Lee sat down to write but something nagged him, tugged at his shirt collar, and it wasn’t the cat.

He looked up from the writing desk in his study.

In all directions, from all angles, copies of himself watching himself watch himself writing stretched into infinity, his body morphing from infant to old man, from human to android, from anthropomorphic form to disjointed sets of states of energy.

Lee let go of Guin’s hand and the image stopped.

Guin laughed.

“What is it, Lee. You look surprised. Did I shock you?”

Lee reached out to hold Guin’s hand again.

They were standing together on Mars, admiring the untouched landscape — their Martian lander behind them, cooling down –exchanging thoughts of uncontrollable joy.

Lee held on to Guin’s hand.

“Do you feel what I feel?”

Guin nodded.  “Now you understand what I’ve been trying to tell you. It’s nothing like a runner’s high.”

Lee swung Guin’s hand back and forth. “But this…this vision I’m seeing…it’s so real!”

Guin nodded again. “I know. It lasts as long as you want it to!”

Lee listened to the rhythm of the song playing over the dance club speakers and began to move Guin in a West Coast Swing right-hand turn while simultaneously lifting Guin high in the light gravitational field on Mars.

How could this be possible?

Lee saw more visions of the future, the intersection of groupthink thought patterns associated with back-to-back readings of books by Bill Gates and Daniel Dennett while wondering if gender still played a part in science writing.

He realised who he really was and would become.

After the song ended, Lee let go of Guin’s hand but the visions persisted.

What was going on?

Five years passed and the visions had come true, one by one, infinities collapsing into single data points, twisting into torii, nonreligious formulae yet sacred at the same time.

Why Guin?

Every time he questioned why, global catastrophe occurred. Every time he accepted why, universal truths revealed themselves with a type of golden aura.

The energy levels that flooded his system overwhelmed him at first but with time Lee learned to channel the energy creatively, on the dance floor and in his writing.

What, then, of an unrealised vision of him in a wooded countryside not far from a university town, playing with her kids?

Why did he feel he is some type of wise instructor in that vision, a duplicate of himself also living in other parts of the solar system, some with Guin, some not, performing parallel experiments on body upgrades for future enhancements on unmodified versions of himself, an iterative process, all of his versions interconnected as one node on the ISSANet?

A vision more real than typing these words about the vision.

Lee looked at his selves again.

It was all true.

No need to ask why.