Reality Heist - Geordi Riker (ready player one ebook TXT) 📗

to yet? Don't say it, I can get it in one guess. Zero. Wanna know what? Because you ain't trying to talk their language, so the restrictive barriers placed on your brain keep you from talking in a forbidden language.”

“How is English a forbidden language?” I wrinkle my nose with the question, “All the newspapers that I've come across are written in it.”

“Just forget it, and stop changing the subject, would you? What's your name?”

“What the heck are you Curses doing here? Private property. Get your shanghaied butts back to the holes you worms crawl out of before I call the cops.” I freeze at the cold voice, but Jesse just smirks.

“You almost got it right,” he calls over his shoulder, “But there's no such thing as cops here, genius. They're called The Law in these parts. Crawl back to the river you crawled out of, Chase, I was having an intelligent conversation over here with a nice young lady who's a bit of a ditz and doesn't even have the good grace of telling me her lovely name, even though I'm the first person she's actually been able to talk back to. You'd think that would give me some brownie points, but no.”

Chase steps into view, all six feet of him, and he sits down between us, hushing Jesse's protests with, “Yeah well, there was a gap the size of the Grand canyon between you two. Doesn't leave much room if a third person wants to sit down on the side of the bench, now does it?” He turns to look at me, “Has that thorn-in-everyone's side been harassing you? Just ignore him, he has an inferiority complex the size of the USSR whenever I'm around.” He holds out a hand, “Chase Blane.”

I shake his hand, “Brandee Taylor.”

Chase shoots Jesse a smug look, who looks away and pretends to pout, “Brandee, eh? Well, do you got a nickname that you go by? Or should we make one up before you meet Dutch? He might get confused if he hears your name while drinking, and once he gets something confused, then neither heaven or earth can correct him, and you will forevermore be known as 'Booze'. It's an okay nickname, I guess, if you're a guy, but there's gotta be something else you go by.”

“My sister calls me 'Dee.'” I don't know why, but something about this Chase guy just sets me at ease, as if I can trust him with anything.

“You've got a sister? How old?”

“She's almost thirteen now.”
Chase and Jesse both shoot each other a glance before they both burst out laughing. Chase doubles over, slapping his knee. “That's a good one,” he manages to croak out, wiping tears of mirth from the corners of his eyes.

“What's so funny?” I demand.

“Oh, nothing,” Jesse wheezes out once his laughter subsides a little, “It's just that, yesterday was July the third, in the twenty-first century, and today's March twenty-eight, nineteen eighty four. So your thirteen year old sister doesn't even exist yet.”

“Wait, what?” My tirade freezes in it's tracks. Both ignore me though, and Chase turns to Jesse.

“I'm curious as to how you figured it out.”

“Easy, I asked someone.”

“That's not what I meant. How did you figure out to look for a Black Hole?”

Jesse shrugs, “Well, looking for Pressure was getting me nowhere.”

“Really? So it just occurred to you, out of the blue, to try to look for the opposite, look for one of them?”

“I figured, worst case scenario, I would actually run into one of them, and they would tell me.”

“Bullshit. Wanna try to think up another excuse? It's not like I don't know what you can do, genius. I can do it too, to some extent. The fact that you suddenly disappeared from the linkup just made it obvious what you had done. You think I didn't notice the black edges around the colours of the Pressure explosion?”

“How long have you known?”

“I had my suspicions, but when you dropped off the map, then I knew for sure.”

They pause, and glance back at me. “Could you at least try to not leak out so much black?” Chase asks.

“What are you talking about?”

Chase looks back at Jesse, exasperation plain in his features, “You didn't tell her what we are? Do you have any brains between those lopsided lunk-headed things that pass for ears?”

Jesse's hand self consciously reaches up to cover his ear, “Shut up. It's not like you can just walk up to the new person saying, 'Jolly good of you to make it, chap. As you can see, you're now in an alternate time line. Don't worry, you're not alone. You are now a member of a team dubbed Sliders for the remainder of your life, whether or not you were supposed to get that job promotion today back at your own time. Oh, by the way, we have several very strange things to show you, but don't panic. And we work for an organization that no one's ever met before...”

“Okay, that 's enough.” Chase interrupts, turning back to me, “Don't pay Jesse any mind, he's just crabby because he hates the colour black.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Only everything,” Jesse snorts sarcastically before abruptly standing up and walking away.

I begin to stand up to go after him, but Chase lays a hand on my arm, “Don't mind him. He's taking this a lot harder than I expected him to, but really, with Jesse, it should almost be guaranteed that he doesn't react the way one would expect him to. Plus, he gets moody, especially around girls. Any ways, let me start over. Like Jesse said, albeit sarcastically, we have travelled through time. Don't ask me how, I'll try to get back to that later. But the thing is, we didn't just travel through time. We travelled over ripples of time, across alternate time lines, and are now in a universe where the future is set on a different path than the time line we just came from.” He pauses, looking at me expectantly.

“Yeah, um, I don't get a thing you just said.”

He sighs, “Jesse wasn't kidding about you being a bit of a ditz, was he? We just time travelled.”

“Yeah, I gathered.”

“Could have fooled me. Anyways, maybe we shouldn't be having this conversation here. After all, this is Pure territory, and I'd rather not have a run in with The Law. Nasty folk.” He stands up and helps me to my feet. He reaches behind the bench and pulls up a black backpack, that looks exactly like mine, except it's a little bigger and looks a lot heavier. He slings it onto his shoulders.

“What d'ya mean 'Pure'?”

“People who have nothing wrong with them. You've studied your time-line’s history right? You know about the concentration camps, and Hitler's regime against Jews, and other races that aren't Aryan?” I nod, but he doesn't even glance behind to check before continuing as we leave the park, “Anyways, here, Japan never bombed Pearl harbour. That's what got the Americans' blood boiling in your time line, after all. So they stayed out of it, the war was over seas and they had no allegiances to any country over there, unlike Canada, who got their butts handed to them at every fight. Americans never showed up, never took part. Hitler succeeded in taking Britain, then made a peace agreement with Russia.”

“How do you know all this? Have you been to this time line before?”

Chase laughs at the question, “That, Petite, is so ludicrous, that I'm already regretting you joining us.”

“Hey, it's not like I signed up for this!” I snap.

He turns to face me, arms raised in surrender, “Take it easy, I'm not making fun of you, or being a hater, or whatever you kids call it these days. It just never occurred to me that you might think that. No, I don't think I've ever visited this time line before.”

“Then how come you know so much about it?”

“Because it's not like there's only a few possible ways the scene could have played out. I'm just giving you a summary that covers over a million different time lines, all very similar with one, maybe two things making them different form one another. The odds of me, or any one for that matter, coming across the same time line twice in a lifetime is like saying the moon is blue all the time- which it isn't, by the way.”

“No shit.”

“Don't get so angry. Sometimes, it is blue.” I shoot him an exasperated look, but he just shrugs it off, “Fine, don't believe me. You'll see one yourself someday. They're mainly in Jesse's division of time lines, but you might get to see one elsewhere too.”

“How did we even end up talking about blue moons?”

“Oh yeah, you wanted to know what Pures are, right? Pures are the blue eyed, blondes, the totally awesome people who don't have an ounce of Jewish blood in them. Of course, Hitler had to change his rules a little bit to avoid conflict with the US so soon after his costly war, so the definition of Pures in the states is mainly- anyone who doesn't belong to a lower class system.”

I try to remember what the guy in the mattress had called me, “And what's a ... 'Fig'?”

He laughs, glancing at my limp, “A Fig is a person who can't walk right, most commonly because of a club foot or other such birth defect. They're just one of the many divisions of Curses. And Curses are just people who have some sort of undesirable characteristic.”

“Why would anyone want to live like this?”

“They don't have much of a choice. Hitler garnered support here, and so it wasn't long before democracy was over ruled in favour of Nazism. The President is still called the president, and they are still elected, but the elections are held behind closed doors in the Senate, which is all just a pile of people who want to keep their positions, so they go with whomever the current president supports. The new president rewards them by letting them keep their positions or even elevate them to something higher. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. I personally, still like it here, even though it gets really dangerous in the wrong sections. Curses are kept to specific areas of every city, and the Pures get the best places. If a Curse goes to court against a Pure, even if the Pure murdered a Curse, the court will side in the favour of the Pure. And the Curses hate it. If you're a Pure and end up in a Cursed sector, you're lucky if they let you out alive. It's gotten so bad that riot police are posted at the border, trying to keep the peace. And that's the only job Curses can get that makes them work with Pures.” He pauses to catch his breath, and grins at me.

“So what are you supposed to be?” I ask, taking in his spotless suit, crisp white shirt, and black tie with a red dot in the middle. Even his shoes are shiny black.

He grins, smoothing the sides of his suit with his hands, “I am a Pure, namely a business man who owns a chain of stores in the neighbourhood. I'm the CEO of the company, and get 52 weeks a year of vacation time. My assistant does all the work for me, as per the rules of business around here. I have a corporate office in the Northern Tower, but I only need to do surprise inspections to keep my people on their toes.”

“Actually? But you said that you've never been here before.”

“I know. I'm just telling you the story I tell every idiot who asks, mainly the Law. Great history, eh?”

“You just like to hear yourself talk”

“Funny, Ky says the same thing every time I see her.”

“Who's Ky?”

He smiles, a small twist at the corners of his lips. Whenever Will smiles like that, she's hiding