[OC-Series] Something Is Wrong With The World And I'm The Only One Who Notices. Chapter 5: Past Magog

Index -- Previous Chapter -- First Chapter

Youtube Audiobook

The reply from the Sherbrooke number arrived as I was passing the exit for Magog.

I did not look at it.

I let it sit on the screen for the next eleven kilometres while I drove and thought about whether I wanted to know yet. There was a specific kind of relief in not knowing. The phone had told me there was someone who could help, and as long as I did not read the next message, the helping remained theoretical. The helping could be anything I wanted it to be, including nothing.

I knew this was not a sustainable position. I gave myself the eleven kilometres anyway.

When I finally picked up the phone at a red light in the small town of Eastman, the message was three lines.

Rue Galt Ouest. The warehouse. I will be there.

A street address followed.

I read this twice. I did not put the address into the GPS. I did not need to. Rue Galt Ouest is in the industrial sector of Sherbrooke along the Saint-François river. I had been there once, years ago, for a colleague's dissertation defence at the satellite engineering campus. The warehouses on that street were the kind of warehouses that get leased by companies with quiet purposes. The kind of street where a physicist with a research leave and no return date might arrange to do something she did not want institutional eyes on.

The light turned green. I put the phone face down on the notepad. I drove.

The DIDP rotation schedule problem had been sitting in my head since I left Montréal, and somewhere east of Magog I finally had room to work through it properly.

The page had listed Elliot as the current researcher. He was not the current researcher. He was at his desk in our apartment this morning. He had texted me about a parking permit two hours ago. He had not been underground for seven months. The rotation schedule was wrong.

The question was not whether it was wrong. The question was what kind of wrong.

A simple data entry error would not have explained why the page named him specifically and listed his institutional affiliation correctly. A deliberate falsification would have required a motive I could not construct. The simplest explanation was that the page was displaying data from a version of reality that no longer matched the version currently in effect. Some part of the institutional record had been overwritten when the rest of the world had been overwritten this morning, and some part had not. The DIDP rotation schedule had retained a fragment of the original timeline because public-facing federal databases were apparently not high priority for whatever mechanism had updated the rest of the world.

I reached for the notepad without looking, the way you reach for things in a familiar space, and I wrote one sentence below the line I had written this morning.

The rewrite is not perfect.

I underlined it. Then I underlined it again.

I did not yet understand how big that observation was. I understood it as a useful working hypothesis about how a global information overwrite would behave at the level of institutional records. I would later understand it as the central operational fact about my situation, and possibly about every situation I would have for the rest of my life, but that came later.

For now it was a sentence on a notepad on the passenger seat of a car heading east on a November highway.

The presence had not gone away.

I noticed this without acknowledging it directly. I had stopped looking at the passenger seat after my conversation with the empty air at the side of the road, the way you stop looking at a sleeping cat in your peripheral vision to avoid waking it. The presence was there. It had been there since Saint-Hilaire. It had not gotten worse. It had not tried again to make the radio crackle, or whatever it had done to make the radio crackle the first time.

It was, as best I could describe it to myself, watching with me. Riding along. Paying attention to the same things I was paying attention to.

I had begun to think of it the way a meteorologist thinks of a slow-moving weather system. Observable. Trackable. Not yet explained. The category of not yet explained was getting crowded. I made room for the presence in that category and kept driving.

My mother used to say, in the way she had of saying things that sounded like advice but were actually statements of how the universe worked, that if you sit with something long enough it tells you what it is. I had been sitting with this drive for almost two hours. The drive had told me several things. Most of them I did not yet have a framework for. But the framework was beginning to assemble itself in the way frameworks do, which is by accumulating data points until the shape of the thing becomes visible by negative space.

I was not afraid. I want to be precise about that.

I had been afraid in the parking lot this morning. I had been afraid sitting at my desk when the fourth observatory confirmed the shift. I had been afraid reading my partner's name in the acknowledgements of a paper about the deliberate end of one version of reality.

But somewhere in the last two hours, in the specific quiet of an autoroute heading east through the Eastern Townships in November, the fear had been replaced by something I did not have a word for. The closest word was attention. I was paying attention. I was driving toward a warehouse on Rue Galt Ouest where a woman who had collapsed the universe was waiting for me. I was doing this with my hands at ten and two and my radio off and a presence in the passenger seat I did not understand, and I was not afraid.

This was, in some way, the most coherent I had felt since I woke up this morning.

The phone buzzed.

I glanced at it without picking it up. The screen showed a number I did not recognise. Not the Sherbrooke area code from before. A Montréal area code. The 514. The number itself was nothing I had ever seen.

I picked up the phone at the next reasonable opportunity, which was a long straight stretch with no traffic.

The message was three words.

Do not stop.

I read this.

I read it again.

I now had three contacts I did not understand. The Sherbrooke number, which had asked me to come, and had given me an address, and was waiting for me. The Montréal number, which had just told me, without context, not to stop. And the presence in the passenger seat, which had been there for almost two hours and had not asked anything of me at all.

I did not know which of the three I was supposed to trust.

I did not know if any of them were on the same side, or even if there were sides.

I did not know if do not stop was a warning about the Sherbrooke number, or a warning about the presence, or a warning about something else entirely.

What I knew was that I was eleven minutes from the exit for Sherbrooke, and that I had not stopped, and that whatever happened next was going to happen regardless of which message I chose to believe.

I put the phone face down again.

The autoroute began its long descent into the valley of the Saint-François river. Through the windshield, in the November grey, the skyline of Sherbrooke assembled itself out of the haze. Hospital. University. The old steeple of the cathedral. The industrial sector along the river, where Rue Galt Ouest waited with a single warehouse and a woman who had built a machine that ended a world.

I drove toward it with my hands at ten and two and the presence in the passenger seat and three unanswered messages on a phone I was not going to look at again until I parked.

Somewhere very far away, in a place I had not yet thought to look, something pulsed steadily into the dark.

It pulsed once for every kilometre I covered.

I did not know this. I drove.