A Fractured Infinity by Nathan Tavares

Author:Nathan Tavares
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags:  
Publisher: Titan Books

21

BREAKTHROUGH

I’ve got a theory about how we’re even in this mess.

Sure, it’s based on one of the marker-board The Alternate World plotlines from one of my Footage Farm coworkers, but let’s call it collaboration instead of plagiarism.

In all the footage from Figueiredo’s universe that we’d seen, there seemed to be a giant patch of time missing. Unless it didn’t exist.

We called his early journals—the ones of him blabbing into his camera in his basement lab—the Basement Records. Creative, I know. In the videos, Figueiredo was gray and full-faced. He looked both older and younger, minus the lines by his eyes, and with the rounder face of someone who’d physically given up around middle age. We had hundreds of hours of him scribbling equations and explaining them to the camera, and welding panels of gray metal to other panels of gray metal in a showering, glowing rain all over his basement lab. Then he tested little gray machines that had a habit of sparking fires, sending him running around with a fire extinguisher and whooping like a goofball scientist on a kids’ show. Hey kids, sometimes when you shatter the barriers between realities, you can make a mess! Remember to get your parents’ permission first.

Then Tiago showed up in the Basement Records and started helping Figueiredo, who then completed what must’ve been his prototype Envisioner. They flicked on the machine and ran some tests that me and the others didn’t understand, and they must’ve worked with how much Tiago and Figueiredo celebrated. All leading up to a kiss, bumbling in front of the machine and suddenly shy, after cresting some mountain between them that they’d been slogging up for weeks.

The next footage we’d been able to place in chronological order must’ve been years after he completed the prototype, based on context clues from the setting and how Figueiredo looked. From a cramped research lab in a university basement to a wide facility that looked like the hangar of a space station. Light from the walls of machinery and screens flooded his face, with cables snaking to the Envisioner, and the databanks where worker-bee researchers droned with tablets and video cameras.

Then another patch of missing time, suddenly they’re in a bigger facility with even more staff, all of them in sage-green lab coats. Figueiredo looked leaner, hungry-eyed, and harder. Like he’d turned his welding torch onto his own skin—sparks flying—to become some version of himself that could complete his work.

Sometimes you might see a light flash across the footage, but it could’ve just been your eyes.

But what if there aren’t actually any patches of time missing and Figueiredo blinked his kingdom into existence overnight? The lab. His staff and his power over them. The hard angles of his face in place of the doughy doubt.

Maybe Projectionist Kaori, on her break outside smoking and flicking butts onto the cracked pavement behind her booth at Hayes’s Disaster Drive-In, knows all this. How Figueiredo discovered an energy source that powers the machine by collapsing probability clouds down into whatever outcome he wants.

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