Maggie paced. How could she think? Sleep? Stuck in this blue void?
Here’s what she knew: on her Earth, Admiral Albert Calavicci was a friend and colleague of her uncle, Sam Beckett. She’d met them both in limited capacities, but not for a while now. This version of the Admiral hadn’t initially recognised her, but after getting her name it seemed to click.
So, she figured, this world couldn’t have been dramatically different to hers. Perhaps in this dimension, her uncle worked for the sliding program, and she wound up here as a prisoner after their incoming wormhole was traced.
Though it didn’t explain why she had no memory of getting here. She didn’t wake up, she was already standing when she found herself here. Something was fishy.
The sound of the door sliding open brought her to attention, and there he was again. Al the Admiral.
“Sir, I need to know that my friends are alright. Please.”
“Maggie, they’re fine, I promise. But who are these friends of yours?”
Maggie looked, pleading, at him.
“I don’t want to put them in danger.”
“Maggie,” Al said, “I need to know their names and where they came from. I promise you, this can only help.”
Maggie eyed him.
“You’re a reasonable guy, right?” She asked. “Why don’t we tell each other what we know? An open exchange of information?”
Al looked like he was having an internal struggle.
“Maggie, we run a highly classified, Top Secret facility here. I can’t divulge any sensitive information. Orders from the top.”
Maggie scowled.
“Well it’s a good thing I have Top Secret clearance, then. Tell me.”
Al tapped his hand device, and raised an eyebrow.
“Says here you’re the Sheriff of Madera County, California. Not exactly the kind of clearance you get in the top brass, sweetheart.”
Maggie’s jaw dropped.
“You’re kidding? I never joined the military?”
“You say that like you didn’t know,” said Al, giving her an odd look.
Maggie sighed, exasperated.
“Okay, listen. Al. Can I call you Al?”
“Sure, it’s my name.”
“Good. Al. Where I come from, I was involved in high level government research, exploring travel between parallel Earths.”
She watched Al’s mouth drift open as he hurriedly tapped on his device.
“Whatever records you have on Maggie Beckett from this Earth are irrelevant. I’m not her.”
She crossed her arms, and steeled her gaze.
“That’s all you get for free. You want info on my friends, you gotta give me something.”
Al shifted uncomfortably, seeming to search for his next words. Then, he finally let his shoulders sag.
“You know, you’re just as much of a pain as your uncle,” he said.
“Tell me where I am.”
“New Mexico.” He was starting to wither under her gaze.
“Gonna need more than that.”
“Then, you may be better off asking when you are,” Al said. “For you, it’s May second, 1999, right?”
Maggie squinted. “It’s hard to keep track of the date sometimes, but that sounds right.”
Al continued: “Well, the actual date today is November sixteenth, 2002. But your friends are still in 1999.”
Maggie wished she had somewhere to sit down.
“I time travelled?”
Al pointed to her. “Bingo.”
Maggie felt her head swimming.
“No, but, that means they must be long gone. I’m stuck here?”
She felt her throat constricting with panic. “Oh god, I’m gonna be sick.”
She leaned over, and felt blackness closing around the edges of her vision.
“This is why we don’t tend to give up this information to the people he switches with,” Al said, attempting to hold her up by the arm as she hyperventilated.
Maggie caught that word.
“Switches?” she said, looking up.
Al nodded. “Your uncle travels in time by… kinda swapping places with a person in history. We call it ‘leaping.’ He lives their life for a little while, helps ’em out, and they wait in here for an equal length of time, until they leap back after he’s done what he needs to do.”
Maggie felt her heart start to slow down as she absorbed this. She could still make it back before the slide. Right? But there was a perhaps more pressing question she had right now.
“How can someone who isn’t me, be living my life?”
Al appeared to struggle for an explanation.
“Uh, well, everyone just sort of sees him as you. To them, he looks just like you. Might be acting a little funny, but people tend to brush it off.”
“Yeah? Well there have been a couple of times I’ve ‘acted a little funny’ and it’s never gone well for me.”
She hoped one of the boys would notice an impostor, at least this time around.
Al placed a hand under her chin, pointing her face to his. He was smiling, but it was bitter. Maggie didn’t like feeling this vulnerable.
“I told you what you wanted, Maggie. Now give me the names of your buddies.”
* * *
“Hello!” Sam called out into the empty jail. He turned back to his apparent colleagues. “It just doesn’t make sense that nobody’s here.”
The other three were sitting around the device, looking over it. Sam desperately wanted to look at it himself, but he just didn’t want to risk revealing himself just yet. Not until he had more information.
“Well,” said the taller of the brothers, “Perhaps we’re in a world where crime has become so rare they don’t need their jails any longer.”
There it was again. A reference to a ‘world,’ as though this wasn’t the only ‘world’ that they knew. Something was bubbling up deep in Sam’s vague memories, but he just couldn’t reach it.
The shorter brother chimed in: “Oh great, that could mean nobody’s coming for us, and we’re stuck here until we starve to death.”
The older man put his head in his hands.
“I can’t go out like this, man!”
The tall brother moved to comfort him. “Well, that isn’t written in stone.”
Gesturing to the knee wound, he added: “It is possible you could die from sepsis first.”
“Always a great comfort, ain’t you Colin,” the older man remarked, shaking his head.
Colin.
Sam’s ears perked up as he heard the Imaging Chamber door sliding open. He looked around and saw Al taking a nervous puff of his cigar.
He gave his hologram friend a pleading stare.
“Sam, the Maggie I got in the Waiting Room claims to be from a parallel Earth,” Al said, with a deep furrow in his brow, as he looked down at the handlink.
That caught Sam’s attention. He watched his friend closely, as he walked over to the older black man, pointing with his cigar.
“This guy’s name is Rembrandt Brown. Ziggy has him as a washed up Motown singer. But, if he’s from a parallel universe, then, who knows.”
He pointed towards the shorter brother.
“This guy’s Quinn Mallory. Seems to take after you in the brains department. Was on his way to a Masters in physics, and poof! – suddenly disappears, leaving behind some video tapes showing some kind of freaky looking portal he said he was going to jump into. Guess he really did it, huh? Travelled to another Earth?”
Sam was having trouble keeping a poker face. He brought his hand to his mouth and tried to mask his look of excitement. He felt that memory he’d been struggling for finally break free, and he grabbed onto it.
“Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky Bridge…” he muttered, and grinned, impressed by this young guy sitting next to an exposed toilet in a jail cell. It mustn’t have been easy to build something like that on his own.
Al pointed at the man Sam had just found out was named Colin.
“She told me this guy was named Colin Mallory, but Ziggy’s got nothin’. Meant to be Quinn’s younger brother, but he’s an only child as far as Ziggy knows.”
Of course.
These parallel worlds were each threads of timeline divergence. In some, Quinn might have a sibling, and in others, his parents may have split up or decided not to have another child. Infinite possibilities.
Sam guessed he must have caused his fair share of divergences merely by leaping in, and Ziggy had a limited, zoomed-in view of this fractal of variations in events from which she calculated her odds and was able to record changes in history.
Al moved to his side now.
“As for the Maggie we got in the Waiting Room, she says where she comes from, she was in a military program working on this alternate world stuff.”
Sam met his eye, intrigued.
“That’s as much as she’s given up. She’s been prying information about us outta me in exchange.”
Sam turned away from his cellmates and leaned into the bars.
“I want to tell them, Al,” he muttered.
Al stepped through the bars to face Sam.
“What are you, nuts?”
He prepared to make his argument, but before he could say anything, the sound of a big metal door bursting open caused Sam, and everyone else, to turn towards it.
“What the hell are you people doing in here?!”
It was a woman’s voice. Sam craned his neck to see who it could be. And when she came into view, he nearly fell over in surprise.
It was Sheriff Maggie Beckett.