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Endless Possibilities

Lesley L. Smith

    I turned off the riding mower, and the sudden silence was jarring. I leaned back in the seat, checking out the night sky. The moon was setting behind the clubhouse, and the ribbon of the Milky Way was just coming into view. A small breeze skimmed the green in front of me, and it was as if the world was holding its breath.
    I gazed up at the stripe of stars and sighed. Beautiful.
    My eyes dropped, and I scanned the golf course in the deepening darkness. If only things were different. If only I hadn’t been born and raised in this dead-end town. If only I could have gone to college and studied the stars instead of just looking at them...
    “Carlos?” A man stood in front of me on the green. Where’d he come from? He was a Latino, about my age, dressed in a fancy suit.
    “Yeah,” I said, getting off the mower. “Have we met? How do you know my name?” I walked towards him. “You look familiar.” If I had a rich older brother, he’d look like this guy. I walked closer.
    “You could say we’ve met.” The man chuckled. “You seriously don’t recognize me?”
    I stepped right up to him. His brown eyes, his nose, and the curve of his lips were exactly the same as mine. “Who are you? Why do you look so much like me?”
    “Obviously, I am you, hermano.” He chuckled again. “I’m Dr. Carlos Garcia. I’m you.”
    I stared. He did look just like me, but I’d never seen a suit as fancy as the one he had on.
    His genial expression faded as he looked me up and down. “What are you wearing?”
    “Shorts and a t-shirt. Duh,” I said. “What else would I wear to mow the golf course?” This guy, whoever he was, was starting to get on my nerves.
    “You’re some kind of landscaper?” the stranger asked.
    “Not that it’s any of your business; I gave my employee the day off so he could go to his daughter’s Quinceanera,” I said, definitely annoyed now. “Who are you, really?”
    “I’m you,” he said. “I’m Carlos Garcia. I work here at the Supercollider. We’re doing an experiment.” He paused. “A successful experiment, I think. Our world contacted your world.” Then he muttered something that sounded like, “Not that landscapers know about many worlds.”
    “I know about the many worlds of quantum physics!” I said. “I may not wear overpriced suits, but I read. I go to the library every week.”
    “The library!” He stumbled. “Are you Carlos Garcia, born in Waxahachie, Texas?”
    “Yeah.” I stared at him. He seemed upset that I didn’t understand what he was saying.
    It finally hit me what was going on here. I was talking to another version of me, a me from another world. I felt dizzy and staggered, sitting down on the smooth green.
    “You don’t work at the Superconducting Super Collider?” He peered down at me. “You aren’t a physicist? You’re some kind of landscaper?”
    “There’s no collider around here. I own a landscaping company,” I said, mind reeling. On another world, I got to study things like stars and particles for a living?
    “No collider?” he asked. “What happened?”
    I shrugged. “I don’t know. I heard something about a big science project here in the early 1990s, but congress canceled it.”
    “But why are you so different from me?” he asked. “Where’d you go to college?”
    “College? I don’t know anyone who went to college,” I said. “All the businesses in Waxahachie are closing. Hardly anyone lives here anymore.”
    Looking like someone’d gut-punched him, he sank onto the ground next to me.
    “Tell me about the collider, about the experiment,” I said. “It sounds fascinating.”
    “It is.” He perked up. “The collider’s circumference is 87.1 kilometers, and it’s the most energetic collider in the world. We have an energy of 30 TeV per proton with the upgrades.” He took in my no-doubt confused expression. “We smash protons together, and 30 TeV means they have a lot of energy. Bottom line: we use the collider to discover new particles and contact other universes.” He flashed me a grin.
    “You get to smash stuff together, and it teaches you about other universes?” I smiled. “That sounds fun.”
    “Yeah,” he said, smiling, too. “It’s pretty great. The main tunnel is right under our feet on my world.”
    Then he turned away from me. “What?” he asked someone I couldn’t see. “Another one?”
    He jumped up. “Sorry, I’ve got to go. We made contact with another world!” He started fading away. Within moments he was gone.
    I sat looking at the now-empty spot for a while.
    Then I lay back on the green and stared up at the sky. The perfect grass was lush and cool underneath me. The Milky Way still hung there in all its luminous glory.
    Wow. There were other universes right next to ours, infinite Earths filled with lawn-mowing, Quinceanera-celebrating human beings.
    Suddenly, the possibilities seemed endless.

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