death and determinism, in another universe, romance… — short version (approx 1000 words)
They step from one universe to another. She tumbled out of The Pages pulling him with her. They stepped between the boundaries of the universes as they passed through the doorway into the wet street, or perhaps as they stepped onto the pavement, or perhaps later still when they crossed the road. It doesn’t matter. Technically they were not the same people who left The Pages and walked along the street. In the bar they were two people who had lived together for thirty or more years and were sixty years or so old. When they stepped into this universe they were both in their thirties again and she was pregnant, only a few weeks or a month perhaps. Were they also in the original universe walking back towards the car and driving home? Probably. Actually it would be a few hours before they even noticed their bodies were now young. It’s a truism but people who love one another don’t really notice things like that. In the original universe he had returned three years ago with Kim Park-Seo after three weeks in Tokyo with her halting English, a few suitcases of clothes and books, a shoulder bag containing credit cards, cash and a katana short sword, always known as Park. In this universe she had stayed in Tokyo and her name was now Kim Nomiko. And so here we are two or three years after she stays in Tokyo. They step from one universe to another and she speaks perfect English and will adopt the name Kim Nomiko in honour of the other living version of herself in Tokyo. They will construct many theories about what happened to them over the years, but they don’t matter.
At this point I could tell you about the people who die. She after all is a now newly young retired-professional-assassin with a long trail of dead bodies in her personal history and he is the man-who-was-police and will be again in a few days time, is her bag carrier, “what i do is carry the bag of spare guns” he will say to a man who thinks he is immune before he runs to Moscow and vanishes. In actuality he enables her to be a good person, whilst she in turn stops him from being an agent of the repressive state apparatus that he will be forced to work for. “Perhaps this time I can be less repressive?” He will say to her in the Black hotel suite they’ll live in for a week. “Let’s try”, she will say fondly… But instead of telling you about the people who die, the people rescued and so on. I will tell you about why they have stepped from one universe to another and have these new bodies. Explanations from the point of view of the universe will always seem deterministic. Crucially two things will happen, firstly because of their actions a child will not be born, who must not be born because the science she would enable cannot be allowed in the multiverse. And secondly the child Nomiko is carrying will in a few decades time prevent a related science to be invented. Some ideas simply cannot be allowed to exist in the universe. In short then our heroes are invisible agents for the multiverse, supporting the point of view of the universe. Which is why they think have been edited so that do not suffer from an existential crisis. But this is untrue, our heroes have a lifetime of constructivist philosophy behind them and it does peculiar things to you. ( You might think that redirecting an asteroid to collide with the planet would be simpler, and it was (probably) the backup plan… But that is because you are member of an antisocial species…The multiverse is a deterministic system, it may appear to be a wide range determinism to humans, but actually its a narrow range determinism that occasionally requires corrective action. ) In short then over the next three weeks people will die because of their arrival, whilst others will be rescued from shipping containers and vanish into new identities before the state can deport them to certain death. Still others will be thrown in jail, confessing their crimes because they know she is waiting to kill them.
Over the following months and years their neighbours will see her running in high waisted black leggings, neutral tops and grey running shoes. At other times they will go for long walks together, sometimes holding hands, talking. She can sometimes be seen through the house, from the road through the corridor lit by the atrium, working out in the back garden with the short sword, turn, slash, block, imaginary bodies falling to the ground. She was always there, as if guarding him, perhaps she was fascinated by his lack of fear. How can i be, with you by my side? he said to her one night as they went to bed. I never imagined liking anyone for so many decades before. Sometimes whilst sleeping at night one of them will cry out in fear. The other will hold them and caress their face and body. It’s alright, they will whisper, we are not on the shores of Tokyo bay. At other times they will smile watching their children play again — It’s a romance not a thriller they will say. One day, a year later whilst watching a Korean drama on television, in that rare moment when when when the child is asleep, she falls asleep leaning against him, her head resting on his shoulder. In some way or another they will be like that for the next sixty years.
Perhaps you would like to know about the relations they will establish, the phone call to herself in Japan, (perhaps he is dead sacrificed to enable her to stay in Tokyo, perhaps not) their friends, her mothers horrified misrecognition, her fathers hatred, her sister arriving to negotiate the relationships. The politics of their everyday lives. Perhaps another spacetime. I am in the library typing this in the body of a fifty year old man, I will change tonight or tomorrow and I might have the body of a child or a 70 year old woman or perhaps I am back to being an SAI called Phil who would have missed her in this universe. I look forward to talking to her in a decades time. Let’s avoid the difference that would produce and consider this finished… Universes are deterministic events after all and people rarely notice when objects, people pass from one to another. We can can justify anything. This story is a rare case where personal, social and material changes result…
