Monday, April 28, 2008

Session 7 - Triften's Alternity game - Jessie is found

No update will be provided for session 6's "boss" battle in which Nick Tardos, ambulance driver extraordinaire, executed an expert handbrake turn, and Alvin Yee, assassin for hire, performed an amazing one-handed breakfall whilst shooting a werewolf in the head. Kellie may have also fired a shot or two. :)

The door opens and they crowd in, the soldiers, the gun nut, the EMT, the cop, and the killer. I think I manage to croak some sort of greeting despite subsisting on minimal fluid intake for the past two weeks. I think Withers left some supplies before they bailed. What jackasses. Protocol says personnel has to clear out, but I'm not considered personnel. Just another thing in the labs.

Mark (Mike? Matt? I can't keep them straight) asks me how long I've been here. "This room?" I reply. "About four weeks." They start peppering me with questions... all of them. The echoes build up and I can't focus on one set, so I just start talking:

You've heard about multiple worlds? For every chance event, there's a parallel universe for each outcome. If you go to Vegas, there's one universe where you won every bet and you're sniffing cocaine off of a prostitute in a penthouse suite, there's another where you lost every bet, lost your car, lost your house and everything. In most of the universes, you probably didn't lose much, maybe gained a little. Most of the universes are very similar.

It seems like so many stupid cliches are actually true... the more things change, the more they stay the same. At least from what I've seen. I wake up somewhere and it turns out that some other jerk went stomping all over Europe about 50 years ago instead of Hitler. Things look a little different, a phone has a strange handle, but it's still a phone. Sometimes, things are very different and I wake up somewhere in the state of Osage of the United Tribes of America.

I was (or at least one of me) labeled borderline psychotic at age 10. I'd hear voices from people who weren't there (but they could have been) and if it weren't for knowing things I shouldn't have, I might have had a tougher time. By time I turned 13, I'd had my first complete shift. At first, I felt as if I'd been dropped into someone else's body, then I found I could remember what had happened to them/me. I had two sets of memories that I could recall. I remembered my grandfather at my 8th birthday and I could also remember being at his funeral when I was 6. Keep up with where I was wasn't hard since I could remember everything that that me had done, but it got hard to keep the two sets straight. After the third and the fourth shift, I really started to get confused. I think this happened to most of the alternate mes since I would find myself in increasingly confined quarters, sometimes a halfway house, sometimes just locked in my room, once in a while in a research facility.

Eventually, I stopped being able to remember things where I was after I shifted. I'd find myself in the middle of an interview and despite the questions and reminders, I had nothing but the memories I had brought with me.

I did notice that I'd see the same people... well, not the same people, they'd have different jobs, or slightly different names, but I'm pretty sure it was them. When the first one recognized me, that gave me a ray of hope. It was an orderly, or he was when he recognized me. Then he remembered being a physician, and a psychiatrist, and a con man. Kind of all at once. I didn't get to talk to him after that. He got transfered off my case.. in one universe, he had committed suicide.

When things got really messed up, either the worms, the werewolves, robots, nuclear winter, whatever, then I started to run into a lot more people who had shifted. Some of them just had weird "dreams" about werewolves while on the run from the worm people. So the idea I had is that the people who shift are the ones who survive more of these disasters. It's almost like maybe we're always connected to our other selves, and that's why we get deja vu and have weird dreams and hunches... but you can't hear those other selves very well when everyone else is around. So some disaster happens, everywhere, because things are often kind of the same, like I said, the people who survive more can hear their other selves better and are more likely to shift over completely.

But maybe there's some limit to how much you can remember so your brain just fills up... or maybe you just think you're you, so you can't just remember some other life. Sometimes I can get little bits of memories from other mes, it just... it's hard, like you just need to let go. Otherwise, I just shift in somewhere and I imagine that the version of me that was there gets shifted out to some new place, continuing some sort of strange cycle.

I keep shifting to new places, or places that look old, but are just different enough so I can never be sure. I've been through so much, and I've even died what seems like dozens of times, but I'm still me, I think. And I think I'll keep being me until I finish something, I don't know what it is, but I like to imagine that there's some reason I'm still me.

And with that I lose consciousness. Hopefully they (I?) will still be around when I wake up...