Tuned In

"There are hundreds of different radio waves being broadcast all around you from distant stations. At any given instant, your office or car or living room is full of these radio waves. However if you turn on a radio, you can listen to only one frequency at a time; these other frequencies are not in phase with each other. Each station has a different frequency, a different energy. As a result, your radio can only be turned to one broadcast at a time. Likewise, in our universe we are tuned into the frequency that corresponds to physical reality. But there are an infinite number of parallel realities coexisting with us in the same room, although we cannot tune into them."
Professor Steven Weinberg, Nobel Prize in Physics (1979)

"However, what if we could tune into a parallel reality? What if?"
Silverwing013, author on fanfiction (2011)

Written Friday, May 12, 1989 of this world

When I am reading, I forget the turn of pages and the letters before my eyes. The world around me disappears and I enter a different world. I see the characters as people, hear their voices and inflictions of their voice, smell colognes and perfumes, and feel the world pass by me. Their scenery is my own and I am resting my feet as I people watch, creating ideas of who the people are passing by. I follow behind them and feel the third wheel as in my own school life. No one seems surprised I am there; they don't question it and let me tag along in their group. It is a whole new world and I am content to go there as much as I can, sinking inside to explore.

So it does not surprise me that when I reach the end of my visit, realizing there is a page in front of me with a jolt, that I find consequences.

Some of these consequences are small, such as the sun no longer shining through my window and I find my eyes pained from squinting without realizing. Others have been greater, such as completely missing my bus stop when I still rode the bus to school and back. I had been hunched over reading and no one saw me, but a few yelled my name out knowing they saw me get on the bus. Figuring I wasn't on with all the screaming, they figured I got off earlier for some reason and drove on. Sure was a surprise to the bus driver and me when I ended my visit. He had nearly reached his house since his hour and a half long bus route was finished.

Some of these consequences of my form of reading are life changing. Digging so far into a story like that, forgetting my own world around me for the likes of another for a few hours, those consequences I could accept.

Apparently, one of the worlds I escaped to for a few hours… Well, someone inside the story sent out a signal from their reality. I think of it like a radio station. Each station has a different frequency, a different energy. In their search for a different reality, someone inside the story tried a different frequency for each day and hoped for someone to push the right button to connect to their station, their reality.

Speak of the world around me disappearing when I read, forgetting I am even turning pages because I see and hear another that I am reading of…

I lost more than a few hours of daylight from entering inside THIS story. There is no book in front of me, there cannot be if the story of the reality I was reading now has myself as a character. Frankly, I have never met the author, so how could that be possible? I suppose if one can imagine a reality, it exists. But I don't think the author imagined this sort of radio station being made and used inside his story's reality. Well, perhaps he did but it never got placed in the story he wrote down… He did already have three worlds in the reality he imagined. There must have been a way for the people to travel from one world to the other…

That's what he said anyway, the scientist. That he took the idea behind world travel here and twisted it to find other worlds, other realities. What he wanted was to walk the path himself and explore the new world, but he said he couldn't enter the path that brought me here. I would not know about that, I was too engrossed in my book. He, that scientist, keeps asking ME questions to figure out the why of that, but the most we could come up with today…?

I simply pushed the button and tuned in to his world.

It is the one thing we are certain of. Certainly explains why I can look at my book, put it down and look around…I find nothing different between the page and place around me.

Why else would I hang around an abandoned mannequin warehouse?

I dislike consequences I never asked for. Nor anyone would ever expect. However, I can live with it. Perhaps. It was always so inviting for me to search out for other worlds to escape to. This one I just escaped to longer than expected.