quantum immortals [other worlds]

Time enough at last?

May 29, 2025

Author’s Note (Rexy Dorado): I haven’t been writing enough recently; the full script for the Maharlika series was written in 2022 and so I’m trying to find opportunities to write more consistently between all the “work” work.

Here’s an extra-short piece for you, from outside the Maharlika universe—with possibly more to come!

And one day, humanity discovered irrefutable proof of an infinite multiverse. Cue the clamor of possibility. A bottomless well of living color.

But what dawned on them later was the logical conclusion: each and every living being sentenced to their own unlimited personal hells. For each conscious quantum thing, their infinite worldlines eventually thinned into a smaller infinity of serial survivors.

At first, perhaps, they would find themselves inches away from a fatal accident. And soon enough, saved by a miracle cure to a terminal illness.

It would be funny, for a while—how lucky could a person be? A missed plane crash here, a jammed gun hammer there, on and on—until they found themselves stranded at the end of time, the sole survivor of interplanetary extinction. With the one genetic mutation that could survive the final apocalypse. What luck.

And at the end of existence, there swelled an odd chorus. Everett’s Requiem swept across a crowded infinity of empty skies.

For in a fraction of those dead universes survived a version of each person that was their inner artist. Freed from all distractions and stripped of all excuses—fueled by an improbable lifespan of experiences and memories of all the beauty they outlived—

There, in their ultimate solitude, they would find the perfect melody, erect their perfect sculpture, write their perfect ode to all that ever was.

Performed for an infinite audience of one.