I winced, wracking my brain for what I’d been up to lately in my place—studio was too generous a word for the single room in the old wharf building I was squatting in, with its chipped brick walls in the drowned neighborhood of South Boston. My mattress on the floor and the card table with the single chair I rescued from the curb one trash day. The collages of doc stills on my walls, along with torn pages from antique beefcake magazines I’d found at a flood sale across the river at Harvard. At the very least, whenever I got home I freed myself from my pants.

“Find anything good?”

“You’re…” she trailed.

“Nondescript.”

“Ouch.”

“Sure, you’re a unique and beautiful snowflake,” she said, managing to crack a tight smile. “Nondescript is a classification. A good one. If I’m being forthcoming here—”

“I’m begging you.”

“We had to be sure that you weren’t a…” She struggled, looking a little embarrassed. “An extraterrestrial. Or time traveler. Or whatever else, given what we’ve found so far.”

“And what’s that?”

Her lips pressed into a line as sharp as the lapels of her white coat.

“Nothing I tell you leaves this facility.”

“Alright.”

“The only reason you’re here is because the machine never gives us a straight answer about you, no matter how we ask.”

“Wait. What?”

“Best we can tell, we discovered some tech from another universe. And for some reason—here’s the kicker—some version of you was in charge of the project and…”

I didn’t hear much of what she said past the words “some version of you.” Everything else just rattled around like noise in my brain.

*   *   *

The layout must’ve made sense to everyone else there, but as Kaori led me around the Compound, the place was a rat maze of white walls, long hallways, and dead ends. Of frosted glass doors that rolled open when I walked by, or others with chrome handles that I was afraid would shock me if I touched them. I followed Kaori, who sucked in a breath as I badgered her with questions. What does this thing do? And how can you keep it and evidence of alternate realities from the public? Just who do you think you are?

With all the conspiracy theories I’d heard on the doc circuit—of a world-wide phalanx of fourteen-year-old geniuses paid by governments to hack into housekeeping synths to sniff out treason and ransom off nudes, of billionaire CEOs strapping cement shoes on their competition and disappearing them down deep wells—I never thought any of them could be real. As I hoofed it through a secret, multinational research center, maybe a little suspicion wouldn’t hurt.