The Beginning of a New Day

Set adrift in the multiverse

By the whims of fate

In thrall to the demiurge

We all await escape

(The Sword, "Apocryphon")

Where am I?

The first thing I saw when I came back to my senses was a faint light, dimmed, diffused. Not enough to really see my surroundings. I felt a strange liquid around me. Floating.

What happened?

The last thing I remembered was checking the integrity of the equipment. I was in the conversion chamber. Ready for the transfer.

What is this place?

We were testing the equipment. Nothing was supposed to happen. It was a test. A test. I was not even part of the Convert team. A simple technician.

What is this sound?

I could hardly move. Hardly breathe. Almost. Somehow, I was still receiving oxygen. My body was not responsive. I started to struggle. Panic.

Help! Someone! Help me!

Crossing the Multiverse was the answer the Leaders found. Our World was dying. Corrupted by many generations of abuse, our Earth was now barren. We consumed, we destructed, we did not think of the future. We needed to correct the situation soon enough or we would die with our World.

The scientists tried their hands at turning the time to our advantage. A number of time machines were experimented. Without any success. Then, one of these experiments gave an astounding result. It was not the time that could be travelled, but other parallel worlds. One of these experiments gave us the Multiverse.

The first teams they sent returned with stories of worlds of wonder and fright. The success was there. Our leaders decided then to proceed with the Converts. The conversion was our salvation. The way I understood it, one entered the machine and his essence was transferred on another World, transplanted inside the body of a member of the sentient specie in this new World. It meant having a chance of survival. Of a new beginning.

Everyone wanted to be a Convert. However, recently, too many issues with conversion chambers appeared. We lost a few of them. The engineers suspected some errors in the diagrams. Some incompatibility between systems. They slowly came to find that refurbishing equipment did not make the most reliable building parts.

They were looking for an equipment failure. I was in this conversion chamber to check their hypothesis. Nevertheless, there was another possibility. One that few would envisage to talk about. The taboo one. There had been a wave of protest recently. The anti-Convert were raising the idea that the Leaders could be wrong... or misguided. They could have some secret agenda. In which the Converts were no more than cattle sent to the slaughter.

Whom to believe? The Leaders knew. The protesters were only deranged ones. Some waylaid anarchist group. They thought they were wreaking havoc. They were but just so few in number that they could not do much harm. They could not be right. They should have been wrong.

Sabotage? The Leaders ensured it was not a possibility. Order reigned. So, how could I explain what I witnessed? I saw it in the Conversion chamber. Some of the wires wrongly assembled. Some piece of equipment misplaced. Some weird contraption added to the main parts. Was it deliberate?

All this conjecture was not helping my current predicament. I was obviously not where I shall have been. I was most likely lost. I probably had crossed the Multiverse. I was now a Convert.