite accomplished in the field of quantum theory. But the only Dr. Cullen I was able to find on the internet is a seventy-three-year-old ob-gyn in Prague.” Jonas can’t tell whether he’s suspicious or curious or, perhaps, both.
He offers an innocent shrug. “You know what the situation is like back in . . .” He nearly says “America.” “Back in my country. It helps to stay off the internet as much as is practicable,” Jonas says, employing the cover story he’d rehearsed with Eva.
“Under better circumstances, Dr. Cullen would be considered a renowned physicist,” Eva chimes in, playing her part.
“In a parallel universe, maybe,” Jonas ad-libs.
Kobayashi obligingly chuckles. “In any case, I have a colleague who has a colleague who owes Dr. Stamper a favor, so . . .” He spreads his hands. Here we are. “She said you wanted to see the SLA?”
“SLA?”
