32. Good August #2
I don’t like the way literally every person in this room is looking at me again. I rebuff them with, “You never struck me as especially repressed, Jon.”
“You might be surprised.” Giving me a slow nod and a disconcerting smile, he returns to the kitchen bench for more tea.
“I’m so glad we got that out of the way,” Shashi sighs out. “Now if we could get down to the science?”
We’re shunted over to the table by Amber’s insistent shoves, and the scale of the work Shashi’s done comes properly into view.
It’s that thing where someone hyperfocuses on something they find fascinating.
She’s been over and over it. She grabs more papers from her bed and bedside table, laying them all out in whatever chaotic order is making sense in her mind.
“Here’s what I’ve figured out,” she begins. “We have parallel worlds sitting side by side—that much we all know from theoretical physics, correct?”
There’s a vague mutter of agreement from all but tea-carrying Jon, who’s just happy to be involved.
“According to this, Villain August—”
“I’m not a villain!”
“—punched a hole into the next world using… what?”
“Um…” There’s an odd shyness about him, mingled with something that looks softly like… pride? “A Blackthorne particle.”
“A Blackthorne particle?” I breathe out.
“A Blackthorne particle,” he reiterates. Then, with the kind of sweet smile I’d like to lick off him… “I discovered it.”
“I called it the same thing!” Assassin August interjects, and they almost share a moment of excitement. I do too. Honestly, that’s amazing. If only I knew what that was.
Shashi gets there first. “What’s a Blackthorne particle? Please start at the beginning, and explain exactly how you got here.”
“So, um… in my London, we had a powerful particle accelerator, and it’s a bit shit that this London doesn’t have one—”
“Right?” says Assassin August.
“Ridiculous,” my August agrees before taking back up his explanation.
“If you fire particles at high speed, then you’ll see some disappear.
They’re just gone. And we all worked, trying to figure out where they went, or why, until I realised they were merging with something, or crossing over.
They went somewhere else. Gone. So, I hypothesised that, given enough of these Blackthorne particles, all in the right place at the right time, couldn’t you follow their path?
See where they were going? Even if you’re not made of the same thing, they would create a gap.
And they’re everywhere. All around us right now.
It’s just a matter of isolating them, amassing enough of them, then directing them. And that’s what I did. But…”
When he breaks off, Assassin August lets out a long and slow sigh. For once, it’s not mocking. It’s sad, and he lowers his head as my August speaks on.
“I didn’t know how to close it. I tried. Opening it was easy. I created a particle accelerator of my own to distribute solely Blackthorne particles. I set it off in the lab, by myself. It was one push of a button, and there it was, a hole into another dimension.”
August’s eyes turn wistful, but the emotion soon fades to sadness.
“The first one I let off, nothing. There was nothing there, but the second, I remember, I… I remember walking up to it. And I put my hand through. I couldn’t feel anything, but it was there.
I poked my head through, and I found the same room.
It was as if my room had just ripped open, this slight quiver in the air, like you see above a road on a hot day.
And there it was, just the same. Shimmering a little.
I’d cracked it. All alone in the lab that day, I’d discovered interdimensional travel. ”
His words don’t arrive with the sort of fanfare you’d expect with a statement like that.
He drops into that distant melancholy I’ve sensed in him so many times, back when I couldn’t figure out why it was ever-present.
Back before I knew he was carrying all the universe, and then hundreds more of them, on his shoulders.
I can’t help but take his hand, and even if Shashi’s mouth twitches at the contact, she doesn’t say anything.
August looks down at my hand, fiddling with my fingers.
“I didn’t go all the way through. Not immediately.
I waited on my side. I wanted to be able to close it.
I decided to stay there, to study it, until I could.
When I opened it, the university had broken up for Christmas, and the place was deserted.
I kept it secret. I watched it. I slept there.
I wondered if something might find its way across, some evil interdimensional horror.
But nothing did. And it seemed so innocuous. ”
He scrunches my hand a little tighter. “I barely looked at the news during that time; I was so deep in my own work. But one night, I remember scrolling, and there was story after story of… of the end times. Of the world breaking down, piece by piece. There was talk of astronomical anomalies, planets that couldn’t be seen anymore.
Someone said the Moon would crash into Earth.
It took me a while to figure it out. A long while.
It seemed impossible that what I had done—this small hole shimmering between worlds—could cause this.
And by the time I realised, it was too late. ”
I hate the way he drops my hand to walk away, that I can’t give him the comfort he needs.
It must have been years ago now, but he’s reliving the moment, hands shaking, eyes wet.
“Things collapsed—everything, bit by bit. The stories stopped, broadcasts of any sort gone. Cities went dark; the sky went black. Can you imagine that? And all that time, it was like this horror creeping up. Why was London last? Why was London being saved? But it was heading for us, like the last domino in the line.”
He looks at me, very specifically, like I’m the only one who needs to hear this.
“You would never have known it in that lab. I didn’t know.
Being the last thing to go, it was peaceful.
It was the only safe place. But who could have known that besides me?
There was no evident displacement of particles from where I was standing.
There was a light breeze, passing towards the gap.
But… that’s all it felt like, a breeze. It didn’t seem like destruction.
I never knew until I was on the other side. ”
He starts a pace of the floor, talking, remembering.
“The room around me finally started to fall apart. There was a weightlessness, a heat, and there was force, like I was being pulled, like every atom in my body had to get through that hole. I didn’t have a choice.
It pulled, and I watched the room closing, just disappearing out of existence, knowing I was alone, that there was nothing left.
I was dragged through. I landed on the floor of that lab, exactly the same as my lab.
There was heat that followed me. It got hotter and hotter, the wind coming from the rift, then, even as I tried to push towards it, to get back, it just stopped.
Everything stopped. The rift closed. And the strangest thing, even now, was the noise and energy of that new empty room. It was… alive.”
Tears roll down his cheeks, but his words come steady, like there’s a wall between him and the pain.
“You can’t know the true sound of silence until everything is dead.
Everything. Not just deceased, not rotting, but no longer existing.
My world was gone. An eternal silence. Everything blotted out.
Just like that. And that schism—to go from a dead world to a living one, to be hit with the seething horror of what I’d done, it…
” A shaking hand rises to his temple. “It tried to take over, this great black gaping thing. So I just… I turned it off. I turned cold. In that instant, it was pure survival. There was work that had to be done. I had to get it all back. Fix what I’d broken. ”
He turns around, his eyes like fire on me.
“I came looking for you.” His strides are fast, and he’s by me again, taking both my hands in his.
“I came looking for you, over and over. In that world, I didn’t find August until the end.
Until it was too late. There were things I had to do—food, shelter, things I’ve got down now.
But back then, it was a mess. Because I didn’t work in that lab—not in that world.
I wasn’t allowed there. I had never prepared for that. It was catastrophic. And I needed you.”
I stroke a slow hand down his cheek, which he leans into. “I’m here now.”
His hand wraps around mine, holding it to his heated skin. “You are. And it’s all done. It’s all over.”
His words scare me. He can’t still be thinking of doing that. When he pulls me into a hug, I hold him tight. I wish I could become him, keep him in me. But too soon, he steps back, separates us, walks to the table and drops a hand down on the papers.
“I’d been smart enough to keep my notes, ready to go, just in case I had to go through.
So I set to work as best I could, trying to figure out how to undo what I’d done.
Hoping it was even possible. Homeless, on a street corner, trying to keep warm while writing this shit out.
I was there for weeks, trying to find a footing, hitting up shelters, no resources whatsoever.
It took so long for the news to reach me…
And when it did… It’s indescribable. I followed stories whenever I got the chance and watched it happen again.
All of it. Just as it’s happening now. It starts small, then grows until it reaches critical mass, at which point the universe folds in on itself, laws of physics broken. ”