Labyrinth

By Natalie Mills · Estimated Reading Time: 16 Minutes

She was a genius in her time, born at the right moment to the right parents, and imparted with a sense of curiosity about the world that melded with the availability of books and maps to find herself at the center of multiverse exploration right as the field was taking off. No one knows if her work was treated as well across all universes, but in this one, she was revered, a sphinx over the mazes that she built, first the maze of her work and then the maze of her property, a universe unto itself that few people would ever explore.

I write in the third person to keep myself honest. I will undersell myself if I tell you what I think directly. Some people puff themselves up in the first person, but some of us tend to drop ourselves down. My accomplishments will live on their own in the writing of my work as hers, ennobled in the halls of our scientists for years to come when I remember that I am not just me, living, wrinkled, liver spots on my fingers, knuckles thicker and fingers thinner every day. I have my own small shrine to my work, a long hallway at the center of my house lined with picture frames. In each frame is an accomplishment, a single moment that I chose to embody a breakthrough in my work, another paper, another sandbox. The plain pewter frames are in need of dusting, and I barely look at them anymore when I walk from my bedroom each morning down the hall. I focus instead on the morning sun seeping under the shade in the kitchen, ready to be unleashed with an ever-slowing yank of my hand as the fabric accordions over itself and rises, and the sun bleeds over the wooden boards and the tabletop flowers in a smooth sweep. 

Her work was immortalized in the papers she wrote, the books they were collected in, and the libraries they sat in for decades to come. Younger hungry scholars would seek them out, and her discoveries became footnotes, another inch of the foundation of houses for the next generation to build, ancient ruins upon which olympic stadiums would be built, forgetting sometimes to give credit to their forebears but never able to complete a circuit, finish a lap, pull the last iron across a field, without giving some small cosmic payment to the ancestors who made it possible. 

I have lived here in this house for a long time, all of my life after sixty years old. You’d be surprised how much can happen after sixty. You have the energy of a fifty-year-old, the mind of a forty-year-old, the personality of a thirty-year-old, and the mental image of yourself at twenty, small white flowers threaded through your hair as you watch your friends circle each other at the June dance, the sparkle of shoes on the parquet floor shaking opposite a spread of staid stars above. I remember those days, before we were consumed, when the questions were still the purpose and the work was just the journey. We played together all night long, still getting used to our arms and legs, bronzed by the summer sun, happy in the evening warmth, unruffled by the soft breeze that would cool your face when you sat to rest. We were the only ones who knew the future of the universe: that it didn’t matter. That this moment mattered and nothing else. That the future, all the things we thought might come to be, couldn’t be any more real than all of the places we had read about in books, the history we had learned with flashcards, the math we had studied and forgotten. All that mattered to us was the glint of sparks in the laboratory and the scuffs that our shoes left across the dance floor as we swirled in between partners until the sun began to rise. We were our work and our play. We were only waiting until the day that we had answers, content with empty hands. 

She spent her early years dedicated to the work, collaborating alongside a group of scientists, known collectively as the Hunters. Together, they shared the work between their respective laboratories around the campus, brought together by the university’s historic reputation as a school on the cutting edge of the discipline of multicursal realities and futurism. The year before the formation of the Hunters, the university’s reputation was significantly damaged by scandal. Three faculty members were quietly removed from their positions after it was uncovered that they were performing pseudoscientific experiments on students. Through the work of the Hunters, the school regained and even exceeded its former reputation for being an institution at the forefront of universe manipulation, each one of the members of the group bringing unique scholarship at a critical time for the university. 

We brought the school back to its rightful place. We were the only ones willing to ask the questions that needed to be asked. Unfettered from our professors who had sullied the reputation of the school, who dragged us into their work until we could escape with the decent parts for ourselves, we were able to uncover elements of our labyrinthine research that never would have been allowed otherwise. The three professors who left—silly people with names I barely remember—jeopardized all of us with their tales and experiments. They wore ridiculous hats and ate at odd hours, spending half the night looking for the dining hall instead of searching for answers about the world we lived in and the worlds we wanted to discover. Two of us from the group, he and I, were the two who finally felled the dead trees, getting them out of the forest to make way for the new work that was coming, our small experiments able to fill up their laboratories, live off of their grant funds, and find new subjects in the students who had been so hurt by the betrayal of our former professors. That night, the night we danced, one of many in the vivid summer between their exit and the start of our work, the two of us always seemed to find each other in the looping couples, swinging between partners until his pale arm met my bronzed hand, spinning in circles within the cosmos, just the two of us in orbit under the soft lanterns strung around the field. 

The work primarily came from the partnership between EM and SP, two students who took over the work of their disgraced professors. Together, they took the work back to its roots and refocused on the original purpose: discovering worlds existing in parallel to our own. Within three years, the two students returned the work to its original hypothesis and branched out into several new disciplines that were undeniably the seed of multicursalism as we know it today. While it is rumored that they had a brief romance at the start of their work together, this has never been confirmed. They remained close friends for more than six decades until they died within a few years of each other. 

We were in love that summer, the way you love a certain dessert from a restaurant when you have it at night with a white cloth napkin on your lap and a server in the corner waiting to see what else you need. He wasn’t just a boy; he was the treat that I had been craving that I ate my fill of that summer until we realized that it wasn’t so tasty in the autumn cold. I only wanted him when I was looking for answers, when we were revolving to music and then sitting together at the edge of the dock, our bare feet blistering from the wooden dance floor, quietly spinning our toes in the black water of the pond at midnight. We were as in love as two squirrels chasing each other along a tree branch, as a pair of bunnies snuggled in the grass. He moved in close to me on that dock, looping his leg around mine, the hair on it brushing against my calf, his foot underneath my foot as his hand rested on top of my own. It was perfect, he said, and I was the perfect one to be there with. I knew what he meant. I was the only one who understood him, who knew why we were looking ahead. Not just midnight docks and evening dances, but the answers that we had talked about the year before, as we whispered together in the library stacks, exchanged books after we finished them so the other could see all of the notes we had left behind. It wasn’t just our legs that fit together, it was our minds, every question that he asked was another that I could find an answer to, another end to the finite universe, another door that I could open and close again, just another hall closet full of white towels and toppled brooms and shaggy-haired mops. 

After completing their degrees and graduating, the two scientists returned to their hometowns to continue their work in laboratories paid for by the money made off of their key invention from their college years: the multicursal linchpin. Sitting between two verses, this small device acted as a lens to see from the present universe into another one. While it would still be decades before a means of transiting these verses would be formed, the linchpin formed a critical piece in the development of that travel, allowing later scientists to map the path of travel required to move from one parallel to another. 

The patent says we invented it together because I would never have been able to convince the school to give me full credit in my time. To say that we both had made it gave them the chance of believing us, two genius students patenting a piece of technology that would surely require the work of three tenured professors at least, perhaps even drive them to madness in the process. It was an answer I had been looking for, even before he asked the question. Like using a mirror to see around a corner, we could find it: the end of the next place we wanted to be. We discovered it in the dining hall, our laboratory situated adjacent to it for a hundred years, the perfect place to peek into a different verse, one where we would be ourselves but not quite. Sharing the credit tied us to each other in a way I didn’t expect. In all of my life, it was my one mistake. I thought that sharing the money we made would be as easy as having an intermediary send the checks to the right place. But there were complications and licensing needs and decisions and contracts to sign and offers to consider. We worked on these every time they came up, meeting together at our cafe in the city, sitting across from each other in armchairs at a round table, putting our coffees to the side to spread the contracts out between us. He would watch me as I moved through the papers, signing, dating, initialing, knowing that each time I wrote my initials, he wished that the second letter was different. My only regret was tying our two names together forever on the patent for the linchpin. His only regret was seeing what we saw in the dining hall the day the linchpin finally worked. We peered together into another world, one just like ours but not quite. We didn’t know how the world would be different when we peeked in. There we were: the two of us across the dining hall together, sharing one end of a long table, the sun slanting in through the western windows as we ate dinner off the tan plastic trays. This world didn’t seem any different, we thought, watching us eat the foods we always ate, wearing the clothes we always wore, exchanging the glances we always did. But then he reached his hand out, empty over the table top and it filled up—my hand in his with one shining star on my finger, a band of gold and a stone of silver, metal upon metal upon flesh. Together in our laboratory, we stiffened. It was our world, but not quite. I thought he would take it poorly, but he didn’t say a word. Instead, we celebrated the success. We locked hands and swung together between our tables and papers, a long season of work and now, this glimpse of spring, the first daffodil to be spotted, yellow among the recursive snow. 

By her thirties, EM was as famous for her cultural appearances as she was for scientific contributions. A beloved representative for various charitable causes, she often found herself speaking alongside celebrities and politicians, offering scientific insights in plain language that opened up the world of elite multicursal study to the general population. From her college graduation through her fifties, it is thought that she had several different long-term partners, but none of these were ever confirmed. While being socially visible, she was extremely private about her personal life, working only out of her laboratory in her hometown where she didn’t allow visitors. During her seasons in the public eye, she would live in the city, famously frequenting a cafe alongside other notable scientists and celebrities of the day.

We had the best times at that cafe, silver pots of rich hot chocolate on winter afternoons, tender lemon scones on summer mornings. I would spend hours there during the months when I wasn’t at work—a season on, a season off, I liked to joke. Everyone else assumed “a season on” was my time at the laboratory, but that was my season off. My season on was the time I spent at that cafe, in the public eye, sitting with scientists who begged me with their ideas or celebrities whose insipid causes weren’t worth the money for the galas that supported them. But the food was good, so I always showed up. They said I had a knack for speaking to the public on matters of science, but I have to believe that my ephemeral phrases just gave the public a false sense of understanding, a weighted blanket of arithmetic to let them believe that this world was as real as they felt it was, that they weren’t living in other verses cheating on their spouses and abandoning their dogs, watching wars bomb their condominiums and eating the foods that brought them acne and weight gain in this world. I lived in this world of tossing a coat of comfort over the minds of our citizens while retreating to my laboratory to experience reality. I was never very far from my goal, watching answers trickle in slowly and then fly in just as quickly as I could count waves on the beach, hoping to catch them all before they rolled past me and depleted themselves on the sand. 

Early in her career, EM purchased a vast country estate and began developing the property with laboratories, greenhouses, and gardens where she continued her work. The property was famous for strictly banning visitors and press on the grounds. Satellite photos showed extensive work and renovations throughout the decades of EM’s ownership. Despite these audacious architectural undertakings, there were never any photographs or videos taken of the inside of the compound. It is speculated that local residents who did the construction were so loyal to EM that they never betrayed their role in its development. While this is the most likely theory, due to her reputation as an innovator, other leading voices theorized that she had programmed an advanced robotics team to do the construction work or that she used a self-printing system that allowed her to do the work herself at a pace beyond her personal capabilities.

Of course I had help in the construction. I could never have done it myself, and I could never have created robots to do it with the human touch that it required: the shrubbery planted with the careful malaise of an absentminded gardener, a teen to paint the fence but miss the right spots to seem fully alive and real. But I didn’t have the loyalty that was speculated from my crew. When they were done, I killed them and buried them in the garden beds and cisterns and basements that they themselves had built. No one looked for them, because I always found the people who I knew would never be missed, in this universe or any other. 

In the final years of her life, EM stopped attending public functions all together. True to her word from decades earlier, she retreated completely from the public eye after her sixtieth birthday, spending her remaining years on her property alone. While there were some attempts to contact her throughout the years, she was able to confirm her health to the satisfaction of the authorities so even general welfare checks were abandoned. After her sixtieth birthday, no confirmed sightings of her were verified until her death. 

It was my best idea, and I came up with it myself. I closed myself on my property after my sixtieth birthday. No one needed to see me or find me. I was happy here with everything I needed. Every day would be an off season respite, and no one would interrupt my work. I had had a plethora of successes over the years: papers and discoveries and patents out there for the world to take and build upon as their own. But I wanted my last success to be mine alone, to live with me, to die with me, to stay with me so that for just a little while, I would be ahead of everyone else, at least in this one existence. Life on the property was easy. I had it all, and I had been able to look side to side to every possible contingency. I knew to have the extra valve for the water purifier because it would snap the third winter. The library had a sprinkler system over the second bookcase because a wire in behind it would cause a fire in one possible parallel, but only that wire and only that bookcase. I put my least favorite books on that shelf. I had the best defense from the outside world that anyone could offer: the ability to see every parallel possibility and a labyrinth so intricate leading to me that each day I could totally forget that I lived in a world with people and instead spend the day in a world alone, my papers stacked on the desk, my photos framed in the hallway, my sunlight covering the kitchen floor, my food waiting on my dining room table, my fork, my plate, my napkin, not a soul in sight. 

The final chapter of EM’s life is marked by tragedy. A recluse who managed to keep others out of her expansive property for more than twenty years, her old friend SP attempted to visit her in his old age. Despite explicit instructions for all people to stay off the property, SP was said to have information pertinent to her and violated all orders in an attempt to see her again. Though he believed his years of friendship would afford him an audience with EM, it is unknown if that ever happened. His body was found weeks later in a nearby pond, still in the same clothes that he was last seen in. It is believed that the system of protection devised around the property managed to disorient SP to the point that he lost track of where he was, causing him to walk the opposite way of his vehicle. After dying of exposure, his body, found downstream in a pond, was likely carried there on the current only to be found by fishermen in the following weeks. This death marks the tragic conclusion of a life that contributed much to the field of multicursalism as well as an end to a friendship that spanned decades. Despite many attempts, EM was never reached for comment about the death of her friend. 

There was only one time when I was startled in this house, and I should have known it would be because of him. He was always insistent on choosing the worst of all possible universes. But I planned for this one too. He came up my front path in August, as I knew he might. He was wearing his powder blue coat that made him look like he should be wearing a top hat in a parade. He stood on my porch with his hands folded together before he ever knocked. I watched him from my bedroom window. He never paused because he was nervous, only because he was infuriatingly present in the life that he had chosen. In our laboratory, he used to say to me after our best breakthroughs, Look, EM, another star in the sky, and he would make me sit for a moment with my hands on my lap so that I would remember it. It made sense that he did that today: pausing for a moment to remember this life, another star in the sky. I was not interested in my home being another one of his stars. He knocked on the door finally, the worst kind of knock: not forceful, not soft, just a presence as he always was, a body with legs and arms and a blue coat and brown eyes waiting for me to open the door. I finally did. He was older, a face that looked as if it had taken a gulping breath and exhaled slowly over decades, but his eyes were the same melted chocolate. He smiled, and I smiled back because I always smiled when he smiled at me, softening me despite everything. He came inside. He had more papers for me, he said, and he spread them out on my kitchen table, and I poured us coffee. It wasn’t as good as the cafe’s coffee, I joked. He looked at me and folded his hands again. I sat before the papers and began signing.

SP confirmed his friend’s wellbeing one last time before his death several years later. In the final contracts that they signed, their joint work was moved into the public domain, allowing expansion by any student or scientist that showed interest and promise with no payment necessary for use of the tools. This flood of available technology marked a rapid expansion in the exploration of multiverses, even allowing the prevention of several mass casualties, as well as better preparation for earthquakes, tornadoes, and hurricanes. In an ironic twist, EM’s property was destroyed by an unavoidable tornado two years after her death. The property had remained unoccupied during that time, tied up in a legal battle between the state and her alleged next-of-kin. In the destruction of the property, many of EM’s final papers were lost. Based on the papers that were salvaged from the property, it was speculated that she had accomplished the next critical goal in the multiverse discipline: closing off a verse from the present continuum. This achievement wasn’t replicated for nearly twenty years, when a student succeeded in closing off a parallel permanently at EM’s alma mater. EM’s greatest contributions, the creation of the linchpin with SP and the confirmation that it was possible to close off destructive verses, were preserved, forever indenturing a generation of young people to her work, allowing them to live with fewer fears about their future in the present verse. 

Of course I didn’t kill him. I was planning on it. I had the whole thing mapped out. When I say I had planned for every contingency, that included knowing SP as well as I did, that he wouldn’t even think about my maze of a property or my dislike of interruption. I realized that none of my normal tricks and traps saved for tourists and unwelcome reporters would slow him down. He walked right to me, as if he were walking up a sidewalk and not through my labyrinth of privacy. He came to me without hesitation and knocked on my door with purpose. He sat at my table and drank my coffee and looked at me with pond-deep eyes, and we sat together signing contracts and drinking coffee. And at the end of the day, he hugged me and walked out. He hugged me, and in that pause, I knew there was another star added to his sky. As much as I was waiting for him to leave me, I had been waiting for him to come. I took a picture as he walked away down the path and framed it in pewter and added it to my hallway. Of course, I would let him live. In another life, I loved him. But for now, I will keep him alive, my one good act in this final house, falling down around me as I wait for the tornado to sweep through.

✷

Story by Natalie Mills · Photo by Jennifer Latuperisa-Andresen

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