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Wakers (Volume 1) (The Side Step Trilogy) - Softcover

Buch 1 von 2: The Side Step Trilogy

Card, Orson Scott

 
9781665917438: Wakers (Volume 1) (The Side Step Trilogy)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1665917431 ISBN 13: 9781665917438
Verlag: Margaret K. McElderry, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

From the New York Times bestselling author of Enders Game comes a brand-new series following a teen who wakes up on an abandoned Earth to discover that he’s a clone!

Laz is a side-stepper: a teen with the incredible power to jump his consciousness to alternate versions of himself in parallel worlds. All his life, there was no mistake that a little side-stepping couldn’t fix.

Until Laz wakes up one day in a cloning facility on a seemingly abandoned Earth.

Laz finds himself surrounded by hundreds of other clones, all dead, and quickly realizes that he too must be a clone of his original self. Laz has no idea what happened to the world he remembers as vibrant and bustling only yesterday, and he struggles to survive in the barren wasteland he’s now trapped in. But the question that haunts him isn’t why was he created, but instead, who woke him up…and why?

There’s only a single bright spot in Laz’s new life: one other clone appears to still be alive, although she remains asleep. Deep down, Laz believes that this girl holds the key to the mysteries plaguing him, but if he wakes her up, she’ll be trapped in this hellscape with him.

This is one problem that Laz can’t just side-step his way out of.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Orson Scott Card is the author of numerous bestselling novels and the first writer to receive both the Hugo and Nebula awards two years in a row; first for Ender’s Game and then for the sequel, Speaker for the Dead. He lives with his wife in North Carolina.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter 1 1
BECAUSE HE WAS a teenager, and teenagers take pleasure in exploring wacky ideas, Laz Hayerian had wondered since the sixth grade whether we are the same person when we wake up that we were when we went to sleep. Specifically, he wondered if he was the same person, because sometimes his dreams persisted in memory as if they had been real events. Did dream memories change him the way real memories did?

This always led to the deeper question: Since Laz had memories that came, not from dreams, but from timestreams he had stepped out of, did his intertwined memories of other realities make him less sane? Or more experienced? Or both?

Since, as far as he knew, no one else in the world had the ability to side step from one timestream to another, there was no one he could ask, and no philosopher who had written about it.

As he woke up this morning—morning?—he felt very strange, and it wasn’t the residual effect of some dream. He didn’t even remember dreaming. It was his own past that felt like a disjointed dream, as if sometime in the night his whole life played out in his mind, but completely out of order, an incoherent scattering of scenes, facts, feelings, people, places.

When he opened his eyes, he was in nearly complete darkness. Even on mornings at Dad’s place, there was always plenty of light that seeped around the curtains.

All he could see was a tiny amount of green light coming from a few inches to his left.

He was lying on a plastic mattress that felt no more cushioned than the pad in the bottom of a portable crib. Yet he didn’t feel any aches or sore spots, and when he flexed muscles up and down his body, nothing caused him pain.

So Laz did what he had always done since his earliest memories of childhood. He searched for the alternate paths through time that were always close enough for him to take hold and shift, changing the story of events in bold or barely perceptible ways. It didn’t matter which, as long as it got him into a place where things made more sense.

For the first time in his life he could not find any of the alternate timestreams.

No, no, he was finding them, yes, thousands of them—as always. Only none of them went back even a moment earlier than the moment he woke up just now. And none of them showed him doing anything different, so there was no point in side stepping from one to another.

He was afraid. He had never reached out and found that all his pasts and all his futures were identical. It meant he had no choices. Whatever was going on right now, he was like other people—he was trapped.

He didn’t like feeling trapped.

Why was he feeling trapped? He extended his hands away from his sides and they bumped into solid walls. He was in an actual container.

The green light came from some LED letters and numbers on a panel at his left side, inside the box, but he didn’t know what any of them meant. Someone else would explain them to him. If he was in some kind of—what? A medical treatment chamber? An anti-infection box while some damaged part of himself healed without gangrene? If somebody had operated on him, he had no idea where.

Laz reached up, straight out in front of his chest, and his hands almost instantly bumped into some kind of ceiling or lid or cap. It felt like plastic; it had a little bit of give to it. So he was in a sealed environment, though he didn’t feel claustrophobic or even particularly warm. He was definitely a claustrophobe. The time his mother rented an RV and invited him to sleep on one of the bunk beds, he couldn’t sleep that night at all. He didn’t complain, though. His mother loved the RV. And Laz didn’t want to ruin it for her.

He was only about eleven, maybe ten—before she remarried, so he knew that this RV experiment was meant to provide his mother with some kind of bonding opportunity. But when he asked her if he could please stay home instead of gallivanting along all summer, she seemed stricken. She also wanted to feel like a good mother. Now she felt like she had failed.

So Laz figured he had no choice but to side step into a timestream in which his mother had decided not to rent the RV after all. While Laz always remembered the alternate timestreams that he had lived through, even for a single hour, he knew that he had to make sure she never got back on this RV kick again. Now his mother had no idea she had ever rented an RV, and there was no timestream in which Laz told her how claustrophobic he was in an RV bunk bed. As long as she didn’t get another RV, there was no need ever to have that conversation.

Here he was now, reaching out for timestreams that did not provide him with any alternatives at all. Just waking up, feeling the thin plastic mattress, seeing his arm only vaguely in the green light, feeling the plastic lid arching over his bed—box? Container? Coffin?

Got to get things moving. He pushed on the lid. It gave a little, but now he pushed harder, then shifted his hands down near the edges of the lid. This time there was no give at all on the left side, but a lot more give on the right. He pushed harder with his right hand. The lid seemed to separate from the edge of the coffin/box/chamber and rise a few centimeters, then drift down when he stopped pushing.

Now he twisted his body and got both hands to the right-hand edge and pushed upward. An awkward pose, but it worked. The lid rose fairly easily and smoothly, and once it passed about twenty centimeters above the rim, the lid raised itself the rest of the way, and then seemed to slide down into the wall of the coffin.

He sat up. He couldn’t see anything. The green light from the message panel did not illuminate anything outside his box.

Then, when he looked to the left, he saw a lot of blurry, twinkling green lights extending in a direct line away from his own instrument panel. And others, in other rows, above the head of his box and below the foot.

He looked back the other way and saw no lights, but he understood why. His own coffin only had a light on the left side. Therefore if there were boxes extending away on his right, all their green lights would be hidden behind the left wall of each chamber. He could be in the exact center, but only boxes to his left would reveal themselves to him.

Why hadn’t somebody turned on the lights? Why didn’t some kind of generalized lighting come on when his coffin lid opened? At least some mechanical voice could have said, You are fully healed now, Lazarus Hayerian; your parents will arrive to pick you up and take you home within the hour.

Who designed this unfriendly system? Who decided to let somebody wake up with no greeting, no guide, no explanation?

Why couldn’t he remember getting in this box? Or going in for some kind of treatment? Since he had always been able to avoid illness or accident by side stepping into a timestream where he hadn’t caught the disease or hadn’t made the choices that got him in the way of the accident, for him to be sick enough to need incarceration in a box like this one would have been memorable. He felt his abdomen, arms, shoulders; no sign of a healed injury or any kind of scar.

He remembered that he did have a kind of marker on his body. It was a weird toenail growth on his left little toe that had been there since he was four and would never go away. “Nonthreatening,” said every doctor who looked at it, “so clip it if it gets big, there aren’t any nerves in it, and wear socks.” Laz reached with his right foot, rubbed it over the warty toe.

That growth was missing. Just a normal nail on the little toe.

What was...

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Verlag
Margaret K. McElderry
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1665917431
ISBN 13 
9781665917438
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
400
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Van Ditmar Boeken, VDB Sales
sales@vanditmar.nl

Hondiuslaan 44
Utrecht
3528 AB
Niederlande