The Window To Another Universe

The morning after Erin's dinner party, she had the early shift at the diner. As soon as she left for work, Walter eagerly came downstairs, slowed only by his aging knees, and started searching through the piles of boxes at the back of his work area. Telling Erin and Noah about the breakup of Scorpion brought back unwanted memories of his many failures, the worst of which was his inability to save those planes from being shot down. That had been the worst day of his life, worse than the bombing of Baghdad. He had felt so helpless, so useless.

The one bright spot in that whole mess was that that was the first night he saw her.

She was what kept him going all these years alone with the guilt of what he had done, what he had failed to do. "Finally!" Walter cried as he found what he was searching for. He unloaded boxes, making pile after pile of binders filled with pages and pages of his hypotheses, his research, mathematical formulas he had created. Everything pointed to where he believed the woman in his dreams came from, an alternate reality.

Walter had notes on why the two sides were connected, how to move between them, and even how to peer through the quantum veil and see those on the Other Side: an alternate universe like ours but different in small key ways. Once he was satisfied that he had found all of his notes, Walter carried the binders up the stairs to his loft. He didn't want Erin or Noah to stumble across this research. He placed all of the notebooks into several piles in the far corner of his room behind a privacy screen, so that he could refamiliarize himself with the information at his leisure.

With that task complete, Walter came back downstairs to the main floor and started searching for the one thing he could never let anyone find. At last, he found it in a box that looked like one corner had collapsed and the bottom had water damage. Walter's heart sank in despair as he opened the box, afraid of what state he would find the contents. He breathed a sigh of relief as he pulled the object of his search out of the box, finding it in excellent shape. Walter carefully wrapped the rectangular object in a blanket he had brought downstairs with him for just this purpose. Secure and protected, Walter carried the surprisingly heavy object upstairs. He was dismayed at how quickly such a small exertion made him out of breath. Walter waited until he knew he had the object safely upstairs in his loft before he examined the thing.

Once Walter was seated at his desk in the loft, he carefully unwrapped the object he had kept safe all these years. He hadn't even thought of it in so long. He had given up hope long ago, but there was something about spending time with Erin and Noah, something contagious about Erin's enthusiasm for life that woke up a part of Walter that he thought had died long ago. Hope, it whispered, Erin's unceremonious appearance in your life has given you hope once again.

"Foolish notion." Walter chastised his inner voice, but nonetheless, he smiled as he laid eyes on the prototype that he hadn't touched in decades. He ran his fingers gently across the high-definition screen and the control panel that calibrated it. He touched his last hope for finding her before it was too late before his time ran out. He touched The Window To Another Universe.

Walter spent the rest of his morning before Erin would be home from work skimming the information in the pile of binders and refamiliarizing himself with The Window's controls and running recalibration protocols. He was ready to start searching for her on the Other Side as quickly as he was able.

Walter had never searched for anyone but her on the Other Side. Not even his family or Scorpion team. It always seemed too strange and intrusive to spy on his old friends or family even as the Other Side versions of them, only her. It wasn't as if searching for his dream woman in an alternate universe had been his first thought. He had searched for her for years before finally giving up in defeat. It was a nearly impossible task he had given himself. Though he saw her when he slept and heard her voice and it was familiar each night as she visited him, he could never remember her voice or face in the waking world. Walter didn't care, he was driven to find her. He worked only as much as necessary to pay the bills, rarely speaking to anyone. He didn't have the time. The only reason he slept was to see her again, to spend time with her. Every spare minute that Walter O'Brien had he spent creating algorithms, searching databases, and chasing any lead he could think of that might lead to her.

He couldn't understand it, but he knew she loved him. He didn't know why such a vision of beauty and kindness would care for someone like him but she did and he knew he needed to find her.

The day after that awful day, the day after she first appeared in his dreams, Walter started searching for her. It didn't matter what he did, it didn't matter that his IQ was so high as to almost be unmeasurable, he could never find her through conventional means.

Finally satisfied with his work, Walter planned out a search pattern and began flipping The Window's display through his planned search coordinates. As he searched, he let his thoughts drift to the past which led him to even consider the apparently impossible: the woman who visited him nightly in his dreams could be a resident of an alternate reality. Before that leap of logic, every spare minute of his day was spent searching for her. He scanned high school yearbooks, social media photos, and even the census, all to no avail.

It was only when he stumbled across an old file while searching for something else that he was reminded of his days at an Army black site doing research into the existence of an alternate reality, trying to find a way to cross over to the Other Side, even eventually almost being experimented on himself, all at the behest of the US government. Only when reminded of the horrors of that time of his young life, did it occur to him that she may be a resident of the alternate universe they had observed. It was illogical, he had no basis in fact for why that would be the case, but seeing her as the same dream replayed nightly was anything but logical. He felt like he was starting to lose his mind in the fruitless search. He was willing to try even the most fantastical of hunches.

Walter revived the old research. He spent countless hours updating, testing, and improving the military's old findings. He even built a Window of his own, based on the early prototype he and the other scientists had come up with. Once The Window was built, he started searching for her on the Other Side. With such technology, a technology he wasn't even supposed to have access to, Walter cut himself off from humanity almost completely. Finding her consumed his every moment, waking and sleeping.

Walter had searched for her for years with The Window, always focusing on 2014 before finally giving up in utter defeat. She was his solace, his reason for drawing breath, but with no real path to follow, there were just too many possibilities to search. Reluctantly Walter had put that dream, that part of his life behind him, no longer living each day, just surviving.

Just surviving that is until Erin blew into his life in a rush of blonde curls and boundless energy, becoming his friend, his first friend in more than fifty years. Her very presence in his isolated existence gave him hope once again, reviving old memories and old dreams.

He had just recalibrated The Window in his search of another geographical location when Walter heard Erin slam through the door.

"Hey, Cousin Walter, are you sleeping in? Sure you're never upstairs this time of day." Erin's footsteps receded as she made her way to the Airstream at the back of the main floor.

Grateful for once, that there was absolutely nothing subtle or quiet about Erin, Walter was able to wrap The Window once again and hide it behind the privacy screen with his notes. He managed to take a deep breath to slow his racing heart and walk downstairs at a normal pace. By the time Erin emerged from her room, Walter was engrossed in the lines of code in front of him on his computer screen. There he was easily able to ignore her questions and endless monologue of who tipped poorly at the diner today as Erin made a sandwich for herself and Walter before she left the Garage once again, no doubt to spend time prattling on endlessly with her friends or Noah.

Weeks spent searching with The Window slipped by into months. 2014 was growing further away by the day and drawing power the requisite power to look that far into the past would have been more of a problem for the genius, but in 2051 nuclear fusion had finally made its breakthrough, and most home and business power on the grid used the ultimate form of clean energy. Walter still had to be careful of his on-the-grid power usage and had built his own miniature fusion reactor just for this purpose.

He was so preoccupied with spending all his waking hours looking for her that he barely noticed as Erin and Noah's relationship grew more serious, but notice he did and Walter was immensely grateful for this development. Erin was rarely at the Garage. If she wasn't working or out with her friends, she was with Noah. They did spend time at the Garage, but that was rare. Walter usually had the Garage to himself and spent hours searching for her. Perhaps in a different reality, events might have followed this path until Walter gave up his search once again, but in a rare display of kismet, even Walter couldn't have foreseen, one night Erin and Noah returned to the Garage much earlier than expected when their plans for the evening fell through.

Noah and Erin quietly entered the Garage. Walter had been preoccupied with a new project lately and they did their best not to disturb him. Noah was in the kitchen grabbing some snacks for the two of them to take into the Airstream while they watched a movie when Erin was concerned by the odd flickers of light coming from Walter's loft. She gestured to Noah, who placed the food back on the counter and followed her as they crept silently up the stairs.

The pair were shocked at what they saw, images that looked like real life, but not quite, moving across an odd screen that Walter was mesmerized by. Noah stopped where he was on the landing as he recognized something in The Window's design that reminded him of an archived project he had cataloged at Kinetic Transformation. Erin pushed past him gesturing to him to follow. She didn't even hesitate to enter Walter's private living space, a place she had never been, never had a reason to be before.

"Cousin Walter," Erin called to him, breaking Walter out of his thoughts. "What are you doing and what the devil is that?" She gestures to the strange-looking screen standing on Walter's desk.

Walter jumped at the sound of Erin's voice and snapped The Window's display off. The sight of Erin standing there and Noah coming up behind her, some kind of recognition of Walter's device in his eyes, terrified him. What if they made him stop searching?

Walter's first instinct was to lie, but he quickly realized that he had no plausible falsehood to give them. He looked into Erin's eyes and saw her confusion and fear, but he also saw her love for him and he realized that he cared for her too much to even try to lie to her. Walter stood up from his desk and carefully covered The Window with a sheet. He walked toward them. "I will tell you, but before I can tell you the story of this device, I need to tell you how it all began."

Erin nodded, linking her arm with Walter's as he let her lead him down the stairs to the main floor, Noah silently following.

Walter led them into the kitchen and started brewing a pot of coffee, Erin pulled coffee mugs off the shelf and Noah sat uncomfortably at the dingy kitchen table. Erin joined Noah at the table as Walter turned to the duo before him. "This is a much longer and more difficult story than the last one I told you, about the end of Scorpion. So please be patient, it will all make sense, eventually. I think." With a sigh, he joined them. He placed his arthritic hands carefully on the table in front of him. He marveled for a moment at how much time had passed. He remembered when his hands had been the hands of a young man, or even of a child. Not now. Not anymore. He was an old man who had lived through more pain and loss than he ever thought he could endure. Noah cleared his throat softly and Walter pulled his attention back to the two of them. He looked at their concerned and confused expressions. He hated this, hated that now they were going to be a party to his pain, to his greatest shame, to his possible descent into madness. The two humans he had let into his life after decades of isolation. Two humans who he cared deeply for. Two humans who would likely never look at him the same way again.

Taking a deep and shaky breath, Walter began. "I was eleven years old and living on my father's farm in Callan. I hacked into NASA to download the shuttle blueprints for my wall…"