Doug vs. Doug

"At that moment, before she saw him, Doug was still alive, but, he told himself, he might as well be a dead cat."

At the time Doug LeKalb pierced the membrane between universes, he was at a low point in his life. He didn’t intend to do anyone any wrong, least of all himself. His brother Jackson had died in a car accident six months prior, and because Doug had just moved to Boston to take on a new post-doctoral research position, he didn’t have any friends to help him through the many long, lonely days the grief set in over him. Doug was angry, bewildered, and most of all, he wanted his best friend back or at least the chance to say goodbye.

Throwing himself into his work was how Doug coped. The lab was a place for him to be, and his work was something to do. It kept him focused on something meaningful. In the lab, when Doug was in the zone, the sadness fell away: only the problem remained.

The problem Doug had been working on was one of parallelism—how closely could lasers run in parallel and still transmit a discrete stream of data without interfering with each other. For now, it remained a theoretical problem, at least as Doug saw it, but as military applications grew in space, the DOD envisioned such a system as a kind of high-potency deep-space broadband, useful for the decades ahead with colonies on Mars, moon bases, or asteroid mining. That was the theory anyway. In practice, the project wasn’t going well. None of the simulations Doug had spent the prior two years running had given any indication why. In the real world, whenever he ran tests on simulations that had worked, any type of signal he tried to encode in the streams became corrupted. Even more frustrating was that it didn’t seem that there was any predictable pattern to the data corruption.

Doug spent weeks running his data sets through every conventional pattern-recognizing algorithm he knew, before finally trying a novel AI program called ¢haN$E. What came out of the data was so unbelievable, Doug thought it was a mistake or an elaborate prank. He spent hours on the ¢haN$E message board, trying to see if anyone else had been getting bizarre responses from the AI when it was fed datasets, but his problem seemed unique. The rabbit hole Doug went down with the DOD data revealed the existence of signals from other possible universes, and not only could these signals be observed, there was some regularity to the way EM signals from our parallel universe seemed to be ghosting into ours. One only needed to know how to interpret these “ghost” signals that were flooding into our world constantly. That, of course, would require a frame of reference. Doug realized that any chance of interpreting these signals relied on having a Rosetta stone of sorts—a definite point of contact for an electrical device on the other side that could be identified, which seemed an impossible task until he thought about it for a moment. Every piece of sci-fi he’d consumed in the multiverse trope—from Counterpart, to Fringe, back to classics, like Sliders, The Man in the High Castle, even some earlier Star Trek episodes—they all informed the same belief: there would be another Doug, right there in his lab, and odds were good the Other Doug would be using the same phone. Once he plugged his phone’s RFID into ¢haN$E’s algorithm, as well as the source code from his phone’s operating system, Doug hoped he would be able to access Other Doug’s phone.

The first attempt failed, and Doug couldn’t begin to guess why. All the signals from his counterpart’s phone should have been encoded right in his own device. Doug tried again an hour after the first attempt, again to no avail. He tried again several times throughout the afternoon as well before finally giving up around eight that evening.

As he was leaving the SPARK center, he saw that there was a light on in the first-floor MATLab in what was otherwise an empty building. On his way past, he could see through the window, a girl he thought was one of the Physics department’s PhD candidates giving a tutorial to an undergrad. It struck Doug as odd for so late on a Saturday in the middle of the semester. The girl smiled and waved as she noticed Doug looking in on them while he passed. Doug gave a casual wave back.

As he was walking down Comm Ave. and the evening was beginning to bubble to life in Allston, it dawned on Doug that it was Saturday. It was possible that Other Doug could have been elsewhere all day. Given the time he’d sunk into the situation already, Doug figured it couldn’t hurt to try again on Monday, though he couldn’t imagine a true counterpart Doug would have been anywhere but the lab.

On Monday, when he finally got hold of a steady signal, it took ¢haN$E less than ten minutes to pour out the entire contents of Other Doug’s phone, which it dumped into Doug’s hard drive. It was a surreal moment. He thought about approaching his supervisor, Asim, who admittedly understood principles of Quantum Mechanics and entanglement at a level Doug admired, but this was entirely new territory for anyone. And, there was the temptation to look. For a moment, Doug questioned the ethics of the situation. It felt voyeuristic to be diving into another person’s life, but the justification was easy—it was his phone. Who better to look at it?

Doug spent all morning looking at the location data on his counterpart’s phone, trying to de-construct the life Other Doug was leading, ostensibly to compare it to his own, strictly for scientific purposes—he told himself—to discern the degree to which this other universe had drifted from Doug’s own. That, and it occurred to him, that if he shared his discovery, any scientist brought in to investigate would want access to every bit of data on his phone for comparison. Discretion would be better for both of them.

As the morning progressed, Doug realized that the RFID in Other Doug’s phone was fluctuating in strength. He deduced he could track its movement within the room, presumably, Doug guessed, trips to the bathroom or to the lounge for coffee. The longer he had the server connected and processing these ghost signals, the more plausible it became for him to keep an open connection and follow Other Doug in real time. All he would need was to clone his phone and connect another copy to his laptop. He’d be able to track Other Doug’s entire life—locations, texts, calls, metadata. He could even, theoretically, use it to map out cell networks on the other side.

Doug decided to take a walk. He’d purposefully only explored the location data on his counterpart at that point. No photos, no texts, no call records. He just wanted to track how much their movements overlapped. It was curious. Even looking at that one aspect of Other Doug’s life, it was clear he was different from Doug. He didn’t just slump from the apartment to the office and back. Doug found himself thinking very clearly as he walked, seemingly aimlessly: Other me must have a life.

Then Doug found himself staring through the window of his cell carrier, looking at the exact model phone he’d purchased six months prior. It was almost as though his feet had brought him there involuntarily. What about that other life? he thought. How much different could that Doug LeKalb be? Other me would want to look at me.

Later that afternoon, after he’d set up the relay, Doug left the office and sat on a bench on the Esplanade, peering into the life of his other. What he expected to see was a marginally different version of himself, a productive, ambitious physicist with a tenacious work ethic—the kind of guy who could pierce the membrane between universes using a cell phone.

What he found surprised him. That girl he’d seen in the MATLab, she was all over Other Doug’s phone, in pictures, in texts, in call logs—long calls late at night. She was listed in the contacts under Nadia. Just Nadia. There was a relationship there. Once he realized they were together, Doug couldn’t help but look at the pictures. They looked happy together, genuinely happy. Doug couldn’t remember feeling as happy as Other Doug looked, even before Jackson’s accident.

Then there was Jackson. Other Doug’s Jackson had been texting him after May 5^th. He’d even come to visit that summer. There were calls, emails, texts, the kind of joking text threads Doug missed being able to start whenever something in Boston reminded him of a shared experience, or really anything he knew Jackson would find amusing. Just saying hello. Part of Doug was happy to know that Jackson was alive somewhere, but he also knew it wasn’t Jackson, not his Jackson. He didn’t understand half of the references between Jackson and Other Doug to their shared experiences. The temptation to figure out a way to reach out brought all the emotions flooding back to him, another ambush of grief. He stared out at the river for over a minute to keep from turning into a blubbering mess right there on that park bench.

Doug also couldn’t help but notice in those pictures of Other Jackson’s visit to Boston that there were other people in them. Doug’s friends. He recognized two of their faces from the SPARK center. As he explored messages and Other Doug’s calendar, Doug realized his counterpart had started a Physics meet up when he arrived in Boston that past winter. It was something Doug had thought about but never did, because he was always too busy in the lab. He was able to put names to two of the faces of these anonymous strangers from his building now: Dustin and Patty; and there was a girl he’d never seen before named Erica in many of the pictures.

Other Doug had a life. It wasn’t just work, sleep, and trying to figure out ways to forget that Jackson wasn’t coming back. The more he looked, the more he wanted to understand Other Doug. There had to be something more than that one difference. It began to gnaw at him. Doug got up from the bench and started walking back along the river; eventually, he ended up back at the lab.

From what he could tell in the texts and emails, Other Doug was the same guy. The pictures showed he was happier, but still the same guy. Texts, pictures, and emails would be insufficient. Doug started brainstorming ways to get into the apps on his counterpart’s phone, to listen in to see what was different about Other Doug. He spent most of the afternoon, digging around in the OS code from Other Doug’s phone, looking for ways to passively listen to the handset. After several hours of frustration, it finally occurred to Doug that it would be a lot easier to see if his own phone could be hacked and what one would need to do to gain access.

Doug stayed up all night, searching troubleshooting logs and forums, trying to figure out ways hackers had successfully jacked into similar phones. In the process, he discovered a no-click spyware he’d inadvertently installed through a junk ad he’d deleted several months back. He’d never have seen it if not for Other Doug, but it gave him the opportunity to isolate it, dig into the code, and learn how it operated. Other Doug didn’t have the same spyware on his phone, but Doug learned enough about how that program operated that he was confident he could jack Other Doug’s audio, perhaps even his camera, if he figured out a way to send a concentrated signal to the other side.

It took Doug nearly two months to figure out how he would do it. He would have to wait until Other Doug was doing work on the laser on his side, which turned out to be rarely, at least by Doug’s standards. Once he had readings from Other Doug’s work with the laser on his side, ¢haN$E could start to decipher what signals were crossing. Each call Other Doug made or text he sent gave Doug a bigger data set to play with. He knew it was just a matter of time. Doug’s obsession with this side project kept him in the SPARK at all hours, which didn’t go unnoticed. The Nadia in his world still waved to Doug, but instead of smiling as he passed by, the look she gave him became something approaching pity.

Looking at that other life, Doug grew more resentful of his counterpart by the day. While he was inside the SPARK working on connecting with his other self and conducting the research for Asim’s DOD grant, Other Doug was going out with his friends, sharing nights out with Nadia, and falling months behind where Doug was in his early days in Boston.

When the fall semester ended, Doug remained in Boston over winter break, spending almost every day in the lab. He didn’t work on Christmas or New Year’s, but he didn’t have anywhere to celebrate nor anyone to celebrate with. He called his parents and a few friends from grad school to catch up, but apart from that, Doug was alone nearly all the time, until in mid-January, he caught a break. Other Doug apparently had enough of a leap forward in his thinking that when he returned to Boston following what looked to be a happy Christmas in Knoxville, he began spending hours testing the laser on his side. During that first week of steady activity, Doug figured out how to jack Other Doug’s phone. From that point on, anything Other Doug said streamed through to Doug’s laptop and then on to his phone.

If Doug mildly disliked the person he thought his counterpart to be before, once he began to hear the livestream of Other Doug’s life, contempt set in. He disliked the sound of his own voice intensely. And this Other Doug was blithely unaware of just how stupid he sounded nearly every time he opened his mouth. Doug couldn’t stand Other Doug, and the more he listened, the more it infuriated him that Nadia and Other Doug’s friends seemed to genuinely like him. He was lazy, chewed with his mouth open, fell asleep with an obnoxious half-snore, and worst of all, he took everyone for granted—Nadia, who was way too good for him; his friends, who Doug quite liked; but more than anyone, Other Doug didn’t deserve Jackson, who texted nearly every day, only to be ignored half the time by Other Doug. It infuriated him.

In the process of removing the spyware from his own phone, Doug got an idea about how to message his counterpart. At first, the thought was just to test the possibility. It made sense that he should be able to do it. If signals came his way, he should be able to send them out as well. All this was speculative, and in Doug’s mind, performed at least partially in the furtherance of science. But as much as figuring out the scientific problem drove him, the carrot at the end was to be able to give Other Doug a piece of his mind. Each time Doug wanted to send a message it was in reaction to Other Doug saying something stupid, choosing to leave the office at four o’clock each day, or taking long lunches in the afternoons with his friends while his work suffered. And every day, at some point when no one else was around, he would say out loud, “Text your brother, asshole.”

Doug spent weeks trying to send texts to the other side that went into the ether. He kept fumbling with the primary laser in the lab, but it was ultimately crossing up a combination of smaller units in the back annex that got the first signal across. Soon after, Doug sent his first message: “Text your brother, Doug,” which popped up on Other Doug’s screen for a few seconds before disappearing again into the ether.

“What the hell?” was the response Doug heard over the stream.

He shouted, “Finally!” so loudly a few people poked their heads into the doorway of the main lab.

“Just solved something,” an embarrassed Doug explained.

“Act like you’ve done it before,” one of the senior professors told him.

Doug spent the next few days building a box setup based on the layout of the smaller lasers he’d successfully tested. It turned out to be a unit about the size of a mini-fridge that Doug pushed into a corner in the back annex and placed a sign on that read: DOD Research DO NOT Touch!

He then began to text his counterpart regularly. Whenever Other Doug left the lab at four, he would text: “Tapping out at 4? Do work! Already months behind.” Or, when he went out with Nadia and said or did something stupid, he’d text something like: “What does that girl see in you, Doug?”

Other Doug’s response was so muted that most times, Doug hardly knew whether the message got through. The tepid reaction frustrated Doug, both on the research front and because he wanted Other Doug to smarten up.

What Doug couldn’t appreciate was that Other Doug was so freaked out by these ghost messages coming from his own number that it had stunned him into silence. He grew increasingly paranoid. He began to question who could be spying on him and how they could be sending these ephemeral messages that disappeared without a trace in the phone’s log. Still, Other Doug didn’t react to these messages in such a way that cued Doug to the seriousness of his inner feelings. Other Doug’s response was so muted, Doug resolved to up the stakes by encoding short voice messages. If Other Doug was quietly disturbed by the disappearing texts, the first time he heard his own scratchy voice echoing out of his pants pocket, the feeling was one of inner terror.

“Do work, Doug! You’re three months behind,” Doug shouted at his other self.

“What the hell?” His counterpart answered to no one.

Other Doug picked up the phone and opened the phone app.

“You have work to do,” Doug said to his counterpart.

“Oh, what is this?”

“Do work.”

Other Doug spent nearly a half hour digging around in the phone’s OS, looking for some sort of compromise. This got Doug even more frustrated that his efforts to motivate his counterpart were proving doubly unproductive.

“This is insane,” Other Doug said. “I can’t be going crazy.”

“You’re not going crazy, Doug,” Doug said. “You are, however, lazy and unproductive. I have better things to do than pull you through your post-doc.”

Doug had an appointment with one of his DOD liaisons for the space-laser project, so he left Other Doug alone for the afternoon while he met with Asim and the two Pentagon officials.

Other Doug spent the afternoon on the internet self-diagnosing psychiatric disorders and then re-diagnosing several times when he realized the presentation of these presumed hallucinations wasn’t  classic in any sense. What was more, they didn’t feel quite genuine. The voices he’d heard weren’t in his head, for example.

Doug left Other Doug alone for several days. He found himself wrestling with the reality of what he was doing—the disruption he was causing his other self. He thought about whether Other Doug really deserved the torment he was obviously causing him, and why—if he truly wanted to help and motivate his counterpart as he’d told himself at the outset—why would he not just announce himself and say what he needed to say. If he can’t figure it out, though, he doesn’t deserve to be let off the hook, Doug decided.

He texted him: “Sorry to freak you out, Doug.”

Then he left his counterpart alone for several days, listening in on his life every now and again.

By Friday of the following week, Other Doug seemed to have settled down and gotten back to normal. Frustratingly, normal meant knocking off work at three-thirty, going out with his friends, and, that Friday, going out with Nadia, who he hadn’t told about the experience because he was terrified she’d run like hell from him if he confessed to having hallucinations.

Doug was sitting alone in his lab that Friday evening, bringing greater clarity to the algorithms he’d developed using ¢haN$E to calibrate the ways the two universes were sharing signals with each other. Other Doug was eating Jalapeño poppers and drinking IPAs in Cambridge with Nadia, who for some ineffable reason, saw something in that sorry inferior version of himself. She was laughing at his stupid jokes, rubbing her thumb along the back of his hand at the table, smiling.

Doug got so infuriated by one of his stupid physics jokes he texted his counterpart: SHE’S TOO GOOD FOR YOU, LOSER!

Doug watched through his counterpart’s camera as he read the text. Other Doug turned white.

“I don’t feel so good,” he told Nadia. “I think I should go lie down. I’m sorry, babe.”

He got up from the table and tried to leave.

“Doug, what’s wrong?” she said.

“I suddenly don’t feel well,” he said.

“If you’re sick, Doug, let me take you home. Let me take care of you.”

“No, no,” he said, getting up and rushing toward the exit. “I’ll be fine.”

Doug looked at his counterpart’s frantic face as Other Doug used his phone to call a ride. He started mumbling, “Jackson will know what to do.”

Whatever sympathy Doug had for his counterpart’s anguish seemed to vanish each time Other Doug repeated his brother’s name.

“What kind of loser would you be without him?” Doug said, as though to his counterpart, but he didn’t send the message. He just let Other Doug flail his way back to Allston.

“Talk to me,” Other Doug shouted into the phone when he got back to the apartment. “What do you want from me?”

Doug severed the link between the two devices and went home himself. He felt awful. All Saturday, he felt so sick he could hardly bear the thought of going back to the lab to switch the connection back on. He knew he needed to contact Other Doug to apologize, but he didn’t go back to the lab. He couldn’t get his feet to move in that direction.

On Sunday morning, Doug finally slumped back to the SPARK and up to his lab. On the way past the MATLab, Doug looked in, and there was Nadia, sitting alone at a table studying for prelims. He slowed down for a moment as he passed. She looked up at him as she sensed him there in the window. He smiled a half-hearted smile, waved, and moved along.

Doug switched the link back on and quickly scanned through Other Doug’s activity to make sure his counterpart hadn’t done anything desperate the previous day. He hadn’t. In fact, from what Doug could gather he hadn’t done anything at all, hadn’t left his apartment. Doug got up and left the lab, exiting the back so he didn’t have to pass Nadia in the MATLab on the way out.

 He found himself walking along the river again. It was cool, but a beautiful Sunday along the Charles in Boston. About halfway to the Esplanade, Doug’s phone buzzed with an alert that Other Doug was making a call. Part of him wanted to cut all ties and just pretend the whole thing hadn’t happened, but he felt an obligation in the moment to make sure Other Doug was going to be okay. Doug popped in an earbud and listened in.

He stopped mid-stride for a second. It was Jackson’s voice. They were talking, catching up. Doug knew exactly what was going on. Other Doug wanted to tell him, would tell him, but first, he needed to try and play it off like nothing was really bothering him. It went on like that for nearly fifteen minutes, Jackson catching him up on what was going on in Knoxville. Doug started walking faster, moving to keep from breaking down as he listened.

“You don’t sound so good,” Jackson finally said to Other Doug. “Something going on, brother?”

Other Doug filled in Jackson on the situation, from the earliest messages to the incident that Friday night.

“Jax, I don’t know, man. I think I might be going crazy. Aren’t you clueless, though, if you’re really losing it?”

“Not necessarily, Doug. Our practice has patients who are acutely aware of what’s happening to them. It’s concerning. You don’t feel like you’re going to hurt yourself or anyone else, do you?”

“No! God, no. I’d never.”

“Good. Good. These voices? What do they sound like? What kind of things are they saying to you?”

Jackson asked with such care in his voice.

“It’s my own voice,” Other Doug said. “It’s coming from my phone. It’s not in my head, and it says things that I’d say to myself.”

“Like what?”

“He tells me to go back to the lab and go to work, not to slack off, and things like that. Tells me to call you a lot, actually—and mom.”

“Really?”

“That, and he calls me a loser sometimes.”

“First time I’ve ever heard that, brother. Most of the time people hear voices, they aren’t telling you to get up early, get a job, go to work, take care of your mother, find Jesus. Figures with you, Doug, even your hallucinations would be productive.”

“Very funny, Jax. I’m serious.”

“Look, man, I know you’re under a lot of stress with that DOD thing. It’s okay to give yourself a break sometimes, despite what your internal voice may say.”

“It’s not internal. It’s not.”

“I know. I heard you. You said it’s all coming from your phone, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Do me a favor. I want you to go down to the nearest electronics store and buy a faraday bag for your phone. Put your phone in it for, say, half hour stretches and just see what happens. If you hear something when it’s in there, then we rule out that someone’s messing with your phone. I also want you to consider going to the university tomorrow and setting up an appointment for counseling if that doesn’t work out.”

Doug listened as Jackson lifted up his brother just as his Jackson had done for him at every difficult time in his life. He felt an awful mix of grief, loneliness, and remorse for being the source of that difficult time for his other self.

Doug debated whether he should try to tell his counterpart the truth then and there, given how rattled he seemed to be. It hadn’t been his intention to drive his other self crazy. He just couldn’t help interjecting and had thought if anyone had license to criticize, it was he. Sure, he’d lashed out a little, perhaps unfairly. At that point, Doug thought it best to simply stop messaging his counterpart until he’d settled down. Then, he fully intended to explain and apologize. In the meantime, Doug thought it best to continue listening in to make sure Other Doug was okay.

The faraday bag was a good idea, but it operated on the notion that whatever signals might be connecting with Other Doug’s phone were ordinary EM signals. Doug merely found it frustrating that he couldn’t get any visual feedback or location data, and audio became muffled to the point Doug needed to amplify it considerably to make out anything, but he remained connected to Other Doug’s phone. When Other Doug took the phone out of the bag again, it was flooded with texts. Nadia had been texting him almost hourly to check on him that afternoon. She was concerned after Friday. The final text from her simply read: “I’m coming over.” Doug didn’t know why, but his counterpart didn’t respond, just put the phone back in the faraday bag.

Then, Other Doug simply disappeared. Doug stayed up late into the night through early Monday morning waiting for some sign of his counterpart, but Other Doug didn’t touch his phone, which was still seemingly in the faraday bag, cut off from its network.

Doug was late to the office the following morning. He’d slept through his alarm and had missed an appointment with Asim, who already had growing concerns about Doug’s increasingly erratic behavior, his long nights at the lab, and recently, even missing timelines for updates on the DOD project. Doug had the sense that everything was about to come crashing down on him. He rushed out of the apartment toward the SPARK, not even stopping for coffee along the way.

As he was hustling down the sidewalk on Comm Ave, Doug decided to check the alerts for Other Doug’s phone. There was still nothing, but when he connected and attempted to listen in, he could hear something that sounded like interference. When he turned the volume all the way up, Doug heard noises as though somebody was moving somewhere in the background.

“Doug?” he shouted into the phone. “Doug, are you there?”

He shouted into the phone for nearly a minute without any response and was about to give up when his phone buzzed with an alert. He had the video feed back.

“Who is this?” Nadia said.

She was pulling Other Doug’s phone out of the faraday bag.

Doug stopped dead in his tracks.

“Please, tell me he’s okay,” Doug said.

“Doug? What the hell? Doug is that you?”

“Is Doug okay?”

“What is going on?” he heard Nadia say.

She nearly dropped the phone. Doug could tell from the location apps that Nadia was in Other Doug’s apartment, but near as he could tell, Doug wasn’t there with her.

“Just tell me Doug’s okay,” he said to Other Nadia as she vacillated between the curiosity that had drawn her to the phone and the terror that was driving her to throw it out the window.

“I’m going to the police, whoever you are. Right now.”

“Don’t waste your time, Nadia,” Doug said. “There’s nothing they can do. Look at the phone. There’s no app running. You need to talk to me.”

“Sorry, but I don’t need to have a conversation with the deep fake convincing my boyfriend he’s schizophrenic.”

“I didn’t mean to. Doug’s not schizophrenic. I can explain everything. Please, just tell me; is he okay?”

“No, he’s not okay! I’m at his apartment picking up clothes to take to him at the psychiatric hospital where he’s committed, asshole.”

Doug made an attempt to explain that didn’t get very far. Even after she zipped the phone back in the faraday bag and Doug kept talking to her, Nadia was convinced there was some simpler trick at play than the outlandish truth. And Doug, in his world, rushing down the sidewalk on Comm Ave., shouting into his phone that he was from a different universe, suddenly became self-conscious about just how unhinged he looked to the people passing him on the sidewalk.

Nadia opened the bag again to turn Other Doug’s phone off.

“This isn’t funny, Doug. You can go to hell.”

And the way she said his name—something in the tone—convinced Doug that she no longer believed he was somebody else. He knew Nadia thought that he was her Doug, Other Doug, somehow playing an elaborate prank on her.”

“I was worried about you! I cared about you! You belong in the nut house, you jerk.”

“Nadia, please,” Doug said. “What can I say to convince you?”

As soon as he’d asked that question—what can I say—Doug realized there was nothing he could say. He hated the idea, but he knew what he needed to do. It would be the most humiliating moment of his life by a factor of ten. His way out was sitting right there. All he had to do was simply cut the connection and forget about the whole thing. Let Nadia leave him. He didn’t, though.

“Would you believe you?” Doug said to Nadia. “If you heard it from your own mouth would you believe me then?”

“How are you going to pull that off, Doug?”

“Very painfully, unfortunately,” Doug said. “It’s going to take me some time. We’re not a couple. You barely know I exist here.”

Doug continued on his frantic pace to the SPARK, hoping he’d be able to find Nadia somewhere in the building, or at least find someone who could get in touch with her. Every step he had the image in his mind of the sword he was about to fall on—a gut shot, social seppuku. You don’t have to do this, he kept telling himself. Then he thought of his counterpart, languishing in a psych ward about to get dumped for something that wasn’t even remotely his fault.

When he got to the SPARK building, Doug realized he’d never truly understood Quantum Mechanics until that moment, as he simultaneously wished with every fiber of his being that his Nadia was both in the MATLab and not there at all. At that moment, before she saw him, Doug was still alive, but, he told himself, he might as well be a dead cat.

Nadia was there, along with three undergrads who seemed to be quietly working as she sat at her desk in the corner. She saw him coming. This time he didn’t look away and keep walking, he looked in, sighed, and entered with a quiet knock, asking if he might have a private word with Nadia, who looked perplexed, but cautiously stepped into the hallway.

“Hi,” Doug said. “Nadia, right?”

She nodded.

“I haven’t properly…I mean, I’m Doug. I need your help, and it’s kinda hard to explain, but in a way, you do too.”

“What?”

“How much do you know about alternate realities and multiverse theory?”

She looked perplexed. “I’m a PhD student in Mathematics, Doug. I work full time tutoring in the MATLab. What is this about?”

“Right. Obviously. Okay, so what if I told you I could prove alternate universes exist but to do so I’d also have to prove that I might be the biggest asshole in this universe?”

“You’re off on the right foot.”

“Hang in there with me. I promise this hole gets a lot deeper.”

She smiled, but only because she didn’t believe him yet.

Doug convinced her to come up to the lab. He could tell she was reluctant, and he knew that whatever chance he might have had with this Nadia in this universe was soon to be over. He only hoped he could convince her to speak to her counterpart. On the way up to Doug’s lab, two undergrads stepped into the elevator with them, so they didn’t talk. Doug thought about how he’d reveal everything. He wouldn’t over-explain it, just tell her she needed to talk with Other Nadia,  to convince her counterpart who they were.

When they got to the lab, Doug pulled up a picture of their counterparts together on his laptop. Nadia examined it carefully.

“That’s like…” she paused and looked it over again. “If that’s fake it’s perfect.”

“Here,” Doug said. “Say hello.”

Nadia said hello and was shocked when she was answered by her own voice. Doug stood by as Nadia and Other Nadia held a long conversation filled with bewilderment and disbelief on both ends. Both of them asked long strings of questions about the other’s life, most of which turned out to be shared experiences—things only they could have known. Finally, Other Nadia proposed that they meet in Kenmore Square and exchange selfies.

On the walk down to Kenmore, Doug felt like the third wheel as the Nadias continued their discussion, most of which was about their lives but deviated briefly into the mathematical implications of the present situation, before it finally came back to Doug—not Other Doug, but Doug himself—and it was about as brutal as he’d imagined it. Other Nadia was particularly harsh.

Doug and Nadia took a picture at a specific spot outside the Hotel Buckminster where the shadow of a lamppost intersected with a seam in the sidewalk. Nadia stood as far away from Doug as she could manage in a selfie.

“It’ll take some time to get to her,” Doug explained.

By that time, his Nadia didn’t seem to have much doubt that she was talking to a genuine counterpart in a different reality.

They got Other Nadia’s picture instantly. She was standing in the same spot exactly. An identical pedestrian wearing a blue skirt was passing behind all three of them in both pictures. Finally, Other Nadia believed. Then it was explanation time. What was Doug thinking? How did he let it get so out of control?

His Nadia stood by and watched as Doug apologized, explained, justified, hedged, apologized again, before ultimately taking responsibility and begging her to get Other Doug out of the hospital; and most importantly, he begged her to give Other Doug another chance.

She asked him why he’d done it.

He didn’t know. Misery, jealousy, grief? Curiosity? Amusement? None of those answers seemed to quite get at the root of it. Nor was it pure self-loathing. When he’d finished groveling, Doug promised Other Nadia he’d leave them alone.

His Nadia had stood by, watching the whole ordeal. Then he got to stand by as the two Nadia’s said goodbye and wished each other well.

“So, thanks for the weirdest two hours of my life, Doug,” Nadia said. “Here’s what’s going to happen now. I’m going to tell you three things, then we’re never going to talk to each other again if I can help it, okay?”

“I figured as much,” Doug said.

“First, I’m very sorry about your brother, Doug. That sucks, and I hope you figure out how to move on in a way that he could be proud of.”

“Thank you, Nadia.”

“Second, you need to get some help to work out whatever it is you’ve got going on, because somehow you managed to take what should have been a miraculous discovery and turn it into something dark and sad and twisted. I mean, it’s perfectly human, right? We discover another universe and the first thing we do is find a novel way to torture each other on multiple planes of existence. Not saying it’s not fitting, but as excited as I am to share the discovery with colleagues, I’m willing to keep this quiet until you figure out a more dignified way to reveal it to the world. But that’s going to be your problem.”

“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that.”

“Finally, it’s not that I didn’t think the same thing about you when I first saw you, like Nadia did on her side, Doug. But you never even said hi to me, just waved through a window. And you sit up in that lab all day every day, depressed and alone apparently. You need to make some friends, Doug.”

He shrugged.

“One advantage you have that no other guy in the history of the universe has ever had, is that you already know who your friends are. You just have to reach out. Okay?

“Goodbye, Doug. Best of luck to you.”

“Thank you, Nadia,” Doug said.

The following night, Doug got word from Other Nadia that Doug had been released from the psych hold. She also told him Other Doug was in no mood for an apology.

In the weeks and then months that followed, Doug spent most of his time trying to get back in Asim’s good graces by getting back on track with the DOD grant. He didn’t talk with Nadia, and when they did meet eyes as he walked past the MATLab, hers held both a shared understanding and a cue for Doug to keep walking. He respected her wishes. He also took her advice to seek counseling. Mostly the conversation revolved around Jackson, Doug’s isolation, and vague notions of the contempt he occasionally felt for himself. The university therapist was helpful, but for Doug, he never quite got to the place where he could give himself a break, as she often put it.

That fall, with the DOD lab work completed, Asim moved Doug out of the fourth-floor lab. No one had bothered his box in the back room. Asim was furious about all the extra server time Doug had used without any discernable purpose, at least to Asim’s understanding.

The evening after he left the lab, Doug sat at his computer and wrote a sincere and honest apology to his counterpart, the one he’d wanted to write for months but didn’t quite have the words for. Somehow losing immediate access to the tech connecting him with Other Doug reminded him of the unfinished business that needed to be addressed. So he wrote.

The following day, Doug went back into the lab and hooked his personal computer into the server so he could send the apology. Even though he didn’t think there was a high probability of getting a response from his counterpart, Doug left the connection on, tucking his laptop into a bag and sliding it behind the box.

Late that afternoon, alone in his office, he got an alert on his phone. It was Doug.

“Four months, two weeks, and three days, really Doug? It took you that long to stop beating yourself up over this thing?”

Doug didn’t know what to say.

“You know I forgave you like, months ago, right? Nadia told me everything you told her. Said she felt sorry for you.”

Doug picked up his phone. “Pity’s not really something I’ve ever aspired to, Doug. It was a really low time in my life.”

“I know. I’m sorry about your brother, Doug. I tried to imagine, and I don’t think I can.”

“I appreciate it. I hope you never have to know. How is Nadia? Are you two still together?”

“We’re fine. Everything’s great.”

“Good. Great, actually. I’m happy for both of you.”

There was an awkward pause, and Doug was about to tell Other Doug that he thought it might be better if they stopped corresponding.

“So, Doug,” Other Doug said. “I understand that part of you, when you first contacted me, wanted to give me the kick in the ass you thought I could use. Before you go, I need to ask you, how is the Physics meet-up going?”

“What Physics meet up?”

“Patty, Dustin, Erica? Our friends?”

“I never did reach out.”

“I told Jax about you. He thought I was joking at first, but I think I really convinced him. He told me he wanted you to move on with your life, just like he’d want me to. I know he’s not your brother. He may not understand you, but I do. Consider this your kick in the ass. You’re going to reach out to all three of them today, right?”

“I should,” Doug said.

“You’re going to. Do it and we’re square. That and the CliffsNotes on the DOD project from your end. I gather you’re still like five months ahead.”

Doug laughed. “Deal. But don’t catch up too quickly. I’m losing all my server privileges. I’ll probably catch hell for this conversation, but I’ll send you everything you need to set up a transfer on your end.”

“How do you know I won’t get the next universe over? The next Doug LeKalb?”

“If you do, Doug, go easy on him.”

“You know I will.”

That afternoon, Doug LeKalb did something that was totally out of character, at least to everyone who knew who he was in Boston. He climbed up the stairs to the 6^th floor in the SPARK and he walked from one corner of the building to the other, introducing himself to Evan Greenblatt, Erica Wong, and Patrick Dassault and inviting them all for a beer.

Later that night, Doug sat alone at the Bell in Hand for a half hour nursing an amber lager. Before he’d even gotten the chance to order a second beer, all three of his new friends showed up, ordered a drink, and asked one another about their lives and work in this universe. Doug had a few words to say, a story to tell, and a way forward beyond the lab. Doug LeKalb had a life of his own.