Double
by Clio Em

“Alison?” Lev spoke my name urgently. Around me, floating candles drifted dreamily to the ground. It was time to focus on the task at hand.

This morning I had landed in this microreality with the usual stomach-heaving lurch. Unusually, a very handsome man dressed in a dapper suit had gallantly helped me up when I was finished retching and reeling in a flower-filled meadow. Inter-universe travel can be extremely disorienting. Every parallel microreality – and they are always small pockets of space-time, nothing like the vast home universe – has a subspace portal, a device that allows us to enter and leave. All mapped microrealities have listed frequencies, and it was one of those that I had been trying to reach. But I had instead been dropped into this other, unfamiliar pocket of space-time.

I had introduced myself by first name only; he’d introduced himself as…