A Hundred Thousand Worlds Read Online Free Page A

This involves both arms around her waist and the top of his head nuzzled into the hollow below her shoulder.
    “What season do you want?” she asks, once they are settled in and the big lights are off.
    “What’s the first one ever,” asks Alex, “storyline or freak of the week?”
    His mom thinks about this. Alex has never been allowed to watch
Anomaly,
because his mom says it’s graphic. But from his mom’s interpretations of the episodes, which Alex suspects she waters down a little for him, he understands that every episode falls into one of two categories: storyline or freak of the week. The freak-of-the-week episodes are more or less interchangeable, although they can be kind of affected by what season they’re in, because of the storyline episodes. Like, if it’s season three, Campbell and Frazer are never together, even in the freak-of-the-weeks, because Campbell is lost in the timestream and sometimes Frazer is looking for him and sometimes she is doing her job. The storyline episodes have to be in order, from season one to season six, or at least up to season five. Mostly the stuff in season six doesn’t make any sense.
    She nods, puts her finger on her chin, and scrunches up her whole face. This is her “considering the options” face, and it makes him incredibly happy because it always comes before a story. She clears her throat. Her story voice is a little different from her regular; deeper, more deliberate.
    “The first episode I’d have to say is storyline,” his mom concludes.
    “Good,” says Alex. “That’s what I want then.”

Anomaly
Pilot
    T im seeded so much in that first episode. Because she was there the whole time and knows how much the plot changed from season to season, sometimes from week to week, she knows it wasn’t a straight line from the beginning to the end. But you could look back from the end and see a straight line to the beginning.
    “It all starts with a weird light in the sky above a field in Kansas,” she says. She thinks it’s Kansas. It might have been Nebraska. “The light gets brighter and brighter, and then there’s a flash and a man falls out of the light and lands in the field.”
    “How far does he fall?” asks Alex.
    “Maybe twenty feet. Not far. He’s safe when he lands. As soon as he lands, he checks his watch and says, ‘Not again!’” She leans in very close to his face to deliver this line with the proper mix of comedy and gravitas. Comedy wins, and he breaks out in giggles. Not one to miss an opportunity, Val yells, “Cue the opening credits,” and begins to mercilessly tickle him. A lack of mercy is essential to any good tickle attack. Alex writhes and wriggles and cries “Quit it!” again and again, but Val does not let up until her work is done. This takes roughly as long as
Anomaly
’s opening credits, which featured Daliesque images of melting clocks and watches whose hands spun backwards, then exploded in a mess of innards: escape wheels, springs, and stop levers. Tim always hated the opening sequence, saying it was too literal.
    “Next scene!” she says, adjusting Alex’s position next to her so they are properly fitted together. “A lecture hall at a major university.”
    “Harvard?” Alex asks.
    “Sure,” Val says. “The same man we saw fall into a field is now lecturing a classful of students about the nature of spacetime.”
    “What’s spacetime?” Alex asks, even though he is one of the very few nine-year-olds in the known universe with an understanding of spacetime.
    “You should listen to his lecture,” she says. She drops her voice into a lower tenor. “‘The universe is like a garden full of forking paths. Every time you or I or any of us make a decision, the path splits again. When you decided to come to class today instead of stay in bed with your boyfriend’”—here she tickles him a little—“‘you created two possible timelines. One in which you came to class, the timeline we’re in, and one