“A Man, Running” by Andrew Kozma [Issue 13 Full Story]
AS SEEN IN PLANET SCUMM #13
Written by Matt Hornsby
Illustrations by Maura McGonagle
A Man, Running
Andrew Kozma
The hall was thirty yards from end to end. The man ran down the hall with determination, without stopping for a breath, heading towards the door waiting there. The door was shut tight. The brass doorknob winked golden in the soft light.
The floor was smooth and finished wood, the slats fitting together seamlessly. He wore jogging pants and a loose running shirt, designed to wick away excess moisture. His dark skin glistened with sweat, but not too much. His shoes were expensive, the kind experienced runners wear marathon after marathon. His stride was long and sure. Without hurry. And when he reached the end of the hallway, he reached out for the doorknob and winked out of existence with a splash of light.
Slightly before the runner vanished, the runner appeared at the beginning of the hallway, his hand still outstretched, his eyes focused on the doorknob that was now, again, at the other end of the hallway. His eyes downcast, he didn’t see himself in the split-second before his other self disappeared.
“What are we doing with our lives?” Alisa asked.
The runner reached the end of the hallway again, and the automatic counter flipped over another number. The number was in the tens of millions.
“We’re pushing the frontiers of scientific exploration,” Mitzumi said. On a sheet he marked the box labeled No Change. The paper was lined with boxes, a third of them filled, all of them No Change.
Alisa snorted. “We’re watching a man run down a hallway, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month.”
The cycle started again. Mitzumi marked another box. “You haven’t even been here a month.”
“Point made,” she said. “So, old-timer, has it ever changed?”
“No,” Mitzumi confessed, after a moment. He marked another box. “We’re making money. That’s what we’re doing.”
“No, I’m getting coffee. That’s what I’m doing. Want some?”
“You never make it right. More sugar than coffee.”
“That’s what you get for polluting your coffee to begin with.”
Mitzumi marked a number of boxes at once, all No Change. They left the observation room, carefully closing the door behind them to hide, at least from casually prying eyes, the fact that they weren’t there.
Through the observation glass, the running man reached out for the doorknob but, for a moment, he held back from touching it. For a full second, he hesitated. The other him appeared at the beginning of the hallway, looking down at where the doorknob used to be, as usual. He did not look up to find himself still at the other end of the hall, because by that time the hesitation was over, the other him having vanished like he was always meant to. The second did not see the first, but he was getting closer all the time.
Alisa’s apartment was dark when she returned that night. She sighed in relief. Scott was gone, then, which she couldn’t be happier about. Her mother had warned her about seeing her ex before half a year had passed, and, as usual, Alisa ignored her. She hadn’t meant to, but Scott knew she’d been having a hard time at work, and had suggested a restaurant she’d always wanted to try.
More importantly, he claimed he just wanted to take her out as a friend.
He was lying, but she didn’t care.
In the morning, when she looked at him in the half-light from the dawnlamps, she saw only the innocent boy she’d fallen in love with, the innocent boy who only truly existed when Scott was sleeping. His dark hair mussed, his face unlined except for the scars marking his right cheek. It would be too easy to fall back in.
She left—no note, no goodbye—knowing Scott would understand she didn’t want to see him again.
The door sighed open. She kicked off her shoes, dropped her purse, was almost out of her shirt when she noticed someone sitting at the dining table.
Scott.
“Alisa, baby, just listen to me.” His words tumbled out, unbalanced, slurry. He had a wine bottle in his hand, no glass. Finally, she thought, he throws himself into something wholeheartedly.
Alisa roughly tugged her shirt back down, grabbed her shoes and purse, and left. Because she worked at Redux Labs her number went straight through to the police. They sent a patrol to take care of Scott, but she wasn’t waiting. They’d get inside, eject him, perhaps arrest him. To be honest, she didn’t care anymore. The nightlamps were dim, highlighting the street with shadows. She called Mitzumi, who she knew would still be awake since they’d both just left work.
He didn’t answer.
With work taking up so much of her time, Alisa’s social life was pretty dismal. She didn’t have anyplace else to go.
Redux Labs never closed, scientists and assistants and delivery drivers and maintenance people working a twenty-four-hour schedule. The lamps outside the building never swayed from their day setting, so that coming upon the Labs at night always made Alisa think she was approaching a holy city, a halo hugging the entire labyrinthine structure.
But something changed at night. Once the administrators left, half of the building became empty, and that emptiness spread into those parts of Redux Labs that were still occupied. The break room, even though the same number of people were there shirking work, suddenly seemed like the remnants of a party, the popular people having left hours before. The hallways were ghost traps.
Alisa walked through the building uneasily, expecting a security guard to confront her at any moment. And she’d tell them she was here to work—honestly, she had every right to be here now—but she was sure they’d know what had really happened, that she was there simply to avoid an ex, as if all the police and security forces in the world shared the same hive mind.
She passed by her lab, looking through the window to see Taufiq and Leonie, chatting to each other in the same way she and Mitzumi did, killing the boredom one minute at a time. They didn’t see her. Over their shoulder, she caught the runner near the end of the hallway, then turned away. Today, tonight, more than ever before, the endless repetition got to her.
There was another woman in the room of cubicles where her desk was located, plugged into headphones and singing out-of-tune. Alisa pulled the chair out from under her desk and scrunched herself in its place, removing the wastebasket’s bag to use as a pillow.
“You’re late.”
Alisa opened her eyes to Mitzumi sitting in her desk chair. “I was here before you,” she said, her voice rough with sleep.
Mitzumi flicked his eyes to the side, and Alisa focused on the figure she hadn’t noticed before. Craig. Their supervisor’s supervisor, whom she only ever saw when she was hired. He was not smiling.
“Oh, Craig,” Alisa said, putting all of her limited morning professionalism into her voice. “Last night, I stayed extra to work—”
“Don’t care,” Craig said. He turned to Mitzumi. “We’ve found your partner. Now let’s go.”
Out of Craig’s field of vision, Mitzumi smiled in apology, but it was a pained smile. Something was wrong. Something big.
Craig turned and vanished out of sight. Mitzumi reached down to help Alisa out, and even though the end result was more awkward than if she’d gotten up herself, she accepted his outstretched hand. After last night’s confrontation with Scott, she just wanted some simple, friendly human contact.
“What’s going on?” she asked, then noticed that the rest of the room was filled with people at their cubicles, pretending not to stare at the woman who’d been sleeping under her desk. She looked around at them all, forcing an unrepentant smile. “Oh, like you haven’t.”
Once they were out of the room, Mitzumi’s expression darkened.
“He’s gone.”
The observation glass was broken, blood streaking what was left. Taufiq was in the runner’s hall, face down in a puddle of blood. Glass crunched under her shoes as she walked forward, hands outstretched as though this were all a hologram she could disprove with a touch.
“Where’s Leonie?”
“Our clinic,” Craig said, his tone making it seem like her being there was Alisa’s fault.
She couldn’t help getting angry. “And why’s Taufiq still there?”
“Because he was dead when security found him. Leonie was not. After the police come and do their thing, we’ll take his body out. It’s not like the room serves a purpose right now, anyway.” Craig turned around to face them. “What happened. Find out.”
Even with the observation glass shattered and Taufiq’s body on the floor, Alisa still saw the ghost of the runner traveling the hallway. She’d seen him run so many times his precise actions were burned into her mind.
“How are we supposed to find out what happened?”
Craig nodded towards Taufiq. “Regarding the runner, you two are the only experts we have remaining. So get to work.”
He left, his job clearly done.
There was a familiar smell in the air. Alisa recognized it as blood.
Alisa and Mitzumi sat in the hallway outside their lab. Mitzumi wrote in a pocket notebook with a wood and silver pen he’d received for his one-year work anniversary. It regularly clogged, so he wiped the tip on his dark pants every few moments to keep the ink running smooth.
“Do we even know the runner’s name?”
“I don’t.” Mitzumi sighed. “I never needed to. I mean, he was right there, running. It would be like learning the name of a lab rat.”
“A lab rat’s not a person.”
Mitzumi shrugged. “Debatable.”
“Taufiq’s dead, and Leonie’s possibly going to die, and you’re making jokes?”
“That wasn’t a joke. And we can’t do anything for them. All we can do is our job.”
Alisa kicked the far wall. It made a disappointing thud. “Our job was to keep tabs on a man endlessly running down a hallway.”
The hallway was empty of other employees, the labs on either side of the hall unused. A wide-shouldered woman turned into the hallway, looked at Alisa and Mitzumi sitting like kids on the floor waiting to be seen by the principal, and went right back the way she’d come. Above them lights flickered and hissed, most of the fluorescents at the end of their life. With the runner gone, their jobs upended, this entire section of Redux Labs seemed obsolete.
“We have to do something,” Mitzumi said. Alisa glanced over at his notebook. A numbered list, each number followed by a question mark, sometimes several.
She stood. “You stay here and go through everything in the lab. Maybe there’s files or something, I don’t know. I’m going to talk with Leonie.”
She left before Mitzumi could argue, just like with Scott the night before. The similarity bothered her, as though she were just like the running man, stuck in an endless loop with no definite end and no clear beginning. At the end of the hall, she glanced back. Mitzumi hadn’t moved, tapping his pen on the notebook.
The Redux Labs clinic was located in the highest point of the building, as if the architects believed height equaled health. Perversely, this meant the clinic was the farthest away from the lamps, so that even during the day it was twilight outside, with well-lit landscapes only visible if you walked right up to the windows. It was bright inside, of course, which only made the outside world appear that much darker.
Alisa had no trouble finding Leonie. Police and lab security buzzed around her room, the tension between the two groups palpable. A doctor with short, greasy hair and red-rimmed eyes waved her over.
“You may go right in,” he said, clearly relieved she’d arrived.
“Have they already—?” she began to ask the doctor, and though she was sure he heard her—his head twitched at her voice—he didn’t stop, didn’t turn, simply opened a door marked STAFF ONLY and left.
So Alisa turned to the police, focusing on the closest, who looked like he might be a nice guy out of uniform. His face was boyish behind the professional scowl, his eyes a soft brown.
She gestured to Leonie’s room. “Have you already talked with her?”
He pinned her down with his eyes. “They won’t let us in until after you talk to her.”
“Okay,” she said, feeling like she’d shown up for an exam she hadn’t studied for. “Well, I’ll try to be quick.”
“Uh huh,” the policeman said, still not looking away. Alisa decided that he wanted her to say something else, something confessional, like his interrogation techniques had bled into every other aspect of his life.
Alisa stepped through the door just as her phone buzzed. A message from Mitzumi. You’ve got to see this. Come back as soon as you can.
Leonie’s room was dim. Alisa couldn’t see anything, not where the bed was, not whether there was a stool directly in front of her waiting to trip her up, not even if Leonie was, in fact, in the room. Maybe she wasn’t that badly hurt and had escaped without anyone noticing. With that crowd outside, that’s what Alisa would’ve done.
“Alisa, is that you?” Leonie asked.
Something was strange about her voice. Not her voice exactly, but the way she spoke. It sounded to Alisa as though Leonie was speaking over herself, her voice doubling.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
Leonie seemed barely aware that she spoke. With the dim lighting, Alisa could just barely make out the tentacled mass of wires and tubes emerging from her body.
“Turn on the light,” she asked, so Alisa flipped the switch, then held her breath to keep from gasping. Leonie was one big bruise, her arms and face swollen so she looked like a blurred picture of herself.
“Turn on the light,” Leonie said again.
“I did.”
Leonie turned toward Alisa, her eyes somehow simultaneously focused and not focused on her. “You did what?”
“The light. I turned it on.”
“Well obviously,” Leonie said, the weird doubling in her voice still there, but almost unnoticeable, a split-second echo. With the light on, Alisa saw something else wrong with Leonie. The light around her shimmered like the air above a hot stove. She reached for a glass of water on the side table, and at the same time she didn’t. She grabbed the glass, drank in tiny, desperate gulps, and returned the glass to the table. But a glass remained in the hand she brought back to rest on her chest.
Alisa wanted to take some notes. She wanted to film this, to record it, to be behind tempered observation glass. But she didn’t know if Leonie knew what was going on, and she didn’t want to startle her. Yet Alisa couldn’t stop staring at the two glasses of water. Whatever had happened to Leonie, it was contagious.
“Do you remember what happened?” she asked, managing to keep her voice calm.
“He went crazy,” Leonie said, her voice coming into perfect alignment with itself, her body settling down, everything about her normal and singular. Except for the water glass. “One moment Taufiq and me were joking around, the next, we looked up and he was there at the glass. He’s not even supposed to be able to see us! You know that.”
“I know.”
“He punched through it. Punched through it! That stuff is bulletproof.” She trailed off, and though her lips were closed, Alisa heard her say, “I don’t believe it.”
“I don’t believe it either.”
Leonie squinted her eyes at Alisa. “Alisa, I need to ask you a favor. We don’t know each other for shit, and you know I wouldn’t ask anything if I didn’t have to, but—”
At the same time, another Leonie moved out-of-sync with the first, both of them together looking like heads of a hydra. This one said, her eyes wide with fear, “Look, I need to tell you something, and I know, god I know, you have no reason to believe me, but—”
After that, the voices were smashed together, incomprehensible. Alisa wasn’t sure, but there might’ve been more than two voices there. Three, four, maybe. With each word another voice appeared until her ears were full of a single, undistinguished buzz in the key of Leonie. Alisa backed away, reaching out behind her until her outstretched fingers jammed themselves against the door. The noise of voices was a tide pushing her back, battering against her skull.
She knew what it must look like to Leonie, her co-worker suddenly horrified at something you’ve said. Scared. Disgusted. A water glass smashed against the wall, barely missing Alisa. A water glass was still in her hand. On the side table next to Leonie’s bed. An infinite supply of water glasses.
Alisa backed through the door, telling Leonie, “I know, I know, I’ll do what I can,” not knowing at all.
In the hall outside, the police and lab security looked at her deadpan. With the door closed, it sounded like Leonie was having a very loud, very involved conversation with herself. Another glass shattered.
Alisa walked away. A man’s voice called after her, “What did you find out?”
“Don’t let her touch you.”
#
Mitzumi sat cross-legged in the middle of the lab on the hard floor surrounded by cardboard storage boxes, open file folders, faded documents, photocopied photographs.
“You won’t believe it,” he said as Alisa entered.
Alisa glanced at Taufiq’s dead body in the observation hall, still in the same place it was before. “There’s very little I wouldn’t believe right now.”
“Ha. Ha ha.” Mitzumi took a file from a box and threw it at his computer terminal. “None of this is on the servers. None of it. And it’s exactly what we’re studying!”
Alisa couldn’t focus. She heard Leonie’s frightened voices in her ears, insistent and pleading.
And when she looked at Taufiq’s body, she felt just like Leonie. Frightened of what was happening. Insistent that it shouldn’t be happening. Pleading with someone, anyone, to let this be a dream. But Taufiq didn’t disappear, the glass didn’t re-collect itself into an unbroken sheet. The running man wasn’t back running his pointless Möbius lap.
“Don’t you get it?” Mitzumi said, his voice breaking. “The answers we’ve been looking for, they were already here!”
“When I first started, you said we weren’t looking for anything. And from all we’ve done, I mean, come on, Mitzumi. We make sure everything’s working and that the lab rat hasn’t died.”
“The lab rat,” he says, sliding a photograph across the floor towards her.
The black-and-white photo looked like it was from an ID, just the head and a bit of starch-collared shirt. In it, the running man was smiling nervously, as though convinced he had a bit of lettuce between his teeth. At the top of the photo was a name. Joseph Millar. At the bottom was a faded date.
“Is that date correct?”
“What date?”
“The picture’s from twenty years ago.” She handed the photo to Mitzumi. “He doesn’t look any different.”
Which wasn’t exactly true. The running man wore lightweight pants and a wicking shirt, his short hair shiny with sweat, his determined expression clean of any fear or nervousness. But it was the same guy, not having aged at all.
She glanced back towards the bland hallway Joseph Millar had spent the last twenty years running down. It didn’t seem possible. It definitely wasn’t logical.
“What was the point?” she murmured.
“That’s what you won’t believe.” Mitzumi answered her. “This was a power plant.”
“A power plant?” Alisa echoed.
She saw movement out of the corner of her eye and turned to where Taufiq’s body lay. Was the body where it had been all this time, or had it slid closer to the broken window?
Of course, any movement she thought she noticed was just a trick of the eye, her nerves rattled by whatever it was she’d seen up in Leonie’s room. Mitzumi shoved three boxes towards her, the cardboard rasping against the polished concrete floor.
“That,” he nodded towards the observation hall, “is the power plant. These boxes have all the details. Apparently, I mean I’ve only skimmed, but apparently it gets power by using the body of…” he paused. “The running man.”
“Joseph Millar.”
Mitzumi made a pained face. “Yeah. Sure. The running man.”
The boxes before Alisa took on a forbidding aspect. “What do you mean the power plant uses his body? Is that some sort of hamster wheel out there?”
Mitzumi laughed. He looked excited by what he’d figured out, the truth behind what they’d been doing, all of it making sense now. She thought about how she didn’t really know him at all. Just like she didn’t know Scott, and what he might be capable of.
“Every time the running man reaches the end of the hall and tries to touch the doorknob, he completes a circuit sending him back to the beginning of the hall,” Mitzumi said, his voice full of wonder. “But there was a side effect. When he gets sent back, there’s a double of him created at the same time.”
Alisa couldn’t stand the excitement in his voice. She looked at Taufiq’s body, the end result of this process that’s been going on for twenty years. It had moved again, now slightly farther away. Underneath it was an old bloodstain, faded and worn into the floor. But she also saw brighter blood reflecting the light from the lab itself.
“Don’t you want to understand?” Mitzumi asked, frustrated at her lack of interest. “You’re a scientist. This is science.”
She answered just to satisfy him. “Sure. So what happened?”
“They thought they’d invented time travel. And maybe they had. But somehow the running man—”
“Millar,” she said.
“Sure. He appeared back in time slightly before himself. It wasn’t time travel, but a merging of alternate dimensions. Or an incomplete splitting of realities. And in order to deal with this constant multiplication, they decided to use those copied bodies as fuel.”
Mitzumi rattled a sheaf of pages as though the words and formulas typed there explained the universe.
Maybe they did. Alisa was out of her depth here. Hell, she never even finished her dissertation. Her job at Redux only required she be working towards finishing it, which in her mind meant never.
“After each copy is created, it’s sucked from the observation room and fed into the power plant.”
“They’re killed?” Alisa asked.
Mitzumi laughed. “That’s the beauty of it! They weren’t ever really alive to begin with.”
Something was wrong with his laughter. Is that what hysteria sounded like? An overdose of earnestness?
Alisa needed to sit down, but she didn’t want to touch this room any more than she had to. The whole place felt radioactive, as if even a month’s exposure of working here had poisoned her body beyond repair.
“We were killing him.” Her stomach roiled. “That’s what we were doing here.”
“Not at all. We were just here to make sure nothing went wrong.”
Now it was Alisa’s turn to laugh. “Well good on us, then, for not fucking up.”
For the first time since she’d entered the room, Mitzumi’s mood darkened. Petulantly, he nodded towards Taufiq’s body. “It wasn’t us who fucked up.”
Alisa rubbed her eyes until lights flashed against the black of her eyelids. “So have you discovered anything useful?”
“Have you?” he retorted.
“Leonie’s out of joint, time-wise. There are multiples of her at the same time, in the same space.”
“The running man must’ve touched her.”
Alisa nodded. “Whatever he has, it’s contagious.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Fine, it’s not possible,” she said. “What about Millar?”
“Security is sure he couldn’t possibly have gotten out of the labs. But if he did, after all that time in the hallway, I mean, there’s been no studies about what that kind of spatial distortion would do to a person. He’s probably insane.”
Alisa took in everything in the running man’s hallway, how it was designed to look like a common corridor in someone’s house, fake-wood paneling on the walls, worn actual-wood floors, the doorknobs with the push-button locks that wouldn’t stop a determined toddler. Darker squares on the wall seemed to indicate where pictures once hung. A perfectly recreated hallway.
Except for Taufiq’s dead body. Except for the one-way observation glass. Except that no one lived in that hallway, in that fake house. Except for Joseph Millar, who’d been running for at least twenty years, never getting anywhere, leaving nothing behind him except enough fuel to power a city.
“Where did he live?” Mitzumi rattled off an address. An hour walk, maybe. If she took a cab, she could get there in no time. Mitzumi groaned. “What is it?”
“What is what?” he asked.
On the other side of the observation window, Taufiq’s body moved. His body lay in his dried blood. His body also twitched, an arm lifting up, a hand pushing down, collapsing in exhaustion.
“Taufiq,” she whispered.
Mitzumi stepped up beside her. Both of them stared together as Taufiq simultaneously lay there, dead as dead can be, and tried to crawl towards them.
“Help me,” the not-dead Taufiq said, slowly crawling out of his dead self, inching closer and closer to the broken window.
“Whatever you do, don’t let him touch you,” Alisa said, already out the door.
In the cab on the way to Millar’s address, Alisa saw a number of strange things. A couple arguing with themselves. A full trashcan both upright and turned over, and a young girl picking up the spilled trash and piling it onto the full trashcan. A series of calico cats chasing their own tail. She kept her window shut, as if a pane of glass could insulate her from whatever Millar was bringing into the world.
Before leaving Redux Labs, she’d called Craig to report in. He’d sounded harried, overworked, and had just told her to “Deal with it, okay, we’ve got enough problems as it is.”
Then she’d dialed the number for lab security, but all she got was a recorded message, meaning either their phone lines were all taken up with other calls or their message inbox was full. Or both.
But Craig and security, they’d only be handling the symptoms. Millar was the problem, and so Alisa went to find him, even though she had no idea what she’d do when she found him. The cab driver didn’t seem phased by any of the things Alisa saw, but then again maybe the woman just didn’t notice, maybe she sees enough in her workday to callous her to the odd and strange unless the odd and strange gets in the cab to ask for a ride.
As they drove the daylamps flickered. Not all of them, and not all at once, but the cab driver noticed.
“Did you see that?” she asked, answering herself as if she never expected fares to talk to her. “The daylamps wizzed out for a second. Never seen that before.”
But the flickering chilled Alisa through and through, because she couldn’t help wondering how much power Millar’s copies had provided. Would the city collapse entirely without Millar running down that hallway?
Alisa had the cab driver let her off at the intersection closest to Millar’s apartment building. A homeless man walking down the other side of the street had an octopus’s worth of arms. The cab driver sped up as soon as she passed him, pulling around the corner with a squeal of tires.
The neighborhood was in disrepair. Full trash bags littered the sidewalk next to full trashcans. The apartment building Millar had lived in was five stories tall, made entirely of brown bricks, covered in stains from mold and moisture. Lights were on behind some of the windows, but just as many were broken. Maybe twenty years ago it was in better shape, but it was hard to imagine this place ever as new. The name, written across the front entrance, was The Savoy.
There was no doorman and the door was unlocked. The entrance hall was lit with a few bare bulbs. There was a tiny guard station next to the ensconced metal mailboxes, but no guard. The marble floor was cracked, the cracks filled with dirt. The tiniest weeds grew from the dirt. Alisa wanted to replant them outside, where at least the light would be better.
It was obvious Millar had been here. Footsteps shimmered on the floor, bits of marble that were dirty one moment, then dirtier the next, the muck of time doubled in only those places.
Millar’s old address was on the second floor. Alisa walked across the marble slowly, carefully avoiding Millar’s trail. She didn’t want to do this. This wasn’t really her job. The lights in the building went out for a moment, then came back overly bright before settling into a shuddery dimness.
Alisa’s phone buzzed twice in quick succession. A message from her mom, saying that even though she was disappointed Alisa and Scott were back together, it wasn’t right of Alisa to treat him so badly, so she’d given him the spare key to Alisa’s apartment that was only supposed to be used for emergencies.
Which meant Alisa wasn’t going home anytime soon.
The second message was from Mitzumi. Leonie’s dead.
Chills ran up her spine. Except for the time-out-of-joint effects, Leonie had been fine when Alisa’d seen her. Did security kill her once they saw she was infectious? She didn’t think that would make sense for Redux, but then again she wasn’t sure they knew what they were doing. They hadn’t understood what was happening with Millar, just used the inexplicable result as an energy resource. They were flying just as blind as she was.
“You’re from Redux, aren’t you?” a man asked.
She looked up to find Joseph Millar on the stairs, at most fifteen feet away. Alisa expected there to be a shimmer around him, just like with the people and things he’d touched, but he looked like the same man she’d seen every day for the past month, only this time not running.
“Yeah, I am,” Alisa said.
Millar sat down on the lowest step. Exhaustion was in every line of his face, the way his body sagged even as he leaned against the wall. He opened his mouth to say something, then looked away. At first Alisa thought it was sweat. Tears collected in his eyes, but he wiped them away before they fell.
“I didn’t realize how much time had passed.” His voice was a smooth tenor. Watching him in the lab, Alisa had imagined it deeper, almost angry. “Twenty years, right?”
She nodded. “Twenty years.”
Millar wiped his eyes again, then his nose. “Do you know where my wife and kids are?”
She shook her head.
“Are they dead?”
“I don’t know.”
The longer Millar sat there, the more shimmery the steps around him became. They gained a sort of visual weight, as though more of the stair was there, more and more of the same thing in the same space, the cheap stone and metal treads increasingly themselves. He leaned back completely against the stairs, stared up at the ceiling.
“I’m sorry about those two at the lab,” he said. “I didn’t know what was happening at first, you know. I saw myself up ahead at the door, touching the door knob, and disappearing, and it was like I woke from a dream. I knew where I was, that the hallway’s right wall was actually a window, and I broke it. And when they tried to stop me, I just shoved them out of the way. The man flew back like a baseball.”
Millar gripped the edge of one step in frustration, the stone pressing out between his fingers like putty.
“There’s something wrong with me. I know. All I wanted was to see them again.”
He stood up shakily, like he was drunk, or starving, or so exhausted he might sleep right there where he was standing, consciousness going out like a light.
“Are you okay?” Alisa asked. She couldn’t think of what else to say.
“It seemed like thirty minutes I was in there. And I’m not any older, am I? I’m not any older.” He looked down at his body, as though the answers were buried in his clothing, his flesh. “But everyone else is.”
The lights dimmed, went out for a long moment, then came back to the same dimness. Alisa jumped back. Millar was right in front of her.
“Thank you for coming to look for me.” He didn’t sound thankful. “Don’t do it again.”
Millar pushed the front door open and left. For a second, the door remained closed as he walked through it. Alisa found another exit.
Like the story?
Put it on your bookshelf!
The guards at Redux Labs waved Alisa on through while they nervously scanned the streets. The lights around the Labs were the only ones lit for a good distance, most of the daylamps off or so dim as to be useless.
The hallways were empty. A few people huddled in their cubicles. Alisa passed a conference room filled with a dozen scientists furiously arguing. She imagined everyone else had abandoned the building as the crisis became real, going home to their families or to hide in bars, wherever they felt the most safe.
Alisa didn’t have that choice. Scott was in her home, clearly not going anywhere. Her mom was so deluded about her life that they might as well be strangers. Her job at Redux had been her last real chance to make a life for herself, to create that career she dreamed of all throughout college and grad school, and instead she’d been a glorified camera, a visual stenographer.
She couldn’t stop thinking about how Millar had been so lost, a man out of time, barely aware how much time had passed. What must the world have looked like on his way out of the lab, through the city, to the place where, in his mind, he’d lived just a few hours before? Alisa couldn’t imagine.
But it was seductive. Not that sense of loss, but the idea of stepping away from her life for a half hour and coming back to something completely new, utterly different, a world she could make herself new in.
The lab was unguarded. Mitzumi was gone, as was Taufiq’s body, though the blood remained on the floor. She climbed through the broken window, cutting her hand on the glass, leaving drops of her blood to join Taufiq’s.
She stood at one end of the hallway. The brass knob of the far door was as shiny as it had ever been, untouched by Millar.
Alisa wiped her bleeding hand on her pants, then began to walk, easing into a gentle run. Her footsteps were loud in the hall, pounding like an extra heartbeat. The door came closer and closer until she knew this was it, there was no going back. She ran and she reached out. She reached out and she ran.
Andrew Kozma’s fiction has been published in Escape Pod, Daily Science Fiction, and Analog. His book of poems, City of Regret (Zone 3 Press, 2007), won the Zone 3 First Book Award, and his second poetry book, Orphanotrophia, was recently published by Cobalt Press.