Something’s wrong
PAUSE
There is a high-pitched hum and whistle of air, and then a blinding flash of blue light. The white of the fluorescent bulbs vanishes, leaving the room entirely dark – so dark that a moment later, when my eyes adjust, I think I can see shapes floating in the dark space. The room hums.
We are, if you haven’t gotten the word by now, in our first interzone.
We are in an airport. I don’t know much about airport interzones, other than that the airport is of indeterminate location and that there are allegedly multiple interzones situated within it, and that a strange thing can happen to you if you sit in an airport interzone for more than a certain amount of time. Someone told me that. The exact amount of time wasn’t clear, but he said it was “very short.”
I – I should introduce myself. My name is Cecelia, or perhaps Cecelia Midford. I am twenty-two years old, an American, and my education was interrupted by the Divine Comedy about three-quarters of the way through graduate school, when my mentor, Aristotle Abascal, returned from a mysterious, year-long journey to the Third Earth. I had been helping him translate a medieval document containing an account of the life and travels of one Adem Evren, a scholar of the Second Earth.
When I came back to retrieve my work from my mentor, he was gone. The work was gone too. But at least I had a partially completed book called “The Divine Comedy: A Satire,” and although it was not necessarily Aristotle’s best work, I decided to complete it, publish it, and seek out Aristotle’s whereabouts to see if he knew what was up with the missing work. I did. He had fallen into a Third Earth interzone. He found his way out, but he had undergone a complete personality change while he was in it. He had come back obsessed with interzones, mostly with trying to help people out of them. He’d also gone on a multi-year trip across the First Earth, mapping out interzone locations. He tried to talk me into coming with him, but I needed to finish my Ph.D.thesis.
Now, I have two degrees, one from Berkeley, one from Second Earth. The First Earth degree is “Doctorate of Doing a Good Job and Being Evil,” and it was conferred upon me as a result of persuading the Magisterial Authority to let me take the test, no matter how disgusted they were at the thought of it. I told them that, as a reputable scholar, if I was no good at the Good vs. Evil thing, I would just humiliate myself to the entire planet.
My mentor Adem Evren was a very famous scholar of the Second Earth, and my final dissertation was to be a translation of several works by him. “Adem Evren’s Amusing Account of a Trip to the First Earth and Also the Eighth,” “The ‘I Get to Read the Catalog of My Library’ Defense,” “Anonymous Death Threats to All My Reviewers.” I was thrilled when I had an anonymous package of death threats fall into my lap, from a publisher who, as luck would have it, had just contacted me about a translation job.
Adem was a very interesting fellow. He was – well, how do I phrase this? He wasn’t evil. I mean, he was a pretty standard guy, in terms of his life and personality. There was nothing about him that made you think he was evil – except for the fact that he had murdered a whole bunch of people, and didn’t seem to feel any guilt about it.
He murdered people because they were annoying him. This was his offense, and he felt no need to hide it. He was merely a truth-seeker. He had, for instance, tracked down and murdered his own siblings, who had some of the same blood as him, but who had no specific knowledge of his secret identity. His defensive argument was that if you had siblings of the same type, you were almost certainly also annoying them. This idea of his that he thought was absolutely obvious didn’t have much of a leg to stand on, and the Magisterial Authority – who were, by the way, both pretty sure that he was evil – threw him in the interzone for his murder spree.
Their main argument against him was that, after a certain number of murders, there was a point at which you had to realize that you were actually evil. When you reached that point, it was important to realize, and not to just keep on being a murderer. That’s why you had to go to the interzone.
“But if I realize I’m evil,” he said, “and I stop doing evil things, then I won’t have the memories of my murdering anymore. Which means that I won’t have memories of not murdering. Which means I won’t be able to remember that I need to not murder! Which means that I’ll keep on doing evil, because there won’t be anything to keep me from it!”
“That’s why you have to realize,” they said.
RESUMPTION
A tingling aura passes through me, from head to toe. I flex my fingers. There’s a low moaning in the distance, faint and far off. My hair tickles as a warm wind blows into my face.
There is a tall man standing beside me. He has pale skin and a large head. He wears a black suit with a red tie.
“I’m afraid this is where we need you, Cecelia,” he says. “For the time being.”
I nod. I smile. I say, “What exactly are we doing, and why?”
“It’s a simple task, Cecelia. Most of our agents are familiar with it, but for whatever reason they can’t seem to be bothered to do it. Will you do it for me?”
“I can hardly refuse,” I say, and I actually laugh, a little. I smile again.
The man looks at me. There’s something cold in his eyes. I start to turn away, but my shoulders seem to have frozen in place.
“Have you heard of Vriska Serket?” he asks.
I’ve been dreading the answer.
“I’m not sure.”
“The leader of the Trolls?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“They’re from Earth C. They’ve come to Earth B recently, and – well, to make a long story short – they’ve become obsessed with defeating the Magisterial Authority.”
I feel my mouth go dry. I look down.
“Which planet is Earth C on?” I whisper.
“It’s another planet in the system you’re sitting on right now,” he says. “That’s probably why you don’t recognize the name Vriska Serket.”
“How long until she gets here?”
“Soon,” he says.
We turn and walk away from the airport gate. The wind rustles through the leaves of trees that line the airport grounds. The air crackles with energy.
END























