HELLO, OUT THERE!
If you exist, hello!
We may well never find out. This is a wild experiment, test of a wilder hypothesis. But it is also a duty.
I lie dream‑bound, only half‑aware of my world. They are using me to call for them across the time streams because that which happened to me, so many years ago, has left its traces beneath my ordinariness; they believe a message thought by me has a better chance of finding a resonance in you than if it came from almost anyone else.
Not that the chance is good. My ordinariness quite overwhelms what little mana may still drift smokelike within. And in any case, I may well be‑I probably am‑radiating into nothingness.
It is only a philosophical idea, that time has more than one dimension, that any number of entire universes may coexist, some utterly alien, some whose differences from ours are perhaps too subtle to detect … Why am I dreaming in this language? It isn’t my normal speech. The preparations have cast me into a strange state. Damnation, I will be myself, not only myself again when I wake tomorrow but myself now and throughout the night …. Earths where Lee won at Gettysburg or Napoleon at Waterloo; Earths where Mithraism won over Christianity in the Roman Empire; Earths where Rome never was; Earths where another animal than man evolved toward a rational soul, or none did; Earths, whole cosmoses where the laws of nature are something else, where it is possible to do what we forever cannot, but they will never accomplish what we do with ease …
Well, I am told that a little more than philosophy supports the hypothesis. There are certain indications in modern physical theory, too abstruse for me. There are anecdotes, cases of appearance or disappearance or both, which suggest that the body itself can transfer between such time currents‑Benjamin Bathurst, Kaspar Hauser … There is what happened to me and mine, though that isn’t the same thing. It is, however, the source of our duty.
You see, if parallel worlds exist, they must be linked in a very fundamental way; otherwise the hypothesis is unverifiable in principle and therefore meaningless. Deriving from the same source, embedded in the same matrix, they must in some fashion have a common destiny. Whatever manifold forms it takes, the war of Law and Chaos surely goes on in them all.
We have learned certain things. We ought to broadcast the lesson and the warning.
To you out yonder, this may appear nothing but a dream. It feels that way to me, though I recall matters which truly happened. We doubt if you‑any of you whom we may reach‑will be able to reply, even if willing. Otherwise we would already have gotten messages from elsewhere. But think over what you receive. Ask yourselves how you could have a simple dream that was quite like this one.
While we have no certain idea what you are like, assuming you are more than a void, we can guess. You probably do not live in worlds radically foreign to ours, or communication would be impossible. How could uncomplicated I resonate with a true alien? No, you too must be human, of technological culture at that. You too must remember Galileo, Newton, Lavoisier, Watt; the chances are that you too are an American. But we have diverged at some point. Have you had an Einstein? And if you did, what did he think about after his early papers on Brownian movement and special relativity? The questions go on without end.
You will have such questions about us, of course. So I’m going to ramble through my story. (That’s hard to avoid anyway, in this drowsy twilight they’ve laid on me.) No doubt I’ll often belabor the obvious. If you already know how electric generators work or how the First World War came out‑or whatever‑bear with me. Better too much information than too little. This is more than vital to you.
If you exist.
Where to begin? I suppose where the affair really began for me, during World War II, though of course the roots run much deeper and further back; the strife is older than creation ….