Rabbits(93)

There in the countless smooth gray stones that made up the beach, written using scraps of ubiquitous golden-colored driftwood, was a message comprised of one word and one letter: Monorail K.

For just a moment I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I took a sip of water and looked around the coffee shop. What the fuck was happening?

I looked down at my phone again. Nothing had changed.

Monorail K.

I took a look at the date the picture had been taken by Google. June 2018.

Is it possible that this image, taken three years ago, might have something to do with me, sitting in this coffee shop staring at it three years later? If I wanted an answer to that question, I suspected all I had to do was call an Uber and ride ten minutes south to the monorail.



* * *



—

The car dropped me off at Seattle Center Station, and I took the escalator up to the monorail. I slipped my card into the machine and was just about to buy a one-way ticket back to Westlake Station when I noticed something strange about the screen.

I had two choices.

I’ve lived in Seattle since I was a kid, and in all of that time, the monorail has consisted of only two stops, roughly a mile apart: Seattle Center Station and Westlake Center Station. Those are the only two stations. No matter which station you board at, the monorail has only one stop to make. But now I was presented with two choices: Westlake and Sea-Tac.

Suddenly, the monorail had a station at the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport?

This was impossible. There was no Sea-Tac Station.

I bought a one-way ticket to the airport.

I could tell things had changed from the moment I stepped into the car.

Because the monorail has only two stations, there’s no need for a map of the route. Instead, there are drawings and photographs featuring the historic train throughout the years.

But now, in place of the historical drawings and photographs I’d been looking at my entire adult life, there was a map that included three stations: Center, Westlake, and Sea-Tac.

I sat down and rode the monorail to the third station on the map.

If there was any question I was following the correct path, there was a newspaper sitting facedown on the seat beside me. I picked it up and flipped it over. The date of publication was a few days ago, which was just as impossible as a third station on the monorail, because the newspaper had shut down ages ago, publishing its last issue sometime in the fall of 2000.

It was a free biweekly called The Rocket.



* * *



—

“Welcome to Sea-Tac Station,” said a woman’s voice on the loudspeaker as the train pulled into the station. I’d spent the fifteen minutes it took to reach the airport alternating between scanning the train and the faces of the six other people riding it, and looking through The Rocket for clues.

I couldn’t find anything.

But there had to be something.

It turns out that something was actually a someone.

She was standing on the platform when I stepped off the train at Sea-Tac Station.

It was Emily Connors.

“Come on,” she said, grabbing my arm. “I don’t have much time.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Wasting my time looking for you when I should be figuring out a way to save the world,” she said, leading me down to the street.

“I’m sorry?”

“You don’t need to be sorry. Just get in the fucking car.”

Emily pressed a button on her fob and the gull-wing doors of a nearby black Tesla X opened with a distant whir and click.

“What’s going on?” I asked. “Is reality somehow…changing?”

“I’m guessing you noticed a few…discrepancies on your way here?”

“Yeah. Is this…”

“Another dimension?”

“I didn’t wanna say it,” I admitted. “But…is it?”

“It’s kind of complicated. But right now, I really just need you to get into the fucking car.”

The two of us got into the car and Emily started driving. Fast.

As we merged onto the freeway, I looked out the window at downtown. The building that had appeared out of nowhere earlier was gone and the skyline was back to the way it had been before all of this stuff started. Sure, the Fremont Troll was holding a different car, and the monorail had three stations, but if I didn’t look too closely, I was almost able to imagine that everything was back to normal.

Emily pulled off the freeway one exit later.

I had a million questions, but I couldn’t decide what to ask first, so I sat silent in the passenger seat as Emily guided us through the city.

She eventually pulled into a small concrete carport just off Lake Washington Boulevard. We stepped out of the car and onto what I’d assumed was a stone pathway treated with some kind of rubber, but as soon as our feet touched the surface, the path started moving. It was a conveyer belt, kind of like you might find in an airport—what they call a people mover.

The conveyor belt eventually dropped us off in front of a small white concrete structure that housed an elevator. There was no call button, but Emily did something on her phone, the doors opened, and the two of us stepped inside. As soon as the doors shut behind us, the elevator started moving up.

We stepped out of the elevator into a marvel of open-concept design.