Reality Heist by Geordi Riker (best ebook reader for chromebook txt) 📖

total of nine days. The main focus was on the funeral though, with the Canadian prime Minister and the United States president making beautiful speeches about how Hitler was a visionary who saw his dream come true and witnessed a golden forty years of Germany under the banner of the swastika. No mention of Auswitch, or the millions of Jews and other nationalities that were murdered in systematic order. Nothing.

Finally, I find my voice, “Shitheads.” That summed it up pretty nicely. I crumple the paper and throw it as far away from me as I can. It lands a puny ten feet away. I glance around the alleyway. Where am I? I shove my hands in my pockets and start walking, annoyed that I can't remember getting in the store, and that the guy hadn't even bothered to ask how I had managed the feat. “Shithead,” I mutter again before emerging onto the street. It must be morning, because there's not many people out. I glance at the sun, it hasn't even risen past the tallest buildings yet. I freeze, my eyes taking in the sight while my brain refused to compute the images it was receiving. I tilt my head back, taking in the sight, a chill rushing through my body as I try to understand how they could still be standing. They had been destroyed by terrorists when I was five, in two thousand one, September eleven, ending so many peaceful lives, devastating thousands more lives by taking away family members with those two planes.

How could the Twin Towers still be standing?

A man is walking down the street in my direction. “Excuse me,” I try to say, but all that comes out is, “Gwalior sie”. The man looks up, his face freezing in a cold expression as he sees me. Just as quickly, he crosses the street, and continues walking, tipping his hat to keep from seeing me again as he passes on the opposite side of the road.

“Hey!” I try again, but this time not even a garbled sound comes out. Instead, I'm silent, my voice frozen when ever I try to talk. What's wrong with me? I huff silently and keep walking, slumping could probably describe it more accurately.

Every person I see automatically crosses the street the moment they notice me, and keep on walking, ignoring any action I make. For some reason, I have no trouble talking when there's no one there to hear, but as soon as someone is within listening distance, my voice chokes up. My left foot still drags, giving me an awkward pace. For New York, it's very empty, next to no cars, except for a few ancient models that are parked on the side of the road. The streets are eerily quiet, and store windows are dark. More newspapers skitter in the streets, coming apart page from page and flying off in the wind that blows my black hair in my face. Where the heck am I? There's no way that New York, my beloved city, would change this much over night. I would have heard something. Even the buildings all look run down, including the sky scrapers, one of which is sagging at a bad angle. I hope it's as deserted in that area as it is here. That would be a huge fatality. My mind races through possibilities about how this place could have happened. Hitler won the war, so something had gone wrong. Somehow, I'm in an alternate time line, where something changed the outcome of the war.

There's this one kid in my class, Alex, a total smart ass and my best bud, and he does his best to outsmart the teacher. One time he asked Mr. Bryerson, the physics teacher stuck with us AP students, the plausibility of multiple universes existing within the same space. Bryerson had retorted with asking a question of his own, “If multiple universes do exist, why?”

Well, that stumped the nerd, until brilliance hit him like a thunderbolt, “Because maybe history isn't a straight line. Each time a person makes a decision, another universe is created where they chose the other option, instead of chocolate ice cream, they had vanilla.”

“And what good would that serve?”

“Well, when a kid runs into him and knocks him off balance, in the one universe his shirt gets stained with chocolate ice cream while in the other one there's no stain at all because he had vanilla.”

So, moral of the story, if alternate universes do exist, which I think, based on the evidence around me, they do, stick with vanilla ice cream, just to be safe. That and the fact that a single person's actions could change the fate of their world. 

Finally, the streets around me start to look a little familiar. There's a Hitler avenue in the middle of nowhere, but other than that, the street names are practically the same. The same fence borders the edges of Central Park. My limp's starting to kill, my feet hurting from all the walking. I still have only run across a few people, all avoiding me. I cross the street, and suppress a small smile as all the people practically run away from me. My backpack bounces up and down, and something is jutting through the padding and into my back. I enter the park, and sit down on the first bench I see. I didn't even notice the people close by until the little girl complains, “Mommy, what smells?”

I glance in her direction, a thin smile on my face. The girl shrinks back behind her mother, who quickly turns her back on me and walks away, her steps practically breaking out into a run, but always keeping herself between me and her daughter. I sling the backpack down from my shoulders and plop it beside me. It's black, and bigger than a regular school backpack, but definitely smaller than the ones people use in those 'roughing it' camping trips.

There's water bottle pockets on each side, and three other pockets, the smallest one barely big enough to fit a disk man. I open the largest pocket, that has enough room to fit at least one clunker laptop. Pulling things out, I find the source of the sharp edge: a small computer tablet, roughly 14 by 17 centimetres, like a big Android phone or something. The screen's black, and there's no visible buttons that I can see. I tap the screen, but nothing happens. That sucks, the battery must be dead. I look through the other contents of the bag, splaying them out on the bench: a lightweight jacket made of some sort of water proof material, a charger cord for the tablet, a small jack knife that I immediately pocket, a roll of duct tape,a black flashlight, a small first aid kit complete with bandages, tape, and alcohol swabs and scissors, a plastic bag containing a packet of waterproof matches, a large safety pin as well as a few little ones, a couple milk bones, a piece of crayon, salt packets, and a small container of dental floss. Then there's also a shiny silver blanket, a tin can with a lid, a container labelled baking soda, and a small box with the sharpied tag “Halazone tablets”. Whatever that's supposed to be used for.

I dig around for more goods, and pull out a red velvet bag with a drawstring. My now emptied backpack drops to the ground as I open the bag and gape in amazement at what I pull out. Money, currency I've never seen before, gathered in bundles held together with elastics, along with passports and other official looking documents, half of which are in languages I can't even recognize. Quickly, I pull the bag shut and stuff it back into the backpack, glancing around me nervously.

No one seems to have noticed, and before long, I reach into the bag and pull out one of the passports, flipping to the first page. The name of the country on the front declares the passport to be Swiss, and that's about the only word I recognize in the whole thing. I flip back to the picture. It's me, with some crazy Swiss name to the right of the picture. In it, I have blonde hair and blue eyes, but the snub nose and pointed chin are all I need to see to recognize that this is the person I see in the mirror everyday before I go to school.

“I think you grabbed the wrong papers for this neighbourhood.”

I jump as I turn around to come face to face with olive-shaped brown eyes, sun-darkened skin, and smirking lips beneath short, black hair. My mind quickly flips through all the people I've ever encountered in my life, his face doesn't trigger any flashbacks.

“Not one for talking are you? I guess that's a good thing, we've already got Ky to fill that category.” He walks around the bench and sits down on the other side of all the junk from my backpack. He glances at it meaningfully.

“Oh, shit,” I exclaim as I start shoving the stuff back in haphazardly. He watches in amusement as I try to cram all the stuff back in, including the stupid space blanket. I freeze as it hits me.

I look back at him, his smirk spreads into a wide grin. “And now she realizes...” he breaks off, trying not to laugh.

“How? How is it that I can actually talk to you?”

He shakes his head and lounges an arm against the back of the bench, “Because, I'm like you.” He tilts his head to one side, “Although, I can hardly believe it myself. I can't even see any pressure coming off of you, much less sense it. First timers are supposed to leak like a sip, or at least that's what Chase told me. But from you, not even a single drop. Do you know how weird that is?”

“Considering I have no idea what what you're talking about, no I don't know how weird that is. What the heck is pressure?”

He sighs and looks away from me, focusing instead on the abandoned playground, “Every human being has pressure, it's what makes you unique from the others around you. I guess, overtly simplified, it's your soul. Stronger souls can sense other strong souls. Weak souls just bum around in CEO offices and on street corners, controlling Wall Street among other entities like privately owned gas stations, independent grocery stores, and Kentucky Fried Chicken.” He pauses, glancing over, “You're supposed to laugh at that.”

I slump, “Yeah well, I can't find anything really funny right now. Come back in a couple of centuries.”

“Sarcastic,” he notes politically, “I wonder if that's a good point or a bad one in your case?”

“Who are you? And what do you want?”

He launches to his feet, spinning about so that he lands facing a thumb pointing proudly at himself, “I am none other than the Jesse Derke of the city Archipelegroe, sensei of the daigen of the same city, teacher of advanced Drifter techniques, third son of the head of the Derke family Kyo Derke, second in line to the dynasty. But everyone calls me Sensei, so you can call me Jesse.” He heaves a deep breath, “So, who are you?” he glances down at my forged Swiss passport, “And please do not tell me that your name is... Heidi Benziger, because you look nothing like a Heidi.”

“Where'd you get Heidi from?”

His eyes bug out of his head, “Wha... are you dense? On the passport in your hands, the name beside the photo says that the girl in the photo is named Heidi Benziger. Obviously, you are not her, so who are you?” He plops down and looks at me expectantly.

“I'm not going to give my name out to random strangers.”

“Oh no, don't do that, that's a horrible crime to commit, unlike dressing like a Curse and limping like a Fig in the middle of strictly Pure territory. Besides, who else have you managed to talk