Ben Rosenstock, Staff Writer
April 13, 2012
Filed under A&E
Chapter 4
Logan stood tensely and silently, willing for whatever would happen to happen. Even with his eyes closed, he still felt the deep blue walls of the pod pressing down on him from all sides. It was as if he were getting an MRI, except with a soft whirring sound instead of the deafening bangs of an MRI machine.
A woman named Aldénès stood outside the pod, staring at the screen located at the front. Her skin was even paler than Nathaniel’s, to the point where it looked unhealthy, even gray. Apparently she was one of the 50 or so people from Dûlínía who had joined in Nathaniel’s cause. She typed away furiously at the touch screen, selecting which type of template would be installed in Logan’s mind, and what types of physical changes would be made to his body.
The whir grew louder, and Logan braced himself as he began to feel his body change. It felt as if soft fingers were pressing gently into the outside of his brain, not enough to hurt, but certainly enough to be uncomfortable.
According to Nathaniel, this process was required for every person traveling from Earth to Dûlínía. Without the wide database of information being installed in Logan’s mind, he would be completely clueless about the world he was traveling to. Hearing stories about Dûlínía was not enough. To fully understand the planet and be able to fight there if he needed to, he had to have all the knowledge possible, without harming his mind.
This particular template—that was the English word Nathaniel had given it—was mild compared to the ones the Dûlínían prisoners had been given. The one that had seized Holly’s mind had pushed her memories far away, to the point where if she didn’t seize them fast they would drift away and cease to exist altogether. Logan would still be able to remember everything. This template wasn’t designed to give him a completely new life; it was merely a source of information.
As the information slid through the cracks of his mind, he also felt his body begin to change. His lips felt tauter, his eyes slightly larger and stronger. The hair on his body receded. Something seemed to be changing with his organs too, but the change was too subtle to identify.
Finally, the change was done. The pod opened and Logan stepped out, now looking like an average Dûlínían. The Dûlínían species of human was almost the exact same as the Earthling species; however, their hair was shorter, their skin harder and their eyes lighter and stronger.
The plan was to eliminate the Correspondence Device on Dûlínía. An identical device was located on Earth, but since one didn’t work without the other it was only necessary to destroy one. Besides, the one on Earth was guarded by an enormous military unit organized by the UN. The government was well-aware that there were people out there who knew about their role in the disappearance of their loved ones. There was no fear, however, of people crossing over to Alternate Earth and attacking the Correspondence Device there. Neither side was aware of Nathaniel’s presence on Earth—he had lived by himself at a Dûlínían college anyway, so his twisted father had no idea he had betrayed him.
Because of the Correspondence Device’s complex ability to manipulate time and space, once it was destroyed all of the universal changes it had made would be undone, and life would continue as it had before each disappearance. Under Nathaniel’s instruction, several Dûlíníans had already brought over time-resistant recording devices. Their footage would survive even when all of the Correspondence Device’s changes were undone, and Nathaniel’s father would be exposed for his plots to kidnap people from another planet and integrate them into Dûlínían life.
Also included in Logan’s template was a memory program made of the same time-resistant material as the recording devices. It would allow Logan to remember everything that happened after the Correspondence Device was destroyed.
The one issue with the plan was finding the Correspondence Device itself. Nobody knew where it was, not even Nathaniel. Going to the island of Waíhírí, where the prisoners were being kept in ignorant bliss, was impossible. It was locked from the inside by an invisible dome force field surrounding the island; simply breaking the captives out was not an option.
Along with traditional Dûlínían weapons, Nathaniel’s ‘army’ was armed with precautionary memory bracelets that could be locked around the arm. They had the same function as the time-resistant memory program of the templates, but templates were known to occasionally fail, so the bracelets were just in case.
The woman named Aldénès led Logan back to the large auditorium, where a massive silver plate lay behind Martin’s podium. Hundreds of people were already clustered on the plate, and hundreds more stood in line behind it. Nathaniel stood at the back of the line, overseeing the traffic, and Martin stood on the plate itself.
After several more minutes of confusion, Logan realized that the silver plate was the machine that would allow them to teleport to the other universe. Finally, after getting a nod from Nathaniel, a man sitting on the other side of the auditorium pressed a red button on the wall. The button activated the machine, and the silver of the plate began to glow and heat up, turning light orange.
Only a moment later, the people on the plate were gone.
The line slowly moved forward. It took half an hour before Logan reached the front of the line and stepped onto the plate, already feeling the ticklish vibrations beneath his feet. Suddenly, a strong force seized his mind. Pain exploded everywhere. It was as if flames were licking up and down his entire body.
Just when he thought the pain was unbearable, it all stopped. Everything was pitch black and silent for a moment, until a dull light and the ambient sound of speech began to surround them. Slowly, everything came into focus, and Logan gasped.
He was in a new universe.
***
After she was sure that her name was Holly, the memories began to flood back fast. She remembered the times sitting in the high school library with a mischievous smile as she navigated past the silly website blocks. She remembered her family. Above all, she remembered her newfound romance with Logan Aranda.
She flashed back with anger on the last moment before she had been whisked away. She had been on the verge of kissing Logan at prom when instead her lips found nothing but empty air. She’d opened her eyes with confusion and found herself standing on a gigantic metal plate in a massive cell, surrounded by other people captured by the Dûlínían United Nations. Of course, she hadn’t known everything at the time. She’d just known that somehow she’d been teleported somewhere else.
It had been a few chaotic minutes before an informant had explained her whereabouts and why the government had taken her. It was strange that an informant was even there; he spoke to her gently, as if trying to truly convince her that she was “making the right choice by coming here.” But Holly hadn’t wanted any of his soothing words in his badly spoken English. It hadn’t been her choice to come.
Shortly after, she’d been rudely shoved out of the cell and into a cramped blue pod that had installed false memories in her mind.
She sat there for a long time before she realized that if she could relay all the information she’d learned to her ‘parents,’ who were likely also prisoners from Earth with similar templates in their minds, they’d begin to remember their old lives and might even help her. She was about to search for the staircase downstairs when she remembered that she could just teleport.
Though she realized by now that she didn’t belong here, it was just as easy to teleport as it had been when she was just an ignorant Dûlínían. An instant later, she arrived in the kitchen with her ‘mother.’ Her ‘father’ was nowhere to be seen, so she decided to speak to them one by one, hoping to establish a more personal (if false) connection if she was speaking to only one at a time.
She had to fight the urge to speak in English, which once again seemed most natural to her. Once she began speaking the national Dûlínían language, though, it felt normal.
“Espenelda,” she said quietly, “can I talk to you for a few minutes? There’s something I have to talk to you about. It sounds completely insane, but I think it’s the truth.”
“Of course, dear,” Espenelda said with a smile of affection. “Let’s sit down.” They navigated to the nearby marble staircase and shared the lowest step.
“Okay,” Holly said, rubbing her palms together with apprehension. “I don’t know how to soften this, so I guess I’ll just say it. I think we’re involved in a government conspiracy, Espenelda. I don’t think we’re from Dûlínía. I think we’re from an identical planet from another universe. I think it’s called Earth.”
Espenelda stared at her, an unreadable expression on her face.
“Look, I know it sounds completely stupid, but I’m serious. Please just bear with me for a second. I don’t think my name’s actually Partíllí. I think it’s Holly. And I don’t think you’re my mom, actually, and I don’t think Jabéko is my dad. I think we all have different lives. And I have a boyfriend named Logan. I know it—”
“How did you know?” Espenelda interrupted. “No one knew.” Her voice was grave, her light gray eyes stormy and focused in their sockets.
“Wait, do you know something about it?” Holly asked, her voice excited and hopeful.
“I do,” Espenelda said. “In fact, I am what they would call a ‘coordinator.’” She’d said it in English. Thickly accented English, but English.
“You remember English!” Holly said, now speaking in English. “But have you gotten used to Dûlínían language? Is that why you don’t speak it too well anymore? And wait, what do you mean ‘coordinator’?”
Holly heard a click and felt a sharp, unexpected pain in her chest as something hard and cold pressed up against her. Glancing down, she saw that it was a black handgun, curiously similar to a gun from Earth.
“I’m sorry,” Espenelda murmured, her eyes cold and her accent thick. “But we cannot fail.”
Holly pushed backward against the wall of the cramped staircase, her heart hammering and her pulse quickening. This was a nightmare.
“You’re working for the g-government,” she croaked.
“Not just the government. When this is all over, the credit won’t be given to the United Nations as a whole on either planet. This program belonged to only a select few of them.”
“You’re evil!” Holly was trying to bide her time, but she could see no way to make an escape with the barrel of that gun still pressed against her heart.
Espenelda laughed. “I’m merely a coordinator, girl. They put one of us in each family at the start to make sure you won’t make any quick discoveries. And look at you. Smart girl.”
Holly could bear this no longer. She had to try to make a move. Still sitting on the bottom stair, she spun quickly around and kicked her foot up into the air towards the woman’s face. The move was clumsy, though, and her foot scraped the wall, missing the woman entirely.
Everything was chaos. A gunshot rang and a bullet blew through the wall right where Holly’s head had been. Holly was rolled into a ball at the bottom of the stairs, her limbs flailing miserably.
There was a deafeningly loud explosion of shattering glass, and it was all over. Espenelda lay motionlessly beside Holly, her eyes closed and the gun hanging limply in her hand.
For a moment, Holly thought she had accidentally committed suicide, but then she looked up at the staircase and found a tortured-looking man standing there, holding the remains of the glass vase he had smashed over Espenelda’s head. It was Jabéko. The man that had thought he was Espenelda’s wife.
“I know everything,” he said, speaking in English. “I overheard everything, and it all came back.”
Holly stayed silent, her heart still rushing from the struggle.
Jabéko sat down at the stair where Holly had just sat. His expression was pained. “The sound reverberates even though the staircase is several stories high,” he said. “I could always overhear you talking when I was at the top, when you were little. At least, I thought I could. But apparently all of those memories were fake.”
“I’m sorry,” Holly said. “I’m just as confused as you are. But we need to leave. I don’t know what we can do, but we have to leave.”
“I know,” Jabéko said. “I have a life to get back to.”
Only minutes later, the two were wandering the idyllic streets of the tropical island. It looked much like Earth, except for the staggeringly large properties. “There’s an invisible dome around the island that protects us from intruders,” Jabéko said. “I think we’ll be able to leave through there, if there aren’t guards. It should only be locked from the inside.”
Holly stopped in her tracks.
“What is it?” Jabéko asked.
“This is dumb,” she replied. “Why are we walking across the entire island? Can’t we just teleport?”
“Oh,” Jabéko said. “Right.”
Jabéko turned out to know more about the island of Waíhírí than Holly, so they decided that he would be the one teleporting, and she would just tag along for the ride.
The two joined hands, closed their eyes, and disappeared. It was time to reclaim their lives.
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