La Fin...

Apprentice Technician Broog Titus scanned the layout of the control room, then took a seat at his assigned station. The only other seat in the room was occupied.

The apprentice glanced at his counterpart’s uniform, noting his insignia, and extended an appendage in greeting. “The name’s Broog, Broog Titus.”

They bumped appendages. “Jeegan Throll. Nice to meet you, Broog.”

They were two mid-level techs, it would seem, in a remote corner of a utilitarian universe, with one hell of a view. They both leaned back in their seats and gazed at a spectral section of the multiverse for a few moments, taking it all in. The new recruit sighed, expelling noxious gases. Though they could see several layers of mutli-verse, (that’s why they were recruited), their job pertained to one very small part of the grand cosmic splendor spread out before them.

They both took another minute to look out the window, rather than at their various monitors and control panels, until Broog cleared his throat and grunted. “They throw you into eighteen days of bootcamp, twelve weeks of VR scenarios, a slew of serious simulacrums and, and—in no way does it compare to the real thing.”

“I should hope not,” Jeegan replied. “We’re literally sitting in a dark-matter blind, on a galactic rim, with a ringside view of twelve or 16 universes, depending on your perspective.”

Broog, clearly the younger man, already looked bored. “But we’re only supposed to monitor this one right here, correct?”

Jeegan smiled. “Of course.” He’d been a QMP, for just over two years now, but this kid made him feel more like a fossil than a seasoned veteran. He sat up a little straighter and said, “We’re focused on a very small portion of space, sure, but events can sometimes affect immense areas of the continuum.”

Broog looked dubious, which prompted surprise from Jeegan, “You doubt me? I discovered a wormhole once, that was eating itself, then burping its guts out, over and over; a wormhole between two universes. What a mess. I came across a system a few months back that contained perverted gravity. I had to take three months of mandatory therapy. Although, in truth, I didn’t really need it. What do I care what gravity does when nobody’s looking. Three weeks later, in the same cluster, another event superseded time in the tenth dimension.”

Broog could only wonder if Jeegan’s claims were true, or if he was pulling his lower appendage. These were terms he didn’t remember hearing in his training. How does creation ‘supersede time’? And why would it matter? Space was mostly empty, it’s just that—there was so much of it. His instructor once intoned, ‘Even an infinite amount of nothing can get unwieldy at times.’

He’d been told that this tour was a short but boring assignment given to all new recruits, a terminally dull form of hazing. Could he have been misinformed?

 When he mentally arrived at that last question, he glanced up to find Jeegan studying him with something more than idle interest.

****

This is funny because, in the arm of a spiral galaxy, in universe 72151-BAH, an entire planetary population of humans began to suspect that they were losing their minds. Small objects seemed to be disappearing, books; keys; pens; pocket knives. Insignificant things. By the time the phenomenon began to include paperweights and bowling balls, people like me began to suspect something more sinister was afoot.

And then larger objects started to disappear: Lamps; tires; bicycles and garden gnomes. (So it wasn’t all bad.) Half the people swore it was a hoax, until tables disappeared from beneath their plates. Chairs vanished while people were sitting in them. The phenomenon was widespread and growing exponentially.

****

A mere three hours into his new assignment, Broog pointed at Jeegan’s monitor. “What is that doing there?”

Jeegan squinted, as if his eyes needed adjustment. “What? Oh. Hmm. I don’t know.” He tapped a few keys on his control panel, then sat back, looking perplexed.

Broog demanded an explanation from the more experienced technician.

“It’s an OIS. An Oscillating Interspatial Spline,” came the reply.

“Yeah? Is that bad?” Broog had never heard of such a thing.

“Well, it’s very rare, and it’s worse than it sounds. Splines should never oscillate. Under any…”

“Why not?” Broog interjected.

“It’s—to put it simply: a spline is the crest of a quantum wave, when the wave oscillates, it takes up more space, much more space. Instead of reticulating reality, the quantum world competes with it.”

“Competes with what?”

“With reality.”

“The quantum layer competes with reality?”

“Correct.”

“So what?”

“So—then,” Jeegan squinted at his monitor, “so then you have uncertainty on a massive scale.”

“There’s so much empty space…” This was the snag that Broog had caught his britches on. A hurdle he didn’t even know he had to clear. “Who cares and why does it matter?”

Jeegan suppressed a wave of exasperation before replying “It’s unpleasant for the life-forms within that space. Extremely unpleasant.”

After initial hesitation, Broog said, “And—why does that matter?”

Jeegan would love to explain, but he was already treading on thin ice with this trainee. Jeegan knew things that he shouldn’t know, and Broog was staring at him, wide-eyed, waiting for an answer.

“Most matter, Broog, is organic. Like us. You know? Thinking? Feeling?”

“No.” Broog shook his head. “Organic, yes. Thinking? Feeling? I hardly think…”

“Broog. Even some rocks are found to be sentient. You know that.”

“Yeah, they think, but they don’t feel anything. It’s hard to work up much empathy for a rock.”

“You mean empathy ‘with’ a rock, don’t you?”

“Huh?”

“The point I’m trying to make, Broog, is that most organic matter, no matter what universe you find it in, it knows what’s happening to it, and quantum oscillation is something it doesn’t understand, and nothing you or I ever want to experience. You don’t even want to imagine it.”

“Why not?” Broog asked. “And how would you know?”

Jeegan fixed his attention on his control panel.

There was a prolonged silence until Broog said, “You’ve been body surfing.” After an even longer silence he added, “That’s illegal, you know.”

“Are you going to report me? Because if you are, then I’ll say no more. You’ll never hear another word about it.”

Broog thought, ‘Finally, someone interesting.’ He leaned toward Jeegan and whispered, “You’ve actually body surfed? For real?”

Jeegan nodded. “It’s not that hard to do. In fact, it happens by accident quite often. That’s why it isn’t illegal.”

“Wait a minute,” Broog countered, “I was taught that it was illegal, and it causes spatial anomalies.”

“Under certain circumstances, yes, that’s true.” Jeegan admitted. “It has its risks, I know—but I’ve been excruciatingly careful in my research and I’m certain, Broog, that I didn’t cause this.”

“Okay,” was Broog’s terse reply, “then we look for this planets twin.”

Somewhere else in the cosmos.

***

Meanwhile, at this end of this universe, automobiles began to disappear. At first, they blinked out of existence, leaving the occupants behind, tumbling down the roadway at fifty miles an hour. Injuries were horrific. Then buses disappeared, but their passengers went with them. Commercial airline flights were suspended until further notice, but private planes continued to fly, and vanish.

At some point, various small objects began to return from oblivion. And then the first occupied vehicle returned, with a dead driver. Surely there would have been rioting in the streets if people weren’t petrified of being outside. Even though a few fact-minded miscreants pointed out that the chances of vanishing indoors was the same as if you were outdoors. The pervasively ignorant retorted that, ‘at least if you were indoors, a plane couldn’t fall on your head, or a bus appear in your living room.’ Both claims were soon proved incorrect, but people stayed indoors anyway. I know I did. Then, a few drivers, and buses full of passengers returned with most of the people unharmed. The first few became overnight celebrities.

Meanwhile, the press was having a field day skewering the scientific community. Popular and respected science advisors were roundly booed off-stage or out of the studio when they admitted they had no clue what was going on. In truth, this state-of-affairs fell under the purview of the physicists, those mysterious manipulators of quantum mechanics. They held a press conference and issued a preliminary statement. Their first statement? ‘We will not take any questions at this time, but we…’

After the riot was quelled and the fires put out, they continued. “…but, we’re assembling a team of the world’s finest physicists—and it is a dead-on certainty, that they will get to the bottom of this chaos in short order.’ That’s all they had to say.

The next day, France disappeared. Now, again, I must caution you, this may at first seem funny, but I assure you, it was not considered funny by people who were there at the time.

****

Within a few days, Broog had located the aberrant twin, a planet fluctuating between the fields of two magnetars. A soft, mucky, world, loaded with enormous worms. It may have sounded unpleasant, but it was perfect for the worms. They were quite happy.

Broog fell back in his seat, disgusted, “How do you explain this, Jeeg?”

Jeegan feigned despondence. It should be obvious to anyone that a world of worms was not the source of spatial oscillations. Certainly not happy worms.

There could be no further doubt, in Broog’s mind, that the oscillation had to be from ‘Jeeg’s’ little experiment, foray, or whatever it was. Jeegan caused the spatial anomalies, inadvertent or not. He had already admitted as much. So his explanations sounded very much like a confession to Broog.

When Jeegan finished, the first words uttered by Broog were, “So it is from body surfing then, isn’t it?” When he got no answer he said, “Why? Why would you do that?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Jeegan said, ignoring the look of disgust on Broog’s face. “You get a much better understanding of the creatures in your sector, their fears, concerns, struggles—their triumphs.”

“But that’s none of our business Jeegan, and way, way above our pay-grades. I think you’ve got a very fuzzy understanding of what our job is, I’m sorry to say.”

Jeegan ignored the insult and said, in a deadpan tone of voice, “What would you say if I told you that there’s a planet down there, with thousands of species, on one world, and every species on it has only two sexes. That, is a fact.”

It dealt a smothering blow to Broog’s self-rightous indignation. “You’re kidding. A bisexual planet? How cosmically weird. I’d say it sounds boring. How the hell do they survive?”

“That’s what I’d like to know. They’re very creative, tool-builders, like us, but burdened with serious flaws.”

“Tool-builders? Flaws? What kind of flaws?”

“Taboos, superstitions, a kind of ‘built-in hair trigger’ that gets a lot of them killed.”

Broog was out of his seat, pacing around the cramped room, wracked with indecision. He stopped, put two of his extremities on his hips, and looked out the panoramic window. Finally he said, “Well, the oscillating can’t be helping much, can it? Why don’t we try fixing that, for starters. See what happens next.”

Jeegan nodded. “Good decision, Broog. I’ll start the process.”

Unfortunately, due to Broog’s reluctance, Jeegan had already called for assistance. Within minutes his immediate supervisor would arrive. The notorious Colonel Caldera.

***

The entire planet, people everywhere went into shock when France disappeared. It left an opaque gray fog, impenetrable by any optical device. You could put a camera on a stick, put it in the fog, let it take some pictures, pull it out of the fog and you’d have either a.) a camera with no pictures; b.) an inside out camera, with pictures, of itself; c.) a highly annoyed pigmy rattler, with no camera or pictures; or d.) All of the above. 

Knowing that, or not knowing that, some people put their hands or arms into the fog, and moments later, pulled out a stump, or a chicken wing, or worse yet, a camera or a foot. Dutch and German doctors were on call around the clock. Within hours, a group of daredevil hikers decided to simply walk into the fog, those few that managed to find their way back out, appeared to be deranged, the cause of their derangement, unknown. In a matter of days, the fog that used to be France became a kind of Mecca, to the chronically truculent. In the span of five days, a lot of angry people went into that fog, and never came out.

In the same five days, the people of the world came to realize they were living in a lenient, but organized police state. Very ‘Nazi-esq’, lots of guns and soldiers, shortages of everything else: wine, cheese, tasty recipes, three-somes, certain words were ‘verboten’, like ‘sabotage’ and ‘resistawnce’.

I didn’t have time to figure out if there was a Hitler, or if there had ever been a Hitler, because the current universe, the one I lived in, seemed to be stabilizing. But I soon found out that I was the only one who was aware of the changes in history.

Someone had led Germany to victory in WWII without France’s presence, and now controlled the entire world. Hard to understand how France, which fell under German occupation so quickly in one world, aided Germany’s cause by not existing in another.

Things stopped jumping in and out of existence. It was possible to drink a cup of coffee without the cup disappearing, then the coffee, and then the chair you were sitting in. Compared to that kind of existence, a police state didn’t seem so bad. It seemed just as obvious to the physicists, that their world was shifting through a series of realities, like a ball on a roulette wheel, it just happened to stop on this one.

Einstein was right, God doesn’t play with dice, he plays roulette. (With tiny, sub-atomic balls.)

***

Broog hesitated. “It should be noted that I was not involved with any of your previous shenanigans.”

“Understood,” Jeegan replied.

“But I think the boss would want us to rectify this error as soon as possible.”

“I agree.”

The process cannot be sufficiently described to three-dimensional beings. Let’s just say it was like two people, with three left hands, working underwater, to thread a needle, tie the thread, sew the buttons on a shirt that was really a dress that kept matching colors with the snake that was wearing it. But they did it. As Broog’s instructor was fond of telling his class of recruits. ‘You don’t need to teach a fish to swim, you just need to put him in some water, the right water, and he’ll do the rest. You,’ he would then say, ‘are the fish.’

When Colonel Caldera arrived in his usual explosive fashion, his demeanor was stoic, almost icy, a pleasant deviation from his normal interactions. It was rare for him to present himself to new recruits, due to his nature, and his ability to read minds. He said to Jeegan, “If you flag me down here one more time, I’ll erupt on your front porch.”

“Yes sir, I’ll try to re…”

The Colonel cut him off and turned to Broog. “Nice job suturing that tear, Intern.”

“Yes sir. Is that what I did? I wasn’t su…”

The Colonel ignored Broog’s response and addressed Jeegan again. “Does he know this is his entrance exam?”

“He? No sir. We never, well, I guess he does now.”

“Good, the Colonel fumed. Keep up the good work.” Then he departed in a shower of sparks and flaming what-not.

“Jesus, he’s hot, isn’t he?” Broog commented, and continued before Jeeg could respond. “So this was a test? You’re just a proctor?”

Jeegan nodded. “I’m just a proctor.”

“So I’m in? I made it?”

“You made it. You’re in. There’s no ceremony or anything, but you’ll be well paid. Any questions?”

“Body surfing. Is that a real thing, or did you just make that up?”

***

 It was a day of great relief, and jubilation, when France and all her people reappeared, fully intact, hardly aware of their own brush with oblivion. The entire world celebrated. When their ambassador, a man who spoke seven languages, fluently, finally met with the press, they peppered him with questions. “What did you see?”

“Mm, no much. No-sing relly. Just, um fug.”

“Fog? Were you distraught at the disappearance of the rest of the world?”

“Ah, non. Eet were, was, a very theeck fug. Most people, um, stay home, some continue work—um…”

One reporter jokingly asked: “Did you even notice the rest of the world was missing?” Which prompted a round of laughter.

In truth, the French government decided to call it a meso-coronal storm, issued a curfew to its citizens, grounded all land and air traffic; and when the quantum fluctuations tapered off and stopped, a thick fog seemed harmless by comparison, and one that they felt would lift in due time. So, to be honest, the French people barely noticed the absence of the rest of the world, and many still didn’t know about the whole affair, but the ambassador didn’t want to spoil the newfound international esprit de’ corps.

He looked with grave concern into the camera, knowing the rest of the world was watching. “We do not worry. We know, that the world could not leave… Leave? Live. The world could not live without us, and would demand our instant return. And so, here we are, grateful to the world, for their appreciation. Viva la France.”

****

How do I know all of these things? Our 'Universe Identification Number' for instance? Beats me. Hell, I certainly didn't want to know, and everyone I confided in treated me like I was nuts. So... I can pretend, to be as ignorant as everyone else.