Clarion West

Swanwick story, day 26 (Doug Ronning)

Up early today. Who knows how much I'll get written?

When Doug Ronning first began seeing ghosts, he reacted as anyone might, by doing a study and then writing a grad school paper exploring how ghostly visitations affect the perceiver’s sense of spirituality. At the time, he thought such events – fleeting, distant, and resistant to analysis – were extremely rare.

And so they were. At first.

Then they became commonplace. The ghosts grew bolder and more vocal. He began seeing them daily. They walked up to him and jovially punched his shoulder with fists less substantial than air. They scowled and slammed the door shut when he walked in to find them on the can. When he gazed at his reflection in shop windows, they stopped alongside him to adjust their hair. Until finally Doug was forced to acknowledge the strange truth: They all had exactly the same face and features.

His own.

He was not seeing dead people at all. These visitations were clearly variant versions of himself, leaking into reality through some unsuspected weakness in whatever it was that kept alternate worlds apart.

An alternate self from a universe where he’d become a physicist tried to explain it to him. “How much math do you have?” alt-Ronning asked.

“Not much. I still remember a little bit of algebra..”

Alt-Ronning sighed. “Okay, I’m going to have to wildly oversimplify here. To begin, by the nature of the universe there are not an infinite number of parallel worlds. Each world is expressed in a bundle of five dimensions –”

“Five?”

“Width, breadth, height, time, and plynth. So you take the first four primes expressed as hypersolids: one to the first power, two to the fourth, three to the second, and five to the third, multiply them, and you come up with 18,000 parallel worlds.”

“Why to those particular powers?”

“Take eight years of calculus and I’ll explain, okay?” The physicist looked at his finger-watch. “Look, I’ve got to go. Say hello to AnnaMiriam for me, willya?”

“I don’t know anyone named –”

Later that same day, another self who worked as an alternate lives counselor, offered him some free advice. “The essence of alternate worlds is otherness, potential, the working out of possibilities that just don’t exist in your life as you currently live it. It will drive you mad if you begin worrying about it. The best possible thing for you to do is to just go home to your three or four clone-wives and accept the world as the drab place that it is.

“Wait,” Doug said, alarmed. “I don’t know what you’re –”

Which is when the Reality Police showed up. They were led by a guy who looked exactly like Doug, and they showed no patience with him at all. “We’ll have the rupture fixed in ten nanoznorks.” The alt-Ronning was a real bruiser. He looked like nobody to trifle with. “Why don’t you just go home to your line-marriage and forget that anything ever happened, okay?”

“But –”

“Move it!”

When Doug got home, Charles greeted him at the door with a kiss. “How was your day?” he asked.

“Confusing.” Doug tried to explain, but it all came out in a muddle. “So apparently there are eighteen thousand of me,” he finished weakly.

“Shush,” his husband said. “You’ll always be one in a million to me.”

*­