“No,” I croak.
“Do you mind?”
I can only shake my head.
“Thanks. Oh, hey, watch this.” She puts the spoon on the end of her nose and slowly takes her hand away. It balances there for a second before dropping into her waiting palm. “Cool, right?”
“Yeah. Cool.” I’ve got a lump in my throat the size of Chet King’s manly hands. “So … are you just, like, visiting? Or is this … am I … ?”
“What?”
“Dead?”
Her eyes widen in surprise. “Oh yowza! No! Don’t be such a Goofy Gloomer.” Her smile fades fast. “But we’ve got a lot to talk about and we don’t have much time.”
“What do we have to talk about?”
“Your mission,” she says through a mouthful of chocolate pudding.
“My … mission.”
“Your mission. We need your help, Cameron.”
I can feel my heartbeat in my skull. “Define ‘we.’”
She writes in the air with her spoon. “We. Plural form of ‘I.’ ‘Nos’ in Latin. Wow, I miss Latin. So much fun—all those exciting verbs that don’t come until the end of the sentence. It’s like a movie trailer for language.” She downs another spoonful of pudding, rolls her eyes in bliss. “Sure you don’t want some of this? It’s surprisingly edible.”
“Mission?” I prompt.
“Right.” She stares right at me. “You ever hear of a guy called Dr. X?”
“No,” I say.
“No Dr. X?” she asks again.
“There are several Dr. Assholes who come in here every day to scribble on my chart and poke me with sharp objects so they can collect points for their Sadism Scout Badges, but so far, no Dr. X.”
“You know, you are very funny!”
“That’s because I’m hallucinating.”
“Dr. X is a brilliant scientist. Like beyond genius. Branes, parallel worlds, time travel, wormholes, superstring theory, M-theory, Y-theory, Double-Z-theory, the Theory of Everything Plus A Little Bit More. This guy was at the forefront of it all.”
Just trying to follow her is making my head hurt. “My dad says that stuff isn’t real science, that it can’t be proven.”
Her left eyebrow shoots up. “Hmmmm. Anyway … Dr. X finally did it.”
“It.”
“Yeah.” She licks the spoon clean. “Personal pronoun, non-gender-specific, third-person singular.”
This is officially my weirdest and most annoying hallucination yet. “What did Dr. X finally do?” I say slowly.
“He figured out how to break through, to travel through time and space. He’s been parallel world hopping, raking up quite a few cosmic frequent flier miles. But that’s not the problem. He’s come home again.” Her dark brows are furrowed. “And he brought something back with him.”
“Something meaning like a T-shirt or coffee mug?”
“Not quite.” She puts the spoon down. “Ever hear of dark energy?”
“No. What is it?”
“Beats me. Nobody really knows what dark energy is except that it makes up most of space. It’s an eternal mystery. When Dr. X traveled through space and time and stopped to smell the roses in the Higgs Field, he tapped into that stuff. Something was created, and it followed him back to this world. Now it’s massing into something new, expanding and accelerating events, destabilizing everything.” Her expression is grave. Chocolate’s smeared around her mouth like a clown’s lipstick. “You’ve got to find Dr. X, get him to close the wormhole before the whole planet goes up in flames. Before everything is obliterated.”
“Whoa. What do you mean I’ve got to find Dr. X? Shouldn’t that be your jurisdiction? Use your angel superpowers or whatever. Leave me out of it.”
She fixes me with a stare. “Cameron, do you wonder how you got your disease?”
I’ve spent, like, a billion hours wondering that very thing. “They say it might have been a bad burger.”
Dulcie makes a disgusted growl in her throat. “So unimaginative. No. Everything’s connected, Cameron. There are no accidents. Your disease isn’t a virus or a bacteria—it’s something completely different, something that actually alters your DNA. Those prions are like car body shop guys pimping the ride of your mind, my friend.”
“Thanks. That’s very encouraging.”
“Don’t you get it? The prions attacking your brain right now? They’re from the same unstable, dark energy. That’s why the doctors can’t figure it out. Because what’s attacking you is from another world.”
