Storm

As we fly deeper into the magnetic storm, it begins to have an effect on us, and we begin to see glimpses of other universes in the energy whirling about us. We have no way of knowing if it's real or not, if it's the effect it has on our mind or on matter itself. But as all the universes join together at this point, we no longer remember which one we came from, and our reality shfits from one to the other — and in one universe this is all happening inside our mind and in another it's happening to matter, seeming to beg the question what difference it makes. Perhaps this storm itself is in my head.

I shake my head, trying to shrug it off. But what am I trying to shake off, and what reality am I trying to return to? Eventually I decide to focus on my body, the one thing whose existence it seems I can be sure of, but I don't remember if my body had always been female. We soon become too confused to even use the controls of the craft, but as it keeps on its course it eventually flies through it, and all is apparently normal again — and we laugh to ourselves that of course that wasn't real! But if it was, how would we remember our lives having changed, if our memories themselves would've changed from those of one universe to those of another?

So this is what the other explorers were talking about. "It will change you." Indeed, I'll never be sure if I am who I am again. I could really have been anyone, and it makes me wonder why I ever took my identity so serious, and ever since, I've begun to change from one identity to another. My friends think that I'm still shifting between one universe and another, but now that I've processed the memory of the experience, I've decided that it was really all just in my mind, but the real question is why I had ever decided upon any one identity. My mind can absorb any information, and identity is no more than information.

So that brings me here, to this cult as people call it, of everyone who's been through the storm around the brown dwarf. The storm's gone now, and it's supposed to occur only once every century — we're on our own, pilgrims of the multiverse.

So what universe did I wander into, whether it was in the storm or at birth? One where water floats in the sky as "clouds", one where continents only exist because it's spewed from the earth by "volcanoes", one where a sequoia can grow from a tiny "seed." No, this can't have been the universe I started out with — it would've been more mathematical. It would've made more sense. This might as well be a surrealist painting.