“I told you. Across all the parallel worlds I study, across all these separate realities with their vastly different peoples and histories, your gene sequence (give or take a few hundred allelic differences) is found more often than any other individual’s. Across a wide spectrum of possibilities, you are a constant. You are the most common man in the multiverse.”

“But why? What is so important about me?”

“That is what I am here to figure out.”

Nathan cautiously put down the unreal photograph he had been handed and regarded the tall, slim man smiling across the circle of table separating them. His relaxed smile, black rimmed oval glasses and white coat reminded Nathan of a young lab assistant taking a well deserved break in a university lounge.

“My selves have a theory, and we are conducting interviews for confirmation.”

“There’s more of your kind here?” Nathan’s eyes darted around the small sun lit café around them.

“Pronoun use and verb tense need a little… revision in these interviews. I should explain that this is one of several million discussions spanning across a slim and random sampling of the Many Worlds.” The white lab coat seemed illuminated by the light poring through the window behind them.

Nathan’s eyes went wide as he slid down into his low-backed chair. He picked up the black and white photograph again. “You must have a busy day ahead of you.”

“Actually the interviews have already occurred, or are occurring from your viewpoint. My fellow selves in the other realities have returned home and have begun analyzing the data. I will inform you if a conclusion is made.”

When it became apparent that Nathan was not as thrilled at the possibility of the answer compared to further staring at the sheet in his hands, the scientist continued.

“I will begin. What do you know of parallel universes?”

Nathan removed his gaze from the photo, thinking. He decided to answer the man’s questions. “Um… I know more about the fiction of it than anything else. Alternate timelines. Evil doppelgangers, you know, with paste-on goatees and all that. Hitler being assassinated by Einstein. For the real science, I read a book once by Hawking that I think said quantum physics proved there are alternate dimensions.”

The scientist’s smile widened. “Close enough to start from.”

“Is that where you come from, an alternate reality?” Nathan inquired.

“Yes. I am visiting from an alternate reality. Coincidently, it has a probability of occurrence close to your own.”

Nathan pondered asking about the probability of a reality occurring but decided against it, opting not to be confronted with math on top of the already dizzying information presented to him.

“Our two worlds reside in a cluster of realities we refer to as the ‘Many Worlds.’ This cluster contains Earths, or Terras, or Edens as they’re called elsewhere, that exist where Homo sapiens have developed. It’s in this cluster where every permutation of possible human history resides.” The scientist paused here, knowing the questions that would follow.

“And that’s the multiverse right? The one I keep showing up in?”

“It is merely a small fraction of the probable multiverse. In a much greater portion of probabilities, life never arises on Earth or is struck down before humans could evolve. The current speculation is that an even larger portion of the multiverse includes realities that fall within four dimensional spacetime, yet have properties of physics different from our own. We cannot even design probes that could physically exist in these probabilities. Realities where, say, the weak nuclear force is different from our own, and atomic nuclei never form beyond that of hydrogen, resulting in a reality of endless, lifeless vapor. Realities where time flows back into itself, continuously beginning and ending before time itself could even be said to exist. Actually those realities are the most useful and studied of the multiverse, excluding the Many Worlds of course.”

“Why would a broken reality be of any use to you? You’re sitting here interrupting my coffee break, not playing with a stopwatch at the beginning the time.”

“You are correct. It is not my area of expertise. I prefer to study the roles of individuals across many timelines in shaping society. Time-inverted realities are of use to physicists and to engineers. They are the ones who make the machines that allow my studies to take place. They divert the chaotic and eternal tides of energy to power devices such as mine here.” The scientist turned his hand palm up, revealing the intricately etched surface of a matte black metal disk. The flowing wave form appeared to Nathan as the darkened silhouette of a hieroglyphic eye.

“Every time I use this device, whether to enter your world or merge back into my own, or when I bring in a physical object like the photo in your hand, one of those ‘broken’ realities dims ever so slightly.”

Nathan traced the face of the figure on the photo. “So is this the original, or did you create it out of a dead reality?” The woman in the photo continued to look up into the eyes of the photographer, her face tilted, obscured by the growing shadow around her.

The scientist paused. “It is easier to… ‘scan’ -for lack of a better word- an object and recreate it here using the device than to physically move an object across the boundaries of two realities. I assure you that photograph is a perfect duplicate to just above a quantum level. By any reasonable measurement, that is the photo you lost.”

By his own reasonable measurement, Nathan agreed. The photo sent him flowing back within himself, down into the memories of that day. The silence of the empty church, abruptly broken every so often by the sound of a closing shutter echoing off the high walls. The beam of white afternoon light wandering in from the entrance doors, illuminating the floor of the processional isle without disturbing the dark solitude of the rafters. He snapped the shot without much thought, pointing the camera away from the stained glass windows he came to see and instead down towards her as she looked up. It was that slightly surprised and so shy smile that Nathan later found going through the negatives. Shining up among so many underexposed frames of glass and iron was a single moment of truth and beauty captured with all the effort and time of taking a breath.

After all her things were arranged in sagging brown cardboard boxes in a locked closet and she herself was arranged in a lacquered Cyprus casket in the soil, it was the one photo he never found despite the long days spent tearing apart their home drawer by drawer and shelf by shelf.

“How did you know handing me this photo would get me to sit and talk?”

“We found early on that interviews with your other selves proceeded briskly after presenting you with credentials of our travel. For this reality and a similar few, it was a lost keepsake. For others, it was a matter of materializing a gold bar in our hand. In quite a few we performed a display of divine intervention to convince your selves of our importance.” The scientist made an almost imperceptible grimace at this.

Nathan broke from his mild reverie. “You performed a goddamn miracle at Starbucks to get me to talk?”

The scientist responded immediately, “The probability of your selves being responsive to religious imagery was quite high.”

The scientist noted hopefully, “my selves did eventually apologize for the momentary deception after the interviews were concluded.”

Nathan’s disgust remained apparent in the slope of his eyebrows. He took a less accusatory tone. “Let’s just get this over with. Where were we before the stories of playing God?”

The scientist resumed his smile and continued. “As you now understand where I come from and are now informed of your unique position in the Many Worlds, my role is to record your response to the information.”

The scientist somehow managed to sit up even straighter, anticipating the data to come.

Nathan only blinked.

“You travel all this way,” Nathan spat, “and put in this much effort just to ask me what I feel about something that doesn’t even make sense? Why not ask about how I feel about being shown irrefutable evidence the Tooth Fairy exists?”

He looked out through the window beside them, hiding his mouth behind a shaking hand. “Why not ask about my life or what I think of the world I can see?” Almost whispering now, “Hell, I’m not sure what I would say about my life as it is, let alone about lives I’ve never imagined.”

The scientist nodded. “We are already well informed about the circumstances of your life. Many of the other interviews concentrate on your history in realities nearly identical to your own. Your biography has been recorded across more worlds than the number of seconds you will ever personally live.”

Extending his hand across the table, the matte black metal eyepiece in his hand regarding the ceiling, the scientist uttered a single small laugh. “Nathan, you are one of a mere handful of your fellow selves who will ever know his place in the greater makeup of all creation. The other interview subjects are never completely informed. You are given this incredible knowledge so we may record your response to what we have collected to complete the study.”

Outside, cars passed along a boulevard filled with people busily living their lives. Men and women going about their days with the belief, realized or not, of their own importance in the world. They all dreamt and imagined and lamented other lives and other worlds. Unknown to them, somewhere out in the vastness of infinity and the quirks of probability, it all existed. Everything existed.

“No one should know this. Not with this life. Not with any.”

Sunlight reflected and played within the tears collecting across Nathan’s hand. He saw them sparkle with all the colors of the world in the window’s reflection.

The scientist nodded for a moment and stood up. He took a step towards Nathan and offered a hand. “Do you want to know what our hypothesis was?”

Nathan looked up at the white lab coat. He could just make out black oval rims as he took the hand offered. Reality seemed to flow and sway around him.

“Yes.”

“In my people’s line of work, we are presented with more information than is fruitful to truth. We can organize and manipulate our data to an endless degree. It is rather easy to analyze the effect a butterfly’s flap on a world’s history when you can send the data to another reality to be analyzed by computers that run for millions of years. All that calculating and analyzing is nothing when the machines can send results back to our own timeline in what seems a fraction of a second later.”

The two came to the door separating the café from the open world around them.

“Sometimes we are presented with statistical anomalies. Meaningless correlations arise. As an example, in a previous study of the Many Worlds I found that the occurrence of a single act of fratricide in an early hunter-gatherer tribe common on many timelines sharply correlated with later societal violence over the following millennia. Was there any reason for the connection to exist? No. Did either brother know the consequences their quarrel would create? Of course not.”

Now out in the fresh air, Nathan raised his face to the sky.

“We hypothesized the same was the case for your existence. You exist across so many different dimensions not because history demanded it; you exist merely because statistics dictated one single man must be so. There would be no difference if it were you or I or any of a trillion other people.”

High above, an airliner passed. A passenger inside looked down at the mass of humanity below with disinterest.

“We thank you for your cooperation.”

Nathan felt a faint breeze towards the spot the scientist had been. Alone, holding the photograph now with both hands, he continued peering into the sky.
Somewhere far away, a universe dimmed.

—

© Some rights reserved. “The Most Common Man of the Multiverse” is licensed under
the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivatives license.

Daniel Travis has a BS in human biology and no right to be writing fiction. He once received money for writing an award winning editorial. The author would be surprised if contacted at danieldtravis@gmail.com.