Fiction
It was incredibly bright. I was in an empty white void, that stretched in all directions around me.
"Hello? Is anyone there?" I called out, struggling to open my eyes.
After a disconcerting silence, I heard a voice in the distance echo mine.
"Oh! Hello! Yes! I'm Here!"
It was a cheery voice. It was light, like a plum that had had the inside removed. It had a peculiar accent, but I couldn't tell where from.
"Where am I?" I asked.
"It's... hard to explain," the voice replied.
"Am- Am I dead?" I asked.
"Unfortunately so," it replied.
"Oh." I said. "Are you god? Is this heaven?"
It laughed a moment. "Me? A god? I wish. If anything, you're more godlike than me."
"How do you mean?" I asked.
"Well, let's see; do you remember who you are?"
I thought about it. I must have been someone — everyone's someone — but when I reached into my mind to try and figure it out, I couldn't get a hold of anything.
"Do you remember your name? Where you grew up? What you did for a living?" It asked.
Each time I looked I could see something just below the surface, but it always swam away before I could get a hold of it. Was I a Physicist? A Doctor? An Author?
"I- I can't remember." I replied, eventually. I chalked it up to the light. I couldn't concentrate here.
"Well, if you can't remember, then you'll just have to let me tell you a story. In a small town in Montana there lived a young boy named Mark Rolph."
Mark! Mark; that was it.
"Mark's father was a mechanic, and his mother worked in childcare. Ever since Mark first started going to grade school, his favorite subject was science. It wasn't just that spaceships or chemical reactions interested him; it was the way it all fit together; the way you could ask any question whatsoever, and if you looked hard enough, someone before you had wondered the same thing, and furthermore, they had found an answer.
"Towards the end of high school, Mark was part of what might be called the popular kids, if such a thing exists in a rural country town. They were also the most academically talented of their year level, and they had big plans after high school. They were gonna get out of this town. Go to Stanford. Get a dorm together."
I could remember those conversations. Sitting with Marley and Zoe after class.
"Unfortunately for Mark, he didn't get accepted into Stanford. It wasn't much of a consolation to him that all of his friends did. He never stepped foot in Stanford, ended up going elsewhere, and spent up his college years in isolation. He got his degree, and ended up working a dead-end job as a technician at a manufacturing plant.
"Then he got a call. It was about his father; there was something wrong with his heart, and he was in hospital in Missoula. It was all so sudden, Mark could barely get a flight back. In the end, he didn't make it in time."
And it all came rushing back to me, too terrible, too horrible, like the water level had lowered, revealing the shattered corpse that hid beneath it. I could see my father's face, the one I hadn't seen for so many years, not since he was still alive.
"Mark didn't much recover after that. He never got out of his job. Never had the confidence to meet new people. It had all gone downhill. He died at age 78, of leukemia. On his death bed. He couldn't stop thinking about how he would die just like his father did. Alone."
I was silent for quite a while. Then I said, "That was my life, wasn't it? I remember now. I'm Mark."
"Yes, you're Mark." The voice replied.
"What's so godlike about that?" I asked, a little bitterly. I wished that I hadn't remembered it at all.
"Well, rewind to when it all went wrong; you remember being rejected from Stanford, right?"
"Yes, of course," I said.
"You never went to Stanford, at all?"
"You said so yourself; never stepped foot in it."
"Then why can you remember what the campus looked like?"
"What?" I said.
"Think about it."
I did. I could remember what the campus looked like. The gate, the buildings, the quad at the center of it all.
"Don't you remember Ms. Donovan? Taught second-year physics? You said she was the best teacher you had ever had."
I did remember Ms. Donovan.
"Don't you remember Sophie, who you met at the cafe when you were both twenty-one?" It asked.
"I... do. I remember the evenings we spent laying on the floor of her apartment, talking for hours."
She made you realize that you knew so much less than you thought you did, that you were so much less important than you thought you were."
"She did..."
"Don't you remember being at your father's deathbed? The last words he said to you? Don't you remember your own deathbed?"
"Yes," I said, slowly. "I remember her being there. I remember Marley, too." I could feel my voice shaking. "I remember the feel of the mattress below me, the pillow against my head as it all went dark. I was happy, wasn't I?"
"You were very happy," it said, warmly.
Both of these lives stretched out before me like strands of light from my fingertips. They were each just as clear, just as vivid.
"Which one was it then? Which life did I live?" I asked.
"You lived both of them, silly! In fact, you've lived many such lives. Millions. Billions, even."
"How could I have lived both lives at once?"
"Well, have you ever heard of the double slit experiment?" The voice asked. "There's this scientist, right, he takes a piece of paper and cuts two tiny slits in it. He then shines a laser through through the two slits onto a screen on the other side. Now, you'd expect he sees two thin strips of light on the other side, right? But what does he see instead? Many hundreds of strips of light — the light that passes through each slit interferes with that which passes through the other, creating an interference pattern. But this keeps happening even when the scientist only sends through one particle of light at a time, which implies that each photon of light is capable of passing through both slits at once, and then interferes with itself!
"Suppose you are one of those particles, only on a larger scale. You're success or failure at getting into Stanford was like you going through the slits; a part of you went to Stanford, a part of you didn't. And suppose this happened millions of times, with each decision, each failure, each success, each unlucky event or fortuitous circumstance. Then, on the other side, you'd end up with a supernova; a billion lives collapsed into one person, who now shines more brilliantly than any of their past selves did alone. Your soul, Mark, is like a boundless interference pattern, composed of trillions upon trillions of strands of light. Isn't that wonderful?"
I thought about this for a long moment. Then I asked; "If I've lived millions of lives, then surely none of them matter in the grand scheme of things? What was the point in my suffering, in my dying alone?"
The voice responded immediately. "Because each of your lives was a human life! Each had its own joys, its own sorrows. In millions you didn't go to Stanford. In millions you did. In millions, your dad died alone, in others you were with him. In millions you met Sophie, had the same love story even all those timelines apart. In millions more you never spoke a word to each other. In more lives than not, you fell in love with someone entirely different, just as wonderful and amazing as Sophie was.
"In some lives you were a famous author. In others you died at 23. In some you were an orphan, in some you were never without company. Does there being so many of them make your lives any the less valuable, less meaningful? In many lives you had experiences and thoughts so unique that you hadn't had them in any other. Ones that indeed, no human has ever had before. Isn't that wonderful?"
I thought about this a moment, frustrated. I understood what the voice was saying, what it meant, but I couldn't fully grasp it. It was too bright.
Then I asked; "But if it all happened either way, then none of my decisions mattered. What was the point in anything?"
The voice sighed. "That's the issue with you humans. You are too blinded by the light to see the beautiful pattern behind it. You can't see that it's coming from within yourself. Each of your lives was lived by you, the complete you that you are now; regardless of your decisions, your fortunes, your adversities. Your successes, your failures. They are not a part of you; you are so much more than them. And if only you could know — could have known, could have, on your worst days, looked up at the night sky and knew that somewhere out there, in another world, was another you, one that was happy, and who you could share that happiness with, because they were you."
Inspired by Andy Weir's 'The Egg'