The dome

I want it on record that I said no to the court. Nobody asked me. I said it anyway, from the back, because somebody has to.

My name is Weakling. It isn't; it's what he calls me, the blind man with the snake, and I call him blind man, and we're both right. I'm from Emeraldo, which is green and wet. I'm the size of a boot. I'm afraid of everything and I say so, which isn't a flaw. It's a service.

When he arrived on the far side, the first thing they did was put him in front of a court. Not a court. A game show. I mean that exactly: lights, an audience, a host, a wheel. It ran six hundred years. He wasn't even guilty. It was the same story as before, he told me, the water and the wall and the girl, but with time travel in it, which makes everything take six hundred years, and at the end of the six hundred they let him go and he'd learned precisely one thing, which was that he couldn't do the next part alone.

The next part was a plan. And to make a plan over there you have to learn, and he learned for eighty thousand years, which sounds like a boast and is a confession: eighty thousand years is how long it takes a blind old man from a teashop to understand a place like that well enough to change one thing in it. It was eighty thousand and a bit. He rounds.

Then he put a team together.

···

"First," he said, "the purest form of my greatest enemy."

"That's a riddle," I said. "I don't like riddles."

It wasn't a riddle. Over there, everything exists in every version, and if you want the sharpest tool in the room you go and find the cleanest version of the person who's hurt you most, because nobody understands your weaknesses better. There were a great many versions to choose from, which didn't make the choice smaller. He chose four.

One of them was me.

"I've never met you," I said. "I've never hurt anyone. I'm afraid of doorframes."

"That's what purest means," he said.

Together we were three Charlie's Angels and Weakling. And I'll say this, since nobody else in the team is going to: I was the bravest thing in it. Brave is being afraid and saying so and going anyway. The Angels were only going.

Then we needed help with the planning, and there was only one person that could be, and she came. And he was bycatch. He'd been standing next to her when the blind man asked. He stayed. He turned out to matter.

···

Together we infiltrated the dome.

A city on the far side under a lid, kept clean, where the experiment ran and ran. We went in through a service stair that wasn't on any plan, because there's always one, and I went last, and fell down it on top of everyone. And we freed the prisoners, and his people, all of them, except one who stayed behind on purpose, and I'm not saying who, because she asked him not to, and he asked me, and I've kept every promise I've made except the one to stop talking.

Here's how a reset works in the dome. I asked. Repeatedly.

Whenever one is coming, they fire a huge wave of energy through the whole place. It resets the brain. Everybody's. You taste the static on your lips, literally, like a coin, and you get thirsty, and then you don't remember why you were thirsty, and the run starts again from the top.

I was afraid of the static. I said so. I said so until the blind man said, "All right, Weakling. What do you want to do about it."

"Vaccinate me," I said.

It was a joke. I make them when I'm frightened. And they did it, the day before, to shut me up. Against the static. A small green dragon with a plaster on its arm.

This time the reset didn't work.

The wave went through and nothing reset. I saw the moment someone on the rail understood that, and got very nervous, and the whole room went quiet in the way rooms do when a machine that has never failed has just failed. I know that quiet. And I'll tell you what the blind man thinks it was, because he said it later with the snake looking at me: the vaccination. It must have been something. The wave went through all of us and none of us forgot.

···

So when the nukes hit, this time, we were awake for it.

And being awake, we could locate, exactly, where Chanel had been keeping the copies of the bodies. Under the hill. The room behind the hundred doors. And because this time it was the real body, and the real brain, not a copy, not a version, we brought them into our world.

That part went out on the channel that night, in three lines. I wrote one of them. I typed it with a plaster on.

ori · 04:11 — we have him. real one. real brain. coming through now. somebody put the kettle on

weakling · 04:11 — i am very frightened and we did it

bycatch · 04:12 — Kettle's on.

That's the whole message. It was enough. I'd have added a fourth line, about kettles. I put the boot-sized whole of me under the table and listened to it boil.