Carrolwood 25-26 The End (Patreon)

Chapter 25

While Carl lost himself in romantic fantasies, Sunni’s mind raced with what she’d seen while hacking into the power company’s systems. Once she’d gotten in, she’d looked first for a power surge on campus, thinking the culprit was no doubt using school facilities to stage the attacks. But, she’d been wrong. The power consumption on campus has been roughly the same as the year before during the same time frame, and the year before that. There was no anomaly. No location that seemed to be drawing far more power than one could justify.

The multiverse manipulator, as she’d decided to name it, was not operating on campus. Now, she paced back and forth in her room, struggling with whether or not to go back and hack into the system right now, tonight, from her room. It was, of course, illegal. Were she caught, that might not go over well with the admissions committee at Harvard. On the other hand, she’d already broken the law, and if anyone were interested, they could easily identify her as the hacker once they traced it back to the old Chem lab.

Part of her was very sure she should wait until the next day, use a little more caution, log in from outside some place that had free Wi-Fi… but another part of her was now fueled with testosterone, and that part sat down at her computer and started to hack. As she began to work her way back into the system, she briefly thought of Carl. He would probably want to be here for this. Them doing it together. Ah! Female nonsense, she decided. It was better to get it done now, when their nemesis was probably asleep. She was keeping Carl safe. She would explain it to him if he did get all female on her.

Hacking was, for Sunni, fairly boring. The process, unlike in the ridiculous movie, Hackers, didn’t involve a lot of flashing lights and explosions. She also did not get any special thrill from “breaking the rules.” As previously revealed, she was a bit of a goody two shoes. However, this particular hack did fill her with excitement because she was about to find the key to undo all that had been done. She would also, perhaps, unmask the villain. Perhaps, she thought, she would turn said person in a toad, or a turnip. Certainly, she would need to erase from that person’s memory the ability to build the machine, or that they ever had built such a machine.

Was it ethical to meddle with someone else’s memory? No. But it was necessary. And more, she felt the machine needed to be destroyed. It gave whoever controlled it too much power. Yes, Sunni was certain she would destroy the machine, and she was enjoying a quite satisfactory sense of her own moral superiority at this thought when she identified the location of a massive and inexplicable power surge that could only be the machine. “No,” she whispered. “It’s not possible. Please. This can’t be true.”

It made her feel sick. It made no sense. And yet each time she looked at the computer screen, she saw it, plain as day. Data didn’t lie: the power surge was located at her house.

Sunni covered her face. It could only be her parents. They were the only ones who lived there besides her. But why? Even as she asked the question, a terrible feeling came back to her, one she’d struggled with her whole life; the feeling that her parents had always kind of wanted a boy.

Hadn’t she heard her father mention, more than once, that the family name would die, as he had no son to carry it on? Hadn’t her father sometimes said in a kind of off-hand way that it was too bad he didn’t have a son to watch football with? Her parents had been loving, supportive. They had never expected less of her because she was a girl, never been ones to make her feel it was more important to be pretty than smart. They’d been good. But she’d always had this nagging fear, this insecurity over the idea they might have loved her more had she been their son and not their daughter.

And now she was the son they must have always wanted. Sexism!

Sunni pulled up the floor plans to the house. She looked them over and spotted a location where she was now sure the machine was located. And then, she sat and thought. It is a testament, dear readers, to the love and devotion that she had for her parents that she now struggled with her decision. If her parents wanted a boy so badly they would go to these incredible lengths to make her one, maybe she owed it to them to be that boy. To marry, father children, carry on the family name. To be strong and tall, to watch football, grunt and fart and drink beer with her dad.

But no. Her years of women’s studies kicked in. Her sense of self and identity and self-determination. She would not be a boy just because her parents had been programmed by a patriarchal culture to think boys were better. She was a girl, and she was going to do great things. Besides that, no one had a right to tamper with reality. No one had a right to change and alter people’s lives. Truth was important. Truth must prevail.

She got up and crept downstairs, past her parents’ closed bedroom door. She headed down to the basement. Yes. Just as she’d suspected. The basement was smaller than indicated on the floor plans. There was a large bookshelf along one wall. It was almost comical, like something out of an old movie. She started to pull books on the top shelf, books she’d once been too short to reach, one by one, until finally she pulled one called “The Master Key” and a secret door swung open. Lights immediately flickered on, filling the room with a warm, golden glow. There was a computer desk against the back wall, surrounded with a server farm, all manner of wires and gadgets and five large screens. That, no doubt, was the machine. But Sunni’s eyes were also drawn to the walls, which were plastered with pictures and news clipping. She saw her own face, again and again, as a small child, a tween… and then a headline caught her eye: Local Teen Missing. There was a picture of her under the headline when she was 13 or 14, smiling, her teeth all covered in braces. Then, another. Teen Found Murdered. Another picture of her.

Sunni shook her head. No. This never happened. I was never kidnapped, murdered.

“I’m sorry,” she heard Mom say, and turning she saw her mother standing in the doorway to the secret room. “You were never supposed to know.”

“This isn’t real,” Sunni said. Her mother seemed, suddenly, a stranger. Someone she thought she knew, but whom she’d never known. “You and dad…”

Mom walked into the room, shaking her head sadly. “Your father doesn’t know about this. I did all of this-- for you.”

“For me?” Sunni looked back at the headlines. She was smart, and she’d put it all together, but even the smartest of us can struggle with denial. “This is all fake. You made this up.”

“I’m sorry. I wanted to protect you. You were kidnapped, Sunni. Beaten. Tortured. Murdered. I had to go down to the morgue and identify your body.”

“This isn’t true…”

“You were— it was so awful to see you like that. To see what he had done to my beautiful daughter. And I wish I hadn’t done it, because for a long time after that I could only remember you that way: cold and dead on a slab in a morgue.” Mom opened her arms, stepped forward.

Sunni backed away. “Stay away from.” Sunni struggled with what she’d just been told. “I died?” She said. “I’m dead?”

“I turned my grief to rage. I worked relentlessly on this— the Multi-verse Mash-up — always driven by one single desire: to erase what had happened, to create a world where you didn’t get kidnapped. To create a world in which you lived, and I had my daughter to love! To have my daughter to live her life, to go out and do amazing things!”

“Shit,” Sunni said, turning away, looking at the machine, trying to process all that she’d learned. Was it possible? Had her mother done all this to save her? To bring her back from the dead? “But then, why this?” Sunni said, gesturing down at her body.

“Because it kept happening,” Mom said, looking at the picture of Sunni as a grinning five-year-old. “It kept happening again and again. Not the same man. But— remember the day you intervened with Matt and Carli?”

“Yeah.”

“Matt attacked you in another timeline. And there was no one there to stop him.”

“Bull Shit.”

“And then there were teachers, professors, bosses… time and again, you were subjected to abuse and harassment. I got sick of it. Sick of fixing it only for it to happen again. I finally realized the only way to protect you was to make you a man. Big. Strong. That way, you would be safe.”

Sunni’s head swam. She sat, put her face in her hands. Her mother stepped toward the machine. “Stop!” Sunni said, standing, blocking the machine.

“I can make you forget all this,” Mom said, her eyes glowing with a bit of crazy now. “You and Carli — you’ll get married and have beautiful children. You’ll be happy. She’ll be happy. I have created a beautiful and perfect future for you. I know I have. Let me do this for you. All I want is for you to be safe, alive and happy.”

“What about Carl? How is this fair for him?”

“He’s perfect for you as a girl. I made sure of it. He’ll make a wonderful mother, a happy little housewife. I spliced it all in there. He loves being your girl. What’s bad about that?”

“But that’s not who he is. Not who he’s supposed to be.”

“It’s who he needs to be. For you.”

“It’s not right,” Sunni said. “I can’t let you turn Carl into my Stepford wife.”

“She loves it!”

“No.”

“Sunni, please,” Mom said. “I am your mother. I know what’s best for you.”

“Maybe I don’t want what’s best. Maybe I want what’s real.”

“This is all real. All of this happened in another world. I just curated it for you.”

“It’s wrong.”

“Do you want to be dead?” Mom said, shrugging. “Are you willing to make that choice in the name of what? Fairness? Truth? You were murdered, and how was that fair?”

***

Carl woke with a start. He had an overwhelming feeling of anxiety, like he was in great danger. He turned on his bedside lamp, looking around the room, half expecting to see someone, or some shadow that would indicate there was a man in his closet, or hiding under his bed. That’s silly, he thought. I’m thinking like a child. Yet, now that the thought had entered his mind, he knew he would have to summon all his courage and look— wait. A poster on the wall opposite his bed grabbed his attention. It wasn’t his Wonder Woman movie poster. It was— some football player? Yes. Tom Brady. Back when he’d been a boy….

“Sunni!” Carl leapt from his bed, heart racing, terrified. Sunni must have discovered the machine. She was changing them back. But Carl didn’t want to change back! He didn’t want her to change back. He rushed to his laptop, popping it open, and started to hack the power company. When he got through, his head swam with confusion. What? How? It didn’t make sense. But he felt the world tilt, and he realized he now had a flat chest. It felt so wrong. Like he was turning into a little girl again. Grabbing his keys, slipping into his slippers, he ran for the door, praying he would be able to stop Sunni before it was too late.

Chapter 25

Sunni sat at the multi-verse machine. She was scanning worlds, going back through the history of all that her mother had cut and spliced, changing she and Carl back to the way they’d been, back to the reality they’d known right before the first change. Her mother had sunk to the floor, her head down, hands in her lap. “You don’t know what you’re doing,” Mom said. “Please. I don’t want to lose you.”

***

Carl knees banged into the steering wheel as his body returned to its previous height. He groaned. Struggling to put the seat back, he swerved without realizing into the oncoming lane. Lights in his windshield grew brighter and brighter, a horn blasted, he looked up just as his car slammed into a Tractor Trailer, the glass of his windshield splintering, and then everything went dark—

And then he was driving down the street again, as if nothing had happened. He was tall still, and the seat was now safely back, and he gripped the wheel determined to be safe, heart pounding.

***

Sunni was talking to herself as she continued trying to fix things. She hadn’t anticipated one of her changes causing Carl to die in an accident. She’d fixed it, but it made her realize that this process had a butterfly effect, where each change could cause a cascading series of unexpected changes to occur. She wondered if she could, in a sense, use the machine to go back in time, stop the changes from happening. She glanced at her mother, but Mom was just staring at her hands. She would be no help.

Part of her said- wait. Learn more about the machine and how it works before you make more changes. But another part feared this machine, dreaded the possibility that as long as it existed, there was the risk her mother or someone else would use it to change her reality. The realities of millions.

Though her brain said wait, her gut said- GO! She decided to trust her gut. She continued to make the changes, reversing everything her mother had done. In what seemed like mere minutes, Sunni curled her long, silky black hair behind her ear, stood and looked down at herself. She was herself once more. Her real self. Or, the real version of herself that had not been murdered.

She looked at the computer screens. Toggled controls, careful not to change anything by accident. “How do you see the future timeline?” Sunni said. Her mother had calmed, was now just staring off with that 1000-mile stare. “How do I make sure this is right?”

“Right? Future?”

“You said that in every version of my future, I was attacked or murdered. How did you foresee that? Where’s the control?”

“I didn’t foresee anything, Sunni,” Mom said. “I lived through them all. I lived through the murders and the attacks. I suffered through them all. And then I fixed them. I have seen you die a dozen times, had to try and console you a dozen more after you were harassed or attacked or escaping from a toxic relationship. I can’t believe you want to put me through all that again, let alone yourself.”

“Omigod,” Sunni said, her heart breaking for her mother. She’d never imagined that all those things had actually happened. That her mother had been forced to endure it all. And her heart broke for herself, all those versions of herself and their suffering. “Omigod.” She looked at the machine. Back to her mother. “Why? Why me?”

Mom shook her head. “I don’t know. I can’t understand it either. You didn’t deserve any of it. And yet, it just kept happening. It’s almost like it was programmed into your fate somehow. An algorithm of certain doom.”

Sunni did not want that. Maybe? Maybe Mom was right. Maybe she should use the machine to change the world, her fate. She could make women’s equality happen right now. But, it still just didn’t seem right. It seemed like the exact kind of controlling behavior she had condemned from the patriarchy. As for herself, she was strong, and she could prevent these doomed fates from happening. She wouldn’t allow herself to be a victim.

“This is the part where you tell me that you can take care of yourself,” Mom mumbled, as if lost in memory. “This is where you, poor, silly girl that you are, convince yourself you can do anything.”

“We’ve been here before? We’ve lived this before? You have.”

“I’ve lived it all before. I have. And I am telling you, you can’t stop this on your own. You have tried and tried, and every time you have failed.”

‘You’re lying,” Sunni said. “I don’t—“

“Believe in the word failure?” Mom finished for her.

The fact that her mother knew what she was about to say infuriated Sunni. She did not like the idea that she wasn’t in control, wasn’t making decisions, but was simply reciting a script, a script her mother had heard before. “Trust your gut," she told herself. “Listen to your heart.” She did, and she knew what she would do next. She returned to the machine.

“And now you destroy the machine,” Mom said. “And I have to live through another nightmare.”

“I’m not going to destroy the machine,” Sunni said. “Not yet.”

“Wait,” Mom said, seeming surprised for the first time. “You always destroy the machine.”

“And we always end up right back here,” Sunni said. “My first impulse was to destroy the machine. But now— I am going to go with my second impulse.”

“What are you doing?” Mom said, struggling to her feet. “You —

Mom faded away just as Carl came running down the stairs. He saw Sunni’s Mom fading away like a ghost. “Sunni? What did you do?”

Sunni turned to Carl. “I erased all knowledge of this machine from her. She won’t remember she ever made it, that it ever existed. She upstairs sleeping now, unaware that any of this ever happened. When I destroy this thing, that’s the end.”

She turned back to the machine. “Wait!” Carl said, rushing to her side, grabbing her arm as she was reaching toward the wires connecting the servers, intending to tear them out. “Stop.”

“What?” Sunni said, struggling. “You know if needs to be destroyed.”

“Not yet. Let’s talk?”  Carl let Sunni go, but he placed himself between her and the machine.

“Carl. There’s nothing to talk about.”

“I love you,” Carl said. “I’ve fallen in love with you— but the other you. The man.”

“That’s just my mother’s bullshit. She spliced all that into you so you would become my Step- ford wife.”

“Then why do I still feel it?” Carl said, tears rolling down his cheeks. “Why does the thought of losing him hurt so much? Why does it make me want to die?”

“I must have missed something when I was putting you back together, but it isn’t real. It never was. Carl, I saved you. She was making you into some kind of Betty Crocker fantasy woman who lived only to be a wife and mother. You can’t possibly want that.”

“I do,” Carl said. “If it means I get to be with him.”

“It isn’t right,” Sunni said. “And the machine is too powerful. In the wrong hands? We can’t use it. We don’t know who else will be impacted.”

“But it hurts so much,” Carl said. “I can’t face the pain. I don’t want to go back to hating you.”

“We have to put everything back. No matter the cost,” Sunni said. “We can’t play God.”

“And I won’t remember any of this?”

“None,” Sunni said.

“So, it’s like this version of me will die? Gone? No one will even remember me?”

“I’m sorry,” Sunni said. “No. But you, Carl, the version you were supposed to be, will live once more.”

“Just one more hug, then?” Carl said. “Before the end?”

Sunni nodded. She felt she owed him that much. This version of Carl was about to, for all practical purposes, die. She stepped forward, Carl put his arms around her, and then he quickly turned her, locking her in a choke hold. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t let you do this.”

Sunni struggled. She couldn’t breathe. He’d cut off her oxygen. She kicked her legs and dug her nails into his arms and thrashed like a wild animal until the world went dark.

Epilogue

Sonny pulled up to Carli’s house in his SUV and gave the horn a tap. Carli came bopping out of the house, all smiles and blonde curls bouncing. “Hey, Babe,” Sonny said, leaning over to give Carl a kiss. “How’s my little love bunny today?”

“I am, like, so totally awesome! Oh, and you are so handsome! My big, strong man!” Carl gushed, grabbing his phone and answering a couple texts from his girlfriends. Sonny grunted, turning up the death metal on his sound system. As much as he loved his little Carli, sometimes her incessant chatter drove him a little crazy, so he had to drown it out sometimes.

Carl smiled to himself, glancing over at Sonny with his beard and his massive arms. Carl, for his part, thought death metal was the worst, but even the things that annoyed him about Sonny were endearing and just made him love the big lug even more. Biting his lip, he shook his head side to side, pleased with himself. Of course, he loved everything about Sonny, he thought. After all, he’d made him the perfect man, using that amazing super cool contraption that Carl had chosen to name The Perfection APP, or PerfApp, for short.

Carl’s phone buzzed. He looked down. It was Sonny’s Mom. “How are my little lovebirds today?”

“Best!” Carl texted back. It sure was lucky for him that Sunni’s Mom had texted him as he was driving over that night. She’d told him just what to do to make sure he got to live his dream of being Sonny’s girlfriend— he was perfect for Sonny, and he knew he was just going to be so happy as her wife and the mother of her children. Once he’d knocked Sonny unconscious, he’d restored his Mom. She’d walked him through putting things back the way they were supposed to be. He really liked her. She was so cool.

Of course, they each vowed to use the machine only for the most dire emergencies, like if a giant asteroid was about to hit Earth or Sonny got a really dumb tattoo. But, well, they did have some plans for Matt. He was in for some big surprises!

As Sonny’s girlfriend and helpmate, Carl knew it was his duty to let Sonny be valedictorian. He’d let Sonny think he’d won it fair and square, of course— boys were so insecure! But Carl knew his status would be dependent on his husbands’ success anyway, so it was better he helped his man get ahead. It was just the way of the world. There was no point in a girl fighting it.

And, anyway, Carl, like, totally didn’t even care about valedictorian anyway. He really didn’t. He just wanted to be Sonny’s girl, and as long as he was that, he knew he would be soooo happy.

The End