At times, especially in those first years, my sanity would teeter in the balance. I would have conversations with people I only realized later had never been there. Alice herself came sufficiently alive again, in my mind at least, that I became unable to distinguish reality fully from fantasy. Without the Authority’s intervention, I might well have descended deep enough into my madness to have never been able to return to sanity.

Once I finally sat down and began to read that last diary, just those first few pages were enough to unleash a flood of memories. Even when I had actively been writing in my notebooks, I had rarely, if ever, reread my entries. Now, as I scanned the words, I found myself recalling things I had forgotten or suppressed for most of the last decade.

That was nothing, however, compared to what I found as I read past the point of that other Jerry’s retrieval, and the details of his newfound life here on the island. Before long I had cause to wonder if I had ever really known myself at all.

Like me, he had been placed in quarantine as a precaution against the possibility he might still carry the EVE virus in his bloodstream. Only then had he been allowed to interact with the island’s community of Pathfinders. I read on, his later diary entries becoming as sparse as my own had, although describing incidents and conversations that were entirely unfamiliar to me. I read of his first trips to other timelines, other parallel universes. His observations could so easily have been my own, except that he had never suffered the feeling that something was being kept back from him. But then again, neither had he discovered by accident that he was someone’s replacement.

I gripped the pages harder as I read about his and Chloe’s burgeoning romance, and his feelings of guilt when he thought about his Alice. He wrote of how his long-dead wife slowly ceased to be such a strong presence in his mind; never gone, but part of that other life he had left behind forever.

The time between entries grew and grew. First six months, then a year, as his new life became busier, and he found new demands on his time. But then came a sudden burst of activity within just the last twelve months – not really so long, I realized with a tingle, before my own retrieval.

His final entries detailed things that struck me as deeply humdrum: a few lines here and there recording picnics he and Chloe had taken on the island’s north shore; a handful of observations about recent missions into the multiverse and sketches of some moai. And then, some bad fights with Chloe . . .