Extra Life (26 page)

Connie turned in his seat, gripped his armrests, and wheeled backward against his wall. Even the planets dangling from his ceiling seemed to be spinning out of control.

She stood, hitched her hands to her hips and said, “So you’re the same Russ who ditched me at the Silver Bullet,
after
assuring me I was in serious danger?
That
Russ? And why I’m here is none of y’alls business, but I’ll tell you anyway. I wanted Connie’s side of the story. Since he’s an actual trustworthy person and all.”

“
Trust
?” I asked. “Do trustworthy people hold secret meetings against me?”

“Whatever,” Paige said.

“Nice job keeping this quiet, by the way, Connie.”

“No, no—she already knew,” he protested, which was true.

Paige said, “Remember, Russ?
You
told me?”

“With your elbow in my throat, yeah.” I had one small advantage here. Unless it was already on Twitter or whatever, neither of them had heard the latest developments over at Silver Screen Studios. I had at least a few more minutes until news of heart attacks and shootings and car chases got broadcast to every social network and news program in the world.

“I wouldn’t have said anything to her—” Connie started.

“Thanks for your vote of confidence,” Paige snarled at him.

“See, you can’t trust anybody,” I told her. “This is the guy—
my best friend
—who at the end of the day ends up mugging me for my cell phone, and then uses it to zap me into particles, him and Virgin Russ, conspiring against me.”

The stereo turned itself on, then off again. Two seconds of Foster the People, a taunt:
better run, better run, faster than my bullet…
The glitches were leaking back into the system again.

“I didn’t take your phone,” Connie said.

“Not this time, not yet. But you have it in you to do it,” I said.

“You’re deluded, Russ,” Paige said. “Seriously.”

“Who’s Virgin Russ?” Connie asked.

“Me—the other me. I call him that—it’s not what you think. And this morning, Connie, you told me not to interfere because of paradoxes, but that was bull. You wanted me to hide so you could be in control.”

As I said it aloud, the details fell into place like expert Tetris. Connie was honors across the board, so loopy about math and science he’d spend more time hanging out with my dad than with me on sleepover nights. Software design, game theory, physics. They’d sit in front of the computer and fire off into mental space while I twiddled the Playstation controller.

Connie was the only dude I knew who could theoretically wrap his head around my father’s time-travel invention. Somewhere in a million alternate realities, he could’ve convinced some other Russ Vale to give it a test drive. Maybe even helped him make the infomercial pitch video to go along with it:
your one chance to make things right—call now while supplies last!

Paige stepped between me and Connie, like she expected me to take a swing at him. Instead, I pointed an accusing finger, straight over the top of her head. “I figured you out, Connie. You been soaking up my dad’s time-travel intel for months,” I told him. “So you probably knew the lowdown on this program long before it ever popped up on my phone. In fact, I think you
put it there
. Like, the most elaborate prank of all time, just to get back at me for the helicopter thing.”

He clenched his fists against his stomach, trying not to freak. “I don’t even care about the helicopter,” he said. “I forgave—I forgave you for that, like you asked. And I can’t—I can’t answer for things I never even did, or things you think I’m going to do.”

“Convenient,” I said. “You’re going to tell me you weren’t the one who made up that fake account for Paige on Facebook or thefacebook or whatever? You make up weird aliases on there all the time. It’s your modus operandi.”

“Russ,
no
—” Paige tried to interrupt.

“For fun, not because—” Connie pleaded.

“Did you have anything to do with this?” I asked. I showed him the bloody mess wrapped around my hand wound. I couldn’t imagine him taking a slice out of me or Paige, but people can surprise you.

He went pale and slumped back into his desk chair.

“Are you serious?” Paige asked me.

“I don’t know,” I said, confidently.

“You know what I know?” she said. “The only way I can tell Russes apart is by who’s the biggest asshole.”

“You kissed me!”

“My mistake,” Paige snapped. “And by the way, where is everybody else? Where’s the Russ we met at the Silver Bullet, the one you left with. How do I know you’re not him?”

They really hadn’t heard. Paige didn’t know that Russ 3.0 was dead—if that was the right word for his sudden nonexistence. She didn’t know about the brief and wild flame that was Future Russ, now vanished in the crash. Russes everywhere, multiplying. Even as I opened my mouth to lie or explain, I realized who was missing from this debate—yet another Russ. The original, Virgin.

“Woah, wait a minute,” I said. “Where’s
your
other Russ? Virgin Russ?”

Silence. Paige looked to Connie for guidance, the two of them still conspiring.

“Tell me, damn it,” I said.

“He went home almost an hour ago,” Connie volunteered. “His—your dad called. He said he had a huge breakthrough.”

D
AD BROUGHT
the wrong me home. It could’ve happened a dozen different ways—dropped calls, broken cell phones, phones in the wrong hands. Lost in his calculations, Dad could’ve easily gotten confused about which Russ he was calling. Didn’t really matter now how it happened, and there was no time to question Connie and Paige about it. I had to get back to my father. I had to find out what he discovered.

I’m sure Connie would’ve let me borrow his bike if I asked, but I didn’t ask. When I coasted out from under the canopy of live oaks on Market, the sun made me wish I had shades. Big switch from the artificial static gray that covered the sky a few hours earlier, too fast to be the result of natural shift in the cloud cover.

Was it possible—glitches in the Grand Design on the scale of weather patterns? Video Russ warned me that my leaps were wreaking havoc on communications networks, and Marv Parker said the whole eastern seaboard was struck with electrical outages, but this was way bigger. The natural world itself, the laws of the physical world recalibrated, and it was all my fault. Nobody wants to screw up that badly.

I got home in a record three minutes, dumped the bike in my yard, and rushed inside. Upstairs, the collapsible attic ladder was lowered to the hallway floor as usual. Dad never remembered to retract it, no matter how many times Mom sternly reminded him. I climbed with some stealth, just until my eyes cleared floor level.

Up in the attic, Virgin Russ was in a fold-out chair holding a camera at arm’s length aimed back at himself while my father slouched above his work station. Dad had designed the computer setup, stacking four Mac shells to hold all the hardware he used. Cables and wires webbed the floor, a large-scale model of a motherboard. Or, as Mom liked to call it, the world’s worst fire hazard.

“Action,” Dad said, tapping a keyboard key. His triptych of monitors captured a single screen shot repeated in triplicate: the camera-eye view of Virgin Russ, ready to deliver his selfie video pitch.

Virgin cleared his throat and squirmed in his seat. He said into the camera, “Hi, Russ. It’s me—you—from the future. This is all pretty strange for me, but I guess you’re getting used to the idea by now…”

I’d seen this setup before. Same Russ, same clothes, same plain white backdrop. Virgin Russ was the one I saw in the video recording on my bedroom computer. He was not the Video Russ who sent me the Pastime Project and encouraged me to take the leap. He was Danger Russ, who sent the warning message back in time so Dad and I would received it at 1 p.m. Dad was closing the loop here, creating the very same video he had watched four hours earlier.

“Wait—cut. That’s not right,” Dad said. He smacked a key, scratched his cheek, carefully considered the setup. He stood hunched in his bathrobe like Igor the mad scientist’s assistant.

“It didn’t work?” Virgin Russ asked him.

“You’re not saying exactly what you said. What the
you
in the video said. It was a warning about something else coming through…” Dad’s voice trailed off as he noticed me climbing the rest of the way up the ladder.

“Holy Crap,” Virgin said, bolting upright at the sight of me.

“Surreal, yes. It’s a huge deal, but you’ll get used to it,” I said.

Dad pounced across the room and grasped me by both shoulders. “Which one are you?” he asked. His heavy breath smelled like an espresso machine after a full day’s work.

“I’m One O’clock Russ. The one you watched this video with.”

“Good—good. Maybe you’ll remember…” Dad was in full DEFCON 3 mode. He fumbled back to his desk and sifted through notepads and empty coffee mugs. He said, “The grid’s been haywire all afternoon, so the firewall at Rush Fiberoptics was a mess. Hacking in went considerably smoother than I expected.”

He bumped his head on the ceiling, stopped talking. He seemed to have forgotten which Russ he was addressing. No matter: he flipped through the pages of a yellow notepad, then showed us both the shower of hieroglyphs he’d scratched across one sheet. “Once I got access to the prototype in Rush’s network,” he explained. “I figured out what big breakthrough they made after I left the company.”

“And?” I asked.

“And nothing. There
was
no breakthrough,” Dad said.

Somewhere
was a breakthrough, but not here, not this world. I felt like a guy waking up in a buried casket. You know you’re still alive and the world you left is only a few feet away, but you’re doomed. There’s no way to get back.

“
But
…” Dad said. “I pulled some info off your Mac.”

He nodded toward the junk leftovers of my computer dumped in one corner. It looked unsalvageable, but I couldn’t be mad, considering. My hard drive was probably swallowed into his monster mainframe already.

Dad went on, bug-eyed, “I couldn’t fully recover the actual video that was sent to you from the future, but some residual code was left behind. Enough to cross reference with the prototype and activate a real, working inter-temporal signal.”

“You reinvented the program? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Ha, not hardly,” Dad said. “You couldn’t send a whole teenager through. But information? Binary code? That’s conceivable. It got me thinking that maybe that’s what happened. We, us,
here and now
,
we
were the ones, or
would be
the ones, who sent, or
would send
, the warning video we saw this afternoon. We made the video and sent it back through time. So I decided I better fulfill the prophecy, so to speak. See if it could be done, at least.”

“Which is why I’m here,” Virgin said.

Now it made sense why Virgin Russ would be the video star instead of me. He had the wardrobe and the non-black eye, while us other Russes were running around with identical shiners, dead giveaways that we weren’t the real deal. Dad had it all figured out.

“Except… I was wrong about the video, too,” Dad admitted.

“Huh?” Virgin and I said, in unison.

“There’s no way we can replicate what we received.”

He was right. In the clip I saw, Video Russ was frantic, worried, and he used an entirely different script. This wasn’t the same scenario. There would be no way to purposefully record the version we saw earlier in the afternoon, even if we could remember exactly what Video Russ said.

Not to mention, Virgin and Dad didn’t yet know
why
the leaps were bad news. They hadn’t witnessed half the malfunctions and screwy anomalies and the murderous techno-vortex I’d lived through.
This
Russ had no cause to be genuinely horrified the way Danger Russ clearly was when he made his video.

Dad watched me, like he could
hear
me realizing. He said, “If our multiverse theory is right, then just think of all the universes where a Horace Vale received a working version of the time travel program. And somewhere in all those universes, different versions of
me
have figured out how to transmit messages through time and space. So the video we saw could be from
anywhere
. Trillions of possibilities and more.”