For a moment, we were awestruck by the beauty of their songs, which sounded almost like prayer. The citizens’ brigades stopped marching, the dark-hearted gamers lowered their machine guns, and the tank operators idled in their war machines. Even those who at this late stage were still attempting to ignore the war and go shopping, paused and listened. The creatures’ stridulations echoed from our sanctuary sites, a wave of exquisite music that was also a homing beacon to their hiding places. We tried to silence the creatures as they sang, but they just looked at us with their compound eyes and continued their melodies. The songs were beautiful, and for a moment we felt like children drawn to the glow of fireflies. Then, just as quickly as it had arisen, the spell was broken. The military trucks began to move again, the citizens began to march, the gunmen raised their controllers, and we finally understood a truth. Our visitors didn’t need to tear us apart—we were doing that ourselves—and the distance they’d traveled was far less than the gulf between us and our own neighbors. Had we had more time, perhaps we could have learned their languages, translated their songs, understood the reasons they were here. But the tanks were already arriving. So we lifted our controllers, and faced our fellow humans.

INFINITE REALITIES

When we finally discovered the parallel timeline mouse, it was sleeping in a universe so onionskin close to our own that it existed in a parallel cage in a parallel lab where a parallel Donnie and I were doing similar parallel-timeline experiments. I isolated the mouse on my monitor and dragged its timeline onto our present one. Then Donnie and I looked at our mouse sipping water from the feeder.

“Okay, let’s do it,” Donnie said, and I hit Enter.

We waited, wondered if the Earth would stop spinning, if matter would crack open, if alternate timelines would go spilling across the universe. But none of that happened. Instead, the parallel-timeline mouse awoke inside the cage and sniffed his new universe. Then he crossed toward his present-timeline self and the two mice put their noses together. Did they know they were the same mouse simply overlapped from different timelines? Were they behaviorally different mice? Might this shed some light on the whole nature-versus-nurture debate? Who knew; we were opening the champagne.

Donnie had first asked if I could write programs for trans-dimensionality back in college. We’d been smoking some heavy-duty Indica, and I’d had a vision of a spider’s web of infinite timelines, the program’s layers as user-friendly as Photoshop. Yeah, I told him, I could do it, but he was the scientist—it was up to him to figure out the hard quantum shit, like traversing string theory and locating multiple realities. Sure enough, eight years later, he did.