Authors: A. Lee Martinez
If Vom was destruction incarnate, and Smorgaz was creation personified, then West was order in its ultimate obsessivecompulsive form. It wasn’t an easy job. He wasn’t perfect. He still hadn’t found the time to nail down the confusing jumble that humans foolishly labeled quantum physics. And once, when he’d eaten a bad hot dog and been sick in bed for a week, the result had been the ludicrousness of superstring theory. A few extra dimensions leaked through here and there at the wrong times, and the human race just couldn’t let it go.
He’d never found the time to fix the error. And it’d probably work out fine in the end. Like when he’d accidentally let spacetime become curved. At first it’d bugged him, but now he hardly noticed. And the humans seemed to get a kick out of it.
Someone knocked on West’s door. He was surprised. There was no rent, beyond the obligations the apartments gatheir occupants, and nothing ever broke. The tenants rarely had anything to do with one another. Except for the pair from Number Three. They baked pies and distributed them on a schedule. He was due for a boysenberry sometime in the next week, if he remembered properly.
It was Number Five.
“Hi.” Diana held up a bag. “I got this for you. It’s a hamburger.” She hesitated. “You do eat hamburgers, right?”
Vom piped up from behind her. “If he doesn’t want it, I’ll take it.”
“I eat hamburgers,” said West. “Don’t suppose you brought a shake too, Number Five?”
“Had one, but someone got to it.”
“If it’s any consolation,” said Vom, “it was a bit watery.”
West took the burger. “Thanks, Number Five.”
He started to close the door, but Diana asked, “Can I talk to you for a second?”
“I can’t get you out of the apartment,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to ask that. I kind of assumed it. No, I wanted to know about Chuck.”
“Who?”
“The guy in Apartment Two. The one with the… dog.”
“Number Two? What about him?”
“What’s his deal?”
“He lives in Apartment Two.”
He unwrapped the burger, took a bite. She waited for him to finish chewing, but he was a painfully slow chewer. And an even slower swallower. He scratched his beard. His furry eyebrows arched.
“S’good.”
“You don’t find there’s too much mayo?” asked Vom. “I thought they overdid the mayo.”
“Is that why you only ate five on the ride here?” asked Smorgaz.
“Guys, could you do me a favor and go back to the apartment?”
Grumbling, the monsters walked away.
“Chuck… Number Two, how dangerous is that dog?” she asked.
West took another bite, chewed, and swallowed in the time it would take a normal person to eat the whole burger.
She sighed.
“I’m just worried about Chuck.”
His eyes narrowed.
“Chuck. Number Two.”
“Uh-hum,” said West neutrally.
“Is there some way to make friends with it?” she asked. “The dog outside of Apartment Two? If I gave it a burger, would it let Chuck out more often?”
“Hmm?”
“Number Two, would the dog let him out more often if he fed it something?”
West’s already sallow flesh paled. “Don’t feed it. Whatever you do, Number Five, don’t do that.”
“Because…?”
“Because it would be a bad, bad thing to do.”
“Bad how?”
West’s brow wrinkled. “You ask a lot of questions, Number Five.”
“How am I supposed to understand any of this if I don’t?”
“There are things the human mind was never meant to comprehend. And things the inhuman mind can never comprehend. Incomprehensible things.”
She nodded. “Uh-huh. Yes, that’s very clear. Thank you.”
The building trembled violently, nearly knocking both of them off their feet.
“What was that?”
“Bugs,” said West. “One tremor is nothing to worry about.”
A second quake rattled the building.
“Two is acceptable. Only pressing if it’s—”
A third shudder, less powerful but three times as long, shook the walls.
“Ah, damn. It’s always something.”
He walked past Diana and opened the front door. The city was gone. A glowing green wasteland stood in its place. A mosquito the size of a fighter jet soared overhead, kicking up radioactive dust.
West shut the door and trundled into his apartment. He found his old green toolbox. Diana stood in the doorway, blocking his progress.
“What happened?” she asked.
“World changed,” he replied. “It happens. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to fix the boiler.”
She stepped aside, but she followed him down the hall.
“That’s how it ends?”
“It didn’t end,” he said. “It changed.
End
implies it’s over, but it’s just different than it was. But it’s always different than it was. Just usually not so obvious about it. Or you’re not in a position to notice. The only reason you noticed this time was because you were in here when it happened. Otherwise, you’d have changed along with it.
“But just like that?” said Diana. “One second it’s there, the next it’s all changed?”
He took note of her voice, tinged with concern, but not overwhelmed with confusion. He smiled to himself. As a general rule, he didn’t get to know many of the tenants. The apartments consumed most souls within a few days. Some
lasted longer. But only a rare few had the right combination of curiosity, common sense, and temperament to last a year.
He jammed a key in the lock and wrestled with it for several seconds. He gave the door a few kicks and rammed his shoulder into it.
“Are you sure you unlocked it?” she asked.
“Oh, it’s unlocked.” He took a moment to catch his breath. “The Hive must’ve blocked it.”
“What’s the Hive?”
He gestured toward the door, letting her know she should help him. Together they put all their weight against the door and pushed.
“Tomorrow a mutagenic radiation will cause all insects on the planet to grow to enormous size. Within a year they’ll devour all noninsect life on Earth. Within ninety years they’ll establish an interplanetary colony that will cover half the Milky Way galaxy. I call it the Hive. Although it probably calls itself something different. Or maybe they don’t even bother with words. They might not even have language. Never tried to have a conversation with the damned things.”
The door opened a few inches. A sticky substance oozed through the cracks.
“Don’t let the mucus get in your eyes unless you want to see how you die,” he warned.
With a bit more work they managed to open the door halfway, which was enough for West to squeeze through. He descended a few steps, stopped, and spoke without looking back.
“Are you coming, Number Five?”
She poked her head into the dim stairway. “Is it dangerous?”
“Worst that can happen to you is you die.”
“Oh, is that all?”
From most people this would’ve been sarcastic, but Diana understood, just as West did, that there were far worse things than death in this universe.
Diana followed him into the dark. He dug a claw hammer out of his toolbox and handed it to her. “You’ll want this. Your powers won’t work down here.”
“If you know it’s going to happen, can’t you stop it before it happens?”
“Doesn’t work that way.”
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“Because the radiation always hits tomorrow. If we succeed in fixing the problem, then it will just hit the day after tomorrow. And if we stop that—”
“Got it.”
“Near as I can figure it, the Hive functions on a reversed temporal axis. Not quite a hundred and eighty degrees from what all other life on Earth uses. Maybe about one hundred and seventy-three degrees. Maybe one hundred and seventy-four.”
They plumbed deeper into the depths. At the bottom of the stairs a faint yellow glow emanated from the goo-coated walls.
“The Hive’s future pushes against our past. If the Hive succeeds in pushing itself forward, or backward if that’s easier to comprehend, it’ll eventually rewrite all of history, erasing all of human civilization in the process.”
“That sucks.”
“Not really. Already happened three times before. Four, if
you count the fall of the Neanderthals. And really, you should, because they were a fine primate civilization in many ways superior to humanity. The Neanderthals invented the telegraph a full week before
Homo sapiens
. And they made a hell of a chicken sandwich.”
“So if it’s the future and we can’t stop it, then what are we doing down here?”
“Just because it’s the future that doesn’t mean it happens tomorrow. The Hive pushes against our past. And our past pushes against the future that is the Hive’s past. It’s entirely possible for the future of the Hive to always be tomorrow, to always be out there.” He waved his pipe wrench in a vague manner, as if pointing toward a distant horizon. “Somewhere else, but never quite here.”
“Ah,” she said. “Makes sense.”
“Does it?”
“It’s like the future, but not necessarily the future that ever comes.”
“No, it’s nothing like that, but never mind. If it’s an explanation that works for you, we’ll leave it at that. Mostly I make this shit up as I go along, so it’s not like I understand any of it either. Theories and explanations are just tools to be used and discarded as needed in this job, Number Five.”
A sac of eggs burst open, and puppy-sized maggots squirmed down the wall.
“Don’t mind those,” said West. “They’re grown for food, harmless.”
A trio of four-foot-tall ants appeared and started collecting the maggots, placing them in baskets.
“Drones,” said West. “Harmless too.”
“So how do we keep the insect apocalypse at bay for another day?” she asked.
“We fix the boiler.”
As they went deeper the basement became hardened slime catacombs and worker drones. After a few minutes every trace of the man-made world vanished.
He stopped at an intersection of eight tunnels.
“Been a while since I’ve seen it this bad.” He opened his toolbox and pulled out a map. “Mmm-hmm. According to this, the boiler is either that way or that way.”
“It doesn’t know?”
“At the point where two histories meet, certainty is replaced by probability.” He folded the map. “I’ll go this way. You go that way. One of us is bound to find it.”
Before she could argue he was already halfway down his chosen corridor, vanishing in the sickly glow of the nest.
“Wait! If I find the boiler, how do I fix it?” she called out.
“Use your hammer!” he shouted back. His voice echoed, ringing against the walls for several long seconds. Then there was only silence, and she was alone in the murky luminescence.
She wondered why she wasn’t terrified, but all of this was becoming too ordinary. She couldn’t remember which tunnel West had told her to take. Rather than think too much about it, she just picked one at random.
She walked leisurely through the nest. She ignored the larvae and drones, and they paid her the same courtesy. Once flies the size of small birds buzzed her. One landed on her shoulder and stayed there like a hairy, clicking parrot. She tried shooing
it away. It kept returning, and after a while she gave up and let it perch. Whenever she came to a junction she’d turn in a random direction.
She was lost. She imagined herself forever wandering through a future that never happened. It more irritated than frightened her. She had far too many dooms, many worse than this, hanging over her head to be bothered by it.
Diana entered an alcove. Aside from the bioluminescent walls, a single lightbulb dangled from a cord in the ceiling. Several crates sat stacked to one side. A rusty boiler stood in the center of the room.
It couldn’t be this easy, she thought.
A fat red beetle the size of a compact car lumbered into the chamber. Diana pressed against the wall into one of the gray pools of twilight. The beetle wheezed with each breath. It scanned the room, its hundred of glowing green eyes sweeping from side to side. She thought for sure it would see her, but she resisted the urge to run for it. Even if she escaped, she doubted she’d find the boiler again. And if she was going to get eaten by something lurking in this nest, then she figured the beetle would finish her off quickly. Only a bite or two at most.
The creature retched, spitting up an arm, a pipe wrench, and a toolbox.
“Damn,” she muttered.
The beetle snorted. It tilted its head to one side. She held her breath, remained very still, and mulled over her choices.
West was dead. Thleft her as the only one capable of fixing this problem, and she had to fix it. Otherwise the bugs from the future would destroy the past, and even if that didn’t
end up erasing her because she lived in an apartment building that didn’t play fair with the space-time continuum, she didn’t think she wanted to live in a world of giant mutant bugs. Her world was strange enough already.