The What-If Game
Oct. 2nd, 2024 10:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gslakesNote: this is a short story I shopped around for publication a year or so ago. I've since gotten sick of the submission grind, so - here you go. A piece just for Dreamwidth. (At least for now.)
CN: brief description of violence against a child, trans trauma/grief
The first universe I helped with the multiversal projector was ours, but 20 years ago.
I’d say that twenty-something me was definitely surprised to see the vortex as it opened - I’d picked the day we had our revelation. But that surprise quickly turned to excitement. I’d always been a fan of science fiction - of wormholes, space travel, and parallel universes - and that had motivated me through a very difficult physics degree. So she figured out what was going on very quickly.
Watching through the tiny wormhole connecting our two universes, I saw the younger version of me curiously plug in the early-model USB drive I'd sent through and inspect the contents.
Before the white-blue vortex closed of its own accord - it can only remain stable only for so long - I got to watch her look through:
Each timeline is immutable, see, and time travel just makes a new universe, a new timeline. You can't change your own past. This was the disappointing part of the revelation younger-me had just had, while trying to find a shortcut to the stars. Wormholes only enable inter-universal travel - and, seemingly, only one-way, one-shot travel at that.
Well, at least I’d thought so, until a similar vortex opened in my lab, and dropped a different USB stick on my workbench.
Reading through the files on that? It turns out the other version of me had managed to go further theoretically than I had. (I’d saved her from the distractions of ‘publish or perish’, after all.) She’d figured out a way to identify timeline branch points, and when - and which - universes had interacted with each other. Like, when I’d meddled with her past just now.
She’d tracked me down to say thanks, in other words. How sweet!
And she put in a little note about multiversal ethics - something I hadn’t thought of. She said that if she could track me down, that I should be very careful about any other meddling I do. Like, if I did something awful to another universe, they could find me and do the same back.
She described it like Prisoner’s Dilemma - the classic mathematical thought experiment about arrested criminals who are offered the choice by the prison warden to betray (‘defect against’) their co-conspirators for a reduced sentence. With a chance of everyone going free if everyone ‘cooperates’, and keeps their mouth shut.
Her note continued: if I cooperate with - do nice things for - my peers in other universes - the other ‘prisoners’ in the dilemma? Then they’re more likely to cooperate with me in return. And not ‘defect’ against me, by doing the multiversal equivalent of ratting me out to the prison warden. Say, by opening a portal and tossing something nasty through, for instance.
The optimal strategy being - since we’re all ‘playing’ over and over again, with no end of the ‘game’ in sight - being ‘tit for tat with forgiveness’. That is, to ‘defect’ against anyone who ‘defects’ against you, but forgive them when they stop ‘defecting’ against you, and return to cooperating.
And as thanks for making her life so much better? She gave me vastly improved multiversal projector schematics. The passwords to some unclaimed cryptocurrency wallets, that in her time (now later, age-wise, subjectively than mine) had been cracked. A couple of health warnings.
I checked out the wallets - and, wow. I’m now very very rich. Any debt owed is definitely repaid in full. I take her warning and give it some careful consideration. I wonder what she’d prevented by dropping this USB in now. What havoc had I caused?
Regardless, a year later, and with my new very-well-appointed personal lab, I’m ready to continue my experiments in inter-universe exchange. To play a game of “what if” with real stakes - what if I change a certain historical event for the better?
I start with my own life. I come from an awkward background. A gender that differs from the baseline for my birth circumstances. A broken family, with an abusive father. What if… I made things better?
Liberated from awful jobs, a little think tank of my friends helps me compile extra information to send back in written form. Names of hotels and divorce lawyers from the historical record. Networks of other trans people who were out at the time, and their historical contact details.
All printed and collated into a binder, along with the information I gave to Universe 2 me. I add what the other me from universe 2 said about ethics, and tell my story. My intent to help, my hopes, my fears. Into the binder I also tuck a sports almanac (I couldn’t help myself), and place it into a backpack for easy transport. I also add a high-end modern laptop loaded with useful software, key schematics to kickstart a technological revolution, a patent database, and offline copies of Wikipedia and Thingiverse. And for my primary mission, the cap stone - a year’s supply of puberty blockers, and a very good forgery of a prescription pad of the era, scripts already written for feminising hormone therapy.
Just to be sure, I add a large quantity of historical bank notes into a sachet, and tuck that in with some gold bullion into the backpack.
With the improved multiversal projector this time I can actually visit, and stay for a while. Included with these new schematics was designs for a multiversal recall beacon. Something that can make itself known across universes, and can summon another vortex to it. A little wary, I test it thoroughly with various stuffed sharks and other Ikea stuffed animals. It works - my brave stuffed companions return unharmed - so universe 2 me hasn’t led me astray.
(Universe 3 me in this case is absolutely unsurprised to see me when I test it personally for the first time. I hope she has a lovely day.)
Universe 4 me, however - eleven years old - is incredibly frightened by the vortex. And I don’t blame her. She’s had it rough up until this point, and has little hope that things could get better. Well, that’s changing now.
I’ve picked a day when my father and my brother are out of the house - one of many masculine bonding activities I didn’t fit in with. Even then, they knew to stop trying. I know I only have a few hours before they return, so I have to be quick.
Stepping through the vortex, I quickly assure her that I’m her from the future. To reassure her further, I utter the time travel password I’d devised when I - when we - were ten. (Yes, I’d been reading time travel fiction even then.) She’s still frightened, but she nods and understands the implications of my appearance. Physical and temporal. That a fervent secret wish has been solved, and soon, maybe, another will too.
In a soft voice, I explain I’m here to help her be girl-shaped like me, as well as help her, our young brother, and our mother escape my father. She nods, words clearly being hard to find in response. I tell her that I’m going to go talk now to our mother, and she follows me. As we walk, she slips her hand into mine - a show of trust and gratitude for a withdrawn child used to all touch being hostile. It’s hard to hold back tears.
We walk into the kitchen where my mother is washing up after lunch - as always, forced into the dutiful wife role - and she immediately drops a plate on the ground in shock. Beyond the fact that a stranger is in her home unannounced, I know I look quite a bit like her. Different eyes, different hair, yes, but our faces, our body shapes are very similar.
I explain that while it might sound crazy, that I’m her kid, grown up, and come back from the future to help. I tell her things about her past that the younger version of me didn’t know, that she’d only confided in me as an adult. Shocked further, she stares at us both, visibly flicking her gaze between me and my past self, comparing us both.
My younger self - with an astuteness for her age that I’d forgotten I’d had - tugs at my hand, to pull it into my mother’s line of sight. She points to a distinctive birthmark on my hand that matches the one she has on the same hand. She must have spotted it when holding my hand earlier. My mother opens her mouth once more, shuts it, then nods her understanding and acceptance of the not-so-impossible.
With her so convinced, I open the backpack, pull out one of the sachets, and show her the money within. I explain that she can leave now, whenever she wants. She doesn’t have to, of course, but, the next time my father is abusive, if she feels the situation warrants it, she can go.
This floors her. She utters denials. I know she hasn’t processed my father’s abuse as being abuse at this point in time. Nor would she until much later. But, I know the seed of doubt has been planted. I can keep her, my past self, and my brother safe, by giving her the ability to leave when she wants to. When she needs to.
I know I don’t have long, but I sit down with them both, and explain what’s in the backpack. How it can help past-me to have a body that suits her better. How they both can use the information I’ve given to make a better life for them all, and keep them safe. That they can choose to make other people’s lives better too. They just have to keep it a secret from my father, as otherwise they won’t get to have the freedom to choose.
I explain to past-me that the laptop can be used for designing inventions, and say that she can get a 30 year start on the technology of the future with the knowledge I’ve given her. So - if she wants - she can build something amazing. And maybe, just maybe? To consider sharing it with other versions of us, in other universes.
Time passes all too quickly, and the alarm on my smart watch goes off 15 minutes before my father is due home. I hug my mother and my past self tight, and with tears in my eyes, trigger the return vortex.
I really hope it turns out okay for them.
I’m barely settled when a vortex opens, and an elegant briefcase drops onto my workbench.
On the outside is a note - in handwriting visibly my own messy script, I see “thank you” written. Next to that is my time travel password written in brackets. Ha, guess there’s anxiety a-plenty to be eased on both sides of this exchange.
Opening the briefcase, I find what looks like a very thin tablet computer, on top of what looks like a compact - and incredibly complex - 3D printer built into the frame of the briefcase. The tablet comes to life when I touch a small recessed button. It announces itself as an interface to the briefcase device - what it describes as a ‘replicator’, which fills me with a sudden thrill. If this is what I think it is… I’ve been given an incredible present.
And it is! It contains a library of just about anything I could possibly think of - from rockets to recreational drugs, medicine to machinery. Even the blueprint for itself, which it assures me it can manufacture with two peer devices to handle certain specialised tasks. Absolutely incredible, this is… well, as already rich as I am, money is now obsolete. As I can now extend the comforts of material wealth to everyone and anyone. Making my world one where scarcity is obsolete, like the best of Star Trek.
Loaded on the device also is a diary of sorts from the version of me in Universe 4. She didn’t end up escaping straight away - her mother took some convincing. The final straw was when her father finally noticed the effects of her now-feminine puberty, and threw a sadly-predictable violent tantrum. A broken arm being the price paid, but, one that Universe 4 me deemed worth it. It being a very visible sign of abuse - with a witness for once - that was convincing grounds for divorce.
The diary tells me that she had a much happier time after that - a smoother time through a new school. With her mother as an only briefly-needed adult accomplice for adventures inventing a technological revolution. Culminating in the device she’d given me. Her next stop is the stars, and I heartily approve.
That path is very tempting to follow too. But I’m not done tampering with time. My friends bubble over with other things we can fix, possibilities to explore.
One is keen to explore mysteries of the past. Now that we can visit in person - and take era-appropriate supplies with us - we can see any ancient civilisation we name up close and in person.
Another had an ancestor who survived Auschwitz. What if we averted the rise of Hitler, emboldened the resistance, defeated the nationalistic fervour? The possibility of averting the deaths of millions, even if anonymously, is a tempting one.
Another has an ancestor who witnessed the arrival of Captain Cook in Australia. What if we sent a warning - and maybe weapons - back to the point in time before European colonisation began? Entire civilisations could be saved.
Another suggests we go back further still.
What if colonisation never happened?
What if the enclosure of the commons never happened?
I wonder what we’ll learn, and - if the gifts I’ve been given are anything to judge by? What wonders we might receive in kind.
CN: brief description of violence against a child, trans trauma/grief
The first universe I helped with the multiversal projector was ours, but 20 years ago.
I’d say that twenty-something me was definitely surprised to see the vortex as it opened - I’d picked the day we had our revelation. But that surprise quickly turned to excitement. I’d always been a fan of science fiction - of wormholes, space travel, and parallel universes - and that had motivated me through a very difficult physics degree. So she figured out what was going on very quickly.
Watching through the tiny wormhole connecting our two universes, I saw the younger version of me curiously plug in the early-model USB drive I'd sent through and inspect the contents.
Before the white-blue vortex closed of its own accord - it can only remain stable only for so long - I got to watch her look through:
- some intensely personal revelations about our identity
- relevant medical advice, with the names of related online pharmacies that existed then
- some future personal and family events to watch out for
- a timeline of future events
- a map to some then-undiscovered gem and gold deposits
- stock tips, and,
- schematics to the multiversal projector itself.
Each timeline is immutable, see, and time travel just makes a new universe, a new timeline. You can't change your own past. This was the disappointing part of the revelation younger-me had just had, while trying to find a shortcut to the stars. Wormholes only enable inter-universal travel - and, seemingly, only one-way, one-shot travel at that.
Well, at least I’d thought so, until a similar vortex opened in my lab, and dropped a different USB stick on my workbench.
Reading through the files on that? It turns out the other version of me had managed to go further theoretically than I had. (I’d saved her from the distractions of ‘publish or perish’, after all.) She’d figured out a way to identify timeline branch points, and when - and which - universes had interacted with each other. Like, when I’d meddled with her past just now.
She’d tracked me down to say thanks, in other words. How sweet!
And she put in a little note about multiversal ethics - something I hadn’t thought of. She said that if she could track me down, that I should be very careful about any other meddling I do. Like, if I did something awful to another universe, they could find me and do the same back.
She described it like Prisoner’s Dilemma - the classic mathematical thought experiment about arrested criminals who are offered the choice by the prison warden to betray (‘defect against’) their co-conspirators for a reduced sentence. With a chance of everyone going free if everyone ‘cooperates’, and keeps their mouth shut.
Her note continued: if I cooperate with - do nice things for - my peers in other universes - the other ‘prisoners’ in the dilemma? Then they’re more likely to cooperate with me in return. And not ‘defect’ against me, by doing the multiversal equivalent of ratting me out to the prison warden. Say, by opening a portal and tossing something nasty through, for instance.
The optimal strategy being - since we’re all ‘playing’ over and over again, with no end of the ‘game’ in sight - being ‘tit for tat with forgiveness’. That is, to ‘defect’ against anyone who ‘defects’ against you, but forgive them when they stop ‘defecting’ against you, and return to cooperating.
And as thanks for making her life so much better? She gave me vastly improved multiversal projector schematics. The passwords to some unclaimed cryptocurrency wallets, that in her time (now later, age-wise, subjectively than mine) had been cracked. A couple of health warnings.
I checked out the wallets - and, wow. I’m now very very rich. Any debt owed is definitely repaid in full. I take her warning and give it some careful consideration. I wonder what she’d prevented by dropping this USB in now. What havoc had I caused?
Regardless, a year later, and with my new very-well-appointed personal lab, I’m ready to continue my experiments in inter-universe exchange. To play a game of “what if” with real stakes - what if I change a certain historical event for the better?
I start with my own life. I come from an awkward background. A gender that differs from the baseline for my birth circumstances. A broken family, with an abusive father. What if… I made things better?
Liberated from awful jobs, a little think tank of my friends helps me compile extra information to send back in written form. Names of hotels and divorce lawyers from the historical record. Networks of other trans people who were out at the time, and their historical contact details.
All printed and collated into a binder, along with the information I gave to Universe 2 me. I add what the other me from universe 2 said about ethics, and tell my story. My intent to help, my hopes, my fears. Into the binder I also tuck a sports almanac (I couldn’t help myself), and place it into a backpack for easy transport. I also add a high-end modern laptop loaded with useful software, key schematics to kickstart a technological revolution, a patent database, and offline copies of Wikipedia and Thingiverse. And for my primary mission, the cap stone - a year’s supply of puberty blockers, and a very good forgery of a prescription pad of the era, scripts already written for feminising hormone therapy.
Just to be sure, I add a large quantity of historical bank notes into a sachet, and tuck that in with some gold bullion into the backpack.
With the improved multiversal projector this time I can actually visit, and stay for a while. Included with these new schematics was designs for a multiversal recall beacon. Something that can make itself known across universes, and can summon another vortex to it. A little wary, I test it thoroughly with various stuffed sharks and other Ikea stuffed animals. It works - my brave stuffed companions return unharmed - so universe 2 me hasn’t led me astray.
(Universe 3 me in this case is absolutely unsurprised to see me when I test it personally for the first time. I hope she has a lovely day.)
Universe 4 me, however - eleven years old - is incredibly frightened by the vortex. And I don’t blame her. She’s had it rough up until this point, and has little hope that things could get better. Well, that’s changing now.
I’ve picked a day when my father and my brother are out of the house - one of many masculine bonding activities I didn’t fit in with. Even then, they knew to stop trying. I know I only have a few hours before they return, so I have to be quick.
Stepping through the vortex, I quickly assure her that I’m her from the future. To reassure her further, I utter the time travel password I’d devised when I - when we - were ten. (Yes, I’d been reading time travel fiction even then.) She’s still frightened, but she nods and understands the implications of my appearance. Physical and temporal. That a fervent secret wish has been solved, and soon, maybe, another will too.
In a soft voice, I explain I’m here to help her be girl-shaped like me, as well as help her, our young brother, and our mother escape my father. She nods, words clearly being hard to find in response. I tell her that I’m going to go talk now to our mother, and she follows me. As we walk, she slips her hand into mine - a show of trust and gratitude for a withdrawn child used to all touch being hostile. It’s hard to hold back tears.
We walk into the kitchen where my mother is washing up after lunch - as always, forced into the dutiful wife role - and she immediately drops a plate on the ground in shock. Beyond the fact that a stranger is in her home unannounced, I know I look quite a bit like her. Different eyes, different hair, yes, but our faces, our body shapes are very similar.
I explain that while it might sound crazy, that I’m her kid, grown up, and come back from the future to help. I tell her things about her past that the younger version of me didn’t know, that she’d only confided in me as an adult. Shocked further, she stares at us both, visibly flicking her gaze between me and my past self, comparing us both.
My younger self - with an astuteness for her age that I’d forgotten I’d had - tugs at my hand, to pull it into my mother’s line of sight. She points to a distinctive birthmark on my hand that matches the one she has on the same hand. She must have spotted it when holding my hand earlier. My mother opens her mouth once more, shuts it, then nods her understanding and acceptance of the not-so-impossible.
With her so convinced, I open the backpack, pull out one of the sachets, and show her the money within. I explain that she can leave now, whenever she wants. She doesn’t have to, of course, but, the next time my father is abusive, if she feels the situation warrants it, she can go.
This floors her. She utters denials. I know she hasn’t processed my father’s abuse as being abuse at this point in time. Nor would she until much later. But, I know the seed of doubt has been planted. I can keep her, my past self, and my brother safe, by giving her the ability to leave when she wants to. When she needs to.
I know I don’t have long, but I sit down with them both, and explain what’s in the backpack. How it can help past-me to have a body that suits her better. How they both can use the information I’ve given to make a better life for them all, and keep them safe. That they can choose to make other people’s lives better too. They just have to keep it a secret from my father, as otherwise they won’t get to have the freedom to choose.
I explain to past-me that the laptop can be used for designing inventions, and say that she can get a 30 year start on the technology of the future with the knowledge I’ve given her. So - if she wants - she can build something amazing. And maybe, just maybe? To consider sharing it with other versions of us, in other universes.
Time passes all too quickly, and the alarm on my smart watch goes off 15 minutes before my father is due home. I hug my mother and my past self tight, and with tears in my eyes, trigger the return vortex.
I really hope it turns out okay for them.
I’m barely settled when a vortex opens, and an elegant briefcase drops onto my workbench.
On the outside is a note - in handwriting visibly my own messy script, I see “thank you” written. Next to that is my time travel password written in brackets. Ha, guess there’s anxiety a-plenty to be eased on both sides of this exchange.
Opening the briefcase, I find what looks like a very thin tablet computer, on top of what looks like a compact - and incredibly complex - 3D printer built into the frame of the briefcase. The tablet comes to life when I touch a small recessed button. It announces itself as an interface to the briefcase device - what it describes as a ‘replicator’, which fills me with a sudden thrill. If this is what I think it is… I’ve been given an incredible present.
And it is! It contains a library of just about anything I could possibly think of - from rockets to recreational drugs, medicine to machinery. Even the blueprint for itself, which it assures me it can manufacture with two peer devices to handle certain specialised tasks. Absolutely incredible, this is… well, as already rich as I am, money is now obsolete. As I can now extend the comforts of material wealth to everyone and anyone. Making my world one where scarcity is obsolete, like the best of Star Trek.
Loaded on the device also is a diary of sorts from the version of me in Universe 4. She didn’t end up escaping straight away - her mother took some convincing. The final straw was when her father finally noticed the effects of her now-feminine puberty, and threw a sadly-predictable violent tantrum. A broken arm being the price paid, but, one that Universe 4 me deemed worth it. It being a very visible sign of abuse - with a witness for once - that was convincing grounds for divorce.
The diary tells me that she had a much happier time after that - a smoother time through a new school. With her mother as an only briefly-needed adult accomplice for adventures inventing a technological revolution. Culminating in the device she’d given me. Her next stop is the stars, and I heartily approve.
That path is very tempting to follow too. But I’m not done tampering with time. My friends bubble over with other things we can fix, possibilities to explore.
One is keen to explore mysteries of the past. Now that we can visit in person - and take era-appropriate supplies with us - we can see any ancient civilisation we name up close and in person.
Another had an ancestor who survived Auschwitz. What if we averted the rise of Hitler, emboldened the resistance, defeated the nationalistic fervour? The possibility of averting the deaths of millions, even if anonymously, is a tempting one.
Another has an ancestor who witnessed the arrival of Captain Cook in Australia. What if we sent a warning - and maybe weapons - back to the point in time before European colonisation began? Entire civilisations could be saved.
Another suggests we go back further still.
What if colonisation never happened?
What if the enclosure of the commons never happened?
I wonder what we’ll learn, and - if the gifts I’ve been given are anything to judge by? What wonders we might receive in kind.
