When my sensors began to clear and reported the ship in front of me was the same ship I was sitting in, I knew it was going to be a long day. It wasn’t just similar; it was exactly the same ship. I was staring at my own rear.

When I was a child, I read up on the history of space travel. One of the earliest pioneers who’d spun a few dozen laps around old Earth reported that he hadn’t seen God while he was up there. I distinctly remember that because I’d always thought it hilarious.

By the time my sensors were able to report that the ship behind me was also me, the thought of a benevolent deity was starting to pick up appeal.

In front and behind are relative concepts in space. There’s no linear reference, no up, down, front or back. All I can say is that my nose was pointed directly to my rear. I belatedly noticed that the engines had shut down. What I’d passed through had taken everything off-line but life support.

There is also no such thing as a complete stop. In space everything is constantly moving. At best, you can come to a complete stop RELATIVE to something else, although the mathematics of the whichness of where could drive a man to drink tea. I neither gained on nor increased the distance relative to two other mes (first person – plural?), so I considered myself as close to stopped as I was gonna get.

Generally, you judge your location by charting against the stars around you, if you have the charts to know where a given star is supposed to be at a given moment. My computer had all that information; it did all the mathematic heavy lifting for navigation.

What I didn’t have were stars to plot against.

The deep stygian darkness was unbroken by anything as prosaic as a raging nuclear inferno a thousand light years away.

Unbroken, uniformed NOTHING. Everywhere. Everywhere except where I was. And the other two places I was.

Thinking that these other two ships had to be, what … sensor glitches? …. reflections? … a cosmic joke?, I opened a communication channel. I had this wild, half hysterical thought that maybe I had a few things to talk over with myself.

The feedback nearly deafened me. Feedback? In this day and age? There are more filters and cutouts in the communications systems then there are in the water recycling system. This is not a comforting thought, by the way.

Feedback is simply NOT possible, not with this equipment. The ONLY way to produce it would be to take your input and plug it directly into your receivers. This would either require a massive amount of rewiring, or…..my throat went dry ... by deliberately trying to open a channel to your own comlink.

It was at this point I decided I could officially declare myself scared.

I stood immobilized for a time. I don’t know how long, the bridge recorders captured a mere few moments, but I swear I grew old and died before I was able to move again. I had to be sure of the nature of these other two vessels, I had to know in the same way a man might refuse to close his eyes when falling off of a cliff.

Communications was definitely NOT the way to proceed. I flashed a few random external lights. At the same time, the other two ships flashed the same combinations. Ok, could still be a reflection.

Hmmm. Maneuvering thrusters? At least maybe I could change my relative aspect a little. Without stars or planets or the occasional dust mote, I could only change the way I was pointed in relation to the other mes. I popped a thruster for a burn of two seconds. So did they – I mean I – I think. Absolutely nothing happened. I hadn’t changed my aspect relative to theirs, nor theirs to mine. Or was that mine to mine and mine to mine?

Attention, from this point on, proper use of pronouns is contra-indicated.

Suddenly, a thought ran through my beleaguered brain: “Why where there only three of me?” I understood that three of me was still two too many, but why I wasn’t also “beside” me and “above” or “below”, or partly up on the right in a sort of vaguely “there” direction or, “Arg, Capt’n I’m, 300 off the port bow from me own self, har, har, and shiver me timbers”.

OK, I was losing it. The first step to healing is knowing you’re losing it. Or was that the first step in enjoying the journey to madness?

Why not four of me? Why not an infinite number? On the other hand, if that WAS me in the front, then I was picking up me behind and me in front. Therefore there I was also behind the me behind me. And on and on.

Yeah, losing it big time.

The back of my brain, the part given to the three “F”s – fight, flee and food, was starting to panic. I kept going back to that benign deity thought again. Was it as ridiculous as it sounded to pray to God that He exists? In that situation, no.

I’d fought and trained for years to get a courier ship, I never figured I needed anyone else but me. And here I had achieved my dream: I was surrounded by myself. My ex-wife would have said that I finally found a universe where everything actually was about me.

“Ex-wife”? Late wife: she died. No, I’m still married. I remember her walking out on me. I left her. I’ve never been married. What about the kids? …”kids”? PLURAL? Two boys and a girl. I remembered every minute of their lives until they died/graduated/moved away/married….

Memories came flooding in on me with the force of a hammer. My skull was about to break open from the shear onslaught. Every single memory mine and not mine; not one of them agreed. And they were all as real as the next.

Mother? Living/dead/run off when I was a baby/orphan/sickly/happy/miserable. Father? Same thing. Siblings? Here the bridge recorders show me grabbing my head and screaming. There were so many histories, too much to take in all at once. I felt like I was going to burst open. The mind was never set to take in so much information.

I desperately cast around for something consistent, something on which I could focus. In astral-navigation, you find where you where in the middle of nothing by fixing yourself on something, say a star or cluster, something immutable, something fixed and dependable. The only thing in this place was me. I directed my thoughts inward.

The pressure eased off a little, though crouching on floor like this was hurting the hip I’d broken in the accident that killed my wife. No, it was the leg, not hip, and it never healed right. It did, of course, it healed fine, and my wife was still alive. What accident? It was my arm that was broken, but that was when I was a child; the doctor mended it the same day. Doctors can’t do that, that’s why my arm is crooked now. Of course they can, but this one did it wrong…

The pressure increased. The slight relief I’d gotten had only softened me up for this newest onslaught. I could feel blood pooling in my mouth, though I didn’t know if I‘d bitten my tongue or if blood vessels in my brain were seeping into my sinuses.

Every nerve in my body was aflame and my muscles were contracting so hard I couldn’t breath. This was probably the only reason I didn’t strangle in my own blood. My hindbrain searched frantically for some way to keep the body alive: a desperate lunge with unresponsive muscles, deep breathing with unresponsive lungs, twisting torso and neck to find air while all the time conflicting self-awareness pounded me.

I was and I wasn’t. I had an infinite number of personalities, most of them I didn’t like. I had an infinite number of lives; none of them were appealing. In nearly all, my marriage was a failure, I was a loss, my children, when I had them, were almost always destined for ignominy and disgrace.

I tried to assert my own will, my own past over the overwhelming noise, but I didn’t know which one of me I was anymore. I lost my personality, my self, my identity in an overwhelming flood of opposing memories, each one as valid as any other.

To this day, I don’t know why I said it. I don’t know what possessed me, but most of all, I don’t know HOW I said it, considering the state I was in. “God help me!” I screamed, though the recorders dispassionately replay it as a barely audible croak.

All I can say is: it worked. I tried to keep my mind focused on God, and the pressure lessened. I thought that maybe I should think back to all the descriptions I’d had of Him, all the information I’d gleaned while being dragged to services as a child so I could know, intellectually, what to focus on. As soon as I did, the pressure came back. Different churches, different experiences, conflicting ideologies, good and bad times fought for predominance in my memories.

I tried again, “GOD HELP ME!” It worked again.

The more I tried to concentrate on Him the harder it was. When a lesson comes with horrible pain, I learn quickly, and soon found out that by leaving myself open to Him, to think of nothing and asking (begging - let’s be honest) Him to come to me, the pressure would ease off bit by bit. After a time I was nearly functional again, but again and again my thoughts would slip back to myself or my situation and each time, the pain came with it.

When I was a little more stable, when I began training myself to remain fixated on the only constant there was in the universe, it occurred to me that just before everything went haywire and blew out into this Twilight Zone reality, there was a surge in the engines.

We’d been playing with gravity for about 50-60 years now, since some bright boy pulled the connection between gravitation and magnetic fields. They’d been floating frogs with magnets for more than a century, but all of a sudden, anti-gravity was available and cost-effective. It didn’t take long after that before someone put it into a drive which created degrees of gravity and magnetic fields which could (theoretically) take a ship near light speed. It took quite a bit longer to create a compensator, but it was worth the wait; if the compensator failed the ship in question turns into a soda can and the crew (me) becomes a small patch of goo.

Somewhere, while I was blithely cruising along, there was a spike in the engine. I can’t tell you what exactly it was, I’m just a courier jockey and anyway information on that has been locked down as classified. Besides, believe me, there’s no reason you would want to duplicate this journey. What I realized while I was appropriately down on my knees, was that old hoary chestnut about every decision you make is made, and all possibilities that can happen do happen, and the multi-universe concept of Quantum Physics.

All I know of QP is that it makes astral-navigation look like a child’s primer on basic math. If I had to try and work out that formula to get out of there, I might as well put on a lacy bonnet and have a cup of Earl Grey. (I risked a quick check; none of me were wearing a lacey bonnet. That was a relief, anyway.)

I hadn’t scanned the vicinity for any gravitational/magnetic anomaly, though considering the nature of the engines, it’s probably the first thing I should have done. I’m willing to admit my oversight, but when confronted with ones self, one has a tendency to allow one’s mind to wander.

I changed the sensors to increase the range of scanning, including gravitational, magnetic, X-ray, neutrino and even threw in infrared for the heck of it.

I found a … something….a hole, I suppose, though the bright minds of our time are calling it an “Event Threshold” and whisper it’s name like they’re afraid it’ll hear them and show up. All I could tell from the limited arrays I had at my disposal (it was a courier vessel after all), was that it seemed to be exactly what I was looking for.

I was vaguely surprised that the pain hadn’t returned, and as soon as I thought that, the pain came back. I reset my attention on the anomaly, but there were too many perspectives for me to handle. I brought my self to where I was open to God again, and I could think clearly once more.

This time the blinding pain didn’t last as long. I admit I found the idea of turning away from God and turning to myself(s) being painful as ironic.

I knew that I had to enter into this … thing. In retrospect, I realize now (as has been pointed out to me in very harsh language) that it could have destroyed the ship. Oh, and me too, though I might not be quite so valuable to Rapid Couriers Inc. I don’t know how I knew to enter it; I just knew without question or reservation.

It was God. That’s the only explanation I could find that fit. Somehow God had plowed through the dross of self-importance when I allowed my self to be open to Him and I was left with peace and purpose.

On the other hand, if the magna-grav field of the engines got me into this, I wasn’t about to light them off while I was inside … wherever I was. “If stupidity got us into this, why can’t stupidity get us out” as Mark Twain once said.

Good writer/wasn’t he a politician?/no, he was general/who?

I still hadn’t gotten to the point where my mind didn’t return to trivial things, but at least I was learning to get back to God quicker.

I was going to have to go on maneuvering thrusters only. As an experiment, I fired off all the starboard thrusters for a brief burst to maneuver the ship’s aspect relative to the … I’m just going to use the word “hole” from now on.

The two ships I could sense of me didn’t change at all, though I could tell they too had fired the same thrusters I had. The hole moved, though. It seemed to slide right in front of the ship in front of me just as I had hoped.

I did the math. It was going to take me nine days at thruster power to enter the hole. Nine days.

I fired all the thrusters off, burning out every last bit of fuel I had and waited.

I tried to eat, but found out that none of me like the same foods. Everything I thought of, every meal that the replicators could concoct was “gross”, or I was allergic, or I was too sick to eat or I was full, or I didn’t/couldn’t/wouldn’t/shouldn’t.

I finally gave up and just didn’t eat. In order to stay sane for nine days when even the normal nominal routine of shipboard life couldn’t distract me, I kept my mind on God. There was nothing to do for the entire time except pray.

It was the first time I had ever fasted and prayed. I still think I was tricked into it, but as I say that I smile, because it was good trick, well played, and I certainly learned fast.

(I would like to note at this time, that even though there were an infinite number of me, and all of mes where sharply divided on what was good to eat and what wasn’t - NONE of me liked tea. I don’t know what that means, but somehow I find it comforting.)

During this time, there were needs of my body: evacuating waste, cleaning myself, and all the other aspects of maintaining a machine of flesh and blood. During these times, I would slip and other realities would come on me again like before, but always I returned to my knees in supplication and the noise abated.

I was found twelve days after I emerged from … wherever I was. I was still deep in prayer, and frankly, I am to this day.

I don’t know what happened or how, I’m just a courier jockey, or as my former boss says, “an expendable trained monkey”. So be it.

I spent a lot of time in a hospital. It seems that anyone who went through what I did and emerged sane must be crazy. A belief in God in this day and age has to be analyzed, scrutinized and certified. As far as my peace and functional abilities, I am told I “tapped into a higher state of consciousness and accessed a part inside yourself that transcended your environment”. Uh huh.

The fact is, science can’t handle anything it can’t measure. Therefore, in order to quantify God, we must first put Him in a box. If the box looks like an emaciated ex courier jock, at least we can get out the ruler.

I actually had one shrink tell me that I am my own God. Let me tell you something: if this selfish, self-centered, self-seeking, fallible, fragile, foolish excuse for a man is the best I can do for a God – I’ll strip down, paint my butt purple and samba out of an airlock.

I answer their questions, I tell them what they want to hear and when they’re convinced that I’m rational, I smile real big and tell them I’ll pray for them. Drives them crazy when I do that.

My first fear on getting out of the – well, place was that I was going to end up in a different reality where people were elongated protoplasmic tubes or something. The second fear was that I would end up in a different me’s reality. On the other hand, I’m still not sure which me I am, and there are still overlapping memories of my life before.

I called my ex, yes she was still alive. We talked for a long time and she filled me in on our history, so I could know which one to remember. We agreed on several things, chiefly that everything was my fault. It was. We’re reconciling.

I don’t ever want to go back there, or face that trauma again, but now that it’s over, I wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything. But I keep my mind on God now all the time. I want to keep in practice, just in case there’s a refresher course.