Chapter Three: It’s Better to Burn Out Than to Fade Away
“The thing is, this world is going to die," Mary said matter of factly.
“What?”
“Well, to be more accurate, this world is going to be destroyed.”
Marc had no idea how to respond to that revelation. It felt like just a few minutes ago he was in this room talking about supplementary healthcare coverage options and accrued vacation time. Now the very same manager who fired him, God herself was telling him the world was going to end, and that somehow it had something to do with him.
“Wait, Why? How? I mean, what are you talking about?" He stammered.
“Ok, this is the part where it gets a little complicated. Bear with me.” Mary looked like a kindergarten teacher explaining to a child why he shouldn’t eat the paste.
“Your world is not unique. There are infinite worlds and infinite possibilities in existence.” Mary explained.
“Like the multiverse?” Marc asked.
“Oh! You know what that is?” Mary raised an eyebrow.
“I mean, sure, it comes up a lot in sci-fi and movies. But it’s just fiction, right? Infinite parallels worlds, there used to be this TV show…’ Marc mumbled, somewhat sheepishly, surprised he had even made the connection.
“Well, it’s not exactly like they talk about in low-budget TV shows, but all things considered, it’s a pretty close approximation.” Mary continued. “In fact, the scientists at this time have a pretty good fundamental understanding of it and how it works. It is a very real and important relationship. But that doesn’t matter much here. For all intents and purpose, each universe in the ‘multiverse’…“ she raised her hands and made air-quotes while rolling her eyes when she said the word, “… is completely independent of each other, with no ability or need to interact with each other.”
“Ok,” Marc confirmed dryly.
“Except…”
“Except?”
“Except when something very bad goes very wrong.” Mary finished, suddenly avoiding eye contact.
“Imagine a highway with infinite cars and infinite lanes. All the passengers live their lives inside the car and can’t stop or get out or they will just get smashed by the next car driving by. It’s a nice orderly progression as long as all the cars stay in their lane and keep moving along.”
Marc was starting to get nervous again.
“In very rare cases, however,” she continued.
Marc could tell this was going to be the important part.
“Under exceptionally rare circumstances, something can occur that can disrupt the traffic. One car speeds up or slows down, swerves to one side, and bumps into another car. The resulting disruption then moves down to other cars, sometimes causing larger disruptions, then some accidents, repeating and spreading forever.” A look of depressed horror was creeping into Mary’s expression.
“Is that what has happened? Is the universe crashing? Why? How? What does this have to do with me!?” Marc, starting to freak out, demanded.
“Yes. This universe is in variance. It’s slowing down, causing a backup of other parallel worlds in this region and creating congestion.” She admitted with a sharp breath.
“While you can’t see any effects now, sooner or later collisions will occur, each intersection will cause great damage and with each passing minute, the probability of more collisions will increase, eventually leading to the annihilation of this entire universe. This will also cause destabilization in other universes, cascading until countless existences are affected.”
Something about that didn’t sound right to Marc, however. “That doesn’t seem like a very effective system. How could something like that be possible? One small glitch and all of reality, every universe in the multiverse just goes poof? How could such a system even exist? It seems far too fragile.” Doubt crept into his voice.
“Of course, there are systems and redundancies that correct for errors,” Mary said defensively. “If you have cars, of course you have drivers. You have traffic laws. In order for a system to exist, everything that is required for existence to continue must be present within the system. This is a fundamental law within the multiverse. Each universe has an administrator. A part of the universe’s existence, an entity whose role it is to keep things running smoothly and in compliance with the rest of the multiverse.”
“You mean God? You, Ms. Lopez? Wait, Did you crash the universe?” Marc accused.
“Maybe a little bit,” Mary admitted, staring down at the floor.
“How? Wait, never mind. But really, what does that have to do with me? I have no idea what you are talking about. You can’t expect me to help fix a crashing universe. I just died because I couldn’t even fix the engine in my car just now. What did you do anyway?”
Mary took a breath and refocused her gaze straight into Marc’s face.
“Ok, Let’s dial it back a bit. Don’t worry about any of that. There is no way I can explain things in a way you could possibly understand anyway. But you are wrong about one thing. I do need your assistance to fix the problem.” She blurted out.
“Like I said, each car on the highway is completely cut off from each other. But in order to fix things here, I need something from another universe, and I need your help to get it.”
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“You need me to go to another universe and do a heist for parts?” Marc raised an eyebrow. This was all getting ridiculous. He started going back to the idea that he was lying on the ground somewhere with a brain aneurysm.
“No, nothing like that. It’s more like a software update. I need some information transferred from another specific universe. Once I get that, I should be able to correct the variance. “
Marc caught the word “should” and gave Mary a deadpan stare.
“So I just need to find this software update? Bring it back to this universe? Why would you pick me for this? I’m nobody. I dropped out of one of the lowest-ranked colleges in the country. I just got fired from a dead-end job in customer service! I have no prospects, no friends, no future. I definitely don’t have any particular skills or abilities. What makes me so special?” Saying such a thing so directly stung Marc’s ego, but it reflected his true self-image perfectly. He knew better than anyone else his shortcomings.
From time to time Marc would wonder if there was anything good about him. Maybe he had some hidden potential, a superpower, or a characteristic that made him ideal for this task. He would daydream about being someone special, important, or successful. But he knew deep down that only the opposite was true.
Still, this was God after all. Maybe she knows something about him he didn’t. Was he some kind of mutant with superpowers like the comic books? Or maybe he came from a long line of dimensional travelers who settled in this world generations ago. Was this what destiny was?
“Oh, no, like I said, your job is to just stay alive.” She said, with a pitying look as if she could see the delusions written on his face.
“To get the update, I need to have a physical connection to the other universe. This can be established and maintained by sending a sentient being there to create a bridge. I just picked you because you were near this avatar and happened to expire in a way that made it easy to prepare you for the transition to another universe.”
“So you are like a pirate ship tying up to another ship at sea to pillage them,” Marc asked, gobsmacked, “ and I’m the rope?!?”
“Oh! That’s good! Better than my highway metaphor. I said you were sharp. That’s exactly right!” Mary beamed. “You are the rope!”
“So I just pop over to another universe. Stand around for a while while you use me to download your update and then what, pop back? All good, universe saved?” A twinge of disappointment seeped into his words.
“Well, kind of. But it will take more than that few minutes, so you probably can’t just stand in one place while you wait though.”
“Then how…”
“Hmmm, maybe a hundred years or so, could be less, like fifty or sixty?“
“Fifty years?!?”
“Well, it depends on how strong the connection you establish there is. The deeper you intermix your existence with the other side, the stronger the connection will be, and the faster I’ll be able to get the update I need.”
“How am I supposed to survive in another universe for fifty years? Do they even have food there? What am I supposed to do?!?” This rollercoaster of emotions was starting to exhaust Marc.
“Don’t worry about that. The world you are going to is not too different from this one. You should be able to fit in easily enough, and I’ll even throw in some support that will help you adjust to any small differences. I’ll also drop you in near a population center where you’ll be able to blend in. No one there should know that you don’t belong to that world from looking at you.” She said “should” again he noticed.
“Then you just need to survive as long as possible. The better you integrate into the world over there the stronger the connection will be and the sooner we can complete the update. Enjoy yourself. Make some friends! Try the local food!” Mary explained like a travel agent booking a trip for him to Boca.
“And when I’m done, you’ll bring me back?” Marc looked at her hopefully.
“Umm, yeah?” She was staring at the desk now.
“…”
“Well, kind of. In a way, yes. You see, the transfer is a type of projection. Nothing physical from this universe can move to another universe.”
“The law of conservation of mass.” Marc interrupted with the term that just popped into his head.
With real surprise on her face this time, Mary continued, “So I will be projecting a type of energy that will construct a body for you on the other side. Then I can transplant your connection to the new avatar. Once the update is complete we can stop the transmission and…”
“And…?”
“… ummm. Poof!’
“Poof?!?”
“Yes, poof. Up in a cloud of smoke. All the matter gathered for your body there will just disperse. No nasty mess to clean up.” She dusted off her hands together like she had just cleaned up a mess in a detergent commercial. “No muss, no fuss!”
“Ok, on second thought I think I am good going back to being dead now. Good luck with the universe.” Marc deadpanned.
“No! Wait! This can be good for you. I can help set you up over there, and give you a bonus so your life will be nice and comfortable. You won’t have to worry, your body over there won’t get sick, won’t age, won’t even die unless you receive some major trauma.” She rattled on like a used car salesman.
“You will feel perfectly normal, but as long as the connection remains with this universe, your body will regenerate back to a baseline. You can even chop off an arm and it will grow back eventually. You ought to have a nice, long and comfortable life over there. Here, you just got made into road kill.” Not a hint of delicacy in her voice now.
“But you said I could be killed over there.” Marc retorted.
“Not by the little things that kill people here. You would need to run into something more serious than a white truck on the highway. You need to keep your head, literally. Your sentience is required to maintain the connection, so ending your brain activity will cut you off.”
“I am immortal as long as I am not decapitated?” Marc thought that sounded familiar.
“Or vaporized, or flattened by a mountain, a million volts to your brain stem would also be a bad thing.” She confirmed.
“But then when you are done using me, I just… Poof! Can’t I just stay there when you are done?”
“I won’t be able to maintain the connection once we start the upgrade here, and your body won’t be able to stay intact without that connection. I also won’t be able to bring your consciousness back here. How about this? When you are done there, I will reset you back to this room before I fired you. You can get your old life and your job back and everything will go on as though this never happened, but without the whole truck on the highway episode.” She smiled brightly.
“So I do you this favor, this job, help you save the universe and maybe countless more universes, then my retirement reward is to go back to my soul-crushing, dead-end call center job?” Marc asked incredulously. “Yeah, hard pass.”
“Fine, on top of that, I’ll fire Ryan. He’s a prick and he pisses me off too.”
Marc raised his eyebrow at that. He was sure she was joking, but for a second he let himself add it to his consideration.
“Seriously, if you can help pull this off, I will make it worth your effort. I wouldn’t make the savior of the universe rot away in a place like this.” She gestured to the room around them.
“Also,” Mary added with a gleam in her eye. “It’s not like you have a choice. I don’t need your permission to send you. Sure, it works better if you cooperate, but even if you just stand there for a hundred years, it will eventually work, and let’s just say time is a relative thing.” She had him.
Marc sat there for a moment, breathing through his nose and staring at the smiling woman across from him.
“What do I even call you?” Frustration mounted in his voice. “Ms. Lopez? Is it OK if I call you Mary? I mean I was never a religious person, but still, is it too much to call God by her first name.”
She smiled back at him. “Mary is fine.”
"Mary, are you sure you are God and not, well, you know, the other one?’ He asked, quickly glancing at the floor.
“So,” she started, leaning forward in her chair, bringing her face closer to him. “Shall we continue by explaining a bit about your new home?”