The mI Paradox

A human popped into existence at the exact same moment that they popped out of existence. They occupied the same time and place as it had before, seemingly unchanged, with one exception: they were, in fact, pushed into a parallel dimension.

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“Oh bother.” I said out loud to myself. “It seems to have happened again.”

The piece of chocolate cake on the plate in front of me hazed in and out, before settling into phase with this reality.

“Well that’s new.” I said.

This had never happened before. I contemplated my new-found companion skeptically. I poked at it gently with my fork, just to make sure it was real. I had never brought anything with me before. Something had changed. Something had definitely changed.

At first, at the very beginning of things, I was in control of the popping. Although I didn’t call it that then. The first few dimensions were barely even different, really. Only minor decisions had varied: the choice to wear the red shirt instead of the blue, or to buy the overstuffed divan instead of the modern chaise for my flat. Things like that. How novel, to relive your day in a different shirt.

“How long has it been now, do you figure?” I asked the piece of cake.

It didn’t respond.

Millenia, I suppose. I had stopped counting. The strangeness of it all grew the further away I traveled. How alarming to walk into what I assumed to be my own bedroom, only to find an enamoured couple quite rudely interrupted by my arrival. Once, the me of that dimension had met an untimely demise and my popping in gave my dear mother quite a startle. The popping began happening even when I didn’t want it to, which made for a very jarring series of years. My popping in meant that there was also a me popping out. Infinite “me”s displacing ourselves between parallel dimensions. So although I had not decided to pop, clearly another me had. It took time for this awareness to dawn on me, and I believe it spread like a ripple through us all. That is when the popping settled down and I, or me, or we, or us, decided to refer to ourselves as a collective mI: many Is, in contrast to the individual consciousness of I.

After millennia of popping in and out, it became almost tedious. Life continued on, in a strangely interrupted sort of way. So when I found myself lying in bed next to a beautiful brunette or blonde of one gender or another, I realized mI was still finding a way to live. I had, in fact, just popped away from my youngest daughter’s third birthday party. My lovely wife Aminah and my three beautiful daughters had been with me just now and oh how I loved them.

I looked around the empty room and found that my only companion was, indeed, the cake. I suppose this mI did not bother to settle down. My heart ached. I would never see that daughter again. I would see others, I was sure, and I knew that mI would be there for her as she grew up, but somehow it never made it any easier. I had been with that family for over a year now, and had grown very fond of it. But why did they have to stay behind while the cake came along with me this time?

Something had changed. Something was wrong. What had mI done?

I picked up my companion cake and headed towards the bridge of mI interstellar ship. (After the incident with the couple, and some likely parallel incidents, mI decided that living in a permanent ship would be better than renting a flat on a station.) I wondered in passing if I should eat my companion cake or if that would be sacrilege. After countless years of popping in and out alone, to have popped in with something else was strange to say the least.

The bridge was empty; It seems this dimension is a solitary one. The main computer confirmed the date and time, although it was utter nonsense to me at this point. The year 7,8572 post-Thanatos. Whoever that was. MI left a message for me, bold black letters blinking in and out:

MI WANT TO GO HOME. THIS LOOP MUST END. I’M SORRY.

Home? How very strange. I thought of Aminah, the wife I just had. Her warm and loving smile, how she would wheeze if she laughed too hard, her delicious chocolate skin, and how she would ask me each morning if I was a new mI. To me, that was home. But so was Steve and the cats before that, and before that was Carol and Carlos and our son Cameron, and before that there was the woman with the braided hair and bright lipstick who’s name I could not quite remember, although I loved her terribly. It was hard to keep track, after all these years and all these jumps. I would hardly even recognize where I belonged anymore. MI belonged in all of the dimensions.

Hopefully there would be another pop soon. This dimension felt so very grey and lonely. No wonder mI wanted to go home. I, too, hoped that there would be another pop soon. Unfortunately, I had not seen the lab where I studied parallel dimensions in several hundred years. It would have to be the mI in one of the many labs to pop mI through to the next dimension. MI had written “loop” but that was not quite accurate, I don’t think. It was really more like infinite pages of a book, all bound together at one point, but each page a little different, and mI was moving one page to the next, ever forward.

MI theorized once that there may be an end, but the problem was that each decision rippled out and printed another page in that book. Not just mI own decisions, either, but everyone’s. Every living entity in the whole of the universe, writing duplicate parallel universes at every choice. It was unfathomably vast, and mI was trapped to wander them all.

Perhaps it sounds as though I had achieved the ultimate goal: immortality. But in truth, I visited the same days and weeks and months over and over again. Infinite possibilities, and infinitely boring. It all starts to blur after the first hundred years. I found it easier to focus on only the last few pops. More than that, and it starts to become overwhelming.

“Did mI mean to send mI back to our original dimension?” I asked Companion Cake.

The presence of the cake continued to bother me. Why, after all this time, had something come along with me. Was the cake significant in some way, or had it just gotten swept along with me?

“That doesn’t make any sense.” I told Companion Cake. I was terribly sad to be missing the birthday party.

This was so exhausting, popping in and out. Thinking too much about it all made my head hurt. Maybe after all this time I was going mad.

“Perhaps I’ll take just one bite. Just to be sure that you’re real.” I said to Companion Cake.

Except, it is terribly lonely, traveling through dimensions. MI was always at home, but somehow I never quite belonged anywhere. I hesitated, and settled for just a small lick of the icing instead.

“It’s a shame that you’re just a cake.” I said.

Something tickled at the back of my mind. As though I had forgotten that I had forgotten something. What was it that I had missed?

“Do you remember, cake?” I asked.

Companion Cake said nothing.

I looked out the window and into the void of nothingness. How strange, really, that mI should have bothered to put in a window, when there is really nothing out there to see. No, that didn’t seem right.

“Cake, that can’t be right.” I said. I ran the external sensors and all scans came up blank. There was absolutely nothing beyond the outer hull of the ship.

“How could this be?” I asked.

Companion Cake chose not to answer.

“Something is wrong. Something has gone wrong.” I said. “Where am I?”

YOU ARE AT THE END.

The screen blinked at me.

“The end? The end of what?” This time I asked the computer and not Companion Cake.

THE END OF IT ALL.

“But. I have never been to the end before. How could there even be an end?” I asked.

THE END IS ALSO THE BEGINNING. DO YOU WANT TO RESTART?

“Restart? Restart what?”

YOUR LIFE. IF YOU SO CHOSE, YOU CAN BEGIN AGAIN. OR YOU CAN STAY HERE.

“Stay here? I’m only here until the next pop.”

THERE IS NO OTHER POP. SHOULD YOU STAY HERE, WHEN YOU DIE IT WILL END. IF YOU BEGIN AGAIN, ALL OF THE MI WILL MOVE FORWARD.

So it was here, all along. This dimension at the end of space and time. This is where I first popped. This is why all of the popping happens. I can send myself back to the beginning, back home, and keep on living it all over again. But then, what of the next mI. Should mI chose to end it all, would I be gone as well? Would all of mI disappear? I had never considered the possibility of death. I had been trapped for millennia, always moving between worlds, but always alive. Were I to die…

“What do I do?” I asked.

ENJOY THE CAKE.