“Dulcie?” I say into the darkness. It’s silent. And then the meteor shower starts. Like the dark is crying tears of colored light.
The tram slows to a crawl, and I’m pretty sure they’re stopping it to look for me. They can’t be too far behind now. Trails of light blink over our faces, and for a second, I swear I see the neon outline of a door off to my right. Another streak breaks the dark and I see it again. It’s most definitely a door, and right in the center is a feather. The ride starts jerking forward again. It’s now or never.
“Hey, I don’t think you’re supposed to be doing that,” the man behind me says as I clamber over the side and step out onto a small platform. I turn around as carefully as I can on the narrow ledge, trying not to lose my footing. The narrator’s voice thunders in the dark like some forgotten god. I push through the door, and the sudden whiteness nearly blinds me.
CHAPTER FIFTY
Wherein I Visit Tomorrowland
It takes a minute for my eyes to adjust. Far above me I can see the grinding motion of huge gears in operation, keeping the ride going. Behind me is the door. Ahead of me is a long tunnel.
I start walking. “Dulcie?” I call out. “Dulcie!”
The tunnel winds around and stops at a door with a big X on it. I push it open. Inside is a stark white laboratory with a ginormous movie screen. A messy desk and chair sit in the middle. I’ve seen a glimpse of this room before, on my computer. Followthefeather.com. There’s a man in a lab coat sitting in a folding chair at the desk. He’s reading a tabloid and eating a bowl of jelly beans. On the screen behind him is the exact same image.
“Dr. X?” I whisper.
He looks down at me from the screen, and in person, squints. “Yes? Can I help you?” He’s smaller than he seemed in the videos and pictures, but otherwise he looks exactly the same, like he hasn’t aged a day. A small, tinny radio plays the Copenhagen Interpretation.
“I—I’ve been looking for you.”
“You have?”
“Yes. Yes!” I say, laughing with some weird mix of relief and happiness. “I’ve been reading the papers and checking the personals, looking for clues and signs, making sense of the random—all to get to you.”
Dr. X’s eyebrows knit together in confusion. “Why?”
“You’re Dr. X,” I say. “You’re going to cure me.”
“I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Cameron. Cameron Smith.”
“And why should I save you, Cameron Smith? What makes you so special?” Dr. X asks in a tired voice.
“I … I don’t know. It’s just that Dulcie said you would and it’d be kind of terrible if—”
Dr. X interrupts me. “Terrible things happen all the time. Don’t you know that? And there’s no reason, no reason at all. No god holding us in his hands like a benevolent parent. This suffering is meaningless. Well, someone should do something about it! There should be some way to stop the pain, the loneliness, the uncertainty. And I’ve found the answer—a way to stop death. Go on. Pull that curtain over there.”
My footsteps echo in the mostly empty room. I pull aside the curtain. Floor-to-ceiling shelves hold the most impressive snow globe collection I’ve ever seen. Each one is marked UNITED SNOW GLOBE WHOLESALERS.
His hand encloses a globe. “This is the answer: To stop yearning. Our atoms sleeping, content.”
“You brought something back from your travels in the Infinity Collider,” I say. “You unleashed dark energy on our world.”
“Did I? Oh. Sorry.”
“Sorry?” I laugh. “Sorry? Jeez. I closed the wormhole, by the way. You can thank me later.”
“You can thank me later,” Dr. X muses. “That’s from Star Fighter, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” I say, a little impressed. Then I remember that he’s being a complete ass**le. “You used to be a scientist. You were doing amazing things! I mean, parallel worlds, time travel—that’s huge. I don’t think it gets any huger than that.”
“What does all that matter if we cannot stop the one injustice of life: everything within us is born to live, and yet, we die. And what we love can be taken from us in the blink of an eye.” He blinks, and on the movie screen, his eyes seem huge, a confused owl. “That is why I created United Snow Globe Wholesalers. To take away the uncertainty. The pain. No. I must continue my work. You can show yourself out.”
“Not without Dulcie,” I say.