"You know, he did have a point," Hillary whispered, her eyes lingering disdainfully on the malt liquors displayed in the refrigerator behind them.
Stuart nodded his concurrence but held his tongue. His feet stuck to the tile floor with every step, and he kept his hands jammed squarely jammed in his pockets, lest he touch anything. From behind the counter, a short, thick man with pronounced neck tattoos peered at them suspiciously.
Hillary adjusted the flaps of her jacket, concealing more of her face. "Remember all that baloney Hippie Love Chick was talking about last night? How the universe is in the palm of our hands, how we can go anywhere and do anything? Like we've all become-"
"Yeah, I remember," Stuart cut her off. He led his classmate away from the cheap alcoholic beverage section into the over-priced grocery section. Neck Tattoos turned his attention to the parking lot.
"Yeah? Am I the only person who finds it funny that we can go anywhere in the spacetime continuum and we're standing in a trashy corner store?"
"The humor escapes me," he remarked dryly. Just to make sure, he glanced through the open door along the back wall into the small room that served as both janitorial closet and appalling restroom. "Okay, there's clearly no trace of him here."
"Or any of them," Hillary amended. "Obviously. Let's get out of here before we get typhoid."
"I don't think you can get typhoid from a dirty convenience store," Stuart pointed out. He regretted the volume of his words at once; Neck Tattoos was now glaring at him.
"Come on." Hillary set off toward the door, but at the last second she stopped at the counter. "Sir? May I borrow your phone book, please?"
He didn't say anything, but scratched at the thick green snake under his right ear.
"We're looking for the address for a friend of ours," Stuart offered. "We… erm, forgot where he lives."
"Uh huh," the man grumbled, handing over the thick tome.
"Yeah, it's the weirdest thing," Hillary said, coming to his rescue. "I guess we got our corners mixed up. We actually thought he lived on this corner – like right where this store is."
Stuart began flipping through the phone book, pleased to be out of this conversation.
"Store's been here for years."
"Oh yeah, clearly… but maybe he lives around here somewhere. Do you know the Nesbitts? Our friend's name is Ned."
"Doesn't ring a bell," Neck Tattoos drawled.
"Oh, I've got it!" Stuart shut the phone book hurriedly and set it on the counter. "We're on the wrong side of Muldoon Ave. Thank you so much." Without further ado, he grabbed Hillary's elbow and pulled her bodily from the store.
Topanga and Darren, sitting on the bench in front of the store, hopped up immediately. "Anything?" Topanga asked hopefully. The four of them had ridden their bikes over here immediately after school.
Stuart shook his head. "Nothing. No sign that his house was ever here. Ned, his parents, his little brother – it's like none of them were ever alive."
"The guy inside said this store has been here for years," Hillary added. "I bet if we started asking around, the neighbors would tell us the same thing."
"Creepy, since I was here playing Super Mario World a week ago… on Ned's couch. Right about there," Darren said, pointing. "You know, where that minivan is."
"You know, I wonder…" Hillary trailed off. She glanced over each shoulder quickly and then dropped one of her gloves. When she crouched down to retrieve it, she was nearly concealed from all directions by the standing forms of her three friends. For a split second, she winked out of existence, reappearing almost immediately later in approximately the same position. She was a little out of breath.
"Whoa!" Darren exclaimed.
"Most impressive," Topanga commented.
"When did you learn to work the Jump Equation in your head?" Darren asked.
Hillary blushed as she stood up. "Last night… if that term has any meaning at all anymore. When we all left the mountain that Hippie Love Chick took us to, I went back to the Hilbert and stayed in my room until I had perfected it. It didn't take as long as you might think. I recommend you all try it."
"More to the point, where did you go just now?" Stuart inquired.
"Ah, yes. I was checking out this hunch… I stayed here, in this physical place, but I Jumped back to last night," Hillary explained. "The whole scene jumped at exactly the time Ned ditched us on the mountain. One minute, the Nesbitt home – the next, nasty convenience store."
"What about the Nesbitts?" Topanga asked, cowering slightly, as if afraid someone was about to hit her.
"Gone," she said. "I tried to save them. I went back a few times to watch the transformation again and again, just to get the timing right. I cooked up some story about Ned being hurt and told them they had to come, you know, immediately to the park across the street. Anyway, I had all three of them with me, and we were running down this little path… and then I was running alone. When their house disappeared, they did, too. When Ned left, they just ceased to exist in this reality."
"Damn," Stuart breathed. He wasn't sure how to feel. Ned's parents and his little brother were gone, but they weren't exactly dead – they had never existed, although apparently Ned had. It was sad and frightening and deeply strange all at the same time. Mostly, he just felt confused.
"So, that's it, isn't it?" Darren moaned, sounding borderline hysterical. "We can't leave. If we leave this plane of existence, our parents get erased!"
"No, that's not it. We left this plane of existence when we went to the hotel," Hillary reminded him. "At least I'm pretty sure that was a different plane of existent."
Stuart shuddered, remembering the casual disregard for physics demonstrated by the Hilbert. "Yeah, and our families and our houses are still intact, right? But there's still a problem here. We can no longer abandon this realm, like Ned did. Apparently, when we do that, the producers of Cory's World make it so we never existed," Stuart explained.
"So when we leave, we must take our families with us," Topanga observed.
Stuart thought of his mother. "That was my plan anyway. But this does mean we have to be careful. There's an intelligence at work behind this sitcom, and it's ruthless. If we take a wrong step, it could mean getting ourselves or our families erased." He made sure this point had sunk in before continuing: "So, I think we need to make some rules. Firstly, we don't teach anyone else the Jump Equation unless we all agree to do it. Okay?"
"Yeah, we need to keep this between ourselves," Darren agreed. Hilalry and Topanga readily signaled their assent as well.
"Secondly, we need to be careful about how often and where we Jump," Stuart went on, looking around again. "Maybe we shouldn't do it in front of convenience stores in the middle of the day, for example."
Hillary glowered at him. "Very well."
"I think we should also start making our plans," Stuart went on.
"For what?" Topanga asked.
"For when we all finally leave this place."
They began by charting the universes closest to their own, which were readily identifiable using the Jump Equation. While Hillary excelled at actually creating the wormholes, Stuart remained the most proficient with manipulating the mathematics themselves. As such, he had the duty of organizing their efforts to create a search pattern through the multiverse. Each evening after school, he sat down at the kitchen table in his house to run the numbers; the following day at lunch he would give Darren, Hillary, and Topanga their assignments on index cards.
When she received her first list, Hillary objected immediately. "Four? There's only four sets of coordinates here."
"I know," Stuart affirmed.
"Four seems like quite enough to me," Darren opined. As a result of Moon's eight step course on Multiverse Mathematics, he had learned to make wormholes – but he hadn't really mastered it. Of all of them, he had had the hardest time. At each session, there had always been a crowd of Darrens at the back of the room, and both Hillary and Stuart had coached him extensively at the Hilbert. He had never admitted how many times Moon had taken him back to repeat a lesson, but he emerged from the experience nearly two inches taller than he had been before.
Hillary frowned at them. "Do you not realize how many universes there are out there?"
"Infinitely many," Stuart replied.
"Uncountably infinitely many," Hillary corrected him. "Which means-"
"Which means that whether we check four a day or 1024 a day, we'll never scratch the surface of all the worlds there are to visit," Stuart said, interrupting her. "Still, if we each do four a day, that makes sixteen a day total, and I think that's enough to get a feel for our corner of the multiverse. Practically, I think we should keep the number lower rather than higher."
The next day at lunch, the four chrononauts gathered to discuss their results. Many of the worlds they visited could be dismissed immediately. Hillary had been to a world where there were no humans, only sentient birds. "It was interesting, and I found the inhabitants very friendly, but there wasn't much to eat. Not any place I'd seriously consider moving my family to."
Darren's luck would prove consistently the worse of the group's. On the first night, he visited two dimensions where the air wasn't breathable, and a post-apocalyptic landscape dominated by small warlords.
"You just didn't explore that one enough," Hillary protested. "Did you try Jumping back a few hundred years? Maybe it was nice before the apocalypse!"
"No, we've definitely got to think long term. I don't want to relocate everyone to a nice place only to have my grandchildren die in a nuclear holocaust," Topanga countered. Among her first day assignments, she had seen a world run by heavily accented, eastern European vampires.
And so it went. Stuart struggled with the Jump Equation every afternoon, trying to make some sense of the data each of the chrononauts brought him. He knew of at least eight dimensions to the multiverse, and he could generate sets of coordinates that should be relatively close to their own, but he couldn't make much sense of the underlying pattern. The closest universe to Hillary's bird world was actually mostly underwater; the vampire drama Topanga had visited bordered a realm of hyper-intelligent rocks. She reported that they were insufferably preachy, which was a powerful condemnation coming from her. For his own Jumps, Stuart focused on sitcom realities. They quickly enough found the two worlds he had accidentally Jumped to from Feeny's classroom, and in so doing he was able to isolate one axis that seemed to encompass only family sitcoms. After only a short distance, though, these became increasingly bizarre, to the point where he doubted any one watched those shows.
Of course, they did find some worlds that were suitable for relocation, at least by most measures. Here, the vastness of the multiverse defeated them; with an infinite set of choices, they each became quite picky. Each member of their group would come to champion a world they had visited. Hillary wanted to take them to a golden city in the clouds; Topanga had grown enamored of a Tolkien-style fantasy world that may, or may not, have actually been Middle Earth. Darren, oddly enough, had found a pastoral planet that showed no sign of intelligent inhabitation – he dreamed of a frontier lifestyle, where their families could scratch out a living as farmers. Stuart stuck steadfastly to the family sitcom plan, reasoning that the universes themselves were favorable, so long as they weren't characters on the show in question.
Stuart came to recognize that his proficiency with the math gave him a powerful sort of authority. He alone chose which worlds the chrononauts would explore. At first, his selection process was no more refined than throwing darts at an n-dimensional map. As he revised his search, he was increasingly able to send himself and the others into alternate versions of their own sitcom. There were places where Cory and Shawn Hunters were actual brothers, related by blood; in other storylines, the two were lovers. In other alternate realities, Shawn was seemingly the central character of the plot. Topanga related a hilarious tale of mistaken identity set in what she presumed to be Shawn's World. "Shawn found me at Chubby's, and thought I was the Topanga from his storyline – who was his girlfriend! I had to play the part for fifteen minutes, then I excused myself to the restroom and Jumped out of there!"
After a couple of weeks, Cory's World lit a fire under them. As near as they could tell, an episode occurred wherein Cory's older brother Eric came and spoke to Mr. Feeny's class. Topanga, entirely against her will, developed a crush on the elder Matthews. By the time all the dust had settled, she was more convinced than ever that the producers intended to pair her romantically with Cory. Worse yet, they might have been laying the groundwork for a future relationship between Eric and Topanga's older sister, Nebula. "I won't stand by while they turn us into whores for the Matthews' line!" she protested ardently at lunch the following day.
A few heads turned to look at them, but as a whole the cafeteria seemed as disinterested as ever in the goings on at the Weirdo Table.
"No one wants that, least of all me," Stuart assured her. In spite of all the strangeness that had seeped into their lives over the previous few months, his feelings for her had not changed in quality – they had only intensified. Meeting Moon Child had been potently confusing for him; he found the uptime version of Topanga alarming, yet strangely tantalizing. He knew that the cameras were rolling when he gave Topanga an origami flower, but even so the action was from his heart.
"We must do something soon," Topanga went on. Clearly, she was talking to him, but her eyes were unfocused, seeming to stare at something over his right shoulder.
"True, but we can't afford to be too hasty, either," Darren cautioned.
"Yeah, where's that hippie chick when you need her?" Hillary asked.
Topanga's eyes snapped back into focus, and she gave Hillary a perturbed look. Understandably, the younger girl was defensive of her older self, and at best Hillary could barely conceal her scorn for the woman. "I don't know where she is now. She left after the mountain that night, and I haven't seen her since."
"Okay, but what did she say?" Hillary pressed.
"She said we should wait for the gap between seasons, that it would give us a window to escape," Topanga told them.
"And that starts when Feeny gets sick?" Stuart asked.
"Feeny gets sick in the final episode of the first season," Topanga reminded them. "Season two picks up with the next grade for Cory Matthews. Apparently, the absolute last moment of the season is a scene with a light bulb."
"A light bulb?" Hillary asked incredulously.
"Yes. I'm in the scene, and so is Stuart," Topanga informed them.
"Well, that's riveting television…" Hillary breathed disdainfully.
"Simple enough. We do our thing with the light bulb and then we leave Cory's World forever," Stuart told them. He had meant to phrase it as a suggestion, but judging by the determined nods he got from his friends, he knew the decision had just been made. He had never intended to become the leader of their group, but it seemed to have happened without his noticing.
"Did she tell you anything else useful about the show?" Darren asked Topanga.
"No," the girl answered. "She refused to tell me much about my future. Our futures."
"But she told you something, didn't she?" Hillary asked shrewdly.
Topanga didn't answer.
"Look, it doesn't matter," Stuart went on, although he wasn't sure that was true. "We don't have any way of knowing when our moment will arrive, so we've just got to get ready now."
Two days later, Stuart would learn that Topanga took those words to heart. He had been sitting at his kitchen table, working on the Jump Equation, when the phone rang. "Hello?"
"Stuart! Thank god you're home!"
"What is it, Topanga?"
"Look, I've got a bit of a situation over at my house. Can you come over?"
"Right now? I've got to start dinner soon for my mother and-"
"Please Stuart, it's important!"
Ultimately, there was never any doubt that he would go to her. "Okay, hang on. I'll get there as soon as I can," he said, hanging up the phone. Minutes later, he approached the Lawrence house at high speed on his bicycle. Seeing the object of his affection waiting outside, he attempted a graceful arrival. Coasting up the driveway, he threw his right leg over the bike so that he glided in at a nearly standing position. His balance didn't hold up as well as he had hoped; he had to throw the bicycle roughly to the ground, but despite stumbling severely he avoided face-planting. Sweating slightly but breathing heavily, he stood facing her at arm's length.
"Okay, Stuart, I don't want you to get mad at me, but I talked to my family…" Topanga began.
Stuart's eyes narrowed. "About what?"
She sighed. "Everything. I told them everything – Cory's World and Mood Child and Jumping and how badly we have to get out of here."
Stuart's head dropped. This was potentially very bad.
"I had to tell them! I mean, eventually, right? I had to convince them that we've got to leave, because we have to take them with us!" she insisted. "Only, they didn't believe me. I couldn't tell how they took it, whether they thought I was just being childish and telling them a tall tale, or if they really needed to get me counseling, or what."
"Okay, it sounds like there's no harm done, then," Stuart said, feeling relieved. Convincing the parents to take action was a problem they would have to solve, but not the first one.
"Yeah, there's definitely harm done," Topanga went on, wincing slightly. Seizing his wrist, she led him to the front door of the house. She turned to face him, with her left hand behind her on the door knob, and her right hand on his arm."See, I was so mad that my family didn't believe me, I thought… I thought that there was a way to prove to them that I wasn't lying." She opened the front door, and he saw that the Lawrence living room was crowded with young women.
He stepped past her to the threshold, trying to get a better view of the interior of the house. Both couches were occupied; every seat at the dining table was taken. Someone had brought in about a dozen folding chairs, and all of them held occupants. A few stray individuals, without any seats at all, wandered aimlessly around the room, inspecting the decorations. All in all, there must have been twenty five young girls in the living room…
And all of them were Topanga.