The Alternate

A young woman in urban America awoke with a start. She lay passively in her bed, feeling the starburst of adrenaline fade slowly into her sheets. The falling dream again. It was always the falling dream.

Experienced at least twice a week since she could remember, the dream was simple but terrifying, and always the same: she’d be dreaming, or nearly dreaming, in a state where she could no longer trust her ability to gauge reality, and would suddenly lose her feet and plummet into an unseen abyss.There was never any pain (at least, none that she could remember), and upon her immediate awakening the fear would be forgotten, but the exhilaration of the perceived brush with death would remain etched into her psyche like the footprints of a winter traveler, melting away only upon the morning sun’s rise.
She extracted herself from the damp and tangled sheets and made her way to the bathroom, where she attempted to wash away her unease in her grimy tub of a sink. The flickering florescent bulb above her bleached her already pale face, giving her the impression she was staring in the eyes of a ghost.
She shivered. This night was different. Her unsettling sense of dread was not only failing to slip into the easily-forgotten past, it was opening the door for a more concrete sense of fear and panic. Unsure of why she should be so distressed, she chided herself for her weakness and moved back into the dark bedroom.
The moment she crossed the threshold of the room, she froze. Something was wrong. Not obviously, glaringly wrong, just....wrong. She looked around her for signs of danger. Her tiny bedroom yielded no shadowy corners or hiding places for would-be threats. Her window was open, her curtains billowing softly in the dim polluted air. She could hear the sounds of a restless city below, rising to meet her, curling around the deteriorating fire escape and spilling through her window to fill her night with its comforting cacophony.
Her eyes were drawn to the window, her ears to the sound. It was here that her unseen fear was tucked away, cloaked in the seemingly normal features she had lived with and come to love during her tenure in this dirty metropolis. She slowly, haltingly approached the window, expecting a darkness to come bounding through and put a face or figure to her fear. Seeing no movement but the gentle sway of the curtains, she reached the window and looked tentatively outside. The fire escape, gaunt and crooked in its age, curved dutifully to the street several stories below her, where the usual thin crowds of night-fairing pedestrians and vehicles navigated to their various destinations. The dancing curls of steam rising from the sewers swept along the streets, rising and twisting and eventually fading with their height.
The picture playing outside her window seemed normal on the surface, but her gut knew something was different. The sound seemed depressed, melancholy. The people walked slowly, without purpose. There were no blaring horns, no shouts, no sirens. There were no distant sounds of bass, pumping through the city like a heartbeat as their vehicle carriers flowed through the veins of the streets. The only sounds were the engines, the footsteps, and the buzz of neon lights.
She stood and watched for a moment more, deciding that the suppressed nature of what she was seeing was nothing more than a fluke, and chalked it up to her fear and restlessness. She turned, intending to return to her bed and try again to sleep. She got no more than a foot closer when she froze in absolute, abject terror.
Someone was in her bed.
The mess of sheets and blanket could not hide the figure curled up on the far side of her mattress, back turned. The dark hair flowing over her pillow hinted that the intruder was female. Eyes moving slowly over the form of the sleeping stranger, she took in the loose tank top, the pink panties, the short socks protruding from the foot of the bed. Tentatively, she looked down at herself. The clothing of the stranger matched her own perfectly, exactly, with the exception of the socks, which were crumpled around the balls of the stranger’s feet, which is how her own had been until she had pulled them on fully upon waking.
Her fear coagulating into a ball of sick in the pit of her stomach, she forced herself to walk around the foot of the bed until the stranger’s face came into view, illuminated in the soft red glow of her alarm clock. Her breath caught in her throat, and she let out an inadvertent gasp.
The stranger had her face.
She staggered back into the wall, tripping over a shoe and knocking a book off a nearby shelf. The stranger did not wake. The young woman scrambled across the floor to the light switch, flooding the room with faint yellow light from the lone bulb above the bed. Still the stranger did not wake.
After standing by the switch for what seemed like an eternity, drawing one ragged breath after another, her fluttering heart seemed to regain a sliver of composure, and its beats became more even and regular. Cautiously, she again made her way around the foot of the bed. She was completely unprepared for the new horror that awaited her.
The stranger was laying in a dark pool of blood. It seeped into the sheets, ran slowly down the side of the mattress, and dripped with stuttering regularity onto the rough wooden floor below. The stranger’s face, her own face, was frozen in a look of neutral surprise, eyes open and staring blankly into the impartial glow of the alarm clock. Her mouth hung slack, a small string of drool trailing down her cheek.
The room began to swim. The young woman knew, beyond any shadow of reason, that she was looking at herself. It was herself laying dead before her, soaking into the sheets. Her legs failing, she fell to the floor, noticing only in passing the men entering her room and moving to stand over her.
“We have her,” She heard one say, as the room swirled into inky blackness.




She swam through the current of dark towards what she knew to be light, fighting an invisible current trying to speed her away. Approaching wakefulness, she became aware of a blinding white light. Fighting the desire to sink back into the cool dark, she screamed into the pain and found herself laying on a small cot in a sunlit room, one window, one chair, one man. She squinted into the light, trying to draw recognition on the man's face. As her eyes adjusted, she saw a middle-aged man, smooth faced and amiable. He shifted in the chair and spoke.
"You're awake."
She looked around, discerning nothing special about the room in which she found herself. Feeling no threat from the man, she nodded slightly.
"Am I dead?" The words croaked through her throat and fell oddly upon her own ears. She swallowed, and tried again. "Am I dead?"
The man cocked his head, shaking it slightly. "No." He paused. "And yes."
She stared.
He attempted to pacify her obvious disquiet. "You are alive, no doubt about that."
"Where am I?" Again, her voice was strained.
"It's a long story. Are you strong enough to hear it?"
She nodded, although she wasn't sure.
The man breathed a deep sigh, and started. "You are in a parallel universe. Do you know what that means?"
She stared.
"Your universe, the world you live in, the world in which you were born and raised, is not alone in existence. There are innumerable worlds and universes and existences alongside your own. It is in one of these other worlds that you find yourself. Every once in awhile, someone from your world slips into ours, much like you did last night. It is the job of men like me to facilitate your transition, and see you back into your own world as quickly as possible."
"Am I dreaming?"
"No. Although you will naturally reach towards that explanation in an attempt to rationalize what you see here, you are very well aware of the difference between reality and dreams. You know you are awake."
She thought about it, and acknowledged that she did indeed know the difference, and was all too aware of the fact that she was awake.
"All the worlds that exist exist in parallel. They exist in the same time, and in the same place. They overlay each other, as if someone drew a line on a sheet of paper, and retraced it an infinite number of times. They are identical in almost every way, with slight exceptions. Here, for example, scientists have discovered the ability to view the happenings in worlds near our own, a technology that doesn't exist in your world."
The young woman was more alert now. She sat up on the bed, turning to face the man. A dizzy spell threatened to take her away, but she recovered. "I'm in another universe?"
The man nodded. "In a manner of speaking. This is your universe, your world, in almost every way. You have not travelled through space, you have not travelled through time. You have fallen through a very weak moment in the existence you were born in, and are now here. You, the you that sits before me, were not born here. But another you was."
"Another me?"
"Yes. You were born there, and you were born here. And you were born in a thousand other universes in a thousand other worlds in a thousand other ways. There are more of you than you can know, living and breathing in the same space and the same time as you."
"You can see this?"
"We can. But we can only see the worlds near us. Imagine it as the layers above us and the layers below us. We can see four universes below us. We assume there are innumerable more below that. But we can only see one layer above us: yours. Your world is the only universe...higher...than our own. For that reason, we assume your world is the main world, the beginning, the ending. Like the trunk of a tree, and we are but the branches."
The young woman swallowed. She was terrified, lost, and confused. But she trusted the man, for lack of choice. "You can get me home?"
He nodded. "Yes."
"Can I go home now?"
He shook his head. "Soon. Very soon. I need to explain something to you, something you are going to find disturbing. But you need to listen, and you need to understand. Otherwise you will never make it home."
She looked into his eyes, and listened.
"We, those of us who exist below you, and those who exist below us, exist for only one reason: to die for you. We call ourselves your alternates. In your world, when you have a near-death experience, we take your place so that you may live on. As far as we can see, we are the only universe of alternates aware of their destiny. We are the only universe with the technology to see the others. We learned through our observations that when one in your world approaches a death that is not his or her predestined end, one of ours is drawn unwillingly, often unknowingly, into a series of events that ends in their death, while their parallel in your world lives. Life and death, tied inseparably to each other through the bonds of existence, must balance in the end, and we must act as counterweight."
The young woman cried, out of fear, out of pain, out of sickness, out of sympathy. "You can't change it? You can't choose to live?"
"No. We have no choice in this. But we accept our fate. We are part of a never ending cycle. We are alternates; we have alternates of our own. We live our lives same as you, knowing that one day we will die. But we die knowing that our death will also be our life."
The young woman curled up inside. "I want to go home."
"I know. Please pay attention. Your alternates don't always share the same situation with you. Some alternates work while others sleep, some worlds are in summer while yours is in winter. Their deaths don't always match what yours would have been. But in some cases, specifically, in our world, your alternates are very, very close to you. The deaths here are exactly what yours would have been had we not taken your place."
The young woman thought of the stranger in her bed. "The girl...in my bed..." she leaned over and retched.
The man nodded slowly, somberly, and waited for her to compose herself. "She was your alternate. A man came in through her window and killed her in her sleep. The same man, in your world, came very close to making the same decisions that led this man into your alternate's room last night. Perhaps in your world, he was a floor higher or lower. But you lived, and your alternate died in your stead."
The room was silent for a moment.
The man continued. "You are connected to all your alternates. You exist with them, you are them. They are you. This connection is strongest in the moment an alternate dies. Have you ever had a dream where you tripped and fell and were immediately jerked awake?"
The young woman looked up sharply.
The man nodded knowingly. "This occurs when an alternate dies in your place. In that moment, your connection is complete. You feel her death. You know what it's like to die, because you have died a thousand times. It is very similar to the feeling of falling."
The young woman thought about this. Her head spun with the implication.
"It is important that you know this. Here, in our world, where we are so close to yours, the connection is the strongest. Occasionally, if the alternate's death is similar enough to the one you narrowly avoided, it is strong enough to literally pull one of yours into our world at the moment of death. This is what happened to you last night. This is how you got here, and this is how you will get home."
"I don't understand."
"The universe must remain balanced. A hole was created when you were pulled from your world. Immediately, an alternate from another universe was pulled in to fill your place. This alternate is likely unaware of any change. She is likely unaware that anything is different. Her world is likely identical to yours. With one exception: she is about to die."
"She's going to die?"
"Yes. She must. The universe is unbalanced. You are here. You are not supposed to die yet; you are not supposed to be missing from your world. Fate chose her to temporarily fill your place because she will soon die and you will have a window to return to your world."
"Like how I came here?"
"Yes. You must be asleep, and you must be aware of the transition, which is why I have told you everything I have. We will drug you to ensure sleep, and you will feel the death. your universe will pull you back, and you must not fight it. When you return, everything will be as it was."
"When will this happen?"
"Soon. Very soon." At the close of this statement, two men entered the room, one carrying a silver briefcase. He opened it, removed a syringe brimming with an unknown liquid, and approached the cot on which the young woman sat.
She recoiled in fear. "You must not fight us," said the man in the chair.  "It is a simple tranquilizer. You will sleep. Do you understand?"
She nodded reluctantly, and allowed the man with the syringe to grasp her wrist and pull it towards himself.
"Remember," said the man in the chair as she felt a small sting. "You must not fight it."
The room faded like a bad dream, and the young woman fell into a deep sleep.



The return to her own world was effortless in its simplicity. She had merely to accept the beckoning pull of her home, and slip easily through the moment of her alternate's death. She awoke the following morning in her bed, eyes hazy and body weak. Had it all been a dream? She couldn't remember. She could see it all so vividly, so unlike a dream. But it seemed so unbelievable. Impossible to believe, unpleasant to believe. Her mind rejected what she had experienced, and she pushed it into the back of her subconsious, to never again think of until the moment she died. 

 That moment, so much nearer than any of us ever care to realize, came to her some time later in the form of a wide square grill and a Ford logo. In the blinding clarity that accompanies the moment of death, the young woman called out desparately to her alternates to save her, to take her place. But it was her turn. Destiny placed her in that intersection on that day. In the rupturing, explosive climax of her death, she felt the familiar sensation that had kept her awake on so many nights. She lost her feet, and plummeted into an unseen abyss.

 A young woman in urban America awoke with a start.