The Multiverse Traveler

And how long have I trudged through the endless existential abyss that is my sole remaining purpose? All else is wasted, my body, my original used up by another avatar in a far distant universe.

Half an Angstrom away! Half an Angstrom away! I sing to the procedurally generated skies spattered with procedurally generated clouds dropping pre-determined rain.

Oh, but my body, I’ll see it again. When the emergency release is snapped off and I’m whipped backwards through the avatars in the various universes I’ve visited, I’ll look into the mirror and confront my body again. I will be old. I will wonder who put these wrinkles on my face. I will wonder why my eyes droop. There will be children I never fathered and the avatar that once led this broken vessel will be re-allocated, rewritten.

It is strange to know that the universe is a simulation within a simulation within a simulation, but not be able to do anything about death. Somewhere, there is a memory file with you on it and one day some subroutine or another will come along and rewrite the space and it will be as if you never existed.

Look: I am a traveler of illusions. I have seen the multifarious programs generated for some unknown god’s imperfect purpose. I seek the prime universe. I do not believe it exists.

Leaping from avatar to avatar between universes I am the last explorer. And I have seen the endlessness of infinity first hand. I have suffered the crush of black holes and was vaporized by exploding quasars. I have died at the hands of ten-million belligerents, diseases, jilted lovers, foolish accidents. Consciousness is the curse and the requirement for this job. There’s no use watching one’s intestines unspooled over one’s face if one can’t recall where the avatar snaps to next.

The panic came first, followed by apathy, followed by delusion. When the world, whichever one I come from, I cannot remember, when we found out that all of reality was simply an algorithm some degree larger than our own universe. Finding out that we weren’t anything more than the illusion of organization generated by a complex system of logic, quantum chance and electrons running through gates and siphons and … well, it was a shock to most people.

There were a lot of suicides in the days that followed the discovery. “Mass suicide pre-determined by the machine” a headline read. Scientists predicted 30,000 suicides in a major city the next day. True precision is matching up the list generated by the scientists to the list compiled by the city police and seeing each name match up, perfectly predictable.

True precision. Supposedly you can escape the pre-determinism of our simulation by shifting between the universes, but I’ve had my head removed enough times to wonder if I’m not being punished for escaping the bonds of my home universe.

I wish I could return, but I do not know the way back.

The programming, burnt into my avatar senses but one thing and that is if there is a universe larger than the one I’m currently in. A constant sense of where up is, where to swim to to reach the surface, the prime universe. With concentration and force of will I can ascend and displace an avatar in a higher plane for a time.

Ennui folded into endless routine and blood and fucking. Jesus Christ on the cross hadn’t a thing on the suffering of imaginary people living imaginary lives following endlessly byzantine flow charts constructed by some higher complexity. Violence punctuated our days and we wondered how the system could so easily collapse when it became self aware, but that was easily answered. The whole of the thing is flawed, we lived in a flawed world created by a god who didn’t care about quality, but rather quantity.

I’ve died 10,000 deaths in the search of the prime universe and then one day my latest host’s friends and family strung her up in a tree and I kicked my legs trying to get purchase and I twisted trying to free my hands from their binds and I bulged my eyes at my family who were responding to some sort of taboo I’d committed. And I knew then that they were not enlightened, they thought they were appeasing the gods when all that would please their god was for them to come into existence and shuffle off neatly enough and let the garbage collectors handle the misplaced memory. The world went dark with the blood burning and forceful in my face.

Then I jumped to the next and instantly felt a weight on my chest and a heaviness to the air. I awoke in a child’s room, as a child, dying as all of my vessels are. There are parents in the room and it’s clear that they’ve gathered here for the last moments.

But the sense. I could not sense a larger universe. I’d reached the top! I was there in the prime universe!

“Buhhh,” I mumbled. “Buhhh.”

“James.” Father said and was silent.

“This is the real one,” I managed through a dry mouth.

“What did you say, honey?” Mother asked.

“The prime universe,” I said. “There is nothing beyond. And there is still suffering.”

“What are you talking about?” Mother started crying.

“What am I supposed to do now?”

“I don’t know, son,” Father said.

“I never thought this would happen and now I don’t know what to do now that I’m here.”

“Neither do we,” Father said.

“No, you don’t understand. There isn’t time to explain,” I said. “Where am I? Where did I come from?”

“Shh, just rest,” Mother cooed.

“Sprung from the mind of a doomed boy! I return to a doomed universe!”

A blinding catastrophic pain came over me and I died in reverse. I was snapped and torn through a billion different universes trying to return to the original one where my body resides where I would die for the last time and have my memory reset.

I lie in a hospital bed surrounded by strangers that I know are my kin. The product of my body while I was astray.

“Subject 10? Have you reinhabited the body?”

“Yes.”

“Did you ever find it? The prime universe?”

“Yes.”

“Tell us about it”

“All the simulations are more or less authentic. There’s no reason to believe that the prime universe holds any greater truth.”

Some began to weep.

The end is coming, I can feel the breath catch in my lungs, lungs I haven’t used in years. “May I ask what my body has done while I was away?”

And as the hot darkness filled my vision they told me something utterly unsatisfying: “His name was Henry. And he lived a long time.”