Rosé sits hugging her knees into her chest.
"What do you think happened up there?" she asks.
Jisoo, looking lost, answers, "Supervolcano. Asteroid strike. Nuclear war. No telling."
"Are we in the future?"
"No, the box would only connect us to alternate realities at the same point in space and time. But I suppose some worlds might seem like the future if they've made technological advancements that ours never figured out." Jennie answered.
"What if they're all destroyed like this one?" Rosé hypothesize.
Jennie says, "We should take the drug again. I don't think we're exactly safe under this crumbling skyscraper."
Jisoo pulls off her flats and shakes the ash out of them. Rosé tied her hair again, this time, a little tighter.
Jennie walks toward Jisoo, "What you did for me back at the lab... You saved my life."
Jisoo looks at Jennie, her bottom lip threatening to quiver. "I used to dream about those first pilots who went into the box. Nightmares. I can't believe this is happening." Rosé put her hand on Jisoo's shoulder and squeezes it.
Jennie unzips the backpack and start pulling out the contents to catalog them. She find the leather bag containing the ampoules and injection kits.
Three notebooks sealed in plastic.
Box of pens.
A knife in a nylon sheath.
First-aid kit.
Space blanket.
Rain poncho.
Toiletry kit.
Two rolls of cash.
Geiger counter.
Compass.
Two one-liter water bottles, both full.
Six MREs.
"You packed all this?" Jennie asks Jisoo.
"No, I just grabbed it from the stockroom. It's standard issue, what everyone takes into the box. We should be wearing space suits, but I didn't have time to grab any." Jisoo explains.
Rosé chuckles. "No kidding. A world like that? Radiation levels could be off the charts, or the atmospheric makeup drastically altered. If the pressure is off—too low, for instance—our blood and all the liquids in our bodies will boil."
The water bottles are calling out to Jennie. She haven't had anything to drink in hours, since lunch. Her thirst is blaring.
Jennie opens the leather bag. It looks custom-made for the ampoules, each glass vial held in its own miniature sleeve.
She begins to count them.
"Sixty," Jisoo informs. "Well, fifty-seven now. I would've grabbed three backpacks, but..."
"You weren't planning to come with me." Jennie concludes.
"How fucked are we?" Jisoo asks. "Be honest."
Jisoo and Rosé looks at Jennie. "I don't know. But this is our spaceship. We'd better learn to fly it."
As Jennie begin to cram everything back into the pack, Jisoo reaches for the injection kits.
This time, the three of them break the necks of the ampoules and drink the drug, the liquid sliding across their tongues with a sweet, borderline unpleasant sting.
Fifty-four ampoules remaining.
Jisoo starts the timer on her watch when Rosé asked a question, "How many times can we take this stuff and not fry our brains?"
"We did some testing a while back."
"Pulled some homeless guy off the street?" Jennie says, with a hint of disbelief.
Jisoo almost smiles. Keyword: almost. "Nobody died. We learned that repeated use definitely strains neurological functioning and builds up a tolerance. The good news is the half-life is really short, so as long as we're not slamming one ampoule right after another, we should be all right." She slides her feet back into her flats, looks at Jennie. "Are you impressed with yourself?"
"What do you mean?"
"You built this thing."
"Yeah, but I still don't know how. I understand the theory, but creating a stable quantum state for human beings is..."
Rosé continues for her, "An impossible breakthrough?"
Of course. The hair on the back of Jennie's neck stands up as the improbability of it all makes sense.
Jennie says, "It's a one in a billion chance, but we're dealing with the multiverse. With infinity. Maybe there are a million worlds like yours, where I never figured it out. But all it takes is one where I did."
At the thirty-minute mark, Jisoo notes the first sensation of the drug taking effect —the flickering of a shining, bright euphoria.
A beautiful disengagement.
Though not quite as intense as in the Velocity Laboratories box.
Jisoo looks at Rosé.
She says, "I think I feel it."
Jennie says, "Me too."
"Me too." says Rosé.
And they're back in the corridor.
Jennie asks, "Is your watch still running?"
Jisoo tugs back the sleeve of her sweater and illuminates the watch face into tritium green.
31:15.
31:16.
31:17.
Jennie says, "So a little over thirty-one minutes since we took the drug. Do you know how long it's supposed to alter our brain chemistry?"
"I've heard about an hour." Jisoo answers.
Rosé suggested, "Let's clock it to be sure."
Jennie move back toward the door to the parking garage and pull it open.
Now she's staring into a forest.
Except there's no trace of green.
No trace of life.
Just scorched trunks as far as she can see.
The trees look haunted, their spindly branches like black spiderwebs against a charcoal sky.
Jennie closes the door.
It automatically locks.
Vertigo hits her as Jennie watches the box push out away from her again, smearing off into infinity.
Jennie unlocks the door, drag it back open.
The corridor collapses again.
The dead forest is still there.
Jennie thought out loud, "Okay, so now we know that the connections between the doors and these worlds only hold during a given session on the drug. That's why none of your pilots ever made it back to the lab."
"So when the drug kicks in, the corridor resets?" Rosé says.
"I think so."
A moment of silence before Jisoo breaks it, "Then how do we ever find our way home?"
__________________________________
Jisoo begins to walk.
Faster and faster.
Until she's jogging.
Then running.
Into a darkness that never changes.
Never ends.
The backstage of the multiverse.
The exertion is making Jennie sweat and ratcheting her thirst to an unbearable level, but she says nothing, thinking maybe Jisoo needs this. Needs to burn through some energy. Needs to see that no matter how far she goes, the corridor will never end.
Jennie looked at Rosé.
She's just walking beside Jennie, watching Jisoo runs. But her eyes, it's like realizing and being haunted at the same time.
Jennie suppose they're all just trying to come to terms with how horrifying infinity really is.
__________________________________
Eventually, Jisoo burns out.
Slows down.
There's nothing but the sound of their footfalls echoing into the darkness ahead of them.
Jennie is light-headed with hunger and thirst, and she can't stop thinking about those two liters of water in their backpack, wanting them, but knowing they should save them.
Now they move methodically down the corridor.
Rosé hold the lantern so she can inspect every wall of every box.
Jennie doesn't know what they are looking for exactly.
A break in the uniformity, perhaps.
Anything that might let them exert some measure of control over where they end up.
All the while, Jennie's thoughts race in the dark—
What will happen when the water's gone?
When the food is gone?
When the batteries that power this lantern—our only source of light—fail?
How will I ever find my way home?
Jennie wonders how many hours have passed since they first entered the box back at the Velocity Laboratories hangar.
She have lost all sense of time.
She's faltering.
Exhaustion bears down so hard on her that sleep seems sexier than water.
Jennie glance over at Jisoo, her features cold but beautiful in the blue light.
She looks terrified.
"Hungry yet?" Jisoo asks.
"Getting there." Jennie answers then says, "I'm really thirsty, but we should save the water, right?"
"I think that's the smart thing to do." Rosé said.
Jisoo nods, "I feel so disoriented, and it's getting worse by the moment. On where I grew up, we used to get these wild blizzards. Whiteouts. You'd be driving out on the plains, and the snow would start blowing so hard you'd lose all sense of direction. Blowing so hard it'd make you dizzy just looking at it through the windshield. You'd have to pull over on the side of the road, wait it out. And sitting in the cold car, it was like the world was gone. That's how I feel right now."
"I'm scared too. But I'm working this problem." Jennie says, feeling how her throat is so dry.
"How?" Rosé asks.
"Well, first, we have to find out exactly how much corridor time this drug will give us. Down to the minute."
Narrowing her eyes, Rosé asks further. "How far do you want to wind out the clock?"
"If you're saying we have about an hour, then our deadline is ninety minutes on your watch. That accounts for thirty minutes for the drug to kick in, plus the sixty minutes we're under its influence."
"I weigh more than you. What if it affects me for longer?" Rosé questions with curiosity.
"It doesn't matter. The moment it stops working on one of us, that person will decohere the quantum state and collapse the corridor. Just to be safe, let's start opening doors at the eighty-five-minute mark."
"And hope for what exactly?" Jisoo asked.
"A world that doesn't eat us alive."
Rosé and Jisoo stop and looked at Jennie. "I know you didn't actually build this box, but you must have some idea of how all this works." Rosé says.
"Look, this is light-years beyond anything I could've—"
"So is that a 'No, I don't have any idea'?" Rosé says.
"What are you asking me, Rosé?"
"Are we lost?"
Jisoo tried to rationalize. "We're gathering information. We're working a problem."
"But the problem is that we're lost. Right?"
Jennie adds. "We're exploring."
"Jesus Christ." Rosé mutters.
"What?"
"I don't want to spend the rest of my life wandering down this never ending tunnel." Rosé, with fear, answers.
"I won't let that happen." Jennie reassures.
"How?"
"I don't know yet." Jennie honestly says.
It's now Jisoo's moment, Jennie realize, that she got scared at the Rosé's thoughts, "But you're working on it?"
"Yes. I'm working on it."
"And we're not lost." Rosé says.
They are so fucking lost. Literally adrift in the nothing space between universes.
"We're not lost." Jennie encourages.
"Good." Rosé smiles. "Then I'll postpone freaking out."
__________________________________
Three of them move along in silence for a while.
The metal walls are smooth and featureless, nothing to distinguish one from the next and the next and the next.
Jisoo asks, "What worlds do you think we actually have access to?"
"I've been trying to puzzle that out. Let's assume the multiverse began with a single event—the Big Bang. That's the starting point, the base of the trunk of the most immense, elaborate tree you could fathom. As time unfolded and matter began to organize into stars and planets in all possible permutations, this tree sprouted branches, and those branches sprouted branches, and on and on, until somewhere, fourteen billion years down the line, my birth triggered a new branch. And from that moment, every choice I made or didn't make, and the actions of others that affected me—those all gave rise to more branches, to an infinite number of Jennie Kims living in parallel worlds, some very similar to the one I call home, some mind-bogglingly different."
Rosé, getting what Jennie is trying to say, continues, "Everything that can happen will happen. Everything. I mean, somewhere along this corridor, there's a version of us that never made it into the box when Jisoo tried to help us escape. And now we're being tortured or already dead."
"Thanks for the morale boost." Jisoo says.
Rosé and Jennie look at each other, then Jennie speaks again, "Could be worse. I don't think we have access to the entire breadth of the multiverse. I mean, if there's a world where the sun burned out just as prokaryotes—the first life-forms—were appearing on Earth, I don't think any of these doors open into that world."
"So we can only walk into worlds that..." Rosé slowly drifts off.
"If I had to guess, worlds that are adjacent to ours somehow. Worlds that split off at some point in the recent past, which are next door to ours. That we exist in, or existed in at some point. How far back they branched, I don't know, but my suspicion is there's some form of conditional selection at work. This is just my working hypothesis."
"But we're still talking about an infinite number of worlds, right?" Jisoo asks.
Jennie answers with, "Well, yeah."
Jisoo lift her wrist and press the light feature on her watch.
The tiny square of luminous green shows...
84:50.
84:51.
Jisoo says, "The drug should wear off in the next five minutes. I guess it's time."
Rosé move toward the next door, hands Jennie the lantern, and grip the handle. Turning the lever, Rosé pull the door open one inch.
She sees a concrete floor.
Two inches.
A familiar glass window straight ahead.
Three.
Jisoo recognizes it, "It's the hangar."
"What do you want to do?" Rosé asks.
Jisoo pushes past Rosé and steps out of the box.
Rosé and Jennie follows, the lights shining down on them.
Mission control is empty.
The hangar quiet.
They stop at the corner of the box and peer around the edge toward the vault doors.
Jennie whispers, "This isn't safe." Her words carry through the expanse of the hangar like whispers in a cathedral.
"And the box is?" Jisoo retorts back.
With a thunderous clang, the vault doors disengage and begin to part.
Panicked voices bleeding through the opening.
It's Rosé this time that whispers, "Let's go. Right now."
A woman is fighting to squeeze through the space between the doors.
Jisoo whispers an "Oh my God."
The vault doors are only fifty feet away, and Jennie know they should go back into the box, but now, she can't stop watching.
The woman pushes through the doors into the hangar, and then reaches back and gives a hand to another woman behind her.
The woman is Jisoo.
The another woman's face is so swollen and battered Jennie wouldn't have known right away that she was Rosé except she's wearing clothes identical to Rosé.
The other Jennie follows and as they begin running towards them, Jennie start to involuntarily retreat to the door of the box.
But they only make it ten feet before Yang's men rush through the doors behind them.
A gunshot stops the other Jennie, Rosé and Jisoo in their tracks.
Jisoo starts toward them, but Jennie pulls her back.
"We have to help them," she whispers.
"We can't."
Peeking around the corner of the box, they watch their doppelgängers turn slowly to face Yang's men.
They should leave.
Jennie knows this.
Part of her is screaming to go.
But she can't tear herself away.
Jennie's first thought is that they have gone back in time, but of course that's impossible. There's no time travel in the box. This is simply a world where the three of them escaped several hours later.
Or failed to.
Yang's men have their guns drawn, and they're moving deliberately into the hangar towards the three women.
As Yang steps in after them, Jennie hears the other version of herself say, "It's not her fault. I threatened her. I made her do this." Yang looks at Jisoo.
He asks, "Is this true? He made you? Because I've known you for more than a decade, and I've never seen anyone make you do anything."
Jisoo looks scared, but also defiant. Her voice trembles as she says, "I won't stand by and let you keep hurting people. I'm done."
"Oh. Well, in that case..."
Yang places his hand on the thick shoulder of the man to his right.
The gunshot is deafening.
The muzzle flash is blinding.
The other Jisoo drops like someone flipped a power switch, and next to Jennie, Jisoo lets slip a stifled shriek.
As this other Jennie rushes Yang, the second guard executes a lightningfast Taser draw and brings her down screaming and twitching on the floor of the hangar.
Jisoo's shriek has given then away.
Yang is staring right at them with a look of pure confusion.
He shouts, "Hey!"
They ran after Jennie, Jisoo and Rosé.
Rosé grabs Jisoo by the arm and drag her back through the door of the box then Jennie slams it home. The door locks, the corridor reconstitutes, but the drug will be wearing off at any moment.
Jisoo is quaking, and Jennie wants to tell her everything is fine, but it isn't.
She just witnessed her own murder.
"That isn't you out there," Rosé tells her. "You're standing right here beside me. Alive and well. That is not you." Even in the bad light Jennie can tell that Jisoo's crying and Rosé is trembling beside her.
Tears streak down through the grime on Jisoo's face like running eyeliner. "It's some part of me," she says. "Or was." Gently, Jennie reach down and lifts her arm, turning it so Jennie can see the watch.
They're forty-five seconds shy of the ninety-minute mark.
Jennie says, "We have to go."
Jennie and Rosé starts down the corridor but Rosé notices that Jisoo isn't with them so she turned back and shouted, "Jisoo, come on!"
When Jisoo catches up, Jennie opens a door.
Total darkness.
No sound, no smell. Just a void.
Jennie slams it shut.
Trying not to panic, but she needs to be opening more doors, giving them a shot at finding someplace to rest and reset.
Jennie opens the next door.
Ten feet away, standing in weeds in front of a teetering chain-link fence, a wolf glares at Jennie through large amber eyes. Lowering its head, it growls. As it runs towards Jennie, she shove the door closed.
Rosé grabs hold of Jennie and Jisoo's hand.
They keep walking.
They should be opening more doors, but the truth is all of them are terrified. They have lost faith they'll find a world that's safe.
Jennie blinks and they're confined to a single box again.
The drug has worn off for one of us.
This time, Jisoo opens the door
Snow streams into the box.
A shot of bitter cold hits their faces.
Through a curtain of falling snow, Jennie glimpse the silhouettes of trees nearby and houses in the distance.
"What do you think?" Rosé asks to Jisoo.
"I think I don't want to be in this box for another fucking second."
Jisoo steps down into the snow and sinks to her knees in the soft powder. She immediately begins to shiver.
Jennie feels the drug wink out for her, and this time the sensation is like an ice pick through her left eye. Intense but fleeting.
They follow Jisoo out of the box, and they head in the general direction of the neighborhood.
Beyond the initial layer of powder, they can feel themselves continuing to sink— the weight of each step slowly breaking through a deeper, older crust of compacted snow.