Now That You're Here (Duplexity, Part I) (10 page)

I press Warren's doorbell and hear it chime inside. “Come on, it couldn't have been that bad.”

Danny crosses his arms. “Let's see. Today I was accused of cheating and of being stoned. I found out I'm friends with a pack of Neanderthals. I ran into one of those stupid sidewalk poles and made an ass of myself in front of everyone. Oh, and did I mention I have the lungs of an old smoker?”

I can't help but laugh. “Did anything good happen today?”

“No.”

“Well, maybe our talk with Warren will change that.”

The door opens. Warren is wearing his tinted goggles, the ones that hide his eyes. He doesn't say anything as he stands aside to let us in. Danny gives me a look that says
See?
This is going to be bad, too. When we pass the kitchen, Mrs. Fletcher looks up from her book and waves.

At the CAVE door, Warren enters his security code into the keypad and the lock
thunk
s. “Don't touch anything.”

“You sound like her,” Danny says.

I give him a small shove, which isn't the nicest thing to do. Walking into the CAVE for the first time is a trip.

Literally.

With the walls painted black, and the dark carpet, you don't see the step down. Everyone trips the first time. It's like an initiation. After you trip
in
to the room, you trip out
on
the room.

Which is what Danny does.

Which makes Warren smile.

Which I interpret as we're off to a good start.

Warren shuts the door and I try to see the CAVE for the first time again, too. Black walls. Blackout curtains. DayGlo Milky Way painted across a ceiling populated by every known model of
Star Trek
spacecraft built to scale, hanging from wires. Saltwater fish tank in the far corner. Life-size Chewbacca behind the mountain of monitors, and a plasma ball glowing pink on the shelf above. Everywhere you look there's something techie, nerdy, cool. That's why Warren calls it the CAVE.

Coolness. Abounding. Virtually. Everywhere.

I note the absence of the Death Star he'd built out of pop-tops. It used to take up one whole corner of the ceiling. I can't believe he traded it for the constellation gun. Warren drank root beer until he barfed, collecting all those little tabs. Then he hung it like a menacing eye over his Warhammer Fantasy figurines. Those are all still on their table, lined up and ready for battle, black-lit so the whites of the Orcs' eyes glow.

Warren sits in the captain's chair by the computers. And Danny sinks into the beanbag by the door. I take the stool by the Warhammer table and fiddle with a wizard figurine.

“So.” Warren tosses a Rubik's Cube between his hands. “Eevee tells me you have a problem.”

“You could say that.”

“And she thinks I can help.”

“Hope so.”

“But the question is…” Warren throws the cube up and watches it fall, spinning, into his hand. “Why should I?”

What is he doing? I set the wizard back on the table. “Warren…”

“Because here's the thing,” he says, holding a hand up to me. “You laughed the loudest after you shut me in that locker.”

Oh no.

Danny shakes his head. “That wasn't me.”

“Yes, Eevee said that, too. Convenient, don't you think? Suddenly you're not responsible for being a total asswipe?”

“Warren, you said—”

“I'd help.” He looks at me. “Yes. But what if he's just taking us for a ride?”

“Why would he make this up?”

Warren shrugs. “Have you asked him?”

I glare at Warren, then roll my eyes over to Danny. “Are you making this up?”

Danny looks incredulous. “You know I'm not.”

“See?” I cross my arms. Warren tosses the cube again. And again. And again, until all I want to do is cram the stupid thing down his throat.

Danny breaks the tension. “What happened to you with the locker was wrong.”

Warren stops tossing the cube.

“Listen, I don't know what to say or how to make you believe me,” Danny says, “but that wasn't me. I wouldn't have done that to you. The truth is, I don't remember ever seeing you before Monday morning.”

Warren swivels back and forth in his chair, just staring at him, for a long, long time.

Time to get down to the business at hand. “Danny,” I say, “tell Warren how you got here.”

Danny clears his throat. “I was climbing over this fence—”

“Why?” Warren interrupts.

“Because I needed to get to the other side.”

“What was over there?”

“A parking lot. Does it matter?”

“I don't know, does it?”

I sigh. “Warren, just let him tell the story.” Warren holds his hands up in surrender, then goes back to flipping the cube.

“Let me start over.” Danny sits forward and moves his hair out of his face. “It was Patriots' Day and there was a parade by the mall. Lots of people around. My friend and I were there on our skateboards. Suddenly there was an evacuation announcement over the sound system, and everyone scattered. Including me. There was a chain-link fence around the parking lot, and instead of finding another way around, I decided to go over it. So I'm climbing over and suddenly there's this huge explosion. Just massive. Then before I could even react, there was a second one, closer this time, that hit me like a wave. Everything went white. The force sent me flying and I landed hard. Smacked my head. It felt like my body was on fire. Then the ground sort of, I don't know,
gave way.
Like it just disappeared under me. I was falling and I thought, game over. I'm a dead man. But then, next thing I know, I'm sitting at a desk. And she's there next to me.”

“It was freaky,” I add. “He gasped like he couldn't breathe.”

Warren rests his chin on tented fingertips. “You said you hit your head. How do you know all of this isn't just some kind of amnesic episode?”

Danny shrugs. “It's possible, I guess.”

“But
your
Phoenix isn't like this, right?” I ask.

“That's for sure.” He runs his hands through his hair and closes his eyes. “I keep thinking maybe Red December had something to do with it.”

This is new. “Who?”

Danny looks back and forth between us. “You know, the anarchist group. Car-bombed the Fed building downtown a few years ago? Hacked the stock exchange back in October? Tanked the market in minutes flat.”

I can't believe what I'm hearing. From the look on Warren's face, he can't either. Danny climbs out of the beanbag and begins pacing.

“Who's the president?” Warren asks.

Danny makes a scoffing sound. “President? There hasn't been a president since my parents were kids. I mean, they have elections, but everyone knows they're just for show.”

Warren leans forward, the Rubik's Cube forgotten in his hands. “So, who's in charge?”

“Coradetti. But it's pretty much agreed he's just a puppet.” Danny stops pacing and looks at us. “You have a real president?”

The hair on my neck prickles. Warren swivels around in his chair. “Okay,” he says, his fingers typing on a keyboard. “Definitely not from around here.”

“I tried that,” Danny says. “Searching for answers. Didn't get anywhere.”

Warren snickers. “This isn't Google. This is the Dark Web.”

“Dark what?”

“Google it sometime.”

“What's google?”

Warren stops typing. “Serious? Okay, never mind. Tell me about the explosion. Did you feel heat?”

Danny takes a step to look over Warren's shoulder. “A little. But it was more like getting shoved really hard. After, when I was lying there, I felt like my chest was gonna explode.”

“Flash of light,” Warren mutters. “Maybe it was some kind of dirty bomb.” His fingers type like mad, then he punches one last key and turns around in his chair. “There. I posted a thread on the Outer Regions board. Maybe someone's heard of this Coradetti, or an explosion at a mall.”

He swivels to face me. “Solomon, remember in ‘Mirror, Mirror' when the Federation was replaced by an evil empire?”

“You mean Spock with the beard?”

“Yes.”

“What about it?”

He points at Danny.

“You think Danny's been replaced by an evil empire?”

“Exactly. I mean, no. Well, sort of.”

“What?” Danny asks.

I can feel my brain starting to cramp. “You're saying he's…”

Warren holds both hands palms down, side by side. “Parallel.”

And that does it. My brain goes into gridlock. “But Mac says there's no way to cross between parallel worlds.”

“Maybe Mac's wrong.”

I laugh. “Mac? Wrong?”

Warren ignores me and pushes his goggles up onto his forehead. He's moved right from speculation to celebration. “Solomon, do you realize what this means? Can you fathom the implications if somehow he's slipped the bonds of space-time?”

I glance at Danny standing there confused out of his skull and think of what he'd said about the museum.

He's a different Danny.

Who kissed a different me.

I try to break in, but they're locked on some scientific something I'm not even going to pretend I get. Eevee's eyes look like they're about to pop out of her head. Warren, though. He's all smiles. “This is huge, Solomon,” he says. “Life-changing.”

“Wait a second, guys.” They're not listening.

“This could open the doors to the top colleges. Research labs. NASA. You name it.”

“Wait,” Eevee says.

Warren doesn't wait. “Heck, we'll be in demand on the international scene.” He falls back into his chair and spins around like a kid.

“Wait a second!” I grab one of Warren's figurines, threatening to snap it in two.

That gets their attention. Eevee nods to Warren. “You explain it, Brainiac.”

Warren hops up from the chair. “I'll make this simple. Try to keep up.”

I hold out the action figure. Warren snatches it back and checks to make sure it isn't damaged before setting it down on a shelf.

“There's a theory—not proven yet, thus
theory
—that ours isn't the only universe.” He clasps his hands behind his back and paces. “That there are, in fact, numerous universes, coexisting alongside ours. Together they're called a multiverse. Are you with me?”

“Yeah. Kind of.”

“Okay. So in
theory,
quantum events spawn off new universes, creating parallel realities. The most famous example, of course, is Schrödinger's Cat.”

“Whose cat?”

“Erwin Schrödinger. The physicist…?” Warren pauses, apparently baffled by my lack of knowledge. He heaves a sigh as he explains. “Schrödinger suggested that if you put a cat in a box with a vial of poison gas and a trigger mechanism to release the gas if certain conditions are met, as long as the box remains sealed, the cat is both alive and dead
at the same time.
”

“Wait. I'm lost.” I look at Eevee for help. “What does a cat in a box have to do with me being here?”

“What he's saying is, when there's a decision point—say, someone getting sick—that point branches the universe into two, one for each outcome. So in the example of the sick person, in one universe the person gets better, and in the other, the person doesn't.”

“So the universe branched, and now there are two Phoenixes?”

Eevee shrugs. “Or more.”

Warren jumps in again, talking excitedly in my face. “The number isn't what's important here. It's the fact that you traveled from your universe to ours.”

Sometimes when Warren's excited, he spits when he talks. I take a step back. “And that part—the traveling bit—that's not supposed to happen?”

“Not according to the laws of physics.” Eevee sits down again on the stool. “There aren't any known connection points between universes.”

“There is now.” Warren smiles.

“No,” Eevee says.

“What do you mean, no?”

“He's a person, Warren.”

“Of course he's a person.”

“We have to be careful here. We can't say anything to anyone.”

“Not even Mac?”

Eevee stares hard at Warren, drumming her fingers on her knee, thinking.

“Eevee,” Warren whines, “we have to tell Mac.”

Finally, she nods. “Okay. But only Mac. And we tell him together.”

“After class tomorrow?”

“Deal.”

Despite not understanding most of what they said, I'm hopeful. This feels like the first step toward getting back home. And that is the best news all day.