Forty: Rainy Days
Forty: Rainy Days He’s walking home from the lab. He’s got a fast-food burrito in one hand and he’s busy scrolling through notes on his smartphone with the other. It’s not quite dark yet, but it will be in a few minutes, so he knows he should get home soon. His fellow researchers think he’s eccentric for liking to be safe at home after dark. His fellow researchers don’t know demons are real.
But since it’s still daylight, he’s not exactly scared when someone says his name, causing him to turn around instinctively. He talks over the burrito as a glob of sauce falls onto his shirt. “Yeff?”
A man is leaning against a chain-link fence. He’s dressed casually in cargo pants and a black t-shirt, and Gene doesn’t notice then the military style combat boots he wears or the hard look in his eyes. When the man smiles warmly at him, Gene realizes he’s young. Probably not more than twenty-five, which is only a couple of years younger than Gene, but still young.
“Physicist Gene Rainy? The one who wrote the paper on multi-universal travel via the exception of temporal space in a finite area?”
Gene raises an eyebrow and then swallows his food. “That was the basic idea. It’s more complicated than that, but-”
The man smiles. It doesn’t seem like a very warm smile anymore.
“I’m sorry,” Gene says, and then lowers his burrito. “Who are you?”
The man reaches behind himself, and for a second Gene thinks he’s going to pull out his wallet and give him a business card. That happens to him sometimes. Not often, but sometimes. There were a lot of corporations interested in his research, not to mention a dozen different government agencies. He starts to put the burrito in his mouth so he can clamp down on it and accept the card, but then he realizes there is something in the man’s hand that is not a wallet and not a business card. It’s a gun, and it’s pointed at Gene.
“I’m Xander Harris.”
It puffs at him. Silenced?
No. A dart. And it’s in his neck. Gene has hardly enough time to let the burrito fall from his mouth and splatter onto the sidewalk before he tips forward and blacks out.
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Six days later and Gene is sure he’s going to die. He’s trapped in some old stone fortress, and he’s a prisoner of the man, Xander Harris, and a terrifying nine-foot tall demon. They say they’ll let him go if he helps them, but Gene isn’t so sure. The equations they want solved and the concepts they want explained are so complex that he has a hard time understanding many of them, but whatever explanations he does have seems to be enough. The demon, Changklar, seems to have some understanding of temporal mechanics that Gene can’t even begin to grasp.
“The induction matrix is sound,” Changklar says to Xander. The two of them are leaning over a large diagram spread out on a writing desk. “The inner blast zone will create the vortex. It will exist for a single moment, engulf all matter within it, and then collapse in on itself.”
“That’s not what I want,” Xander says, and Gene’s already learned that what Xander wants is the key to survival. Changklar works for him, not the other way around. “It can’t leave a big empty circle in its wake. People will ask questions when there aren’t any burn marks at the edges. The regular explosions won’t produce the proper scorching. It needs to engulf biological matter only. Whatever gets left behind will be roasted by the flames.”
“It will engulf all matter. This is how it is.”
“Then change it. You’re the great big Dolhendrinar. You can’t come up with a hex to weed out non-biological matter?”
“It’s an unnecessary alteration, and one that costs both time and resources! I still don’t see why you do not just kill them along with the others. What you plan for them is a death of sorts anyway.”
“They’re my friends,” Xander says, smiling like a used-car salesman. “I don’t want them to get hurt. This way they’re safe and out of the way.”
Changklar just snorts at him. This seems to make Xander smile wider, and he adds, “Plus if they don’t die then their deaths can’t resonate. You don’t want to go through all the trouble of killing Willow just to have some other person out there take up her place, do you? You know how the balance works. Take from pile A and you give to pile B.”
“Unless you remove the piles altogether,” Changklar finishes. “I admit, there is a cunning to it, but it all comes to naught if this human’s bomb cannot do what it must. They will die most horribly if it does not.”
“That’s why he’s going to make sure it works,” Xander says. He whirls to Gene, who tries to pretend that he had been focused on his notes and not watching their conversation. “Aren’t you, Mean Gene?”
“Y-yeah. Sure.”
“How’s it coming?”
“P-pretty good. I-if this accelerator works like you say it will-”
“Do not doubt my magicks, human,” the demon growls.
“Right, well if it works like it should, th-then the explosion should create an expanding b-but ultimately finite event horizon of sorts that will, um, effectively displace those within it outside of our space-time continuum. Except the energy it will need to maintain it will be...Well, a lot.”
“Don’t worry about that, Gene. That’s why we’ve got multiverses.”
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They kept him there for weeks. There were always new problems he had to overcome. The explosion had to be this precise, the time dilation before true space-time exemption came into effect had to be to a certain degree, the initial energy burst must be no greater than a certain amount. And all the while, he was privy to Changklar creating spells of magic and science. He was there to watch as Changklar opened portals to other universes, other realities. They needed a very specific set of conditions for the bomb to work. It wouldn’t be like the last time he’d tried to freeze time on his own, there would be no equipment to route power through. The bubble would have to be maintained by the ambient energies all around it, and that would take-
“Behold! A universe with a lifespan of a mere heartbeat.”
Changklar has his hand out and there’s a tiny white marble floating over it. Xander raises an eyebrow at it. “That’s it?”
“A portion of it.”
“Is it really that small?”
“No. And yes. What is the relativity of size when it is another universe one fathoms?”
“Yeah yeah, one hand clapping. I get it. But this is the one? You found it?”
“It will suit our purposes.”
“My purpose,” Xander amends. “This is for me, not for you.”
Changklar bows at him. “Of course. My purpose is merely to better understand the powers of space and time. I am in your debt for expanding my knowledge so greatly.”
Xander doesn’t look convinced, and Gene doesn’t blame him. The matter is dropped, however, and Xander points down to the diagram. It has been revised a hundred times since Gene first caught a glimpse of it.
“Let’s go through it then. You got your kill zone, that’s all of this out there. My explosives will handle that with no problem. Blast zone is this area here,” he make a circle with his finger and taps the center. “So I’ll kill a few right around here to drive them that way before the bombs go off. I’ll be sure to be in this section here when it does. The minute Buffy and the others enter the blast zone, boom, the charges go.” He points to Gene, “His bomb goes off, your spell gets triggered, and my biggest problems are out of the way. It’s going to work?”
“It’s going to work,” Changklar assures him. “My spell will, at least. The human’s bomb is another matter.”
“Would you quit it with the ‘the human’ stuff? I’m human too, you know. Jeez.”
“I apologize. It is,” Changklar smiles. It’s hideous. “Easy to forget.”
Xander just smirks at him. “So how’s it coming along, Genie? You about done?”
He’s done fighting them at all by then. He’d tried escaping a few times and that just led to pain. Once he refused to work, and that had led to even worse pain. There had been a day when Changklar was gone that Gene thought to sneak attack Xander and make a break for it. He wound up with a bloody nose and an aching head for his trouble.
“A-almost,” he says. And so help him, he almost is.
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It’s beautiful, Gene thinks. It’s also horrifying. He’s actually staring at another universe, one with a relative time difference so great that he is actually watching it born and die thousands of times every second, and it’s part of his sick genius that helped it to be. Every time the universe reached its end his bomb and Changklar’s magic forced it to revert and play out again, over and over and over again. It was a never ending death spiral for a universe that might have held an infinity of wonders, and that Xander and Changklar had decided to use for their own personal jail.
He’s created a bomb that can reset a universe, only Gene has no idea how it could possibly work. He just built what they told him to built and Changklar’s magic does the rest. On his own, his bombs can freeze time, although they would only last a few seconds without power. In the universe Changklar has opened the gateway to, it can freeze time indefinitely, and a second bomb can reset the rest of time around it. It’s a dizzying synergy of horror. It’s power beyond what any person should wield, even if it was not power they could wield in their own universe.
Yet was it any less horrifying to use an entire universe for your own purposes? To play with an entire universe just to have what amounted to the perfect jail, all because some madman didn’t want to kill his friends, but still wanted them dead?
Oppenheimer, eat your heart out, Gene thinks as he stares at the vortex. The three of them haven’t become death. They’ve become God. They were Gods to the reality next door, and they were an unmerciful pantheon indeed.
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“So, what do you think?” Xander asks Changklar. He’s dressed much the same as he had been the first time Gene ever met him. He’s got his cargo pants, only now every pocket is bulging. He’s got his black t-shirt, but now it’s covered by a tactical vest with guns strapped all over. There are guns strapped to his hips, his thighs, his chest, and his back. The remotes for the detonators are hooked onto his belt. Gene feels sick just looking at them.
He’s also got a patch over his left eye.
“He would not wear so many guns,” Changklar says.
For weeks now they’ve been using Changklar’s magic to watch a different Xander. It’s a Xander somewhere in a dusty town in Africa. He’s slightly leaner than the Xander that Gene knows, and he has a patch over his left eye. They’ve watched him take it off sometimes, and there is no eye underneath it. The Xander that Gene knows has matched it perfectly, even down to the tan he’d just gotten in a salon three blocks down. There was even a tan line for the strap holding the patch to his head. He looked just like the other Xander.
“Artistic license,” this Xander grins. He grips two deadly looking handguns from holsters at his hip, twirls them expertly and then checks the actions on them. He’s apparently pleased with he finds because he slips them back into the holsters. “What about it? Do I check out?”
“Your auras are identical. I managed to smooth out your irregularities, although they will only last for a few days. Then any with the sight will be able to see the death that weighs over your soul.”
Xander shrugs. Gene’s learned that death means very little to him. After all, he’s planning on killing dozens of young girls with his explosives, and doing worse than killing people that he claimed were his friends. It’s no surprise to Gene that he’s killed before, nor that he’s not afraid to do it again.
“Doesn’t matter. Just needs to check out on any inspections they do.”
“Any signature you leave behind will be identical to his.”
“Perfect.”
“They will likely kill him for your crimes,” Changklar reminds him. “If they do so while your auras are aligned, you may feel a slight discomfort for a few days.”
“Not a problem. The idiot deserves it and I can handle it. You know he was engaged to marry a vengeance demon?” He shudders and grimaces. “Guy’s a traitor, man. Total traitor.”
“You recognize the irony, I hope,” Changklar replies.
“Hey, I’m not gonna marry you, big guy, not that I’m not flattered. I’m totally using you, and I’ll probably kill you when all of this is done.”
Changklar just laughs despite what Gene thinks is a very legitimate threat. “Perhaps you will. But not, I think, until I have given you all that I can give you, and you have given me the opportunity to bask in my glorious successes. I will gladly live but a few centuries if those centuries see me as undisputed ruler of all I survey.”
“Australia,” Xander says, and Gene has the sick feeling he’s actually using Lex Luthor as a model for villainy. “You get Australia, at least until you’re not useful to me anymore.”
“Of course.”
“Well,” Xander says, and then claps his hands together before rubbing them. “You’ve got a few more months to work out the bugs, Gene. Then as soon as Retardo-Xander books a flight back to the states...It’s showtime.”
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“No!” Gene screams. He’s too weak to fight. Changklar’s done something to him, made his arms and legs weak and useless. “Please! You said I had a few months!”
“I know, but we need a real person to test it on,” Xander says, grinning at him. He’s got Gene by the shirt collar. Behind Gene screams the death and birth of the other universe, over and over again at a thousand times a second.
“Please don’t! Please! Don’t do this!”
“Don’t worry, Gene. It’s not going to hurt. One second you’ll be right here with us and the next second-” Xander’s face splits into a grin and he looks back to Changklar. “Well there won’t be another second, will there?”
“No,” Changklar says, but he is not grinning. “Get on with it. If it does not work we have little time to alter the spells.”
Tears are streaming down his cheeks. He knows what is to come. It won’t even be death. At least with death he knows there’s some evidence of an afterlife, some evidence of continuing on with existence afterwards. This will be nothing. It will be a void of never-being.
He’s two seconds away from wetting himself when Xander shoves him into the vortex. He has one brief moment to realize he is bitterly, deathly cold, and then he can
feel the bomb go off. He opens his mouth to scream, reaches his hand out to try to grab at the reality he’s been pushed out of...
And falls into a heap on the stone floor of the room he’s been held prisoner in for months. The screaming vortex is out of control, expelling the tiniest of impossibly minute energies into the real world. His mind hasn’t felt the passage of time, but something in him has, and he feels like he’s just woken up from a thousand eternities. His glasses are cracked - he doesn’t remember when this happens, but it doesn’t matter - and he looks back at the vortex. It is a maelstrom of fury. Can anyone in the world besides him realize the enormity of what it means? It’s been torn open. It’s going to spill out into their universe until...God...Until what?
Then he turns and looks at the thing that tumbled out of the vortex with him. It’s Xander, only he’s thin to the point of unhealthiness and the scarring under his eye extends beyond his patch. There are scars all over him, and he’s shivering and muttering on the floor. Then he looks to the strange girl with the blue hair who is screaming and somehow actually pulling the tear back together again. Then he looks to the thin, pale man with the bleached hair who looks down at him with a look of surprise that is far more muted than Gene would expect.
“You got me out,” Gene whispers. It should not have been possible. It was flatly, mathematically, and absolutely impossible.
And to think otherwise...Was crazy.
