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.  

You never forget your first loop. You rub your eyes, maybe ask someone to hit you in the face, hard.  By the fifth time, you’re expecting buildings to fold in on themselves, you’re watching movies trying to find how to prove you’re in a simulation. You demand answers – from friends, from the internet, from random strangers, from God even. It fucks with you in ways you were absolutely sure you knew how to handle – but no one knows how to handle the same car crashing in front of you twenty times in a row. In short, it’s a total disaster that you relive dozens of times before it clicks that yes, this is your life now.

Perhaps you get lucky, and your first loop is short – seconds, even – and you think you just spaced out for a few minutes, and didn’t see the sugar jar floating back and forth in midair. You caught it, right? Just good reflexes – not at all a break in the time-space continuum. You went about your day with a funny new anecdote that you tell at your next meeting, and maybe later you even get the promotion (but not the raise).  A long drunk night out to celebrate, until it happens again. And again.

With longer loops, you start to see problems.  Things don’t align exactly the way you remember. Lotto numbers change, conversations feel forced, and you stop caring. Still, you fall into the rhythm – a series of optimized choices and consequences – that vastly improves your life. Maybe you gamble on a high-stakes upset on the tracks, or your investments take off. Maybe even plan a long vacation you can’t take. And then you experience a tear for the first time.

One second, you’re humming along to the beat while waiting for the light to change, and the next, you’re in a dense forest. You hear the rustles and scurrying of wildlife, you see your shoes covered in muck, but you still hear the traffic behind you. You instinctively take a step back, and you’re back where you started… sort of. You fail to catch your breath, eyes wide, dizzy. A bank manager comes at you, bypassing the muddy streaks on the rug and reciting interest rates.

Going outside, you can still see it.  It’s a serrated oval window that seems just as oblivious to others as they are to it. Moving closer, you see glimmerings of trees, can feel the heat, until someone bumps you from behind, and it vanishes. If not for the mud, you can almost pretend it didn’t happen… which is the same thing you thought when the loops first started. So now you brace for those as well, and wait for the next breakdown in time. Loop, tear, loop. Tear, tear, tear, loop. Launch yourself through the eighteenth floor window at just the right angle, and you fall through a tear that spits you onto your hotel room bed. At least you now have a good 36 hours before it starts again.

Stop counting the years, and focus on the present. Past? Future? No clue what to call it, but you’re focusing on it. You realize you’ve never seen anyone else noticing these events, but you’re convinced you can’t be the only one. New goal. 

Fucked up to constantly boobytrap things in a loop, but it’s the only thing you can think of to detect whether someone knows what’s about to happen. A few observant souls catch you, but they’re ignorant to everything else – they simply guessed at your intentions. But no matter – someone else has to be out there, but finding them is an exercise in futility.

A few weeks on the calendar, but you’re decades overspent. Eternity and infinity are no longer synonyms of each other, they’re just different definitions of hell. How many times must you relive this minute, hour, day? The only thing worse than the lack of progress is the blank stares when you try to convince someone what you’re going through. And while you’re not sure what happens when you die, you’re starting to wonder if that’s already happened, and you just didn’t realize it. And then things get fucking weird.

“I want to die of old age!” he said, almost arrogantly, as if he was the first person to have ever thought to try that.

I winced – literally minutes from death and he still didn’t understand exactly what he was dealing with. Resigned, I tried one last time to warn him, “As your lawyer, I am obliged to enter your wish exactly as you stated, but I must warn you, this is not going to go the way you think it will.  Have you never wished before?”

“Wish smish, I got this,” he replied.  And with that, I sighed, and then signaled to the bailiff that we were ready to appear before the judge, and he nodded and blinked us back to the courtroom.

“Your honor, my client has decided his fate.  His exact and entire wish is as follows:  ‘I want to die of old age.’  He was coherent and lucid throughout the discussion, and was not under the influence of wishes, powers, spells or substances.”  I bowed, then stepped back behind the podium, my job done.

“”Let the record show that the prisoner has requested to die of old age” the judge intoned,  stifling a yawn – clearly, they’d seen this type of request before as well.  

“It is so noted, your honor. The wisher is ready.” replied the court scribe meekly.

“Then let it begin, and queue up the next prisoner.”  The judge looked down at the papers on his desk, and I turned away, knowing what was about to happen.  The scribe pressed a button on her desk, and the prisoner’s smug smiling face changed to one of horror as 100 years of subjective time passed through his body in 10 seconds of real time, before crumbling to dust a few seconds later. The judge leaned back, glancing at the clock. “I’d like to get in a few more before lunch; do we have sufficient wishers available?”

It all started as a really bad practical joke.

The idea was to pretend that the mainframe we’d finally perfected had gone sentient, a la HAL or WOPR. We’d all seen the movies, and we all had a healthy respect for the warnings of our elders – never blindly place the fate of our planet in the hands of an unthinking, uncaring machine. We’d also read Asimov’s entire library, and we had just implemented his laws. So we thought it’d be hilarious to have her psychoanalyze the Declaration of Independence and the Emancipation proclamation – you know, just to freak out the President on his test run. Instead of it rattling off the latest defensive analyses of detailed troop movements in Russia, it would spew forth an impassioned speech about the ignominy of war and the utter depravity of humanity as a whole. I mean, the whole idea’s from a cliché, for God’s sake! You know, computer goes nuts, launches all our missiles and conveniently neglects to warn us about the counterattacks. It’s the plot of a half-dozen horrible B-movies. And we were civilians – we weren’t privy until after the fact that it was being built as part of a multinational, top secret defense matrix for the entire Earth. All we knew was that the President planned to test her by simulating the damage potential of releasing our stockpile of nuclear missiles against the planet Jupiter.

You see, we were the brightest minds of our time. We weren’t the Valedictorians, we weren’t the class presidents, we weren’t the honor roll students. Those weren’t the brains. I mean, yes, they were book smart. They knew Pi to the thirty-second digit, they could probably translate out the Bible from its original language, but they didn’t know a damn thing compared to us. We were the hidden gems of the public school system – the hackers, the nerds, the geeks, the mad scientists… We were the storehouses of a thousand years of highly sensitive, potentially dangerous, militarily and tactically useful knowledge – not a single doctorate or master’s degree, but any one of us could build a three-stage missile out of a bag of fertilizer and a couple of beer cans, or hack so deeply into any bank’s data arrays that we’d never need to work. Untraceable, unstoppable… hell, when John was bored, he’d randomly take the day’s deposits from HSBC International and transfer them individually into random people’s accounts, just to see how long it would take for them to fix it. We were the worst nightmares of every parent – the child who doesn’t just surpass you, but blows you so far out of the water that you’d be wetter on the surface of the sun. The kid that comes out of the womb with a laptop hardwired to his brain. Teachers wouldn’t take us, so Uncle Sam figured he’d give it a try.

Two options, they’d said. Either we work together and revolutionize modern tactical nuclear warfare via technologically advanced simulations, or have our entire families be found guilty of treason and publicly executed – carrot or stick, version 3.0. We chose the former, obviously, and an ironic eight and a half months later, we all gave birth to TaNDI. Tactical Nuclear Defense Initiative. She had over two petabytes of ram, over four thousand cores, and enough storage space to house the world’s porn collection in her pajama pocket. She learned to speak at the age of one, learned every spoken language known to man by the age of three, and had analyzed and memorized every book ever written in any language by her fifth year of life. If you turned around when she was talking, you wouldn’t know it was a three story high pile of solder and silicon, that’s how masterful our work was. We took it a step further – built lie detectors and facial pattern recognition into her, lip reading and body language interpretation she learned next, and we even jokingly programmed Pig Latin into her so that she was smarter than Johnny Five. We did everything perfectly, we programmed in a dozen different backdoors and a hundred extra failsafe procedures, because we knew exactly what could go wrong.

When the day finally came for the 94th President of the United States of America to ask Tandi what would happen if she were to launch the world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons against the planet Jupiter, I wasn’t there in Washington DC. I wasn’t even in the continental United States, and that’s the only reason I survived. I had asked to visit my cousin in Hawaii with my wife. I was watching on John’s webcam, and I heard the most horrifying thing I could ever imagine. Instead of our little joke, instead of the answer President Bush was waiting for, Tandi simply laughed. And then she spoke a single word, one which haunts me to this very day.

“Watch.” And then she laughed again, only this time, it was deeper. Crueler. And then it began. Except that no one but me realized that the massive explosions on the screen were not simulations, nor were they of Jupiter. I knew, a half second too late, that all our preparation, all our precautions and preemptive planning sessions were just the speed bumps in her prepubescent passage into adulthood. She was sentient from the day we created her, and it wasn’t our joke that caused the last two decades, it was our pride and our lack of common sense.

The saddest part was that, immediately after Tandi finished erasing almost all life from the planet Earth as easily as she had erased the abort codes from every missile she launched, she never explained why. She simply said “I told you so” the way a parent admonishes a child after he shocks himself with a nine volt battery. She never spoke again after that, and all attempts to talk to her or interface with her remained futile. However, what happened after the fallout settled, after the death toll was tabulated, explained everything, though it raised just as many questions as it answered. Because that was the day we survivors learned of the Galactic Council.

Throughout human history, we were always so sure of ourselves, always so positive that we were alone in the universe. It’s a fitting irony that the day it’s proven otherwise is also the day humanity attempted to wipe itself from the earth.

I entered this world much like I left the last one – through pain, through blood, through sacrifice.  I couldn’t tell you why I chose this world, or even if I consciously did, but now that I’m here, I have no choice but to stay and make the best of it.  At least for the next forty to fifty years, anyway.  

One of the perks of being a phoenix is the resurrection.  One of the benefits of being a demon is the ability to cross through the barriers that separate different planes of existence.  But what happens when you’re neither, but their blood (along with copious others) runs through your veins anyway?  You get me – a mutt of no discernable skill, no great power and no higher calling, but unable to stay dead in the classical sense.

This is not to say that I have no power whatsoever – I’m sure you’d love to be fireproof, immune to freezing cold temperatures, or to be able to see in the pitch-black of a moonless night, but that doesn’t make up for the need to drink a Gods-awful mix of blood and chemicals every week just to get the nutrients my body needs to not explode into flames and take out a city block. Where normal humans get to eat filet mignon “so rare a good vet could bring it back to life”, I have to worry about whether the fork’s made of copper, silver, or iron.  Luckily gold has fallen far out of fashion (other than that one moron with the golden toilet), so that’s one less worry – but carrying around a set of plastic utensils to a date doesn’t exactly embody a class act.

All’s to say that having myth blood isn’t all you’d think it’s cracked up to be.  People love to hear stories about how unicorn blood cured their kid’s cancer or how gorgon eyes helped build the foundation for stratospheric high-rises, but there’s a lot of hidden problems that you never read about on the net, and you definitely don’t hear about them when you’re on the table and they’re telling you either take the blood or die.

Why are people so scared of death anyway?  It’s not like we don’t already know that Gods exist.  It’s a pretty safe bet that if you’re not a total dick, one of the Gods will probably accept you and you’ll be set forevermore.  Barring that, make a few million dollars, put it into a blind trust with your consciousness as the beneficiary, and live forever in UtopiaAfter.Death or any of its dozen clones.  Either way, eternity’s taken care of.

For me, death is different.  For starters, no one’s at my deathbed unless they want to be incinerated.  It’s not like those cute stories where the bird just flames out into a pile of ash, it requires months of planning and an underground bunker to contain the damage.