Prologue
I was eight when we opened the door to welcome Paradise. Everyone knew it was coming but few believed promises would meet expectation. Yet when the doorways opened and the world witnessed the unbelievable, the mental shift was as great as the physical.
Since you’re reading this your world is much like my own before the change and there is a choice before your reality. Contact has already been made but not made public knowledge. Whether you believe or not, take this to be fiction or not, ultimately doesn’t matter. You are one version of yourself, and probability puts you on an infinite bell curve of mundanity. Then again you may be like me: a statistical improbability so great that your birth is outside the standard curve of infinite reality. An Anomalous Birth.
My name is Avree and it has been seven years since we opened the bridge of our reality to the infinite multiverse. Within three months our lives changed entirely. I went from living in a one-bedroom apartment with my dad, an upscale house with my mother to having my own space with every amenity desirable accessible to both parents. Nutritionally optimized, delicious food was free and plentiful, work became optional, and even education was discretionary after six years. We watched this wave of change spread over the world like an inevitable sunrise. Conflicts that raged for decades ceased seemingly overnight, governments of nations made way for our Government of Humanity, and even aging became optional.
The question that eventually came to everyone’s mind “what now?” and the answer was limitless. We were literally a part of a fabric of existence that was unfathomable yet our lives, perspective and needs were still very finite.
Please let me tell you what came next.
Chapter 1
It’s strange looking back; I remember the news storm, I remember the hold-outs, I remember the fear of what was going to happen. It’s strange to think about being hungry, to remember tv and commercials about all the toys we couldn’t afford. I remember wanting them so badly and the pain in my dad’s eyes every time I bugged him a little too much.
I don’t remember anything from when my parents were married; though sometimes I feel a shadow of a memory of yelling and things breaking when I’ve asked my dad about it. They divorced when I was three and I spend most of my time with my mother; that was pretty normal back then. I was lucky though, I’ve seen too much not to know that now. Families that cared enough to fight over me has to be better than parents that left for good. When Paradise finally did come to the starving children of all nations, I couldn’t stop crying for weeks whenever I thought about it; no one could. There was this video … well, I’ll get to that.
But thinking back to the time before Paradise, I’m proud of where I came from, I’m proud of my mom for her resolve and faith. Nothing could shake her. she was a lion in protecting me from any threat. I’ve met many versions of her since her passing and none had the strength of my mother, even the ones with children.
My dad was opposite in many ways: frequently broken, he’s a wave forever trying to reach beyond the beach. Failing again and again, over and over, yet always trying and overtime shaping the terrain. He laughed when I told him this and said: “just call me a cockroach who refuses to die!” Resilience is a hard lesson to learn, but even when I later learned how often it was a mask, I was still grateful to him for teaching me. The other versions I’ve met of my father have all been much more arrogant and thin-skinned.
How odd must it be to see yourself? To see the path of life that could have been your. To shake your own hand and look yourself in the eye. I’ve interviewed thousands of people that overwhelmingly have related the catharsis involved with the experience. I observe second hand in hopes of absorbing the fruit of the experience, but so far there has been no help for Anomalous Births.