A story by Adam-Troy Castro and Alvaro Zinos-Amaro,, March/April 2017 Analog.

The bed is overcrowded with Me again. There is a Me to my left and a Me to my right and another Me curled in a fetal position at the foot of the bed; and there are others passed out with exhaustion in their floor, wheezing the raspy breath of sleep. Several other versions of Me sleep with the silence of the dead; others snore like buzzsaws, coughing or murmuring or muttering words of infinite frustration at the blind stubbornness of Me, the one at the center of all this, the one who lies in his bed wishing that they’d all go away and stop trying to get Me to listen to them.

 I cannot hate them because they are Me — at least not any more than I am sometimes moved to hate myself — but as I lie on my teeming mattress listening to the ones in the bedroom and the ones in the hallway and the ones sleeping in shifts in the kitchen and the ones in the living room and the ones in the closets, as I breathe in the communal stench of over fifty unwashed versions of Me exhausting my air conditioner’s ability to cope, as I listen to the half-dozen insomniac versions of Me arguing ad infinitum over the precise shape and form of the disaster about to ruin the rest of my life, it is hard not to want Me to be gone.

One of Me, the one who first explained the peculiar physics behind my predicament, identifies himself as a probability theorist. He is by a considerable margin the most annoying little prick of the bunch: he has thin little lips and watery little eyes and an offensively ridiculous toupee that sits atop his head like a turd recently dropped by a seagull. He is forty years older than Me and one of the few who’s developed a smoking habit. Despite the oppressiveness of the atmosphere in here, he persists in lighting up his noxious orange cigarettes and turning the precious air all around us to toxic haze. Even worse, he is even more than the others absolutely convinced that he’s right: and though he’s suffered more than one beating at the hands of the more brutal versions of Me who are even more repulsed by him than I am, he persists in keeping that awful nasal voice of his going from the moment he wakes up in the morning to the moment he finally succumbs to exhaustion at night I don’t want to consider the unlikely series of events that would lead up to Me someday becoming just like him. But he has his uses, and one of them was on the first day all these versions of Me invaded, when he explained what was happening to us in the most concise terms imaginable. He was the one who told Me that the fifty familiar strangers who had just rung my doorbell, who had waited for Me to open it and had then marched through the threshold, were not of equal legitimacy. Though they looked like the Me of tomorrow, the Me of five years from now, the Me of forty years from now, the Me who I could aspire to and the Me who I desperately needed to avoid becoming, and though they all claimed to have traveled here from their own particular versions of my future to offer vitally important but mutually contradictory advice, though they are all only projected duplicates who do not need to eat and drink and eliminate wastes, one of the fifty is more real than the others, since he reflects my true future and all the rest are merely flawed reflections created by an error in chronal translation. I did not have to reconcile the paradoxes. I just had to understand that the rest of my life depends on figuring out which Me is giving Me the proper information.

“Because if you don’t,” he said, on that first day, while the forty-nine other versions of Me all nodded or grunted or gibbered in abject agreement, “you are doomed to absolute disaster any day now.”

Find the rest of the story in the March / April ANALOG.

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