Kenton K. Yee
In my other parallel world my father's bulletproof vest fails and he is buried with full police honors. My mother raises me on his survivor benefits and on what she earns as a data scrubber, an income that pays for a condo apartment in a new development an hour subway commute to her downtown workplace. I play soccer and work in the food court of the local mall. I'm more keen on saving up for the latest video game than saving up for college.
Not once do I talk to the teen I am in this parallel world, where my mother is a lawyer and my father holds a doctorate in business administration. He teaches accounting a few years before starting a company that builds simulation software. His pipeline of military contracts allows my mother to take regular leaves from her law firm to spend time with me. My childhood of piano and Mandarin lessons and art and science camps is uneventful and prosaic. No surprise then that I spend hours every day engrossed in stories about space aliens and time travel.
In my other world, I work my way through a communications degree slinging code for the simulation software company that in this world my father had started and now runs. In my junior year, I help one of the developers code up a game simulating a coordinated cyberattack on financial institutions. Hearing of my interest in video games, the developer encourages me to pursue a masters in computer science. I never meet my boss's son.
In this world I know before starting college that I enjoy the back and forth of learning and discourse too much to pursue anything but an academic career in science or fine arts. After devouring a diverse array of undergraduate courses, I decide on the most expansive field I can find: cosmology. Doing theoretical research requires me to cultivate a working mastery of everything from mathematics and data analysis to quantum and string theory, and I feel privileged to enter a profession where people earn a living challenging their minds.
Meanwhile, in my other world, after completing a masters in computer science, I turn away offers from gaming companies in favor of a quant role on Wall Street with starting comp twice that of senior developers. I figure I will endure it for a few years to save up the capital to fund my own startup building adventure games under my own label. At work, I find myself bored to death scrubbing data between team meetings and training sessions. Every day, I want to resign but can't bring myself to give up the bimonthly paychecks. I enroll in creative writing MOOCs and find myself writing short stories late into the night. I submit a quantum inspired short story to a sci-fi fantasy journal that I help to edit in this world.
In this world I get home late to my university-subsidized brownstone a brief subway ride from the campus across the river where I'm a professor of theoretical physics. Although too tired to calculate, I don't intend to fritter the evening away in front of the flickering screen, so I boot my laptop and begin rejecting stories from the slush pile. It is rare, and even rarer when I am as tired as I am tonight, that I accept one. I volunteered for the editorship a couple of years ago only because a writer neighbor told me that culling through submissions will osmose literary skills into my brain that might benefit me when I launch a career writing cosmology-inspired novels. Tonight, my submission from the other world, which has been sitting in the slush pile for months, is nineteenth in the queue.
In the cramped studio apartment across the river where I am living in my other world, I am at my desk after dinner tapping out the first draft of another novel. It's a tough slog and I check social media and email every half hour in hopes of finding inspiration or encouragement, like an acceptance of one of my forty-six stories obsolescing away in slush piles around the world. The echoes of communal feelings I shared with the sci-fi-fantasy community following my last acceptance many months ago are fading. Is this happiness? I decide it's time to brush my teeth.
In this world, I get to my submission two hours after my bedroom light across the river goes off. It's a story about a man who lived recklessly because he believed that, according to the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, after death his consciousness continues to survive in the many alternate worlds where he remains alive. To what extent can this be understood, and it be true, and also false? Under what assumptions? Under what assumptions? The man lives with the joy of a child playing a video game, unencumbered by fears of demise. I re-read the story slowly, trying to understand. Ask what I will. Ask what I have to. His longing for immortality is familiar. Is it from the same aspirational dimension that drew me here? Isn't what I seek the emotion from the knowledge of belonging to something bigger than myself? When I don't care, or when I do, are they there?