Bob made one last push to get through to himself. To his relief, his other self relented for just a moment, and in the next instant he was sitting on the roof of Atopia, staring into the Destroyer’s black eyes. The priest smiled and released Bob’s hand, then stood and walked away.
Grabbing himself, he dragged both parts of him down to his family’s habitat.
“Stop this!” he said to himself. His emotional side glared at him from across their breakfast table.
“It’s too late,” the other Bob replied. “You had your chance on the beach. I said to stop, to save her, to save them, but you wouldn’t.”
“You need to make it stop.”
“So now you want to stop.”
A seagull sailed by, angling away on the breeze. The slow roll of the swells and setting sun gave the impression of a lazy end to the day. On the other side of the world, the collider powered up.
Less than three minutes remained.
Bob shook his head. “I don’t want to.”
“You have to.”
“Why?”
“You can’t kill all these people.”
“I’m not killing them.” Emotional Bob laughed. “They’re already dead. We haven’t been alive since Martin killed himself six years ago. Getting high, playing games, we’re as bad as they are.” He waved an arm at the waiting billions. “We don’t even exist here anymore.” Both sides of Bob felt the awful void.
Bob stared at himself. “Do you know about the POND data?” He forwarded copies of Sid’s data streams. “The priest used us.”
Angry Bob laughed. “Maybe we used him.”
A wave crashed on the shore. Bob watched himself assimilating their past lives. He paused. It was a moment for truth. Had he pushed his brother over the edge to commit suicide? He looked himself in the eye. “You mean your suffering must end.”
Bob gritted his teeth. “Our suffering.”
“You know he took them away. Your priest, he’s the one that took Nancy and Mom and Dad.” Bob hesitated. “Even our brother.”
“Did he? Are you sure? And anyway,” said Bob, looking at himself and smiling, “if that POND data is true, then Sid and Nancy and everyone here is somewhere else as well. What does it matter if we end this one reality? The game here is lost.”
He was right.
The fragments of the POND signal, streams of Bob’s memories from other universes, contained snippets of conversations with Sid with Nancy in other similar but different places.
Two minutes now, came a warning from Sid. Two minutes until the supercollider could fire.
“This doesn’t need to be over,” Bob said to himself.
“What do you mean?”
Bob forwarded the details of a technical schematic contained in the POND message.
Both of him nodded. He might be angry, but he wasn’t entirely unreasonable.
“We haven’t much time.”
33
“Mom, there’s someone I want you to meet,” said Vince, holding Connors’s hand, pulling her attention into the world he was in.
His mother was watching an ancient cathode-ray television set, sitting in the living room of their old house on Bolton Street in South Boston. It wasn’t really a house. It was the ground level apartment of a triplex, but to Vince it was always home. He wondered how detailed this world was. If he walked outside, would he see the old neighborhood—three-level brick walk-ups with trees struggling up through cracked concrete, beat-up cars lining both sides of the street, his old friends Nick and Tony sitting on the stoop next door?
And was it all just a simulation?
Vince’s mother perked up, straightening her hair. “Oh my, it’s been a long time since you introduced me to anyone.” She leaned forward in her chair to get up.
Vince smiled. “It has been, Mom. It really has been.”
“This isn’t really the time,” hissed Connors under her breath. She was talking to her own dead mother in an alternate world when he jerked her aside.
Ninety seconds.
“This is exactly the time,” soothed Vince. “Bring your mother. We’re going up on the mountain.”
Vince secured a private spot in the wikiworld, on top of a mountain next to the Commune. The view eastward was pristine, and the sensor resolution made it feel like you were there, staring at the stars in the night sky. Vince had seen himself in the streams in the POND data. He’d seen himself through Bob’s eyes, a different version of himself, but still recognizable, living out there, somewhere else in some time and space. He’d also seen Connors. With him.
Connors started up a private world to talk, but Vince dismissed it with a flick of a phantom. “There’s nothing we can do.” Bob was gone. Vince felt that strange sense of freedom he’d felt in the jail cell. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, maybe nothing, maybe everything.”
But in his heart he knew.
From the corner of his eye, back in the cavern, he saw Zephyr smile at him. Vince smiled back. Zephyr stood holding hands with Willy and Brigitte and the Reverend. They were praying. Sid was sitting on a crate, talking to his own family.
Vince returned his attention to his mother. “This is Sheila, Mom.” It was the first time he’d used Connors’s first name.
His mother tottered forward, her smile and eyes wide. “It’s a pleasure.” She looked at Vince. “Did he mention my name’s Sheila, too?” She laughed.
Connors smiled and glanced at Vince. “No, he didn’t.” She had her own mother in tow, pulling her from her own world, their realities merging. “Mom, this is Mrs. Indigo, Vince’s mother.”
Thirty seconds.
“Come on,” said Vince, “there’s somewhere I want take all of you.” Extending his phantoms, he grabbed their attentional matrices and brought them up to the top of the mountain.
The stars spread like a carpet of diamonds above their heads.
“Vince, this is so nice,” said his mom, uncomprehending, but the reconstruction of her mind trusting like a child’s.
Hotstuff stood with them, and Vince’s mother looked at her and smiled. “Who’s this?” she asked.
“That’s a friend,” replied Vince.
Hotstuff winked at Vince, then smiled at his mother.
Thank you, Vince mouthed silently to Hotstuff. She knew what he was thinking anyway. For the first time, Vince wondered what she was thinking. He reached out and embraced her with his phantoms while reaching down to take Connors’ hand and squeeze it. “Can I ask you something?”
“What’s that?” Connors whispered.
Only seconds now.
“Can I kiss you?”
34
A pulse of protons was born, a tiny cloud of millions of hydrogen nuclei stripped down to their cores of three quarks glued together by the strong interaction force. In the intense magnetic field into which they were birthed, their combined magnetic charge accelerated them, pushing them around the thousand-mile circumference of the supercollider. Inside the protons, strong nuclear forces were orders of magnitude stronger than the electromagnetic or weak nuclear forces, each of these orders of magnitude stronger than gravity. Since the birth of this universe, this arrangement was how it had always been, but soon, it would be no more.
Around and around the collider the protons flew, their magnetic fields accelerating them ever faster. First, to ninety-nine percent of the speed of light. Time slowed down as their masses started growing exponentially. Onward toward the ultimate barrier they were pushed, to point-one percent, then to point-zero-zero-zero-one percent of the speed of light. Lights of cities around the world dimmed as the space power grid soaked up their energy and directed it into the collider.