“Like déjà vu?” I asked, but I knew Emily wasn’t talking about déjà vu.
She was talking about the gray feeling.
“Déjà vu is most likely a brief glimpse into being awake in another dimension. I’m talking about something else. Have you ever experienced missing time, or an obsession with patterns or coincidences? Or maybe you notice that part of your reality has suddenly changed? Normally it’s nothing huge, like the South won the Civil War or the Beatles never existed. It’s something small, but significant to you in that moment. Maybe a company’s logo looks different from the logo you remember as a kid, a children’s book no longer has the same name, or a farmhouse in a famous painting has a different number of windows.”
“You’re talking about the Mandela effect,” I said.
“What I’m talking about is feeling like the world around you is slowly forgetting the world you know, one tiny piece at a time.”
“I’ve felt all of those things,” I admitted.
Emily nodded, and I noticed something in her eyes. The exhaustion I’d noticed earlier was still there, but there was something else. She had the look of somebody ready to give up after treading water alone in the deep ocean for days waiting for help that was never going to arrive.
“How does it work?” I asked.
“In order to find me, you had to follow coincidences, find a pattern. And on your way here, I’m sure you noticed certain…discrepancies.”
“The Fremont Troll was holding a Mini Cooper instead of a Volkswagen.”
“Interesting,” Emily said.
“You remember that troll holding a Volkswagen, don’t you?” I asked.
“I do,” she said.
“Thank god.”
“But I’ve forgotten so many other things.”
“What do you mean?”
“Most of the discrepancies—those things that you notice are different in your new world—will soon fade. You can write them down on scraps of paper, compose intricate stories to yourself, use audio and video, but none of that will matter. Because, in the end, you’ll never believe yourself, never remember. Those things will always seem like a fiction.”
It sounded impossible, but I felt like I was already losing the plot of the Richard Linklater movie Before Midnight. I still understood that it had existed, and knew that I’d seen it at least three times, but I could no longer remember any of the details.
“I’m sorry,” she said, checking the time on her phone, “but I’m going to have to speed things up. Where was I?”
“You’d just finished with the Meechum Radiants.”
“Right, so, a few years after Kellan Meechum published his final paper on the Radiants, a computer scientist named Hawk Worricker picked up the baton, so to speak, and started digging deeper into Meechum’s work.”
“WorGames’s Hawk Worricker?” I asked.
“Yes. WorGames is a lot more than it appears to be,” Emily said.
“What is it?”
“I’m getting to that.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s fine. Just stop talking.”
I opened my mouth to apologize again, but quickly shut it.
“Worricker was a genius—a total savant when it came to mathematics and statistical analysis. He was brilliant at forecasting strategic outcomes. He would collect as much data as he could and then extrapolate certain results involving clusters of people and industries over time. He was amazingly accurate and made millions by betting on changes in the market. But it wasn’t until Worricker discovered Meechum’s Radiants that he found his own life’s work. That’s when everything changed.
“Worricker became obsessed with figuring out what the Radiants were, how they worked, and why they existed. Eventually, he’d collected enough data to run some models and projections, and he discovered something incredible. Meechum’s Radiants were real. He was astounded and excited…until he discovered something else—something terrifying.”
“What was it?”
“Worricker discovered that Meechum’s Radiants were decaying, and that they would soon lose their efficacy.”
“Their efficacy? What were they doing?”
“Worricker believed what Meechum had discovered was more than simply invisible lines of manipulatable energy beneath the world. Worricker believed that these Radiants existed for a reason, that they functioned as a kind of multiuniversal insurance policy.”