The Space Between Worlds Read online

  The Space Between Worlds is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Micaiah Johnson

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  DEL REY is a registered trademark and the CIRCLE colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  ISBN 9780593135051

  Ebook ISBN 9780593135068

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover design: David G. Stevenson

  Cover illustration: © Cassandre Bolan

  ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Three

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Four

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PART ONE

  “In the far reaches of an infinite cosmos, there’s a galaxy that looks just like the Milky Way, with a solar system that’s the spitting image of ours, with a planet that’s a dead ringer for earth, with a house that’s indistinguishable from yours, inhabited by someone who looks just like you, who is right now reading this very book and imagining you, in a distant galaxy, just reaching the end of this sentence. And there’s not just one such copy. In an infinite universe, there are infinitely many. In some, your doppelgänger is now reading this sentence along with you. In others, he or she has skipped ahead, or feels in need of a snack and has put the book down.

  In others, he or she has, well, a less than felicitous disposition and is someone you’d rather not meet in a dark alley.”

  Brian Greene, The Hidden Reality

  CHAPTER ONE

  When the multiverse was confirmed, the spiritual and scientific communities both counted it as evidence of their validity.

  The scientists said, Look, we told you there were parallel universes.

  And the spiritual said, See, we’ve always known there was more than one life.

  * * *

  EVEN WORTHLESS THINGS can become valuable once they become rare. This is the grand lesson of my life.

  I’m at the base of a mountain, looking over a landscape I was never meant to see. On this Earth—number 197—I died at three months old. The file only lists respiratory complications as cause of death, but the address on the certificate is the same one-room shack where I spent most of my life, so I can picture the sheet-metal roof, the concrete floor, and the mattress my mother and I shared on so many different Earths. I know I died warm, sleeping, and inhaling honest dirt off my mother’s skin.

  “Cara, respond. Cara?”

  Dell’s been calling me, but she’s only irritated now and I won’t answer until she’s concerned. Not because I like being difficult—though, there is that—but because her worry over a wasted mission sounds just like worry over me.

  Behind me, information is downloading from a stationary port into a mobile one. When it’s done, I’ll take the mobile back to Earth Zero, our primary Earth, the one the others think of as real. The information I gather is divided up into light data—population, temperature fluctuations, general news—and dark data—what is affecting their stocks that might affect ours, or, if it’s a future world, a full listing of where every stock will close on a given day. The existence of the dark data is a big secret, though I don’t know why anyone would care. Insider trading doesn’t even sound like a crime—not a real one, one with blood.

  “Cara…”

  Still just annoyed. I check the download’s progress. Sixty percent.

  “Cara, I need you to answer me.”

  There we go.

  “I’m here.”

  There’s a pause while she resets to apathy, but I heard the panic. For a second, she cared.

  “You don’t always have to leave me waiting.”

  “And you don’t always have to plant me two miles from my download port, but I guess we’re both a little petty, eh Dell?”

  I can hear her smiling but not smiling from 196 worlds away. I’ve dodged the physical training for my job since just after my hiring six years ago. She’s so uptight, you’d think she’d just report me, but forcing me on these long walks is her answer.

  “You’re wanted back. There’s a file on your desk.”

  “I already have my pulls for the week.”

  “Not a pull. A new file.”

  “No, but…”

  I put my hand against my chest, expecting to feel a divot, some missing chunk of flesh.

  I want to tell her it can’t be true. I want to tell her I would have known. Instead, I tell her I need an hour and cut the link.

  If I have a new world, it means that particular Earth’s me isn’t using it anymore. I’m dead again, somewhere else, and I didn’t feel a thing.

  I’m not sure how long I sit, staring out at a horizon that’s like mine, but not. The download dings its finish. I could traverse out from here, since there’s no one to see me, but I steal a little time exploring the place fate tried to keep from me.

  Another me is gone. As I walk into the valley, I’m a little more valuable walking down the mountain than I was walking up.

  * * *

  WHEN I WAS young and multiverse was just a theory, I was worthless: the brown girl-child of an addict in one of those wards outside the walls of Wiley City that people don’t get out of or go to. But then Adam Bosch, our new Einstein and the founder of the institute that pays me, discovered a way to see into other universes. Of course, humanity couldn’t just look. We had to enter. We had to touch and taste and take.

  But the universe said no.

  The first people sent to explore a parallel Earth came back already dead or twitching and about to die, with more broken bones than whole ones. Some actually did make it through, and survived on the new world just long enough to die from their injuries and have their bodies recalled.

  It took a lot of smart people’s corpses before they learned that if you’re still alive in the world you’re trying to enter, you get rejected. You’re an anomaly the universe won’t allow, and she’ll send you back broken in half if she has to. But Bosch’s device could resonate only with worlds very similar to our own, so most of the scientists—with their safe, sheltered upbringings in a city that had eliminated childhood mortality and vaccinated most viral illness into extinction—had living doppelgängers on the other worlds.

  They needed trash people. Poor black and brown people. Peopl
e somehow on the “wrong side” of the wall, even though they were the ones who built it. People brought for labor, or come for refuge, or who were here before the first neoliberal surveyed this land and thought to build a paradise. People who’d already thought this was paradise. They needed my people. They needed me.

  Of the 380 Earths with which we can resonate, I’m dead in 372. No, 373 now. I’m not a scientist. I’m just what they’re stuck with. The higher-ups call us “traversers” on paper. Using ports put in place by the last generation of traversers, we download the region’s information and bring it back for greater minds to study. No better than pigeons, which is what they call us, not on paper.

  One day, the Eldridge Institute will figure out how to remotely download information across worlds, and I’ll be worthless again.

  * * *

  BACK ON EARTH Zero, I go straight to my floor after changing into my office clothes. Dell stands out tall in the herd of desks, more than two-thirds of them empty now. Her face is all tight because she’s been kept waiting by the only person who ever dares inconvenience her.

  “Slumming it, Dell? I thought coming below the sixtieth floor gave you hives.”

  She smiles, less like she thinks I’m funny and more like she wants to prove she knows how.

  “I’ll survive.”

  Of that, I can be sure. Survival is Dell’s whole problem. Here, on Earth Zero, she wanted to be a traverser. She was set up for it too: an air force pilot who’d had her eyes on space before the possibility of other worlds opened up. But Dell comes from a good family, one with money a long way back. In some worlds her parents never emigrated from Japan. In some she joined the private sector instead of this government-research-institute hybrid. But she survived in over 98 percent of other worlds, and in most of those she thrived. I’ve seen three dozen Dells, and all but one wore clothes more expensive than mine.

  When I take off my jacket, we both hide our wince. Bruises line my arms in jagged stripes, and those are just the parts she can see.

  “It shouldn’t be this bad,” she says, her eyes moving between quadrants of my body like she’s doing hard math.

  “It’s only because I’ve been doubling up.”

  “Which is why I advised against it.”

  “I need the long weekend.”

  We’ve had this conversation five times this week and it always ends right here, where her concern is outweighed by the effort it takes to argue with me. She nods, but the look she gives my arms lasts long enough for me to notice. It’s when she notices my noticing that she finally looks away.

  Early on, the professionals on the upper stories, scientists like Bosch and watchers like Dell, told me the bruising was from the resistance of an object from one world being forced into another, like the violence of north and south magnets being shoved together. Other traversers, and they are a superstitious lot, told me the pressure we felt had a name, and it was “Nyame.” They said her kiss was the price of the journey.

  Dell touches the clear screen that’s been delivered to me. It looks like a blank sheet of plastic, but once I activate it I’ll know the basics of the world that’s just been assigned to me. I learned quickly after moving here that the city loves plastic the way my town loves metal. Everything here is plastic. And it’s all the same kind. When a plastic thing stops working, they put it down a chute and turn it into another plastic thing, or the same thing but fixed. Plastic here is like water everywhere else; there’s never any more or less of it, just the same amount in an endless cycle.

  “Do you know what your new world is?” she asks.

  “You haven’t given it to me yet.”

  “Can you guess?”

  I should say no, because I resent being asked to do parlor tricks, but instead I answer, because I want to impress her.

  “One Seventy-Five,” I say. “If I had to guess.”

  I know I’m right by the way she refocuses on me. Like I’m interesting. Like I’m a bug.

  “Lucky guess,” she says, sliding the screen to me.

  “Not really. There’s only seven options.”

  I sit and pull out the drive that contains the payload from my last job. As soon as I plug it in, the dark data will upload to persons unknown and delete itself. I send the light data to the analysts who will interpret and package it for the scientists.

  Eldridge thinks we traversers don’t know about the first package of intel. Like the organizations responsible for space exploration in the past, Eldridge is technically an independent company, though it’s heavily funded by the government of Wiley City. There is an industrial hatch outside the city walls, in the empty strip of desert between here and Ashtown, which brings in resources from other worlds. Taxpayers, government officials, and especially Eldridge’s lesser employees are supposed to believe that is how the company supplements the income it gets from research grants. Sure, bringing in resources from another world so we don’t have to harm ours is probably worth a mint. But that doesn’t add up to tenth-richest-man-in-the-city money, which is what our CEO and founder has.

  Because no traverser has ever made a report to enforcement or asked questions, they think they’ve pulled this elaborate ruse on lower-level employees. But really, we just don’t care. A job’s a job, and people edging out other people to make money buying and selling something invisible just sounds like rich-people problems.

  I look up at Dell, still standing beside me. She’s a rich person, but the kind who’s always going to be rich. Rich so far back it’d take two generations of fuckups for her family to go broke. There’s a lot of this up here in the city. Not new-money rich people, like Adam Bosch, but whole rich families where the wealth is spread out among the members so it doesn’t attract attention.

  “Something else?”

  “Saeed is gone,” she says.

  “Star? They fired her?” When she nods, I ask, “Did she mess up?”

  I hope she did. Starla Saeed is one of the last traversers remaining from before I started. She was born in what they call a civil war but was really just a ruler systematically killing his subjects. When she was twelve she took a journey across the sea that drowned more people than it delivered. She could travel to over two hundred worlds.

  If she screwed up, it’s just a firing, only interesting because we have the same job and were close once. If she was downsized, she’s a canary in the mine.

  “One Seventy-Five was the last world only she had access to. When your death on that world registered…Why pay two salaries and benefits when they can just put 175 in your rotation?”

  What she doesn’t say, but thinks: Why pay a decent salary at all for a glorified courier?

  “One Seventy-Five won’t be scheduled for at least a week, but it wouldn’t hurt for you to familiarize yourself over your long weekend. And pay attention to the bruising. I want to make sure it’s clearing before your next pull.”

  Again, I can interpret her fear over a wasted asset however I want, and I choose to pretend it’s affection. The long look she takes at my arms and chest makes me shiver, and for a second I wonder if I am just pretending. But then she sees my reaction and backs away, nearly running into Jean.

  “Ms. Ikari,” he says, formally, the way she likes.

  “Mr. Sanogo,” she says, also formally, the way he doesn’t like.

  The famous Jean Sanogo has always just been called Jean, or Papa Jean by the papers.

  “How is our best girl today?” he asks.

  “Stubborn. She’s bruising more than usual, tell her to pay attention to it.” Dell glares over her shoulder. “She might actually listen to you.”

  “I assure you, she ignores us both equally,” he says, and Dell walks away.

  I’ve finished uploading the information packet under my username, so I log out and log back in with my superior’s credentials. I use the stolen access to se
nd a copy of the light data packet to my cuff so I can read through it later.

  Jean has pulled over an empty traverser’s chair.

  “Dell is tense. You need to stop teasing her when you’re off-world.”

  “But then how will she know I like her?” I say.

  “You’ve been flirting with her for five years. She knows.” He leans forward, setting down a steaming cup, and adjusts his glasses to look at my progress screen. “Am I witnessing company theft in my name? My wounded heart.”

  “Come now, old man. It can’t really be theft if I’m just reading. You can’t steal something that’s still there when you’ve taken it.”

  “You’ll find a large portion of the judicial system here disagrees with you.”

  I wave my hand. Judicial is a Wiley City word if I’ve ever heard one, and it has no place between us.

  Jean knows what I’m doing. Not only was it his idea, but it’s his credentials I use to send myself the info. He thinks if I study the figures and look for patterns the way analysts do, I’ll be valuable to the company for more than my mortality rate. He thinks I can be more than a traverser, that I can be like him. With the number of desks sitting empty around me, I am desperate to believe he’s right.

  Jean was in the first group of surviving traversers. Before that, he lived through a rebel army’s ten-year border war on the Ivory Coast. As a traverser, he could visit more than 250 Earths. He used to walk the worlds with us, but now he sits in a room and makes the policies surrounding traversing. When he goes out in public, people repeat his famous quote—I have seen two worlds now and the space between. We are a wonder—from the moment he landed safely on a new world. They shake his hand and take his picture, but he is quick to remind me that he was once worthless too.