Parallel U.: Freshman Year

By Dakota Rusk

Welcome to Parallel University, where the students all come from parallel universes ... and where Merri Terryl, a freshman from a post-nuclear Earth, makes a shocking discovery: something is causing the various parallels to wink out of existence. With the help of her friends (a nocturnal boy, a Roman gladiator, and an irresistible android), she travels from world to world until she discovers the cause — and the staggering evil behind it. But by then it may be too late to save all reality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dakota Rusk
• Release date: Jul 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311221933

Dakota Rusk

Dakota Rusk is my pen name. Under another name, I've written nine novels, two memoirs, assorted short fiction and literary criticism, and many, many Marvel Comics.

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PARALLEL U.

FRESHMAN YEAR

DAKOTA RUSK

Copyright © 2013 Dakota Rusk

Smashwords Edition

For Lauren Lefkovitz

PROLOGUE

My name is Merri Terryl.

This is the story of my freshman year at Parallel U. I’ve pieced it together from old emails, journal entries, video footage, and the stories my friends have told me about what I did, and why I did it.

It’s the only way for me to tell what happened. After all, I wasn’t there.

1

Oh, it was a beautiful day!

The sun pushed past the tar-black clouds, spilling golden joy like honey from a jar. The winds had slowed as well, to just under 160 kilometers an hour—not even enough to uproot a tree. There was far less cinder and ash in the air than usual, so I could make out the blasted thicket across the soybean field—a thicket I couldn’t ordinarily see unless I was close enough to throw a rock at it. And the thermometer outside my window read 51 degrees, making it the warmest August morning I could remember.

Why, oh why did it have to be so gorgeous on the day I had to go?

I sat on my bed and packed the last of my clothes into my suitcase, trying not to look out the window. It would be my first time leaving home—the first night I’d spend away from my parents, my brother, the house where I was born. I kept telling myself, You’re seventeen, it’s time you went out into the world; but that was just the problem.

I wasn’t going out into the world. I was going someplace else entirely.

There was no mistaking how big a deal this was. I hadn’t even left yet, and it had already changed my life. My parents had become noticeably shy around me, as if I was already the stranger I might soon become.

It was hardest on Cody. He was three years younger than me and very much a baby brother, even though he was now a teenager himself. I’d had to spend my childhood studying my parents, trying to make sense of the world from the confusing, contradictory clues they gave off; but when Cody was a kid, he never needed to do that. He’d had me to explain everything to him. And he’d depended on me ever since.

Now I was going away, and he was only just starting to realize what that meant. Suddenly he was shy around me, too, not sure of what to say to me, what to think about life without me. We used to spend our days together, inseparable, but lately it was almost like he hid from me. I missed him. And I hadn’t even gone yet.

I sighed and looked out the window again. The winds had torn open a hole the size of a tractor in the clouds, and one whole section of the farm was all yellow and glowing. When we were kids, Cody and I would whoop with happiness at such a sight, quickly suit up, and tear outside to jump around and dance in the warmth and the light before the clouds closed up again.

But I wasn’t a kid anymore. Something was different now. I could feel it inside—something restless, something reaching. I was sorry to be leaving Cody; but I was ready for new challenges, new experiences that he couldn’t be part of.

A rustling at the door made me turn away from the window; and there he was, leaning against the jamb. How long had he been standing there? I felt a stab of guilt, like he might have been reading my thoughts.

Hi, I said.

He dragged one toe across the floor. Still packing? he asked listlessly, like he wasn’t really interested.

Figured that out, huh? I said, nodding at my open suitcase.

But he didn’t laugh, or tease me back. Instead he crept in and sat on the edge of the bed—lightly, as if at any second he might change his mind and run back out. He watched as I folded up one of my old radiation suits, and when I was about to put it in the suitcase he said, That one doesn’t fit you anymore.

I looked down at it, like I was seeing it for the first time. No, I guess it doesn’t.

Plus, he added, you won’t really need it where you’re going, right?

Right, I said. I dropped the suit back on the bed.

I was afraid to say or do anything else; this was the closest we’d come to talking about my leaving since the day the letter came. Then, everyone had been excited and proud; it was only a few weeks later that the doubts and worries had set in.

Outside, the hole in the clouds closed up and the big bowl of sunlight disappeared.

Tell me again why you have to go, Cody blurted, with a catch in his voice that took me completely by surprise. I was afraid he might cry, and I couldn’t allow that. Not on such a beautiful day. Not on the day I was going away.

"I don’t…have to go, I said, choosing my words carefully. I want to. He looked at me, not understanding—or not letting himself understand. It’s an honor. I couldn’t say no. Plus, it’s so…I mean, it could open up so many… Agh! It was crazy hard to talk with him looking at me this way—eyes wide, almost begging me to make it all make sense to him. I have a chance to do something, to improve all our lives—not just mine."

You won’t know anyone there, he said. They won’t get you at all.

"Only at first. That’s the whole point of the place. Bridging the gap that divides us. Learning about each other."

Parallel U., he said with a sneer in his voice.

Yes, I said, tossing it back at him, but without the sarcasm, Parallel U. He scowled and pulled at a loose thread on my blanket. To cheer him up, I said, You might go there yourself, someday.

He looked up at me with an expression that said, We both know I’ll never leave Kansas. And it was true; I was the exceptional one in the family—the one whose mind moved like lightning, whose curiosity expanded beyond the framework of the tiny life we knew here and grasped for something bigger, something grander.

I closed my suitcase. Another awkward silence fell over us that Cody broke by saying, Are there any other parallels like ours? Where there was The War, and everything?

I’d already considered this; investigated it, in fact. I tried to phrase my findings so he could understand them. There are some parallels where something like The War happened; but mostly the people all died.

So there really won’t be anyone like you, he said, a tone of bitter triumph in his voice.

Probably not. But there’ll be people there who are as different as me. That’s the whole point of Parallel U. Ever since the Veil was pierced, and they discovered all the different parallels—all the alternate Earths where history took different paths—they’ve been trying to bring people together to share their experiences and to pool their knowledge.

I know, he said defensively. I had to watch myself; I didn’t want to come off like I was lecturing him.

I began again. I may meet people from parallels where America was colonized by the Spanish instead of the English. Or where Christianity never took hold and western civilization is still pagan. Or where the Nazis won World War Two. Though in that case, I added with a smile, I hope not.

How are you even supposed to talk to them? he asked, desperate to find some flaw in my plans, some reason for me to give up at the last moment and stay home.

It’ll be easy, I said. I already speak English. And since the physicists who first pierced the Veil were British, that’s the school’s official language.

Cody had used up all his arguments. He turned away and sulked.

Don’t, I said. "Come on, Cody. It’s not like I want to go. I mean, I do; I want to go, but I don’t want to leave. Not you. Not Mom and Dad. If only I could split myself in two!"

He refused to look at me. I don’t care if you leave or not. I just think you’d be happier at home.

Cody… I stopped myself; I didn’t want our last talk together to be an argument. Listen, I’ll be home for holidays. And probably for the summer.

He whirled. "Probably for the summer? You’re not sure?"

Well…no. A lot of the students come from parallels where schools don’t have a summer break. Of course the university accommodates them. And since I’m only on a two-year scholarship, I might take advantage of that and apply for classes during June and Jul—

You can’t wait to get away from us, he interrupted. You can’t wait to forget you ever knew us and be embarrassed when anyone reminds you of us.

My shoulders slumped. Cody, you know that’s not so…

He fled the room.

I sat numbly on the bed for a while. Inky, the family cat, slid up onto the covers and rubbed against my arm and purred, as though this were just another day and so would be tomorrow, and I surprised myself by bursting into tears and clutching him to my chest. He panicked and scratched my arm, and when I loosened my grip he propelled himself away from me.

I was upset, and I knew why. Cody’s accusation had hit a nerve: I did want to leave. I didn’t want to waste my life—waste my mind—on this scorched, barren world, where the most anyone could hope for was to stumble along from season to season, scratching out the barest living possible from the hot, irradiated soil. I felt such a whirlwind of possibility and hope, so many feelings and ambitions, and there was nowhere in this parallel where I could act on any of them.

I wanted to go away, and never come back.

Except…I didn’t. I was born here. I grew up here. The only people who loved me, in all the dozens of parallels on record, were right here.

I brought my knees up to my face and clutched my ankles, and cried some more. And that’s how Mom found me, twenty minutes later.

Merri, honey, it’s time to go, she said, and from the swollen look on her face I could tell she’d been crying too. We hugged, and she added, You’re going such a long way away.

I sniffled and gazed up at her. Depends on how you look at it, I said. In one sense, I’m just going to England.

"An England. One of many. And one I’ll probably never see."

I know, I said, suddenly feeling the weight of my decision. Apparently Cody had gotten to me after all. Mom, I said, and I didn’t need to go on; the terrified tone in my voice said it all.

Hush, now, she said, squeezing my shoulder. You’ve gotten this far, so it’s no time for doubts. Besides, you know what I always say: Better to give it a try than to miss out and cry.

I laughed in spite of everything. I can’t believe one of your lame expressions is actually making me feel better.

She pretended to be shocked. Who says my expressions are lame?

Everyone, I said, and she put her hands around my neck and mock-strangled me. I cracked up.

Then she kissed me on the forehead and checked the seams of my radiation suit, and said, You’d better get going, your father’s waiting. And her voice sounded funny, like those were the last syllables she was going to be able to manage for a while. So I picked up my suitcase and went to the garage, where I found Dad loading my bags into the back of the truck.

He looked up brightly and said, Guess my little girl’s really heading off to college! I started crying again, and he looked guilty, like he didn’t know what he’d said wrong; then he very thoroughly double-checked the boot’s radiation seals. It should’ve taken him about five seconds, but he kept at it until I reined in my bawling, which took quite a bit longer.

He gently helped me into the truck, climbed up after me, and shut and sealed the doors. He started the motor and pressed the button to lower the shield behind him; the garage door noisily scrolled back and the truck pulled out onto the gravel drive.

I braced myself for the first slam of the wind into the vehicle; with that out of the way, I craned my neck for a final look at the only place I’d ever called home: the tiny farmhouse, built into the side of a hill to protect it from the worst of the ion storms, and surrounded by the acres of blasted fields that had, with tireless effort, day in and day out, yielded up just enough sustenance to keep the family going all these years. Suddenly I had a grown-up moment, as Cody called them—one of those sudden realizations where I grasped something terribly important that never occurred to me as a kid. I realized how fragile our lives had been, and how one small miscalculation, one injury or spell of bad luck, might have ruined us entirely. And there was no more government to bail us out or even lend a helping hand.

I looked at Dad as though seeing him for the first time, and tried to imagine the load he shouldered every day. I wondered why it was that I never appreciated this about him till now, when I was saying goodbye. And almost as quickly I knew the answer: It was only because I was saying goodbye that I could see him this way.

I wanted to say something, to let him know I understood and respected and loved him for it. And I was trying to find the right words when, at just about the point where our property ends and the Loughlins’ begins, he didn’t watch where he was going and hit a nest by the side of the road, and as he was backing up, about a hundred cockroaches came spilling out of it and swarmed over the truck. Dad cursed, using some pretty blunt words I’d never heard him use before, and scrambled to activate the grid on the truck’s exterior that repelled the roaches with an electric charge.

I looked out the window as the roaches fell to the side of the road, sizzling and smoking. Dad said, as he always did whenever we encountered them, Damn filthy things—big as dogs. Because apparently when he was a kid, cockroaches were no bigger than your thumb, and it was only after The War that radiation mutated them to jumbo size. Dad liked to tease Mom by saying there’s no reason we shouldn’t use them as a food source—they were so plentiful, and they were pure protein, and he knew people who treated them like livestock and had recipes for them and everything, which would make Mom go very quiet and shut herself in the bathroom till he changed the subject. But I know he was never really serious about it, because he was always unnerved by the roaches too, no matter how many times we ran into them; and also, the stink of them was just awful. You’d never, ever want it in your kitchen. Even now I thought I could smell it leaking through the radiation seals, but that was impossible; it was just my traumatized brain filling in the stench I knew was outside.

Dad seemed pretty shaken up; in fact, a lot more than usual. And come to think of it, it wasn’t like him to hit a nest like that. He was usually the most careful driver ever. And all at once I realized he was upset about my leaving too, and it was distracting him, affecting his focus.

He checked the truck’s battery level; it was now dangerously low. Activating the repellent grid had seriously depleted it. He’d have to stop for a charge after dropping me off, and maybe even before. And I wondered if maybe he even hit the nest on purpose, so he’d have an excuse for running out the truck’s power and missing my appointment at the Terminus Dock, which would mean keeping me home a while longer.

But no, that was silly; it wasn’t like him at all.

Was it?

I reached over and placed my hand in his. He closed his fingers around mine and gave me a smile. Then without letting go of me, he used his free hand to steer the truck back onto the gravel road, and we drove the rest of the way in silence.

I wonder now, many months later, about what he did after he left me—whether he stopped to recharge the truck, or took a gamble that he could make it home and charge it overnight in our own garage. Either way, I like to think he made it back in time to see Mom and Cody; I like to think he reached them first, so that they were together when it happened. But I’ll never know for sure.

2

It would have been funny, if it weren’t so frustrating. I’d finally escaped the cramped, sheltered, boring world where I grew up, only to land in an even more cramped, sheltered, boring one. At least temporarily. Because it was standard policy at Parallel U. that first-time visitors from alternate Earths spend their initial few days in quarantine.

On my arrival at the house, somewhere outside the city of Greenwich, I was so disoriented from the trip that all I could do was sleep. I’d expected that the crossing, as it’s called, would feel a bit like being unwoven, strand by strand, then knitted back together; that’s what all the sources said. But in fact, from the moment I stepped into the Terminus Chamber—a small, open gateway that reminded me of pictures I’d seen of airport metal detectors—I’d felt like I was tumbling head-over-heels in a clothes dryer.

We’re very sorry, the technicians had said when I arrived at the other side looking obviously the worse for wear, and told them what I’d been through. That’s not supposed to happen. As I left them, they were going over the Terminus Chamber, checking it for a malfunction.

After almost fourteen hours in bed I finally felt strong enough to sit up and look around. I saw that I was in a very small apartment with a daybed and a kitchenette, its walls, ceiling, and carpeting all various depressing shades of beige.

There were no other residents at the moment, and even if there were I wouldn’t have been allowed to meet them—that would have defeated the whole purpose of quarantine—so it was pretty lonely. True, I now had a computer; but every time I tried to use it, it crashed.

The first time it happened they sent a tech-support guy up to my room; he was twenty-five or so, tall and lanky and with shaggy brown hair. I could feel my eyes just about jump out of my head. But he barely looked at me; he just came swaggering in with his little kit, saying, Don’t worry, you didn’t do anything. It’s probably Daimon Seed.

What’s ‘Daimon Seed? I asked.

"Not what, who, he said as he sat down at my desk. Parallel U.’s very own dedicated computer hacker. Real pain in the buttocks. Got a major hate on for the University. He—or she, for all I know—is always pulling stunts like this…cocking up the works. Though it seems kinda petty to strike at people in quarantine, for God’s sake. Like you don’t already have it crappy enough, stuck in this pit."

When he said this, something occurred to me. "Hey, how come they let you in here? If I’ve got some weird virus or something they haven’t figured out yet, you could bring it back out into the public."

No worries, I live here, he said with a smile. They keep me on site in case anything like this happens.

"But…Daimon Seed hasn’t ever struck here before, you said."

Nah. But now that he has, he’s met his match. He turned long enough to shake my hand. Mike, he said.

Merri, I replied, and when his flesh met mine I felt a jolt. Uh-oh, I thought. This is exactly what I can’t let happen. I can’t go and crush on the first guy I meet. Especially someone who lives at the quarantine house! That’s not even on campus!

But I couldn’t help it. He really was pretty adorable. And just so happy to be delving in to my computer’s faulty functionality.

But that faded fast, once he determined that it hadn’t been hacked, it had just shorted out. He looked so disappointed. I realized he’d been almost hoping for Daimon Seed to come stomping around his territory, just so he’d have something big to tackle. So he could finally be the hero he probably always wanted to be.

He replaced some circuitry and got the computer up and running again. But the next day, when I tried to use it, it shorted out again. Mike came back and fixed it, and then the same thing happened a third time. I was so embarrassed; I could tell he was starting to suspect that I was doing it deliberately, just to bring him back to my room. I was trying so hard to play it cool, but my computer was making me look desperate. So I was almost relieved when he gave up and told me there was nothing more he could do for me. I never saw him again. So much for my first brush with boys.

So I was computer-less. It wasn’t a huge problem. I was supposed to register for my classes online, but ended up having to do it manually, which took three times as long. It didn’t really matter, as long as it was all processed by the time I left quarantine.

But I’d also been looking forward to hanging out in the chat rooms frequented by incoming freshmen. I’d gone there once or twice, and had just enough time before the computer crashed to get a brief glimpse of the various interactions. Everyone had such an easy, breezy way of talking to each other—a kind of spoken shorthand. Mike was the same; even the way he said Good morning had a kind of ironic smirk in it. Having grown up in almost total isolation, I knew I couldn’t manage that kind of casualness; I’d have had better luck speaking French backwards. But I thought I could at least pick up some clues by eavesdropping on everyone else. Oh, well. Apparently I’d have to wait and try my luck face to face.

Though that wouldn’t be much easier, and I knew it. I grew