XX/XY
Have you ever stepped into an alternate dimension, before?
What am I saying. Of course you have! You've been in a post office, right? An airport terminal. A particularly long parking lot, or a Buy N Large, after midnight. One of those "liminal spaces" those kids online are always going on 'bout.
But you've never noticed that you were doing so, probably. Beyond, of course, that vague sense in the back of your spirit that you are someplace you weren't, just a moment ago.
That's because you are/aren't, of course. Most dimensions that are near each other look an awful lot like each other, you see. The same thing, but slightly to the left. Everything and everyone is as you know it, but there's a few air molecules displaced around your pinky toe that weren't before. Things like that.
You walk out of those liminal places, and you and the alternate-universe double you swapped with are... probably back where you belong? And if not, well, no one will ever notice. Not even you.
...or maybe I'm just blowing smoke up your keister. Other dimensions are things of science fiction, after all. Who knows how they function, really, or if they even exist? And
no one knows how post offices work, come right down to it.
But certain assumptions can be made, when everything is taken into consideration. Once one stops blowing smoke, and starts considering statistics and chaos theory, the likeliest answer becomes entirely clear. Any dimension, contrasted to our own, is likeliest to be one of two things. And yes, either it will be shockingly similar to ours - nearly indistinguishable - identical in almost every way -
- but also, it may be
wildly different. The kind of different that only an entirely aside set of
physics could account for.
What it won't be is the middle ground. There's not gonna be any of that sci-fi nonsense, should other dimensions ever be proven to exist. No mirror universe where everyone has an evil goatee. No alternate timeline where so-and-so evildoers won this-or-that war. No ocean worlds, where everybody's a mermaid, but everything else otherwise ticks on as it always has.
And it's not gonna be the same as Earth, except that everyone is the opposite gender. That's the kind of stuff you'd only see on bad shows on TV.
It is dark out, and has been for some time. There is a container of Chinese takeout - teriyaki chicken with chickpeas - that is going gummy after hours of being untouched. There is the noise of crashing trash cans, outside.
Ludwig von Drake, leading scientific expert on everything, stares into the boob tube, reflecting.
He is... he is he. Always has been. He is he, and she is she. He is over here, and she is over there. He got the house, she got the car. Other than that, there are no differences, he thinks. And when Ludwig thinks, he tends to be... well, he tends to be an odd duck.
But he also tends to be right.
(Except, apparently, where Flubber is concerned, and where responsibility is concerned, and where
people are concerned for you, Ludwig, you're pushing yourself too
hard, Ludwig, take a
break-)
He'd heard the press conference being announced, earlier that day. Had the opportunity to see what the hubub was, bub. Decided to skip out, because er, to be honest, the thought of
watching it turned his feelings into a gordian knot that no amount of sideways thinking was ever gonna untangle. Happy? Sad? Angry? Happy? Sad? Red? Blue? Red, red, yellow, yellow, purple, orange, blue -
- green.
Ludwig considered himself a man of science. A duck of science.
The duck of science. The method, the means, the
meaning of science: the advancement of the modern mind was the creed Ludwig
lived by.
But there was no scientific explanation for the shiver he'd felt run up his spine, earlier that day.
(More than a shiver. A certainty. But that thought's beyond mere not-science, beyond simple quantum entangling, or fairy tales, and reaching into the idea he'd had nightmares about, that maybe he'd split his very
soul -)
A hunch, some might call it. Others might say what he did next was more a premontion. He'd made note of the time. He'd compared it to the timing of the conference, the events therein, making sure to take time zones into account.
And he'd watched the consequences come crashing down, with Ludivine left there in the rubble. Left there to foot the bill.
Hardy-har-har.
Specifically, the moment she'd dropped the - she called it vulcanization fluid? Just, that? Uncreative, unimagiantive, sloppy? Not even a snappy name, that's how
little she thought this through?! - the vulcanization fluid.
That was the moment of his premonition. The, the cold, the skip of the heartbeat.
The certainty that he was about to die.
It was a
Eureka! moment, after a fashion, as most near-death experiences are. A self-contained truth. Evidence that he is she, and she is he, and that they are both, together, the
same person. Ludwig/Ludivine, stretched out over time, liminal space, and two different consciousnesses.
It's the ultimate proof that their relationship is one grandiose, overwrought act of purest self-loathing.
But look again. See, like quantum states, how the evidence shifts, when observed. How a thought can be both a particle and a wave. The same moment, the same circumstance, the same
Eureka!, and then the opposite realization:
She
can't be him. They look vaguely alike, but they're from entirely different universes, in the end. Ludivine proved that the moment she lifted up that vial of Flubber for all to see, and doubled down the moment the vulcanization fluid hit the green, green, green.
Because Ludwig would never have done this.
And evidently, Ludivine would.
She is taken away in chains. He knows this. He's been told this. He doesn't have to have
been told this, to know this. He hasn't watched it happen, though. Forgone conclusions are not... they are not scientific, you see. Science is about cataloguing the unknown, not watching as...
...it is so hard for women to make a name for themselves, in such a male-dominated field. In such a male-dominated world, heh. So maybe that explains it: his own ego, his own achievements - beaten down, instead of propped up. It's no matter. The ruins are for archaeologists to dig through. He doesn't need to see her losing her... credibility. Her status. Her bright future. Her...
Her.
The TV flickers in the dark room. The clock creeps close to midnight. The air is stale, and muggy, even so late in the year, and carries the scent of spoiled teriyaki.
His finger has hovered over the rewind button, for some time.
Her.
His.
He hits the play button.
"Wait, wait, no! It's safe, I'm telling yoo, dis was a total coincidence! Wun inna million chance! Let me joost try again and-!"
Ludivine hated him. She'd made that very clear. As clear as a shard of glass, between the ribs. He was a mature adult; he got
why. He'd handled so much poorly: the genesis, the conditioning, the lack of peer review, the, the
assumptions he made. The horrid ownership he presumed over another living, thinking being. Everything she had done since the moment she was born was hating him, and everything she had ever done was
justified.
And he understood that. He liked to think he could fire back with the best of them, give as good as he got, pay enmity unto enmity, but the sheer fact of the matter was: Ludwig was an old man who assumed the world belonged to him, and Ludivine was a young woman who deserved a better world than his.
Sure, he hated her, too. But the scientific method, the creed he claimed to live by, is the revelation of truth. The one that Ludwig really hated was
him, because he knew she was the
hero of their shared story.
And he, the one with the goatee. The dark reflection.
She told him time would take him, the last time that they spoke. He was only
part Toon, she reminded him, and therefore the furthest thing from timeless. She declared that when he was buried, she'd be there over his grave, to claim his work for herself, and do with it the things he never could. To be the second chance. To steer, instead of trampling. To move the world, without hurting the people living on it. To be him, but
right, this time.
Because unlike Ludwig, she would choose to
think.
"You lied to me."
He sits on a chair with a too-short leg, staring at the flicker of the screen, and Ludwig von Drake feels like he's all alone in this world.
