Bob Thistlewaite had just gotten through the security checkpoint and was pulling into the parking lot of the secure government facility where he worked, returning after a late lunch, when an explosion tore through the center of the building in front of him, and a river of rainbow light poured upward into the sky.
Bob was a dignified, professioral sort of man, the kind of 50-something fellow who felt most comfortable being clean-shaven and wearing tweed and horn-rimmed glasses. He was native to the Midwest, and most of his colleagues would have been surprised to hear anything stronger out of him than an "Oh, gosh." Maybe, in dire circumstances, an occasional "damn."
Today, he stared at the light pouring endlessly upward out of the center of his workplace, and said, "Holy fuck."
Then he ran. Toward the building. If what he feared was happening was actually what was happening... first responders wouldn't be able to handle this, and the project couldn't survive untrained outsiders seeing such a spectacular failure, either. It was going to be up to employees like himself to rescue the others. He was sick with fear, but he ran toward the building to rescue his coworkers, because he had some idea what might be going on in there.
They'd been trying to find a way to access endless clean energy by exploiting the energy gradient between their own universe and one with different physical laws, full to bursting with far more energy than Earth life could ever have tolerated. And it looked like they'd succeeded.
The metal detector inside had turned into a menacing, metallic maw, twisting and groaning in its place, trying to wrench itself out of the ground so it could devour people. Bob assumed, anyway, from the gnashing of sharp metal teeth. He went around it, through what was normally the exit. All of the security people were stone statues, literally. The security desk was gone, or so he thought until he looked down at his feet and realized that the floor was now the exact color and texture of the desk, in blotches that looked like puddles. As if the desk had melted. In a corner of the room, Susan from HR was crying and screaming and holding her hands over her head. Bob caught the faintest glimpse of something the reddish-orange color of her hair moving under her arms. He jerked his head up, not looking at her, and shucked off his tweed jacket.
"Susan!" It was hard to run toward her without looking at her, but if his wild and uninformed speculation was correct, looking at her at close range would be fatal. He threw the jacket onto her head. "Hold that on your head!"
She grabbed it and wrapped her head with it. "Why?" she sobbed. "Why?"
There was no easy way to explain "because I think your hair is turning people to stone." "I have to try to get the others. Can you get out of the building? Carefully! Keep that jacket on your hair, don't let anyone see your hair!"
As she stumbled off, his jacket wrapped around her head like a turban, he went deeper into the building.
Every step he took, he saw a new horror. Jay Patel's face on the trunk of a tree, shaped in a soundless scream. Malcolm Johnson stuck to the ceiling, apparently unable to get down, his gravity inverted. Brenda from Accounting was blue and gasping for air, her legs fused together into a fish-like appendage, scaled. Acting on another hunch, he picked her up and staggered back the way he came – she wasn't light, and he wasn't either young or the sort of guy who works out – until he met up with two security officers who'd been spared from Susan's hair. "Get her to the water fountain!" he shouted at them, noting how every time she fruitlessly gasped, the skin on the sides of her neck realigned, flaps lifting and sticking out... like gills. "Put her head under the water or she'll die!" The fountain was hopefully still on. It was much too shallow to have sufficient air for a creature the size of a human for very long if the jets weren't aerating it.
Back into the building. Oksana Nikolaev was unchanged, but screaming, standing still with her hands up at either side of her face, shrieking. He shook her. "Get out of the building! Go that way!" He pointed.
"What's happening?! What's happening?!"
"It doesn't matter." Oksana was in IT and not cleared to know the full details of the project. "Get outside, fast!"
He passed other co-workers who were either beyond help, or who were like him, unchanged and assisting others. His key card didn't work to get him into the secure area, but Peter Andrews, who was built like a tank, was able to bodyslam the door open from the inside, and to move the security desk so it was now propping the door open, allowing anyone inside to escape. Peter stared at Bob as if he'd grown three heads when Bob attempted to go in. "What the hell, Bob? We need to get out, not in!"
"Have you been outside since this started?"
"No, but I've been trying to get there."
"I came in from the outside. There's some kind of unidentified energy coming out of what's probably Lab 0, going up. Given the nature of the project... someone's got to turn that damn thing off."
"You can't. You don't know what's in there – the things I've seen." He shuddered. "It'd be suicide."
"And what if the entire planet is destroyed because no one here wanted to shut off the tap?"
"Well. Okay, then. Good luck, and godspeed. I'll pray for you."
Bob was an atheist, but he took the offer in the intent it was made in. "Thank you. Be safe."
"There are blobs," Peter said. "Roving blobs of light, and if they touch you... something happens to you. It's different every time."
"I'll be careful."
Emergency lighting was active beyond the secure door, but it wasn't hard to see. There were indeed blobs of light that transformed everything they touched, floating aimlessly through the halls. The air was filled with what looked like fireflies. He almost slapped a mosquito before realizing it was a co-worker who was new enough that he didn't know the guy's name, shrunk to the size of a dragonfly and granted insect wings, that he'd been trying to use to escape. Stephanie Armundsen, who'd been merged with her wheelchair so now she was essentially a centaur with wheels instead of legs, offered to get him out of here. She was one of the few who'd been changed in a way to make her more functional; her wheels could scoot down the corridor far faster than either her original powered wheelchair or an average human's legs.
Bob kept moving toward Lab 0, dodging the blobs. When he reached the corridor with the labs – with three other scientists who had all apparently had the same idea, but one of them had been granted an octopus for a head and now Bob had no idea who he was – he almost jumped out of his skin, and he did jump backwards away from the corridor. Here, the floor was made of people, an undulating wave of crying, screaming heads of people he knew. There was no way to get to Lab 0 without walking on them.
Xing was the first one to dare it. "If we don't shut down the portal, this is the whole world," he said, gesturing at the screaming floor, and gingerly walked out on it. The faces cried and screamed harder as he stepped on them, no matter how carefully he tried to walk, but there wasn't any choice. He was right. The portal had to be shut down.
This wasn't the kind of energy Bob and his coworkers had been expecting. Something more similar to an earthly energy, maybe heat or electricity but flowing endlessly, because the power gradient between their own and the target universe was steep, according to the math. This energy was like nothing on earth. Like magic, a malign, chaotic, transformative magic that warped everything it touched. It was probably possible to harness it to solve Earth's fossil fuel problem, but it was obviously much too dangerous to do so. Bob only hoped it was possible to close the portal. According to the test protocols he'd read, it had been intended to be tiny, the diameter of a pinpoint. They'd underestimated the gradient, he was guessing, and the energy had blown the portal wide open.
When he got into Lab 0, there was no avoiding the light. The rainbow-colored energy, thick and viscous like no earthly energy ever, was boiling endlessly out of the portal, and not all of it was going up. He staggered and fell to his knees, feeling something happening to him, but he couldn't tell what. Above, the clouds had turned into black, menacing giants with cruel, angry faces, lightning lancing out of them constantly. The rainbow light spilled out against them and smeared, running this way and that across the bottoms of the clouds, as if it was a liquid, but spilling up, and as if the clouds were solid objects.
In despair he saw the apparatus, or what was left of it, home now to spindly metal monsters stuck to the ruins of the apparatus by their feet, engaged in beating each other violently. The portal wasn't being held open by the apparatus, and no earthly force could possibly shut it now. Octopus-head, who Bob thought might be Viram, tried anyway, staggering through the thick light over to the apparatus to try to—what, repair it? When most of it had turned into battling stick figures? Behind him, Margritte shouted. "I'm going to try to get the secondary prototype from Lab 2! Maybe we can use it to close this thing!"
"We can try!" Bob said, but he didn't go with her. Xing did, and the two of them could move it on their own. The prototype in Lab 2 had never even worked; there was no real hope it could shut anything down.
But there was something inside the portal. Something moving. And he could just barely make it out.
It seemed at first to be the shadow of a monster, something twice the height of a human and shaped like some kind of impossible snake. As he watched it come into focus, it seemed to shrink, and reform into a more human shape, and then shrink some more, and more. And then, the rainbow light began to dim.
The writhing multicolored light of wrongness in the center of the room shrank, just like the figure in its center had. It shrank, and shrank, and then light seemed to go rushing back into the hole, like a vacuum. And for the first time Bob saw the figure clearly.
It was a human boy.
He was tall and lanky and his face hadn't much body fat, so Bob's initial guess was that he was a teenager, but he was naked and his pubes were hairless and childish, so he hadn't hit puberty yet. He had black spiky hair in a mohawk, the high cheekbones of a Native American and the strong nose and chin of a classic Roman emperor. His race was impossible to determine, because his body was mottled with different colors, as if he were a chimera, embryos merged in the womb to become one person. While his face had the reddish tinge of Native American or Hispanic skin, his torso and half of one of his arms was the dark brown of a person with African ancestry, but his legs and half an arm were the golden tan of a European from the Mediterrenean, and one arm was pale beige like a Northern European.
His hands were up, like Oksana's were, but not positioned next to his face. They were held out, and flexing, pulling and pushing on invisible threads. His eyes glowed yellow and his body was sheened with sweat, his expression one of great strain. The screaming and moaning from outside in the corridor stopped. The stick figures battling each other in what remained of the apparatus fell over, limp. He and Viram both stared at the boy, and Viram no longer had an octopus replacing his head.
When Margritte and Xing returned, wheeling the prototype, they had news. "The people – on the floor – they're alive! They're not in the floor anymore!" Margritte said.
"Is the portal closing on its own?" Xing asked.
Bob wanted to ask them what they thought the boy was doing, but he saw that the boy had collapsed on the ground, folded over. The portal continued to shrink.
"It... might be?" he said.
"I'm going to see what I can do for the folks in the hall," Margritte said. "They looked like they were alive, but... I saw a lot of limbs missing."
The boy lifted his head. His eyes were no longer glowing, but they actually still looked yellowish.
"Do you people have any idea what you've done?" he asked in a shrill, boyish voice, reinforcing Bob's thought that he must be quite young, just very tall. "DO YOU EVEN KNOW WHAT YOU'VE COST ME?"
"Young man—" Viram burbled, despite having an octopus for a head, and stopped, apparently at a loss of what to say. Or unable to figure out how to say it with his new vocal chords.
The boy's colors weren't the only mismatched thing about him, Bob realized. One arm was long but thin, and had six slender fingers on it, with very long nails. One was shorter, muscular, and had four fingers. And one of his legs was longer than the other, and stronger; the shorter leg looked thin to the point of serious weakness, and had no toes. The larger one had some kind of bony growth pushing out of the back of his heel. There were also bony growths marring the smoothness of his forehead, like horns trying to grow out of his skull.
Had the energy done this to him? Was he from Earth at all? No one's son had been brought to work today, and no child could have gotten into the secure area. But the portal to the other universe had been more than wide enough for a living creature to pass through, the size of a human. Or larger.
"I can never go home now!" the boy screamed. "It took everything, everything I had, to fix your mistake, and all the magic's gone every which way and dissolved into your world and there's nowhere it concentrates, no way I can get it back no matter how much chaos, and it's all your fault!"
His legs gave out on him again. This time he went to his knees and started to sob. Bob went to him. The boy flinched slightly when Bob knelt down beside him, but didn't try to evade Bob's hand on his shoulder.
"I'm sorry," Bob said. "I'm not going to pretend I understood half of what you just said, but if our carelessness hurt you, I apologize. We never meant to harm anyone. We just wanted clean energy to save our world."
"Idiots," the boy sobbed. "You're all big idiots. And I'm a bigger idiot because I volunteered, but what was I supposed to do? None of the others would have had the strength to survive the trip in that turbulence, let alone have enough strength to get back. They're – they were my friends. I couldn't – I couldn't – it would tear them apart and I knew it and I couldn't–"
"Shh," Bob said. "It's going to be all right."
"No, it's not! I'm never going home again! Never – never going to see—"
"I shouldn't have said that." He pulled the boy, very gently, onto his lap, more of a guide than a tug, but the boy went with it without much hesitation. "Of course it's not all right. But you're alive, and if I'm right about what just happened here, you saved lives. I don't know who or what you left behind, but we won't leave you all alone. We'll take care of you."
He hugged the sobbing child, fatherly instincts he'd never known he had rising up. He'd lived his life never expecting to have a child in his care; sure, it was possible for a gay man to adopt, but a single man of any orientation had no business adopting a baby, he'd thought, not if he has a challenging career, and if he's too focused on his job and too old to feel comfortable with this new world where he could be out and even get married if he ever met a guy he wanted to marry... how would he ever have time for a child? Besides, babies were annoying.
But he held a strange little boy in his lap as the child cried, and he stroked the boy's head, and murmured reassuring words, and somehow, it felt natural.
The boy screamed something against Bob's chest, but his voice was muffled, absorbed into Bob's shirt. It sounded like "Fuffershy" or something like that. Maybe the name of his dog? He then fell to sobbing even more hysterically.
Later, Bob found out that all the changes had mostly reverted. Brenda could breathe air again, and had two legs, but they were still covered in fish scales. Jay wasn't a tree anymore, but his brown skin was rough and more rigid than it should be, barklike. Susan's hair stopped turning people to stone, but it remained thick red tentacles on her head rather than hair. And as Margritte had observed, the people who'd been fused into the floor came out missing limbs when they were unfused. But they were alive and they weren't a floor anymore.
He didn't learn any of this until after the boy had cried himself to sleep in Bob's arms, until eventually the first responders did show up and started collecting people to go to the hospital, and the boy was one of the ones they took. A naked child with deformities turning up in the middle of a secure installation was a matter that required medical investigation before anyone was allowed to begin the more prosaic inquisition into his name and origin.
As it turned out, when Bob checked up on the boy, the child was claiming amnesia. He didn't remember his name, his family, or anything apparently, including how he got where he ended up. The hospital found nothing physically wrong with him and recommended transferring him to a psychiatric ward, due to the amnesia; but because the government was paying for it and the social workers were arguing against it, saying that if all he had wrong with him was amnesia then inpatient psychiatric treatment was an inappropriate placement, he ended up in limbo for four days, watching cable television non-stop in his hospital bed. By the time it started to sort itself out, he claimed that he'd remembered his name, Richard Cordry, but he wanted people to call him Dick. This, apparently, was enough to shut down any talk of psych wards.
When Bob next checked on the boy, he had disappeared into the foster care system, and no one was willing to tell Bob where he'd gone.