When Squint started wandering through New Jersey he was attacked by a mountain lion.  Now he's barely able to move, and all of a sudden someone else in a world with no people came along to help him out.

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Chapter 21 – Through The Looking Glass 

 Alice nursed me back to health there in the tree.  As soon as I was well enough to move she helped me climb slowly down.  It felt good to get out of that tree, but I still wasn't out of the woods yet, so to speak.  I had multiple broken bones, and some of my wounds weren't healing as fast as the others, Alice was worried they might be getting infected. 

  She set up a camp for us right there under that tree, making a lean-to for shade, and a fire for warmth.  Alice dried and smoked some meat in strips over the fire to preserve it for later.  She seemed to know exactly what to do and how to do it.  I felt like a louse, just laying there while she did all the work, but she insisted that I lay still and just let my wounds heal. 

  It was a shame that I lost the books when the mountain lion attacked me, it really would have been the perfect time to read them.  And I was sure that Alice would have loved to read my moms books too.  We talked, or whispered, a lot during that time.  She said that she had seen the smoke of New York’s fire as far away as the old capitol and headed in the direction of the smoke to check it out.  She kept asking me questions about other worlds, like where were the trade routes or how a unified government between them would work.  I had to explain that I didn't really know the answers to those things, and that the grass roots movement to enable ordinary people to time travel was still a relatively new idea to me too. 

  “How do you do it?” she asked, “How do you travel between worlds?”  I had to stop and think for a moment.  “It usually happens when I die,” I said, “I just kind of wake up in a different time in my life.  Sometimes I think it happens even when I don't remember things.  But when I do remember the future I usually try to do it differently, at least a little bit.  I think that's how it becomes a slightly different world each time.” 

  “I hope that never happens to me!” Alice hissed under her breath, “I can't even imagine...”  She went on to argue that such an existence would be worse than death.  I tried debating the issue with her, but she made some good points.  It seemed like for every reason I could think of for wanting to justify time travel, she came up with an equally good, if not better counter-point.  In the end I don't think either of us convinced the other to change their minds, but we did manage to decide that calling it time travel was a bit of a misnomer.  The only things that really traveled back in time were memories, and sometimes germs.  Eventually we decided to call it Socratic Lucidity instead of Time Travel. 

  She asked me if I believe in God and I told her I didn't know what to think.  Alice was surprised by my response.  She said that the world had too many perfect details to be an accident.  I agreed with that, but all my memories of what religion meant came from other lifetimes, each with their own opinions and perspectives.  Admittedly in most of my lifetimes I hadn't been very religious though.  Then I told her that if I had died even just once then this existence would probably be in the afterlife which could explain all the magical time travel stuff. 

  Alice laughed at that, “So what does that make me then?  Some kind of angel that saved you from a big cat demon?”  I thought for a moment and then agreed that it kind of did.  Although somewhere in the back of my mind I had to admit to myself that I just wasn't feeling the sense of futility that I would have expected from being a ghost.  Nor was I mourning the loss of my first life.  And now that I thought about it, I was kind of boring back then, I'd rather mourn the loss of my second or third lives. 

  “Look Squint, I'm no angel,” Alice said, and then pinched my arm near where it was hurt, “and you're completely alive right now.”  She gave me a serious look, “I don't pretend to know how time travel or lucidity work at all, but I do know that life is worth living.  Even if you're not entirely convinced that you aren't already dead, if you can still feel pain then it's enough of a reason to not give up on yourself...” 

  I had to stop her there and explain that I had no intention of giving up, I was just thinking out loud when I said this could be the afterlife.  It was a theory I had for a long time, that if there is an afterlife then it probably would seem real just like real life, so how would I know the difference.  But I supposed that if there were more than one reality then there might be any number of realities, possibly even infinite; in which case it technically wouldn’t matter which life I was living at the moment, because in some other reality I’m probably living some completely different life.  Then I started to wonder how many of me there really were. 

  I must have been thinking out loud again because Alice stood up and walked away.  I thought she mumbled something, but I didn’t understand her.  The weird thing is she just kept standing there, starring at the sky not saying anything at all.  It was as if she was just waiting for something.  I tried talking to her but she didn’t respond.  It seemed like hours went by. 

  “Okay, I’m back”, she said suddenly and sat back down again.  “Uh, welcome back,” I said, and then asked, “Where did you go?”  Alice just looked at me blankly for a moment and then finally spoke up, “I’m not going to lie to you anymore, Squint.  But what I have to say may startle you a little bit, but I want you to try to stay calm and please don’t run off.  Because well, here’s the thing, I am actually from what you would call ‘the future’.” 

  I couldn’t stop myself from laughing a little bit, but the degree of seriousness in Alice’s voice and eyes told me to shut up and listen.  She went on to explain that in ‘the future’ people have things called computers.  “I know what a computer is.” I chuckled at her.  “No, Squint, you have no idea what a computer is.” she said, “Where do you think you are right now?” 

  “In an alternate timeline, Post Apocalyptic New Jersey, circa the 1918 flu outbreak,” I started responding.  She reached out and held my hand saying, “I’m sorry Squint, but that’s where you were.  That was where your body died.”  I just looked at her blankly for a moment.  Even after she had warned me that I may be startled, I still wasn’t prepared for that.  I looked around at my surroundings and everything seemed real. 

  “I've been pausing you off and on for the past few weeks while you were recovering.  You’re inside a computer,” she said.  I let go of her hand and looked down at my own.  Everything seemed perfectly realistic in every way I could think of.  I looked back towards Alice and said, “How long have I been in a computer?” I asked. 

  “You died when the mountain lion ate you in Post Apocalyptic New Jersey.  Then about five thousand years later I was born.  And well, the other day I was bored, and so I kind of asked my computer a silly question.  And, you know how computers are...” she seemed to stumble at explaining how computers are when they’re presented with silly questions.  So I asked her, “If you’re really telling me the truth then could you take away my pain?” 

  “Yeah, sure,” she said, and then instantly I somehow started feeling better.  I looked down at my body and couldn’t see the bite marks anymore, and my clothes weren’t even torn.  In fact, they looked clean and new.  I looked back at Alice in total amazement.  “How did you do that?” I asked loudly with my vocal chords fully restored.  She sort of giggled a little, “It’s simple, I just touch the interface and then think about what I want to have happen.  It’s sort of like how people used to have to type and click everything by pushing buttons in your time, but now we just think of something and it happens.  In my time the world isn’t a paradise like it used to be in yours, so my people spend most of our time in the computer worlds.  Nowadays everything is done by computer.” 

  She looked at me as if I was going to ask a question.  I thought for a moment, and then asked, “Wait, what happened to the world?  You said something about a lost paradise?  And if I’m virtual now, then who’s really asking these questions?”  Alice looked at me with a serious expression on her face.  She leveled the tone of her voice saying, “I couldn’t even begin to describe the unbelievable damage done to the world by the people in your time.” 

  “I’m so sorry,” I began to say but she hushed me, stating bluntly, “Don’t apologize.  I ran a simulation of you on my computer for a reason.  If I didn’t want to see you then I simply wouldn’t have run the program.  But I still don’t think you understand how powerful computers are now.  Quantum computing opened up a lot of new possibilities.  Now instead of playing in cartoon-like virtual worlds, we use actual parallel universes.  We can mine resources from alternate uninhabited Earths, and we can even slow down time.  In fact that’s how refrigerators work now, instead of keeping things cold, they keep things slow, it works the same way with medical trauma units.  They slow down injuries to...” 

  “Wait,” I said.  “If you can do all that then why don’t you just get rid of the pollution?”  I asked, and she looked at me like I was an idiot.  “We were only able to clean up some of the pollution, but it’s all over the world, in the soil, down there for miles.  Even five thousand years later, even with artificial intelligence that is smarter than all the people in the world combined, we still haven’t worked out a technology that can clean up planet Earth.  And that’s just the tip of the iceberg, Squint, I haven’t even told you about genetic pollution.” 

  I thought for a moment, the information was kind of a shock.  Then I asked, “Okay, so why are you telling me all of this?”  She looked me right in the eyes and said, “Because you’re a time traveler, Squint, I found you on an uninhabited world, with a note in your pocket about parallel universes and factions in a time-war.  I just had to hear your story and find out as much as I could.  I hope you can forgive me for lying to you at first, I just needed to find out if you were for real.  And... maybe we can be friends?  Because if you want, I could just kind of let your program keep running in the Cloud.”