Volume III — Tales from the Rift
The Mercer Rift
The first one was inside the vacuum chamber.
The first one was inside the vacuum chamber.
I want to be clear about what that means, because nobody at Mercer Field Station ever wanted to be clear about anything. The chamber is a steel sphere the size of a minivan, buried forty feet under the Nevada scrub. It gets sealed, pumped down to almost nothing, and chilled until the metal forgets what heat is. Nothing gets in there. Not air, not dust, not light. That is the whole point of it.
And on the morning after Run 41, when the camera inside came back online, there was a little wooden figure sitting on the floor of the sphere like someone had set it down on a kitchen table.
It was about the size of my thumb. A hunched shape, arms folded, head bowed, carved from some pale wood and worn smooth, the way a thing gets when it has been carried in a pocket for years. No face. Just a small notch where a face should be.
Dr. Halvorsen looked at the feed for a long time. Then she said, "Contamination," and wrote it in the log, and that was the end of the conversation. Contamination. In a sealed sphere at minus four hundred and fifty degrees.
I work nights. I am not a physicist. I watch the gauges, I log the numbers, I call someone if a number turns red. The physicists go home at six and leave the building to me, the hum of the pumps, and the wind dragging grit across the parking lot. I liked it that way. I liked it until Run 42.
The experiment had a long official name, but everybody called it the Rift. The idea, as far as I understood it, was to hold a tiny region of space so still and so empty that the universe would have to show its seams. Halvorsen said that empty space isn't really empty. It boils with possibilities, things that almost happen. The Rift was supposed to let us listen to them.
Run 42 went at two in the morning. The lights dipped, the way they always did. The pumps groaned. And when the readings settled, I went to my locker to get my thermos and found the little wooden figure sitting on top of it.
Same pale wood. Same folded arms. Same notch for a face.
My locker has a combination lock, and I am the only one who knows the combination. I stood there holding the thing, and it was warm, warm like it had just come out of somebody's hand.
I did not put that one in the log.
After Run 43, my car was blue.
I know how that sounds. I have driven a gray Corolla for six years. I walked out at dawn and there it was in my spot, my dent in the bumper, my parking sticker, my sunglasses on the dash, and it was blue. Dark blue, like it had always been blue. I sat in it for twenty minutes before I could drive home.
The figure was in the cup holder.
After Run 44, the guard at the gate called me Wes. My name is Walt. When I told him, he laughed like I was making a joke he didn't get, and I checked my badge, and it said Wes. Wes Arden. My photo, my face, a name that was one letter off and somehow completely wrong.
The figure was in my shirt pocket that time. I had not put it there.
I started keeping notes on paper, in my own handwriting, because I had begun to suspect the computers would agree with whatever the world decided to be. Each run, something shifted. Small things. A door that opened left instead of right. A coffee shop in town with a different name over the same window. A scar on my knuckle that I could not remember getting. And every run, without fail, the little hunched figure turned up somewhere close to me, as if it were following me.
Or as if it were the only thing that wasn't changing.
That thought came to me on the night of Run 46, and once it arrived it would not leave. Everything else slid a little every time the Rift opened. The car, the name, the doors, the scar. But the figure was the same. Same wood, same grain, same worn spot on the left shoulder where a thumb had rubbed it smooth.
So I did something I should have done at the start. I looked at the bottom of it under the magnifier in the instrument room.
There were letters there. Scratched in with a pocketknife, very small. Two of them.
W.A.
I carved things when I was a kid. My grandfather taught me, out on his porch in Elko, with a knife he let me keep. I made dozens of little figures, mostly bad ones. I had never made this one. I was almost sure of that.
Almost.
Here is what I believe now, sitting in the control room with the pumps humming and Run 47 scheduled to start in nine minutes.
Every time the Rift opens, the world steps sideways. Not far. Just one step, into the version of things next door, where the car is blue and the guard says Wes. And I step with it, and so does everybody else, and none of us notice, because we were always here.
But somebody noticed. Some Walt, or some Wes, a few steps back down the line. He figured it out. And he wanted to leave a warning for the next one of us, the one who would wake up in the next world over and not know anything was wrong. He needed something that could cross. Something small, something carried, something that meant nothing to anyone but us.
So he carved it. And he set it in the one place the Rift touches directly, the empty heart of the chamber, and he let it fall through.
Every figure I have found is a message from myself.
The thing I can't stop thinking about is the face. Or the lack of one. That notch where a face should be. My grandfather used to say you leave the face for last, because the face is where the figure becomes somebody. You don't carve a face until you know who it is.
I think the first Walt didn't know who it was yet.
I think I do.
I have my grandfather's knife. Strange, how I still have it in this world. I have a block of pale wood from the break room, from a shelf that I'm fairly sure used to be metal. And I have nine minutes, now eight, to finish a face.
It is going to look tired. It is going to look like a man who works nights and has finally understood his job.
When I'm done, I'll walk it down to the chamber hatch before they seal it, and I'll set it inside, on the cold steel floor, where the next one of me will find it in the morning.
He won't believe it at first. I didn't either.
But he'll turn it over. He'll see the letters. And this time, when he looks at it, the little figure will be looking back.