The OA

Michelle is 15 years old.

Forgive me if this feels a little irresponsible.

It's irresponsible to let our son...

- I can't... - What?

You can't keep calling "her" a "him."

- Really? This again? - What else...

Think of a line, a straight line coming across your elbow, your wrist.

Oh, way late, dude. She doesn't have all night.

Sorry. Did I miss anything?

No. We waited for you. Come on.

We couldn't have imagined what interdimensional travel looked like

any more than we could have imagined

the blood on the floor rolling back into Scott Brown's body.

But we believed.

Two years passed in captivity.

Scott had given us the third movement.

Renata, the fourth.

You have it?

Once more. Once more.

In Renata's NDE, her guardian told her

one of the side effects of dimensional travel is amnesia.

You could potentially forget everything from before.

So we invented symbols to record the movements.

Just like music is recorded in notes.

Do you want to take a break?

No.

Keep going.

Once more.

Homer has the second and fourth movement on his back.

And I have the first and the third.

We figure the scars are a map we can never lose.

Can I touch it?

Yeah. It doesn't hurt anymore.

Why didn't you just let yourself die?

- And stay in your NDE? - It wouldn't have worked.

The best way to think about it is like this...

There are all these dimensions, worlds, alternate realities,

and they're all right on top of each other.

Every time you make a choice, a decision, it forks off into a new possibility.

They're all right here, but inaccessible.

The NDEs were like...

a way to travel through them, but temporarily.

We wanted... choices, chances.

The movements would allow us to travel to a dimension permanently.

Stay there.

A new life... in a new world.

To us, that was freedom.

What will it look like when we open the tunnel to the other dimension?

I don't know. I've never done it.

- What? - All I know is that it would be invisible.

The person leaving this dimension

would experience a great acceleration of events,

but no break in time-space.

It's like jumping into an invisible current

that just carries you away to another realm, but...

we had to have all five movements

and we had to do them with perfect feeling.

But you never did it?

Every movement we received...

the Angel Hunter received as well.

One, two.

Face.

Elbow.

We were locked in a strange race with our captor.

Right above us, Hap was learning each movement on his own.

The question became, what would happen if we got the fifth movement?

Could we keep it away from Hap long enough to make our escape?

It had been a year since Renata had returned with the fourth.

Rachel was never given a movement.

We kept trying, but secretly I started to wonder...

would we ever get the fifth movement?

At least we had each other.

Hap was all by himself.

There was only one man he could share his secret with.

I've been having this dream, Leon.

It's dark. I'm low to the ground.

Suddenly, there's this snap.

And I look down... and my leg's in a trap.

And I realize...

I'm a rat.

I'm a scientist and I dream of being a rodent.

Don't blame yourself if it wears on you.

We're not dealing with plants.

I told you the same thing when you were my trainee in residency

and you lost your first patient.

I remember. This is different. This...

I mean, quite apart from the intellectual rigor, the...

- the physical labor... - Endless.

And the need to maintain the ecosystem to support the...

Test subjects?

There's the guilt, some days.

Don't you find? Guilt?

A given.

Huh. Looks exactly the same as the old one.

I needed a bigger space to fit the new capacity.

I thought it would be difficult to find,

but, really, this entire wing of the hospital is dead.

A janitor comes in on Thursdays, and I simply lock the door.

Where are the subjects?

In the next room.

So... the other day I found myself feeling, uh... resentful.

- That ever happen to you? - Mmm.

My subjects seem... so united.

They... have this tribalism that sustains them somehow.

- Uh, is this clean? - Yeah.

Rituals. Mutilation.

Attempts to explain existence, to control pain.

Yeah, I know all that, but I still...

I couldn't help feeling outside of it all, somehow.

You are on the outside. Stay there.

Well, I mean, in some ways we work together, no?

Lab partners go home at night. Subjects sleep in the experiment.

How do you not get attached?

I enforce turnover. You know this.

Potassium chloride. Then into the incinerator.

Another perk of having my lab in a hospital.

Yeah, right.

It changes everything. Trust me.

I realize that our work is, uh...

about a paradigm shift.

Like Copernicus' revelations that...

that Earth is not at the center of the solar system.

- Mmm. - Life is not at the center of...

- human existence. - Mmm.

But I can't help wondering if Copernicus, the man, not the scientist...

if he would have pursued that truth...

if his work involved... experimenting on human beings.

It's a useless comparison.

Here's the terrible, beautiful truth.

No one cares.

There is no line between good and evil. There's only what a man can stand.

Röntgen killed his own wife discovering the X-ray.

My advice?

Uncover what you can, destroy the evidence...

and turn a profit before you can no longer forget how you've done it.

You should know...

I'm on the brink.

- Really? - Maybe a year, year-and-a-half,

and I'll be able to offer incontrovertible proof of an afterlife.

What do you mean by that? "Afterlife"?

Nothing spiritual. More like a...

a greater reality, another dimension.

Imagine the worldwide sigh of relief when I reveal that the answer to death

is more life?

How many nightmares will end then, my friend?

I will reshape the world in a single click the day I publish.

Do you have an opposing theory?

Come on, Hap.

Friction improves the work.

Share.

I think what we're dealing with, maybe, is not a single dimension.

I think it's multiple.

The Many-Worlds theory?

Well, no, not exactly.

More like, uh, reality forking off into a different path.

No, look...

imagine a garden of forking paths.

So, my subjects have touched on them in their NDEs, but now...

now, Leon, they are uncovering a technology of movement

that-that could allow them to travel to different dimensions,

maybe even stay there.

And what's...

What's really exciting is that I think I know where they go.

I think I know specifically where my subjects go to.

Maybe even what we're all a part of.

Where do they go?

What do you mean, "a part of"?

Well, I don't wanna say yet.

I mean, I don't know for sure. I wanna... I wanna go there first.

I could give a shit about profit, with respect.

I just, I want...

God, I want to taste the truth. I just wanna walk out of the dark.

God, I'm sorry, I'm getting carried away. It's probably all bullshit,

and you're right and our work will spur each other on.

And then some young, smart, better person than us will come along.

And he, or she, probably, will...

They'll be the one to build on our back-breaking work,

and switch the light on. Right?