Tevun-Krus #26 - Alternative Universe

The Best Possible World - a Short Story by @originalthinker26

Across the boundaries of the universe, and with them the precepts of their select world, the handpicked number increased. The device was minute and intricate. Several lifetimes seemed to be disappearing in a whim. Passing across the room meant blasting past the molecules through the wall. In my search, I was dwelling in the continually diligent observation. Carefully, I crafted the way it ought to be. I walked across each room, splashing into the wall each room, each version of my home I walked through. Universe after universe, I continued on the steady path until I could discover the one... the correct one. Every version of the home, the home I had known for so long. But it was not the place that I sought in their perfect version but the elements. Sometimes, the house was drastically different. Other times, it was gone altogether.

The abode, once comprised of love and the delicacy of marriage, had been torn asunder. While I now paced through worlds that continually alternated with my footsteps, I masked myself with the dark cloak of my jacket. There were an infinity of worlds, but I looked for the subtleties as I searched them over, walking time after time over the same place, filling the same footprints, but it never was the same causal product.

I had killed him. This did not bother me. Everything in life possessed a value based on its rarity. Yet in a multiverse where there are infinitely many versions of a person already in supply, what is the direness one version lost? And in his death, I gained a device that could puncture the barriers of dimension and time. As far as the origin world knew, that man was me. His flesh might have been recognized as different had his distinctions not been eaten up in the furious perdition that had taken up the house. Well, I thought, still looking for the perfect version in my invisible crusade, the family has slumped into an irreconcilable residue, and now the one thing that had bound them is also in ruin. In severe pathos, I had relinquished myself to a chair within my house, waiting, watching until the most intimate moment before the home would have swallowed me entirely. Yet in that time I had made sense of the device, and in doing so, I had escaped to begin again.

My life in that universe was done, finished. I was going to a new place, a place to start over. Many of the closer universes had a minimal amount of a few differences, based upon past deviations. But the farther away I went from the original universe, the sooner I could find deviations of various provenances. Different things had changed, with absolutely no correlation. I could see now why that man from the other universe could become skilled enough to build such a device; I had taken quite strongly to appropriating the knowledge of how the multiverse operated. One of these plains of existence had been labeled as the new home. It was a world where neither her nor I had been born. In this world, we would set back up our home... that is, when I found the precisely incepted lady that would love me forever. While I had been traveling across, I would now need to travel back. Certain arrangements needed to be made if this Zero World was to become a starting point.

It had been ten years in my origin world since she perforated the bond that we had pledged ourselves to. Observing time pass gradually, I saw my children mature without a father, and I witnessed as they fell apart and depreciated their inherent value until there was nothing left but a couple of drug-addicted deadbeats. Concentrated alone in my hands was a rag drenched in chloroform. The transition was to be subtle with overtones of temporal alteration. For days, I watched Gabriella as she carried out her daily activities. This would be the one for me. I would take her to the Zero World: a world where the spark of electricity did not escape the outlet and consume our home. Here was an earlier version of this love, this glorious beauty. Over her, I had been a literal translation of the poems by so many lyricists... for it was by her impulse that I had quite truly become quite insane with love.
She was twenty years younger at this point in the alternate universe. Finding it this way, I did not perceive that in fact she would meet and love me for several weeks to come, according to the confined chronology of the universe.