The next footage we’d been able to place in chronological order must’ve been years after he completed the prototype, based on context clues from the setting and how Figueiredo looked. From a cramped research lab in a university basement to a wide facility that looked like the hangar of a space station. Light from the walls of machinery and screens flooded his face, with cables snaking to the Envisioner, and the databanks where worker-bee researchers droned with tablets and video cameras.

Then another patch of missing time, suddenly they’re in a bigger facility with even more staff, all of them in sage-green lab coats. Figueiredo looked leaner, hungry-eyed, and harder. Like he’d turned his welding torch onto his own skin—sparks flying—to become some version of himself that could complete his work.

Sometimes you might see a light flash across the footage, but it could’ve just been your eyes.

But what if there aren’t actually any patches of time missing and Figueiredo blinked his kingdom into existence overnight? The lab. His staff and his power over them. The hard angles of his face in place of the doughy doubt.

Maybe Projectionist Kaori, on her break outside smoking and flicking butts onto the cracked pavement behind her booth at Hayes’s Disaster Drive-In, knows all this. How Figueiredo discovered an energy source that powers the machine by collapsing probability clouds down into whatever outcome he wants. How he can change his world by warping probabilities with his hands on the Envisioner, his eyes closed as if in prayer.

I can drive myself crazy wondering about this and whatever horrors Figueiredo sent our way if my coin-flip idea about the relationship between our universes is right. He gave his world all the glory—miracles of science and medicine—and left ours with the shit side of the stick. Plagues instead of progress. My mom dying instead of his. The return of high-waisted pants.

But I guess it’s just a theory.

*   *   *

In the tableau of the Theater the night that Kaori held us hostage—I could almost float above the scene and see it as a diorama with little figurines from a kid’s fifth-grade history project, like Hayes First Breaks the Universe—the FantiSee screens above us were set to a starry sky. Me at the Envisioner with Yusuf at my side, less than an arm’s length away. Kaori ten feet across from us, her bored why are we here again look on her face and her arms crossed, her three-person security team in body armor with guns pointed at both me and Yusuf, just for kicks.

About an hour before, Fred had knocked on the door of our dorm/prison cell and left us a tray with a couple of slices of lukewarm cafeteria pizza and bottles of water, and my stomach still churned from the taste of soggy cheese. Of course, it was probably mostly nerves.