Abernathy Keith

Abby's from a high-tech original universe, one with man-made pocket universes, cybernetic implants, and thriving interplanetary (and inter-universe) commerce. Magic fascinates him, as does anything supernatural, and he seeks out new phenomena and experiences with a curiosity bordering on compulsion. He's pansexual, has a deep protective streak, and is casually tactile when given permission.

One of his core traits is his wanderlust a.k.a. his ‘itchy feet.’ Settling down feels very much like a trap, and while he does roll with basically everything, the state of being existentially off-balance is where he’s most comfortable. Contentment is a type of stagnation; he knows a thousand ways to leave and zero ways to stay. In a similar vein, too, with choices great and small, closing doors and choosing specific paths inspires the kind of dread that makes him feel like he needs a bright, winning smile on his face while he desperately hunts for a way out and/or self-sabotages in a panic. This tendency toward escape artistry happens, too, when everything is too much, or when he doesn’t feel safe, or when he has any kind of emotion that he’s unwilling or unable to deal with. His go-to coping mechanism is to GTFO.

Abby’s other primary core trait is that he likes to think of himself as a friendly person who just wants others to be happy and who makes the world a better place. He does not, however, see ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ as things that can ultimately restrict his behavior. While he has ideals and values (be kind, be honest, be forthright), he will dump them in garbage without apology if he judges it absolutely necessary. He genuinely wants to be a good person—measured against those in his past that considers emulable—and most of the time it’s easy to be. When the chips are down, though, and he judges that ends justify the means, then that’s it.

Oftentimes, the ‘that’s it’ is tied to the protection of an individual. Collateral damage, at that point, is not his problem. Though that kind of blaze of glory type of decision means he’ll be leaving soon anyways, preferably before the embers are even cool. That and he can’t take anything with him anyways, so best to burn it all down before he leaves so there’s nothing to miss.

So with a somewhat…avoidant relationship with his own personal history and the events he’s not necessarily proud of therein, Abby is also prone to telling tall tales and bullshitting up his backstory. He does have a past—seventeen years before he skipped town and ten years on the interdimensional road—and some of it remains consistent (the people, usually, and the nature of where he’d been living), but the details…smear. He’ll use them how they’re needed, often in service of seeking connection with others. (Feel free to call him out if you catch him at it.)

Universe-tuning Implant: the device appears as two little silver discs, one beneath each of his ears. In reality, the implant accesses his brain and performs two main functions. First, it technologically provides an abstraction layer for the complex math-up-subatomic-particles that defines a discrete universe such that the distinctions are able to be processed by a human brain. The abstraction of the local reality’s identifying ‘fingerprint’ is translated into music, allowing him to interpret the ‘universe-song’ of each individual slice of probability-reality. The second function is’ universe-song attunement,’ more or less. This is what allows Abby to shift from universe to universe. These two functions are related, but neither depend on one another.

Plays a Mean Guitar: Abby’s constant companion and only true possession for the last ten years has been the guitar given to him by his almost-sister. He’s pretty good with it.

Jack-of-All-Trades: Abby has a very broad practical knowledge of many useful things, but very little theoretical knowledge of anything at all, nor does he have expertise in any one thing. He is adept at trial-and-error in the pursuit of something functional, but while he has an instinct for how things work, for the most part he doesn’t actually know the underlying principles.

Abby grew up in a ‘small-town’ bubble universe and hopped the first wormhole out when he hit majority at age seventeen. He hitched his way to the nearest metropolis, a multi-universe hub, by paying his way washing dishes at waystations and having, shall we say, small adventures. Young and invincible, he did a lot of making spontaneous friends and couch-surfing as he started to learn how good he was at getting out of trouble (i.e. not good at all).

Once at the metropolis, he acquired both a tattoo and a universe-tuning implant. The tattoo? A constellation on his lower right hip called 'The Wanderer', one that only shows up during summer nights on his home planet in his home universe. It's a series of three stylized stars in a zigg-zagging line. The implant? It shows up as a pair of dime-sized bumps of silver metal, one beneath each of his ears.

A decade later, his only possession is a beat-to-shit guitar, and his implant works sporadically at best. He’s developed both an ear for local melodies, and a tendency to never say no to new experiences. His memory of how different universes ‘sound’ lets him tune his implant and return…if he ever feels the need. Mostly, though, he’s been universe-hopping, getting into trouble, and skipping town the moment his luck runs out.

Ten years worth of stories starts like this: a small-town boy, aged seventeen, is champing at the bit to leave his parents’ broken home. The place where he grew up feels tight around his heart, around his shoulders, and there’s just no damn room to grow up. Not in his parents’ house, where he has to contend with the skeletons in their closets and the shadows they cast just by living and a whole heap of expectations that barely have a passing acquaintance with reality. Not in the town, where everyone knows everyone and every damn relationship is the mortifying ordeal of being known—and every scrap of that kind of knowledge always seems to turn out to be a weapon or a noose or an indelible stain. Not inside his head, where gettin’ gone is the only path to survival.

So.

He gets gone.

The first story happens by surprise on the way to where he’s going, at a little truckstop, a waystation moon at the back-end of nowhere, midway between where he started and the destination he knows will open up the entirety of existence just for him. There, he falls in love, doesn’t he? He falls in love. Head over heels. Her name is sweet on his tongue, her fingers are delicate as they knit with his, and her eyes are bright with all the looking ahead toward the future she’s doing. There’s a city of opportunity he’s headed for and he’s taking her with him when he leaves. So he kisses her and makes promises that he doesn’t know yet to never make to someone.

He stays too long. That’s his first mistake. Something breaks between them, strained by the pressures of a small town not his own and the molasses-slow process of disentangling a life from all those ties that bind, and it’s not something he can fix by loving her no matter that he tries. All he knows is that he’s watched the future in her eyes darken by degrees until it’s as vacuum-black as the past he left behind and there's no air left for him to breathe in the void.

He hides the ring in her apron pocket before he goes, heart bleeding all over as he orders one last cup of coffee for the road and avoids any hint of a goodbye. The ring’s a gift. He can’t bear to take it with him.

Weeks, months, and dozens of couches and morning-afters later, the city is starlit and cosmopolitan with more little pockets of designer spacetime stapled to local reality than he can shake a stick at. His tattoo and implants both come from the same shabby, busy little port-side shop and he tunes to his first new universe right there on the sidewalk outside of the parlor. The songs that pass through him shiver under his skin in ripples of sound and light. He only stops when one particular string plucks itself importantly and then he’s somewhere strange and unknown and its melody is already soaking into his bones.

So the first story, where everything really begins, is about a woman and her two kids. The city he lands in layers him immediately with grime and there’s no technology there to speak of, but the entire universe is brand new and, in some way, he’s new, too, with the first discovered universe-song of many looping through his implants at all hours. He’s long learned how boyish his smile needs to be to open doors, so he opens some and the woman who hires him to mind her children looks at him, him all of eighteen-almost-nineteen, and she sees someone more lost than he actually is.

He lives the lie of being lost all the way until he sits down at the table with her family during one of the local eatin’ holidays, her siblings on his right, her kids on his left, and feels his blood freeze in his veins. Because while they weren’t ‘like that,’ her and him, not with the sense-memory of a little band of metal slipping through his fingers, that didn’t mean that they weren’t halfway to family. Worse, the future had started creeping into all of their conversations when he wasn’t paying attention, quiet words about higher education and extra bedrooms and plans for the summer.

And suddenly, he realizes: with all of the finding she and her family had done of him, performed under false pretenses, he had conjured things for them to find. Had handed himself a script and been reading his role, forgetting that he’d never been cast in the first place. The him that doesn’t exist is supposed to want all this stuff and the him that actually exists has never even heard of most of it. This isn’t where he belongs and the shape he sees himself calcifying into if he stays doesn’t leave any room for the vast multiversal symphony that awaits him just out of earshot.

He almost leaves the guitar her and her kids got him behind, but it had been a gift, and he never wants to forget the tune that still sings him to sleep even after all these months.

Most universes—little snippets of melody, harmony, and rhythm—aren’t earworms, or any type of notable in particular. He passes through them like a tourist, all of his business on his back, making friends for a day or a week or a month and moving on. A harmless foreigner with a boyish smile and slowly improving musical skills. He learns how to adapt his odd-job skills to technologies and physics he’d never even dreamed of back home. He doesn’t understand the bizarre power sources, or whatever the local magic’s named, or any of the technological paths that had long died out back home, but trial and error works the same everywhere even if the physics don’t.

In each place, he takes care not to overstay his welcome. Takes care not to make promises that can’t pass the multiversal barrier with him. And takes care not to let himself be coaxed into putting down roots, either playacted or true. His native soil is far, far from here, and he doesn’t want to gamble his life on a transplant.

The first story that really matters starts, as these kinds of stories always do, with conflict; a melody, in a rich, deep minor key, drops him in the middle of a feudal war. Magic is the weapon of choice, of which he has none, but he loses his heart to a man with a cause and whether or not he’s equipped to fight stops mattering. He’s neither a soldier nor a leader nor particularly adept at any one thing, but he is a pair of hands who has long discovered how large an explosion error can cause when he’s being deliberate about what he tries.

However, his lover’s cause is impossible and death will claim its champions sooner rather than later. Whatever kind of love drives him now is a far cry from the doomed sweetness of the first, but it’s enough like it that he cannot let his lover’s eyes darken. As he watches their options tick down like the numbers on the kind of bomb that doesn’t exist in a world of spells and sorcery, something snaps inside him and clears out, like it left the universe without him. After that, he champions their champion and, in his zealotry, stops tallying the cost of his actions.

He leaves soon after in a blaze of glorious victory, gifting the act. It’s a sacrifice, if not a death; he takes everything he brought into the universes out except the blood that soaks the soil. Afterward, his heart beats to drown out the universe’s song and the heavy, tripping cadence is woven with the terror of not recognizing his own hands at the ends of his arms.

A boyish smile, a beer, a bed for the night, on repeat. He performs familiar motions in familiarly unremarkable universes, one after the other after the next. Except even as he sheds the terror, beat by beat, and both his heart and steps lighten, whatever had left him behind when he’d stayed too long in love remains universes ahead of him and widening its lead.

So the next story begins with a hole in a life in the shape of a man. Not his life, mind; for all his love, what he’s missing isn’t a person. He fetches up in a not unremarkable universe, but shadowy courts filled with immortals of varying rumored levels of undeath are not, per se, unique. He doesn’t encounter any immortals, either, or not directly. Only a man who lost a best friend to love and immortality and who is now recasting the emptied role. After one look at the intensity of the protective codependency he’s being offered, he accepts the role willingly.

They both know he’s playacting.

Even with one eye on the clock and wary of wearing out his welcome, it’s nice to be someone expected for a while. When he’s looked at, the shadow of the person he’s not overlays him, but he can make all the right gestures and speak all the right words and it’s just…nice. As a type of love, he could do worse. The intensity fades over time as the role becomes less prominent—everything else that’s right about him, he’s still not the right person—and he starts thinking of himself as something like a parachute protecting against the bloody mess of a sharp, sudden stop at the bottom of a long fall.

Probably good that he’s temporary, too. All that fabric is hell to deal with once someone’s feet’re back on the ground.

So he gives the gift of solid ground and once he’s folded himself back up after, he leaves. The universe is a little better for him having passed through, and that little reminder is something he can take with him.

The local cluster of universes is pretty mundane, but he stays a little longer in each, interferes a little, doing small things that only someone who doesn’t exist can do for the people who live there. He doesn’t find whatever left him in that wartorn universe, but he does find a star to steer him by in the eyes of the people he meets. Sometimes, now, when he leaves, there’s genuine trouble on his heels, brought down on himself for someone else’s sake.

And sometimes—sometimes, he’s not an idiot—he sheds blood. Every universe drinks it.

That makes some small patch of that universe’s soil his own.

The story where all the problems start begins with a sour note. Half a decade on, and this is the first his implant comes across a dead universe. The universe-song is discordant, the melody that plays on repeat just for a moment sharp or flat, or purely wrong, and his implant stumbles.

Cracks.

The planet has air and little else but dust, and death, and the baleful eye of some wretched cosmic being that twitches as it looks past him. Every horror and terror he’s glanced past or sidled around or escaped from hits him all at once. From body to soul, his entire being shivers fit to knock him off his feet as he tries to make his implant tune back into the symphony beneath reality.

For three terrible minutes beneath a bloodsoaked sun, his implant fails again and again.

The instant his boots hit grass in a living universe, he drops to his knees and sobs.

This, then, is the first story without a smile to open a door for himself. The existential dread comedown from the dead universe wipes out all his higher thought and it’s all he can do to bask in the green-scented breeze until the locals find him. They take him in, flightless as he is, and let him sit near their hutches to watch the tiny, hopping herbivores nibble their fodder and twitch away insects for days at a time.

His wits return do return, if in fits and starts, but he stays longer than he means; the universe-song quiets out of his bones for horrible, timeless spans and the fear of that silence leaves him unwilling to test his implant. Still, he does leave, though only for the promise of a tinker in the city and the possibility of repairs. Once there, the color and light that fill the streets are only just enough to take his mind off of the possibility he’s trapped in a place where everyone but him can launch themselves into the sky and soar.

The tinker roots around beneath his skin and he bleeds on their tools like he didn’t when his implant was installed, but the implant is unique in this universe and the best the tinker can do is a kludge. What he needs is a full replacement or repairs from someone in a universe that’s traveled a similar technological path far enough to make a difference. What he has is a probabilistic local cluster of universes that are all relatively low-tech and an implant that can process only a few songs at a time.

By that metric, he’s a long way from anywhere he could possibly call home.

He leaves the tinker with implant schematics enough to throw off the entire universe’s technological progression (a gift he’s certain he shouldn’t be giving) and cautiously follows a thread of melody somewhere new. His breath only comes easily again when the kludge holds and a new universe-song unfolds in his bones.

Of course he has lied before, and often, that his implant was on the fritz, as an excuse to stay or an excuse to leave. Now, however, it isn’t quite a lie, and the care he must take with his very presence in any universe is new and unwelcome. He can no longer leave at will, can no longer shed his skin, his name and past and life, without wondering if this would be the last time he can. If this was a life he wanted to keep. If this was a life he could survive.

Of course, next comes the story when he starts to wonder what if. He’s older, now, near ten years gone, and playacting a lost boy suits him less. In a universe where everyone is obsessed with their care of massive companion mammals, a doctor takes him in. There, he plants and harvests and mixes and studies and he thinks back to the university he’d almost gone to and the books he’d nearly finished and the family he didn’t join. He’s partially an apprentice but mostly a menial, and while his collected knowledge is best described by its breadth, it’s gaining dimension with every spine he cracks.

He almost stays.

Hands burrowed into the dirt, he digs up tubers for their meals and turns the soil for planting and considers the nature of roots. Then, he slices his hand open while paring off eyes for seed. As he sits and bleeds through his bandage, he wonders what it would be like for his help to not be the last act he might ever gift to someone in this lifetime. Wonders what happens after the moment is over and the dust settles.

He scars. There’s a trick to staying, a knack that he doesn’t have. Nothing holds him there, either, however, and that’s the deciding factor.

Not saying goodbye is a habit that he’s unsure he should break, so he doesn’t.

Then, worst and hardest to tell: a story of uncertainty in a universe with a melody like an alarm’s wail. There is no outcome. She and he fasten onto each other in something like love, but the whole set-up is tailored to make them bleed. Maybe she dies. Maybe he fails to save her. There is no grand gesture, no last sacrifice, and after, no guarantee that he wouldn’t be bringing death down upon them both if he returns. Uncertainty means she’s alive, always. Going back would collapse the wave-form.

He doesn’t go back.

But then, he never has gone back, so this time’s no different, really. Once the story’s over, it’s over.

That’s his refrain, at least, as he makes his slow way toward the universe he should call home.