Another tale from Paul and Sally’s multiverse adventures. Push the Button introduced us to their predicament – now we explore what happens when Paul is sent to a reality where Sally doesn’t know him…
Sally and Paul’s Multiverse Adventures: A Rearrangement of Displacements
I regained consciousness in a cold hospital bed. The room was dark but there was a bright light shining in my face, practically blinding me.
A deep voice said, “Sir?” After I groaned in response, the man repeated “Sir? Are you awake?”
“Where am I?” I asked.
“You’re a safe place. You’re in the emergency room at the Shady Grove hospital. What can you remember about where you were last?”
There was a long pause. The bright light shut off and then a light switched was flipped and the room filled with a fluorescent glow. I could now see an older gentleman in scrubs with a stern, worried, expression staring at me. “On a bridge,” I replied at last.
“Correct. What were you doing on that bridge, sir?”
Another gap of silence. “I wanted to jump.”
They kept me in the psych ward, locked up for a few days after my arrival. A nice psychiatrist named Judy was assigned to talk with me and determine when and if I could be released. She asked what my story was. I said, “You wouldn’t believe me even if I told you.”
“Try me, Paul. I’ve heard lots of stories throughout my years.”
“Then I’m curious at what point during my story you will decide I am inevitably insane or schizophrenic and therefore you won’t listen to anything I say after that,” I told her earnestly.
“You seem fine to me. This is a no judgement zone. I am here to help.”
Releasing a big sigh, I shrugged. “Fine. You want the story, you’ll get the story. But I know for a fact you won’t believe me.”
“I’m just here to help, Paul.”
Reluctantly, I began to tell her the truth. “I’m from another dimension, or universe, if you will. It’s very similar to this one, but there are significant differences. It all began when my wife and I were cleaning out my mother-in-law’s stuff when she got moved to a nursing home.”
“Your wife?” She look surprised. “Are we able to contact her? You never mentioned a wife.”
“That’s because in this reality, we never met. I tracked her down when I first got here. That’s how ended up near that bridge – after she dismissed me for a crazy person, much like how I assume you’ll dismiss me, too.”
“Sorry for interrupting. Continue, please.”
“Okay, so we found a button in her mom’s stuff. Like an orange remote control but with a singular red button in the middle of it. Naturally, when encountered with such a contraption, there’s one instinct. What do you think that is, doc?”
“To push it,” the psychiatrist answered automatically.
“Right, so that’s what we did. Without even thinking about it. And it was the worst decision we ever made. Instantly, we were transported to another version of Earth. We remained together, but since pushing that button, we would sometimes get, like, shoved into another universe without pushing the button. From what we could surmise, that meant other iterations of ourselves had pushed the button elsewhere.”
“So you switched places with them?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “We never got a rule book or a clear explanation, but sometimes we would end up in worlds where we had not found the button yet, so if we hadn’t pushed it, then whoever did push it would in theory have the contraption already. So if we didn’t push it and sometimes ended up in those worlds, then that means whoever did push it probably took our places in that Earth, leading to us getting sent to a different universe. By this logic alone, we assumed it was kind of like a… rearrangement. Whenever any one of us from a given world pushed the button, it caused a rearrangement of displacements across the multiple universes.”
“And you have experienced this?”
“Thousands of times,” I starkly replied.
“But your wife…”
“Sally… or sometimes Chrissy, sometimes Nancy. But when we first met in our original timeline, she was Sally.”
“How did you become separated?”
“Again, we weren’t sure of the rules, but we played it safe. Whenever a random switch happened, we were always in the same room, or under the same roof if it was just two of us in that building. If other people were present, we stayed in the same room as not to risk losing each other.”
The middle-aged doctor jotted down a few notes then glanced up at me. “But you broke this rule?”
It was difficult to hold back tears as I nodded. “Yes,” I finally sobbed. “We got into a stupid fight and I stepped outside to breathe and some asshole in another dimension pushed that fucking button and it took me here. I tracked down Nancy as soon as possible so I could get a hold of the button but she wanted nothing to do with me… I thought of finding it without her, but honestly, I’m just exhausted. I’ve been to worlds where we have children, and those were so hard to bear. We traveled to universes where a weird screen was with button, and we could literally watch ourselves in alternate realities. Sometimes we would end up in a peaceful place with suitable circumstances, but there would always be an abrupt exit thrust upon us by some other version of ourselves pushing the button…”
At the end of our conversation, and some period of solitude while the doctor deliberated my diagnosis, she concluded I should remain in the facility until I was “healed.” Ultimately, she didn’t believe a word of what I said at all.
But, after several months, I was again pushed out of that version of Earth to find myself in another universe with a difference circumstance and setting. I can only imagine how the conversation went with the doctor when she began to talk to another version of myself from another parallel universe…
Luckily, however, Sally was with me this time, and she knew who I was. She did not, of course, understand why I was so relieved to see her. “I thought I lost you,” I said.
“We were just together,” she answered. “And we found some weird button with my mother’s old stuff…”
“It doesn’t matter,” I replied. “We’re back together now….” And I gave her a big hug with a stupid smile on my face; my watering eyes were closed.
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Written by BW Derge
NO AI WAS USED TO WRITE OR EDIT THIS STORY
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