Content warnings: Descriptions of many types of deaths.
The day that Alex Myndus died began much like any other. He woke up to an alarm, set the previous night and timed perfectly so that he would be refreshed and ready for his day. That day, it turned out that the perfect time for him to wake up and feel refreshed was precisely 9:04, so he had some extra time in his morning before he needed to dress himself and rush to the office.
He elected to spend this time lounging in bed, enjoying the feeling of fresh white sheets on his skin and idly wishing that there were a beautiful woman beside him. Many nights, he was indeed accompanied to bed, sometimes by someone he knew well, usually by someone he had met earlier that day, through work or at a bar. He already knew exactly what would make them come home with him, so he never had too much trouble
Dwelling on this fantasy a moment longer, he considered checking the strands to see if there would be any visit to his office by an attractive woman seeking proof of a husband’s infidelity. Those were some of his favorites, as when they did receive photographs or some other evidence, they were always just the right combination of vulnerable and vengeful to leap willingly into a nearby detective’s bed, assuming he was able to present the idea in just the right way. Alex always was. Usually he just had to suggest that the best way to spite a cheating husband who demanded fidelity of his wife was to deny him that fidelity.
Still, it was risky. He didn’t try to come on to any client if the strands indicated they were going to get violent when confronted with their requested evidence; it just wasn’t safe. He usually didn’t accept jobs from clients like that anyway, nor those who had vengeful spouses. Some people would let rules like that consume them, get so paranoid that they wouldn’t accept any work at all on the grounds that someone might try to shoot the messenger, but Alex knew could easily sort the loudmouths from the real psychopaths, so for him the rules were no more difficult to abide than the law of gravity.
Eventually, Alex stirred. He had spent quite some time in bed thinking, and it had been lovely, but it was getting to be time for breakfast. That left a question, though. Alex always kept his breakfast options diverse, from eggs to cereal to hash browns, and he wasn’t sure what he wanted to eat.
Easy enough to solve that little riddle, though. He idly checked the strands, looked at how much he would enjoy each option. Not bacon, it seemed; his microwave wasn’t in the mood to cook it the right way and Alex really didn’t want to waste the time it would take getting the settings right. Similarly, it seemed that pancakes would be too heavy for Alex’s stomach, not quite right for how energetic he felt. Toast seemed like a good option, so into the toaster went two slices of wheat bread.
Of course, Alex did not always choose this easy option for deciding what to eat. Sometimes, he would actually use his judgment, think about what sounded delicious to him, and take a chance on something he didn’t know if he would enjoy. This was necessary, in Alex’s estimation, in that it kept his mind flexible, helped him to be sure that he knew himself even without the crutch of being able to check how he would feel about things. It wasn’t entirely clear in his mind what would happen if he didn’t do this on occasion, if it would cause his sense of self to atrophy, if it would lessen the accuracy of his ability to check, or if it wouldn’t do anything at all, but he didn’t like the idea of taking an unnecessary risk.
Alex knew that if people were aware of how much of his life was built around minimizing risks, they might think he was paranoid. In a way, he was, but only because he remembered how checking the strands could ruin a person. Several of his peers, while he was still at the police academy, had been part of the same trial group as him, and they had been careless. He didn’t know exactly what they’d done, but he knew that they’d all been much more free with their checking, going further along the strands and looking at so many more of the strands at once. And, of course, he knew that they’d been wheeled out of the academy, one by one, catatonic at best.
The theory went, as far as Alex had been able to overhear his superiors talking about it, that there was something in the strands that the mind couldn’t handle. Maybe some terrible unavoidable cataclysm in the future that was too terrible to imagine. Potentially there were some tiny, low-probability strands that held some terrible truth of reality. It was all above the pay grade of even the police commissioner, much less an academy recruit, so all Alex really took from the rumors was that he had to be very careful when he was checking. Only check strands up to a day or two in advance, only check the big strands unless absolutely necessary.
Of course, a cop with future-seeing powers who barely used them wasn’t the most popular with the top brass, and they made sure to let him know that. Eventually, Alex had the common sense not to remain with the force, it didn’t seem exactly conducive to his future success. And since he didn’t particularly care for serial killer as a career path, the best job for a police academy dropout was private detective.
He hadn’t had much trouble making a small name for himself. He didn’t advertise his specific abilities–that seemed as though it would invite trouble, and many of the cases people gave him wouldn’t exactly be immediately solved by them anyway. Still, the strands gave him a definite leg up on things. When he was asked to track down a missing person, simply sorting through the strands until he found one where the person was located quickly let him know exactly where to look. Even if a strand like that was too hard to find, he could at least see which locations definitely wouldn’t provide results.
And when he was asked to investigate a spouse’s infidelity, as with most cases he ended up getting, he had one of two easy options in front of him. If the client was willing to take his word for it, and didn’t need evidence for divorce court, he could just check the strands, find some small detail associated with the ones in which the spouse really was cheating, and then check for that detail. That saved him the risks which actually tailing the spouse would bring. Alex hadn’t ever quite understood why these details occurred. According to the scientists who’d first introduced him to the strands, it was something to do with chaos theory, but whatever was the case, things like the precise wording of a headline or the quality of a sandwich at a bistro could confirm someone’s activities in the previous day with 99% certainty.
Even if the client wanted harder evidence–photos or the like–it wasn’t all that tricky. Yes, he actually had to go out and find the offending couple in the act, which took some foreknowledge and some stealth. But the details could still help out, and even give Alex a good idea of where to hunker down to take the photos in question. Then he could just get there before the spouse and their lover, plant himself or a hidden camera, and then wait. It always worked out in the end.
On that note, Alex finally shook himself out of his pensive reverie. He had let himself go through most of his morning on autopilot, eating his toast, brushing his teeth, putting on one of his suits. It was a bit of a disappointment that he had been so lost in thought. He usually quite enjoyed the routines of his morning, but it was all the same in the end. He was still a young man; he would have plenty of mornings to savor the experience of picking out a suit.
Now, though, he had just enough time to check the strands through this afternoon and see if there would be any surprises that he should prepare for. He always liked to have a general idea of how many clients would come in on a given day, if there was going to be thick traffic on his normal route to work, or if anything else would be annoying. It never hurt to be prepared, after all.
Oddly, however, the first strand he checked didn’t seem to be easily visible beyond around noon. That was unusual; the strands could be difficult to interpret, but they weren’t often this opaque. He checked the strand a little closer, still a bit wary, as though something might jump out and bite him. Examining the last few moments of clear visibility in the strand, he saw that, as he walked across the street to a nearby deli, presumably to buy a sandwich for lunch, he didn’t see a fast-moving car screaming down the street to him. Looking even closer, it looked to be a taxi, and the passenger seemed terrified as it hit Alex with a deafening thud. Then the strand went dark and fuzzy, not completely gone but muffled, like it was under a thick pillow.
This was equal parts relieving and off-putting to Alex. Relieving, because there was nothing wrong with his ability to see the strands. It made sense that one wouldn’t be able to easily see past the moment of their death. Off-putting because, of course, it’s not a pleasant thing to witness one’s own death.
Still, there was nothing to be done about it, so Alex resolved to pack himself a lunch today instead, and avoid the situation. Examining a strand in which he did so, he was shaken to his core to discover that it, too, became obscured past a certain point. In this one, he had to leave home slightly late, having taken the time to cook lunch beforehand, and as he drove through a busy intersection, he barely noticed a car running its red light coming the opposed direction which plowed right into him. Then, dark and fuzzy.
Terror struck him for a brief moment. Two strands in a row with him dying before the end of the day? What could that mean? Was the specter of death coming for him, to punish him for some past transgression? No, no, no. Alex was not a superstitious man, and panicking over the first surprising thing to happen to him in a year was the surest way to get himself in trouble. The roads were dangerous today; all it meant was that he would have to take the subway instead of driving and be very careful walking down the street. He checked the strands in which he took the subway to work.
These were more promising at first, as they continued past him arriving at work, and even continued past him having a pleasant home-cooked lunch. But in the later afternoon, as he prepared to leave the office and go home, he smelled something burning. He tried to open the door to his office, only to cry out as the knob to his office door was already too hot to hold. Looking out into his waiting room, he saw flames, fire already mounting high, encroaching quickly on the office. The fire department was not waiting outside the window, and Alex saw that the fire was spreading far too fast for them to arrive in time.
He looked away from this strand, not wanting to see how it concluded, and gave out a frightened cry of his own. Why? Why were these things all happening, why was he dying in every strand he checked? He would stay home, perhaps that would help. Simply stay at home, watch some television, calm his nerves, maybe order a pizza.
The strands would not cooperate. In those in which he stayed home, he had a pleasant, if boring, day, telling his secretary to close the office for the day and relaxing with a nice movie, but in the evening, he felt a sharp pain in his left arm.
Heart attack. Okay. Well, if he was going to have a heart attack this evening, Alex knew he should go to the doctor. In the strands where he went to the doctor, he was mugged on the way. No matter which time he left. He didn’t even have to look all the way down these strands to know that the muggings would go wrong and lead to him bleeding out on the ground, just outside a hospital but not found in time.
Alex began to shake in his chair. The strands said that he would die no matter what. Whatever he did, he would end up dead by the end of the day. He was starting to lose his sense, giving over to fear. But he had to find another way. Something that could save him. He had to find another strand, even a difficult or unlikely one. One in which he would survive. He had to survive. He couldn’t lose all of this just because of the whims of fate.
Breathing deeply, he made a decision. The rules were all to protect him from something terrible happening, but something terrible was going to happen no matter what if he didn’t find a strand where he survived. What could he find in the thick mass of strands that would be more horrifying than the knowledge of his own imminent death? There couldn’t be anything. He would have to use his reason. He would look hard, see as much as he had to, in order to save himself.
So he began to look hard. He forced himself to see even the tiny strands, the ones that weren’t likely to come to pass. The ones that required thermodynamic miracles to come to pass. He could do everything in his power to make them more likely; he just had to know there was a way to live. He sorted through aneurysms and murders and several dozen times being hit by lightning, casting them all aside as he searched.
As he went, he saw great and terrible things. There was a chance that every child in the world would simultaneously be struck by the unstoppable whim to kill all adults, and they would succeed. There was a chance that gravity would suddenly and violently reverse, sending everything on the earth hurtling into space before causing the earth itself to shake apart into cosmic dust. There was a strand, an infinitesimally small one, in which Alex would suddenly ascend to godhood, becoming a benevolent, all-powerful protector of humanity and all else that existed in the universe. But in the process, the man that he was beforehand would die.
None of these strands mattered. They were all chaff, distracting him from what he needed to find. He stumbled out of his apartment into the hallway. Any strand where he stayed inside would lead to him dying. He had to get out.
He stared in horror at his neighbors’ doors. He had seen hundreds of strands in which each of them had strangled him to death when he asked them for help, or even when he just lingered in the hallway for too long. Get away, get away.
The elevator cord could snap, so he couldn’t trust it. He ran to the stairs, knowing that he would fall down them but tucking his limbs in so that he would roll as he went, and not be killed. When he arrived roughly at the ground floor, he felt sure that he had broken an arm in the process, but he was alive, and so he continued running, trying to escape certain death.
Perhaps doing improbable things would shift probability, make that infinitesimal chance of surviving a bit larger. He flapped his arms, wincing at the pain from his broken one, and clucked like a chicken. He danced through the front door of his apartment complex, doing a tango with one leg and a samba with the other, or at least attempting to. He rolled on his stomach across the sidewalk, crying with fear for his life even as he sang showtunes.
When he reached the crosswalk, he was too crazed with desperation even to think about what he was doing, and so he began to run across it, backwards, with his eyes closed as he recited the pledge of allegiance in his best approximation of sign language. Even still, though he wasn’t able to see it, he heard the car’s approach for the briefest of moments before the impact. And of course, he briefly heard the CRUNCH.
“Holy shit! Is he okay?”
“He’s not breathing. I think…”
“Why did he just pop out like that? Didn’t he see there was a car coming?”
“He was acting pretty strangely. I’d say he was a bum if he didn’t have that nice suit.”
“Poor bastard.”
“Ah, it could be worse.”
“What do you mean?”
“At least he didn’t see it coming.”