Page 105 of Velveteen vs. The Consequences of Her Actions

“I do,” said the Princess. She stood, offering a hand to help Jack up from the floor, then placed two fingers in her mouth and whistled shrilly.

A variety of small animals began rushing out of the various doors, all of them wearing cunning little dresses or waistcoats, most of them carrying or helping to carry gold-framed mirrors. They arranged them around Jack and the Princess, setting them directly on the ballroom floor, then turned and scampered, ran, and flew away again, leaving the two women alone in a ring of enchanted glass.

“Mirror, mirror, on the tile, show us Darwin’s plan so vile,” said the Princess.

Jack gave her a sidelong look.

“Oh, you try doing better when you don’t have time to prepare,” said the Princess.

“I didn’t say anything,” said Jack, putting her hands up.

“See to it that you don’t,” said the Princess. One by one, the mirrors were flickering to life, each one showing a single scene. In several of them, Portland appeared to have been overrun with anthropomorphic dinosaurs. They wore clothes, cut for their saurian forms, and moved around the city like they belonged there, had always belonged there, and had never been anything but dinosaurs.

“Well, that’s a kick in the teeth,” said the Princess, as a jet-black archaeopteryx the height of an adult woman walked into the reflection. It was wearing a black body suit, and had a crest of rainbow feathers atop its head, which rose as it turned to watch a bright red vectiraptor running toward it. The vectiraptor had no breasts, not being a mammal, but was wearing a carefully tailored corset all the same.

“I guess some things never change,” said Jack, faintly.

“Guess so,” agreed the Princess. “Jack, honey, am I having a stroke, or is everyone in Portland a dinosaur all of a sudden?”

“Definitely the second thing,” said Jack. “But that’s not the real problem.”

“Please enlighten me, o child of winter,” said the Princess.

Jack indicated another mirror, which appeared to have tuned itself to CNN. A ruffled anchorman was talking fast, a map behind him, centered on Portland. A red line ran along the edges, not quite even, pulsing as it was redrawn every few seconds.

“It’s spreading,” said Jack.

The Princess, for once, was speechless.

VELVETEEN vs. Extinction

Stunned into a silence as profound as it was temporary, Jacqueline and the Princess watched the red line on the television display as it continued to pulse and expand, pulling an ever-larger stretch of the country into the time of the dinosaurs. The various mirrors showing them the modified world began to flicker and change what they reflected: one by one, the various views of Portland became images of other places, other cities.

The Princess sighed as she moved closer to the mirror. “There goes Vancouver,” she said. “Think they realize what’s happening to them while it happens, or is it kinder than that?”

“I guess it depends.”

“On what, sugar?” The Princess turned to look at Jacqueline, who had yet to take her eyes off of the mirrors.

“On how bad of a guy our bad guy really is.”

One of the mirrors showed a saurian who both assumed to be Doctor Darwin, based on the cut of his lab coat and the design of the ray gun he had cradled in one arm. He was accompanied by a slightly taller raptor with long red-brown feathers and a beautifully beaded pocketbook, and by two much younger saurian creatures whose plumage seemed to be a mixture of the adults’ in terms of color. As the pair watched, Doctor Darwin preened the female’s hair with the tip of his muzzle, then smiled, mammal-style, lips pulling back wide enough to display the entirety of his teeth.

The dinosaur nuclear family, in other words. Jacqueline shot the Princess a despairing glance, and the pair of them remained where they were, watching the world as they knew it as it was consumed by something else entirely.

* * *

When one checks the records of the superhuman organizations that have dedicated themselves to keeping us safe, the sheer volume of reports to be found on alternate worlds and alternate timelines is staggering. There is, in fact, so much documentation of what are collectively called “alternate histories” that they must be divided into categories to keep the quantity from becoming overwhelming.

“Alternate worlds” are worlds which would exist with or without the influence of our own. They will have their own evolutionary paths, their own continents, even their own solar bodies. There are no shared populations between alternate worlds and the world we know, even in those rare cases wherein the point of deviation can be determined. Some theorize that all alternate worlds will have a point of deviation, and that this is what defines an alternate world, but those few researchers who have attempted to prove this have never been heard from again.

“Alternate timelines,” in contrast, are defined entirely by their points of deviation, and will have histories which run identical to our own up until this point. Most alternate timelines will have populations identical or near-identical to our own, however unlikely the world’s changed path makes the birth of any specific individual. Some alternate timelines can even be resolved, changing the point of deviation to match the events of our reality, and causing the alternate to erase itself from the continuity. This is not generally a goal, as even seemingly identical people deserve to live their own lives.

Distinct from either of these is the replacement world, in which a point of our own world’s history is somehow changed, allowing it to be overwritten with history as it played out in some other timeline. This replacement is the greatest crime that may be committed by the various parallels and alternates which surround us at all times: so long as those potential worlds remain content to keep their distance and allow us to keep ours. Replacement attempts are largely small and easily forgotten, but the fear endures that one day the attempt may be made by someone with experience and determination, and we made find ourselves in more trouble than we’re collectively prepared to handle.

When asked how they know our world is the original, scientists who focus on these parallel potentials have a tendency to either babble incomprehensibly or refuse to reply.

Both these answers may be true.