Multiplicity

I. The discovery
It started with the dreams. Lives he'd never led. Memories that belonged to another Louis. Sometimes he was married. Sometimes widowed. Some iterations of the dream had him a proud father, others a broken man, unable to move past the death of his wife and first born. Each seemed as real as the next, and on waking there was always a period of confusion as Louis tried to remember which one of the many was his actual life.

The one that kept coming back was the dream of the twins. As ever, Louis played himself in the reverie, but unlike in all the others, he is a twin. His identical twin, Michael, and he, have been aware of the crossover for some time, and are researching ways to make the connection consciously. Ironically while they focus on making connections, they are unaware of Louis' presence in his counterpart.

All the minds that Louis nightly inhabits, seem dimly familiar, as though each of them experiences the same connection, yet only one has ever spoken of it, one whose public ridicule and eventual committal, serve as a subconscious warning to the others to keep the secret just that.

Not so the twins, who each confided in the other, after methodically waiting through a year of the connections. Each individually running their own tests in solitude, trying to establish whether the dreams stemmed from science affecting them, or science manifesting as delusions in their own heads.

Once each was certain he wasn't mad, and that these dreams actually were happening, he instinctively knew that the other had reached the same conclusion.

"So what now?" Michael wondered aloud

"Now we try sleeping in separate faraday cages" Louis offered - pleased to be able to tease his brother  again about his namesake, something of a running joke between the twins. Nevertheless the experiment was a logical step, in spite of the jibe.

Solitary Louis did not see his "brothers" for some days after this, and he got the sense from each of his counterparts that he wasn't alone in having noticed their absence. Each night without their appearing, swelled the growing sense of unease Louis felt. It felt like two of their number were missing, and the ersatz-hive mind was quiet without their chatter.

After six days, Michael declared that there was nearly enough data, though both twins were drawn, and irritable, and eager to return to shared dreaming, now that they knew the cost of avoiding it. They had slept, but it had been a slumber without the rejuvenation they needed to properly think and function. After the third night they had changed the parameters so that they both stayed in the  the same faraday cage, sleeping in shifts, and though that had allowed them to dreamshare at least with each other, the three days of absence from the hive mind to which they were accustomed, brought about a strong feeling of anxiety and apprehension, that each felt even more acutely while sharing the other's consciousness. They elected to get by with what little data they had acquired on that night, and returned to separate cells the following night.

It was after nine days of absence that Louis once again dreamed of the twins. His counterpart felt tired and sluggish, but there was an overwhelming sense of excitement and optimism that pervaded every thought. Progress had been made, though since Michael was not to be seen, Louis would have to wait to find out what the progress was. While inhabiting his counterpart, Louis found that he could not access his host's memories, only feelings, so he had to draw conclusions based on those feelings and what memories he had of his previous visits.

After the dream when the twins first admitted their discoveries to each other, each of the iterations Louis visited gradually started researching faraday cages. Louis had considered trying to fashion one himself, to see if it helped the experiment, until he saw the enormous amount of work involved in constructing one. He convinced himself that he was better waiting to see what his brothers found, though only to avoid admitting that he was just lazy. He was pleased to see that one of his others had apparently paid attention during physics lessons at school, and was slowly acquiring random pieces of metal, and various discarded bits of tech that might eventually serve as a cage.

During the nine day absence of the twins, the most noteworthy turn was when for the first time, Louis awoke as Louise. The self was familiar, though less self-assured, and the perception keener. Louis was troubled by the almost unbearable ache in his abdomen, but was slightly reassured by the sense of familiar resentment that came with it. He wondered if the twins knew of their apparently sole female other.

The cages had been daily tweaked and reconfigured to give more useful results. The twins had established that as they seldom occupied the same space as their others, there had to be some kind of neural link joining them to the collective consciousness, and the faraday cages, as Louis had hypothesised, severed their link from it. On one occasion, Michael had been surprised to link with a new other on day four - a welcome, though disorientating merge. The other must have been occupying space in the geographical location of Michael's faraday cage.

The link between Michael and Louis was unique among the many worlds connection. The fact that they had started as one embryo which split, and the fact that they seemed to be the only iteration who had, meant that Michael had no other, yet as he was genetically identical to Louis, he had always had the same links. They always happened at the same time as Louis, and it was always one or other Louis that he woke up as.

The readings that night had been wildly different to the other nights, and the fact that the crossover happened at all demonstrated that the faraday cage blocked whatever was causing the link, but that it was only effective geographically, not universally. Two brothers in the same physical space could still join within the cage.

The chance finding led to the brothers forging out a plan to get several Louis iterations in one place at one time, to see if joint communication were possible. Each should be able to remember their own self, and follow instructions to answer specific questions on a sheet. They spent the next few days working on a list of questions, to ask of each of their visitors, then they each memorised the GPS location of their shared lab, where the faraday cages stood, and started sleeping whenever they felt tired. Any hour of the day or night was fine, as each presented an opportunity to meet with an other, and note down the coordinates on whatever paper they could find, for the other to find and puzzle over once they regained their own consciousness. The hope was that either they'd be intrigued enough to investigate the location, or that they would each in turn visit the lab in their own sleep, where they would see Louis and Michael's message:

You are not alone. You are one of many. You exist in the same space and time as do each and every one of us, but one degree away on the dimensional plane. We are all one, and many. As far as we can ascertain, we alone, Louis and Michael, are twins. Our unique vantage point has allowed us to study what you have all probably long believed was madness. We believe that by occupying the same space and time, within a faraday cage, we can communicate safely. Please answer the following questions and begin looking for these coordinates in your own dimension.

II. The Device
Question 1:

The feeling was like a dream half-remembered. Not the struggle, upon waking, of trying to remember the dream that you woke from, but the feeling you get hours later, when something triggers a brief recollection, but you're not sure why, or what the memory even is. It’s a feeling of familiarity with knowledge, rather than the knowledge itself. Every Louis felt it, to varying degrees, at various times. Each knew, with some certainty, that they were in contact for a reason, but none of them could put a finger on what the reason was, or even why they were so sure.

Plan:

The various iterations of Louis work together to build a device that allows them to communicate and find out more about why their link exists.

Once all the iterations of louis are in contact, they can have whole meetings in faraday cages. One aspect of Louis is a chemist, and share a recipe for a a hallucinogen, the result of which is that instead of appearing as NPCs, observing the actions of whichever Louis they landed in, they can share thoughts. It’s confusing at first because it’s not like a conversation, but more as though whenever one of them thought something, each one felt not as though they had heard the words, but as though they themselves had had the thought. This was initially quite confusing and overwhelming, but with so many of them practising at every opportunity, and each being oddly aware of the discoveries made by another version, it was not long at all before they started being able to have regular meetings, with various groups. Much over five people and it became too confusing and draining, as each person was effectively processing five separate consciousnesses.

the hive mind spends quite a lot of time thinking about, and discussing possible reasons for, their link. Had it happened by accident or design? Were they supposed to be doing something? And if so, was it connected to a specific version of Louis, or was it some divine plan?

After several months of making small progress, on a variety of things, they had still no real idea of why they had been assembled. None of them could quite put their finger on it, but they each individually had a feeling, like they knew they were there for a purpose. not in the sense of buying into the divine plan idea, but in the sense of something they had known as a fact, but couldn’t quite pin down the whole memory around  the thought.

One Louis is a quantum physicist, and spends several months collecting all the data he can about reality. Levels of radiation, key decision points in Louis’ life, and which versions had chosen which path. The information was fed into various computers across the louisverse, and examined and analysed in any way they could think of to analyse data. They were looking for patterns, and correlations. Quantum Louis managed to slowly piece together a map of the louisverse. There were a number of gaps in the network. A few of them could be identified as dead, based on events other versions of Louis had survived that had almost ended in death. It was a stark thought, to consider that in that moment you thought you were going to die, your survival was at the expense of another version of you, whose timeline ended in that instant.

III. The Anomaly
Plan:

Louis was never completely sure what drew him to astrophysics. Was it the beauty of the stars? His curiosity lending itself so well to a scientific discipline made up almost entirely of questions? Was it the boyish fascination with the possibility of other life in the universe? Whatever it was, Louis concluded, it wasn't this.

His colleague, Erwin, appeared to be having some kind of breakdown, and Louis was ill-equipped to handle it. It was not unusual for scientists to become a little peculiar after years of solitary research, or a long string of failures to prove a hypothesis. Erwin was generally not the type to succumb to the pressure, or the solitude, so the whole episode genuinely concerned Louis.

Louis exists before the other iterations. A colleague who studies quantum entanglement tries to convince him that a cosmic event has shifted their universe out of sync. They calculate that the gap between their universe and the others is growing, and if it is not stopped, they will become a paradox and sheared out of existence.

They devise a plan to implant the idea of their solution, in the minds of alternate versions of themselves, who exist in what they would consider the future. Though they recognise that they should be in sync, they realise that if they can understand the maths involved, they can use quantum entanglement and DNA, to share information, on a subconscious level, with their counterparts.

By vibrating unique elements of their genetic structure, they believe they can affect the corresponding elements in their counterparts, on a quantum level, and pass a message to their other selves to help them. Though they won’t be aware of the message on a conscious level. They will feel it as suggestions, rather than think it as an idea.

Louis speculates that one possible side-effect might be that a kind of hive mind will occur, though as none of the recipients will be aware on a conscious level of the messages, Louis does not know how this will manifest, what form it will take, and perhaps most importantly, whether he will be able to access it, in spite of his dimension being out of sync.

IV. The Refuge
Now connected with the disjointed Louis, the original and the variations work together to find a way of separating Louis’ dimension from the others, safely, so that they continue to exist, albeit changing their reality irreversibly.