Dimension Slut
I never meant to become an adulteress. I love my husband, I really do. But I love Keith, too. I sneak out to see him as soon as my husband leaves for work, and I come home before Nick gets home, and pretend nothing out of the ordinary has happened.
When, really, it's the most extraordinary thing in the world. In any world.
You see, three months ago, an alien spacecraft landed in our town. The alien who emerged didn't speak much English, and his name didn't translate well, so we called him Osiris. Osiris and Nick became best friends, despite the language barrier, and Osiris gave us many things: a machine to control the weather, a winter park in the middle of summer, a device that could call someone on another planet. (Being able to understand what they were saying was another matter.)
The last thing he left us, before he went home, was a way of traveling to another dimension. I'm not up on how exactly it works-Nick's the scientist, not me-but all we had to do was press a button, and we'd be in another version of our town, one with other people living there.
Nick went first. He didn't say much about the trip, and in fact, when I asked him, all he said were three words: "Hello Kitty Hell." I had no idea what that meant-yet.
"How do you do it?" I asked him. "Is there a dial to set, or a switch to pull, or what?"
"It's simpler than that," he explained. "Osiris set it up so that even someone with no technical knowledge could work it. Switch it on, like so," he said, thumbing the ON button, "set your destination here, with this touch screen menu option, and then just press the button with the globe on it."
"And it takes you there, just like that?"
"Just like that. You may feel a bit lightheaded or nauseous the first time, but you get used to it."
"And there are people over there?"
He nodded. "The world I've been visiting, I call it SFP. San Francesca Prime. It's just like our town, only some of the buildings are different. The houses are all in different places, and there are different people living there. I've met them; they're really nice. You should come with me next time."
"Are there other worlds besides SFP?" I wanted to know.
"Definitely. If you accept the dimension theory of reality, there's an infinite number of possible worlds. Osiris' machine takes us to the closest ones, so we don't get eaten by dinosaurs or shot by Nazis or whatever."
"Sounds like a science fiction show I saw when I was a kid," I said. "About a group of people who travel from world to world, and they're all different. Some of them are really different."
"I'll bet there's some really interesting worlds out there, but I want to take it one step at a time. For now, at least, I'd like to stick as close to home as possible. Promise me, Linda, that you won't go anywhere but San Francesca Prime. Not until I've checked out some of the other worlds and made sure they're safe, anyway."
"I promise," I said, knowing it wouldn't be long. Nick is nothing if not insatiably curious about scientific matters. The lure of new worlds to explore was too much for him to resist.
"And don't ever switch off the safety protocols," he said, tapping a red dial above the HOME button. "They're the only thing that keeps you on the path, so to speak, between here and SFP. Without them . . . who knows where you might end up?"
"Don't touch the red thingy," I said, nodding mock-gravely.
He stared at me reproachfully. "This is serious business, Linda. I don't want to lose you to some dimensional mix-up. Promise me you won't ever misuse the machine."
"I won't," I said, and meant it. Of course, that depended on your definition of "misuse."
I went with Nick on my first jaunt (as I came to call them). He gave me the Home trigger, and I tucked it into the side pocket in my apron.
"When we want to go home," he told me, "all you have to do is tap the green button, and it'll take us instantly back here. Just make sure you're holding my hand when you do. We have to be touching to come back together."
"Hold your hand. Got it."
"Let me just set the time delay here . . . we'll be ready to go in a minute. Wait till you meet Bill and Nancy. They're really nice people."
"They own our house in SFP?"
"Yes, and the layout is a little different, so you need to be standing over here." He gently tugged my hand and led me about a meter to the left. "There's a wall there, in their house, and you don't want to zap into the middle of a wall. We'd have to tear it down to get you out."
"Yikes! Dimensional travel sounds dangerous!"
"It is, if you're not careful. Just keep your wits about you, and you'll be fine. Here we go."
The machine beeped, and everything started to get fuzzy around the edges. Then pop! We were there.
There was a moment when I did feel a little dizzy, but it passed pretty quickly. Then as soon as my head cleared, I took a look around.
It was our house.
But it wasn't our house.
The color scheme was completely different, for one thing-our house is brown and white, and this was blue and white, with touches of gray here and there. The furniture was a lot nicer than ours, too. Not that we're poor or anything, but we tend to bargain shop, if you know what I mean. These people had money to spend.
They were sitting in the living room. Just sitting there, like they were waiting for us to arrive. The woman had dark hair and a sharply pointed chin. Her husband (at least, I assumed he was her husband) was an older black man with salt-and-pepper hair and a comfortably worn face. He looked to be maybe ten or fifteen years older than her, and I wondered how they had met.
"Linda," Nick said, "this is Nancy and Bill Spears. This is my wife, Linda."
Nancy was the first to get up and greet me. "You're exactly as I pictured you," she said, and when I saw her up close, I realized something. I had seen her face before.
In the mirror.
Her hair was darker than mine, and styled differently, but we had the same cheekbones, the same jaw line. It was uncanny. She was me, with a makeover.
I wondered if Nick saw it, too. I wondered if it was why he liked visiting this house so often.
"Come sit down," Nancy said, leading us over to their huge C-shaped sectional. "I've just baked some cookies; would you like one?"
"Yes, thank you. I do a lot of baking myself." They were good cookies, too. I thought they'd be some weird thing like oatmeal banana armadillo, or something, but they were regular old chocolate chip. I love chocolate chip cookies. My oven gets a twenty-four-hour-a-day workout, baking batch after batch of cookies.
"Wait till you taste her muffins," said Bill. "She makes the best carrot cake muffins you ever had, I guarantee." He had a bit of an accent, but I couldn't immediately identify it.
We sat there chatting for the better part of an hour. Between the four of us, the cookies were gone in no time, and I got up to go bake some more, on autopilot. And you know what? It took me a while to notice that I wasn't in my own kitchen, because she kept things in the exact same places I kept them. She even had a little TV in the corner, to watch while she waited for the cookies to finish cooling. So it was a surprise when Nancy came up to me and said, "You don't have to do that. I can handle it."
"Huh?" And then I looked around and wondered, When did we get that pretty wallpaper? I'm pretty sure the last time I looked, we had plain off-white walls.
And then I remembered where we were.
"Sorry," I said. "I forgot it wasn't my kitchen."
"That's okay. I don't mind a little help now and then, but you can go sit down. I'll take over."
"All right." I went and sat back down next to Nick, feeling a bit embarrassed.
Nobody said anything about my little gaffe, though, maybe because it was such an unusual situation all around. At the end of the evening, Nick and I stepped outside and pressed the HOME button on the little gadget.
There was a kind of wavery thing and a pop, and we were home.
"That was weird," I said. "Nice, but weird."
"I can set it up so you can visit solo," he told me. "Also show you how to use the Automatic Return function. You can set it so that you automatically come back after an hour, or two or three hours. Probably not more than that, or you'll strain the machine. And I have no idea where to find spare parts!"
"Maybe Osiris will come back," I mused, looking up at the starry sky.
"Maybe. Well, it's late. We'd better go in and go to bed."
"You go. I'll be along in a minute."
I sat out in the yard and thought about the implications of being able to visit multiple worlds, eventually. Worlds where Nick and I had never met, or didn't exist at all. What would one of those be like?
Maybe I would find out soon.
I took one last look up at the night sky, and then got up and went in the house. It took me a long time to fall asleep. My brain was full of the endless possibilities.
I met Keith completely by accident. It was my first jaunt on my own, one day when Nick was at work, and I went to the wrong house by accident.
What happened was, I entered SFP in front of Bill and Nancy's house, but they weren't home. I thought they might have been visiting the Andersens, their next-door neighbors, but I must have gone to the wrong side, because when I knocked on the door, it was answered by a hunky guy in a Speedo.
"Oh! Hello. Um, are you selling something? Cause it's really not a good time . . ."
"You're not Michael Andersen, are you?" I couldn't stop staring at those pecs, those abs . . .
"No, you want Number Four. But I can tell you, they don't like sales people any more than I do."
"No, no! I'm not selling anything! I, um . . . I was actually looking for Nancy."
"Nancy Spears? I think she's at work. She doesn't get home till four."
"Oh." I had set the Auto-Return to bring me back after an hour, so that wouldn't work.
"Do you want to come in for a minute? I just need to take a shower and get dressed, but if you don't mind waiting, we can talk."
"I, uh . . . sure. I'd love to."
He held the door for me, and I stepped inside. His home was spacious and full of fun stuff-was that a foosball table over there? Nick had always wanted one, but we'd never found the space for one. I actually told him one time, "We can either have a foosball table, or a baby. You decide." A little cruel, I know, but if we wanted to have kids, we couldn't have a lot of useless junk cluttering up the place.
"Sit down," he said, gesturing to the cream-colored sofa. "Make yourself comfortable. I'll just be a few minutes."
"Thanks," I said. "I'm Linda."
"Keith Baker."
"Huh," I said aloud. "Our neighbors across the street are named Baker, too. Ben and Maggie. They throw big block parties once a month, and the whole neighborhood comes."
"Sounds like fun," he said. "Be right back."
When he went upstairs, I had a good look around the place. He had one of those fancy bookcases built right into the wall. I've always wanted one of those. His bed was huge and dark and oh, so soft. I could have rolled around on it forever, but I knew he'd be back in a couple of minutes, and it wouldn't look good for me to be rolling around in his bed. So I moved on.
Bathroom fixtures: huge shower, with triple nozzles and safety handgrips, plus notches in the walls for soap and shampoo and all those nice things. He had a bottle of body wash that smelled really nice. Was there an even better shower upstairs?
I could hear it running as I moved into the kitchen. The color scheme here was black and white-not my favorite, but to each his own. The oven was all automatic, controlled by the push of a button. How nice. The fridge was easily twice the size of ours, and had fold-out shelves in the doors. He had a lot of food for someone who lived alone.
Or did he? The bed was a queen, but lots of single people have queen beds just for the extra room. I hadn't seen any female stuff lying around, but that didn't mean he didn't have a very tidy live-in girlfriend.
When he came down again, he was wearing an open-throated blue shirt and brown slacks. His shoes were those fancy Italian ones I'd seen the celebrities wear on TMZ. I wondered what he did for a living.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," he said. "I just got out of the pool, and I hate to stand there reeking of chlorine."
"Oh, I don't mind," I said. "I used to be a lifeguard at the town pool. I love the smell of chlorine."
"Really? Maybe next time you come over, you could bring your swimsuit, and try out the pool. I have a slide shaped like a dolphin. It's mostly for the kids, but I think you'd enjoy it."
"You have kids?" I asked. I hadn't seen any toys or kids' clothes lying around.
He laughed. "No, I'm not even married! I have two sisters, one with three kids and one with two, and they come over all the time."
"Oh. I'm an only child, myself. I can't imagine being part of such a large family."
"It gets pretty crazy, sometimes, but mostly it's fun. How about you? Any children?"
"No, not yet."
"Do you want children? If you don't mind me asking about it. I know it's rather a personal subject . . ."
"No, it's okay. We've talked about it, Nick and I, but . . . I don't know. I guess we're just busy right now."
"Well, hopefully you've got time to decide. Now, where exactly is it you live? Over by the Community Center, isn't it?"
I wasn't sure if I was allowed to tell him or not. "Not . . . exactly. Um, I don't know if you've talked to Nancy and Bill, but-"
"I'll go you one better," he said. "I've met your husband."
I didn't know what to say to that. Here I'd thought the whole thing was our secret, and it turned out that Nick had been over here making friends with the whole neighborhood. Without telling me about it! I mean, I should have known, that's just the kind of guy he is, but it still came as a shock that he had this whole other life over here that I hadn't even known about until he told me. It made me wonder what else he hadn't shared with me.
Keith and I talked for what seemed like forever, but at the end of an hour, I felt something strange. It took me a moment to realize that the machine was trying to pull me back.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I have to go!" I hurried outside and tried to at least get to the sidewalk before the Automatic Return . . . well, returned me. I made it halfway down the front walk before that dizzy, spinny sensation came over me, and the next thing I knew, I was standing outside the Taylors' house, looking out at the street.
Mike Taylor was just getting home; he rolled down the car window and called out to me, "Hey, Linda, need a ride home?" It was something of a joke between us; I only lived a few hundred yards away, but at the last neighborhood party, I had gotten so drunk that I couldn't find my way home on my own. Mike had had to help me home, and ever since then, every time he saw me, he offered me a ride.
"No, thanks, Mike," I said, "I'm fine."
"Okay then. See you Sunday?"
"What's Sunday?" I asked, and then I remembered. Some kind of party for the Walkers' new baby. "Oh, right, sure. We'll be there. Bye now!"
I found my way home with no trouble at all, and I stayed there till Nick came home. I didn't touch the machine again for three days, after which my curiosity became too much for me to bear.
I planned my trip this time. First and most important, I didn't eat anything for two hours before the time I intended to jaunt. I also brought small gifts for the neighbors, since I would be visiting the Spears and the Andersens before I saw Keith again. I was hiding my true intentions, though I refused to admit it to myself. I'm a married woman, I kept telling myself. He's a nice man, but we can't be any more than friends.
Thirty-five minutes after I arrived in SFP, Keith and I were rolling around on his big, soft bed. We had sex twice before the alarm I had set warning me of the return went off. I barely heard it, since the alarm was in my watch and my watch was on the nightstand, but once I realized what that beeping was, I hurriedly made my apologies, threw my clothes back on, and hurried out of the house. I made it across the street this time before being yanked back to my own world.
When I thought back to what I had done, I felt like . . . like I hadn't been in control of my own actions. Like someone else was making me do things against my will. Well, maybe not entirely against my will, but it was still weird. I knew I should tell Nick about it, but that would have meant revealing the affair (it's not an affair! It was one time, and I won't go back there! I won't do it again), so I kept quiet.
This time I kept away from the machine for almost a week before giving in. I decided that I would spend the time at Nancy and Bill's, maybe baking up some treats, but of course the minute I crossed over, I went straight to Keith's house, like I was drawn by a big magnet. It was like I didn't even have control of my own thoughts anymore.
As Keith started to lead me to the bedroom, I summoned up the willpower to tell him, "This is wrong. We shouldn't be doing this. Please, just let me go home."
"I can't," he said. "I'm not the one doing this."
"So you feel it too? Like someone is controlling us from outside? It's like I don't have any will to resist!"
He looked me straight in the eye. "No one's controlling us. You think it's out of your control only because the compulsion is so strong. I wanted to do this the moment you showed up at my door, but I held back for your sake. Are you telling me you don't want to do this anymore?"
"Of course I don't, but . . . I can't stop myself! Please, the next time I come over, just don't let me in. We need to end this before it goes any further."
"All right. Just please . . . let me have this one last time?"
I couldn't say no. I mean, I literally could not get that word out of my mouth. We did it until my alarm went off, and then I went home. And I told myself I would just never go back, that was all.
Easy to say. I lasted a whole two days this time. And I really tried, too: I refused to go near the machine at all. I wouldn't even go in the room the machine was in, that's how far I took it.
But somehow on the third day, as soon as Nick had gone to work, there I was, standing in front of the machine, setting the dials and pressing the button. I had the feeling that I'd forgotten something, but I wasn't sure what.
That was almost an hour ago. Of course, the first place I went was Keith's, and the first thing we did was . . . what we always do.
Neither of us even tried to deny it this time; the moment we saw each other, we just got right to it.
When we were done, I asked, "So, has Nick been around lately?"
"I think so. He came by one day last week. We played foosball together."
"In the middle of the day? Don't you work during the day?"
He actually scratched his head. "You know . . . I'm sure I must, but I never remember anything from the time I leave the house until I get home again. I know I must work, because I get paid. But I don't remember anything I actually do."
"Huh. I know what you're talking about. I remember I was an architect, to start out with, and then I quit that job and became a fashion designer, and then all of a sudden I was working in a real estate office. I know the economy's bad and all, but I don't actually remember deciding to change jobs just like that. What's going on?"
Just then, my alarm beeped.
"Time to go," Keith said. He kissed me goodbye at the door. "Tomorrow night?"
"I'll be here."
I felt the familiar tug, and stepped out into the street (but at the side of the street, so I wouldn't get run over) to wait for the transfer. I closed my eyes . . .
. . . and opened them, a second ago, in some place that didn't even remotely look like our neighborhood. I wonder what went wrong? I had all the safety protocols set-
No. No, I didn't. That's what I forgot! The safety protocols! Well, I have the return button here in my-my pocket. No, I don't. I forgot to bring it.
What do I do? Nick won't be home till almost midnight! Maybe I'll be lucky and the thing will zap me back in an hour, but somehow I doubt that. I think I broke the machine. I may be stuck here, wherever here is, for-
What was that? That noise? It sounded like-
Oh, epikrasnu! That's a dinosaur! Only . . . it's wearing clothes. The same kind of silvery space suit that Osiris wore. Are these his people? No; he was green, but he wasn't a-
Kras! He saw me! Nowhere to hide out here, it's all open country. What do I do? Civilized or not, a dinosaur is still a predator! I have to run! I have to
To: Systems Support
Re: Major game glitch
Since the update, I've been having most of the same glitches as everyone else: time stalls, depletion, unfinished buildings, etc. Last night the issues seemed to have resolved themselves.
This morning I opened the game, and found nothing but this text document. All my Sims are gone, and my town has vanished as well. Could you please explain to me what's going on? I've never heard of this happening before.
Thank you for your consideration.
A. Player