Chapter 4; Stuck

Stuck on this dead end street
Where all the new kids come to play
Stuck where past and future meet
Watching all our autumns drift away
I just wanna die anywhere else
Anywhere. Just not here.

-Die anywhere else, Night in the Woods

October 24, 2013

Steph and Max tiptoed down the bare concrete steps into the shuttered facility, holding onto each other to avoid having to touch the walls, which were soggy with condensation and patches of mold. The stairs went down about a half-flight into a larger open area. Their phone flashlights only carried so far, not much of a match for the depth of shadow inside the mountain. A glint at knee-level caught Steph's eye.

"There's generators! A couple of 'em!" she called, and knelt down to see if she could stir them into life.

Max worked her way around the periphery with her phone flashlight. Next to the stairs she found an empty vehicle bay, big enough to hold maybe 3 vans. The door at the backside of that area was locked, but peering through the reinforced glass window, Max saw what appeared to be a row of cages. Straitjackets and other restraints hung on the wall beside them. Before she could comment, the space filled with a dull mechanical growling as the generators rumbled back into life. Sickly yellow lights flicked on. Many of them failed to light or flickered dimly, throwing blocky shadows into the corners. Turning her back to the cells, Max saw a few rows of desks supporting boxy 90's computer monitors; Their beige plastic yellowed and their screens caked with dust. Another set of reinforced glass windows blocked off what looked to be a medical area. Max noted grimly that the beds all featured restraints.

"What in the world did they do here?" Max wondered aloud. Dimly lit, covered with a film of dust and mildew after 20 years of disuse, the place looked like something from a torture film. She couldn't help but compare it to Jefferson's dark room, which had been outwardly clean and professional. She couldn't decide which was worse; the lie or the naked horror.

"Let's find out. I found a VCR and a projector!" called Steph. She was examining equipment up against the far, bare wall between the rows of desks.

"They did tests," echoed Jane's voice, from the other side of the facility. She was digging in some of the cabinets. "They weren't always pleasant, but I learned more about my power here than at anywhere else."

"Why would you volunteer if you knew ... all this was waiting for you?" called Max. She picked up a folder atop a filing cabinet and began leafing through it. Looked like faxes between this facility and sister sites in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles and a few other places. The most recent was a closure notice from New York from 1996.

Jane's voice laughed a hollow, rattling laugh back at her from across the empty space, "Me and pain are old friends, after all this time. Besides, what were they going to do? Kill me?"

"Well, that's fine for you, but what about everybody else?" Max said, though not loudly enough for Jane to hear her. Moving to a nearby desk, she leafed through a stack of police reports from around the country. Max read one about a New York woman who vanished from police custody after attacking people with a sword in a nightclub, and another about a young boy in Raleigh who was sole survivor of a freak electrical fire in his apartment building. Both were from before she was even born.

"Got it!" called Steph.

Suddenly the far wall was filled with the blurry image of a man in a white coat talking on a stage. "You're all familiar with the concept of entropy; the force in the universe that works towards chaos; that breaks things down. Well, what if there's an equal and opposite force? One that seeks order. One that pushes the fundamental building blocks of the universe towards control."

Steph called out, "Looks like we only get one speaker, and the projector lens is jammed, so this is as focused as it gets."

The blurry man in the video continued, despite murmurs from his audience, "Matter. Energy. Time. Space. Picture them as a sheet, pulled taut. It is possible that an extraordinary mind would create a depression on that sheet via this force of control, just as a massive object does upon space-time via the force of gravity. And it is then possible that a truly extraordinary mind; one in a million, might create such a depression on the sheet as to pull in these threads, like a black-hole, until they become inextricably bound up in it, and the mind becomes able to manipulate the universe directly. That it develops a link to an aspect of the universe and is able to control it as if it were another limb!"

Steph called out, "Jane, how much of this was Dr. Blurry here right about?"

From somewhere in the back corner came Jane's reply, "A lot. I don't know about the metaphysics of it all, but in practice he was right about most of it."

Max wandered over toward Steph as the blurry figure continued, "If the human mind were capable of exerting control on the universe via this force, then it should be measurable, and detectable, much in the way we can detect massive objects by their distortion of space-time and bending of light. What would be especially easy to detect would be when two such minds came into contact. In theory their links to this force of control might interact in violent and unpredictable ways, much as when two massive objects collide in space."

The speech in the video stopped. It seemed the speaker was engaged in a conversation with others in the room, off microphone. Steph had the volume maxed, but with the poor quality of the audio, neither of them could quite make out what was being said.

"Is that you and Rachel?" Steph asked Max, "Massive objects in space?"

"I guess," Max shrugged. She couldn't help but feel a certain gravitation toward Rachel, or more precisely, at times she felt trapped in Rachel's orbit.

Steph called out loudly to Jane again, "Could they actually detect people? Did they catch Rachel? Was she here?"

Jane's voice echoed from the distant side of the chamber, responding, "In the timelines where I volunteered and the place stayed open until the present, yes, they did. She was here."

Steph smiled at Max who was squinting at the blurry, projected figure, trying to make out more of his features, "Max, if Rachel was here that might mean we were right! About her causing your tornado!"

"If Rachel was here, I don't think she was happy about it. There's a bunch of cells and straitjackets in the back."

"I guess not everybody was a volunteer."

"I'm glad this place got shut down in this timeline. I don't know if answers are worth this kind of suffering."

As if to offer a rebuttal, the voice on the video started speaking into the microphone again, seemingly mid-sentence, "... before a baby can learn to walk, it must first learn that it control its legs. And before it can do that it must realize that its legs are part of its own body. To establish control of one's link to the supernatural, there must be a trigger event. A kick that makes one activate their supernatural link. Most likely it would have to happen to a young adult or adolescent. Someone whose mind is fully formed, but still malleable."

Max and Steph exchanged sideways glances. Max wasn't sure she would describe her own mind as 'fully formed.' Steph wasn't sure she appreciated being called 'malleable.'

"And what kind of event would this be? Well, it would have to be something traumatic, and yet nothing so obvious as direct personal threat. That happens every day. It may have to be the exact right threat to the exact right person or thing under the exact right circumstances, and then of course, you would also have to realize what happened. Not brush it off as adrenaline or a bad dream. So if possessing a link is one-in-a-million, but only one in a million of those find their trigger event, and only one in a million of those actually realize what happened, then we start to see just how rare-RRR-RRR-RRR KA-CHUNK!"

Max and Steph stood and watched the static snow projected on the screen for a moment before realizing the VCR had eaten the tape. Steph surveyed the damage, but quickly realized it was bad enough she'd need to take the VCR apart to save the tape.

"So people could have powers and not even know it. Jane, what..." Steph looked around for Jane but could no longer see her. "Max, what was your trigger?"

Max took a moment to answer, lost in thought, "Chloe being shot. What's weird though is that I didn't actually know it was her at the time."

"To hear this guy tell it, the trigger might not have worked if you knew. Crazy! I wonder what Rachel's trigger was, or if she even knew what she could do? I mean, how many days does it have to rain when you're sad before you start to wonder if you're a wizard? I bet it's a shitload!"

"Jane did say this was only the first loop where I developed powers, and it sounds like she's been through... I don't know, maybe a hundred loops? If that's true, then I guess that guy in the video is right," Max looked down at her hands, pondering the strange twists of fate that led to her discovering her power. It made some kind of cosmic sense that Chloe Price, of all people, had to be there when her power unlocked. Her trigger event, to use the video's term. She couldn't help but be jealous of those 99 other Maxes who didn't have to deal with this craziness. Which was worse? Losing Chloe and knowing you couldn't have done anything about it, or losing her and knowing it was your fault, because you could have?

Steph knelt down and searched through the additional video cassettes on the projector cart. All were unlabeled. They'd have to find somewhere else to watch them, she supposed. "What's the deal with Jane, Max? I mean I'm picking up hints that she has the same power as you, but what do mean she's been through loops? Is it like Groundhog Day?"

Max nodded, "I guess, but instead of just one day, it's her entire life."

"Whoa! That's... Wow. Okay, I don't know if that's better or worse!" Steph stood and turned to face Max, "Do you know what she wants? I mean, why did she bring us... SHIT! MAX!"

But it was too late. Max knew exactly what had happened the instant she felt it. The sudden sting at the back of her neck. The hot rush of injected chemicals. The world going blurry and sideways. She'd felt it all before. As she collapsed to the floor she heard Steph call her name again, then saw her grab the tire iron off the floor to rush to her aid.

"Not this time!" Max thought to herself. She reached out with her mind and grasped at the stuff of time. She weaved her fingers through it and clenched. Grinding her teeth and screaming, she flexed every muscle in her body. She would rewind her way out of this if it killed her! Wrenching, grasping, tearing, she pulled time backward with all the will she could muster, scouring, burning synapses. She saw Steph slow in mid-stride, grinding to a crawl, tire iron raised high, shouting angrily at whoever was behind Max. Almost! Almost!

But it wasn't helping. The drug was still taking her. Her vision was dimming and her hearing going numb and fuzzy. She couldn't feel her legs. She looked down at them just in time to see Jane step over her, empty syringe in one hand. In the other, the bright gleam of a blade, moving toward the time-stuck Steph. Max resisted as long as she could, but her body was failing her and her attacker was immune to rewind. For her struggle, all Max managed to accomplish was having to watch Jane murder Steph in slow-motion. Steph fell to the floor in front of Max, bleeding from the chest. The look of shock and confusion on her steadily-draining face was the last thing Max saw before everything went black.