The Displacement - Ch. 3

3. Almost Positive

              It was with no surprise that on that night, nightmares came for Nes Garrow. He saw things in his distorted visions that made him want to scream -- his family, his friends, every single person that he cared about, was suffering. And Roseanne was undoubtedly the most prominent figure. Time and time again, she appeared, worming her way into scene after scene, and all the while she screamed out to him. But no matter what he tried, he always found himself unable to do anything but stand still, watching in horror, as if he was paralyzed.

              The nightmare went on and on, stretching through the night; tormenting him. In his mind, Nes begged for the torture to stop, but hour after hour, the visions dragged on mercilessly. He did not wake up until the morning, when something cold and damp touched his face and yanked him immediately out of his dreamworld. He shot open his eyes, breathing heavily; the horrible images still seemed to linger around him. But soon he saw what had saved him -- his dog, Rocket, had come to give him a very literal rude awakening.

              “Rocket, quit it,” he said, pushing the dog away. Either having given up or simply no longer interested, Rocket turned and walked carelessly out the door. Nes, left alone once again, slid out of his bed and got up into a firm stance, taking several deep, calming breaths.

              “I’m worrying too much about this,” he said to himself. “Nothing will go wrong. Nothing. Just... stay calm.” With a forced sense of assurance, he then went on to slip quickly into his clothes. He knew he would have to change as soon as he got to Pillar Enterprises, so he did not take any thought toward dressing fashionably; thinking any of it over would only waste his time. He threw on a loose, long-sleeved shirt and a pair of blue jeans, slid his socks and shoes onto his feet, and then headed downstairs to assimilate himself into the morning routine.

              The environment Nes woke up to was usually no different from one day to the next; so much so that it almost seemed he lived the same morning over and over, day after day. He could describe every aspect of it in full detail. Audrey, the earliest riser of the family, was always eating breakfast at the table downstairs. Celine, on the other hand, was still sleeping, and would likely continue to do so until almost nine o’clock. His mother, a de facto health nut, was always in the kitchen at work on some new concoction, and his father typically sat on his large red armchair, watching the morning newscast or listening to a record on his stereo -- a huge, bulky thing he had inherited from his father and would gladly have taken a bullet to save.

              But this morning was not an ordinary one, and indeed, save for the scratchy music from the record player, almost none of the usual characteristics were present. His parents, too, were far away from their usual places; they were ready to meet him at the foot of the stairs, as if they had been waiting there for him.

              “Morning, Nes,” said Mr. Garrow, and then he held out an energy bar. “Might want to eat this,” he said. “There won't be time for a real breakfast.” Nes took the bar and ripped off the wrapper, then began to eat it ravenously. It tasted the tiniest bit funny -- he had never been an advocate of energy bars, but after his nightmares he was hungry as the devil, so he ate up.

              As soon as he had finished, Mrs. Garrow spoke up. “The van's outside,” she said. “We should hit the road soon if we want to make it to Stark on time.”

              The trip to the city of Stark was quite the long haul, but Nes did not mind this, because a certain part of him liked long car rides. It was almost relaxing in a way, and if nothing else, it was a good time to think. He didn't need any form of entertainment to keep himself busy during the length of the trip; he preferred to simply look out the window and watch the scenery go by. As more of the trip went past, the barns and cornfields of the country began to fade into shops and streets of the city suburbs, and in time they came upon the city itself in all its glory, with tall, rectangular buildings that stretched into the sky and dwarfed all else nearby.

              This was Stark, a city that had allowed the future to send it to new heights since its humble beginning years ago. Fifty years had grown it from a blink-and-miss-it country village into a good-sized metropolis that served well as a point of convergence for all nearby civilization. It was the closest big city to Nes's home, and for the Garrows, whenever came the time to run errands, it was the usual destination. As a small child, Nes had always been fascinated by trips to Stark. The intricate busyness of it all was almost magically captivating. But what was far and away the most fascinating to him was the buildings. He was enthralled by their sheer monstrosity; he could have spent hours by any given skyscraper, standing at the base and staring upward. In his mind, it was as if they stretched all the way up to heaven -- and possibly kept going after that.

              Today, though, Stark was bathed in a different light, especially for Nes’s parents. The city added the problem of morning traffic onto their growing list, and Mr. Garrow, prone as he was to fits of road rage, was often quick to honk his horn and shout loudly. The fact that they were running a tight schedule was not a help to his anger. Even Mrs. Garrow -- by the looks of her, at least -- was nervous. Every five minutes, it seemed, she would shoot a glance at her wristwatch or the clock on the dashboard, and Nes knew what this meant. She was worried of being late, which no one hated more than Mrs. Garrow.

              Soon enough, however, they got to their destination. The Pillar Enterprises building was nestled in a quadrant formed by four adjacent streets, ringed all around by city traffic. Built of whitish concrete, it stretched only two stories up, not even daring to compete with the skyscrapers of Stark. A row of black letters reading PILLAR ENTERPRISES was attached to the side of the building rather unevenly, as if each one had been haphazardly glued there and could very well be close to giving up its hold. The building had no windows or adornments of any sort, and, as it appeared, only one entrance -- a pair of double doors situated directly below the letters. And that, really, was all. Nes could not ever have predicted the building to be so humble. The whole arrangement was not so much of an enthralling sight as an awkward, out-of-place one, and for a short while, it got Nes thinking ugly thoughts again. But, knowing better than to be pessimistic on a day like this, he shoved them out of his mind as quickly as he could.

              Mr. Garrow screeched the car into the first open parking spot that he could locate and hurriedly unlocked the doors. Nes, eager to get out of that sweltering chamber of nervousness and road rage, was quick to step out as soon as his door slid open. The tainted air of the city might never have been more refreshing. He took a short while to look around, and he soon saw that only one human figure was visible anywhere on the premises -- a tall girl with stick-straight, dark brown hair, who stood sentry-like in front of the doors. As Nes approached, she watched him like a hawk. There was something chilling about her eyes, something unnaturally deep. Perhaps, he thought, she was wearing colored contact lenses. If not that, though, her eyes were the strangest he had ever seen. Nes was unnerved by her presence. Something about her -- something he couldn’t name -- was simply not right.

              Nes, if only to get her out of his sight, turned back to watch as the van left the parking lot, slunk down the street, and finally faded into the distance. It was then that he knew it; he was alone. With the girl. As he spun slowly back around, he noticed that she had not budged an inch since the last time he had looked toward her. It was as if she paid no mind to his presence at all, regardless of how closely she was watching him. Nes wondered for a small while if she was some kind of robot, but he quickly let that thought leave him. Pillar Enterprises was a strange organization, but something like that was simply too absurd. He swallowed to keep his composure, then took a step closer for an attempt at conversation.

              “What's your name?” he asked the girl. Her head spun around like an owl's as she turned to look him straight in the face.

              “Coral,” she said in reply, looking annoyed. “Coral Vancourt... Dr. Pillar’s assistant.” It looked very much like she had not wanted to be bothered, and such an assumption was not far from the truth. It had seemed enough to Helen Pillar that she would need to use a completely unnecessary false name, but the long, itchy wig and uncomfortable contact lenses were even more of an annoyance. She would be happy as soon as all of this was over.

              “Are you a test subject?” she inquired.

              “Yes,” he said. “From Centerville High. I was chosen in Dr. Pillar’s survey, and-”

              “I know, I know,” spat Coral, interrupting. “Just tell me your name, would you?”

              “Nes... Nes Garrow.”

              “Come with me, then,” ordered Coral. She spoke in a tone not unlike that of a strict teacher; as if constantly taken by a sense of superiority. “I'll take you to where you need to be.” Coral opened the door and ushered him inside, and he walked in without question. She seemed to him like the type of person that got angry when disobeyed, and the last thing that he wanted was for the already intimidating girl to be angry at him.

              Nes allowed Coral to take the lead again and continued to follow her into the bowels of Pillar Enterprises. As he took in his new surroundings, despite his nervousness, he could not help but marvel, for it was like nothing he had ever seen before. The whole of the building's interior seemed to fit together like a well-oiled machine. Circuits and control boards, the functions of which Nes had no idea toward, dotted each and every wall. It was captivatingly futuristic, like the inside of a spaceship -- something right out of the movies.

              Soon, he also discovered the reason why Pillar Enterprises had not been a tall building. It did not go up, like most skyscrapers in the city -- instead, it went down. As Coral explained, the two levels that Nes had seen outside were only the tip of the iceberg, and below them, countless others others stretched down into the ground. Access to different levels, as he soon found, was via a small, cylindrical glass elevator that ran down a single shaft in the center of the complex. Coral and Nes could only barely both fit within it; it was with significant squeezing that they managed it, and even then Nes felt significantly cramped. Coral pressed the very bottom button on the elevator's control panel, marked with a thick black number: 32. 32 floors down, thought Nes. That was an awfully long way into the center of the earth. The thought of it made him shiver; something about the underground had always unnerved him. But he had little time to think before the elevator began on its downward course, letting out a sharp whistling sound as it creaked into motion. It then began an agonizingly slow descent down the circular shaft, and the further down it went, the more distressed Nes became.

              By the time the elevator had reached the bottom, Nes wanted nothing in the universe but to be out of that awful, cramped elevator. As soon as the glass door slid open, he practically leapt out, like a rabbit loosed from a cage. As he took in his first sight of Pillar Enterprises’ lowermost level, he noticed immediately that it looked nothing like the other floors, which had all appeared more or less the same -- in his fleeting views of each one through the elevator’s glass wall, he had been able to detect little difference from one to the next. The thirty-second floor, however, was a completely different story. It was smaller, for one, and compared with the others, it seemed empty and bland, with a gray concrete floor and gray walls made of the same concrete. There seemed to be little present in the way of machinery. All that was in the room, in fact, was a single door on the far left wall and what looked to be a wide, windowless garage door that sealed off another part of the chamber, completely blocking it from his view. As to what was behind it, he couldn’t even begin to guess.

              A tall, middle-aged man in a white coat stood in the room's farthest corner, next to a wide control panel fixed on the wall. Standing at his side was group of teenagers, seven in total -- five boys, two girls -- that all looked to be around Nes's age. The strangeness about them lay in the fact that not one of them seemed to be making any move to socialize, or even to speak at all. They only stood in place like bored customers in a long grocery queue, twiddling their thumbs if only to have something to occupy themselves with. It was not them, though, but the man that Nes’s attention was drawn to, for he was obviously the one in charge of the whole thing. He seemed an inconspicuous figure overall, with graying hair and a pair of round-framed glasses. To Nes, he looked like the type of nice old man that gave candy to children on Halloween. There was nothing about him that implied 'mad scientist', and that was a good sign.

              “Coral,” he said. “There you are. And that must be one of our brave volunteers.” He spoke with a cheery, bright tone, and as he talked, he gave an innocent-looking smile.

              “Your name?” he asked Nes.

              “Nes Garrow,” he replied. The man in the coat smiled.

              “Very good. You're the last one we were waiting for today. That means we can get on with the fun now.” The emphasis he placed on the word fun sent a chill down Nes’s spine. Before could think on it, though, a change of clothing was shoved into his hands -- a thin red shirt that bore the Pillar Enterprises logo, and a pair of black, baggy cargo trousers. “Just change into these,” commanded the coat man. Nes looked up awkwardly at him.

              “Go on,” urged the man. “No one will watch. Just put them on.” Nes did as he was instructed and shed his shirt, replacing it with the one that the man had given him. He then moved on to the pants, and as promised, no one watched. As soon as he had changed, the coat man and the teenagers turned back around. Nes, not knowing what else he had to do, filed into the group, merging in with the other test subjects, all of whom, he then noticed, were dressed in the same outfit as he. Then, finally, the man began to speak.

              “For those of you who don't know,” he said, turning toward the group of bored-looking teenagers in matching red shirts and black pants, “my name is Dr. Lyle Pillar. As you may have guessed, I am the founder, head, and namesake of Pillar Enterprises.” As he spoke, he began to mill around the room, and with every word, he gesticulated heavily, like a college professor giving a lecture. “I'll go ahead and say this -- I am a friend to all of you. I can see why you might be nervous, since you were not told what it was that you would be testing. But please rest assured, for none of you are in any danger.” Nes found himself instinctively nodding to show that he understood, but in reality, he was not so sure. In most movies, it was when someone said anything like that that things usually began to go horribly wrong. But he tried his best to shake off his fears. This was no movie; this was real life. Movies were never true to life... were they?

              “Now,” said Pillar. “Here's the big moment. Is everyone ready?” A grenade could have been thrown into the group of teenagers and it would have failed to elicit a response from any of them. They looked lifeless as corpses.

              Pillar cleared his throat. “Well, then. Let's not waste time.” He turned to the control panel and flipped a black switch, and the garage door slid up without a sound. Behind it was the strangest machine that Nes could possibly have ever seen. The strange apparatus looked more like a theme park ride than anything that could possibly ever be brought into useful application. A row of four ovoid capsules, all of which had glass tops through which a single seat could be seen, sat in a long, deep trough, facing forward into a pitch-black tunnel. Nes eyed the odd arrangement for a long, tense while, moving his gaze from the first in line to the second to the third to the fourth and final, and then, finally, staring deep into the thick darkness inside the tunnel that they faced. He could see nothing overtly special about any part of the thing, and as he tried to think about it, he only became more and more bamboozled.

              A boy in the crowd asked the question everyone had. “What... is it?”

              “It's called a Gate,” Dr. Pillar proudly stated. “A Flume Gate, to be exact.” Nes judged by the look in his eyes as he spat out the statement that he had expected the question. This, then, was probably his rehearsed answer. It was becoming more and more apparent to Nes that the man seemed to be overdoing the warm tone he spoke in, and for a moment, Nes wondered if he could have been faking it.

              “It's the greatest innovation of the age!” belted Pillar, sweeping his arm through the air as if to swat a gigantic mosquito. “You ask what it does? The Flume Gate can send you around the world in mere seconds. All it must do is connect up to a destination -- another Gate, in this case, in some other location -- and once connected, it can send you there faster than you could imagine!” Pillar paused for a dramatic effect, but he must have been the only one feeling the drama, for no one else reacted in any way. Nes was beginning to feel that perhaps he was not the only one who had no desire to be there on that day. “Think of what this means for the world as we know it!” he finally went on. “Soon there will be no cars, no ships, no trains, no planes... The Flumes are the future! An uninterrupted, flowing river connecting all corners of the world!”

              Nes was utterly confused; mostly since he had no idea whether or not to believe a word that Dr. Pillar said. By that point, the doctor seemed more of a nutcase than the friendly old man he had first seemed to be. Nonetheless, he listened as Pillar went on. “How, you may ask, does it work? I have harnessed the power of other dimensions.”

              That was what finally triggered a response. Dimensions were not something you heard about every day. “Dimensions?” asked an incredulous girl. Pillar nodded, smiling widely.

              “Yes!” he said in reply. “Dimensions! I have devoted years and years to their research. There are others besides ours, floating among us, right under all of our noses... and the Flume Gate, you see, works on a principle of interdimensional travel. But you will not be traveling to another dimension today.” Once again he paused, and when he resumed talking, he softened his tone.

              “I know what you are thinking,” he said. “You all want to know what’s out there, don’t you?” The group of test subjects stared hopefully like kindergarteners, waiting for his answer.

              A few seconds passed, then Pillar straightened and cleared his throat. “Well,” he blankly stated, “I can tell you that there isn’t very much. All of the others are barren. Lifeless. No other worlds, no aliens. You will only be spat into a specific dimension I’ve singled out as the best for traveling purposes, and then you will be flung back out into the other Flume I have set up.”

              “Where’s the other Flume?” asked a boy.

              “Great Britain,” was Pillar’s answer. “All the way across the Atlantic. I’ve had a team of my scientists set up a special facility there, specifically for housing the other Flume. But don't be alarmed. You won't be staying there… not for long, anyway. You'll all come back in the end. Now, who's going first?”

              Not one person raised a hand, including Nes. In all truth, he did not want to be sent all the way to Britain in a pod only barely big enough to fit himself into. The whole idea of being flung into another dimension made him feel queasy. He never had been the type that could handle theme park rides, and at the very least, rides were completely under control. They had no chance of getting anyone hurt. This, on the other hand, was an untested machine. It had full potential of being dangerous -- it involved dimensions, for Christ’s sakes! For all he knew, if he stepped in, he could come back out as a pile of smoking, gray jelly.

              In the name of all that was holy, he, Nestor Justinian Garrow, was not stepping into any single one of those pods.

              Dr. Pillar, by the looks of things, was growing vexed. “We can’t move on unless someone steps up,” he said with the tiniest snap in his voice. “We'll need four volunteers. So who wants to go first?” Not surprisingly, no sudden change of heart came upon any of the test subjects. But Pillar, as it turned out, had his ways of keeping things moving along.

              “Well, then. Coral, pick out a few.”

              The long-haired girl stepped forward, and without a word, she went to three test subjects, chosen seemingly at random, and gave each one a tap on the shoulder. Two girls and one boy were selected. For a while, Nes was relieved, but it did not last; after a brief period of hesitation, Coral advanced toward Nes and tapped him as well. He knew by that point that he had nothing else to do. He stepped slowly and awkwardly forward, following the others toward the four dormant pods.

              “Don't be shy,” Pillar urged. “Get in your seats. The sooner you work with us, the sooner this will all be over and you'll be leaving with a couple thousand dollars in your hand.” By then, Nes noticed, his tone had completely changed from chipper happiness to impatience and gruffness. But he couldn’t deny that what he said had been right. The sooner he cooperated, the faster it would all be over.

              Like a cow urged on with an electric prod, Nes quickened his pace as he approached the fourth in the line of pods. He didn’t know why he chose the particular one, but yet something made him gravitate toward it. Something about it seemed lucky to him; as if in it, the chances of anything going wrong were the least they could possibly be. Besides, in the very last of the pods, he would be able to see what was happening to the others before it happened to him. This was about as good as things were going to get for him. He planted himself beside it, took a deep breath through his nose, and waited.

              He didn’t have to wait around for very long. As soon as the four test subjects had come to the pod of their choice, Pillar used a switch on his control panel to flip up all of the lids. Nes stared at his pod for several long seconds before he finally gathered enough courage to swing his leg over the edge and step inside. He sat himself down in the pod’s lone seat, making sure to tighten the seatbelt as tightly as it would go. Not knowing exactly what he was about to go through, he felt it necessary to secure himself as much as he could.

              Soon, Pillar returned to the control panel. Nes watched tensely as he pushed a single button, but the very second after, something happened that kicked his tension out of its place and replaced it with a mild wave of terror. The inside of the tunnel jumped suddenly to life -- languid, bluish strands of light leapt out of the walls and clumped slowly together into a solid, glowing mass, brightening the tunnel’s dark interior so intensely that nothing could be seen past its entrance.

              “I'll send you through one at a time,” said Pillar, speaking up in order for his voice to be heard over the roaring hiss of the activated machinery. “The pods will send back a signal as soon as they arrive. The moment that happens to the first one of you, I'll send the next one, and the process will repeat. After all four of you have arrived successfully, you'll be sent back immediately. Stay relaxed. What's most important is to keep your composure and think positively. I’m almost positive that everything will work out.” The words did little to calm Nes. Almost positive, he had said. Not positive. Not sure. Almost positive. Those were not reassuring words. For him, they did just the opposite of their intention, sending pessimistic thoughts into his head that, much to his dismay, he found himself unable to remove.

              Pillar pressed another button once he had stopped speaking, and the top hatches of the four pods closed down. As Nes was sealed inside his pod’s claustrophobic interior, every noise from outside became muffled almost to silence through the thick glass. Nes saw Coral walk up beside Pillar, and then, in a voice he could barely make out, she spoke the words he had been dreading to hear.

              “We're go on three... two... one!” Before Nes could realize what exactly was happening, the first pod was blasted through the tunnel at an impossible speed -- by what, he could not discern. Five seconds passed, and then a small red light began to flash on Pillar's controls.

              “We have our first arrival!” belted the doctor, practically giddy. “On to the next one, then!” Coral began to count down again, and the next pod was sent through. The third was dispatched moments after that. Nes's pod, the fourth and final, was then the last one sitting in the trough.

              “We're go on three...” Coral began. Nes closed his eyes.

              “Be ready,” he said to himself.

              “Two...”

              He repeated himself. “Be ready, be ready.”

              “One.”

              “I'm not ready.”

              Nes was slammed against the back of his seat as the pod shot forward. The blinding light of the tunnel lasted for half a second, and then it was gone, replaced by total blackness. At that point, the apparent success of the other test subjects did nothing to comfort him. As he sailed out into the dark and infinite void, Nes Garrow fought the urge to scream like a little girl on a roller coaster.

NOTE FOR RESEARCHERS:

When you find yourself stuck in a small, cramped pod and flying through endless, inky blackness with no idea of where you are going, there is one thing that it is best you do: panic. Never is a situation like this a good one to be in. Nes Garrow did not know this, due to the fact that he never thought he would find himself in such a situation. He was also yet to truly panic, as he still thought he would wind up in the completely normal destination of Great Britain. This brings up the other thing that he did not then know: When your trip across the Atlantic involves flight through space, you may want to think twice before assuring yourself that Britain is going to be on the other end.