His tired sigh is what bugs me the most. How sinking down to my level to even talk is beyond exhausting.

“Beyond the hull is an initial singularity shrouded in a time-dilation field. Every time you ask the machine a question, it dials the singularity forward and observes the conditions of that universe iteration. Compared with the data from the Farsight network, the machine then provides the most likely outcome to the query before compressing the simulation down again.”

“Oh.”

“It’s fine. From what I know of you, I don’t expect you to understand. I could speak to you about matter resonance memory, and cross-brane entanglement, and meta-universal inflection points but your world’s grasp of nature is…” He trails, already bored of my existence. “Nascent at best. Except Dr. Nakamori. She has perspective.”

“So you’re saying it’s a universe machine.”

He pauses. “I suppose you could call it that, with the most absolute basic understand of… Never mind.”

“And how do we connect to it?”

Even facing off like this I can feel his gross need to celebrate himself and his achievements, like his endless video journals monologued to audiences only he could see.

“Each device carries with it an internal sample of my blood. Neural-linked admin-level functions like brane incision and selective branch collapse—what you did by choosing a specific future outcome and imposing it onto your universe iteration—are coded to my genome. And I studied branch collapses for years—years—before even attempting. And only to further my research and progress, even when my staff became insipid.”

I almost shiver, picturing him slicing open his veins again and again to feed this gunmetal spider, when he wasn’t creating and destroying universes every time he dialed the machine. This fucking monster. Maybe there’s another version of us in there. Or we’re stuck in someone else’s machine as they lean in and ask a question, sending us all on our useless track loops, over and over again.

“Then how do you explain me? Other versions of… us… who I’ve met don’t have the link.”

“I suppose it is statistically significant that you can do what you can.”

Oh, fuck him so hard. That’s probably the biggest compliment he’s ever given to anyone.

“We’re the same.”

“You’re mistaken if you think that every possible event that produced every possible one of your ancestors played out the same in each universe. You may think those others that you met are you, but they are products of different variables. Different ancestors here and there, different environmental factors—different minerals in the soil that grew their food, even—which all impacted their genetics. We’re all approximations of each other.”

“But if any two of us are the same, it’s us.”