Eventually, Milon Tusk escaped the smart home of the unhappily deceased Dieter Peel. This process had not been straightforward. Everything inside the fortified compound was voice-controlled, including windows and doors. He had tried imitating Peel’s voice, jimmying the locks, and at one low point, throwing a chair at the wall of windows overlooking the bay, only to watch it bounce jauntily off the bullet- and blast-proof security glass. However, once he had managed to prise the smartwatch off Peel’s wrist, just beginning to stiffen against his body, Tusk’s luck improved.
Now free, he wasn’t so sure why he had been so eager to leave. He lurched through the uneven sand toward the ephemeral creatures holding the giant earth-corer in place. He no longer cared whether they saw him. “Come on, you bastards!” he screamed into the sky.
He quickly began to care again when it became evident that he had gotten his wish. From far up atop one of the jellyfish, a drone detached itself and glided into an investigatory descent. It started out as a dark speck against the brightly lit monstrosity, becoming gradually bigger as it whizzed toward him. Tusk started running when it got big enough for its features to become identifiable, because these features included eyes, a nose, and a mouth.
The drone was, in fact, a giant fleshy human head. Well, a grotesque caricature of a giant fleshy head – initially he had taken it for a tasteless paint job, but it quickly emerged that the thing was indeed covered in skin or something like it, complete with terrible glistening eyes and gnashing teeth.
Tusk tried to run faster, but the soft, fine sand beneath him gave way, simply converting the extra force into deeper footprints. He wished he had never broken out of Peel’s fortress. He longed for the comparatively peaceful death he had left behind.
He ran toward the waves in search of firmer ground, and behind him a noise got steadily louder. He allowed himself the briefest glance back. It was nearly upon him. Its mouth had opened, revealing a thick and glutinous tongue. Tusk gave it one last burst of speed, all ragged breath and crying, knowing nothing good lay ahead. Would it chew him up? Would it fold him into that wet and terrible mouth and take him up to the jellyfish?
A whiffling sound ricocheted above him, followed by an impact that put him face-first into the surf. A moment later something warm and wet hit the back of his neck, joined by slapping noises all around him. When he finally allowed himself to look up, he found the surrounding beach covered in pinkish clumps of varying constitution. Preserved in one of these was a single, monstrous eye.
Standing right behind it was Buff Jezos, his shiny pate, wry smile and enormous arms bulging out of his sleeveless flak jacket, at once martial and reassuringly avuncular. “It’s all right,” Jezos said and jogged over, helping Tusk to his feet. “It’s gone.”
“How did you -” Tusk began. Jezos wasn’t holding a weapon. “Is it really you?”
“It’s me,” Jezos confirmed as he steadied Tusk and pulled him further along the beach. “But we need to go.” He nodded in the direction of the jellyfish, which had already dispatched several more of the grotesque probes.
Tusk was on the brink of hysteria. “Go? Where do you want to go? What’s left?”
Jezos gestured up into a far corner of the sky, away from the creatures and their hellish star-blocking device. The only thing Tusk saw there was the moon.
“The moon?” Tusk said, blinking at Jezos. It took a moment for the logic to click. He gasped. “You actually did it?”
Jezos allowed himself a little smile as he made a complicated motion with one of his wrists, which was strapped to a funny-looking watch. “We did. Construction finished last month.”
Tusk looked back at the remnants of the splattered head. Stretching along the illuminated sand, he saw only one set of footprints. “Your footprints…” he murmured. “I can only see mine.”
“Oh, my child,” said Jezos, his beatific smile backlit against the shimmering purple of the nightmare jellyfish. “That’s my Zimazam Basics antigravity belt!” He lifted his shirt, exposing an extraordinary eight-pack and a device that looked like a cross between a circuit board and a weightlifting belt. “It’s to keep me from getting re-acclimated to Terran gravity. It’s $89.99 but we were thinking of putting it on sale next month.” His voice became wistful. “To coincide with the global announcement of Luna HQ3 and fulfillment center.”
Something whined in approach and Tusk watched a heavily armoured Zimazam delivery drone slide out of the darkness. “Get in,” Jezos said. “Quickly.”
Safely inside, Jezos threw himself into a recliner and exhaled explosively. Instantly the ship launched up with a wrenching tug that pinned Tusk to the back of his seat. Through a small porthole, he watched the beach recede with remarkable speed. One of the heads came close to intercepting them, causing Tusk’s heart to clench in fear but leaving Jezos – and the drone’s many laser cannons – unfazed. They rose higher and Tusk could feel the drone’s cabin pressurising. Tusk began to notice the curvature of the earth, and he realised they might really be heading for the moon in this thing. He worried that he had just traded in one agonising death for another.
“I hope you have a bathroom,” he said in an attempt to broach the topic lightly, hoping Jezos would quickly laugh off the notion and explain the actual, much more sensible plan. “Otherwise it’s going to be a long three days.”
Jezos looked contrite. “Do you think you can hold out for about half an hour?” Tusk was relieved. Definitely not the moon, then.
As he mulled through possible alternatives, Jezos launched into an explanation of how he had built Luna HQ. First he had secretly invested his staggering net worth into poaching ESA scientists who had been agitating for a moon village but were constantly stymied by their countries’ poor funding. After Jezos dropped them off with nothing but a nested matrioshka set of 3D printers, they had figured out how to tap the nearly endless supply of drinking water from the ice trapped in the black lunar shadows. In their spare time, they had also worked out how to get energy from the limitless supplies of helium-3 in the regolith. Now there was a Zimazam fulfillment centre below Shackleton crater, and a glittering nest of domes above to house HQ3. “The solar system’s first off-Earth corporate headquarters,” Jezos said. “We’re totally self-sustaining.”
“After that, it was just a question of how to get same-day delivery to Earth,” Jezos said, and his face lit up, but now, finally safe from the nightmare below, Tusk was finally settling into his exhaustion, and found it difficult to focus on customer service and logistics. He was vaguely aware of Jezos gesticulating around terms like Lagrange point, counterweight and carbon nanotubes, when the drone suddenly passed out of the earth’s shadow into unfiltered sunshine, and the porthole shut.
On the screen that now displayed the outside view, Tusk saw that they were approaching an asteroid. Tethered to its rocky surface was a thick cable that rose above them and disappeared into the distance. The drone landed on the asteroid, colliding gently with the cable. With a great deal of shaking and clanking, the drone attached itself to the cable. Then a different clanking, this one reminiscent of the kind of funicular that trundles up picturesque Swiss mountains. The drone car rose slowly off the asteroid, picking up speed until Tusk had to look away from the screen because he was starting to feel vertiginous. Jezos had built a moon elevator, just so Zimazam could guarantee prime same day deliveries.
After the shock wore off, Tusk asked Jezos why a moon hideout was any safer from the jellyfish creatures than Peel’s fortified compound.
“The Luna fulfillment center was just my cover for a much bigger project,” Jezos said. “Stephen and I have been working on it for years. He predicted all of this. That’s why we had to fake his death.”
Surely he wasn’t talking about – but before Tusk could finish the thought, he felt the moon elevator compartment braking, and a look at the screen confirmed that they were quickly descending to the Zimazam Luna station. A circle of reflective domes clustered around a landing platform for the elevator, and embedded cargo doors swallowed them into the structure, away from the hostile lunar surface.
The drone’s door opened to reveal two people who looked absolutely nothing alike and yet who gave the unshakable impression of being twins. The woman’s affect and wardrobe could only be described as “business goth”.
“Milon, these are my assistants Alice and Bob,” said Jezos with a mild smile. “Well – technically they’re Stephen’s assistants. Sorry, did I say assistants? I mean assassins. Alice, Bob -” he did a strange, grandiose little flourish “- the one and only Milon Tusk.”
Bob looked at Alice expressionlessly, and Alice’s dark green lipstick curled into a smirk. “Bob says we should throw him back.”
Jezos laughed uproariously and Alice chuckled. “Calm down, Bob,” she said, though as far as Tusk could see, Bob’s facial muscles hadn’t so much as twitched. “Seriously, pull it together. Of course we found him.” Tusk stared at Bob’s face looking for the faintest twitch, but all 43 of his facial muscles were immobile. A moving walkway brought them to something that looked like a control room. Waiting for them next to a bank of screens was Stephen Hawking.
“Finally!” his speech synthesizer said. “Cutting it a little close?”
“He was hiding in Peel’s house,” Jesoz said, running to the screens. “I couldn’t get in.”
“Fine,” Hawking replied just as klaxons started blaring and red lights flashed. Hostile approach warned a robotic female voice, and Hawking’s voice issued a command Tusk couldn’t make out, and then the world shimmered out of existence. Just before everything disappeared, Tusk caught a glimpse of mechanical jellyfish arms materialising in the lunar sky.
+++++++
The world snapped back into being, exactly as it had been just a moment ago, minus the jellyfish. The control room screen showed only a black sky in which hung the marble of earth, unperturbed by gargantuan black shapes. Everyone was exactly where they had been, including Stephen Hawking.
“But you’re dead!” was the first thing Tusk could blurt. “There was a huge funeral! Hundreds of longform obituaries were finally published after having been meticulously updated since the 1970s!”
“I’m very much alive,” Hawking typed. The robotic voice managed to sound amused.
“We had to fake his death,” said Jezos.
“Stephen Hawking is different from you and Buff,” Alice told Tusk. “There’s only one physical instantiation of him across the multiverse. He just hops across to where he’s needed. And we needed him with us full time.”
“What’s going on here?” said Tusk, very much afraid of the answer.
Bob stared unblinkingly ahead. Alice stifled a laugh and swatted him as though he had just said something rude. “You’re not wondering why we went to all that trouble just to get you off the planet?” she asked.
“No,” Tusk said, insulted. This time Bob’s frozen rictus doubled Alice over in a belly laugh. Tusk glowered at them both.
“Okay okay,” she said, indicating a ceasefire. “Are you familiar with the name Elon Musk?”
“The name on the – whatever that machine was. It sounds like a lazy pastiche of my name,” Tusk said irritably.
Hawking chimed in. “Elon Musk is just one of the billion billion versions of you that exist in parallel universes. In his home universe, he was in a bit of trouble. He was in charge of a car company that was having trouble meeting its production deadlines. But then Musk discovered that all he had to do to bring his assembly line up to speed was slurp the molten cores of parallel earths into a new energy source.”
Jezos interjected. “One issue with this approach is that, in order to access his target universes, Musk has to be invited in. He uses objects of intrigue – mysterious Sumerian tablets, say, or dark sarcophagi filled with red liquid – as bait. These capitalise on the greed of the people who find them. When they drink the liquid in the sarcophagus – and they always do – or follow the instructions on the ancient tablets – and they always do that too – they activate the technology and the extermination clock starts the countdown.”
Tusk remembered what Peel had said about the contractual language in the tablets Panopticorp had taken out of Iraq. “Why does he need to exterminate?” he asked.
“No two universes are exactly the same,” Hawking explained. “Every creature on Earth has a slightly different foundation, and the biggest intra-multiverse differences exist in microscopic organisms like bacteria and archaea. Traversing universe biomes can cause travellers to die in horrible and unpredictable ways. So they send the disease to exterminate all flora and fauna and everything else. Then the miners can come in and get to work, and everyone is reassured that anything they bring back with them is sterile.”
“What are those jellyfish machines?”
“Those are the entanglement portals,” said Hawking. “They materialise the equipment needed to core the earth. It takes a while.”
“Elon Musk is the only version of you who has found this way through,” Alice said. “But the rest of them are working on it. Belon Fusk. Telon Blusk. Elongated Lusk. All of them except you. You’re the only one out of all those billions who hasn’t been interested in building this device.”
“What about you?” Tusk gestured at her and Bob. “Are you different from how you are in other universes?”
“Oh we’re not real. We’re a figment of the mathematical imagination,” Alice said with a little flourish. “We only exist where Stephen Hawking goes.”
“They were invented in a 1978 paper to explain cryptography,” said Hawking.
“When Stephen found us in the physics textbooks, he asked us if we wanted to become his body guards.” Alice looked at Hawking with unmistakable warmth. “He broke us out.” Alice glanced at Bob, who was occupied at one of the computers. She lowered her voice as she leaned closer to Tusk. “It was so boring in there, Bob lost his ability to speak. Obviously we’re entangled, so that’s not a problem for us.”
Bob turned around and Alice raised her voice performatively. “And that’s why there’s only one of us each across the multiverse. We’re like Stephen, we can jump around to wherever we’re needed.”
Bob stared at her silently. “Yes I know you heard all that,” Alice said.
The klaxons started again.
“It’s Musk!” shouted Jezos. “How did he find us so fast?”
Hawking’s speech synthesizer issued that strange command again, and again, everything vanished.
+++++++
When it reappeared, Jezos looked worried. “I don’t understand how he found us,” he said. “No one invited him into that universe.”
“Obviously someone did,” said Alice sourly.
“Where are we now?” Jezos barked at Hawking. “Does this version have a sarcophagus? Who is the president of the United States?”
When the klaxon went off again, Jezos’ face combined fear and disbelief. “How is he doing this?” he shouted. He looked at Hawking expectantly. “Well? Let’s go!” he shouted, but Hawking shook his head. “We can keep running, but he’ll keep finding us,” his voice synthesizer said. “If we want him to stop, we need to know why Musk is coming after Milon.”
“How?” Alice began, and then her face clouded over and she began to shake her head, slowly at first. “Oh no. No no. Stephen, I already told you, I’m never going back there. I’m not going to Asshole Hal’s!”
But as the jellyfish began to materialise atop Amadeus Luna HQ, the group was already speeding away along the moon elevator towards Earth.
+++++++
The air down on this version of Earth was sweet and summery when they emerged onto the helipad at Amadeus’ Terran headquarters in Seattle. All had endured painful injections on the way down to guard against alien microbes, except Hawking, whom nature had seen fit to render immune to the standard problems caused by universe hopping.
In between the many injections, Tusk had asked repeatedly what Asshole Hal’s was, but no one volunteered. So he didn’t know what to expect as they sped down increasingly mangy streets that became alleys that turned into glorified crawlspaces. Then they rounded a corner and found a line of what must have been hundreds of people, meticulously dressed for the night of their lives. The men wore blazers and the highest-quality fedoras; the women wore disco shoes and surgical face contouring. It looked enough like a standard queue for a wildly popular night spot that Tusk almost didn’t notice the incongruity: most of the occupants clutched binders overflowing with thick academic papers and heavy textbooks. Many debated intensely in small groups as they pored over the pages. A woman in a snakeskin dress reached up to rummage inside her glittery bouffant and pulled out a scientific calculator.
“Fuck!” Alice spat. “I hate this fucking place.”
Tusk realised he was both underdressed and had no money, and even if he had remembered his wallet, he wasn’t sure if the bills inside were legal tender on this planet. He mentioned it to Alice. She shook her head dismissively and gestured at the door. “Just watch,” she sighed.
The bouncer was an intimidating specimen. His arms, which dwarfed Jezos’, rippled under a tight black T-shirt. His face bore intimidating scars and his upper lip appeared to have been punched into a permanent sneer. He stood next to a kind of cage that Tusk took to be a metal detector.
A group of guys at the front of the line edged toward him nervously. The first one, resplendent in a shiny plastic playsuit, cleared his throat. “I think my friend put us on the list,” he said, the lie sweaty and obvious. “Name’s Logan?”
The bouncer’s expression didn’t change as he gestured to the cage. Delighted that his ruse had worked, Logan entered, and found himself trapped. The bouncer took a breath and cracked his knuckles. “You’re on a trolley,” he said in a hoarse New Jersey accent whose intensity transformed r’s into w’s.
“I’m on a -” asked the supplicant, now distinctly alarmed.
“Shuddup.”
“Sorry I’m sorry -” Logan raised his hands. His suit crinkled loudly.
“I said, you’re on a fuckin trolley. It’s a runaway trolley. There’s little kids in front of you on the tracks. You can’t stop the trolley. All you can do is move a lever and put the trolley on a different track. If you do that, you kill a fat guy on the other track. If you don’t do that, you kill the little kids. What’s the ethical option?”
“I – I don’t understand,” Logan desperately searched the faces of his companions, but they were blank.
“Get the fuck out of here,” instructed the bouncer, and Logan and his crew did not need to be told twice.
Another well dressed group approached. There was the girl with the bouffant and the calculator. She entered the cage readily. She was prepared. “You’re on a trolley,” the bouncer said and recited his liturgy. The girl smiled triumphantly. “The goal of utilitarianism is to maximise happiness, so the ethical choice is to pull the lever and kill the fat man.” Her group clapped a little.
The bouncer pulled a lever, and the girl’s face went from triumph to dismay as she realised that the platform on which she was standing in the cage shunted its captives onto one of two tracks. But instead of leading into the club, the track the bouncer had chosen for her was diverting her and her friends away. They were trundling towards an enclosure Tusk hadn’t noticed before, a large pen surrounded on all sides by chicken wire, inside which great crowds of people debated utilitarian ethics with each other in loud, performative voices, from time to time glancing at the bouncer as they lobbed their most arcane philosophical ontology over the fence.
The scene repeated again and again, as Alice, Bob, Hawking, Tusk and Jezos, stuck at the back of the long line, grew increasingly nervous, their eyes never leaving the sky.
Tusk agonised. He remembered this problem from his introductory philosophy class at university. If he could just get a look at one of those textbooks to refamiliarize himself with the theory of utilitarianism. He craned his head to peer inside the book being shared by the group in front of him. Before he could get a look, however, a shadow drifted above them, and a reuseable rocket landed on a nearby roof. Within moments, three people were running towards the club at full speed. Even though he had been briefed on the existence of billions of copies of himself, this didn’t make it any less shocking and uncanny for Tusk to see the man who looked exactly like him. Making matters worse, he was flanked by two women who, despite looking nothing like each other or like Alice or Bob, again gave the unnerving impression of being part of a set of four identical siblings.
“Eve!” Alice hissed. “What the hell is she doing here. Oh shit, and there’s Carol.”
Jezos made an executive decision and ushered the group out of the line, cutting to the front past outraged shouts.
“You’re on a trolley,” the bouncer began, and Alice punched him in the face.
“Welcome to Asshole Hal’s,” the bouncer said with a broad smile, and waved them all onto the track that led into the club. “Please drink responsibly.”
They ran inside just as Musk, Eve and Carol got to the bouncer. Alice and Bob motioned for the others to go ahead inside as they crouched inside either side of the door to intercept Musk, who was sure to be close behind. Jezos and Hawking followed their orders, but Tusk couldn’t help himself. He had to get another look at his multiverse doppelganger. He crouched just inside the door, watching through the smoked one-way glass. “You’re on a trolley,” the bouncer was telling Musk and his non-identical blondes.
Tusk knew Musk had seen Alice punch the bouncer, so he should have followed suit. And yet, incredibly, it seemed Musk could not stop himself from engaging with the thought experiment. Tusk watched as Musk began to explain his reasoning, gesturing wildly. And he watched as the bouncer impassively pulled the lever that diverted Musk, Eve, and Carol into the philosopher’s prison. Alice and Bob did a little fist-bump and both grabbed Tusk’s shirt to get him up.
As they sprinted down the neon-lined hall that led to Asshole Hal’s inner sanctum, Tusk could just barely make out the sound of Musk’s howling: “Roko’s Basilisk!!”
Please keep going, I’m glued to my seat! The level of sci-fi silliness has me wondering where the Vogons will come in