“We eventually got it to work,” Karla grumbled, “but we made a terrible discovery. The machine doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to on regular humans. When you send somebody through, it’s a one-way trip.”
“So, we believe Dimension One’s Dr. Nash and Dimension Six-Eighty-Seven’s Karla are out there somewhere in another dimension,” the computer’s hypnotic voice continued. “Lost, with no way to get home.”
“Hold on, hold on… ” I shook my head in disbelief at what I was hearing. “You’re telling me this thing lets people travel across dimensions?”
“Again, you are halfway there,” Dr. Nash clarified. “The Interdimensional Future Doomsday Radar is a device that, in theory, grants travel to future timelines across a plethora of alternate dimensions.”
“Wait, no.” I stood up and shook my head even more vigorously. “Maaaaybe I can believe your father disappeared and that his personality was uploaded into a computer program, but now you’re trying to sit here and tell me Dr. Nash invented not only time travel, but interdimensional time travel?”
“That is correct.” The face on the screen nodded. “Shall I continue?”
I didn’t even know what to say. So, I threw out my hands, shrugged, and then sat back down.
“I guess I might as well hear you out,” I admitted. “The story can’t get much crazier from here.”
“You’re going to regret saying that,” Karla mused.
“So, this is where the Wayfarers come in,” Dr. Nash began once more. “Each timeline has what we call a ‘Wayfarer,’ or a person who has the ability to travel back and forth across space and time. Unfortunately, the Dr. Nash of Dimension One wasn’t one of them.”
“We spent years trying to find the Wayfarer of this dimension,” Karla added. “I scoured the world looking for anyone who might fit the bill.”
“And how do you know when people fit the bill?” I chuckled. “Did you just go up to them and ask ‘Hey, are you an interdimensional time traveler?’”
“Wayfarers are surrounded by anomalies in the timeline,” Karla retorted without missing a beat. “They’re people who constantly experience things like deja vu, precognition, prosopagnosia, and other similar phenomena of the mind.”
“Well, that only narrows it down to a few million people,” I joked, but Karla didn’t seem to be in the mood for jokes.
“I did my best, given the circumstances,” the brunette woman scoffed. “I was in my twenties, barely even above the legal drinking age, and I was next to alone. Mom was dead, and Dad was gone… It wasn’t exactly a simple task.”
“No, it wasn’t.” The face on the screen frowned. “That’s why I wanted to make sure she was never alone again. The Karla of Dimension One may not have been my daughter, but I couldn’t bear to see her lose her father again.”
“So, you uploaded yourself into the computer,” I finished the statement for him.
“That’s right,” he confirmed.
“We put him into sleep mode about five years ago,” Karla explained. “This thing only has so much juice left in it, and I didn’t want to waste it while I jaunted about looking for the Wayfarer.”
“I instructed Karla not to wake me until Dimension One’s Wayfarer was found,” Dr. Nash noted, “and now, here you are in the flesh!”
“I-I think you might have the wrong guy,” I admitted. “I mean, I have some bouts of deja vu just like any normal human being, but I’m just a regular dude who spends his weekends playing video games and binge-watching Japanese anime. I’m no interdimensional traveler. Besides, what are the chances the one guy you’re looking for just drops onto your doorstep like this?”
“That’s what I thought at first, too,” Karla admitted, “but my father here seems to think that ‘fate’ made it so.”
“I’m not some super badass time-jumper,” I repeated. “There’s no way.”
“I have a sample of your blood, Hunter Bragg.” Dr. Nash’s glowing head nodded. “It has the genetic makeup of a Wayfarer.”
Now, the room started to spin around me, so I leaned back in my chair and looked up at the ceiling to keep from passing out. There was no way. This had to be all a dream. Nothing but a dream…
And if it wasn’t, these people were certifiably crazy.
Was I really supposed to believe I was talking to a living computer, whose consciousness was uploaded from a man from another dimension, and that I was some sort of special mutant who could jump across space and time?
This was insane, and I had a feeling it was about to get even crazier.
“Okay, okay… ” I motioned with my hands to try and calm the situation down. “Let’s say I’m the Wayfarer of Dimension One or whatever. Why do you need me here? Do you want me to try and find this dimension’s Dr. Nash?”
“Yes.” Karla nodded. “But only after you’ve saved the world.”
Of course “saving the world” was going to be thrown out somewhere. Now, I just needed “you’re our only hope” and “you’re a secret orphan from another planet” to get a fictional savior bingo.
“Again,” I reminded both of them, “I’m a Pest Control Technician. Unless the world is going to be overrun by a bunch of bugs or rats or snakes, I’m not sure how exactly I can help you.”
“There may be a timeline where that’s the case,” Dr. Nash admitted, “if that’s so, then I suppose you’d be more than prepared to take on the challenge, eh?”
I really didn’t like where this was going.
“You need to understand what my father’s work was all about, Hunter,” Karla interjected. “It wasn’t just about crossing interdimensional timelines or finding special people or even bending the laws of space and time. It was about preventing Doomsday. It was about saving billions of lives.”
Okay, now I knew I was being pranked. Surely, there were some hidden cameras around here somewhere, and Ashton Kutcher was gonna come out and tell me I’d been Punk’d.
Might as well play along with the insanity.
“Doomsday?” I fake gasped. “What kinda Doomsday are we dealing with here? Pandemic? Alien invasion? Volcanic eruption?”
“Here in Dimension One?” Karla raised an eyebrow. “We don’t know. That’s why we need the Wayfarer.”
“According to the IFDR,” Dr. Nash interjected, “there is an anomaly that happens here in this world, or a ‘Doomsday Scenario,’ if you will. It has already happened across dozens of different timelines, in a dozen different ways. We believe the only way to prevent it from happening in Dimension One is to save the human race in said dimensions, study what caused their own Doomsday, and then prevent it from happening here.”
“You’re right,” I admitted, “that’s a lot to take in. Why can’t the Wayfarers in these different dimensions just step up to the plate and save their own worlds? Why don’t the David and Karla Nash of those dimensions just find their own Wayfarers and save the world themselves?”
“Two reasons,” the face on the screen explained. “First, if Doomsday has already happened in the other dimensions, then chances are our dimensional clones didn’t survive. Secondly, much like yourself, the Wayfarers of the other dimensions don’t know they are special.”
“That’s kinda asking a lot of a Pest Control Technician, don’t you think?” I semi-mocked.
“It is,” Nash said, “but you are our only hope, I’m afraid.”
There it was.
“I do wish you were a soldier or at least a cop or a firefighter or something like that,” Karla sighed. “Hell, I would have even settled for a former black belt.”