Wakers Read online

  Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

  Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

  CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

  Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

  TO DELPHA AND BRAD

  BUILDING YOUR OWN TIMESTREAM

  STEP BY STEP

  1

  BECAUSE HE WAS a teenager, and teenagers take pleasure in exploring wacky ideas, Laz Hayerian had wondered since the sixth grade whether we are the same person when we wake up that we were when we went to sleep. Specifically, he wondered if he was the same person, because sometimes his dreams persisted in memory as if they had been real events. Did dream memories change him the way real memories did?

  This always led to the deeper question: Since Laz had memories that came, not from dreams, but from timestreams he had stepped out of, did his intertwined memories of other realities make him less sane? Or more experienced? Or both?

  Since, as far as he knew, no one else in the world had the ability to side step from one timestream to another, there was no one he could ask, and no philosopher who had written about it.

  As he woke up this morning—morning?—he felt very strange, and it wasn’t the residual effect of some dream. He didn’t even remember dreaming. It was his own past that felt like a disjointed dream, as if sometime in the night his whole life played out in his mind, but completely out of order, an incoherent scattering of scenes, facts, feelings, people, places.

  When he opened his eyes, he was in nearly complete darkness. Even on mornings at Dad’s place, there was always plenty of light that seeped around the curtains.

  All he could see was a tiny amount of green light coming from a few inches to his left.

  He was lying on a plastic mattress that felt no more cushioned than the pad in the bottom of a portable crib. Yet he didn’t feel any aches or sore spots, and when he flexed muscles up and down his body, nothing caused him pain.

  So Laz did what he had always done since his earliest memories of childhood. He searched for the alternate paths through time that were always close enough for him to take hold and shift, changing the story of events in bold or barely perceptible ways. It didn’t matter which, as long as it got him into a place where things made more sense.

  For the first time in his life he could not find any of the alternate timestreams.

  No, no, he was finding them, yes, thousands of them—as always. Only none of them went back even a moment earlier than the moment he woke up just now. And none of them showed him doing anything different, so there was no point in side stepping from one to another.

  He was afraid. He had never reached out and found that all his pasts and all his futures were identical. It meant he had no choices. Whatever was going on right now, he was like other people—he was trapped.

  He didn’t like feeling trapped.

  Why was he feeling trapped? He extended his hands away from his sides and they bumped into solid walls. He was in an actual container.

  The green light came from some LED letters and numbers on a panel at his left side, inside the box, but he didn’t know what any of them meant. Someone else would explain them to him. If he was in some kind of—what? A medical treatment chamber? An anti-infection box while some damaged part of himself healed without gangrene? If somebody had operated on him, he had no idea where.

  Laz reached up, straight out in front of his chest, and his hands almost instantly bumped into some kind of ceiling or lid or cap. It felt like plastic; it had a little bit of give to it. So he was in a sealed environment, though he didn’t feel claustrophobic or even particularly warm. He was definitely a claustrophobe. The time his mother rented an RV and invited him to sleep on one of the bunk beds, he couldn’t sleep that night at all. He didn’t complain, though. His mother loved the RV. And Laz didn’t want to ruin it for her.

  He was only about eleven, maybe ten—before she remarried, so he knew that this RV experiment was meant to provide his mother with some kind of bonding opportunity. But when he asked her if he could please stay home instead of gallivanting along all summer, she seemed stricken. She also wanted to feel like a good mother. Now she felt like she had failed.

  So Laz figured he had no choice but to side step into a timestream in which his mother had decided not to rent the RV after all. While Laz always remembered the alternate timestreams that he had lived through, even for a single hour, he knew that he had to make sure she never got back on this RV kick again. Now his mother had no idea she had ever rented an RV, and there was no timestream in which Laz told her how claustrophobic he was in an RV bunk bed. As long as she didn’t get another RV, there was no need ever to have that conversation.

  Here he was now, reaching out for timestreams that did not provide him with any alternatives at all. Just waking up, feeling the thin plastic mattress, seeing his arm only vaguely in the green light, feeling the plastic lid arching over his bed—box? Container? Coffin?

  Got to get things moving. He pushed on the lid. It gave a little, but now he pushed harder, then shifted his hands down near the edges of the lid. This time there was no give at all on the left side, but a lot more give on the right. He pushed harder with his right hand. The lid seemed to separate from the edge of the coffin/box/chamber and rise a few centimeters, then drift down when he stopped pushing.

  Now he twisted his body and got both hands to the right-hand edge and pushed upward. An awkward pose, but it worked. The lid rose fairly easily and smoothly, and once it passed about twenty centimeters above the rim, the lid raised itself the rest of the way, and then seemed to slide down into the wall of the coffin.

  He sat up. He couldn’t see anything. The green light from the message panel did not illuminate anything outside his box.

  Then, when he looked to the left, he saw a lot of blurry, twinkling green lights extending in a direct line away from his own instrument panel. And others, in other rows, above the head of his box and below the foot.

  He looked back the other way and saw no lights, but he understood why. His own coffin only had a light on the left side. Therefore if there were boxes extending away on his right, all their green lights would be hidden behind the left wall of each chamber. He could be in the exact center, but only boxes to his left would reveal themselves to him.

  Why hadn’t somebody turned on the lights? Why didn’t some kind of generalized lighting come on when his coffin lid opened? At least some mechanical voice could have said, You are fully healed now, Lazarus Hayerian; your parents will arrive to pick you up and take you home within the hour.

  Who designed this unfriendly system? Who decided to let somebody wake up with no greeting, no guide, no explanation?

  Why couldn’t he remember getting in this box? Or going in for some kind of treatment? Since he had always been able to avoid illness or accident by side stepping into a timestream where he hadn’t caught the disease or hadn’t made the choices that got him in the way of the accident, for him to be sick enough to need incarceration in a box like this one would have been memorable. He felt his abdomen, arms, shoulders; no sign of a healed injury or any kind of scar.

  He remembered that he did have a kind of marker on his body. It was a weird toenail growth on his left little toe that had been there since he was four and would never go away. “Nonthreatening,” said every doctor who looked at it, “so clip it if it gets big, there aren’t any nerves in it, and wear socks.” Laz reached with his right foot, rubbed it over the warty toe.

  That growth was missing. Just a no
rmal nail on the little toe.

  What was really going on? Why would any hospital remove that warty growth on his toe? Accident or no accident, why would they include that in their treatment? Or did the healing box handle it automatically, because genetically it wasn’t supposed to be there?

  Laz started pressing every spot on the display panel but nothing gave him any feedback. There were no unlighted buttons or switches or levers, either. Whatever controls this healing cave had, they were on the outside of the box—which made sense, since a patient might accidently hit one of them in his sleep, and no medical professional would allow a patient to have a significant vote on his own treatment.

  Maybe he had an illness or accident that attacked his brain and made him unconscious for a while. Then he wouldn’t have memories of it.

  His dreams had been an array of memories, playing out in almost random order. And it occurred to him that this box might not have been a healing chamber at all. Maybe his dreams came from recorded memories being played into his brain, his empty brain, because he wasn’t actually the real Lazarus Hayerian. Maybe he was a copy.

  He didn’t know whether to be excited or dismayed. How far had cloning technologies advanced? Cloning nonverbal animals didn’t allow for questionnaires about how well the clone remembered being the original animal, though they had experimented with memory recording and playback in sheep, pigs, dogs, and baboons—he had read about that stuff.

  Did those experimental clones feel what he was feeling now, with memories forced on him, pushed to the front of his mind, but in no rational order?

  While he was thinking, Laz did an ab crunch, and felt that his muscles were taut and strong. It was a feeling of strength beyond anything he’d ever felt before. He was a leisurely hiker, but summers of hiking everywhere left him with a decent core and great thighs and glutes and calves. But now his belly was as tight as a swimmer’s. As a gymnast’s. And sitting up from mid-crunch wasn’t just easy, it was almost automatic. He was built to make this move; it required no particular exertion.

  Still, it wasn’t easy to get out of the box. The sides weren’t more than fifteen centimeters high, but that was still an awkward lip to get his feet outside and over, and then raise himself up and slide his bare thighs and butt across the edge.

  He was glad that however long he had spent in the box, his muscles hadn’t atrophied. Once he was standing up on the cool hard floor, rubbing his buttocks and thighs to help get over the scraping they had just had, he realized that in some ways he was in better shape than ever. His arms and chest were well muscled and he had very little body fat—for the first time in his life, he actually had washboard abs.

  But, feeling his thighs and calves, he realized that these could not be his own legs. His calves were ropy and wiry, his thighs well developed, his glutes tight from having spent all his teenage years taking long, long walks, many times over the mountains from the Valley down into Hollywood or Beverly Glen or to the houses of some of his friends in Brentwood or Highland Park, or even, once or twice, to Malibu or Topanga Canyon.

  Southern California was full of long distances that required grown-ups to drive everywhere—but a kid like Laz, with no responsibilities and no fears, had all the time in the world to walk. Nobody ever accosted him or caused him grief, because any situation that had the potential to be dangerous or even just annoying caused Laz to side step into a timestream where the obstacle wasn’t present.

  He looked into his parallel timestreams and saw that in some of them, he had already discovered the packet of lightweight clothing on a shelf built into the head of his coffin. It fit loosely. It felt like paper. But it wasn’t uncomfortable.

  He could imagine his nonexistent guide explaining, We can’t be sure if any of our clients are allergic to various fabrics, so we made our wakeup clothing out of hypoallergenic paper. If this causes you any discomfort, or if the fit is not just right, merely tell me and I’ll bring you a replacement. We have cotton, rayon, silk, and hemp, though all of those are heavier and warmer than the paper.

  There was no guide. But there was a paper costume, and it covered his body adequately. Unlike the normal hospital gown, which left your butt open to the air so you could get injected or bedpanned without formalities, these were genuinely modest.

  Or at least no less modest than the pajamas his grandparents sent him every Christmas. Those always had two-snap flies, so that either you flashed other people every time you sat down, making the fly gape open above and below the middle snap, or you wore underwear, so that there was no particular reason for you to have the pajamas at all, since underwear was fine for sleeping in.

  Dressed now, right down to the lightweight slippers on his feet, he rested his left hand on the lip of his own coffin and reached out with his right hand. The next coffin was close enough he didn’t have to reach very far.

  He leaned over that new coffin and found that it, too, had a green light, though the only numbers it showed were zeroes. He could see the other person’s arm.

  Only it wasn’t an arm. It was a radius and ulna, with a humerus above the elbow. There was still some tissue there, stretched like parchment between the bones. Whoever was in that box, they weren’t alive.

  Laz suppressed ridiculous thoughts like the zombie apocalypse, which he thought would be even less likely to happen than the Christian rapture. He was still in the real world, where dead was dead.

  Could the people here be prisoners? Was this a prison that kept its inmates in boxes where they could be sedated automatically? A prison where three consecutive fifty-year sentences could be served, even if you died thirty years into it. No wonder he woke up feeling groggy.

  “Excuse me,” he said aloud.

  No, that’s what he meant to say. What he said was more like a strangled whispery cough. He cleared his throat. Some phlegm came up and he didn’t know what to do with it. Spit it onto the grimy floor? That felt too piggish—he was indoors, after all—and he certainly wasn’t going to spit it into his bed. So he swallowed it. Which was difficult because his mouth and throat were really dry.

  He hadn’t been aware of thirst, but he certainly needed to get some water into his mouth and throat.

  “Excuse me,” he tried again. This time if someone had been there, they might have understood his words. “Drinking fountain, anyone?” he asked. “Bottled water? Don’t care about the brand. Room temperature is fine.”

  No sound came back to him; there wasn’t even an echo.

  Either he was alone in a room full of healing boxes, or the observers could see him through heat-sensing lenses or infrared scopes and were watching to see what he would do.

  Well, what would he do? Sleeping in that box hadn’t hurt him at all—every joint was working smoothly, every muscle clearly had more power than he had ever felt. He thought he could run a marathon. He thought he could do a hundred chin-ups in a row. If the floor weren’t filthy, he’d drop and do push-ups until he got tired of it, and the way he felt right now, that would be never. So whatever his silent observers had done, they hadn’t tortured him, they hadn’t weakened him.

  Nobody was watching. He was alone in the room.

  Unless Laz could find another timestream in which the other boxed-up human was not dead.

  He couldn’t. The timestreams were slightly different now. He dressed more quickly in some than in others. He had already found that his right-hand neighbor was dead in some, and he had not yet checked in others. But there was no reason to make a change, because none of the timestreams had any lights on, or any explanatory signs, and certainly no helpful attendants to make his waking up ceremonies more pleasant or understandable.

  I’m a clone, Laz decided. Nothing else made sense.

  Of course, being a clone didn’t make sense, either. The process was still experimental and ridiculously expensive. Only the most important people in the world were having their DNA stored and new bodies grown. Not teenagers in SoCal whose sole contribution to humanity was walking every
road, sidewalk, bike path, and trail from Oxnard to Koreatown. Who would be crazy enough to clone him?

  His parents had a little money, but not like that. Plus, shouldn’t he remember at least some kind of discussion about being cloned?

  I can’t figure out anything standing here. The fact that the lights in the coffins were on—even the ones that were zeroed out—suggested that this building had electric power, so that in the rooms where employees worked there were bound to be lights and explanations. Why not look for the light switch in here?

  If he just started walking in any direction and kept going, he would eventually come to a wall, because this was an enclosed space and something was holding up the ceiling and keeping wind and weather out. Come to a wall and follow along until you come to a door. Open it if you can, walk through. Or at least search along the walls near the doors to find a light switch. That’s where people put light switches, so they could turn them on as they entered the room.

  The pulse display inside the healing cave showed his heart rate as forty-one. But now that he was outside the box and moving around, it must be reporting his last inside-the-box reading.

  He put one hand on the long side of his healing cave, and the other hand on the side of the adjacent box. Then he started walking in the direction where his feet had been pointed inside the box. That was “down” and it was a direction, so why not?

  Laz tried to count the boxes and he believed he was at fifteen when he thought, No, thirteen, and then he didn’t know anymore. He stuck with fifteen.

  At eighteen—or sixteen?—the boxes ended. At this point there was no light at all. The wall might be one meter or a hundred meters away. There might be a steep drop-off, though why there would be he couldn’t guess.

  If he got disoriented maybe he’d walk in circles in the dark and never find his way back. But if that happened, he could side step to a reality where he went in a different direction from his healing cave. It was sometimes wrenching to make such a shift, but apart from the concentration it required, it cost him nothing, so he never had to live long with the consequences of bad choices.