"I saw that little electricity in them that the camera gave out. She was darkness, she did not become darkness and she did not embrace darkness. She is darkness. She was always darkness and I fell in love with her, I fell in love with her darkness."

"Del" wakes up drugged in a seemingly empty hospital -- locked in a room. Everything she has ever known has been deleted: her memories, her identity, even her name. But then the night visits start and she begins to be tortured by memories that could not possibly hers: the tragic memories of several victims of the CIA's infamous MKULTRA project. EXCERPT: The bed lurches, and swings and I am gliding. A cold breeze rushes in on the stagnate room as lights float over me as I try not to stir. Electric currents course through my body. I’m certain Fill will notice the goose bumps on my arms as we swing round a corner and my flesh begins to crawl. The rat runs wild in my stomach like it’s being chased towards a trap with poisoned cheese. Fill must notice something is up. He slows down my carriage and bears down on me. I can make out his shadow through my lids, his head hinged to mine, and I suppress the instinct to pinch my eyes shut. “What are you up to?” he asks with a voice greased with the sound of motorcaws. He stares down at me for a moment, but then jingles the keys again. My heart starts to thump. I hear the turning of the handle. What am I so afraid of? And how can I be afraid of something I don’t even remember what it is? At the head of my bed again, I feel Fill over me. He grips either side of my pillow. The dry edges, I pray. I can smell the man of him now. Somehow, I know it is a smell I have bathed in in the past. I can’t believe he doesn’t hear the pounding of my heart, see it beating violently against my chest. But it’s not Fill I’m afraid of. I’m numb to his attention. It’s the door that scares me. Or, rather, the total blackness behind it. “Go get ‘em tiger,” he says as wheels me in. I can feel the rat dig his heels into the walls of my stomach, and scramble up my esophagus, clawing its way through my throat and out my teeth.

They say in life there are no second chances. But what if you had blown it with the girl of your dreams? What would you do knowing that she was out there, in other realities, realities you hadn't screwed up? That kind of thing could really mess you up... and it could make you do "some crazy." Down-on-his-luck David Blunt is as loser as a loser you can get; recently kicked out of school and fired from his dead end job, David's been squatting in his flop-house apartment, avoiding his landlord and subsisting on stale fortune cookies and cheap street meat for weeks. But when David reads a fortune that predicts an epic future for him, he starts to think that his luck is about to change. Emma Gossett is a spirited world traveler full of wanderlust, and never stays put in one place long enough to form any attachments. Her lovable and eccentric Gran insists this is because she was hidden from the Norns as a babe to keep them from naming Emma's fate, a fable Emma puts little faith in. But when Emma meets David, her faith in reality is shaken to the core. Does this rambling cynical romantic hold the answer to the prevailing sense of déjà vu she's been feeling lately? Or is it just something else, as her new and mysterious and magnetic acquaintance Gabriel insists? Perhaps he holds the key to the mysterious sensations she has felt of living another life alongside her own. All Your Fates is a multiverse mindwarp with supernatural elements that one reader commented: "This story is twisting into ways a pretzel couldn't even try!!"

This novella was a Hugo and Nebula nominee twenty years ago. I lost both to Charles Sheffield -- whom I married five years later. Life sometimes really is just as strange as fiction.