“So . . . when I have a power tackle, it’s like hitting a universal remote. Literally.”

“Yes,” said Edd. “Your brutish concussive jolts are the mechanism. The method of change is different for every sub-loc, depending on their ‘skill sets.’” He said it as if my “skill set” wasn’t much of one. Of the three, Edd was quickly becoming my least favorite.

Eddy tapped on his game controller and it brought up a dizzying stream of illegible data flying across the screen.

“Basically,” said Ed, “all the things that never happened, all the choices never made, and all random possibilities that fizzled away become possible again. It’s actually pretty exciting.”

But Edd shook his head. “Not when a sub-loc dredges up a world as miserable as this one.” And he looked at me as if I had brought about this abomination on purpose.

“He’s still untrained,” Ed said, coming to my defense. “With our help, his influence can be a positive one.”

The two looked at each other. I sensed some unspoken communication between them. Not so much mind reading, as reading between each other’s lines. There was more going on here that I wasn’t privy to.

So I decided to ask the big question. “Why me?”

Their response was to launch into another one of their hot-potato conversations, as if the question made them nervous.

“Why not you?”

“We think it’s random.”

“Unless it’s not random.”

“There’s evidence to support both possibilities.”

“Yes, the jury’s still out.”

“There is no jury.”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“You know that, right?”

“We don’t want you thinking there’s a jury.”

I threw up my hands. “I get it! I know there’s no jury. Just . . . just tell me how long I’m going to be this ‘subjective locus’ thing.”

“It varies,” Edd said. “Five, maybe six jumps—but once you cease being the sub-loc, the world will be stuck whatever way you’ve left it.”

Then Ed put a hand on my shoulder that was supposed to be comforting, and gave me a brief history of the multiverse, or at least how it pertained to me. “Your situation is not all that unusual,” he told me. “This kind of thing is happening all the time. There’s always someone somewhere who’s the sub-loc.”

He told me that the universe tended to center on individuals of sapient species (that is, species capable of intelligent thought), which were scattered throughout the universe—and since most shifts happen millions of light-years away, they don’t even affect us here on Earth.

“Since intelligent life appeared on Earth, there have been about forty sub-locs here,” Ed told me. “Of course half of those times, it was a dolphin.”

Just then Eddy leapt up and shouted so suddenly, it made Edd drop all the trash he had collected.

“I found it!” Eddy said. “I traced the current reality back to its source!”