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Somehere in the Mouldyverse - by Erin Greer
I heard on the radio that some physicists think we live in the hole of a hunk of Swiss cheese. They mean this figuratively, of course.
They say our own universe is like an infinite hole in an infinite block of infinitely expanding cheese, which is full of infinite other holes and infinite copies of ourselves doing the same infinitely inane things. And other copies doing slightly different things. Because, in our hole and in every hole, matter is finite but space infinite. Which means that matter will have infinite chances to combine into finite patterns. The patterns will inevitably repeat, even the wildly improbable ones. Even the miraculously unlikely explosive births of galaxies where little University towns are eventually built, with little coffee shops full of tables of little twins of you and me. Our twins drink coffee and whiskey and read books just like us, throughout the Big Cheese.
Some of them are smarter than we are, of course.
Some of the gaps of curd are populated with twins who’ve discovered other hobbies besides war. And who don’t wail until they become hoarse about making sure poor people get healthcare. Some don’t outlaw homosexuality.
Maybe, somewhere in the cheese-verse, we’re all homosexual. And we reproduce by pissing into the ground. Maybe. Brian Greene says this is almost certain. It’s probable that anything you can imagine does exist, somewhere.
Nothing’s fully certain, of course. The most we can say is whether things are probable or improbable. It’s probable that a person genetically identical to me, for instance, somewhere and somewhen(s?), is quite famous and happy. The coolness of my cheesey alter-ego is almost assured by physics.
She’s talented, of course. I’m not untalented, I guess. But she’s better at all the ordinary things that give life … a danceable rhythm. Like talking to people in coffee shops who look interesting.
Somewhere, for instance, right now, my cooler twin is about to put down her pen and say something witty to the guy sitting at the table next to her. The guy with the Eastern features, his dark eyes fixed upon a thick book and his thumbnail gripped unconsciously by his teeth.
I bet the book’s Ulysses, the pretentious ass. No – no, it’s probably something Russian. I love the Russians, as far as writers go, at any rate. I don’t know any real Russians aside from an exchange student in school who once pretended to be asleep at a party in order to peep in on a bit of covert oral sex. That was the rumour, at any rate, and in some bit of cheese it’s almost definitely pravda. I don’t deduce that all Russians are sexually curious voyeurs, of course. I’m not a racist. And I didn’t hold it against that guy, either. I’m a bit of a watcher myself. Like Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window, except instead of a broken leg I’m confined to the window peepshow by my own broken will.
Now I’ve gotten melodramatic. I know. My cooler gap of mammary bacteria undoubtedly lives with subtlety and grace.
No; no! My cooler curd is hyperbolic, or about to become so, as she turns her untinted eyelashes toward the young man in the cobalt button-down with the possibly-cobalt 1 | 2 | 3 NEXT |
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