Waiting to Happen
Leah Cypess brings us this week’s multiverse hero who’s just doing her job (that is, unless you ask her mother)… ~ Julian and Fran, March 23, 2025
March comes to you with Sunday Morning Transport stories by Stephanie Burgis, Eric Smith, Sarena Ulibarri, and Leah Cypess. As always, the first story of the month is free to read.
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Waiting to Happen
by Leah Cypess
You should have seen it coming. That is literally your job. It’s your job in almost every universe you’ve seen, at least the ones where you (1) were born, and (2) did not die young.
You died young in a lot of those other universes. Which, frankly, does not surprise you. Your mother was always so careless, so sure that things would work out. She took chances you would never take with your own kid, if you had one. Borderline-safe booster seats, unsupervised playdates in the basement, taking a nap while you were riding your bike.
In your universe, she’d gotten lucky, and thus got to believe she was right. But in other universes, in many other universes, the inevitable consequences must have befallen you.
You mentioned that to her once. It didn’t go over well.
In the universes where you don’t exist, the multiverse mirrors were discovered anyhow. (In most, they were called something less confusing and stupid than multiverse mirrors, but in your universe, that name won’t go away.) There were too many people involved, too many concepts rising to the surface of scientific consciousness at the same time. Turns out, their discovery was inevitable.
(Then again, it’s possible that you can only see into the multiverses that are also looking outward. That’s the debate ripping apart theoretical physics departments at the moment, which, like most of their debates, is all the more vicious because the outcome doesn’t matter at all.)
The point is: you weren’t necessary to the discovery of the mirrors. You helped—at least, you did in your universe—but they could have found the multiverse without you. The really important thing is not what you did back then, those equations you discovered or those conferences at which you presented. The important thing is what you do now. Sitting in a small room, staring through the mirror, calibrating and recalibrating so you can see what you need to see. The hundreds of people whose lives you’ve saved, whose avoidable deaths you’ve prevented—you were necessary for that. That’s what you’re really talented at.
Which makes it even more puzzling, and more tragic, that you didn’t see what might happen to you.
#
You don’t need a multiverse mirror to know what’s going to happen when you discuss this with your mother. And yet you do discuss it, every couple of months, usually while sitting in her elegant green-and-black living room with its view of the Mediterranean Sea.
“I can’t quit, Mom. Not until we’ve recruited and trained more people who can do what I do. This work is too important.”
She does that thing where she doesn’t roll her eyes but makes it really obvious that she’s refraining from rolling her eyes. “You don’t seem to be moving very fast on that.”
“I’m sort of busy.” And then, before she can not-roll her eyes again: “It takes years to sync the kablai-transmitters to any individual person, so we can’t afford mistakes. There aren’t many people whose brains can sync with the mirrors to begin with, and there’s no simple way to select—”
“You don’t have to carry the whole world on your shoulders,” your mother goes on, and you remember, too late, that she is always prepared with answers to her own questions; she considers anyone else’s answer a rude interruption. “Look at the pressure you’re under! It’s too much. You’re going to have a nervous breakdown. You need some time to take care of yourself, to live your life.”
By take care of yourself, she means take care of your looks, and by live your life, she means date, get married, and give me a grandchild. But this is low on the list of things you want to argue about, especially because you can’t risk her realizing that it bothers you that you’re alone, and that you’ve taken to avoiding actual mirrors. In some universes, you look pretty good, with hair that’s reasonably styled and no bags under your eyes, and that’s where you get your mental image of yourself.
Anyhow, you’re pretty sure nervous breakdown is an offensive term, though you don’t have time to look it up.
#
The irony is that it was your mother who gave you the idea in the first place. It was the intersection on her way to work, where they hadn’t put a stop sign even though there was a nearly blind driveway, even though it was on a school route. “Accident waiting to happen,” she’d sighed as she braked sharply and you watched a car screech by inches in front of her bumper. “But no one will do anything about it until someone gets killed.”
You’d thought of the solution right then and there, but you didn’t tell her. You’ve learned not to share your initial enthusiasms with your mother; she remembers the ones that don’t work out with much greater clarity than the ones that do. You waited until you knew you could do it: focus the multiverse mirror, build a program to help you search for what you needed, record the results. You waited until you and your team had found what you wanted, and then you released the video. A school bus full of children, braking and swerving. Careening over. All those kids, screaming. The sirens and the horror.
You put off telling your mother until they actually put up the stop sign.
She wasn’t as impressed as you thought she would be.
Once you got over your disappointment—an ability that is second nature by now, or should be—you started searching for others. Accidents waiting to happen, dangers that people shrug off because, even though it’s obvious what could happen, everyone believes it won’t. Not in this universe. Not to them.
Until they see the videos proving that it could. That it did, to another version of themselves.
You started searching, and then you applied for grants, in that order. It created complications later, but that couldn’t be helped. You were saving people’s lives. Once you knew you could do it, you were glued to the mirrors, frantically trying to stop all those unnecessary tragedies. You couldn’t look away from the horrible, avoidable accidents. You couldn’t wait for some review board to wrap its head around what was so obvious to you.
Turned out, you didn’t need the IRB. The private sector saw the potential way before the government did. They were mostly hoping you’d show that they didn’t need expensive safety modifications—most of them, it seemed, had not quite grasped the concept of infinite. But avoiding lawsuits was a nice secondary benefit, as far as they were concerned.
When you finally got the grant, it was wrapped up in so much red tape and bureaucracy and privacy concerns that you didn’t bother using it. By then, you had enough money flowing in that you didn’t need it.
For a little while.
#
You expected more controversy when you started. You were prepared to go up against corrupt planning boards and shake your evidence in the faces of the rich and complacent. You daydreamed about having an inspirational movie made about you. But it turns out, most of the fixes are so simple. A stop sign here, a railing there, more frequent safety checks, some extra security. You focus on those, because you don’t have time for battles anyhow. The world is astonishingly full of unsafe things.
Sometimes you see those things too late. You’re not a prophet, no matter how much headline writers love that word; you see across universes, not forward in time. If the accident happens here at the same time as in the universe where you see it, it’s too late. Then you’re just someone to blame.
The headline writers also love having someone to blame.
So plenty of people didn’t like you, even back when you started. But there were far more people who did like you. And you heard about those people more, because most of the time, the media loved you.
Some of them still do. Now they don’t have to rely on actual events to raise people’s anxiety and get them to check the news obsessively. There’s always disaster and danger and tragedy somewhere, in some universe. Always a cataclysm that could come here. That could happen to you. Maybe if you think about it enough, it won’t.
But that’s exactly the problem.
You stop those disasters, and because of that, people don’t believe they’re real. They get bored. Of you, of all these real-but-not-to-them universes. It doesn’t matter how heartbreaking your videos are if no one watches them.
Cue balanced press, and articles pointing out problematic aspects of your work. For a while it seemed like a handful of journalists were having a secret competition, with points graded both for how ridiculous a concept was and for how somberly they could discuss it.
So. Back to those government grants. Because even if you can no longer convince people to care about what might happen, the government can make them act like they do.
The problem is, the government wants rules. They’re not going to spend millions to prevent freak accidents, one-in-a-billion chances. They talk a lot about risk management. Everyone agrees that you can keep saving their lives, as long as you’re moderate about it. Everyone accepts the possibility of the rare negative outcome, as long as they’re not the one destroyed by it.
Still, the rules are reasonable. You have to see the mass accident in at least one hundred universes before they have to act on it. Five hundred universes if it’s only a single death. Three hundred if it’s a child’s death.
Ten universes if it involves the imminent destruction of all humanity. Though to be fair, you only saw that once, and if it had only been eight or nine, they probably would have bent the rules.
#
“Is it worth ruining your life for this?” your mother asks you one day. “How much difference are you really making, anyhow?”
She’s asked you this question before, in dozens of different versions, and your answers never satisfy her. They couldn’t possibly, because you didn’t really understand the question. You were so focused on the people you were saving. So many people! Didn’t she get that?
Now you know what she always knew. (Not that you would ever tell her that.) Somehow, even though she has never once looked through a multiverse mirror, she understood before you did that every person you save is just one of multiple versions of themselves, and an infinity of them die no matter what you do.
Weirdly, the more people you save, the less it seems to matter.
“I have to,” you said, last time she asked this question. “I have a responsibility.”
“No,” she said, “you don’t. I know you, I know how you get, but the truth is, you could stop anytime you wanted.”
You wish she knew you as well as she thinks she does.
#
You sometimes see universes where you’re not part of the multiverse project, where you’re just an ordinary person. Sometimes married, sometimes with kids. Your mother is super happy in those universes, except in the ones where the two of you no longer speak and she’s not allowed to see her grandchildren.
You look pretty happy too. From the outside. But you know better, because it’s you. You can see the tightness around your eyes, the weight of dread you carry. Even in the universes without mirrors, you know there are tragedies and deaths just waiting to happen. You feel them pressing down on your chest. The only difference is that in those universes, you can’t do anything to stop them.
Shouldn’t you be happier in the universes where you can stop at least some of them?
Yet the more good you do, the more helpless you feel. Some days, your disinclination to do your job is an empty, gnawing tightness in your gut, and you have to force yourself to sit down and attach the kablai-transmitters to your head.
Once you do, though, you don’t take them off and you don’t look away. Not until you have to. A few years ago the IRB limited how many hours per day the mirrors can be activated, supposedly because of the strain on the space-time continuum, but really—you suspect—because of the strain on the people monitoring them. So when the feed goes blank, you try to get some sleep.
Try being the operative word. Most nights you lie staring at the ceiling, your heart racing, your entire body filled with the pervasive dread of whatever terrible things you would see if you could look.
#
It was only a matter of time before you saw your own death. You were kind of looking forward to it, honestly. Death sounds sort of restful.
“Aren’t you afraid of seeing something happen to you?” your mother asked you once, and you retorted that you weren’t going to stick your head in the sand. You didn’t tell her the truth. She would have called you ghoulish. You already know what she thinks of you, but it seems worth a little lie to keep from hearing her say it out loud.
You lie to your mother a lot, now that you’ve seen her die a few times. You did tell her about the heart attack that might have killed her already, and though she was very focused on how overweight she was in that universe, she took you seriously for the first time in your life. Now she eats healthy and jogs daily, which seems to make her happier anyhow. Bonus, with all the time she now spends judging you for your eating habits and nagging you about exercise, she has less time to fuss at you about your job and how it’s slowly killing you.
Not so slowly, you sometimes think, but you never say it. It definitely wouldn’t help.
#
Did you ever wonder why you haven’t witnessed your own death? You’ve seen plenty of universes where you’re already dead, but you’ve never seen yourself in the moment of dying. And anyone can die, at any second—that’s a truth that holds across all universes.
There are a lot of different possibilities. So little is understood about the multiverse mirrors, even now; you know how to use them, but not the underlying details of why they work or even what exactly they are. Your mother now believes what her massage therapist told her, that there are no multiverses at all, that you’re seeing quantum possibilities that never would have happened anyhow, so all these precautions are unnecessary.
Maybe the multiverse hid your death from you, for whatever reason. Maybe, in the complex incomprehensible interactions between your mind and the mirrors, you hid it from yourself. Or maybe it’s a lot simpler than that. Maybe a person who can see the infinite probability of every danger in the multiverse just doesn’t die all that often.
But today is your day.
#
And this is where I can no longer tell what you’re thinking. Because this is the moment we go our separate ways.
Though I suppose an argument could be made that I never could tell what you were thinking. Because if we were truly the same, could we be making different choices right now? Even though we acted the same, even though I watched you do every single thing that I did, something must have gone wrong in my brain that didn’t go wrong in yours. Something unseeable through the mirror, something that manifested no differences until now.
Something that explains why you’re the one watching, eyes wide with horror, and I’m the one wiring explosives to the kablai-transmitters.
What is that something? I wish there was a way you could tell me. Because I don’t want to be doing this. I just can’t take it anymore, the death, the suffering, the constant and endless apprehension. I can stop it here in my own universe, but it’s still happening in all those multiverses where I—and you—made the wrong decisions. Where we didn’t act in time, where we never discovered the mirrors, where we stumble through life without knowing all the things we could have prevented. I’m jealous of those versions of me. You probably are too.
But I’m also jealous of you. Because I can feel all those tragedies, all those dangers simmering below my brain and closing around my chest, and you must have found a way to shut that feeling off, or to deal with it, or to hide from it. Otherwise you’d be the one readying yourself to run before the explosion, not the one staring at me with that furrowed brow, like you’re trying to figure out a way to stop me.
You can’t stop me. Nothing you do can change anything in my universe, just like nothing I do can directly change yours. But now that you see where our lives lead, where I end up, maybe you can stop yourself. That’s why I’ve been waiting for you—for any of you—to see me doing this.
I’m shaking so hard. It’s okay, though. I’m used to it after all those trembling nights lying awake in the darkness, thinking about the fact that nothing I do matters. What’s the point of it, anyhow, saving a few people out of an infinite number? The deaths outnumber the rescues by such a massive, crushing amount.
I don’t really want to die. There’s a chance I’ll escape the blast radius—at least, that’s what I tell myself. But the honest truth is, even if I destroy my universe’s multiverse mirrors, it’s probably too late to help me. My brain will never stop knowing what I know.
What you know too. Yet you are able to go on, to keep doing it. I wish I could ask you how.
If I do survive this, will you be able to tell? Or will you assume I’m dead when your mirror goes blank? Will you try to see the aftermath, or just turn your attention to a different universe? It’s an interesting theoretical question. I guess I’ll never know the answer, but you will.
It might be a useful thing to know.
Just watch. Please. Maybe you’re headed down the same path I am. Maybe you know why I’m doing this, and you’re thinking of doing the same thing. Maybe this will help you make up your mind. One way or the other.
And that, I think, is the real reason I waited. So someone, someone who understands, could be here with me. Because I have this pathetic need to feel like I’m making a difference, even now, and I want you to see where you’re headed.
But it doesn’t work. And now, finally, I understand the difference between us. Because your eyes widen with understanding as you watch me connect the final wires. You know exactly what’s going to happen. You know you can’t stop it.
And in the moment before I press the button, you look away.
#
Thank you for joining our journey this week.
Leah Cypess is the author of the early chapter book series Miriam’s Magical Creature Files, about a girl who investigates fantastical creatures, and of the middle grade series Sisters Ever After, which retells fairy tales from the points of view of forgotten younger sisters. Leah has also written four young adult fantasy novels and numerous works of short fiction. She is a four-time Nebula Award finalist and a World Fantasy Award finalist. You can learn more about her and her books at www.leahcypess.com.
“Waiting to Happen,” © Leah Cypess, 2025.
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Wow.
Ouch!!