The cafeteria with its abundant, wrap-around paned glass, and intimate yet spacious nooks overlooked a new lake that we had just finished building to test deep-water scuba gear. The lake was an acre wide, and a thousand feet deep which was quite an engineering challenge. But then our project director was a former Martian terraformer.



“I’ve been doing a study.” I said to a few groans as the work crew of versers relaxed over cups of hot cocoa, Jolt(r) cola, and stranger drinks.

“What about those worlds where you did not last even ten minutes before you were killed off, and versed out?”

That got their attention. All of us versers have memories of such. Two years ago, I had ran through five worlds in an hour.

“You are not talking about pointless suiciders, right? I met one insane man who kept blowing himself up in hopes of finding a Utopia. He took me with him, the jerk.” Said a dark-haired and slim man from a very off-putting alternate Earth. Fifteen of us in the room came from an Earth that you might not be able to distinguish from your own. But that left five from other places.

I shook my head in the negative in answer to his question.



“I-I woke up to find myself floating, if-if that is the right word in a sea with one-hundred fifty foot waves.” A terribly thin boy said, and another laughed. The boy turned with agitation on his face.

“I believe you, I too have been to such a world, but I was more fortunate. I landed on an island. Perhaps it is merely where you land that determines your safety.” The terraformer said in his peculiar Martian accent.

“Perhaps.” said a tall, and wide-shouldered woman who always carried her 70gwatt plasma cannon on her shoulder. None of us ever patted her on the arm, or elsewhere. Not after she almost sliced open Hrarl for bumping her with his chair. Strength greater than an ox, and she has moves like a striking cobra is our lady commando. She looked inward for a while.

“I woke upon a field of worms. Nothing but worms squirming over each other, and when Henry here, “she patted her gun, “spoke, I did not find land, or stone, only bigger worms underneath the layer on top. I was grateful to be eaten for I wondered if I had finally gone to Hell for my sins.”



A long pause …

“I woke to find a pack of wolves eating me. The snow was falling.” An ethereal-seeming Nordic princess from Alf Lapskjar spoke.

“It was dark, pitch black, and I stood up, and took one step, and I fell for a good twenty seconds.”

“I had finished this dragon, and it got me, and next thing I know, I am standing on this black surface with horns blaring like mad. Before I can get my bearings, I turn in time to see a UPS truck plow me under. He must have been doing sixty.” Karl’s story provokes laughter as he intended. The man never takes any setback too seriously.



“The air was pure and thin as if I was high in the mountains, and I opened my eyes to see this man, a verser, pointing a pump shotgun at my face. He asked me what came after ‘I pledge allegiance.’ For some reason, my brain blanked. I could not remember the American Pledge of Allegiance to save my life. He shot me. Never did find out what that was about.” A rangy man with blue tattoos and a psionic crystal embedded in his forehead like a third eye held his hands up in bewilderment.



“Ah, I-I know,” The terribly,thin boy with the mild stutter announced proudly, and then he was embarrassed as we all looked at him. “I-I-It was this world where Germany and Japan won World War Two, and the only place left American was the Rocky Mountains with this hunting lodge where versers tended to appear.”



“Yes, some of the octragonal hyper-smiliarities of uber-dimensional theory…” The terraformer began, and then he paused. “In English, there may be weak spots in world walls that let versers reenter and reintegrate easier, and thus more versers are likely to appear at certain spots.”

This was merely another reminder to us all why the terraformer ran many of our more complicated projects. He was literally smarter than Einstein. His people in the Twenty-Seventh Century had gengineered themselves to be superhuman with a focus on intelligence and resistance to harm(very good health).



“I said ‘Hi’ to these blue people by a lake. They did not like it at all. I don’t know what it means in their language…” The cyborg Michael De Vars(r) was a formidable entity, but he told stories with a flair.



“We, my girlfriend and I, landed on the Great Plains. She pointed out some Sioux tribesmen running like mad, and I said ‘Great’, because I had been wanting to continue my study of these fascinating peoples. Then I looked to see what they were running from. Frankly, I expected the U.S. Cavalry, but instead I saw a wildfire in the distance. Well. Both me and She Who Is Gold are champion marathoners. So we set out, and before twenty feet, wouldn’t you know it, I stepped in a gopher hole. Broke my leg. To make a long story short, despite her heroic efforts to tote me on her shoulder…” The professorial Baron Coranado shuddered. We nodded, as most of us have been burned alive.



“The world seemed okay, and in the distance the lights of a city gleamed brightly. So, I tried my levitation and flight powers. They worked all too well. I shot upward at ten g’s, and blacked out. I’m not sure if I reached the edge of the atmosphere, or if I crashed, or if I just versed out from the g’s.” The careful experimenter from Detroit shrugged. It happens sometimes, the shrug said.



“This jungle. Has much water in air. Very hot. Then rain fall like under falling water.”

“Um, like under a waterfall?”

“Yes, yes.”

“What happened?” After a patient wait.

“I drowned.” Hans laboured under a curse from a necromancer that made his learning a foreign language other than his native Dutch, a terrible effort.



“The spaceship did not have any air in it. Boom goes me. Sometimes you just get slapped around by the Universe.” The acidly stark voice of our resident pessimist snapped our heads up. Something about her just makes you want to fight.



“Sometimes you get slapped around by your own stupid self. I, or should I say, this guy landed in a Main Street 1950’s across from an ice cream parlour. He was ecstatic. His childhood come again. So he decided to do a flip in the air like he had done as a child. He did not look above himself where the framing of an awning hooked his legs, and dumped him head first onto the sidewalk.” Baron Coranado said.



“Yeah, well, what about this guy, and it really was a guy, my former boyfriend, Phil to be exact, who landed in this world. And he, as was his overly serious custom, gave thanks to God for his goodness. Well Something, with a capital ‘S’, and it sure wasn’t Superman came up out of the ground or the Abyss and ate him. Either the Multiverse is blind chance, or the Great Nameless Ones are in charge, or the best I wil accept is that Lord Murphy is in ‘control’, because despite Phil’s protests otherwise, I don’t believe in a benevolent …” Kyla ranted.



“Um.” I said with a clearing of my throat, and a glare. “We are not here to discuss theories of the verser’s purpose or lack there of, and neither are we here to discuss the nature of Divinity. Popular though those topics are.” They were popular. You would think that having met gods in person would settle the arguement about the fundamental nature of Reality, but Atheism, Solipsism, and Nihilisms thrived right alongside Fundamentalism, Objective Reality, and Absolute Standards of Morality as sources of arguements. For every one who met the Creator, or Thor, there was another who had dealt with demons, or ran screaming from Cthulu.



“Nor are we here to discuss Kyla’s abandonment issues with her father.” A snide female voice from the direction of the Nordic princess sniped. I glared again, and was rewarded with innocent looks.



The talk trailed off, and soon we got to designing a scuba gear that would work at this low level of tech bias to withstand a thousand feet of water. Baron Corando had a hankering to lift the Atocha, a sunken treasure ship. The ship had sunk in a deep trench which did not exist in my native ocean which was fortunate for the brave finders of it in that other universe.



Tadeusz (who is hoping to take a week off next week, but may have a cool idea come beg to be typed anyways.)