THIN

THIN

The first time Kasha went thin, she vomited into a wastebasket in a Shenzhen co-working space and lost forty-two seconds of subjective time. The basket was the brushed-steel kind, the sort that looked architectural until someone used it. She remembered that. She did not remember the in-between.

The lab called it a soft transit. Kasha called it the worst hangover money could buy, and money had bought her many.

"You went to four," Pram said, pulling the leads off her temples with the bored intimacy of a hairdresser. He was Dhaka-born, MIT-broken, and wore a Hello Kitty lanyard with a kind of weaponized irony. "Maybe four-and-a-half. We lost telemetry at the membrane."

"It tasted like copper."

"They all taste like copper." He typed something. The room smelled like solder and the cheap floral antiseptic the cleaners used at three a.m. "It's the brane bleed. Your tongue picks up the dielectric shear before your eyes do. Welcome to the club."

The club was eleven people. Eight were still ambulatory.

Brane theory was the thing the physicists had stopped laughing about around 2031, when the Geneva group put a coherent photon through a stack of what they politely called adjacent sheets and got back a photon that was, measurably, older. Not much older. Forty picoseconds. But older in a way that suggested it had been somewhere else and done some living.

Universes, it turned out, were sheets. Thin ones. Hung in a higher-dimensional bulk like laundry on an infinite line, none of them ever quite touching except where gravity leaked across, which was why gravity was so embarrassingly weak compared to everything else. The discovery had not produced the flying cars. It had produced Pram, and Kasha, and a chemical called Vitreon-9 that thinned the wall between sheets if you took it sublingually and didn't think too hard about what your liver was doing.

"How many sheets out, this time," Kasha said.

"Four. We told you."

"How many can I go."

Pram looked at her the way you look at a friend who has started asking the wrong question in the wrong tone. "Six is where Hollis stopped coming back the same. Seven is where Marisa stopped coming back at all. We don't have a number for you. We have a number for the body you're using."

The body she was using was thirty-four, half-Korean, half-Lithuanian, and had run a midcap fund into the ground in 2029 before reinventing itself as a test subject. The body she was using had good cheekbones and a small white scar above the left eyebrow she could not remember earning. There were now several things she could not remember earning.

Sheet two was Tokyo and not-Tokyo. The Sumida ran the wrong way, and the bridges had a vocabulary of curves she didn't know. People still wore shoes. The convenience stores sold something called milk-pear in tetrahedral cartons, and she had drunk one and wept, and not known why.

Sheet three was a city she didn't recognize built on the bones of one she did, the way a coral reef is built on a shipwreck. Brooklyn, possibly. The signage was in a Cyrillic that had absorbed kanji at some unrecorded juncture. The sky over the East River, or the thing that took its place, was the color of a television tuned to a channel that hadn't been invented yet.

Sheet four was where she met the man who was not Pram.

He was standing in a noodle stall under a freeway that did not exist in her sheet, eating with a kind of grave attention, and when he looked up he had Pram's face, exactly, except for the eyes. The eyes were older. Not older in years. Older in sheets.

"You shouldn't keep coming," he said. He said it in English, and then in Bangla, and then in a third language that sat in her ear like a coin she'd swallowed as a child. "Each time, you come back a little thinner."

"Thinner how."

"Thinner." He tapped his own sternum. "The wall. The wall between you and the next you. You wear it down. One day you'll lift your hand and a different hand will lift."

"Is that bad."

He considered her. The freeway above them made a sound like distant surf. "It depends," he said, "on whether you like the other one."

She came back into the steel basket. Pram was holding her wrist with two fingers, the way doctors used to in old movies, taking her pulse against a stopwatch on his phone. The Hello Kitty lanyard swung.

"Four again?" she said.

"Three." His face was doing a thing. "Kasha. You were gone forty minutes. We registered three."

"I met you."

"You met someone."

"I met you. Different eyes."

He was quiet. He took a long breath, the kind he took before delivering numbers to investors who had asked questions they weren't going to like the answers to. Kasha had been on the other side of that breath in a former life. Several former lives, possibly.

"There's a hypothesis," he said. "We don't publish it. The thinner you get, the more porous you become to the other yous. Some of them have figured out how to push. Not violently. Just — leaning. Like leaning on a door you know isn't latched."

"And eventually."

"And eventually the door opens, and the one leaning is the one who walks through."

She looked at her hand. It was her hand. The small white scar above her eyebrow itched in a way that felt suddenly, surgically, informational.

"Pram," she said, very carefully. "Did I have this scar yesterday."

He looked. He looked for a long time. The fluorescent above them buzzed in the key the cheap ones always buzzed in, the one she had started, over the last month, to find comforting.

"I don't remember," he said.

She believed him. That was the worst part. She believed him, and she also, distantly, like a radio signal from a building two blocks over, remembered earning the scar — on a beach, on a sheet she had not yet officially visited, from a man whose face she would recognize the next time she went thin.

Outside the window, Shenzhen was doing its nightly thing of pretending to be the future. Somewhere across the bulk, in a noodle stall under a freeway that did not exist here, a version of her was sitting down across from a man with Pram's face and ordering for two.

Kasha smiled. It was almost her smile.

"Book me for tomorrow," she said.

— end —