9. No fixed outcome
Chapter 9 of Camera Obscura, written by Matt Boothman after Samantha Leigh
Day 247
Does anyone else’s lab need pens? We just got a bulk delivery. No idea who placed the order or when. Hundreds of pens, way more than we need, just loose and rattling around in the box. Happy to share.
Mixture of clicky ones and ones with caps. They all just say S.T.U.D.Y. on the side, so they won’t look out of place in any lab.
I’ll leave the box in the Curzon Labs breakout space. Come and get your pens. The IRB audit is over, auditing bodies long gone, no more lockdown, no need to quarantine any more. You’re all safe to come visit again. I hope you do, I’d love some company that isn’t trying to batten onto my hippocampus.
If you helped yourself to any of those S.T.U.D.Y. pens, I’m really sorry, but I need to ask for them back.
Also, recent observations indicate that it is possible to break out of paradoxical predestination. But the headline for you reading this is the pens thing.
It’s not for me. But it also sort of is. Based on my previous posts, you can probably tell where this is going.
For anyone who needs convincing to bring your pen stash back, here’s the justification:
Earlier today, a group of 14 individuals arrived at Curzon Labs, walking in lockstep, and announced, in unison, that they were there to participate in our study.
If they hadn’t all talked in unison, it might have taken me longer to realise that all 14 of them were me. I’ve mentioned this effect before. Alternative timeline/parallel dimension versions of yourself initially register as nondescript and unremarkably ‘normal’, until some attention-grabbing detail disrupts the effect.
Encountering my own alts is getting exasperating at this point. At least none of the 14 appeared to be $IVYREEF, the specific alt who’s given me the most trouble over the past few months. But why must they always turn up demanding to participate in the study? I can’t participate in a study I’m assisting with running, for blindingly obvious data hygiene reasons, and if I can’t, and they’re me, then by the transitive property, neither can they. And if they’re me then they should know that! Why am I the only me that understands how you do science?
This time at least I didn’t have to labour that point; I could instead screen them out because the observation portion of the study is strictly one on one, and 14 is not one, no matter how many times you say “We are one” all in unison.
So I booted up the lab system to input the screening questionnaires, and was about to call over the whole divergence of alts when I observed something change. The date in the date field, the one that always loads up pre-populated with the date of your doom, changed.
And I looked around the screen at the alts again and observed a change there too: there were 13 of them.
And as I observed, another one disappeared. I didn’t have a spectrometer active, but it looked like a timeline slip or a complete cessation of existence, not a dematerialisation or disintegration or anything more biological like that. No residue that I could see.
She’d been leaning over the box of S.T.U.D.Y. pens when she vanished. The other alts didn’t react. They sat waiting for her to bring them the pens she’d presumably got up to fetch. When no pens materialised, another one got up, went to the box, fished for a pen, and disappeared.
And the date of my doom changed again. With each disappearance, the date pushed farther into the future. Farther away from the day I curtailed $IVYREEF’s timeline and paradoxically predestined myself to become her, time travel back and be curtailed by myself in turn. As long as those dates no longer match, I’ve succeeded in prying my timeline away from hers. Did we know that was possible or am I plumbing new depths here? Possible material for a study under proper laboratory conditions?
With 11 alts to go, I wasn’t about to interfere with events. I observed and recorded from the workstation. Another one went over to the box, looked inside, then looked straight at me and said, “I thought you said there were pens in here.”
So I just need 11 of those S.T.U.D.Y. pens back, if it’s not too much hassle. And if I can ask you all to just keep track of the rest, in case of another divergence of alts turning up like this. I’m sorry I won’t be able to give those 11 back. Maybe if anyone’s working on cross-timeline penetration and retrieval, you can work out a way to get them back?
Camera Obscura is an actual play of Outliers, a single-player journalling game by Samantha Leigh, based on The Wretched by Chris Bissette, and published by the Far Horizons Co-Op.
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