​         People find the multiverse a fascinating concept.

​         Until the moment they’re obliged to live with the consequences of its charm.

*

​         I discovered the multiverse in high school. It happened in class, half-listening to a string theory supposed to make sense of the ungodly mess that was cosmology. A subject I could live without; Latin was enough to give me headaches. I’m not sure how we passed from the infinitesimal big to the infinitesimal small, but at a certain moment all the class shouted excitedly, and the word multiverse was launched into the fray. I liked the sound of it. 

*

​         That night I couldn’t sleep. I kept looking up at my oblique window on the rooftop, gazing at the night sky and the thousand stars of the (allegedly rare) clear Scottish nights. Multiverse(s). Did it mean there were versions of Helen Walters in all of them? But what good would do to have them if I couldn’t interact in any way? 

​         My eyes scanned Orion stars one by one, Castor, Pollux, Betelgeuse…which one was the gate to the happiest-verse, where a lanky, nail-biting Helen was in love? I’d better get there as fast as an arrow. 

​         In this dimension, love seemed outright impossible.

*

​         And yet, it soon occurred to me, I had already met the multiverse: in an antique, oak-framed mirror in the attic. Many remember similar episodes in their childhood. The eerie, chilling moment they chase their own images on the looking glass, wondering if what they see is just an optical phenomenon or the face of a demon that has taken over their features. Not one, but two people divided by a dimensional barrier, trying to make contact.

​         After that first encounter, I started spending time in the attic every day after school, under my mother’s puzzled eyes. What is Helen doing up there?

​         Nothing good, it came out.

​         Helen did nothing but staring and making faces at the mirror, studying her reflection until the reflection stared at her. One evening, I had been looking at my doppelgänger for so long my mother found me in tears. She was angry with me, I explained to Mom.

​         “Who?”

​         “Mirror-Helen.”

​         Mirror-Helen had no life, because the demon of the mirror kept her prisoner inside its crystal tendrils like a cricket in a matchbox. She sang her pain through splinters of light, trying to break the looking glass. But now she knew I existed, free to walk in the world, free even to stare at her captive self, and I was terrified she would come out and take my place within my family.

​         My mother sold the mirror.

*

​         "Have you checked the liquid helium levels, Walters?"

​         "Levels stable," I reply, eyes focused on the panel readings.

​         "Magnets status?"

​         "1357 in nominal conditions, one seems to be malfunctioning. Before we put the system in hibernation for maintenance, I suggest we find out why. It’ll prevent any breakdown when we need it to work."

​         "I see." Yelena’s voice doesn’t seem utterly concerned, but she’s a good director and knows the success of any initiative resides in having people fully committed. Listening to them is one way of doing it. "Ask the theorists to run simulations about the time necessary to fix all items that need replacement or reprogramming. In the meantime, you can try to find out what’s wrong with that magnet."

​         "Yes, boss."

*

​         Twenty years after my discovery of the multiverse, with its hidden dangers and delights, I work in a collider centre. Not an extremely sophisticated version, but one that tries to accomplish something I feel uniquely suited for. This research complex investigates the levels that connect all the n-verses theoretically existing, all the possible cosmos. Yelena Kornitova, Nobel Prize for Physics, believes we have overlooked a key area of investigation in the traditional string theory, and this accounts for the unexplainable facts in our universe. 

​         She argues we’re in contact with the other universes, and it’s not that ours is in a continuous expansion: it exchanges matter, energy, and information with all the others, and they all grow together as a result. So far, she has (sort of) proved it with equations but not experimentally. She’s determined to do it though, and that’s why she has raised the money for the centre.

*

​         I am alone in the basement of the collider, where the quantum magic unfolds.

​         We have removed the radiation shields—the ones with the responsibility to absorb all particle beams—and now the core is naked in front of my eyes. It’s so elusively simple, so beautiful in its raw symmetry, so powerful in the energy is able to summon.

​         Deep down in its colloidal guts, I feel as if a gentle, nourishing cocoon wrapped me cosily. Helen is like a chrysalis that has not yet become butterfly but that senses her infant wings twitching; she knows she must be careful and not get too close to the nuclear flame but the attraction is stronger than ever.

​         My hands move quickly on the holographic platform, rewiring its neural conduct, preparing it for the next launch, for new discoveries. I have given this place all my adult years, helping Yelena and the director before her to design its specs, test its components, and recruit the best people, all in the quest of those dimensions we’ve never seen but we know existing somewhere.

​         Nested in the layers of the multiverse, like the petals of a carnivorous flower, there’s a Helen-with-child, a Helen-with-husband, a crab-lover Helen, and, perhaps, a Helen-cyborg still feeling the pain of her missing legs.

​         But of one thing I’m certain now: they’re out there, all waiting for me to come.

​         I’m big sister Helen who will let them meet one day and keep them safe, rescuing a scared baby-Helen from a dark mirror in the attic and giving a heartbroken Helen-teen a girl to hug in the night.