Bound by No Universe • Zarry

i.

 Our lives are incredibly fickle. Ever since the moment we take our first breath, filling the space around our tiny bodies with cries and happiness, nothing is certain. Nothing except for death. The itinerary of our lives isn't set in stone. We don't get a guidebook along with our time on Earth. Follow these steps to get to your next milestone 'High School'. You shall reach the milestone in fourteen years, two months and three days. Sci-fi shit like that. No, that's not the way it works. We enter this world clueless and many times, we leave it clueless as well. Each of our time here is barely even a small blip on the whole timeline of things. Billions of years and we consider spending ninety years on Earth a rather high number.

But what makes our lives so unpredictable is that we simply don't know how much time we have left. For some it's just mere days of breathing oxygen, leaving the world without ever getting a chance to properly look around and see the world we live in. Some people live so long they wish they died decades ago. And some die at

the height of their lives, soaring and flying in their youth, eager to see the entire world and explore as much as they can. But life or fate or whatever takes care of these things interferes and they're gone. Just like that.

Humans have always been fascinated with death but more so with what happens after it. Here comes the idea of a soul, of consciousness, of reincarnation. Every single major religion revolves around it. The holy books are something of a tutorial of what to do to have the best afterlife, how not to end up in hell and burn with the eternal flames. Have a pure soul, do right by god, repent for your sins. All of it just so we have a decent afterlife. Egyptians sent their dead on the way to afterlife with useful things for it and gold. In fact, many cultures still to this day equip graves with mortal possessions.

More than fascinated, we are terrified of death. We always have to stick our noses into everything and know everything and invent everything. The idea of letting go and putting your trust into something no one knows anything about for certain is pure terror for some. Ever since the earliest days of religion and alchemy, humans have tried to trick death and live forever. Sorcerer's stone, fountains of youth, vampirism. There was a noblewoman in 16th century who took it up a notch, killing young girls and bathing in their blood because she believed it kept her young. As you can see, even the mere thought of aging is a monster under our beds.

Some things have definitely changed since the Medieval Ages. Technology, for instance. Robots, lab-grown carbon copies of people, all sorts of things. Inventions that thousands of scientists are trying their hardest to get to work and make available for public. General public, not just the 1% of the 1%.

One little thing that has been tiptoeing on the minds of scientists, philosophers and regular people as well is the concept of alternate universes. The world we live in, somewhere out there, being exactly the same except for a few slight changes. Your nails are painted black instead of red. The town of Arcata, California doesn't exist because the settlers that founded it simply went somewhere else and now there's a town that doesn't appear in the universe we live in. The WWII is considered just a small German rebellion because Stalin signed a deal with the UK and France instead of Germany.

What if there were infinite possibilities for each of our lives? What if we were given the opportunity to open the cage that our universe embodies and get to a new universe full of new discoveries? And what if I told you we were closer to it being true than ever before?