“What happened?” I asked.
“We’re not sure, but it looks like when certain people die or disappear, they do so across the board, so to speak. We don’t know exactly how or why this happens with some people and not others. If an alien or previous terrestrial civilization created or managed the mechanism connected to these Radiants in the past, they didn’t leave us any kind of instruction manual.”
“So, Crow has been obsessively manipulating both the game and the Radiants in a fruitless effort to find a universe where his daughter isn’t…dead, and that obsession is what put the multiverse at risk?”
“Yes.”
“How does that work?”
“It used to be that when you messed with things in one dimensional stream, it didn’t really affect the others. Sure, you’d get the occasional Berenstain Bears or Nelson Mandela controversy, but otherwise, memories and experiences would remain consistent along dimensional lines and stability was maintained. But, over the years, Crow’s obsession with finding his daughter has resulted in him completely destabilizing the game and therefore the dimensional lines. It looks like now, if one goes, they all go. He’s fucked up everything.”
“How does it really…work?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, the science.”
“What do you know about coherence and interference?”
“Assume nothing.”
“Imagine the multiverse consists of waves. When you have coherence, there’s no interference, and all the waves are functioning perfectly fine. But when there’s something called constructive interference, waves can blend together to create a wave of greater amplitude than either one individually. Now imagine countless numbers of very powerful waves that used to exist in a coherent state suddenly coming together. The amplitude of that resultant wave would be impossible to measure.”
“That’s what’s happening to the multiverse? It’s becoming one giant, super-unstable, decoherent wave?”
“Yeah.”
“The last time I saw you, you told me that my parents used my ability to slip me into another dimension in order to hide me from Crow.”
“That’s right.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense. Don’t he and I both exist here in this universe?”
“Yes, but because of dimensional drift, the Crow in your primary stream no longer knew that you existed.”
I shook my head. This was a lot to take in.
“So why do you think Alan Scarpio asked me to help him?”
“No idea, but the whole thing had to be part of Worricker’s game.”
“Rabbits sent Scarpio to meet me here in the arcade?” I said.
“I think so, yes.”
We sat there in silence for a moment, then the world began shaking again—longer and harder this time.
“The tremors are lasting longer now,” Emily said, squeezing my hand.
I nodded, still trying to come to terms with everything she’d just told me.
“So, in another dimension where we’re married, you and I somehow figured out a way to send me here in order to stop Crow from killing the multiverse?”
“Yes. Well, we had a little help.”
“Help?”
“From the woman who calls herself Swan.”
“What’s going on with her? Who is she?”
“You told me once that you believed she was what’s known as a Warden.”
“Wait, Swan’s a Warden?”
“I’m still not really sure, actually. She’s not a big talker. I just know that she’s concerned with the integrity of the multiverse, and that she’s capable of moving between dimensional streams.”
“Did you ever think about, you know, slipping streams or whatever, to try to find a way to bring Annie back?”
Emily stared at me for a long time.
“You don’t remember?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“The night Annie died.”
“I remember everything.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, we listened to Tori Amos while you drove the truck up to the Petermans’ house. You pulled out a journal or something, added some numbers together.”
“One-oh-seven point three,” she said.
“Exactly. You called it The Night Station.”
“Years later, I discovered that Crow believed The Night Station was a kind of shortcut to a very powerful point of The Terminal. It turns out that one of the strongest of Meechum’s Radiants is located right here in the Pacific Northwest.”