Another Multitude of Her

When things went wrong, we used to say it was the multiverse crashing into us that was to blame. Like an old superstition in the olden time. Crashing your car was the multiverse. If you said or did something you regretted, you blamed it on the other you from the multiverse. Overtime again was the multiverse curse.

It wasn’t like there was a lot to do at work these days. I even had a long lunch today. Sat outside with the warehouse department doing nothing, smoked a little too much. We threw balls of paper at each other for laughs and talked about the merging of the company. And by talking about it I mean going on about how much we hated it, hated the bosses, hated work, hated where we were going in life.

We were all just barely hanging in there, not in the air, floating like a good trip. No, more than the second before you wake, when you dream about hanging above a cliff, falling and waking up just as you hit the ground. It’s like… Can you for once just hit the round? That way I at least would have done something in life.

“Did you hear the new update they did?” Tim from distribution said when he made the connection of the merging companies to the crashing multiverses. Most of them nodded, they were all good at it, keeping up with the times. Good students, soon ready to move onward. Not me, I was more or less frozen in time, not moving forward. This is where life would lead me, this was my world.

“Anyway, you know the collision, right?”

The collision he was talking about was when the multiverse crashed into ours, three years ago. It was a big deal then, but it’s strange what you get used to. It wasn’t like it was crashing into the actual world either, like two planets colliding. It was our data and the internet it had collided with. Some would probably say it was more of our world than the one we were physically standing in.

“Yeah?”

“So anyway, in the new update in the space net it created after the collision, they have managed to link our social media to ours now. You could actually send a friend request to yourself.”

“What?”

He had the attention of the whole group now. They had always talked about trying to connect with the multiverse, but had been unable to for most people. There were whispers about the rich getting special access, but for the rest of us, this was still a distant and hypothetical thing.

“Did you do it?” John from Delivery asked, already too late with his daily tasks, but not caring. People's packages could always wait, there was no rush for cheap dinner plates, candle sticks and questionable electronics we sold from the Outlet. Tim looked proud, finally a pioneer among his peers.

“Sure did.”

“What’s he like then?” I asked. He didn’t answer for a couple of moments. He faltered in his words, taking a moment to frame the response in his favor.

“Well, he hasn’t actually answered though. Yet! He has a private profile and probably doesn’t use it as much. But from what I saw from his profile picture, I can see he’s driving a better car than I do.”

“Really”

“Yeah, Mercedes.”

The rest of the gang started teasing Tim about his other self not accepting his friend request, and I wondered as I went about my day, taking stocks and packing boxes for the Delivery to take out. Would I have been accepted?

Getting back home I was bored, hungry and too tired to do anything about it. Microwaving yesterday's pasta I thought about the update and the idea of another me living her life in another universe. Same, but perhaps not. We had all heard stories about those who had made connections with their other self and gone mad. So how was it even legal to give to the masses with this new update?

Eventually, I fell for the temptation and downloaded the update. I understood now how it was legal as it was behind a paywall and someone made a profit. Anything seemed possible then. Tim was right, there were a lot of things you had to accept and waiver your rights from. All the information they had a right to monitor, save and use for research, all of the responsibility was placed with the consumers. They could not take account of any mental damage people found when they went looking for their other self. I accepted, not really thinking it asked for more than the standard social media anyway.

The match was instant, a little profile picture with my name next to it. Looking at her profile, I realized that she was not me, I was not her, even though we sort of looked the same. Pictures of her in tight dresses visiting fancy restaurants for dinner and scenic places for vacations and weekends made me think I had to have gotten the wrong one. There must have been a fluke in the update giving me a better doppelganger resembling me, not the actual me in another universe. Except the same family and the same house I grew up in sometimes made an appearance on her feed. More so than it did in my own life.

She looked like she worked in an office, but from the amount of updates she posted she couldn't spend much time there. I realized she was leading a life I thought I would when I was younger. Looking at my face through the screen, living a life I was not a part of, that existed only in another universe, made the room I was sitting in extra bleak, the only color and light coming from the screen.

After hours spent browsing and scrolling through her life, I reached the end, the very first post, her birth online. It looked eerily similar to some of my first posts. Younger, more optimistic. I started crafting my new profile, editing all the sarcastic and self deprecating posts and changing them into more aesthetically pleasing things. I posted stock photos of food and parks, instead of memes and the view from the subway. I bought bots to make it seem I had more followers. In my new profile picture I tried to look more like the girl I had spent hours studying, the way she did her hair, the pose she made for the camera.

With an updated branding of myself I hovered over the follow button for a long time before clicking it. I followed up with a message: Hello, you, it’s me, you from another universe. Hope it’s not too much for me dropping by to say hello!

Days went by without hearing a word. I didn’t say anything when the update came up in conversation at work. I didn’t want to be like Tim, who had revealed that his other self didn’t even want to become friends with him. He claimed it had to be because his other self didn’t have the update yet, and I wondered if the same was the case for me. But that didn’t answer the question as to why they came up when searching. It drove me mad. Did she really think she was too good for me? Even the fake facade version of me? I kept updating the socials whenever I had a moment to myself. Then one day, a message ticked into my inbox.

Hello, so nice to hear from you, this is unreal! I wanted so much to reach out, but was a little afraid. Glad to finally meet you.

From then on, the messaging became a constant stream and soon, I spent every day talking to her. First through texts, but when video became available through the update, and we talked for hours facing each other. I hated to admit it, but she was rather… nice. Much nicer than I had ever been. She listened intently when I talked about my days at “The Office”. She asked about my family and wished us the best for holidays and weekends. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I didn’t really speak much with my family, or gut is perhaps the better word. She gladly showed me pictures of my family going on vacations, celebrating birthdays together or simply just having family dinner. Her family, sorry. It was confusing to look at the same faces from my world and accept they weren’t the same. Looking at her though was easier. She was so pretty, stylish and had an elegance about her I didn’t recognize in myself. As time went on I started to feel bad about lying to her, as she opened up to me like we were tight knit sisters, the best of friends. She said that it was so nice to finally meet someone who seemed to understand, someone who was just like her.

A new tower had been erected in the city. The Port they called it and it was a portal to the multiverse we had been conversing with for years now. In union, the two worlds had created this portal and designed it as a luxurious restaurant where you could enter and actually meet the people from the multiverse, in flesh. She started talking about it, wanting to go to meet me. She said she knew someone working in the restaurant and could get us in, we didn’t have to be put on the ever growing waiting list of people wanting to meet themselves from the other side.

I was hesitant as I didn't want to reveal just how different I was in real life. But when she said she would pay for dinner, I could no longer refuse and we decided to book a table.

When I got to The Port I had to register an ID. they had to scan in and scan out when I left. I gave them my driving licence as I didn’t even have a credit card, and felt awkward giving a debit card in a place like this.

I entered the restaurant and looked out. On one side there was my world, somehow dimmer and less colorful than the other side, I couldn’t even explain why. She was sitting by the window table, looking out at my world through the glass. I went over and she turned around with a smile on her face, happy to meet me.

“I can’t believe you're finally here!” she said and threw her arms around me, smelling like a good dream, making me drowsy, unwilling to let it go. I had tried to emulate her as best as I could, put on a similar dress and pulled the hair back as she tended to. Still, there was something amiss. I was the inverted selfie that just looks.. wrong.

We talked and laughed, ate steak and drank fancy wine. We both liked the steak well done, laughing as we struggled to cut through it with the enormous steak knives. She said it had been a great night and it had been so nice to really get together after finishing the bottle. For a moment I completely forgot about the circumstances until she waved to a waiter and asked for the check. It was time to get moving so people wouldn’t start wondering where she was. This hit me harder than it should have. I realized that there was no one waiting for me. No one knew where I was tonight or wondering where I was. I could have vanished into thin air and no one would notice.

“I wish we could do this more often,” she said, knowing well that the waiting list for this place had many years wait by now. It was unlikely her friend could keep pulling these kinds of favors.

She put down her card to pay the bill and left for the bathroom. I was looking at the black card laying on the table. It had my name on it, but even if I took it into my own world, it would never work. It would never work for me. A darkness fell over me and I left for the bathroom myself. When I entered she was fixing her hair by the sink and smiled at me.

“Everything alright?” she asked in her sweet voice and I nodded, locking the door. She noticed and her smile faded ever so slightly. She repeated her question, more cautious now and I stepped closer to her. My hands were shaking and my brain had gone foggy. A dark curtain had been drawn over my eyes and I felt like I was at the edge of the world with hands pushing me over.

I whispered an exhausted yeah, and drew the steak knife. I jammed it into her chest and saw her stumble back, her eyes wide open in shock as blood started splatting over the bathroom tiles. I let go of the handle of the knife, mirroring her shocked face as some part of me was not a part of this.

“Why,” she breathed out before falling to the ground, she sounded like she was in pain. It was too late to go back now anyway. The only way was forward. I pulled the knife out and bent over her, stabbing her again and again until her gasps silenced and her trembling feet and her weak arms trying to push me away, fell to her side. Her empty eyes stared back at me, her life gone and I finally saw myself in her.

Exiting the restaurant I went into the elevator on the other side of the Portal. I saw in the mirror a speck of blood I had missed in my hairline and averted my eyes, her eyes, looking back at me. When I was checking out I gave the black credit card I had paid for dinner with. They welcomed me back and I walked out into the bright colored world.