Chapter 15 Entanglement #11
In the antiuniverse, the tragedy is not that one can die but that one can’t.
The brain can be nearly dead, an organ unsewn, and still a body perseveres until the end—the only end, as, in Laurel’s world, there is a single way that life begins.
Yet the toll of war is still immense. Conflict takes other forms: technological, financial.
Physical violence can incapacitate, if not kill.
Survivors must be cared for until infancy.
Families who can afford to do so spend their savings on long-term assistance; those who can’t take on multiple jobs, or relinquish retirement, or fall into bankruptcy.
The waitlist at veterans hospitals is staggering.
“Most people couldn’t leave the country, but overtakers have that privilege: there is a network, with tributaries and pools. My son found a placement here. I thought a day would never pass when I didn’t miss the ocean.” The overtaker smiled. “And it hasn’t.”
“It must have been incredibly painful. I can see how much you’ve given of yourself,” Laurel said. “Mr. Nakamura—”
“Kenji,” he said.
“Kenji.” She toggled, readjusting. “I don’t know that Eli and I ever thanked you. Properly, I mean. For helping us to find Silas—and then coming to see us again, when he was a baby. We must have seemed so disrespectful. I’m sorry.”
“I’ve known many parents in that state. I’ve experienced it myself,” Kenji said, and Laurel thought of his son.
“I’m sure.” Laurel tipped her face up to look into his. “I need to know what happened to the other Laurel.”
Kenji sighed. “I thought you might. But I can’t tell you.”
“Why?”
“A doctor is forbidden to disclose a patient’s information. Overtakers are no different. Confidentiality is a tenet of our work.”
Laurel felt as though she were back at McMurdo, begging Nita Two for answers.
“But she…she is me,” Laurel said.
This had emerged instinctually, without reason.
“Do you think so?” Kenji asked.
“I’m not sure.” Laurel felt fragile and bewildered. “It’s as though…I can feel her—but it’s like groping in the dark: I touch something, and then it slips away. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”
Laurel described her visions: the first in the cave, and then her recent experiments. She did not mention that one had included Kenji himself.
A smile played on the overtaker’s face.
“What you’re describing goes by different names,” he said. “Past lives. Déjà vu. Eli would know it as entanglement.”
Laurel remembered Eli’s long-ago Halloween costume. “Spooky action at a distance.”
Kenji nodded. “You are connected, always, to the person you call Laurel Two. Most of the time, that link is subconscious. People think of it as instinct, or intuition.”
“My intuition comes…from her?” asked Laurel. “Do you mean that I don’t make my own choices?”
“You make them together.”
“That still sounds like I don’t have free will.”
“Because you’re thinking as an individual. You are using the word I when you could be using we.”
Her voice, when it came, was small. “But then why are we so different?”
Kenji cocked his head.
“Her career, for example,” said Laurel. “She was so much more successful than I ever was. She never knew Silas. And I did something terrible. She didn’t make that kind of mistake.”
“Perhaps she did.”
“I promise you she didn’t.”
Her emotions, hot, swam just under the skin.
Laurel was angry about what she had lost; she was angry to be trapped here, in the antiuniverse, more than a dozen years after she arrived.
She was angry to be seeking answers alone, while Eli was probably with Angela.
And she was angry to be compared, continually, to the other Laurel—though it occurred to Laurel now that she herself was the only person who had done so.
“Come with me,” said Kenji.
He pulled a lever at his desk. Every screen went dark. Then he walked to the door, which relayed the hallway light as it ebbed open.
—
They continued down the passage to a larger door. When Kenji pressed his thumb to a wall pad, it swung inward.
They entered a broad tunnel with a vaulted ceiling. On both sides were alcoves, lined with cells. The circumference of each cell was no wider than two or three inches, and what lay inside was imperceptible in shadow. A long table ran down the center of the room.
Kenji moved briskly. Again Laurel sensed that he was bending a rule, or making a complicated judgment. He scanned the cells while tapping the fingers of one hand, as if performing some internal math. Then he selected one compartment, which slid out of the wall.
What lay inside looked like a scroll. Kenji spread it open on the table.
A fractal image had been drawn in infinitesimal handwriting.
Laurel knew without inquiring that these were the Maps, the genealogical records that Kenji once described to her and Eli.
He had implied they were made of ink and paper, but this was unlike any ink and paper Laurel had ever seen.
Kenji lifted the hem of his top. Attached to a belt was his own set of tools, the same three that the apprentices had worn.
He withdrew the pen-shaped item. One side tapered to a copper point, the other a rounded silver protrusion.
When Kenji held the latter over the Map, a jagged fractal family illuminated.
Laurel stared. “How…?”
“The sheet is made of carbon atoms, rolled into microscopic tubes. To make paper, the tubes are matted in a net. The circuits store data.” He pointed to the chosen fractal. “This is your lineage.”
It was twig-shaped, with tiny nodes, each of which were labeled. The Rosens spread from the other Eli’s node, as the Salters did from the other Laurel’s, though her father’s dot had not yet been named. Laurel and Eli Two were connected by a thread. From that thread extended Celeste.
Laurel’s throat swelled; emotion flooded to her face; and because she did not want to give in to it, not yet, she said, “How do you make your handwriting so tiny?”
Kenji laughed. “This helps.”
He showed her the copper tip. Its point looked finer than a human hair.
“I know about Celeste,” Laurel said. “It isn’t the same. She’s gone, yes, but she lived a full life.”
The brightness of the fractal was already fading. The overtaker rolled the Map again and slid it back into the drawer.
“The overtakers have a saying,” he said. “The Duoverse does not repeat. It rhymes.”
—
He showed her upstairs now. One year ago, Laurel had been wheeled to the second-highest floor.
She shuddered as they passed it now, although the babies’ cries were not as loud as she remembered—or perhaps she was not so attuned to them.
They curved around the ramp one final time and arrived below the oculus.
Laurel felt suddenly faint. The walls on this level were lined with shadow boxes: the same compartments she had seen in one of her visions.
She approached a box at random. Affixed to the stone perimeter, a gold plate read:
Olivia Wu
2090–2016
Inside the compartment were four items, artfully arranged: a picture of a dark-haired woman with bangs; a necklace with a yin-and-yang symbol; a pair of jazz shoes; and a small plaque that read Distinguished Professor of Engineering.
The box beside Olivia’s was labeled Marco “Mouse” Oberman-Horowitz (3001–2042). A double-sided frame contained two photos: an adult man, and the same man as a baby. Beside that was a rubber mouse on a handmade, miniature pillow; the fabric was patterned with tiny baseballs.
“Does Celeste have one?” asked Laurel.
In the instant before Kenji pointed, Laurel realized that she already knew where it was.
She moved toward it instinctively: the eighth column, four rows up.
The dates on her plate read 2111–2019. Celeste must have died not long before her parents traveled to McMurdo.
In a photo, she sat on a rock in black Converse sneakers, her hair blowing back from her face.
A second picture showed her at the Eiffel Tower with Laurel and Eli Two.
A mood ring sat beside a Post-it that read Bigger than the world.
The final object was an award. A pair of golden prongs held a sphere made of four rings. Laurel squinted to read the text on the base.
for excellence and service
in space exploration
“She was an astronaut?” Laurel asked. The implication was incredible: influence that ran in all directions. Had Eli Two become a physicist because of Celeste? Had she even, somehow, impacted Laurel’s Eli, who had longed to be an astronaut?
Some emotion flew across Kenji’s face, which Laurel tried to decipher. It could have been pride, or loyalty, or even love. He might have been thinking of a person—or maybe his love was for the Duoverse, as an invention reveres its creator.
“I still don’t understand,” said Laurel. “You implied that the other Laurel made a mistake. You said that she was like me.”
Kenji paused. “When you came here with Silas, you went to the floor below this one: Labor and Delivery. In every room, there was an infant like yours, and a woman like you—every room, that is, except for one.”
Laurel remembered. She had passed a room that seemed different from all others—one in which the infants’ cries were louder, and more numerous.
“An adult becomes a child,” said Kenji. “A child becomes a baby. A baby becomes an infant—and there is a window, then, when the infant must enter the mother’s body. It is the same, I think, in your world…the same, but in reverse?”
“A woman can miscarry,” Laurel said. “An infant can be born too early.”
“And here, after a point, it becomes too late: they cannot enter the mother at all. Laurel miscalculated,” Kenji said. “During that window, she was gone.”
Laurel could see that it pained him to say it—to break the code that had governed his life, and before that, his son’s. She could not yet wonder why he’d done it. Lightheaded, she reached for the wall.
“No,” she said, beseeching. “What happened to Celeste?”
“They brought her here. We made her as comfortable as we could.”