Jeremy Fink and the Meaning of Life Read online

  “I’m sorry, Kal,” my father says, when no one else replies. “We had no choice. Earth is gone.”

  [When I look up at the sky,] I think about all the things I don’t see up there.

  —Kip Thorne, physicist

  Adeafening silence fills the room as everyone watches Kal. As virtually immortal life-forms, we don’t have to breathe unless we want to, and at this moment no one is.

  My hand on his shoulder, I can feel Kal trembling. His knees are locked in place, which is probably the only thing keeping him standing. He refuses to turn away from the transparent wall of my father’s office. We are high up in The Realms here, with the whole universe spread out around us. Usually the sight of billions of galaxies swirling like glittering diamonds is mesmerizing. Today, though, we cannot see its beauty. Today the distant clusters of stars only serve to remind us how, in a universe teeming with energy and drama, one small planet in the outer spiral arm of the Milky Way barely counts for anything (no matter how much fun it is to watch their football games on our view screens). We have been raised to believe that in the grand scheme of things, one planet doesn’t matter. Can’t matter.

  Unless your best friend’s parents are on it when it’s destroyed.

  “But I don’t understand,” Kal says, his voice sadder than I’ve ever heard it. (And I’ve heard him sing the blues—badly, but he’s sung them). “My parents are immortal, like all of us. Wouldn’t they have survived the destruction of Earth?”

  “That was our assumption, too,” my father says. “But we have not found any trace of them.”

  Kal still won’t turn away from the window. It’s like he’s searching the vastness of space for some sign of his parents. Through gritted teeth, he asks, “Did you know they were there? Before?”

  “Of course not,” says my father’s second-in-command, striding into the room. His name is Gluck the Yuck, a nickname my brothers and I gave him because he refuses to rearrange his facial features to be even the slightest bit pleasing. He’s not a bad guy, just a little hard to look at.

  “Well, we didn’t exactly check,” admits the green-haired suit. I really should learn their names.

  “There wasn’t time to check,” insists another. “The destruction has to be instantaneous. And what would be the odds of your parents working on that particular planet at the exact time someone from there would view The Realms? The odds are astronomical, that’s what they are.”

  A nice try to deflect blame, but we all know that the odds of anything existing in the universe at all is astronomical, so the man’s argument falls short.

  “I know!” Kal exclaims, whirling around to face the PTB. “The Afterlives will be flooded with all the new arrivals. I’m sure I’ll be called into work. My parents will still show up there with all the Earth people, right? So they’ll be back after all!”

  The committee members exchange uneasy glances. They look to Gluck to reply. Gluck then looks pointedly at my father. For the first time in my (very long) memory, my father hesitates before answering. “No one will be coming to the Afterlives.”

  Kal scrunches his brows. “I don’t understand. There were billions of people on that planet.”

  Dad looks uncomfortable, which is not a good look on the Supreme Overlord of the Universe. “We didn’t exactly destroy the planet. Per se.”

  “So my parents are still alive!” Kal shouts. He grabs my father’s arm, then immediately lets go when my father glares down at him. In a less shouty voice Kal asks, “Why did you say they’re gone?”

  My father sighs. “Perhaps I should have chosen my words more carefully. If someone never existed, you couldn’t truly say they were gone, could you?”

  This is as good a time as any to admit that I’m only the sixth smartest of Dad’s seven sons. My brother Laz is generally considered the least smart, at least when it comes to school stuff. He fails Planet Building class every term. He’s always calculating pi wrong, so his planets keep straying from their orbits and crashing into everyone else’s. But even with my limited brainpower, I can tell my father isn’t making any sense. “Dad, what are you trying to say?”

  He sits back down at the head of the table and places his large hands on the gleaming surface. The holograph pops back up. He pushes it toward Kal and me. All I see is a dark blob.

  “The last time The Realms were spotted,” my father says, “the spotter’s planet was able to escape harm due to his being thoughtful enough to die on the spot.”

  “Yes, we all know that,” I say, anxious for him to get to the point.

  “And the time before that,” he continues, “the planet was far from its sun, leading to very harsh living conditions. Only a few species had evolved, and their numbers stayed small. It was fairly easy to log them into the Afterlives in an orderly fashion. But in the case of Earth, which supported such an abundance of life…” He trails off, clears his throat, and continues. “Basically, the Afterlives would have been totally overwhelmed, so the PTB came up with a better idea.” He pauses and glances at Gluck, who nods his encouragement. Dad sighs. “We ripped Earth out of the space-time continuum.”

  Kal repeats the words, but slower. “You ripped Earth… out of space-time?”

  “Technically we couldn’t just take Earth,” Gluck explains, “since it’s gravitationally bound up with the sun and the rest of the solar system….”

  “So we took that, too,” Green-Haired Suit continues.

  “You took their sun?” I ask, hoping I heard him wrong.

  Green-Haired Suit nods. One of the PTB wearing a long white robe centuries out of style adds, “And the rest of the planets. And their moons and the asteroids and comets and such.”

  I clutch the back of a nearby chair to steady myself. From all my years of history class, I know nothing like this ever happened before. To interfere in the universe on such a grand scale is just unheard of. Kal, too, is frozen from the shock of it.

  “We didn’t have much choice, Joss,” my father says. “None of our options were good. If we had exploded the planet, gravity from the sun would have kept the pieces grouped together. A dead world, clinging to chunks of lifeless rock. No one wants to see that.”

  I shudder.

  Dad puts his large, steady hand on my shoulder. “Or if we simply took away the sun, Earth would have gone shooting off into space, and a rogue planet aimlessly hurtling about is simply too dangerous. We considered halting the planet’s rotation, but then everything would fly into the atmosphere, and there’s already enough junk in space these days. This way it’s nice and neat, and we don’t have that nagging guilt at killing off a five-billion-year-old planet. Now Earth never actually existed, so no one had to die. It’s a plan we’ve had in place for a while, in case the occasion ever arose.”

  Kal makes a sound that falls somewhere between a whimper and a growl. He faces my father and says, “According to your logic, my parents never existed, since they were ripped right out of time, too, right?”

  “I suppose you could say that, unfortunately. Yes.”

  Kal puts his hands on his hips. “Then why am I still here?”

  I turn to Dad to await his answer. We all know about cause and effect. It’s one of the basic laws of the universe. The arrow of time goes in one direction only. First comes cause, then effect. Even I know you can’t have a kid without having his parents first.

  But Dad only stares at Kal. Or should I say, stares at the spot where Kal had been standing. For Kal, my best friend, my childhood companion in all things, is totally, utterly gone. Gone like back in the days when we were able to wink in and out of places, but those days are far in the past. Is he hiding behind a chair? I peer under the table, but all I see are a lot of hairy legs in sensible shoes.

  He’s just… gone.

  “Hmm,” Gluck says thoughtfully. “I was afraid that might happen.”

  Before I can question them on Kal’s sudden and utter disappearance, he’s made MORE gone by the fact that in his place now stands a tall,