theresnodoor | (no subject)

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milliways

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Picture it: a bar, at the end of the universe, warm and cheerful and filled with the quiet murmur of voices. At a table in the corner, specifically set aside from all the other patrons, is a blonde, pretty teenager.

Or maybe that scene is a little too broad for a bar like Milliways.

Add in a scowl and a National Geographic.

Rachel's wondering if there'd be any point in making it out of somebody's door to a zoo. Though she's finding there are depressingly few animals that don't already have memories attached.

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"That's an invasion," Rachel corrects, raising her eyebrows right back.

Jamie lets out a low whistle.

"That's a step above the wars They usually --"

He breaks off; They are an explanation he's not sure he wants to get into.

"-- I mean, invading a whole world takes some real ambition."

Rachel stares at him for a moment. Her expression mostly blank but her hands, resting on the table, pull back to fold in her lap.

Where she can clench her fingers together until knuckles turn white, tell herself he didn't just say that in an admiring tone.

"I have a feeling we weren't meeting the same aliens."

"Mostly I've not," Jamie admits. "Mostly just people. People fighting people, usually, over this bit of land or that."

. . . he means human people.

"Demons, sometimes -- though I wouldn't say I've met them, exactly, or at least I've tried not to if I could help it. Those wars are less about land, more about not wanting to get eaten."

(There's always a war, or several wars. Almost always. Less so, now that They're gone, but it doesn't change as much as you would think.)

"Though you might call demons aliens, I suppose. They come from another place, anyway."

"...yeah, really different."

But he's surprised her enough for Rachel to relax her hands and just blink at him. "So you go to all these different worlds and there are humans on all of them?"

"Well, it's the same world, sort of, it's just -- look," Jamie says, fidgeting a little, "I'm going to make a botch of this, I've told you I'm no good at it."

Helen tried to explain it to him often enough. How would Helen have explained it?

"It's like -- you know how people say, 'well, what if I hadn't kicked that football off the field through the neighbor's window, I might've won that match and everything would've been different?' So say there's a world where you did win that match and a world where you didn't, and whenever you kick a football there's both at once. Well, that's a stupid example, you'll say, probably kicking the football doesn't change anything much."

He shrugs. "But then it goes back and back -- say to the first caveman who kicked a rock. And then there's a split, so you get a world where that caveman won his big caveman match, and went on to be sports king of the cavemen, and a world where he kicked it into his neighbor's cave and stayed a sort of rubbishy caveman all his life. And down and down the line, the world where the caveman became sports king is the one where, I don't know, everyone's sports-mad and gathers around watch gladiator football matches to the death, and in the one where he stayed rubbishy it's something totally different. And it's all like that -- and there's hundreds and thousands and millions of them."

Rachel listens, calm.

She's thinking about meteors and dinosaurs. About rifles and a president crossing the Delaware. She's thinking about machines buried away to keep people safe from their own ambitions.

"No, I get it. And you just... what? Watch the football wherever it goes?"

'Watch the football' -- Jamie likes that. He grins again. "Right. You'd be amazed how many different kinds of worlds there are, just from people doing things different. I reckon some are as strange as aliens."

Rachel thinks of Taxxons and smiles, dry. "If they're still physically human, I'd guess not."

"You'd think that, wouldn't you," Jamie says, looking sage.

"It tricks your head, when you're new. You see people that look mostly like what you know -- and they usually do, because you're always in the same geography, generally -- and you think, well, I know how to handle this lot, don't I? And then it turns out you're all off. I met a fellow once who looked just like my old maths teacher, it turned out he'd got lizard legs surgically attached to his knees. Everyone did in that world -- when they were fifteen, that was the rule. Did I lie about my age there!"

Rachel snorts, head ducked. She doesn't really have to imagine it and there's no parallel to attach memories to. For that, more than anything in a conversation about world-hopping, she can grin.

"That's definitely a new one for me, yeah."

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