Other Worlds Than These

“So why me? I’m a nobody.”

This is the hook, and the only undeniable truth.

“You’re one of the greatest actors of your generation, and three films wasn’t enough. You’ll have the opportunity to develop your craft and not be pigeonholed as the bad-boy rebel. Isn’t that what you’ve dreamed of since you raised sheep on your uncle’s farm?”

Disbelief and desperate hope collide in his eyes like a stormfront.

“What if I decide to never step in front of a camera again?” He crosses his arms, dips his chin. That willful petulance—

I smile. “Jimmy, it’s your life and future. Except with one possible caveat.”

“Oh yeah?”

“When I saved your life, I created a small fracture in reality. Like a fault line.”

“What does that mean?”

“If you move back to Indiana and become a dentist, events could snap back like a rubber band.”

“You mean—”

His enigmatic mother, Mildred Dean, succumbed to ovarian cancer when he was nine. She has haunted his life. Jimmy’s greatest anxiety is the specter of death, and he instinctively rejected the afterlife espoused by his aunt and uncle. That’s the lever I use.

“You’ll die, Jimmy. Like you were meant to.”

“Brane slicer” contraband, case D-T 2756

Diana: My Story (2017). Autobiography of the former Princess of Wales chronicling her privileged childhood, education, life before and after Prince Charles, motherhood, her second and third marriages, a failed 2008 suicide attempt, and her re-dedication to charitable work. Random House, 398 pages. Stated first edition. Signed by the author.

Bid: $71M EUR [convicted bidder identity redacted]

In 1974 an Air Force corporal named Pete Moss (no more a joke name than Turnipseed) found a small transistor radio that wasn’t a radio. It was constructed using highly advanced fabrication technologies, unrecognizable at the time. A Device’s invisible skin resembles graphene, incredibly strong layers of carbon arranged in a hexagon honeycomb lattice an atom thick. Inside there are no solid-state circuits or chips. Instead, intricate networks of nano-machines and quantum computers the size of large molecules link with other Devices across universes using an entanglement codec like a cosmic GPS unit, calibrating frequency shifts and navigation. Devices aren’t solid objects in the conventional sense and they easily take the form of ordinary items, chromatic surface particles coordinating to mimic a pack of cigarettes or a smartphone.

Moss’s discovery lay forgotten in Pentagon storage for forty-five years until a brilliant young DARPA analyst named Dick Jenks activated it. More on Jenks later.

DARPA-Tunnel physicists failed to reverse-engineer the Devices, but they uncovered a wholly unexpected view of existence: that endless paper-doll chain of Earths characterized by a puzzling dominant sameness. All those stories we loved of snuffing out Hitler or arming the Rebs with machine guns or stopping Oswald from murdering JFK—hopeless.

And the Devices impose three primary restrictions. Considering that we’re still homicidal primates, I think that’s fortunate, don’t you?

You cannot visit a future coordinate on another Earth. Maybe this is a fundamental law of travel of the multiverse, or maybe it’s a governor function.

Second, you can never revisit the same coordinate in the same universe.

Third, you always arrive on Earth. The Devices don’t double as transdimensional portals to Altair IV or exo- planets like Gliese 581g. A Tunnel sub-team is exploring this possibility: a cornucopian New World of raw material would vault America back to superpower status. If there’s an indigenous population, well, I think of Chris Columbus, and shudder.

Dick Jenks whimsically called it the Cristobal Effect.

The Devices deny us the tantalizing power to redirect history, but someone with access could employ one in that most signature human enterprise—making astounding amounts of money on a black market unlike any in history. Brane slicers.

What exactly were you expecting?

“You’re some kind of criminal, aren’t you?”

We’re poking around the engine of Jimmy’s Spyder, parked at the edge of a dusty Bakersfield raceway. It’s March 20, 1956.

I grin at Jimmy. “I prefer the term rebel.”

Beneath that teen-idol exterior he’s a maelstrom of driven ambition and vulnerability.

“You’ve got to tell me one thing,” he asks. “Am I going to win it this time?”

“You’ll have to wait, I’m afraid.”

I clap an oil-blackened hand on Jimmy’s shoulder, and he winces.

Eight days later he beats out Anthony Quinn, Robert Stack and Anthony Perkins to accept the Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for Giant.

I studied film history at Colombia while majoring in particle physics. I loved the magic of early cinema before digital effects and motion-capture, so it’s easy to convince myself that I’m doing a Great Thing. Saving important films that should have been made, etc. The row of glowing numbers in my encrypted offshore bank account strongly suggests that I am as full of shit as Dick Jenks.

Ask yourself why Christopher Columbus petitioned various European crowns for nearly a decade to finance his dream of a quicker trade route to India. Any classroom of overfed American children will tell you that the son of a wool weaver and sometimes cheese-stand merchant was a visionary explorer whose brave tenacity forever changed world history. Forget that their nation is erected atop a graveyard of butchered and displaced human beings. Forget the titles (Admiral of the Ocean Seas) and riches (Hispaniola gold and ten percent of all profits made in the new lands) that drove Columbus to make four hazardous journeys to the New World. Catholic priest Bartolome de las Casas catalogued the crimes committed against the people “discovered” by Columbus and his hired Spaniards during the years of single-minded pursuit of wealth and prestige: “My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write.”

Humans are explorers, but our motivations haven’t changed since before we stood fully upright.

For myself, money is no longer a valid motivation. The next films are purely for art, for posterity.

Jimmy’s name, in glowing ruby capitals, dwarfs even the picture’s title, Shipwrecked, atop the Grauman’s Chinese Theatre marquee.

Inside the lobby I stop to admire a movie poster depicting Jimmy battling Japanese soldiers on a lush pacific atoll. Jimmy gleams like a knight in his pearl-white Navy uniform, a blazing .45 Colt in either hand. A banner blares, GEORGE STEVENS’ GREATEST EPIC YET! and Over Two Years in the Making! I shake my head in wonderment. In an eternity of 1957s, The Bridge on the River Kwai dominated the awards, but now?

I approach Jimmy, with Ursula Andress at his side radiating glamour like a quasar. I pluck a fluted glass of champagne from a passing waiter and spill it down the front of Jimmy’s tuxedo jacket. The sycophants surrounding him draw back, aghast.

“Godallmighty, I’m sorry! Let me get you cleaned up!”

Inside the men’s washroom, I dab away at his soggy jacket with a wet silk handkerchief, but he shoves me against the porcelain sink.

“You.”

“That was intentional, but my hands are shaking,” I say. “I’m about to see the fourth great James Dean film. You once said you wanted to do Hamlet while you were young, and re-create the role of Billy the Kid onscreen. The future