Alien Proliferation

mind-set.
    Reader had my hand and was massaging my shoulder. Jeff followed suit. I had four people rubbing me, and yet I didn’t feel relaxed at all. I heard Camilla talking quietly into the com. She was requesting a variety of extras, blood foremost among them. I went from nervous to frightened, fast.
    “One minute apart, dilated to ten.” Tito’s hand was on my stomach. “Baby’s still moving around.”
    The way he said it made one of his lectures come to mind. “Is her head down?” Thudding silence. Okay, that meant no and that meant dangerous for her and for me. I closed my eyes and tried to send some sort of message to the baby to let her know she had to turn around again.
    I felt someone else helping talk without speaking to Jamie, and she shifted. “Head’s down.” Tito sounded incredibly relieved.
    Pain hit, bad, hard, and fast. I screamed, couldn’t stop myself. The room went nuts, with a lot of fast medical talking and a lot of movement. I felt myself detaching from it. I didn’t think this was a good thing.
    I heard some scary beeping and saw Jeff’s face drain of color. “Kitty!” I could hear Reader calling to me. “Focus, Kitty. Stay with us. Come on, babe, stay with us.”
    I looked at him, and I tried to stay, but something dragged me off.
    The last thing I heard was Jeff, speaking softly. “No, please. Please don’t take her away from me. Please.”

 
    CHAPTER 13
     
    I WAS FLOATING, and I had perfect clarity. All of a sudden, I remembered that nine months ago Reader had told me he’d died, seen all sort of things, then been sent back. To take care of me.
    I didn’t have a body, which I verified by looking around. All I could see was a thin golden line, like a string, attached to me and something else. I got a very possessive feeling about that string.
    The nice part of this was that there was no pain at all. I kind of liked that. Sadly, it was quiet and somewhat dull, which meant my mind was wandering. Well, I was only my mind or soul or whatever, but it was bored and wanted some stimulation.
    I saw what looked like an old-fashioned wheel for a slide projector, only the wheel was huger than I could really comprehend, and the slides were thinner than my string. They sat next to each other. I realized I was seeing the universes just like Reader had. It was pretty weird and awesome at the same time.
    They flipped through, and I saw myself in a lot of them. Like Reader had told me, we were together in most of them, married in at least half. The ones where we weren’t married we were still each other’s best friend. We were never enemies or indifferent to each other. The universes were moving quickly past me, but I got full information from them as they went by. I understood what the term “soul mate” meant now, and why he and I had gotten so close so fast.
    Saw a ton where I was married to Chuckie, almost as many as where I was married to Reader. They were interesting, too. I knew Reader in most of them, for a variety of reasons, but there were a few of the Chuckie-worlds where Reader and I didn’t cross. There were almost no worlds where I didn’t know Chuckie, however, and it was the same as with Reader—we were always best friends, married or not. So I had two soul mates, which was nice.
    Seemed pretty happy with Chuckie. Or Reader. Very happy, actually. Good marriages with both Reader and Chuckie. Interesting.
    Of the few worlds where I wasn’t married to Reader or Chuckie, there were a variety where I was married to men I didn’t know and a few where I was married to girls I didn’t know. But even so, Reader and Chuckie were there in almost all of these as well.
    There was another sampling where I wasn’t there at all—most of these seemed to have been those where antiSemitism had won the day so definitively that my father had never been born. Me not being in them aside, I found those worlds horrible—dark and cruel and joyless for far too many of the people in them. There were so many races missing from Earth in those, I had to figure genocide truly did equal misery for all, not just the races being wiped out.
    There were some where dinosaurs still existed and some where the Earth was so odd I couldn’t comprehend what was going on. It was fascinating to see, but I found myself wondering how anyone, God or not, could keep all this stuff straight. Remembered that ACE had said God gave us free will for just this reason.
    ACE was a superconsciousness I’d