Snakes and Ladders and the Destinies of Unborn Universes: Prologue
A Novel
Snakes and Ladders and the Destinies of Unborn Universes: Prologue
Evan remembered passionately uttering the sentence “Destiny is as real as this bong,” while sitting in his favorite bean bag chair with his crew in his apartment near the UCLA campus on the Friday before Christmas break. He thought it sounded clever and deep, and his friends seemed to think it sounded clever and deep as well, because they all said “wow”—except Levi, his roommate, who was shy and Mormon and drinking milk.
The cannabis-clouds of near-term recollection dissolved like the opening credits of a holiday special, as a woman’s voice welcomed everyone to Kingsford Smith Airport in Sydney, Australia. The lurid glow of the setting sun penetrated the terminal’s glass walls. Evan took a step forward. He was at the security checkpoint.
New Year’s Day, 1994, was over and done with. Time to get back to California and finish up his senior year. Classes were scheduled to begin the morning he arrived, so he’d miss the first day of the last semester.—Fine by him, since the first day was always a bunch of unimportant stuff: introductions, book-buying, and reading over syllabuses . . . or were they called “syllabi”? He really didn’t know what a syllabus was. He wondered if it was the French word for “outline” and originally pronounced seeyabú. Levi would know. Mormons ate up languages like cornflakes.—Wait, Evan remembered. Not “Mormons.” That’s an insult.
About a month ago Levi told him in that hyper-friendly gosh-golly voice of his that the word “Mormon” was considered objectionable to some folks (like his parents) and he asked—“but only if you don’t mind”—if Evan could refer to him as a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of this that and the other, or “LSD” for short. And Evan was rubbing his eyes because he was recovering from a bender, so he chugged his bottle of Gatorade and said, “Bro, that’s like . . . a lot to remember.”
Levi was a good guy, just weird. He was two years older than Evan because he’d been on a mission to either the central part of South America or the southern part of Central America. Either way, Levi was fluent in Spanish so he basically knew French. He’d definitely know the plural for “syllabus”.
Evan already had a job lined up after graduation. He would be working at Caltech in Pasadena. He was scheduled to start in June. The job wasn’t glamorous (shipping, mail sorting) and it didn’t bother him that all the sorority girls he met at the house parties assumed he’d landed the job at Caltech because he was a physicist, which he wasn’t (he sucked at math and science), but the thing that did bother him was when people implied that the only reason he’d gotten the job there in the first place was because his mom was a senior executive assistant at Pasadena City Hall, which was true.—But mom swore she had nothing to do with it.
Just before leaving the hotel, Evan bought a souvenir for his big sister, Julie, who would be picking him up at LAX. It was a stuffed kangaroo wearing a sash that read “G’day, Mate!” He put it in the outside pouch of his nylon backpack and put the backpack over his chest instead of his back to deter thieves (dad’s advice). He sensed the vague outlines of a corny joke about stuffing a stuffed marsupial in the pouch of a backpack and wearing the pouch in front like a pouched marsupial, but the joke needed work—aaaand he was next in line.
There were other things in the backpack: a sweatshirt in case he got cold on the flight home, a toothbrush, toothpaste, and a shaving kit. There was also a paperback spy thriller that his buddy Marcus had loaned him. It was called The Dingo Affair: an Agent ZX5 Adventure. Most of the novel was set in Australia, except for the opening teaser at the anthrax lab on the German-Austrian border. Mark told Evan that the novel was “basically a guidebook to the Land Down Under, since the author takes you there.”
The villain’s Zeppelin hangar built into the side of Ayers Rock (with its camouflaged hydraulic doors) was pretty cool and believable, since there were things like that in Colorado. And then there was the totally rad chase sequence in which the buxom computer programmer shows the hero how tough she is by putting the pedal to the metal and driving the jeep out of the burning factory in Sydney as the hero shoots down four helicopters with the .50-cal mounted to the back of it.
In the novel, the woman and Agent ZX5 drive from Sydney to Ayers Rock in five hours. So when Evan asked the concierge at the hotel if there were day trips to Ayers Rock, the man’s eyebrows shot up and he said that Ayers Rock was about 2800 kilometers away.
“Is that far?” Evan asked. (He didn’t know the metric system.)
When the guy told him 2800 kilometers was roughly 1750 miles, Evan got pissed off and stopped reading the novel, because the author hadn’t done his research and was just making shit up. It wasn’t Marcus’s fault, but Evan thought he’d better set his buddy straight so that he didn’t give someone else bogus advice: “Dude,” he planned to tell him, “I don’t think this guy’s ever been to Australia, so it’s not, like, a reliable guidebook.”
Evan set the backpack on the slick metal rollers and pushed it to the brink of the conveyor belt. The backpack vanished behind the dangling car-wash curtains and into the belly of the X-ray machine.
The uniformed agent on the other side of the metal detector waved him through.
Evan stepped through and the alarm went off.
Ping!
The agent told him to empty his pockets.
Evan had on the same salmon-colored Bermudas he’d worn on the beach at sunset on New Year’s Eve. He had returned to the hotel that night, taken a shower, and hung the shorts on the towel rack in the bathroom. Then he changed into his acid-washed jeans and put on a white button-up shirt and headed upstairs to the hotel’s rooftop lounge to watch the fireworks and sing “Old Ang Zine” with the other partygoers and try to figure of what the hell had happened on the beach at sunset.
Evan had worn the Bermudas for no more than six hours; so as far as he was concerned they were clean. He thought that shorts would be more comfortable on the flight home than pants. These details would assume a new significance later when he tried to piece together the peripheral and seemingly inconsequential series of events that led him to this very moment at the airport.
Evan gave his passport and ticket to the same agent who had asked him to empty his pockets. The agent didn’t know why Evan had done this, since passport control wasn’t his job. But he opened the passport and read the name and made sure it matched the name on the ticket because he suspected the sun-kissed American kid was a bit slow and expected him to do this.
Evan removed his wallet from his left pocket and cast it into a gray dog bowl that a second (latex-gloved) agent was holding out. But it was in his right pocket where the problem lay. Evan heard the coins jingling as he reached into it.
He spoke rapidly and defensively: “I just bought a souvenir at the hotel and they gave me change.”
He dropped the three Australian 20-cent coins into the dog bowl, and they fell in it with a wad of lint.
“What’s this?” the airport security man said.
In the meshes of the lint was a bright pinpoint of light.
“Oh!” Evan said.
“Looks like you picked up a singularity, mate.”
Indeed, that’s what it was: what the textbooks called an “inert singularity,” which is to say an unborn universe.
The official picked it out of the lint and said, “You can’t take this on board. There’s still time before your flight. You can return to the ticket counter and check it with your luggage.”
“Nah, too much of a hassle,” Evan said. But he was kind of bummed out, not because unborn universes were particularly rare in this version of the planet Earth (where the sun rose in the west instead of the east, and set in the east instead of the west), but because an inert singularity would’ve been a really cool memento to remember his fun-filled trip to Australia by—to remember her by.
The security man’s supervisor, a stocky functionary with a tusky mustache, stepped forward and assessed the situation. Then he told his subordinate that Evan could take the singularity with him on the plane.
“It’s an unborn universe,” he said, “so it doesn’t exist now, does it? No regulation prohibiting it. Not that I’m aware of.”
The agent shrugged and put the singularity back in the dog bowl; and the latex-gloved agent set the bowl on the metal rollers.
The supervisor smiled at Evan: “Enjoy your flight.”
Evan walked through the metal detector and waited at the dispensing end of the X-ray machine for his backpack to emerge. The backpack oozed lubriciously out of the second set of vertical flaps, like the chain-pulled car of a haunted house ride with its burden of giggling passengers. It struck Evan that the conveyor belt, the X-ray machine, the sleepy-eyed dudes yawning and watching the monitors—it was all like… I dunno, like a metaphor for life.
He shouldered his backpack instead of putting it over his chest because he thought it unlikely he’d be robbed inside the terminal. The last thing to come out of the X-ray machine (“the metaphor for life”) was the dog bowl with its contents.
Evan put his wallet, passport, and ticket in his left pocket. Then he dumped the following into his right palm: 3 coins (check), 1 wad of lint (check), 1 unborn universe (check). He took a hard look at these five discrete items. Then he put them in his right pocket and headed to the gate. Yet, somehow, by the time Evan arrived at LAX, the unborn universe had disappeared from his pocket and, in its place, a shiny 1967 American quarter had materialized like a magic trick with its proverbial presto! And that’s because what happened over the Pacific Ocean between Sydney, Australia, and Los Angeles, California, was indeed magical—so magical, in fact, that it warrants an ellipsis at the end of this paragraph, because this is where the story truly begins . . .
Continue to Chapter 1
I like your prose, and the AI illustrations.. wow.. so great! :) the colors.. the atmosphere here... love it....
Just starting my journey with this story, Daniel, and really enjoyed the first chapter with the reveal at the end. Also, Evan is a fun character and his thoughts on French and Spanish along with the Australian “tour guide book” made me smile. I look forward to seeing where this one takes me 👍🏼