Yuichi started to pull himself back up into the truck. ‘Sure as shit, there’s more,’ he said. ‘And you’re going to see at least a couple others before we head on home. Now do you see what we mean by “seeing is believing”?’

We drove back the way we had come, to find Tony waiting for us with hot coffee and bowls of soup he had prepared for our return. We sat and ate by the fire, Tony insisting on squatting next to it while Nadia made use of his easy chair. Myself and Yuichi crouched on low stools taken from the kitchen nook.

Tony seemed more relaxed this time around, and as we talked, I learned he was a member of one of several Inuit communities that had made its way south from Alaska a few years before the Authority first found their way to this alternate. Even when he showed me snapshots of a New York half-buried under glaciers, the Statue of Liberty still just about recognizable despite being mostly submerged in ice, I still had trouble believing in what I was being told about parallel universes. A couple more years, Tony continued, and both the city and the statue would be ground down to dust. He explained there were other, similar communities scattered here and there across this Earth, all from cultures with long experience of dealing with harsh and frozen environments.

After we had finished eating, and as we sat by the glowing warmth of the fire, Nadia explained in precise and concrete detail the substance of my new reality.

She, Yuichi and a number of others were all, she explained, survivors of some apocalyptic event or other, on different parallel Earths. Each had come from somewhere identical in most important respects to my own – up to the point where most, if not all, of humanity was wiped out.

Yuichi, I quickly realized, despite the outward appearance of a biker outlaw, was clearly a man of deep learning and intelligence. He soon took over, delving for my benefit into the mechanics by which an infinity of parallel universes might exist. Although not a physicist, I was nonetheless still a scientist, so I wasn’t entirely unfamiliar with the concepts he outlined. My comprehension, however, was at times paper thin. Whenever there were two or more possible outcomes to any event, he explained, the universe fractured, quietly and invisibly, so that each of those possible outcomes in fact took place. Creation was big enough to accommodate a near-infinity of parallel realities, each branching off the other and accommodating every possible history.