"Hey, Matt! Look at this," I called after my friend. He jogged back to me as I held up an odd pair of plugs I found in the piles of refuse lining the road. "I'm sure I've seen one of these things before."
"Hmm," he contemplated, weighting one of them in his hands," Maybe the others will know what they are. I'll hold onto this - who's that?" I turned around and saw a little boy in Lederhosen standing stock still several yards away.
"Are you looking for your parents?" Instead of answering me, the child took hold of his own head, pulled, and lifted it off to reveal the metal helm of a cyberman. Matt and I fled. Only after putting several hills and forks in the road between us and the cyberchild did we stop. Panting, we collapsed onto another trash heap.
"I thought all the cybermen had been converted back to humans."
"Obviously not!" I snapped.
Once we recovered our breath, we started to plot how we might destroy the boy. Most of our ideas boiled down to finding a gun or a chainsaw and attacking from behind. However, before we could come up with anything cleverer, I noticed footsteps. The cyberchild marched into view, trapping us in the blind alley. I squeezed my eyes shut.
"Toby!" a woman snarled. My eyes opened in time to see a woman bustle over to the boy and yank his human head back over his steel one. She pinned Matt and I with a desperate glare, then scurried away with Toby in tow.
"What...was that?" The next day, I had an answer for Matt.
"We're cybermen."
"No, we're not?"
"Yes! It all makes sense. Don't you remember? The history books say that this planet was nothing but cybermen until the humans came and converted us back. But that doesn't make any sense! This place should be flourishing with plants and animals, but it's just mounds of metal scrap. And cybermen don't go inside of people like that boy. The people go inside of the cybermen suits."
"But that cyberman was wearing a human suit. We saw him"
"If you had to brainwash people that hate you into becoming your kind and reviling their own, wouldn't a psychic filter to make them see the good when they look at the bad and vice versa be a handy way of doing it?"
"So, you're saying that every human we see, including ourselves, is actually a cyberman."
"Exactly!"
"And how did you come up with this theory?"
I pulled the plug we had found the other day out of my pocket. "This. Do you know what it is yet?"
"No, but I suspect you do."
"Think about all the times you've gone to sleep and woken up, and you don't remember going to bed or getting out of it. The last and first thing you can remember is standing in front of a dresser drawer that you've never opened before. That's because when we need rest, we have to plug ourselves in to the wall with one of these to recharge. The filter making us think we're still human can't explain that away, so it just blacks it out."
Matt took the plug from me and examined it hesitantly. After a time, he returned it with a shaking hand. "We...we need to fix this."
I'm not entirely sure how or why, but it seemed that my band of friends included several experts in alternate universes and how to create them. They concluded that our entire universe was a rotten branch of the alpha timeline, and if we wanted to escape it, we would have to break through to a parallel universe. So, we started to dig, but not with ordinary shovels. Our shovels dug holes through the ether dividing timelines. As we dug, the barriers between our space and others broke down, and flares of purple light streamed through the cracks. At last, the hole had become large enough for someone to step through.
"Well, I guess I'll see you on the other side," I said, but before I could go through, the police appeared. They looked like humans, but they moved like cybermen, and they chanted "delete." I tried to leap through the crack before the ether filled it in, but one of them tazered me, sending my cybernetic circuits into lock-down. I woke from the dream with the most severe case of sleep paralysis I have ever experienced.
Then I fell back asleep...
It seemed like a typical dream; Loki, out on parole, defended me from a drunken oaf at a Christmas party; I went to the school cafeteria to order a meal, but I didn't know what any of the food was. Then, the lethal purple aurora started to appear. It seemed to happen at random. Hongkong would suffer earthquakes and storms induced by the violet lights crackling through the sky. An hour later, the same thing might occur in Zimbabwe. Every government agency from the secret service to PETA was looking for answers. A group of friends and I decided to help them out.
Using a combination of astrophysics, numerical methods, and a wealth of comic book multiverse knowledge, we came to the conclusion that the purple flares were caused by a breach in space-time originating in some other universe. They appeared seemingly randomly because our planet moved relative to the alternate earth. By running some equations, I could calculate the time and location of the next flare within 5% error. Naturally, it took a while to convince the feds that we weren't just some meddling kids. However, once they were convinced, they gave us everything we could possibly need, including access to some experimental air-flippers that let you swim through the atmosphere. I had just started writing a program to automatically compute the next flare location when I woke.
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