“We’re not dead.”
“But this place is like a dreamworld! Everything we say, everything we want, and snap, it just happens. I feel like a rat in a maze! I mean this whole empty world, this feeling of being watched…” He backed away from the machine, scanning the buildings on either side of them, looking for Alien Funt again or perhaps Joseph Mengele.
Jill tried to remain calm, but her equilibrium was thrown off, too. She remembered how she had asked the computer at the spaceport to locate her equation, the universal wave equation, and based on no more information than that it had printed it out. And the blank emptiness of the City, almost like… what had she thought that first day? A movie set.
She shook her head angrily. “No. Why would someone go to the trouble of running us through a maze? This City doesn’t exist for our sake, Nate; I mean, it’s pretty damn vain for us to think so. ‘Any technology sufficiently advanced will seem like magic,’ remember?”
“I know that. And I can handle the audio translation and even, though god knows how they do it, the writing. But ‘You are here’? I mean, is this an alien planet or a shopping mall?”
She swallowed a lump in her throat. “Well… ‘You are here’, means pretty much what it says, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s just a coincidence.”
“Why not ‘This is your present location’ or something? That’s a pretty big coincidence!”
Jill did find it freaky, but she would never admit it. “Well… any good translator program uses colloquialisms. Right? So it must be familiar with that particular colloquialism, that’s all. We don’t have the technology to do this kind of thing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible.”
Her words seemed to be having some effect on Nate. He stopped trying to find hidden cameras in windows and sank down against a wall in a squat, head in his hands. “So why does this place give me such a creepy feeling?” He shuddered.
“You’re just not used to it.” Jill squatted down next to him.
They were quiet for a minute, but even in English, the alien voice was annoyingly distracting. She thought at the metal plate, telling it to shut up, and was relieved when it paid absolutely no attention to her.
“It really is all too easy, Jill. We needed food and water—we found them. What are the odds that the food the aliens eat would be suitable for us? Shelter has been no problem at all. I mean, there just happen to be hundreds of abandoned apartments in this City, unlocked, unguarded in any way.”
“Nate—”
“Then there are the aliens, right? Could be dangerous. Could be very dangerous. But not only haven’t they threatened us; they can’t see us at all. Or the spaceport—the power came on when we went in, including all the equipment in the control room. It didn’t have to. It clearly isn’t being used anymore. You ask the computer for a Hammurabi math code and presto! it gives you one. But even that’s not enough.” His voice was rising again. “The same day, I find a translator in the supply room and decide to hang on to it, and I hold it to my ear like an idiot. Presto, chango, I can hear alien speech! Then you say—”
“I get your point.”
“No, then you say maybe we can get the computers to talk to us and blink, I can read the alien script. We now have access to everything, Jill—absolutely fucking everything.”
“I know.”
“I mean— You’ve heard of ‘too good to be true’? There’s never been anything as ‘too good to be true’ as this. This is the paradigm, the quintessential, the Platonic ideal of ‘too good to be true’!”
Jill didn’t know what to say. Despite her brave words her stomach was in knots. She was a scientist; she didn’t believe in coincidences or fate. And she didn’t like it when life looked rigged any more than Nate did.
They both sat there for a moment. Then Jill reached over and gave his arm a big pinch.
“Hey!”
“Feels real to me.” She sighed. “We have been lucky. But if you’re suggesting that someone is watching our every move and pressing buttons… I can’t buy that any more than I bought it when Christians back on Earth claimed God was doing it.”
Nate frowned as a thought crossed his mind. “Haven’t we had this conversation before?”
Jill could see he was on to something. She waited. After a moment, his face cleared; his eyes widened. “I know what it is. Dang!”
“What?”
He shifted to face her, face avid. “Jill—we’re on a seventy-thirty planet!”
She studied him, eyes narrowed. “Go on.”
“We were talking about how this place should be a paradise. Well, obviously it’s not, but what it might be…” He took a shaky breath. “What it might be is easy. Is that possible? That things go the way you’d wish them to per law of nature? That there’s a much shorter gap between wanting something and having it? That the constant struggle we take as a fundamental part of reality on Earth just doesn’t exist here? Maybe it feels so spooky to us because we fifty-fifty folk are used to having to work our butts off for every little thing and here a quarter of the effort gives twice the return. Could that be it?”
Sometimes he amazed her. He had a theoretical instinct that humbled her, though she didn’t completely trust it. She preferred plodding, methodical work to brainstorms, but as brainstorms went, his were class A hurricanes.
“If our theory about the one-minus-one wave is correct,” she said slowly, “a change in it would affect just about everything. The fundamental way things work.”
“Remember that conversation we had months ago, about how the crests in the one-minus-one didn’t necessarily manufacture good things, but it might cause a right-place-at-the-right-time kind of phenomenon? You know, up your random chances of a particular good thing coming to pass? So maybe these translators weren’t invented for us by some alien maze master. Maybe they were used in the alien’s space program way back when. But the luck—our luck—was that we found them sooner rather than later or perhaps never at all. We might have spent a lifetime on this planet and never discovered them.”
“They’re certainly small enough. But, Nate, does it really matter why we’ve been lucky? The point is, we can read. You were right before—now we have access to absolutely everything. All of the alien technology!”
“That’s not even the best part,” Nate countered, grinning. “The best part is: we can get home.”
Jill paused in her elation like a car hitting a bump in the road. “Really? How’s that?”
Nate’s eyes were dancing. “Don’t you see? Because this planet is lucky! Because all we have to do is really want something and we’ll get it! And I want— Do you hear me, planet?” he shouted. “I want to go home!”
Jill felt a sudden antagonism at his words. Her mind answered back, I don’t.
But that wasn’t true, was it? That wasn’t exactly what she felt. She was going back to Earth at some point, obviously, and she was going to be the next Einstein. She just wasn’t ready to go home yet. There was far too much work to be done right here. How could Nate not see that? What kind of scientist walked away from an opportunity like this one?
Besides, they were in another universe. Just because they wanted to go home didn’t mean there was a chance in hell of getting there.
“Remember, Nate,” she said carefully, “even if this is a seventy-thirty world, that’s still not one hundred percent, right? Not everything that happens is good, and, as you say, we’ve been pretty lucky so far.”