Chapter 19: Inter Alia

Carl Sandburg, "Fog"

The fog comes
on little cat feet.

It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then, moves on.

It was a cold morning. Olivia sprinted to the coffee shop and was grateful to enter its warm, aromatic interior.

Her counterpart had already chosen a table, a booth in the far corner, and had two coffees and two danishes on the table.

Olivia took a seat and the untouched danish. "Thank you."

"No problem," Agent Dunham said. "Thanks for meeting me." She handed her a copy of her report on the incident at the mine. "There have been no unusual events in Ontario since we were there. I think Peter may have been right."

"He usually is. How are you doing?"

"Fine. I just wish I knew how I did it."

Olivia laughed. "Yeah. It would be nice if we could just jump universes at will. Then me and Peter would be home by now. But he and Walter have been in the lab since the moment we got back from Canada trying to figure it out. And when they put their minds together..."

"They're dangerous," Agent Dunham stated.

"Definitely," Olivia lifted her cup of coffee in a mock toast of agreement.

Agent Dunham's phone rang. She looked at it, frowning. "Broyles," she explained before answering it. "Dunham...I'll be there in ten." She closed the phone and stood up, grabbing her coffee cup and the last few bites of her danish. "I have to go. Look over those files and let me know if you can think of anything else."

"I will." Olivia opened the report and skimmed through it for a minute. She looked up and watched as Agent Dunham got into her car.

Anyone observing them would have thought they were twins, but they were much closer than twins. Even identical twins didn't have the same fingerprints, but she and this Olivia Dunham shared that, as well as the same name and memories from childhood. But then there paths had diverged. One of them killed their stepfather, one of them had been taken in by Nina Sharp, given a loving home and a life of privilege, while one of them had only shot their stepfather and lived under his shadow through a difficult and often deprived adolescence.

At some point in the few minutes she'd been in the coffee shop, fog had rolled in. It was a thick fog, cold and gray. She watched the dark form of a woman appear from out of the fog. There was something strangely familiar about her.

She stared out the window at the fog, contemplating her sudden feeling of deja vu.

The woman in the long black coat ordered a coffee. Olivia recognized the voice. She turned.

The woman was staring directly at her as she waited for her order, a secretive smile tugging at the corner of her thin lips.

It was the woman whose mysterious appearance in the lab had heralded Olivia finding a way to this universe.

Alia.

Olivia briefly considered what to do: should she call the other Agent Dunham back, or arresting Alia on her own? But on what charge? Trespassing in the lab in an alternate dimension?

Alia held up a finger and mouthed something. As soon as her order was placed on the counter, she took it to Olivia's table, where she sat down like it was perfectly normal for them both to be there.

"Nice to see you again, Miss Dunham."

"I didn't expect to see you here, Alia," Olivia said.

"I could say it was a coincidence, but of course you wouldn't believe me."

There was no one close enough to overhear their conversation, Olivia quickly determined. "How did you get here?" she whispered.

"I walked."

"But where did you come from?"

"We've always been here," she said casually before taking a few sips of coffee.

"You're not one of them, are you? An Observer?"

She scoffed. "Please."

"Why are you here?"

"Why are any of us here?" Alia asked philosophically. "Especially when you think how much easier and simpler it would be for there to be nothing instead of something. Existence is chaos. And then for any individual to exist, when you think about how easy it would be for them to be slightly different or to never have existed at all, is astronomical." She drank some more coffee before continuing. "Every action causes a ripple of effects. That's what makes it impossible to accurately predict the weather more than three days in advance, and the future in any meaningful way. Of course, the flutter of a butterfly's wing won't do a damn thing to affect a hurricane, but a hurricane would sure have a effect on the flutter of a butterfly's wing."

"What's your point?"

"Say your mother had chosen to do her hair differently one morning in college, she wouldn't have had time to stop by the cafe for a danish before class, and never would have met your father. You exist because your mother decided to go with the ponytail instead of the twist."

"I understand the concept," Olivia said. "I've known how the different decisions we make can lead to parallel realities for years now."

"Good. Of course, regardless of the decisions anyone makes, the ultimate fate of the universe remains the same. It ends."

Olivia flinched. "The universe ends?"

"Of course. It can't go on forever, can it?"

It sounded like a rhetorical question.

"But...there are...millions of universes," Olivia said. "So even if this universe ends, there will be another that continues."

"But those will also end. Of course, there are also new ones always coming into existence. But you don't really need to worry about that. This solar system will die long before the universe. The sun will exhaust its fuel supply and burn out. And the way human civilization is going, life on Earth is doomed well before even that."

"You're not much of an optimist," Olivia noted.

"Well are you? Knowing what you know?"

Olivia thought over what Alia had said for a minute, then put down her cup of coffee. "But to survive, all humans would have to do would be to find a new universe to live in, a suitable universe."

"That's true. But you'd have to be really good at traveling between universes to accomplish something like that. And humans have just barely begun to explore that possibility. You, Olivia Dunham, are the best your world has produced so far in that department, and you have to admit you're pretty clumsy at it."

Olivia was struck silent as realization hit her. "That's what Peter's working on now."

Alia smiled. "Let me tell you a story about cause and effect. There was a man, a brilliant scientist, a professor of physics. He was the only child of a very wealthy, influential individual who was himself a scientific genius. Our lives are the result of the decisions we make, but those decisions arise because of the opportunities we are given, which ultimately we have very little influence over. This professor had been given every advantage in life: loving parents, the best schools, the best college. One day, he met a traveler from another dimension. When she told him where she was from, he didn't believe her at first, but he was willing to hear her out because the theoretical physics of alternate dimensions was one of his specialties. She said she had a message for his father. Two scientists from her own world had been watching his for decades. They'd been adapting the superior technology from his dimension to build themselves a very lucrative corporate empire. They'd been studying ways to cross over, but none of them had been safe enough to put into practice. But one of their colleagues had stolen their research and crossed over on his own. He was a dangerous man, now loose in a world that didn't know he existed.

"The traveler from the other dimension had been sent because she had the natural ability to cross over, which the two scientists had been helping her cultivate. She wanted to get a message to the professor's father to warn him about the man who'd stolen their technology. With her help, they tracked down the fugitive, and she was forced to kill him. Then she went back to her own world. The professor, naturally, was intrigued by the proof that alternate universes exist in reality, and he was also intrigued by the beautiful dimension hopper. She returned about a year later, wanting his help on another case. She also just wanted to spend time with him. He studied her, figured out what allowed her to cross, to move in directions unfathomable to the human mind. With the knowledge he gained from these experiments, he discovered a way to travel across dimensions. He designed and, with his father's help and funding, built a machine that allowed him to shift from one universe to another, precisely measuring the quantum distance between universes in order to travel accurately and safely. In that way, he was able to visit her universe. There he met an alternate version of his father, who, it turned out, was one of the scientist who'd built the window to look in on his universe. This man's own son had died as a child, but he'd had much solace in watching another version of his son grow up, and he was overjoyed to meet him in person. The professor and the dimension hopper fell in love, and he divided his time between his world and hers. Eventually, years and years later, everyone in his world learned about alternate dimensions, and when the time came they used giant ships based on the machine he designed to colonize new universes.

"As you may have guessed," Alia concluded, "That man I've been talking about never existed, because when he was a boy and was dying of a congenital disease, his brilliant father failed to find a cure because a strange man in his lab distracted him at just the moment when he would have seen it."

"Peter," Olivia stated. "That's why he was so important. That's why his cure was so important that the Observer was there to witness it. And the traveler...was me?"

Alia looked at her. "He would have been the inventor. You would have been the catalyst. And that would have been the first time that humans had advanced that far in any Earth across all the universes. That wouldn't just have been a significant event for the science of one planet, but the eventual salvation of the human species in the multiverse. If, you know," she shrugged, "that's the kind of thing that concerns you."

Olivia thought for several long moments, then she looked up again. "What are you?"

She smirked. "You didn't expect to get all the answers, did you?" She finished her coffee and stood. "I'll be right back." She tossed her empty coffee cup in the trash and disappeared into the restroom.

Olivia finished her own coffee slowly, thinking about what else to ask Alia. When after five minutes the other woman had still not returned, Olivia stood and slowly approached the restroom door. It was unlocked. She pushed it open.

It was dark inside. She flipped the light switch, and wasn't too shocked to discover it was completely empty, and there was no other way out.

She left the coffee shop. The fog had lifted as quickly as it came.