A team of researchers look for reasons why one particular timeline doesn’t end in armageddon. One trainee on the team discovers the reason. We just need to have a little talk…
Two hundred and twelve student lifelines writhe in the gym, unspooling their stories, a tangled ball of yarn, touching and retreating and crossing paths over and over until the lights come on at midnight, sending students home, in universes like this one, that is, the ones that don’t play “Cotton-Eye Joe” right after “Single Ladies.” Strobe pulsing, kids lit in mid-pose, the dancers caught arms high, twisting, laughing, talking, looking at each other, then wink out to reappear an instant later, like stop-motion animation slowed.
Observers return to first positions, Supervisor Beck says in my earpiece. Check your recorders. Supervisor Beck sits on a front row bleacher in the dark in front of me. She’s dressed as one of the parent chaperones, beige slacks, a beige vest over a blue, long-sleeved blouse. I’m passing as a student: running shoes, blue jeans, button-up short sleeve shirt. Just another guy in the gym. It’s an informal dance.
If anyone asks, my name is Craig, but I’m not supposed to talk, just observe.
I get up, move down the bleachers to the dance floor. First position for me is on the other side of the gym, Alistair Nims’ side, where he sits high up on the end near an exit sign that glows red on the wall above him. I’m as far from him on this side as I can get. No one is to approach him, certainly not a trainee like me. We know what he does, hunched in his coat. We know his eyes are closed most of the time, wallowing in whatever thoughts are leading him toward pressing his button, or not.
Pounding music. They’re playing “Life is Good,” right now, by Future. A little on the nose, I think. The school administrators must not listen to the playlist’s lyrics.
It’s my third verse-jump training trip into the braid, but my first into the Liberty Concourse High School fall dance, a class-four event in the doomed timelines, in the ones where they play “Cotton-Eye Joe” after “Single Ladies.” Those kids never get out of the gym. Fifteen-year-old Alastair Nims sitting in the bleacher’s darkness, still wearing a ratty blue ski jacket zipped up to his neck, presses the button in his hand as “Cotton-Eye Joe” ends, exploding four sticks of dynamite strapped to his chest, bursting the gas line in the wall behind him, creating a cascading set of explosions that take the gym roof down, killing everyone inside.
Two years later, a multi-national nuclear exchange wipes out most of humanity, maybe all of it, over seven-billion people, but only in the universes where Nims blows up the dance. Not in the handful of threads where he doesn’t.
The detonation won’t happen in this timeline. You don’t train beginners in the snuffed-out universes. You certainly don’t put them in a gym that’s going to explode that night.
Well, that’s not quite true. In one universe, Trudy Anderson, the supervisor Beck replaced, intercepted Nims in the parking lot before the dance, and slit his throat. No one in the gym missed him—Nims had no friends—but the DJs didn’t play the deadly duo of songs. The bloody knife still in her hand, Anderson pinged the future, sending a pulse down the combined threads of every living human in that universe, and still got an echo from where those lives ended at the same time, except in this new universe she’d created where Nims died before the dance and the gym didn’t explode, the end came five months earlier.
Anderson killed herself. How could she not? Seven billion times the five months she’d taken from them was thirty-five billion months of human life. Instead of killing Hitler before he rose to power, Anderson made herself a bigger monster than him.
Wrong as she was, though, she’d given us hope. We could change the future, our future, if we made the right move. If her actions moved the end in that line five months, then something we did in our line could eliminate it altogether. The “Our Lives Matter” crowd took ascendancy at The Project. You didn’t hear from the “Their Lives Matter” position after that, at least not in public. Trudy Anderson believed their lives mattered, and it killed her. Officially, only our timeline is important and real.
We’re watching the kids, gathering vital information: why does this thread survive? What miniscule difference in the evening’s events cause the suicide bombing to not occur? Beck told the trainees in the orientation, “Theory tells us an infinite number of parallel universes exist beside this one.” She scanned the classroom, meeting our eyes. “An infinite number, but we can only reach six hundred and seven. That’s our vertical travel. We can go forward or backward in time a couple of years. That’s our horizontal travel. Maybe someday we will traverse them all, visiting universes so unlike our own that we won’t recognize any part of them, universes with art and science and philosophies we can learn from. Maybe we will share our knowledge too, but that time is in our future, if we have one. For now, we are limited to the six hundred and seven. In just six of them, Alistair Nims resists the urge to kill himself and his classmates. In all the others, in each one, he doesn’t, and two years later, seven billion people die in a nuclear holocaust. We don’t know what connects this event and the end of the world. Something that saves six universes happens at this dance.”
Like everyone recruited into the program, I’d spent the last months studying the biographies, preparing for my jumps into the braid, to the gym where two hundred and twelve students, eleven teachers, four parent chaperones, four DJs, two photographers, and two janitors gathered. I’d watched hundreds of hours of video and 3D recreations of everyone’s movements, listened to recordings of conversation. Mostly, though, I studied Alistair Nims. We know a lot about Nims. Tragic, sad, lonely Nims.
We don’t live in a universe that survives, by the way. The massacre at Liberty Concourse High happened a year ago. We’re less than a year from our nuclear end.
Alistair sits on the other side of the gym from me. I’ve walked the floor below him twice tonight, trying to look like another student, trying not to display terror. Imagine if you stepped in a room with Jack the Ripper or Jeffrey Dahmer or Josef Mengele, although in the dimly lit gym, I doubt if Alistair sensed my fear.
It’s 10:30. The line for couples’ photographs in the hallway outside the gym has dwindled to nothing, and photographers are packing away equipment. The teachers taking tickets now stand at the double doors under the basketball hoop leading to the parking lot, telling kids if they leave they can’t reenter (that way students who stashed beer in their cars can’t go out, drink, and come back). In the bad universes, we know forty-one students left before the playing of “Cotton-Eye Joe.” Our research finds no connection between them and the explosion, nor do any seem to have a relationship with the nuclear war two years later. The survivors suffered trauma to some degree, knowing they’d missed death by mere minutes in some cases, and friends died in the gym, but two years is hardly life-long damage.
I’m moving closer to the DJs, Supervisor Beck says in my ear. A week ago, when she observed a doomed line, I learned she’d tried an experiment with another crew of observers. She deleted “Single Ladies” and “Cotton-Eye Joe” from the music crew’s computers. She pinged the future to check after she erased the songs. Nothing changed. I watched the replay of the expedition. Beck deleted the songs, pinged the future, called her crew out of the gym to a hill above the school. You can hear the explosion, but no flames appear until the roof collapses a few seconds later.
The songs don’t cause Nims to detonate himself. Correlation is not causation.
I sit on a front row bleacher, my hidden equipment recording video, audio, body temps, heart rates; storing data to be sorted later, 3D-modeled and graphed. When our data is combined, we’ll add to the incredibly detailed view of this dance that can be compared to the other dances. Why does everyone die most of the time? Why does the world end or not end?
But my role now is passive. I observe, looking for clues the data would miss. The speakers blare out the ending beats from “I Will Survive” and transition into “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record).” The lights switch from strobe to different colored spots that slowly sweep over the throng. This is the best part of the evening. An hour ago, kids still stood, chatting, loosening up. Only a few danced. But now, they’re into it. I tap my feet. The metal bleacher vibrates to the bass as does my chest. If I could, I would join them. Later, my ears will ring from it.
McKenna will emerge from the mass of dancers soon. I’d seen her in the recordings, of course. Would she be as stunning in real life? I miss her at first, lost in the poor light and motion’s confusion. Kids bouncing about, raising arms, some grinding, keeping their eyes open for chaperones. Then, McKenna separates herself like a bird breaking from a great flock that wheels away. She’s barefoot, summer dress reaches her knees, ponytail to her shoulder blades.
I’ve watched the recordings. She came to the dance with friends, dancing with boys, with girls, and then by herself when they couldn’t keep up. What teenagers lack in grace, they make up in enthusiasm, which keeps them precious and a joy, but McKenna rises above. She is the dance, and the dance is her. I settle back to watch. The next song will be “Shut up and Dance.” She matches rhythm, counterpoints, swirls, her feet flying, springing, reversing direction, sort of an Irish step dance ballet with more arms.
Bare footed, toes pointing, knee bent, she twirls, her skirt floating around, whipped, rippled, dropping and rising. She stamps on a down beat, glides ten feet without seeming to touch the floor.
I should be watching more, the other kids. Why does this universe survive?
McKenna, though, demands attention. Strong legs. Runner’s legs. She’s a senior on the cross-country team. Well-liked. Good grades. “You Spin Me Round” fades out. She places her hands on her hips, breathing deeply. A blue spotlight passes over her in an azure nimbus, her face glistening. I’m sweating too in the warm gym. My palms are wet against the metal bleacher. I realize I’d been leaning forward, so I straighten and stretch. I just turned twenty. Almost a high school student myself, which is why The Project chose me. Adults like Beck change student behavior. She can’t move into the crowd like I can, the unknown student. Maybe I came from another school. Maybe I’m a new transfer. Just another kid.
In my universe, the one I’ll return to after midnight, I won’t see my twenty-first birthday.
McKenna leans into the beat of the next song, swaying. First step. She pirouettes, hands above her, palms together, then flares out. She almost flew for a second. I’m not listening to the music. Just watching her.
I sigh, forgetting the mission for a moment. You go, McKenna, I think.
A minute goes by before Beck’s voice breaks through, Something is wrong.
I stand, scanning the crowd. She’s right. I’d studied the videos and 3D recreations dozens of times from all the angles. The rhythms of their movements are familiar but off. McKenna still dances by herself, but it’s a different dance. Not the one I expect.
Hold positions.
I can’t see Beck on the other side of the gym or any of the other observers.
I should have realized sooner, instantly even. I blame my obsession with McKenna.
She dances with vigor and power, a dance celebrating movement and being alive. You don’t see that often.
But the song is “Single Ladies.”
The song that begins the countdown.
Four minutes and thirty seconds of “Single Ladies.” Three minutes and fifteen seconds of “Cotton-Eye Joe,” the song that never makes it to the end. Everyone in the gym now, except the time-jumping, universe-crossing interlopers, will die in less than eight minutes, as they do in hundreds of other universes.
My earpiece crackles as if Beck opened the line without speaking.
High in the bleachers, Alistair Nims sits. I can’t see him until a red spotlight plays across him. He’s hunched over, hands in his coat, hood pulled over his head. The light illuminates his face for a second, too far away for me to read an expression.
Miscalculation somewhere. We missed our universe, says Beck. Move to the evacuation point and exit the gym. We have time. Don’t panic.
In training class, they’d told us about theory and technology, mostly through metaphors. “Imagine layers of mica pressed together so thin that a one-inch block of the stuff, when separated, could cover a football field. The alternate universes are tighter than that. Controlling the layer we hit is the secret to traveling between universes and returning to ours.”
Another metaphor is “the braid,” lines of bound existences running side by side in infinite but parallel diversity.
Across the gym, opposite of the double doors leading to the parking lot, are locked locker room doors. Beck will let us through. We’ll pass the administration and counseling offices, past the trophy cases and state championship plaques, and out the school’s front doors. Our exit rendezvous waits atop the hill beside the school.
I’ve been trained. Reflexively, I start toward our exit, around the crowd of dancers moving to the music. Don’t rush, says Beck. Don’t call attention.
My breathing quickens, but I slow. Ten feet away, a couple faces each other, bouncing to the beat hard. The girl’s hair flies before her face. The boy laughs, hands open. He twirls and almost falls over. Beyond, their classmates wave and sway. Closer to the speakers, the music is lung-crushingly loud. I can’t see the steel girders in the ceiling above, the tons of heating units and heavy lights and electrical wiring that will collapse in minutes.
In the surviving universes, the students leave the dance at midnight. Some go to parties. Some park their cars on night-filled roads. More than a couple watch the sunrise through their windshields, but they all make it home.
In the shadows at the bleachers’ end, Beck unlocks the doors. Two other trainees are already there. They don’t glance back as they exit. The other two join Beck and are gone. I’ll be the last one out.
Kids are shout-singing the lyrics. “Oh, oh, oh.” Singing to each other, bellowing enthusiastically.
Beck spots me. She’s holding the door that will close and lock behind her. “Our lives matter,” Beck would say to me. “We’ll take what we learned from tonight. We’ll see minuscule differences and find the one that we change to save ourselves. We’ll do it.”
I pause.
Beck would say, “This is not our world. They’re not really alive.” That’s what she would say to preserve her sanity, or maybe she believes it.
Less than a year. That’s all our universe has, so in a way I’m not really alive either. I’m a delayed version of what the dancers will soon be. The gym roof in my future is nuclear fired, but it’s coming down just the same.
I turn around, move toward the kids. Beck might try to grab me, pull me back, but she wouldn’t dare enter the crowd. Too many changes if she did. I dig into my ear—turn my communicator off.
From the outside, the dance is a moving mass, like a blanket spread out and flapped from one side, undulating, but close up, it’s a bare shoulder with the dress strap dropped, an untucked shirt tail waving, a couple doing a big swoop, a bump and a push and a jostle. Sweat, perfume, breath mints, humid and warm. An agitated teenage herd.
Then I’m out of the crowd, and they’re behind me. Somehow, the music seems louder now.
I’ve never known how to answer the question: is it “Our Lives Matter” or “Their Lives Matter”?
Everything here is real. The kids have stories, hopes, desires. That’s part of my last few months: reading their biographies, connecting the lifelines, becoming an expert on the Liberty Concourse High School Dance. Maybe if they were just faces, I could dismiss them, but they’re after-school jobs and college applications, and big sisters and loved sons (and tragedies too: sophomore Bernice Neil has leukemia; junior Ray Brammer’s brother died in a car accident two weeks ago; senior Layne Wilde is alcoholic). They are not an echo of our timeline, despite what Beck argues. They’re not just an experiment we observe to save ourselves. Timeline exceptionalism is our coping mechanism.
I can’t go.
Bleachers aren’t good stairsteps. Too wide and high. I climb them, headed toward the dark lump of Alistair Nims, no plan in my head, and when I get there, he doesn’t look at me, hunched, face down. I suppose his eyes are closed, thinking whatever awful thoughts a boy who is only minutes from pressing a button in his coat pocket must be thinking. Can he feel the dynamite strapped to him, each stick pressing against his ribs? Does he wonder how the instant of detonation will feel?
“Cotton-Eye Joe” blasts from the speakers, a dance favorite. I’m a bleacher below Alistair and turn toward the gym. Kids who had been standing to the side join in. McKenna takes her hands off her hips, picks up the rhythm, slams into action.
I wonder why she dances barefoot? She took ballet for two years in elementary school without notable success. She didn’t dance the lead in any recital, and she dropped ballet for soccer and cross country in middle school. Still, she dances, lost in her dipping, weaving, bouncing world of changes in direction, pauses, swoops, self-contained exuberance.
I sit in the bleacher below Alistair. His feet rest beside my right elbow. He might not even know I’m here.
Not enough time! I know that’s ridiculous to say, if you have a time machine, but it’s true. We jump from universe to universe, and we can go back and forward in time, although not very far. We can only visit each universe once, then the twisted physics that make such travel possible locks us out. We can’t fix a previous error in a universe we’ve already tried. Experience, now, tells us we can only go back in our own time line once, which is why we haven’t gone. Our fix has to work the first time. The Trudy Anderson event tells us we can change our future, but we only get one chance at it, and time is running out. Less than a year.
McKenna dances almost below us now. I noticed her in the recordings I’d studied, of course, but the images didn’t catch her vitality.
It’s all so sad!
She, Alastair, we, me, the gym have three minutes left.
“I’ve never seen such a dancer,” I announce, shouting. “God, she can dance!” I don’t care if Alistair can hear me. In other universes, our people had sat with him, tried to engage him. We lost a couple of trained counselors. They dissolved in the flame. This close, each would have been torn apart.
Now or in a less than a year, I’m going in flame, too.
Beck didn’t tell us about the people in the gym. “Gather information,” she’d said. “We’re relying on your intuitions, your impressions. You need to see the difference the recordings don’t measure. You need to be used to the gym so when we go to our own timeline with the answer, you’ll be familiar with the scene. We need experienced agents when we make our one stab at saving ourselves.”
She didn’t tell us about the other universes’ humanity. Their lives matter.
Alistair shifts, raises his head. Is this it? Have I triggered him early?
He sits above me and to my right. I turn just enough to see his face, but I can’t see his expression in the dark. Then a spotlight crosses the bleachers, washing us with white light. I will be blind if I look into it.
Alistair’s eyes are open, looking down on the gym floor at McKenna.
And he watches.
And he watches.
Until “Cotton-Eye Joe” ends.
McKenna bends to put her hands on her thighs, winded. A loose strand of hair sticks to the side of her face. She breathes like she’s just finished one of her cross-country races, smiling from the effort.
A new song starts. A girl separates herself from the other dancers, approaches McKenna, offers her hand, and they embrace, dancing to a slow song, the first of the evening.
It’s “You and Me,” by Lighthouse, a piece that has never played at the Liberty Concourse High fall dance in any universe, because no song ever followed “Cotton-Eye Joe.” They’re dancing to the slow dance at the high school.
My heart flutters. I barely feel my breath. Tingles run from my hands up my arms.
Beck joins me just as “You and Me” ends. Sometime during the song, Alistair Nims left. I didn’t see him go.
“What did you do?” she says after she settles in. “Everything changed.”
The kids are milling among each other below. In the silence between songs, they murmur like the sea.
“The future?”
“A clean ping for as long as we can reach. These kids, this world, has a long future, now.”
What could I tell her? That I sat beside him ready to join him in his last act? That I couldn’t leave knowing I’d abandoned a gym full of children? Or should I tell her I just wanted to watch McKenna throw herself into her dance?
“I didn’t say anything to him,” I tell her, “but I gave him a reason to see.”
She digests this for a minute.
“Can you do it again?”
I smile at her, light as a bare-footed girl rising to the music. Spotlights crisscross the gym. Red beams, blue ones, green, and white. They’re dancing in Liberty Concourse High.
I lean close so she can hear. “Hundreds of times,” I say. “I can do it hundreds of times.”
END
