Stories

He was sure he had seen that plant before, although he couldn't, for the life of him, remember where. It was a nice looking vine too, if one was into that sort of thing. Plants, that is, something his mother always found a reason to coo over, God knows why!
Richard walked around the bend, passed the Belvedere point, without stopping to admire the view this time, and picked up the pace on the old cobblestones of the pedestrian trail that connected the town to the steam plant. Back in the day when everyone walked to work it used to be the principal thoroughfare to and from town, but since they had built the railroad for the commuter train nobody took the long walk along the side of the mountain anymore, and the trail hadn't been used in years. 

When you get used to the thought of being endless, a life that spans a few decades feels like a cruel and senseless death sentence, the proof the universe really doesn’t care about you. 
It is the ultimate banishment from Eden, to live your fated lot as a frail, naked, scared and inescapably impermanent creature.
If he couldn’t find the ultimate meaning in all the centuries he’d spent wandering through the many splendored versions of reality, what could he possibly hope for in however long of a human life was now laid before him? 
It was his punishment, really, to wrap up his epic adventure with the fate of a fruit fly! 

There is no planning life if it lasts just one day, and that’s what his life really was, he was just too cowardly to admit it, so he borrowed time from the future and put things in it, time that didn’t belong to him yet, and for all he knew, he might not get at all. 
Planning that borrowed time was just as absurd as venturing into a virgin territory with maps of some place else and relying on them for guidance. 
The debt of these variances accrued, and he got more and more lost while dutifully following his useless map and desperately trying to bend reality out of shape to make it match his expectations. 
Reality didn’t take kindly to that. 

He remembered his dream and reviled getting dragged into fake reality again, and acting towards it as if it was real. And even if it was real, he wasn’t Helmuth, and he didn’t know what Inclusion 35B was about. He didn’t choose any of this. Why was he playing along?
“I’m not Helmuth,” he declared.
“Aah, yeah…” his partner assessed him with a critical eye. “Maybe you should sit this one out, my friend. You don’t look so hot.”
“Aren’t you going to take me to the hospital?” he asked, with a shrewd gleam in his eye.
“Not on your life!” his partner didn’t miss a beat. “I don’t know what you took, but I hope it doesn’t kill you. This is too important to muck up. I trust you’ll get your act together soon and start behaving like a grown-up. I can’t keep making excuses for you, you’re fifty years old, for God’s sake!”
“Finally, some information that’s not useless! So, I’m fifty then! That would make my birth year…”
Of course he didn’t know what year they were in. Not what year, not what place, not even what reality. Back to start.

In the realities with friends and families, he became Helmuth, and took upon the obligations that came with his persona, but for the most part being just kept churning new contexts and new worlds every day, an endless array of possibilities in every combination of details. 
Some worlds were so beautiful and so bizarre he spent days, sometimes weeks, going through the same panel again and again, trying to get back to them, and the quantum probabilities translated as refrains, turning the corresponding lyrics into old-fashioned French poems, strewn with repeating lines.
The largest archive of poetry in existence, which had all written itself, was carefully collected and organized by the only being ever to need order and reason - the human it carried in its womb.

He didn’t ask himself who Jennifer was to him. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway, it could be a Roger or a Taylor next for all he knew. 
His appetite now gone, he excused himself for a moment, pretending he had to take a phone call and promising to delve into the subject of phase two when he returned, and made his way out the door, relieved to hear the muzak chiming softly in the background.
He wrote the new destination on the panel under the other three and gaped incredulously when he read the composite: 
inside the wall
the blue world
duplicates
phase two holographic game
“It’s a language?” he laughed out loud. “Does it read top to bottom or bottom to top?”
Strange, the assumptions we make about unfamiliar things, we automatically dump them in the closest category that seems to fit, without ever looking at what they really are. 

But what if this was hell? What else would hell look like, if not as an absence of all meaning? He suddenly felt like a condemned man, sentenced to live his disjointed life outside the bonds of family, purpose and love. However much his now husband might hurt from his jealousy and insecurity, at least he could feel human emotions. He lived a story, good or bad, where things happened because of other things. He instantly resented this man, who was a complete stranger, for loving him and having his happiness tied to his whims. They weren’t even his whims, he mused. Whose whims were they, really? Who decided, when a random door opened, whether it was just another door or it led back to the muzak lounge?

He leaned back in the chair, trying to make himself as comfortable as possible, and fell asleep immediately, helped by the slowly dimming light. He had no idea how long he’d been sleeping when he woke up, his head pounding and his mouth feeling like cotton balls. There was a blanket on the chair next to his, neatly folded so the edges aligned to form a perfect square.
Startled by the discovery, he jumped to his feet in a fight-or-flight response that bypassed his brain. 
There was nobody else in the room, and after he checked inside every cupboard and behind every door, he had the uncomfortable feeling of his privacy having been violated, even as he had no expectation of privacy living in this space. 
He didn’t even know how much time had passed since he first woke up in this lounge, there was no accounting for day or night in this place with no doors, no windows and no clocks, a place he had started to suspect was outside time itself somehow, like some sort of hub where different realities and timelines intersected.

The mind is a strange thing that can twist and stretch to no end and accommodate almost anything, no matter how logically unsound, when caught in the push and pull of human rationalizations.
Who would have thought only a few short months ago that this room, which he could not escape, would become the only place in existence where he could find some peace?
We all imagine we have all our ducks in a row, imagine we know what we could live with and what we could not, and think we’re in control. It only takes one minor adjustment, the slightest thing, a ridiculous detail, to wake us up to the fact that we’re barely one rung above an eating and breeding machine, programmed to stay alive at any cost.
Some people find a savage nobility in accepting this thought, in embracing their instinctual nature, they consider it a mark of courage in the struggle for survival they perceive life to be.
It clarifies their purpose, removes their internal conflicts and sets them free from the agony of moral choices and from the obligation to uphold one’s own standards of behavior in the face of insurmountable odds.
Tragically for him, he was not one of those people.

He looked at it, focusing his attention on its details to remember them later: the design comprised swirling and winding stems with tulips at the ends, so entangled it was impossible to tell them apart.
‘I’m not going,’ he decided, calm, then turned his back to the gaping hole in the wall and went to the bar to fix himself lunch.
A blood-curdling scream emerged from the depths, the sound of a person facing mortal danger. 
He hesitated, faithful to his original intent, arguing with himself that this was not his problem and that being stuck in here in this alternate reality hub was punishment enough. 
Meanwhile, a second scream pierced his ears, and then a third, accompanied by desperate cries for help.
His protective instincts got the better of him and he walked through the opening, already furious because he knew ahead of time he’d have plenty of opportunities to regret this later, kicking himself for being such an idiot and hating that person, whoever they were, for calling out his guilt.
He barely had time to adjust his eyes to the bright sunlight when he got engulfed in a sea of flashes, camera clicks and loudly shouted questions.