You probably think you know what happens when someone shifts, but you don’t. Hell, until a few years ago, I thought I knew everything there was to know about shifting, given that I was an original beta tester.  And I’m not talking about the class you need to take before getting your license, or the three rules – which, by the way, are deadly serious – FOLLOW THE RULES – but what really happens on the “back end”, as it were.  But maybe I should back up a bit so that we’re all on the same page here.

Shifting, or as it’s been deemed by the various chamber corporations, “alternate reality chrono-shifting” or ARCS, is on the surface exactly what you think when you hear those words in that specific order.  Alternate reality – a reality similar to but not exactly your own.   Chrono – having to do with time.  Shifting – moving backwards, forwards or sideways.  Put them together, and you get moving through different versions of your own timeline.  Except it’s not that simple, for obvious reasons.

Let’s put it a different way.  Say you’re playing Super Mario Brothers 3.  You’re jumping over the goomba, you’re grabbing the fire flower, you save the princess.  Simple, right?  But what happened to the hundreds of times he fell into that pit and died?  How was Mario suddenly resurrected with the knowledge that he should jump over that pit next time?  That’s kind of like what ARCS is.  You know what’s coming, you know what to do – as long as you follow the rules.

Rule number one – never shift less than two hours before or after your current date and time.  And in case it’s not obvious why, I’ll explain.  Right now, you have thousands of unanswered questions in your head, and thousands of random decisions that you haven’t even consciously thought about yet.  Things like, “what should I eat for breakfast?” or even “Should I eat breakfast?” Or maybe you looked at the weather outside and thought, “It’s a nice day, I’ll bike to the office instead of taking the train.”  All of those eventually inconsequential decisions make it impossible to know with 100% clarity exactly where your alt might be at your current point in time, and we all remember what happens if you ever come in contact with your alt, right?  Okay then, so that’s rule number one.  

Rule number two – never take anything from or leave anything in your alt world.  Yea, yea, I know – air,  microscopic flakes of skin, strands of hair – but you know what I mean.  Don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t go to the bathroom, don’t even sneeze if you can help it (we’ll get into that in more detail in just a second).  Shifting is a relatively new branch of science, and we still don’t know about the long-term effects of adding or subtracting matter and energy into or out of a particular reality.  When it comes right down to it, we don’t even know how many versions of reality any specific person may have – as an example, so far I’ve done over a thousand shifts and never hit a repeat – so you may think this one is more precaution than rule, but either way, that’s rule number two.

Rule number three – never shift while impaired in any way.  That means exactly what you think it does, but it also means if you’re sick, if you’re tired, if you have a papercut or even if you just stubbed your toe on the way to the chamber, don’t shift.  Will anyone know?  Probably not.  But you don’t want to be the one that finds out that the reality you shifted into has some rare blood parasites that your papercut gets infected by, and now you’re stuck in the infectious disease ward in your local hospital with multiple scientists prodding you, wondering what the hell you brought back and why you took that chance.  Remember rule number three  – it’s there for a reason.

Those are the rules, for better or worse.  But you’ll notice right away that besides the rules, there’s not a lot of restrictions on what you can or can’t do while you’re in your other reality.  And why is that, you might ask? Because of the beauty of that word “alternate”.  Much like being the understudy in some way-off-off-Broadway musical because you can’t sing worth a damn, this here alternate means that no one’s ever going to see you. As long as you’re outside of that two-hour window, your alpha timeline’s not at risk, and nothing else matters.  Hell, some theologits argue that there IS nothing else but your alpha timeline, and what you experience during an ARCS run is just unicorns and imagination, but you’ll understand after your first shift.  There’s a reason why we’re one of the most successful scientific ventures on earth.

Thanks to ARCS, we’ve resurrected flora and fauna from billions of years ago (not that you’d recognize them as such).  We’ve solved crime, prevented countless mass extinction events, and colonized galaxies.  There isn’t any single scientific advancement made within the last twenty years that doesn’t owe some aspect of its development to this technology.  And sure, mistakes were made, but that’s why the rules exist.

Anyway, so where was I?  Right, what happens when you shift.