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CHAPTER SIX: The Machine

I lay dreaming in a driftwood cabin on the Pacific Coast, the greatest detective in the Bay Area snoring next to me. This was no ordinary sleep: we had been guided by the sea witch Carlotta along a path between realities. Another world had been sending agents into our own, and we wanted to find out why.

I often fly in my dreams, but never swooping like a bird. Instead, I tend to float around like a beachball. I can only go where the wind takes me.

In this dream, the witch’s dream, I am lifted from my perch atop Mount Tamalpais and lofted down toward the bay — but it is not my bay. Nothing’s been dammed, nothing paved. There are no skyscrapers shadowing Treasure Island. All the cities of the bay — West Alameda, Moletown, the Island of the Cats (neither an island, nor home to cats) — there’s nothing there. Peralta City, where I grew up — it’s just water.

And then I am tumbling down into San Francisco, which is not the antique heirloom city that I know, but a half-gleaming metropolis with a skinny pyramid and a fat thumb vying for dominance in its skyline.

I hit the ground, skidding like a frisbee. My heels scrape pavement at Columbus and Kearny, and there is City Lights: thank goodness. Some things don’t change.

I call Annabel Scheme’s name, but hear no reply. There are people on the street, and they’re all wearing masks … like surgical masks, except some are almost cheery, printed with colorful patterns. Why are they all wearing masks? What’s going on?

I want to look around, ask questions, maybe see what books they’re selling in this world’s City Lights. And that’s when I realize I’m being drawn upward, inexorably, as if by a magnet. On my left, the bay glitters, a void that seems to me malevolent. How can it just be EMPTY? A container ship floats ridiculously in the center.

Ahead of me, on the hip of Twin Peaks, I see the silhouette of Fritz Leiber Tower, except it’s not Fritz Leiber Tower. This is something else, a webbed monstrosity with a crown like a ship.

Careening through the sky above the city, I am suddenly sure I will be skewered on its dark trident. A glimpse of a strange San Francisco; a swift impalement. Hardly worth the trouble.

But then I see, at the base of this strange tower, an enormous facility, people in lab coats moving from building to building. I am pulled toward one of the buildings, sucked through one of its narrow, fortress-like windows and inside, I understand why: Here is the boxy, fashionable bag into which the detective Annabel Scheme deposited her crystal earring. Here is the bag’s owner, the cool and confident Lois, sipping a smoothie. And here, beside Lois, is a man I don’t recognize.

“—pieces in place,” the man is saying. “What about Dr. Gatua?”

“He’s in,” Lois says. “He’s ecstatic. It proves his theory.”

“After he and Pajunas complete the facility in Bay 17,” the man says, “we’ll have enough to merge all the timelines.” He is gaunt, hollow-cheeked, his head raggedly shaven. I can see, from my vantage point, that he has missed a spot. “We’re so close, Lois. SO close. I’m nervous.”

“Don’t be,” Lois says. “Chander, you built the machine that builds the machine. Dr. Gatua will follow your instructions like it’s a set of Ikea shelves.”

Chander looks out the window, which means he looks directly at me. I suck in a breath, but he’s looking through me. I am a ghost.

“When you were in Bay 17,” Chander says to Lois, “did you hear anything about … any other … version of me?”

“Bay 17’s Vacal Chander? No. I didn’t ask.”

“It doesn’t make you pause? Knowing all those other versions of you are going to evaporate?”

Lois finishes her smoothie with an empty, rattling slurp. “Nope.”

A deep rumble from the world outside draws my attention. From this perch, I can see all the way to the Marin Headlands, where the gray curve of Mount Tamalpais is crumbling. Trees slough off. The mountain is waking, and so am —

In the sea witch Carlotta’s driftwood cabin, Scheme was already awake.

“What did you see?”

I told her about the empty bay, the strange tower and the enormous facility.

Scheme’s face was stony. “So, you flew over a city and overheard a conversation. How nice for you.”

Hadn’t Scheme seen the same world? The people in masks?

“Ah. Yes, I did see it. But more … impressionistically. I was inside the gears of a giant machine — which I understood, dream-wise, to be the greatest and most dangerous to ever exist on this planet. Those gears ground me into dust, which was painful but worthwhile, because I was distributed throughout the machine’s workings and able to determine its function. Did I mention it was painful?”

“I did brew your tea a little stronger, Annabel,” Carlotta interjected.

I told Scheme how they had referred to our world as Bay 17.

“I’m sure theirs is Bay Number One. Typical. But it doesn’t matter. They want to produce something new, some … concatenation of all these different timelines. Bay Zero. Bay Nothing.”

Perhaps they would do it by combining different parts from different versions.

Scheme’s eyes widened. “Of course. Stella Pajunas. She’s terrible, but she’s brilliant — the most capable administrator the Bay Area has ever had. Will, they didn’t abduct her. They recruited her.”

From the kitchen nook, Carlotta held up her phone. “This came through while you two were sleeping.” She showed us the screen (the sea-witch had a late-model iPhone; unexpected) which displayed a news alert: Pajunas had called a press conference with the physicist Dr. Sven Gatua. Its subject: the construction of a new machine.

Tomorrow, Part 7: The Presser