A Broken Kaleidoscope

The jagged edges of splintered reality jerked unpredictably around Jessica as she reached out, her hand passing through shards of color and sound.  A triangular window into another universe where the Martian landscape was covered in ugly purple shrubs spiraled past.  Her mother called to her from another shard, her forehead covered with too many eyes, far too many eyes.  The sky overhead darkened briefly as a blue-grey cloud floated into view, then fizzled and swirled into tiny iridescent droplets of an unknown liquid that fell upward and out of sight.

Jessica’s hand passed through a universe where her skin was nearly transparent, her veins and bones and muscles all on display.  She flinched momentarily but felt no pain, and so pressed on, pushing her hand closer to the pedestal and its small, lumpy prize, surrounded by the only quiet spot in the accelerating maelstrom of madness.

Her hand emerged into the sphere of influence the stone emanated, an anchored reality where all possibilities converged, and her fingertips brushed the stone’s surface.  In an instant, reality solidified, and Jessica was herself, surrounded by the sandstone walls of the ancient temple.  She closed her hand around the yellowish stone and lifted it off the pedestal to examine it closer.

It looked a little like the tiger’s eye pendants she had seen some of the traders bring from Old Earth, and felt cool to the touch, but it thumped continuously, sending deep vibrations up her arm.  Jessica turned and stepped over to a shaft of sunlight angled in from an opening in the temple’s ceiling.  She rolled the stone over in her hand, watching the light play on the striations on the surface.

“Well?  Can you do it?” Jessica looked up at Malkot’s expectant face, calling to her some fifty meters back near the chamber’s entrance.  His eyes were alight, excited, lifting the creases in his ancient face.

Jessica closed her eyes and focused her attention inward, reaching out with her mind to touch the stone.  It linked with her instantly, and she could feel the whole of its existence, a vast well of experience looped over itself an infinite number of times from every universe the stone had been within and would be within.  The stone was alive with considerations of every improbability; it knew Jessica, it knew Malkot, it knew Old Earth and the Confederation of Stars, and it knew what they had unleashed with the entanglement drive.  It saw what she had come for, and it opened up to her inquiry with a reluctant sadness.

“No,” Jessica said, her body deflated. “The Witness cannot undo our actions; the damage is done.  It will remember us, and keep those memories, but it has no power to stop the collapse.”  She carefully placed the stone back on its pedestal.  As she did, the sundering resumed, and Jessica sobbed as the ever churning storm of possibility consumed everything.