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  Lost in the Multiverse

  R E McLean

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  Thanks,

  RE McLean

  Contents

  1. Great Dane

  2. Osmond

  3. Silicon City

  4. Shrubbery

  5. Halitosis

  6. Fluffy

  7. Cheeky

  8. Garfield

  9. Rabbit

  10. Silly Cat

  11. Fancypants

  12. Box

  13. Glass

  14. Vet

  15. Run

  16. Tetanus

  17. Spinner

  18. Please

  19. Collar

  Murder in the Multiverse, Book 1 of the Multiverse Investigations Series

  A Rift in Space & Crime, Book 2 of the Multiverse Investigations Series

  Read about Schrödinger’s Exploits - free and exclusive

  1

  Great Dane

  San Francisco

  1 April, 9:58am

  “It’s been four days now,” said Alex. “Why isn’t there any trace of him?”

  “Be patient. Time passes differently in the inter-dimensional void.”

  “How do you know? You’re a materials scientist.”

  Sarita looked up. She was wearing a purple silk shirt that made her eyes look even larger than usual. Alex looked away, blushing at the memory of the kiss they’d shared after falling out of the Spinner on the journey back from Silicon City.

  “I’ve picked up a thing or two,” Sarita said. She had that don’t ask me any more questions look on her face that she liked to sport when Alex was being particularly inquisitive. It had been happening a lot lately. Both the inquisitiveness, and the look.

  “I wish we could take the Spinner, find him that way.”

  “You said we can’t.”

  Alex sniffed. “It’s the same Spinner that’s kidnapped him and taken him God knows where. We can’t use ours to find him, because it’s the same one.”

  “And it would cause a rift in the space-time continuum,” Sarita muttered, sounding like a teenager whose mum had told her she had a great idea for helping with homework.

  “It’s true,” Alex replied, tetchy. “Not the rift thing, that’s just a cliché. But it’s physically impossible to take it to the same universe that it’s in with Mike. We need to find another way.”

  “Well, you know the answer to that. The MOO.” Sarita turned back to the computer monitor she’d been reading.

  The MOO was the Multiverse Operations Organization, the Silicon City version of their own Multiverse Investigations Unit. The MOO was based in a gleaming mercury-like building in a high-tech city with augmented reality and floating cars. The MIU was based in a van in the parking lot of San Francisco Police Department. A van that looked suspiciously like it should be the home of four meddling kids and one cowardly Great Dane.

  “Do they have any news?” asked Alex.

  “None.” Sarita’s shoulders slumped.

  “I want to get out there. I want to look for him. He has to be somewhere in Silicon City. Somewhere in Hive Earth, at least.”

  “They haven’t seen him. If he was there, they’d know.”

  ”But he isn’t plugged into the Hive.”

  “He doesn’t have to be. Madonna has her sources.” Madonna was the genius who’d invented the Hive, Hive Earth’s augmented-reality version of the internet. “She’ll tell us, if he’s there.”

  “I hate to think of him out there alone.”

  Sarita turned in her chair. She gave Alex a look of sympathy. Alex tried not to melt. “Yup. Me too.”

  2

  Osmond

  The Spinner

  1 April, 9:59am

  Mike struggled to grab hold of the smooth walls of the Spinner as it picked up pace. Just moments ago, he’d been looking into the faces of his oddball team of colleagues, celebrating the fact that they’d solved Claire Pope’s murder.

  Now he was alone. The Spinner had been primed to take them home from Silicon City to his own version of San Francisco. The one with kumquat ice cream, Indian pizza, and eggplants. He often wondered what other universes would make of eggplants.

  But instead of sending him home like a high-tech pair of ruby slippers, it had whisked him away. His colleagues were gone, and he was alone.

  He closed his eyes, feeling the revolutions increase. This thing normally spun at 53.4 revs per minute. If he opened the door to this thing (if indeed he could open the door to this thing), he knew that what he saw outside would be very odd.

  Quantum cats simultaneously dying and coming to life in cardboard boxes. Facial hair morphing into shapes that defied gravity. Cities rising and falling until they became heaps of Jell-O. And, of course, the inter-dimensional void.

  They’d warned him about that. He didn’t fancy gazing into it any time soon, no matter how much it looked like the inside of a unicorn’s ear.

  He swallowed hard, focused on keeping down whatever was threatening to make the journey into his esophagus, and slid to the floor of the smooth-walled cylindrical space. The floor sloped gently toward the center of the Spinner and it wasn’t long before he was curled up in a little ball at its lowest point. A hardened SFPD detective, weeping and calling for his mummy.

  The Spinner juddered to a halt. Mike lurched sideways once, twice, three times, then gave up and let himself slide toward one of the walls. The Spinner had landed at a rakish angle. Not something the Spinner normally did.

  Mike took a deep breath, then another one. The air was full of the smell of his own fear: sweat, metal, and a particularly juicy fart he’d done just as the Spinner reached its maximum speed. He swallowed hard and clamped his lips shut.

  Eventually, he opened his eyes. And his lips. He took another breath and staved off death by suffocation. The air had cleared; he could smell honey, and pollen, and the backs of rabbits’ ears. He hadn’t known what rabbits’ ears smelt like until this precise moment.

  He checked his limbs. All present and correct. He checked his pockets. Nothing in them, of course. Not even the bitbox, a piece of Hive Earth tech he habitually carried between universes. He couldn’t remember if he’d left it behind in Silicon City, or if it had got lost at some point. He peered around the Spinner looking for it, but it was nowhere to be seen.

  He pushed himself up and slid his hands up the wall. Slowly, as his legs still felt like someone had pulled them off, given them a bit of a twist and then replaced them with somebody else’s.

  “Hello?”

  His voice sounded pathetic. The kind of voice he would point and laugh at, if he wasn’t stuck in a high-tech machine invented by people from another universe who had run off and left him. And if he wasn’t the one whose voice it was.

  “Hello?” he tried again, his voice a little stronger this time: Jimmy Osmond instead of Mariah Carey.

  No response. Of course.

  He leaned into the wall and worked his way around, pushing on the blank white surface as he went. There was a door somewhere. When the Spinner came to a halt, it normally opened.

  He winced as his foot landed in something damp. He looked down and realized that it was his own vomit. He’d done a full circuit and would up where he’d started. And there’d been no sign of a door.

  He looked up at the ceiling of the Spinner. It stared back at him, white and featureless.

  “Clean this up, will you?”

  A whooshing sound started up. He moved to one side and waited for the space to be cleaned. Afterwa
rds, the walls were even more white than before. He hadn’t believed that was possible.

  “Let me out!” he cried, pushing at the wall nearest to him.

  “Meow.”

  He rolled his eyes. This dumb machine liked pretending to be a cat. It had a theory that they were superior beings, or some such baloney.

  “Look, I need to get out. You already let out Alex and Sarita. It’s my turn.”

  “Meow.” This meow had an extra dimension to it, a kind of crunchiness. Like the Spinner was trying to form a cat-derived language.

  Typical. Alex claimed that her cat had helped her solve the murder. Now the tech was joining in.

  “Please?”

  “Me-no.”

  “Did you say something?”

  “No.”

  “No? You’re not letting me out.”

  “No. And yes.”

  “No and yes?”

  “It’s quantum.”

  There was a swooshing noise. Mike felt air on the back of his neck. He turned to see the door open.

  3

  Silicon City

  Silicon City

  1 April, 1:08pm

  “Ooh.”

  The Hive Earth version of Professor Nemesis Orion, quantum physicist and owner of a collection of brightly-colored lab coats, turned to his colleague. “What what?”

  Madonna Ciccone, tech genius, inventor of the Hive and fan of thrash metal, smiled. She had a perfect smile, the kind of smile that made people think let me take you to meet my mother. “It’s moving.”

  “What’s moving?”

  “The Spinner. The one Mike Long ran off with.”

  “Well, my dear, given what Sarita and Alex have told us, I don’t really think ran off is—”

  Madonna waved a hand. “Semantics, Prof. That Spinner belongs to us, and it’s currently in the custody of Detective Sergeant Mike Long. We need it back.”

  “I rather think that the MIU need their detective back as well.”

  “Of course.” Madonna leaned in to the screen, squinting. “That’s odd.”

  The Prof pushed his chair off, gliding into Madonna’s own chair. He’d been trying to aim for the spot right next to her, but he wasn’t always the best judge of distance. Not an ideal trait for someone whose job involved putting people into a high-tech inter-dimensional jump machine and sending them off into the unknown.

  “What’s odd?” he asked, wishing Madonna would be a little less opaque.

  She lifted a perfectly manicured finger to touch the screen oh-so-lightly. “That.”

  He leaned past her, eliciting a huff, and peered at the screen. “Nanoparticles.”

  “Not just any old nanoparticles.”

  “Hmm.” The Prof had no idea what she was talking about, but he wasn’t about to let her know that.

  She turned to him. “You can’t see it, can you?”

  “Of course I can,” he lied.

  “Hmm.” She turned back to the screen. “It’s not good. Not good at all.”

  “Shouldn’t we warn them? See if the MIU can get a message to Mike somehow?”

  Madonna scoffed. “You think they have the capability to do that?”

  The Prof shrugged. “Sarita is cleverer than you think.”

  A shadow passed across Madonna’s face. “We watch. We need to get that Spinner back.”

  “I think we should tell them.”

  “If they go in there trying to pull him out, it will be a disaster.”

  The Prof frowned. He opened his mouth to speak.

  “Uh-uh,” she said. “I know you’re tempted, but don’t. We can handle this.”

  He tilted his head in his best pleading pose. She turned to him and laughed.

  “Oh Nemesis!” She ruffled his mop of unruly hair, which he’d dyed the exact shade of a denim jacket this morning. “You’re so cute sometimes.”

  The Prof pushed back to his desk, uneasy. No one had called him cute before.

  4

  Shrubbery

  The Spinner

  1 April, 1:08pm

  Mike didn’t move. If he was lucky, he would find himself back in the MIU. If he was very lucky, Nemesis would be waiting outside for him. If he was super amazingly lucky, Alex wouldn’t be out there laughing at his lack of facial hair.

  Mike wasn’t feeling very lucky right now.

  He stared at the door. It was still open. If he didn’t hurry up and get his butt over there, it might close again.

  He sniffed. The MIU smelt of damp, and body odor, and the faint smell of a distant electrical fire.

  The smell here was of none of those things. It was the kind of smell that to some ears was heaven in a nostril; fur, and warmth, and softness. But to others, it was the stench of hell: decaying meat, pheromones, and the world’s worst halitosis.

  He could smell cats.

  He sighed. It was probably Schrödinger. He wasn’t bad, as cats went. He’d taken to Mike, for some unknown reason, and Mike had quickly realized that the ginger tom cat was the best way to his owner’s heart.

  “Alex? Have you brought your cat into the office?”

  “Meow.”

  He looked up at the ceiling of the Spinner. “Stop meowing, all right? I know you can talk.”

  “Meow.”

  He stormed towards the door, his feet echoing in the blank space of the Spinner. He almost tripped as he reached it, but managed to throw out an arm and hook it round the edge of the door.

  “You left me, guys. What happened?”

  He stopped moving. He was standing at the edge of what could only be described as a shrubbery. Ahead of him were low mounds of greenery, some speckled with flowers, others not. They were shifting. Dark shapes darted between the bushes, some retreating farther into the shadows beneath the planting. He stood very still, waiting for whatever it was to attack him.

  At last a face appeared under one of the shrubs. Then another, and another, until every bush had at least one small face looking up at him.

  The faces weren’t human. They were small, with large ears and snub noses. Each had whiskers. Most had scars on their cheeks, or nicks in their ears. Some were baring teeth his dentist would be horrified by. And all but one of them was furry.

  He’d landed in a world full of cats.

  5

  Halitosis

  San Francisco

  1 April, 1:26pm

  “So?” Monique Williams, SFPD Lieutenant and Mike and Alex’s boss, arched an eyebrow.

  “No joy as yet,” said Alex. “But we are following a few lines of enquiry.”

  “No one says that in real life. You’ve been watching too many cop shows.”

  Alex shrugged. “Give me time. I’m learning the ropes.”

  “You certainly are. Maybe we need to find you a temporary partner while Mike’s gone, someone with policing experience who can keep an eye on you.”

  “No!”

  Monique sat down in her chair and laughed. “I had no idea you felt so strongly about Mike.”

  “I don’t. Well, I didn’t. But he saved my life. Or at least, he may have done.”

  “The ‘spinal injury’ incident, you mean.”

  Alex gritted her teeth. Back in Silicon City, when the team had burst in on her fighting with Claire’s would-be killer, she’d thought her spine was broken. She’d landed hard on her back and felt fluid beneath her. Turned out it wasn’t spinal fluid, but the result of her landing on a box of duck eggs.

  “Not just that. If he and Sarita hadn’t come after me, well… You know.” She shuddered.

  “I know.” Monique cracked a smile that looked as if it might swallow the office whole. “Just find him, alright?”

  “We will.”

  “Tell me about these lines of inquiry.”

  Alex tensed. She’d been lying about the lines of inquiry: it had sounded impressive but had been plucked from air as thin as a supermodel on a diet.

  “We’ve spoken to the MOO,” she said, deflecting.

 
; “And?”

  “Madonna says they’ve seen no sign of him. And when we asked if we could use the Spinner to go look for him, they said no.”

  “Being proprietorial, are they?’

  “No. It’s the Physics. They’re right. But they said they’d watch for signs of Mike’s version of the Spinner moving.”

  “They can detect that, can they?”

  “Apparently. I’m hoping we’ll be able to as well.”

  “Good. In the meantime, do we have any other way of tracking him down?”

  “Well…” Alex shifted in her seat.

  “Go on.”

  “It’ll sound a bit daft.”

  Monique leaned in. Alex leaned back; Monique looked stunning but her halitosis was infamous. “Alex Strand, you are a short Scottish physicist who uses a device we don’t quite understand to travel to alternate universes and solve crimes. From a van in the parking lot of SFPD. Daft is a relative concept.”

  “It involves cardboard boxes.”

  “Go on.”

  Alex heard voices behind her. Monique looked over Alex’s head and through the glass wall that separated her office from the rest of the Homicide department. She bared her teeth.

  “Get her out of here, now.”

  Alex turned. Madge, her fellow multiverse investigator and someone who resembled the world’s kindliest granny, was handing out cups of tea to the assembled cops. Again.