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Schroedinger's Shop Rite
1861
You've seen Sliders, right?
Okay. Take the concept of parallel worlds -- quantum whatsis -- and throw it in a blender with fiction. Comics, movies, television, books, whatever. Crosstime, Hypertime, Infinite Earths, mirror universe-- lord, I could keep going for hours. Basically, in theory, an infinite number of realities exist, as different or as familiar as you can get from your own. Since infinity is, well, infinite, that means that -- again, in theory -- every piece of fiction on Earth could actually be real somewhere. And each one of those could have infinite variations on it, and each of those variations could have infinite variations, and so on ad... infinitum.
That's leaving out the things that no one's thought of yet, too.
We're talking infinity.
The other thing is, the odds of you ever making it home again if you *did* happen to start worldsliding? They're beyond astronomical. They're infinitely improbable, just like the drive of the Heart of Gold. (Go read some Douglas Adams if you don't know what I'm talking about. Or see the movie. I don't care.)
I'll grant that the odds of your landing in universes similar to your own are better than infinity to one against, because it stands to reason that if you really did slip into another reality on accident, it wouldn't be very far away, and therefore it wouldn't be very far off the mark. Proximity, sameness, la. On the other hand, if you're actually making a go at getting to a parallel world, all bets are off.
-----
Throughout most of my life, I've primarily made friends with people who are smarter than I am. Not to sound like a complete self-aggrandizing dick, but I've also never had many friends. Lots of people I was friendly with, lots of acquaintances, lots of people I liked, who liked me -- but very few real friends. I lived in my own head too much. Well, my own head and books -- primarily science fiction and fantasy, and when I got around to narrowing it down that far, urban fantasy and cyberpunk and slipstream and uncategorisable but *good* books.
So I had all these worlds in my head already, and these genius friends--
--not too surprising that what wound up happening *happened*.
-----
It started with time travel and supermarkets.
"No, don't tell me how it works," I said to Jen. "We've been writing about this stuff since high school. Dreaming about it. I won't understand the explanation and it'll just make me get bored and distracted and then I'll be daydreaming when it actually happens and I'll *miss* it."
Jen had been my best friend in the world when we were in high school. She was a year ahead of me, and blonde and thin and pretty, and I met her completely by accident on my first day, and she happened to know the spelling, definition, and pronunciation of the word 'floccipaucinihilipification'. I did too. From the moment this was revealed, we were inseparable.
I've never been good at keeping in touch with people. Keeping track of people, certainly, but in touch? No. Jen kept making the effort to keep in touch with me, and I appreciated the hell out of it, but when only one side is making an effort, the inevitable happens. By the time I was twenty six, I knew where she lived and she knew where I lived, we had each other's phone numbers and email addresses, and we hadn't spoken in years.
Then I called her and told her about the Shop Rite on Route 10 in the town where I worked, and about what happened in there, and she booked a flight back to Jersey that night.
To give a little backstory, the Shop Rite on Route 10 in the town where I work is a supermarket that never actually got past nineteen eighty-eight. You go in through the front doors, and you're in a tiny little hallway, narrow and panelled with fake wood. It houses gumball machines and a couple of payphones, a bulletin board, and a vending machine. You go in the rest of the way, and you step directly into the past.
The people who shop there, the ones you'll generally see if you just drop in, they're dressed in the eighties and have hair from the eighties, and they buy things from the eighties. The decor is all from the late seventies and early eighties, and the logos are old -- the place has never been updated, and I don't think it ever will. It's been overlooked by the corporate powers-that-be, and I can't help but think it's because they don't know it's there.
Ghost supermarket?
Anyway, there's a door in the back, behind the pharmacy and the VCRs and the Hallmark cards. You go around the pharmacy counter, and there's a long, dark, narrow, wood-panelled corridor with a nicotine-stained ceiling and a water-stained brownish grey carpet, and at the end of it is an emergency exit.
For years I've been sure that if I went through that door, I'd exit in nineteen eighty-eight.
I've read _Time and Again_, and I saw the movie, too. The one with Christopher Reeve, where there was this time travel experiment run by-- oh, I don't remember. But the gist of it was that if he wore period clothes, stayed in a period room, and hypnotised himself sufficiently, he'd wake up in the period in question. He did! But he got punted right back out when he poked around in his pocket and saw modern coins he'd forgotten to ditch beforehand.
I was *really careful* not to bring anything anachronistic with me.
Leaving the house was kind of embarrassing, dressed like that.
I took our old videocamera with me and programmed the date in to be *that day*, but in eighty-eight, and then I drove there, and I ignored everyone and walked right back toward that emergency exit, which was propped open with a rock. Purposeful walk! I told myself. No one will question you if you look like you know what you're doing! It really works. It does. I went right through that hallway, unpacking my camera, and I--
No, wait. You need the drama. You need the *impact*.
With a kind of wondering reverence and no small amount of trepidation, I approached the fateful door, faithful old video camera at the ready on my shoulder. Slowly, my bangle-braceleted arm reached for the push bar, and holding my breath, I hit 'record' and stepped forward.
The outdoors was bright after the darkness of the grimy hallway, and I blinked a couple of times upon my exit from the building. It smelled the same outside -- just like New Jersey. The asphalt was cracked under my feet, thirsty weeds dying in the hot sun. As my eyes were adjusting, I saw -- I almost panicked -- I saw the parking lot as a double exposure. I saw cars from last year, and I saw cars from twenty years ago looking new, and they were layered all on top of each other, and I rubbed my eyes with my free hand. Clatter-clatter. I thought it was just my bangle bracelets again, but then I heard the hitching of someone's breath, and I whipped around and caught, on tape, the girl who was staring at me.
It was Jen.
She wasn't a little girl.
Everything snapped back to the present year, then, and Jen wasn't there anymore, and I was *reeling*.
Someone called, laughing at me, "Hey! Nineteen eighty-eight called and they want their wardrobe back!"
I felt sick and elated all at once-- and worried.
When I got home, I popped the tape in the VCR and watched it -- and that was Jen, all right. There she was, my age, our right age for the present, dressed terrifyingly stylishly for the eighties, staring in shock right before the display gave way to snow for half of a second. When the snow cleared, there was the aughts, where-- no, *when*-- I'd gone in the front doors. And no Jen. So I called her, and she was there, she was okay, she was busy but she was fine, and she wanted to know why I sounded so freaked out, and I should call more often, and.
And I interrupted her. "Jeni," I said. "Jen! Shh. Listen. Listen! I promise you I'm not crazy, and I swear on the word for the act of deciding something's worthless that I'm not lying. I saw you in nineteen eighty-eight."
Her silence spoke volumes. They just weren't the right ones.
"You don't believe me, do you?" I sighed.
"No, I do. But what's the big deal? I was nine, you were eight, we lived in the same area, it stands to reason you might've spotted me at some point," she pointed out reasonably. Her IP-phone dragged out the last word, and in light of the day I'd had, it was the creepiest sounding thing ever.
"No, Jen. I time travelled to eighty-eight today, and I *saw you there*. And you were twenty-seven."
Silence again, and this time I could practically *hear* her get worried about my sanity.
"I promised you I'm not crazy or lying. I got it on tape, Jen. I filmed you. I filmed you *there*. I have proof. Come see."
I was wrong again, about what she was thinking. It'd been far too long since we were best friends, practically telepathic. I had also just proven she was smarter than I was, because it never occurred to me that she didn't think I was nuts. I never considered that she might *know* about it already, or at least be willing to entertain the notion.
The silence finally broke, and Jen's voice was a distorted whisper over fiber-optic networks and copper wire and radio waves. "...you mean it works?"
"What?"
"It-- it works-- *will* work-- whatever--" Jen was practically crying, and was *definitely* hyperventilating. Too excited. Not excited enough. My heart was beating so fast, all of a sudden.
"Jen?" I started, or tried to. It didn't actually come out. I swallowed and tried again. "Jen?" I squeaked, finally. "Jen did you build a time machine!!"
"HAH! Yes! YES! I did! And it's gonna work! You just-- it's gonna work! Oh my god! Oh god!" Now her voice got faint, and then it got loud and distant; it sounded like she was holding it at arm's length, whooping and cheering and laughing, running around like a kid. "WE DID IT! WE DID IT!"
We?
"We've been-- oh, oh god, I'm flying there tonight-- I'm coming back, and we're gonna *time travel*! You're gonna show me that tape, and I'm going to finish my machine, and we're gonna *do* it!" she finally managed, half laughing and half sobbing. "Iiiiiiiii--" That was the damn phone again. "--gotta go pack. Pick me up! Newark! I'll call youuuuuuuu with the fliiiiiiiiight ttttttttimes, okay?"
"Okay! Just do me a favor, use a payphone if you have to. VoIP is a pain in the ass."
"You're liiiiiiiiving in the passsst," she laughed delightedly, and hung up.
-----
You've seen Sliders, right?
Okay. Take the concept of parallel worlds -- quantum whatsis -- and throw it in a blender with fiction. Comics, movies, television, books, whatever. Crosstime, Hypertime, Infinite Earths, mirror universe-- lord, I could keep going for hours. Basically, in theory, an infinite number of realities exist, as different or as familiar as you can get from your own. Since infinity is, well, infinite, that means that -- again, in theory -- every piece of fiction on Earth could actually be real somewhere. And each one of those could have infinite variations on it, and each of those variations could have infinite variations, and so on ad... infinitum.
That's leaving out the things that no one's thought of yet, too.
We're talking infinity.
The other thing is, the odds of you ever making it home again if you *did* happen to start worldsliding? They're beyond astronomical. They're infinitely improbable, just like the drive of the Heart of Gold. (Go read some Douglas Adams if you don't know what I'm talking about. Or see the movie. I don't care.)
I'll grant that the odds of your landing in universes similar to your own are better than infinity to one against, because it stands to reason that if you really did slip into another reality on accident, it wouldn't be very far away, and therefore it wouldn't be very far off the mark. Proximity, sameness, la. On the other hand, if you're actually making a go at getting to a parallel world, all bets are off.
-----
Throughout most of my life, I've primarily made friends with people who are smarter than I am. Not to sound like a complete self-aggrandizing dick, but I've also never had many friends. Lots of people I was friendly with, lots of acquaintances, lots of people I liked, who liked me -- but very few real friends. I lived in my own head too much. Well, my own head and books -- primarily science fiction and fantasy, and when I got around to narrowing it down that far, urban fantasy and cyberpunk and slipstream and uncategorisable but *good* books.
So I had all these worlds in my head already, and these genius friends--
--not too surprising that what wound up happening *happened*.
-----
It started with time travel and supermarkets.
"No, don't tell me how it works," I said to Jen. "We've been writing about this stuff since high school. Dreaming about it. I won't understand the explanation and it'll just make me get bored and distracted and then I'll be daydreaming when it actually happens and I'll *miss* it."
Jen had been my best friend in the world when we were in high school. She was a year ahead of me, and blonde and thin and pretty, and I met her completely by accident on my first day, and she happened to know the spelling, definition, and pronunciation of the word 'floccipaucinihilipification'. I did too. From the moment this was revealed, we were inseparable.
I've never been good at keeping in touch with people. Keeping track of people, certainly, but in touch? No. Jen kept making the effort to keep in touch with me, and I appreciated the hell out of it, but when only one side is making an effort, the inevitable happens. By the time I was twenty six, I knew where she lived and she knew where I lived, we had each other's phone numbers and email addresses, and we hadn't spoken in years.
Then I called her and told her about the Shop Rite on Route 10 in the town where I worked, and about what happened in there, and she booked a flight back to Jersey that night.
To give a little backstory, the Shop Rite on Route 10 in the town where I work is a supermarket that never actually got past nineteen eighty-eight. You go in through the front doors, and you're in a tiny little hallway, narrow and panelled with fake wood. It houses gumball machines and a couple of payphones, a bulletin board, and a vending machine. You go in the rest of the way, and you step directly into the past.
The people who shop there, the ones you'll generally see if you just drop in, they're dressed in the eighties and have hair from the eighties, and they buy things from the eighties. The decor is all from the late seventies and early eighties, and the logos are old -- the place has never been updated, and I don't think it ever will. It's been overlooked by the corporate powers-that-be, and I can't help but think it's because they don't know it's there.
Ghost supermarket?
Anyway, there's a door in the back, behind the pharmacy and the VCRs and the Hallmark cards. You go around the pharmacy counter, and there's a long, dark, narrow, wood-panelled corridor with a nicotine-stained ceiling and a water-stained brownish grey carpet, and at the end of it is an emergency exit.
For years I've been sure that if I went through that door, I'd exit in nineteen eighty-eight.
I've read _Time and Again_, and I saw the movie, too. The one with Christopher Reeve, where there was this time travel experiment run by-- oh, I don't remember. But the gist of it was that if he wore period clothes, stayed in a period room, and hypnotised himself sufficiently, he'd wake up in the period in question. He did! But he got punted right back out when he poked around in his pocket and saw modern coins he'd forgotten to ditch beforehand.
I was *really careful* not to bring anything anachronistic with me.
Leaving the house was kind of embarrassing, dressed like that.
I took our old videocamera with me and programmed the date in to be *that day*, but in eighty-eight, and then I drove there, and I ignored everyone and walked right back toward that emergency exit, which was propped open with a rock. Purposeful walk! I told myself. No one will question you if you look like you know what you're doing! It really works. It does. I went right through that hallway, unpacking my camera, and I--
No, wait. You need the drama. You need the *impact*.
With a kind of wondering reverence and no small amount of trepidation, I approached the fateful door, faithful old video camera at the ready on my shoulder. Slowly, my bangle-braceleted arm reached for the push bar, and holding my breath, I hit 'record' and stepped forward.
The outdoors was bright after the darkness of the grimy hallway, and I blinked a couple of times upon my exit from the building. It smelled the same outside -- just like New Jersey. The asphalt was cracked under my feet, thirsty weeds dying in the hot sun. As my eyes were adjusting, I saw -- I almost panicked -- I saw the parking lot as a double exposure. I saw cars from last year, and I saw cars from twenty years ago looking new, and they were layered all on top of each other, and I rubbed my eyes with my free hand. Clatter-clatter. I thought it was just my bangle bracelets again, but then I heard the hitching of someone's breath, and I whipped around and caught, on tape, the girl who was staring at me.
It was Jen.
She wasn't a little girl.
Everything snapped back to the present year, then, and Jen wasn't there anymore, and I was *reeling*.
Someone called, laughing at me, "Hey! Nineteen eighty-eight called and they want their wardrobe back!"
I felt sick and elated all at once-- and worried.
When I got home, I popped the tape in the VCR and watched it -- and that was Jen, all right. There she was, my age, our right age for the present, dressed terrifyingly stylishly for the eighties, staring in shock right before the display gave way to snow for half of a second. When the snow cleared, there was the aughts, where-- no, *when*-- I'd gone in the front doors. And no Jen. So I called her, and she was there, she was okay, she was busy but she was fine, and she wanted to know why I sounded so freaked out, and I should call more often, and.
And I interrupted her. "Jeni," I said. "Jen! Shh. Listen. Listen! I promise you I'm not crazy, and I swear on the word for the act of deciding something's worthless that I'm not lying. I saw you in nineteen eighty-eight."
Her silence spoke volumes. They just weren't the right ones.
"You don't believe me, do you?" I sighed.
"No, I do. But what's the big deal? I was nine, you were eight, we lived in the same area, it stands to reason you might've spotted me at some point," she pointed out reasonably. Her IP-phone dragged out the last word, and in light of the day I'd had, it was the creepiest sounding thing ever.
"No, Jen. I time travelled to eighty-eight today, and I *saw you there*. And you were twenty-seven."
Silence again, and this time I could practically *hear* her get worried about my sanity.
"I promised you I'm not crazy or lying. I got it on tape, Jen. I filmed you. I filmed you *there*. I have proof. Come see."
I was wrong again, about what she was thinking. It'd been far too long since we were best friends, practically telepathic. I had also just proven she was smarter than I was, because it never occurred to me that she didn't think I was nuts. I never considered that she might *know* about it already, or at least be willing to entertain the notion.
The silence finally broke, and Jen's voice was a distorted whisper over fiber-optic networks and copper wire and radio waves. "...you mean it works?"
"What?"
"It-- it works-- *will* work-- whatever--" Jen was practically crying, and was *definitely* hyperventilating. Too excited. Not excited enough. My heart was beating so fast, all of a sudden.
"Jen?" I started, or tried to. It didn't actually come out. I swallowed and tried again. "Jen?" I squeaked, finally. "Jen did you build a time machine!!"
"HAH! Yes! YES! I did! And it's gonna work! You just-- it's gonna work! Oh my god! Oh god!" Now her voice got faint, and then it got loud and distant; it sounded like she was holding it at arm's length, whooping and cheering and laughing, running around like a kid. "WE DID IT! WE DID IT!"
We?
"We've been-- oh, oh god, I'm flying there tonight-- I'm coming back, and we're gonna *time travel*! You're gonna show me that tape, and I'm going to finish my machine, and we're gonna *do* it!" she finally managed, half laughing and half sobbing. "Iiiiiiiii--" That was the damn phone again. "--gotta go pack. Pick me up! Newark! I'll call youuuuuuuu with the fliiiiiiiiight ttttttttimes, okay?"
"Okay! Just do me a favor, use a payphone if you have to. VoIP is a pain in the ass."
"You're liiiiiiiiving in the passsst," she laughed delightedly, and hung up.
-----