Crossover Earth '98
Cassandra Awakes
by Lise Mendel
For years, scientists and science fiction authors have speculated that our universe is but one of a continuium of realities. There are an infinite regression of Earths which vary from our own in physical laws or details of history. In the normal course of events, these worlds will never meet.
This story is not about that normal course of events.
In one of those alternate dimensions, one not too tightly bound to our own, the possibilities of travel between these worlds were explored, with extreme results. A small number of people were fused with their counterparts on other timelines. This awakened innate powers within them, but left them feeling estranged from reality.
One of them found herself continuing to travel across causality lines, pausing in varied realities only long enough to fuse with yet another counterpart of herself, to use her extroadinary abilities do a little good in each world, before some temporal glitch shook her loose again.
Cassandra knew she was having a bad night. She didn't realize how likely it was to be her last. Despite her self-given name, she couldn't see the future... yet.
It was miserable and rainy outside. It was pretty miserable inside, too. She had been pounding her head against the same block of code since two o'clock in the afternoon. She hated debugging, and tracking down other peoples bugs was the worst sort. This was not the job they'd hired her for when she'd interviewed here two years ago, but that was par for the course at Omega.
She glanced at the clock, it was after ten f'ing o'clock already! Yeesh! And she was supposed to call her mother about flying back for Thanksgiving. By the time she got home Mom would be asleep, even with the time-zone difference. She decided to let Omega Corp pay the bill this once, and made the call.
She dutifully took her long-distance dose of guilt. "No, really, whatever you decide is fine." The voice over the phone assured her. "I just want you to know that I would really like to see you. I'll buy the plane ticket."
"Mom, I can afford the ticket, that's not the problem," Cassandra told her with irritation. "I need to get this project done by December 1st, and right now I'm not sure I can do it. I'll come down for Christmas, though," she continued optimistically.
"Oh, good! Your sister's coming in, too. The whole family will be together."
*My sister's dead,* that wicked, self-critical voice in the back of Cassandra's head insisted on reminding her. She pushed it aside, as usual, and accepted the guilt that came with it. Mom was talking about Evelyn, of course, not Grace. She pictured her mother rattling around that big house alone, for the second year in a row. The three of them had been together the year before that. That had been the year Dad died.
"What will you be doing for Thanksgiving, then?" Cassandra asked. "Are Dave and Mary having a dinner this year?"
Mom answered "No, Dave's back is..."
A man's voice from behind her drowned out Dave's back condition. "You!" it barked from behind her shoulder, "what are you doing here?!"
She put her hand over the receiver and swiveled her chair around to look at the interruption. He was about six feet tall, built like a marine, and dressed in the oddest uniform she'd ever seen in a night watchman - it looked kind of paramilitary.
"I'm working late," she growled back. "Here's my ID," she continued, handing her photo-tag to him.
The phone squacked something interrogatory at her. "Sorry, Mom," she said. "I'll talk to you later," and hung up quickly, but not too quickly. She didn't want the rent-a-cop goon to think he'd intimidated her.
"The office is closed," the aforementioned goon barked (he didn't seem to have any volume control to his voice). "You'd better leave."
Cassandra sighed. "Alright," she said, swiveling her chair back to the computer. "I wasn't getting anywhere tonight anyway." She closed her document and opened the emailer window.
"I said you'd better leave," he repeated.
"Yeah, I hear you. I'm logging off." She typed as fast as she could without showing panic, and shut down the PC she'd been working on. "I don't see what the fuss is about," she continued. "I've worked late before, and it hasn't been a problem."
The security guard (or whatever he was) escorted her, poker faced, to the coat closet and then marched woodenly along side her to the elevator. She found herself standing very erect, making sure that every inch of her 5'2" counted for something.
"You don't have to come along," she told him as he entered after her.
"Yes, I do," he replied, and pushed the button for the main lobby. They rode down in chilly silence. He walked her to the main door, and swiped her card against the sensor to open it for her, then thrust it into her hand and all but shoved her out.
"My car is parked around the side, you creep," she called after him, but the door had already closed and he was dissappearing back into the suddenly forbidden building.
She turned her collar up against the November rain, and dashed to the corner. The "Walk" signal had just started blinking as she got there, so she raced across. Suddenly, the street buckled and lurched beneath her feet. Directly in front of her, a large building was caving in upon itself, and an explosion roared. It was broad daylight.
She barely had time to recoil before the sight, and to recognize it as the Oklahoma City blast, when she saw a large bare room, lit only by a whirling column of multicolored light that sent strange and disturbing shadows spinning across the walls. The floor was almost completely covered with an intricate, interlocking pattern drawn in several different colors of chalk. A small figure -- a child, but somehow not a child -- stood before the light, addressing it in German. The column seemed to shift and flicker in response to his words. At the end of his speech, the child held out cupped hands, and something dropped from the column into them -- a gray oblong stone, smoking faintly.
But there was another child, reaching gleefully for a Christmas present with a choir singing "Silent Night" in the background. The air smelled of christmas tree, and something... Burned popcorn? She saw her mother laughing with the child and Grace(!?) *That had to be Grace. She was grown up, and a mother, but I know that face!...* ~Why not Grace? She had had a different name, but so had I~.
In addition to the places she was (not images she saw, she was there), Cassandra was swept through with memories. That horrible day when she was twelve, fought with her ten year old sister, fought like cats and dogs. It was like many other childhood fights, except that this one had been at the top of a flight of concrete steps. She remembered realizing that as she kicked, and trying to pull back the blow, too late. Only now, she also remembered that it had NOT been too late, and that fifteen years later her sister claimed not to even remember the fight...
*This is crazy!* Cassandra tried to will back the street, the rain, and she thought she saw it, but other images were equally real. She started across the road again, but it was daylight again, and a man awash with colors and a costume that looked like Eroll Flynn meets Peter Max was giving a speach before a shocked crowd.
By this time, she seemed to be in so many places at once... She threw herself to the side of the road (well, one of the roads, at least it was night) and threw her hands over her ears, squeezing her eyes shut, but the sights, sounds, smells and feelings just kept coming...
A team of super heroes was foiling a bank robbery. A black and red clad youth was doing pirouettes off of a burly robber's back. An orange rock-covered man had grabbed one, and was yelling threats in his face. A flying woman, pretty much un-clad in blue, surveyed the scene from the air, and a white haired man, who made up for his team-mates lack of wardrobe in length of cloak, called a small, cigar smoking dragon to heel.
She remembered these folks. They had helped her to fight someone, or had she helped them...? But she also knew she'd never actually met them, although their normal operations were within fifty miles of her parents home...
A large, fur covered manimal stopped and stole an armored car in a crowded street in full daylight. Then two red-haired men in identical gray sweatsuits were fighting and their faces are the same, down to the scowl of ferocious concentration each bore. Each strike, kick, and block was met swiftly, almost before it even begins. The two long walls of the room were mirrored, reflecting the men into infinity. Then a man in torn clothes, crossed a desert wasteland, waves of heat emanating from his body. Cassandra found her mouth going dry, and felt the sun baking her. Suddenly, a smell of burnt flesh, and Reflection and Golden Gate were hurling light beams back and forth across a crowded street. The devestation was terrific as soldiers sprayed bullets at the unarmed protesters, but then an agast nation was pouring out their hearts and their money to get relief to the flood survivors.
Images, sights, smells, feelings, tastes, feelings of power. Dramatic and banal. Shocking and mundane. Almost all of people, good, bad, or just self-interested. Past, present, future, as things happened or almost happened, or could-have-would-have-should-have happened, coming faster and faster, flooding her brain.
The car was just one more of the images, it seemed far less dangerous than many of the others.
The driver swore that he'd never seen her. He felt the car thump into something soft, and stopped immediately. Luckily for Cassandra he'd been driving slowly in the rain. . .
Putting her world awareness back together was a little like fitting together a jigsaw puzzle - one that had been mixed together in a box with three others, was three dimensional, and the picture kept shifting.
A couple of times she almost had it. It was easy to filter out the fringe reality lines - any interactions where Spectre was the president could be safely ignored. It was harder to distinguish between close lines, you had to pick one, interact with it, and see if it reacted back... This was how to find both world and time.
It helped that she knew she had done it before. She had all that experience to call on, even though she also had all her "old" voices to distract her, knowing that she could do it was half the battle.
The battle was easier than it had been in the past, too. Because, from this world line, past and future didn't diverge much. The past was narrowly constrained, "self correcting" around time travel and temporal manipulation. The future...
Forward time flow was also closely constrained. It showed little divergence for a short time into the future, then it stopped.
*Oh, no, not the end of the world, again,* Cassandra thought, then she clicked onto the here/now point, squeezed her mother's hand, and opened her eyes.
Cassandra was released from the hospital fairly quickly. There was nothing physically wrong with her, and her insurance company wasn't interested in giving the doctors time to go over her from top to bottom. So she was still a little unsteady, and found herself still a little distracted by things no one else seemed aware of, by the time she checked herself out.
It was a few days later, after dropping by the office to see how they'd gotten by without her, that she put her powers to their first test. She walked past the news stand and stopped suddenly, as if she'd been struck.
"Are you OK, miss?" the clerk asked.
Cassandra shook her head and turned to look at him. "Yeah, fine," she said dazedly. "Just deja vu, it happens all the time. Let me have a lottery ticket, willya? Give me the numbers 14,7,5,6,1."
She bought the ticket, shoved it into her jacket pocket, and went to her car. She waited through two light cycles to cross the street, because she kept flashing back to her accident, only this time there were other visions:
The red emergency lights cast an eerie, evil glow across the darkened room. An older man, his face creased with heavilly shadowed wrinkles, stands behind a set of iron prison bars. He glares out with a look of intense concentration, an armed police officer on the other side of the bars the target of his unconcealed rage. The officer scrambles for his gun in shock and panic, only to fall heavilly to his knees and then slump to the ground. The pistol strikes the tiled floor with a clatter as the captive turns his attention to the only other person in the room, a young woman wearing a sweater and jeans. She staggers back in horror, staring at the still policeman on the floor and bumping into a table behind her, sending glassware spilling to the floor with a crash. She lets out a piercing scream and clutches her hands to either side of her head, then suddenly goes dead silent. The room is still for several long seconds before the vision ends.
A large black man, with ragged clothes and graying hair, approaches a white teen ager and asks for spare change. A second teen jumps out from behind and pulls a knife, while the first one demands the money the older man has been begging from people. There's a quick, bloody fight which leaves the first man face down and bleeding, while the two youths run away.
A heavyset, greying man with just a hint of a bald spot is seated behind an ornate oaken desk. The wall behind him is covered with row upon row of hardbound books and folders, many of them carrying governmental seals. The sterile lighting of the room gleams off the desk polish and a number of brass picture frames, stealing the warmth and leaving a prefabricated feel to the scene. A younger man paces back and forth in front of the desk, gesturing expansively with a manilla folder as he rants on and on about "Bureaucratic nonsense," "Lack of support," and "Failure to follow up." Finally, he slams the papers down onto the desk in disgust. Reaching into a pocket in his sportscoat, he pulls out a passport-sized case and tosses that on top of the folder before stalking out the door. The scene fades with a crash as the door shakes the frame.
Cassandra eventually geared herself up and crossed the street, without so much as pausing in the middle. She strode blindly ahead, without looking left or right, bearing straight down on her car.
The panhandler was big and black and scruffy looking. Two months ago she would have thrown him some change in fear rather than talk to him; she probably had. Now she walked around him without a glance, and practically fell forward until she was more or less lying on her '93 Miata. She leaned on it gasped, as if she'd just surfaced from being underwater.
The man stared at her for a moment, as if trying to gauge whether she meant danger or a handout, then approached her.
"I'm O.K.," she told him before he'd said a word. "Thank you. I'll be fine." Still she didn't turn to face him.
He stopped a couple of steps from her. "Maybe you shouldn't be driving," he suggested gently.
"My spare change won't help, you know," she gasped. "It's too little to do anything with except blow on MadDog 20/20, and you know damn well that won't help."
"Hey, lady, I was just trying to help." he said, and turned to walk away.
But Cassandra continued her tirade, her voice sharp and cold. "No one said you made the situation, but you sure as hell helped it along once it started, didn't you, Curt?"
At the sound of his name from a stranger, the man froze. They stood, backs turned to each other, and Cassandra continued speaking.
"When did you decide to give up?" she asked. "Was it when he finally died? When the insurance company convinced them to fire you? When you lost the house? Was it when she walked out? When did you finally let go?"
He turned towards her, fear in his eyes. "Who are you?" he asked. "How do you know about me?"
But she was still leaning on her car, talking intensely to the air across it's roof. "Everything was taken from you, wasn't it?" There was a vicious edge to her voice. "You fought it as long as you could, the you just gave up and started taking, yourself."
He shuddered. She was very clearly talking to someone who wasn't there, but, somehow, Curt felt that someone was himself. He slowly started to edge his way around the car as she spoke.
"Yes, you could have done worse," she continued. "You beg, but you don't steal much. You haven't hurt anybody, and you've kept out of trouble as well as anybody. But don't you think you could have done better than keeping out of trouble?"
"I'm not sure there is a better..." he said, quietly, as he eased into her line of sight.
Her eyes locked with his, and she pushed to a standing position. "You could have tried, Curt." she told him. "You've been on the streets long enough to get a handle on things. You've got ideas that might work to change things, but you haven't got the balls to try."
"I'm not exactly in a position to try," his heart was pounding, but he was too drawn in to the strangeness of the whole situation to back away anymore.
"But if you got a second chance?" she demanded.
"I'd do things differently," he told her.
"That's easy to say. It's not easy to do." she said. "You can't change the past. You just have to grab the present and hope the future follows."
"I don't think there is a future," he answered. "Not for me, anyway."
"You'd better be wrong there. If there's none for you then there's none for any of us." she squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head as if to clear her head. "Either things can change or they can't. Either you'll be dead next week or you'll live."
His eyes widened. "Dead?" he asked. "What...?"
"No more handouts, guy. Don't ask for any more. You've got to start giving back, or you're gone."
"I don't have anything to give."
"Bullshit! You've got a brain, and you've seen how things work. You've got ideas that might make a difference for other people like yourself. You've got to start doing something with them." She continued slower and louder, like someone trying to force a foreigner to understand her language by force of will. "You've got to start giving back"
"Give back to who?" panic and frustration filled his voice.
Cassandra thrust the lottery ticket at him. "If this isn't the winning ticket, you can curse my name," she told him. "and if it is... Well, you know the money doesn't come from me. It doesn't come from the State. It was sucked from people who don't have it to begin with, and given to you on a platter."
Curt looked at the ticket as if it were a gun pointed at his chest. "People buy hope one way or another," he told her. "Numbers or drugs or..."
"A lot of people in this city have been making payments for hope on layaway, then," she said, "now it's time for you to start making deliverys."
"That's a big job for one man, even with a million dollars to give away."
She laughed at him. "It's more like ten million, but you know it won't be as easy as handing out cash. You're the man who's seen how things work."
"It's a tall order. I don't know if I can do it, no matter how much money I have."
"You don't know if you can do it? Think of how I feel. Time is going to end unless I can find a way to turn it. You're the test case, guy. Either you'll be dead in a week, or you'll make a difference. I'm not likely to get a bigger tool than this ticket - if it can't change your time path, there's not much chance of me saving the world, and I'm not going to try. Take the ticket and guard your back."
Curtis took the ticket. Cassandra opened the car door, though the shaking of her hands made her keys jingle.
As she got in the car, he stared at the ticket in his hand. "I don't even know your name," he said.
"I'm your fucking fairy godmother," she told him and buckled her seatbelt. "We don't have names."
She slammed the car door and drove away.
*OK, it's not a fair test,* she thought. *I didn't actually see him die, just stabbed and dying. I'm not even sure that the end of the time stream means the end of the world anyway... I've never given up on a fight just because I know I can't win, anyway.*
She tried not to think about what it would mean if it wasn't the winning ticket...
The rest is the end of the beginning, the odds and ends of starting fresh. She filed the paperwork to change her last name to 'Netherland', because she'd made a habit of starting a new life with a new name. She gave Omega Corp their walking papers, cleared out her condo and put it up for sale, and went East with her mother. It was time for another new beginning.
Next Issue: Memories, Ghosts and Demons...