The Adventures of Abernathy Franklin

“Wait…so are you both the same age as me?”

“36 years fun.”

“So we all have the same birthday?”

“December 6th.”

“And all versions of us are like, born to the same parents, grew up in the same town?”

“Well it depends on what you mean by versions, but for the human iterations of us some of them have the same family circumstances, some don’t. The multiverse is infinite, any possibility you can think of exists somewhere. Try not to think too hard about it this early into the game, New Kid.”

Dizzying as this sort of conversation tends to become, I couldn’t help my intrigue. I found myself feeling rather grateful that Franki was so incorrigibly easy going. I had a million and a half questions, but she never seemed to be the slightest bit annoyed with them.

Franki had led the way for Nat and myself to what she called The Orion Portal. “Sort of like an airport and a mall had an interdimensional baby, and that baby was raised by a tourist trap in David Bowie’s subconscious, haha,” Franki laughed at her own joke in my direction as if I had understood it. She strolled leisurely between Nat and I, as we passed wildly alien store fronts with markings that must have been shop names in some language or another. It was odd how Franki seemed able to lead us both without the need to be ahead of the group. Like her energy was so immense it created a bubble bigger than she was, and Nat and I were just along for the ride.

“Beings from all over of the cosmos come here to connect to other portals, go shopping, get some quick cybernetic augmentations, grab a snack for the proverbial road…ooh! Speaking of snacks, I see a personal favorite of mine, excuse me.” Franki whisked off toward a little stand in the middle of what I can only describe as an atrium and began placing an order with a blue skinned ..person? Its difficult to know how to define the beings I was seeing, not knowing whether they self identify as people or as some other word I have yet to learn. Had we still been on some version of Earth I might have found the blue skinned being more off putting, what with their enormous solidly iridescent eyes, lack of of nose, ears or hair and nearly non-existent mouth. But the sensory overload of such a variety of other worldly beings in this colossal Portal, mall, whatever it was, made the strangeness of each individual somehow less strange.

“Ah, that must be the place.” Nat indicated somewhere further ahead of where Franki was receiving what appeared to be a to-go container full of colorful bunches of …something. “Hey,” Nat threw her voice to Franki, “I’m gonna go in and get rested up. And whatever else they do. Meet you guys back here shortly?”

“Sure thing, we’ll find a spot to gawk from, eh, New Kid?” Franki tossed one of the colorful somethings in the air and caught it in her mouth. When she bit down I heard a distinct crunch reminiscent of a potato chip. “Ooh! The texture of these bad boys, just perfectly crisp on the outside, and such a fun juicy squish on the inside.” She shook the container at me in a gesture of offering, but not being enticed by her texture description, I shook my head and waved it away.

“What are you eating now?”

“You know on Earth in like Zimbabwe where they have those giant caterpillar mopane worm things that they eat?”

“What? No, eww.”

“Haha, well I’m not sure what the equivalent Earth English word for these would be, but these are basically the same deal. Only these ones come from a couple of planets around The Seven Sisters.” She plucked one from the bag, tossed it up, and again caught it in her mouth.

“Sorry, who are the Seven Sisters?” I was starting to feel very intellectually inadequate.

“Seven Sisters? You know the Pleiades, star cluster kind of between the constellations Taurus and Aries? Was your dad not big into astronomy? Mine was.”

The more she crunched down on her snack, the more I could swear I was now also hearing the squish she mentioned, and my shocked disgust was difficult to hide. “I mean he used to point out constellations when I was a kid and we were camping or whatever, but I guess I never really picked up much of it. I’m sorry, but you’re eating space bugs.”

Far from being offended by my tone, Franki seemed highly amused. “They don’t live in space, they live on a planet like you and me do. We’re aliens here every bit as much as anyone else is, ya know.” She moved to a cushioned bench and sat down, so I followed suit.

“I suppose that is true. Self-identifying as an alien is going to take some getting used to.” I sat down next to Franki and commenced my tourist like gawking. Still unable to hit a pause button on the questions in my mind, I kept on about the bugs.

“So do your space worms become butterflies if they aren’t turned into food? Or do caterpillars from the Seven Sisters become pterodactyls or thunderbirds or something?”

Franki shook the container and flicked a few of the colorful clumps about as if fishing for a real good juicy one. “I spent a few hours as a butterfly once.”

“You did what now?”

Undeterred by my shock, Franki continued. “I’m not sure what these ones turn into, I presume some of them become butterflies. Like I said, anything you can think of exists somewhere, so some of them must also turn into pterodactyls and thunderbirds, too. Probably dragons in some dimensions. That would be a cool thing to see, a dragon emerging from a chrysalis…course for the size of these things that’d be a pretty tiny dragon. But I suppose even giants start as babies.”

Franki’s stream of consciousness explanations had a way of creating so much confused wonder in my mind, it was a task and a half to select which one of the many threads to pull on and ask follow up questions.

“Not sure how I would feel about eating baby dragons, I already have enough guilt over how delicious I find cows and precious baby lambs to be. I can’t imagine what sort of wrath Earth vegans would throw my way for consuming magical creatures.”

“Ha, emotional guilt over flesh consumption isn’t as galactically common as you might think. Most other species recognize that all of existence is more holographic theater show than anything else, and we’ve all agreed to the roles we play even if we get lost in them.” Franki caught yet another lobbed snack in her mouth and I started to wonder whether she had some kind of telekinetic ability that allowed her to never miss.

“So the guilt I feel when I enjoy a cheeseburger or a nice lamb vindaloo is misplaced then?” I perked up a touch at this thought, as I’m happy for any excuse to release my own human guilt, regardless of it’s source.

Franki chuckled as her eyes panned around the great space, very much gawking as she had indicated we would. “I think all guilt is misplaced, but that’s my truth, you can pick whichever truth for yourself that you prefer.” Franki seemed to sense my resistance to the idea of choosing my own absolution rather than receiving it from an external source and nudged me with her elbow. “Relax Nikki, no need to beat yourself up for ordering from the menu. Every path is valid, all roads lead to Eldorado.”

This time the part of my brain programed to be selfish took no time in selecting which thread to follow up on. “Nikki? That’s what you come up with for my alternate selves label?”

“Yeah. Nikki. N.K. New Kid. Fresh blood. Daniel-san!” She shouted that last very much in my face and then threw her head back in laughter. “Remember Karate Kid? Did you have Karate Kid in your reality?”

“What? Yes, Miagi, do I really need to have a nickname?”

“Do you take issue with Nikki?”

“We have an aunt Nikki, wouldn’t it get confusing?”

“Mmm.. Only if she were around while other us’es were hangin out with you. In which case, I hardly think the name issue would be the most pressing matter among the topics available for discussion.”

She had a point there. “Right. How do I have a tattooed, bug eating doppleganger? Would probably be at the top of the list.”

“She’d probably think one of us was a demon imposter and call a priest.” Franki laughed again.

“Ha! Yeah…she probably would.” I agreed. It was almost irritating how likeable Franki was. Is. Whatever tense you like.

“Nikki. Ok, fine. So, the bag o bugs that would be butterfly dragons, how did you pay for that?” I nodded toward the dwindling supply of rainbow insects.

“Mmm..” Franki swallowed and shook her head. “They don’t do money here.”

“They what?”

“Don’t do money. Like exchange of stuff or currency for goods and services. Humanity in our timespace dimensions isn’t there yet, but we will be soon.”

“So you can just have anything you want here? So what’s to keep these people working the stands and facilitating the travel, who cleans the bathrooms? Omg, please tell me there are bathrooms and they aren’t crazy weird alive or something..”

“Hahahaha! Alive or something! You’re a riot!” Franki coughed a bit as if I had made her choke on one of her bugs, but she waved her hand and recovered quickly.

“Yes, there are bathrooms. The stalls are….not alive so to say, but the technology they are made of turns into whatever kind of bathroom you are used to or expect to see.” She jostled the bug bag again and tipped the bottom upwards to pour remaining contents into her mouth.

“I’m not entirely sure the idea of the bathroom being sentient enough to know I want an Earth toilet makes me feel any better about using one.”

‘Ha!” Franki chuckled with her mouth full. “Fair enough.”

“Ok so the…person? Being? At the snack stand?” I directed my thumb towards the, well, alien, that had handed Franki her bugs, trying to be casually discrete in my curiosity. After all I didn’t want to come off as that much of a tourist, lest I offend anyone.

Franki crumpled the now empty bag into a ball in her hands and looked back in the direction of the snack stand. “Seen a few people like them before, but can’t say for sure the species. Probably some amount of reptilian DNA based on the scales, but like us humans, most inter-glactic species aren’t just one, well, ethnicity I suppose you could say, for lack of a better term.”

“Ok, sure, but what keeps them working there if they aren’t getting paid and they don’t need money to pay for anything else?” Alien DNA, for the moment, wasn’t nearly as interesting to me as the idea of any advanced culture not having a need for money.

“He does it because he wants to” Franki said. “Or she. Or however they self identify. Not all species have male/female gender designations like we do either.”

My head was starting to hurt like it was being filled with more information than it could handle at one time. But endlessly curious, I pressed on. “So he hands people orders of bugs at an interdimensional airport because that’s what he wants to do with his life. Or she. They. Whichever.” The idea that any living being would choose to work because they actually enjoyed it was so completely foreign to me, I could not conceive of a civilization in which every job was filled by someone. I mean, I haven’t figured it out yet, but if I could get paid to exist on my couch or sitting by a bonfire on a beach, I absolutely would not be working.

Franki shrugged as if she weren’t thinking nearly as hard about it. “Maybe its what they do with their life. Maybe just what they do today. There’s always someone to fill the roles that are needed, even if they are just trying it out for fun or cuz they didn’t have anything else in particular to do in a given now.”

“So who trains them to do the job? And what, even some people WANT to be clean up crew people? Wait, do the bathrooms clean themselves? What do you do with that trash?”

Franki tossed the ball of trash in her hand up into the air and caught it again. “Check it out,” She nodded towards a spot close to the snack stand at what looked like an ordinary trash can. Then she stood up and made like a basketball player going for a three pointer from half court and two hand lobbed the ball of rubbish across the atrium, over the heads of pedestrians and right into the trash can opening and ‘fwwoopp! It was gone as if some invisible fire had disintegrated it and left only the merest puff of smoke.

“No trash heap in the oceans then,” I considered out loud, more than a little impressed by Franki’s continued display of physical agility and spatial accuracy. “Hang on, what if some kid tried to stick their hand in there and loses an appendage?!”

Franki, unflappably amused, sat back down and responded “Are you gonna get upset if I tell you the trash cans are smart enough to distinguish between trash and flesh? You seemed to have enough trouble with the bathroom situation.”

I added an eye roll to my exasperated sigh and sank back against the bench. “And I suppose when there isn’t a person to do a job there’s always some kind of robot to do it?” I was half kidding and more than a little sardonic, but Franki didn’t seem to notice.

“OH yeah, of course, artificial intelligence is way more advanced here. I mean, not all automated jobs are done by sentient technology, some of it is closer to Earth assembly line machinery from our timelines, but yeah, whatever things need to get done, they all get done somehow by someone or something. Ope! There’s Nat.”

Franki popped up from her sitting position and made her way back towards the middle of the atrium to meet Nat, and I followed close behind.

“Whew! Franki, you weren’t kidding about that spa, I feel like I just hibernated over the winter and woke up a whole new bear.”

“Well then welcome back to springtime, Baloo.” Franki said opening her arms wide theatrically. ”What sort of bear necessities shall we celebrate with?”

Nat pointed to towards a store front with a brightly lit 3d hologram of what looked like a hooka billowing clouds of purple and blue smoke. “Shall we take Mogli here to explore some of the pleasures of the jungle?”

Franki looked in the direction Nat had indicated then turned back and threw a jovial punch at Nat’s upper arm. “Don’t have to ask me twice.” Franki linked her arm at the elbow with Nat, used her free arm to link up with me, and started directing us towards the Hooka Bar as if she were Dorothy taking the Lion and the Tin Man to the Emerald City. “Oh,” Franki said to Nat, “And this one goes by Nikki now.”