One verse multi, p.1
One Verse Multi, page 1
One Verse Multi
Synopis
For the last ten years, Martin King has been a rift repair technician for the Multi-verse Protection Corporation (MVP), closing gaps between universes. But he is ready for a change and joins a research team tasked with answering some exciting questions. “Exciting” quickly becomes “troubling” as the team learns that the multi-verse is on the fast track to a collision event that could destroy everyone and everything. MVP is there to help, right? Maybe not. Everything changes when Martin is kidnapped by an anti-MVP group who claims MVP is secretly propelling the collision.
And if the multi-verse issues weren’t enough, several men make Martin rethink what it means to be single or even monogamous. Martin’s growing feelings for Luca, the data manager on his research team, and Tidus from the FOX universe, help him understand what’s truly at stake. Only one thing is certain, Martin must figure out how to keep the multi-verse and his love life from collapsing into chaos.
One Verse Multi
Brought to you by
eBooks from Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
http://www.boldstrokesbooks.com
eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of this work.
Please respect the rights of the author and do not file share.
By the Author
Best of the Wrong Reasons
One Verse Multi
One Verse Multi
© 2022 By Sander Santiago. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-63679-070-1
This Electronic Original Is Published By
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, NY 12185
First Edition: January 2022
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editors: Jerry L. Wheeler and Stacia Seaman
Production Design: Stacia Seaman
Artwork by Nikoli Shaver
Cover Design by Jeanine Henning
eBook Design by Toni Whitaker
Acknowledgments
This book owes a lot to Nikoli. Thank you for supplying the beautiful cover and making a masterpiece out of my disjointed thoughts.
Thank you, Bold Strokes Books. You would think I could come up with a more powerful way to convey my gratitude.
Thank you, Katy Y., for being a solid first reader.
For
Nikoli
Mariah
Laura
Part One
Trying to establish the hypothesis
Section 1
Give a horse a flying test
The video on the screen looked more like B-reel of a desert flyover, just vast, vacant dunes. Only it wasn’t. My remote quantum drones were only flying three-ish meters off the ground. According to the report, this place wasn’t a desert of sand but of ash. Each pile of dust had been something. The chances were too high it had once been a person. Before the event, the city had been home to nearly nine hundred thousand people. Now it was a dead zone.
“Martin, move your ass,” Tamar Garcia ordered. She kicked my foot with her clunky boot. I guess I was in her seat. I moved over as much as I could on the couch. I smiled and tried to look forgivable. She was tall—tall enough that people asked her constantly if she played basketball. She would never play basketball. And her chola aesthetic made her all the more intimidating. She pulled her hair over her shoulder and hugged it as if she were trying to protect it, scowling at the screen.
When the drones arrived at the coordinates I had been given, I set them to hover, typing the command into my laptop. I didn’t want to look at the dead landscape. Instead, I looked at the ends of my locs, pulling at loose hairs pretending I wasn’t impacted by my own imagination of the horrible event that must have occurred. When that wasn’t distracting enough, I looked around the room.
The research lab was more like a science-themed apartment, with a workroom, a living room, and dorms. The couch Tamar and I sat on faced the couch our other two teammates sat on. With the armchair, the three pieces of furniture formed a C, with a table in the middle. The C faced the door connecting the living room to the workroom. Beyond the armchair was the hallway to our rooms. The couch Tamar and I sat on faced the video screen.
“This is what they are calling ground zero,” Hugo Del Mar said, flipping through the hefty folder that contained our research assignment. The folder had the name Multi-verse Protection Corporation (MVP) stamped on it in harsh-looking red ink.
Hugo was a sandy-haired Frenchman from a universe in which the French had kept their territories in the Americas and fully colonized the western half of the continent. He would have been from what was generally considered Wyoming in most verses, which made him something like an American cowboy with a French accent. My name out of his mouth was all “m” and “t” instead of “m” and “r” the way my mom said it.
“Nice and ominous,” I said.
He looked at me over the top of his folder and rolled his eyes. He was sitting with his back to the screen and had yet to turn around and look at it.
“Six years ago, a universe-multi man named James Dugan was the focal point of a massive multi-verse disaster,” Hugo continued, his tone too scientific for an event that destroyed a city of hundreds of thousands of people, at least in the ground zero universe. “This was the site with the most impact. The blast radius is roughly three kilometers, but the radiation reaches at least one hundred kilometers.”
I typed commands that rotated some of the quantum drones. The visual on the screen broke into five different views of ash piles, chemically damaged sky, and inky distant horizons. Not a plant or animal in sight.
“This is very interesting to see,” Wei said. Wei was from a sleepy A-class universe where khaki was considered the lux color, so everything from Teslas to tuxedos were all shitty tans and beiges. He was a round-faced, Chinese territory man, who wore a “long on top” crew cut and had been adopted by an elderly couple in what most universes called Ohio.
Hugo looked back at the screens for the first time. Up to that point, Wei hadn’t said a word. He was getting over strep throat. He had spent the last four days constantly chewing extra-potent CBD lozenges from some B-class verse, twenty years behind the nearest A-class. They must have been working. Looking at me, Wei pointed to the laptop. “I didn’t get to watch you work at the rift closing we recruited you at. How did you develop the code?”
I was about to answer when Hugo cleared his throat. “Wei, you can nerd out with Martin later, focus.”
Wei winked at me and faked some bashful pose, then turned back to the screen.
“Anyway, Martin, if you want to go to the next verse, I’ll read the event description,” Hugo said.
I tuned the quantum drones into the next verse. The images on the split screen were of trees, grass, and a clear blue sky. I adjusted the drones to get better images, then buzzed them around to get a feel for the area. I felt relieved by this verse, mostly because stuff was alive. We were in a park roughly the size of a city block, a cozy square of grass sliced by brick walkways. The paths were lined with trees and benches. The sun hadn’t moved from where it hung low in the evening sky, but it was bright and warm and unobscured by ash.
“This is San Jose. At approximately three in the afternoon there-verse time…” Hugo started to read. I flew the drones around as he talked, looking for I don’t know what. The park was empty of people. A car passed, and a cat jumped out of a trash can chasing a squirrel.
“…a man named James Dugan stood at these coordinates. In other verses, other James Dugans stood in the exact same place at the exact same time. That marks the start of the event. In the first verse, Dugan was last known to be at work in a power plant deemed the source of the explosion. That is all we know of his actions. In this verse, witnesses reported seeing the here-verse Dugan get up from a bench and walk to this section of the park.”
As my drones wandered, one set came upon a statue at the north end of the park. It was a stone statue of an angel holding a rose with names carved into the base. It stood out because the park had no other statuary.
“Witnesses say Dugan started moving his arms, silently gesturing in what looked like a performance. A crowd gathered. Dugan didn’t respond to any of the questions asked by onlookers. At three fifteen p.m. here-verse time, Dugan’s pantomime became erratic and panicked. Three minutes later, the James Dugan of this universe erupted in a sudden and peculiar explosion.”
“Fucking unreal,” Tamar said.
“Seventeen people and Dugan in this verse were killed in the explosion. The authorities would later say Dugan had a bomb, but none of the eyewitnesses reported seeing one. The autopsy reported Dugan’s body emitted an extreme, unexplained level of radiation. He also had unexplainable chemical burns and was perforated by an excessive volume of shrapnel, including unusual metals and glass. The same inexplicably large quantity of debris was found in the other bodies. However, some key bits were missing. Someone on the ballistics team wrote in one of his reports there was no bomb because fra gments from the bomb itself were not found.”
“Did this Dugan guy converge with his counterpart in the ground zero verse?” I asked. I looked hard at the statue, realizing it was a memorial. Seventeen names were inscribed on the base along with a date. James Dugan wasn’t listed.
“Do you think?” Hugo asked. His voice was more like a teacher giving a logic test than a researcher looking for a hypothesis. I guessed he might have had an answer of some kind he wanted me to figure out for myself. I thought about it. People converged often enough. The degree of damage was unpredictable and could have been responsible for a quantum event that mimicked an explosion. The difference between this event and others was that the damage was uneven.
“There’s too many universes involved,” Wei said, getting to the mystery before I did. He got up from his couch and came to my laptop. “Make this thing take quantum pictures.”
“Also, it says here some Dugans survived with minor damage as the event occurred in their universe,” Hugo explained.
“People don’t survive convergence,” Tamar said. Hugo gave her a resolute nod.
I was actually curious now. There were two ways convergence happened. The first was rifts, or a weak spot in the quantum barrier between universes that could allow things to pass between them. If a universe-multi person crossed the barrier into a verse where they had a counterpart, that was the end of both. Convergence also had the power to destroy whole universes. It had been my job in MVP for the last decade to locate and close rifts.
The second source of convergence was tuning, using a quantum drone or a Multiverse Encounter Sequencer (MES). A sequencer was a universe-unique Nokia E70 series cellular phone MVP had modified to create quantum consonance and dissonance and allow for travel between universes, among other things. It didn’t make calls. My sequencer was connected to the laptop. The quantum drones were controlled through the sequencer, and the laptop just gave me more power to access more drones.
MVP had virtually eliminated tuning convergence by having only universe-unique people like me as technicians and most research staff. We only existed in one universe. A convergence event at MVP hadn’t happened the last eighteen of the twenty years the company existed. That meant if it was convergence, a rift must have happened. Wei was on the right track. The way to spot a rift was to look at the area from a quantum perspective.
“Wei, move so I can do it,” I said, pushing his head out of the way of my laptop screen so I could type code. He leaned in eagerly anyway.
The quantum drones could collect data on pretty much anything. They were a swarm of near-microscopic computers that could act as a collective or as individuals. So, I switched the drones from video to quantum and pulled up the quantum visualizer. The sequencer would process the data from each drone and build a map of the area. I programmed the drones to look within a ten-meter cube of the Dugan coordinates. The image of the park became a blank canvas. Anything that had a quantum frequency for the there-verse would be depicted in white. Anything with a different frequency would be a different color based on its home-verse.
We watched eagerly waiting for colors to change on the screen. Slowly the drones chased down a few thousand particles from other verses. After ten minutes the program beeped to let me know there was nothing left to find.
“That was anticlimactic,” Tamar said dryly.
I could hardly believe the image. The data showed the area had less than five percent particle contamination from another universe. Any square meter of any verse had an average of eight percent due to natural forces. Any zone that had a rift at any point in history would have a contamination rate of twenty to seventy percent. “Not only was there no rift,” I said, “but this place is almost quantum pure.”
“Isn’t that something?” Hugo said as if he already knew.
“If it wasn’t a rift, what was it?” I asked.
“That brings us to our assignment,” Hugo said. “The file suggests it had to do with universe-multi people, so we’re going to study what impact they have on the multi-verse.”
“Great,” Tamar said even though she didn’t make it sound that great. “I need some food.”
“Go to the other verses,” Wei said to me, trying to type on the laptop himself.
Hugo looked at Tamar. “Okay, what’s the matter? This is actually some really interesting stuff. Tam?”
“It’s fine,” she snapped, clearly annoyed. She stood and crossed to a phone on the wall of the lab. “I just want some food.”
Hugo stood and followed her. “Tam, qu’est-ce qu’il y a?”
Tamar shrugged off the hand he had placed on her shoulder. “Nothing.”
“Aren’t you excited for a new project?”
“Not like we didn’t have plenty of old projects.”
Tamar and Hugo had been with MVP for thirteen years, research teammates almost from day one. Wei had been with the company the least amount of time and, at twenty-one, was also the youngest. Wei had been on Hugo’s team for a year.
“Tam.”
“All right, fine, Hugo. I don’t trust it.”
I let Wei have the laptop so I could watch the drama between Hugo and Tamar.
“Tam.”
She growled at him. “Why now? MVP has only cared about finding universe-unique things and closing rifts until now? The point of the whole company is to protect all the universes from rifts. Why bother with this one guy and this one event?”
Hugo puzzled it out, linking his arms behind his head. He looked like an anime protagonist. The plaid cotton button-down and denim jeans threw off the image a little. His long, wavy hair was pulled into a ponytail and shoved under his cowboy hat. It was funny watching him next to goth princess Tamar.
“Don’t you think a recurrence of this event would be equally as threatening as any rift? Maybe more threatening?”
“Not if it’s only been one time in the whole history of the universes,” Tamar said.
“We won’t know until we study it.”
“Well, Hugo, I don’t think it’s just some interesting project. It’s too specific.”
“You’re such a skeptic, but I guess that’s a good thing in our line of work.” Hugo tried to make a friendly show of putting his arm around Tamar. She just jabbed him in the ribs.
I didn’t say it, but I agreed with her. The file had the name Don Brady on it. Brady was the company’s director of marketing. What did he want with this information? He didn’t do anything unless he could sell it. He had observed me once, thinking he could capitalize on my rift closure technique. All technicians used the sequencers, but only I used the laptop. I was the fastest, most effective technician the company had. Brady, however, figured the cost of finding universe-unique computers was too high compared to the benefit of the work, or at least work that could be effectively done with a sequencer. Other technicians had come to me to learn my technique, but most stuck to the company plan. I didn’t trust that. If we could do our jobs better and faster, why not invest?
As far as this project went, I had a feeling Brady already knew what he wanted to do in the multi-verse, and this research would somehow give him the means to do it. Or worse, it would give him the means of covering his ass when something happened. The wording was almost too specific:
CLASSIFICATION GRADE: ALPHA. Discover the reason for the event. Provide an accurate and thorough understanding of the quantum forces that linked the James Dugans during the event and the cause of the connection between the counterparts. What impact do universe-multi humans and human-intelligent animals (H-HIA) have on the total multi-verse? What would happen to the multi-verse should one or more of the universe-multi H-HIA be removed from their respective universes, with special interest in A-class universes?
I didn’t say anything. I just listened to their argument.
Tamar tried to dodge Hugo by pulling the phone around a pile of boxes. The stuff all over the room was mine. I was new to the team and had to be relocated from rift technician quarters to the lab. I hadn’t had the chance to unpack.
