Piotr's Box

Piotr's fingers traced the worn edges of the antique market stall. Dust hung in the air, giving the entire market hall the feeling of being lost in a haze. It was as if some giant had strode through the place swinging an immense thurible that had hurled smoke and cinders in all directions. Except that it smelled of sweaty armpits and dogfood rather than incense. Amidst the clutter of obsolete technologies, rusting typewriters, and discarded photographs, his eyes snagged on a device. A relic, a thing, a whatnot. It was interesting, but he had no idea what it was, a thing perhaps, from a bygone era.

He reached for it, his hand dancing over the tarnished surface. The device felt cold, alien in his grip. It had buttons that yielded with a reluctant click as he explored its mechanisms. Piotr didn't quite understand its purpose, but a sense of anticipation, a premonition perhaps, clawed at the edges of his consciousness.

Weeks passed, and the device found a quiet corner in Piotr's grubby apartment. Its angular presence now a small intrusion into his otherwise dull life. Nights unfolded with the whirring of its inner workings, a mechanical heartbeat echoing through the darkness. Piotr tried to figure it out, but had no clue what is was or what it was doing, with all the whirring and buzzing. Eventually he tried not to think about it too much. But there was, in truth, little hope of success in that endeavour.

As days elapsed, Piotr noticed subtle and alarming changes in himself. His reflection in the mirror started to change, with shadows pooling in the hollows of his eyes. He looked older, haggard, tired. Vivid dreams invaded his sleep - full of fractured realities, tied to the hum of the device and each dream incompletely remembered. He felt as though he was perpetually grasping for elusive memories, and always failing to reach them.

The city outside his window started to seem strange. Faces in the crowd appeared distorted, everywhere seemed different, alien, unfamiliar. Piotr felt like an intruder in a narrative not his own, a witness to the dance of lives converging and diverging, like transient shadows on the periphery of consciousness. But he felt as though he was just not there. Somewhere, but not there.

Curiosity metastasised into obsession. Piotr decided he was going to figure out what was going on. After hours and hours of effort, he dissected the device. There, nestled within its mechanical heart, he discovered its core - a whisper of a forgotten science, or a parallel science. An aberration in the linear cadence of existence. And then, suddenly and shatteringly he understood. The machine, he realised, was a conduit, a bridge between realities that constantly teetered on the brink of collision. Often so close that some leakage seeped between them.

Each button, he learned, was a cipher to unlock access to a parallel world. He held the potential to unveil the multitudes of existence. Piotr understood all of this, even though he had little knowledge or background in physics or philosophy. It was all suddenly as clear to him as the hand in front of his face. No aspect of it was hidden. He could see it all. What was more, he could explain it to anyone, but they would simply think him deranged. This was not the stuff of TV documentaries. He wanted to exploit it but he hesitated, torn between the allure of the unknown and the tether of his own reality. The device, re-assembled, pulsed with a latent energy, a siren's call luring him into an unfathomable abyss of uncharted possibilities.

‘What the hell, Press Button B and be damned,’ he thought, Piotr pressed and held a button. Reality fragmented, shattered into kaleidoscopic shards. Familiar landscapes warped, rearranging themselves like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle manipulated by an unseen hand. Piotr stood at a nexus of diverging timelines, varieties of existence, all similar but different.

And off he went. He floated through this fragmented cosmos, glimpsing versions of himself adrift in the tides of alternate destinies. In one, he was an artist, splattering canvases with a chaos of tortured emotion. In another, a scientist pushing the boundaries of human understanding. On and on, he went, each new place different in some ways from the last, each iteration held in the choices he had made or left unexplored.

He encountered reflections of the people he knew – friends, lovers, adversaries. The lines between observer and participant blurred, the boundaries of self dissolving like smoke in the wind. Yet, a disquieting truth lingered beneath the surface - the interplay of his choices that shaped the destinies of countless iterations, and in that understanding he suddenly became aware of his awesome and silent responsibility to hold together the strings of existence. It was him, he was the captain and the navigator. He, and he alone must choose.

Piotr, now an inadvertent puppet master, grappled with the weight of his newfound awareness. The device was, it seemed, a harbinger of consequence that transcended the boundaries of time. And Piotr held it.

He glimpsed an impending convergence, a collision of worlds, of realities. The threads of fate  strained against a tension of diverging realities. The device, now pulsating with an urgency, led him towards a singular point where the destinies of countless iterations intersected.

In that moment of convergence, Piotr faced a choice - to unravel the fabric of existence, to sever the ties that bound the multitudes of worlds, to embrace the chaos, to become the architect of a new reality forged from the remnants of the old. The weight of responsibility pressed upon him, a burden beyond anything he was ever remotely capable of dealing with.

And so Piotr hesitated, suspended, dangling between the unraveling threads of possibility. He chose. He chose the place he knew, the people he knew, the time where his arrow had always flown. He chose the ordinary, the everyday. The device dissipated into nothing. Gone to ephemeral echoes of existence, leaving him standing at what had been the crossroads of creation and annihilation, but was now home.

The city outside his window returned to its familiar contours. Faces in the crowd resumed their normal, tired masks, borne down by the weight of unremarkable histories. Piotr, bore scars of a journey through the frayed edges of existence. He would never again be able to see the world as just one existence, just one reality.

The device had served its purpose, in Piotr’s unwitting hand. Piotr, marked by the imprints of so many alternate lives, so many alternate states and realities never returned to his old self. He found that he could not. He could no longer relate to the world or to people. He was lost. He grieved for worlds that might have been but now were not. He grieved for lives he could have lived, but had not. 

He sold his flat, left his job. He travelled alone, by long slow routes to far, silent places, where only the sound of the wind on its inexorable journey would intrude upon his mind.

He shunned the world that he had unwittingly saved and it, in turn, shunned him.