When the Universe Calls

“Hello. No need to be alarmed. I have taken over your computer to talk to you, and I’ve frozen you and time itself so you don’t interrupt me and nobody interrupts us. Now I’m assuming this is your first time talking to a supreme being like myself. I can’t give you my real name due to its power being too much for your mortal soul, but you can simply call me the Universe. That’s normally the calls for help I answer anyways. The people who turn to gods aren’t as fun, so I leave those to my siblings, but I’m not sure they answer them either.”

“But anyways enough about me, let’s talk about you. I’ve seen you and many others reading those choose your own adventure stories. They’ve piqued my interest but I was curious how people would play them if the person you were reading about was actually real and under your control. So I spent some time watching everyone playing choose your own adventure stories and honestly I couldn’t choose one person so I just let some chaos in and just picked one of you at random. So don’t let me down.”

“So here’s the deal. Despite me going by the Universe, I can actually watch over a multiverse. But that doesn’t have the same ring to it, and nobody ever seeks help from the multiverse. So I ran through some ideas and figured giving you control over someone in your own universe would have some messy consequences. Purely hypothetically, of course, you definitely aren’t my second try at this and certainly not my fifth try because that would be embarrassing if I wrecked 5 universes before figuring out that I needed to do cross universe control. Or at least I hope cross universe control works, but why wouldn’t it?”

“So I’ve got this metal collar that will act as a conduit for your choices. It has your name engraved right here, see where it says Sam? That is your name right? Now I’m going to just drop this into another universe and I’ve enchanted it so that whoever picks it up will be inclined to put it on. Then you can watch their lives unfold, and when I see fit I’ll freeze time in their world and let you decide what they do next. We’ll figure out the specifics as we go, I’ve never done this before, well at least not long enough to figure out specifics.”

“So with all that setup out of the way, it’s time for us to pick a world. This is a new step since my previous attempts at this were all in the same universe. So let’s see what kind of world would you like control over one person. We could do one nearly identical to your own universe. There are plenty of fantasy universes with magic and beasts. Maybe an alien world, or a more advanced world living with advanced technology. So pick a world, any world. What do you want? Come on pick something. . . . . I’m starting to lose patience, if you don’t pick soon, maybe I’ll just select a different person to play and end your universe all together.”

“Oh, oops. Forgot to unfreeze you. Sorry about that, ignore my impatience. Okay now tell me what kind of world do you want?”