You also wouldn’t be expecting a strange man to suddenly leap up from behind a shelf of Young Adult fiction (Laura Ingalls Wilder to Roger Zelazny), snatch your bookbag out of your hands, and pull his own doppleganger out of its side pocket. Again with the not crazy.
The shock of seeing a badly-dressed version of himself appear so abruptly and yoink him away distracted Alex Pizza from his ester-infused physic-craft fugue state, and he rapidly unfolded himself back into the Secret Agent to the Stars. He attempted to engage his mysterious double in psychic combat, but found all his tricks useless — it was like trying to arm-wrestle an SUV.
Norway-Taft Baldwin-Basinger shrieked and fled, which both versions of Alex Pizza ignored.
“I’m you from the future,” said the other Alex Pizza. “This isn’t really happening. I was replaying this scene in my mind and now I’m inserting myself, Gary Stu style.”
“I don’t believe you,” said Alex Pizza. “If I wasn’t real, if I was just an idealized verson of myself created through the haze of memory, I’d know it.”
“Don’t you?” asked the other Alex Pizza.
“…well, shoot,” said Alex Pizza. He sighed and sat down on one of the school library’s many flimsy wooden chairs. “So yeah.”
The actual Alex Pizza, passed out on too much Miller High Life, hallucinated himself up something with better ergonomics, and sat down opposite his imagined/remembered duplicate. “I got a problem,” he said, “and the only person I can trust to talk about it is me.”
“Uh huh,” said the imagined Alex Pizza.
“This scene happened about a year, year and a half ago, and it was right after I decided to write the Great American Novel, so…”
“So you eventually took some time off to write, and found that you lacked enthusiasm or skill or maybe you’ve forgotten how pencils work, so you’ve conjured up me to invigorate your creative centers with remembered enthusiasm and overall awesome powers,” finished the imagined Alex Pizza. As an idealized version of the real Alex Pizza, he was nothing if not perceptive.
“Shit, I mean, that’s the thing,” said the real Alex Pizza. “I mean listen to your dialogue; it’s essentially me writing it and to my ear it sounds totally hollow. And that’s not fair to my creative process. I’m really second-guessing myself about the value of my ideas and my capacity to put them on paper.”
Imagined Alex Pizza scoffed. “I have an awesome outline all blocked out in my head,” he said. “It came to me yesterday while I was gathering spearmint under the light of the full moon for sacramental mojitos. But you know all that.”
“Sure sure,” said the real Alex Pizza. “But it’s all bland and empty when I go over it. Let me hear it from you.”
It’s basically a lesson story, with a structure pulled from the Great Gatsby (the imago Alex Pizza said). The protagonist is a young man who flattens carpeting as part of a construction crew. Someone else lays the carpeting down, and he rolls it flat with a heavy roller and makes sure the seams are straight and there are no visible bubbles or defects. It’s skilled labor, but not something that requires all that much of him mentally. At night he does something creative; at the moment I’m leaning towards he makes mashups of popular songs and puts them online. He lives in a shack on the roof of a supermarket with two roommates, and they pay almost no rent but he can’t exactly entertain, so his social life isn’t much.
He makes friends with a couple of professionals — she’s a lawyer, he manages a microbrewery — when they’re shopping in the supermarket under his shack and he overhears them arguing about whether the store-brand toaster pastries are better than the Pop-Tart brand toaster pastries, and he’s able to resolve their dispute by introducing them to Lucky’s Toaster Tarts. Our hero ends up joining the couple, as well as the brewer’s introverted sister, on a trip to the lawyer’s great-aunt’s summer house on George Alfalfa Island.
He suspects at first that the couple is trying to hook him up with the brewer’s introverted sister, but she’s so quiet he can’t get to know her. She reads thick volumes of Japanese comics, and on the rare occasions that she does speak, it is in cliche. For the first two days at the summer house it rains, but on the third day they go walking along the shores of George Alfalfa Island, and they bump into Gatsby.
I should probably name him something other than Gatsby. Archie, maybe. Archie and the lawyer used to date, a long time ago, and now Archie has made millions buying inexpensive rental properties and reselling them. He wants the lawyer, the lawyer is into him some, tensions mount all through the vacation. The introverted sister becomes a sounding board for the brewer to complain to, because the brewer and the lawyer are apparently having troubles. The lawyer comes to our hero late one night alone in his room and tearfully confesses that she feels nothing for the brewer, that she never has, and that she only married him because she thought she was pregnant and discovered too late she wasn’t but he knows nothing about that.
So our hero says hey, it’s modern times: if you feel nothing for the brewer you don’t need to stick with him, and the lawyer realizes that he’s right. As soon as they’re all back from the trip, she leaves the brewer. She doesn’t hook up with Archie right away, though, she moves in with the brewer’s introverted sister. Now the brewer has no one but our hero and a couple of other friends to turn to. He starts drinking heavily.
One night a few weeks later Archie shows up at our hero’s shack; he’s incensed because the lawyer has decided against hooking up with him at all, and he blames our hero for turning her against him. Our hero protests that he had nothing to do with it, and the brewer is revealed to have been sleeping in the shack, because he wakes up and kills Archie. Big climactic scene.
The brewer is arrested, Archie is dead, the lawyer moves to the other coast, no one is left except our hero and the introverted sister. The introverted sister, it is revealed at the end, has been writing a webcomic based on the events of the novel, in real time, except in the webcomic the character which is a version of the introverted sister and the character which is a version of our hero are lovers. At first this freaks our hero out, but he realizes that the introverted sister isn’t interested in him especially, she just thought that it made a better story that way. End of book.
“That’s the worst novel I have ever heard,” said the real Alex Pizza.
“You seriously don’t know what you’re talking about,” snapped the imago. “Of course it doesn’t sound as good as the novel itself will sound, that was just me talking. When it’s actually written there will be scenes, dialogue, characterization, and all that jazz. It won’t just be characters with one-word descriptions performing rote actions.”
“Yeah, well, that presumes I can write it at all,” Alex Pizza responded. “I’m just not feeling it.”
The imago leaned back in his notional chair, and considered this for a half-second. “What you need to do it sell the project to someone else. Me, okay, I’m already behind it. Call up whatsherface and tell her all about it, she’ll be skeptical, and you’ll start defending the project, and then you’ll have sold yourself on it in the process of selling her.”
“Whatsherface quit,” said Alex Pizza. “I think she’s married to Bono now.”
The imago made a dismissive gesture. “Somebody else then, look, this conversation is going nowhere fast and I can feel my ontological integrity decaying, so why don’t you wake up, dust yourself off, maybe clean up some of the Miller High Life you spilled on yourself, and then go find a real person to talk to? Or failing that, someone you know?”
“I don’t know.”
“No, but if someone calls you on it, boom, you will know, and you will know strongly, and you will argue on your own behalf until you’re blue in the face.”
* * *
“Sounds nice,” said Lisa-Marie. “Go on, if it will make you happy. I think you should go for it.”
They were in a Starbucks, which is where Alex Pizza liked to do most of his informal meetings with his non-celebrity, non-wizard, “normie” friends. Or, to be more clear, where he would have liked to meet up with his normie friends, if he actually had any normie friends. Lisa-Marie was the closest thing available, and she was neither completely normal nor especially his friend. She didn’t wish him any active harm, he was pretty sure of that, unlike the Illegal Artist.
When Alex Pizza had shown up on the heels of a full-bore crone assault, the Illegal Artist had made a gesture that you might make if you were going to throw down your cigarette in disgust but remembered after you had already started teh gesture that you had quit smoking. She’d gone stomping away from the bus stop, leaving Alex Pizza and Lisa-Marie standing there looking awkwardly at one another. In fact the Illegal Artist had assumed Alex Pizza would chase after her saying something witty or at least surreal; this was what he had done every other time he’d shown up and she’d stomped off.
She ducked into a Brazilian grocery store and waited for him to catch up, so she could start berating him about crones and the supernatural world and her place in it (or out of it, if she had her way). When he didn’t come in after her, she bought a pack of cigarettes.
Meanwhile (ish) Super Lucky cursed her mistakes. This is the real world, she told herself. There are actual people who can be hurt, she told herself. To her surprise…. Super Lucky has always prided herself on her callous disregard for people who aren’t biological simulacra of Ally Sheedy, which is to say, everyone else in the world. But now we see that she can, in fact, have layers; beneath her offhanded contempt for her friends and neighbors there is a basic nubbin of human decency which proves she is not a sociopath after all.
Things had been going reasonably well, under the circumstances. It wasn’t a position anyone wanted to be in, with the exception perhaps of John McClane (Bruce Willis in Die Hard, not the esteemed statesman with a different name), but Super Lucky had found that by accepting the unreality of her predicament she could, in fact, stumble along. Perhaps she had not been making progress towards rescuing the hostages, but on the other hand, she hadn’t gotten any of them shot, and time the terrorists or thieves or whatever the hell the bad guys actually were, time they spent shooting and shouting at Super Lucky was time they weren’t spending making things worse for the hostages.
And then she’d fucked it up. Maybe not insolvably, but seriously. Let this be a lesson to you, she resolved at herself. Don’t screw around when the lives of strangers (many of whom were elderly) lay in the balance, because then you will feel bad.
“Okay!” she shouted. “You win! Don’t shoot anybody else! I will do what you want!”
There was a delay in response from the other end, as if the criminals hadn’t been expecting that. “What?” one of them shouted, as if he thought he had misheard Super Lucky over the wailing of the gunshot hostage and the fire alarms and the hissing of the oily black water from out one of the sprinklers which had somehow gotten turned on despite being well away from the small fire which was in a matter of minutes very likely to turn into a medium-sized fire and then a large one. “What was that?”
“I said I’m surrendering because you people are psycho killers and I don’t want you to shoot any more hostages!” Super Lucky shouted back.
Perhaps someone with a gun and a short fuse had heard only the part where Super Lucky called him a psycho killer, because his response was to shoot another hostage — this one in the thigh, again probably survivable with prompt medical care — and angrily demand Super Lucky’s surrender.
Super Lucky grunted in annoyance. “I am trying to surrender!” she shouted. “Stop shooting people! I should not have been taunting people with guns aimed at other people! I get that now!” She stepped out from behind the slot machine she’d been hiding under, and waved her arms above her head.
“Shut up and tell us –” started one of the criminals, but another criminal cut him off.
“Stop moving,” said the other criminal in well-modulated tones, loudly but distinctly, “and walk slowly towards us.” No one pointed out the contradiction in his instructions, because the meaning was clear in context. Context was everything, to these guys. Let me tell you a little bit about these guys.
Context was everything, to these guys. Let me tell you a little bit about these guys.
You’re not going to believe me, I am pretty sure. Regardless of what I say you are going to think that I’m making it up, but I swear by the sweat of Poseidon Horsefather every word of this is either true or a really awesome lie that seemed like a good idea at the time.
First off these criminals are neither thieves nor terrorists. In fact they are, technically speaking, pirates… or victims. But let us go with pirates. Not the fun imaginary kind or the quasiharmless filesharing kind or the dangerous violent kind (at least they were not initially violent), but rather the reality-hopping scavenging kind. Check check it.
Say you have a machine which when you press a button on it transports you to a parallel universe you specify, and when you press another button on it, it transports you back. I realize this is a conceptual leap, but go ahead, take the concept for a whirl. Key, here, is that you specify the nature of the parallel universe you get transported to.
There’s an infinite number of universes. Now, okay, that doesn’t mean that anything we can imagine must exist. The set of numbers that goes 1, 2, 3, 4… is infinite in that there is no last number in the set, but it is a set that excludes one-half and pi and even zero. But let’s ignore Georg Cantor’s work and pretend that means that anything we can imagine must exist, because loads of sci-fi authors already have, and anyway who’s to say Georg Cantor’s set theory is a reasonable description of the set of all extant parallel universes? So in other words you could press the button on the machine and be taken to a world exactly like the current one, except that, to pick an example, a gold bar has just materialized at your feet. There are a lot of atoms of gold in the world, and while it is extremely improbable that one of them will experience quantum tunneling and whap into another one, and surely it is infinitesimally unlikely that enough would come together from across the universe to form a gold nanocluster which swells up into a whole gold bar, in an infinite universe anything is possible. But not really. But we’re ignoring that.
So you go from boring ol’ Earth-A to Earth-B, which is an alternate history of a kind; it’s one where a profoundly unlikely event just happened. And then you scoop up the gold bar and you go back to Earth-A, one gold bar richer.
But after paying hefty jeweler’s fees you may find yourself thinking bigger. Why not go to a parallel universe in which you are a rich and happy person who has never needed to resort to the decadent lifestyle of the reality pirate? Let us call this parallel universe Earth-C. Now the obvious problem is that there is already a parallel you on Earth-C. However on another parallel world, Earth-C+, this parallel you – you-C+ — has just ceased to exists, his or her atoms abruptly dispersed by the same eerie quantum miracles that, two universes over, netted you a gold bar. Then you could effortlessly step into the shoes of this parallel you.
And why stop there? Perhaps somewhere there might be a parallel earth with medical technology far in advance of our own, a world in which random people on the street are sometimes handed magic potions which cure all of their ailments and give them the bodies of fitness instructors and decathletes. And perhaps you can step to this earth – call it Earth-D – and accept such a proffered potion, and drink of it, and live forever.
I think you begin to get the idea. So imagine a group of three gentlemen, once reasonably honest sorts, who have by dint of their parallel-universe-box become impossibly decadent epicures of all the realities, ruthless and hardened pirates who plunder realities while cackling.
NOW, imagine three test subjects from a university lab who have been heavily drugged and subjected to carefully edited stimuli until they believe that they are three gentlemen in possession of such a universe machine. Give them guns from somewhere – perhaps wished into existence by their magic box, perhaps seized from police officers taken aback by how rapidly the seemingly docile test subjects became violent – and you begin to have a sense of what Super Lucky is up against.
There is more, but I will get to it later.
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