Gate Story
Matthew Ryan Fischer
It was the end of the beginning or the beginning of the end or
some other such transitional moment. Left, right. Forward, backwards. They
always led in one of two directions. There were always two choices. It could go
either way. One or the other. Hardly ever both. But that was another way of
looking at these things altogether.
Choice. That was the key. It was the choice of free will or the
choice of destiny. It was the choice to cross the threshold and take what came.
John looked at the gate and thought about his choice. He could
slip out and around things and he had the uncanny knack of being able to look
both ways. He didn’t always know what he was looking at. He didn’t always know
which was real and which was just possible. It was unfair and made the process
difficult. But that was the way things were.
The gate offered choice. It would do things. All one had to do was
step through. It wasn’t a promise, it wasn’t a guarantee. It didn’t make any
particular outcome turn out more likely any more than it made any other outcome
occur. What it did was make an opportunity point. It made a moment of potential
and a moment of divergence. Things could go either way. There was no way of
knowing which way.
Most people couldn’t see their options. Most people didn’t know.
John could slip outside of the normal space-time flow of things and see more
than he should have been able to see. He was presented with too many choices,
too many opportunities. There were too many outcomes to process. There were
more outcomes than he could properly conceive of or comprehend. Every
opportunity point presented an infinity of choice. It was too much to take.
There was no way he was going to properly analyze them all and make a
well-educated choice. The failure was debilitating.
One versus two would have been okay. Maybe. One versus a million
was impossible.
John wanted to go back. He could go back. He thought maybe he
should go back. He could ignore all the current choices and just go back and
start over. He could start at the beginning and subtly nudge everything in one
direction. He could pick a path and aim for it. Everything was achievable. Time
was mutable. He could make a perfect decision and create a perfect outcome.
But there were too many paths. Too many directions. He didn’t know
where to begin or what to do if he could figure out which beginning was the
correct beginning.
John looked at the gate. He thought about the gate. He just stood
there. Going back, there were too many options. Going forward, there was no way
of knowing which forward was going to turn out to be the real forward. There
were just too many of them to understand them all. He didn’t know and what he
didn’t know froze him with fear.
On the other side of things, Janice had stood and looked at the
gate long enough. The intrigue of possibilities was too great and she had to
find out. She took a step forward and crossed the threshold into the gate. For
her, everything was change.
No comments:
Post a Comment