Wakers

Chapter 1 1 BECAUSE HE WAS a teenager, and teenagers take pleasure in exploring wacky ideas, Laz Hayerian had wondered since the sixth grade whether we are the same person when we wake up that we were when we went to sleep. Specifically, he wondered if he was the same person, because sometimes his dreams persisted in memory as if they had been real events. Did dream memories change him the way real memories did? This always led to the deeper question: Since Laz had memories that came, not from dreams, but from timestreams he had stepped out of, did his intertwined memories of other realities make him less sane? Or more experienced? Or both? Since, as far as he knew, no one else in the world had the ability to side step from one timestream to another, there was no one he could ask, and no philosopher who had written about it. As he woke up this morning-morning?-he felt very strange, and it wasn't the residual effect of some dream. He didn't even remember dreaming. It was his own past that felt like a disjointed dream, as if sometime in the night his whole life played out in his mind, but completely out of order, an incoherent scattering of scenes, facts, feelings, people, places. When he opened his eyes, he was in nearly complete darkness. Even on mornings at Dad's place, there was always plenty of light that seeped around the curtains. All he could see was a tiny amount of green light coming from a few inches to his left. He was lying on a plastic mattress that felt no more cushioned than the pad in the bottom of a portable crib. Yet he didn't feel any aches or sore spots, and when he flexed muscles up and down his body, nothing caused him pain. So Laz did what he had always done since his earliest memories of childhood. He searched for the alternate paths through time that were always close enough for him to take hold and shift, changing the story of events in bold or barely perceptible ways. It didn't matter which, as long as it got him into a place where things made more sense. For the first time in his life he could not find any of the alternate timestreams. No, no, he was finding them, yes, thousands of them-as always. Only none of them went back even a moment earlier than the moment he woke up just now. And none of them showed him doing anything different, so there was no point in side stepping from one to another. He was afraid. He had never reached out and found that all his pasts and all his futures were identical. It meant he had no choices. Whatever was going on right now, he was like other people-he was trapped. He didn't like feeling trapped. Why was he feeling trapped? He extended his hands away from his sides and they bumped into solid walls. He was in an actual container. The green light came from some LED letters and numbers on a panel at his left side, inside the box, but he didn't know what any of them meant. Someone else would explain them to him. If he was in some kind of-what? A medical treatment chamber? An anti-infection box while some damaged part of himself healed without gangrene? If somebody had operated on him, he had no idea where. Laz reached up, straight out in front of his chest, and his hands almost instantly bumped into some kind of ceiling or lid or cap. It felt like plastic; it had a little bit of give to it. So he was in a sealed environment, though he didn't feel claustrophobic or even particularly warm. He was definitely a claustrophobe. The time his mother rented an RV and invited him to sleep on one of the bunk beds, he couldn't sleep that night at all. He didn't complain, though. His mother loved the RV. And Laz didn't want to ruin it f