Intrepid Page 7

  The gesture from anyone else would have felt intimate. Instead, Iago just made me feel safe, like he knew exactly how to take away this new experience of pain. “See. You’re okay,” Iago whispered over and over again. “You’re okay.” And suddenly, I felt okay.

  My chest heaved up and down like my heart was going to tear out of my chest with velociraptor claws. I examined the marbled cracks in his eyes, and the way they spread out every shade of green.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  He smiled, but then we heard the door hinges move.

  “Um… Iago…” Crystal said from the open door. She looked at us with stories forming on her tongue as Iago dropped his hands away from my face. “You’re Homecoming King,” Crystal said what she came in there for. “They’re waiting on you to start the dance.”

  “Tell them I’m not here,” Iago said, but there were already faces peeking into the restroom.

  I couldn’t move or breathe for a different reason. It wasn’t what it looked like—Iago and me standing in the bathroom with my face in his hands—but even I knew that rumors were things with wings.

  Liam

  A twofold tale I shall tell:

  At one time it grew to be one

  In solitude

  Out of many:

  Another grew apart to be many

  Out of the singular.

  Double is the birth of all things mortal,

  And double their destruction,

  For one is brought to birth and destroyed by the coming together of all things,

  The other is nurtured and deconstructs to drift apart again.

  This continual exchange refuses to cease.

  But it is Love all coming together into one,

  Only to be deconstructed into the hatred of Strife.

  The two exist always in this changeless cycle.

  Love being the coagulator,

  Strife being the deconstruct-or.

  And in this, we know that one cannot exist without the other.

  -Empedocles

  -S-1200, V-49098-L9098645678, Prod.

  Chapter Twelve

  I pulled the line in, and the wire re-spooled around the reel. The hour Nobu was supposed to be gone came and went, which meant he was visiting a certain someone. I wished he had hurried on his supply run because we could have spent a couple more hours tracking Arti, but now the bottom of the sun kissed the waves and Arti would have to wait.

  Instead of being upset by this, I decided to revel in the peace and quiet because, even though it was only Nobu and me on this boat, it was nice to know I was completely alone in this space and time. The only fish biting were the green-gills, with their rainbowed fins and squishy eyes. They weren’t my favorite, but they were tasty when fried.

  I cast the line back out, and waited for another bite. After ten more minutes of this, the sun was all but gone from the sky. The green-gills never bit in the dark, so I reeled it back in one last time.

  “Catch anything?” Nobu’s voice drifted from the deck above, and although it startled me, I didn’t let on how much. He was a sneaky bastard, and he loved giving me crap anytime I wasn’t as aware of my surroundings as I should have been. He was all about keeping me on my toes.

  “Enough for my dinner, but you, my friend, are shit out of luck.”

  “Then no ice cream for you!” he yelled and held up a bag.

  “You didn’t!”

  “Mint chocolate chip and raspberry crème.”

  I laughed. “Fine. Fine. I’ll share my fish. Meet you in the galley,” I called up to him, but he’d already headed that way.

  I latched the hook on the third ring of the rod and dropped the pole off in the gear cupboard. Then I grabbed the three fish I did catch and headed to the galley. Nobu was already in the kitchen putting the groceries away and humming a tune that only meant one thing.

  “Supplies, huh? How was Biiii-ly?” I stretched out the name and falsetto-ed my voice to really dig in and felt a sense of victory when he blushed. His “supply runs” kept lasting longer and longer lately. Last week, he was gone an entire day.

  “Mock all you wish, but one day, you’ll understand.”

  I shook my head no and pulled out the fillet knife and a cutting board so I could clean the green-gills. “I understand plenty. There isn’t time for that.”

  A look of deep sadness fluttered onto his face. “You won’t be stuck on this boat forever. In the near future, you’ll be allowed your first leave.”

  “That doesn’t mean I’m going to seek out a love life, Nobu.” I tried not to be frustrated by this conversation. We always talked about him when it came to this stuff, and I didn’t like that the tables had been turned in the course of a few measly sentences.

  “Just wait until you meet the right girl… or will it be a boy?”

  It was the first time he’d ever asked me my preference, and I blushed. “Dude. You know how you’ve always known you’re into boys? I’ve always known I’m into girls.”

  Nobu laughed. “Fair enough, dear brother of mine, but you’ve never even met a girl before.”

  “Not my fault.” I snorted as I wrenched the knife into the belly of the green-gill. Scales sparkled under the lighting, and I almost felt guilty destroying something so beautiful.

  “Well, that might change, and you’ll never know what attraction feels like until someone makes you feel it.”

  “There won’t be anyone like that for me. Not if I’m gonna make Grande Master by the time I’m your ripe old age.”

  Nobu pulled out some potatoes and began peeling them. “Your sense of duty is commendable, but you are human. Part of being human is the ability to love.”

  “And part of being human is wanting to save humanity. I’m not an Explorer. I’ve had my entire life to come to terms with my role in this. I Stand on the Shoulders of Giants, not some girl.”

  The potato in his hand took on a maroon shade of red under the water he rinsed it in. Nobu had something on the tip of his tongue, but he was avoiding saying it. After a lifetime on a boat with someone, you start to notice when they hold back and when they give it to you straight. Lately, Nobu had been holding back a lot. Instead of saying what he wanted to, he said, “Well. Technically, you have one girl in your life.”

  “Har. Har. Speaking of, Geronimo wrote another piece about Texi.”

  “Any clues in it?”

  “Nope. Only that he thinks the Change will happen. I don’t blindly agree with him, but I have a feeling he’s right.”

  “You’ve been in the sun too much, and your brain is fried,” Nobu said. “There’s a seventy-five percent chance one canceled out the other. Even if she’s showing symptoms, it doesn’t mean she’ll survive the side effects. If anything, I bet she dies within the week. It’s too much for a brain to handle.” I couldn’t tell if there was malice or fear in his voice.

  “That’s cruel.”

  “Cruel? Or true? Look at this objectively. What they did to her isn’t natural, and no brain should have access to what they have tried to give her. She’s as good as dead. Have you seen the circles forming under her eyes? The headaches are coming, which may not be the good sign you think it is.”

  Just talking about her headaches began to trigger one of my own, and I gripped the filet knife a little harder as I cut. “I see where you’re coming from. There’s so many things that can go wrong before they go right, but sometimes, Creation gets lucky. Take Earth. Had it been the wrong distance from the sun or a different mix of chemicals, there’d be no life on it. So many improbable things happened so that Earth could sustain existence. The improbable is just as possible as the probable. You might be right, but there’s still a twenty-five percent chance you’re one-hundred percent wrong.”

  “Touché,” Nobu said. His expression was pained when he looked at me, and I got the overwhelming feeling he knew something more.

  “Are you afraid of her?” I asked.

  “Aren’t you?”

  “You
saw it then? In her eyes?”

  Nobu nodded. We found the same things in our Condensing after all, and it worried him as much as it worried me. “As much as we can hope for the best, we can’t forget she’s dangerous,” he said, for what felt like the millionth time.

  “Dangerous or not, we have a responsibility to objectivity. We can’t jump to conclusions on this one,” I said. That was the thing about Texi. It was easier to fear her than to try and understand her. It was a curse she didn’t realize she carried.

  He nodded. His tanned hands zoomed over one potato after another with the peeler. “Speaking of Jumping, I’m guessing by the look on your face that the headaches are getting worse.”

  I nodded.

  “Appreciate these moments. It means your brain is growing. Let me know when they start happening in intervals of twenty minutes.”

  I grinned over the pain in my head. I’d been waiting for this my entire life.

  The Change was coming.

  Chapter Thirteen

  I rubbed my fingers over the rows and rows of books on the shelves in the den and pulled out the one that was the most tattered.

  The Manifesto.

  I sat down and opened it up, examining the margins where my handwriting layered between Nobu’s. Since we were kids we wrote our own thoughts into the text. Corbin taught us that it was a different form of data collection on the self. He told us, “With annotations, you can see what you used to think and compare it with what you currently think on a text. Experience has a way of changing how you look at things. Remember that.”

  The book was large and clunky, but it always calmed me to spend time with it. I flipped to the Origin Story. It was always my favorite because it explained the birth of the Multiverse. Whenever I was scared or nervous, I returned to these passages for comfort, and at the moment, with the Change looming in front of me, I was terrified.

  I read the first paragraph out loud, and let my own voice still the havoc in my heart. “Everything has a beginning and everything has an end. In our beginning, there was the Nothing: which has no metaphors or analogies to describe it accurately. Within this Nothing, the universe of Origin, Gaia, was conceived during the Big Whisper, and with the birth of Gaia came the birth of Energy.”

  Sometimes I wondered what would have happened if Gaia had never diverged into a second universe. I wondered what a life without the reality of a Multiverse would feel like. Would I have grown up in some tiny boring town leading a miniature existence compared to the one I lived now? What would I be worrying about instead of the Change? What kind of kid would I have been back on the Gaia-verse, unable to do anything special, like travel between parallel worlds? It was an imaginary life that horrified me, because there was nothing worse than living a life that was less than extraordinary.

  “I thought I’d find you in here,” Nobu said from the doorway. “You okay?”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure what my answer was to that question. I felt far from okay, and my head was swimming in a kind of pain I’d never experienced before.

  Nobu walked in and peeked at the page I had open as he sat down next to me on the couch. “Ah, the Origin Story. Remember when Corbin explained the Splice?”

  Nobu was trying to distract me, like when you stub your toe and it’s all you can think of until you bang your shin on the table. I didn’t know if talking would distract me from the pain, but I gave it a shot. “He said the Multiverse was alive, splitting and replicating like cells in the body. And like cells, each Splice makes two identical copies that continued on their own paths. They have the same Origin, but different futures.”

  Nobu grinned, and added. “This is why every universe only parallels to a certain extent, because they grow into something that is entirely unique.”

  I remembered the old man with his wrinkled hands drawing a circle on the screen projected on the wall. He tapped it, and it replicated so many times the wall was overcrowded. Then, he said with his rusty voice, “This is how the Multiverse experiences growth. It’s as alive as you or me, and just like all living organisms, it is adaptable and instinctual. The only interest it has is survival and self-preservation. It’s the same for humans. We know we will eventually die, but it does not mean we welcome death. It is in our nature to fight it to the bitter end.” Thinking of Corbin filled me with a sense of missing. He wasn’t always around, but he was the only other family I’d known besides Nobu.

  I looked at the margins of the book and saw the corner where I’d drawn circle after circle layered on top of each other. The pencil markings were smeared with a few years of aging, but the idea was still the same. We lived in an overcrowding Multiverse, and because of this, it was dying. The Origin Story was the one that terrified me the most because it made me recognize our ultimate approach to the end.

  “Keep reading it,” Nobu suggested, and I ran my finger under the words as I read:

  “After the Origin of Energy, rather than remain concentrated in the Nothing, it spread out to begin the process of life. In this, the Multiverse sacrificed concentrated power for existence. The initial, chaotic burst expanded into the first universe, and once it began, chaos could not stop.

  “The chaos of Energy is within you, it is within me, and it is within everything.

  “It is what propels the Multiverse to expand.

  “However, everything has its limits, including the Multiverse.

  “Unintentionally, the Multiverse became a bottle containing a set amount of Energy. This Energy could only readjust into new shapes within the confines of its set parameters, so it became a truth that Energy could be neither Created nor Destroyed. Instead, Energy became interchangeable fuel for the readjustment of matter. The more the Multiverse Splices, the more it readjusts the amount of Energy available for each, individual universe. The Multiverse attempts to expand in infinite ways using a finite source of Energy.”

  I pulled in a gasp of air as a wave of pain collided between my ears. There was a feeling scraping across my irises like a million caterpillars crawling back and forth across them, and I could feel every infinite mile within their tiny feet as they traversed the terrain of my eyes. Nobu took the book from my hands and let me put my hands over my eyes. I rubbed them raw and tried not to cry. I wasn’t exactly a crier, but I felt a good solid sob coming on. I pulled at my earlobes, then held my own hands, pinching my skin to distract me from the tears I wanted to let out.

  Nobu tried to let me keep my dignity, so rather than look at me, he read from the book:

  “Yet what does this mean for the survival of the Multiverse? It cannot stop Splicing, because that would be like stopping a child from growing past the age of two while letting its mind continue to grow in knowledge. It is an impossibility to trap maturity in a body that cannot handle it. But every time a universe Splices, it isolates Energy into a new container, diluting the power of the Multiverse the more it spreads, forcing Energy to settle into Stagnation.

  “This Stagnation of Energy is the death of movement, and the death of movement will be the death of us all.”

  He closed the book with a gentle thud and sighed. “Kind of morbid for today, don’t you think?”Another invisible fist squeezed my brain between its fingers, and I let out a small yelp. Nobu’s fingers laced into mine, and he tethered me to his calm presence. “You’re doing great, Liam.”

  I gulped back the choking saliva gathering at the back of my throat, and I submitted my sight to the blackness found behind closed lids. But it felt too claustrophobic, and I finally had to open my eyes to the soft lamplight flooding the walls. There was Energy surging through my veins and blooming in my irises. Nobu never told me about the way the eyes would burst, but then again, the Change was hard to talk about. Even Nobu had trouble describing it.

  Though it was a pain I’d anticipated my entire life, I could never have prepared for how incapacitating it would be. I felt the Knowing activate in my bursting heart, and I suddenly contained feelings beyond instinct. Every fiber of my be
ing wavered between fire and ice. With my free hand, I fiddled with the Planck Activation Bracelet on my wrist. The silver was smooth and soothing, and I couldn’t remember a time that it hadn’t been on my body. The fidgeting gave the Energy a place to go, and I took a deep breath.

  “Your headaches are about twenty minutes apart. I’m going to activate the Jump,” Nobu said. I tried to ignore the fear that floated to the surface of his expression. What reason did he have to be afraid? The Change was a natural part of life.

  My mouth, which seconds before had felt so overwhelmed with saliva, had suddenly become a dry desert that made the roof of my mouth feel the shape of every tastebud on my tongue.

  “You ready?” he asked as he pulled up the screen from my Planck Activation Bracelet.

  I was. I’d been ready for a long, long time.

  Texi

  The Energy Convention of 1763

  We now know that Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. We now know that Energy simply changes form.

  I can’t help but wonder what this means for us. If we trace back the evolution of humans and pay attention to just how far we’ve come, what does that mean for our children? Before our eyes, humanity has changed form in subtle ways, yet we refuse to acknowledge it. What does it mean to be human, and how will this definition change as we humans do?