Overwhelmed

Dan sat in bed and stared up at the spinning fan above him.

It'd been a few months since he'd been kidnapped from his universe and brought to this bizarre new one. A part of him thought that one of these days he was going to wake up back there and be able to put everything behind him as some fever dream. Yet it never happened. Every day he woke up in his beautifully furnished house with its polished oak floors and lovingly painted robin's egg blue walls, stepped into a bathroom whose marble tile he'd never been able to previously afford, and down into his lavish kitchen with all the latest appliances to sit down and not think about how to budget his meals this week as money was no longer a concern with the overly generous stipend he was given.

Even if he didn't materially need to anymore, Dan wanted to work or at least find something to desperately take his mind off of everything. Oh, he'd gotten better since he'd first been dragged kicking and screaming across the void of space-time to his new home and been utterly bewildered as he was poked and prodded by the scientists that had conducted their experiment. He could barely even remember the seemingly infinite barrage of questions from his first few days in this new reality as they tried to ascertain what his old universe had been like. Luckily for him, there had been no problematic barriers like languages that didn't exist in his world or anything of the sort. But his desire to think about something, anything, else besides his current situation felt nearly impossible.

It wasn't that anyone had been unkind to Dan. Ever since he'd fully managed to take stock of what had happened, they had treated him with nothing but smiles and reassurances; as much as his current living situation was an apology for what was done to him, they could have thrown him to the wolves the moment it was apparent that any further data was only going to be tertiary at best. His life had even achieved a kind of faux normalcy except for the visits from the lead scientist to conduct the occasional checkup with him and the odd interview from straggling media organizations after the initial frenzy to get his take on what it was like to be the first human being to cross from one dimension to the next had died down a bit.

No, it wasn't the fact that he was stuck in a world where everyone had penises that bothered him. Even if one of them existed now only in his mind a preference for dick or pussy had never been an issue for him (in that sense, he was glad that he'd been the one to come through instead of some hapless straight boy). His issue was that literally overnight he'd gone from some random joe to one of the most important people on planet earth - or at least, this planet earth anyway. It was a kind of celebrity that would be impossible to shake for the rest of his life and, just as he'd thought, he'd gotten his fair share of admirers to go along with it.

They were women for the most part and while there was the occasional worrying comment that made him question the mental stability of the person making it, it was mostly harmless fluff. A meme here, a Facebook group there, either gushing about how they were the right one for him or, if they were feeling less tactful, how much they and their friends would like to spit roast him. In any other scenario he might've thought he'd hit the jackpot. After all, thousands of women willing to throw themselves at him without a second thought was the dream of countless men the world over. But if nothing else, his dad had helped drill a strong work ethic into him and, frankly, he felt that all the attention he was receiving wasn't particularly deserved. All he had done, all he was doing, was simply exist.

When he was finally finished feeling sorry for himself, he threw off his sheets and lifted himself up out of bed. The early morning shone brightly through the flowing curtains on the opposite side of the room, causing shadows to dance this way or that as the branches they came from were blown by the wind. He had to admit that in all the ruckus that had gone on since he'd woken up in this parallel world it was nice that the government had gone out of its way to find him the most peaceable spot they could. He didn't know he missed the quiet of a small forest off the beaten path of the city until he was fully situated. At least the birds and other animals wouldn't pine after him.

After beginning his morning routine of brushing and flossing, Dan made his way downstairs to the kitchen, threw open the door and began to rummage for the milk. When he finally found the plastic jug he turned around and went for a bowl, then his usual standby of Cheerios, and finally a spoon before going about assembling it all (deciding that he felt far too lazy today to cut any fruit). As he sat there, quietly chewing his cereal and wondering what to do with all the free time he'd suddenly gained, he almost jumped out of his Ikea chair when he heard his doorbell ring.

'Shit, is it Friday already?' he thought to himself as he looked over at the calendar stuck to the fridge with a magnet.

Sure enough, he caught the telltale sign of today's date circled with a bright red marker with the simple phrase "BLOMQVIST" written underneath. Inwardly sighing Dan picked himself up and began to shuffle through the kitchen, down his fairly expansive hall, and out into the foyer of his new digs. Taking a moment to put on a simple pair of slippers, he fumbled with the door's lock for a moment before he pushed it aside.

"Hi, doc," Dan said with a nod as he stepped aside to let his guest in. Evelin Blomqvist gave him a curt nod before she stepped wordlessly past the threshold and into the house, a briefcase under one arm, and a pen in the other. No matter how ridiculous her preparation Blomqvist never failed to make it seem like anything he said was the most important thing in the world.

"Should I take everything to our usual spot in the living room, Mr. Wright?"

"Ah, well, I got up not that long ago. Just having breakfast when I heard you ring, as a matter of fact. Would you mind going to the kitchen instead?"

The shrill whine of her phone interrupted whatever answer she would've told him and she ripped it out of the purse at her side with such speed that Dan didn't even know she'd managed to open it until he saw the device in her hand moments later. After several moments of her clacking away against the screen to send a text she turned her attention back to him and nodded, tiredly brushing a loose strand of her platinum blond hair back into place in her otherwise immaculate, tightly bound bun.

As they walked back to the kitchen, Dan idly thought about making small talk but decided against it. If one were to search for a picture of an 'ice queen' on Google he was sure Blomqvist would be the first to come up before anything Disney or Hans Christian Andersen related. The most human he'd ever gotten to experience her was when he'd woken up in her laboratory, surrounded by men and women in lab coats, and she had apologized profusely for everything that they had chosen to do. The further they'd gotten from that initial date the more she'd grown distant, though whether out of a sense of professionalism or because she didn't really know how to deal with people in general he couldn't say; maybe it was even a mix of both.

He went over to his chair again as the two of them entered together and she moved around the table to sit opposite of Dan. Before he knew it, she was already snapping open the case and spilling out a number of pieces of paper onto his countertop, eyes moving from one to the next, before pulling a small handful of them and sitting them in front of her. Clicking her pen only once, she put it down just above the page she'd decided to use, before looking at him expectantly.

"How've you been since we last spoke, Mr. Wright?"

"Fine, I guess," he answered, dipping his spoon down into his breakfast. "Same as it always is these days."

Scritch-scritch-scritch.

"No new developments in your personal life?"

"Kind of hard to do when I don't think my parents exist here or any of my friends," he murmured, not bothering to hide the disappointment in his voice. For a brief moment, he watched Blomqvist's normally piercing blue eyes soften before they went back to being the same clinically detached gaze that she always seemed to possess.

"I just imagined that it would get very lonely being out here by yourself. Surely you'd want to go meet new people?"

"Being famous is great for a lot of things, but it means every time you go out people want to take advantage of that. They're not cruel just..." Wright trailed off, shoveling the cereal into his mouth as an excuse to think of a response. "...They treat me like I'm a piece of fragile china or a slab of meat at the butcher shop."

"I see," Blomqvist said, jotting whatever it was she'd gotten out of that down. "As much as I wish we could make it otherwise what you experienced was always going to make you stand out."

Not that you had any choice in the matter hung in the air between them unsaid.

"Look, doc..." Wright began, scratching the back of his neck. "I can't imagine that any of this is ever going to be useful for you. I think you've tapped the well dry at this point. The world I'm from might not have all the same people, but it's close enough that you'd never be able to tell the difference except for, well, you know."

Blomqvist placed her pen down, folded her hands, and sat across from him in silence for a few moments as she studied him. He had to admit, despite her typical demeanor, she was quite the looker. Though he had no particular knowledge of when she was born he was sure she couldn't have been much older than her early 30s, always dressed in smart black women's slacks and a white dress shirt, and an IQ that was off the charts (she was, after all, the theoretical physics prodigy that had brought him here in the first place).

"Like I've said before," she sighed, "think of it like a wellness check. The last thing I or anyone else needs are ethics complaints from idiots who can't appreciate the kind of revolutionary-"

Blomqvist paused, stopping herself before she continued on what had felt like the beginning of a tirade.

"Besides, you're unique, and will remain that way for the foreseeable future."

With that remark, a glower crossed her otherwise graceful Scandinavian features.

"I'm sorry?" Dan asked confusedly. As much as he'd initially been a part of Blomqvist's world, a lot of the discussion about where to take the technology they'd developed had been far above his head. He knew that there had been many people furious that they'd even tried what they had in the first place - a position he was definitely sympathetic to - but there were those who wanted to try again and maybe even go much further, to places that were far more alien and strange than a timeline where the sexes had diverged considerably.

"Our current objective is going to be various inanimate objects. No one's going to complain that a book is missing, after all."

She folded her arms across her chest and gave a drawn out, exasperated snort.

"Right now, you're our most valuable asset since you're an actual living being."