Extinction Game by Gary Gibson Read Free Book Online

fighting, maybe a few thousand here and there. People like Tony were better equipped to survive, but they still suffered badly. It’s pretty much over for
humanity in this place, and it’s the same on world after world after world.’
    ‘So there’s more than just this world, and the one we just came from?’
    Yuichi started to pull himself back up into the truck. ‘Sure as shit, there’s more,’ he said. ‘And you’re going to see at least a couple others before we head on
home.
Now
do you see what we mean by “seeing is believing”?’
    We drove back the way we had come, to find Tony waiting for us with hot coffee and bowls of soup he had prepared for our return. We sat and ate by the fire, Tony insisting on
squatting next to it while Nadia made use of his easy chair. Myself and Yuichi crouched on low stools taken from the kitchen nook.
    Tony seemed more relaxed this time around, and as we talked, I learned he was a member of one of several Inuit communities that had made its way south from Alaska a few years before the
Authority first found their way to this alternate. Even when he showed me snapshots of a New York half-buried under glaciers, the Statue of Liberty still just about recognizable despite being
mostly submerged in ice, I still had trouble believing in what I was being told about parallel universes. A couple more years, Tony continued, and both the city and the statue would be ground down
to dust. He explained there were other, similar communities scattered here and there across this Earth, all from cultures with long experience of dealing with harsh and frozen environments.
    After we had finished eating, and as we sat by the glowing warmth of the fire, Nadia explained in precise and concrete detail the substance of my new reality.
    She, Yuichi and a number of others were all, she explained, survivors of some apocalyptic event or other, on different parallel Earths. Each had come from somewhere identical in most important
respects to my own – up to the point where most, if not all, of humanity was wiped out.
    Yuichi, I quickly realized, despite the outward appearance of a biker outlaw, was clearly a man of deep learning and intelligence. He soon took over, delving for my benefit into the mechanics by
which an infinity of parallel universes might exist. Although not a physicist, I was nonetheless still a scientist, so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concepts he outlined. My
comprehension, however, was at times paper thin. Whenever there were two or more possible outcomes to any event, he explained, the universe fractured, quietly and invisibly, so that each of those
possible outcomes in fact took place. Creation was big enough to accommodate a near-infinity of parallel realities, each branching off the other and accommodating every possible history.
    I learned some of the acronyms they used to describe certain of these worlds; NTE stood for Near-Total Extinction – meaning bad enough to kill most of humanity, but not all of it. TEA
stood for Total-Extinction Alternate. The worst was TPD, or Total Planetary Destruction. Along with these acronyms were further bifurcations of classification, such as Category 3 NTE or Category 5
TEA, terms Yuichi and Nadia tossed around with apparent abandon.
    I barely had time to take any of this in before we were once again back in the truck, then back at our arrival point. The air twisted around us, and I felt that same fleeting moment of
weightlessness before we materialized somewhere new.
    Over the next several hours, I saw things and places I can hardly describe. I no longer had any choice but to accept as absolute truth everything Nadia and Yuichi told me.
    The next world we visited looked almost normal, viewed on arrival through the hermetically sealed windows of a vast dome. I saw dusty streets overgrown with weeds and trees, and buildings slowly
crumbling from decades of neglect. I saw minarets and onion domes, and learned we were in the