Welcome to the Multiverse

by Ira Nayman

  Michealovitsky nodded at Orodovitz, who showed Noomi and Investigator Chumley out of the office.

  > ‘Noomi’s Realife Adventures’: 1.129 points; 1.449 share

  ‘Aggie’s Reality, Yo!’: 1.127 points; 1.435 share

  * * *

  Walking through the lot to get to the parking area where they left the Dimensional Delorean™, Noomi and Investigator Chumley passed by a chorus of women in tutus and battered hockey masks. A couple of them were holding chainsaws. One had blood all over her costume. Neither Noomi nor Investigator Chumley gave them a glance.

  Soon after the Dimensional Delorean™ shimmied out of existence, Investigator Chumley quietly said, “Please roll your window up all of the way.”

  “Sorry?” Noomi, who was following her own train of thought as it ran over a series of cartoon cows that had been tied to the track, responded.

  “You have to roll your window up all the way when we’re traveling between dimensions,” Investigator Chumley told her. “You’re letting the Pollock in.”

  Noomi saw that her window was open just a crack, but that was enough to allow black stuff with occasional bursts of colour to ever so slowly seep into the car. “Sorry,” Noomi said, and rolled up the window. It made a slight “pfft” sound when it was fully closed.

  “Tissues are in the glove compartment,” Investigator Chumley said.

  “Tissues?”

  Apologetic, Investigator Chumley explained: “It’s next to impossible to get alternate reality out of leather.”

  Nodding, Noomi found the tissues and wiped the Pollock off the window, careful not to drip any on the seat.

  “’Preciate it,” Investigator Chumley told her.

  After a couple of minutes of silence (two minutes and 34 seconds of silence if you want to be anal about it – not atomic clock anal, obviously, which would have involved several decimal places – several being anywhere from three to nine depending upon how anal you a – look, this is why I use generalizations for this kind of number, so let’s just leave it at “a couple of minutes,” okay?), Noomi, in the most casual voice she could muster, asked, “So, how did it go?”

  “We…got the information we needed,” Investigator Chumley delicately answered.

  Noomi frowned. “Well, I knew that,” she said. “What happened when I wasn’t there?”

  “Umm…” Investigator Chumley, “all that…detail will be in my report.”

  Sensing something…off, Noomi continued, “Give me the Cole’s Notes version.”

  “Ah, well, I think Michealovitsky took me on a…kind of…date.”

  “A date?”

  “Kind of.”

  “Anything happen on this…‘date?’”

  “We, uhh, kissed.”

  “YOU KISSED?”

  “Ooh! Mommy and daddy are having their first fight!” TOM exclaimed. “You always remember your first.”

  Ignoring him, Noomi continued, “When you say you kissed, who exactly kissed who?”

  “What do you mean?” Investigator Chumley, becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this line of discussion, responded.

  “Did you kiss her?”

  “Ah, no. She kissed me.”

  “She bleaches her skin, you know,” Noomi confided. “She’s definitely lighter than I am. I can’t prove it, but I’m sure she bleaches her skin. When she molts like a snake, then we’ll be sure!”

  Investigator Chumley nodded but said nothing. He was mindful that the woman he was talking about was, in some sense, the woman he was talking to; he couldn’t just come out and say that, yes, while he did think that Noomi Michealovitsky was beautiful, it was in a manufactured, artificial kind of way that he didn’t find at all attractive. But, that really didn’t explain why he was tiptoeing around the issue. If you can’t trust your partner with the details of an investigation, you could both end up dead; his other incarnations must have learned that lesson the hard way. So, why was he tiptoeing around, here?

  Noomi stared out the windshield. She wondered: why am I making such a big deal out of this? I haven’t been part of the Transdimensional Authority long enough to make such a big deal out of such a small detail. What is that all about?

  They spent the journey back to Earth Prime in silence.

  Chapter Seven:

  Noomi Isn’t In This Chapter, Either

  The basement of Bart Finkleheimer and Jessica Cornflake’s mom’s house smelled like leeks and Yentl’s (a fragrance that was popular with the Yiddish hip hop crowd for about 30 seconds about 30 years ago). There was a small bookcase with volumes that had clearly passed their best before date. The brick looked like…well, brick and the exposed pipes looked very pipish. It was the definition of “musty.”

  Mom didn’t care. She was sitting on a folding chair watching images on the screen of her Home Universe Generator™. At this moment, a man and a woman were doing things with 27 quarts of strawberry jam, three stuffed owls and a Salbutamol inhaler that Mom wouldn’t have believed were anatomically possible. Yet, there it was. Mom decided that the availability of such filth would require a strongly worded letter to the Sun. (The fact that she had intentionally overridden the factory set parental controls on the Home Universe Generator™ was irrelevant; after all, if she could figure out how to do it, her children certainly could!) As she watched, Mom felt both fascinated and disgusted (if you had to put a word to it, she was fisgustinated). This particular reality did not fit in with her plans, but she couldn’t quite tear herself away from it.

  “Moooooooom!” Jessica Cornflake shouted down the stairs, “Bart Finkleheimer is being a ferking dork again!” Children are great for tearing parents away from things.

  Mom hastily changed the frequency of the Home Universe Generator™ so that it showed a Japanese woman in a kimono poking fish in a tank with a chopstick. Ah, the memories that brought back! Unfortunately, she didn’t have time to savour them.

  “You watch your language, young lady!” Mom shouted back. “I will not have you talking like that in this house!”

  “Well, he is!” Jessica Cornflake insisted. “He programmed all of my Smart Shirts™ so that the only thing they will display is English swear words in Cyrillic characters!”

  Given the mouth on you, it’s probably appropriate, Mom thought. She had long ago learned not to voice such thoughts, however. “What can be programmed can be de- re- and/or unprogrammed,” Mom loudly responded. “I’ll deal with it when my hour of Me Time is over.”

  “But, Moooooom!” Jessica Cornflake protested.

  “Tell Bart Finkleheimer that I will deal with him when I am through down here!” Mom shouted with finality. With a huffy exhalation, the door to the basement slammed shut.

  Mom clicked on the link that took her back to the universe she had been watching, but the couple were lying in a puddle of strawberry jam and asthma medication, spent. Mom felt frustrated. Frustrated yet strangely exhilarated. Frexhulated.

  She clicked on another link. On the screen, the woman asked, “Have you ever heard of the Bloopstein Minimum Security Correctional Facility?”

  “Can’t say as I have,” the man responded.

  “Apparently, that’s where the answer lies.”

  Oh, no, no, no, Mom thought to herself. I’m not going to make it that easy for you! She clicked on another link.

  The woman on the screen was about six inches tall with strange pointy ears; she wore a sparkly, low-cut mini-dress. A black fairy? Mom had never heard of such a thing, but she had long since stopped being surprised by what she found in the Multiverse. “Aye, but ah kin solve yer case with a wave of me wand,” the woman said.

  The man considered this for a moment. “I’m not sure you can.”

  “Waddya mean?” the woman challenged him.

  “It’s the McKay Inverse Proportionality Law,” the man explained. “The further away you get from the originating universe, the less effective a magical spell is. I could show you the math if you don’t believe me.”

&n
bsp; “Well, damn yer fancy math all ta hell!” the woman complained. Then, her voice started to waver and snow appeared on the screen.

  Mom fiddled with the rabbit ears antenna on top of the Home Universe Generator™ console. Under ordinary circumstances, the Home Universe Generator™ worked just fine without them. But, Mom had made some – ahem – adjustments to the device that had temporarily made the display unstable (not to mention voiding the warranty throughout all of space and time); the coat hanger antenna was a kludge that would serve until she had the time to properly fix the problem.

  “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted an infinite number of entries very similar to the 408,236 already displayed,” a message at the bottom of the search results read. Mom had come to the end of her Google Multiverse search. She tweaked the parameters a little and looked at the first entry that came up. It was of fish in a tank. It had a certain…insistent fascination. For the first five seconds. Then, Mom wanted to pull her own eyes out through her ears. Just like that. No intermediate state. No gradual slide into boredom. One second, fascination, the next strange ocular violence. Fortunately, Mom knew all about strange violence, so she had the self-control to simply click the next link.

  The woman was standing in the middle of a fire station in her underwear. Okay, this was promising. An alarm was going off around her. She jumped onto a pole and slid through a hole in the floor. She fell through a tube that sprayed a firefighter’s uniform onto her, as cumbersome as any firefighter gear Mom had ever seen. (Yes, she had owned a firefighters calendar when she was 14 – what of it?) The woman dropped through another hole in the floor and jumped onto a fire engine that was hovering there. It immediately flew out of the firehouse and –

  “Moooooom!” Bart Finkleheimer shouted from the door.

  “WHAT!” Mom shouted back.

  “Did you say that Jessica Cornflake could cut off one of my fingers with a butter knife?” Bart Finkleheimer asked.

  “I said no such thing!” Mom told him.

  “Well, she keeps asking me to come into the kitchen with her!” Bart Finkleheimer told her.

  Mom sighed. She knew 237 ways to kill a man with chopsticks, but she couldn’t control a pair of pre-pubescent brats.

  “I’ll be up in a minute!” Mom said. “In the meantime, you tell Jessica Cornflake that if any digits are going to be severed in this household, it is going to be done by me!”

  Furiously pulling on the earlobe she no longer had, Mom glanced at the search results. Yes, there appeared to be some promising leads here. Saving the Google Multiverse search for future reference, she shut down the Home Universe Generator™ and trudged up the stairs to face her maternal destiny.

  Chapter Eight:

  Noomi Busts Heads

  Peace Negotiations Break Down…Again

  World Yawns, Says, “What Else Is New?”

  by SASKATCHEWAN KOLONOSCOGRAD, Alternate Reality News Service Religion Writer

  Negotiations between Nordlingerites and Floatheads broke down yesterday afternoon when Yinka Adegoke, chief negotiator for the Nordlinger Caliphate, stormed out of the room at the Toronto Convention Centre screaming, “I wouldn’t talk to him again if he gnawed his own arm off! I wouldn’t talk to him again if he gnawed the arms of all of his immediate family off! I wouldn’t talk to him again if he gnawed the arms of every member of his ferkackta religion right off!”

  “You see what we have to deal with?” Theosophile Homolle, primary negotiator for the Most Holy Church of the Big Floating Heads, asked. “Nordlingerites are completely meshuggah!”

  Low intensity battle between the two religious groups has raged for at least 18 years. Erm – raging might be an overstatement. Smouldered might make more sense. Low intensity battle between the two religious groups has smouldered for at least 18 years. Umm…no, that makes it sound like a vampire movie aimed at tweens. Let’s just say that low intensity battle between the two religious groups has [VERB TO BE DETERMINED AT A LATER DATE] for at least 18 years.

  Current conflict has centred primarily on the Rocky Mountains, although it has [VERB TO BE DETERMINED AT A LATER DATE] as far as Seattle to the south and Toronto to the east.

  Adegoke walked out of the talks due to reports that Floatheads in Washington were responsible for knocking out the satellite that transmitted religious broadcasts to the faithful from Nordlinger headquarters in the high Arctic. “We worship in front of our flat screen TVs from underneath our beds five times a day,” Adegoke explained. “The Floathead putzes know how important this is to our religious practice – that’s why they tampered with it!”

  “We had nothing to do with the Nordlingerites losing their satellite,” Homolle countered. “Serves them right for getting it from Crazy Eddie’s Discount Space Hardware! Mazel tov with that! Besides, their broadcasts were blasphemous – everybody knows that the only true path to spiritual enlightenment lies in the BFH Bible! And, anyway, if we had done it, the schmucks would have deserved it – they sent a virus through the Internet that blurred the picture on our Headcams!”

  Homolle was referring to the cameras that are trained on the 30 Big Floating Heads that appeared over 50 years ago over 30 major cities around the world (and Paris). Spending at least one hour a day communing with one of the heads (which consists mostly of staring at one of the Headcams trained on one of the BFHs) is common practice within the religion.

  Adegoke denied that his people had had anything to do with the Headcam virus, claiming that they would have been justified to do so, nonetheless, by the Floatheads’ Baffin Island Massacre. Homolle countered that the Baffin Island Incident was a response to the Rolling New York State Raids. This devolved into a chain of atrocities that went back 17 years, when, it is claimed, somebody killed somebody else’s electric sheep.

  China, which at one time or another has supported both sides of the war, seems to be tiring of it. “They can gnaw off all their arms for all we emancipate!” said Chinese delegate to the United Nations Lee-Kwan Sapperstein. “Crazy, bloodthirsty North American crazies! We have barked and barked and barked and barked and this is the abstention we get? Pfeh!”

  There, uhh, may have been a problem with the translation.

  The premise of Nordlingerism is that the world is too complex and scary to confront directly, and that the only proper response to it is to hide under one’s bed. It seems odd, then, that Nordlingerites would actively pursue a guerrilla war.

  “No. No. No,” Adegoke said. “Please, don’t chack me a chienick! The religion is made up of two very different approaches. There are the Passive Bedhiders, who believe in the literal meaning of the Book of Harve. We’re the Active Bedhiders. We believe in hiding under our beds out in the open.”

  Hmm…

  The Floatheads, with their superior firepower, were expected to win this war easily. While it is true that they won a lot of territory early in the war, the Nordlingerites have waged a battle of attrition that has slowly bled the Floathead Empire dry. Homolle gave us a fascinating evaluation of Nordlingerite tactics; unfortunately, it was so laced with obscenities (not to mention increasingly obscure Yiddish phrases) that we couldn’t use any of it in this article.

  Since both nations are tech savvy, much of the military activity has been transmitted over the Internet. What has this done to the famed “fog of war?”

  “It’s more like a monsoon of war,” said historian Oliver Stone. “Or, possibly a tsunami of war. The problem used to be that you had to make sense of what was happening on the battlefield from fragmentary and often contradictory pieces of information. Now, you are being bombarded by direct evidence from multiple sources – it’s like drinking from a fire hose of death!”

  Just as we went to press, there were reports that the Nordlingerites had successfully carried out an ambush at the Cyber Pass. Could this be the act that finally turns the tide of the war?

  “Oy!” Adegoke moaned. “I really hate Armchair Canutes!”

  * * *


  Moderate Sleeper with Oak Dream Clusters Noomi Rapier-Witte used her AI-enhanced binoculars (which had been programmed to focus on what they thought she should be looking at) to scan the pass below her. The road quickly curved away to her left; that was the direction the Floathead convoy would be coming from. To her right, the road snaked like a thing coming out of a snake charmer’s barrel for a couple of miles until – wait, no, the thing that comes out of a snake charmer’s barrel is a snake. That wasn’t a metaphor. Dammit! Rapier-Witte decided to start again.

  Moderate Sleeper with Oak Dream Clusters Noomi Rapier-Witte used her AI-enhanced binoculars to...

  “You know what this reminds me of, man?” a voice in the trees behind her asked.

  “Naah, man,” a second voice responded. “What?”

  “This is just like that scene out of Wooden Splinter Cell: Sam Fissure Gets Out the Tweezers.”

  “What scene out of Wooden Splinter Cell?”

  “You know, man, the one where Sam and his band of black ops operatives are on the hill waiting for the enemy agents to drive by on the road below them so he can blow their asses up with his solar-powered bazooka?”

  Rapier-Witte was annoyed that this attempt at comradely banter had interrupted the voice over narration of the scene that she had been composing in her head. “Can it, you two!” she growled.

  “Naah. I don’t see it, man,” the second voice argued. “I think it’s more like that scene from Worlds of Wowcraft.”

  “What scene from Worlds of Wowcraft?” the first voice asked.

  “You know. The one where Bibo Buggowt, Graffnir Goovbaal, Pete the Legless and their band of cast-offs from the Guyship are on a hill waiting for the evil sorcerer Sourghum and his entourage to march by on the road below them so they can blow their asses up with a Sorcerous Spell of Superpowerful Spitballs.”

  “We’re on a mission, here!” Rapier-Witte snarled. “Will you please SHUT! UP!”

  “Ooh, somebody’s really tense, man,” the first voice said.