It's Not the End Read online

  The irony is Cünzken didn’t live to see the fifth paper published. He’d killed himself by then, a suicide note explaining it was inevitable someone would test his equations. More than that, he claimed his pondering the deepest recesses of reality had created a multi-dimensional space in his mind. It had allowed something in the universe’s deepest bowels to reach out to him. To mark him. If a doorway opened, he feared the indescribable wonders and horrors that would emerge from the hidden dimensions would seek him out.

  At least, he concluded, his headaches had subsided.

  That’s why I understand why Cünzken willed his considerable fortune to be used as seed money to build a collider for testing his equations on the property he had purchased. Cünzken had been a ridiculed outcast his whole life. He dared the world to prove him wrong. The world itself would be the stakes. His hometown would be ground zero.

  Forty years later, a consortium of scientists and commercial interests accepted the dare. Once home to just eight hundred people, the facility’s construction crews brought roads, restaurants and hotels to Smythers. Staff brought their families, which meant schools, which brought a desperate search for teachers. All one needed was a Bachelor’s degree. It gave me the chance to get closer.

  The bell rings, stabbing my head, and a moment later stampeding feet and gleeful voices fill the hallway. Another moment and hundreds of kids bolt outside, breaking into small groups that claim spots of grass.

  As I grab the eraser, Liz walks in and hops up on my desk. “You ran the experiment?”

  “It says Pi, the great universal constant, is 3.26.” Something is wrong with my chair. It takes more than a complete turn to face the board.

  “I thought you had a physics degree,” she teases.

  I motion to the figures on the white board. “Run the numbers yourself.”

  She grabs my calculator. From how she’s sitting and where I am in this chair, I have a great view of her legs, but the headache is pounding an uneven rhythm.

  Her eyebrows knot at the result. “Well, you did something wrong, speedy.” She hops off my desk, squeezes my shoulder to let me know she’s kidding, and grabs the compass, intent on repeating the experiment.

  I’m barely aware. The pain in my head is uneven, but there’s a pattern. Complex, sophisticated. Oscillating in multiple dimensions.

  “Does—” The tone of Liz’s voice pulls me back. Next to me, she’s tense, turning the compass. Watching, it’s taking the compass longer to complete the circle than it should. Like there’s more than 360 degrees to traverse.

  A kid’s voice outside: “Hey, look!”

  I look up. A handful of kids are standing, pointing. Pointing at the horizon.

  “Liz,” I say, wondering if my eyes really have gone bad. “Outside.”

  She looks. Sees what I see. Sees what the kids see. The horizon is curving. “Oh my God.”

  The agony in my head pulses, filling my mind, pushing beyond it.

  A wordless understanding arises.

  I haphazardly shove pins around the circumference of the circle Liz has drawn.

  “What are you doing?”

  It’s language. Something so foreign, so immense, is trying to communicate. “What if Pi has changed?”

  “What?”

  Cünzken predicted this: unravelling a micro-dimension could cause another dimension to curl up, possibly changing universal constants—Planck length, speed of light, Pi. “The collider—” I gasp.

  “That was today?”

  The circle looks smaller than the one I drew, but it takes almost all of the string to wrap its circumference. I fight through the pain that threatens to overwhelm my awareness and measure the string, punch the measurements into the calculator, and hold it up for Liz to see: Pi is 3.71.

  She says something, but I don’t hear. Holding Cünzken’s graphs in my mind, I apply it to this communication and the pain shatters. The message, loosed from the constraints of my three-dimensional perception of space-time, expands along infinite dimensions. It would take a lifetime to explain its intricacies, but it boils down to a basic concept: We have been noticed and it is coming.

  “What does that mean?” Liz repeats.

  Entry to a wormhole comes via a three-dimensional space—a sphere. A finite space. “Look out your room’s windows,” I tell her.

  She runs to the door without question. From there, she can see into her classroom and out its windows toward town.

  Outside my windows, the horizon continues to curve. Curve upwards. A few teachers stand, pointing. And the children, taking their cue from the adults, remain motionless.

  “It’s flat,” Liz says from the doorway. She’s only twenty-five feet away, but she seems so distant.

  The speaker at the front of the room crackles. A voice trying to hide its fear says: “Attention, attention. There’s been an accident at the collider. We are asking everyone to calmly leave school grounds and walk toward town.”

  “Get the kids,” I tell her. “Run. Get outside its effects.” Corners where walls meet the ceiling and floor begin to bow.

  Footfalls pound by in the hall.

  “I’ll get someone to carry you.”

  She leans into the hall, but I shout: “There’s no time. Get the kids out.”

  Her face is pained. “I’ll send someone back.” And she’s gone. I begin to turn toward the window, wheels spinning and spinning, but I barely rotate as the wheels’ circumferences increase with each passing second.

  Liz emerges outside, commanding the kids to follow her. Unquestioningly, they and the teachers obey. A moment later, everyone disappears around the corner of the building.

  The horizon is now bowl-shaped, the collider complex impossibly distant rising from behind it.

  This is no delusion borne from madness. It’s truth, the ultimate truth I have sought for three years.

  With a sense I can’t quantify, I detect the approach of something from a direction moments ago I could not fathom, but now seems so obvious. It has been here so close all along, yet infinitely unreachable.

  I wait for the universe to reveal whatever wonders or horrors it has concealed.

  Ascension

  —Dear God, they’re everywhere—

  Limping. Can’t remember how long. Can’t think straight. This dull, distant pain in my leg. Sirens. Something’s burning?

  —Can’t believe—

  Everywhere, people are running. Streaming between cars, trying to get away. Some lurch, limbs twitching. Bodies lay still on the asphalt, bleeding. And others . . .

  —oh-god-oh-god-oh-god-oh-god—

  Oh god.

  Others feed. A pile of people, their flesh shredded and eyes milky blanks, hold down a screaming, kicking old man. They tear loops of guts from his abdomen, press them to blood-streaked mouths—

  —HELPMEPLEASEHELPME—

  These thoughts . . . They’re not mine.

  I focus. How did—

  A bang tears through the screams and sirens. Ten steps away, a police officer, gripping a pistol, hurries among the parked cars, yelling for others to run. Focus punches through his terror. Through that tunnel of determination, I see years back, a younger him leading others in combat, a newly promoted First Lieutenant. Driven, well-trained to—

  A scream. Sallow-skinned hands grab a teenage boy by a tangle of hair. His mind a jumble of wordless horror. He swats the hands drawing him close.

  My hands.

  I open my hand, letting him—

  My fingers remain clenched in his hair, pulling.

  The teen lurches one way, another, and he’s free, running, leaving bits of bloody scalp clasped in my fingers. My hands press this into my mouth. Bitter, salty. Something base and savage within me is satisfied and—disgusting—craves more.

  Yet it’s not me. Only my body desires this flesh. To feed. To spread this special death so we can change, leave, ascend—

  The cop fires again. To my right, a young woman staggers, a raw, red s
cream where her right cheek should be. Blonde hair in a ponytail, skin translucent, blue veins beneath. The torn collar of her blood-spattered college sweatshirt exposes a bite wound on her shoulder.

  Beyond her, burning shapes twirl and dance out of a flaming store front.

  Across the small grocery store parking lot, her clouded eyes lock with mine. Questions flood between us.

  —what’s happening—when did—how long have—can you remember—stop yourself—how can we hear—

  A memory that might be hers or mine or belong to someone running between us: sirens jerking me/her/us awake. Contradicting radio and television and internet reports. It’s local. It’s worldwide. The military is moving in. Government communications have broken down. It’s in the water. The air. Our very thoughts and words. A fast, desperate debate with our roommates to stay put or make a run for it. One of us—me, her, the cop—needs to find someone. Save someone. So I/he/she/we go out into the chaos, terrified but more afraid of losing—

  Bang. Her right eye explodes. Our connection snaps. She drops, but a force—a momentum—tries to pull me after her into . . . something. A glimpse, a whiff: higher and bigger and beautiful. Inevitable.

  Unsteady legs turn me, on the edge of balance, to face the cop. Hands reach out, feet shuffle forward, ignoring others racing past.

  That’s right, the cop thinks, towards me. His concentration hardens. Seven rounds left in this clip, one more clip to go. His car just on the other side of Fuller Avenue. If backup doesn’t show by the time he reloads, he’ll fall back.

  And out there among the jagged, interweaving thoughts are others like him. Still thinking, still evaluating. Their minds solid, consistent shapes among the amorphous panic. Their rational, human minds resisting the raw, adrenaline-fuelled impulse to flee that’s spreading like fork lightning through the unconscious, animal connection we all share.

  And others like me, most adrift in their terror, but others joining, connecting. Thinking. A Tokyo subway station. An apartment building courtyard in Cleveland. A church in Cape Town.

  I’m sensed, welcomed.

  —is this intentional—part of a plan—how are others—

  Not in English, but I understand. Thought, not words. Pure.

  —our flawed, finite bodies jettisoned so our minds—

  Another bang and I’m yanked back and up and out, into somewhere else. Somewhere above, somewhere of everything and everyone. I’m barely aware of seeing my mangled body collapse through the eyes of the cop because now I see everything through everyone’s eyes.

  The Machinery of Government

  In Paul’s right ear, Eddie asked: “Next: Do you have your access codes?”

  “I think so,” Paul replied, moving into the front hall of the small townhouse he rented. Honestly, he had no idea where they were.

  Outside, the siren was getting closer.

  Three more notices scrolled up into his field of vision:

  * MINISTER OF NATIONAL DEFENCE EDDIE LAZENBY ARRIVING AT GOVERNMENT OPERATIONS CENTRE

  * PRIME MINISTER ANDREW RENAULT HAS BEEN ALERTED

  * LAND AND CELLULAR COMMUNICATIONS NETWORKS OVERLOADED; GOVERNMENT NETWORK REMAINS STABLE

  The upward movement of the red letters—a direction his inner ear told him was impossible while he turned to the right—made him motion-sick.

  He shut his eyes, moaning, bile filling his mouth.

  “Are you okay?” Eddie asked, sounding like he was next to Paul and not speaking through a device in Paul’s ear. In the background, Paul heard a commotion of commands and responses, voices trying to get Eddie’s attention.

  “Yeah,” Paul replied, tentatively opening his eyes. The messages had contracted and joined others in the upper right corner of his vision. Missed communications gathered in the lower right. “Just the heads-up display.” He grabbed his briefcase from where it lay by the door.

  Someone shouted Eddie’s name as he spoke: “You’ll get—not now!—you’ll get used to it.”

  Paul sorted through the briefcase, wondering if he’d get used to the pain. Before now, he’d only worn the interface for about an hour at a time. He’d pull its strap snug against his forehead just before Question Period, which let his aides send him talking points or statistics to deal with a question from the Opposition, then shut it down and slide it off afterward. That limited exposure caused a dull ache behind his eyes. Now, the increased electrical signals the device was pumping into his occipital lobe, the vision centre at the back of the brain, caused his head to throb. “Hope I didn’t pack it in a bag that’s on its way to Marcel’s cottage with Laura.”

  Three more notices appeared:

  * PUBLIC SAFETY MINISTER MARCEL CHARLEBOIS HAS BEEN ALERTED

  * ENEMY FORCES RE-GROUPING NEAR VARS

  * RUSSIAN, CHINESE AMBASSADORS DENY INVOLVEMENT OR KNOWLEDGE

  His eyes fought between focusing on the briefcase and the messages seeming to float two metres away yet superimposed over the leather case. Paul shut his right eye and the messages disappeared. Using his left, he kept searching.

  He bit his lip. Not there. Maybe the laptop bag. “So much to keep track of.”

  “You get used to that, too.”

  He pulled open a Velcro flap to find the backs of two thick, black binders. “I feel so useless.”

  “Andy would not have picked you if that was true,” Eddie said. In the background, someone screamed about “getting some fucking air support.”

  Not for the first time, Paul wondered if his skin colour had more to do with his promotion than his abilities. Having a young black man from the prairies in cabinet helped silence critics who claimed his party was the domain of old white men from the coast.

  He pushed the idea away. Now wasn’t the time for those thoughts.

  Opening a side pocket revealed the thin blue folder containing his access codes. “Got it.”

  Paul opened his right eye to see:

  * SPEAKING POINTS: USE: ‘SENSLESSS AGGRESSION,’ ‘DISRUPTION OF PEACEFUL CO-EXISTENCE’

  * AVOID: ‘INVASION/INVADERS,’ ‘ATTACK’

  “Last item: Is Laura still there?” Eddie asked.

  “She left about an hour ago.” Paul returned to the living room. The siren sounded like it was somewhere in his neighbourhood. “Said she couldn’t wait to get down by the water.” The muted television showed a view down Highway 417 in the farmland to the east of the city. Just at the edge of the camera’s range, indistinct shapes moved, sending up plumes of blue-grey smoke. “Wanted to enjoy this great weather.”

  They’d both been looking forward to the long weekend. His first two weeks as cabinet minister had been spent getting hammered by the opposition in Question Period and attending endless meetings scheduled by his chief of staff, who insisted Paul should have been wearing the interface more frequently. In both venues, Paul parroted the talking points sent down from the Prime Minister’s Office—deflect attacks, stay on message, defend the government’s agenda. Nothing about using his own discretion. Nothing about the government’s response to hostile forces on Canadian soil for the first time since the Fenian Raids. He felt like a cog—messages from the PMO made him spin and he, in turn, spun others.

  So this weekend, he and Laura were going to a cottage in the Gatineau Hills owned by Paul’s other mentor, Marcel Charlebois, the current minister of public safety, to review the government’s agenda. For months, the front lines had been stable so the Prime Minister—“Andy” to his friends and caucus members not out to replace him—had given them the okay to get out of the city. Just a quick, last-minute meeting with his chief of staff on the Hill and Paul would have been on his way.

  An emergency notice twenty minutes ago had changed everything.

  “That’s the best place for her,” Eddie said. “One more second! It shouldn’t take her too much longer to get there. We can evac her with Marcel if it comes to that.”

  The kitchen phone rang. Pain pulsed in time with its simulated bell sound. Paul sh
ut his right eye. The caller ID showed: Laura - Cell. “Eddie, it’s Laura on the house phone.”

  “Go ahead and take it. I need to figure out what’s happening here. Tell Laura to stay at the cottage. GPS shows your security escort is almost there. Let me know when you’re on your way.”

  “I will.” The connection clicked off. Paul hit the “GO” button on the handset and pressed it to his left ear. Sirens shrilled in the background, an ice pick through his brain. An instant later, near-panic at how far the chaos might have spread. “Sweetie, where are you? Are you safe?”

  “Thank God,” she said. “Been trying your office and your cell.”

  “Meeting was cancelled. Where are you?”

  “Downtown. The Rideau Centre. But I’m heading for the Hill.”

  The words froze him, like that doctor five years ago telling them it was cancer growing in her belly, not the baby they’d hoped for. “I thought you were on your way to Marcel’s.”

  “I made a quick stop,” she said. “A small present for you for making it into cabinet. And something for Marcel and Eddie. Then everyone’s going crazy. I can’t get online, but people are saying they’re on the move.”

  His temples throbbed in time with his racing heartbeat. “It’s true.”

  “Holy shit, Paul.” Terror in her voice. “Coming here?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “Are you going to the Hill? Can I meet you there?”

  “No, I—” An unsecure line, he had to pick his words carefully. “I’m not going to the Hill.”

  “I hear you. What’s my next move? Should I get to get to you?”

  Tires screeched. He turned, right eye popping open. Messages—shifting and scrolling—filled his vision. Behind them, an RCMP cruiser skidded to a stop out front. Pangs of nausea beat in time with its pulsing lights. Paul turned away just as the messages rearranged themselves into a tighter pattern. His stomach flipped and he clamped his teeth and eyes shut.