A Hundred Thousand Worlds Read Online Free

Crumpled and damp with his sweat. Disgusted, he puts it back.
    “Twenty bucks to talk to me?”
    “Just to talk,” Brett says.
    She looks at him. Look of a mother, not a lover. She leans over and kisses him on the cheek.
    “I’m glad you won your bet,” she says. She makes her way past him. Toward the exit.
    “Miss Torrey?” Brett says after she’s passed him. She turns back.
    “I liked season six,” he says. She assesses this. Remnant of another conversation. Wreckage from a different ship. She nods and leaves the bar.

Live-Action Role-Playing
    T he screen goes black and the credits appear. Andrew Rhodes is Ted Kammen, they say.
    Alex’s dad is Andrew Rhodes, a television actor who lives in Los Angeles and whom Alex hasn’t seen in six years.
    Alex’s dad is Ted Kammen, a movie actor who lives in Los Angeles whom Alex has spent the past half hour with.
    Alex’s dad is Ian Campbell, an agent for a secret government organization that tracks threats to the timestream, whom Alex has never met but has heard a lot about.
    All of these are true, Alex thinks, even though some of them aren’t real. Stories can be true even if they’re not real. When Alex thinks about his dad, which he does, often, it’s as a knot of these three threads. There are memories of him, which are mostly bits of sensory information: a smell, the feeling of being lifted into the air. There is the image of him on-screen, carrying out actions and storylines Alex can barely comprehend and doesn’t feel the need to follow. And there are the stories his mother tells him, which are never about her and his dad directly, but always about the characters they once played on television. None of these on its own is Alex’s dad, but the interaction between them makes an outline in his mind, something dad-shaped and of vital importance to Alex.
    Alex jots a few of the actors’ last names in his notebook for later. There’s an actress who plays a Russian maid, and her last name is Gradechenko. It sounds promising, but he doesn’t have time to flip it backwards right now.The credits are almost over. Alex jumps off the bed and goes to shut off the air-conditioning, which he turned up to full blast the minute his mom left. The air conditioner goes silent, leaving a hole in the room’s sounds, and in that hole Alex can hear a small metal rattling: his mom’s keys in the lock. He never worries. She is always on time.
    “Did you meet a prince?” he asks before she is through the door.
    “Nope,” she says, kicking off her pretty shoes. “No princes tonight.” She shuts the door gently behind her, but the lock still makes a loud click.
    “Oh.”
    “It’s freezing in here,” she says, rubbing her bare arms. Alex pretends not to notice, but of course he wants it freezing in here. Freezing in here increases his chances of being cuddled, possibly under blankets. It’s one of the only things he hates about summers in New York. In their apartment with the air conditioner that only cools half of one room, hers, sometimes attempts to cuddle are squirmy and uncomfortable. This hotel has a very good air conditioner.
    “How was your father?” she asks him. This reminds him he’s left the TV on, and the next show, which he’s not allowed to watch, is starting. He finds the remote and turns it off.
    “It was a good one,” he says. “It was funny and nobody gets sad.”
    “That does sound good,” she says, pushing his hair back to kiss him on the forehead. She stands and smiles at him. She’s been doing that a lot lately, and it makes him worried. It’s like she’s making notes of everything about him so she doesn’t forget.
    “Tell me a story?” he asks, half because he wants her to stop standing there smiling and half because he wants a story.
    “After I get my PJs on?” she says.
    “After you get your PJs on,” he agrees.
    When she comes back, he convinces her to stay in the bed with him while she tells the story and he cuddles her extra.