Then the researchers would continue to monitor the news over the following weeks and months to see how the divergences grew over time. They looked for a classic “for want of a nail, a kingdom was lost” scenario, where the ripples expanded steadily but in an intelligible manner. Instead what they found were other small discrepancies, unrelated to the one they’d originally discovered; the weather was instigating changes everywhere, all the time. By the time a significant political divergence was observed, it was difficult to ascertain what the cause had been. The problem was exacerbated by the fact that every study had to end once a prism’s pad was exhausted; no matter how interesting any particular divergence might be, the connection between branches was always temporary.
In the private sector, entrepreneurs realized that while the information obtained from prisms had limited instrumental value, it was something that could be sold as content to consumers. A new kind of data broker emerged: a company would exchange news about current events with its parallel versions and sell the information to subscribers. Sports news and celebrity gossip were the easiest to sell; people were often just as interested in what their favorite stars did in other branches as in what they did in their own. Hard-core sports fans collected information from multiple branches and argued about which team had the best overall performance and whether that was more important than their performance in any individual branch. Readers compared different versions of novels published in different branches, with the result that authors faced competition from pirated copies of books they might have written. As prisms with larger pads were developed, the same thing began happening with music, and then film.
At the first meeting she attended, Nat had been incredulous at the things its attendees talked about: a man obsessively worried that his paraself was having more fun than he was, a woman trapped in a spiral of doubt because her paraself voted for a different candidate than she did. Were these the sorts of things regular people thought of as problems? Waking up covered in your own vomit; having to fuck your dealer because you couldn’t scrape together enough cash: those were real problems. Nat had momentarily fantasized about telling everyone in the group they should just get over themselves, but of course she didn’t, and not just because it would have blown her cover. She was in no position to judge these people. So what if they felt sorry for themselves? Better to wallow in self-pity over nothing than to have actually screwed up your life.
Nat had moved out here to get a fresh start, away from the people and places that could trigger a relapse. The job at SelfTalk wasn’t great, but it was good to earn an honest paycheck, and she mostly liked hanging out with Morrow. His side hustles had been fun; she’d always been good at that sort of thing, and she told herself that it helped keep her from relapsing, because the pleasure of conning people was a safe substitute for getting high. Lately, though, Nat had begun to feel that she was just fooling herself about that. Even if she wasn’t spending the money on drugs, these little scams would probably lead her back to using again. It’d be better for her to get away from all of it; she had to find a different job, away from Morrow, and that probably meant relocating again. But she needed money to do that, so she had to keep working with Morrow before she’d be able to not work with him anymore.
Zareenah was talking. “My niece is a senior in high school, and for the last few months it’s been college application season. This week they heard back, and she did pretty well; she was accepted to three schools. I was feeling good about it until I was chatting with my paraself.
“It turns out that my paraself’s niece got accepted to Vassar, which was her first choice. But here in this branch, that’s one of the schools that rejected my niece. Everything different between our two branches is a result of my activating the prism, right? So I’m the cause of my niece getting rejected. I’m to blame.”
“You’re assuming that if you hadn’t activated the prism, your niece would have gotten accepted,” said Kevin. “But that’s not necessarily true.”
Zareenah started tearing apart a tissue she held in her hands, a habit of hers when talking about herself. “But that means my paraself did something to help her niece, something I didn’t do in this branch. So I’m to blame through my inaction.”
“You’re not to blame,” said Lyle.
“But everything different is because of my prism.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s your fault.”
“How can it not be?”
At a loss, Lyle turned to Dana for help. Dana asked Zareenah, “Aside from Vassar, were there any other differences in the acceptances and rejections that your niece and her paraself got?”
“No, the rest are the same.”
“So we can assume that your niece’s overall application package was equally strong in both branches.”
“Yes,” she said firmly. “She’s a smart girl, and nothing I do is going to change that.”
“So let’s speculate for a minute. Why would Vassar accept your niece in the other branch but not in this one?”
“I don’t know,” said Zareenah.
Dana looked around the room. “Does anyone else have any ideas?”
Lyle said, “Maybe the admissions officer in this branch was having a bad day when he reviewed her application.”
“And what might have caused him to have a bad day?”
Nat had to feign interest, so she participated. “Maybe someone cut him off in traffic that morning.”
“Or he dropped his phone in the toilet,” said Kevin.
“Or both,” said Lyle.
To Zareenah, Dana said, “Are any of those foreseeable consequences of actions you took?”
“No,” admitted Zareenah. “I guess not.”
“They’re just random results of the weather being different between the two branches. And anything can cause the weather to be different. If we looked, I’m sure we could find a hundred people whose prisms connect a branch where your niece was rejected. If the same thing happens in branches where you acted differently, then you aren’t the cause.”
“But I still feel like it’s my fault.”
Dana nodded. “We like the idea that there’s always someone responsible for any given event, because that helps us make sense of the world. We like that so much that sometimes we blame ourselves, just so that there’s someone to blame. But not everything is under our control, or even anyone’s control.”
“I can see it’s not a rational response, but I feel it anyway,” said Zareenah. “I think I’m prone to feeling guilty about my sister…” She paused. “Because of our history.”
“Do you want to talk about that?” asked Dana.
Zareenah hesitated, and then went on. “Years ago, when we were teenagers, we both studied dance, but she was much better than me. She got an audition to attend Juilliard, but I was so jealous that I sabotaged her.”
Now this was interesting: legitimately bad behavior. Nat hadn’t heard anything like this in the group before, but she was careful not to lean forward too eagerly.
“I put caffeine in her water bottle because I knew that would throw her off. She didn’t get accepted.” Zareenah put her face in her hands. “I feel like I can never make up for what I’ve done. You probably can’t relate to that.”
A pained look crossed Dana’s face, but she quickly rearranged her expression. “We’ve all made mistakes,” she said. “Believe me, I’ve made my share. But there’s a difference between accepting responsibility for our actions and taking the blame for random misfortunes.”