My Internet Nightmare Read online

  Chapter P-5

  Cole remained overly conscious of the advertisement sprawled across his chest. He knew some of the ancient city-states revered the warrior culture, especially Sparta, but somehow, he didn’t think his love for the movie 300 was going to help him fit in with this world.

  He hadn’t yet learned if these people still respected and glorified their military. For all he knew, they no longer had need of an armed force. If these researchers understood the word across his chest, they might have been holding him in silent contempt.

  There wasn’t much choice when it came to wardrobe. It wasn’t as though he had time to pack a bag for this trip, and somehow the rucksack carrying the belongings he had brought with him from Fort Benning didn’t make the trip with the rest of the crap from his father’s lab. Until he had an opportunity to procure a new set of clothes, he was stuck with the billboard.

  His sergeant had stopped him on the way to the bus, warning him he might want to reconsider his civilian attire. The man even went as far as to call him and some of the other boots “motards” for broadcasting their service to the world.

  Cole understood the point the saltier dogs made, he really did. It wasn’t as though he had proven his worth. He hadn’t yet gone out on deployment and “earned the right” to call himself a soldier as some of the other sergeants barked. There were even accusations from some of the senior enlisted that boots like him went out to the civilian world to fish for that occasional appreciation from people who couldn’t tell the true war heroes from the states-side boots.

  None of that played into Cole’s choice. He wanted nothing more than to throw his service in the face of all the New York liberals who quietly rued his generation’s habit of blaming the politicians for the wars, not the soldiers. He could see every time he was in a Panera Bread or a Starbucks or a Chipotle and someone played one of those videos too loudly on their cell phones or tablets – the ones where a soldier comes home from overseas and surprises their unaware children – or when someone in uniform happened to walk in that many of those faces had a look of disgust twisted on them. It almost offended them when someone approached and offered a “thanks for your service,” that they could not approach and spit on the individual as they had done when their own generation returned from Vietnam.

  And in Cole’s mind, it wasn’t as though he paraded around in his full uniform as some of the others in his platoon were apt to do. Sure, the shirt was authorized for PT, and he could get away with it under his desert Alphas, but the cargo pants weren’t regulation. They might have reminded one of those uniforms, but they didn’t sport the camouflage pattern those uniforms pants bore. He might have been a motard in the sergeant’s eyes, but really, he wasn’t that “motivated.”

  If it bothered their hosts, they didn’t show it.

  Arank and Eudora had led them to one of the lifts and taken them up almost sixty stories higher in that massive structure. The five of them stepped off and headed into a plaza ringed with restaurants. This must have been the entertainment district in this building, and Cole wondered what other kind of entertainment they had to offer around here.

  Still, those translators didn’t translate the written signs describing each venue, so he was just as lost in navigating this district as he had been in understanding those guards without that magical device.

  The plaza itself bustled, but it was nowhere near as packed as those they crossed when their friends led them away from that jail that morning. The crowds were small enough where the public space had a more relaxed feel to it.

  People hung out by the massive columns. Couples kissed around the fountain. Some even watched the ads roll off the pervasive billboards.

  As they neared one restaurant, there was one woman in the entire crowd who caught Cole’s eye. Her skin was reddish like Arank’s and her hair was jet black, pulled back behind her head. She appeared to be a teenager like him, but her plain, almost out-of-place clothing with streaks of dust layering the dull gray of the cloth, and the broom resting in her hands while supporting her weight as he passed her by suggested she was there as custodial help and not as a tourist.

  Their eyes locked and hung on each other while they passed. Hers were piercingly dark. Though it might have given her an ominous quality to anyone else catching her attention, to Cole they were almost mesmerizing. Yet there was nothing mesmerizing in the way she watched him back – almost as if she were studying him.

  Cole had been so used to being a white male in a white world, his skin color never entered his mind. It was never a feature that left him sticking out as an oddity as it did in this world. The pale Greeks stood out against the red Lenape in much the same way, but even their skin had a tinge of olive which differentiated them from him – and there were more of them within the population so that someone like Eudora was not the oddity Cole and his father were.

  Cole considered she probably never saw someone as pale as him (he had to admit, despite the hot Georgia sun, he was awfully pale, even for a white boy). His eyes fell away from hers when they had passed far enough ahead that he could no longer crane his head without being obvious.

  His group had reached the restaurant they were after anyway, and Cole was hungry.

  Inside, he spied the rest of the guests waiting for them. They rose from the large table set in the middle of the restaurant to greet them and introduced themselves.

  Of course they already knew their escort Arank who was the lead scientist on this project, and Eudora the sociologist and liaison to Athens.

  An older woman introduced herself as Wawetseka. Her title didn’t quite translate, but she was the equivalent to a lieutenant governor for Lenapehoking (the actual governor being detained with a prior commitment). Like many politicians back home, she seemed kind of worn and tired, as if she had been waiting years for her turn at the state’s helm, only to be frustrated at every opportunity that arose.

  Rowtag was a junior to the project, second to Arank. His face was as leathery as Arank’s and his expertise matched his age. Michael would be working with him whenever Arank had to step out, but otherwise, he was expected to deal exclusively with Arank.

  Chogan and Lysandra were the equivalent of lab assistants. Though they had their own degrees in the Greek version of astrophysics, they were still relatively young and therefore required to put in their time under a more experienced scientist as an apprentice might with a master. Like Jessica with Michael, they were still trying grasp the intricacies of fieldwork.

  The last individual was also the most curious. “This is Huritt,” Arank introduced.

  The young man circled the table to shake their hands, making sure to approach from Jessica’s side of their group. He was about her age, younger than either Chogan or Lysandra, but he was more “athletic,” as Cole thought, not really wishing to admit to a stronger adjective. Like the other men, he wore a plain sleeveless vest, but his arms filled it out more flatteringly. He left it open across the chest to show off, and it was obvious to Cole that Jessica was very impressed. Her eyes studied the slicked back hair and the square jaw.

  Huritt took the young woman’s hand and kissed it delicately while keeping his gaze locked with her starry eyes. “It is a pleasure to meet you,” he said. The actual voice sounded smoother than the English translation that came through the earpiece.

  “I’m Dr. Michael Greenburg,” the old man said, extending his hand for the courtesy.

  But Huritt did not take his eyes off Jessica’s, nor did he release her hand. Cole couldn’t help but notice Jessica’s blushing cheeks. They practically lit the room by themselves, and he had to roll his eyes while noticing the slight smile Arank offered for their display.

  “Huritt comes to us with a background in temporal mechanics,” the lead scientist added to get Michael’s mind off the unintended slight.

  Cole’s father dropped his lonely hand and studied both the scientists quizzically. “Temporal? Are you saying yo
u can travel through time as well?”

  “Not at all,” Huritt told him softly without removing his eyes from the magnificent woman standing before him. “From what they tell me, each of your universes offers a glimpse into another time. Those worlds offer unique histories unlike our own, but they are glimpses into a past nonetheless.”

  “Sometimes the future,” Michael noted.

  “True,” Arank said, taking his seat as an invitation to the rest of the group.

  Cole really didn’t want to take a seat next to his father, but their hosts didn’t leave him much of a choice. The servers came around to take their orders, and he decided to distract himself on the décor rather than risk making eye contact with Michael. The voices around the table were loud enough that he didn’t miss anything.

  “I must admit,” Huritt spoke to the group while his eyes returned once more to Jessica seated squarely across from him, “that I do not entirely understand the concept of your multiverse. If these other universes exist, where are they and how do you expect to travel to them?”

  Like bubbles in a bath. Cole doubted anyone on this project had the same trouble grasping these concepts as he had. More than likely, it was a subtle test of how much his father understood; and the man was all too happy to show off his knowledge once more.

  “We have a number of theories,” Michael began, “as to the nature of these universes and where they’ve come from. The most popular suggests that they exist in the same plane of existence, but they are slightly out of phase with each other, that by piercing some dimensional barrier, we can cross from one to the other without truly leaving our lab.

  “Other theories suggest that they are collections of matter separate from that which we consider our own universe, and they aren’t far from the truth. Think of the multiverse as a collection of bubbles in a bath. All of these distinct universes spring up beside each other within the larger fabric of empty space.

  “That fabric by itself has a distinct texture which gives rise to the new universes, but once a universe forms and corrupts that texture, a new universe cannot form within it. The edge of each universe also has a bit of surface tension which holds back the neighboring universes. It is not impossible, and it will happen that the surface tension can break just enough to allow two universes to merge into one giant universe.”

  “If that is the truth,” Huritt wondered, “then how is it possible to travel to these other universes when we cannot cross our own?”

  “Simplistically speaking, the matter of these universes acts in much the way soap does when you add it to dirty water: it repels the foreign matter in the water. In a sense, all we have to do is reach that surface membrane and the universe itself will propel us around and away and into one of those other universes.

  “Now, as your scientists have discovered, it can be dangerous. You could end up anywhere within another universe. Worse, you could end up sliding along the surface of each bubble until you reach the end of the multiverse where you may never be able to pick out your own from that infinite sea of bubbles.”

  “But you still have to reach the edge of your own universe first,” Huritt insisted.

  “We’re already there!” Michael exclaimed. “When a universe begins with a Big Bang, all the matter is thrown outwards in all directions at a near constant speed. It all rides the edge of that shockwave and occupies the outer shell of the universe in much the same way all of your buildings rest on the edge of the Earth’s surface.

  “The universe seems three dimensional to us, but it is only so in the way that your city is three dimensional – You do not build all through the crust going down to the core and you do not build these cities rising into space. Relatively speaking, your cities are rather flat, and thus is the nature of the universe.

  “But like the Earth, that universe is a spherical structure. There might be little within the sphere, but we can see through to the part of the universe that occupies the far side of the sphere. And like the Earth, if we could travel clear across what we perceive to be the universe, eventually we could go all the way around that sphere and return to Earth without having to turn around and backtrack.

  “Since we are already at the edge of the universe, we really don’t have to go anywhere. The device I designed creates a field that is repellant to the surface tension of our bubble. When I untether that field, the universe itself makes the trip possible.”

  It was Wawetseka who interrupted next with her own supposed confusion. “I must admit I do not understand how we can see the past by going to these other universes.”

  “In my world,” Michael sighed, “science fiction likes to use the cheat that the entire multiverse was created at the same instant – that each universe exists in the same moment of time so that we might see how our society would look if one event played out differently – but that is not the case.

  “These alternate universes are constantly springing into existence, so no two will ever share the same moment in time. You and your society might represent a moment in history a thousand years ahead of my calendar, or you might live a thousand years in my past – we won’t know for sure until we actually calibrate our separate calendars.

  “But you saw that for yourselves when you said past researchers sent a probe out to witness the destruction of the Earth during the sun’s red giant phase. And we saw it when the first two worlds we visited represented Earth at different points in its very early history.

  “Now, I theorized that when a universe springs into existence, the neighboring universes develop shortly after. The very first universe sits at the center of the multiverse while the new creations spread from it in much the same way a universe expands from that central point of the Big Bang. If I’m right, it means all neighboring universes will line up more closely with yours than those at the far edge of the multiverse. And if our two worlds are separated by a thousand years or less, then we would be relative neighbors in the multiverse.”

  The servers brought the food and the discussion fell to silence. Glasses fell to the table. Napkins went into laps. And forks rose to prominence as each one became anxious to sample the chef’s creations.

  The natives of this world took the first bite without much thought. To them, this food was familiar. The Lieutenant Governor might have been used to more lavish meals, while the scientists were probably eating familiar foods presented in a way that elevated it above their means.

  Before Cole sat a cut of salmon topped with beans and squash with a drizzle of lemon juice and a few spices he wasn’t familiar with. It might have all been standard food he had remembered, but he would never have thought of topping salmon with beans and squash.

  As he sliced his fork through the flaky fish and brought the first bite to his lips, he was reminded of what Arank said about their food being manufactured. He was curious as to what fake food tasted like, and the twisted expression broadcast his answer.

  “You don’t like it?” Arank asked.

  All eyes looked up at him from their own plates, and he could already hear his father’s voice in his ear berating him for embarrassing them all. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the fish and he didn’t want to offend his hosts with the thought it was so.

  “I don’t hate it,” he offered trying and failing to choose his words carefully. “It just tastes different from what I remember. There is something strange about it and I can’t quite place it.”

  “It is the manufactured nature of it,” Wawetseka noted. “No matter how closely we are able to duplicate natural food, there is something in the flavor we can never seem to capture. Most people, all they have ever known are the manufactured products, so they do not realize that flavor is absent. They are used to it and like it. But for those of us lucky enough to have indulged in a natural cut of meat or a natural vegetable, we find it hard to enjoy this. Do not feel bad, my boy. I know you do not find it ‘bad,’ merely ‘disappointing.’”

  Cole smiled at her
attempt at kindness, but still he didn’t want them to feel he bore insulting thoughts toward their generous meal. “It reminds me of the veggie omelet in our MREs – tastes nothing like veggies or eggs.”

  Michael nudged him with a sharp elbow hoping to silence him before he made a bigger fool of himself, but Eudora leaned forward in her chair, anxious to hear more.

  “What is an MRE?”

  “Don’t!” Michael sneered in his ear, but Cole simply ignored him. His father was merely upset that he was no longer the center of attention.

  It did not escape Cole’s notice that the man swam in the attention those Greek and Lenape eyes fixed on him when he shared his stupid theories on this whole multiverse. His pride and his ego practically exploded across the table as he got to share his life’s endeavors with an eager crowd. Even Cole realized these people knew those theories, and they probably had a better grasp of it all than his father did.

  Now that those eyes were fixated on his son – his disappointment – he couldn’t stand it. Somewhere in that hard head of his sat a refusal that Cole had anything of interest to offer these geniuses. Everything had to be about him, and the man loathed the idea that someone so inferior could be at the center of attention.

  Cole only too-happily indulged their hosts’ curiosity, if for no other reason than to frustrate his father.

  “Meal-Ready-to-Eat. They’re shelf-stable, pre-packaged meals our military uses in field ops when we don’t have access to the chow hall.”

  “They sound like the protein cubes our infantry carries,” Chogan noted. “I take it your MREs have been formulated to resist chemical and radiation weapons.”

  “Of course not!” Cole blurted out with undiplomatic surprise. “Chemical weapons are illegal. And nuclear weapons are too destructive.”

  “Illegal!” Wawetseka blurted with a similar lack of diplomacy. “How can anything be illegal in war?”

  “We have treaties,” Cole went on. “Our leaders agree not to use those weapons because they hurt the civilians as much as the armies – and they’re inhumane. Chemical weapons don’t just kill the enemy, they torture them slowly. They’re designed to inflict needless misery.”

  “But that is the point of war,” the Lieutenant Governor asserted. “When all else fails, you have to show the other side how bad their situation will be if they do not capitulate. How do you expect the civilians to abide by your authority if they do not share the pain of defiance?”

  “We don’t,” Cole admitted. “It’s not worth the trouble to assume direct control over another country. Our politicians figure it’s easier to install a friendly leader and let them worry about the day-to-day operations. Besides, they can’t work for you if they’re dead or the whole population suffers from chronic disease.”

  “Perhaps your armies were using the wrong weapons. Do you not have weapons that will simply render the other side unconscious? Instead of killing the other side, you put their army to sleep and force the leaders to quake at the sight of your unopposed forces marching to their door. Or if death is your goal, why do you not have a toxin that kills without torture? It seems to me, Mr. Cole, that your leaders lost the stomach for true warfare. It sounds as though they turned their backs on an entire class of weapons before they truly unlocked the potential.

  “And as far as the population goes, they will never be ‘innocent’ until they are made to accept any new order. When the Greeks first showed up on these shores with their guns and their missiles, my ancestors did not trust them in the least. They were not interested in trade or friendship; they made it clear the Lenape were to bow to their leaders and pay them tribute. We would never have capitulated had the Greeks merely targeted our chieftains. My ancestors had to see how brutal those warriors could be before they surrendered.”

  Michael leaned in and whispered his disgust once more into his son’s ear. The conversation had veered into territory that would have been uncomfortable in their own world, and he wasn’t about to allow Cole to destroy the cooperation these people were willing to offer.

  But his objections were overheard by all around. Both of the paler Greeks sat up straighter wishing to interject their opinions into the discussion, but Wawetseka waved them to keep silent as she herself was all too happy to educate their guests on their politics.

  “I am sure you will satisfy your curiosity eventually, so why not hear it now? Your assumptions are correct that our ancestors struggled with the arrangement, but the truth was if they had repelled the Greek forces, they would have succumbed sooner or later to the Roman invaders, or the Malinese, or possibly the Chinese. Though they abhorred the idea of paying tribute to any foreign power, the benefits of the relationship outweighed the inconvenience.

  “The Greeks gave them medicines to protect against the diseases they brought over. They brought over European crops to diversify their diets. They introduced Greek technology to allow them to till their fields with greater speed, sow their crops with greater density, and preserve their food to better get them through the harsh winters. They helped defend our territory against our jealous neighbors, and kept their wars off our soil.

  “My ancestors might look upon the cities we have built for ourselves today with their most reviled disgust, but it is these cities that have allowed us to support our population without spoiling every square of our land. If it were not for the Greeks, we would not have one spot of Nature left to cry over after the destruction these urban centers would have wrought across the landscape. And had they not waged war against all Lenape instead of just the politicians and soldiers, we would still be fighting the Greeks to this day instead of appreciating all they have done to advance our culture.

  “We are not ashamed of our heritage, we celebrate it; and the way it sounds on your world, you do no favors to those other cultures in trying to spare their civilians from the horror of your wars.”

  The conversation continued on military matters as these people were intensely curious about the other ways in which the other Earth carried on their wars, but Cole quietly admitted Wawetseka’s opinion of the Greek conquest left him wondering how things might have been different in his United States had the Natives been forced to assimilate, instead of suffering extermination and relocation.