Violet Plays With Raindrops, 2024
With a fingertip, I caught raindrops on the windowpane one by one, letting the coolness shock my skin and obscure the whorls of my fingerprint.
“They broke the fabric again at the accelerator site,” my brother said as he passed through the room and turned on the TV. He flopped down on the futon and scrolled through streaming services. He didn’t seem to see me, but I saw him perfectly well even without looking at him. He was in my peripheral vision, not to mention he was doing the same thing I’d seen him do every day forever. “At least that’s what the weirdos are calling it. They say the accelerator ‘breaks the fabric of reality.’” He snorted. “All anyone really knows is they’re detecting unusual energy fluctuations.” He shifted sideways to face me. The old futon creaked. “Are you even listening to me? What are you doing? You should close the window. It’s raining.”
I caught another raindrop. “I know it’s raining. That’s why I have the window open.”
“Honestly, Violet. How old are you? Four?”
“Times a few.” I muttered the words into my forearm, because I was resting my chin on my folded arm, and I was just as happy if he didn’t hear me. I was eighteen and saw nothing wrong with raindrop-catching at any age. Besides, it kept me facing away from him, which made it easier to hide the fact that I was more interested in his talk about the fabric of reality than I wanted to admit. I didn’t know why I resisted showing interest, except that it plucked a string inside me that resonated with half-formed ideas, things I didn’t want to have to try to describe because I had no words for them.
Violet Feels the Crossroads of Dimensions, 2034
The side room of the bio-physics lab was a mess. It was the space dedicated to cutting-edge molecular and subatomic research that would one day be used for new medical technology, yet somehow it had collected more than its share of junk. The fume hood contained a few kilos of dried leaves for reasons only one of the grad students knew, and I had to turn sideways to get past all the clutter in the room—boxes, a broken stool, a bin of stained glassware.
Two thermocyclers were running at one end of the bench, alternately heating and cooling DNA to allow the heat-tolerant Taq polymerases in the tiny tubes to make thousands of copies of the genomes within. I knew not to touch those, and I also knew not to touch the plasma particle collider at the other end of the bench. My only job was to wash and put away the day’s glassware and shiny steel spatulas and scoopulas, make sure the hot-water bath and shaker plates were all turned off for the night, and sweep the floor in here and out in the main lab.
My job was not to think about the text from my brother, who was on an overnight solo hike in the desert mountains. The text that said only, I screwed up and forgot to pack enough water. Ran out before nightfall. That’s fifteen miles to go tomorrow before I get anything else to drink.
My job was to be a good assistant and clean things well so next year, when I applied to grad schools, Dr. Farmer might consider letting me join her lab. Worrying about my brother wouldn’t aid that cause, since I couldn’t do anything to help him.
Someone had left their electrophoresis apparatus on the counter between the thermocyclers and the particle accelerator. I needed to wash the apparatus and put it away or Dr. Farmer would be annoyed with me in the morning. To get to that side of the room, I stepped over one of the boxes that stood crooked on the floor, misjudged the distance, and tripped. My hand shot out, jostling the particle accelerator.
In the space between stumbling and catching myself, the room dissolved. My own matter became not the solid suit of meat I was used to but something that shimmered, something indefinite yet more truly me than I’d ever been before in this life. A crystalline grid of stardust surrounded me, instead of the familiar lab.
I caught myself on the black epoxy resin bench before my nose would have smashed into it. The particle accelerator slid a few inches and came to a stop. The machine was unharmed, as far as I could tell.
But I was not the same as a moment before. I still felt made of shimmering light, and the air, the walls, and everything else seemed to pulse in time with the vibration of my body. I straightened up and took a deep breath. Maybe I was just dizzy from the near-fall.
The air pulsed again, stronger this time. It felt like the waves of sound that hit you physically when you’re near a jet taking off, except I heard nothing. My torso compressed and released in rhythm. My jawbone vibrated.
“What’s going on?” Since I was alone and no one could hear me, it made me feel better to speak the confusion aloud.
As soon as I said the words, the pulsing calmed to a low buzz in my chest and in my bones. Relieved, I took a deep breath, gazing absently toward the fume hood, toward all those red maple leaves spread out to dry inside it.
A form appeared in the hood’s shadowy glass. I whirled to see who’d come up behind me, but there was no one there. When I turned toward the glass again, the form remained, a pattern of shadow vaguely humanlike in shape but lacking any distinct features. “Must be a trick of the light.”
We are not a trick of the light.
I looked around again, pulse pounding. Still no one there.
We have always been here.
“What do you mean, always?” There was still no one in the room that I could see, but I felt the presence of someone—or someones—as surely as I heard their words in my mind.
Always is always, pulsed the voice in my mind. Time is not what you think. Time is not linear, or cyclical, or multilinear. All time is simultaneous; all pasts, presents, and futures, as you would name them, are equally real and equally here.
I sat down on the grungy tile floor and closed my eyes. The pulsing from earlier returned and vibrated the marrow of my bones, my brain stem, my heart. In my mind’s eye, I “saw” the beings who were talking with me, but I didn’t see them as a visual image—just as I didn’t hear what they were saying as sounds.
You don’t have to close your eyes to see us, they say. We’re non-corporeal, which means we’re not made of matter. Our decisions are not determined at the quantum level. Distance does not exist for us, neither in space nor in time. Humanity will know this in time. We wait for opportunities such as this one, when a disturbance in the quantum field allows you to perceive us.
The words didn’t fully make sense, but I felt their meaning—just as I felt my body and the room and all the world beyond it made up of billions of points of light.
You are bound by a vast set of either/or decisions made every moment at the quantum level, said the voice, now seeming warm and familiar even though I’d only been acquainted with it for a few minutes. In physical reality, there exist an infinite number of parallel realities, each unfolding from a quantum possibility.
My hands felt warm on my knees. “So there’s a reality in which my brother will walk home without a problem, and a reality in which he’s about to die, and another in which he’s already dead.”
The air pulsed again, placing an even pressure on every surface of my body. Yes. And every other possibility that exists across all multiverses. They all exist. They all, also, do not exist.
I sat feeling the pulsing for a few minutes, listening to the loud rush of the overhead ventilation system and the lower hum of the various small machines in the room. “You said humanity will know this? Have other people had the same experience I’m having now?”
A few have. Many more will in the near future, as plasma particle colliders become more common and as you expand their usage. When you corporeal beings look at the world, what you think you are perceiving is not technically inaccurate, but it is only a fraction of the story of reality and therefore not truly correct.
“How do I know I’m not just hallucinating you?”
Our access to your realm is weakening, but if we act quickly, we can show you something that will remind you of these moments. Name one thing you would like to change in the version of physical reality you inhabit right now.
My eyes opened and I sat up straighter. There was no question about what one thing I wanted to change, even though I knew it was impossible. “I want my brother to have water. But he’s a thousand miles away.”
The feeling of soft laughter vibrated in the air around me. The apparent distances in your spacetime are not real, not in our dimension.
I pictured myself filling a bottle of water and handing it to my brother but shook my head. He was several states and two time zones away.
Try it, the voice urged.
I got up and went to the computer area in the entrance to the lab suite, where I’d left my blue plastic one-liter water bottle. Outside in the hall, next to a dark window looking out on the quad, I filled the bottle at a water fountain.
As soon as I screwed the bottle’s cap back on, I felt the air around me grow warmer. Close your eyes, urged the voice. I did so, and in the dark of my temporary lack of sight, I saw myself standing in a dark desert landscape, bending over, and placing the water in my brother’s green hiking pack.
When I opened my eyes, I didn’t have the water bottle in my hand. Probably I’d wandered out here into the hall without it. Probably, I was half-dreaming all this and needed to go home and go to sleep.
I re-entered the lab, and the air inside it felt normal again. One of the thermocyclers had finished its run and entered its overnight hold at four degrees Celsius. The other thermocycler was almost finished, and the particle accelerator had entered automatic shutoff mode too. By now, the data it had collected had been transmitted to Dr. Farmer’s computer and would be waiting for her in the morning. I checked the water bath and the shaker plates. Satisfied that everything was shut down for the night, I turned off the lights and locked the lab.
Violet Wakes in the Certainty of Rain, 2040
The morning of my dissertation defense, I woke to a steady rain, looked up at the gray window, and put my hand over my heart to feel the steady beat. Whatever happened today, I would be at peace. There was a reality in which I would pass the defense, a reality in which I would fail, and a reality in which the defense never happened at all. The sound of each drop striking the windowpane contained a world of possibility. I picked up my phone to read the screenshot of the text from my brother six years ago, the same thing I read every morning as a reminder of how I, and the world, had changed.
Thought I forgot to pack an extra water bottle, but I was wrong! Found another in my pack. Didn’t even know I had a blue water bottle like this one.
A.J. Van Belle is a nonbinary biologist and writer who lives on Vancouver Island with their husband and two dogs. Their stories have appeared in journals and anthologies from 2004 to the present. A member of HWA and SFWA, A.J. is a literary agent intern at the Booker-Albert Agency, volunteers as a submissions reader for Apparition Lit, and a mentor in two novel-writing mentorship programs. They are represented by Lauren Bieker of FinePrint Literary.
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