This is the opening day of RinthCon, the sci-fi event happening in the far future year of 2324. Stories are already coming out of the event. It looks to be a strange and exciting year!
Alice Joiner followed in Klekman’s wake as he slipped through narrow aisles of shelving, skirted stacked boxes, and dodged around crates. The dim light muted colors and softened edges. It felt like Klekman was leading her into an ancient cave instead of a mazelike storage area. She had worked with Klekman as a volunteer at the con twice. That was a total of ten days over two years. She didn’t really know him, and if she had realized the kind of place he was going to take her, she wouldn’t have agreed to go with him alone.
“You could hide a body in this place and nobody would ever know.” Although Joiner said it with a laugh, it was the utmost concern on her mind at that moment.
“You have no idea!” said Klekman. “You could stack entire families and no one would suspect! I’ve been running storage for years and years and I’m always finding something new. This is a hundred years of RinthCon props and gear. Sometimes other stuff, too.”
“That’s interesting, but I’d like to go back now.”
“Already here!” said Klekman.
The crooked aisle they had been following suddenly opened into a small room defined by bookshelves and stacked crates and other objects with sheets thrown over them. There was a puffy recliner and a cot and a freestanding lamp around a small table.
“I rearranged a few of the shelving units to make a place where I could stay when things get frantic. I don’t even have to leave the storage room to sleep when it’s really busy. Just around the corner is a little kitchenette with a hotplate and coffee maker.”
Joiner eyed the cot suspiciously. “What are we doing here?”
“It’s cozy, isn’t it?”
Klekman was tall but skinny. He probably didn’t have a whole lot of weight advantage on her. She looked around for something that had a blade or enough heft to act as a club. If he put his hands on her, she didn’t think she had better than a 50/50 chance without a weapon.
Klekman got the wizard staff before she could grab it. “Take a look at this,” he said.
Joiner held out her hands. “Ok, hand it over.” She wasn’t sure if she was going to hit him with it right away or see what he tried to do before she began swinging.
But Klekman didn’t give her the staff. He turned and held it so the top of the staff was right in front of her eyes. An embellished cap of wrought iron covered the end of the staff and was topped with a delicately-fashioned cage in the shape of a water drop. The cage held a crystal.
“See that?” he asked.
“You just stuck it right in my face. I would have to be blind not to see it.” She pushed the end of the staff aside. He was so annoying.
“I brought you here to show you this.”
Relief flooded through Joiner. He wanted to show her his stupid prop. He didn’t plan to rape or kill her. That improved her day tremendously. She could deal with whatever annoying thing he was going to go on about if that was going to be the worst of it.
“Last year I got stuck for a while in the Information booth. That’s when everything was crazy and everyone was overwhelmed,” said Klekman.
“Yeah,” said Joiner. “I had to help the security people for a while. I almost didn’t come back this year because of it.”
“While I was working Information, this guy came up to me with a crazy story. He said he was a scientist.”
A suspicious look crossed Joiner’s face. “Do you mean a good scientist like a biologist or a chemist, or are you talking about a physicist?”
Klekman took a deep breath. “He was a physicist.”
“Nope! Nope!” said Joiner, shaking her head and her hands. “I don’t want to hear it. Don’t go trying to change my worldview. I don’t want to hear whatever batshit crazy theory this is going to lead to!”
“Just listen to the story!” pleaded Klekman. “This is going to help the con like nothing you’ve ever seen!”
“I’m not like you people who’ve made this con into your life’s work. This is only my third year volunteering. Why would you think I care enough to listen to some random physicist’s nutjob theory?”
Klekman relaxed and Joiner knew she was caught in a web. Instead of just repeating “no,” she had let him turn this into a conversation. She felt like she was sliding into a pit but the sides were too steep and slippery to escape.
“The first time I met you,” said Klekman, “you told me you had a degree in classical speculative fiction. Out of everyone who works on this con, you are better equipped to understand what we are doing here and why, than we are ourselves.”
A little bit of flattery went a long way for someone who had a liberal arts degree. Joiner scowled, knowing she had been hooked. “All right, Klekman, what are we doing here?”
“The scientist, his name was Ahbet…”
“Don’t care.”
“And he worked in the El-Fihriya Museum where he discovered an ancient device.”
“Is all this supposed to be real, or is this just the opening to some sort of LARP adventure?”
“Listen! Listen! He thought the device was a prototype designed to move things between alternate universes.”
Joiner huffed. “We already do that.”
“But in a limited way! Ahbet said the device he found could move things between infinite alternate universes because it worked on a different system. Have you ever heard of Simulation Theory?”
Joiner rolled her eyes. “Has the woman with the degree in classical speculative fiction ever heard the theory that we live in a simulation? Why don’t you just mansplain that for me?”
“Okay, okay, I apologize,” said Klekman. “But this Ahbet guy said that if all possible universes are simulations, they’re just information. And the device he found just moved information around. That is what happened last year. The device pulled characters and things out of books.”
Joiner glared at him.
“You know,” continued Klekman, “because a book is one possible reality if there are infinite realities.”
“Don’t be a cretin,” said Joiner. “I can write a story about me being a ham and cheese sandwich and you being a worms and pickle sandwich, but that doesn’t mean that world exists even if there are infinite worlds. It’s because it’s infinite possible worlds. Impossible things don’t exist just because we add the world ‘infinite’ to the phrase.”
The two stared each other down for a few seconds until Klekman said, “Why am I a worms and pickle sandwich? Is that really a thing somewhere?”
“Once I’ve escaped from the Ninth Circle of Storage Hell here, I’ll make sure you get to try a worms and pickle sandwich.”
Klekman narrowed his eyes in suspicion but shrugged it off. “So this guy Ahbet said that if a writer thought it up somewhere and wrote it down, that information was enough to create the world that was described.”
“And that’s why nobody listens to physicists anymore.”
“Let me just finish,” said Klekman. “The con leadership council thought it sounded nutty too, so I was assigned to watch out for this guy and make sure he didn’t cause any trouble. At the end of the con last year, his device broke. That’s when all the crowds disappeared. He was weeping as he left. After he was gone, I found a piece of the device. That crystal on the end of the staff is the piece!”
“And it’s broken.”
“But it’s like a crystal! And I thought to myself, what if it works like a hologram? A hologram can be broken into smaller pieces and each piece contains the whole hologram.”
“But when you break a hologram, it becomes less detailed. Is your goal is to move vague, incomplete, and grainy things between universes?”
“Stop teasing!” hissed Klekman, a frothy bit of spittle flying out of his mouth as he worked himself up. “If there are infinite universes, then a fragment is still…
“…still infinite!”
“Yes!” exclaimed Klekman. “And all I had to do was figure out how to power up the crystal by itself. I spent all year working on this staff. The whole core of the staff is a powerful battery that lets me activate the crystal.”
“You still haven’t said what you’re trying to do.”
“I want to do what happened last year, but in a controlled way. You’re the one with the degree in spec lit. You can help me curate the most amazing con experience ever!”
“Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should.”
Klekman frowned. “There are so many ways we can make this the best con experience ever.” Klekman waved his arms around and seemed temporarily at a loss for words. “I spent the last year collecting books from all over the storage space and putting them here in one spot. We can pick any amazing thing out of any book and have it right here for the con attendees! It’s like magic!”
Joiner rolled her eyes. Again. It was a record day for eye rolling. Klekman was nuts, but she no longer felt threatened by him. Maybe she should just resign from the con and let goofballs like him have their fun without her.
“Look! Look!” said Klekman, “I can pull anything from any of these books. Maybe for you ladies I pull some hunky guys out of a romance novel like this one. Just for an example.” Klekman grabbed a thick tome off one of the shelves and held it up so Joiner could see the cover.
“That wasn’t at all a misogynistic stereotype,” Joiner said with one eyebrow arched and a sneer on her face.
The thumb on Klekman’s other hand flicked a switch on the staff and the crystal in the metal cage suddenly came to life. It was filled with millions of tiny sparkles. Klekman touched the tip of the staff to the book.
“I’m not 100% certain how this works,” Klekman admitted when nothing seemed to happen.
“Good thing it didn’t work,” said Joiner. “Because that’s not a romance novel.”
Klekman looked at the book’s cover. “It’s about the craft of love.”
“No,” said Joiner. “Lovecraft is the author’s name. If your wizard staff gizmo were for real, you wouldn’t want to conjure anything from that guy’s books.”
Klekman lowered his arms and looked around the dusty, shadowy, silent space. “This is anticlimactic,” he said.
Joiner noticed the tenebrous tentacle curling around Klekman’s leg just before he was hoisted into the air. She heard him screaming as the staff flipped end over end until it hit one of the bookshelves. Then a larger, darker shadow like a small hill rose further back in the storage room. Shelving units toppled into each other like dominoes. Bookshelves landed on the staff. There was no way she could retrieve it. Joiner had no choice but to run.
She was definitely going to give back her volunteer t-shirt and go home.
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