"* Hush, don't you cry *" "* In the next life *" "Michelle is 15 years old." "Forgive me if this feels a little irresponsible." "It's irresponsible to let our son..." " I can't..." " What?" "You can't keep calling "her" a "him."" " Really?" "This again?" " What else..." "* Don't say a word *" "* And when I ask her *" " * Is she doing all right * -  * Are we happy inside *" "* She's a roller coaster *" "* And, yeah We're a fire in the night *" "* Lay your dead flowers *" "* All in a row *" "* Sooner or later *" "* We're gonna let them go *" "* And when she asks me *" "* Are we doing it right *" "* Come a little closer *" "* You've got nothing left to hide *" "Think of a line, a straight line coming across your elbow, your wrist." "Oh, way late, dude." "She doesn't have all night." "Sorry." "Did I miss anything?" "No." "We waited for you." "Come on." "We couldn't have imagined what interdimensional travel looked like any more than we could have imagined the blood on the floor rolling back into Scott Brown's body." "But we believed." "Two years passed in captivity." "Scott had given us the third movement." "Renata, the fourth." "You have it?" "Once more." "Once more." "In Renata's NDE, her guardian told her one of the side effects of dimensional travel is amnesia." "You could potentially forget everything from before." "So we invented symbols to record the movements." "Just like music is recorded in notes." "Do you want to take a break?" "No." "Keep going." "Once more." "Homer has the second and fourth movement on his back." "And I have the first and the third." "We figure the scars are a map we can never lose." "Can I touch it?" "Yeah." "It doesn't hurt anymore." "Why didn't you just let yourself die?" " And stay in your NDE?" " It wouldn't have worked." "The best way to think about it is like this..." "There are all these dimensions, worlds, alternate realities, and they're all right on top of each other." "Every time you make a choice, a decision, it forks off into a new possibility." "They're all right here, but inaccessible." "The NDEs were like... a way to travel through them, but temporarily." "We wanted... choices, chances." "The movements would allow us to travel to a dimension permanently." "Stay there." "A new life... in a new world." "To us, that was freedom." "What will it look like when we open the tunnel to the other dimension?" "I don't know." "I've never done it." " What?" " All I know is that it would be invisible." "The person leaving this dimension would experience a great acceleration of events, but no break in time-space." "It's like jumping into an invisible current that just carries you away to another realm, but... we had to have all five movements and we had to do them with perfect feeling." "But you never did it?" "Every movement we received... the Angel Hunter received as well." "One, two." "Face." "Elbow." "We were locked in a strange race with our captor." "Right above us, Hap was learning each movement on his own." "The question became, what would happen if we got the fifth movement?" "Could we keep it away from Hap long enough to make our escape?" "It had been a year since Renata had returned with the fourth." "Rachel was never given a movement." "We kept trying, but secretly I started to wonder... would we ever get the fifth movement?" "At least we had each other." "Hap was all by himself." "There was only one man he could share his secret with." "I've been having this dream, Leon." "It's dark." "I'm low to the ground." "Suddenly, there's this snap." "And I look down..." "and my leg's in a trap." "And I realize..." "I'm a rat." "I'm a scientist and I dream of being a rodent." "Don't blame yourself if it wears on you." "We're not dealing with plants." "I told you the same thing when you were my trainee in residency and you lost your first patient." "I remember." "This is different." "This..." "I mean, quite apart from the intellectual rigor, the..." " the physical labor..." " Endless." "And the need to maintain the ecosystem to support the..." "Test subjects?" "There's the guilt, some days." "Don't you find?" "Guilt?" "A given." "Huh." "Looks exactly the same as the old one." "I needed a bigger space to fit the new capacity." "I thought it would be difficult to find, but, really, this entire wing of the hospital is dead." "A janitor comes in on Thursdays, and I simply lock the door." "Where are the subjects?" "In the next room." "So... the other day I found myself feeling, uh... resentful." " That ever happen to you?" " Mmm." "My subjects seem... so united." "They... have this tribalism that sustains them somehow." " Uh, is this clean?" " Yeah." "Rituals." "Mutilation." "Attempts to explain existence, to control pain." "Yeah, I know all that, but I still..." "I couldn't help feeling outside of it all, somehow." "You are on the outside." "Stay there." "Well, I mean, in some ways we work together, no?" "Lab partners go home at night." "Subjects sleep in the experiment." "How do you not get attached?" "I enforce turnover." "You know this." "Potassium chloride." "Then into the incinerator." "Another perk of having my lab in a hospital." "Yeah, right." "It changes everything." "Trust me." "I realize that our work is, uh... about a paradigm shift." "Like Copernicus' revelations that... that Earth is not at the center of the solar system." " Mmm." " Life is not at the center of..." " human existence." " Mmm." "But I can't help wondering if Copernicus, the man, not the scientist... if he would have pursued that truth... if his work involved..." "experimenting on human beings." "It's a useless comparison." "Here's the terrible, beautiful truth." "No one cares." "There is no line between good and evil." "There's only what a man can stand." "Röntgen killed his own wife discovering the X-ray." "My advice?" "Uncover what you can, destroy the evidence... and turn a profit before you can no longer forget how you've done it." "You should know..." "I'm on the brink." " Really?" " Maybe a year, year-and-a-half, and I'll be able to offer incontrovertible proof of an afterlife." "What do you mean by that? "Afterlife"?" "Nothing spiritual." "More like a... a greater reality, another dimension." "Imagine the worldwide sigh of relief when I reveal that the answer to death is more life?" "How many nightmares will end then, my friend?" "I will reshape the world in a single click the day I publish." "Do you have an opposing theory?" "Come on, Hap." "Friction improves the work." "Share." "I think what we're dealing with, maybe, is not a single dimension." "I think it's multiple." "The Many-Worlds theory?" "Well, no, not exactly." "More like, uh, reality forking off into a different path." "No, look... imagine a garden of forking paths." "So, my subjects have touched on them in their NDEs, but now... now, Leon, they are uncovering a technology of movement that-that could allow them to travel to different dimensions, maybe even stay there." "And what's..." "What's really exciting is that I think I know where they go." "I think I know specifically where my subjects go to." "Maybe even what we're all a part of." "Where do they go?" "What do you mean, "a part of"?" "Well, I don't wanna say yet." "I mean, I don't know for sure." "I wanna..." "I wanna go there first." "I could give a shit about profit, with respect." "I just, I want..." "God, I want to taste the truth." "I just wanna walk out of the dark." "God, I'm sorry, I'm getting carried away." "It's probably all bullshit, and you're right and our work will spur each other on." "And then some young, smart, better person than us will come along." "And he, or she, probably, will..." "They'll be the one to build on our back-breaking work, and switch the light on." "Right?" "It's science." "So it goes." "Your confidence in your work makes me proud." "Since we're being open... can I share something unusual with you?" " Please." " Come." "The cold chamber, on the far wall." "Open it." " Which one?" " In the center, number 20." "What am I looking at?" "Leon?" "Where are your subjects traveling to?" "What have you uncovered, Hap?" "What are you doing, Leon?" "Tell me!" "I can't." "Leon, put it down." "You're not gonna..." "Tell me!" "All my fucking work." "My life!" "Stop!" "Leon, just stop!" "Stop!" "Oh, fuck." "Excuse me." "Call the police." "Give them that for access to the abandoned morgue." "There are people there that need help." "Sir?" "Sir?" "What do you mean "people"?" "I hope you know I've always thought of you, well, all of you as collaborators, but... you, most of all, I like to think of as a partner." "Don't." "And I know we're both worried about the same thing." "Will we ever find the fifth movement?" "One of us will get it." "And what then?" "What will you do with it?" "You and Homer will live fat, free and happy in some different version of this world?" "You don't want that." "You'll always be the girl willing to risk everything for the chance to achieve something extraordinary." "I know you, Prairie." "He'll never understand that about you." "I have a proposal for you." "We leave... tomorrow." "We suspend the work, we take the first two movements, which we know can heal." "We set up a clinic somewhere remote, an island maybe." "And we cure the incurable." "And the world's wealthiest, we take their money, our technology, and we continue the work in secret." "And the others?" "I'll take..." "That's a detail." "I will take care of them." "What happened?" "Who did that to your head?" "Something happened." "I had to protect the work." "I did what I had to do." "Prairie..." "Please..." "I'll take you anywhere you want to go." "I will not go with you." "Khatun?" "Where are you?" "Khatun?" "We need the fifth movement." "Khatun?" "Please help." "Khatun!" "I can't get warm." "Well, you will." "Your body temperature dropped to hypothermic levels." "Now, there was a sound." "There wasn't anything." "I didn't see anyone or hear any..." "I heard something very faint, very low frequency, but I..." "I managed to track it, isolate it." "I need your help." "What I need you to do..." "I can't." "I don't want to." "I am not your lab partner." "I am not your friend." "I'm your slave." "You want to know what happens on the other side?" "Put yourself in that machine and die for it." "I know you're exhausted." "So, I'll make it very easy for you." "I'm just gonna play you some sounds of where I think you may have been, and you tell me if you recognize them." "All right?" "So, how about this?" "I told you I didn't go anywhere." "This?" "Please just take me back to my cell." "Or this?" "I knew it." "You see?" "There was a sound." "So what?" "You record our NDEs." "No, no, no, that's..." "That's not a recording of your NDE." "That's a recording of, um... waves of electrons captured in plasma by a machine of great sensitivity that has traveled way beyond the heliosphere." "Decades." "But..." "You know, it takes years to reap the rewards, right?" "The rings of Saturn." "They sing." "That's where you were." "I don't think Khatun's gonna give us the fifth movement." "I don't think she wants him to have it." "We will get it." "We will get it." "When we were in the lab, he confided in me." "He was really scared." "He talked about wanting to leave." "I think he may have killed someone." "He talked about wanting to take me with him." "I don't know, maybe I should have said yes." "In exchange for your freedom." "For everyone's freedom." "Don't talk like that." "I don't think there's another way to talk, Homer." "It's like we've reached some sort of dead end and... determination just isn't enough, and..." "Fuck." "What did we think was gonna happen, anyway?" "We thought that..." "We don't know." "Show up on some other plane of reality and..." "Do what exactly?" "We're gonna have a garden." "A what?" "Yeah." "We're gonna plant vegetables." "I don't want to plant vegetables." "Fine." "I'll plant 'em." "Celery." "Squash." "Peas." "Come on." "We don't know anything about vegetables." "They'd all die." "You're right." "They die." "There wasn't enough rain." "We, um..." "We planted them too close together." "Not enough soil." "Yeah, they die." "So we try again." "The second year, there's rain, and we get the spacing right... but these mites come." "They eat 'em all up." "Their leaves are like tissue paper." "And they can't feel the sun." "Yeah." "But the third year?" "We grow this, um... like, uh, a special..." "A nettle plant..." "in between the vegetables." "The mites hate that shit, so they stay away." "And the rain comes." "And the rain comes." "Hap, your door's open." "I'm just coming in, okay?" "Hap." "Hap." "What...?" "Hap." "Hap." "Michelle?" "Michelle?" "Michelle?" "Buck?"