Content Disclosure: Existential Themes
“We want to rename the building ‘The Ethereon Flux Parallel Worlds Center,’” the woman said. Lathar stepped toward her, having just taken the elevator up to the thirty-third floor. Slowly, her face came into focus: wide nose, a bob cut dyed green and purple, half-and-half, right down the middle. A small amount of blush applied to her cheeks. “So, what do you think of the name change?”
“I guess ‘Transamerica Building’ sounds a little small,” Lathar said, “when you can send people to whole other realities.”
She motioned him to the window, which opened onto the waters of the East Bay. Cars sped across I-80 toward homes in Emeryville, Fremont, and Hayward. All cities Lathar had helped build for the last three decades with townhomes and condos, cloud service centers and product warehouses.
With any luck, he’d be leaving that life in just a few weeks.
“Sorry, I didn’t introduce myself,” the woman said. “Hepnia Synol. Parallel Lives sales associate. You must be—”
“Lathar Jackson,” he mumbled and extended his hand.
“Sorry, could you say it again?” Hepnia said.
He summoned what energy he had and added a bit more bass in his voice this time. “Lathar Jackson.”
“Of course you are,” she said and offered a glowing smile. “We’ve been anticipating your visit all week. You’ll meet with Dr. Chen and the team in about thirty minutes.” Hepnia invited him to sit on the brown leather sofa and took a seat opposite him. “In the meantime, we just have a little more intake, where I’ll explain how the Parallel Lives LifeScan process works.”
“Ask away, then.” He interwove his fingers and clenched them tightly together.
“First let’s start with how it works. As I’m sure you know, since Dr. Chen’s discovery in 2034 of the existence of parallel worlds, we’ve realized that at every moment you make a choice, a new reality emerges, with a new ‘you’ and a whole new set of circumstances.”
“Except my particles here are entangled with those of myself in every other universe. So at any moment, my quantum wave function is spread out across multiple parallel worlds.” Lathar paused for a moment, and Hepnia raised an eyebrow, impressed. “Collapse the wave function, and this ‘me’ disappears and becomes another ‘me.’”
“It seems we have a real expert. I’ll just get through the standard stuff. Product description.” Hepnia flipped through a few sheets of paper. “Here we go. For every branching choice you’ve ever made, there’s often a better choice you could have made. And in several of the parallel worlds you’re about to see in today’s LifeScan, you made amazing choice after amazing choice.”
“Unlike in this one, you mean,” Lathar said with a gruff laugh.
“I don’t know, Mr. Jackson. Trading subprime mortgages at twenty-three, founding Brambus by twenty-seven, and turning it into a twelve-billion-dollar real estate empire in less than two decades. Given the keys to practically every city from Richmond down to San Jose. Houses in Hawai'i, Malibu, Biarritz, among other places. I’ve read up on you, and I’d say you’ve made some excellent choices.”
He leaned. Eighty, eighty-five-hour work weeks. Too busy to even have kids with Eleanor. And then—at least that wasn’t his doing—the accident. She was dead the minute the drunk plowed into her sedan. No time to say goodbye. At the funeral, he thought about how little time he’d truly given her over these last twenty-nine years. How little he really knew about her beyond a few petty details: born in Iowa City, had a taste for ravioli, sleeveless dresses. Loved to draw the intricate floral patterns on the tops of Corinthian columns and the faces of the Greek gods.
