Self Possession
What happened in the accident? My colleagues think I was vaporised, but can’t work out why. (They keep trying: they must make the experiment work.)
I’m still here, just a bit tenuously: no hearing, taste, smell or touch, but I can still see. I don’t need to eat or breathe. I just exist – persist – forgetting nothing.
I have a new trick, slipping “sideways” into parallel existences. In some, the accident hasn’t happened (yet). In others, it happened earlier. I’m not time travelling: the date is the same in all these existences, perhaps even in those worlds where tall trees stand where the laboratory should.
I used to “hitch” rides in people, particularly myself. It gave me a purpose: finding out what went wrong. (There were enough examples where it did.)
I don’t do it now. Not after the eighty-seventh time it happened.
As usual, I was inside myself, as the other me worked on the reactor. Unfortunately, he was doing the same things that led to the accident. I was about to leave myself – who knows what it would do to me? – when I was pushed out, with an “Excuse me, Kidler!”
I haven’t been called Kidler for years… except by myself (and only in my head). Clearly another tenuous me had pushed me out.
Some of those other accidents must have made other mes. I hadn’t seen any, but I can’t see myself in a mirror.
Why was I pushed out? I soon found out. The inevitable accident was followed by my not at all inevitable physical survival. When the other me said, “Thanks, Kidler,” I knew that he hadn’t; the other tenuous me had.
Now I sit under the trees, in two minds: should I trade my immortality for real life... someone else’s?
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