Continuum

스물 아홉

Taehyung did not feel too exceptionally excited to continue to try to find a way home after hearing Halkyeon's words. He still did want to go home, of course. There was no point in him staying here. And, it was true, the boys here were going to die either way, whether he stayed or not. Still, it wasn't easy to know that for the price of him getting home, the end of their lives might be worse.

After that discussion, it had been said that Jeongguk and Namjoon ought to leave the place for a bit, and walk around or go home for a while. It would look suspicious if they were in the same place - an already skeptical place - for a long time. So they had left, and a few of the other boys had left with them.

Which left Taehyung alone with Halkyeon in a smaller room, this one without the giant machines, and more filled with chalkboards and boring-looking paperback manuals. ("Are those books?" Taehyung had asked excitedly as they walked into the room, remembered the two boys' earlier pride in their small collection of books.

"Books?" Halkyeon had answered.)

Taehyung had been describing everything that he could remember from the day he had disappeared - appeared? Reappeared? - and Halkyeon was scribbling down notes on a yellow Steno notepad. Nice to see that some things never change.

"We went to go see the stage we'd be performing at the next day," he recalled. "It was our second stop in Taipei, we'd only gone to the hotel to drop off our bags and then we went to it..." What was the stage called again? "Linkou Stadium." He sighed, remembering. It seemed like so long ago that BTS had been rushing about their apartment, worried that they would miss their flight to Taipei. They were running late because they'd slept too late. They'd been bickering, as usual, but all light-heartedly. They'd been relying on Seokjin to get them out of bed on time, as he was always the first person to get up. But he ended up falling asleep with noise-canceling earbuds in, so he didn't hear his alarm. Yoongi, of course, wasn't woken up by blaring alarm. "Jin-hyung!" Jimin had laughed, pulling on a shirt as he ran to the kitchen for coffee. "How could you betray us like this?"

"Why don't you brats set your own alarms?!" Seokjin yelled back.

"Never heard of it," Halkyeon said, pulling Taehyung from his memory. "But okay, so you were at some sort of auditorium, is that what you're telling me?"

An amphitheater being an auditorium? Well, that was one way to put it. "Sure."

The scientist's pen tapped on the notebook. "Stage lights emit some amounts of electromagnetic radiation. It could be that somehow the radiation caused you to have enough of a chemical change to be sent here. So we could try a really crazy idea," he said in a questioning tone.

"I'm good with crazy," Taehyung said. "I'm totally willing to try crazy."

"Crazy like be re-exposed to large amounts of radiation?"

The boy tilted his head. "Will that make my hair fall out?"

Halkyeon gave Taehyung's scalp a good look. "You seem to be fine after one meeting with radiation."

Just then, Yoongi led the other boys with long hair into the room, looking rather cross. Of course, the others just looked wary. "I heard radiation. Sounds like fun. Now can we get on with this?" Yoongi asked. "I don't mean to be that guy, but we don't even know if this is going to work, and eventually people are going to wonder where we are and what we're doing." He pointed over his shoulder at Namjoon and Jeongguk. Jeongguk seemed to be trying to hide behind Seokjin. "And it won't take them long to figure out where we are."

"Don't blame us!" Jeongguk squeaked.

"I thought they'd gone out so no one would notice," Taehyung said, his heart suddenly thrumming with anxiety.

Yoongi shrugged. "Yeah, but the people in charge of watching those wristbands are beyond paranoid. And we ought to already be surprised that no one has come to check up on us after what happened at work last night." He said that last sentence calmly enough, but he gave Taehyung an annoyed look.

Taehyung smiled apologetically but was thinking. Had that really only been last night? It felt like decades ago that the man had grabbed Jeongguk. "Huh," he said.

"Can you boys please give us a little longer?" Halkyeon asked the others. "We'll be done talking and ready with a plan soon."

Yoongi thought for a moment, then reluctantly nodded. He led the others out just as he had led them in. Jimin and Namjoon looked at Taehyung with concern, but said nothing.

Halkyeon looked back at his notebook once the others were all out of the room. "Okay, so if we're going to try this, we need something that emits the same amount of radiation as that stage. We need to see what he can find. Maybe the particle accelerator could be used?"

"But I still don't understand," Taehyung said, shaking his head. "Even if me being here is somehow an evening out of the two worlds. The radiation, too. Still how - why - did I get here? Why was I able to meet all of the people here?" For a moment, Taehyung wished it was nighttime and we was outside looking at the stars. For some reason, the idea of looking at the stars, something that was the same in both universes, giant celestial beings far greater than any one person, was a comforting thought.

Halkyeon straightened in his chair, looking conflicted. "As a scientist, I'm not really supposed to say this, but," he paused again, his lips pursed, "are you a spiritual person?"

Taehyung didn't respond immediately out of surprise. He wasn't sure how to answer that question. He was spiritually curious, did that count? "Maybe?"

"Kim Taehyung, I don't and I can't know for certain, but I think some higher power might be behind this."

Taehyung's mouth went dry. Some mystical being was behind this? Why? "Isn't that kinda a cop-out?" he breathily laughed.

"A what-out?"

The boy fumbled around for the proper words. "You know, cheating." Certainly, there had to be other people on his world that didn't have a doppelgänger here because of whatever reason and had at some time been subjected to the same kinds of electromagnetic radiation. Why him?

Halkyeon scoffed. "I'm a scientific man, Taehyung, do you think I enjoy giving only a supernatural answer? No. But I haven't got anything better to say."

"Okay then, why me?" Taehyung asked. He thought of the future of this universe and shivered. "Why now?"

Halkyeon let the pen fall from his hands and sat up a bit, looking at one of the boards in the room. Taehyung followed his gaze and saw the easily recognizable blueprints for the particle accelerator. "Why not you?" the man asked. "Why not now?"