Gunden died quietly in their sleep, so when they awoke (as everyone does) in a world that was very similar but for certain key details, they didn’t remember dying. So they distrusted their memories of things like which cabinet the coffee beans were in or the color of the sky. “I could swear I had ten fingers, not twelve,” Gunden muttered, but kept most of it to themself because they didn’t want to be labeled crazy or get diagnosed with some sort of psychosis. Nearly everyone else had no memories of where Gunden had existed before dying. Since they had come into existence — along with their memories — at the very same instant as Gunden and maybe even their whole new world, there were none to say “yes, I remember that too; you died Gunden, and you’ve been recreated in this new place.”
It wasn’t entirely true, of course, that everyone had been created anew along with the world; the universe hated to waste any effort, and since worlds are large and people are small, each new world was the place quite a few dead souls were spun back into service. So there were people Gunden could have consulted, who would have reassured them that their memories weren’t fabricated. But unfortunately those people were randomly distributed throughout a very large and populous plane of existence, and Gunden was unlikely to ever meet any of them.
Nevertheless, this particular world included a communication system enabling individuals to contact others of like mind and matching opinion — or, if they desired, of different mind and conflicting opinion. So when Gunden placed an open message confessing his strange memories, or dreams, or whatever they were — and relating his fear that he must be losing something, whether his mind or his grip or his sanity, it just randomly happened that some of the right people saw the message. Gunden began to receive some private messages of reassurance. Yes, they said, you’re right in recalling a sky that was blue, and five-fingered hands, and all the rest. You’ve just come to a different place. Remember, they said, you died. This is what’s next.
It was the references to dying that took Gunden aback. He had died? How can you not notice something like that? He remembered everything else — well, at least a lot of it. Why not that? It seemed pretty central.
One of his new correspondents, Brattinger, was the first to suggest that it was possible that Gunden hadn’t noticed because he’d been asleep or sedated at the time. So there wasn’t any rapidly approaching bus and large bang to remember, nor was there an illness or injury. “Hmm,” mused Gunden, “that old story about dying in your sleep being something to hope for might have been a bit off.” Gunden was able to think that because Brattinger’s suggestion immediately rang true. It explained everything. Or at least it explained a lot. Orloff, another correspondent of Gunden’s, had added that only a relative few of the people in this new place had died (or at least lacked any recollections of things being different); everybody else seemed to have originated right here. Possibly, speculated Orloff, those folks would die and wake up somewhere else again. After, of course, a long life of 300 or 400 years, which was the norm.
Gunden took notice of that comment as well. “People live for centuries here?” he posted. “In the place I remember, you’d be lucky to last more than 90 years. Are the years different?” Brattinger answered that. “No,” they said, “the years here are even longer, as far as I can tell.”
“That seems right,” agreed Orloff. “So really we’re talking about a life span of more like 500 of the years in the old place.”
“Even for the natives?” asked Gunden. He’d already noticed that the children didn’t seem to be growing up as fast as he would have expected.
Feeling like they were on a stronger psychological footing, Gunden tried to pay more attention to their immediate surroundings. Their house seemed the same, and their family, including Gunden’s partner Rem, their friends, and their children seemed to be the same, except for the difference in some memories. Rem even seemed to remember everything about when and where they’d all met, and everything they’d been through. Even the bed where Gunden had supposedly died (which made them feel quite strange about lying in it) was the same. And yet, thought Gunden, these were not the same people.
Or were they? How reliable, after all, were these distant correspondents Orloff and Brattinger? And a few others who had joined their informal sessions. Maybe they were just enablers, confirming and boosting what were just psychoses. Some sort of hallucinations. Had any of them offered anything original that Gunden also remembered, or were all the details coming only from Gunden?
As a test, Gunden sent the following message: “what else does everyone remember about the other place? So much of everything around me seems exactly the way it used to be that I sometimes lose track.”
Orloff was first to reply. “The thing I remember most often is the taste of chocolate. It was my favorite. But I’ve never found anything close to it here.”
Brattinger said that they had been a musician, and pianos here had 89 keys, but in the other place they had just 88.
Malin, who had explained their death from bullet wounds in stomach-churning detail, mentioned a kind of butterfly with wings colored in a pattern not found here, but then Lenidibis pointed out that it sounded like Malin was describing a Ceylon Rose butterfly that certainly was found here, but it was just quite rare. That sparked an argument that continued for several days until Lenidibis posted a photo and Malin agreed that indeed, the Ceylon Rose was the one, and that in the other place, they had lived in Sri Lanka, where the Ceylon Rose can be found.
Gunden sent a message intended to represent laughing, and said “look, we have our own butterfly effect.” The comment didn’t produce the amusement Gunden had intended. Instead, Brattinger responded “have you ever considered that we were not supposed to find each other, and maybe we shouldn’t be talking about all this? Maybe we’ll just get separated. Maybe that’s even what happened in the other place.”
The others quickly blamed Gunden for starting the whole discussion, and everyone signed off. Gunden, though, had what they had wanted. Confirmation. The others remembered the same things (except for the butterfly). Gunden even began to wish for some chocolate, even though that had never been their favorite. But the rush of confirmation triggered another memory, fainter in some way. Had it just been something they dreamed? But no, it felt real, just very distant. It was, in a way, a memory of a memory. It was from the other place, and from not too long before the “dying in their sleep” episode. In the other place, Gunden had begun to remember other things. Four-fingered hands. A brilliant red sky. A taste of…something they couldn’t quite name, but delicious. It had been a favorite.
The sun was getting low in the lovely green sky. Gunden rubbed their face with their six-fingered hands and looked at the bed. And didn’t feel at all like lying down.
