Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life

  “I’m sorry, Kal,” my father says, when no one else replies. “We had no choice. Earth is gone.”

  [When I look up at the sky,] I think about all the things I don’t see up there.

  —Kip Thorne, physicist

  Adeafening silence fills the room as everyone watches Kal. As virtually immortal life-forms, we don’t have to breathe unless we want to, and at this moment no one is.

  My hand on his shoulder, I can feel Kal trembling. His knees are locked in place, which is probably the only thing keeping him standing. He refuses to turn away from the transparent wall of my father’s office. We are high up in The Realms here, with the whole universe spread out around us. Usually the sight of billions of galaxies swirling like glittering diamonds is mesmerizing. Today, though, we cannot see its beauty. Today the distant clusters of stars only serve to remind us how, in a universe teeming with energy and drama, one small planet in the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way barely counts for anything (no matter how much fun it is to watch their football games on our view screens). We have been raised to believe that in the grand scheme of things, one planet doesn’t matter. Can’t matter.

  Unless your best friend’s parents are on it when it’s destroyed.

  “But I don’t understand,” Kal says, his voice sadder than I’ve ever heard it. (And I’ve heard him sing the blues—badly, but he’s sung them). “My parents are immortal, like all of us. Wouldn’t they have survived the destruction of Earth?”

  “That was our assumption, too,” my father says. “But we have not found any trace of them.”

  Kal still won’t turn away from the window. It’s like he’s searching the vastness of space for some sign of his parents. Through gritted teeth, he asks, “Did you know they were there? Before?”

  “Of course not,” says my father’s second-in-command, striding into the room. His name is Gluck the Yuck, a nickname my brothers and I gave him because he refuses to rearrange his facial features to be even the slightest bit pleasing. He’s not a bad guy, just a little hard to look at.

  “Well, we didn’t exactly check,” admits the green-haired suit. I really should learn their names.

  “There wasn’t time to check,” insists another. “The destruction has to be instantaneous. And what would be the odds of your parents working on that particular planet at the exact time someone from there would view The Realms? The odds are astronomical, that’s what they are.”

  A nice try to deflect blame, but we all know that the odds of anything existing in the universe at all is astronomical, so the man’s argument falls short.

  “I know!” Kal exclaims, whirling around to face the PTB. “The Afterlives will be flooded with all the new arrivals. I’m sure I’ll be called into work. My parents will still show up there with all the Earth people, right? So they’ll be back after all!”

  The committee members exchange uneasy glances. They look to Gluck to reply. Gluck then looks pointedly at my father. For the first time in my (very long) memory, my father hesitates before answering. “No one will be coming to the Afterlives.”

  Kal scrunches his brows. “I don’t understand. There were billions of people on that planet.”

  Dad looks uncomfortable, which is not a good look on the Supreme Overlord of the Universe. “We didn’t exactly destroy the planet. Per se.”

  “So my parents are still alive!” Kal shouts. He grabs my father’s arm, then immediately lets go when my father glares down at him. In a less shouty voice Kal asks, “Why did you say they’re gone?”

  My father sighs. “Perhaps I should have chosen my words more carefully. If someone never existed, you couldn’t truly say they were gone, could you?”

  This is as good a time as any to admit that I’m only the sixth smartest of Dad’s seven sons. My brother Laz is generally considered the least smart, at least when it comes to school stuff. He fails Planet Building class every term. He’s always calculating pi wrong, so his planets keep straying from their orbits and crashing into everyone else’s. But even with my limited brainpower, I can tell my father isn’t making any sense. “Dad, what are you trying to say?”

  He sits back down at the head of the table and places his large hands on the gleaming surface. The holograph pops back up. He pushes it toward Kal and me. All I see is a dark blob.

  “The last time The Realms were spotted,” my father says, “the spotter’s planet was able to escape harm due to his being thoughtful enough to die on the spot.”

  “Yes, we all know that,” I say, anxious for him to get to the point.

  “And the time before that,” he continues, “the planet was far from its sun, leading to very harsh living conditions. Only a few species had evolved, and their numbers stayed small. It was fairly easy to log them into the Afterlives in an orderly fashion. But in the case of Earth, which supported such an abundance of life…” He trails off, clears his throat, and continues. “Basically, the Afterlives would have been totally overwhelmed, so the PTB came up with a better idea.” He pauses and glances at Gluck, who nods his encouragement. Dad sighs. “We ripped Earth out of the space-time continuum.”

  Kal repeats the words, but slower. “You ripped Earth… out of space-time?”

  “Technically we couldn’t just take Earth,” Gluck explains, “since it’s gravitationally bound up with the sun and the rest of the solar system….”

  “So we took that, too,” Green-Haired Suit continues.

  “You took their sun?” I ask, hoping I heard him wrong.

  Green-Haired Suit nods. One of the PTB wearing a long white robe centuries out of style adds, “And the rest of the planets. And their moons and the asteroids and comets and such.”

  I clutch the back of a nearby chair to steady myself. From all my years of history class, I know nothing like this ever happened before. To interfere in the universe on such a grand scale is just unheard of. Kal, too, is frozen from the shock of it.

  “We didn’t have much choice, Joss,” my father says. “None of our options were good. If we had exploded the planet, gravity from the sun would have kept the pieces grouped together. A dead world, clinging to chunks of lifeless rock. No one wants to see that.”

  I shudder.

  Dad puts his large, steady hand on my shoulder. “Or if we simply took away the sun, Earth would have gone shooting off into space, and a rogue planet aimlessly hurtling about is simply too dangerous. We considered halting the planet’s rotation, but then everything would fly into the atmosphere, and there’s already enough junk in space these days. This way it’s nice and neat, and we don’t have that nagging guilt at killing off a five-billion-year-old planet. Now Earth never actually existed, so no one had to die. It’s a plan we’ve had in place for a while, in case the occasion ever arose.”

  Kal makes a sound that falls somewhere between a whimper and a growl. He faces my father and says, “According to your logic, my parents never existed, since they were ripped right out of time, too, right?”

  “I suppose you could say that, unfortunately. Yes.”

  Kal puts his hands on his hips. “Then why am I still here?”

  I turn to Dad to await his answer. We all know about cause and effect. It’s one of the basic laws of the universe. The arrow of time goes in one direction only. First comes cause, then effect. Even I know you can’t have a kid without having his parents first.

  But Dad only stares at Kal. Or should I say, stares at the spot where Kal had been standing. For Kal, my best friend, my childhood companion in all things, is totally, utterly gone. Gone like back in the days when we were able to wink in and out of places, but those days are far in the past. Is he hiding behind a chair? I peer under the table, but all I see are a lot of hairy legs in sensible shoes.

  He’s just… gone.

  “Hmm,” Gluck says thoughtfully. “I was afraid that might happen.”

  Before I can question them on Kal’s sudden and utter disappearance, he’s made MORE gone by the fact that in his place now stands a tall,
skinny girl wearing a big red parka, a white ski hat, and a sour expression.

  “Fascinating!” exclaims my father.

  “Now that,” says Gluck, “I didn’t see coming.”

  It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.

  —Charles Darwin, naturalist

  Seriously?” the girl says, looking around the room in annoyance. “First I dream about some old lady baking a pie, and now this? I totally shouldn’t have watched that Star Trek marathon last weekend. My father’s never going to let me forget it if I sleep through the closest approach of Mars in like, sixty thousand years. He’ll keep dragging me outside in the middle of the night pointing his new telescope at the sky until I go off to college.” She starts pinching her arm. “Why am I not waking up?”

  The PTB stare at one another in amazement, and it takes a lot to amaze these guys.

  “Fascinating!” Dad repeats, beaming. He loves the mysterious and unexplainable. That’s why he’s so good at his job.

  I just gape.

  Dad walks over to the girl and touches her on the arm. They both jump back.

  “So solid!” Dad exclaims. “Gluck, you have to feel this!”

  Gluck makes a move toward the girl, but I step in front of him. “Wait! You can’t just go around feeling people’s arms.”

  “That’s right,” she says, with only a cursory glance my way. “Don’t you people have any manners?” Then, surprisingly, she laughs and shakes her head. “Look at me, talking to people in my own dream. What are you supposed to do in nightmares again? Oh, right.” She turns to my father and shouts, “Be gone, freaky dream guy. And your freaky dream friends, too!” Then in her regular voice she says, “But I like the green hair, dude. It’s a good look for you.” She turns to Gluck and shudders. “How did I dream you up? You look like your face got caught in a garbage disposal!”

  If I weren’t so traumatized by Kal’s disappearance I would chuckle at that one.

  A few of the PTB rush from their seats. “You cannot talk that way to the Supreme Overlord of the Universe and the Powers That Be!” they bellow. “You are in the presence of greatness!”

  The girl quickly steps back until she is inches away from the invisible wall that overlooks the cosmos. My father holds up his hand. “It is all right, gentlemen. She means no harm.”

  She looks like she doesn’t know what she means right now. Her brows are furrowed in confusion. Fear alternates with indignant determination. She yanks off her hat and stuffs it into a coat pocket. She then crosses her arms in front of her. Or tries to, but her parka is so puffy her arms get stuck trying to get around her elbows. With a grunt of frustration, she unzips the coat, throws it on the floor, and begins stomping on it.

  While she’s distracted with that, my father nudges me and whispers, “Go talk to her. You two look about the same age, so she won’t perceive you as a threat.”

  “But what about Kal?” I whisper back. “We need to find out what happened to him and how to get him back. We have to hurry.”

  “We’ll talk about the Kal situation later, I promise.” He nudges me again. “Go. And ask her how she got here.”

  But I can’t seem to move. Kal is not a “situation.” He’s my best friend. The only person outside my family I really trust. I’m not even sure I trust everyone inside my family, actually. Kal is the person who understands me the best. And he’s gone. GONE. Things like this—shocking, unexpected things—don’t happen here. The universe might be a seething, swirling, booming place. But after nearly fourteen billion years of the same sorts of things happening—a sun exploding here, a galaxy colliding there, a new species sprouting up on a new planet—life in The Realms has fallen into a sort of “been there, done that” kind of routine. I admit, I like it this way. Unlike my father, I am not at all fascinated by the unexpected. At least not when it involves losing my best friend and one of my favorite planets.

  “Joss!” my dad booms. I startle and turn my attention back to the girl, who is still stomping on her coat.

  After one last jump-stomp combination with her clunky black boots, she kicks the coat, and it lands a foot away from me. Aware that my father’s eyes are on my back, I bend down to pick it up. Moving slowly so as not to frighten or anger her, I hold out her coat. “You really don’t like this parka, do you?”

  She looks at it but doesn’t take it. “It’s puffy and red and stupid and I hate it. Plus, it makes me look twelve years old.”

  “How old are you?”

  She shrugs. “Twelve.”

  When I can’t think of a suitable reply, she adds, “But I’ll be thirteen really soon.”

  “I just turned thirteen,” I say. It’s more like a billion and thirteen, but she probably doesn’t want to hear that. “So… how did you, uh, get here?”

  Ignoring my question, she steps closer to me, examining my face carefully. “You have really perfect skin, anyone ever tell you that? Like, no pores. My friend Lydia is obsessed with her pores and spends hours in front of her magnifying mirror. She’d hate you.”

  “That’s nice to know,” I say, not really sure what pores are. To be polite, I say, “My name’s Joss. What’s your name?”

  “Annika Klutzman,” she replies, then glances down at her watch. I’m shocked to see the second hand ticking the time away. Eyebrows rise all around the room. Time is measured by how long it takes a planet to revolve around its sun, and we have no sun. Her watch should not work in The Realms.

  “I really need to go,” she says, blinking fast. “This is the LONGEST dream, and I’ve got to wake up. I don’t want to sleep the night away and miss the whole meteor shower. Well, I do want to miss it, but it’s important to my dad, so…” She starts pinching her arm again. Then she squeezes her eyes closed and open, closed and open. She takes a big gulp of air (we don’t have oxygen here, which begs the question of how she can breathe), holds it, then lets it out. “Ugh,” she says. “I’m still here.”

  My father taps his large foot impatiently.

  I repeat my previous question. “So, um, how did you get here again?”

  “Honestly,” she says, “I don’t really remember falling asleep. One minute I’m looking through Dad’s scope at the sky where, as usual, nothing is happening, and then I must have fallen asleep because suddenly I see this old lady with flour on her face, pulling a pie out of an oven.” She pauses. “I think it was apple.”

  “And then you were here, in my father’s office?”

  She nods. “Pretty much. That dream faded into dark and then this one started. You know how dreams are.”

  I don’t, actually, since we don’t dream here. We don’t much sleep, either, maybe once every few months. But I nod politely.

  She looks around again, clearly trying to make sense of her surroundings. I try to see PTB headquarters through her eyes, with her limited senses. Like the rest of the universe, The Realms are made of concentrated energy disguised as matter. But in the rest of the universe, all the matter—all the stuff —is made of tiny dancing particles inside only slightly larger atoms. And almost all those atoms, including the ones that make up her own body, were forged inside exploding stars. Here in The Realms, those tiny particles aren’t so tiny. Humans are made of trillions of atoms, of all different elements. We are made of only a hundred atoms and only primordial elements, the ones that were here at the very beginning of space and time, the ones that no other beings in the universe can see. We are more gas than solid, more energy than matter. Our surroundings shimmer and glow, vibrate and pulse. Sounds weird, but you get used to it.

  As for the people, the inhabitants of The Realms mostly look like the kind of people she’s used to. We have brains and hearts and skin like most of the species in the universe, but we are very different from them. Basically, we are only a bit denser than our surroundings. Like a liquid on Earth, we can mold ourselves to fit any container. Last century it was very trendy to take the shape of Bl
opies, the purple blobs from a planet with a really weak gravitational force in the Whirlpool Galaxy. The Blopie craze wore off when people missed having hands.

  I’m suddenly not sure how much I’m supposed to say to this girl, this living, breathing human. Do I tell her she’s in The Realms, and that this isn’t a dream? Do I explain that the PTB made it so her entire solar system never actually existed? All because of her? I want to ask about Kal, but it’s all too much to process. I glance at Dad for help.

  “Permit me to explain,” he says, stepping closer to us. The girl flinches but holds her ground.

  “I am Joss’s father, and you could say I run this place.”

  No longer hindered by her huge coat, Annika crosses her arms successfully this time. “No disrespect, mister, but you don’t run my dream.”

  A flash of anger crosses my father’s face, but it is gone so quickly that her senses wouldn’t have noticed even a flicker in his expression.

  “You are right, of course,” he says. “I will defer to your nocturnal flights of fancy.”

  “Good,” she says. “Whatever that means. Well, since this dream won’t seem to go away on its own, I’m gonna curl up and ignore it till it does. So… see ya.” She takes her coat from my hands, drops it to the floor, then lies down on top of it and closes her eyes. Instantly, gentle snores fill the cavernous room.

  Dad and I share a surprised glance. The PTB grumble angrily. Really, no inhabitant of The Realms would EVER treat my dad this way. But Dad motions all of us to the other side of the room.

  “Let her be for now,” he says. “Joss, you wait here until she’s ready to talk again.”

  The PTB hurry out, probably glad to be released of any responsibility for the strange girl. Gluck the Yuck is the only one who stays with us.

  “Dad, you promised to get Kal back.”

  He glances at Gluck before answering. “It’s not that easy.”

  “You’ve been saying that a lot today. Everything’s easy for you. You’re the Supreme Overlord of the Universe!”